I absolutely adore this one. It's my favourite non-multi-chaptered story I've ever written apart from "Ardent", which has not been posted yet but will as soon as I finish editing it. (Which may be a while, as it's kind of lengthy.) If anyone would like to use this idea (Colour AU, as I'm calling it), go right ahead! I'd love it if you'd send me a link to what you wrote so I can check it out, too :) But yeah, another one for the 24 Fics in 24 Days Challenge here.
When Alec is nine, he is grey. He is blurred and uncertain, teetering on the edge of two stark contrasts he can't fall into no matter how hard he wishes he could. There is no definition to his being, no extremeness in anything he does or traits that fall undeniably into either of the two shades around him. He is grey, with nothing set in stone or made clear by the beautiful starkness of his colour.
He doesn't think about it much, barely notes how unclear he looks in comparison to the rest of his small universe inside an Institute that is still all too unfamiliar. It's not until Jace comes crashing into their infinitesimal corner of the world a few years later that he starts to worry about it. Because Jace, brilliant, wild Jace with endless bounds of impulsiveness and bravery, is a burning white so bright it nearly blinds him when he looks. His edges are sharp and sudden, his planes smooth and glimmering like the summer sun Alec has always tried so hard to avoid lest he get burned under it's selfish caress. Jace, stunning, exuberant Jace, really is the sun and Alec has the sudden realization that he can no longer take cover from it in the confines of a dark room or his mother's growingly distant embrace.
Jace is the sun, and Alec realizes he will never burn that bright.
It's then that the greyness that is Alec's soul starts to worry him because if he'll never be white, that must mean he'll eventually be black. It's terrifying, staring in the mirror and not knowing into which extreme he'll fall or if he'll always be caught in this limbo of the in-between, his features never sharpening into something more clear, more definite. He widens his eyes then to the colors of his parents, his mother white and his father black as they clash with each other in a burst of the grey that has come to form Alec, and the sister who watches him like he carries the sun on his back. He hates how she looks at him like that, doesn't understand why she can't see that Jace is the sun here, not him, and it doesn't take but a moment for him to realize that she too is white like their mother and the brother neither had expected to have. It scares him, looking at them and realizing he is the only one left undefined. The most terrifying truth of all, however, is Max.
He is three when the crushing realization that is Alec's own personal eye-opening to the world around him comes and nothing more than a gurgling ball of bundled desperation to keep a dying love afloat. Alec had taken pity on him when he'd been born, had looked at him and seen the scraps of his parents' ruined marriage in his stormy grey eyes, and had taken it upon himself to make sure that his little brother could never see those ugly shards himself when he looks in the mirror. Which is why, when Alec watches the toddler with newly perceptive eyes, he finds himself soon heaving into a toilet in the upstairs bathroom.
Because Max is not black or white or even grey.
No, Max is a muddy brown swirling with a thousand colours that have all drowned each other out to meld into the smooth murk of his own unique shade. There are hundreds of traits waiting to take root in his still undeveloped brain, lurking fuzzily in the air around the bright toddler, and millions of uncertainties that have yet to be shaped into the definitiveness that comes from black or white. Max is something new, something different and unknown, and therefore the most terrifying of them all.
This time, when Alec looks in the mirror and tries to trace the blurry lines of grey that make him up, he wonders if he'll become something else entirely; not the black or the white of those who have always surrounded him. Lying in the middle of his still gargantuan bed, Alec prays with all he has that that will be the case.
When Alec is seventeen, he is black. There is a heavy weight that pulls at his tired shoulders, a cloud over his deep blue eyes that bathes the world in darker hues, and he finds little joy in anything now. He hates more than he loves, is downtrodden and reserved more than he is ever happy and open, and even the sweetest things the earth has to offer leave a bitter taste in his mouth. He is black; harsh lines of shadowed doubts making up his edges and coarse desolation forming his planes.
He avoids mirrors on all occasions now, unable to bear seeing the way that the worse of the two contrasting shades has staked its unrelenting claim on his weary being. He doesn't like looking at how far he has fallen, doesn't like feeling the guilt that comes with knowing he had once wished desperately for this, for anything but the grey he used to be, because oh, God, how he wishes he could go back to that. Grey, as it turned out, was a far easier shade to live in than black.
