A/N: I binged watched Star Wars while reading Malec fanfiction. This strange little snippet is the result of that...
Summary: He'd never expected to open his eyes after sacrificing himself for Rey in Exogol. However, in his new life, he'll find himself pushed to new limits and even…fall in love. Can a weapon, broken in the name of serving the Darkness, find redemption as a soldier (weapon) of the Angels?
Tags: Canonical Character Death; Past/referenced abuse; Canon Typical Violence; Bad Parent Maryse.
Redemption of the Broken
Alexander Gideon Lightwood is born with too many voices in his head and too much power at his fingertips.
He is born with eyes too weary for the babe they belong to, with a wail of anguish and anger on his lips because hadn't he repented in the end?
(Hadn't he fallen back into the light? Paid for the lives he taken by giving his own for the new hero the universe needed?)
He is born with a fascination with the stars that is unheard of in Nephilim children, with a presence that vacillates from warm and inviting , friendly to cold, harsh, dangerous with little warning.
He is born with the voices of galaxies in his ear, hearing each death, each rebirth, hearing them dim and grow. With the screams of planets (stars, people, power) haunting his footsteps, and a guilt, anguish, pain that both is and isn't his.
Worst yet, he's born with memories that scream familiar, memories that he knows are his even though they couldn't (shouldn't) be. Memories of a lonely boy who'd dared to befriend the voice in his head. Of a teen broken before he truly had a chance to fight back, shattered by betrayal from the one he'd hoped would save him. By the voice in his head and the cruelty of a being that called itself his master. Of a man, whose shards had been forced back together into the shape of a weapon, held together with blood, then cauterized with trauma and pain until it could withstand the orders of its master. Memories of turning on the voice, master that had broken him, crafted him, (betrayed) taught him.
He is born with the blood of the angels running through his veins to a woman colder than the one he remembers as mother (enemy, traitor, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.) and a man he hesitates to call father (enemy, Dad, I'm sorry. Wake up. Please.). He is born with a broken bond curling around his soul, searching for its other half and when he is handed over to a man with eyes sharper than they have any right to be, a man who is too much like The Voice, he knows.
He knows.
Alexander Lightwood is born with too much Kylo Ren's anger (pain, rage) and not enough of Ben Solo's redemption (exhaustion, longing, guilt, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.)
The universe mourns.
*/*
Valentine is too much like Snoke.
It's the first observation he made when his mother had told him that the man would be taking over his training. Those cold dark eyes watch his every move, harsh and unforgiving in the wake of a mistake, not much different in the face of an accomplishment. Perhaps that is why he flourishes under the man's care.
He picks up skills far faster than several of his peers, including Valentine's own son, Jonathan, who is only a year older than him. He's adept with using seraph blades, a fact that doesn't surprise him given his previous use of lightsabers, but it makes his new master's eyes light up with interest. The man begins to keep him for longer lessons and once he determines that he is as adept at his blades as his age would allow, they move on to another weapon, a whip.
From the whip they move to archery.
He picks them up at astonishing speeds, anything to avoid the agony rune Valentine likes to use as punishment, and by the time his parents defect from the man's ranks when he is four years old, he's at the intermediate level of archery for his age.
Beneath his skin, the Force, having lain dormant in those first years, begins to stir.
*/*
He's on Terra.
Somehow, before his parents' defection from Valentine's ranks that fact hadn't occurred to him. He'd likened his parent's inability to use the force with them being force-null rather than to the fact that he was on the exiled planet of the Federation. If his memories of Snoke's tutoring were correct (they were) Terra had been considered too underdeveloped at the time that the Federation was founded, then as time went on, most of the universe just seemed to forget about the little planet, and the Milky Way galaxy as a whole. Especially when it became obvious that its' inhabitants were unaware of the inhabitants of the galaxies beyond their own.
It felt too much like a dream come true.
Finding a whole planet untouched by his crimes, by Jedi and Sith, by Force-Users in general. Instead they had much more interesting creatures. Vampires, Werewolves, even Mages and Warlocks. Valentine had always preached that these were creatures rules by their base instincts, that they needed to be destroyed and yet…he was fascinated by them.
His parents…were not.
After leaving Valentine's ranks, they'd moved to Idris and then shortly after, to the New York Institute. While there he'd hesitantly expressed his desire to learn more about those his mentor had called downworlder's.
The punishment he'd received had ensured he never spoke of it again.
Instead, he shoved his curiosity down and threw himself into his training, especially when he discovered the true reason for his parent's defection.
His mother was pregnant.
He was going to have a younger sibling.
The night he found out, he trained until his hands were bleeding.
A few months later, Isabelle Sophia Lightwood was born.
He fell in love the moment his mother placed her in his arms and deep within him, a sliver of his soul began to heal.
