Title | Shooting Butterflies
Genre| romance/horror
Rating| T for blood and death
Fandom| TMI
Timeline| Pre-CoB
Couple| jonathan/clary

Warning| Jonathan, child!Jonathan, slight!animal abuse, some gore, some bullying, some Simon, some demons, some death


Chapter Two: prince with a scarlet crown


"'Cause we all know what goes around, comes around,
Should have known what I was all about
Do not test me—'cause I'm the fucking king of the world, get on your knees."

King of the World. Porcelain and the Tramps


Seasons pass and years go by and little by little, Sebastian watches the world through eyes that grow blacker and blacker with rage, and wonders why do I see what I see? He can never ask Jocelyn or Luke these questions; he would be scolded and sent to his room for hours afterward if that were to happen. Worst off, he would be banned from seeing his sister. The primitive punishment stills stings like thorns in his skin, but now easier to brush aside.

No, what he sees and what no one else can is the unspoken forbidden subject in their household.

He can't ask, he can't research, so he learns.

The things with the fangs and glowing eyes are vampires. The beautiful things with illuminated faces are the fey. And the fury things are shape shifters.

Or werewolves.

He's always running into werewolves.

Their claws and eyes and animal-like nature shine through their human skins.

Luke's the one he watches the closest.

He's not scared and he never has been scared of any of them. Luke made a perfect guard dog and kept Clary, and sometimes him, safe from the bigger and badder of the hidden world he's hardly breeched the borders of.


There are other things too, people with glowing eyes and indefinite shapes. They are powerful—and their abilities vary greatly—they are strong and steely and beautiful. They are charming types of beauty, the kinds that draws in the weaker minded so that they could be pulled into darker waters and drown for their crimes of thinking their beautiful equaled kindness.

They watch him as he watches them with furious envy.

He feels like them. He feels as though he could understand them.

It's the demons, the things with the shining eyes and wicked mouths that he feels the closets to.


There's one demon that ventures to talk to him from the myriad of others. She is a child from his class: a girl with long black, knotted hair and paper pale skin. Her lips are shiny and pink like they were always pressed too thin and her eyes are freakishly wide and black. Blacker than his. Blacker than oil. Blacker than any color or shade he had ever seen.

She gives him fey food during lunch as a trick and he gives it to their overweight principal.

They share a laugh and some secrets.

"You're a monster like me," she whispers so softly it could have been the wind, and she smiles with gapping margins between her boxy milk teeth. "We will be great friends indeed."


Up until now, Sebastian had led a quiet existence in his large class in the city, but then the day happened when Clarissa came to his fourth grade classroom crying. Then his rule had begun.

It started with the day Clarissa first entered the school, by the end of the day she had been: pushed, bullied, and had her lunchbox stolen. And Sebastian was beyond angry at the thought of someone picking on his adorable baby sister. The demon-girl laughs at the deliciousness of it all, but wisely bows out whenever his sister is near.

And a good thing too. Comforting her was on the top of his list, patting her shoulders and wiping away her tears. When they got home from school he bites his tongue between his teeth because she doesn't want to tell Jocelyn. Then that night they sneak into the living room to watch TV and falling asleep.

Sebastian is wide awake, mind alert and glaring at the television, but not seeing, until something of interest catches his ear.

"By showing his teeth, the alpha proclaims this act of dominance towards his Beta—keeping him in line." The announcer-man, Morgan Somethingorwhatever, says and Sebastian gets an idea. A very thoughtful, ingenious, and possibly bloody idea.


He gives Clary her chance, and he's puffed and proud when she marches over to the other side of the playground—Sebastian and the pale, four-eyes flanking her—and asks, demands, but never pleads to have her lunchbox back. He says no and Clary launches into high hell. Yelling, screaming, and threatening.

"—tellin' your mom!" Slips past her lips and Sebastian watches his little sister go down flat with a single push. Being so delicate and waiflike isn't any sort of defense. But the delicate people always have other people—stronger and tainted—to protect them in their gentleness.

Before Clarissa could make a sound, he tackles the boy into the woodchips. Clawing at his face, and going for the throat with a roar on his lips. He's a blur of fiery rage and tight muscle flailing around with blood on his tongue.

