Archive of Our Own ^beta

When he first meets Clary, she is two.

She is playing by herself in a park, red curls flying around haphazardly, giggling the laugh of a carefree child. Her mother, identifiable by her nearly-identical features, is lying on her back in the sunlight with worry creasing her otherwise beautiful features.

He checks his glamour- still intact, and why shouldn’t it be, he’s the best (and oldest still-living) warlock the world has ever fucking seen- and walks over to the little girl with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face.

The red-haired woman doesn't see him, and he advances further. He crouches by the toddler’s side and smiles gently down at her.

The two-year-old feels his shadow fall over her and looks up with a little gasp of surprise.

“Hey there,” he says, and his voice is gentle as the breeze caressing her soft red curls. “How are you, little lady?”

She gurgles at him, and he wonders if she can speak.

“My name is Simon,” he tells her, touching her gently under the chin. “What’s yours?”

She looks up at him silently for several minutes. He waits with the patience of a man who has forever and knows it.

“Clary,” she says finally, little-girl voice trailing off in a giggle. “Clary!” she cries, throwing her hands into the air and running in a circle.

He sits back on his heels and watches her, brown eyes entranced. “Well hello there, Clary.” He greets her formally, even doffing an imaginary hat to the little toddler.

The redhead giggles and hugs him.

Simon takes a moment to hug her back, cradling her gently, unused to this; unused to open displays of affection, so freely given and with such innocent intentions. Unused to everything relating to children, really. He hasn’t been around them in so long…

Clary lets him go, beaming. “‘Imon!” she crows proudly.

He finds himself smiling at this innocent, fiery-haired angel, and he also finds he doesn’t know or care why. It feels good to smile, and he is allowed to feel good, goddammit.

“Yeah, I’m Simon,” he replies gently, grinning back down at her. “Nice to meet you, little lady.”

He wiggles his tanned fingers in front of her. Gold sparks burst from his fingertips and dance between their faces, illuminating hers and bringing out the little caramel freckles dotting her cheeks. She coos, eyes wide and awestruck as she reaches out to touch one. It dodges and skims her milky cheek gently. Clary gasps and claps her hands, high childlike laugh ringing into the air.

The redheaded woman looks up then. Her emerald eyes widen and she jolts up, running to her daughter and jerking her away from Simon.

“Get away from her,” she spits.

Simon looks at the woman he now recognizes as the infamous Jocelyn Fairchild. Valentine's wife. Meaning that this innocent little child…

“Oh,” he murmurs, looking down at her daughter with anguished eyes, “what have your parents made you, little lady?”

“Get away from her,” Jocelyn insists.

Simon looks at her squarely, brown eyes frank. “You will never be safe, Fairchild. She has the Sight. She will be dragged into the affairs of the Nephilim, and what then?”

“Shut up,” Jocelyn hisses, dragging Clary against her chest; “shut up, you warlock, leave my daughter the hell alone-”

“I want to help you,” Simon tells her, and he can tell she knows it’s honest. She stares at him and he directs his gaze to Clary.

“I will protect your daughter,” he swears, and his eyes flash gold with magic. “Whatever form that takes, I will choose, but you can stop me if you want. I swear on my magic, Jocelyn Fairchild, I will guard your daughter’s life.”

Jocelyn stares at him and Clary wriggles in her grasp, fighting to get to Simon.

When the Shadowhunting woman realizes that, her eyes go blank and she releases her daughter.

Clary runs straight into Simon’s arms.

Jocelyn's shoulders slump and her breath hisses out. “Okay,” she says, eyes on her little girl.

The brunet looks over at the redheaded Shadowhunter and smiles reassuringly.

“I will never hurt her.”

“You better not be lying.” Her green eyes blaze with a maternal fury that Simon hopes Clary will have the chance to develop, decades in the future with her own child(ren).

“I’m not,” he tells her, and then he rubs his nose in Clary’s curls.

“Take her to Magnus Bane,” he says, not looking up. “He can take her Sight away.”

He tells her where to find the much younger yet very powerful warlock- perhaps tenth in the world- and then he stands, placing Clary on the ground beside her mother.

And he walks away, away from the tiny Shadowhunter with scarlet curls and sparkling green eyes and a bubbly little-girl laugh he’s sworn to protect with his life and the little girl’s mother (her mother who is the wife of a monster), and he smiles up at the sky.

He moves in next door to the Frays (he will do them this small favor of calling Jocelyn and Clary their assumed name, because he understands better than most the compulsion to leave a life behind) with the Lewises, Rebecca and her parents Elaine and Ben, and he becomes their son: Simon Lewis.

He’s Jewish now, and he likes that. He’s always liked that religion and what they stand for, and after breaking into several concentration camps to free prisoners during the second World War, his appreciation for them has only grown. He can comply with this religion and he can do it easily.

Simon alters everyone’s memories, places himself in them and ensures they suspect nothing, and he creates what is possibly the most complicated glamour he’s ever made.

He looks Clary’s age, right now, all big brown eyes and messy brown curls and freckles dotted over pale skin dwarfed in oversized T-shirts, but he cannot stay two forever. He has to have a glamour that ages.

He’s pretty sure that has never existed before, but hey, he’s over five-fucking-thousand years old and he has always been the most powerful warlock alive, why not try another impossible spell and see what happens? That’s how he ended up with the ability to freeze time at will, after all.

So he starts layering, the charming and adorable two-year-old over his permanent glamour (well, it’s not really permanent, but it may as well be) and then more, yet-to-be revealed layers, what he’ll look like to everyone else when he’s five and eight and twelve and sixteen-

He wonders how long it’ll be until Jocelyn recognizes him and shrugs to himself. Ah well… I’ll handle that when the time comes.

Santiago stands on top of a cliff in Peru and wonders what would happen if he jumped.

Would he die? Would it (finally) kill him? Or would he simply be grievously injured, unable to move and then forcibly encased in his automatic healing cocoon until his wounds heal?

He decides it’s not worth the risk and turns away, back to the jungle where he’s been living as a hermit for the past fifty years. He’s unglamoured and happy and as at peace as he can be here, and he knows that it cannot last much longer.

His father never lets him have good things for long.

He’s learned that lesson too many times to forget it now.

Santiago looks at his calloused brown palms- the color of hazelnuts, now, from long years spent in the sun-and-steam filled rainforests of South America- and remembers holding a perfect little girl with bright gold eyes and thick dark curls.

He clenches his fists, shoves the baby and her mother out of his mind, and walks back to his hut.

“This isn’t possible.”

“Yes, it is. She’s alive, darling… I’m pregnant and it's a girl.”

“This shouldn’t be possible…I can’t have kids, beautiful… ”

“Well, you have one now.”

“Ha-ha… what’s her name?”

“I thought you should decide. She is your daughter.”

Timothy leans over the rail, staring out at Niagara Falls and letting the beat of the water drown out the thoughts in his head.

A hand slips into his and he turns, looking down.

A little girl is looking up at him with fluorescent lavender eyes under a mop of thick auburn curls, pale skin tinged with a hint of purple in the bright summer light. He smiles at her and scoops her into his arms. She laughs and waves her arms before wrapping them around his neck and gazing out at the water with the occasional little gasp of wonder.

“Unca Timmy?” she asks after a while.

He looks into her big purple eyes. “Yes, Corrin?”

“Why did Momma give me to you?”

He winces. “She couldn’t take care of you by herself.”

“And you can?”

“Yes, that’s why you’re in my custody now, sweetie.”

She nuzzles against his chest and he sees a couple of burnt orange sparks escape from her mouth as she yawns. “Don’ tell Momma, but I tink you’we a better daddy then she was.”

He represses the little spike of pure joy he gets from that and laughs gently instead. “She was a mommy, not a daddy, silly goose. Of course I’m better at being a daddy!”

“But you’we a better pawent,” she stresses, eyes big and earnest.

He finds he has no verbal response to give, so he simply tucks her head against his chest and nuzzles his nose into her soft nest of hair.

“Love you too,” he whispers, once she’s asleep.

Tim wakes up one morning to a harried-looking woman with a baby on his doorstep.

It’s the early 1800s and this isn’t completely unusual- Tim is the expert on healing (and magic, but he lets the customers believe in that themselves) in his little Canadian town near Lake Ontario- but what stops him in his tracks is the sight of wide purple eyes peeking up at him from under an untidy mess of auburn curls and a stained baby bonnet.

He lets the woman in- mundane, but a warlock baby- raped or willing?- and follows her to his living room, seating himself across from her on his couch as she takes the seat near the wall.

“I am sorry, Mr Denica, but my girl-”

“You didn’t know about her father,” Timothy interrupts, green eyes doleful, “and now you have a half-human child on your hands.”

The woman bursts into sobs, nodding, tangled brown hair flying. Tim puts a hand on her shoulder and neatly removes the baby warlock from her hands without her even noticing.

As the poor mundane sobs, the older warlock examines the little one. The mother obviously doesn’t know how to care for a warlock: her hair is a mess, her eyes dull, and her skin is waxy.

“What have you been feeding her?” he asks.

The woman bites her lip and looks uncomfortable. “I… I feed her like… like anyone else would feed their child…”

“That’s not enough,” Tim informs her gently. “She isn’t fully human, Miss, you can’t expect her to have the same requirements as human babies-”

The woman gasps and shakes and sobs, eyes huge and dark with panic, before she bursts to her feet. Timothy doesn’t move; he knows what she’s about to do.

The woman stares down at her child. Without moving her eyes, she says dully, “Take care of her.”

She runs from Timothy’s house without another word and leaves her daughter in a stranger's hands.

He sighs, looking down at the little warlock. “Your mother’s rather rude, isn't she?”

The girl nods solemnly and Tim wonders, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, just how old this little Downworlder is.

“Looks like I’ve got another apprentice, huh?” he smiles.

The baby giggles and grabs for him, skin already losing the waxy sheen as he sends little pulses of healing energy into her system, cleaning out the contaminants.

“Hey there little lady,” he says, caressing her cheek. “I’m Timothy, but you can call me Uncle Tim. How does that sound?”

The little girl claps.

“What’s your name, then?” he muses. “Your momma didn’t tell me… do you even have one?” His face creases and he thinks hard for little-girl names. Then he smiles again and wiggles a finger in front of her face.

“Hello, Corrin,” he says.

Corrin grips his finger and sucks on it solemnly, and Tim cannot help but laugh.

Simon attends public school with Clary and enjoys it more than he thought he would. He’s never had a formal education, ever- well, he’s attended several colleges and acquired quite a few degrees under multiple names, but this, this simple teaching of the minutiae, surrounded by naive young mundanes shorter than him when he was five… it’s almost a sort of dream. A strange one, certainly, and one you wouldn’t expect him to like, but he flourishes.

He sits across from the pseudo-mundane with blue plastic barrettes in her unruly red hair every day and eats from his lunchbox and thinks about the life he's living, not the ones he’s left behind.

Clary looks at him over the table with her big green eyes and asks, “Simon? Are you okay?”

He jolts from his thoughts, spilling O.J. down his Spiderman shirt. He “awwwww”s and pulls the sticky fabric away from his skin and grins bashfully at the girl who has somehow become his best friend.

“I was fine, and then I got juice on me!” he complains. Clary laughs and rubs napkins down his front. He looks down at the top of her head from where’s she bent over and scrubbing at him with something in his eyes that’s so much more than any young child should have in their gaze.

He remembers blood-soaked black hair, a mother’s dying wish, a crowd strapping him to a pole and setting him ablaze. He remembers civilians screaming as a bomb drops onto their village; a girl who was almost his daughter rotting from the inside out within minutes in front of him; a ship sinking into icy water with him aboard; his mother’s blazing eyes as she steps back and lets a man gut him.

He remembers white hair and merciless onyx eyes and the rush of battle in a murderer’s name, the name of a serial killer who claimed to be cleansing the world by killing Simon’s people.

He looks at Clary’s bent, innocent head and remembers all the carnage her people and people like hers have wrought, and for a single moment he is furious.

Then she looks up at him with her naive little grin and says, “All done! Don’t be so clumsy, Simon!” and he remembers hugging a little girl with scarlet curls; mentoring a half- Nephilim because her guardians washed their hands of her when she refused to fight her fellow Downworlders; Jocelyn’s words saving the Clave and the Downworlders together; the locked silver box hidden in his room and its contents; the innocent laughter of a two year old girl who doesn’t know her father is a killer.

He grins back at her, because nothing is Clary's fault, it is her kin’s fault, and he knows everything there is to know about having monsters as family.

Frederick is running on fifteen energy potions and his own manic inspiration at this point, small flat lit in gold. He’s not come out since he first got the idea in his head, and that was five days ago. He hasn’t slept either, but that’s not as important as making this work.

He huffs a breath and smears laburnum oil across his sooty cheeks and twists his fingers at the just the right moment, sending gilded sparks skittering over the metal- and it does not blow up.

“Success!” he whispers, punching the air. It’s blown up, literally in his face, twice already, and it is an absolute wonder his next-door neighbors haven’t called the church deacons on him to report witchcraft or something of the sort.

The copper glows and the cold iron shimmers as it gives off an icy aura to fend off Fae. Frederick smiles coldly as he curls up a wire of the dark metal.

“Curse my girl, will they,” he mutters darkly, navy blue eyes flashing bright gold and staying there in his fury. His glamour is slowly flaking off in pieces with his rage and the steady depletion of his magic, revealing his naturally bronzed skin, the inhuman designs covering his body, and his bright gold eyes, but he cares not a whit. “I’ll show them a curse. They won’t be able to live in this area again for centuries.”

He slips the copper items into his pocket and plunges the iron into a vat of potion before taking four steps and collapsing into his cot.

“One hour,” he sets his alarm spell. “One hour and I get up.”

He sleeps and dreams of blood.

Simon climbs in through Clary’s window seconds after she calls him.

“Simon,” she sobs, face in her hands. She’s shaking like mad.

The brown-eyed male gets into bed next to her and hugs her and lets her tears soak his shirt.

“Valentine,” she gasps; “Valentine- Jace- so much blood-”

He strokes her hair and hums and hugs her, and she calms a little, but not enough. He sighs.

“Wanna see the magic…?” he asks slyly, wiggling his fingers.

That was their code phrase for so many years, before Clary saw Jace kill an Eidolon and things got so fucking complicated. Before Simon discovered yet another fucking genetic anomaly that comes with being 5,000 years old that allows him to be two species of Downworlder at once.

She looks up at him, confused yet hopeful. “Can you still do that?”

“Told ya, Clar, I’m a weird one,” he quips. “I’m apparently both a warlock and vampire now.”

“ … huh,” Clary says.

“Yeah, I don’t understand it either,” Simon admits cheerfully, then reverts back to the original topic. “Well? Do you?”

She grins bashfully. “Uh… yeah…?”

He grins back at her and repositions, back propped against the headboard and Clary situated more in his lap than on the bed. He holds out his hands to the redhead seated before him- and lights up.

Magic spills from his palms, round globes of golden fire hovering above his callused skin, illuminating both their faces. It washes Clary’s pale skin in gold as she leans forward, entranced as always, mouth open in a round O of awe. Simon smiles and tips his head back to watch his creations fly upward and take shape into two small people.

Clary gasps, but otherwise she remains silent, watchful and waiting for the fun to begin.

The right one slowly takes the form of a vertically-challenged female with long, wavy hair and a wide smile, and a male with long limbs and messy curls. The male holds his hand out to the female and bows; she presses a hand to her smile and takes the offered limb.

They waltz, the boy showing the girl the steps, and Clary’s gold-lit green eyes absorb their every motion.

At one-thirty, Simon dissolves the dancers and lets the freed sparks dance over his best friend’s freckled cheeks and wind into her hair. She chases them with her fingers, but they elude her and go back to Simon only to be reabsorbed into his glamour and disappear from sight.

Clary sighs and snuggles into her thick downy comforter as Simon stands and walks to the window.

“Night, Si,” she says, her voice already fogged with fatigue.

He smiles and sends her a two-fingered salute as he climbs out the window. “See ya, Clary!”

Her giggles follow him out into the night as he clambers back into his own house.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Liam Môrester can honestly say he never expected to meet the famous brothers, but he’s certainly glad he has.

They’re here to speak with him, the village storyteller, because they think they can get some new tales from him.

Liam smiles slowly and launches into his tale.

He tells them about his friends, Natasha and Aaron (he changes their names, though: Aaron becomes Adam- his middle name- and Natasha becomes Belle, her joking nickname) Welkmann: the werewolf man and his mate; the Downworlder who locked himself away in a castle and alone because he couldn’t live with what he became on the full moons and the woman who refused to let him leave her behind. But he changes the details: Adam’s not a werewolf; he’s a furry, vaguely lupine humanoid all the time and the only thing that can return him to his human form is true love’s kiss (because these men are all about true love).

He remembers Aaron shaking in Natasha’s arms, both of them streaked with his blood from where he’d clawed himself to shreds in places to stop his wolf from hurting her, and his throat tightens.

She did save him with love; she did.

And Liam thinks that maybe these brothers aren’t wrong true love after all- they are simply wrong about everyone finding love.

Liam doesn’t get to love and be loved without something catastrophic happening.

He clears his throat when he finishes, looking down at his folded hands and letting his thick blonde hair hide his eyes, and he feels the brothers’ eyes burn into him.

Wilhelm is the one to speak, in heavy German and with a light in his eyes Liam’s unable to interpret. “That was amazing,” the younger brother says. “Can you tell us anything more?”

Liam thinks back. He has several thousand years of experience to fall back on, after all.

He smiles.

“I’ve got a few more.”

He buys a copy of the newest edition when it comes out and nearly cries when he sees the table of contents.

The very first story is something called Beauty and the Beast, and Liam knows it’s the tale of a self-hating werewolf and the incredibly loyal mundane who refused to let him go.

He suspects they’ve put in all the stories he told them, but right now, none of the other stories matter except this one.

Simon meets Luke Garroway and instantly thinks about bloody weapons and white hair and mindless followers, all flashing together into one big, doomed ball in the middle of the Accords Hall in Idris. (No one really knows he was there, fighting the Circle, but he was.)

Then he remembers the stories of betrayal inside the ranks, of a second-in-command falling in love with a queen (Lancelot and Guinevere all over again…) and being cast out by his king, and he looks for the signs on Lucian Greymark.

He’s a werewolf. A Downworlder.

Simon wonders if Valentine tried to kill Luke before or after his lieutenant went feral.

Then he decides it doesn’t matter. Luke, like Jocelyn, is redeemable; and he doesn't know Simon is a warlock, so that's another plus.

“Hi!” Simon says cheerfully, waving up at the scruffy ex-Shadowhunter. “I’m Simon!”

“I’m Clary’s Uncle Luke,” Lucian says, kneeling and smiling.

Simon does what he should do. He hugs one of the werewolf’s thick arms and asks, “Can you be my uncle too?”

(He can get away with so much more in this little-boy form.)

Luke looks surprised. He glances at Jocelyn, at her reassuring smile, and he looks back at Simon.

“Sure,” the werewolf says, and Simon beams at him.

Clary is eight and so Simon is too, the first time she sees him using magic.

He’s in his basement, just making golden sparks fly for the heck of it (because sometimes he needs to remind himself that he’s not mundane, that he is a warlock and not only that, he is THE warlock), and the stairs creak. He can’t turn it off in time before he hears a shocked gasp and he turns, heart in his throat, to see his best friend standing on his stairs in denim overalls and a paint-stained shirt with her small pale hand over her mouth. Her bright green eyes are wide and fixed on him, on his hands, where the sparks used to be.

“Clary-” he says, not really sure how to continue, brain stalling with panic.

The redhead continues toward him with shaky footsteps. She reaches out to him, hand brushing his cheek, and he closes his eyes as a tear slides down his cheek.

(she will hate him and hurt him and throw him out and tell her mother and Luke and everyone and he will be alone again because he doesn't deserve to have anyone who cares about him; he will be rejected by the little Shadowhunter he swore to protect and he’ll still do his best to help her but even if she doesn’t recognize him she will still hate him like her mother does)

“Simon,” she says, voice hushed. He bites his lip at the cool feeling of another salty drop sliding along his skin.

Her thumb brushes it away, still so gentle, and his brown eyes open in confusion.

(why isn’t she pushing him away why is she still here why isn’t he in pain)

“Simon,” she says, and she might only be eight years old but her eyes are full of the wisdom of a woman ten times her age. “Can you… was that magic?”

“Yes,” he breathes, ashamed, eyes slipping closed again.

“Show me?” she asks, and he stares with open-mouthed shock.

(she’s not going to hate him?)

“O-Okay,” he says finally. “If you want.”

“Oh, yes please,” the redhead breathes, bouncing a little on her toes, and Simon smiles a little.

He steps back from her and spreads his hands; a little drama can’t hurt her. “Ready?”

His best friend nods eagerly.

He can’t quite manage a grin, but he gets his eyes to lighten a little as he raises his palms and close his eyes- and lets go.

Gold light spills out from his outstretched fingers, thready orbs of gold rushing away and filling the corners of the room. The majority go to Clary, skidding along her cheeks and winding into her hair and rubbing against her skin. One attaches itself to her cheek, right above her eye, and refuses to budge.

Simon frowns; he knows what that means. “You hurt yourself.”

She glances at him, broken from her awestruck mindset. “Hmm? Oh- I fell down the stairs.” She giggles in embarrassment. “I came down here to get the first aid kit, actually.”

This time Simon’s face can muster a grin. “Clumsy much?”

She pouts at him.

He laughs a little. “It’s no matter anyway; I can heal you.”

She gapes, pouting forgotten. “Really?”

He smiles at her. “Sure… but I need your permission, okay?”

“Of course.” Clary looks nonplussed, like her compliance was never in question.

Maybe it wasn’t.

He walks to her, and the globes of power flit back into his skin. Clary’s gasp when the golden energy melts into his skin is quiet enough that he is able to ignore it, instead pressing a finger to the skin near her eyebrow, the place where a bruise would form. She winces.

Then her expression melts into awe as she watches his magic wipe away the energy in the mirror on the wall behind him, eyes wide and admiring in the glass. Gold ripples along her skin, pulsing in her freckles and glinting in her eyes, until Simon takes his finger and his magic away before he does something stupid like mark her.

“Oh,” Clary gasps, hand on her face and eyes boring into Simon’s.

“Yeah,” her friend says, rubbing the back of his neck and breaking eye contact. “I can… do that. And other stuff. And- yeah.”

“That’s amazing!” the eight-year-old squeals.

Simon looks at her. “Yeah?” he asks, a slow smile spreading over his face.

She nods, bobbing excitedly.

He catches her arm. “You can’t tell anyone, Clary. Not your mom or Luke or- or anyone.”

She looks at him for a long time, green eyes considering and far too wise for a girl of eight.

“Okay,” she says finally. “I promise.”

Simon smiles at her.

Simon stares at Jocelyn across the Accords Hall, Clary’s messy red curls somewhere in the middle, defiant brown eyes meeting her green gaze so much like her daughter's. Simon knows the Shadowhunter knows what’s going on, what Simon is going to do (or not do), and he’s waiting for approval he doesn't need from the mother of his best friend.

Jocelyn nods to him.

He smiles, letting the points of his fangs show in the grin, and walks out.

He has a spell to set up and approximately fifteen minutes to do it in.

“I can’t do this-”

Panting for air, blood spattering to the ground, eyes wide and desperate-

“Of course you can! You’re you.”

“That’s not a guarantee of success.” He chuckles, the sound edged in pain-

“To me it is.” Huge hazel eyes full of ironclad faith-

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

“Damn straight!”

Timothy grabs Corrin’s arm. “Cory, please-”

“You need to let me do this,” she says, eyes hard and determined.

Tim fights back a sob. “Please- I can’t lose you too-" 

“Dad,” she says, and a tear slides down his cheek. “Dad, please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

“I will not let you out of the house for a year when you come back, do you understand?” he says instead, fighting tears and losing. “You will not leave my sight for a decade Corrin-”

“Daddy,” she whispers, and he crushes her to him.

“Don’t you dare die,” he sobs into her hair, and he feels her own tears seeping into his shirt.

“I’ll do my best,” she replies, voice choked.

He steps back and hands her a seraph blade, snapped out of thin air. “You might not be a Shadowhunter, but you damn well are going to be as prepared as they are.”

She looks from the blade to him with wide eyes, but she doesn’t ask. The we’ll have time to talk later goes unspoken.

“I love you,” he tells her, and she flings her arms around him again.

“Love you too,” she cries, and he pushes her away gently.

“Go win a war, okay?” he asks, and she nods as she swipes the tears away, purple eyes slowly drying.

“I’ll bring ya back a demon head, will that satisfy you?” She yells the question over her shoulder, running off down the street.

“Not at all!” he shout after her, and he’s left alone with the sound of her laugh.

Tim drops into his chair and covers his face with his hands as he sobs.

Simon is four and he watches Clary return from her appointment with Magnus Bane. He pushes down a growl at the warlock mark hidden in her mind (notyours/neveryours/sheisMINE) because she’s not his and Magnus is just trying to keep her safe and he’s the one who told Jocelyn who to talk to anyway so this is all ridiculous anyway but goddammit she is his responsibility and he’s her guardian and Magnus has no right to claim her the way he has.

But Simon doesn’t try to mark her, doesn’t take Magnus’s mark away either. He knows it’s too risky, it’ll raise too many questions, it’ll put Clary in even more danger.

But fuck does it hurt not to be able to claim her as his like he should.

Aidan stares at his mother with defiant, terrified eyes.

She looks back with fury and a blank uncaring that makes him feel cold all over.

The mob seethes behind her, waiting for the signal to begin the slaughter.

She turns to the man beside her, the man Aidan has known his whole life and who’s now holding a dagger and looking at Aidan with hungry eyes, and she waves him forward.

Aidan screams, just like he’s supposed to.

Elijah is so, so tired. Tired of walking, tired of breathing, tired of life. He hates immortality.

But he has to keep going, because even if he hates this world and wants to leave it, there are so many people who want and deserve to keep living and he cannot take this away from them.

He has no idea how long he’s been walking through the thick green rainforest before he reaches the outpost. Kiera’s on watch; when she sees him, her green eyes go huge and she dashes inside screaming for the captain.

Marco comes out with sick terror on his face.

“What has happened?” he asks Elijah. The Spanish words twist and curl in Elijah’s brain and he takes a minute to process the question.

When it finally registers, so do the memories, and Elijah drops to his knees on the muddy ground and throws up. He stays bent over, shaking, eyes closed and face and hands covered in blood. His clothes are torn and caked in red liquid, most of it his.

Marco follows him to the mud, dark eyes terrified. He shakes the warlock’s shoulder roughly, voice tripping over the words. “Elijah! What has happened? Where is my son?”

“Dead,” Elijah tells him. His voice cracks, the image of a dark-eyed, black-haired boy being stabbed through the chest and crumpling to the ground; his ebony locks soaked scarlet and his pale hand gripping Elijah’s with dead man's strength. “They- They’re all dead. Marie and Jack and Santi… they’re all dead.”

Marco’s face is pale as bone. “And… the invasion…?” he asks, voice tremulous. Elijah sees Kiera watching them a few yards away, dark hands over her mouth and night-sky eyes shining with tears.

“We won,” Elijah says, and it sounds like a lie. “We won and they’re dead.” His head shakes from side to side, a cracked laugh bubbling out of his throat. “That’s the definition of victory in war, you know. We won and those soldiers- all those soldiers gave their lives for a cause that might not even be worth it.” He stumbles to his feet and wipes the back of his hand over his mouth, blood streaking across his filthy cheek.

Marco looks at Elijah like he’s dead too, and Elijah wishes he was.

“I’m sorry,” he tells the man in Spanish. Then in French and English and Latin and any language he can remember how to speak, because there is no way for him to apologize and make it matter. Tears cut through the dirt and blood on his face and he doesn’t wipe them away.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, in the language of his father, the language he should never speak.

He turns and runs into the jungle, cracked rib and bruised lung forgotten in his haste, because if he has to keep looking at the eyes of a man who's just lost his son he will shatter.

He knew choosing this name was a mistake.

He’s not Elijah Stelle anymore, he’s Tanmun Sakalera and he’s in India because the heat reminds him of home.

(He hates that he thinks of his father’s realm as home. It’s not, not really, but he still thinks of it that way.)

He helps people and he doesn’t fight and he stays by himself, and his father doesn’t send anyone to destroy this place.

Tanmun remembers why he’s always alone and he hates himself for trying to make friends back in Brazil. He should have known it would end in death.

It always does.

Niko Mattina is immigrating to America because in this day and age it’s actually easier to do that rather than sneak into the country (the World Wars have made everything more difficult) and the officials are looking down at him in that way that makes him want to drop the glamour and watch their dull eyes light up in terror.

Shut up, Kaage, he thinks, and the impulse lessens.

“Thank you,” he says to the admissions officer (or whatever his title is) with a cold smile. Then, in Portuguese, he adds: “Fuck you very much.”

There’s a gasp and a short huff of incredulous laughter somewhere behind him in the line, but the officer doesn’t notice anything amiss.

“Yes, yes, go on though,” he says, waving a hand.

Niko looks at his papers and raises one black eyebrow. “This says my name is Smith.”

“It is now,” the official drones. “Mattina is too foreign.”

Someone chokes on air behind him, and Niko hears a soft “They can just change our names? Just like that? Because they’re not American enough?” in Spanish in the line.

His fists clench.

He tilts his head and says every single insult he can think of in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and even Greek without missing a beat. Then he gives them another frigid smile.

“Thanks for the help,” he says, voice cold as the Himalayan mountains.

He turns and walks out without another word, listening to his fellow immigrants’ sounds of shock at his impudent and imprudent behavior behind him.

He remains Niko for a long time, longer than he’s ever kept to one name. He doesn’t really know why. Niko doesn’t really have an anchor, any person in particular, and he wonders if maybe that’s why. If maybe he’s finally become someone who can stand on his own and be his own person, exist without shaping his being around another person or around killing.

He is Niko when one of Valentine's cronies breaks into his house and attempts to set him on fire.

It is pretty fucking terrifying, at least at first, but when Niko realizes that it’s just one of those idiotic minions and not the man himself (or one of his father’s servants), he calms down. He snaps his fingers and the fire rushes to cover the young Nephilim.

He screams, hands thrashing and eyes wide in fear and agony.

Niko folds his arms and watches, cold and cruel and merciless.

