A/N: Let it be known now that I fully support Clary and Jace. I might not like Clary sometimes, but I support this pairing and have no wish for them to break up. This just had to be written. I do have to say, though, that I don't really like this. And, yeah, I know it's a stupid title. Something about it just seems…not right to me. However, if I get at least one review and if anyone wants me to, I will write a companion piece to this one-shot. Yes, this is just a one-shot. xD Now, R&R PLEASE! REVIEWS MAKE ME HAPPY!
"Are you sure you don't want to go catch the firework display with us?"
Clary looked up from the magazine she'd been reading to see Kyle standing not too far away from her, his leather jacket hanging by one hand over his shoulder, the position of his arm lifting just enough of his shirt to reveal the toned skin underneath. She smiled a small smile and shook her head. This was probably the fifth time he's asked her whether or not she wanted to join them and her answer always remained the same. She didn't think it would change if he asked a hundred times, but maybe Kyle thought otherwise. After all, if he had joined the whatever-Lupus and taken Simon under his wing, he must be filled to the brim with hope which was most likely the reason why he wouldn't quit bugging her about seeing the fireworks.
"I thought I'd just chill out here and finish reading my book," she said, holding up the magazine for Kyle to see. If he saw that she was busy reading, maybe he'd leave her be.
"Right, 'cause it actually takes more than thirty minutes to finish reading Seventeen Magazine." He flashed her a smile that she couldn't quite describe, making a clicking sound just as the doorbell rang. Clary had never felt more relieved in her life to hear such a shrill sound. The only one in the group who wasn't here yet was Maya and since the doorbell had rung, it meant that she had arrived and whenever Maya was around, Kyle wasn't quite himself. He saw no one else but her and that suited Clary just fine.
But, just to bring laughter to both Kyle and herself, she provided him with a retort. "It does when you're a girl!"
He turned to look at her, laughter already dancing in his eyes. "No, it doesn't."
"What would you know?" she said to him, clutching the magazine tightly to her chest as if it were a bag filled with gold that needed to be kept away from this amazingly hot werewolf. "You're not a girl."
Kyle's hand landed on the door knob, his wrist twisting in a fluid motion before he pulled the door open. "Maya's a girl," he said quite pointedly in Clary's direction as his girlfriend walked in, "and she takes less than half an hour to finish a magazine."
"Well, Maya's not normal. But that's your problem."
He shrugged in agreement to the statement Clary had made about Maya being abnormal. Simon chose this exact moment to show up, looking rather cute in his jeans and hoodie get-up. He smiled at Maya and gave Kyle a tiny, barely perceptible nod. "You're a hundred and ten percent sure that you don't want to come with us?" he said, looking at her with a glimmer of hope upon every feature of his face.
She nodded, returning to her former lounging position on the couch. "It's my lazy day."
"Every day's your lazy day since—" Simon broke off just as Clary whipped her head around, her red hair following the motion like a trail of fire. He cleared his throat, wanting to restore the joking mood before it got too serious to be saved. "Every day's your lazy day when you're a sloth, I guess," he tried.
She went back to her magazine, training her eyes a little too intently on the picture of a smiling girl in a Roxy advertisement. Awkward silence filled the room for about five seconds before she heard the jingle of keys clanging against one another and the door creaking open. In the next few seconds, she heard the door shut with a decisive click and Kyle shouting from outside to lock the door in case a psychopathic faerie decided to come and trash the place.
Her ears strained to listen to their footsteps as they got softer and softer the further away they got from the apartment, all the while hoping that maybe one of them would think that leaving her alone was a bad idea and come back to keep her company or that one of them suddenly caught food poisoning and had to come back. They'd be retching all through the night, but at least Clary would have something to keep her occupied both physically and mentally. Or better yet, since one of them had contracted food poisoning, all of them would come back and she could watch a movie with Simon since he was a vampire and it was impossible for him to catch any form of illness.
But, slowly but surely, their footsteps disappeared fully from her range of hearing and she knew that they wouldn't come back. None of them would. It's the freaking Fourth of July, for God's sake. A time when the most beautiful firework displays would be held. They wouldn't come back even if Valentine had returned from the dead and started terrorizing Downworlders and Shadowhunters.
She flipped through the next few pages of the magazine in a bid to keep her mind from going to that one place it always went back to, the one thing she didn't want to remember. She couldn't focus on the words any longer, however. Every time she read a word, her mind would be racing to somehow relate it to the phone call that had happened more than two weeks ago. Finally, she slapped the covers of the magazine together and placed it non-too gently onto the coffee table before curling up into a ball on the blood red couch, her knees held tightly to her chest. The position was constricting and uncomfortable, but she was glad for it.
