Chapter Text
one.
Oh, good Lord, what it means to be alone // I knew well, I knew hell, and now I don't
Alec’s word changed in a warm August day, when his mother broke both of his legs and he learned just how important it was to always be ready for anything.
Alexander Lightwood was a Nephilim, and he’d known since forever that he would’ve become a true, proper Shadowhunter with his tenth birthday.
His family was one of the Primae, but he’d been raised in an Institute with the knowledge that, once he would turn ten and receive his first Rune, the Enkeli, the most sacred and holy, he would start to walk the darkest streets of New York City, at night, with a blade in hand to kill the demons who sought to ruin their reality with their evilness.
Knowing that the world would turn into dust and ashes if they were to stop with their never ending counter-attack. They were the world’s only and last defense, and their duty was angelic and supreme.
Alec turned ten, and left for his first patrol after receiving Hodge’s permission, who’d judged him healed enough to move. Which had been the greatest achievement of his short life, even greater than that one time when Izzy had gotten ill and, after throwing up on him maybe four times in two and a half hours (during which he hadn’t been able to properly clean himself and shower), had healed miraculously after three days of rest.
It was the duty of every Nephilim to start active duty before they turned fifteen, with the only exception of those who had some kind of medical issue (a grant made by the ‘32 Penhallow Legislation, that had turned their society in what it was to the one Alec lived in), but everyone knew that a Nephilim who became a Shadowhunter so late in his teens had tried to find shortcuts to escape the duty that the Angel had given them, so many centuries before.
All Nephilims became operative by their twelfth birthday.
This, of course, was the rule for those who lived outside their beloved Idris, and Alec lived in New York where his family had been exiled five years before, so he knew that losing this chance to graduate would be catastrophically bad.
The Embedding ceremony only happened once a year, and only the Angel knew what sort of rumors would’ve spread about his family if the firstborn had failed in such a humiliating way. His mother would’ve broken his legs a second time.
In fact, only a month before the ceremony his mother had broken his legs during a training session, but Alec still managed to go out and walk the same streets he’s studied for hours, sitting at his desk with his head bowed over maps and charts of the city that he’d stolen from a mundane news stands, or downloaded from the internet (but the latter always made his eyes water and hurt).
Regardless of how horrible and painful it was to sit down, the night before he’d sat down and turned on his small, old lamp, and he’d bowed over those frail looking paper maps to make sure that every street name was imprinted in his mind.
Alec, regardless of the pain that hadn’t left him for a whole month, couldn’t help but feel a deep fondness whenever he thought about that afternoon he’d spent with his mother. He could count on one hand the times he’d trained with her, after all: she was a busy woman, and he understood.
That made the visit only more special.
And she’d taught him an important lesson, the most important of them all- that he would never be safe. In a world like theirs, with a life like theirs, safety, peace, weren’t something that he could take for granted. They were things that he had to pursue with focus, dedication and effort; once he would get them, he couldn’t lose sight of them, because they were weak little things that wouldn’t last more than a few seconds.
(Seconds worth as much as that one afternoon with his mom.)
No one was every really safe.
Shadowhunters died young, and Alec would probably die young: just like Izzy, and just like their parents, barely thirty years old, would soon do. They fought demons for a living, they gambled with their life every day and were ready to sacrifice everything they had- their lives, their bodies, their children, their minds- for their duty.
Nothing was set in stone, everything was unstable.
And the most important thing in a world so chaotic, was control.
Control, knowledge, strength, his mother had told him, as Alec did his best to stop crying like a child.
Cry now, and never cry again, she’d told him, as Alec let the tears fall down his cheeks.
Never lose control, know yourself, know the world, survive to fight another day and to fulfill our destiny, she’d concluded, helping him sit up and drawing the first iratze on his skin, caressing the boiling skin. A scorching heat that had felt like ruin, but that was salvation.
Those were the words that Alec took with him in his first, unforgettable patrol.
—
Ragnor Fell
If someone were to ask Ragnor why, after all those years, he still worked at the Academy, he would’ve answered that, to be fair, he was about to start his last year as a teacher.
Ragnor, regardless of his old age, wasn’t the oldest warlock alive: there were tons of warlocks, spread all over their planet, that had been born before him, that were older and wiser than him, but at the same time he could say that no one knew quite as much as him about Nephilim.
Nephilims, Ragnor had found out, were a rather singular species.
Born in a singular way, able to bloom and thrive in a singular way, and very capable of burying everything that made them singular with dirt and decay until they became just like anyone else, Ragnor had come to know them not thanks to his work.
No, Ragnor had known his first Nephilim in far 1475. Terrible year, as many other ended up being, if not for the fact that he’d met Eduard, a precious bohemian Nephilim who’d told him about his Angel and his Sacred Mission with eyes full of fervor, his body animated by the brightest, most devoted soul he’d ever seen. And Ragnor hadn’t known how to resist: he’d asked questions and absorbed every drop of knowledge the other was ready to give him. When Eduard, thirty-two years after their first meeting, asked him to come to Idris with him, Ragnor accepted without a second thought.
