Author's Note: Hey, I'm back again. I know I've been posting fanfiction like crazy today. I guess I just had a good day for creativity or something. I'm definitely not complaining. Anyways, this one is basically a character study-esque peek into Alec Lightwood's life before Clary Fray came into it. It's also the aftermath of what Jace said to Alec in 1x05. (Yes, I'm rewatching Shadowhunters. Stop judging.) I thought his words were more than a little harsh, so I decided to write how I think Alec could have reacted to it, and I got a little carried away. Trigger warning for self harm and mentions of past self harm/training that evolves into self harm. Please stay safe 3 This is also really sad, so don't read if you're into happy endings, because this fic doesn't have one. Anyways, I hope you like this and please leave reviews, I love hearing from you! As always, I hope you have a wonderful day/night!
~ Em
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
The words bit into his subconscious like a Ravener demon's venom. It wasn't the first time they'd invaded his mind like this, but it was the first time they were hurled at him in his parabatai's voice.
"Maybe your mother was right and your best just isn't good enough!"
It all still felt like some sort of bad dream; Jace couldn't have really said that, could he?
But he did, the voice in Alec's mind snarled at him. You know he did. You heard him say it. And he believes it, too.
Alec closed his eyes, taking a shaky breath. He'd heard it before, of course. He was Alec Lightwood. The heir to the Lightwood name. The acting Head of the New York Institute. He was groomed to be a leader from birth. There were certain standards he had to live up to, and there certainly wasn't any time to spare his feelings along the way. His mother and father had wanted him to be the best, and he was. The thought gave him a little pride, as it always did; save for long-dead Shadowhunters of the past, Alec was the best damn archer the Shadow World had ever seen.
But such perfection had come at a cost.
Alec remembered when he chose his signature weapon. He was the first of the Lightwood children to be runed, the first of them to join the ranks of the Shadowhunters to protect the world from demonkind, the first of them to choose the weapon that would become almost a part of them by the end of their training. His choice of a bow and arrows was not received well by his parents. They had hoped he'd be drawn to seraph blades or kindjals or something that provided more of a 'frontlines' approach to fighting. He'd been devastated. All Alec wanted, all he had ever wanted since the day he was born, it seemed like, was to make his parents proud. Clearly, the choice of a bow and arrows as his weapon was not going to help him with that.
So Alec decided right then and there that he had to be the best. If his parents weren't proud of his weapon choice, they could at least be proud of him when he sailed above their expectations and became the best archer there ever was.
And he had.
For months, even years, Alec waited until everyone else in the Institute was asleep. When the halls fell silent and only the occasional witchlight lamp lit the dark corridors, Alec snuck out of his bedroom and trained with his bow and arrows all night long. Once upon a time, he wore his archer's gloves when he trained. As time passed, he started 'accidentally' leaving them off more and more. He fired arrows into the targets on the walls of the training room until his hands bled and his fingers were sliced raw. Slowly, his arrows gravitated more towards the centers of the targets. His hands stopped shaking when he released an arrow. The motion of reaching back into his quiver became familiar, almost comforting. The iratzes he applied to his hands were conveniently forgotten more often than not until, eventually, they stopped altogether.
Alec's sister noticed the purpling half-moons stamped underneath his eyes, but Izzy was only eight back then, and easy to placate. A few well-intentioned lies and soothing words of comfort and the little girl was back to her usual bubbly self, confident that her brother was completely fine.
Then Jace Wayland waltzed into their lives with his cocky attitude that Alec immediately knew was just for show and the immense walls built up around his heart, walls that only Alec seemed able to crack. His entire life, Alec's mission was to protect. Protect the humans from the demons. Protect his siblings from harm's way. Protect the Institute. Protect the Clave. Defend and serve and protect, always. Jace was the perfect mission for Alec: a young, free-spirited boy that came from tragedy and needed a family he could count on. Alec jumped at the chance.
Over the next year or so, Jace and Alec grew close, closer than Alec had ever allowed himself to be with anyone. They were more than brothers, closer than friends, less than lovers. Alec thought that, maybe, just maybe, Jace knew exactly how he felt about him. Maybe, just maybe, the other boy felt the same way. And maybe, just maybe, the bond they shared meant that Alec might finally have a shot at something real. And then Jace asked Alec to be his parabatai, and it all made sense. Alec was disappointed in himself for thinking, even for a minute, that there wasn't anything wrong with him, that he might be able to have what he wanted. He almost said no. It was a crime against the Clave to be in love with your parabatai. But Alec was too afraid to pass up the chance to have one, and he wasn't sure how he felt, anyway. He was so young; could he even really be sure that what he was feeling was love?
They went through with the ceremony.
After they became parabatai, Alec's life took a turn for the worse. He and Jace fought so well together. They could see out of each other's eyes, feel what each other felt, and it was a connection so unique and alive and real that sometimes Alec was almost afraid of it. They clicked together impossibly well, and it only made him feel even more guilty about the dirty little secret he was keeping from Jace. As the years wore on, he learned how to hide his feelings from his parabatai so the other boy wouldn't come running every time Alec felt like having a late-night session in the training room yet again or decided that punching a hole through his wall was a better alternative than allowing himself a few moments of painfully human levels of vulnerability.
Emotional turmoil was hard to hide, but faking a smile was ridiculously easy.
