Hey, guys! Before getting into it, I want to recommend some of my favourite songs as of late...Undrunk by Fletcher. Dance Monkey by Tones and I. And then of course Kill My Mind by the beautiful Louis Tomlinson and Lights Up by the just as beautiful Harry Styles, although the Lights Up music video was an experience and a half, especially while high. Pretending and Honest by Mali Koa are just beautiful. Then Promise Me by Badflowers, which...Made my heart hurt when I heard the song, and then when I watched the video, I cried for the next hour. Yeah. I just wanted to share some happy things, since my note down the end isn't as happy, I guess. Anyway. On with the story x
Right now, literally the only thing that wasn't perfect was the fact that Clary was wearing clothes and shoes that weren't hers. They were clean, and they clearly hadn't been worn too many times, but she could still smell Maia on the sweatpants and singlet that she was wearing, and that grated a little at her insides, and the shoes were Isabelle's, but thankfully the smell of grass and dirt covered most of that up.
But other than that, the wind in her hair, Jace a few steps away from her, adrenaline pumping as they ducked and wove, she felt the best that she had in years.
She was pretty sure that Jace was holding back a bit, given he was an Alpha, so would naturally be faster than her, but then it also felt as though she was moving quicker than she ever had before. There was this energy pulsing between them that just seemed to make her run faster, and more agile, and it was like there was this invisible string that was tying them together, because when Jace seemed to make the decision to change their path a little, Clary was already turning in that direction, not needing him to call out and let her know that they were shifting off to the right.
The forest around here was different from the one around Luke's house, and where Clary had grown up. The trees were gathered more densely, but there were obvious paths that were broken by the pack who clearly ran them a lot. The smell of the ocean was also a lot sharper, the salt heavier in the air, and just the smell of dampness in the air in general, so she was guessing there was also a pond or a stream nearby, because she could hear it closer than the ocean was.
She wasn't even thinking about where they were going, or how long they were running for.
Her head just felt clear and her body felt free and her wolf was singing, practically howling in happiness behind her rib cage as she just ran, trusting Jace.
It must have been over an hour before they started slowing down, and Clary's thighs were burning in the best possible way. In the city, it wasn't really like she could push herself and her wolf to its limits, so she was definitely feeling it now, and it was a pleasant ache in her limbs even though she knew that it would all heal and pass very soon. Jace slowed right down, pushing through some trees and then stepping out to where it was suddenly clear, and there were smooth rocks and sand and a stream trickling.
"Shit," Clary breathed out as she wiped a hand over her face, wishing that she had a tie for her hair to keep it lifted off the nape of her neck. Jace looked over at her, and he wasn't smiling, but his expression was happy and open, and she was pleased to see that his cheeks were a little flushed as well, and he looked a bit sweaty, unlike how he had looked after running with Max.
"Did you want to walk in the water? It's pretty shallow here, and it leads out to the beach," Jace told her as he kept walking toward the stream.
"Yeah," Clary nodded and followed him. Part of her wondered if she should take off the shoes and socks that she was wearing, because they were going to get wet once they walked in the stream, and the water would feel so good against her bare feet and around her ankles, but then she would be stuck carrying the shoes and socks and trying to put them back on when she had wet feet and had to head back to Jace's place, so she left them on.
They walked in silence for a while, Clary looking around at the new scenery and the scents that were swirling around them, but the strongest one was definitely coming from the Alpha who was walking alongside her, and the whole point of coming here today was to talk, so she took in a deep breath and tilted her head as she looked across at him.
"So..." she began tentatively. Jace looked back at her, and it was clear that he was being careful about what he was choosing to say, because his mouth moved to form a few words before he actually said anything.
"Did you want me to start? Or did you want to?" He finally decided to go with and Clary chewed at the corner of her bottom lip before nodding a few times.
"Can I?" She asked and he nodded in agreement. She was glad that they were still moving, because it meant that she had other things that she could focus on, but she could smell the slight shift in Jace's scent, curiosity and relief. "Um..." she took in a deep breath, and reached back a hand to scratch the back of her neck, and then she blinked as she smelt the change in Jace's scent again, something soothing. It was more than a scent as well, it was something in their connection that Jace was giving off, trying to help calm her down, nothing too intrusive because their bond obviously wasn't very strong, but it was definitely working, and she felt her heartbeat slow back down. "How much do you know about my father?" She asked, glancing over at him. Jace's jaw clenched and his eyebrows pulled together and Clary immediately felt a wave of anger come off him. He was clearly trying to suppress it, but it was there.
