A/N: If you've arrived here without reading the previous chapter...I really recommend you go back and read it, because they really do go together. Not to mention that it's got lots of the best romantic moments!... :)

Otherwise...carry on! And try to forgive Clary. She's finding it hard enough to forgive herself. But she has understood the truth, at last, and she knows what has to be done.

She is after all Valentine's daughter — however little she (or we) wish to see it most of the time...

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It was warmer here away from the blustery river; even the trees seemed to feel it, their emerald leaves barely beginning to turn to gold. You could almost forget it was October, Clary thought, looking up at the sunlit boughs that arched above their winding path. To their left, the high slides and climbing towers of Carl Schurz playground were just visible above a tall, glossy bank of shrubbery; Clary could hear the cries of playing children, loud as a flock of jays in the sun-warmed air. As they passed the entrance, Jace slowed for an instant, before glancing quickly over at her and picking up his stride again.

She looked at him enquiringly.

"Another time," he said, shaking his head. "It can wait — unless you're actually enjoying doing an impersonation of a wet sponge. But there's something there I want to show you sometime." His voice held a hint of excitement, anticipation, like he had a present for her — though Clary had a feeling it might be the sort of present boys liked to give you, the kind that generally involved a lot of assembly by the giver, like the Optimus Prime she'd got from Simon for her seventh birthday.

She was about to tell Jace she didn't mind the detour when a little gusty breeze shook out the leaves overhead, dousing them with a fresh shower of rain. The call of dry clothes suddenly seemed a lot more compelling. Clary wiped her hand across her face, suppressing a sneeze.

"I suppose you couldn't just tell me about it now?"

The grin he flashed her was as unrepentant as it was expected. "Not a chance. I want you to see this. But tomorrow will do, assuming the weather doesn't go berserk." Actually, Clary thought, the way the weather had been lately, that was a big assumption: berserk was a pretty good description of the string of storms which had been battering the city the past few weeks. But what did a bit of wind and rain matter, beside the small, bright spark of interest she could see kindling in Jace's shadowed face?

"Umbrellas," she said, tucking her hand into his as they drew aside to make way for a mother with a stroller and two children coming down the path towards them. "Big yellow mackintoshes and Paddington Bear hats. We can do berserk if we have to."

Jace looked affronted. "Shadowhunters don't wear yellow. Or Sou'westers."

"Wait, I have to give up wearing a raincoat? Shouldn't someone have warned me before I signed up for this?" She could feel Jace's light-heartedness spreading like tiny bubbles in her own blood.

"Rain hats," he corrected her, "I never said anything about raincoats." Taking her elbow, he steered her around a branch the storm had brought down across the path. "And trust me, nobody should wear a rainhat. Unless they're a bear. Or maybe a weather-beaten fisherman with far-seeing eyes — preferably somewhere a long way out to sea where no one can see them except other far-seeing, weather-beaten fishermen."

He wrinkled his nose. "Anyway, you can't possibly wear yellow. Isabelle could just conceivably get away with it — but she'd look stunning in a black plastic bag, it's just how she's made." His gaze rested on her meditatively, a lurking warmth in his eyes which took the sting out of any implied comparison. Clary felt a blush creep into her cheeks and saw the smile in Jace's eyes deepen.

"Definitely out for you," was all he said though, his voice studiedly light. "Apart from anything else, it's impossible with your hair."

Dislodged from somewhere over their heads, a scattering of golden leaves was spinning down about them on the breeze; Jace caught one as it sailed past and held it where she could see it against her soaking red braid. "See? Red and yellow — hideous."

They had reached the top of the broad, granite stairs that curved down towards the north end of the park. Clary watched Jace as he turned and began to descend the worn steps, taking them two at a time — the contained grace of his stride, the fluid bend of wrist and arm carelessly skimming the stone of the balustrade. There was an ease about his movements, as if somewhere along the way a burden had lifted from his shoulders. His face was cloudless, the harsh lines of despair smoothed away as though they'd never been. Too smooth, thought Clary with a sudden stab of misgiving.

You haven't begun to mourn for him, Jace, she thought, as she followed more slowly down the steps. Or for yourself.

You couldn't just decide it was all behind you, push the reset button, wipe the slate clean by sheer force of will: it didn't work that way. Jace couldn't rewrite his childhood out of existence any more than Valentine could.