He could still remember how his hands had shaken with every step he took towards the borders of Idris, how they’d been clammy with sweat, how he’d bitten the inside of his cheek with sharp teeth. How he’d imagined himself being rejected by the barriers protecting that young country, the safe haven of all children of the Angel.
He hadn’t been pushed back, and he’d breathed in clear, new air, feeling like a newborn fawn taking his first steps. Eduard had smiled, relieved and content, and Ragnor had met his grandchildren. He and his wife Maria had been raising them ever since their daughter and her husband had died, leaving behind those two beautiful children, and Ragnor could still remember his pain, how he’d suffered and cried for his little girl. Even after six-hundred years.
In those six-hundred years Ragnor had seen both beautiful and ugly things, and it didn’t matter how many Shadowhunters looked at him with disgust, they would never erase the memory of the wonder that used to fill Eduard’s eyes when he gazed at Ragnor.
Just like he’d never forget how his mother never stopped being happy to see him until her last day, or how his father- the man who’d raised him, that common farmer that had believed Ragnor was God’s gift- had taught him everything he knew, full of pride until war and plague took him away.
When he’d started teaching at the Academy, Ragnor had made that choice thinking about the first generation of Shadowhunters he’d known, with whom he’d debated for hours about their mission and their Angel and the strange, beautiful world they lived in. Because they’d given him hope, just like his parents had when they hadn’t rejected that curious looking boy, with his green skin and white hair and a few too many bones in his hands.
Not even when horns had sprouted from his head. Or when he’d made their cow fly into the plot of their neighbor, who happened to be his father’s greatest foe.
There was something fascinating about teaching, and Ragnor had learned this lesson thanks to his most precious student.
(For someone so blind to his own value, Magnus was more extraordinary than anyone he’d ever met.)
The choice to teach at the Academy had been one of the most important choices he’d ever made.
But Ragnor, who’d been defined by Magnus a ‘madman of an optimist’ more than once (other than ‘my green green heart’ and lots of other pet-names that always had something to do with his skin colour), he found himself, in the year 1995 (five had always been his lucky number, and nine his enemy for life, maybe that was the reason why the twentieth century had been so terrible), planning his resignation.
Six years after the utter mess that the Circle had been, Ragnor gave up, for the first time in his long life. In front of a difficult situation, he gave up.
Ragnor would have liked to say that the situation wasn’t difficult, it was downright impossible, but he wouldn’t know who to argue with.
Magnus and Catarina had tried to throw a party at the news.
Raphael would probably ask him why he found it impossible to deal with Shadowhunters now, after so many years at the Academy, teaching generation after generation of kids that told him all about the Downworlders’ trophies hanging over their fireplace. Before the geniuses behind the Accords understood that no, there wouldn’t be peace as long as Nephilims kept thinking that it was normal to make jewels out of vampires’ teeth and put them on where visiting vampires could see them.
Nothing should’ve been able to shake him, but the Circle had somehow managed to ruin the Academy for him. Which was terribly unfair: Ragnor didn’t overestimate his role in those children’s education, but he knew that his different perspective could be valuable and help them along the way. But what else could he possibly do, when his own students had killed people he’d knows for years, decades even? When they’d almost killed Ragnor himself?
Had they been unknown Shadowhunters, little bastards that Ragnor had never met before, then he would’ve been able to keep on teaching his lessons about ancient demonic languages and history of the Shadow World. But with how things had gone he didn’t feel like going on.
After all, each of those kids sitting in front of him could have grown up to be another Stephen Herondale, lively and chaotic Stephen who’d turned into a stranger under their very eyes; or another Lucian Greymark whom no one but Ragnor had tried to help out; or even another Valentine Morgenstern. Another Maryse Trueblood, stubborn and set on showing that she deserved to be there, uncaring for any consequence. Another Jocelyn Fairchild, blind and desperate like few others.
His heart hurt: another Michael Wayland, another Celine Montclaire, whose joining of the Circle had felt like a personal betrayal.
Did it really matter, if Ragnor had spent months tutoring young Michael on the subject of the development of relationship between the first Institutes of Africa? Did it matter, if Ragnor used to smile as he read Celine’s papers, always happy to see what she had to say, or correct her simple, amusing mistakes in translating an ancient chant in some ctonic dialect?
It ended up mattering a lot.
A new year started, without new recruits, and with progressively louder rumors about the school’s closing, that became more real and tangible with every glance and whisper.
The new classes were the least numerous of the last few decades. The last time there had been so few students had been in 1953, when someone had spread a rumor about illegal experiments being done in the Academy’s laboratories. Many had blamed Ragnor, willingly ignoring the fact that Ragnor had walked into those labs maybe two, three times in his whole career, and never on his own. In addition, the science professor of the time had loathed him and forbidden him entrance, and Ragnor (being the gentleman that he was) had kept his distance.
