Shooting Butterflies Chapter 1: a boy named Jonathan Christopher, a mortal instruments fanfic

Warning| Jonathan, child!Jonathan, baby!Clary, child abuse, inside jokes, brotherly/sisterly love, torture, knives

Chapter One: a boy named Jonathan Christopher

"I hardly know you; I think I can tell,

These are the reasons I think that we're ill."

My Manic and I. Laura Marling

Moonlight was silver like old scars, shining bright as the sun through the curtains. Flickering across the floorboards and drawing a long stripe down the center of Jonathan's room from window to the newly ajar door that had awoken him. "Jonathan," a woman's voice, his mother's voice, calls to him from the shadows and she strides across his bedroom and yanks the curtains shut. Her hair is long and red, curling into ringlets tumble down her leather covered shoulders and back. Her face is pale and sickly in the dark. "Come here."

Throwing back his sheets Jonathan stands in his pajamas for a few moments as his mother runs around his room, grabbing clothes, books, and a few half-broken toys into a bag laid out on his bed.

"Mama?" he whispers but Mama won't look at him. She muttering to herself, a strange progressive mantra he can't begin to understand and he's suddenly reminded of his father, warning him of his mother's depressive mood swings. "Mama—?" He reaches out to touch her and she flinches away eyes wide like she's seeing something she shouldn't.

Jonathan recoils too, shocked by the sudden movement. Jocelyn's expression softens, but she says nothing, just stares on quietly transfixed.

"Jocelyn!" a male voice bellows and Lucian—the werewolf man—runs into his room, hair askew and clothes rumbled and dirty. Jonathan's eyes widen. Wasn't he supposed to be dead? "Hurry up, we have to go now!"

Mama's eyes are wide and she nods, wordlessly slings the backpack onto her arm and looks to Jonathan. "Sweetheart, we're going to go on a little trip," she says sweetly as she can, but keeps her distance, as always, she never touches him unless it's necessary.

Sensing her hesitation, Lucian grabs him, jostling him upwards—Jonathan shrieks. "Unhand me!" He swings his hands back and lands a few blows to the not-dead wolfman's ears. He howls in pain.

"Luke!" His mother pries Jonathan back and he burrows into her warmth and smell, taking comfort in her presences. Mama shivers against him.

Her skin is damp with sweat and . . . blood.

Suddenly they're in motion, running through the corridors of the Fairchild estate and down the spiraling staircase in a clutter of motion, shouting and weapons.

His grandparents are waiting at the bottom of the staircase in their nightclothes, their hair is the same fiery red as his mother's, but silver just as their skin was leathery and wrinkled, it was scarred silvery like the moonlight—like his father's and his mother's and everyone else's. They are like warriors of the shadows, graced in moonlight.

Silver moonlight dominates everything in the dark and chases away the monsters.

"Jocelyn!" they cry and Jonathan glares at them for good measure. "Where are you going?"

She says nothing to them and runs out the door, escaping into the night.

This new world is odd and funny smelling. There are odd glowing devices, metal carriages that run without horses and so much noise. He doesn't like it and he wants to go home. He longs for grass and trees and horses and his father's smooth, benevolent voice. Mama just smiles at him and asks, "Why?" and says they've always lived here.

It's him, and her, and Lucian living in a small cramped room, much less extravagant than the rooms of the Fairchild or Morgenstern mansion.

The people on the streets are odd as well—out of the corner of his eye, sometimes, he'll see them for what they truly are. Then indirectly he'll see them as they aren't. Unnatural colors are dulled and claws are filed into nails. He'll later remember that these people are covered by what's called 'glamor'.

Things get stranger and stranger when he's taken to a man with upturned eyes and glittery make-up and lavish yet outrageous clothes. He summons sparkling blue fire in his palms and fingertips and touches the sides of Jonathan's face—the fire doesn't sear him, or burn, it's cool as water.

When he withdraws his hands, his expression is grim and Jonathan is smiling because yes this land is magical too.

Mama is in a state of stress for the next few days, vomiting into toilets and running her fingers through her knotted hair and crying no no no because what's happening can't be happening. Lucian is distraught as well, but Jonathan doesn't really care for the fleabag and refuses to act otherwise. They make it exceedingly clear that he is on his own in his dreams of glass cities and shining moonlight and a father who was gentle.

