To look at Riley Lightwood would be to look at a young man who has been forced to grow up much too fast. At a glance, he isn't too much of a far cry from your run-of-the mill District One citizen. Riley is tall and lanky, standing at six feet, two inches of height and weighing one hundred and forty-five pounds. His bone structure is spindly and what some might even call effeminate, with narrow shoulders and long, graceful limbs. His skin is mostly clear and free of blemishes although he tends to get minor breakouts when he is stressed (which seems to be all the time nowadays), with a swarthy tone that tans easily and almost never burns.

Riley is the spitting image of his father, many people have been known to say, sporting a mop of tousled chocolate curls in contrast to his mother's immaculate sandy blonde tresses. He doesn't put all that much work into his hair, preferring to simply let it air dry and go where it will, the mussed waves falling to just below his somewhat overlarge ears. An extreme fondness for fedoras and colorful bandanas make Riley susceptible to the cosmetic plague commonly referred to as hat hair, but usually a few passes through the flattened locks with absentminded fingers will bring his hair back to some semblance of normalcy.

The structure of Riley's face lends him an innocent, gentle disposition, the features of it tending to be more towards the delicate side of the spectrum than rugged. His only noticeably masculine features are a defined, square chin and a strong jawline, although these nuances are typically lost against the more striking characteristics of high cheekbones and wide eyes the exact same shade of chestnut brown as his hair, rimmed with lush, dark lashes that are too long to be considered boyish. While Riley's eyes would be considered beautiful by many they have the distinct disadvantage of severe nearsightedness, requiring him to wear either contacts or rather embarrassingly nerdy glasses with thick lenses.

The remaining facial features are rather unremarkable, and do nothing but add to Riley's young-looking aesthetic. His lips are somewhat thin and are prone to getting chapped in the colder months, their color a healthy carnation pink. Frequent smiles seem to radiate warmth and reveal a set of white, well cared-for teeth that maintain a slightly bucktoothed appearance despite attempts at dental correction. A nose that is slightly flattened due to a bad break makes an appearance just above his mouth, the thick bridge making his eyes appear to be more closely-set than they really are.

Riley's body structure has always made it difficult to find clothes, especially jeans long enough to cover his legs that aren't miles too big in the waist. He has to wear belts with almost everything, and even then he seems to have problems with his pants being too baggy (there was an incident involving a mischievous sister, an important social event, and a resulting pants-ing, but we won't go into that). Long sleeved button-ups and dark jeans are a fashion staple for Riley, things like tee shirts and shorts an impossibility because of the macabre secret they would expose. Thin white scars crisscross the darker-toned skin everywhere that can be covered by fabric, covering arms, legs, and lean torso in nonsensical patterns, each raised line holding its own story of deep-seated guilt and the need to feel something again.

The one part of his body that Riley makes a concerted effort to keep entirely pristine are his hands. While he has good hygiene in the general sense, he is borderline obsessive with keeping his hands in prime condition. Long fingers are somewhat flawed by the presence of thick, ever-present calluses brought on by years of playing guitar, nails kept closely-trimmed out of necessity for playing his beloved instrument. What Riley's friends and family perceived to be a mere quirk for a few years has quickly manifested itself into a noticeable obsession: Riley seems to wash his hands at every possible opportunity, sometimes three or four times in a row, scrubbing until the skin of his hands is red, raw, and dry. It's gotten to the point where the worn flesh will crack and bleed at the slightest provocation, but still Riley continues to dash for the sink constantly.

It's almost like there's a stain that he can't wash off, something no one else sees.

The personality trait that possibly best defines Riley is good-hearted. He is a gentle soul, more predisposed to smiles and harmony than strife and discord. He goes out of his way to make people happy and is said to have an infectious laugh although he isn't what most people would call lighthearted. Riley is good-natured in that quiet way that is reminiscent of a ray of sunshine, warm and radiant without being overly enthusiastic or pushy about it. He tends to avoid any type of conflict but will step in as a mediator when people he cares about argue with each other, being skilled at negotiating arguments after a lifetime of performing these duties with his six younger siblings.