History was a circle, crisis would always follow prosperity and vice versa, but Ragnor was waiting for that time of prosperity with an amount of hope and anticipation unwelcoming of a warlock of his age.
Point is, that new year even his Nephilim colleagues were terribly quiet, not unlike Ragnor.
If not that, before Ragnor could announce his intentions to retire, a few minutes before the semester staff meeting could end (to avoid having to interact with his more annoying coworkers), Alinda Ashdown called for their attention, eyebrows furrowed and dark eyes more worried than usual.
(She used to make the same face in front of Ragnor’s tests on ctonic dialects, twenty years before. Ragnor loved to remind them all that he’d taught them half the things they knew, when they inevitably argued about something.)
“We’ve been delivered an official request by Robert and Maryse Lightwood. Their son, Alexander Lightwood, is ten years old, and for reasons that they’ve already discussed with me privately they wish for him to enroll in our two-years course of study.”
Ragnor raised his eyebrows, and he wasn’t the only one.
“I studied his situation and observed his performances personally, and accepted.”
“We don’t accept students under the age of fifteen for the two-years course,” was Whitebird’s useless contribution, and Ragnor saw Laura roll her eyes.
“The young man has an even better preparation than our fifteen years old,” Alinda explained, “The only field in which he’d risk being left behind is the physical one, but he shows impressive knowledge on theoretical strategy and the only obstacle in his path is his age. He had less time to learn, and still he achieves more than anyone would expect him to.”
“Why come to the Academy at all then?” grumbled Whitebird, and Ragnor tried very hard (and succeeded) to block out their voices and think of a new opportunity to announce his retirement. Not that he was in a rush: he intended to finish this semester.
(He could have talked after the discussion on the boy ended, but he didn’t. Somewhere around the globe, Magnus was swearing and taking his head in his hands.)
He was forced to think about Alexander Lightwood again when, a week after, a boy walked into his Tuesday class looking like a ten year old would.
An extremely young ten years old. Who spent the whole hour taking notes on the bureaucratic organisation of the Mumbai Institute, the largest in the world (and also the most beautiful one Ragnor had ever seen).
He didn’t get up from his seat when he wrapped the lesson up, and Ragnor followed with his eyes his movements, as he gathered his belongings with the most neutral expression possible. No, not neutral, but that specific kind of inexpressive that all Shadowhunters mastered around their twenties: it looked especially depressing on that young face.
It wasn’t one that his classroom knew, seeing that it was usually occupied by young adolescents. It was something that could be seen in their last day of school.
The boy stayed with a few others for the advanced demonology lesson, and he was just as focused.
Ragnor saw him again at lunch, eating alone as he scribble something down a mundane-looking, old notebook (the kind that could be found in Catarina’s office), barely looking at his plate as he did.
Laura, specialized in runes, adamas and history of angelic worship, tilted her head towards him, whispering a rather conspiratorial “His mother’s copy, isn’t he?”.
Ragnor offered a dry “His mother would have already complained about ten different things, and told me to spell the names of some old demon fart with the condescension of a child who believes themselves to be the smartest person in the room.”
The other grinned. “You’re right, I was talking about his looks. Too quiet that one, wonders who he took after.”
Ragnor knew that things like that weren’t inherited.
He knew of the Lightwood’s nomad tendencies as of late, exiled from Idris, the land where they’d grown, and he knew that they ruled the New York Institute from afar, never settling in the city long enough to be really associated with it.
Alexander would one day inherit the Institute. He’d already received his first rune, and he had many others on his body like all the young Shadowhunters from the Institutes, that started hunting way too soon, so maybe they’d wanted him to have a good preparations before he became Head of the Institute, by sending him to the Academy.
The thought was sour.
He’d personally taught the youngest Whitelaw, the youngest member of a family that the Circle and the Lightwoods had wiped out. And the Lightwoods, as members of one of the Primae, had been punished with a trophy- at least from Ragnor’s perspective.
“We don’t need more chaos, that’s sure,” he chose to reply with sour sarcasm.
Laura was still looking at the boy.
“I’ll ask him to stay behind after class, I want to know more about the reason why a brat is attending my Holy Wars advanced course.”
A brilliant one in Ragnor’s opinion, that explored the more religious aspect of Nephilim culture and its ties to the violent, military tradition of their people.
Maybe to advanced for a boy that age. He may be able to understand it, he’d met geniuses before, but Ragnor usually preferred to see kids doing things for kids. Like, just to say, reading adventurous novels and roleplaying as a pirate with wooden swords.
But it was just a dream, because Ragnor knew that even the younglings were trained with adamas swords.
“Don’t be too pushy,” he warned her, “He must already be stressed, with no children of his age to talk to.”
“He’s here, Ragnor, I don’t think we have to worry about that.”