Jace had talked as though it was a question of growing up — but this wasn't really about putting away childish things, was it? Of course growing up meant letting your childhood go. You had to move on and make room for new things into your life: new loves springing up — Clary glanced involuntarily at Jace, tranquilly waiting for her at the foot of the stairs — to overshadow the old childish ones.

You gave up the illusion of security too, the comforting, magical belief that grownups could make everything okay. She'd done her own share lately of relinquishing the illusory consolations of childhood.

But the past mattered. You could move on, but you couldn't just throw it away, however illusory — or awful — it had been. Because if you could throw the past away, didn't that make the present disposable too?

Loss and pain — scars that were etched into your being for all time — these were part of growing up too. Jace had been right about that, all those years ago. Out of the mouths of babes, thought Clary, grief closing round her heart. You didn't just move on into adulthood and cast off the dead weight of your ruinous childhood. You carried it with you, like the other indelible Marks you bore. Or you would never be healed.

Jace had said to her bitterly, "the father I loved didn't exist." But in a way, that was the opposite of the truth. It was clear from everything Jace had ever told her that the fanatical, charismatic, mercilessly exacting father who brought him up had been Valentine in everything but name. Throughout his decade-long impersonation, he had never really pretended to be anything else.

If he had, Clary thought with a sudden painful insight, if that terrible, golden childhood had been pure fabrication, if the father Jace knew had been less like Valentine — or Valentine had been less of a father to Jace — it would have been easier for him to set aside his gilded memories, and come to terms with the long black shadows cast back across that remembered light.

But if anything, Jace's upbringing had been uncompromisingly authentic — far more honest, in a way, than her own. The golden circle of love and security he remembered was real, and so was the horror and the cruelty. All of it, unthinkably, was true, and an inextricable part of who he was. The child with the dead falcon, the little boy squirming with laughter in a bath of spaghetti, the young man cradled bloody and dying in his father's arms; the dogged, valiant, shattered boy at her side who was only barely holding himself together by God knows what means — they were all...Jace.

Battered, bloodied Jace. And she had to break him.

"Jace," she said reluctantly and stopped walking, so that he stopped too and turned towards her, a question already forming in his golden eyes. For an instant, Clary's heart failed her. He had given her the knife; but looking into his face, she could hardly bring herself to use it, not with Jace looking at her like that, a smile curving the corners of his mouth and his heart in his eyes. As she watched, the light died in his face and was replaced by a watchful look, as if he'd heard some warning in her tone.

"I'm not all that matters, Jace." She could hear the regret in her own voice as she carefully loosed her opening volley. "Or all you need."

Jace gave her a look as if she was stating the obvious. "You don't need to tell me that, Clary." His tone was patient. "I haven't forgotten about the Lightwoods."

"Or Max," he added, his face darkening. "Of course they matter to me, will matter till the day I die. I haven't forgotten either that I'm a Shadowhunter, and a part of the Clave, despite everything." He sounded almost relieved, as if he'd thought from her expression she was going to say something else, something worse, and had been bracing himself to meet it.

You were right, Jace, thought Clary unhappily. I was. I am.

"Valentine matters, Jace," she said deliberately, eyes never leaving his face, and heard him suck in a breath as though she'd punched him.

She paid no attention. "Of course he does, Jace: he was everything to you for more than half your life. You can't wish that away — any more than I can wish away the fact that my mother married him." Beneath the clammy fabric of her cuffs, her fingers had begun to tremble; she stilled them with an effort.

"And you weren't a fool to love him, either." Clary paused and smiled a little crookedly. "Or if you were, then so was everyone I love best in the world. Which has to mean something."

For me too, she thought reluctantly. Jace, her mother, Luke: all of them had loved him once, the man whose dark heredity she carried, however little, thankfully, she could see it in the mirror. The man whose daughter she was, like it or not.

"You all loved him — well, all except Simon, I guess." She said it aloud, because Jace was staring at her; though whether it was incomprehension or something else in his white face, she couldn't tell. "And the other way round too," she added with a faint feeling of surprise. "You might be the three people in the world that Valentine ever loved."

And had gone on loving, thought Clary, an unexpected constriction in her chest: to the day that he died. Well, maybe not Luke. But Valentine had clearly never gotten over the loss of her mother — any more, thought Clary with a fresh ache of understanding, than he'd gotten over losing his young son. Even if that loss had been deliberately, cold-bloodedly self-inflicted.

