Between two hands is a cup of coffee, steam still pouring and filling the room with its scent. A gentle blow of air leaves Seraphina’s lips and passes over the cup, creating a brief ripple on the black coffee. A moment is spared looking at the piping contents to look up at her father from the other end of the table. “What’s on the agenda today?” she asks. It’s always something. A revolving schedule of weapons, language, history, and art.
A hand releases itself from the supply of warmth radiating from her mug to grab her bagel from its place on the center plate. “Don’t tell me you’re taking us on a field trip,” she says, soft pink lips curve up exposing the round child-expression that still remains in her cheeks.
SEND ME A TOPIC TO WRITE A META ABOUT MY MUSE ON. // ALWAYS ACCEPTING cause im trash.
@phaesphorosborne
OKAY. Me not talking enough about how Valentine is singularly and inscrutably the most important person to Jonathan? Sounds fake. Let’s fix that.
Let’s talk about something Ithink people tend to underestimate: how much Valentine loved his son ( or son’s) cos yeah let’s include Jace.
Personally, I think its important because Valentine can’t lie to Jonathan. Notin the most obvious sense. He can keep information. He can manipulate this boyto the end of his rope. He can order him into damnation and Jonathan would comeback to him still, all hell fire and rage after. But the important things, hecan’t keep from Jonathan. Because there was no one else other than Jace who hadhis attention. He’d isolated this boy from the world and everything and taughthim to only love him.
Every lie and every truth,Jonathan could keep track of, could keep count of, that eventually it muddledin between. Lies just as easily became truths as much as truths became lies. Itdidn’t matter to Jonathan as much as the fact that Valentine would keepvalidating that he chose him. Not Jace. That he was the son that got to stay.He was the son that was going to wear the Morgenstern crown when all was over.He was the one who was going to continue his Father’s legacy.
So in the end it didn’t matter ifValentine had lied to him all his life, Valentine was god, Valentine’s wordswas dogma, and his planned future the promise land to a boy who could notcomprehend anything else.
But I think people underestimatehow his own choice fucked him up too.
What seeing Jonathan grow up theway he did – could have done to him? Because Valentine isn’t evil per se. Hedoesn’t even stand on the same plane as Jonathan when it comes to the awfulthings he’s done even though they kind of hover in the same light. Both theirsins damnable and worthy of their deaths. But what makes Valentine the tragic figurethat he was that he was driven mad by a mandate he thought would save people –from beginning until the end, he thought what he was doing was right that herisked everything to get it.
He risked losing his family.
He risked losing his own fleshand blood – quite literally – to hell.
He became everything he promisedto expunge from the Earth.
And no matter how determined hewas, there was that regret. There was that moment with Jocelyn, that moment ofrecognition that he was afraid of his own son, that he was so certain this boyhe’d created into a soldier, into a monster, couldn’t love him.
That it was him who did that totheir boy.
He took away Jonathan from himselfand from Jocelyn and from Clary.
And I don’t really think that wassomething he could hide from Jonathan.
Not when he teaches him thingslike “To Love is to Destroy.”
And yet all Jonathan can see ishim destroying himself over and over pining over a woman that had left him. Hadleft them.
And the thing about that, thatmakes it worse for me, is that Jonathan would have known BECAUSE HERE IS THEONLY PERSON he would get any context of what love is, what it should be, whatit could be, and with Valentine the chapters are already broken apart.
And what he learned about love isthat its useless, it destroys, it accomplishes nothing and yet his Father wasso sparse with it with him. The one man who seemed to be capable of it in thefirst place. Him? The boy that has never left. The boy that wasn’t weak. Theboy that would stand with him till the ends of the earth and do everything forhim. The LOYAL SON.
And yet Jocelyn keeps getting it –a Mother that wasn’t even there.
And Jace – a boy who doesn’t evenshare his blood – gets more of it.
They get his Father’s humanity bydoing nothing, by being human, by being weak.
While he gets those looks, thosefleeting touches, those small moment of pride before it comes back, those scarsas a reminder, the flicker of concern,that worry that he would be too much for him. As if he could be the one tobring his own Father his own death.
( Which to be fair, Jonathan hadtaught about on numerous occasions because it was unfair, it was cruel, it wasn’tright how his Father had raised him. )
Okay but I’m going off the rails.What I meant to point out is this:
I hate that people can’t considerthat this choice haunts him.