Jonathan doesn't care for Mama's mood swings either, or the fact that she has taken to calling him Sebastian. It happened suddenly one day, he woke up and she and Lucian started calling him Sebastian. He also has to take a new medicine, a small handful of white pills that Mama swears are good for him and Lucian frowns grimly, but nods all the same.

They give him headaches, dilute his mind, and make it harder for him to think. Until it's harder and harder for him to remember his father's face and the great halls and home in which he once lived and the horses he rode and the toys he left behind.

He has a sense—he knows his mother is tricking him. He doesn't know or for what purpose, but Mama was trying to hurt him somehow. Infect him with her lies and tie him up into the new spun from fable world they live in where the monsters hide in plain sight. He won't accept it though. He can't. He longs for his old life and the faces he could just barely see through the haze of memory as the days progress to weeks and then to months.

So, when she comes to him the next morning with his usual breakfast and pills and orders him to take them first—more than the usual amount—and he screams, cries, bites to get away.

Mama makes a point thereafter to sneak the medicine into his food.

There's a thing growing in Mama's belly.

A big thing.

A loved thing.

It's called a baby.

And Mama loves it more than him—which is unfortunate but not unlikely. He often finds himself staring at the swell that grew under her once form fitting tee shirts and longs to touch it, and his mother let him, reluctantly.

The skin was warm there, pink and silvery with old scars that shine under his pale hands. Her belly was round like a growth, sphering outward from under her breasts to the waistband of her jeans similar to a half-globe. He wonders that whatever was inside would be circular, and how would it come out.

He voices his thoughts on the subject when something brushes past his fingers and under the hard, silvery skin.

His eyes go uncharacteristically wide and Jocelyn smiles a little. "I think she likes you, Sebastian." Her smile reminded him more of a sneer, something that carved all remaining gentleness from his heart.

His mouth twists.

Baby's love everything, right? They love without thought or care and however they are raised they grow to indifferently love the person who gave them care and raises them up—like he with his mother and father. Since he is alone in the world, he's learnt to value the prospect of alliance in something that could be so easily corrupted by default. Yes, Sebastian thinks, staring into the opaque green eyes of his new baby sister. I will love you and care for you and you'll love me in return.

"What did you name her?" asks Lucian and Jocelyn smiles up at him, weary and blurry eyed as she smiles down at the peach skinned baby and let the little girl fist her finger—no more than two hours old and Mama already loved her more—and coos to her.

"Clarissa. Clarissa Fray."

By the time she's two Clarissa is a thinker, he can tell and he can already imagine all the great conversations and pranks they will play once her vocabulary expands upon that of "Mommy, Unkie and Bassie."

Of course, she can't say his full name, yet, but he coaches her for long hours out of the day and taught her the break down and how to put it together. Though the hapless two-year-old will only giggle and place her pudgy hands on his face and lightly slap him, crying, "Bassie! Bassie!" between shrilly giggles and he'll sigh heavily, but smile too.

"No, Clarissa, Seb-bas-tian,"

The name had always felt wrong and he can't exactly remember why, but Sebastian doesn't seem to fit him as well as any other name. Perhaps he could rename himself one day.

"Bassie . . . pwetty!" She yanks fistfuls of his white-blonde hair and he restrains his primitive urge to yell in retaliation.

Clary can see the invisible things too.

It happens one day at the park when Sebastian realizes Clarissa was staring at a patch of flowers, and beyond to the things floating between the blooms with papery butterfly wings and chirping voices. "Do you see them too, Clarissa?" he asks, almost shocked when his sister shrieks loudly as they flew closer.

His sister could see Them too. The faeries! This was the best day ever!

"Hey, Clarissa do you want to see a cool trick?" Clarissa brays excitedly and Sebastian nods. "Okay, wait here."

He crawls forward a few steps on his hands and a knee, keeping his eye trained on a tiny winged creature furthest from the rest. Like a predator, he slowly slides his arms through the cool grass towards it until his hands created two half spheres and quickly brings them around the faerie and brought it close. The thing cries and kicks and bites, but Sebastian was immune having done this before. His fingers are marred with tiny, upper jaw bites that remind him that the fey are real.

He shuffles back to Clarissa, knee green with earth, and opens his hand a little, catching the creature's lower half in his fist and held it up for Clarissa to see. "Pretty, huh?"

The papery wings outstretch and extend like pressed thin gossamer, so translucent and pretty and breakable it seemed to be sinful to make something so fragile. Sebastian felt his heartbeat quicken at the thought.