He doesn’t know this boy’s name or why he agreed to fight for Valentine or even how he knew Niko’s here, and he doesn’t really care at the moment.

The voice in his head is laughing happily and whispering Yes, yes, let him burn, let him come to father and then you shall follow-

Niko snaps out of it suddenly, the bloodlust-haze that should only happen to Kaage (and that has never happened to him before), and he snaps his fingers to put the boy out. The Nephilim sags, face charred and body smoking. Niko’s green eyes are wide and glassy and horrified and and he presses glowing hands to the boy’s chest.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he gasps, gold sparks being absorbed into the blackened, roasted flesh. The smell makes Niko gag. His eyes are watering, but it’s not just from the smoke and the smell. The boy will have burn scars on his torso and legs, and maybe his face, but he’ll be okay. Niko sighs and sits back on his haunches. What the hell do I do with him now?

In the end, he drops the kid off at the steps of the Institute and wipes his memory of attacking Niko. It’s the best he can do at three in the morning and functioning on about four hours of sleep, sorry, he can’t really think much under those circumstances.

God, he fucking hates Valentine. Dragging otherwise-innocent youngsters into his messes, killing hundreds of Niko’s people, and for what?

He downs a sleeping potion in one gulp as though it’s a shot of cheap alcohol and crawls into his bed (thankfully unburned).

He sleeps, and he dreams of flames and his father’s mocking laughter.

“Magnus.”

The warlock stops. Turns. His green-gold eyes are curious. “Yes?”

“Theresa Gray is not the only warlock able to have children. She never was.”

Magnus watches, stunned into immobility and silence, as the other spins on his heel and walks out.

Simon follows Clary into the Seelie Court and stops dead, eyes fixed on the Fae woman on her throne.

No, whispers his mind, and he has the urge to sob. Not her. Please, not her…

His mouth shapes her name, the name she had before she faded into mystery to take the crown, but she does not see it. Her guard- Meliorn- does, but Simon doesn’t know him and he does not know Simon. The guard doesn’t know her name.

Simon remembers a young Fae girl with hair that shone like a waterfall of flames, soft as silk and just as pliant in his hands, and her glittering emerald eyes that glowed with pure life like few others Simon (not Simon then) had ever met. He remembers the tears staining her porcelain cheeks and the emotion in her eyes as she ranted about the unfairness of the world, that her sister was dead and that she herself would be queen. That why can’t my brother take the throne, I don’t want it, I cannot be myself and be Queen, I DON’T WANT IT-

His eyes raise to hers, and he is haunted by the fact that she looks like Clary. Two little girls (well, little for their species), one Fae one Nephilim: one he could only comfort and watch over from the shadows; and one who has welcomed him wholly into her life, no exceptions and no regrets, the girl who needs a shoulder to cry on and his magic at her disposal. He remembers a Fae girl who did not want to be Fae.

Life is never fair, he thinks to the Queen. I learned that before I was four years old, and you have learned it as well. Clary learned it when her love was revealed as her brother; Alec when he fell for one whom he would be shunned for loving; Isabelle when her mother entrusted her with a secret she had no right to place on her shoulders; Jace when he learned that the father he loves still is a monster, always was and always will be.

Life is never fucking fair.

The Queen targets Clary and Simon remembers where his current loyalties lie.

She has fallen too far to be retrieved; she can only be joined, and I am not quite willing as yet to cast myself back into the Pit.

They leave, and Simon cannot help giving the Seelie Queen one last pitying glance before he leaves the Court.

Long live the Queen.

The voice in his head is wry and bitter.

Clary is not the Seelie Queen. She will never be.

But oh, when her sick depraved demon-spawn of a brother tells her she will be his Dark Queen, Queen of Edom, to rule by his side and love him as a sibling should not love the other and to lose any and every scrap of humanity, he can see it. See her, the Clary Sebastian describes, the Clary Sebastian wants her to be (and, he supposes, the one Valentine might have wanted had he lived).

She would be dressed in the finest of clothes, eyes outlined in darkness and red hair up in a multitude of braids and whorls. She would be seated on the throne, legs crossed and leaning forward, chin in palm, as she listened to whatever her subjects think worthy to bring to her attention. Her green eyes, gone the color of poison not emeralds, would glitter with hellfire and she would smile in that way that all demons have mastered.

She would laugh at their plight and step down the dais, and her gown would tinkle with gems. She would unsheathe her sword, plunge it through the poor supplicant's heart, slide her delicate tongue along the metal to taste their blood. She would go to her brother and kiss him, and both their mouths would be stained red.

Simon sees this, and he shudders.

But Jace saves her, because he is Jace and she is Clary and save each other is what they do, and Simon’s (and Sebastian’s) vision of Clarissa Morgenstern, Queen of Edom, crumbles into ashes.

Simon smiles and hugs her. Her red curls tickle his neck. 

“Please.”

His fingers scrabble for purchase on the stone, eyes wide and glittering in the glowstone light. He is tired and dirty and covered in blood, and he needs to get home. Now.

Her lips curve into a smirk. “Now, now, warlock… you have insulted us. You have insulted the Queen of this land and you must learn your lesson.”

“Please,” he says again. No, not says. He begs, something he never does, ever.

He does not beg for himself.

Her blue eyes glitter cruelly and she smiles. It is as sharp as a blade and colder than the iron she (not-so-)secretly fears. “Nice try, warlock, and I do appreciate the begging. Lovely sight, you know; the ancient, all-powerful warlock, the son of the highest force of evil this world has ever known, my own distant relative, and he begs me for a boon.”

She stops. The smile grows wider and her eyes glimmer with hatred. “A boon, I am glad to say, that will not be granted.”

“NO!” he screams, shooting unsteadily to his feet. He is dizzy with blood loss and fatigue but he swears to his father that if she follows through with this, if she hurts her-

She tsks and shakes her golden head slowly, pale green skin shimmering as though drenched in gold dust. He hates her; her and her otherworldly beauty, her cunning and her temper and her way of knowing exactly what to hit to cause the most damage in any individual, her sharp sky-blue gaze and delicate fingers that know exactly how to hold a sword and her utter lack of mercy.

“No,” he says again, weak and frail and fading, because the awful truth beckons. “No, no, no… she has done no wrong, it was all me. Please…”

It is useless.

The truth is, his little girl is going to be hurt grievously because of him, and he will be made to watch.

“You will regret this,” he hisses, gold chains of Fae magic binding him against the rough-hewn stone wall.

The Seelie Queen tilts her head speculatively and smooths out her face. “Perhaps. But so will you, warlock.”

He closes his eyes. (Blue this time, bluer than hers, the color of the night sky.) He breathes out.

His eyes open, flashing gold, when he hears her scream.

“The Morningstar would pay a pretty price for you,” the young (but still despicable) faerie boy murmurs. “I could be greatly blessed for this.”

“You’re mad!” he cries, struggling in the warlock-proof bonds. “He will take me and he will burn you, foolish Fae!”

The faerie slaps his cheek and draws a summoning circle.

He stands back to admire his work, purple-tinted skin glowing with exertion and excitement. “Oh, little star, I will be rewarded very richly for you.”

He stops struggling. It is pointless.

Well, looks like I’m going home again. Yay.

“Do try not to make him too angry,” he says dryly. “I don’t like being spattered with innards anymore than I have to be, thanks.”

Aidan stands in the ruins of what was once a thriving little village, now burnt far beyond repair. Corpses lie at his muddy feet and their melted weapons smolder in the ashes.

He falls to his knees among the destitution he has wrought and screams, long and loud and heartbroken.

Sarah Adler stands in his room in the apartment he shares with Jordan and he embraces her like a long-lost relative.

“Sarah, liebling, darling…” he murmurs softly, eyes filling with tears. “Oh, how I have missed you.” He pulls back suddenly. “How did you get in?”

The dark-skinned warlock steps back, sad smile adorning her delicate features. “Oh, vater von mir, father of mine, if only we could tarry. But we cannot, there is no time…”

Liam frowns. “Liebling, what is wrong?”

She shakes her head, midnight-blue braids whipping around her narrow, dark features. “You did not tell us.”

His heart sinks. “Sarah…”

“No.” She stops his protest. “No, do not back away from your wrongdoing. He is here, vater, here! In this city’s Institute, this city you live in, and… and you told no one. Why?” Her deep green eyes shimmer with tears. “Why?”

His shoulders slump and he sits down heavily on his bed. “Sarah… he is different.”

“He is your Bane!” she hisses. “He poses a danger to you and all you care for, and you have not killed him! What is wrong with you?! You, who have suffered the most from that curse-”

“Sarah.”

His voice is firm and her mouth snaps shut.

“He is different,” Liam says again. “His One is a Downworlder-” Sarah’s eyes grow wide, and she stifles a sound of shock. “-and he has never shown any signs of corruption. He is not like the others.”

“But…” Her voice falters. “But he is the Curse-Bearer, your Bane. He will hurt you.”

“He already has,” Liam tells her. “And he has been grievously hurt himself, Sarah. He. Is. Different.”

She wraps her arms around herself and looks toward the wall.

“I do not know what to believe,” she says quietly.

Liam rises and goes to her, hugging her gently. “Oh, tochter, daughter, I know. It will all be fine, I promise.” His brown eyes grow darker and he puts her at arm's-length. “Who else have you told?”

“Maddie, and Rhia,” she tells him. “And your friend- Kaitlyn.”

He sighs. “Get them here, and I will clear things up. He must not be hurt, they must be cleared on that. You understand?” His dark brown eyes bore into her deep green, and she submits easily, used to him being the leader.

“Yes, vater,” the younger warlock says.

He hugs her again. “Gute Reise, und Ich liebe dich.”

She stifles a sob and clutches him. “Ich liebe dich, vater.”

He kisses the top of her head and steps back. “Go, liebling.”

She nods and slips out his window. He doesn’t worry about her; no, his thoughts are on the subject of their conversation.

He’s tried to keep it secret for so long… but the reveal, he supposes, was inevitable.

Simon groans, dragging a calloused hand through his messy brown curls. “Dammit, Alec… there’s a reason I didn’t tell them about you,” he mutters.

“Aidan Morningstar.”

His voice is cool and stone-hard, with a biting edge.

“Son of Lucifer. Son of the devil. ‘Little Flame’.”

His hands drum on his sword-sheath, lips twitching upward to curve into a cruel, cutting smile. His icy blue eyes flash.

“Hell’s champion. Just as I am Heaven’s.”

“My father will welcome you in the Pit,” Aidan rasps.

His eyes shine grimly and he swipes his dark hair back from his face. “Oh, little star, we both shall be returning to our rightful homes this night.”

Liam meets Sarah and her brother Madden a year or two after he meets the Grimms. He isn’t quite sure which meeting is more fortuitous.

They are not true siblings, of course, but born of the same demon: Sarah the elder, with the distinct blue-black coloring of her father, and Madden with the same eyes and skin just as dark, but with hair blonde as cornsilk. They glamour away the dark hue of their skin and Sarah turns her hair blonde as her brother’s. Their eyes remain unveiled to the world.

(Liam envies them this small freedom. The only part of his anatomy he could possibly unglamour is his hair, and even that is a risk, with the faint gold gleam from any light that shines improbably in his otherwise-dark hair. He is exotic to the people of Germany- or he would be, unglamoured. He has magicked himself pale-haired and hazel-eyed, and he looks as native as he dares.)

They approach him because of his magic, or so they will claim.

“Mein gott,” the male warlock breathes behind him.

Liam whirls, hands out and ready. “Who-”

The young warlock holds up his hands. “Peace! We wished simply to know why one with such power would be here, in our city.”

Liam’s shoulders fall. “Ah. I am not here for bloodshed or conflict, young one; simply a wanderer.”

He nods, then cocks his head. “‘Young one’? I am nearly two hundred. How old are you?”

Liam usually doesn’t answer this question honestly. This time, however, he decides why the hell not and tells the truth.

“I am over four thousand.”

The warlock’s eyes go wide.

“Mein gott,” he breathes reverently. “You- you are a marvel.”

Liam shakes his head, bitter smile adorning his face. “No, no. I am simply a demonic creature who doesn’t know how to submit to Death.”

The young warlock licks his lips. “What- my name is Madden,” he says, all in a rush. “Madden Adler. My sister is over there- Sarah.”

Liam looks; the warlock girl is bickering with a man over the price of herbs. Her hair is glamoured blonde, but he sees the midnight-dark shimmer of her true coloration.

“Liam Môrester,” he says, and dips his head. “What would you ask of me? I know your curiosity.”

Madden flushes lightly. “I- I just- could you-”

Liam smiles slightly, knowing what the much younger warlock is trying to ask. He places a heavy, callused hand on the green-eyed man’s shoulder and looks down at him with gleaming eyes.

“I will teach you, kleine, if that is what you wish,” the hazel-eyed (for now) man says kindly. “Your sister too.”

“She’s not really my sister,” Madden mutters on reflex. Then his green eyes light up and he beams at Liam. “Really? Thank you!” The warlock looks like he’s trying not to bounce up and down.

Liam smiles, grateful. It has been too long since he’s been around young ones.

“Sarah!” Madden cries, dashing off to tell his sister. “Sarah!”

The older warlock watches him with an indulgent smile. He’s always liked young people.

Hopefully I’m not going to regret this any time soon, he thinks pessimistically. Like I usually do.

His smile slips a little, but his eyes keep glittering.

Simon runs his tongue along the edge of his fang, still unused to being a vampire.

He’s sprawled out on his bed in the Lewis house, mini-fridge packed with blood, and mother out at the store. He’d slit his wrist to get the fangs into action, and they’d sprung forth to dig painfully into his lower lip right away.

He sighs and licks the blood off his pale wrist, feeling the fangs retract.

How is this possible?

When the bloodlust had faded, when rational thought had returned, his first thought was to his glamour. Only when he was conscious enough to think about it did he realize that the constant hum of magic hiding his true face was still buzzing away in the back of his head.

He stretches out a hand, palm to the ceiling and fingers spread. His sleeve slides back toward him, and he sighs in a great huff as he tries, just as he had all those millennia ago, to make something happen.

Gold sparks dance away from his fingers and the breath catches in his throat.

Frederick has two girls. One is his apprentice- or she will be, when she is grown. She is twelve and she is lovely already, with only her ruby-scaled feet to ruin her porcelain-doll image: she has thick waves of fiery red hair and blazing green eyes that display all of her emotions. (Her mother was Irish, immigrated to America and then to England.) Her name is Emily, and he is very proud of his young apprentice-to-be.

The other girl, while younger, is far more precious to him than Emily can ever be. (She knows this, and she accepts it easily.) This little girl is three years old, with soft, gold-tinted tan skin, and silky black curls. Her eyes are her real mark, bright and glittering, two thick pools of honey dusted with powdered gold. They shine in her small face like newly-minted coins. She is three, but she laughs so easily, with a sound like tinkling bells. Frederick has never been happier than when he hears his little girl laughing.

Her name is Semeio, in the language of her mother.

It means miracle.

Frederick meets Ataahua when she is twenty-eight and he (glamoured) thirty. He’s curious about the islands down south, that mysterious mass of rock called Australia and her fellows New Zealand and Tasmania. He is curious, too, about their occupants; not the prisoners and criminals the English have shipped there, no, the natives of that land. The Maori.