Max's brown has taken on underlying hues of earthy green by then and, while Alec might have thought before that it would eventually turn entirely to the more colourful tone, he knows now that this is what it will always be. His brother is balanced in the way no one else Alec has ever met has been, this trait making for the green that has bled its way into his hue, and friendly but serious in the way that the brown conveys so well. His colour is perfect and beautiful and brilliant and Alec would be lying if he said he isn't the least bit jealous.
Jace is no longer a harsh white, his colour turning gold with flecks of orange and bits of purple. He is impulsive and superficial, but full of success and triumph over everything he so much as chances a glance at. He is still the sun, burning bright against Alec's dark starless skies, and it still hurts to look at him.
Isabelle is silver and magenta, indigo and red. She is brilliant and passionate, wild and expressive, with an uncanny intuition for the things Alec's blackness has always hidden so well from everyone else. He loves her and worries for her and wishes she would look at him like she used to because wouldn't it be nice to know someone still believed he had at least a touch of all those around him's brightness? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to pretend no one but him could see that his grey has catapulted into the harsh reality of black?
And then he meets Magnus.
There is an explosion of colour at first, so bright and unorthodox it blinds him and he soon finds himself blinking dumbly at the man standing in front of them. Red and orange and yellow and green and indigo and silver and gold and suddenly Alec feels this incomparable urge to cling to the colours, to wrap them around him so they might banish his black, to hold tight and never let go incase he loses the sudden brightness that has burst into his dimming world. He doesn't, though it's hard to resist, and instead finds himself watching as his siblings, who have always garnered all the attention in the room with the brilliant colour Alec has never possessed, blend seamlessly into the vibrant tones of the party. He is bitter, as he often is now, but says nothing even as they turn to leave with the air of having forgotten he's even there with them.
And then there's a hand curling around his arm and the world is exploding into vivid hues of every colour Alec has ever known before the blast is suddenly focusing in a pair of dancing golden-green eyes locked with his own. "Call me," Magnus tells him, slipping a card into his jacket pocket. Dropping a glittery wink, he's gone then and Alec is left staring after him with an aching feeling of desperation for the colour to come back and a growing panic at the black that has settled itself comfortably right back into place.
Help me, he wants to say. Save me. Please, I know you can.
He turns to leave instead.
When Alec is nineteen, he is uncertain. The black is still there, heavy and suffocating with its implacable embrace, but there is something new that has started to work its way up from underneath. This new shade is more bright, more brilliant, and Alec prays with everything in him that it will take over from the black sometime soon. He is a muddled mess of uncertainty; the black warring angrily with whatever is trying to break through the painful hands it has wrapped around him like a cage.
The rest of his world is no longer the black and white it was when he was nine. It's grown bigger now, fitting in new faces that each bring new colours to it, and Alec finds that nearly all of it is made up of the vibrant burst that is Magnus. He also finds that he doesn't really mind, despite the way his parents look at him or the sinking feeling that the colour Magnus has brought isn't enough to excuse the walls that still stand defiantly in the core their relationship. For now, he's content to hold tanned hands and kiss soft lips and whisper words of love and patiently wait for his own colour to make its appearance.
And then, suddenly, the vivid hues Magnus has surrounded him with are no longer enough to block out the growing feeling of inadequacy when compared to the brilliant man before him, and he is no longer blind to the little things that are so hugely wrong between them. He sees Magnus's unwillingness to share anything even the smallest breadcrumbs of personal things with him. He sees how he can never really be sure that he isn't just being played here, that he isn't anything but a trivial blip in the long line that is Magnus's life. He sees the doubt that settles heavily in his heart at all the 'I love you's and the hurt that pounds harshly in his chest at Magnus's easy dismissal of things that Alec has always thought to be so very important. He sees, oh he sees, and he wishes with everything in him that he could go back to being blind.
It's a stupid thought, though, Alec has always hated the concept of love being blind. After all, if love were blind, how would it ever hit its mark? And maybe that's what really gets to him the most about this sudden lifting of the happy cloud Magnus's colours had left him in before; the fact that this love he feels so strongly might not be the right one, that he'd been too blinded to realize this wasn't all there was ever going to be for him.