Finally, he has the boy pinned—hands under his knees, shoulders with one hand and head in the other—and forces the boy to look him in the eye. The boy, by now, is sputtering and wide-eyed, since he's more than half Sebastian's size and weighs a bit on the hefty side—Sebastian had knocked him back no problem.

The demon-girl is watching from the shade.

"This is how it's going to be," he says slowly so that his slug brain will understand. "My little sister wants her lunchbox back, and you're going to give it back to her—alright? And I will not hear," His grip tightens in the boy's hair. "One word otherwise." His grip tightens further until the boy is yelping and crying and nodding and when Sebastian lets him up, he scrambles for the lockers and retrieves Clarissa's unicorn lunchbox.

Sebastian snatches it from him—not thinking much to the design—and gives him a low warning against touching his sister or even looking at her.

From that day forward, people just seemed to do whatever Sebastian said.

"He's a natural born leader." His teacher chirps during the parent-teacher conference and Jocelyn's eyes are round and wary as Sebastian is attended to by several other fourth-graders asking him how he is and complementing on his grades and how pretty his little sister is.

"Like his father," Lucian deadpans and Jocelyn looks worried.


The overweight principal is now thin and tired looking, always hungry with a dry cotton-mouth and has been sent to a hospital in some foreign country to be studied.

Sebastian and his demon laugh for the day and look for other mischief to cause.

"I'm bored," she says and he nods in agreement.

She touches his shoulder and they walk out of the classroom and out the door like no one could see them. Because no one can see them. "You can do this too," the demon-girl says as she leads him towards a flock of quelling birds. "On your own. When you're ready."

They leave a bird pined like a butterfly on the Science teacher's desk and watch the horror roll across their faces through the window outside. Clarissa—luckily—misses the incident due to the fact that she was in art class.


He's sure now that Clarissa, and her plus one, are safe in their second-grade classroom and has appointed the hall monitor to take special care of her and confided in her teachers that he's 'worried' about her being bullied and pays three second-graders a cookie-a-day to keep a close eye on her.

In addition, there are always boys who want to fight him for top spot and catty little girls who want to kiss him under the slide.

Being king is hard work, but he glides through it effortlessly and calls the shots without too much bloodshed. Not that his demon friend minds the cleanup.


"I propose a game," the she-demon says one night when he snuck out of the apartment to swing on the swings with her. He had been trying the cloak of invisibility thing for a while now, but has thus far only managed the feather-light steps Lucian and Jocelyn walk with.

"What sort of game?" he asks, fists tightening and untightening around the loops in the chain.

"A fun one." She snickers, all teeth and black eyes. Her breath does not crystallize in the frigid air.

He now knows why all the girls in class whisper about her behind her back. She's hideous. There's no alternative beauty that befits her vulgar form and she knows it.

"If you can steal the heart from a dead human, I'll tell you everything I've gathered on your true parentage." Sebastian's eyes shine. "However," she adds coyly. "If you don't," Her cold, dead hand presses to the side of his face and a furious burning sensation creeps along his jawline with the trail of her fingers. "You must give me your beauty. Deal?"

The new information intrigues him and he shrugs. "Deal."


It's cold and the snow crunches under their boots in February, Clarissa's fiery hair is curled into ribbons and she's wearing a soft red tee shirt and black jeans. The rest of the school is in a symbolic shade of red, white, and pink—all doted in hearts and colorful streamers and the like.

Sebastian feels the bile rising to the back of his throat.

"It's Valentine's Day!" Clarissa brays excitedly and shows him—for the fifth time—the cardboard Valentine's Day box she decorated with pink colored paper and hearts. He notes, happily, that some of the hearts have oozy red, glittery blood dripping down the sides of them.

"Did you make one, Sebastian?" she asks.

"Nah, I don't really want any Valentine's." He says.

Personally, he likes Valentine's Day—the French crepes au chocolat their psychotic French neighbor made, the red coloring everywhere, the love-struck fey running around, and the fact that the very mention of the day makes Jocelyn cringe.

He prompts Clary to name the stuffed red bear he gets her Valentine, in honor of the day.