She is Maori, and she is magnificent. 

Simon watches Alec fall to Abaddon’s claws and makes a decision that may very well cost him his life.

He takes the Nephilim’s bow and shoots the demon in the face.

Abaddon dies and goes home, and Simon yells Karma, motherfucker in his head because Abaddon terrorized him when he was in the Pit so he’s allowed to enjoy shooting the fucker in the face.

He looks at Alec, and thinks that maybe that choice won’t mean anything in the end anyway. If maybe Alec will die regardless. If maybe he himself will die because he saved Alec.

He still doesn’t regret it.

“I had a family, long ago,” he says to the ceiling. His eyes are open but blank, unseeing of the world around him: his sight is filled with the memory of his girls.

Clary rolls over, and he can feel her emerald eyes on him. “What were they like?”

“My wife,” he says, voice fond and choked with grief. “Ataahua. My beauty.” He swallows past the blockage in his throat and manages a tiny, sorrowful smiles. “She was Maori, you know.”

“Native New Zealanders?” Clary asks, a little surprised.

He nods. “It’s what her name means in their language. ‘Beautiful’.” He sighs. “It hurts that she’s gone. She’s not coming back, and…”

“And?” the perceptive redheaded teenager at his side asks. Her hand slips into his, a sign of solidarity.

He closes his eyes. “My daughter. She is dead too.”

He doesn’t know who he is, sometimes.

Clary knows, he thinks, that the person in front of her isn’t always her Simon.

He always belongs to someone; every person he has been has had an anchor, a person or people he is irrevocably tied to. Simon is Clary’s (and Isabelle’s, and Becky’s too, sometimes); Frederick is Ataahua’s and Semeio’s; Timothy is Corrin’s; Liam is Sarah’s and Madden’s and Rhia’s; just to name a few. He has been tens, dozens, maybe hundreds of people, and each of them have built themselves around someone/thing else.

(Is it ony coincidence that he is nearly always anchored by women?)

((Kaage is his father’s, and Kaage is banished to the corners of his mind.))

Simon is anchored by Clary, most of the time. But then there’s Isabelle and Elaine and Rebecca and Jocelyn too, they’re holding him here as well; but Clary is still the reason they’re all there in the first place, and she is the one to keep him Simon.

He thinks that she knows this.

It is a comfort, him knowing that she knows that she owns his identity. It shouldn’t be a comfort, he knows, and it's strange and wrong and backwards because he has always valued freedom and free will above mostly everything; but then he meets his anchor and then he’s a person and not just a bunch of personality scraps. Then the most important thing is his anchor, their safety and their happiness, and he and his values take second place importance. Clary knows that she owns him. And she relishes in it, in her darker moments. She is like her father and her brother sometimes no matter how she tries to hide it, and instead of being put off like most people, Simon is reassured by it.

He is used to demons and darkness. He is Lucifer’s son, for fuck’s sake. There is nothing Clary can do that will repulse him to the point of abandonment.

(If she had joined her brother, he very probably would have followed her into the black, and his father’s smile would have been tattooed into his eyelids. But that is a twisted and dangerous path to go down, and he doesn’t want to think about it. So he doesn’t.)

When Clary inevitably dies, he will leave and he will become someone new, no matter his faux-mother and sister and no matter the love of this life (he loves her but it isn’t enough, it will never be enough). He will leave Simon Lewis behind and go to the other side of the planet and wear a new glamour and no one will find him from this life.

Clary knows that too.

He doesn’t really exist.

Kaage Zornička is not a real person. He is a faceless shadow, a being of incredible power and invisibility spells and blades for hire. He is a magical assassin, one who doesn't care how much blood is spilt as long as he is compensated, and he is feared.

And this is all his father’s fault.

Kaage was his decision, true. It means shadow in Japanese, the country he came out in the first time. And Zornička, his surname… just a different language this time around. Same meaning as always.

But he needs a change, a drastic one, and after Hell…

When his father gets a hold of him, drags him into Hell and makes him his lieutenant, it burns away his humanity. And at least right now, he isn’t ready to be human again. He is a demon with the face of a man, fresh from the torture pits, and if he is to reintegrate himself he must start by being a terrible person who covers himself in blood.

When he feels remorse for the lives he has taken and will inevitably take, he will stop. But until then, he will stalk the streets and killkillkill until his mind stops screaming at him.

 “Luke-”

“Jocelyn? Why are my wolves telling me there’s an unregistered warlock in the woods?”

“Oh- um… actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that…” 

“Simon.”

“Luke? What-”

“Please tell me Jocelyn and you are trying to pull some sort of elaborate prank. Tell me that, I don’t know, she’s drugged or something-”

“Hey!”

“-because I cannot deal with you being a fucking warlock, Simon Lewis.”

“…she’s drugged or something?”

“Why is this my life?!”

“Alyona Dvoynev… I’ve been looking for you.”

The blonde woman whips around, pulling a throwing knife from seemingly nowhere and pointing it directly at his head. He raises his hands in the universal surrender gesture and smiles a little.

“You have wonderful reflexes. Moi pozdravleniya, my congratulations.”

She snarls, green eyes icy. “Kto ty? Kto vy rabotayete?”

He shakes his head. “English, please. My Russian is not what it should be, and I’d like to be able to understand each other with utmost clarity.”

Alyona sniffs and tosses her blonde head. “Who are you and who are you working for?” Her voice is heavily accented, but still lovely; lilting and musical and sweet. Not really the voice one expects from a trained assassin.

“I am working for myself, and I mean you no harm, Alyona. As for my name… do you want the pseudonym I use in this city, or the name I am going by for this century?”

Alyona blinks, but she does not seem fazed by the allusion to time. Good. If she truly had no knowledge of the Shadow World, this would be much harder. “I do not believe your intentions are pure- no one who comes to me has clean hands- but I do not think you will harm me, either. And I would like your ‘real’ name.” The quotations around the word ‘real’ are clearly heard in her tone, and his smile widens.

“I knew I made a good choice in you,” he mutters. “My name, for the moment at least, is Alexei Zvezda.”

Her eyebrows raise. “An unusual name, to be sure.”

He shrugs. “Most of them are.”

Alyona’s inscrutable green eyes flick from his hands, to where one might carry a weapon, and then back to his eyes. “And… why do you want my services, Alexei Zvezda?”

“Just Alexei, please,” he tells her. “And I’m here to enlist you into stopping the apocalypse, if you’re up for the challenge.”

Her eyebrows hit her hairline. “Should I simply dump you at the merest physician, or do you have a personal doctor I can contact?”

Alexei laughs. “I understand the impulse, but I am not crazy.”

“And your persuasion for getting me to do this is…?” Alyona asks, voice slow and sardonic, hand unwavering on her blade.

The warlock in her sights grins at her, teeth sharp and glinting, and his green-laced hazel eyes flash golden in the lights. “Other than the continued existence of the planet and everyone on it?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. “I know your mother, Alyona, and I will bring you to her… but I need your assistance in stopping the end of the world first.”

“And why should I believe you?” the blonde assassin asks. Her voice and hands remain still, but Alexei can see the truth of her emotional earthquake in her eyes.

He shakes his head and give her a comforting smile. “You already do.”

He takes a single step forward, arms lowering slightly. The angle of the knife adjusts with him, but she doesn’t move otherwise. Alexei gets closer… closer… closer… and then he is beside her, hazel eyes sparkling and wicked mouth so close to her ear he knows she can feel his warm breath on her cheek: he feels more than sees her repressed shiver.

“And besides that?” His voice is low, sultry, and deep, and the effect on her is obvious, but to his keen eyes alone. “You and I are in the same boat, Alyona. Neither of us are quite of this earth.”

“What do you know?!” she cries, whirling to face him, knife dropping to her side. She fixes him with wild green eyes and he brushes his hand to her cheek in response.

“So impatient…” he murmurs, shaking his head. “I know plenty of things, Alyona, and I will tell you them in good time. For now, though, all you need to know is that neither of our fathers are human, and that your mother is alive and cares deeply about you.”

Alyona looks at him with desperate, fiery eyes even as her shoulders slump in confusion and defeat. “I do not know what to do…” she murmurs, hand running through her thick blonde locks. “I need someone to tell me what to do…”

Fucking assassin obedience training, Alexei seethes. Remove their free will and leave them obedient and submissive and vulnerable… god, this isn't fair to her. Fucking demons, using their power to help mundanes in this way. Fucking mundanes, getting the demons to do this in the first place. God, I hate my relatives.

He takes her hand, the one without a weapon, and makes her face him.

“Help me save the world,” he says, and his tone brooks no argument.

She doesn’t put up a fight. “You will bring me to Mama?”

He shudders internally at the childlike quality of her voice. This isn't right… she shouldn't sound like that…

“Yes,” he promises, and kisses her fingers. “Yes, I will.”

She shivers and presses up against him, and Alexei realizes it’s drizzling. “Alright then,” she murmurs, voice smooth. “I’ll do it.”

She pulls back and kisses him, hard and forceful and hot, not at all innocent, and Alexei cannot bring himself to pull away.

Before Clary and Jace show up on that rooftop… Simon has a talk with Lilith.

It goes something like this:

The demonic Bitch Queen looks at Simon and her black eyes get really big, especially when she connects it with the fangs and the Mark of Cain, and she takes a step back.

“Aidan?”

He flinches and steps away, hands clenched and eyes furious. “My name is Simon Lewis.”

“No, no,” she murmurs, walking slowly closer, gait sinuous and swift. “You are him. Aidan. Big brother’s son… my best creation...”

He flinches again. “Shut up-”

“But how did you- oh,” and her eyes go wide again. “Oh. I see. Well… this is unexpected.”

“Will you leave us alone now?” Simon asks without much hope.

Lilith tosses her head back and laughs. “Oh, little flame, I know you don’t really expect that. And no, I won’t. What I will do is get my son back and then… then I will let you go.”

Simon gapes at her. “What? Why?”

She laughs. The sound tinkles like a bell and hisses like a snake. “I love discord! And Lucifer angry always means more fun for those of us up here. Besides…” Her eyes glitter. “His idea of always making you watch the world you’ve built crumble around you- and entirely your own fault!- is much too good an experience to pass up. I or someone else will collect you for Lucy when the apocalypse is over. You’re far too good an entertainment to pass up.”

Simon doesn’t cry; instead, he glows with rage. “Fuck off, you bitch. I’m not raising your son from the dead!”

Lilith sighs and shakes her head. “Oh, yes. Yes, you will.”

Jace drags Clary onto the roof, and suddenly things get much more complicated.

(When Lilith dissolves into salt, she looks at Simon with burning black snake eyes and hisses, quiet enough that only he can hear: “You can never escape your father’s legacy. When the world burns and my son stands atop the ruins, you alone will be left to watch it crumble. I made you, Aidan, and I will watch you be unmade with great relish.”

He stares back and doesn’t reply, simply watches the destruction he has wrought on a woman who is sort of technically his aunt (and his mother in a way but he is so not thinking about that).

He doesn’t feel sorry.)

It takes a lot to raise a child. Tim remembers that, vaguely, from the time he doesn’t let himself think about (his name was… Fred? Darren? Daric? Something along those lines… and there was a beautiful woman, and two lovely little girls…); he also remembers, hazily, that he’d had help then. He doesn’t now.

Being a single parent when you were never married is hard. People shun him now even more than they did before Corrin. But he’s fallen in love with this adorable, helpless little warlock girl, and he will die before he gives her up.

((he wasn’t given the choice last time))

He raises her to childhood much like you would a mundane child, and when she hits five years old, he begins teaching her to control her magic. It’s difficult and sometimes she hurts him without meaning to, but on the whole Corrin is a very good student. (And the wounds she gives him- magical burns and the like- are easily treatable.) Her magic is burnt orange. Tim has never met a warlock with that color before. It makes her unique, at least to him.

He smiles at his little seven-year-old (faux)daughter and begins teaching her how to heal.

When they are in fifth grade, Simon and Clary learn about Egypt, the pharaohs and the pyramids and the slave labor.

He has to excuse himself to run off and have a meltdown in the boy’s bathroom.

He’d thought he left his upbringing behind when the empire fell. But nope! Turns out, archaeologists just had to figure out the rough outline of the great Egyptian Empire and then the American education system decided the subject needed to be studied by all children under their jurisdiction.

He had been ostracized before his warlock mark came in, back when everyone looked at him strangely because of his name (“What kind of name is Aidan? What does that even mean?”) and his eyes that glinted amber in the right light.

Then his eyes became the color of burnished gold and the patterns overtook every inch of his skin, and then he was seen as a sign from the gods. Some people thought he was a gift from Ra, but his mother and the priests believed he was an offspring of Set or even of Apophis himself, fit only to be sacrificed or simply killed and then dumped in the desert to show their contempt of his father.

It hadn’t turned out well for them.

But then he had run and left it behind, had still been Aidan but had gone to the other end of the Empire. He watched it fall, changed his name to Aurelius because he has a sick (sick as in horrible and bitter, not that strange 60s term meaning “cool”- really, where had that come from?) sense of humor, and joined the Romans. He had left Egypt behind.

And now the education system- the one he’d entered willingly- is shoving it in his face.

He gasps for air, on his knees in a stall, not thinking about the germs. His eyes are spilling over with tears and he knows the shock and the assault of memories are making his glamour fray when he sees glints of gold on his arms. He pulls himself together enough to marshal his magic into a glamour and holds it steady as he dry-heaves over the toilet.

Simon breathes in as he sits back, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth and blinking away tears. He leans his head back against the plastic dividing wall and just breathes, concentrating on the 21st century and everything not in it.

You are Simon Lewis. You left Aidan behind a long time ago. He doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just you. They’re all dead, Simon. You killed them all. They can’t hurt you.

He releases a shaky breath and gets up to go back to class.

The blade slides into his stomach with a sickening sound and Aidan screams, feeling his blood slide down his abdomen and soak the cloth around his waist. His newly-gold eyes are huge in his copper-skinned face, tears slipping down gold-filigreed cheeks like raindrops.

Haro- his neighbor- narrows his dark eyes at Aidan and draws out the blade. Aidan’s small body curls in around the wound, even with his arms bound above his head and ankles tied to the wood post.

“Die, son of Chaos!” Haro hisses into his face. His breath smells sour and Aidan turns his face away, still crying softly from the pain and shock and betrayal.

Haro hands the dagger to Lisi, his daughter. She is sixteen, just three years older than Aidan. He looks into her eyes pleadingly, and her hand shakes on the blade, but her mouth is set and determined and her eyes are steely. She draws back her hand and sheaths the metal in Aidan’s shoulder, and he screams again as crimson leaks down around the blade and his sunburnt skin.

Lisi keeps her eyes on his the entire time, and when the blade can sink no farther, she leans close and says “Return to Isfet, enemy of Ma’at!”

Aidan’s newly-gold eyes find the nearly-black ones of his mother. She stands to the side, arms wrapped around her middle with comforting women swarming her with such platitudes as It isn’t your fault, You did nothing wrong, He is the son of Chaos, not of you. Her chin tips up when she looks at him. Her eyes are cold and merciless and unrepentant.

He closes his eyes, lets his head hang, and waits for the next stab without struggle.

Aidan will admit to not having set foot within Egypt’s borders in over 3 thousand years. He’s not ashamed of that, honestly. He’s pretty sure Magnus hasn’t been to Indonesia since he left his home country the first time, either.