Seasons changed and time passed and before he knew it, he, Izzy, and Jace were training together side-by-side, as a team. Alec loved his family more than anything in the world, and he knew, without a doubt, that he would die for them in an instant. It was staying alive for them that Alec found challenging at times.
Alec's future seemed monotonous; dull, gray. Once, when he was a child, it had seemed to sparkle with colour. He saw himself, sitting in the Head of the Institute's chair in what would hopefully, one day, be his office. He played with Shadowhunter action figures and dreamed about becoming one of the brave warriors that defended mankind from demons. He looked up to his father and mother so much that he practically worshiped the ground they walked on.
Now, after years of having those three poisonous words flung at him time and time again, he had no such illusions.
Alec knew what he was: a soldier, a pawn in his parents' game, and nothing more. His future would be whatever they decided for him. He had accepted that. It would never be about what he wanted. It would never be about his happiness. That wasn't what was important.
It was what had to be done to ensure the good of the Shadow World that carried the most significance, and Alec knew that. He would sacrifice everything for the Clave, for his parents. By the time he was sixteen, Alec Lightwood wanted nothing more than to protect his siblings from harm and make sure they never endured the same pressures he had to face.
His life became a dull, plodding song of missions, Clave reports, and taking care of Jace and Izzy. He had recognised long ago that he wasn't happy; in fact, he had recognised long ago that as far as he could see into the future, he would never be happy.
Still, the closest that Alec came to genuine happiness was when his parents complimented him. When their voices rose with pride and he saw a smile grace his mother's stern features, he felt as though some kind of light had bloomed inside of him. He felt like he was in colour again, instead of the darkly painted version of himself that he had tattooed in gray chalks in his early years. It was a breathtaking feeling, and Alec chased it like a senseless mundane after the high of a vampire's venom.
Likewise, when Alec fucked up, the resulting disappointment of his parents meant just as much to him. The opposite of light slammed into him, filling him up to his very core with anger and guilt that cut in from all sides. That feeling that brimmed every time Jace and Izzy convinced him to lead them on unsanctioned missions that his parents found out about was so all-consuming that he could deal with it no more than he could deal with his stubborn, unrequited love for his parabatai.
Yet he knew he must find a way to deal with both, or risk injuring Jace and Izzy when they were out on mission. In a field like Shadowhunting, there was simply no room for distractions of any kind.
That was how Alec found himself in the training room more often than not as he approached his eighteenth birthday, the passing of which would drag him on to a future that he wanted no part in. Alec knew that his relationship with pain was complicated; there were no two ways about that. But he had never expected it to become this much of a constant when he first began leaving his archer's gloves on the table instead of slipping them over his hands when he trained in the dead of the night. He had never expected it to become something he leaned on like normal people might lean on a close friend or trusted relative. And he had certainly never expected it to become this direct.
As Alec slid the point of his arrow over the pale skin of his forearm for what was certainly not the first time that night, the harsh words of his parabatai rang soundly in his ears. After all these years of listening to his parents scream the same words at him whenever they Portaled home from Idris to reprimand him, he should be used to them.
But he wasn't, not when they came from the mouth of the one person he thought would never utter them.
His parabatai was always there for Alec, and the knowledge that he had gladly replaced him with the pretty little redhead at the first chance he got was more than Alec could handle. He sighed and drew another red line into his wrist.
Tomorrow, he would pay for his actions that night. Izzy would see his sleeves rolled down and wonder why. He would have to think up another excuse when Jace questioned him about the burning pain he'd felt in his arms the night before. Clary would wonder why he was off his game when they trained, if her damn life could slow down long enough for them to even get to the training room. Hell, maybe even her little mundie friend would be able to smell the blood on him. From the looks of it, he was still recovering from his experience at the DuMort. He had probably drank some of Camille's blood; the side effects were obvious enough.
Still, Alec refused to stop as he dug the tip of the arrow in again, deeper this time. Thick, red blood cascaded down his wrist from the other cuts he'd made. The hardest thing about it all was that he couldn't even be angry at Jace or his parents for saying what they had; after all, it's not like they were saying anything that wasn't true.
Jace was right.
His parents were right.
His best wasn't good enough.
He wasn't good enough.
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
Not good enough.
Alec studied the arrow in his hand, it's sharp point darkened with his blood. He felt crazy, and maybe he was crazy; he was hurting himself on purpose, and that was practically unheard of in the Shadow World. Still, it made everything in his life a little less threatening, pushed the tide back a little, kept everything just balanced enough for him to deal with. Why shouldn't he do it when it helped him so? As long as he was able to keep control over everything, he would be fine. He would always be fine. He didn't have a choice.
Alec sighed and locked the arrow away in one of his bedside drawers for another day. The cuts on his arms still bled sluggishly, but he was so far from applying an iratze that it wasn't even funny. He wrapped himself in his bedsheets and pulled them up to cover his arms. He could feel the crimson staining the fine fabric, but luckily, they were black, so it didn't matter. As he stared up at the white, blank ceiling of the room that had never truly felt like his, in the cold, unwelcoming place that he had never really called home, he remembered what Izzy had said to the mundane outside the City of Bones.
Firstborn; heavy is the head that wears the crown.
It was beginning to feel less like a crown to Alec and more like the weight of the world.