Clarissa's eyes are bright with wonder and she coos and waves her pinky towards the hysterical faerie, unaware of its distress.

"Watch this," Sebastian takes his thumb and forefinger and places it on the faerie's paper-thin wing and pinches. Tremors ran through its tiny body and it yips. Sebastian pinches the wing hardens and yanks back, ripping the wing clean off.

The faerie screams as sharply as a baby rabbit would, and clear liquid ran out of its body and down between Sebastian's fingers and dripping of its dismembered wing as he smiles.

The faerie's screams mix with other cries too. Cries he doesn't like.

He takes one look into his baby sister's face and felt his stomach beginning to tie in to knots.

Clarissa is crying—sobbing—and it's all his fault.

Jocelyn is sure to enforce that thought when she came running over seconds later to find the dead faerie in his hands and Clarissa's cherry red face. She tears Clarissa away from him, all the while yelling and marching back to the apartment across the street—leaving Sebastian to his own.

He tucks the faerie body and wings into his coat pocket.

Sebastian would never forget this day, but Clary would try.

It's dark in the house, quiet, too quiet.

Sebastian slowly slips across the hall into his sister's nursery without waking Jocelyn—who'd fallen asleep on the couch with 'Uncle Luke' and a bottle of something heavy and smelly.

Clarissa's nursery was painted a pale rosy pink with designs of flowers, and angels, and stuffed animals, and toys he never had time to count. So much work had gone into it though. Lucian and Mama had worked really, really hard to make Clarissa's room so perfect, they'd forgotten completely about him—which was fine because he liked his grey walls better anyway.

Clarissa was lying in her crib, motionless and clutching a pink blanket to her chest. "Clarissa?" he calls softly and he watches his sister pull the covers over her curly redhead. "Clarissa . . ." He shuffles across the floor towards the crib and rests his hands on the bars, pressing his nose and one eye between them to watch his little sister as she holds her breath and pretends to be sleeping. "Clarissa, I'm sorry," he whispers. "I didn't mean to hurt it; I was trying to pet it. Please, look at me."

Look at me. Look at me! Don't you forget me too! He wants to reach out and grab her and make her look at him, but his rage quells when the blanket lowers slowly and two red tinted green eyes stare up at him, sniffling. "Bassie . . . sworry?" she whimpers and Sebastian smiles as tenderly as he'd allow; eager to fool his sister back into his arms again. To curb that craving for love he so desperately needed and had become accustom to receiving from her.

"Yes, Bassie's sorry." He nods and lowers his voice as to sound sad.

He crawls up the bars and into the crib, pulling Clarissa into him, he plays with the spiraling curls that adore her head and whispers into her hair how sorry he was and that he'd never do it again.

While she's watching, at least.

When he woke the next morning, the sheets in the bed are cool and Clarissa is gone.

And so was her sight.

"You broke her!" Sebastian shrieks loudly at his mother. They're back at the park again today, Clarissa playing in the sandbox with Lucian, not even sparing a glance towards the willowy tree woman eyeing her curiously. Jocelyn remains livid throughout his tantrum and says nothing, but tries to calm her raving son.

"Sebastian, calm down." The same condescending voice forever tired of him. "I didn't do anything to Clary."

"Bullshit!" He yells a word adult's said when they were angry, and several old ladies turn to look back at Jocelyn with disapproving looks. It made him feel a little better—seeing that look on blush burn across her cheeks. "Yesterday, Clarissa saw those things with wings and now she can't! You did something to her!"

"Sebastian, stop this. I didn't do anything to Clary. There are no things with wings." Her voice is utterly calm, but harder than bulletproof glass. "Don't ever speak about this again, or you won't be allowed to play with your sister anymore."

Sebastian's eyes widen in marvel at his mother's mirth and then his expression twists, like his anger, like the screws in his head, they turn like switches in his mind. She had something on him. Something he wanted, something she could take away.

"Fine," he spits and stomps away, past Clarissa and Lucian in the sandbox, past the tree woman, past the old ladies, past the seething faeries in the flowers and up into the jungle gym—swinging himself up onto the bars and sat there until Lucian has to come up and get him. Not without a few scratches and kicks he might add.

"Clary, Clary, see the faerie." He raises his jarred specimen for three-year-old Clarissa to see and she's staring into the foggy glass and seeing nothing.