A lot of warlocks never go “home” if they can avoid it. It’s not unusual.

It is 1778, and America is its own country and Mark is part of it, and he decides to do a study. Why, he’s not really sure, but he’s bored and there are more warlocks around than he’s seen in a while and he wants to do something (and he needs closure on what happened to him when he was thirteen but he won’t admit it).

He starts asking around, tracking down older warlocks and getting their stories. He’s kind about it, but he is also relentless, and he gets his data however he can.

It ends up taking half a year, but he has a full survey from every warlock he could find in America, and the topic is their childhoods.

Katharina Limme, who’s actually still a teenager, has had one of the best upbringings he’s ever heard of. Her mother loved her and protected her from her prosecutors and the girl has a good grasp of her magic by sixteen. She is a very lucky warlock.

The rest aren’t as fortunate.

Mallum Freeman (dark skin, African roots, father was a slave, warlock mark: the bright green leaves sprouting out of his spine) was thrown out of the house when his mother came into his room and saw her little two-year-old with leaves growing out of his back. He grew up with another warlock (Good, Mark notes, the system I set up is working well) named Fiona. She’s Italian originally, and her eyes are the color of autumn leaves. She was beaten by her father on a regular basis from the time she was six to the time she knocked him out with a piece of wood and ran away. She was seventeen then, and she’s one hundred and thirteen now. Mallum is just eighty-four, but he looks like he’s eighteen, and Fiona is frozen at thirty, and they’re just the first ones Mark encountered.

Elliot Mansfield is English, but he defected and fought for the Americans. He was dropped off at a poorhouse for orphans by his very much alive parents because his skin changed to a deep, vibrant purple when he was three. He was nearly killed several times while there and escaped as a stowaway on a ship to America, learning to glamour on the trip. He’s as young as he looks: twenty-nine. He still has the scars from the last beating.

Maria (no surname given) is over five centuries, born in the 1200s in Spain. She looks like she’s in her early thirties. Her feet are those of a chicken, red and scaly and clawed, and she has soft white feathers instead of hair on her head. She lives in the woods of New York State, far away from the cities and towns, and she glamours herself until even Mark has trouble seeing her truth. She is quiet and surly, and she is terrified of cooking pots. Mark doesn’t ask why.

Rose Porter is three hundred and seventy-two, platinum-blonde and pale-skinned, of Scandinavian descent. Her left arm is made of pink granite, and her left eye is milky white. She doesn’t speak much, but she writes about a man shattering his bottle across her face and the glass shard that took the vision in her left eye. The other is a lovely bright crystal-blue and Mark tells her she’s beautiful. She closes her eyes and with a voice like chewed-up marble, she tells him not to lie to her.

He doesn’t ask her who it was that was holding the bottle. He knows the look of a person betrayed by their parent.

It goes on like this. Warlock after warlock with childhoods you’d find in a horror novel, and Mark just listens and writes and comforts. There’s not much else he can do.

The worst is Cora Manson.

She was born a little less than six hundred years ago, to a couple in the Mongolian Empire. (She’s changed her name and Mark gives her a ‘amen, sister’ nod when she tells him that.) She wasn’t born with her mark; it came in late, when she was ten, and Mark raises his eyebrows. “I’m tellin’ you the truth,” she insists, and he believes her. (His came in when he was thirteen, after all.)

Her hair is pure gold, literally metal, glittering its way over her scalp. It’s long, very long, and looped around her skull in a series of elaborate braids. Her eyes are the color of wet earth, and the left side of her face has been burned off. She hides it with glamour, but Mark cannot be fooled by such things. She was born with black hair, she tells him, just like everyone else. Then on her tenth birthday, she woke up to hands in her hair and gold strands hanging in front of her eyes. Her parents were horrified; they dragged her outside to the Khan’s soldiers and asked what they should do. The soldier took her to the Khan’s second-youngest son as a trophy, proof the gods had blessed the Empire: a girl with precious metal for hair! What else could she be fit for than the possession of a war-tested prince?

The prince was not kind to her (and he doesn’t miss that she refuses to tell him the specifics of her time under his command), and when she stopped aging when she was thirty-six, he threw her into a fire in fear. She burned but she lived, and she lived in hiding for decades until the Khan died and left no heir.

“And then?” Mark asks her, eyes soft.

“And then I helped to bring the rotting Mongolian Empire down,” she hisses, striking the tabletop. Her dark eyes flash and the burnt half of her face suddenly seems more like a medal than a war wound.

He stands and bows to her, and the motion is not sarcastic or mocking at all.

“Then I congratulate you on your freedom,” he says, and inclines his head.

Cora stares at him, unspeaking. Then she looks down at the paper where he’s been recording her tale and asks, “Are you on your list?”

“What?” Mark is taken aback.

Cora narrows her eyes. “You heard me. What is your story? Did you include it?”

He shakes his head silently.

The gold-haired warlock extends her hand over the table, eyes soft and welcoming. “Then why don’t you tell it to me?”

He collapses into the chair across from her, head bent and eyes squeezing shut.

“You don’t want to hear it,” he tells her weakly.

“Try me.”

He sighs, and lets the glamour fall.

He hears her soft gasp and his mouth curls into a bitter smirk. “Like what you see?”

“They are…” Cora searches for the right word, and Mark bites his lip and keeps his head down, letting his shaggy black hair cover his face. “They are incredible.”

His head shoots up. “What?”

She gestures at the markings swirling over practically every inch of his coppery skin with glowing eyes. “Look at them as- as tattoos, not a demon’s mark. Look at them like they’re on someone else. Then you may see what I mean.”

Mark bites his lip and looks at his arm, and he tries to think of it as someone else’s. Someone he doesn’t know. A stranger’s arm.

And then he sees it, just for a moment; he sees it as what it is, not the history of pain it has brought him. His mouth falls open.

“Oh,” he says faintly, and he feels like he’s two hundred years old again.

Cora smiles comfortingly at him and takes his hand, squeezing gently. “How about that story, hm? You do not look like you’re from around here.”

He swallows and keeps his eyes on hers. (It’s ironic, sort of, that his eyes are the color of her hair and vice versa. But he doesn’t find it funny.)

“My name is- used to be- Aidan,” he says, and Cora’s eyes widen in recognition. She swallows, and he waits for her to push him away in horror, but she doesn’t.

She keeps holding his hand.

“My name was Aidan,” he says again, braver this time. “And I was born around four or five thousand years ago…”

Alyona curls into him and tells him she killed the husband her handler forced her to take.

Alexei tells her he killed his mother because she tried to kill him.

She kisses him and says “It’s not alright.”

He kisses back and whispers, “It will never be alright.”

Ataahua knows what he looks like without the glamour. She’s known for years, and yet every time he deems it safe enough to strip away the magic and let her see him, her face glows with a wonder he doesn’t think he deserves.

They’re lying in bed, him shirtless and her in a silky nightgown, and she’s tracing his scars. It’s something she does every once and again, and when she does it it’s soothing, not terrifying.

She smooths her fingers over the small knife wound in her shoulder and asks softly, “When?”

“I was thirteen,” he whispers back, and her little intake of breath is sharp in the quiet of their room.

Her fingers wander down the curve of his spine, following the path of the largest scar he has. It bisects his back, from left shoulder blade down to his right hip, and her eyes get darker every time she sees it.

“How did you survive this?” she murmurs, voice raw.

Frederick shifts and wraps his leg around one of hers. “Magic, of course.”

“But…”

“Most warlocks wouldn’t have survived it, no. I’m different, beautiful; you know I am.”

“I know,” she breathes, and presses her mouth against the skin of his back. He shivers.

She smiles against his flesh, slow and honey-sweet, and she rises to turn him over, cup his face in her soft hands, and kiss him firmly.

“Stop getting those,” she says sternly.

He laughs and nods, rubbing their noses together and tracing the curve of the tattoo on her right shoulder through the fabric. Ataahua smiles again and presses their mouths together.

“No more,” she tells him again.

Frederick nods, and his eyes are serious. “I’ll do the best I can, beautiful.”

They both know that’s all he can promise her.

The thing is, Simon has panic attacks sometimes. And flashbacks. He’ll forget who and when he is and he’ll get swept into the flash flood of memories he represses so that he can actually function. And when this happens, he needs someone who can’t be associated with anything in his past to bring him back- his anchor.

In this case, Clary.

Clary is the only one who can bring him out of his ‘fits’, as he calls them, and she’s come through every time so far. They’re not actually too frequent, but he’s been with this girl for more than a decade at this point, so they start to accumulate. And with the war going on and all… he’s had three in the past month alone, about fifty in the past year. That’s more than he had in the whole first five hundred years he was alive.

Yeah. It’s getting bad.

And of course, Alec’s near-constant presence isn’t helping at all.

It’s bad enough that this newest incarnation of his Bane isn’t even twenty years old; it’s worse that he’s dating a warlock and is actually a fucking ridiculously good person; and it’s worst that Simon is kind of in love with his sibling and so Alec is around a lot. Seriously, they’ve known one another for something like two months at this point! Most of his Banes are trying to off him within two days; the most Alec has done is be (understandably) prejudiced against vampires- vampires! Not even warlocks!- and yell at him for making out with Isabelle in Alec’s room. Both things are understandable and honestly, Simon’s had some similar experiences himself.

So yes, panic attacks. Bad and painful and frequent. And Alec Lightwood, present (maybe-)Bane of Simon Lewis’s existence. (Isn’t it just a little ironic that Alec is probably his devil-assigned Bane, but Alec is also basically soulmates with a warlock- a motherfucking warlock- whose last name is Bane? Oh, his father is laughing his ass off downstairs right now.) His life is getting really fucking difficult.

And Sebastian is still terrorizing everyone, and Simon has escaped from a crazed fourteen year old fangirl/vampire queen/stalker who wanted him to be her consort (EW), and so obviously the solution is to walk into Edom. Right. Because entering a Hell dimension where your enemy reigns supreme just spells victory.

Magnus is gone, kidnapped with Jocelyn and Luke and Raphael, but Simon is pretty sure that the green-eyed man is the only other person he knows that’s directly involved with this that would actually understand the full threat and scope of the plan that’s unfolding. Simon is surrounded by desperate teenagers; there is no way that any of them are getting out of Edom alive if he doesn’t help.

He grits his teeth and agrees to the plan, because he will not watch more people he cares for die. Not if he can help it.

That’s worth the risk of the Bane awakening and Alec stabbing him in the back (right?).

Liam teaches the Adlers (Sarah took on her half-brother’s name when they met; she claims it’s just easier that way) as much as he can before he has to go. There have been sightings, in Czechoslovakia and in Romania and in Russia, of a blue-eyed black-haired milk-skinned man with blood on his hands and a warlock target, and Liam knows his time is almost up. But the Adlers need him, at least right now, and he’s never lost before, so he can take the risk and stay a bit longer.

((he wouldn’t mind losing anymore, they’re gone, the Adlers can’t make up for that and he doesn’t care much if he wins or not))

Madden’s quite good at offensive fighting, and Sarah balances him with her healing. They’re incredible together, but he’s trying to get them to be able to function apart again. They’ve known one another for more than half their adult lives, and while they weren’t shabby before they met, they’re so much better now.

It’s frustrating, how utterly adamant they are about staying together.

“What if you can’t be together?!” Liam yells finally, throwing his arms into the air. “What if one of you is incapacitated and the other is rescuing them on their own? What then?” He stares at them hard until they look down; Sarah fiddles with a braid and Madden sucks his lower lip into his mouth. “You are too reliant on on another, kinder. You can’t be together all the time, no matter how much you want to.” He sighs and drags a rough hand through his messy hair, eyes flashing. “Now. Again.”

They grumble and bicker, but they obey, which is really all that matters.

Niko is sincerely pissed when the Circle attacks that pack of werewolves. If Magnus Bane hadn’t gotten there before him, there’s no guarantee that Valentine wouldn’t have died right-fucking-there. But no, his city-wide watch had been down for the night, and he missed the attack on the innocent Downworlders until he heard about it the next morning. From a faerie.

He fucked up royally, he knows that. He also knows that Magnus Bane definitely deserves the title of High Warlock of Brooklyn.

When Kaitlyn visited Niko in New York and realized no one actually knew who he was- and that the High Warlock circle didn’t include him- she was shocked.

“Why the hell haven’t you come out?” she demanded, stomping around his apartment and gesturing wildly. Her silver hair was flying every which way, and her cat’s tail was whipping the air just as fiercely at the warlock girl herself.

He sighed and forced her to sit down. “Katie.”

She shut up and looked at him with her big green eyes.

“I don’t want to be known,” he sighed, sitting down beside her. “I want to remain anonymous and unknown, and I want Aidan Morningstar to be a legend that died millennia ago like he was supposed to.”

“You were the First,” she said quietly. “You watched everything else evolve. You met the First vampires, the First werewolves. You met a fucking angel before you were one hundred.”

“That was an extenuating circumstance,” Niko protested quietly. Kaitlyn didn’t listen, as per usual.

“You cannot seriously expect warlocks to not make you a legend.”

“They all think I’m Lilith’s son, though!” he burst out.

Kaitlyn shook her silver head. “Well, you kinda are, Niko.”

He sighed, waving a hand at her dismissively. “Go. Get out of my apartment and go cause chaos somewhere else, you minx.”

She chuckled and left, but the questions she’d raised are still in Niko’s head.

How could he have expected to be forgotten? Aidan was the first of a species, after all; the only one that beat him were, of course, humanity and the Fae. But faeries in those days were quite different from the ones today, more… feral. Less evolved, more primal. Like how wolves slowly became dogs, except the Fair Folk had magic and beauty and evil on their side of the equation.

He sighs, letting his head thunk back against the sofa. He is an idiot.

But his earlier point to himself stands: Magnus Bane is, in some ways, much more qualified for High Warlock of Brooklyn than he is. For one thing, Magnus is easily located; he hasn’t changed his name once in the roughly-three hundred years since he was given the moniker ‘Magnus Bane’. (Really? Name the son of Asmodeus ‘great destruction’? Way to make a self-fulfilling prophecy, Silent Brothers, jesus.)

He’s merciful, and moral, and his warlock mark is actually pretty inconspicuous, considering. Nothing like Aidan’s or Kaitlyn’s or- or Maria’s or Rose Porter’s, from his damn survey all those decades ago.

Magnus is lucky.

Niko has never been lucky in any sense of the word. Ataahua was a fluke; a way for his father to torture him more, with the promise of a heaven on earth before it’s ripped away.

Magnus is so much better at the High Warlock gig than Niko (Aidan) could ever be.

He realizes, after a while, that he’s still not used to company, which- what?

It’s been five-fucking-thousand years, and he didn’t actually spend too much of that by himself, so… what?

But he’s read those psychology books and he freaking met Freud back in the day and he’s watched so many people fall apart, and he does know why he’s probably never going to get used to being in a populated area.

The way you grow up shapes you, and his “childhood” may have lasted for less than a hundredth of how long he’s been alive- he counts the first 13 years with his mother and then the twenty or so after that until he stopped aging as his so-called “childhood” because he fucking can, he’s older than the motherfucking pyramids okay he can do whatever the fuck he wants- but it made him who he is. Those decades spent utterly alone in an uninhabitable- or it should have been uninhabitable- desert because he couldn’t be accepted into normal society shaped him. He’s never going to be used to the billions of people on this planet and how hundreds, thousands, millions are going to surround him every day.