"I know a bit," he said slowly. "I heard things, after...After," he decided to go with. "Obviously when your pack needed to speak with the Institute and then when began to rebuild with Luke as the Alpha, I heard things through my father, and then from Luke. But...I would rather hear them from you." Clary nodded a few times, and her mouth felt dry as she tried to swallow.
"I...Never realized that my father was a bad Alpha," Clary began quietly. "I mean, not for a long time. I mean, I definitely realized that he was an asshole, but I just thought that maybe I thought that because he was my father, you know, so it was just...Everyone gets pissed off at their dad, right? He was strict, but I thought that that was just him," Clary made a face and rolled her shoulder, fingers twitching at her sides, and she could feel that Jace had take a step closer to her, not getting too far into her space that she felt crowded, just enough that she felt comforted. "I knew that him and my mum fought, but I never knew how bad things were. I had never been around other werewolves, other packs, and I didn't know that was unusual until later. Until after." She had been thinking about this talk for a while now, she'd known that it was going to have to happen and she had been preparing for it in the back of her head for the past few years, but it all sounded like a mess, now that it was coming out. None of it was structured and it was frustrating, because she didn't want to get emotional, she just wanted to get everything out there, because her and Jace needed that.
"Take a breath, if you need to," Jace said quietly, and as soon as her headed lifted and looked at him, he cringed a little, as though he thought that maybe he had been condescending and crossed a line, but it was her turn to take a step closer, the gap between them lessening so that there was only a couple of inches between their shoulders.
"Whenever my father hurt my mum, or my brother, or someone in my pack...Or me," she heard a sharp intake of breath from Jace, and that smell of anger again, one that he wasn't able to suppress. "Whenever it happened, it would be when he said we had done something wrong. And I genuinely thought that he was right. He was my Alpha and my father and everything in me wanted to make him happy and do what he wanted me to do, and so when he was telling me that I was being hurt only because I was doing something wrong, I believed him, you know?"
"Mm," Jace grunted quietly, because he completely disagreed, but there wasn't much else he could say.
"I thought some things in our pack were strange but...I didn't realize how weird they were. How fucked up they were," her words were getting angrier, coming out quicker. "That my father just enjoyed being an Alpha because he enjoyed being in charge and having people do whatever he wanted them to. That he enjoyed the power that came with it. It wasn't about loving and caring for his pack—for us. And when Luke came back into the picture—they had been friends when they were younger, when my mum and father had first met and before he was an Alpha, it just got worse. Me and Jonathan—my brother—we actually blamed Luke for a few years. Because it was after he got there that things got worse. That our mum got hurt more and that my dad was even crazier than normal. But...I mean, obviously it wasn't Luke's fault. I know that now, and I knew that a while ago, but not when I was a kid and I was watching my mum get broken down. It feels shit to know that me and Jonathan treated Luke as though he was the problem, when he had really just come to join a pack with someone he thought was his friend, and then stayed because he knew that something was wrong."
"I'm sure Luke understood," Jace murmured and Clary nodded.
"Yeah, he did, because he's amazing," Clary flashed a tight smile across at him, obviously trying to lighten the mood. "Before you came, before that afternoon where you showed up...My father had never been blatantly violent toward me. Not outright, anyway. I mean, he was rough when we were meant to be training, but I thought that was normal, but that afternoon that you came over...None of us knew that mum had gone to the coven of witches to ask them for help, so we didn't know why my father suddenly came home and was in such a terrible mood, but he had found out somehow. He just went after my mum and just—he looked like he was going to kill her. He was going to kill her," Clary gritted her teeth together, and her hands were clenched into fists. "It's the only time I had ever gone against him, and he just threw me, as though I was nothing, and—I would have been killed if you hadn't shown up. My mum would have been too."
She wasn't exaggerating.
Jace knew that.
He could still vividly remember the horrible crunching noise that her body had made when she had hit the tree, her petite body had crumpled to the ground in a broken heap, and she had lost consciousness shortly after Jace and Stephen had arrived. Her spine had been broken and she'd had a concussion, and even with the speed of healing that came with being a werewolf, she would never have healed fast enough to get away from her father if he had come back after her. It had taken her days to recover, which was a long time for a werewolf, even if it was something that a normal human would potentially have never recovered from.
