3x11: lost without you

He hasn't been able to breathe since it happened. It's like his lungs have shrunk in size, as if Clary were the one who helped him to breathe.

He takes slow, measured steps into her room. Touches her drawing model, the pieces of charcoal she always kept in her pocket. Everything he touches brings a flash of memory.

He finds her sketchbook, sitting on the edge of her desk. He'd never asked to look at it before. He's sure if he had, she'd have showed him.

He wishes he'd asked. He wishes he'd asked her to show him all her drawings, her memories, those pieces of her mundane life she'd held onto even as she fought demons and shot sunlight from her hands.

He turns the page. What he sees clenches every inch of his heart, holding tight.

It's him. A sketch of his face as he slept, love in every stroke. It's how she saw him. Not how he sees himself, all angles and clean lines and sharp edges. She saw the softness.

No one else has ever seen him like that.

"Jace?"

Jace slowly lifts his head to see the person standing at his bedroom door. Maryse's runeless arms beckon.

"Mom," he chokes.

Maryse Lightwood has never been a particularly affectionate mother, but now she wraps her son in her arms and holds him tight. She whispers words of comfort, words like I know it hurts and I'm sorry and I'm here. Words that won't take away the pain but will hopefully ease it.

Maryse didn't know Clary well, not personally. When she first appeared on the Clave's radar, a Mundane with the Sight, she disliked her immediately. Maryse has always tended to dislike what she does not understand. As more things came to light, she continued her dislike. Clary put her children in danger. Made them fight her battles for her. She was a liability.

But she learned this was not the case. She saw Clary's strength, her bravery, her ferocity. The day Maryse found out that Clary had used the One Wish, a chance to have absolutely anything in the world, to save Jace, was the day that she made up her mind about her. Seeing Jace in this moment makes her certain.

Clary was never a liability.

She was her son's greatest strength.

The love of his life.

And now that she's gone, a part of him is gone too.

He doesn't want to hope. He's afraid to, because hope has always been more dangerous than fear, in his life. Hope leads to loss, carrying you on much the same path love does. To hope is to destroy oneself.

But Luke is so certain, and Jace is in so much pain.

He reaches for her, sometimes. When he's getting briefed for a mission, or after waking up from a nightmare, shuddering. He walked past her room this morning and nearly popped his head in to invite her to join him for strength training. Afterwards, he made a coffee the way she liked it before realising she wasn't there to drink it.

Jace looks at the dingy motel room, and realises that even though she has never been here, there are pieces of her. A doodle that has clearly been folded and taken out and folded again. A photo of her, Jocelyn and Luke, smiling side by side.

Luke is the only person who loves Clary like Jace does. Simon loves her, sure, but he has Maia, and the Mark of Cain to worry about, and Luke-

Luke has a life that has fallen apart in his desperate searching. Luke has a corkboard covered in theories.

Luke has hope.

Jace wants to have hope too.

She's there. She's standing in front of him, eyes wild but assertive. She is far from the mundie girl he met a year ago in Pandemonium.

Then again, she killed a demon that night, with no training and no runes, so perhaps it was in her all along.

In any case, she's alive. Right now. He runs to her, fixes her wounds, holds her, warm and soft and real, against his chest. He says something stupid and cheesy. She smiles.

He can breathe again.