a/n: Please note that this is a cross between the book and film, and as such it draws from both. Takes place after Valentine is pushed through the portal, but the portal has not been destroyed, and Valentine has not tried to cross back. Lyrics at the end by Colbie Caillet. Don't own a thing. If I did, I don't know that I could share Jace with the world as Ms. Clare did. Enjoy, lovelies!

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Clary stared where, just seconds before, Valentine—her father, she loathed to admit—had vanished beyond the portal's sea of shimmering glass. It was remarkable, she thought, how clean his disappearance had been. Merciful. Entirely undeserving.

She wanted him writhing on the floor before her, Jace's sword planted firmly where she imagined his heart would be.

She wanted his body covered in runes, the dark ones, old ones, forbidden, that whispered to her how to kill a man with just a thought. They taunted and seethed, itching to overtake her fingers and plunge the stele into flesh. Into Valentine's flesh. A jagged angle, a swift curve, and a light stroke would be all it took in her mind to see skin, tissue, and muscle melt off his bones.

But even spontaneous combustion was too good for Valentine.

"Clary?"

She looked up, startled to find Jace had moved closer, hovering. As if afraid she was about to jump in after Valentine. Uncertainty was etched in the purse of his lips, the ruffled draw of his brows. His gaze, though, was unwavering. Like steel. She was hardly surprised when her chest gave a flutter, a twist, as if those eyes were actually piercing her heart. Searching. Desperate for some grain of truth, as if looking deeper would tell him what his heart refused to believe. That she was, in fact, his sister. Clary swallowed back the lump in her throat. She suddenly felt sick. Not at the idea that she had kissed him, that she had fallen for Jace, her...brother. But that this—whatever was between them—was rapidly caving in like a tidal wave, seeping through all the cracks and threatening to drown them both for their childish emotion. Their stubbornness to refuse to believe. She felt sick that it was over. The us she had come to know, and love. She felt it slipping away like shadows before the dawn.

The trouble with light is it's always exposing what we aren't prepared to see.

Something warm floated past her face. Clary blinked and realized Jace had bent down to level their gazes, face to face. He tucked a fallen strand of hair behind her ear, allowing his fingers to linger for a moment longer before both hands came to grip her upper arms. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, before clamping it shut.

Clary wanted to kiss that damn frown away. She wanted to soak in every drop of fear, every doubt, every notion that this was wrong, and leave him wanting for nothing but more of her.

"Jace—"

He shook his head once, cutting her off with his stormy glare. Clary felt her eyes travel involuntarily down to his full lips, which had parted. He took in a deep breath. Let it out. In. Out. In. "I don't believe it, you know," he breathed out, his words soft and forbidden.

"You don't want to believe it," Clary corrected sadly, offering him a timid smile. She could feel his fingers flexing around her arms, alternating between loosening and constricting. She wished he'd hold on tight as he could and never let go.

Jace instantly straightened, her words like a slap to the face. He stared at her hard, cold and calculating. One brow tipped upward in cool question. "So you believe it's true, then?" He shut his eyes closed, and Clary felt as if the last door to an escape had just slammed shut in her face. She watched him work his jaw for a moment, the angles of his face more prominent. Sharper. Like the edge of broken glass. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to see if she really would bleed. "You would believe me to be your brother?" he finally asked, voice hollow. "Long lost and now so coincidentally found?" His gray eyes slid open, slanted and distant. There. That oh-so-familiar wall Clary despised was back up in place. Blocking her from her Jace.

My Jace.

She hated the way he could just compartmentalize everything so easily, file it away behind an impenetrable barrier. Anger bubbling deep inside, she felt her cheeks flush in rage.

She wanted to strike him with her fist.

She wanted to drive her palm into his chin until that damn, arrogant smirk was wiped off his face.

She wanted to shove him against the wall and kiss the hell out of him.

"The only thing," Clary snapped, "I believe in is this." She swiped his hand off her arm and pressed it firmly against her chest, where her heart fluttered madly against her ribcage, like a bird desperate to find its freedom. Jace stared, wide-eyed, at where his hand fell. His fingers burned through her skin, but Clary kept her gaze on him as heat pressed against the back of her eyes. He may as well have been carving a rune into her heart. And she would have let him, would it have kept them together forever. "I know what I feel. I know what I've felt. I've been following it my whole life. And I'm not shutting it out now just because some tyrannical, half-angel Nazi tells me to. He can't change the way I feel. I won't let him. I'm not a coward that bends at the first sight of disbelief. This," she gripped his wrist tightly, "this is what I believe in."

