Archive of Our Own ^beta

She wasn’t sure why she had stopped. The conversation was far from being her thing—Jace was talking to Clary, and his tone was light, almost carefree. But when she heard her name, she couldn’t help but feel curious. Clary asked if her older brother was better than me at killing demons.

She was a little confused about what her own answer would be, but she was even more upset when she heard Jace’s answer. How could he be so careless?

“Better? At killing demons? No, not really. He’s never killed a demon.”

She froze.
The words echoed in her head like a poorly written rune. Never killed a demon. Never.
She felt a sudden tingling sensation, the ground seeming to disappear. For a moment, she wanted to barge in on the conversation, interrupt Jace, yell, “It’s not a competition, idiot!”—but she held herself back. The revelation, so careless to him, fell on her like a hammer.

Suddenly, everything began to weigh on her. Her brother. Alec. That silent pillar of strength, who even as a child already exuded too much responsibility for his shoulders.

The memory of her childhood, her adolescence. The way he was always the first to wake up and the last to sleep. How he took on the leadership role of the Institute when their parents were away—which was practically always. While she trained, made jokes, or ran off to the streets of Brooklyn, Alec was there. Leading. Commanding. Protecting.

And now that she thought about it, she remembered perfectly the loneliness she felt when her parents disappeared for weeks at a time, too busy with Clave matters. But she didn't sink into that emptiness because Alec was there. He was the one who sat with her at the breakfast table, who checked if she had slept, who asked if she was okay—even when he himself clearly wasn't. He was the older brother, and so it seemed he held the title of legal guardian even before he was an adult.

Whenever her brother wasn’t busy paying attention to her and Jace, he was training to keep his skills alive, whether it was physical training or improving his archery. She remembered seeing him alone in the field, shooting arrows until his fingers bled, without complaint. And whenever he wasn’t training, he was working as the Institute’s deputy head, always so busy and with so much pressure on him—pressure that she only now realized was greater than anyone imagined.

And it wasn’t just the Institute. He also protected her. And Jace.

She remembered the first hunts she had gone on with Jace, how Alec had seemed so stiff, tense. Not because he was the “annoying one,” as she sometimes called him, but because he was visibly exhausted. Exhausted. She wondered now how she hadn’t noticed it before. How could she have spent so much time looking at him and still not seen the tiredness in his eyes?

And she had never asked. She had never thought about how he was dealing with all of this.

She remembered when she had wanted to wear more daring clothes and her parents had simply denied her. “Not appropriate,” they said. “Unworthy of a Lightwood.” But not Alec. Alec just looked at her, sighed, and without saying anything, let her choose whatever she wanted—he paid for everything with the salary he earned as a Shadowhunter, as a leader. At the time, she had thought it was just complicity. But now she saw: it was sacrifice. It was affection. It was a silent attempt to give her the freedom he never had.

And when she had asked her mother to teach her how to fight in heels, his answer had been even crueler. “That’s not a skill appropriate for your age.” She had said this in front of everyone in the cafeteria. None of the other Shadowhunters had offered to help her after hearing this. But Alec had. He had learned. He had secretly taken her heels, trained at night, fallen several times. And when he had managed to balance himself, he called her to the terrace and taught her as if he were teaching her how to wield a sacred blade.

She had never forgotten those days, but now it hurt in a different way. Because she finally understood what it meant. He wasn't just being a good brother. He was giving up his own rest, his own pride, to support her. To see her happy. He was the one who supported her. He always had been. And now... now she heard that he had never killed a demon before everything started. And she thought: of course not. When would he have had the time? How could he have the time, when all he did was take care of everyone around him, except himself?

Clary, surprised, asks: "Really?"

And Jace explains: "I don't know why not. Maybe because he's always protecting us, me and Izzy."

She sighs in relief when she realizes that she won't have to go in there and strangle Jace or maybe give him a good whipping for talking nonsense. Because, for a moment, she thought that He really was putting Alec down. But his answer only revealed something she herself had neglected for so long.

The hard truth to think about was that her beloved older brother only started going on hunts when she and Jace started going too. Because he trusted himself to protect them more than he trusted the others around him. Because his priority was never glory or fame—it was their safety. And she never thought about that. She never thought that while she dared, defied rules, and sought to be free, Alec held the walls of the world around them so she could do it in peace. That the freedom she valued so much only existed because he stood firm, enduring what she never saw.
Isabelle leaned against the cold wall of the hallway and felt a pang in her chest. When had they lost each other? When had the trio that said "three in, three out" stopped working as one?
She didn't know. But for the first time, she wondered how many times Alec had held the world together so she could run free without ever looking back.