He is generally calm and level-headed although there are a select few, seemingly innocuous things in the world (raised voices, sudden movements, the hum of insects, reminders of nightmarish days gone by) that can make him jumpy and noticeably uneasy, wide eyes darting in search of all-but-forgotten adversaries that he has no desire to remember again but is nonetheless faced with in recurring flashbacks that seem to be inescapable. A victim of night terrors from a young age, Riley will regularly wake up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright in his bed and gripped in a tight vise of horror, sometimes screaming but more often fighting tooth and nail just to regain the ability to breathe. These episodes make him rather averse to sleeping and as a result have made him quite a night owl. It isn't odd for the sunrise to find a wide-awake Riley sitting in his bed reading or scrawling out tablature for his guitar compositions, never having gone to sleep at all the night before.

While Riley is the poster child for pleasant and amiable, he is protective of his younger siblings, almost abnormally so. Any of the Lightwood children would readily admit that this borderline-obsessive, constant worrying can be more than a bit annoying at times, but for the most part Riley comes across an an endearingly earnest big brother with a genuine (albeit overzealous) concern for the welfare of his family. In his mind, even though he is one of a set of triplets, he's the eldest, the 'man of the house' as his father told him once upon a time, and therefore it's his responsibility to take care of the others even at the cost of his own well-being. Almost entirely responsible for raising the youngest of the Lightwood children (it would be a joke to think their mother would care or that the nannies would do their job), Riley is no stranger to taking large burdens onto his narrow shoulders and bearing them without complaint.

Despite his protectiveness, Riley is a pushover when it comes to his younger siblings' happiness, or anyone's happiness, really. All it takes is a pout from Keela or Edana and in seconds he'll be doling out his hard-earned money to fund this new camera lens or that new book of sheet music for the satisfaction of being rewarded with a smile and a glowing you're the best brother ever! that will disappear into thin air the second he gets too overprotective and starts running background checks on any potential suitors that turn up on the front porch. In addition to sacrificing for his family's happiness, Riley has gained a reputation at school as the guy who would do anything for you if you'd ask him. This has led to people taking advantage of and basically walking all over him, but he is curiously content with this fact, glad to help his "friends" in some way even at his own expense.

Riley is what most people would call shy, reluctant to speak in front of large groups of people or strangers until he has gotten to know them. Even though he's not a big talker, Riley is very friendly, ready to offer a bashful smile and nod even hen he is not prepared to put words into the air (they are fragile and irrevocable, not something to be taken lightly). Soft-spoken and contemplative, he does not say much, but when he does his words tend to be poetic and well-chosen. Obviously he is more comfortable around his family, but it is very rare for Riley to be loud or brash, even more rare for him to speak sharply, and completely unthinkable for him to actually yell.

Perhaps the only instance where Riley is completely happy and at ease is when his fingers dance expertly over the strings of a guitar. Talented at both performing and composing alike, he spends the majority of his free time with an instrument in hand, a pencil tucked behind his ear in case he needs to jot down a quick riff or complicated pages of tablature. Classically trained but inclined more towards modern rock, pop, and jazz, Riley is a musical jack-of-all-trades and able to play almost anything by ear given a few minutes to figure it out. The walls of his room have been outfitted with special racks that hold scores of guitars, the fruits of a lifetime of birthdays, Christmases, saved-up allowances, and careful yard sale shopping. However, despite the large collection of guitars, some of them very expensive and flashy, Riley's prized instrument is a rather beat-up looking vintage acoustic that belonged to his late father, his first and only guitar teacher. The old heirloom has every sort of emotion and nostalgia ingrained into the worn fretboard, where the fingerprints of its former owner have rubbed away at the dark mahogany until light tan spots remain even years after his death. Sometimes in moments of guaranteed privacy, Riley will take the instrument down from its hallowed place on the wall and carefully map out the worn prints with the callused pads of his own fingers, wondering how everything could have changed so much in the short amount of time since the guitar was lovingly cradled by a different pair of hands.

Haunted. This is the part of Riley's personality that he tries with all of his might to keep hidden, not only for the peace of mind of his loved ones but for their safety as well. He remains swallowed by guilt and terror that refuses to fade even four years after the incident (it wasn't his fault, it had to be done, for the others, to protect them). But whatever his self-asserted opinions were, no amount of stammering justification could stop the stains from appearing on his hands a few days after everything happened all those years ago. He would look down and there it would be, all of that crimson essence painting his palms and making his breath catch in his throat until he could get to a sink and scrub it away, only to have it return again in a few hours' time. No one else has ever noticed the stains themselves (he knows they're only in his mind but the knowledge doesn't take away the visions), only taking note of Riley's obsessive hand washing when his skin becomes so dry and fractured that playing guitar becomes a chore of unbearable agony and the halls of the Lightwood home are eerily silent for a few days until careful applications of lotion do their job, returning the over-cleansed flesh to a useable although raw (always raw, red, damaged) state.

