Buttercup

“Jace, you
don’t have to—”
“I was trying to go…somewhere,” Jace said. “But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t stop thinking.
About the first time I ever saw you, and how after that I couldn’t forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I forced
Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee
shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me—I should have been the one sitting with
you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew
you, the more I felt it—it had never been like that for me before. I’d always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not
wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick’s and I
knew.
“And then to find out that the reason I felt like that—like you were some part of me I’d lost and never even knew I was missing
until I saw you again—that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on
me. I don’t even know for what—for thinking that I could actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be
that happy. I couldn’t imagine what it was I’d done that I was being punished for—”
“If you’re being punished,” Clary said, “then so am I.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass