#becayse he's got much more of a 'dress in black and go to another city' situation

[spoofymcgee]

on alec lightwood and queerness

Alec Lightwood is twelve the first time he stares into his sister’s eyes and feels his heart try to beat its way up out of his throat.

They’re drunk on the late hour, no parents home to supervise and Hodge called away on urgent business. There are rings of cocoa powder around the rims of the mugs to their left and Isabelle has a smear of it under one of her liquid, dark eyes. It mirrors the cut Alec had given her in training the other day.

His hands go numb in hers. It feels like every word out of her mouth drains the blood out of them, like her newly drawn Voyance rune is letting her cut into his soul with her gaze.

It feels like he spends an eternity with his breath locked up in his chest, her question reverberating around his skull.

In reality, it’s maybe a few seconds before he jerks away from her, standing and snarling down at her not to ask him that.

She recoils, shrinking in on herself, and he wants to take it back, to tell her that he’s not angry, that he didn’t mean to scare her.

Alec has never been brave enough, though.

This is a continuing trend through the years. Jace is the blazing sun barging in where he will and swanning out without a hair out of place, and Alec is satisfied being his shadow, putting his body between anything that might harm either him or Isabelle.

Of course, this means that no one gets close enough to protect them from Alec, but by the time he realizes that, life has taught him that love without pain doesn’t exist and he’s grown used to pricking the people he cares about with the bramble he’s grown around his heart.

It’s a double-edged sword, of course, and with every tight-lipped silence from Jace and poorly concealed sigh from Isabelle, Alec can feel his secrets biting deeper into the flesh of his lungs. He welcomes them, because the other option is to risk pulling apart his ribcage and allowing the world to see the ugly, snarled mess that is his beating heart, and in that case he might as well hand a rouge vampire a fang-sharpener and unbutton his collar.

So Alec contents himself with drawing himself inwards, with bandaging up the wounds Jace insists on hiding until they’re out of sight, with wiping away Isabelle’s smeared makeup.

Years later, laying in on the sort of lazy Sunday morning Alec wouldn’t have ever dreamt of allowing himself, Magnus will trace nonsense patterns over Alec’s shoulder blades and tell him that he is Patroclus.

Alec will laugh and roll over to ask if that makes Magnus Achilles. He’ll watch the rising sun stipple Magnus’s skin with gold leaf through the rising blinds and feel the quiet rumble in his chest through the palm pressed to Magnus’s heart more than he hears it.

“No,” Magnus will say, closing his eyes as he explains. “Patroclus was–brilliant. If you read the Iliad, you see that. He was smart and talented and an incredible warrior. Beyond that, even, he was caring and kind and couldn’t bare to watch others get hurt. But the society of the time didn’t care about those other things, and next to Achilles, nobody could measure up.

“You have the biggest heart I’ve ever known, Alec,” Magnus says, letting his eyes drift open. In the shadow of the blinds, his pupils are still blown wide, nearly eclipsing the amber of his irises. He trails two fingers down Alec’s sternum, pausing right above his heart. “And I know you were raised to think that doesn’t matter, but whoever taught you that was wrong.”

Alec has never been good with words. He buries his face in the juncture of Magnus’s shoulder and grabs hold of Magnus’s hand, pressing the it into the concave of his chest and wondering when he’d stopped seeing the mess of vines in his ribcage as a monster and started looking for the flowers.

Of course, this morning is a long way off from twelve-year-old Alec, scrubbing furiously at the crusted rim of the mugs and trying to ignore the tears dripping down his cheeks.

It’s a long way off from Alec at fourteen, watching Jace toss his head back and laugh in the sunlight, surrounded by their peers and delighted by it. Alec, lurking in a nearby shadow, wonders whether how wrong he is for noticing the way Jace’s hair glitters in the sunlight is what makes him so alien to everyone else, and if not, how many ways a person can be broken before someone does something about it.

At sixteen, Alec polishes weapons on the floor of the training room next to his mother and discovers that secrets taste like ash and ichor. She sits there calmly, methodically wiping down blade after blade, and Alec can’t help but think that she looks like a stained glass window, and there’s a stone gathering momentum at the base of his throat, just waiting for him to spit it out.

At nineteen, Alec spends his birthday trying to ignore the secrets piled like pebbles in his lungs, rattling with every breath. His mother hugs him and Isabelle gives him a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes and his father pulls him aside to have a discussion Alec doesn’t remember a word of, having been too busy wondering how many words made up the precipice their relationship sat on. Was is ten? Five? Or maybe just two would do it, would shove the hopes and dreams his father had had for him since the moment he’d first held him off a sheer cliff.