Jace was standing very still, his hands curled tightly at his sides. She was close enough to distinguish the fine black shadows his lashes cast against his cheek, fragile as thistledown in the cold, bright sunshine. You could see the marks of what had been done to him printed starkly in his face: a hurt so deep, Clary thought, that there wasn't any part of Jace it didn't reach.

"I know I said to you before that Valentine wasn't your real father because he didn't act like a father to you, because he didn't take care of you." She'd believed it when she said it — and it was probably what Jace had needed to hear at the time, to slow the dizzying sense that he no longer had the faintest idea who he was, or where he belonged. To help him start picking up the pieces of his life and go on as the person he'd been for seven years now: Alec and Isabelle and Max's brother, Maryse and Robert's adopted son.

"But I was wrong, Jace," she said doggedly. Closing her fingers on the front of Jace's jacket, Clary tipped her head back and gazed up into his closed face, wishing for the millionth time it wasn't such a long way up to look him in the eye. "Wrong about both." She paused, glancing around.

The picturesque dell where they had come to a halt was deep and nearly circular, its cobbled paving ringed by soft green shrubbery. Wooded slopes rose steeply above them on three sides, fenced off by a low stone balustrade. Across the fourth, a massive granite arch loomed over the path leading out of the park, its dark sides curtained in ivy.

Reaching back, Clary braced her hands on the flat top of the balustrade and hoisted herself into sitting position so she was looking straight into Jace's too-dark eyes, their gold all swallowed up in pools of black.

"Valentine sent you away, Jace." Her voice sounded thin in her own ears, but she made herself keep going. "He sent you to safety, even though — I think — he loved and missed you. He didn't use you the way he'd used my mom, the way he used everyone else he ever knew. You were the one person he chose not to use."

Jace just looked at her, his pale hair tumbling into his eyes. "Of course Valentine wanted to use me, Clary." He sounded deathly tired.

"He tried every lure he could think of to get me to join him against the Clave. You heard the lies he told me in Renwick's. And when I was stupid enough to go see him on his ship, he offered me — well, everything, to fight on his side." He stopped abruptly.

"Yes, but he let you choose, didn't he?" A pulse had begun beating sharply in her throat. "He hoped you'd come back to him, but he let you go. Like he let you go when you were a little boy." She swallowed, and when she spoke there was an aching note of sadness in her voice.

"Valentine did look after you as a child, Jace, in the only way he could — knowing what he really was, and what he was planning on doing someday. Knowing you: what it would do to you, to try and make you into the ruthless killing-machine he'd wanted you to be.

"Or needed you to be, anyway," she said, staring out into the trees. "I'm not sure he even wanted it, not really. He pretty much said so, didn't he, that night when—"

She broke off, and felt rather than saw Jace flinch. She could hear the echo of Valentine's voice ringing in her ears, dark as old bronze. You were too gentle. You felt others' pain as if it were your own. Understand this my son — I loved you for those things. But the very things I loved you for made you no use to me.

Valentine had thought to raise his son the way he raised his hunting birds — Shadowhunters of the sky, he called them. What was it he'd said to Jace? Falcons are fierce and wild, savage and cruel; they are not meant to be loving pets.

But Jace was none of these things.

Clary thought of the savage reproof Valentine had flung at his son. I told you to make this bird obedient; instead you taught it to love you. And taking the falcon Jace had reared with such loving care, he had snapped its neck, so that his son would never forget the terrible power of love. When did he first realise, Clary wondered, what he himself had done? Did he already recognize, even then, the first turning in the road leading inexorably to the shores of Lake Lyn?

Jace was so close that she could have reached out and taken his averted face between her hands. She sat on them instead, letting the weight of her body press her palms into the cold, dank stone. She could feel the chill seeping into her jeans.

"Faking his own murder was a terrible thing to do to you — only Valentine could have done it, probably." For a moment, her voice wavered.

"But I think he did it for you, Jace. He knew staying with him could only harm you, so he sent you away. He gave you up to protect you. Which is about as parental as it gets."

Jace's head came up at that, his face going paler and paler, and she saw a spasm cross his features, his mouth twisting as though he were being slowly torn apart from the inside. For an instant, Clary felt like Valentine standing over Jace, the red-hot stele gripped in his hand.

She turned her head away, unable to bear the look on Jace's face.

