I’ve been thinking about a post I saw that joked that Jocelyn/Luke/Valentine are like the “failed version” of Tessa/Will/Jem, and it made me want to write about it. So what this really becomes is less a comparison and more a deep dive into why Luke/Jocelyn/Valentine never stood a chance, while Herongraystairs always did.
First, obviously, there is Valentine. Herongraystairs did not have an evil cult leader in the middle of the relationship.
But the less obvious answer is this: Herongraystairs only works because they all love each other equally and jealousy does not rot the relationship from the inside. Tessa loves Jem and Will equally. Will loves Tessa and Jem equally. Jem loves Tessa and Will equally. Nobody is the emotional afterthought. That simply does not happen with Jocelyn, Luke, and Valentine.
Luke loves Jocelyn more. Valentine loves Jocelyn more. Jocelyn loves Luke more. Already, the structure is crooked. Already, someone is always losing.
And yes, Valentine being evil matters. He destroys himself in the process. But what makes it especially tragic is that, on paper, he could have stayed married to Jocelyn. Luke was never going to sabotage them. Jocelyn herself is far more complicated, and her perspective is fragmented across the narrative, but one thing is constant: Valentine never factors anyone’s inner world into his choices. He assumes loyalty will keep everything neat.
“We all have competing loyalties,” Valentine said, before Robert could give in to temptation. “The Clave would like to make these things simple, but it’s just another example of their obtuseness. I love Lucian, my parabatai. I love Jocelyn. If those two loves were ever to come into conflict . . .” He didn’t have to complete the thought. Robert knew what Valentine knew, and understood that Valentine loved his parabatai enough to allow it. Just as Lucian loved Valentine enough never to act on it." - The Evil We Love
It has always been obvious to everyone that Luke was in love with jocelyn.
“But it was just as obvious that Lucian had no romantic interest in anyone but Jocelyn Fairchild. Obvious, that is, to everyone except Jocelyn.” - Robert in The Evil We Love
“...How Valentine looks at Jocelyn—”
“How Lucian looks at Jocelyn,” Michael added with a wry grin.” - The Evil We Love
“When your mother was young, she had a best friend, just as you have Simon. They were as close as siblings. In fact, they were often mistaken for brother and sister. As they grew older, it became clear to everyone around them that he was in love with her, but she never saw it." - Hodge in City Of Bones
“...But after all these years of watching him pine away for Jocelyn, it was hard to take him entirely seriously. The same went for Jocelyn, who somehow managed to remain oblivious. Robert didn’t understand how you could be the center of someone’s world without even realizing it” - The Evil We Love
“Pangborn cackled. “Jealous, Graymark? Perhaps you no longer feel about her the way you used to.” - City Of Bones
It was obvious to Valentine too. Like I said earlier, Valentine is the biggest problem in the entire situation. He knows Luke is in love with Jocelyn and he still goes after her because he wants her. He assumes Luke will never act on his feelings.
“He didn’t pick you for your weakness, Lucian—he picked you for your greatest strength. Your loyalty. He knew it was a double-edged sword—that you’d always ignore yourself and your needs for the people you love.” - Madeleine in Who the Wolf Loves
Valentine is the kind of person who notices people’s weaknesses and knows exactly how to use them. He looks at Luke’s loyalty and slowly, almost casually, turns it into a leash. He does that to Luke in the most cruel way possible, especially once Luke finally admits how he feels about Jocelyn:
“...I waited for him to tell me I was being an idiot. That of course you loved me the way I loved you. Instead, he nodded. “I always say you’re smarter than people realize. There’s nothing romantic about opening yourself up to humiliation.” That was when I stopped hoping.”
Valentine plants the idea in Luke’s mind that he will never be loved back, that rejection is inevitable. And Luke believes him.
This is where it starts to curdle.
Their parabatai relationship is already corrupted from the very beginning. It is doomed. Valentine thinks he can manipulate every piece of the situation and, for a while, he can. Then it collapses.
“When I asked you to be my witness for the parabatai ceremony and you said that didn’t feel quite right, I thought: She thinks I’m not good enough for him. I know, now, that that was not what you meant.”
Luke’s inferiority complex is everywhere, and Valentine uses it to control both Luke and his connection to Jocelyn.
“The surprise came when Valentine suggested you serve as his witness as well. None of us expected him to be bound by tradition, what did he care if the ceremony called for two witnesses? But why you?”
“.. and spoke our oath to each other as you watched, your hands clasped in front of you. So tightly your knuckles turned white.
Entreat me not to leave thee,
Or return from following after thee—
For whither thou goest, I will go.
And where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
I swore it to Valentine, but I was also swearing to you. I was confessing, the only way I knew how.
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”
Luke uses the parabatai ceremony to confess his love for her, taking a vow that was meant only for his parabatai and extending it to her as well, because that’s the only way he allows himself to speak.
“By ceremony’s end, my gaze had drifted away from my parabatai. I was looking at you. Always, when you were near, I was looking at you. When I wrenched my focus back to Valentine, I discovered he was looking at you too.”
When I say their parabatai bond started wrong, I mean it truly started wrong. From the very beginning, a relationship that was supposed to be about two people always involved a third. There was never a clean line, never a sealed circle. Someone was always standing just outside it, or right in the middle.
And a brief pause to say this: this whole section of them becoming parabatai is some of the best writing Cassandra Clare has done in YEARS. She ate. And she ends it with the line that perfectly defines their relationship:
“Maybe there’s a reason the ceremony calls for two witnesses. Four is a stable number. Safe. Three forms a shape with a much sharper point.”
The relationship between Jocelyn and Valentine hurts Luke. He tries to hide it, but can never fully conceal it from Valentine. That pain turns into something darker in Valentine, fueling his anger, his paranoia, and his jealousy.
“You were the two people I loved most in the world and I wanted you both to find happiness. So if I were the good friend I pretended to be, shouldn’t I be thrilled for you to find it in each other?” - Who the Wolf Loves
“You know what happened next. It is a time that even now is painful for me to remember. You and Valentine were married, I was his suggenes; I walked beside him up the aisle, my presence meant to bless your joining. I remember the light in the garden as it fell on you, a bride so beautiful it took my breath. I remember your smile. I remember going home that night to a silent, empty house.” - Who the Wolf Loves
“..She stood with Luke and Valentine, someone made the old joke about how if the groom hadn’t showed up, the bride would have had to marry the best man. Luke had been wearing evening clothes, with the gold runes for good luck in marriage on them, and he had looked very handsome, but while everyone else had laughed, he’d gone terribly white. He must really hate the idea of marrying me, she’d thought. She remembered touching his shoulder with a laugh.
“Don’t look like that,” she’d teased. “I know we’ve known each other forever, but I promise you’ll never have to marry me!” And then Amatis had come up, dragging a laughing Stephen with her, and Jocelyn had forgotten all about Luke, the way he had looked at her—and the odd way Valentine had looked at him.”
“.. Anything for Jocelyn. Anything for either of you. You know that.”
“My friend,” said Valentine, “I do.” Valentine clasped Lucian’s arm in return, but Magnus saw the look Valentine gave Lucian. There was love in that look, but hate as well, and the hate was winning. It was as clear as a silvery shark’s fin in the dark waters of Valentine’s black eyes.”
Jocelyn’s feelings are the hardest to untangle, mostly because we never get a POV from her during the Circle years. What we have instead is Jocelyn telling the story later, in City of Glass, after everything has already fallen apart, after she knows how it all ends. That matters. We never see her inside the Circle, making choices without hindsight, without knowing who Valentine would become or what the cost would be.
Everyone knew Luke was in love with her. Everyone, except Jocelyn. And somehow everyone also seemed to know that she didn’t notice his feelings, or even her own. That disconnect sits at the center of everything.
Her own words say it plainly:
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know how you felt. I wish I had. I think things would have been different.” He looked at her incredulously. “How?”
“I wouldn’t have married Valentine,” she said. “Not if I’d known.” “You would—”
“I wouldn’t,” she said sharply. “I was too stupid to realize how you felt, but I was also too stupid to realize how I felt. I’ve always loved you. Even if I didn’t know it.” - City of Lost Souls
“..But you did. You loved Valentine, but now you love Luke.”
“I know.” Jocelyn’s look was faraway. “...And I always loved Luke. I might not have known it, but I always did love him.” - Clary and Jocelyn in City of Heavenly Fire
There’s this idea, reinforced in the books, that Nephilim only truly love once. And Jocelyn insists that her love was always Luke. The tragedy is that she didn’t recognize it in real time.
What Cassandra seems to suggest is that Jocelyn shares the same fatal flaw as Luke: an inability to see what’s obvious when it comes to emotions. In Who the Wolf Loves, she kisses him, she sleeps with him — There is clearly more there than friendship, but Jocelyn, like Luke, keeps interpreting everything through the lens of obligation or pity.
“...Are you asking because you feel sorry for me, not having a date?” you said, and I just stared at you. You were the most beautiful girl in school; how could anyone feel sorry for you?
“Shows what you know.” You patted my cheek. “I’m going with Valentine.” - Who the Wolf Loves
The same pattern repeats when Luke asks her to marry him:
“I’m serious. I want to marry you.”
