I just want to put a trigger warning in here for, like, violence? I guess? Or...Mentions of violence, death, torture, although not to any main characters...That sounds really dark, but I guess you've been warned?
X : X&Y - Coldplay
Requested by RumpelstiltskinWantsMySanity
I dive in at the deep end
She become my best friend
I wanna love you
But I don't know if I can
I know something is broken
And I'm tryna fix it
Trying to repair it
Any way I can
Jace Herondale had worked alone as long as he could remember.
As a child, he grew up with barely any contact to the outside world. There was just his father, Stephen Herondale, and Hodge Starkweather, one of his fathers work colleagues. He was sort of like another father to Jace, although not in the terms that most people would use the word 'father'.
He didn't go to school, he didn't know any other family members, he didn't have friends.
All he knew was training and dedication and pain.
As he got older, he was introduced to more people, although he barely spoke to them, not used to interaction, and they were always brought to the property that he had grown up. Some of them were people like his father and Hodge, hard and cruel and evil. Some of the people were like him, and had been trained and ordered around and whipped if they didn't do as they were told and breathed with one sole purpose.
To kill.
He was eight when he killed his first man.
By the time he was fourteen, he had lost count.
When he was fifteen, the rage that he had bottled inside him for as long as he could remember, the contempt that he felt for his father and for Hodge and for everything that they had put him through, that wrath that swirled around in the pit of his stomach at his own helplessness boiled over. He killed his father and Hodge and ran from the house that he had spent his life chained to and ran from the property that he had never been allowed to leave and to the road in the distance that he had only seen when he was being forced to run outside in the icy cold on winter mornings in just a pair of briefs.
He ran for a long time.
His body could endure a lot, and so even though he had barely eaten or had anything to drink and he was only dressed in a thin pair of sweatpants and a singlet to protect him against the cold air, he was able to keep running for over a day. Cars went past and sounded their horns at him and some of them even slowed down, calling out to him, asking if he was okay or if he needed a ride.
Jace ignored them and kept running.
He only stopped when his body actually gave out and he passed out in a little alcove behind a church.
He was found by police and forced into a group home.
It didn't go so well.
It was too loud and there were too many people and he didn't have his own space and he almost tore the arm off a kid for trying to take one of his blankets. In the end, he got into far too many fights that he ended up being sent to juvie.
And that was his saving grace.
He met Alexander Lightwood and Jordan Kyle and for the first time in his whole life, he actually felt as though he had a family. They were good friends and they stuck close together in juvie, but one afternoon they were separated, when Jordan was sent to solitary for getting into a fight. Jace knew the murmurings around the detention centre that Alec and Jordan were sons of some high up mob members and they had both taken a fall for some older men to get away, since they wouldn't get hit with the harder charges. Because of their parents position, there were a lot of people inside who had it out for both of them, and when Jordan was in solitary, they seemed to use that moment to move in on Alec.
Jace hadn't had much to do with either of them beforehand, but they had both been respectful of him by giving him distance and not crowding him like some of the others had, and so Jace had stepped in.
He had ended up in solitary himself for nearly a week for breaking several bones in the other teenagers bodies, but he and Alec had come out without barely a scratch. Once he had come out of solitary, things immediately felt different with everyone giving him a wide berth which he appreciated and no one shoved or pushed him in the lunch line or the bathrooms. It turned out to be because Alec and Jordan had spread the word that he was under the same protection that they were.
By the time Jace was released, he actually had what normal people would call friends. Alec had been released before him and then he was let out a week before Jordan, and Robert and Maryse Lightwood had been there with Alec to greet him when he came out. They had some strong influence and they pulled a few strings, and before Jace knew what was happening, they had adopted him and he had the first proper form of a family that he had ever had in his life.
It didn't erase the way he had grown.
That was still with him.
He sometimes found himself triggered when the temperatures got too cold, remembering being forced to run in the snow with barely any clothes.
He sometimes couldn't work out why he was boiling over with rage, his whole body just felt as though he was a few pulses away from snapping completely.
It was good, because part of being in this new family brought on a whole lot of responsibility and it was in areas that he was good at.
Extracting information.
Being methodical.
Working people over.
It was different from working with his father and Hodge though. There wasn't this constant threat hanging over his head that if he did something wrong then he was going to be punished within an inch of his life. There was definitely loyalty that was expected and if he ever turned on them and betrayed them, he would be killed, just like any other man in the extended 'family'. But the reason that it didn't feel as dangerous and threatening and suffocating as when he was with his father and Hodge was because he didn't want to get away from them.
Alec and Jordan were like his brothers, and he absolutely adored Max Lightwood, the younger Lightwood sibling, although he had difficulty showing it. There was also Isabelle Lightwood and Maia Roberts, who were gorgeous and fiesty but just as deadly as any of the men.
And then there was Clarissa Morgenstern.
