He is ready to die when Clarissa draws a rune on him, which is, to say the least, unexpected. Sebastian - Jonathan? - spurs a little, blood trickling down his chin, but her eyes, green as he wishes his would be, are focused.
"What are you doing?", her mother hisses, but Clarissa doesn't answer. Sebastian feels himself growing stronger, the skin on his abdomen mending, and he knows what she is doing, but doesn't know why. He deserves to die as redemption for his crimes, so why…?
Clarissa doesn't answer and keeps working. He is still unsure why - and when her green eyes bore unto his, a smile graces her features, an angel in mortal flesh and green eyes. He is undeserving of her, he always was; no wonder Clarissa preferred Jace, the angel boy - he was more akin to her than he was, a demon in black blood and eyes.
Clarissa draws one more rune onto his skin - and now the marks of the Angel don't hurt him, don't burn his skin, an ache that he had grown used to but never faded, always in the forefront of his mind, always forcing him to keep his mind focused on anything else - and he falls asleep. He dreams of the dark, as always, and only the faintest light guiding him; but this time, Jonathan - Sebastian? - does not reject it, does not shy away from it and hisses. No, he goes toward it.
When Sebastian wakes, it's in a prison cell. He is not surprised, and in fact, welcomes whatever trial he receives, his transgressions judged by an angelic sword and heavy against his palms. Clarissa was there, green eyes fixed on his as Sebastian confessed the multitude of sins that poured out of his mouth. She didn't seem to mind, quiet - she knew all of them. When asked, she spoke the truth, sword or not. She was a sight to behold, fiery as an angel in the way she spoke.
To his absolute wonder, he wasn't still head over heels over Clarissa, love subdued and giving place to admiration on the most platonic ways; and yet, her hair still conjured images of hellfire and angelic rage in his mind - as such, he could deduct his love for her was a demonic side effect. His human feelings for her were odder than expected, still. Ex-demon boy, now purely a boy with only the slightest twinge of angel, aware that emotions deemed wrong by society were his demonic side in fact. It was… Sort of relieving, truth to be told. He wasn't bad - what was made to him was what created those odd feelings.
His sentence, in the end, was the cruelest - to be deruned, to be thrown with the mundanes he hated (debatable, now). He accepts the pain, and does not scream, fading into unconsciousness naturally. Valentine wouldn't be proud.
Clarissa, for some reason he cannot grasp fully, helps him adapt. She is the one who gets him fake documents until the Clave seems fit to produce his real ones; she is the one who gets him an apartment, since her (their) mother can only glare at her, at him, angry at something Sebastian cannot fully comprehend why; she is the one who helps him get documentation to prove that he was scholarized (you were homeschooled, she tells him, soft as her eyes, and that's what we're going with.) and with that, Sebastian - Jonathan Christopher Morgenstern is the name on his fake ID, but it's not his; Jonathan was never born, disfigured by experimentation to become what he was, and he wasn't Jonathan - is able to go to college. It's odd. Sebastian never expected to go to college: the destiny Valentine conjured never involved higher education -, but he goes nonetheless, and falls in love with mathematics.
Mathematic is logical; there is a defined path and strategy for everything, a formula on the tip of his fingers able to solve what others think unsolvable. It suits him - his life is a math equation whose formula belongs to a dead man, the unknown variables lost to the world -, and he finds peace between the numbers. Mathematics are orderly in a world that is not, in a world where he is not welcome.
Clarissa is still with him; she appears on his door late at night with takeout and bruises fading before his eyes, the glow of a seraph blade still illuminating her skin. It's weird, he notices, while she asks him about his day - her skin marked with runes and his skin free of them. It used to be the contrary, but he doesn't point it out, and nor does she.
"Why?", he asks, one night, her blades side by side with the college textbook open in asymptotes, and Sebastian can't help but feel they're similar; he is close to the runes, to the world he was raised to rule, but never to feel their touch them again. A cruel joke the world played on the boy whose only conceivable fate was to be a warrior.
Clarissa looks at him.
"Why not?", she replies, as if it answers everything. It does not, and she knows it, a smile gracing her angel-like features. "Everyone deserves a second chance, I think."
"Even me?", is his incredulous question, because Sebastian cannot see how he can be worthy of redemption, his sins too heavy for any sort of redemption. Death was his redemption, and it was stolen from him by Clarissa.
"You're not who you once were. I mean, have you killed someone recently?", she asks, as if this was normal, as if the world he had hailed from and the world she was new to were one and the same.
"No."
"Then see? No problems. You're not Sebastian,", she says, but he still feels like Sebastian. "You're Jonathan. You deserve a second chance."
Am I, he wonders. Do I, he wonders. Sebastian does not voice this concern, and watches quietly as Clarissa says her goodbyes, leaving him with only his textbooks for company.
"Asymptotes,", he says, to no one in particular. Two lines that approached, but never touched. Sebastian wondered if it wasn't a subtle nudge by the Angel to tell him to let it go, to forget his past and be free.