“You’re a good friend, Lucian,” you said. “But I could never ask you to do that.”
“I need to get away,” you said. “I need to disappear, so deep, so well, that he never finds us. I can’t ask you to do the same, just because you feel obligated. I don’t need your pity, or your protection, Lucian.”
“..I could have told you that you were wrong. it wasn’t pity or obligation. I loved you. I wanted, more than I’d ever wanted anything, to be by your side. I could have said, I love you and have loved you since I drew my first breath. I could have said, Please, join your life to mine, let me be the father to your child, the other half to your heart, let us be a family, let me throw away everything I know and everything I am to be yours. But: After what had just happened between us, how could you not already know? The way I’d held you, kissed you, loved you…how could you imagine I felt only pity and obligation? Unless…that was all you felt”
Jocelyn understands Luke’s proposal as pity and duty. Luke understands her rejection the exact same way. Neither of them is willing, or able, to say the obvious thing out loud.
They are, genuinely, two fucking idiots. But that mutual blindness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Valentine feeds it, sharpens it, weaponizes it.
“You’re trying to destroy her, you know.” He said it casually, as if it was understandable, so how could he fault me? “Rejection has curdled your heart. You hate her, just a little bit, for not loving you. You probably hate me too.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You don’t want to see it,” Valentine said. “You tell yourself you’re looking out for her—it’s just coincidence you’re doing so by trying to tear apart her family. You can’t separate what you want from what she wants. That’s only human.” That was back when he still considered himself one, or pretended to. “But it’s cowardice, Lucian, to look away from your own dark desires. And if you face the truth, maybe you can move on. Otherwise, ask yourself, where does this end? If not in her destruction, then in yours. Are you prepared to waste your entire life on someone who will never love you the way you love them?”
Valentine lied fluently. But his best lies, his most poisonous, derived their power from truth. Why else did we follow him, if not because he could see what no one else could? He could see into the darkest corners of our hearts, he could map our personal fault lines as clearly as he did those of the Clave. So when he told me I couldn’t trust myself when it came to you, I believed him. When I fled to the woods and began a new life as a child of the moon, I longed to tell you I was alive but I couldn’t shake the echo of Valentine’s warning. What if I did resent your happiness? What if he was right, and the wages of my unspoken love could only destroy you?
But if we go back to the moment when everything truly goes wrong, it’s here. This is when the relationship between the three of them finally collapses for good. Jocelyn turns to Luke because he is the person closest to both her and Valentine, the one she trusts most, and she tells him something crucial: she has started to be afraid of her husband.
“I remember the first time you came to me and told me you had grown afraid of Valentine. Of his rages, the strange sounds in the house, the night he spent away, returning with red eyes and shaking hands. I asked him about it, carefully. For a moment, I thought I saw fury flash across his face. Then he calmly told me he’d been devoting his time to cleaning out the nest of the werewolves who’d killed his father.”
And that is the moment Valentine’s fear curdles into something unrecognizable. In his disturbed mind, Luke stops being a brother and becomes a threat. A rival. Someone who knows too much, who stands between him and Jocelyn.
Jocelyn later pieces it together herself:
“Luke says I told him I was afraid of Valentine even before he was Changed. He says I told him I could hear screams through the walls of the manor, that I suspected something, dreaded something. And Luke—trusting Luke—asked Valentine about it the very next day. That night Valentine took Luke hunting, and he was bitten. I think—I think Valentine made me forget what I’d seen, whatever had made me afraid. He made me believe it was all bad dreams. And I think he made sure Luke got bitten that night. I think he wanted Luke out of the way so no one could remind me that I was afraid of my husband. But I didn’t realize that, not right away.” - City of Glass
What’s important here is that Luke’s feelings toward Valentine were also already changing. He had witnessed Valentine’s transformation up close. He was beginning to understand what kind of man Valentine was becoming, and he felt trapped by the oaths he had sworn.
Luke reflects on it later:
“But even then, when I was churning with rage and confusion, a part of me understood. It wasn’t a loss, not entirely. It was a becoming. Maybe even a homecoming. It was Valentine who put me in harm’s way, we both know that. He needed me gone, and so he let it happen. He stood by as the wolf leapt upon me, and sunk its teeth into my flesh. But was he the only one to blame?”