Jace pulled his hardened eyes away from where his hand perched, splayed across her collarbone, the heel pressed firmly against her heartbeat. Clary's heart raced, the echoing drum somehow amplified by his touch. The ice in his stare broke, shattering into a million pieces behind his irises. "You," he spoke huskily, pulling his hands up to frame her face and draw her against him, "are what I believe in, Clary." He searched her eyes, locking his fingers behind her ears to pull her even closer. A thumb brushed softly beneath her eye, as if anticipating a trail of tears. Clary hated how well he knew her—the heat beating behind her eyes was too much to blink away. It finally cascaded, quietly, into his waiting fingers.

Jace leaned forward, tilting his head to the side as his lips lightly brushed against her tears. Clary knew how cheesy it must look, and could only think of the countless novels she had read or movies she had seen where she'd rolled her eyes at the clichéd, romantic notion of kissing away a woman's tears. But there, now, she felt she understood. Replacing pain with love. Tasting, sharing in, and taking away one of the most unbearable and powerful emotions a human being can be burdened with: sadness.

His lips ghosted across her skin, parted and waiting until Clary threw herself against him, crushing her lips to his in a kiss that seared her brain with white, hot blaze. His arms snaked around her, trapping her stomach to his, pelvis against pelvis as he dipped her back. He cradled the back of her head in his hand, the other gripping her chin firmly as he soundlessly directed her chin towards him. She felt like a rag doll melting in his arms. But she didn't care. She didn't care about Valentine, or the dark words he'd used to separate her from Jace.

Clary threaded her fingers through his golden locks, drawing her knuckles in and anchoring him to her. She needed this. Needed him. Like air. Like water. Like the sun. The sun in her darkness.

The floor began to shake beneath them, and Clary half-wondered if they were the cause of it, when she felt Jace freeze against her. She looked up to find his face angled away, towards the staircase and the rest of the Institute. He was breathing hard, the rise and fall of his chest quivering against hers.

Jace glanced down at her, eyes muddled with an emotion Clary dared not name. "Clary, I—"

A loud scream filled the air—inhuman and deadly. Like nails screeching down a chalkboard. Clary almost moved to cover her ears, but she was so afraid if she let go of Jace, he would disappear.

He pulled her up against him as he looked back toward the door, face stern and serious. Stone-like, his nostrils flared as his Shadowhunter senses seemed to calculate the situation. Clary couldn't take her eyes off him. In that moment, especially, he was beautiful. The way he held her protectively against him, shielding her body away from Hodge's office door. The way that, when she gripped the front of his shirt, he clung her to him tighter, fingers digging into her back and her jacket. Anchoring her amidst the tide of chaos. His hair hung loosely around his face, a halo of golden mess. Lips plump and smooth, parted slightly above a chiseled jaw line and cheekbones.

Clary swore he looked like an angel of God.

A guardian angel, infinite and hers.

His heated gaze trailed back to hers, even as the office door blew inward off its hinges and an explosion of ravens and crows fluttered madly around the room. Jace leaned forward to press his forehead against Clary's, shutting his eyes and breathing her in. Clary mirrored his actions, inhaling his musky scent. He smelled like something crisp, like first winter's snow, and...risk. Danger. Like standing on the precipice of a cliff and preparing to jump. Jace was completely illegal. Off limits, just out of reach, as deemed by her father.

But how could something so incredibly immoral feel so irresistibly right? So true. So perfect, like the moment the final piece to the puzzle slips into its home.

Suddenly light-headed, she stumbled against him. He caught her, keeping his forehead trapped against hers. He chuckled lightly. "I tend to have that effect on women." But his voice cracked on the last word, like he was forcing himself to lighten the mood. And somehow, to Clary, it sounded like goodbye.

"Good to know I'm easily categorized," Clary joked, her gaze flitting all over his face. Memorizing it. Locking it away tight in her head.

The birds, screeching like banshees, began to weave around them, circling Clary and Jace like a black, feathery tornado. Jace's face grew serious, seeming to realize they did not have much time. "Clary, you are the only..." he trailed off, words insufficient. Clary untangled her hand from his shirt, lifting it to lightly brush his brow and the corner of his eye. Jace swallowed thickly. "You are the only...in my heart, you are the only thing keeping it—me—alive. I've never felt it like I do when I'm around you." His words, awkward and rushed, clicked into place and Clary found herself repeating them over and over in her head. A broken record player of Jace's first and only admission of his feelings for her.

It felt like his last.

The birds swarmed, closing in on them. In a move too quick for Clary, Jace swept her into his arms and bolted for the portal. The bluish-white pool swelled and rippled before them. So beautiful. So deadly.

"Clary, they're coming. And I can't stop them. I can't stop them all and save you. I have to keep you safe, do you understand? I have to keep my family safe." His voice broke.

Family.

At first, Clary thought Jace was referring to their alleged blood ties. She was infuriated, that in these final moments, as the birds began to take molten form and demons claw their way toward them, Jace would only think of her as his sister.