Even more carefully hidden are the scars and the wickedly sharp razor blade that is their source, countless little white lines that mark old injuries and scarlet ones that mark the new lacerations enfolded carefully in long-sleeved shirts and jeans, never shorts, the tool itself stashed at the bottom of a box of guitar picks that no one would ever bother to look through. Riley is perfectly aware that it's unhealthy and sick and wrong on so many levels, but it's been going on for so long that there's nothing he can do to quell the impulse anymore. All-consuming guilt, lingering fear, deep dark secrets that can never see the light of day - they all twist and writhe and scream for release until madness threatens to overcome his fragile mind, and that is when the sharp pain brings Riley back to the world of lucidity, watching with fixated dark orbs as scarlet liquid builds and flows in an enchanting macabre trail over skin already ridged with scar tissue from similar lapses. The scary thing is that he really doesn't know he's doing it until it's already done, he tells himself, applying antibacterial ointment and gauze bandages with practiced hands.

The most horrid things always happen on impulse. Like murder.

Riley Kalen Lightwood wasn't born to be a murderer. In fact, he and the sisters who comprise the (in)famous Lightwood triplets, Avon and Antoinette, were conceived in the utmost love. Willow Riley and Casper Lightwood never expected to start a family in their late teens and they really didn't expect to start a family with three babies at once. But love conquers all, so they say, and for a while it certainly seemed that this was the case. Shortly after a hastily thrown-together wedding, Willow gave birth to the first three of her seven children.

The first, you guessed it, was a cherubic little boy with a head of chocolate curls, named Riley in honor of Willow's family. The second, a wide-eyed girl with a fierce gaze even as he looked his first on the world, Avon. And finally, Antoinette, who would later turn out to be very aptly named after the haughty French queen of olden days. But apparently having three children wasn’t quite enough for Willow and Casper, and less than a year later, Edana Lightwood was born. She was not quite as fortunate as her older siblings when it came to her health, extremely premature and born with a defect that made it necessary for her right leg to be amputated at the knee. Keela, all bright eyes and freckles and radiant smiles, would follow Edana one year down the road, bringing the total of Lightwood siblings to five.

Growing up in an abnormally wealthy family, the Lightwood children lived a life that was very different from that of their peers. For some time their family dynamic was peaceful and idyllic, a group of beautiful, well-mannered children gently shepherded by two loving parents. Riley was especially close to his father, and Casper indulged his eldest son with everything from camping trips to teaching him to strum his first chords on a tiny guitar sized for his five-year-old fingers. The siblings had their scuffles, as siblings do, and with so many clashing personalities, how could they not? While Riley adored Avon, Antoinette, Edana, and Keela, he secretly longed for a little brother, someone to play catch with him and save him from endless days of being forced into tea parties and games of make-believe.

Just after his and Avon’s and Antoinette’s sixth birthday, Riley got his wish in the form of Aris Lightwood, the sixth and final real Lightwood sibling. Riley was nothing short of elated, spending every second of his free time practically glued to his baby brother’s side, playing with him and picking out simple lullabies on his guitar. For a few short months, contented bliss reigned supreme in the Lightwood home. But all of that was instantly shattered when a grim-faced messenger turned up at the front door with news that Casper had been horribly injured in an accident at work.

For being stung that many times by tracker jackers, he held on for a surprisingly long time. While it must have been torture to live through days of venom-induced hallucinations and unbearable physical pain, Casper fought through almost a week before he died. While the symptoms of the venom included mental instability and general agony, he was able to obtain one final moment of lucidity just before he passed on, shaking off the nightmares and pain long enough to request that the doctors let him speak to his oldest son in private, to latch onto his hand with a faltering grip and speak his final words that weren’t hallucinatory gibberish. “You’re the man of the house now, Riley. Take care of them; your mother and your sisters and brothers. And be careful who you trust. Sometimes the people who should be on your side are anywhere but there.”