But he doesn’t miss the solitude, either.

Kaage kills for two reasons.

The first is the simplest: he’s good at this, at finding the right points to do the most danger to them with the least effort from him, at killing people before they know they’re in danger or, depending on what the hirer wants, terrorizing them for hours or days or even weeks until he kills them slow and painful and just like his father likes

He is fucking great at killing people.

The second reason is more personal; the second he doesn’t tell his employers.

The second is simple, too, but oh so much more complicated too: he kills because he has to.

This reason is very hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been to Hell- so, basically everyone he will ever meet outside of the pit. But, put simply: when you’re in Hell, but you’re not dead and you are not a sinner being punished (he is a sinner, by every definition, but he cannot be placed in that place to stay yet; he’s alive, and he will remain alive until the End comes, and so his father cannot punish him the way he wants to), your humanity is burned away.

Or his is, at least. It may have something to do with his half-demon (well, okay, fallen angel-turned King of Hell) heritage, or it might have to do with the pure amount of sinning Kaage has done, or it might be something his father has cooked up; it doesn’t matter how or why. What matters is that it happens; that his soul is slowly stripped of what makes him not a demon- actually, he is being stripped of his soul altogether- whenever he is in Hell. This is the third time in as many millennia, and he can feel the permanent damage his soul has taken.

Point being: while his soul heals, he is more demon than human. And one way to appease the demon, without causing the Apocalypse like Lucifer wants, is to kill and cause chaos.

He chooses killing, because then he controls the aftermath to some degree at least.

So Kaage waits for his humanity to return and in the meantime, he covers his hands in blood and leaves a trail of scarlet footprints over the planet, and he wonders vaguely if this makes his father happy.

When the whole world thinks you’re evil… what’s keeping you good?

Liam meets Rhia on the run from his Bane with the Adlers in tow, after two weeks of traveling around upper Europe. They’re in Holland when Sarah runs directly into a young woman with a headscarf and a basket on her arm.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Sarah cries, getting back her balance with a little wobble and small laugh at herself. But the girl doesn’t reply beyond staring directly at Liam. Her eyes are wide and dark, the color of black opals, and her skin is caramel-toffee brown. Her hair is carefully hidden. Liam stares back until she speaks. Eyes twinkling, she looks up at Liam and murmurs, “You are running from a great power, are you not?”

Liam grabs her wrist. “You are coming with us,” he says.

The girl smiles. “Gladly.”

Rhia is a mundane with fey blood and the ability to See the truth- the truth of people, half-demon or otherwise. She stays with Liam after the Adlers run off on their own adventures, after he kills the incarnation of his Bane, and she remains as strange and otherworldly and charismatic through all of it. She stays at his side until they are attacked by a rogue vampire, and she is bitten and drained to the point of no return. Liam kills the damn thing and holds her while she bleeds. He slashes open the vampire’s pale wrist, but he leaves the choice to her.

“There’s no undoing this, Rhi.”

She smiles weakly and touches his cheek. “I want… to stay wi… with you, Liam.”

He drips the blood into her slack mouth, and finds a proper graveyard to bury her in, and stands over her grave with a bag of blood when she rises.

The first time they kiss, it tastes of blood and dirt, and Liam lets her bite down on his bottom lip and lick the blood away without a flinch.

Simon’s not really sure when Jocelyn caught on to him. It might have been when he was twelve, when his facial features started becoming recognizably similar to the form she met him in; it might have been later, when the Shadow World began to encroach on their little bubble- on the life she had made that was removed from her old one, from the reality she and Simon had fled from. Either way, it would have been obvious from the way he acted after she woke from her coma.

As soon as Clary left the room (she may know what Simon is and some of what he has done, but he hasn’t told her of the deal he and her mother made of protecting her life), he leaned over and said, voice rushed and low, “You can’t tell Clary about our deal.”

Jocelyn blinked at him for a moment before she understood. Her green eyes went wide and bright, but she nodded and even shook his hand. “No,” she agreed, “I can’t. I won’t.”

He let go of her hand and leaned away as Clary stepped back in, hand in Luke’s, and both Simon and Clary just watched The Lucelyn Show for the next fifteen minutes until they got tired of the pining and walked out.

Tim loves his little girl. Corrin is smart and sassy and tough, she learns magic easily and quickly, and she’s not afraid to back-talk him. When he was young, if a foundling like her talked back to their keeper, they were thrown out onto the streets. But Corrin knows he’s too soft-hearted for that, and she takes full advantage of it, to his chagrin; he lets her get away with far too much mischief. It’s not good for either of their reputations, even though his reputation is basically ‘that crazy healer guy’ and hers is ‘that girl adopted by the crazy healer guy’. They don’t really have too far to fall, honestly, but Tim likes to grumble nonetheless. It makes him feel better.

Corrin will flutter her eyelashes and smirk and twist him around her little finger, and he grumbles and protests right up until she skips away, trouble done and leaving him to clean up the mess.

He’s always been fond of mischievous ladies, and his not-daughter is no exception.

Simon struggles with telling the Lewises. He loves them, sort of; Rebecca especially has been a good sister to him, and Elaine is a far better mother than his biological one had been-she’s better than either of his “mothers”, really. But judging from Elaine’s reaction to his simply being a vampire… yeah, not gonna happen.

He tells Becky that which his not-mother had discovered on her own, that he is a vampire. She reacts better than he expected, considering, and he wonders if he should tell her the rest. About his age, his true species, the fact that he’s not really her brother at all.

He thinks better of it. Her world has been shattered enough.

Aidan has stopped approximately eighteen and a half apocalypses in his lifetime. He has met and spoken with five angels, one of which he knows quite well after a long acquaintance, (she hasn’t contacted him in a couple centuries, but he can wait) and two of whom he fought. He has met all seven Princes of Hell, including the Princess, and he has clawed his way out of Hell twenty-three times. He has met his father, punched his father in the face, been tortured by his father, and has a little shard of Hell disguised as a person inside his head permanently. He was stabbed by his mother and tortured for weeks by his father in the pits, and most of his “siblings” have tried to kill him. He has a reincarnating supernatural creature stalking him for as long as he lives, he is technically the son of two demons and a human woman, and he is a fertile warlock. His warlock mark(s) can only be concealed by glamour, and his magic is the most advanced in the world.

When you look at his life like that, he sort of sounds like a hero; the underdog with a bad past who rose from the ashes to become more.

He is not a hero. He’s not even human.

He is what he told Madden all those years ago (though maybe not in the same words): a stubborn, powerful demonic creature who doesn’t know when to let Death win.

Well, the last part’s not quite true. He knows when Death will win.

Aidan can die after he watches the world die.

He’s not on the side of the angels. He’s on the side of not dying, and that means saving a world that, frankly, Aidan isn’t sure deserves to be saved.

Simon has never really known exactly what Clary thinks of him. He knows that at the surface level, her conscious mind, she at least likes him enough to put up with his issues. It’s probably more, though he can’t quite comprehend why there’s more; he’s never really understood what other people see in him, to be honest. But he knows that she likes him enough to call him friend… at least in her conscious mind.

But in her subconscious, she could think any manner of things of him, and he would not know them. Even she may not know them. It makes him nervous, sometimes. Other times he’s glad he doesn’t know Clary’s true thoughts on him.

And besides, she’s never told him her conscious thoughts about him, either. It doesn’t matter where they originate in her brain; chances are, he’s never going to know them regardless.

Niko meets Kaitlyn Monedha in 1965, fifteen years after his (legal) entrance into the United States of America. He’s in New York, laying low and working as a low-level warlock, and Kaitlyn bursts onto the scene with great gusto. She’s taken the mundane way of life to heart, dressing in bright colors and taking drugs and spinning through life with abandon, and Niko is drawn to her. She is a bright whorl of color in the gray haze his life has become; a sweet, refreshing draught of water in the Egyptian deserts.

She is a warlock, a young one, but powerful. She is wise and insightful, when not drugged into an ecstatic stupor, and snarky and cynical even in the haze of drugs she constantly puts herself in. Niko hears of her before he meets her, and their meeting is one he will remember for a long time.

They are at a party in Brooklyn, one thrown by the current High Warlock. Niko is pleasantly tipsy but not drunk and not high- he hates being out of control- and he’s looking around at the other guests for anyone entertaining enough to speak to.

That’s when his eyes catch on a bundle of thick silver cables, or what appears to be a bundle of silver cables. It moves, bobbing through the crowd, and through the haze of smoke and chatter that hangs heavy in the air, Niko realizes that the silver strands is hair on what can only be a warlock’s head. The hair is pure silver, done in thick braids and looped over the scalp in an intricate pattern, and the person under the hair is just as eye-catching. She appears to be around seventeen, but he can’t be sure how old she truly is. She’s wearing a long, purple and gold and pale blue shirt, slashed open in strips on the back; the brightness and the clash of colors makes Niko’s head hurt. But so does the rest of the past year or two- really, he’s had a nonstop headache since rainbows became the height of fashion. Under the shirt are bellbottom jeans, dyed bloody-scarlet and shamrock-green, and she’s barefoot. The lighting makes it confusing, but Niko thinks she has olive skin. There’s movement behind her; Niko realizes that she has a cat’s tail, black and silky with a white tip, whipping the air behind her.

He walks toward her and catches her wrists, drawing her away and into a corner. “Hello.”

She looks up at him with wide, glassy green eyes, and giggles vacantly. “Hey there.”

“You are drugged out of your mind, aren’t you,” Niko says. It’s not a question.

She giggles again, swaying. “Yeah…” she drawls. “But ‘m not inco- inco- incoherent.”

Niko sighs. “I came over here because you seemed interesting. It would appear I was mistaken. Excuse me-”

He blinks. Her hand is on his arm, squeezing with a strength he did not expect. Her eyes are clearer, and her mouth is twisted up in a grin. Her balance is still off, but she adjusts her stance to compensate for it effortlessly. “Oh, don’t do that,” she says. Her voice is still bubbly, but now it seems eerie in contrast with the rest of her. “We just got started.”

Niko stares at her. “Are you here for me, or do you do this to every young man you meet?”

She laughs. “Neither. The interest is mu-mutual, Mr…”

His eyebrow lifts. She really is on drugs. Hmmm… “My name is Niko Smith.”

“I doubt that.” Her eyes are glittery.

He chuckles. “According to the U.S. government, it is.”

“And according to you?”

Niko bites his lip and extends a hand. The wine buzzes in his veins. “Niko Mattina… but you can call me Aidan.”

Her eyebrows lift, and he thinks there might be a dull spark of recognition in her eyes. “I know that name. Aidan. Have we met?”

“I assure you, I would remember meeting you,” he says. “And your name?”

She smiles and shakes her head, as though trying to shake something out of her brain. “Kaitlyn,” she says, and shakes his hand. “Kaitlyn Monedha. I will enjoy finding out your secrets, Mr Mattina.”

“I shall enjoy deflecting your attempts, Miss Monedha,” Niko says playfully.

It’s the start of a wonderful friendship.

Kaitlyn does not need to dig into his past. In the times between her highs, Niko tells her parts of his story; that he is the fabled Aidan Morningstar, the warlock of legend. That he, under a plethora of pseudonyms, created the warlock safety network, fought for the Allies in World War 2, and met and fought angels, among many other feats. She stares at him with her glittery green eyes and wraps her tail around his arm and hugs him. Then she gets stoned and giggles about everything while he keeps her from injuring herself or anyone else.

He’s never had a druggie for a friend before, but he finds that he doesn’t mind Kaitlyn’s less-than-legal activities. She’s a good friend when she’s sober.

Kaage does not always remember his deeds. Neither does Aidan, when he takes back control. And any memory dulls over time. But there is one memory none of them have ever forgotten.

Kaage has been paid by a man in a mask to kill a family of three. No questions asked, quick and efficient and secretive, and he’ll be paid a shit-ton. Well, in all honesty, Kaage would probably have done it regardless of the reward, but the money certainly doesn’t hurt anything. He’s sent across a continent (or two), from Singapore to London of all places. He has good memories of this place, from the late 1880s, but aside from those pleasant times he doesn’t particularly like the rainy, cold, sunless city. Admittedly, the darkness makes his job easier, and the police are ridiculously easy to avoid, but Kaage likes this place about as much as Aidan likes deserts. Especially African deserts.

His client asked that he use a knife, if possible, but beyond that and the usual request for secrecy Kaage has been given free rein. He enjoys it quite a bit.

There was nothing in the request that said he kill them right away, so he spends the better part of a week simply shadowing them, learning their habits and their personalities. A father, a mother, and an eight-year-old daughter. The father is a drinker, a fighter, and an idiot; Kaage will take pleasure in killing him, especially if he struggles. The woman- Kaage thinks her name is Elisabeth, but the names don’t really matter- is soft and sweet, pale cheeks and glass doll-eyes and curly dark hair, no sharpness or fight. She’s simply weak; a boring kill, but somewhat satisfying, since she and her weakness will be removed from the world. Now, the daughter (her name might be Fiona, but he isn’t sure); she is interesting. She looks like her mother and faces the world like her father- with fire and recklessness. Despite her age, she seems to have already had a tangible effect on her peers- the children that visit their house leave with more presence than they had when they arrive. Kaage would spare her if he could- she might actually make an impact on society- but alas; a deal is a deal, and she must die with her insufferable parents. A pity.

Kaage picks the lock on the door and slips inside on a rainy night, when the droplets drumming against the roof drowns out the soft sounds of his entrance. The parents sleep in the room next to the stairs- easily accessible- and the girl sleeps a floor higher, in the attic. The rain ought to be even louder for her; hopefully she will sleep through her parents’ death, and Kaage will not have to struggle with her. A quiet death will suit her, he thinks; a swift and painless passing is the most he can offer the girl.

Kaage slips into the room like his namesake and watches the adults’ faces light up with lightning. They’re asleep, the woman’s (Elisabeth?) head cushioned on the man’s chest, curls spread over his shirt, and her hand is placed possessively over his heart. His head is turned away from her, one hand dangling over the edge of the bed and the other tucked behind his head. Kaage takes his bag off his shoulder and looks through his blades; he chooses the instrument of Elisabeth’s demise and draws it from its sheath. He holds it up against the light from the window, watching the edge glitter, and then, without drama or fanfare, he drives it neatly through her skull.

It nicks the man’s chest as it passes straight through her head, and the blood soaking into his shirt makes him stir and frown. He shoves the body off him, rolling over and snuggling into the pillow. Kaage’s eyes glitter, bright as the edge of his blade, as he flicks the blood off it.

“Wakey wakey,” he hisses, just loud enough to be heard over the sounds of the rain. The man jumps, sitting up slightly, and looks down at himself. He puts a hand to his chest and draws it away, the blood shining darkly in the weak light from outside.

“What…” he mutters. Then he looks up at Kaage with wide, terrified eyes.

Kaage smiles and places the knife at his throat, choking off his voice. “Hello,” he says cordially as he drags the blade through the sensitive flesh and thick jugular. The man keels over, thick scarlet liquid practically jetting out of his throat. “I think Dad will welcome you with open arms,” Kaage finishes, stepping away from the bed as he sheaths his knife. “He does love the abusive types.”