He never found out if Laura drilled him about his past and intentions.
Two weeks after the start of semester, Alexander didn’t leave the classroom when the two hours lesson on demonic dialects wrapped up. Since the class wasn’t supposed to house any other lesson that day Ragnor understood that the boy either: a, wanted to talk with him, or b, wanted to spend the afternoon there to study alone.
The second option was a little odd, since there were private spaces built exactly for that purpose in the Academy, and they boy even had his own room since he was too young to share with any other student. The first option was less odd, but still strange, because the minutes went by and the boy had yet to say anything.
Ragnor had never heard him speak.
So he reclined back on the heavy wooden chair Catarina had gifted him a decade or so before, joined his hands over the buttons of his vest and stared at the boy as he got up and walked up to his desk.
And maybe Ragnor expected the boy to stutter a little- like many of his students did, still young and insecure like only kids could be (regardless of how imposing and demanding their parents were), or at least be scared. Scared at the idea of talking to a professor, scared at the idea of talking to Ragnor with his green skin and white eyes and additional fingers.
But the boy’s voice reached his ears loud and clear.
“Forgive me, professor, I do not wish to bother you, but I have a question about last week’s lesson.”
Ragnor looked, and looked, that little frame all straight posture and that specific Nephilim brand of stiffness, the one that took control of them when their bodies didn’t turn to flowing water during a fight. Stiffness that wrapped around them like long rusty chains, the physical embodiment of that strange, fascinating and terribly toxic society of theirs, that moved their bodies around until their hands went behind their straight backs, and their legs and soul still.
They’d trained him well.
“I’m a professor, I get paid to answer your questions. You can even ask them during my lessons, and not after.”
“I didn’t want to bother my course-mates or waste their time, sir, and I noticed that you spend a few moments here after lessons. But if you must leave I thank you still, forgive me.”
“Woah.” He barely heard himself say it. That was a thing that he would’ve expected Catarina to say, not Ragnor, but in front of Alexander’s strangely anxious yet calm diplomatic approach he couldn’t react in any other way. “I can answer now. Ask away, boy.”
Even straighter and surer after his order, Alexander asked.
When he walked out of the room, after a few minutes, Ragnor found himself slightly smiling, and chided himself.
He wouldn’t fall for it again. He could see the trap now: the trap of teaching. That feeling of satisfaction, pride and happiness that would fill his chest when the eyes of his students shone with understanding and interest, that was his trap.
But he wouldn’t get imprisoned, not again. Not by Alexander Lightwood.
But the week after, Ragnor was the one to make Alexander stay behind after the bell.
Before he could walk out with that heavy bag full of books on his shoulder, Ragnor called him.
“The Great Recession of 1764 doesn’t sit right with you, mister Lightwood?”
During his lecture the boy had looked strangely surprised, as Ragnor went on and on, and his brows were still furrowed, his blue eyes locked in reflections that went miles away from the warlock’s old desk and classroom.
“No, sir.”
He didn’t say anything, but stayed still. Ragnor waited a second, accepted that the boy would only move after an order, and he let him leave with a curt “Then go, shoo”, to which the boy replied with “Good evening, sir” before walking out.
But it happened again and again.
The boy took notes, re-read them during every pause Ragnor made, and in those few minutes before the bell he looked them over with the most puzzled expression on his small face. The issue wasn’t with understanding- his History lessons, the young Lightwood knew them by heart as he demonstrated in the following month. The issue wasn’t academic, and he’d sworn to only look after his students and worry about them in regard to school matters: that was the limit that Ragnor had forced himself to set, to avoid getting his heart broken for the thousandth time.
No more cups of tea in his office, no more tales and stories that left the young Nephilim and Shadowhunters, heirs to a cruel history and iron-like traditions, open mouthed like small children.
No more secretly lent books, with the start of a grin on his face.
No more debates after the bell, no more supplementary lessons.
No more dry, kind words to make Celine feel better after yet another face-down with her own pathetic solitude, as she used to call it.
(Celine, died too young like only Shadowhunters did.
No one at the Academy had bat an eye, Ragnor hadn’t made himself even weaker to their eyes by crying when he learned that one of the best students he’d ever had was dead and buried. The unshed tears turned into guilt, and shame, and they lived deep in his chest.)
No more cutting jokes with the young Waylan, the young Michael, always with a smile on his lips and an arm around the shoulders of his parabatai, a pain that would never fade there, in his eyes, for Ragnor to notice, for Ragnor to understand.
(Michael, disappeared from the face of Earth, maybe dead after a life spent hiding in the shadows. Or maybe not. No one would have cared, and that hurt even more, because Ragnor cared. He doubted it mattered much at all.)
No more of all this.
And yet.
“Feel free to share what troubles you, boy,” he told the boy, after another lesson in which Lightwood hadn’t uttered a word. The older ones thought of him more as a ghost than a fellow student, but nobody dared to bother him, knowing the consequences and not that interested in him.