She didn't like being alone. The only reason she'd decided to be alone for just tonight and not tag along with the rest to watch the fireworks was because she knew he would be there. He wouldn't be watching the display. Rather, he would be staring off into space, brooding. And all that brooding would just attract girls to him and they'd all want his phone number and when they asked, he would smile and simply walk away, leaving the girls in despair.
It killed her that she knew exactly what he would do. It killed her that even though he had hurt her beyond the bounds of heartbreak, everything he had ever done wouldn't leave her mind. His smile was etched into her memory. His scent forever lingered everywhere she went. Even now, as she sat in Kyle's living room, a place in which he hadn't set foot in for almost two whole months, she could smell his scent and she could see his worn out face smiling at her.
Their relationship had never been normal. He always kept himself away from her. Not all of him, but some parts. His happy self was kept separate from the rest of him and he never stopped refusing to show her the other broken bits. He didn't let her help. He wouldn't let her help. She was happy, though. She loved him and he loved her. Or at least that was what he'd told her.
Clary released her knees from her chest, her mouth opening to help in her breathing. She felt her chest constricting, keeping her heart tightly bound inside. She felt like it wasn't beating, like it couldn't. It was like her lungs had contracted to become something smaller than their normal size and she couldn't breathe. She felt pathetic. She felt stupid. She felt like the useless heroines in romantic novels who were so dependent upon their loves, who were fanciful beyond anything that was logical. But that was exactly what she was, wasn't she? She hated them so much, yet she was turning into one of them. She was being fanciful, too. If her heart had indeed stopped beating, she wouldn't be alive and if her lungs had somehow contracted, she would be suffocating.
And in that moment, she hated him. She hated him with every fibre of her being, with everything she was. This was what he'd finally reduced her to—a senseless moron.
When you played with fire, it was only a matter of time before you got burned. And that was exactly what she'd gotten. She should've listened to her mother. She should've thought more about it when Jocelyn had said that she didn't like Jace. He was the spitting image of Valentine, she'd told her. Even though Valentine wasn't his biological father, he had raised him and he was more a father to Jace than Stephen could ever be. Why hadn't she listened? Why had she been so stupid?
The question you should be asking yourself, she thought, is why you loved him so much even though you'd seen what he was capable of?
Ever since she found out what she really was, Jace seemed like the only person who ever brought the sun into her life without so much as a hint of gray skies. She'd trusted him with everything she had. She'd loved him far more than she should and he ended it all in a phone call that didn't even last half a minute.
"This is who Jace really is," a voice in the back of her mind said.
He'd been a jerk when they'd first met. He'd been a jerk even when they were together. He distanced himself from her, never letting her get too close. Maybe this was the reason why. If she had gotten too close, she would've been able to see right through his lovable, sad façade. She would've seen the real him in an instant and stopped feeling any pity for him. She would have left him and who would he have then to play his games with him? Perhaps that was all she had ever been to him, a pawn in his chess game. She lived it every day she was with him and she didn't even know it. But how was she to know when he changed the rules every day, when he would never let her win?
She turned in the couch, her arms moving to hug herself. This was how Jace used to hug her. He was forever surprising her with hugs and kisses she wouldn't be able to see. Maybe he only ever kissed her from behind so he wouldn't have to see her face. She knew she wasn't the prettiest girl, but for however long it had lasted, she'd convinced herself that Jace saw more than what she looked like on the outside, that he knew what her soul was like and that theirs were the hearts that had been made to beat in sync with one another.
Her mother had told her more than once, "Leave him before something happens."
Clary realized now how she should have run far, far away from him. She should've run till her legs were aching with the exertion and still she continued running.
She chuckled when she thought of her relationship with Jace. It was funny how less than a month ago, he had been the perfect, perfect man in her eyes. Yes, she thought him a man. Now, though, he seemed little more than a boy because surely a man would not play with a woman's feelings as such. Did he feel no compassion when he looked at her? She was only seventeen. She still had much of her life to live and she had been so in love with him, and yet he toyed with her life, with her heart, and he took her innocence and threw it into the sea. This bitterness that she felt, this hatred for him that was engulfing her person, was the product of his games, of his lies.
Overhead, she could hear the sounds of fireworks booming and she knew that colours of all sorts would be splattered against the canvas of the dark night sky. Every boom! that she heard coincided with the beating of her heart. She knew then that she would never forgive Jace. She would never be able to. Every moment since they'd met, he had tried his best to convince her that he was his own man, that he was not Valentine.
She now felt relief, though, and she knew she had won because she was the one thing that he could never be. She wasn't like Valentine whereas he was the exact replica of the man he so desperately didn't want to be.