Well, that was disappointing, he thinks as he strides toward the stairs. His gold eyes slowly turn scarlet as he struggles to remember why he was going to go easy on the little girl at the top. What reason had she given him? He can’t remember… ah well, it can’t have been that important anyway…

He unsheathes a smaller knife as he ascends, only a little larger than a scalpel. His bright red eyes glitter maniacally as he opens the door to her room and looks inside, still utterly silent even when he doesn’t really have a reason to be. It’s not like he needs her asleep, is it?

Her soft curls are spread over her pillow like her mother’s, in a little lacy white nightgown that Kaage simply despises. White, really; what gives her the right to lay there and look like- like that, like a fucking angel, what right does she have-

She snuffles and turns over, and Kaage’s rage gets the better of him: he smashes a glass jar against the floor. She jerks upright immediately, a soft cry escaping her lips; her eyes go right to the source of the noise, and fill with utter fear when she sees a dark man, speckled with blood and holding a knife, standing in the doorway of her bedroom. He smiles at her, and his teeth glitter like his blade. “You get three minutes before I come after you, little girl.”

He steps away from the door, clearing a path for her to run if she so chooses. She gets out of her bed silently, looking up at him with huge blue eyes as she passes. She dashes down the stairs, uncaring of the noise, and he calls after her: “I don’t suggest going to the parents, dearie! Only wasting time!”

Despite his warning, he hears her footsteps enter the blood-soaked room of her parents and the start of her quiet sobs as she exits. A slow smile crosses his face; it looks like one a poisonous snake might make, if it could smile. The only things missing from the image are the fangs.

“Two minutes!” he calls, and flips his knife around in the air. He begins to descend the stairs with twenty seconds left, twirling the blade and watching light bounce off it. He hears a clatter and stifles a sigh; he’d been hoping for some fun tonight, not just the usual scream-and-stab. His internal alarm beeps, and his smile grows. “Time’s up, little girl,” he murmurs: he doesn’t really care if she hears him or not. “The big bad wolf wants a snack.”

He sticks his head into the parents’ room first- it’s not a bad strategy, hiding in the room of corpses because the murderer assumes you’re too weak to handle it. Kaage thinks that this girl could definitely handle it, but she’s not there. He checks the other second-floor rooms perfunctorily; he has a hunch as to where she is, and it’s not on the second floor. Sure enough, they’re empty. Kaage smiles at being proved right and walks down the stairs more silently than should be possible, eyes roaming the main hall where the stairs let out. Empty as well. Kaage makes a sharp left off the stairs, beginning to walk into the kitchen, and hears a tiny sigh. Most mundanes’ ears wouldn’t be able to pick up on the sound, but Kaage is a bit more advanced than that. He smiles and turns, and the girl races out from under the staircase. She shoots past him, back up the stairs, and Kaage follows leisurely, sliding his knife along the wood of the railing as he goes.

“I’ll make it quick,” he promises, words sliding easily off his tongue, “if you make it good.”

She sobs, ahead of him and hidden in shadows and the sounds of thunderstorms. Kaage smirks and follows her damp footprints- when had she gotten to the door? Ah well, doesn’t matter now- to an empty guest bedroom.

She’s collapsed in the corner, scrunched up against the wall, arms crossed over her chest and eyes wide. Her cheeks are pale and soft, and they shine with tears.

“Please,” she begs, scrambling away from him along the wall. “Please, please, please…”

Kaage stares at her silently, head cocked to one side, smile gone. She stops moving and stares back. He feels the need to say… something… something he has never said before.

“I… I’m sorry about this,” he murmurs. He knows she hears by the widening of her eyes and the quickening of her breathing. “I… I don’t really have much of a choice,” he confesses. It feels like he just stabbed himself to say.

(He doesn’t realize it, but the crimson drained out of his eyes at the first word.)

He walks forward slowly, but this time the tardiness is from his own weakness, not from a desire to prolong her suffering. “I am sorry,” he says again when he stands directly before her, knife edge against the curve of her throat.

She closes her eyes and whispers, “Please, just- just do it.”

He obeys.

Liam has known that the Adler siblings are closer than most, off-puttingly close to outsiders. Despite only having known each other for part of their adult lives as opposed to since birth, like most siblings, they seemed rather joined at the hip- figuratively, of course. It took him far too long to teach them how to fight as separate entities and not one whole, because they are a single whole together, not two wholes apart. But he hadn’t really expected their relationship to go down… that lane.

It isn’t that he’s bothered by it, or thinks that it’s wrong, like most people would. He has no right to tell them to stop, or that they are doing something wrong, because they aren’t. It’s that he sees the danger in their closeness, the fact that if they tie themselves together so closely, they will unable to function apart. If they can’t function apart, they are doomed. He wants them to be happy, but not at the cost of one or both of their lives.

He talks to them one night, after three weeks of contemplation.

“I know what you’re doing.”

Sarah glances at her brother. They’re sitting across the small table from him, a flickering lamp swinging from the ceiling above their heads, and she slides her hand into Madden’s stealthily. She blushes slightly when she realizes that Liam is watching her movement, but she tips her chin up and stares him down. She refuses to be ashamed. “And?” she asks.

Liam lets out a long rush of air and leans forward, elbows braced on the table. “I’m not telling you to stop.”

They blink and look at one another, then at him.

“So…” Madden trails off, unspoken question hanging in the air, unfinished.

Liam smiles slightly. “As long as you’re not hurting anyone and it makes you happy, I have no right to interfere. But…” he swallows, and tries to make his face as open as possible. “But you’re already too close. I need to know that you two can function as a person without one another.”

Sarah and Madden glance at each other. Then the naturally-blonde warlock sighs and nods, clearly submitting to his sister’s will. Sarah turns and stares Liam down again. “What would that entail?”

Liam explains the requirements as clearly and concisely as he can, and the Adlers agree after a minute of discussion. He smiles at them and rises to leave, but Madden catches his sleeve.

“How did you find out?”

Liam turns and rises an eyebrow. “Aside from the fact that you two are attached at the hip?”

Madden flushes, but nods for him to go on.

“I understand the appeal of after-battle sex, but you need to remember to lock the door.”

Madden goes bright red, his sister only a shade lighter, and Liam walks laughing out the door.

Kaitlyn meets the Adlers for the first time in 1988, after the time when drugs, rainbows, and insanity was the height of fashion. She still likes drugs, and she gets stoned on a regular basis, but since she came to live with Niko as his roommate, she’s gotten better habits.

It happens in a roundabout way: Niko gets an invitation to the wedding of Madden Adler and Sarah Morester (he blushes slightly and smiles, because he knows that her false last name is solely to honor him), and he decided that Kaitlyn must accompany him. It’s about time they meet, anyway.

Then he flips the card over and sees the note on the back.

Could you walk Sarah down the aisle? You’re the closest thing we have to a father.

Kaitlyn walks in as Niko wipes the last of the tears from his cheeks, but she doesn’t mention them. “What’s that?” she asks instead, pointing at the little pink card.

“Wedding invite,” he tells her. “Some old friends of mine. Wanna come?”

Kaitlyn blinks, tilts her head, and then shrugs. “Why not? Oh- how old?”

“They know about Aidan,” is all he tells her. It’s all she needs to know.

She nods in understanding. “Great. When do we go?”

The wedding is magnificent. He walks Sarah down the aisle, once more bearing the name Liam Môrester, and glamoured to match her soft dark curls and green eyes. He watches Madden and Sarah kiss in front of a crowd of people, and he thinks about how he is the only one aside from them to know that they share a father, that the first time Sarah took Madden’s name it was because they were siblings and wanted to be seen as such. He thinks that it’s better this way, with them flaunting their love even with the element of secrecy. He thinks I am so proud of them.

He dances with Sarah and with Kaitlyn, and after the ceremony is over and most of the guests are gone, he makes the introductions.

“Kaitlyn, these are my dear friends Sarah and Madden Adler,” he says, letting his glamour drop and sweeping his arm out at the newlyweds. “Sarah, Madden, this is Kaitlyn Monedha. She’s a friend, and my present roommate.”

Sarah’s eyebrow lifts. “Friend.”

“Not an anchor,” he says. The words feel like freedom. “There is no anchor.”

Now Madden and Sarah are staring at him, wide-eyed. “No anchor?” Madden blinks, taking Niko’s cue that Kaitlyn is informed. “How?”

Niko shrugs. “I think I’m centered around an ideal, not a person.”

“Independence,” Sarah murmurs, and hugs him. “That’s good, L- Niko.”

He smiles gently, patting her back. “You really need to get used to calling me by another name, Sarah.”

She laughs, embarrassed, as she draws back. “I know! It’s just- difficult.”

Liam nods and kisses her cheek and doesn’t say what he thinks: You don’t want to let go of me. He smiles gently at the Adlers, letting his pride and paternal affection shine through. “I am so happy for the both of you,” he says, ignoring the shine of tears in his eyes. “You better have a good honeymoon,” he threatens, pointing at the both of them, “or I will have to get involved.”

Madden laughs and Sarah pretends to be afraid. “Oh no!” she cries, setting the back of her hand to her forehead as though swooning; “no, anything but that!”

Liam laughs and hugs them, and then he shoos them toward their car. “Go! Go!” he says, still laughing. They obey, just like always, climbing into their car and waving at him as they pull away. Niko stands, waving back, as he watches the Adlers drive away.

Kaitlyn stands beside him, not touching, but close enough to feel her body heat. “Ready to go home?” she asks quietly.

He smiles and finally lets the tears fall. “Yes,” he replies, and turns away.

Aidan isn’t sure how long he spends in the deserts. It’s decades, at least, because he grows into manhood while there. But it’s unclear, because he stops aging when he’s somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. He isn’t sure how old he is, and he isn’t sure how long he’s been here, and he isn’t sure how or why he stopped aging in the first place, but does it really matter? Does he need to know anything? All he needs to concentrate on is not dying; everything else is secondary.

The strange power he used to destroy his village is invaluable. He’s always low on it, but that’s because he’s constantly using it because if he didn’t, he’d be long dead. He fights the desert and its inhabitants to live, and it works; he might be sandy and miserable and utterly alone, but he’s surviving. He’s alive, and he’s thriving, which is much more than can be said about anyone else in this desert.

After what he thinks is ten, maybe fifteen years- he stopped aging a couple years ago, by his reckoning- Aidan realizes that he hasn’t spoken in… he doesn’t even know how long. Years? It feels like years.

He blinks, stilling in his movements, and then he shrugs and continues on. It’s not as though it matters if he speaks or not; there’s no one else to hear him.

Niko gets a call from an old, old friend one night, weeks after after Kaitlyn’s left. Rumours about the Circle are running rampant and maybe she’s trying to discern fact from fiction, but Cora’s never been the sort to really pay attention to these things until they involve her directly- and she never wants to be involved directly in anything. So Niko doesn’t really know what to expect when he accepts the call.

“Hello?”

“Hello, gerelt od. I have a request to make of you.”

Niko smiles vaguely. Cora’s always been blunt, never mincing words if she can just cut right to the center of the issue. “How may I be of assistance, tangata faitotonu?”

“I will explain when you arrive,” she dodges the question. She tells him where she is- her apartment- and asks him to hurry.

“If you’re in danger…” he leaves the sentence open.

“No, no. I simply need help.”

“That doesn’t make me less worried,” Niko points out lazily, walking out the front door to his car.

“I am aware,” Cora says. Niko laughs and hangs up.

It takes a little more than an half-hour to drive to Cora. Niko spends the time listening to Fleetwood Mac and half-paying attention to the driving, half-watching raindrops slide down the glass in front of him and to the sides. He flips on the wipers after ten minutes because it’s dangerous to drive with the windshield blurred with rain (as if that even counts as danger) and hums along, bobbing his head and flicking his messy hair out of his eyes. He looks twenty-something and it’s the eighties and he’s allowed to enjoy himself, he’s allowed to act the way he looks, even if he is alone in a car on a rainy highway trying to get to an old friend of his who says she needs help but won’t explain further, and when ‘needing help’ can mean anything from ‘help me cook this’ to ‘I’m being murdered, kill them before they finish me off’, he kinda needs more info than he’s been given. But Cora did say that she’s not in danger, so he’ll trust that she is in fact telling the truth.

He parks in front of her building (he’d never pegged her as someone who’d be willing to live in an apartment complex, but he supposes that she can hypothetically change) and steps out, slamming the door behind him and walking up the stairs. It’s a busy building most of the time, he knows, he’s been here before, but right now there’s no one in the lobby or on the stairs. He thinks there might be some kind of event going on, he heard something on the news- maybe, he isn’t really sure- and that’s why it’s so empty. He can hear shouting behind one of the walls as he passes on his way, and then moans and a sharp cry from the apartment one floor above- Wonder how that’s working, can’t they hear each other?- and a soft (in comparison) conversation the floor above that. A parent and child, judging from the voices, and Niko thinks they might be talking about a book or a movie… something along those lines.

Cora lives on the fifth floor, and she splits the floor with a young mundane. He has messy blonde hair and a rough voice, and he has an on-off relationship with  a girl named Jessie, according to Cora. (Niko hasn’t been here often enough to learn that last himself.) His name is Walt- again according to Cora- and he’s trying to be a musician. Niko thinks he’s going to crash and burn as soon as the decade flips over, but he doesn’t say anything about it. The kid will learn about the realities of life soon enough.

A woman comes storming out of Walt’s apartment as Niko crests the staircase. He steps aside for her and watches her storm down. She has thick auburn hair tied back in a thick braid and she’s wearing a soft gray sweater and kitten heels- probably Jessie, Niko thinks, and knocks on Cora’s door. As he waits, he sees Walt sitting dejectedly on his green plaid couch (ugh, I don’t even follow fashion and even I know that was not a good choice) with his guitar in hand, strumming absentmindedly.

The door is yanked open and Niko redirects his attention to the woman in the doorway. He smiles at her and follows her inside obediently, shutting the door when she yells “Close it!” at him from over her shoulder.

He can see (or smell) why: the apartment stinks of magic, the kind that spawned tales of witches and curses and potions that would turn you into a frog or a fish or leave you weak and blind. It smells of danger and herbs that have a hundred different uses. He raises an eyebrow as he steps into her sitting area. “Potions, Cora?”

She settles herself in her armchair, clad in a soft white shirt and long pants, and stares him down with her bottomless dark-earth eyes. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Cora, you know I’m shit at potion-making, I’m a raw magic kind of guy-”

“That’s not what I meant,” she interrupts smoothly. She takes a small vial out of her shirt pocket and hands it to him carefully, calloused fingers gripping the glass with a strange sort of reverence. He takes it with equal caution, uncapping it and taking a small sniff.

He stares at her over the rim of the vial. “Cora. This is poison.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you making poison, and why do you need my help? You know I don’t murder people without a good reason-”

“No, you idiot, it’s-” She huffs and leans forward, uncrossing her legs and putting her elbows on her knees. She swallows. “It’s for me.”

Niko glances between the innocuous little vial and Cora. “Explain.”

Her expression softens, going dark and weak and almost helpless. “I don’t want to be here anymore, Aidan,” she says softly. He flinches a little at the use of his given name, but she doesn’t seem to notice, lost in her own head. “I’ve lived a long life, even when I didn’t want to live it. I’ve seen the world change. I’ve met a lot of good people and I’ve met terrible people. I am tired, and I am sad. I want to leave.”

