A/N: And, here you go. A new fic. At last. Keep in mind that I haven't quite finished CoG. I no own.
Update: I've finished CoG, so apparently this is AU, since chances are she isn't going back to school.
-Beth M
~LINE BREAK OF AWESOMENESS~
A doodle was taking shape at the top of the paper. Swoop, swoop- a neck and shoulders. Tch, tch, tch- viola, hair. It seemed to be a man's face, a man who could almost be smiling, but his eyes were cold and hard. A dead man who haunted a teenage girl's nightmares.
Valentine.
The drawing seemed so real, she could almost see him standing by Lake Lyn, summoning the angel.
Clary Fray stared down at her test paper.
A lake appeared, or at least the outline of one, by his feet- she didn't know how they had shown up, since she certainly hadn't been paying attention to what her hands were doing. The lake- she felt like she'd gotten the squiggly bits, but the point of her pencil, the traitor, was just taking her through the very first line of text.
Name: _
The same words that graced every piece of homework she had ever done. The same answer, every time.
Clary Fray.
It should have been easy. Two simple words, and she could get on with the questions. Nine letters, instead of nineteen.
Clarissa Morgenstern.
A part of her mind whispered, No. Clary Fray.
Clarissa Morgenstern.
Clary Fray.
Strange, how fast the world could change. How last summer she'd been waiting in line at a nightclub, waiting for her sixteenth birthday, waiting for sophomore year to start. Now it was March, less than a year later, and any happy ending she could see wasn't much of one.
Luke and Mom were married, and Jace had promised to take her out to some fancy-shmancy restaurant in Brooklyn that weekend. But…
There was a little boy taking shape, now. A boy who wouldn't get to take his girlfriend out to a nice lunch. A boy named Max- adorable, manga-loving, nine-year-old Max, who died last fall.
A teenager, Isabelle, with eyes too old for her body.
Magnus and Alec engaged in some serious liplock.
Simon hanging upside-down from the uneven bars, calmly eating an apple.
Clary, her hair in a tangled mess, pulling on the back of his shirt to get him off.
Name: _
The Clary Fray who had waited outside Pandemonium Club that day- that innocent, laughing, happy girl, who was an only child, whose best friend was an unashamed geek, whose mother smiled, whose father had died in a car crash, who thought the strangest thing in her life was Eric's poetry- as far as Clary was concerned, that version of herself was dead.
Dead and gone, like so many other things.
In full view of her classmates, she bent her head and cried. For the lost, for the lonely, for the broken, for the dead and the ones who would never die...
(It should be noted that before she lost herself to tears, she wondered if that one Yearbook kid would end up taking a picture of this.)
Strange.