Hey guys. This is my first story on this website, so don't be too harsh. I welcome criticism, if it's constructive, not destructive. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Mortal Instruments characters. They are the property of Cassandra Clare.
Prologue
Jace Wayland had been trained not to feel pain. Ever since he was five, his father had trained him that pain was only a message—that you didn't have to feel it if you didn't want to.
But these days, pain was all he'd wanted to feel. It took away the numbness that had been clouding his brain, his senses, his entire life. All he wanted was to feel something, to show that he was still alive, even if his mother wasn't. It was a physical distraction from the agony that his father had abandoned on a street corner, claiming he was the reason his mother was dead.
He knew the disgust his adoptive family would feel if they knew what he did late at night with their kitchen knives when the nothingness he felt became too much to bear. He knew that they would throw him out on his sixteen-year-old ass, just like his father had
So he covered the scars he gave to himself with long-sleeve black T-shirts. He covered up with the pain with a cutting, sarcastic wit that no one could match. He knew the façade was cliché, but the more predictable your moves were, the more subtle you were. At least, that was what his father had said. Even after his father threw him out, Jace still listened to his advice. He didn't know why he did. Maybe it was because he didn't know how else to live. Or maybe it was because, despite everything, he still possessed a childish hope that his father would actually let him come home if he saw how much Jace trusted and abided by his rules and words of wisdom. He buried that hope deep inside him. But in a chasm of his soul, somewhere deeper inside him, he knew the whole façade and hope was bullshit, and he would never be accepted back into his father's life. Never. Not since the car accident that had—
He couldn't think about that.