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Chapter Text

Magnus liked to take a thorough inventory of his working apothecary every six months or so. He did keep a ledger that had general amounts give or take, but inevitably, he would get in a hurry and stock or use ingredients without marking them. 

If four hundred-plus years had not taught him the value of accurate and current bookkeeping, he doubted anything could. At some point, everyone had to face the dismaying conclusion that you are who you are at some base core, for better or worse. 

And for Magnus, it had largely been better. He had met Alec some years ago; they had moved in together, and they were mostly blissfully cohabitating as well as two stubborn independent men reasonably could. 

Which was to say, they had passed the honeymoon period a while back and had ended up somewhere entirely unfamiliar to them both: grudgingly comfortable domesticity. 

Magnus, clutching at a bottle of dried asphodel, thought about the funny green stain on the kitchen ceiling. About a month ago, Alec had opted into one of those meal delivery kit services and had attempted, with terrifying intensity, to make a dish with the pre-portioned ingredients and overly complicated little recipe card. It had taken him hours and resulted in a frighteningly bright green mound. Alec tilted his head, regarding the jiggling mound thoughtfully. “…is it supposed to be that shade of green?”

“Darling,” Magnus began, wincing painfully, “I don’t think anything is supposed to be that shade of green.” He rubbed Alec’s tense shoulders as he heard a defeated sigh. “How did green end up on the ceiling, my lovely?” he asked, squinting up at the bright green splatter.

“Some bad things may have happened,” Alec allowed, sounding precipitously close to peevish. 

“Never you mind,” Magnus said, pressing a kiss behind Alec’s sweaty left ear. He surreptitiously wiped his mouth. “I’ll find us something good to eat.”

“I’ll guess I’ll start cleaning up,” Alec said, staring glumly around at the shambles left in their kitchen. 

“How about I take care of it in the morning?” Magus offered. 

It was a testament to how tired Alec was that he allowed it. Normally, he couldn’t rest until the apartment was at least reasonably clean. But as Magnus watched fondly, Alec washed his hands and padded to the living room, where he sank down onto the couch. 

The next morning, Magnus did clean the kitchen but since he laughed every time he saw the green stain on the ceiling, he decided to leave it. At least for a little while. 

He shook the half-empty bottle of asphodel and then made a notation in his ledger. It would have to be filled soon, but not immediately. It was rare to use it in a potion; asphodel had to do with time and immortality, the afterlife, and regret that could last beyond a lifetime. 

Personally, Magnus didn’t believe in regret and he believed in altering time and reality even less. 

He’d left the green stain; he liked it to remind him of Alec, who he had been seeing less and less of lately. There were tensions between the Lisbon Institute and the surrounding downworlders and Alec had been chosen to mediate their disputes, largely due to his own successes in New York. It was an honor, but the added stress and hours were taking their toll on Alec and Magnus both.

He was glad that they’d planned a vacation in two weeks. They definitely needed the time away. Magnus had reserved a private island only accessible to portals and a rickety ferry, thinking that maybe if the location was remote enough, Magnus could talk Alec into wearing the tiny green speedo he’d purchased for him some months ago. He grinned to himself as he imaged Alec’s outraged expression and reached for another jar. 

Just as his fingers closed on the powdered High John Root, he heard the front door open.

“Alexander, is that you?” Magnus called out knowing full well that it was. He’d known the moment Alec had gotten close to the building; the wards he set up were part of himself and they shivered with relief once Alec was safely home. 

 He heard the now familiar sounds of Alec removing his jacket and tiredly shuffling to the couch. 

Magnus put the jar of light brown powder back and wiped his hands off before heading to the living room, where Alec was sprawled across the couch, his face turned to the wall, rune standing out in stark relief against the pale skin of his neck. 

“Alexander?” Magnus asked again, crossing the room. Beyond their cozy apartment, night had fallen, but the city never really slept. There were noise-dampening charms all over the apartment but nothing to block out the light and bustle of the city. Sometimes he liked to be reminded that no matter how separate he felt, he was still a part of the pulse of humanity. Everyone was.

At his name, Alec turned his head and flopped over, a shy smile already curling at the corner of his generous mouth. “Hey.”

The ever-shifting lights from outside wavered, throwing his features into shadow, then sharp relief.

While Magnus had loved many people throughout the years and did not diminish their impact on his life, he could honestly say he’d never felt this particular type of gratitude to the universe at such a simple gesture. Alec’s face quieted something within himself; his smile felt like coming home.

He came to sit on the couch up by Alec’s head, rearranging his body so that he could run his fingers through Alec’s dark hair. Alec’s socked feet dangled over the arm of the overstuffed monstrosity that he had talked Magnus into co-purchasing sometime last year. Despite its admitted comfort, he was still slightly too tall for the couch, but then again, Alec was slightly too tall for most things. “Hey yourself,” he responded softly.

Alec groaned in appreciation, pushing back towards Magnus gratefully. 

Magnus slid his hands down, giving the back of Alec’s neck an affectionate squeeze, and reached down to massage Alec’s shoulders, the muscles corded tight with stress. “Another tough day at work?”

“It’s looking up now.”

Magnus had given their future a great deal of thought, even more in light of recent events. Things, except the cursed Lisbon institute, had calmed somewhat between the shadowhunters and downworlders, and Alec had, in a fit of recent inspiration, been struck with the disastrous urge to be domestic. From his recent (failed, awful, terrible) foray into fine dining, to last week when Magnus saw Alec staring moodily at a baby blanket in a department store while Magnus was busy desperately trying to sway Alec towards a gift for his mother’s birthday that wasn’t weaponry. 

A surge of fear had raced down his spine as he thought, Dear God, I’ve married one of those. 

The rare domesticated North American male who craved home and family and babies and matching dinnerware.

It wasn’t that Magnus didn’t know Alec was all about that life, it was just that Magnus had assumed he had more time. Alec was in his early twenties. From what daytime television had led him to believe, most males of his species tended to be as enthusiastic about the idea of domesticity as a root canal without anesthesia.

But Shadowhunters always did surprise him in the best and worst of ways, and due to their terribly violent and thus, shortened lives, they did seem to start procreating as soon as physically and socially possible. 

Magnus himself had never considered a family since a) most of his given family was historically terrible and b) he’d never found someone that he wanted to be tied to in such an intimate and permanent way. 

But if anyone could make him crave the distasteful vagaries of domesticity, it would certainly be Alec, who had mostly bumbled and smashed his way through every other defense Magnus had managed to erect over the years. 

Fuck it, let’s have a kid , he’d elegantly thought to himself that day.

“Never you mind, darling,” Magnus chirped. “I’ll pop down to that Italian restaurant you like so much, and we can have a night in.” He added cheerily, “Besides, in two weeks, it’ll be a distant memory.”

He felt Alec go stiff, all the tension that he had rubbed out of Alec’s shoulders instantly returned.

Alec rubbed the back of his neck nervously as he sat up, putting some distance between them. “Ah, about that.”

“No,” Magnus warned, his gut giving a warning lurch. He felt cold all over.

“Magnus—”

He narrowed his eyes at Alec, daring him to continue.

“The talks are going to take longer,” Alec began.

“This is the third time you’ve canceled a vacation in a row,” Magnus interrupted. “We’ve been planning this for months and we both agreed that we desperately needed this vacation.”

“That was before this mess with the Lisbon Institute.”

“Before, before. Alexander, there’s always something that comes up. Sometimes you have to say no. Sometimes, you must put yourself first.”

Alec stood. There were two spots of color high on his pale cheeks as he looked down at Magnus. “Don’t you see how hard I’m trying to, but I can’t ignore this. They need me.

I need you, Magnus thought, but they had danced around this issue for so long that it already felt like an old argument, one that might never be resolved. Who could really say what was more important – duty or heart? Might as well contemplate the length of a string.

“Can’t you see that I’m trying?” Alec repeated.

“I see that you’re being selfish.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, Magnus regretted them. It wasn’t fair and not even what he really meant. If there was anyone less selfish than Alec, he’d yet to meet such a person. If anything, his issue was the opposite: he took on far too much responsibility for everyone and everything. Magnus wished Alec could be a little more selfish.

All the accomplishments in the world don’t mean anything if we lose sight of each other , Magnus thought bleakly. 

He didn’t know why he couldn’t say it – maybe because it felt like something Alec should already know. Maybe because he didn’t want anyone who had to be guilted into desiring time with him.

Magnus’ nails bit into the soft flesh of his palm, knuckles white. He had to leave before he said anything else he didn’t mean.

“I’m going to go out for a walk,” he announced to Alec, who just nodded tiredly.

At the door, Magnus looked back: Alec was sitting on the couch again, head in his hands, his shoulders a tired slope of defeat. Magnus felt his heart squeeze inside his chest. For a moment, he almost apologized, but then the moment passed.

The world might be a better and kinder place if we did not feel the need to have the last word, but if people always acted sensibly then they wouldn’t be people, fallible and messy and a little bit awful. Conflict in itself was not such a bad thing, so long as you weren’t married to a stubborn dumbass martyr who might never put you first in his life.

Magnus snagged his discarded coat from the back of a chair and slammed the front door closed behind him, not caring that he was being incredibly immature. Sometimes exits required extra flair.

 He stalked down the hall to the elevators. He tried not to pretend like he wasn’t waiting for Alec to come running after him, but he admittedly had to push down his disappointment when Alec never came, and he stepped into the elevator alone. 

--

Autumn in New York was one of his favorite seasons, and the cool crisp air cleared his head.

The tress had begun dropping their leaves – yellow orange and red, like fluttering confetti, the last hurrah before snow and that strange, muffled silence that accompanied it laid claim over the city.

All in all, Magnus walked a few blocks and had a sulky piece of cherry pie at the diner two blocks over, not even tasting the tart explosion of cherries or the flaky buttery crust. When the bill came, he tipped $100 because even though his night sucked, not everyone else’s should as well.

On his walk home, he turned over the events of the night. With a little time and distance, it almost seemed silly. He had overreacted, and Alec was being thoughtless. Okay, he could work with that. They loved each other too much for this to be a stumbling block.

Magnus pulled his velvet coat closer around him to block the chill that had fallen. Probably, Alec was at home weeping into his cordial for being so pig-headed and so, so Nephilim.

Once he got home, Magnus had already planned his benevolent speech in his head, but Alec was not in the living room. He frowned and checked the kitchen, tossing his coat over the back of one of the chairs. Next, Magnus headed to the bedroom, where he found Alec in bed, his bare back turned to the door, the cover pulled to his waist, and snoring noisily.

Magnus’ eyes hungrily roved over the runes mapped across Alec’s broad shoulders, contemplating the best place to stab.

Catarina had once cautioned him to never go to sleep angry but fuck this. She’d never put up with Alec when he was on one of his moral high horses, refusing to even acknowledge that Magnus might have a valid point.

Magnus slammed the bedroom door shut, not caring if it woke Alec up or not. If Magnus was going to stew in misery all night, then they damn well both were. It was the matrimonial way.

Even though it was now late, Magnus knew he wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon, so he might as well get some work done. He ended up in his apothecary again, opening his ledger with more anger than the book deserved. Just as he was about to turn back to his shelves, his elbow caught the edge of the glass jar of asphodel and sent it tumbling to the floor where it shattered. “Damnit!” He rarely made mistakes anymore. 400 years had taught him more precision, but not how to reign in his temper and be more careful, apparently.

He bent down to salvage what he could of the asphodel and hissed as one of the larger shards cut his palm, blood dripping onto the spiky asphodel flower buds scattered across the floor.

Good god, never mind. He’d clean this up later. He peeled one of the flowers off his palm where it stuck to the blood drying against his skin.

He washed his hands in the guest bathroom, examining the cut area but not too concerned. He could heal this without problem, but the asphodel was done for. It had been tainted with his blood and even though true magic was in the intention of the caster, ingredients still had power on their own.

It was getting late and his anger had banked a little, reduced itself to a low simmer. Magnus wasn’t truly a person meant for unhappiness, he had trouble holding onto anger like trying to hold onto smoke with his fists, but all the little hurts got filed away to be examined and reexperienced later. Those, he could never seem to let go of.

Tonight had been a bust in every way imaginable. Magnus sighed and turned off the water. He dried his hands, flicking off the light in his wake. Finally, he changed into some silk pajama bottoms and grabbed a heavy blanket from the linen closet.

He headed for the empty couch, which felt a little like returning to the scene of a crime, and settled in for a long unhappy night.

---

Magnus woke up suddenly and sat up. “Aw fuck!” he yelled as his forehead connected with something decidedly solid. He rolled sideways in a kind of horizontal crab-crawl towards freedom. He hit the floor with a thud, legs tangled in what seemed to be a white sheet – or, as his eyes focused, a lab coat of some sort. Above the left breast pocket, Dr. Bane was stitched in dark blue cursive.

Just as he was trying to make sense of his surroundings – metal bunk beds – holy fuck, he was in a prison – there was a knock on the door.

“What the hell—” he began, then thought better of it. Who knew what kind of hell dimension this was? He cleared his throat. “Do come in.”

Raphael, dressed in loose blue scrubs poked his head in. “Dr. Bane?”

Judging by his expectant expression, he was waiting for an answer in the affirmative even though they both knew for damn sure that Magnus wasn’t a doctor, couldn’t even watch those wretchedly dramatic medical television shows that were so popular. “Yes?”

Raphael scowled; his nametag which labeled him as Nurse Santiago was crookedly hanging from the hem of his wrinkled scrub shirt. “I learned to knock the hard way.”

“How was that?” Magnus asked, mystified and temporarily derailed from the more pressing mission of figuring out what the ever-loving fucking fuck was going on,

“You know, the on-call room ,” he said as if it was supposed to mean something to Magnus. He could, Magnus thought, double-emphasize every word in that sentence, and it still wouldn’t mean anything new to him. He decided it was probably best for them both to let it go.

Clearly, Raphael was not himself and whatever shitty dimension saw fit to make him a carer for actual living people was no world that Magnus wanted anything to do with.