“When does this end?” Valentine had asked, as we picked our way through the woods... He meant you. But you weren’t the one I’d pledged my life to. I had sworn myself to Valentine, till death do us part. I had taken an oath, that he would be my brother. That his pain would be mine, that I would follow him to the ends of the earth. He’d taken the same oath, for me. But it was becoming clear only one of us felt bound by those words—and even clearer what kind of man I had bound myself to. When would it end? How could i unmake an oath, unbrother myself? It ended that night, in bloody teeth and torn flesh. That wolf killed the Shadowhunter in me, and it was indeed a kind of death. But I walked into those woods a man in a prison of his own making. That wolf set me free”
Luke knows that something in Valentine’s feelings toward him has shifted. He knows Valentine isn’t a good man, He knows the anger Valentine feels about him and Jocelyn has consumed him to the point where he is willing to kill him to "save" his marriage.
“Valentine, of course, wished me dead. Yet even as I grieved, there was relief. That in becoming a werewolf, f had broken the parabatai bond that tied me to Valentine. I was free of him—free of the burden of his ever-increasing paranoia and hatred. Free to see clearly how what had once been a passion for change had turned into a lust for dominance and violence. I was free to consider him my enemy. And you, Jocelyn—the only one who did not abandon me; the only one who still came to see me, despite what I had become—had begun to feel the same. You feared for yourself, for your son: the fair-haired boy you had named Jonathan. You feared the future Valentine would bring.”
In the end, what was supposed to be a plan to get rid of Luke in order to preserve his relationship with Jocelyn completely backfired. Valentine never understood that he was the source of everything that went wrong. The collapse of his relationships, both the romantic one with Jocelyn and the parabatai bond with Luke, was always the result of his own actions. But Valentine was incapable of recognizing that. Instead, he made excuses. He shifted blame. First onto Luke, and later onto Clary. Anyone but himself.
Luke’s “death” did nothing to save Valentine’s marriage. Quite the opposite. When Jocelyn believed Luke had committed suicide, she fell into a deep depression.
“After Luke died, it was like I fell into a black pit. I spent months in my bedroom, sleeping all the time, eating only because of the baby. Mundanes would call what I had depression, but Shadowhunters don’t have those kinds of terms. Valentine believed I was having a difficult pregnancy. He told everyone I was ill.” - City Of Glass
When she found out that Luke was alive and that Valentine had lied about his death, that was when her hatred for him truly began
“But it wasn’t until I went to the werewolf encampment and saw Luke that I knew for certain that Valentine had lied to me, lied to me about Luke’s suicide. It was then that I started to truly hate him.” - City Of Glass
Luke’s transformation didn’t just break the parabatai bond. It effectively ended the marriage too. Jocelyn’s suspicion of Valentine only grew from there, eventually leading her to uncover the full extent of his atrocities. Together, she and Luke plan the Uprising. They manage to stop Valentine’s immediate plans—but they don’t destroy him. And because of that, the hatred between them is allowed to deepen and calcify over the years.
“And then I saw Jocelyn racing up the stairs toward me, her face a mask of fear. “Valentine, stop!” she cried out. “This is Luke, your friend, almost your brother —” With a snarl Valentine seized her and dragged her in front of him, his dagger to her throat. I dropped my blade. I would not risk his harming her. He saw what was in my eyes. “You always wanted her,” he hissed. “And now the two of you have plotted my betrayal together. You will regret what you have done, all the rest of your lives.” - City of Bones
“There are many things for which Valentine can never be forgiven. But when I think about squeezing the life out of him with my bare hands—and trust me, I think of it quite a bit—it’s you I’m avenging. You, the night we fled Idris, after the Uprising, after we discovered what he’d done. Your family burned away to ashes in the ruins of your home. All that remained of your son: charred bones. The smallest, most delicate child’s bones, streaked black by fire. The world would be better off if Valentine were dead, I know that much. But I would not be killing him for the good of the world. I would be killing him for what he did to you.” - Who the Wolf Loves
“...In the bitterness of his voice she heard the love he’d once had for Valentine, curdled into a weary hatred” - City Of Bones
And Valentine, even at the end, remains incapable of seeing the truth.
“...The only thing endangering her is you. The only thing that ever endangered her was you. She’s spent her life running to get away from you.”
“I loved her,” said Valentine. “I never would have hurt her. It was you who turned her against me.”
Luke laughed. “She didn’t need me to turn her against you. She learned to hate you on her own.”
“That is a lie !” Valentine roared with sudden savagery, and drew his sword from the sheath at his waist. The blade was at and matte black, patterned with a design of silver stars. He leveled the blade at Luke’s heart” - City Of Bones
More than three thousand words just to say the triangle never stood a chance, not because there was no love, but because the love that mattered most went unseen. Luke and Jocelyn loved each other in a quiet, genuine way, but neither of them knew how to recognize it while it was happening. That unspoken love was easy to manipulate. Valentine’s jealousy fed on it, his need for control turning love into possession. What he felt was never selfless, never generous. It was an ego-driven love, one that demanded loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice from others while offering none in return.
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