And her mum, who had been the direct target of Valentines anger, she would definitely have been killed.
"I don't ever want you to think I'm not appreciative for you saving us, for saving me," Clary finally breathed out heavily, stopping in the water and turning to look at Jace, and she was embarrassed that she could feel tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. "Because I am. I really am," her voice had a high pitched twinge to it, one of distress, because she knew that she had a lot to make up to Jace, and they had a lot to make up for, and Jace's eyebrows pulled together as he reached out for her, a hand wrapping around her fist and squeezing at it, not particularly lightly, obviously trying to help calm her down. "And I just—I had dealt with being under an Alpha's command for so many years, my entire life—and I hadn't even realized how badly I had been treated, how badly my family and pack had been treated. And then you were there straight away, and I just—" her breathing was coming out quickly and Jace took her other hand and squeezed that one as well.
"Clary," he said gently. "We're just talking. That's all, okay? Just talking." Her tears felt glassy and there was the scent of distress in the air, and it looked as though Jace wanted to wrap his arms around her, and part of her wanted that, because Jace was her mate and he wanted to comfort her, but she was glad when he didn't. She felt some more calming waves come through their bond though, and that helped.
"I just—I wasn't ready to have someone else have some sort of claim over me. We didn't know each other. My father was dead. And then my brother took off a-and you know what happened to him, right?" Jace nodded slowly, not caring that there was running water around there ankles and they were now stopped in the middle of the stream. "He was older than me and he...He needed an Alpha, and so he just clung to the first one that he found." Jace had heard this from Luke, in the years that they had gotten close. He had never heard Jocelyn mention Jonathan Morgenstern—or Fray, if he had changed his last name to his mothers maiden name, like Clary had—though he had seen photos of the two siblings in the Greymark pack home. "And that Alpha was a fucker as well," she growled, sudden anger coming over her again, changing from the sadness that had been there before. "And he took advantage of Jon, until Jon didn't think that he could make any Alpha happy and...It drove him fucking mad."
The Alpha that Jonathan had found had been a rogue Alpha, not one with a pack already. He hadn't been particularly interested in having a pack either, but there were advantages at running with another werewolf. And even for rogues, there were still pulls to having a companion, to being tactile, and obviously that Alpha had found that in Jonathan. But he had never been an Alpha of anyone else, and he had been by himself for so long, and he had forced Jonathan to isolate himself from his family and the pack that he had grown up with. He just wanted to make his new Alpha happy, and that meant doing things that he had never been prepared to do before, such as killing other supernatural creatures. The new Alpha warped his view and in the end, both the Alpha and Jonathan had been killed by some seelie soldiers, after they had killed a seelie prince.
"I know you're not like that now," Clary met Jace's eyes and squeezed his hands firmly back. "I know that you're not going to do anything like that—especially now, when I've heard things about you as an Alpha, and I've seen you with your pack. It's just...At the time, all I knew was that my Alpha had just died, and suddenly my mate was there, and I just...I couldn't let myself be caught again. Not so quickly."
It stung to hear that.
It hurt Jace's wolf to hear that Clary viewed their relationship, their bond, as being caught.
He knew what she meant, but it still pained him.
"Sorry," Clary added quietly, and she could obviously feel the hurt coming off him in waves. He forced a small smile and nodded at her, but they didn't say anything for a few beats. "Just after my father and after Jon...I needed to be by myself. I couldn't let myself be tied to someone else so tightly again so soon, and I knew that you were going to be an Alpha one day because of your dad, and...I know that it was selfish, because it wasn't just myself that my decision was effecting, I just really needed to breathe and know who I was, and if I had stayed here, years ago, I would never have been truly happy with myself, and with you." Jace watched her with careful eyes, not interrupting her, even though she was rambling a bit now. Once she cut herself off, pressing her lips together, Jace gave her another small smile.