He doesn't mean to hurt Magnus, doesn't mean for the unwanted flits of vindictive satisfaction to come when he sees how he has wounded the man he loves with his own desperation to bridge the gap he's realized has been cutting between them since the start. He doesn't mean to feel just a little bit grateful to Camille for burning the pretend bridge that had been thrown over it, but he can't help it because now he won't fall into the aching pits below when he tries to cross the imagined path. He is thankful the illusion of love and brightness and colour is gone, even if it's left him sitting alone in the black of his own being once more.
When he looks ahead at the explosion of vibrancy that has left him behind, he thinks its for the best. He's only sad that the colour he'd felt creeping in under the black has disappeared.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't realize how much I was hurting you."
Alec doesn't answered, instead staring absently at the dark stretch of his wall across the room. Magnus sighs, a heavy sound wet with the tears Alec has never before seen him shed, and rubs a tired hand over his weary face.
Stop it, Alec wants to say. Bring the colour back. Where did it go? Did you lose it?
"I love you," he says, like its any different from the thousands of times he's said it before, like Alec is any more likely to believe now than he ever was when they were together. "And I— I'm so sorry I made you feel like you couldn't believe that. I'm sorry you can't think I do because you've got it in your head that you're trivial to me. I'd say it's a crazy idea, but I realize now that I've never given you any reason to believe otherwise. I— I'm just— I'm sorry."
Are you? Alec wants to say. Or are you just saying what you think I want to hear?
"It's okay," Alec murmurs instead, collapsing back from the seated position he'd been in until he's laying spread out on the bed, staring at the ceiling now instead of the wall. He'd never realized how dark his room was before, how it matches the black that surrounds Alec in every aspect of his life.
"No, it's not. I was being selfish and cruel and unfair and a thousand other things I refused to admit and, as if that wasn't bad enough, I went and blamed it all on you in the end. I shouldn't have broken up with you over the thing with Camille. I shouldn't have refused to even let you try to explain. I shouldn't have made it out to be all your fault that we were over. I should have admitted that it was my fault, too. In fact, I think it was more my fault than it ever was yours."
No, Alec wants to say. Don't say that. It's my fault. I knew I would never be as bright as you, but I clung to your colours selfishly anyway because I hated the black. Do you know what that's like? No, I guess you wouldn't. It's terrifying, the black. I'm sorry I dragged you into it.
"Can we try again?" Magnus asks in the beats of silence where Alec doesn't voice his running thoughts. "I'm not stupid enough to think we can just forget this ever happened and I know I'm being selfish here, but I can't let you go, Alec. I want us to work, I want to fix the things that have gone so wrong in our relationship. I want a second chance." A pause. Alec doesn't move. "But I understand if you don't. I don't want you to agree to this just because it's what I want or because you're trying to cling to whatever you can get. I need you to want us to be able work, too, and to be in a healthy relationship. I need you to want us, Alec. The ball's in your court now, darling, you can decide what you're shooting for."
"I love you," Alec says, his thoughts coming out loud for the first time in days. "I want us to work. I want there to be an us. But, I can't go through my life feeling like I don't know you at all, Magnus. I want to know about your past, about your life. And if you're not willing to tell me about it, then I shouldn't be with you. You need me to want us, and I do, but I need you to be willing to do that."
There's something pleading in Magnus's expression, Alec thinks, as he shifts from his place perched uncomfortably on the edge of Alec's bed. "I can do that," he whispers, reaching out to brush a gentle, tanned hand over Alec's cheek. "Can we try again?"
The colour is creeping back into Magnus's being, curling around him and sharpening his fading edges with the vivid tones Alec never grows tired of. He almost reaches to catch at a tendril curling through the air towards the tall man, but instead leans forward to wind a hand into Magnus's hair. "Alright," he says. "We can try again."
An explosion of colour, just like the first time Alec had met him, suddenly comes rushing into Alec's newly darkened world and he welcomes it with an open heart. This time, the burst centers around the brush of Magnus's lips against his own, soft and full of promise Alec is beginning to believe to be true. And when Magnus murmurs, "I love you," he almost doesn't doubt it.
He's too busy reveling in the brilliant blue that has emerged and overwhelmed the black he used to be.
Did I mention how much I love this one? Anyway, let me know what you thought.