(At least Ragnor hoped so.)
Alexander bit his lip, a gesture so childish that it looked bizarre, and he weighed up his options. Ragnor kept on flipping through the lesson plan for the next year- lessons that he wouldn’t attend, seeing that he intended to resign, but he still couldn’t throw away those papers. He feigned indifference to give the boy enough time to think and translate his confusion and worry into words.
His efforts paid back.
“Which sources do you consult for your lessons, professor Fell?”
Ragnor didn’t raise his head from his papers.
“As I always specify, some information stem from my own personal experience. But mostly they come from my work as a researcher, and the researches done by scholars of the time. From written text and everything we have today, like official acts that can be found in any archive. From every corner of the world, and some come from the Mundane side of it, if you can believe it.”
When the silence started to turn almost awkward, he raised his head. The boy hadn’t left- better for him, or Ragnor would have never forgotten that- and was watching him, his face twisted with the same focus that painted his face during a ctonic or aramaic lecture.
“Would you like a way to ascertain the veracity of my words?” he asked, not as sarcastic as he should have been.
“… if possible, professor Fell.”
Ragnor blinked and got up, walked around the desk to the opposite side so that he could lean with his lower back on the wooden edge. From this close the boy was even smaller. He wouldn’t be for long, seeing his parents’ heights- his mother’s, mostly, whom he already resembled terribly.
“It is, possible. I can point you to some texts that would help you get over this… block of yours- tell me, what makes you doubt my words to this point?”
Ragnor had an idea of what the boy would say, and all those reasons had something to do with him being a Downworlder: the boy was polite, but Ragnor had entertained polite conversations with polite Nephilim who would’ve loved to skin him and sell his horns at the Shadow Market. Maybe the boy didn’t trust him enough. Maybe he wanted to learn more, fearing that Ragnor wasn’t telling the whole story.
Or maybe what Ragnor was teaching them wasn’t enough. He wanted more. That would be nice. Or maybe he’d been taught a different history, and Ragnor’s truth was shaking things up.
“I’ve already read about some of these events, and they were told very differently,” he did in fact say, with all the frankness of someone who felt no shame for what he was saying. “So I’m… confused. I’d like to learn how is it possible for two versions can coexist when regarding a subject like history, that I was told is supposed to be impartial from all kinds of personal, political or religious beliefs.”
Of all things, he wasn’t expecting that.
Ragnor grimaced.
He could have told the boy that rarely the truth was told, that at his age he could feel the weight of this knowledge like tons of dirt burying him underground. The weight of lies that he knew to be lies, that he couldn’t expose as such because he was but a warlock, alone in that battle to make the Nephilim see reason and truth.
He didn’t.
He took a sheet of paper from his desk, wrote down the first titles that came to mind, and sent the boy away.
A week after he gave him two heavy leather clad books, that had to be at least one-hundred thirty years old, a personal recollection on the effects of the great Recession of 1764, and the boy took them with gratitude.
Two months after the start of Ragnor’s last year at the Academy, the boy asked again if “Professor Fell” had some time for his questions, and Ragnor, old and stupid and weak Ragnor, invited him to his office.
He offered him tea because he had manners, and told the boy to hit him with it (as he chased away the ghosts of his dead students). He used this expression and smirked in his cup at the boy’s confusion.
“I read what you recommended, sir, and I thank you again. But…”
“You still struggle with it?”
The boy nodded with the air of someone who loathed the admission, with furrowed eyebrows and lips reduced to a thin line.
“What did your books say about the Great Recession?”
“They weren’t mine, but came from the Institute’s library,” he specified rather uselessly, but Ragnor didn’t point that out. The boy had the habit of point out obvious details, but it let Ragnor understand what really stood out in the boy’s mind. He had to feel some kind of way about those books, otherwise why feeling the need to say that?
“I read that the declining population and manufacture of adamas were caused by a sudden spike in demon activity, which, together with a series of socioeconomic factors, forced the Shadowhunters to leave Idris for the Institutes. Unlike your works and the titles you recommended, those books make no reference to the Morghenian Costitution of ‘778, to its impact and how the average age rose like never before.”
Average age, a term they used to refer to the age of their death. So many curious things in a Nephilim’s vocabulary.
“I bet they didn’t even mention the Clave politics that led to the spike in infant death.”
“They didn’t.”
“Who wrote your books, boy?”
He blinked.
“Not mine,” escaped his mouth, maybe he didn’t even notice, “Christopher Lowbrez.”
Ragnor stood still, but his expression was loud.
“Lowbrez. Clave Official from 1924 to 1936, successful career, brother of Consul Lowbrez II and father of Consul Lowbrez III. What does this tell you?”
“That he was heavily involved with politics.”
“Exactly.”
Ragnor waited but the boy kept staring at him, so he gave him one last push.