"Do you want to keep walking?" He prompted her and Clary nodded. He let go of one of her hands, but kept holding onto the other as they moved to walk side-by-side. It was a few minutes before he spoke. "I didn't know who you were when we were driving to speak with your father. I just...I knew you were my mate once we got onto the property, I could smell you, I could feel you, and I knew that you were in trouble," he winced as he looked down, and Clary closed the gap between them all together, bumping her shoulder against his. "I shouldn't have reacted the way I did. I-I killed someone," he swallowed hard, throat clicking. "I had never even really hurt anyone before then, but I had killed someone that day, and honestly, I would all over again, after seeing you the you did that day." He glanced over at Clary, and there was an understanding expression on her face. "I wasn't even thinking when I saw you on the ground, all I knew was that you were hurting and I had to stop it." Clary's hand tightened around his, her fingers shifting, sliding between his. "And I—" he broke off for a moment and let out a heavy breath through his nose. "And it was shit. It's been shit," the honesty in his voice struck a chord deep inside Clary, and her wolf whined at the sound.
"Jace..." she murmured and she felt him draw himself back together in response.
"I know that you had dealt with a lot growing up—that you lost so much and were treated in a way that no one deserves to be treated—by a parent or an Alpha," Jace told her carefully. "It took me a while to learn a lot of things, and even then, it wasn't everything, because obviously, no one else can tell me exactly what you've been through. But...I can't say that it didn't hurt that nothing I knew about you over the years came from you. And when you moved to New York, not long after we met, after you graduated high school, that distance was...Painful as fuck, in all honesty." Clary flinched, feeling those words hit her directly in the chest. "And after my dad died...After I became an Alpha, it was even harder. And I think...I know, actually," he let out out another breath, this one a bit harsher than the other. "It built up some resentment, you not being here."
Their fingers loosened a little, not as tight as they were before, but they were still walking shoulder-to-shoulder, and neither of them seemed ready to actually let go of one anothers hand, so that seemed like a good thing.
They kept walking until the woods broke and the stream started opening up, and then they had to move to the edges of the stream because it was getting deeper. They stopped moving side-by-side because they had to climb on some rocks that lined the stream, and Jace lead the way, their hands gripping one anothers a bit tighter again. Both of them were moving confidently, sure of themselves on the rocks even though they were slippery, light on their feet. Then the treeline broke completely and there was sand stretching out in front of them and the ocean was beautiful in front of them.
"I'm sorry," Clary said as they stood in the sand. "I'm sorry about...Doing that to you. And not—I'm ju-just sorry about how I handled it. All of it. Everything," her voice was coming out almost wet from her throat, and she wanted to swallow hard, but her nose was itchy and her skin felt really dry all of a sudden, and she was worried if she tried to clear her throat, tears might fall from her eyes. "I never wanted to hurt you, it was never about that."
"I know," Jace said simply, tugging on her hand so that they were walking toward the water. They kept on walking, until their toes were right where the smallest waves were eating up the sand. "You want to swim?" Jace asked, glancing toward her, and there was a small smile on his face, obviously trying to tell her that it was okay.
"It'll be cold," Clary scrunched up her nose as she looked down at the water, even though their bodies would regulate their temperature quickly.
"What—that scare you?" Jace's smile grew a bit more as he stepped into the water, still completely clothes and shoed.
"Yes," Clary couldn't stop herself from responding, even though her voice was too sincere to be an answer to whether she was scared of the ocean. Jace heard that, and he jerked his head in a nod.
"Me too," he murmured, before he lunged forward, grabbing her around the waist, and marching her into the deeper water, despite her surprised laugh.
Alright, so, obviously I didn't update last month. My bad. I'm in a pretty shitty spot, to be honest, mentally and physically and I've just got a lot going on right now. I'm still dealing with the abrupt loss of a family member and the fall out of that on my family and recently my husband has had a colleague take his life, which has brought up a lot for him. We're going to be okay, we're dealing with things, but I just need to take a breath right now. When I am in front of my computer and I'm actually focused enough to write, I'm not sticking to the schedules that I had before and I'm just writing what I really feel like which unfortunately hasn't been these stories. So I'm just...Gonna take a step back for a bit.
You guys are all beautiful, and I'll be back soon, I just need a bit of a breather to re-centre myself.
Since updating last, it has been World Coming Out Day and World Mental Health Day and I just wanted to say to anyone dealing with mental health issues and anyone in the LGBTQ+ community, whether you are out and loud or still processing things internally, you are all beautiful and deserve love and kindness. Just because I'm going to be away for a little bit, doesn't mean I'm unreachable, feel free to message me on my socials or on here if anyone ever wants to just chat, even if it's just about movies or songs, we all need to look after ourselves first, and then one another.
Much love xx
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