Wherever and whenever he was now, he needed to get away, and most importantly, he had to find Alec. The Institute. He could portal to the institute as soon as he found somewhere private. First, he had to ditch the bizarre alternate Raphael, who was watching him with insulting resigned exasperation.

No, first -- Magnus coughed from the floor and scrambled to his feet, brushing off his jacket. “Could I have a moment?” he asked.

“Sure, doctor,” Raphael said grudgingly, like it physically pained him to be polite to Magnus.

Magnus cupped his ear. “What was that, nurse?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Raphael said loudly before leaving and closing the door behind him.

Magnus grinned and once he was alone, he kicked away the stiff sheets pooled around his feet and closed his eyes. When opening a portal, it was important to visualize where you were going. He had to see it, know he was there, and feel the tug down low of his body attempting to be where it felt it should. 

He waited for his magic to gather and flow out of him, but there was nothing. He waved his arms experimentally.

He opened his eyes to see the same four bare walls painted the ugliest shade of greige he’d had the displeasure of encountering in any healthcare setting.

“Abracadabra?” he said to the empty room. When nothing happened, he sat down on the narrow cot. Well, shit.

Chapter Text

Well, there went that theory. On the far side of the depressing room full of depressing bunk beds were a depressing set of lockers, and a couch facing a large flatscreen. There were empty chip bags and half-drunk coffee littered across every surface, indicating that not only were the doctors at this hospital stuck in a kind of uneasy hostage situation, but they were also terrible slobs.
 
Magnus took a deep, bracing breath. There was nothing else to be done: he would have to go out and face this universe’s version of Raphael, who also seemed allergic to joy.
 
Good god, he hoped he wouldn’t be expected to help anyone. Without his magic, he wasn’t sure how much he could really do – Alec was far more suited for this kind of thing. He had more recent field medic training, though he was on occasion baffled by mundanes, such as when he jumped out of a third-story window and looked back confused and frustrated when the mundanes he was traveling with elected for the stairs instead.
 
Here, there was no Institute. No Magic. And possibly no Alec. Magnus swallowed hard and blinked a few times. Enough feeling sorry for himself. He needed to get out of this room and find a way back to his own dimension. The key might be the surly nurse waiting impatiently on the other side of the door. He stood up and opened the door to find Raphael frowning down at his phone, between sending furious-sounding long strings of text.
 
“I’m ready when you are,” Magnus announced, smiling benignly.
 
“Too late,” Raphael muttered and sighed, slipping his phone into a pocket high up on his left chest. “C’mon, Dr. Bane. If you run any later, it’s going to be both our asses.”
 
H followed Raphael to a set of locking doors where he swiped his badge next to a nondescript control on the wall, opening the double doors. Magnus was familiar with this mechanism from visiting Catarina, occasionally bringing her food during a double shift or one of those hideously sugary coffee drinks she liked so much. The doors opened like magic; right now, Magnus could not help but feel slightly resentful.  
 
“Pray tell, where might I be headed this auspicious morning?” Magnus asked, nearly at to jog to keep up with Raphael’s punishing pace.
 
“You were due in the clinic an hour ago.”
 
All around them, people in pajama-like scrubs seemed to be powerwalking through the halls and scooting people, things, and baffling machines in different directions. Being in a hospital reminded him a bit of the Institute except full of meaner people.
 
Ah, well. The Clinic sounded manageable. Though Magnus was no medic by any means, but he had picked up a few tricks in his long life. He supposed he could manage to put Band-Aids on scrapes for a few hours until he could get Raphael alone and learn all about this blasted universe. Magnus figured he had to have learned something from the many years he’d comforted and rubbed Catarina’s shoulders – healing through osmosis, perhaps. Though it was a rare occurrence, it was hard to heal physically when he’d previously had magic to aid him. It was a bit like trying to paint while colorblind: it could be done, but it was a far more difficult process.
 
They turned a corner and entered through a set of sliding glass doors.
 
“Doc! Doc!” someone yelled while accosting Magnus and steering him into a tiny glass cubicle where a man was screaming and bleeding on a table while people milled around and shouted incomprehensible demands to each other.
 
“What should we do, Dr. Bane?” someone else yelled from the head of the table.
 
To say that Magnus had no fucking clue would be a kindness; he brushed his suddenly sweaty hair back from his forehead. A cold, unpleasant film was breaking out all over his body; his ass would be a sweaty mess in five minutes. “Are you sure he can’t just walk it off?” he tried.
 
“Doctor, he only has one leg!” the nurse shouted back.
 
“I see,” Magnus said, struggling to stay upright. “Perhaps consult ortho?” Magnus shuffled backward, hitting the glass and star-fishing against it. Outside the room, his hands squeaking on the glass were starting to attract attention.
 
Raphael roughly shoved him out of the way and ran out of the room.
 
Godamnit, Magnus swore to himself. This may be some shitty alternate dimension or fevered dream but he wasn’t in the habit of letting people bleed to death in front of him. He grabbed a stack of gauze pads on the tiny counter that ran along the left side of the room and started tearing open packages with his teeth while the other hand held a wadded-up bunch of gauze against the spurting blood.
 
“Keep ‘em coming,” he yelled at a nurse who had followed his example and was frantically grabbing any available gauze within reach. The man beneath his hand had quieted down. Usually, this would be a good thing, but in this case, Magnus sincerely doubted it.
 
Magnus was busy weighing the odds of something happening while trying to transfer the patient out of this small hell room when Raphael came back, accompanied by someone tall who was wearing a mask and a determined expression.
 
“Compress the iliac artery,” the man said, pushing in beside Magnus and adding his hands to the mess of bloody gauze. “Type and cross?”
 
“Already done, PRBCs on the way.”
 
“Good.” The man leaned into Magnus, the whole length of their bodies pressed together. “I’m going to slide my hands beneath yours so you can grab the vascular clamps,” he said, his voice tickling the hair at Magnus’ ear. A whole body shiver went through him then, and it had nothing to do with the pants-shittingly terrifying scene in front of him. 
 
He knew that voice, would know it absolutely everywhere in any universe. 
 
“Alexander?” Magnus whispered hoarsely, not daring to look away from the massacre beneath his hands. True to his word, Alec edged his gloved hand beneath his, the other sliding above until he took over, leaning his whole body into it.
 
Magnus didn’t waste any time. He spun around and grabbed the nearest thing that looked like hemostats and shoved his whole hand into the bloody mess on the table. The eyes were sometimes deceiving, everything in front of him looked like nothing more than fresh ground meat. But if he closed his eyes and followed his hands past the right pelvic wall, he could feel the mess of arteries, one of which was about to kill their patient. He ran the tips of his fingers along the arteries until he felt it – the bleed, then he clamped it off. Almost immediately, the patient monitor stopped beeping out its warning. The blood pressure was low but stabilizing, Magnus saw, as he watched the numbers waver and steady.
 
Next to him, Alec let out a shaky breath and leaned back, releasing his hold. “Nurse Santiago already has an OR prepped and waiting.”
 
“Good,” Magnus said, still watching the monitor, the small spiky shapes across the front. It was strange to him, sometimes, that those small little innocuous peaks and valleys represented the whole of a man’s life, as if men were no more than bits of flesh and electrical currents.
 
“There are surgeons there waiting, but if you want to scrub in—”
 
“No,” Magnus said. “I think I need a moment.” He could feel Alec studying him from the side.
 
“How about some coffee?” Alec asked as the nurses prepared the patient for transport and he peeled off his gloves before tossing them into the wastebasket in the corner.
 
 Magnus swallowed. “Sounds good.”
 
 
 ---
 
 
 
He got lost in the maze of beige corridors while following Alec, all the halls dotted with signs more terrifying than the next: radiation beyond this point, authorized personnel only, the morgue.
 
“How in the world do you remember the way?” Magnus asked.

Alec always was bafflingly good at navigating any space but his emotions, which were often too big and complicated for him to disassemble easily. It was said by Downworlders that Shadowhunters could feel Alicante, but there was no shadowworld here. Ugh, maybe the bastard just really was that good at geometry and spatial sense, even in this vile wasteland of linoleum.
 
The cafeteria was nearly empty, it turned out. Just a few sad-looking people picking through day-old premade salads and pre-portioned granola in cups.
 
“Post covid, it’s a brave new world,” Alec said, surveying the rows of empty tables. It was downright apocalyptic looking.
 
“That’s a dystopian novel,” Magnus muttered.
 
“I’m aware.” Alec led Magnus to a small vending machine that dispensed hot drinks. “During the height of the pandemic, I think we had too much time to think and examine ourselves, and I’m not sure that we liked what we saw.” He grabbed two cups and held them beneath the spicket, one at a time. “The coffee here is terrible, but it still beats the coffee in the doctor’s lounge.” He took the two cups from the machine and added one cream and two sugars, handing Magnus’ cup to him.
 
Magnus stared down in surprise. “You know how I take my coffee?”
 
Alec seemed baffled as he handed over a few crumpled dollars to the cashier. “Why wouldn’t I? We’ve worked together for five years?”
 
“And we’re not—” Magnus could not think of a delicate way to ask why they weren’t banging, so he coughed into his curled fist. “Never mind.”
 
They were sitting alone in the cafeteria. An entire side of the cavernous space was made of windows where they could sit and watch the traffic pass by, but Magnus mostly only had eyes for Alec, studying him carefully. They had known each other for a long time, they saw each other regularly, but it was clear from the careful distance that Alec maintained from him that they were not romantically involved.
 
Magnus was both baffled and offended. Why weren’t they in love?
 
“Hey, where’d you go?” Alec said, breaking into Magnus’ thoughts.
 
Magnus grimaced and took a sip of his bitter coffee. “Nowhere. Everywhere.”
 
“Yeah,” Alec replied. “You looked kind of freaked out in there earlier.”
 
“It might have been the spurting blood,” Magnus said dryly. Granted, it maybe hadn’t been one of his finest moments, but he’d been surprised. He’d thought his bloody battlefield days were long passed.
 
“Good thing Nurse Santiago was there, or else we’d still be stuck.”

Magnus snorted. “Yeah, he’s so great that apparently he’s been tasked with wrangling me.”
 
Alec shook his head. “You will haven’t figured it out? Raphael volunteers to keep tabs on you. He worries about you. We all do.” He took a deep breath. “I know that you’ve been—through stuff—Iraq—"
 
Magnus looked up at Alec sharply.
 
Alec shrugged and continued drinking his bitter brew like it was water, another trait he shared with his counterpart. Alec had the phenomenal ability to drink absolute shit with a straight face. “People talk. I asked around. The nurses know everything.”
 
“It was a long time ago,” Magnus muttered. But no, in this world, it wouldn’t have been, would it? The scars weren’t scars so much as scabs, barely crusted over and the flesh still new and raw beneath. He could see why this Alec would be worried enough to ask; even in his own world where war was centuries past, it didn’t take much to take him back there. He’d turn a corner and his eyes would be gritty, his nose full of gunpowder and old blood.
 
Plenty of scars faded but watching human suffering should never be one of them.
 
“Thank you for watching out for me.”
 
“It’s the least I could do for my attending.”
 
Magnus fiddled with his cup. “Is that why we aren’t together?”
 
Alec flushed and looked away, pink starting on his chest and crawling up his neck. “Jesus, Magnus.”
 
Magnus watched, as charmed as the first time he had seen it and aching to do something about it.  Magnus thought wistfully, he had kissed that neck and jaw so many times, felt the stubble beneath his lips and Alec’s soft exhale.
 
 Loss was a funny thing – Magnus didn’t know how he could reasonably grieve the loss of someone who was sitting right across the table from him, but he suddenly missed his own Alec in a tidal wave of grief so strong that he had to blink back tears. He sat his coffee down with a shaking hand.
 
He supposed it would be creepy for him to ask this version of Alec -- who seemed like a friend, a coworker, and a subordinate -- to hold him.
 
 
Some coffee had sloshed on the table and had gone cold. Magnus traced the rings with the tip of his finger. The urge to tell Alec the truth was strong, but he had the sneaking suspicion that in this overwhelmingly mundane universe, telling the truth would get him a one-way vacation to the psych floor. “It’s just, I think we’d be so good together.”
 
“Would we?” Alec cocked his head and gave him a careful, evaluating look. “There was a time when I thought that maybe…and then there was that kiss at the Christmas party a couple of years ago. But honestly? I think we’re too much alike. We both work about a hundred hours a week. We’re married to our jobs. When would we have time for each other?”
 
Magnus felt stricken. “We would make time.”
 
But they hadn’t always, had they? Even together in his own world, he was just as apt to cancel dinner plans as Alec. It was deeply sobering to realize that for all that their circumstances had changed them in superficial ways, they were fundamentally still the same people: they cared for each other, and they had trouble balancing work and life.
 
“Aw, fuck nuggets,” Magnus said with feeling, draining his coffee cup and crumpling it in his fist. It felt like a very manly and satisfying gesture.
 
“Come on,” Alec said, pushing back his chair and standing. “We should get back to the clinic.”
 
“You should really stop it a clinic,” Magnus told Alec, following him back. “It really gives the wrong impression.”
 

 
 ---
 
 
 
In the hallway, as soon as Magnus spotted an exit and pinwheeled around, he hesitated. That was his chance to get out of here, sure. But then do what? There was no magic here, strictly speaking. He supposed that somewhere there was possibly a mountain with a shaman sitting atop it that might be able to offer some guidance but that would take both time and research. He did not doubt that it existed, though. Magnus refused to believe there was any world populated by humans without magic. After all, what was magic but energy and belief? Both of which would persevere as long as humans did.
 
 
“Rapid O.R. 2,” paged over the intercom. Suddenly doors were popping open and previously deserted halls were alive with people in a rainbow of scrubs who all seemed to be heading in the same general direction, so he followed along with the rest of the human bodies pressed in close on all sides. “This feels like the first time I visited Tokyo in the 70s,” he shouted in Alec’s general direction.
 
“What?”
 
“Oh, never mind,” he said and let the current sweep him towards what he presumed were the operating rooms, where the intercom told him things had deteriorated into a code blue. Each way he turned, people seemed to know what they were supposed to be doing. Finally, he arrived and shoved through the crowd. He saw that there was a line forming behind the person doing compressions and after each set, they seamlessly switched out without losing a beat.
 