Two hours later, he was gone. The entire Lightwood family was devastated, but Willow was the most inconsolable of them all. Left completely hollow by the loss of her husband she began to deteriorate, staying in her room for days on end and neglecting her children entirely. Some distant family member had the forethought to hire a nanny a few days after the funeral, but the woman was spectacularly awful at her job, preferring to sit on the couch and thumb through Capitol fashion magazines rather than change diapers and console children who were more or less fighting through crippling grief with only each other to lean on.

Taking his father’s final words to heart, Riley began taking the burden of maintaining the family’s fragile homeostasis onto his own shoulders, doing everything from feeding baby Aris to holding the girls when they started crying and trying to hold back his own tears. It was awful and unheard-of and completely wrong, a six year old boy with nothing more on his side than an abnormal amount of maturity and a determination fueled by a dying father’s last wish looking after five other children while the one remaining parent in the family stood by and watched with unseeing eyes, but what had to be done had to be done.

After two years (nights of the triplets crying themselves to sleep becoming fewer and farther between, teaching Keela to ride a bike and patching up her subsequently scraped knees, guiding Aris through his first steps with steady hands) everything seemed to be returning to some sense of normalcy, the Lightwood siblings eventually coming to terms with the fact that having their eldest brother as the closest thing to a parent was the way life worked now. At age eight Riley had seen more struggle and heartache than many of the adults in the First District, but the lingering pain did nothing to dim his smiles or deter him from his newfound role as his siblings’ caretaker. And really, he decided, the job’s stresses were far outweighed by the rewards – seeing Avon smile again, even if it was tentatively, feeling Edana’s grateful arms around him after he’d sprinted all the way back to the house to grab her inhaler when she was having a horrid asthma attack. This life was one he could happily live with.

What he couldn’t live with was a stepfather, more specifically one who had once been his uncle.

Xavier Lightwood was not a good man. In fact, he was about as far from good as it is possible to get – sneaky, greedy, conniving, and jealous, so horribly jealous that he would go to any lengths to get what he wanted. And in this case, what he wanted was one Willow Riley-Lightwood, recently widowed and still incredibly beautiful even in her grief. After an extended amount of time being an understanding shoulder to cry on, a confidante through the worst pain of her life, Willow came to the (late, very late) conclusion that her children needed a father figure. Besides, she could do far worse than marrying back into the Lightwood family.

The children, especially Riley, were highly displeased with the prospect of someone attempting to fill the void that Casper had left behind. That empty place in their family was sacred, unable to be usurped by the first person to come waltzing in to sweep their mother off her feet. Still, it was a rare occurrence to see Willow outside of her room, much less looking so happy, and it was for her sake that the siblings contented themselves to suffer the intruder in their midst.

Xavier, however, wasn’t too keen on suffering his brother’s progeny interfering with his relationship with Willow. While he was the image of fatherly love and affection when his lovely bride was around to see, he was downright nasty to the children when Willow wasn’t watching, going out of his way to make their lives difficult. The verbal berating and ridiculous, unattainable expectations would have been bad enough, but what started out as an irritating inconvenience would soon launch into a cycle of terror that would last for the next six years.

Looking back, Riley would admit that it was him who really started it, but maybe that was just the guilt talking. It was all surprisingly fast, startlingly normal; Xavier spitting poison about Edana being a useless cripple that sent the little girl fleeing from the room in tears, Riley standing mutely in the background as familiar words ran through his mind. Be careful who you trust. Sometimes the people who should be on your side are anywhere but there. And for the first time, he finally realized what his father had meant. Perhaps it was that very realization that caused him to open his mouth, the spark that would set of an irrevocable wildfire of pain and suffering floating into the air in a quiet, neutral tone. ”I don’t know how you fooled Mom, but you don’t fool us. You’ll never be half the man our father was.”

The resulting backhand came with an incredible amount of force behind it, creating heavy bruising that Riley would later justify as the consequence of a bad fall. It was all downhill from there, the occasional slap evolving into vicious beatings that came with increasing frequency. Riley went on for six years carefully covering the bruises and acting like everything was perfectly normal, shifting from a quiet, innocent little boy into a virtually mute teenager who had seen more strife than anyone ought to. It went unsaid that telling anyone about the abuse would mean harm coming to the other Lightwood siblings, a nightmare that Riley refused to see become reality. He had sworn to look out for his family, a promise that he had already broken by standing by and watching his mother marry a monster, it was the least he could do to protect his sisters and brothers from his own fate. He was content to deal with a hellish existence as long as the others were safe. At fourteen, he was juggling the weight of the world.