Sebastian finds a knife in his mother's things and tucks it away in his pocket, before he leaves to retrieve a human heart for his demon. She had left him a note, giving an address to a family that had been brutally murdered a few days ago, but the police had yet to investigate. He finds the door unlocked and it slides open easily before he walks through the dark house to find the bodies.

They're in the bedroom—if that's not nineties horror enough—the man is lain to sleep on the bed looking peaceful. Sebastian would have almost believed he was asleep too, if not for the tear cutting the length of his sternum (which was gone by the way) and the overflow of blood spilling out onto the floor and sheets.

Easy, he thinks and rolls up his sleeves.

He reaches into the gaping red hole in the man's chest, feeling around the broken bones and the squishy insides. There's no heart there.

Cool air brushes his cheek and Sebastian whirls around, facing the demon-girl.

"Like it? He was her father." She grins and a bloody smiley face stretches across her mouth. "And over there—in the bathroom—that's her mother." His eyes skim the blood across the floorboards leading into the dark, cavernous room.

"That's not your true form?"

"Of course not, idiot." She begins to circle him, slow and predator like. "You're not a Shadowhunter. You're not a demon. That puzzles me, you smell like both."

"Smell?"

"Like sulfur and steel. You smell like both. You repel—and you draw our kind close. Hmm, that makes me wonder . . ." she grins wider and her bloody teeth shine in the dim light. "There were rumors and whispers of this."

"Of what—"

She lunges then, cutting him off mid-sentence, her teeth sink into his shoulder. Sebastian screams and thrashes, trying to push her off but her jaw is locked. His dark red blood gushes out and into her mouth and into his jacket. He's still screaming.

He reaches out, almost on instinct, and pulls the knife from his pocket.

He bashes the hilt of the knife into her head and she pulls back, shrieking, but Sebastian is far from done with her yet. Betrayal burning through his veins, he wraps his arms around bringing her to the ground with a tackle—she tries to get up and he smashes her head into the floorboards until her human skulls splits—and wrapping his fingers around her neck and squeezing, squeezing, wringing until the dying gasp brushes past the demon's lips. "Monster . . ."

He pushes the knife into her throat.

When it's done and she dead and evaporated into blue fire, leaving nothing but a bloody corpse of a powdery pale girl, Sebastian is staring at his bloody hands wondering how something could seem so easy. How his rage had taken him.

How this could hurt someone he actually wanted to protect.


He's halfway home when the pain in his shoulder stops, the bleeding crescent her jaw left is only a scar now against his once flawless skin.

He shucks off the bloody jacket and gives it to a homeless man on the side of the road.


He gets home and runs to the shower, pouring hot water over his body and washing away all traces of blood and guts and grim from his pale skin until he's slick and fresh as a daisy.

He sits at the edge of the bathtub for a while, towel drying his hair and staring at the cracked tiles and flowery purple walls, realizing that this world isn't for him anymore.


"Where are you going?" Clarissa asks.

"Out."

"But it's cold outside," Clary says and she puts her book down. "Sebastian you can't go outside its cold." She repeats when he keeps walking. "Sebastian—"

"Clary, I'm just going to sit outside for a little while." He opens the screen door, tugging his coat over his shoulders and is almost gone until Clary comes plowing out after him.

"Then I'll sit with
you." She grabs his elbow in one hand and pulls tight enough to bruise.

"You'll be cold." Sebastian retaliates and starts to tug his arm away.

"No I won't!" Clary wraps her arms around him like a blanket, holding him as tightly as her strength would allow her to. "I won't be cold. Let's just go back inside and sit down. I just got a new movie—watch it with me, please?"

Years later, Sebastian—now Jonathan again—will ask his sister why she clung to him so tightly that night and refused to let go.

"I got that feeling . . . that if I let you go . . . I'd never see you again."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"Of course it is!" Clary insists with tears streaming down her face. "You're my brother and I love you."


Sorry that this came a bit late, I was going to skip ahead to the first book but people wanted more of Clary and Jonathan's childhood so I did what I could. One more childhood chapter to go. They're pre-Junior high here. Thank you for all the reviews and I hope you enjoyed this bonding, first kill and bully prevention chapter!

~QueenVamp