All these disparate people -- from different backgrounds and places and situations -- all came together with the sole purpose of saving this stranger’s life, Magnus thought. There was a kind of magic here, too.
 
He turned when he felt a light touch on his shoulder. “I think they’re okay here,” Alec said. “We can go back to the clinic now.”
 
“Sure,” Magnus replied and realized that he actually meant to finish the workday. He found that he wanted to know this Alec to better understand his own. What parts of him were carved away by the Shadowhunter lifestyle he had led, and what parts were as intrinsic to him as the golden flecks in his hazel eyes? He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about Alec, but still, he kept surprising him.
 
And Magnus had surprised himself, too. Stripped of his background, this is what he might have been, and he found that although he hated not being with Alec, he did not hate who either of them had become in lieu of each other. It was nice to know that after so many years alive, there were still pleasant surprises that life held in store for him.
 
 

---
 
 
Oh fuck, he hated this job.
 
His white coat was crumpled beyond reason, and his tie had a bunch of mysterious stains splattered over its purple paisley. How could so many people spew so many foul liquids from each and every orifice? At some point, he’d snagged Alec’s shirt and pulled him behind a curtain. “I think I’m out of my depth."

Alec’s eyebrows tried to crawl into his hairline. “Okay, remember what you told me?”
 
“Refresh my memory.”
 
“When in doubt, prescribe ibuprofen 600. Unless they’re peeing blood.”
 
“Right,” Magnus said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
 
Alec cheerfully handed Magnus a clipboard, which he reluctantly accepted.
 
“Would you like to see the patient in exam room 3?”
 
“I could think of nothing I would like to do less,” Magnus had answered truthfully.
 
Now, after a grueling twelve-hour day, Magnus wanted to go home and sleep for a lean twelve more hours but could not yet think of an elegant way to ask someone where he might live, and he was far too tired for any in-depth sleuthing. So, he waved goodbye at Alec and shuffled towards the on-call room, praying that whatever misdeeds sometimes took place there, were either absent or else the amorous couple did not care if Magnus snored loudly next to them.
 
He was in luck, he supposed. There was someone on the bottom bunk that appeared to be sleeping so Magnus kicked off his running shoes and took the top bunk, belly-crawling towards the center of the bed. He didn’t even bother taking off his coat before he grabbed the pillow and bunched it up beneath his head. He ought to make a plan for tomorrow, but he was asleep before he could even finish that thought.
 
 

---
 
 
When he woke up, he was tangled in a long drape of fabric. Magnus pulled it off, but it kept going. Worse, it seemed to be attached to him. He gave up with a groan. Magnus had trouble remembering what had led him here, exactly, to an unfamiliar bed, wearing what appeared to be a dress.
 
While it wasn’t the most compromising position in which he’d woken up, it was the most embarrassing that he could recall for quite some time. He rolled out of the bed and stepped onto worn, creaky hardwood, hobbling towards what he desperately hoped was a bathroom.
 
His dress, as it turned out, was actually a garishly purple cape. Whatever he’d been doing the previous night, he sincerely hoped it was worth the massive hangover he was suffering from this morning.
 
The bathroom tile was cold against his bare feet and he wiggled his toes for a moment, willing his headache to pass. He was afraid to look at himself in the mirror above the pedestal sink, but he might as well get it over with. He raised his head, leaning against the white porcelain, and blinked. Then raised a hand to touch the outline of the thick black leather mask that covered the top of his face and ended above his mouth.
 
“Holy fuck,” he whispered to his equally astonished and hungover reflection. “I think I’m Batman."
 
 

Chapter Text

Magnus was staring at himself in shock when the sharp click of heels hitting the floor grabbed his attention. “Hello?” he croaked out, clutching his cape to himself, then hastily dropping it. While he did harbor vague regrets about the capelet going out of style in the late 1800s, he was not prepared for silk purple today. No one was ever properly prepared for silky purple.

“Isabelle?” Magnus asked, peeking his head around the corner cautiously. 

She raised an eyebrow in his direction as she slid the balcony door closed behind her. “Exactly how hard did you hit your head?” She was wearing a red leather catsuit that she looked way too good in, and she walked like she knew it. 

Magnus licked his dry, cracked lips, already harboring vague regrets that Alexander was not to play the Catwoman to his Batman in this universe. Regardless, she did raise a valid point: Now that he thought about it, he had been both hungover and concussed in tragically recent memory and this pounding behind his eyeballs did fall more to the concussed spectrum of misery. “What if I told you that I was from another dimension?”

Izzy glanced over him appraisingly as she stood in the center of his tiny studio apartment, looking formidable and elegant, while Magnus’ apartment was decorated like he faithfully clipped Kmart coupons from the Sunday paper. “I would say that we needed to get to the hospital right now.” 

“I just came from there,” Magnus replied sullenly. 

Izzy crossed the room terrifyingly quickly and shoved her way into the bathroom behind him.

“Hey,” he mumbled. Up close, she was wearing a mask that covered just around her eyes, and beneath that, he could see thick winged black eyeliner. Beneath Magnus’ mask, he was sporting a lump on his head, and what appeared to be grease paint smeared around his eyes that gave off distinct sad clown vibes. 

This universe was not going at all how he had hoped.

For a playboy billionaire who masqueraded as a flying rodent, his bathroom was shockingly small. Magnus looked around haplessly. And shockingly dingy.

“Am I not Batman?” he asked finally.

From where he could see her peering into the mirror over his right shoulder, he watched her lips press together in a firm line. “Hospital, now.”

Magnus held up his hands placatingly, deciding that when the truth didn’t work, might as well tell a big-ass whopper of a lie. “I’m serious – I just came from there and it’s a concussion with some short-term amnesia.” 

Izzy’s lush mouth was made for subtle grins and seduction; worried paranoia looked all wrong on her.  Come on , Magnus thought,  just believe the crazy guy. 

Just then, a glint of gold on his left ear caught his eye and Magnus spun around to peer at himself in horror. A gold hoop. Magnus was  outraged . What was he in this universe, a poor gay pirate Batman?

In the mirror, Magnus anxiously watched her expression melt from suspicion and alarm to mere alarm.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked finally.

“—fighting crime?” Magnus hazarded, tugging anxiously on his pirate hoop. True, he could go to the hospital here but there wasn’t anything wrong with him other than being a semi-immortal son a Prince of Hell who was currently hurtling through various dimensions in no discernable order.

He did not see how that would help his current situation.

“That doesn’t narrow it down.”

“—fighting crime on the street?” At Izzy’s unimpressed expression, Magnus blew out a hard breath and admitted, “Okay, I remember my name.”

Izzy slumped forward against his shoulder. “Oh, my god,” she groaned. “The General is not going to be pleased.”

“The general?”

“Our boss, Magnus. The woman who’s going to rip me a new asshole the moment she finds out I let one of her precious commodities get damaged.”

Magnus did not like the look of the peel-and-stick linoleum tile that lined the tiny bathroom, and he liked the sound of this general even less. “Maybe we don’t need to tell her.”

Izzy’s eyes narrowed, meeting his own terrified, bloodshot gaze in the smudgy mirror. “What do you have in mind?”

“This is going to be temporary, right?” Magnus said, thinking quickly. Of course, she assumed he was talking about the amnesia, while Magnus was busy saying an internal prayer of thanks that he would skip out of this dimension faster than Jace and Clary liked to jump to conclusions. “Maybe you can just fill me in on what I’m missing until my memory comes back and then no one will be the wiser?” It was a long shot, but he’d just finished an entire day convincing a tight-assed type-a version of Alec to let him practice medicine for which he was woefully underqualified. He felt like he could do anything. 

But then again, between Alec and Izzy, Alec had a far tougher shell that surrounded a far more gooey center. Though he would rather die than admit it, Alexander wasn’t built to be mean -- he couldn’t stay angry at people he loved, other people’s happiness was always at the forefront of his mind. Magnus felt a sharp pang at the thought of Alec; he missed him terribly.

Izzy was chewing her lip, deep in thought, when a shrill alarm sounded. She immediately grabbed a phone and began scrolling through the messages.

“That is a terrible alarm clock.”

“Shut up, there’s a robbery on.” Izzy tapped a few buttons and slid her phone back into the old man's phone holster attached to her belt. 

“If you need to get that,” Magnus said, turning to face her again, “I can just stay here.”

And research what the hell is going on, he added silently. He wanted to go back to his own dimension and make things right with Alec. Go to bed, fight again, and make up again. What was the saying about only properly appreciating things when they were gone? He desperately hoped his own life wasn’t out of his reach forever.

“No way I’m letting you out of my sight,” Izzy said and grabbed the back of his cape, yanking him out of the bathroom and towards the balcony. Christ, she was strong.

She dragged him through the sliding glass door and onto a depressingly small concrete balcony with rusted wrought-iron railing. 

“Bring your wallet,” Izzy threw over her shoulder as she gracefully jumped onto the balcony railing and waited there for Magnus.

She tossed his wallet at him, which he caught reflexively. He hadn’t even seen her pick it up.

“And where would you like me to store it?” He waved his hands, indicating the entirety of his spandex suit. “Clenched between my buttcheeks?”

“There’s an idea.”

He rolled his eyes and tucked it in the front of his suit. It made him look like he had lopsided boobs, but he could live with that.

In the meantime, he had sidled up the railing and curiously peered down the side, which was an impressive twelve stories up. Oh, God. He was definitely going to die.

Magnus had never been particularly afraid of heights but then, he’d never been so assured that they were about to kill him. He supposed anything that had the power to kill you was fair game for fear: he did not fancy the idea of a thousand papercuts, either. 

“I think I’ll take the stairs,” he said. Beneath him, the city wavered menacingly. He was pretty sure he was no longer in Brooklyn. There was far too much concrete and resignation. 

Though he hadn’t had the opportunity to check, Magnus was mostly sure that this decrepit shithole he called an apartment did not have a working elevator. Magnus did not enjoy the prospect of twenty-four flights of stairs in any dimension.  

Izzy made an impatient sound; her leather catsuit creaked in an equally angry manner. “C’mon, you’ve made this jump a thousand times. It’s muscle memory by now. Besides, I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

So, death it was to be then.

“I don’t see what we have against the stairs," he grumbled, climbing onto the railing and looking down at the gridlocked traffic below. 

That was a mistake, he decided a second later, feeling distinctly woozy yet again. 

Izzy grabbed his elbow and shook it. “Come on, let go.”

Let go, indeed. 

Let go of expectation, let go of fear, let go of control. Magnus had been fighting for control his whole life; Alec had shattered it, showing him that control was an illusion, the opposite of love, the opposite of living. Control was a lie, and it was a cage. That lesson had stayed with him, even if Alexander had not.

With that, Magnus closed his eyes and leaped. 

And if he screamed like a young, frightened child on the way down, that was between him and this godforsaken city.

----

In the end, as far as he could tell, it was a simple bank heist gone wrong. Magnus did manage not to die a horrible, messy death, surprising himself most of all. He supposed the hotdog vendor that he’d crashed into might feel differently about his ranking, but Magnus wasn’t taking a poll. 

At the last minute, with the ground rushing towards him, his instincts kicked in and he stretched out his arms, activating a set of mechanical wings, and began gliding up and forward, easy as can be, as if a moment ago he hadn’t been a hairsbreadth away from soiling his spandex. Izzy met him on the roof of the adjacent building, the wind whipping her long dark hair around her face. She was peering down at the shorter building next to them where alarm bells were sounding. 

“See?” she said, grinning widely and turning towards him. She seemed unsurprised to find him landing behind her, face red and wheezing with a perplexing mix of adrenaline and fear. 

Magnus finally put his arms down, marveling at the soft hiss and mechanical click of the wings folding back into place to join the bevy of contraptions hidden behind his cape. He finally felt only very slightly vindicated; Batman couldn’t fly at least. “What if I wasn’t able to…glide?” Flying wasn’t quite the right word for what Magnus had done, but it also wasn’t like he’d been playing a leisurely game of pinochle on a geriatric cruise ship, either.

“You always said that it’s more difficult on days that weren’t as windy, but that’s what the jet propulsion pack’s for.” She shrugged and turned back to study the bank. “The suit takes care of it for you – it senses if there’s a precipitous drop in your elevation. I knew nothing would really happen to you.”

“You could have told me that before I fell eleven and a half feet,” Magnus grumbled. And crushed at least half a dozen hotdogs, he mentally added.

Regardless of what he’d been told, apparently, he wouldn’t have died either way because he had an apparent government-issued suit that made sure it kept his fool ass alive. It was both good and a little disappointing to know.

“So,” Magnus said carefully, “I don’t actually have any superpowers?”

Izzy snorted. “You’re a super pain in the ass, does that count?”

“No,” Magnus replied smugly, “I can do that even without powers.”

Izzy laughed. “You’ve got…stamina, to put it bluntly.”

Magnus felt like the human equivalent of a raised eyebrow. “Pardon? Stamina?”

“Aside from the obvious, you don’t tire of running or fighting or flying, or anything else you might be doing. As best as we can tell, it has something to do with your cells.”

“Isabelle,” Magnus said slowly, “have you studied me?”

He didn’t know why he was so delighted to find out that she was a woman of science in every dimension, other than it felt right. She was so often reduced to her beauty that it was gratifying to learn that whatever the circumstances, she was still brilliant. 

“As much as they’ll let me. You’re the asset; I’m your handler. I need to have a general idea of how your body works to best manage you. Your cells – They keep pace with you. Your muscles don’t break down, and you don’t go into rhabdomyolysis or hypertrophy. From what I can tell, your body just—exists – regardless of whatever else you may be doing.”

Magnus suppressed a wince. Self-pity was a deeply unattractive quality but, in a universe where people could presumably lift cars and fly, simply existing wasn’t the most exciting superpower to be gifted with. On a scale of general excitement, it ranked up there with being supernaturally hairy or supernaturally sweaty.

Izzy seemed to be done with the conversation for now, though. She had her finger pressed to a small earpiece that Magnus hadn’t noticed before, and she was describing what she was seeing. “Two armed males on the west side, visible from the second window from E. 38th.”

Magnus tried to visualize what she was seeing but had no luck. It just looked like aggressive blobs to him. Possibly with a hostage blob. How was he a superhero and Izzy, who could jump unhesitatingly off a twelfth-floor balcony and apparently see with eagle-eyed clarity inside brick buildings, only be his handler?

“Damn,” Izzy cursed, voice low. “There are Supers in there.”

“How can you tell?”

“Body heat signatures. When we use our powers, we expend more energy.”

“Causing our bodies to heat up,” Magnus concluded. “Can you tell what their powers are?” 

Possibly, they were on their side. If not, hopefully, their powers were as lame as his own. What if one had the power to be really, really sleepy? Or better yet, really slow, and all Magnus had to do was hold out his foot and wait for them to trip?

“Can’t know without going in.” The gravel crunched beneath her boot as she shifted from side to side. She grabbed his arm. “Stay here. I’m going in.”

“I will not,” Magnus insisted. He didn’t know why; Magnus did not actually want to go in headfirst into danger with his superpower of like, existing, but one thing that was true of him across all universes: Magnus generally tried to help. He just couldn’t say no to someone in need, apparently unless that person in need was himself and was internally screaming for him to shut up.

“Fine, okay,” Izzy said with a sigh and shook his arm a little like a naughty toddler. “But stay where I put you, and don’t get into any trouble.”

“I will be so quiet, you won’t even know I’m there,” Magnus promised, fingers crossed behind his back. He never did intend to get into trouble, but trouble always had a way of finding him.

“It’s my job to know where you are.”

Magnus frowned. That was the third time she’d said something to that effect. What exactly did being a handler entail? “That seems like a pretty bad job for you.”

“It’s what I was built for.”

Now was not the time for that discussion, but they would be talking about it later. Magnus filed that horrible statement away, too busy at the moment following her into a building where he was only 25% sure that he would meet his untimely demise.

Do not go gentle into that good night, he thought and said a little prayer, even though he had no clue if god existed in this universe or any others.

---

The inside of the bank was marble, pale yellow, and deeply veined in shades of rust and brown. Everything that could reasonably be gilt, was. It was terribly gaudy and nouveau riche; he was certain that Lorenzo Rey would spontaneously ejaculate upon walking in.

Izzy left him on the second floor and said she was going to scope out the third. She told him twice to stay exactly where she left him, so as soon as he heard her turn the corner, he went exploring. He could see that on the opposite end of the corridor was a curving staircase, one of two that curled inwards, leading down to a great lobby area with a desk at the front. 

He saw the rope tied to the railing before he knew what it meant. 

Strung in between the staircases, hanging upside down and blindfolded, was a tightly bound man. It reminded Magnus a bit of a reverse Saint Sebastian, especially with the darkly hooded figure standing on the opposite upper railing, holding a bow and arrow pointed down directly at the man.

Even without seeing his face, Magnus would recognize Alec anywhere, through a dozen years and a thousand universes. 

This version was currently balanced on the top of the banister, arrow nocked and ready. Magnus was no math whiz, but Alec was, and he did not have to imagine that the arrow was pointed directly at the man’s heart. Alec’s arm was shaking, and he was swaying where he stood. Everything about this was all wrong.

Magnus felt his own heart break just a little. “Alexander.”

The arrow swung towards him, before dropping, just a little. “Magnus,” Alec said, “you shouldn’t be here.” His voice sounded ragged, tired.

“Oh, my Love,” Magnus said sadly, “neither should you. Not like this.”

Alec lowered his bow, releasing the tension on the arrow entirely. He pulled back his hood so that the single lamp on the desk caught the outline of his profile. His dark hair was sweaty, plastered to his skull, and his eyes glittered, fever-bright. He was pale with purple-black smudges beneath his eyes; he looked like he hadn’t slept in a month. 

Magnus could only ask, “Why?”

“You know why,” Alec said. 

Magnus wanted his hands twitch and tremble, his fingers tapping out a silent rhythm against the leg of his black jeans, a silent song that only he knew. Alec looked like he could shatter apart at any moment. Magnus knew the feeling.

“People like him—” Alec pointed to the man still dangling from ropes “—they worked with the General to destroy us. They made us this way.”

Magnus was so stupid and so unprepared for this conversation. He didn’t know what Alexander was talking about or who this General was, but what Alec was doing was wrong on every level.

“This isn’t the answer,” Magnus said, swallowing painfully, and shaking his head. “It never is.”

There was a time when his own Alexander might have felt justified in killing a person. Magnus was well familiar with the casual cruelty Shadowhunters could sometimes display, both to Downworlders and to each other. And to be brutally honest, Alec might still if the person were awful enough and there was no other solution. For all that Alec believed in peace, he was still a soldier. It was a truth that Magnus’ mind had shied away from many times – he loved too many Shadowhunters to look at what they were fully in the eye. And maybe they took pains to hide it from him and maybe he just didn’t want to acknowledge it. Magnus couldn’t say, but he couldn’t avoid it now. It was standing in front of him, twitching and unkempt, a hair’s breadth away from killing a man who he’d felt wronged him in some way.

If there was anything of faith left in him that had been whole, untouched by learning that he and Alec weren’t meant to be together in every dimension, seeing this particular shattered version of his beautiful Alexander, broke what might have remained. 

Alexander, he thought, what has this world done to you?

Magnus didn’t have the chance to ask, though, because blue and red lights were flashing through the windows, bathing the room in flickering colors. He looked back towards the windows to check how close they were and then turned back to Alec, but he was gone.

Chapter Text

When he exited the building, it was surrounded by cops. And just beyond the line of caution tape roping the area off, Izzy was standing and tapping a booted foot against the pavement while filing one of her sharp red fingernails and looking bored. She didn’t look up as he approached. “Did you have a good talk with Alec?” She tucked her file away in her utility belt.

She was a menace, Magnus decided. “You knew?”

She tapped her headset meaningfully. “Heat sensor, remember?”

Of course. Izzy always seemed to be three steps ahead of him. 

“You were supposed to protect me with your life, Isabelle.” He looked meaningfully at her. “Even if it meant taking a bullet for me, or five.”

A grin tugged at the corner of her mouth. “And ruin my shoes? Never.” Izzy turned, weaving through the crowds of officers and onlookers. “Besides, he would never hurt you. Even half-crazed and hearing voices, you’re still the most important thing to him.”

He desperately wanted to know about Alec, but in the middle of a crowd hardly seemed to be the place. He weaved through the crowd, who couldn’t have been less interested in him if he were handing out fliers for the tenth local Chinese buffet. 

 “We’ll have a debriefing with the general in the morning,” Izzy called out, shouldering people out of her way. Between his earlier hotdog massacre and Isabelle’s blatant disregard for personal space or pedestrian safety, Magnus supposed they could take out a whole city block with their combined powers of chaotic destruction.

“Tell me about this general,” Magnus said, running to keep up, dodging the dazed individuals she left in her wake.

“Oh,” Izzy said with a sigh, crossing the street and stepping up onto the curb. “She’s tough to describe. Maryse—”

“Maryse Lightwood ?”

Izzy seemed genuinely puzzled, when she said, “Well, yeah.”

“She’s your mother.”

 “Only strictly speaking.”

“My dear, is there any other way?” Magnus said, trying not to raise his voice. They were already making enough of a scene, though admittedly, less than Magnus had secretly hoped for.  

“It’s just genetics.” Izzy shrugged and turned the corner. “Mmmmm. There’s this little place that serves these huge strombolis for cheap. They’re so big that the corners poke out of the takeout boxes.”

Magnus was watching the passing people on the sidewalk who couldn’t give a rat’s flying ass that two superheroes were on the hunt for massive inexpensive Italian food.

“Shouldn’t we be, like, wearing glasses?”

“Why?" She gave him a puzzled look.

“To, you know, disguise ourselves.” He looked at her looking back at him silently for a moment. “I don’t need to go to the hospital,’ he said too defensively. 

“I’m still deciding about that.” She stopped at a door, which was sporting a closed sign that looked like it had been making its silent declaration for at least a month. There was a long crack spiderwebbing across a window that had the day’s specials written across it in garish fluorescent marker. 

“Damnit.” She kicked the brick beside the door and a little shower of red dust sprayed across the sidewalk. “Well, any other ideas? I’m famished. I need a lot of food for cheap. Unless you have money?”

Magnus tapped his swollen left bosom, where his wallet was safely and conspicuously tucked away. “Sorry, used all the cash I had paying for some hot dogs.”

“I’m going to assume that was a euphemism, and not ask questions.”

Manus spluttered, “It was not .” 

“Where's all your money, Magnus?”

“I only had a couple of twenties, where’s yours?”

“We’re government employees, the pay is shit,” Izzy explained. “At least you invested in some IBM stock early, Grandpa. I have six roommates.”

“Look, the hotdog stand I crashed into served chilidogs and chili cheese fries,” Manus offered. “And I’m talking about actual hotdogs and not some sordid and terrible euphemism for male genitalia.” Magnus shuddered a bit; there were some sentences that he’d never wanted to utter in any dimension, ever. 

“Perfect.” Izzy spun around and began crossing the street, heading back towards Magnus’ apartment.

Horns were honking and drivers were yelling at her as she brought traffic to a screeching halt. In a thousand years, he had not pictured this being the life of a superhero. There was no anonymity here; everyone knew who he was and regarded him with the same vague annoyance that everybody in DC seemed to reserve for innocent bystanders.

When he caught up to her, she wasn’t even winded. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “We’re going to have to come up with something to tell the General tomorrow that won’t get both our asses thrown into the brig.”

“So, this General—” He stumbled over the title; no matter how weirdly stilted their relationship with their mother had been in the beginning, Izzy and Alec’s relationship with Maryse never felt anything other than familial. This felt transactional in a way that left Magnus feeling cold.

Izzy crossed the street again while Magnus scurried after her, throwing apologetic looks at furious drivers. “Maryse Lightwood was the seventh generation and I'm a ninth. They’ve been trying to replicate and improve you.”

Magnus almost stopped in his tracks. “Me?”

Izzy grinned at him, her long hair swaying behind her. “You're second gen. Your mom was a super, too, the first generation. Probably the first real one they had. And then you were born and you're  you —"

Not that great, Magnus mentally supplied. But his head was still swimming with the onslaught of information. And the mention of his mother. It had been a long time since that particular hurt had haunted him, but only through sheer force of will. If there was anything that his jaunts through different realities had taught him, it was that some hurts were too great to heal. Some could only be managed. 

Magnus did stop then and grabbed Izzy’s arm. “Wait, if I can’t get tired, can I age?”

Izzy blinked at him and laughed happily. “Now you’re getting it. You stopped aging about forty years ago.”

Great. In every dimension, he was a geriatric chasing after jailbait. “Can I die?”

Izzy stopped smiling then, her face growing serious. “I don’t know,” she said finally. 

It wasn’t that the idea bothered him; in his own dimension, he’d made peace with his immutability, but he also knew that there were many worse things than death. 

“And Alec?”

“Alec is the same generation as I am.”

Magnus fought the urge to shake her, She was talking about her goddamn brother like – they were coworkers, he realized suddenly. A bunch of people genetically linked that no more saw themselves as family as the random guy from the fourth floor that sometimes used your floors’ bathroom to have his daily poop. 

Magnus didn’t know who he hurt more for – Izzy, Alec, the whole damn miserable world here. 

“Ohh,” Izzy said, “I smell canned chili!” In the history of the world, she may have been the first person to utter those words in a happy tone. She picked up her pace, spotting the terrified-looking vendor. Magnus held up his hands in silent apology and deigned to approach. Isabelle hadn’t asked him if he was hungry, but he wasn’t. He wondered if he even ate or slept. He would have to, right? For his body to maintain its bizarre homeostasis?

Izzy came back with a terrifying amount of food, all wrapped in little foil packets. Magnus held out his arms as she unloaded about half with a small grunt and then proceeded to rip open the end of one of the hotdogs with her teeth. 

Once she’d inhaled her third chili cheese dog, Magnus felt compelled to ask, “Where are you putting all this food?”

She delicately dabbed at the corner of her mouth like she hadn’t just wiped out the vendor of the remaining stock that Magnus hadn’t managed to destroy. “The energy that we expend has to come from somewhere, right?

“But you’re eating-- he privately added, an appalling -- amount of chili dogs.”

“It only provides a finite amount of emergency. Our bodies aren’t as efficient as yours.”

They weren’t discussing the amount of energy that a small nap could replenish. It was enough that the Supers in the bank had lit up like Christmas lights at midnight under a heat sensor. “What do you do when you run out of energy?” 

Her mouth turned down a little bitterly. “Eventually, our bodies just burn out. My times almost up.” She made a small motion with her hands and numbly, Magnus handed her another little foil packet, which she tore into. When she finished, she said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get a new handler. They’re probably already working on it.”

“That’s not what’s worrying me,” Magnus choked out. If he had been even remotely hungry before, he wasn’t now. In fact, he thought he might be sick all over the small patch of grass next to the sidewalk. All over the bustling city that bred and raised these humans to die for them – these humans that might have had wants, dreams, and families, if they hadn’t been weeded out of them like prize livestock. 

All day, she’d told him over and over what she was, he just hadn’t understood it. It was so wrong and tragic, but how could he explain it to this Izzy, who had managed to maintain all of her best qualities without the benefit of love? It was like trying to describe a rainbow to someone who was colorblind. “Did you ever want anything else?”

“What else can I do? I don’t have any other skills. And it’s not like I have time to learn any.”

He thought of Izzy worrying over him in his cramped bathroom, of her breaking protocol for him to have a private moment with Alec. He thought of flowers growing through cement, straining for the sun. For all that Shadowhunters could be savage, they were still individuals, and any individual could be like this: absolutely radiant. 

Like his Alexander. 

“I'm sorry,” Magnus said, though it wasn’t nearly enough to encompass the gaping sorrow in his chest, his desire to keep Isabelle close and never let her go.

“For what?” She sounded about as bothered as discussing upcoming rain. “It’s just how life is. I don't try to fight it like Alec. But then again, I never had—"

“What?”

“You,” she said simply. “I think you made the difference.” She hugged her arms around herself, but she couldn’t have been cold. Impulsively, Magnus slung his arm around her shoulders. She looked startled for a moment, then leaned into him. “See, there was another one of us, Jace. They tried experimenting by joining their powers telepathically and creating some kind of super team. And there was this theory that if one rested while the other fought, they could double their lifespan. Maybe it would have worked, but Jace met this girl.” She looked up at Magnus like she was pleading for him to understand. “We told him to be careful, but she put all these ideas in his head about shutting down our trials and freeing us, and well, you know the rest.”

He did, or at least the horrible shape of it, but he still wanted to hear it said aloud. “Tell me anyway."

“On one of their missions, Jace died while he and Alec were still psychically linked. There was already some emotional bleed through, but Jace dying just sort of created a void. Who knows what he’s filling that void with?” She licked her lips, looking at his other empty hand longingly. “I could be wrong, but I think he’s filling that void with crazy.”

Who knew what severing that connection, when they were still mentally linked, did to Alec? This was so close to the parabatai bond that Magnus had to wonder if he was looking at a terrifying version of his own future, except with a substantially better apartment. 

“He's afraid they're going to do it again,” Izzy said softly. 

“Should he be?”

“Of course," Izzy answered, that hint of bitterness back. “They always do.”

---

After dropping Isabelle off at her apartment, Magnus trudged the six blocks toward his own. 

When Alexander was sad, Magnus, thought, shucking off his horrible cape and suit, he went somewhere high. Alec always said the cooler air helped clear his head, but Magnus had always secretly thought it was his hunter’s instinct to have the high ground.

Magnus thought so even more now. 

He pulled off his mask, dropped it onto the floor, and quickly pulled on a t-shirt and soft flannel pajama bottoms.

Earlier, as Magnus had been busy falling ass-first toward a terrified hotdog vendor, he’d noticed a railing on top of his apartment building. There were no stairs leading to the roof, but eventually, he found a hidden access stairwell in a storage closet with a broken lock.

As he trudged up the stairs, he thought about everything he had learned so far. 

Magnus didn’t really believe in unconditional love, probably because he’d never seen it. He secretly thought that there should be a limit to love, some lines that could not be crossed, but as he unpleasantly discovered, the heart didn’t work like that.

There was Jace’s death, which broke Alec’s heart and shattered his mind, and then there was the government whom he loved and served and had betrayed him, betrayed his whole generation, which Magnus couldn’t even begin to process. But in the end, we are all responsible for our own actions.

Could he really love this damaged, terrible version of Alec? 

He could, he thought, and he did. Maybe he couldn’t forgive him his sins, but he could love Alexander despite them. And wasn’t that a big, terrifying thought? Everyone had always described unconditional love as something miraculous that the human heart was capable of, but no one had ever dared call it what it really was – foolish, too large to quite behold, and a little bit devastating. 

Because this Alec wasn’t so far from his own as he would like to pretend – perhaps Alexander had always had it within himself to be monstrous. His mind skidded back towards his thoughts earlier, and all the various Shadowhunters he had loved, their vicious loyalty, their innate righteousness. It had and always could be used for evil. 

But this wasn’t a trait relegated to just Shadowhunters. He could be monstrous as well, and so could everyone else, he supposed, under the right circumstances. And then there was Izzy. Beautiful Isabelle. We’re all a little monstrous, Magnus thought, and we’re all a little beautiful. He supposed it depended on who was doing the looking to decide which one prevailed.

He took the bottle of cheap black nail polish he bought on his way home and sat on one of the oversized Adirondack chairs that some enterprising soul had brought up to the roof, waiting. He didn’t have to wait long; by the time he was blowing on his painted fingernails, he heard the tell-tale crunch of boots hitting concrete covered with cigarette butts and a remarkable amount of bird shit. 

“Ah,” Magnus said, still blowing carefully on his nails, “here comes the villain origin story I’ve been working on."

“What makes you so sure that you’re the hero?” Alec asked. He sounded exhausted, utterly scraped raw. 

“I was talking about myself,” Magnus said simply. He was currently employed by the government entity that bred and killed humans like cattle, what other word was there for him other than a villain?

Alec’s fingers twitched and his head tilted like he was trying to listen to something far off, just out of earshot.

Taking a chance, Magnus stepped forward enough to tug Alec closer, to wrap him in his arms. “Stay with me, Alexander,” Magnus pleaded, though if he was talking to this version or his own counterpart, he couldn’t really say. 

Alec practically melted into him. “I can’t live like this,” Alec moaned, fingers twisted into Magnus’ shirt, helplessly opening and closing. 

If souls were real -- and Magnus fervently believed that they were – then Alec’s had essentially been cleaved into two at the moment that Jace died, and though Jace wasn’t his favorite, he couldn’t imagine a world without him. His heart ached with the loss, too, and it had to be a fraction of what Alec felt. 

“He still talks to me,” Alec said. “And I keep getting stuck over and over in that moment, reliving it.”

It just kept getting worse.

“I know, my love,” Magnus said anyway, combing his fingers through Alec’s greasy, lank hair.

“I can’t, I can’t—” Alec said, practically panting. 

What would Magnus say, what would he do, if his Alexander ever came to him and told him that he could not live this way, if death would be a mercy? His body went cold and numb at the mere thought of it, and he had to close his eyes and catch his breath. 

Alec cried out then, pitching forward, hard enough that it made Magnus’ knees twinge in his effort of keeping them both upright. “Alexander!”

He clutched at Alec’s chest, cradling him as he dragged him back toward the chairs. He lowered them both until Alec’s torso lay across his lap, his head cradled on his left thigh. When Magnus touched Alec’s cheek, he’d expected it to be cold, and clammy, but Alec was feverish-hot, burning up from the inside out. It was just like Izzy; Alec was out of time. He must have known it when he showed up and he’d chosen to spend the end of his life with Magnus. 

Magnus held Alec tighter in his arms and let out a low moan. A distant part of him could hear himself; he sounded like a wounded, dying animal. It was a primal sound that mourned the loss of everyone in this dimension: Izzy, Alec, Jace, and even Maryse, who should not have existed this way with her dark, kind eyes that looked so much like Izzy’s.

Alec reached out to grab Magnus’ hand, his grip white-knuckled and painful. But it was okay; this moment should hurt. A trickle of red dripped from Alec's ear onto the cement, staining it.

“Once we die out,” Alec said through chapped, colorless lips, “they’re just going to keep making us, treating humans like we’re disposable. What’s right about that?”

“Nothing,” Magnus answered, “nothing is right about this world at all.”

“I think…you should re-think the…eye grease,” Alec gasped out. “It’s not the best look.”

It surprised Magnus so much that it wrenched a startled laugh from him.

Alec grinned up at him; his teeth were covered with a thin film of blood that stained his gums and made his lips look vivid red, a bloody gash across his face.

Magnus kissed him anyway, his lips coppery-tasting and rough. He kissed this Alec goodbye because somewhere out there, maybe in his reality or bouncing around multiple dimensions like himself, this world’s Magnus wasn’t able to do so. 

His eyelids felt heavy as the sun dipped below the horizon. Despite himself, he was relieved that he did not have to watch Alec pass, even if it wasn’t his version. Magnus couldn’t stand the thought of Alec being alone in his final moments, but one thing he’d learned about himself here was that he was no hero. There were some things that he just couldn’t make himself do and watching the light fade from Alexander’s eyes was one of them. 

He felt a sob wrenched from his chest and the setting sun blurred into large swathes of pink and orange. Across the street, Magnus could see graffiti, a fist raised in protest with the words, “Revolution is an act of hope.”

Change was in the air; he could nearly taste it. Maybe he had inadvertently helped move this world along by falling in love with Alec, maybe Jace falling in love with Clary was the impetus. Maybe none of it mattered at all, he supposed. But he hoped it was true. It seemed fitting somehow that small acts of love could eventually lead to a revolution.

Alec’s breath was rattling, and Magnus held him close as he closed his eyes—

---

The first thing he saw was a hideous paisley brocade. No, scratch that. The first thing he actually saw was the darting lines of the road flashing by, highlighted by the fog lights of the car. He’d fallen asleep against a car window and his breath made little puffs of clouds against the cold glass.

The questionable fabric belonged to a smoking jacket Ragnor was wearing. Along with leather driving gloves. 

Schubert was playing on the radio as the car ate up the asphalt, a pleasant purr beneath him.

Ragnor was driving, hands on ten and two.

Magnus’ mouth tasted like ass, and he should know. He’d tasted actual ass before. “Where are we going,” he croaked out.

“I got a call a couple of hours ago about a possible poltergeist up in Maryland. Kids are home from college for fall break and it sounds like all hell broke loose.”

“Poltergeist?”

“Saving people, hunting things. That’s what we do,” Ragnor said smugly. 

“Oh, this sucks,” Magnus managed and passed back out.

Chapter Text

They stopped for gas and coffee at a 7-11, the taste just as awful and shocking as the fact that Ragnor even knew what a gas station was. Every itineration of Ragnor that Magnus was familiar with generally regarded petrol as peasant nonsense. 

Magnus smacked his sticky lips, unconvinced that he hadn’t accidentally mixed up the coffee and the gasoline.

 Ragnor donned his driving gloves and pulled out of the parking lot.

“What in the James Bond hell?” Magnus murmured, squinting out at the darkness rushing past his window. “Where in the world are we going?” Magnus slouched down into the passenger side, the leather seat creaking beneath him. 

“We’ve still got two states to drive through,” Ragnor answered. “Luckily, they’re not the horridly large ones that circle this infernal country. But it’s still going to be a while and you might as well get some rest, old friend.”

Magnus grabbed the paper cup blearily and winced as the thickened sludge hit his tongue. In theory, it could keep you alive, but at what cost?

Magnus still had a thousand questions to ask, none of which were particularly useful, and against his better judgment, he felt his eyelids closing as the car ate up the road before them.

 ---

He woke up to the sound of gravel crunching under the wheels as Ragnor pulled into the gracefully swooping circular driveway of a turn-of-the-century home with a peeling clapboard exterior. It was surrounded on all sides by tall oak trees in various stages of decomposition, and no, it didn’t look scary as shit at all. 

This was totally going to be super okay. Magnus pulled his jacket tighter against the chill that ran through his body as he followed Ragnor to the front of the house.

Despite the fact that he had just left a universe where everyone had goddamn superpowers, Magnus still wasn’t prepared for who answered. 

The door opened and there was Maryse, hair down and soft around her shoulders and wearing leggings and a stained sweatshirt.

Her feet were bare, toenail polish chipped. It was, Magnus thought, an odd little detail to notice but as long as he had known her, he could not ever recall seeing her bare feet. It was oddly vulnerable and touchingly human. it made Magnus ache in a strange way, and he felt fiercely protective of her and her messy feet. 

Oh dear, his mind had finally cracked.

“Hello, madame,” Ragnor said imperiously like he was announcing the queen. “We are the famed duo known as the Ghostfacers.”

Ghostfacers?  Magnus mouthed the name in silent horror.

Maryse’s eyebrows shot up, and her mouth twitched. “Believe me, I know who you are. I never thought I’d have to call you, but please, come in.”

“From your message,” Ragnor continued as if he wasn’t spouting utter nonsense, “you’re hearing voices, and things are being moved?”

Magnus found himself in a spacious kitchen and in the center of the room, there was a tiled island with a copper kettle on. “It started as soon as we moved in, but it got really bad as soon as my children came home from college break—" She was interrupted by the high whine on the kettle, and she turned it off. “Tea?”

“That would be lovely,” Ragnor answered for them both. 

Maryse grabbed some mugs from the cabinets and milk from the refrigerator. 

Behind him, Ragnor made a slight choking sound when Maryse splashed some milk into the cups before adding a tea bag and topping it up with hot water. 

Maryse grinned softly and set a cup down in front of each of them. “My son says I do it in the wrong order too.”

“Alexander?” Magnus asked breathlessly. Ragnor shot him an amused look like Magnus must have gone slightly daft, but he was curious to see where it led, regardless. 

“Who?” Maryse asked, looking delicately puzzled. “My son’s name is Jace.” She gestured to a picture on the wall of herself sandwiched in between two children – a young blond Jace, smiling beatifically at the camera, and supremely irritated-looking Maia. 

“Your children-“ Magnus said, at an utter loss.

“Are lovely,” Ragnor smoothly interjected before kicking Magnus under the table. 

Magnus swallowed his yelp and glared back at Ragnor, who sipped his tea pointedly with his pinky out.

“Robert and I couldn’t have children, so we adopted Jace, then Maia a few years later. They both go to Northwestern, but they’re on fall break now.” She smiled, but it was a thin, wan thing. “My ex and I just got divorced and the kids have been helping me move into this house.” She wrapped her hands around her mug but didn’t bother drinking. “The sounds began the first night I spent here. Tapping on the windows, voices whispering just out of earshot.”

“Have you felt any cold areas? Smelled rotting eggs?”

Magnus could not be entirely certain what they were doing in this universe but he was getting a vague idea, and he didn’t particularly like it.

Maryse shrugged, looking apologetic. “It’s an old, drafty house, and plenty of strange smells. I can’t think of any one instance, though. When the kids came home, it all seemed to grow more intense. I hear—crying, it sounds like crying, sometimes arguments. Sometimes glass shatters, but I never find anything broken.”

“Has anything ever tried to hurt you?” Magnus asked. He’d seen the movies. He knew where this was going.

She shook her head. “No, never. The house just feels – sad? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel like I can’t catch my breath. Like there’s a weight on my chest.”

“Fascinating,” Ragnor said, draining his glass and setting it down. “Would you mind if we took a look around the house on our own?”

“Help yourself,” Maryse said. “It’s why I called you. I need to get some work down anyway.” She gestured towards a set of French doors on the opposite wall. “If you need me, I’ll be in my office.”

Magnus followed Ragnor outside. “What are you thinking?” Ragnor asked, tossing the question over his shoulder. His shoes crunched on the gravel, keys jangling in hand. 

While Magnus had not ever been a ghost hunter, he’d consumed a great deal of media, and endless days of tumbling through universes had made him decidedly quick on his feet. “I think,” Magnus said, “that we have a lot of work in store for us.”

“Agreed,” Ragnor said grimly, and Magnus gave himself a silent pat on the back. Undeniably strong, yet progressively vague opinions hadn’t steered him wrong, yet.

Ragnor popped open the trunk, crammed full of a small arsenal of increasingly dangerous-looking items. He picked up a small device that looked not unlike a Geiger counter with a tire iron. Oh good, Magnus thought to himself, now they were prepared to detect radioactivity and change a tire in equal measure. Where else might this fascinating whirlwind of activity take him now? Exorcising the local demons from the nearest nuclear reactor?

He handed Magnus the Geiger counter, which he seemed to be under the false impression that Magnus knew how to operate. Magnus wordlessly followed Ragnor back into the house, pressing random buttons on it until it made a shrill squeal of protest. “Argh!” Magnus said, nearly dropping it. 

“Having trouble?” Ragnos asked, turning back towards him, a single eyebrow raised. 

“No,” Magnus lied, feeling sweat break out over his upper lip. If he was going to die here today, he at least planned to do it with some dignity. Or if not, at least not giving Ragnor the satisfaction of knowing he was terrified.

Magnus had lived through worse for dumber reasons.

“Right,” Ragnor said and stepped into the house. “Let me know if you see any activity.”

“Of course,” Magnus replied severely, though he was mostly only severely confused as to what the ever-loving hell he was even doing here. He tapped on the of the machine threateningly. 

They crossed the living room, still haphazardly filled with neatly labeled moving boxes, and down a narrow hallway lined with closed doors that presumably led towards depressingly undersized rooms. Ragnor turned the knob of the first room easily, pushing it open to reveal a small room with deep navy-colored walls filled with the sharp tang of fresh paint, the breeze from an open window, the white curtains blowing inwards, and all undercut by a distinctly feet-y odor.

Magnus sniffed. “I definitely smell the evil.”

“I think that’s just the general stench of a teenage boy,” Ragnor replied, stepping in further.

They just moved in, Magnus marveled, how could it already smell so bad? In his hand, the Geiger counter started squealing. 

“EMF,” Ragnor muttered, “concentrated in this area.” He raised his tire iron expectantly in the empty room. 

Fantastic. He was stuck in this universe with a crazy person. Electromagnetic frequency was certainly a great deal better than radioactivity, Magnus supposed, but if pressed, he doubted he could verbalize why. He would much prefer neither. 

Just then, the room started to get hazy, fog roiling around their feet, all converging on the vague figure of a girl, her mouth opened in a silent, grisly rictus grin. Magnus’ ears buzzed like he was hearing a note just out of his range, a vibration that burrowed beneath his skin and teeth, louder and louder until he could feel the pressure inwards, down into his ear canal, and towards his jaw. Distantly, he was aware he’d dropped the EMF reader and clapped his hands over his ears. He thought he was screaming, but he couldn’t tell. His nose started running and when he looked down, a spot of red blood landed on his shoe. 

Next to him, Ragnor hoisted the tire iron and gave it a wide, uncontrolled swing, cutting through the ghostly image, his own eyes lined bright red, a single drop of blood tracing a line from his eye to his chin. As abruptly as it started, it stopped. 

In the sudden quiet, Magnus couldn’t hear anything above his own shuddering breaths and the pounding in his ears. “What the fuck?” he gasped out, dropping to his knees. He rubbed a shaky hand across his face. 

He’d seen plenty of pants-shittingly scary things in his lifetime, but never on this side of the learning curve. Never this powerless. 

“Guess we found the ghost,” Ragnor said and pulled a monogrammed kerchief out of his breast pocket with a small flourish. 

Down the hall, he could hear the thud of footsteps, and then the door flung open as Maryse burst into the room. “I heard screaming.”

It was funny, Magnus had believed that this Maryse was about as far from the Maryse he knew, but when she heard screaming, her first instinct was to run towards danger instead of away from it. Perhaps they weren’t so different after all. 

“I think we’ve found the issue,” Ragnor said, delicately dabbing at his bloodied cheek. 

He always did have a talent for understatement, Magnus thought as he collapsed onto the floor sideways like a puppet with its strings cut. Lying on the dusty floor, he suddenly wished very fervently to go back a mere thirty minutes ago, when possibly being radioactive was once again the biggest immediate concern he had.

---

Ragnor was back at their hotel room sleeping off their all-night drive while Magnus was busy scanning microfiche, looking for any mention of suspicious deaths. He could, he supposed, ditch this project to work on research toward going home, but in the hierarchy of what was likely to kill him first, the murderous ghost they were currently hunting ranked a bit higher.

Besides, he at least at some idea of where to start with the murderous ghost, unlike his other issue.

For a town as old as this one, it was surprisingly boring or at least extremely secretive. The only deaths that had occurred in the last hundred years were due to old age and one unfortunate DUI incident involving a carload of teenagers, alcohol, and a host of bad decisions. 

He might have to go back further. 

Magnus leaned back in his chair, craning his neck to look around the library where there might be an information desk. He spotted it tucked in the corner where a kid was scanning books, head bent down low. 

Magnus got up with a groan, his back stiff from hours studying the deaths of Mabel and her many cats. It was winter here, and though the library had an ancient sputtering heater doing its very best, it was losing its valiant battle with the encroaching frost. Magnus was cold, had not showered in three days, and felt like his hair was limp and flagging about as much as his will to live. 

He crossed the library and rapped his knuckles on the desk, and the kid started, pulling a set of earbuds out. Magnus might have been more gracious if he didn’t feel like his mouth had become its own unique biome.

He nearly groaned out loud when the kid looked up – it was Simon, of course, it was Simon. 

“C-can I help you?” Simon asked, adjusting his thick glasses and blinking owlishly at Magnus. 

“Hey, I have a question.”

“This would be the place to ask questions,” Simon said, pointing down at the Information sign printed in big bold letters across the front.

“God, okay, the microfiche only goes back about 80 years – and I think I need to go back further.”

“Yeah?” Simon asked, looking puzzled. “Any particular timeframe? I mean, you could check all of it, but it’s like, a lot.”

Magnus shrugged helplessly. Of course, it was a lot; he’d spent most of the morning and a great deal of the afternoon combing through the whole useless lot. “Unfortunately, not really? But I could narrow it down to area if that would help.”

“Maybe? Let me look.” He logged onto the ancient library computer, fingers flying across the keyboard. Simon always did have weird moments of usefulness; Alec had called him an idiot savant more than a few times for a reason.

Magnus leaned against the desk and rested his eyes. He always did like the mechanical pitter patter of keyboards; it reminded him fondly of evenings spent working alongside Alexander, Alec typing furiously on some budget report while he scratched along with a quill on parchment. Though an unlikely combination, it had become endemic to the strange juxtaposition that characterized his life; Magnus couldn’t imagine it being better, more precious. Unbidden, he felt his eyes sting and he pressed the heels of his palms against them. The first universe had been sad; the second had been devastating. He was exhausted and who knew what this one had in store for him? If nothing else, he might genuinely perish from boredom. 

Magnus had spent his entire life being extraordinary, even if he didn’t always feel like it. At times, he resented it, just a little, when it made life complicated, a little more painful than it necessarily had to be. But there was no denying it -- being mundane sucked. And it was deliriously inefficient. 

The dust tickled his nose and Magnus sneezed loudly, causing Simon to jump and look up. “Are you okay, man?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Magnus said wetly, hastily wiping at his eyes and nose. “I just really love microfiche.”

Simon looked at him appraisingly. “Can’t say I share your enthusiasm, but I know someone who would.” He furiously typed some more. “Okay, what area are we looking at? Can you narrow it down to a particular city? 

“Even better, I can narrow it down to an address.” As he began rattling off the house number and street name, Simon stopped, mouth hanging open.

“You’re looking up the murder house?” He had lowered his voice to a forceful whisper, as subtle as a category four hurricane, and all the more noticeable for how out of place it was.

“What a lovely epithet,” Magnus murmured. People had died there, their lives reduced to campfire stories that drunk teenagers told to each other to get a reaction. 

“Well, it is,” Simon defended himself, having the grace to look a little embarrassed. He leaned forward, elbows on the scarred desk. “So, it’s kind of a local ghost story – apparently there was a couple that married young. The woman’s father built that house for them to move into as a wedding present. The dad? He came to visit a few weeks later. After a while, people in town started noticing that none of the neighbors heard from them for a while. Friends came by to check on the family, but they were all found in their beds with axes in their heads.”

As gruesome as the tale was, Magnus thought, it was not necessarily supernatural – crazy people had been killing others in equally crazy ways as long as people existed. As a general rule, people sucked. 

Simon was leaning so far forward that he was nearly straddling the desk. “The weird thing was? All the doors were locked – from the inside! So how did they all get axed to death inside locked bedrooms?”

“Good question,” Magnus agreed. “Has anyone moved into the house since then?”

“The murder house?”

“No, Buckingham Palace. Of course, the murder house.”

Simon chewed his lip. “Well, no, and yes, families have moved in. Haven’t heard anything about it since the last family, though. They moved out in a hurry without a peep to anyone?”

“So why now? What’s different now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Magus said quickly. “Same old murder house, you know how it is.”

“Okay,” Simon said, dragging the word out. “You know, you could stop by the city council. They might be able to give you a date and actual names.”

“Yeah, thanks for the advice,” Magnus said sincerely. Simon had probably saved him from hours of work and the subsequent loss of ten years of his life. 

After getting directions from Simon and shooting off a quick text to Ragnor, he walked towards the center of town, where a small red brick building stood with quaint white columns. For the past few hundred years of his life, Magnus had made a concentrated effort to stick to large cities – they were both more exciting and less likely to blink at strange happenings, but Magnus had forgotten how appealing small towns could be. 

Once inside, he slapped the silver bell on the desk.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” a voice yelled from the back. Magnus felt all the hairs on his arms stand up as someone came racing out of the back room. “Sorry,” he said, slightly out of breath and raking his fingers through his dark hair. He grinned crookedly at Magnus. “Trying to clean out storage in the back. Only about 90 more years of junk to go through.”

Magnus couldn’t breathe. It was Alexander, far younger than his current itineration. Magnus had not seen Alec at this age for some time. 

It reminded Magnus of meeting him all those years ago, all big doe eyes framed by long dark lashes. He was so lovely, and so very young, without the weight of time and the stressors of his life weighing heavily on his shoulders, the occasionally exhausted shuffle of his gait. 

Magnus cleared his throat, mouth suddenly gone dry. “Y-yes, I was here for some information?”

The corner of Alec’s mouth quirked. “Is that a question?”

“Should it be?” Magnus asked nonsensically.

Alec laughed softly, tucking his chin down. It was a shy move, and Magnus found he was just as charmed by it now as he was the first time he saw it. 

“I’m writing a book about hauntings—”

“You’re here to ask about the murder house,” Alec interrupted, eyes glinting mischievously. It was a good look on him. 

“Yes,” Magnus confirmed. “I was told by a rather hysterical young librarian that you might be able to provide more details.”

“Simon’s a lot,” Alec agreed. He looked around and slid his hands into his pockets, rocking back onto his heels. It was a gesture that Magnus had seen Jace make plenty of times, but never Alec. This is what he would have been like outside of the shadowhunters, outside of the pain that every other life had held for him, Magnus realized and hurt just a little for all the other versions of Alec he had met and those he never would.

Alec was wearing a loose untucked button down, sleeves rolled up, forearms corded and strong. Magnus bit his lip; he was in so much fucking trouble here. “Let’s see, there have been a couple of books written on the history of this town that I could loan you.”

“Wouldn’t the library have had copies of those?”

“Yeah, Simon’s an interfering asshole,” Alec said blowing out a hard breath and rubbing the back of his neck embarrassedly. A lovely pink flush sat high on his cheeks. Magnus wanted to gobble him up. “Anyway, let me get those books for you,” he said before disappearing into the back again. 

He came back a few minutes later holding two books. “Here they are. Should be all the information you need.”

“Can I make copies of these?”

Alec waved a hand. “Bring them back whenever.” He bit his lip and furtively let his gaze sweep over Magnus appraisingly. “Besides, it gives you an excuse to come back and see me.”

Magnus ran his fingers over the cover of the dust jacket, unsure what to say. He was aware that all these versions of Alec weren’t his own but saying goodbye to them over and over again both figuratively and sometimes literally, hurt in a real, visceral way, and the culmination of them all left him feeling worn, stretched thin, and achy. 

Ragnor was going to kill him, but he didn’t think he could bear to do it yet again. On impulse, Magnus looked up at Alec and said, “Hey, you want to come with me?”

Chapter Text

He found himself sitting across the table from Alec, watching him thoughtfully swirl French fries into a baffling mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise. 

I love him, Magnus had to remind himself. “How long have you lived here?” Behind him, there was a notice board with local services on offer, including a large poster with clipart crystal balls offering a 30-minute reading for $25.

“Born and raised,” Alec said, grinning up at him shyly. “I wanted to leave for college, but you know how it is. I go to community college at the edge of town.” 

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “I have too many people who need me here, you know how it is.”

“If you’re happy,” Magnus said doubtfully. It was nice enough, but Magnus couldn't think of much here to recommend it to young people. An exciting Saturday night probably consisted of milking cows and darning socks.

“Does it change anything if I’m not?” Alec asked, with no hint of bitterness, just curiosity like it was a question that had honestly never occurred to him. 

“It does to me.” Magnus wanted to tell this young man that his counterpart was a warrior, beautiful and brave, but Magnus was already discussing ghosts with a near stranger and there was only so creepy he was willing to be before noon. He picked at his already chipped back nail polish.

Alec wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed the books he’d set on the corner of the table in between the saltshaker and chromed napkin holder, and flipped through the top one, stopping about midway through. He turned the book towards Magnus, holding it open. 

Featured front and center, Magnus saw his very own lovely murder house. He took the book eagerly. Skimming the page, the book detailed the land before it had been purchased on behalf of one Clarissa Morgenstern. He turned the page, finger tracing down the page until it arrived at the portrait.

“Biscuit,” Magnus said softly, “what are you doing?”

---

“So, when Ragnor asks, you are—”

“A cameraman who really likes ghosts?” Alec said, looking confused as he buckled the passenger side seat belt.

Magnus suppressed a sigh; it would have to do. When telling Alec what he did for a living, he had to use some creative license, which shouldn’t have been difficult for the fictitious writer of a show about ghost hunting of dubious authenticity, but Magnus was a person who enjoyed misdirection to outright lies.

He honked the horn and leaned back in his seat. He’d solved the mystery of why Clarissa was acting up if not exactly what to do about it, so he hoped that was enough that Ragnor wouldn’t question the fact that he’d picked up an errant college student in the meantime. He gave Alec a happy little pat on the hand. Hopefully, Ragnor would let him keep Alec.

Speaking of the devil, the hotel door opened and Ragnor slouched out, looking none the worse for wear and eating a scone with jam and cream. Magnus narrowed his eyes. Ragnor popped the last bit in his mouth and dusted invisible crumbs off the front of his coat, striding across the parking lot. 

“Where did you even manage to find a scone here?”

“I have my ways,” Ragnor said very mysteriously. 

“They sell them at the bakery on Main,” Alec supplied. 

Manus watched Ragnor make an outraged sound a moment before he registered Alec, stopped, and then tiredly shook his head before opening the door and slipping into the backseat.

“Greetings,” Ragnor said to Alec, then turned to address Magnus, “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not,” Magnus admitted.

“I’m a big fan of ghosts and I would like to be a videographer,” Alec stiffly interjected. His long fingers tapped nervously against the car window, a staccato beat of  lies! Lies! Lies!

Magnus winced; Alexander was just as poor of an actor in this dimension as in any other. “Good news!” he said, trying to stop this train of conversation before it careened even further out of control, “I found out about the original owners of the murder house.”

“Murder house? How lurid.”

Magnus pulled out of the dusty parking lot and headed towards the highway while Alec filled him in. 

“So, what do we do about it?” Magnus asked and immediately wanted to smack himself. He should, in theory, already know what to do. “For Alexander’s benefit, of course.”

“Of course,’ Ragnor said dryly. “See, young man, spirits get trapped in between worlds because of unfinished business, so we need to know what this Clarissa Morgenstern is after and why now, of all times, she’s decided to start acting out.”

“How do we do that?” Alec asked and laughed nervously, “it’s not like we can ask her.”

“Well, we could,” Ragnor said, “or we could dig up her bones and burn them.”

The tapping abruptly stopped. “Wait – are you serious?”

“He never jokes,” Magnus muttered, swinging a wide U-turn. Horns honked as he passed, but Magnus didn’t mind. He considered laws more suggestions than anything.

“It’s true, I never joke,” Ragnor placidly agreed. 

What in the world would make Clarissa rise from the dead like some kind of evil zombie carrot? Magnus wondered.

Suddenly, it made a kind of terrible sense: what had changed recently? Maryse had moved in and with her, she had brought Maia and Jace. And if there was anything that made Carrot make poor impulsive decisions, it was Jace. When they got together, it was like they were in a race to see who could get to the bottom of the stupid tree. “Hey, get out the book,” Magnus told Alec. “Flip to the page you showed me.”

Alec fanned through the pages, stopping and holding the book up. 

“Next page,” Magnus said and Alec turned the next page. At the end, near the bottom right corner, was a picture of her husband. “Looks a lot like the boy that moved in, right?”

“Wait, let me see.” Ragnor grabbed Alec’s wrist and twisted it around to peer at the page. “I see, that’s her unfinished business.”

Alec licked his lips anxiously, brow furrowed. “How do we get her to…finish her business?” 

Magnus didn’t know, but he had one idea in mind. It was time to see a psychic. “Brace yourself,” he yelled and pulled around for another sharp U-turn.

Chapter Text

It was a tidy home, one room behind the other in the manner of so many of these New England houses. It was perfectly normal in every way, except for a wrought iron triple moon that hung above the front door, and the forest of windchimes hanging from nearly every branch of the nearby trees, like little ghosts, silently judging him for being in this predicament at his age.
 
As Magnus raised his hand to knock, the door opened, and he had to catch himself on the door frame to keep himself from falling into a heap in the foyer. 
 
“I’ve been waiting for you all,” Catarina said. She was wearing a housedress with a wildflower print and her hair pulled up at the crown of her head. She wordlessly gestured for them to follow her down the dark hall to a room at the end filled with a round table, covered by a purple tablecloth and surrounded by three small chairs. There was a black cat sitting on one and Catarina used her hand to shoo it away before sitting down.
 
“A bit on the nose, don’t you think?” Magnus asked, eyebrow raised.
 
“It’s a classic for a reason,” she replied. All the hallmarks of a hack fortune teller were there: heavy silky curtains, a large crystal ball on a gold stand, a small ornate chest with half-melted candles on top, but this was Catarina. If Magnus learned anything about world-hopping and watching exorbitant amounts of television, it was that if there was a recognizable face as a guest star, then they were important to the plot.
 
The bangles on her wrist jangled like music as she moved her arms to encompass them all. “What can I help you with?”
 
Ragnor took the seat next to Magnus as Alec leaned against the back wall, arms crossed. The familiar pose sent a pang through him.
 
Ragnor cleared his throat. “Hello, Madame, we’re paranormal investigators and we’re looking into a house—”
 
“The murder house,” Catarina finished for him.
 
“How did you know?”
 
“Lucky guess,” she said. 

Magnus bet this version of Catarina was a motherfucker to play chess with. His version was already tough enough without knowing everything that was going to happen before it did.

She pulled her crystal ball in front of her; Magnus was pretty sure he’d seen the exact same one at the garden center for half off at the end of the season because he wanted it and Alec had said it posed a security threat without being able to say why. Alec had felt that way about garden gnomes too but Magnus always privately thought it was a little bit of a phobia. A piece of glass's pedigree hardly mattered; he knew better than most that it wasn’t the object that held the power or even the person. Power existed in the universe; it was just a matter of how well people could tap into it. 
 
“The house,” Ragnor explained, looking a little shaken, “was purchased for a young married couple – Clarissa and Jonathan Mogernstern --” Magnus twitched in his chair “-- but they were killed shortly after, but no one knows by whom.”
 
Catarina leaned forward, studying her reflection in her crystal ball. Magnus had the distinct feeling that she was seeing something far beyond a garish lawn ornament. She said finally, “She was in love with a young blond man? I can see them together, but It’s hazy, feels forbidden.”
 
“Why would it have been forbidden?” Alec spoke up. “They were engaged then married. There was no reason to sneak around.”
 
“So much anger and sadness,” Catarina murmured. Her dark eyes had gone wide; her hands were shaking where they were splayed flat against the table like it was the only thing holding her up. “He shouldn’t have come back for her.” The light fixture above them began to chime as it swung as if pushed by an invisible breeze. 
 
Catarina leaned forward, eyelashes fluttering; whatever she was seeing was tearing her apart. Her right hand made a white-knuckled fist, nails digging into her palm. The lights above them burst, followed by tiny pieces of glass raining down on them. 

“What the hell,” Alec breathed behind him. He sounded unnerved, but probably not as much as he should have been. So far, Alec had taken everything with a surprising amount of grace, but this – this was a lot. Magnus probably should have left this Alec and his tidy button-downs in the town hall where he’d been dusty and bored, but safe.
 
Catarina groaned, low in her throat like she was in pain. A small crack appeared in the crystal ball and Magnus watched as it grew, spiderwebbing out slowly. It was like seeing someone squeeze a balloon and the uncomfortable tension that settled low in his stomach as he waited for it to pop.
 
The table shook as the pressure grew. The air felt thick and Magnus had to gasp to catch his breath. The black cat hissed and ran out of the room; Magnus was deeply tempted to join it but was stymied by the fact that he would have to take both Alec and Ragnor and couldn’t decide who would be most incensed by being carried out bridal-style. 

In front of him, the crystal ball gave a last small shudder before exploding outward. 

On reflex, Magnus twisted away, lifting his arms to protect his face.
 
When he turned back, Catarina was slumped forward, squeezing her hands together in her lap. The table was littered with iridescent glass and tiny shards of lightbulbs. 
 
“He killed them,” she said softly, sounding exhausted. She closed her eyes. “He killed them all.”
 
Alec, white-faced but stoic, pushed away from the wall and set the book on the table. A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Can you take a look at something else for us?”
 
Alec was so big and brave and strong, Magnus thought. But also, murder. They needed to solve a murder. He flipped to the page in question, the picture of Clarissa, then the picture of her husband. “Was that who you saw?”
 
“That was the girl,” Catarina said, looking surprised, “but that wasn’t the boy.”

 
 ---

 
Magnus brought the steeping cup of tea to where Catarina sat on the couch, a knitted light green afghan around her shoulders. She took the cup gratefully.
 
Ragnor had taken the wing-back chair next to them while Alec was taking a short walk outside; Magnus didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t be surprised if Alec walked to the road and kept right on walking until he found his way back to a life that made some kind of sense, but Alec had shown himself to be very resilient so far.
 
“So, we think that Clarissa had a romance with this other fellow and then she was killed?”
 
“By her husband,” Catarina confirmed. 
 
If there was one thing hoovering an unwise amount of true crime had taught him, it was: “It’s always the husband,” Magnus added sagely.
 
Ragnor sniffed. “Why do you think I’m not married?”
 
“Because you’re impossible and no one would have you?” Magnus asked affectionately.
 
“That too.”

 ---

 
As they were leaving, Magnus clasped Ragnor on the shoulder. “Go find Alec, will you? I’ll be out in a bit.”
 
Magus watched him leave silently, then circled back and sat down across from Cataria. It was time to get to the bottom of things. 

Catarina sipped her tea quietly, watching him with knowing eyes. “You’re a long way from home.”
 
“You have no idea.” Magnus sagged down into his chair. “How could you tell?”
 
Wordlessly, she reached to the edge of the table where a small deck of tarot cards sat. “Pick three cards and lay them out next to each other.” She grinned then. “I like a simple spread for complicated questions.”
 
Magus reached out; the deck was worn with age, cards creased randomly and edges gone soft and fuzzy with use. It had a faded art nouveau style with gilding that caught the sunlight filtering through the living room windows.
 
As he set the cards down on the coffee table between them, she said, “Past, present, future,” and turned the first one over. “Clarissa isn’t the only one with unfinished business.”’
 
“Is that how I ended up here?” Magnus asked, only half-joking. 
 
Catarina didn’t answer, too busy studying the cards laid down in front of her.
 
He tapped the overturned card, where three long swords pierced through a heart, upside down. “Why this one?”
 
Magnus was deeply familiar with tarot and often had a habit of picking a card of the day to get a feel for what kind of energy he’d be working with, but the power of tarot wasn’t in the universe or the cards, in as much as the soul was part of the universe and what was a soul but life energy?
 
The cards reflected the person’s belief, funneled through the lens of another person, not unlike a particularly rousing therapy session. But there was a certain kind of magic in truly understanding yourself, Magnus thought, which he personally found far more appealing than mystical pieces of paper.
 
“You tell me – you picked it.”
 
“Pain,” Magnus murmured. He moved to the next card, his present, and flipped it over. It was the lovers -- trials, relationships, decisions. Magnus snorted. Of course. Over the last card, his fingers lingered as he traced the edges contemplatively. 
 
“You’ve redrawn the topography of your life to fit around him,” she said, touching the middle card. 
 
She was right, in a way. 
 
“You were never meant to live a small life, Magnus Bane,” she told him. “Your paths will diverge eventually, if not by choice, then by time. And what will you have then?”
 
Magnus sat back in his chair. He didn’t know the answer to that, but he knew the shape of Aexander’s jaw, the exact shade of his eyes. He knew that Alec was good at math and awful at cooking. And he knew that if he reformed the pathways of his life around the shape of Alexander, that it would collapse without him. He and Alec had not always prioritized each other like they should – for a variety of reasons -- but most of all, it was fear.

But last and most important, Magnus knew that he wanted Alexander, no matter what it cost him. Like so many things, whether we know it or not at the time, we all choose our own method of destruction.

 
“How did you end up here?”
 
“Asphodel, accident with inventory,” he answered, though even as he said it, he doubted the veracity of the statement. He’d been handling dangerous potion ingredients for a hundred years and nothing like this had ever happened. Nothing like this was supposed to happen. Like the tarot cards, like the crystal ball, ingredients just channeled specific intentions. 
 
“Still lying to yourself?”
 
He swallowed, and it hurt. Magnus closed his eyes. “He’s worth it.”
 
“Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.”
 
“I did a long time ago,” he said. “So why am I really here, then? Who’s doing this to me?
 
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” Catarina huffed; she was definitely laughing at him and not with him. “Magnus, the only one who has enough power to keep you here is you.”
 
“What do you mean? I’ve been through hell and back – why would I do this to myself?” But even as he was protesting, it had the ring of truth, of something that he’d known all along but had been too afraid to look at fully.
 
He watched her sip her tea, dark eyes knowing and not without sympathy. Outside, the sun was shining, glinting off the light dusting of snow.
 

“Is any of this real?” he whispered.
 
Catarina’s nails were painted a dark, glamorous red. Magnus had once complimented her on the color. “What does it mean to be real? Are thoughts real? Are wishes real? What about all the paths we could have taken, but never did?” 
 
Magnus took a ragged breath. “What’s real are the things that we do.”
 
“If actions are real, then what about inaction? That, too, is a decision we make.”
 
Magnus looked down at the cards, at his past and present, and his unknowable future, and he leaned forward and swept the cards up without looking at them. He didn’t need a card to tell him his future, and he wouldn’t be ruled by inaction. He decided then that he didn’t care about the vagaries of reality; these things that had happened were important to him. Therefore, they were real and that was enough.

He stood up on shaky legs. “Thank you, for your time.”

“Any time, Magnus.”
 