There was a bronze statue in the centre of the cobbles, a young boy dressed in a tunic, with tumbling hair and a bow and arrow at his side. He was seated on a log, his hands clasped carelessly around one knee, and there were animals gathered about his feet: a hare, a fox cub, a fawn — Clary couldn't tell if they were his companions or his quarry. Looking at him suddenly made her feel unbearably sad.

"You told me once," she said slowly, eyes still on the bronze boy, "that you were happy then, Jace, because it was the only time you were sure who you were. Those years in Idris with your father, I mean. The one time you felt like you knew where you belonged."

Valentine had talked to her about belonging too, quoting the Song of Songs at her. He'd got it all wrong: love had nothing to do with ownership. But maybe she'd missed the point too. Belonging to someone wasn't simply about giving yourself to them completely: you could do anything with me, and I would let you. It had just as much to do with the way they'd given themselves — even grotesquely inadequately, defectively — to you.

Jace had said it himself. Clary could hear his thoughtful voice in her head, and every word was like a shard of glass in her heart.

Someone who had a stake in my life. Someone to grieve when I died...

She closed her eyes for an instant, pierced by a grief so sharp it was almost a physical pain.

She opened them again. "I think what you were really saying, Jace," she said gently, "is that you were loved."

All the remaining colour drained from Jace's face.

"Clary, why are you doing this?" he cried, voice cracking like broken glass.

Because I love you, she thought, blinking back angry tears. Jace looked as if the planes of his face were being driven apart under intolerable pressure, the kind that crumples continents and forces mountains inch by inch into the sky. Clary thought of that small hand twisting and breaking up under the strain of a force too strong for it to weather. But Valentine had gauged his son's strength rightly in the end.

"Because it doesn't work, Jace." Clary could hear the raw pain in her own voice. "You can't start again from zero, whatever the stupid song says. You can't erase the past, not without erasing yourself with it, nobody can."

She looked down at her hands. "My mom thought she could. She tried to run away and make a brand-new life for herself with me in New York. But it didn't work for her, any more than it did for me. Not that it was a mistake to live as a mundane. But all those years she could have been with Luke, if she hadn't been so desperate to cut herself off from what she'd been." Clary bit her lip. "All those wasted years.

"You and I both found out this summer what happens when you try not letting yourself feel what you want to feel." She gave him a small smile. It still gave her a sick feeling, thinking about those awful weeks she'd spent believing Jace was her brother and that there was something poisoned and wrong about the way she felt about him, when it was twined so deep into her being she couldn't imagine rooting it out and having anything of herself left behind.

"But the opposite is true too, Jace. All the things you don't want to feel — you have to let yourself feel them too."

Or in the end, thought Clary, the result was the same. Work hard enough at lying to yourself, and in the end you began to believe your own lies. And that had been the most terrifying thing about Valentine, hadn't it?

She reached out for him then, taking him gently by the shoulder and turning him towards her, so that the brilliant sunlight fell unforgivingly on his ravaged face.

"Your childhood wasn't a lie, Jace," she said steadily. "Any more than mine was. Not in the things that matter." There was no uncertainty in her voice now.

"Your father loved you, Jace, to the moment he died — and you loved him, and it was his tragedy and yours that he thought he'd been charged by Heaven with saving the world. An earlier century might have called him a visionary; maybe we'd call him insane. And maybe everything he did would have been wrong even if it really had been the only way save the entire world from destruction, I don't know.

"But I do know this, Jace: Abraham loved Isaac. And nothing but your father's sacred duty to God, as he saw it, could ever have driven him to do what he did. I was there," she said quietly.

Jace was staring at her, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. She could see the sweat shimmering on his collarbones as they rose and fell raggedly with his breathing. His face was washed with golden light, the pen strokes of grief and pain etched sharp as a Rembrandt print into his fine, bloodless skin.

"You loved him," she repeated, because Jace was still staring at her blindly, a look on his face like he was coming to pieces. "And he loved you, and he's gone."

And at last he broke down — for the first time, Clary guessed, since he was a very small boy. Leaning forward, she pulled him into her arms, the rough stonework scraping the backs of her knees as she gathered him close and held him, her cheek pressed against his tangled head and her own tears rolling slowly into his hair.

He's gone — and I killed him, Clary thought with a little jolt, hard and precise as an electric shock to her chest. Of course she hadn't killed Valentine, exactly — that was the Angel, or the will of Heaven or whatever — she'd only cleared the way for the fatal bolt. And Valentine had murdered Jace...