You see some semblance of it intheir last moment: LIKE LITERALLY THE ONLY MOMENT IN THE WHOLE SERIES WHERETHERE WAS A MOMENT BETWEEN JONATHAN AND VALENTINE THAT WAS TENDER ( because everything before and there afterwas an enlightening look at the amazingly abusive way a father could dehumanizehis own son. What a great dad. )
Him touching Jonathan’s cheek.Jonathan seemingly melting at the touch. Jonathan: devoted, docile, loyal andcompliant; acquiescing to his father’s control, to his commands, when they bothknew he wanted more horrors to be spread to the people that betrayed hisfather. Valentine: somber, wistful, regretful. Valentine: seeing so much of hisboy and so little, seeing all smoke and chaos and then that child who’d coweredfrom him and then tried to stab him when he was five, a boy in his mother’sarms, his hands clasped around his as he gave him his first blade, all of it inone small moment as he’s promising his son the world he’s not even sure if it’sthe truth or not. Just knowing that this boy was his real son.
( No one knows how badly I wishthe movies got to the third book at the least because that scene was sopoignant to me. Not only cause its important to note that Jace tried to hintjust a few minutes after that the scene looked so intimate to the point that hethought Jon was Valentine’s boyfriend but the mere fact that minutes later wasthe moment that readied his death: he listened to Jace’s goading that Valentinewould not appreciate him being killed without a fight proves how much Valentineinfluences and restrains him. His Father had absolute control over him andwhile there was resentment there – it didn’t matter as much as the fact thatValentine was family and that meant he would have done anything to make himproud. )
I also hate that people can’tfathom that he chose to keep Jonathan not merely for a sense of responsibility( because here’s the thing: if Jonathan was truly as monstrous and asthreatening as Valentine made him out to be, more trouble than he’s worth heshould have killed him. He was a rabid dog. The best thing to do was put himdown. ) But he didn’t. He kept his son. He tried to make him into something hecould control, something that could be useful to him, something that could be considereda person.
But he did it in all the wrongways ( WHICH I COULD TALK ABOUT SOME MORE BECAUSE LETS NOT FORGET THATSHADOWHUNTERS AS A CULTURE HAD VERY ARCHAIC WAYS OF RAISING THEIR CHILDREN ANDVALENTINE TRIED TO RAISE HIS KIDS THE SAME WAY AS HE WAS RAISED BY HIS OWN FATHER– just you know more awful and horrible and just really bad. Just…a very baddad. I’ll stop talking about it cos thisis getting ridiculously long. )
And again, he’s still trash andwas an awful father AND HONESTLY LIKE JONATHAN, doesn’t deserve anything. But Ijust really hate it when people are so quick to dismiss parts of him that makehim human when valentine is the very definition of the whole” DOESN’T REALLYTHINK OF HIM AS A VILLAIN BECAUSE HE’S SO CONVINCED WHAT HE’S DOING IS RIGHT.
Of course, he was wrong in the most extremesense. But still. And I am all up for the argument that he never really lovedJonathan at all and merely saw him as a weapon – which to some degree I wouldnot contest.
But, for me, I just can’t unseethe small moments where you know it was there.
Because Jonathan believes hisFather loved him.
This is one of the universe’sirrefutable fact to him.
Hands tug harshly at her blankets to keep warmth in her body now the sweat on her skin has cooled to a chilling degree. Hands ball up into fists with the fabric in hand. “It was a lot of blood.” Eyes squeeze tightly, looking away from her father, “A river and three skulls and three stars.” She shakes her head, its still too vivid and closing her eyes only brought the image back, hazy but the message was clear enough. “We can’t let it come true.” None of her dreams had come to fruition yet, but this one was direct and left a deeper ache in her bones than the ones before.
Muscles tensed and grip tightened around the handle of the electrum whip just aching to be used, yet she held back, out of fear, mostly, not that she’d want to admit that to herself. But it was the damned truth. Gaze never wavered as he stood before her, head held high. It would have been easy to lash out, even at his words, even at her own father’s name, yet still, she held back. “You have no right to speak about my parents, not my father. He may have been a member of your Circle, but he’s better than that now.” Grip tightened once more as she stood her ground, whip just twitching ever so slightly. “What would you know about lullabies, or being a parent?” That’s it. Keep him occupied until the others arrived, that was the plan and she was sticking to it.