Clary was the daughter of Valentine and Jocelyn Morgenstern, who were very involved in the mob, just like Lightwoods. Her brother was heavily involved and moving up the ranks, just like Alec, but Clary was happy running her own business, with a little bakery in the middle of town that sold out, every single day. It was her business, but it was linked to the mob, and a lot of their money was cleaned through there, but without a doubt, it was Clary that made the place successful.
She was sweet and she was happy and she was gentle and Jace had no idea why she had deemed him worthy of inviting into her inner circle, but she had.
She knew what he did.
She knew what they all did.
They didn't try to hide things from her—it had been her whole life.
And yet somehow, she had managed to remain rather untainted.
Which is why Jace was certain that she was too good for him, and that he needed to bury these feelings that he had for her. He didn't totally understand them, because he hadn't been raised the same way as most other people were. He didn't feel about her the same way as he did about Isabelle and Maia, he knew that. Towards them, he definitely felt affection and protectiveness, but it wasn't at the same scale that he felt toward Clary.
She would bring him cupcakes and she would talk to him about music that she liked and some of her more eccentric customers through the week. She asked him about his week and what movies he had seen recently and she would tease him about how long he was letting his hair get.
She acted like they were friends.
Good friends.
Jace tried to distance himself, he tried to tell himself that whatever it was that he thought was happening between them really wasn't, because it couldn't happen.
What he did for the mob...The blood that was already on his hands...She deserved so much better than the broken man that he was.
But she kept coming back.
And one day, she came down to the room under the warehouse where he worked.
Jace didn't know that she was there as he sliced and carved and blood fell to the ground and splattered over his shoes. The man had been an accountant that they had employed and they had found out that one; he had been skimming from the money that they were trusting him to move through their shell companies and two; he had known that he was going to get caught out and so he had started informing to the FBI. It was Jace's job to find out exactly how much the man had told to the FBI, he needed to know as much as he could so that he could pass it onto Alec, Robert and Valentine so that they could make sure that everyone was safe.
Jace would do whatever he needed to protect the family that he had managed to find.
Even at twenty-four, sometimes he still felt like that scared, broken child that was beaten down until he felt as though there was absolutely no reason for living. But he now had a family and a reason for living and he would do everything in his power to protect them.
He was in that dark, dank room for hours, and after he was certain that he got everything out of the man that he had given to the FBI, he killed him. Before he even washed his hands, blood still tacky and dripping over his fingers and down his arms, he rang Alec and told him everything that he had heard. Once he had, he dropped the phone onto the a little shelf and began washing his hands and arms in the sink.
Then he turned around, and Clary was standing in the doorway.
Jace's eyes widened and he began mumbling that she needed to leave, that she didn't need to see this, but then he had cut himself off when he saw her face.
She didn't look surprised.
She didn't look disgusted.
She didn't look sick to her stomach.
Her big green eyes moved from the body that was strapped to a table in the middle of the room across to Jace. She tilted her head to the side before nodding at the body.
"He was the one who was stealing and informing to the FBI?" She asked, her voice neutral. Jace stared at her for a long time, trying to figure out what was going on inside her head. She raised an eyebrow at him. "Did you not think I knew what happened down here? Did you not think I knew what you do?" Jace blinked at her, unsure of what to say. "What you do for all of us?" He blinked again, feeling his heart thundering in his chest and roaring in his ears. Clary took a step closer to him, reaching up on her tiptoes and pressing a soft kiss to his cheek, not caring that his face was damp with sweat and probably even spattered with a bit of blood. "Clean up and I'll make you some pancakes."
And then she left.
Jace just stared at the empty doorway, a long time after she had left.
That changed things.
He wasn't good at feelings and emotions and working out what things meant, but he knew that this changed things.
She knew what he did.
She accepted who he was.
So maybe he wasn't as broken as he thought he was.
I just want to write a quick note...Please make sure you guys are looking after yourself. The world is scary right now and...Yeah. Please look after yourself and your family and friends. Please stay safe and sane and remember you're important, valid and loved.
My top 10 songs of this week are;
1) You Broke Me First - Tate McRae. 2) Must Have Been The Wind - Alec Benjamin. 3) Daechwita - Agust D. 4) Too Sad To Cry - Sasha Sloan. 5) Puss - Jimin featuring IRON. 6) Burn It - Agust D featuring MAX. 7) Boys Will Be Bugs - Cavetown. 8) Stupid - Tate McRae. 9) What Do You Think? - Agust D. 10) Cruel Intentions - Delacey featuring G-Eazy.
And then...I've recently watched Whisper of the Heart and Kiki's Delivery Service, which are both just beautiful and soothing movies if you need something sweet to just transport you away.
Leave a review, let me know what you think, let me know what you're listening to and watching x
Tumblr: SereneCalamity
Twitter: CalamitySerene