But the way his tone washed over her, the emotion behind it, raw and so brokenly human. There was love there, passion. Not the kind one held for one's sister, but a lover. A wife. He looked at her, now, as no other man had ever looked at her. And, as she feared, no man ever would. With such awe and fury, obsession and protectiveness no one had ever shown her before.

Clary shuddered against him, hardly noticing as Jace slowly, gently, lowered her feet into the portal, its magic pulsing over and around her boots, halting at her calves. She kept her eyes on Jace, soaked in the way his arms tucked her against his chiseled chest, how his muscles flexed against her and held her so easily.

But something dawned on Clary. Something she hadn't considered before, until now, as Jace's jaw clenched and the vein in his temple pounded against his skin. His eyes, so warm moments ago, were now bitter, frost cracking at the irises. "You're not coming with me?" Although she meant it as a question, it came out more as a statement, a cold, hard fact. Her words, despite the surrounding madness, echoed loudly in the room. A rock sunk in the pit of her stomach, immobile and relentless. She felt like she was going to be sick. A chunk of her was being torn out, and from the look on Jace's face, there was nothing she could do about it.

"You said it takes years of training to use this. What if I end up in limbo? What if I'm lost? And what about you? If you can't defeat them—"

"I can't defeat them while I'm concerned about you. If I know you're safe, out of harm's way," he grinned, pausing. The smile never made it to his eyes. "Have a little faith, Clary."

The portal was up to her lower thighs now. Clary had the feeling he wasn't going to tell her when he would let go. Like the drop of a rollercoaster, it was just going to be. She couldn't control the breaks, she couldn't stop any of it. "I can help you," her fingers trailed tighter around the back of his neck, digging into his scalp affectionately. "I can write runes, you should have seen me earlier, I can do it, Jace, just," she squirmed, suddenly desperate, "just put me down and I can help." She peered over his shoulder and, Jace, seeming to sense what she saw, the horror closing in on them, held her tighter, refusing to let go as he steadily backed her up further through the portal. The arm tucked beneath her legs was in now, but she couldn't feel it once she crossed the barrier.

She hated not being able to feel him.

"Clary, listen to me. No, that's enough, Clary, that's enough!" he shouted as she fought him suddenly, her fist driving into his chest as tears began to slip down her face. She felt herself sobbing openly now, but she couldn't help it. She needed to be here. With him. The one person she belonged with. She worked her legs through the barrier, trying hard to swing them back and around but Jace held her firmly, backing them up so his stance remained firm against the edge of the portal, using the stone for balance. He cupped Clary's head gently, tucking her face into the crook beneath his neck as screams wove up and around them. "Shhhh," he soothed, just as he had back in her apartment, when he'd found her after the Ravener attack. She wished she could go back. She'd take it all back.

"You need to listen to me. I need you to think of someplace safe, somewhere you know like the back of your hand."

The only thing Clary could think of was Jace.

"I need you to hold onto an image of it in your head, Clary, when you cross. Do you promise me?"

She thought only of Jace, but she nodded mutely as the darkness swooped in around them.

He crushed his lips to hers, then. The sensation of his arm around her back slowly melted away, and she knew he was pushing her further through the portal. She threw her arms tighter around his neck, desperate for better purchase. She thought that if she held on tight enough, she could pull him with her.

His lips skated over hers one last time, his breath mingling with her own rushed exhalations as his eyes sought hers. Gazes locked, he slowly reached up and, with practiced precision, untangled her arms from his neck. The portal held the portion of her body that had already gone through, and for a moment, she felt as though she were flying, suspended midair as Jace pressed his lips to the inside of her left palm, the one she had marked with the rune.

"Jace, don't!" she pleaded. He pressed something small and cold into her palm then, and she glanced to find a white stone. His witch light.

"I'll be here waiting, Clary." Resolute. Self-righteous. Unwavering. Her life. Her love.

Her hands were on his face now, fingers framing his jaw line as his hand went to the sword tucked in his belt. "Just come with me. We can think of the same place together, right? Go there together. Together, Jace."

"Demons will follow. If not through the portal, they'll find us, Clary. I won't let them hurt you. I'll find you." He folded her fingers over the witch light, closing her hand around the stone. "After all," he offered a small smile, "there's something of mine I'll be wanting back."

Clary frowned. "The witch light?"

"You."

He gave her a final push, and before Clary could grab hold of him again, as Jace swung around to face the wall of demons, she was gone.

"But you must know

I'll be here waiting,

Hoping, praying that

This light will guide you home.

When you're feeling lost

I'll leave my love,

Hidden in the sun

For when the darkness comes..."

I'd love to hear what you think.