Later, his father would remark that he'd never seen him smile until that moment.
*/*
He receives his angel rune a month later, the youngest to ever do so. Later, he hears Lady Herondale whisper to his parents that there is something dark about him.
Something dangerous.
He laughs until he no longer feels like he's going to cry and tries not to see the phantom flash of a green lightsaber lingering in the corner of his eye.
*/*
The thing is, in this new life, he tries to keep his darkness under wraps. He tries not to give into the anger, the rage lingering beneath the surface, and most of the time he's successful.
He was born with all of Kylo Ren's rage and Ben Solo's shame and somehow the two work against each other making it easier for him to ignore both, helped along by Valentine's teachings.
But they're never gone.
With his connection to the force even stronger than it had been before his death, he finds it all too easy to slip and even easier to fall into more…dangerous mindsets.
So, when he's sent to the academy for three weeks in order to find teammates for his first official mission, he hadn't planned to slip. He'd gone in, shy but steady, even as his classmates whispered and jeered.
He'd stayed calm…until one had dared to hit him.
He hadn't been expecting it, focused on ignoring the (loneliness) irritation building at the jeers of the older students because he hadn't attended the academy, so obviously his parents paid his way.
Then, one of the older boys shoved him. The teacher, having seen it, said nothing, something dark and bitter in her eyes.
He was moving before he could find a reason to stop himself.
He had the boy, he'd later learned was named Jaden Wyrick, on the ground, one hand curled into a fist as he coiled the other around his throat, his fingertips tingling with the call of the force.
"Don't touch me."
A low snarl, impassive but threatening, and the older boy trembled in fear, blue eyes wide.
The rest of their class was just as stunned and he let go, moving back to his seat.
He didn't find any teammates for his mission.
He didn't care, he took it anyways and completed it successfully with only a cut on his arm to show for it.
He took the next one only two days later.
Another success.
His mother brought him before Lady Herondale sixteen missions later.
She gave him a proposition.
Six years in the Order of Seraphim and meanwhile she would teach him how to run an institute. If he didn't tell anyone, she would train him.
He accepted, after all, what was he if not a weapon.
He pretended not to see the shark-like grin she gave in return, even if inside…that shattered part of him that had started to heal with Isabel's birth…began to splinter once more.
*/*
He serves six years in the Order of the Seraphim.
One year of being broken and reshaped, honed into something deadlier than Snoke had ever managed.
Three years of assassinations, of "interrogations", or staining his hands in the blood he'd once tried so hard to wash from them. In those three years, he learns everything She can teach him about running an institute and she even begins to teach him some of the duties he would take over if he ever made Inquisitor. He works himself up the ranks and at the end of his third year he earns his Name and the right to assemble his own team.
She Named him Samael and offered him a position as her Left.
He declines the offer of a team, trying not to picture the team (family) he'd left behind.
She doesn't ask.
At the end of the six years, he takes over as acting Head, his parents becoming more interested in clave politics.
They introduce him to a boy they'd adopted while he was away.
Jace Weyland.
His heart gave a flutter he wishes he didn't recognize, and he forces himself not to blush.
The darkness began to recede…just a bit in the face of the shy smile the boy offers him.
They become parabatai only a few months later.
*/*
Jace reminds him of Rey.
The boy is jaded and guarded just as she'd been when they met all those years ago, his blue eyes containing a sliver of the loneliness he had glimpsed in her mind. There's a darkness there, not as sharp, or deadly as his own, but very much so present, cradling a light that he finds almost blinding to look at.
It doesn't surprise him that he falls in love with him with little effort, not when he'd known that had there been more time he may have been able to fall in love with Rey. And yet, Jace is so different from her.
He hid his heart and his feelings behind bravado in a way she'd never been able to, and looked at him like he was something wonderful, something to be believed in rather than someone that needed to be changed.
Still, he knows shadowhunters, had been watching them for years, and he knows that what he feels would get them both killed.
So, he shoves it down, trying to shake the creeping ache building within him as time passes and Jace grows more and more dear to him. Trying to ignore the lovehopepain he feels as they grow older and the other boy begins to date. As he begins to have one-night stands with any woman willing to sleep with him. Izzy, the only one with any inkling of how he feels about the blond bound to his soul, watches him with dark sympathetic eyes and promises that one day it wouldn't hurt.
One day, he would find someone that would love him.
He doesn't believe her.
He can't.
Not with his crimes lurking in his dreams, the darkness tugging at his soul as the voices in his head scream louder with each passing day.
Not when he knows that weapons don't get happy endings.
Then Jace meets Clary.
And with her arrival, a beautiful whirlwind enters his life. A whirlwind by the name of Magnus Bane.
It's the beginning of something…extraordinary.