“Would you ever write a book in which you explicitly reveal your family’s darkest secrets, report their greatest mistakes, and by doing do ruin their reputation?”
He was glad to see him reflect on it before answering.
“I believe I would. Even the worst sins shouldn’t-” He frowned. “Are you saying that Christopher Lowbrez, to make the Clave look less dumb, told a different version of history, and completely glossed over the mistakes it did during the Recession?”
“I say.”
“But- he’s an historian.”
So that was what was bothering him. Ragnor couldn’t stop himself from smiling.
“With time, boy, you learn that it’s impossible to tell any story without letting yourself bleed into it.”
He did his best not to sound condescending- condescension was the worst sin that could be found in a professor.
“But then we can’t trust anyone.”
“Why should you lean on others for you knowledge?”
“I can’t know and live through everything, every time, everywhere. No one can. I- don’t you also have to trust others when it comes to academics, professor?”
The question wasn’t a challenge, and Ragnor shrugged.
“I trust those whom I know will never lie about history willingly, and I do that without hesitating when it comes to doubting and searching for more. You waited to ask me, you hesitated. Don’t do that again. If anything sounds strange to you, you have a duty to ask yourself why- you thought I could be lying at first, right?”
He didn’t look him in the eye as he nodded. “But then I told myself it couldn’t be that, and-”
“Why, boy?”
His little eyebrows furrowed.
“You are- professor Ragnor Fell. Your works on historical philosophy are genius, you studied with the most brilliant minds of the last centuries, you’ve been teaching here for decades and are one of the best professors the Academy has known.”
Ragnor had thought he’d know what the boy would say, but once again, he was taken aback.
So he set aside his purpose and the lesson he wanted to teach the boy, and let himself be a little weak.
“You did your research, mh?”
Again, the boy was embarrassed.
But he hid it good. He took a sip of tea, his fingers flexing around the cup and his face muscles at work to hide any physical reaction.
“My parents… told me about you, but some things didn’t make sense if compared to other things I’d heard, so I looked in the Institute’s Archives, and the Academy’s ones once I got here.”
What had he read?
But also,What had he been told, and that thought was much sourer.
He ignored the part of his soul that kept bleeding even after ten years, agonizing in its betrayed condition, and thanked God for the golden opportunity to get back on track.
“That’s what you have to do, boy. I’ll tell you the sky is blue, you’ll have to go out and make sure. It’s a good thing, trust, but you always have to be cautious. When you tell a story it’s easy to mix things up, or hide a truth, or change details because of your own restricted point of view. This world has suffered much because of these misunderstandings, and it keeps suffering for this pain that you could, in a way, spare yourself from.”
Alexander tilted his head and, finally, his face moved into a real, honest expression.
He wrinkled his nose, his lips curled down, his shoulders bowed slightly.
“I understand.”
He nodded, more to himself.
“But you wouldn’t me telling me this if you wanted to trick me into believing in your personal agenda, so it’s obvious that whatever mistake you may make in the future, regarding your role as an history teacher, it won’t be made with malice, or because you want to indoctrinate us. I knew it,” he almost smiled, looking self-satisfied with his reasoning like a child who’d gotten the toy he’d been pestering his parents about for months.
Ragnor blinked, and a laugh was startled out of him. And somehow, that childish sense of victory made him forget about the ghosts roaming around in his office.
“If only it was this simple, mister Lightwood,” he joked, smiling freely and causing surprise in the boy, who straightened up.
He looked a little affronted, and still cautious, but more comfortable than he’d been when he walked in.
And for the surprise of absolutely no one, while his friends believed that Ragnor had resigned from his position, while Ragnor hid how he’d been avoiding having to resign with the feeling that giving up would destroy him like not even the war had, while the world kept spinning despite the blood that had been absorbed by the dirt and had gotten to the deepest aquifers, Alexander Lightwood became a regular visitor of Ragnor’s office.
The first time he made the boy laugh, Ragnor felt his heart break because of his swiftness in hiding, repressing that young, sweet sound to push it down together with all the things that would have let him be happy.
The first time the boy nodded earnestly, accepting Ragnor’s explanation on how his comment on the last chapter they read in class could be insulting to any being with even a drop of demonic blood, Ragnor felt the knot in his throat unravel a bit, and breathing became slightly easier.
The first time the boy rolled his eyes, his hands around a cup of hot chocolate (apparently he hated tea), as he said that the physical copy of the last statute law endorsed by Consul Malachi deserved to be burned at the stake (or executed in the public square, he’d added), Ragnor let himself laugh and shake his head. He hesitated about sharing his opinion only for show, and to make the boy scoff with his “I can’t talk about politics with a student.
The first time the boy truly scared him, it wasn’t in a way Ragnor would’ve ever expected.
Alexander could’ve spent a day too many with his peers- which would’ve done him good, since the boy didn’t have any friends (something that his brain didn’t help with, since he usually asked to wrap up a three-months course after three weeks of lessons since he felt he’d be ready for the exams, something that made him constantly change classmates and made some teachers fume)- and heard a bigoted opinion too many, enough to become convinced that there was some truth to his parents’ teachings.