But for the first time, picturing the dark figure crumpling silently onto the sand, Clary felt a sharp pang of sorrow and regret — not that she'd brought him down, because what choice did she have? — but that she'd had to. It had been much more comfortable simply hating Valentine, because he was hateful and evil and insane and had tried to destroy everyone she loved, one after another. Thinking of things as black and white — the way Valentine did. But nothing in the world was like that really, except possibly demons. And they weren't of this world, were they? That was the thing about humans: they were all mixed up, the good and the bad all tangled terribly together. Wasn't it Valentine himself who once said something like that to her?

A lump rose in Clary's throat, choking off the words she was going to say. She held onto Jace a little desperately, feeling the strength of him beneath her fingers, the taut curve of his back warm and solid and familiar as her own body. Between her hands, Jace's body was steadying, the racking convulsions of grief slowly dwindling away.

"Oh damn it all," he said indistinctly. "Damn, damn, damn." Clary gazed down at him through a wavering lens of tears.

"What is it, Jace?" she said very softly.

"Waylands don't cry. My father always said." His voice was muffled against her shoulder.

She pulled him closer, his fine, damp hair curling like raw silk around her fingers. "But Morgensterns do, Jace. I mean, look at me." She gave him a watery smile. "And you're a thousand times more Morgenstern than I'll ever be — no matter what blood runs in your veins.

"I wouldn't want you any other way, either." she added gently, taking his face in her hands and tilting it so she was looking right into the small steady glow, bright as a candle flame, that shone in the depths of his gold eyes. "And neither should you — Jace Herondale Wayland Morgenstern Lightwood."

She gazed at him, a serious expression on her face. "They're all a part of who you are, Jace — like the rings of a tree." Her eyes slipped past him to the woodland climbing up the hillside, glowing like stained glass in the afternoon light.

"Or lines carved into its bark, maybe. The living tree grows around them over time, but they're never wholly lost." Her voice was still shaky, but she could feel a growing flame of conviction spreading inside her chest.

"And your father gave every one of them to you, Jace — from the potions he administered to Céline to his decision to send you away to the Lightwoods. If it weren't for him, you wouldn't be the amazing person you are." She felt for his hand, winding his fingers determinedly into her own with love and a sort of wondering gratitude. Behind them, she could hear a soft rustling in the undergrowth, as though some small creature was foraging quietly for its autumn stores.

"He had all these insane schemes for saving humankind and remaking the world, and in the end they came to nothing. But that one thing he did might have made more difference to the world than anything else he could ever have achieved.

"It changed the world for me, anyway," she added softly. "Whatever terrible things Valentine did, I guess that has to count for something."

He looked up at her then, his eyes very bright. "Maybe," he said. "But the greatest gift he brought into this world, Clarissa Fray Morgenstern, was the one he didn't even know about, not until long afterwards. The one that transformed my world — permanently."

Eyes shining, he bent down and kissed her softly, so that Clary felt her heart expand inside her chest with the radiance of a thousand suns, a radiance so bright it seemed to illuminate the darkness behind her closed eyes. When she opened them, Jace's face was ablaze with the same brilliant light, a look on his face that took her breath away. Clary thought of the exultation of Piaf's trumpets, the angel flaring to incandescent glory beneath the stones of the Wayland manor, and for a second she almost expected to see the ghostly shadow of wings hovering beyond Jace's head, the way she saw him in her dreams.

He looked down at her, his lips curving in the sweet, irrepressible smile she loved best, and kissed her again. Then sliding his hands to her waist, he swung her lightly down onto the cobbles and taking her by the hand, walked out with her beneath the shadowed arch to the waiting city beyond.

Cantab / NYC
May - Sept 2012

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A Note about Location:
Pedants will observe that I've played fast and loose with local geography: you can't actually quite see Renwick's from the '80s and the NYC Parks Dept has yet to install either arbor or sleek new picnic tables on that stretch of the river, though they've done it elsewhere. Nor is the entrance to Carl Schurz playground quite where I've put it. But the broad outlines of river, park and promenade are correct, and the statue is really there. And Clare herself built the Institute half a block out into the East River...

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If you liked this story, you might also enjoy my stories-in-progress about Valentine and Jocelyn: The Circle Game, Wednesday's Children and Odi et Amo. For more glimpses of Jace's childhood with Valentine, have a look at my Songs of Innocence shorts, Fall 1997, Discipline, An Orchard So Young in the Bark and now Lessons, my latest Jace and Valentine story-in-progress.