Last chapter!

I'd just like to take this chance to thank each and every person who's reviewed on this story so far; without your support, I'd probably have given up months ago.

Anyway, I give, the final conclusion to The Story Of Our Scars.

Disclaimer: I don't own TMI.

Rewarded

SADNESS WILL NEVER BE FOREVER

Things eventually got better. The storms passed.

As all storms are generally wont to do.

They all came out weather beaten and soaked to the skin and freezing, but they came out nonetheless.

Clary finally threw out all the brown hair dye she had. "Good riddance," she said. "I can't remember why I wanted to dye my hair. I can't remember when I stopped, nor why, but I'm glad I did. I don't have anything against the colour brown, but it's just not me."

She'd noticed that those odd, weekly phone calls from Jocelyn to both her and Jon turned to daily calls, then weekly visits, then daily visits too, until there wasn't a day that went by they didn't hear from her.

Valentine came back one morning about a month later. He was gruff and curt when Jon explained everything that had happened, and his demeanour turned cold when he saw Jocelyn in the kitchen, on one of her visits. Three hours, several broken chairs, and a few voices blown out from screaming later, they'd come to an agreement: Jon and Clary could live alone in the house (they were doing perfectly fine on their own anyway, thank you very much) and Valentine and Jocelyn could drop by to check on them as they willed. Jocelyn did regularly. Valentine, funnily enough, did not.

But that didn't matter.

She'd gotten through it, and survived. They all had.

And she was eternally grateful for that.

Jon finally reconciled with Isabelle, and Maia, and everyone else he'd managed to piss off severely. He still pissed them off, because he was Jon, and pissing people off was practically his art form, but now there were no hard feelings behind it. Not many, at least.

Clary and Sebastian had become almost as close as Clary and Simon, though there was still that hint of awkwardness when he introduced his new girlfriend to the rest of them. But they laughed it off, and if the new girl noticed, she was wise and shrewd enough not to comment.

And as for Clary and Jace, well, they got there in the end.

Because the road didn't end just because the bumps did.

It was still long and winding, through painful territory, through unfamiliar territory, through tentative and shy territory. They stumbled along it like two new born foals, uncertain and scared yet simultaneously awed by the forest around them. Occasionally they would stumble, and they would shout, and one would walk out and slam the door, leaving the other behind wringing their thumbs in distress, but. . . They got there.

Other relationships took longer to repair. It was years before Clary spoke amiably and calmly with her father of her own free will, and it was years before Jon began to forgive Jocelyn for leaving them. Loose ends for problems never quite solved trailed in their wake as they plodded on.

And again, some things would forever haunt them.

Jon would never be entirely comfortable with letting Clary drive.

Clary never wore clothes coloured grey or brown or black ever again, if she could help it.

And Jace and Clary never spoke of the argument that had raged so fiercely, and done so much damage. They never brought up, or let themselves return to that event that had punched through both their souls like paper, and left a gaping hole in its wake, one they still hadn't quite fixed. Jon and the others never found out what exactly had been said, though they had their suspicions whenever they deigned to think of it.

But that was alright.

That was life.

You gained scars, and you healed them.

And so Clary focused on the healing, on the light glinting off of Jace's god hair at sunset, of the steady reassurance of a hand in hers, whether friendly or romantic, of the comforting swish of a paintbrush as it sawed across the canvas.

And so she didn't live happily ever after. She'd always known that that particular fairy tale ending was barred from her. Was barred from everyone.

She didn't live happily ever after.

She lived.

The End