Or maybe his parents could have come to reprimand him, reminding him that Ragnor wasn’t that different from the demons he would one day live to kill.
Or maybe one day he would grow tired of the increasingly safe, warm balance between them, made so by every knock on his office door.
Ragnor didn’t lie to himself, the boy was in dire need of a responsible, attentive and present adult that would look after him and care about his well-being, it wasn’t unexpected that he would get attached to someone like Ragnor.
(And what if Ragnor had gotten attached to the one boy that was shaping up to be one of the few successes of his career?)
And it wasn’t strange for fragile kids like him to destroy what they had, for ignorance or pain or by mistake. In that case, he wouldn’t consider it his own failing, but rather the failing of his parents.
But no.
Alexander greeted him with a dark bruise that covered half of his face and a swollen cheekbone, with the violet reddish shapes of two hands around his neck, limping, a frown on his face. His small hands covered in bandages.
The hands of an eleven years old boy, so weak and forced to be so strong.
The first thing Ragnor said was “What demon tried to devour you?” as he got up to prepare them something to drink.
“It’s nothing.”
And still, walking looked hard. A pained grimace fought to show itself and kind of failed, because Ragnor’s eyes were trained to notice things like that.
And still, it looked like a man three times Alexander’s size had tried to kill him.
“Oh, sure. Looks like it.”
“Professor,” he almost whined, childish in a way he rarely was, “It was just training. Accidents happen.”
“Oh, yes, how could I forget all the times, during my wild teenage years, when my neck casually fell into the hands of a giant of a man. Forgive this old warlock, it’s hard to keep track of everything, truly-”
“Professor,” he repeated, trying to stop Ragnor’s monotone monologue.
“Of course, tell me, does the tree you sparred with have a name?”
A few seconds of silence, a sigh. The boy walked towards the armchair close to the fireplace, taking his shoes off to sit on his feet. The act surprised Ragnor, who did his best not to react.
“Training exercise. A- a guy from my team changed idea mid-simulation about his opinion of me. But it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have trusted the outcome of the mission on him.”
He hummed to show his attention as he gave him his back.
“If I had thought about everything, I would’ve done what was expected of me without causing the ire of my instructors and classmates. I shouldn’t have given them that responsibility.”
It didn’t sound like some classmate had decided to turn on him. It sounded like something else had happened, and he didn’t want to tell him.
“What do you think could be the alternative?”
The boy’s startled “What?” made Ragnor smile.
(Who had still been light and calm, used to the boy’s confusion at the silliest things.)
“How could do differently, next time?”
For a bit, neither of them spoke.
Alexander then talked, and his voice was iron-like.
“My… my mother taught me to be strong even on my own, to only rely on myself. She had to break a few bones to make the lesson stick, but I learned it- at least I thought so.”
He kept talking as Ragnor’s body tensed and his hand froze over the cups he was about to fill with their preferred beverages.
“Depending on others means to be- to be weak, and this world doesn’t let the weak survive. I’m gonna get eaten alive, if I’m weak.” He sang those words like a prayer, like something that had been hammered into his head until even his sleeping form could whisper them in the middle of the night. “I shouldn’t be so easily tricked. We’re not safe, none of us are, and the only way to survive is to be strong.”
That was his conclusion, Ragnor finally turned to set eyes on his angry face.
“I’ll be strong. This is the last time I’m gonna be so stupid.”
He stood still.
What could Ragnor say, in front of a child that whipped his own back in front of him for committing the crime of being a child?
And wasn’t that the only role of a child, to be trusting of an unknown world because they only knew its best, safest parts? To be hopeful? To believe in a better future, to believe that they lived in a present that was already “better”?
Wasn’t Alexander a child?
And wasn’t Alexander a child like many adults had been, before they were consumed by their sense of duty, by the knowledge that they lived in a harsh, cold world?
Or had he already been consumed?
Surely, Alexander didn’t think it tiring, to destroy Ragnor’s heart.
“And- you told me the same, didn’t you? Not to trust easily, to check everything I was told and to not bow my head, to stay in the front-line- I should’ve listened to you, and understood that it couldn’t only apply to academics.”
He was frustrated, and angry with himself, and Ragnor felt envious of his past self, who wouldn’t have seen those motions swirl into Alexander’s blue eyes.
Had Ragnor truly inspired such a cold, dark, sad vision of the world? Had Ragnor been the last push towards the belief that his mother’s words were true? Was it his fault if now Alexander believed them wholeheartedly?