When the news that Riley’s efforts had failed came, it came in the form of a sobbing, hysterical Keela running into his room in the middle of the night, throwing herself into his waiting arms and weeping uncontrollably for all of a half-hour before he could calm her down enough to make any sense of what she was trying to say. ”He… he made me smash my piano. And he’s been hitting Aris, and Edana… He’s been doing terrible things to Edana. I had to swear not to tell. Riley… he killed Dad. He told me.”

The plan was simple, if cruelly ironic and somewhat sadistic. Unable to accomplish everything on their own, Keela and Riley brought Avon into the plan, since she was clever, and really the only other person that Keela and Riley could count on to stay strong and keep her mouth shut. Keela, the smartest and most strategic of the group, took care of the planning while Avon went to great lengths to procure a jar of tracker jackers. In the end, though, it was Riley who insisted on being the one to pull the proverbial trigger, to shake up the jar before smashing it and running, to look into Xavier Lightwood’s eyes as he met the same fate as his brother. His ultimatum wasn’t motivated by any great need for revenge, but rather by the fact that he refused to let either of his siblings have the actual act of murder on their conscience, blood on their hands.

Riley didn’t cope with the guilt as well as he wished he could. After he and Keela had disposed of the evidence and sprinted back home, it was a surprisingly short time before the same grim-faced messenger that had conveyed news of Casper’s death showed up at the front door to inform the family of his brother’s eerily similar demise. That was when Riley first saw it, the crimson liquid painting his palms as he watched his mother collapse to the floor in grief at having lost yet another husband, just in the first days of the toddlerhood of Chyba Lightwood, the first and only Lightwood half-sibling. Bile rising in his throat, Riley turned on his heel and sprinted to the bathroom, barely managing to shut and lock the door before he got sick, the realization that he had taken someone’s life hitting him like a locomotive.

The scarlet stains were reluctant to be cleansed, enduring so much scrubbing that Riley’s hands were pink and raw before they finally dissipated. But then they returned the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, prompting such relentless washing that his hands dried out and cracked, the skin throbbing in agony that made playing guitar or even holding anything with even the most mildly abrasive surface completely impossible for almost a week. Talking to Avon or Keela was too dangerous, the risk of their crime being discovered too great, so Riley reverted into himself, staying in his room for days on end in a way that was strangely reminiscent of his mother, who had again become a hollow shell unreachable by the outside world.

The first scar didn’t come from a razor blade, or a blade of any kind for that matter. A few weeks after Xavier’s funeral the guilt was starting to drive Riley completely over the edge, into a self-contained little world of flashbacks and horror and the fact that there was such a large chance of someone finding out that such an ironic death couldn’t have been an accident. Suddenly there was a sharp bite of pain that brought him back to lucidity, blood blooming from a small laceration where fingernails had dug too sharply into the skin of crossed arms.

The newfound clarity was interrupted (but its source was not forgotten, that would be evident in the innumerable scars that would follow) by the unexpected arrival of a hollow-eyed Edana poking her head through the door, locking her gaze onto Riley’s and speaking in a numb voice. ”Chyba’s crying and no one knows how to make him stop.”

Only flinching slightly at contact with the only remaining physical evidence of Xavier Lightwood’s presence in the world, Riley fell almost seamlessly back into his dual role of big brother and parent, performing the same duties he’d been doing for most of his life. While the Xavier’s reign of terror in the Lightwood home was over, the scars remained; emotional ones like Keela’s refusal to speak to anyone outside the family or Aris’ strange shifts in behavior almost like he was several different people in the same body, and the physical ones that began to appear in an increasing number along lanky arms and legs, Riley’s only tether to reality, barely enough to keep the ever-present guilt from pulling him back under.

Four years later, not much has changed. The Lightwood family is still broken from the inside but continues with a pristine exterior. Riley still dashes to scrub away invisible stains of guilt that no one can ever know, thin white lines serving as reminders of a responsibility that he can’t forget. Perhaps the only shift in daily life is that Willow has married for the third time and is expecting yet another child, prompting the survivors of the fallout from her last marital union on edge and guarded, but determined to weather any potential storm that might strike.

After all, they’ve made it this far.

Looks good! Tracker jacker death = not fun D: