Something changes with the hug. Jace doesn't know what changes, isn't even sure it's the hug that does it, but that's all that he can come up with. Clary moves her head back so that she's not pressed to his chest but she doesn't unwrap her arms so neither does he.

Her hands slowly slide around his waist, from his back to his stomach and he can feel his muscles twitch and tighten, jumping. Her hands are firm and sure but slow and gentle. It's familiar, not the way she touches him but the way it feels. All of her is familiar to him and he doesn't understand how. Or why.

Before he had time to think too seriously about it, her hands start to slide up his chest and towards his neck, sliding up the sides of his throat and cupping his jaw and the sides of his face. She stares up into his eyes and he can't find it in himself to look away from her. He stares into the depths of her green eyes as she stares up into his eyes.

He'd always been a bit self-conscious about his eyes. Both are a clear, pale blue but the left one has a spot of brown. It's almost a triangle, taking up a little less than a third of the color but noticeable against the pale blue.

When he was younger, he'd tried to use a glamour to make his eyes match, to make them both blue, but it never stuck. He'd hated it but didn't know what else to do. He just wasn't comfortable enough with contacts, especially with as often as he fought. The contacts could be uncomfortable for him at the best of times, during a battle with a demon was not the time to be distracted by anything, much less discomfort for vanity's sake.

So, he'd forced himself to get used to them, his strange eyes.

Now, with Clary holding his face so gently in her small and calloused hands, looking into his eyes like they hold the answer to every impossible question, he doesn't feel like they're so strange after all.

After what seems like an eternity of silent debate with herself, she lifts onto her toes, the move smooth and effortless and serving to remind him of gracefulness. The lift is slow and controlled. He's watched Isabelle bounce onto her toes plenty of times to press kisses to cheeks and give hugs. He knows that's a bit easier than this slow move that Clary does.

But then he realizes that she's trying not to spook him. So, he uses the arms around him and tightens them on her back, pulling her body closer to his at the same time as he helps to hold her up on her toes.

A smile graces her lips at the move and he starts to smile back but then she's pressing her lips to his. It's soft, a slow press, and his eyelids drift down, shuttering his gaze until he can't see anything but he can feel her.

He feels her body pressed to his, her hands on his face, her mouth on his. He presses back, tilting his head the slightest bit to get a better angle, and lets their mouths slot together like pieces of a puzzle. And again, it's so familiar. A piece of him that he hadn't realized was broken feels like it's coming back together.

The sensation makes him gasp a bit and it breaks the kiss, Clary putting her feet flat on the ground once more and stepping back from him. He blinks rapidly as he tries to clear the flash of something he'd seen. It was so brief that he can't be sure that he saw anything, not really.

And then there's a knock on the door and Clary's moving towards it and opening it before he can say anything, before he can process what just happened.

"Excuse me, bibi ." Magnus speaks up from outside of the door where Jace can't see. "But, I believe his family is getting restless."

Jace moves from his spot and towards the door, coming to stand behind Clary as she stands there looking up at Magnus.

"Thanks, Mags." Clary tells him with a softness to her tone that Jace has yet to hear until now. If asked previously, he would've been unsure if she was capable of that tender tone.

"Have you…?" Magnus trails off speaking and somehow Jace knows that isn't characteristic of the warlock. He doesn't understand how he knows, but he does.

"No." Clary answers him easily, shaking her head slightly and making her hair swish and sway, the curls bouncing around. "Not yet."

Jace reaches up and presses a hand to her shoulder blade, pressing in slightly as he slides his hand up a bit and curls his fingers over her shoulder. He's not sure why he does it except that she sounds like she needs comfort and he wants to be the one to comfort her.

Her shoulders don't tighten at the gesture and he takes that as a win. He steps closer, not quite touching but close enough that she can feel him. He feels like it's another win when she leans back into him, her back pressing into his stomach and lower chest.

It's such a casual and intimate move, something that people with years of familiarity between them would do. It makes Jace look down at the top of her head and she presses her head to his chest and looks up at him, meeting his eyes with her own.

This new level of comfort is strange but it's like once they'd touched, once he'd been allowed to hold her, he can't seem to stop himself from continuing to touch her. And she seems content with that, as far as he can tell.

"I think they'd like to talk to you." Magnus tells Clary.

"Well, let's not keep them waiting." She replies as Magnus steps away from the door and starts walking back up the hallway.

Clary takes a step away from Jace and turns to the side to look up at him. She doesn't say anything but she holds one hand out and he takes it easily, lacing their fingers together. She pulls him out of the room and he closes the door behind him, letting her lead him back up the hallway and to the living area where Alec and Izzy are still sitting on one of the sofas.

He sees them both look at his fingers interlaced with Clary's but they say nothing. Alec narrows his eyes and Izzy raises a brow, but they don't say anything at all.

Magnus was all grown up and travelling on his own when she had moved back to Ireland, into the area where she'd been born. It had felt like the right time. She had not been back since she was Céibhfhionn. There was no one left to remember that girl from so long ago and so she had felt comfortable living in that village near that cliff once again.

Her name was Fiadh and she lived there for a decade before she saw him again. His arrival had nearly coincided with Magnus's visit and she was not sure that it had been a coincidence.

Once she'd told the warlock her story, in full, he'd begun trying to figure out why she lived and why Jaka did not but seemed to reincarnate. And he'd told her that he would try to find a pattern of reincarnation. If he came back more than she knew, Magnus had hopes that she would continuously seek Jaka out.

But she wasn't so sure because she seemed to lose him every time she found him and she had been wondering for a while if that was her fault. If she let him be, maybe he could live a full life on his own, free of early and brutal deaths.

When she had confessed her thoughts and feelings, Magnus had not known what to say so he had said nothing. It's always better than false reassurances.

So, when they had shown up so close together, Jaka going by the name Chryses and Magnus still Magnus, she had been suspicious but cautiously happy.

And that time, when the men with the circle scars on their necks had shown up, they'd fled in the night, Magnus portalling them to an unfamiliar cabin in unfamiliar woods.

Eventually, their luck ran out and the men caught up to them with Magnus nowhere in sight.

That time, they kept their hands laced together, eyes locked on each other's, as one man, the leader, drove a sword through her back and out Jaka's. It had pierced them both through the heart, pinning them together as they gasped out their final breaths, hands going slack as the blade was removed and they both fell to the ground underneath them, falling together and remaining still as the men that had gathered left.

And all she had been able to think is that if she had just let him be, had sent him away from her, with Magnus, perhaps she would have been able to fight the men off, perhaps she would have been able to kill them all, even as they tried their hardest to kill her.

So, that is what she vowed. She would not love him, would not tell him who he was, what they seem to be to one another, until every last man with a circular scar on his neck is dead and gone from this world.

And then she would drive them from the next world, until there was nothing left of those men, nothing to threaten her love, her life.

That is what she did.

She woke up, she buried her Jaka once more, and she began to hunt.