Ragnor hadn’t broken his bones, but he’d been selfish. He’d taken the chance to be someone the boy looked up to, a role model even- Alexander trusted him, despite his words, and he’d trusted Ragnor, Ragnor who had known the vulnerable boy would get attached-
Ragnor abandoned his task, and reached for Alexander. He lowered himself on one knee to be at the boy’s eye-level, one elbow on his knee, his other hand on Alexander’s shoulder. He gripped it lightly, moved up to circle the bruised skin where his shoulder met his neck. He made sure Alexander was looking at him.
Because Ragnor had been selfish, and he was selfish because he would fix his mistakes, he wouldn’t run from them.
“Listen to me and listen carefully, my boy,” he said, staring into those impossibly blue irises, “I never heard so many lies strung together in the same sentence. At least not from someone as intelligent as you.”
Alexander blinked, his dark eyelashes moving up and down at the speed of light.
“What?”
“I know, it’s not your fault, it will never be. But, Alexander, I ask you to forgive me for failing so… horribly. Look at me, boy,” he ordered him when his student looked away, and his order was followed.
Alexander was tense, straight like an arrow, once again the perfect soldier that was no doubt waiting for a review of his poor performances. A critique that he was bracing to receive, like a brave child who did his best to prepare for a blow to the face, taking a deep breath, squaring up his shoulders.
“Doubt is sacred when it comes to the past, because there will always be someone who wants to lie, and wants you to let yourself be lied to because it’s just easier, sometimes. But, listen to me,” his voice shook, “This… doubt, it can’t become your life, Alexander. You can’t be so distrusting, so closed up- or the life you’ll live won’t be worth of the name ‘life’. Take this from a warlock as old as me. I saw beautiful, bright souls be stifled behind metal bars that had been put there by others, in cage from which they refused to escape. Maybe for a lack of courage, maybe because they’d never known anything else. But we aren’t build to survive on our own, Alexander. You have a right to share your hardships with those who love you. You have a duty to do so, towards yourself.”
His throat was burning.
“You aren’t alone, Alexander. You have people who wouldn’t hesitate to help you. People who will need your help- will you refuse them, when they will ask?”
“No!”
“Yet you value autonomy so much. If your sister won’t be able to do everything on her own, will you think her unworthy of her name, of her life?”
“Izzy’s my sister,” he spat out, that childhood nickname marred by anger, “I’m his brother, it’s my duty to protect her!”
“Izzy isn’t different from you, Alexander. She deserves to be supported, just as you deserve help and support, someone who will take on the situation when you won’t be able to- because you won’t be able to make it alone.” The boy’s mouth closed with a snap, whatever answer he had ready forgotten. “Sooner or later you will fail. It could happen tomorrow, or in ten years, but it will happen and if you want to survive you have to accept it. You need to be able to ask for help, or when you’ll struggle you’ll struggle and die alone.”
Alexander stared at him with widened eyes, his soul painted on his face for the world to see. All that vulnerability, right in front of Ragnor, who almost couldn’t trust himself with it. He took his hand away from his shoulder, and got up slowly.
(Had anyone ever lowered themselves to Alexander’s level, to look into his eyes as equals?)
Alexander also got up. He nodded, said “I understand, professor Fell. Can I- I’m sorry, but I’d like to go”, and Ragnor could do nothing but nod.
But that was Alexander, at the end of the day.
A boy who wanted to take the world on his shoulder and survive it just to prove he could.
Ragnor didn’t change his mind that afternoon.
In the year and seven months they were teacher and student, Ragnor couldn’t change his mind.
Alexander came to him, in the eve of his graduation, after showing himself to be one of the best students they’d ever had at the Academy, graduating five months before his peers and at only thirteen.
He told him that he had to go back to the Institute, that his new sibling would be delivered in a few weeks (a child he had known the existence of for only two months, when he’d decided to wrap up his second year in half the time) and that his family needed him.
That his siblings would need him.
“And without a teacher as good as you, who else is gonna tell them to check and see if the sky is really blue?”
Ragnor resigned the day after, and in five months he walked out of the Academy with the feeling that he’d failed as a teacher for one final, last time.
—
Dear professor Fell,
I chose to take your invitation to write literally, and not as a social obligation. I wish you a happy day, and ask: how are you? I hope retirement is treating you well, since you deserve to rest more than everyone else.
I trust that you’ll remember my wishful thinking, back when I told you that I would have liked to complete the five-years course of studies of the Academy- something that isn’t possible anymore, sadly. I have accepted this by now, but I also want to avoid regretting my rational thinking in a few years so I ordered the reading material for all five years. I found myself deeply… disappointed by it.
I attach to this letter a list of the books and manuals that more than others make me doubt, and I kindly ask you to tell me if the replacements I found are suitable, or if you have better alternatives that you would be gracious enough to recommend.
I also attach a photograph of my brother Max: he’s five months old, he weighs twenty pounds and he’s maybe the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. Next to him you will see Jace. Seems like I’ve been blessed by the Angel not with one, but with two new brothers. My gratitude knows no limits.
I thank you in advance for the time, and for the help that I know you won’t deny me.
Best regards,
Alec
—