Deserted Highways

Words for the Missing

A/N: THERE IS THE START OF A SMUT SCENE IN THIS CHAPTER!! Read at your own risk.

her towel on the floor as she stepped towards a closet. She spun quickly, muscles tensed, face sharp and angry, and he felt like a sweater with loose threads, getting caught on her all the time. "Sorry," he muttered.

"Jace," she said. She turned away, stepping fully into the closet and shutting the door behind her. "I didn't think you'd be in here." Her voice came out muffled to Jace's ordinary ears and he could hear her shifting around in the closet. He heard a thud.

"Oh, you motherfucker," he heard her curse, and he desperately wanted to laugh, somehow managing to control it as she stepped back out, giving a poisonous glare to the closet door as she kicked it shut. "Bitch."

Jace raised an eyebrow and she turned her glare to him, softening when she finally met his eyes. She wore a cropped black tanktop, and he could tell that she didn't bother with the restriction of wearing a bra. Soft black shorts curved over her hips and he could see the swollen ache of her knee, the edge of a scar peeking out under her shirt and it was like he'd forgotten how incredibly breathtaking she was.

"You know, that closet never did anything to you," he said with a soft smile, trying to shove down some other darker emotion that swirled in him at the sight of her just standing there barefoot in her room like she'd not been gone for weeks.

She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes and she sat next to him on the bed. "You're still bleeding," he said and she shrugged. He sighed loudly, and suddenly irritation was boiling in his blood and he bit his tongue to keep quiet. He reached under her bed for the small kit of healing supplies that he'd discovered there during one of his many nights spent raging in this room at her photos.

She let him take her hand in his and she didn't flinch when he rubbed medicine into the wounds, maybe a little too harshly. She just sat there, not looking at him, her brow pulled low over mismatched eyes, and she looked to small for the room, to small for the weight of her life, the heaviness of her existence to be resting on her shoulders and somehow, it just made Jace feel more angry, at her, at her leaving him behind, at everything.

He wrapped gauze around her wrists and then he couldn't handle it anymore. "How could you do that?" he asked, quiet, dangerous, his anger a poison in the air, clouding the room and surrounding them.

"What do you mean?" she asked him, and he could hear in her voice that she knew what he meant before she even asked the question. He stood, suddenly desperate to move and she looked up at him. He was glad that she'd shut the bedroom door behind her.

"How could you fucking do that to me?" he repeated, nearly shouting and she flinched, but he kept going. "How could you sit there and let me think that you died? Do you fucking know how much it hurt? I couldn't breathe, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I kept seeing you die over and over again. I wanted to die. I couldn't fathom my use in a world where you weren't and I was minutes away from putting a gun in my mouth and I didn't because all I could think of is how disappointed you would have been."

"Jace, I-" she started.

He cut her off, screaming now, he could feel the veins in his neck popping out, felt the heat of his anger and his despair clawing red across his skin. "You said you loved me. You stood there in my room and you told me that you loved me and that you would never leave and then you fucking left and you let me think you were dead for weeks, Kaelie, for weeks. How could you do that?" He knew everyone could hear him, and he didn't care.

"You said that you loved me," he repeated and his voice cracked and there were tears hot and salty on his cheeks.

He could see her face stiffen, see her retreat from him as she stood, her stance nearly predatory, a cold grin curving her mouth and she laughed. "You think I wanted to? You think I fucking liked this, Jace? Is that really what you think of me?" She stopped to laugh again.

"I would rather have been dead. I would have done anything to keep you alive, I don't care how much it hurts me, how much I don't want to do it, I will do anything to keep you alive and safe. Don't you fucking get it? Goddammit Jace, I didn't want this. I didn't want any of this. I thought that if you knew I was alive that something seriously awful would happen. And I was right, wasn't I? Ben is dead. The second someone figured it out, they died. I couldn't let that happen to you."

"You let me suffer like that. You let me hurt and cry myself to sleep, you let Sarah and Michael and Lilith think that they had failed you. You knew and you didn't say anything, you just stayed away. The Kaelie I knew would never have done anything like that," he spat, and her voice was like ice, soft, deadly, eerie.

"You don't know me at all, Jace," she said, and her eyes burned bright in her anger. "You don't fucking know anything."

He stepped towards her, crowding her against the wall, towering over her. "Don't fucking lie to yourself, Kaelie, and don't lie to me," he growled. "I know you. I know how you think, I know how much you care about everything, about every living thing that crosses your path, about Michael and the rest of them. I know that you talk in your sleep, I know that you get a wrinkle in your forehead when you laugh, I know what your skin smells like when you just shower, I know what you look like when you've killed someone, I know how you got that scar on your throat. I know you."

He leaned closer to her, mouth a whisper away from hers. "And yet, I still didn't know that you could look me in the eye and tell me you loved me and then walk away and watch me suffer, watch the blackness swallow me whole and do nothing at all. Would you even have told me? Ever? Or would you have just pretended to be Hera and kept pretending that you loved me and using it to justify this?"

Her face was a strange mixture of murderous and heartbroken. "Don't you fucking dare," she said, her voice was venom. "Don't you fucking dare talk to me like that. You don't get to do that, not after everything. I would have told you, I wanted to tell you, it killed me to watch you and not say anything, but you'd be dead if I had. You still could end up dead, Jace, open your eyes. The people around me die, and goddammit, I fucking know better than to have ever let you get this close, to ever have let myself feel this way about you, but it's too late. I told you I loved you Jace, and I fucking meant it and I never want to hear you say you don't believe me again."

She looked up at him, anger and sincerity and heartache in her eyes. "I love you so goddamn much, Jace Daemonero."

Jace froze and then his body was surging with the remnants of his anger, a potent mixture of relief and sadness and desire and he picked her up under her thighs, forcing her roughly against the wall and bringing is mouth to hers in a near painful kiss. Kaelie gasped and it did incredible things for Jace's body, he drank her in. She kissed him back, arching into him, the press of her body was delicious.

"I'm so fucking angry with you," he muttered, pulling away from her mouth and kissing at her throat.

"I know," she said, and it sounded like a moan, and he pressed into her harder, sure she could feel how badly he needed her at that moment. Her thin fingers twisted in his hair, pulling hard, and he groaned, bringing his lips back to hers. He moved back and set her gently on the floor and she was pulling him back into a desperate kiss.

"I missed you so much," he said and his fingers were at the hem of her cropped tank, and she smiled against him, let him peel it over her head. She shook her head and her hair tumbled down her bare back and he wanted to stop and stare at her in awe. His thumb brushed over a raised scar on her stomach and he looked down, stuck for a moment on the place where the bullet had entered her flesh.

"I know," she said and he brought his eyes back to her face and she looked- shy, embarrassed about the blemishes on her skin and he cupped her face in his hands.

"Beautiful," he murmured, reaching for the light and then pulling her with him to the bed. He pulled her down to sit in his lap, and she ground her hips down into his. "You're gonna kill me, baby."

She grinned at him, leaning in to nip at his throat. She pulled at his tip and he shivered at her touch, feather light across his bare skin and she pushed on his shoulder until he scooted up on the bed, leaning back into the pillows. "Yeah?" she murmured against his chest, kissing her way down his body and scratching her fingernails above his waistband.

She stood suddenly, winking at him, and in one smooth motion