In the end, he goes to find Magnus, to lose himself in being cared for by someone who knew all his secrets and loved him anyway. It’s a short respite, but Alec finds that it’s so much easier to breathe through the weight of snarling shadows in his chest when he can leave them at the door for a night.

Equally, though, it awakens a horrible, desperate desire to empty his ribcage of stones, to break the windows and shove away the choking dreams others see when they look at him. He shoves it away, spends more time with the archery targets and goes out patrolling on his own and doesn’t say anything to anyone about the impulsive, stupid animal lying in wait for him to get tired enough.

It turns out that three words are all it takes to steal his breath away enough for the creature to slink in.

Magnus says ‘Be my partner?’ and Alec takes his hand and says ‘Can I kiss you?’

And he does, in the middle of the Accords Hall, and then he pulls out his stele and presses it into Magnus’s fingers, wrapping them around it when he just stands there and stares at Alec like he’s the sun or the moon or possibly, maybe, just himself and for once, that’s enough. Alec can’t seem to meet his eyes, but he shucks the right arm of his jacket and pulls his undershirt collar down enough for Magnus to lean in, close enough that his breath is warm on the shell of Alec’s ear.

After, standing in the quiet, ichor-soaked fields, the hilt of a seraph blade biting into his palm, comes the panic. He drops to his knees, head ringing, and Isabelle is by his side in what feels like an instant, hands pressed like burning brands to his side.

“–hurt? Alec! Can you hear me? I need you to breathe,” she says, tinny and far-away.

He doesn’t remember how, is the thing. Maybe his lungs are so crushed that he doesn’t remember how to breathe without the weight on them. Maybe they were right, and he really was broken and cursed and now he’s going to die because everyone knows–

“Alec,” Isabelle says, right next to his ear. “Count with me.”

One. Two. Three.

“Four. Five. Six,” he says hoarsely, and they keep going until he can feel the burning on his forearm where ichor’s eaten away at his sleeve and his head feels light and stuffed with cotton rather than clamped in iron.

“It’s okay,” Isabelle says quietly, pressing her forehead to his. Her eyes are just as big and dark as they were when she was ten.

“I’m–I can’t,” Alec says, voice cracking. “I’m not brave enough. And–god, Max–”

Isabelle’s face crumples at that, and she pulls back so she can press herself to his chest and bury her face in his neck. Alec holds her, grief filling the cavern in his chest until his heart feels like it’s barely beating. Isabelle shakes in his arms, and by the time their parents find them there, kneeling in the blood and muck, she’s half asleep, cried out and dropping off the other end of two sleepless days and an adrenaline jump on top of the crushing weight of grief.

Shadowhunters do not get the chance to mourn. Nor do they have the time to be scared; a scared Shadowhunter is a dead one, and so Alec saves his grief for the punching bags and his fear for sleepless, dark nights curled up alone and says he’s handling it whenever anyone asks him.

It takes two months for Magnus to get him to crack, and when he does it comes in a silent flood. He shakes apart in Magnus’s arms, tears streaming down his face and not a sound in the small apartment but his occasional hiccuping breath and the wind banging the window against the frame.

When he’s coherent enough to talk, he keeps his eyes on the opposite wall and tastes bitterness and guilt as he whispers out a confession of resentment that he wasn’t given a chance to be afraid, that he hasn’t found the time to grieve, that it’s so unfair, Magnus, why couldn’t the world be a kinder place?

Magnus holds him tight and smooths his hair away from his face and doesn’t try to answer any of the questions. Alec cries until he can’t anymore, and wakes up to the morning sun in his face and a blanket tucked around his shoulders.

#alec lightwood #isabelle lightwood #magnus bane #malec #queer #queerness #tmi #the mortal instruments #tmi fanfic #tw internalized homophobia #i have so many emotions about alec and his relationship to his queerness #because he didn't grow up the way most characters w/ internalized homophobia in media did #his world and family are far enough removed from modern day homophobia that he never had to reall worry about it #and i think that's why i relate to him so much #becayse he's got much more of a 'dress in black and go to another city' situation #and that's what i was told queerness was when i was younger #something to be ashamed of and avoided at all costs #a selfish indulgenc #a tragedy #a terrible secret i couldn't share with anyone #anyway. here's to giving in to the screaming impulsive voice trying to convince you to just get it over with. #and here;s to not having time to grieve the person you used to be or a chance to come to terms with coming out #here's to the first explicitly canonically openly gay character i read about #here's to every single one of you standing on the precipice with someone. #my writing