“And you want my help to…”

“I can’t… I can’t do it myself,” she admits shamefacedly. “I’ve tried. I drop the vial, or my hand shakes too much to drink it, or my magic rejects it as soon as it hits my tongue.” She looks at him from under her dark lashes, so at contrast with her hair. “I’ve drained myself of magic, and all I need is someone else’s hand to get it down my throat.”

Niko’s voice is scraped raw. “And so you came to me.”

Cora looks at him with pleading eyes. “Aidan…”

He holds up a hand. “No, no; I understand, you don’t have to spare my feelings. I don’t take offense, just…”

Cora nods like she understands. Niko’s just glad she didn’t make him finish the sentence. He’s not sure what he would have said; just because he understands why doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like a fucking bitch that a friend came to him for- for a voluntary euthanization. She curls her hands around his, the cool glass heating up under their combined grip, and she keeps her eyes firmly on his.

“Aidan,” she whispers, and it sounds like a prayer. “Please.”

He stands, her hands falling away and into her lap, and he walks around to behind her. He pulls her hair loose from the confining braid and winds a strand around his finger as the rest tumbles down around her shoulders. “There,” he says, and he reaches around to hold the uncapped vial against her mouth. Her breath puffs out against it as he nudges the cool glass against her lip; she opens her mouth and tips her head back slightly, just enough to see his face. He smiles at her and brings his free hand through her hair, stroking her scalp comfortingly, the soft metal catching like silk on his rough hands. She blinks heavily and murmurs, voice heavy in the suddenly-hot room, “Let me see you.”

He goes still abruptly, hand and vial frozen against her mouth, before he closes his eyes. A breath he hadn’t realized he was holding slips out of his mouth as he shimmers, the first layer of the glamour slowly dissolving: lightly tanned skin gives way to bronzed, soft green eyes give way to brilliant gold, and his hair darkens and curls slightly at the ends. He bites his lip, looking down at her, but she doesn’t look away from him. He shudders slightly, the vial tapping her lip, and the final layer lifts, revealing first his scars, then his sigils. The glimmering gold signs spread over his skin like sparkling paint on a canvas, leaving him feeling vulnerable and exposed. He realizes his eyes are closed and opens them to be greeted by Cora’s welcoming, awed face. She reaches out a trembling hand to touch his arm, fingers smoothing over the dark skin and the faded scar that wraps around his wrist and the glittering sigils glowing on his fingers, his wrist, his forearm. “Still beautiful,” she murmurs, and Aidan barely keeps from crying because this is not about him dammit.

He makes himself stop shaking and tips the vial just slightly toward her mouth, the liquid inside sloshing towards the opening, and Cora stills. Her hand freezes on him, fingers curled loosely around his wrist, and he smiles down at her as he strokes her hair.

“Shh,” he murmurs gently, tipping the vial further, and the poison splashes onto her tongue. Cora is quiet, drinking it down without protest, her grip never tightening on his arm. This, this is why he admires her, why he counts her among his group of trusted friends; because of her iron will and strength, her steadfastness and her honesty and her determination. This is why he agreed to do this, the resigned and yet quietly joyful expression on her face as he feeds her poison that she brewed, the fact that he’s doing it only because the instinct to survive was wired too deep into her; this is why Cora is his friend, why Cora had been an anchor and is now one of his inner circle.

And now he’s killing her because she asked him to- and she asked him to because she knew, out of everyone, that he would do it.

Aidan does not think about what that says about him, that one of his closest friends trusts him to end her life when she cannot do it herself.

Cora finishes, the poison all gone, and Aidan gently sets the vial down on a side table. He doesn’t stop stroking her head softly, gently, as he asks, “How long?”

“Minutes,” she replies. Their quiet voices echo in the otherwise silent apartment. She smiles sleepily up at him and Aidan watches as her youthful, untroubled face slowly wrinkles and declines. He brings his free hand up and she tangles her fingers into his, and they both watch as age overtakes her. She lifts their intertwined fingers and presses a soft kiss to his knuckles, and his hand tightens in hers, and his other hand tangles itself in thick gold strands just so he can keep standing. He presses his mouth to her forehead and doesn’t move it even when her breathing slows to a stumbling, hitching crawl; and when it stops entirely and she goes completely still, he squeezes her hand and extracts his fingers and walks into her kitchen. He cleans up the evidence, destroys her ingredients and the pot she cooked them in, and he tidies up her rooms with a soft not-smile on his face.

He doesn’t bring his glamour back up until he’s finished. He kisses her forehead once more and smashes the vial on his way out, and he locks the apartment behind him.

On the way out, he notices that Walt’s door is cracked open. Inside, the blonde mundane has his fingers caught in thick auburn hair; a white shirt and a silvery sweater are lying on the floor, kitten heels sitting beside the door, and his guitar is on the floor and half-covered by a lacy red bra.

When he is one floor from the bottom, there’s a commotion from the apartment next to him and the door flies open. Niko barely has time to move before a guy is tumbling out and there’s an incensed warlock (he just knows these things) standing in the doorway, shirtless and panting. The guy- mundane, dark-haired, and also shirtless- gets to his feet and dashes down the stairs with a parting glare over his shoulder.

Niko and the other warlock look quietly at one another for a moment; Niko shrugs and keeps walking, and he hears the door close behind him.

The warlock’s green-gold, slit-pupilled eyes stay in his head for a long time, but he can’t figure out why.

Niko Mattina (because that is his name, fuck you American government) is out of the country within three days, but it takes another week and a half before Walt calls the police because he hasn’t seen his neighbor in two weeks and it smells like rotting flesh. They find an old woman and a smashed bottle that forensics say held poison, but no signs of foul play. Walt insists she was a young lady- “like thirty three, man, you gotta believe me”- but they blame his insistence on confusion (there are a lot of people in this building, after all) and close the case.

The warlock who lives one floor up from the ground level moves out three months after the investigation wraps up. 

Niko doesn’t come back for months, and when he does, his name isn’t Niko Mattina anymore.

Simon Oddyn (he gets some weird looks for his last name but he ignores them) settles into a little apartment in Manhattan and lets out a sigh of relief at the absence of the Circle. He is safe and there is peace, and for the moment, he needs no anchor.

((He will meet a young girl with red hair and bright eyes and her bitter, distrustful mother in three months, and he will send them to the High Warlock of Brooklyn (who used to live in the same building as one of his best friends) to keep the little girl safe, but he doesn’t know that yet.))

Corrin is not an easy child. Her magic stings when it touches him involuntarily, and her control is faulty for years and years so it touches him like that often. Tim always makes sure the pain doesn’t register on his face; Corrin is a soft-hearted child at her core. She would hate to hurt him, so he doesn’t let her know that she does, often. Besides, it’s really not that painful in the scheme of things.

She finally gets a hold on herself at the age of eight. She’s powerful, quite powerful, and Tim is both proud and worried for her. Powerful warlocks do not lead peaceful lives. Granted, neither do Ifrits- those poor cursed souls with demonic parents but nothing to show for it but a mark, no magic and a human lifespan- but there is a middleground, and Tim thinks sometimes that Corrin would have been safer if she’d fallen in that place, strong enough to fend for herself and maybe make some money off her talents, but not strong enough to draw attention from the wrong crowd or hurt others when she loses control of herself.

Then he remembers that he’s raising her. She’d never have been safe anyway, with him as her guardian, so it’s a good thing she’s powerful: it gives her a better chance of self-defense.

He teaches her the way he did the Adlers, when he was Liam Môrester and he was ahead of his father. She has a propensity for both healing and fighting, and he tries to get her equally good at both; if she has to fight, she will need to defeat them and recover as quickly and efficiently as possible. Simple fact of a good warrior: good battling skills, better healing ones. Corrin is good: she takes to his training schedule better than the Adlers had, at least, and while seeing a little purple-eyed girl fight the way two full-grown warlocks had almost a century earlier is a little odd, it also brings a strange sort of nostalgic relief. He’s raised warlocks before; he can do it again.

Corrin is a ray of hope for Tim, someone for him to build himself around and protect with all he has.

She becomes his anchor after seventy years without one, and it feels amazing.

Clary asks him once, why he has an anchor. Why he needs one the way he does, why he crumbles and dissolves the way he does when there’s no one to hold him up.

He’s thought about it before, Liam and Tim and Niko and Frederick. Even Kaage has had a passing thought or two.

It’s hard to put into words, the soul-deep need for someone, something, anything to keep him upright, keep him breathing, keep him here, because he can’t do this by himself. Aidan is the only one who ever managed true independence, ever managed to build himself around himself and stay functional; even Niko had a principle in place of a person, a deep desire to stay separate of someone because people are too vulnerable, so he made himself around the ideal of independence and let that fuel him. But Aidan had needed no ideal, no person, nothing and no one to keep him sane and alive and strong. Aidan had been whole.

He tells Clary that it’s too hard to stand on his own, that he is too shattered and empty to hold himself up. He needs something, someone, to lean on, to take the weight off his chest and keep his lungs and heart working.

Clary hugs him, pressing her face into his neck. His nose ends up her hair and he breathes in deep, smelling coconut and pomegranates and Clary.

He isn’t sure if what he told her is a lie, but it feels enough like truth so he puts it aside and concentrates on the strong grip Clary’s slender arms have on his middle and just breathing.

Simon steps back from the hug with Clary, and then the question is raised: How are we getting home?

Magnus chants and summons Asmodeus. All the blood in Simon’s body freezes and his mind is awash in scarlet-filtered memories. Bloodpainjealousyhurtwhipsilverbladefirefirefirestretch

He blinks, and he's back.

Asmodeus doesn’t notice him, or maybe it’s that he’s ignoring Aidan. It doesn’t matter, anyway: the price is laid, Magnus’s immortality in exchange for everyone else’s freedom.

None of them will take that deal, but they need to go home.

So Simon takes a step forward and offers the only other bargaining chip they have: him.

Take mine. I am willing.

Isabelle brings up what she thinks is a flaw: You’ll be a corpse. He wants, desperately, to tell her that no, I won’t, I’ll be just as I was before! But he cannot.

Asmodeus asks for his memories, and the air leaves his lungs.

Take your pick, Aidan says shakily, and it’s only now that the spark of recognition flares in Asmodeus’s eyes, only now that the demon seems to feel the familiarity of the messy-haired Daylighter standing in this ruined throne room.

But it’s not until Asmodeus’s fingers touch his temples that Asmodeus says, shocked and astounded: Aidan?

Aidan smiles.

Kaage crawls out of the ground in 1887, fingers red with blood and eyes redder. He starts walking, and ends up in London.

The next day, his murder is reported, and all throughout 1888 the news screams his name and he floods the streets with blood.

Jack the Ripper Strikes Again! they call. Kaage smears blood across his cheeks and grins sharp as his knife when the girls beg.

Clary presses her face into Simon’s shoulder. “You aren’t really in love with me, right?”

“No,” he says. “I just- there’s no other word for how I feel, and Jace won’t respond as hard to anything but that.”

“Stop trying to ruin my relationship,” Clary admonishes softly. “I don’t need your protection. I can have this, Simon.”

You didn’t need my help, Simon thinks, when Clary tells him that she and Jace are siblings.

“Take these,” Liam says, dropping two identical pendants into Sarah’s and Madden’s hands. Each one is a tiny, intricate glass bottle, and each one glows faintly gold. Madden’s is shaped like a rose; Sarah’s, like a clenched fist. “They’re shards of my power,” he explains shortly, watching awe curl over their faces. “They’re a sort of… warning system. If the light’s red, don’t go near me; Kaage is in charge.” Fear flickers over their faces. “If it’s black… Father got me.”

“What if it goes out?” Madden asks.

Aidan’s quiet for a moment. “I’m dead. But you won’t be alive to see it when that happens.”

“Here,” Niko says quietly. Kaitlyn glances up and holds out her cupped palms, and Niko drops a necklace into them. She studies it: it’s a beautiful little swan-shaped glass bottle on a chain, and a soft gold glow emits from within. “What’s inside it?” she asks.

“A piece of my magic,” Niko replies quietly. “Sarah and Madden each have one. It’s color-coded to my state of being: gold is normal, red is Kaage, and black is… if it’s black, Father took me.” He swallows. “If it goes out, I’m dead, but-”

“But I won’t be around to see that happen,” Kaitlyn says, just as soft, and hugs Aidan abruptly. “Thank you.”

“I trust you,” he says helplessly, and Kaitlyn squeezes harder.

“Simon?” Isabelle says hesitantly, after long minutes of Asmodeus’ fingers against her boyfriend’s temples and utter silence. Clary’s hand flicks out and covers Isabelle’s mouth, and she gives the other girl a severe look.

“Don’t.”

“You know what’s happening, don’t you?” Isabelle asks when the hand is removed. “What the fuck is happening, Clary?”

“I’d appreciate the info, biscuit,” Magnus chips in.

Clary glances at Simon and Asmodeus, frozen together like some kind of joint stature, Deal with a Demon or something. “He’s making a deal,” she says quietly. “And we’re not going to see him for a long, long time.”

“What?” Isabelle presses, worry beating at the inside of her rib cage. “Clary, what-”

Asmodeus jerks back, breathing hard. Aidan blinks, regaining full awareness of the room around him.

“I don't think that's adequate payment,” Asmodeus says after a moment, taking a short step back. “You entered this realm, you must know you’re not leaving it.”

“Of course I do,” Aidan says calmly, ignoring the shock and mingled horror and grief on his friends’ faces. “I stay and they go. That’s my deal.”

“Simon, wait, no-” Isabelle says, reaching for him.

“Isabelle,” Aidan says calmly, “I need you to leave. You need to go back.”

“We can’t just leave you here!” she says indignantly.

Aidan’s eyes flicker, the glamour dropping for a split second as he looks back at them. Isabelle quiets at the brief flash of gold.

“I’m not going to die here, Izzy,” he promises. “This is the best option.”

“I-”

“Let him do it,” Clary interrupts, voice cracking on the last word. Her green eyes are as hard as gemstones.

Aidan smiles at her, his anchor, and reaches into his pocket.

“I need you to call Kaitlyn,” he says, tossing her his phone. She catches the small object easily, staring at him. “And then I need you to wait for them to get to New York, and listen to everything they tell you. Got it?”

Clary nods.

Aidan takes a few quick steps and hugs Clary, suffocatingly tight. She makes a small noise when his hand slips into her back pocket.

“Kaitlyn will explain,” he breathes into her hair, and moves away, back to Asmodeus.

“Magnus?” he says quickly, as Asmodeus starts muttering. “This isn’t your fault.”

Magnus’s eyes widen and his mouth opens-

And they disappear, back home.

Aidan faces Asmodeus. “I assume you’re gonna try to take me to Dad.”

“What’s with the try?” Asmodeus smirks, snapping his fingers. A sword appears in his hand.

Aidan grins and opens his palm. Gold light coalesces into a weapon of his own, a keen-looking blade with a leather-wrapped hilt and strange patterns carved into the blade. It glows slightly, and so does Aidan, his sigils shining his defiance. “Maybe you’ll win, maybe you won’t, but I’m makin’ this as hard as possible.”

Asmodeus bares his teeth. “You know I enjoy a good challenge.”

“As do I,” Aidan says, and attacks.