He leaves the little faerie corpse on Jocelyn's pillow and the wings in Luke's cereal.

There's something different about his mother and Lucian. They are like him and they could see the faerie things too. They believed that survival is pretending not to see the things that rap their nails at the window and dance through the playground at night. Sebastian wanted to embrace them.

He's alone in his world again. Able to see things no one else can.

He catches Jocelyn's long stares at certain people sometimes. He sees their fangs and tusks and purple skin and decaying flesh while the rest of the world sees the pretty glamor around them. Like other people trading their true skin for prettier packaging. Jocelyn and Lucian are a keen example of such masque.

But Clary's sight never comes back and it angers him that Jocelyn would ever alter something so brilliant and beautiful in her own perfect creation—the only one Sebastian liked.

They move around a bit more, finally settling in a part of the city Jocelyn likes and she becomes a painter. In the days that follow, gone is the elegant woman with shining copper hair and exquisite taste. Born from her ashes is a tacky, paint-covered woman with too much opinion for someone of her lowered stature. Lucian too becomes someone else—beast on four paws and garnished teeth tamed into clothes and becoming a book merchant by trade.

The sight disgusts him and he keeps Clarissa close and whispers to her of his hate because she is the only one on his kin left with any sense at all.

And Clarissa tusks with him and smiles.

The other things are getting harder to see and the sicker he gets.

His mind is empty like an egg, cracked so only the yoke spills out. Jocelyn just drags him bed and bandages him up and sends him to school—an arranged eight hour day of lessons that underline the basic parts of his mind, while what remains of him strives for what he has forgotten. He can't find it. Anywhere.

Father was the man on the mantle that Jocelyn wept for. Old home was a country house somewhere. All other family he had not met. He was just a poor, odd boy from the country with no identifying accent or trait to trace back to origin.

Jocelyn's pills had finally done their magic.

And when he falls to the floor of his first grade class room, foaming from the mouth and heart lurching in his chest the human doctors and teachers know it too.

She'll tell police that arrive at the hospital that he got into the bottle of pills and cries when child services threaten to take away him and Clarissa.

He almost lets it happen, but then Lucian shows up one night in his hospital room. Nothing threatening, nothing at all. He simply let's Clarissa walk in and give him a get well soon Bassie card she drew and fall asleep on his bed. When it was time to go—way into the early morning—Lucian curls Clary into his arms and talks about statistics of siblings finding homes together in foster systems.

His eyes flashing that foreboding gold when he says, "choose wisely" before walking out the door with steps as silent as air.

And Sebastian hates him for that because now he knows his weakness too.

He contemplates telling the truth, but figures he couldn't risk the chance of being separated from his beloved sister. So spins a tale on his tongue of wanting to take 'big boy' medicine and that he's sorry and he hugs Jocelyn close in front of his teachers and case workers and doctors. And he inhales her fear and the scent of Lucian and digs his nails a bit too sharply into her back. It's all for Clarissa—always for her.

Counting his triumphs still, months later in the kitchen while Jocelyn and Lucian are preparing dinner he stands in the archway of the kitchen twirling a steak knife in his fingers. He smiles when they notice him and he gives his carefully thought speech ending with: "and no more pills," and tosses the knife back onto the counter.

Little did those two know that Sebastian had made a pact to himself that night in the hospital when he held all of their lives in his hands before his testimony. That ever should the situation come across again: he would crush them for their abuse and make them pair for what they have done to him. He would not be so weak and pliable as the boy from before. Sebastian Fray would be someone new and bring wreckage to his name.

And now, watching their horrified face and widened eyes, he knew they knew.

It's that moment, Clarissa runs into the room—four years old and talkative as ever—hoisting a book over her head and demanding to be read to. Sebastian nods to her, smiling gently and letting her lead him into the living room.

He catches one final glimpse of Jocelyn and Lucian as he rounds the corner—eyes wide in fear and trembling as if visibly shaken.

He treasures that powerful feeling before it dissolves into the black of his heart, like sugar to the bottom of cup.

So Jocelyn takes Jonathan with her to the mundane world and he hates it. Luckily he has Clary with him to keep him sane. Yes, I know it took more than one trip to Magnus's house to get rid of Clary's sight, but let's pretend it happened all at once. And Jonathan's too demonic to not see his own kind. Yeah, whatever it worked in my head. I can'twaiting to finish this! So many ideas!

~QueenVamp