There was an impatient knock, and Magnus headed for the door, reached for the handle, and stepped out into the brilliant sun.

Chapter Text

When they arrived back at the house, Jace and Maia had returned from the store. Maryse rolled her eyes as she let them in, the sounds of their bickering carrying through the house. 

No wonder Clary's ghost had gone crazy; she hadn’t gotten any rest since these two chuckleheads moved in.

As it turned out, Jace was just as annoying here as he was in his own universe. “So, let me get this straight – you think this ghost girl has the hots for me?”

“That is not what we said at all,” Magnus said, though grudgingly he had to admit that Jace wasn't entirely wrong.

 “Can’t imagine why,” Maia said, distinctly unimpressed where she was sitting, legs folded beneath her, on Jace’s bed. She looked both comfortable and annoyed. It spoke of long acquaintance, and well–-family. Magnus was glad that in one universe, at least, she had a loving family. His Maia had spent so much of her life alone.

“We think that you triggered her to become active again. Maybe you look like the boy she loved, maybe you’re just really annoying—”

“Hey—” Jace said weakly.

“—but since she’s focused on you, we can use you as bait to draw her out.”

“And then?”

“Then we exorcise her,” Ragnor said with a stunning amount of confidence for someone possessing of such a stupid plan.

 Maia was looking down and tracing the pattern on his comforter with her fingernail. It was airplanes and trains, very old and equally well-loved. A corner had obviously been chewed on and Magnus pressed his lips together, trying not to find it adorable. “Do I get his room if he dies?”

 Jace shot Maia a betrayed look, and she shrugged.

 Afterward, Ragnor split them up into small groups with unclear and unsettling directions to follow. Once out in the hall, Maia snagged the edge of Ragnor’s frankly ridiculous smoking jacket. “Is he going to be okay? Is this safe?”

 Ragnor raised an eyebrow. “I thought you already had plans for his room?”

 She shrugged again, looking away. “Like, I know he’s a super himbo, but he’s still my brother, you know?

“He’s as safe as any of us can ever be.” He patted her arm, not at all comfortingly.

Magnus might have been a hilariously ineffective doctor, but Ragnor would have been far worse, he noted smugly.  

 ----

While on the way back from the local hardware store where Magnus and Alec managed to purchase a suspiciously large amount of road salt, it started to rain. It was a cold, torrential downpour, and they ran through the parking lot repeatedly until the last bags of the rock salt were loaded. 

They fell, laughing breathlessly, into the front seat. Ragnor was going to have kittens when he saw his upholstery. Carelessly, Magnus used his sopping arm to sling water off his face, an action about as useful as a diet of Tinkies and Frescas for losing weight. He turned the car on, starting the short drive back to the house.

When he glanced over, Alec had his head back, pressed into the headrest, still softly laughing. “I wonder what Mrs. Henderson thought we were doing with all this salt?” He pushed his wet hair back from his face.

 “Probably weird sex stuff. It’s always weird sex stuff.” Magnus wasn’t nearly as irritated about it as he sounded; it was human nature and people were generally all sorts of interesting and funny if you were willing to get to know them well enough. 

 “Sunday school is going to be really awkward now,” Alec agreed with a small silly grin as Magnus pulled into the driveway, turning the car off. The engine clicked as it cooled. Sweet baby Jesus tap-dancing on a cracker, Magnus thought, shocked at the reminder that this version of Alec was so young. His pajamas probably still had footies built into them. He was torn; he wondered if he should kiss him or burp him.

Magnus could never remember his own Alec this young, even when he had actually been this age. His Alexander slumped when he thought no one was looking, dragged down by the weight of responsibility, of hiding. Nothing aged the soul quite like being a child soldier.

Hell, Magnus could hardly remember  himself  at this age. 

 What had Magnus been doing as a teenager? Probably nothing good. He’d spent a lot of angry years trying to hurt a world that had offered him so much pain first. It had probably taken longer than it should have for him to realize that pain was not currency; it could not be traded or bargained away. It lingered on the edge of your periphery always, and the goal was not to look forward and avoid it, but to acknowledge it and continue on despite it.

The rain beat against the windshield, whiting out the world outside their small space. It was a cold rain, not quite enough to freeze but just on the verge of danger.

Magnus knew the feeling well, a little wild-eyed and reckless today himself. 

All this time, he had been spread too thin – over the universes, over centuries – and felt himself unraveling slowly, peeling back layers to reveal his essential nature. Maybe it was a good thing, to get to know himself this well, but the process hurt like hell regardless. 

“I’m getting older,” he said, unsure where this particular train of crazy disembarked. He may have been staring at the windshield, but he couldn’t help but see the expanse of his life, the long years, the losses he’d thought to never survive, but had anyway. 

 Alec looked at him. “You’re still young,” he said quietly, "you know, -ish." He reached out, fingers skimming the gold buttons down the front of Magnus’ wet jacket. “You’re really—something.”

 Magnus grinned at Alec; he did not think it was particularly kind or comforting. “Not that kind of young, Darling. Let me tell you something no one likes to think about: when you get older, it’s easy to become more afraid. You have so much more to lose and it can make you less brave, and less willing to take chances. You’re still young – you’ll find this out eventually.” He turned toward Alec, touched his face, the raindrops that clung to his dark eyelashes, and felt a swell of tenderness so profound that he thought he might burst with it. “Fight it, don’t let the years win.”

 Alec bit his bottom lip and stared at Magnus with his silly big, beautiful Bambi eyes. “You’re a little strange, aren’t you?

 Magnus huffed softly. “Yeah, I get that a lot. Especially recently.” 

“That seems like a big accomplishment considering what you do for a living.”

Oh yeah, the ghost hunting. “You know,” Magnus said, “in the 70’s car windshields changed, they started using safety glass. Before, the windshields would shatter during an accident.”

“O-okay."

“Safety glass shatters but it doesn’t usually break. And if it does, it’s more likely to break into one large shard instead of a bunch of tiny ones.”

 “I guess the glass thing, that’s good, though? I think I’d rather have one big cut than a thousand small ones.”

 “Would you?” Magnus looked at Alec consideringly; he wasn’t certain of the answer himself. “It seems to me that you could survive a thousand small cuts but one big one would kill you.”

 Alec said, “We’re not really talking about glass, are we?”

 Magnus laughed then; it was a tired sound. “No, I guess not.”

 “I don’t mind it,” Alec said, looking down at his lap and pulling the wet fabric away from his legs. At Magnus’ incredulous look, Alec sheepishly added, “Not a lot of exciting things happen here.”

 Alec looked back up at Magnus. The moment was suspended, held in a safe place outside of time, of drama, of pain. Magnus nearly wet himself when a fist knocked on the side of the car next to him, catching him completely off guard. He rolled the window down and Ragnor appeared, motioning them to come in with their abundance of sexy condiments. 

 “C’mon, kid," Ragnor said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself, “are you ready to hunt a ghost?” 

 Alec squinted back at him. “My life has gotten really weird since I met you two.”

 Magnus sighed. “I get that a lot too.”

 ----

 Maia and Jace had found a dusty trunk of dresses in the attic between pressing salt rounds for their ghost-killing shotguns. The dresses were old-fashioned enough that Ragnor thought they were worth burning in case that was the physical item holding Clarissa here. She’d been cremated back in the day, so there were no bones to burn. If it wasn’t the trunk, they had a lot more work to do. Victorian people had all manner of creepy fucked-up keepsakes. Hair lockets, human tooth rings. Who knew, maybe they'd find one of her molars made into a toilet handle or something.

 “I thought I was just here to be the videographer,” Alec huffed, red-faced and hair curling damply around his face. It was, Magnus was unsurprised and a little offended to verify, still a glorious look on him. Alec looked like a young Greek Olympian, while Magnus was pretty sure his eyeliner was running so badly that he could slot himself in the middle of a KISS live show with no one being the wiser. 

 He surreptitiously wiped his eyes and glared at Alec’s retreating back. 

 “Now, we have to make a circle in the center of this room with the salt, making sure that there are no breaks in the lines,” Ragnor instructed, looking fresh and ready to host a pretentious book club.

“And then, what, we sauté it?” Jace asked skeptically. He was wearing a pair of gray track pants because he said he needed room to lunge in case anyone was in danger, though what he thought that would do, Magus couldn't say. Maybe the sight of his untethered glutes would be enough to send Clarrissa into a lust-filled catatonic state and save them all. The waistband was sparkly; Magnus was fairly certain they were Maia's.

“I hope the ghost literally eats you,” Maia said and pinched his arm.

“Rude,” Jace replied with a frown and pinched her back.

---

All things said, this was not one of Magnus’ prouder moments.

This teenage ghost had been in love, she’d been bullied into marrying someone else, and then she’d been betrayed by someone who’d promised to love her above all others.

 Now, they were trying to get rid of her, and he didn’t even think his guilt had anything to do with his natural affection for Clary. This just felt like a shitty thing to do to a young girl who's only real crime was being a little spooky. If that was reason enough to vanquish someone, then everyone in this room needed to be lined up on the scaffolding behind her.

 Ragnor was outside waiting with lighter fluid and a lighter, and Alec was in the center of the room holding up a phone, recording this whole goddamn mess.

Magnus didn’t really know what to do. Jace was standing in the center of the room, surrounded by a circle of salt. All his furniture had been pushed to one side of the room to make space. Magnus wondered if he should have sprinkled some parsley on Jace's head like an entree.

“Clarissa?” Magnus called out. “Here’s Jace, looking all... handsome...and tasty…and juicy….”

Alec frowned at him. “Why are you making him sound like a chicken drumstick?”

 “This is kind of like Romeo and Juliet except with murder,” Maia said with a snort. She was holding the iron poker like a baseball bat, fingers loosening and tightening nervously. Someone was getting hit with that poker, and Magnus just hoped that it wasn't going to be him.

“There was murder in that, too,” Alec pointed out.

“What if she wants to sleep with you?”

 “Does that count as necrophilia?” Jace asked, looking thoughtful.

Maia shook her head. “I don’t think so.” 

 “Love is love?” Magnus asked doubtfully.

 “Not when it’s necrophilia,” Alec said. “Now everyone shut up, you’re ruining the video.”

“I thought we agreed it  wasn’t  necrophilia,” Jace protested.

The curtains stirred and around them, the temperature took a sharp drop, Magnus' breath making a small cloud in front of him. Mist rose from the floor like some shitty b-movie horror flick. He'd seen this movie and they all died in the end.

As if reading his spiraling thoughts, Jace said, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” 

“This is so cool,” Alec mumbled, panning the video camera out to capture the whole room. 

About a foot in front of Jace, the mist began converging. 

In his left hand, Magnus had his phone on speaker. “I think she’s here,” Magnus told Ragnor, voice hushed.

“Copy, over and out,” Ragnor replied, and Magnus rolled his eyes fondly.

An invisible breeze picked up and Magnus watched with a growing sense of horror as the grains of salt began blowing away, leaving a hand-width gap in the line surrounding Jace. Oh fuck. Magnus hoisted up his shotgun, waiting. The mist rose to eye level, a pit of darkness in the center. As he watched, the darkness resolved itself into the familiar shape of Clary, not wild-eyed and screaming this time, but calm, laser-focused on Jace. No longer terrified, Magnus realized, like a punch to the gut . Each time she encountered a stranger in her home, she must have been reliving the night of her death.

This version of Clary’s brilliant red hair was piled up high on her head, the simple cotton nightdress high-collared, but her eyes were the same -- clear green, luminous --as she stared at Jace. 

Wordlessly, she stepped into the circle and held out her hands, palms up. 

“What the  fuck -” Maia hissed. 

Jace stepped closer and touched his hands to hers, seemingly as entranced by her as she was by him.

“Should I hit her?” Maia asked softly, eyes not leaving the strange tableau. “Kind of feels like I should hit her and kind of feels like I shouldn’t. I’m torn.” 

Alec still shushed her, eyes wide. 

Hands clasped, Clary leaned forward and lightly touched her lips to Jace’s.

Everywhere they touched started glowing, their profiles limmed in gold, growing brighter and brighter until Clary stepped back, smiling. Her body seemed lit within, from somewhere deep inside of her like she’d swallowed the sun; her copper hair tumbled loose and wild. This was the Clary Magnus knew. 

“There you go, Biscuit,” he whispered. “Now you’re free.”

She closed her eyes as she grew impossibly bright until they all had to look away. From his periphery, he could see the white glow of her, hear her sigh, and then wink out of existence, leaving him blinking against the dark spots dancing in front of him. 

Jace stood in the broken circle, hands still outstretched and trembling towards the empty room.

Maia had dropped her iron poker, leaving a gouge on the wooden floor. 

“She just wanted to tell him goodbye,” Magnus said wonderingly. Even after all she had suffered, she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone – she just wanted closure. He took a deep shuddering breath. 

“Hello? What’s going on?” Ragnor said, voice tinny and far away from the phone, which had tumbled from Magnus’ grasp and lay on the floor. “Is everything okay? Hello?” 

 ---

 Magnus stumbled out the front door, pulling it closed behind him. It was cold, but he didn’t feel like going back in and getting his jacket. The good news was, if his toes fell off, he’d likely get new ones tomorrow. 

Knowing that he was the root of all his problems did not actually help him solve them, a quandary that had plagued him all of his life.

Alec found him shortly after, sitting on the stoop. “You’re leaving now, right?”

Magnus drummed his fingers against the step next to him consideringly. Alec’s hair was tousled, the tip of his nose a fetching red.

 Impulsively, Magnus leaned forward and slotted their mouths together, Alec making a surprised sound in the back of his throat before melting into the kiss.

Magnus did not feel guilty, even though maybe he should. It was so bittersweet to remember this, Alec’s gorgeously sweet fumbling. His lush lips trembled slightly against Magnus’ own, but still – this was not his Alexander, not exactly. Maybe this was a reminder, maybe this was goodbye.

 Magnus poured all his love and longing into it so that if there was even the remotest connection between them all, this hodge podge of messy worlds and damaged souls, then his own Alexander might be able to feel his love a thousand worlds away.

Alec broke the kiss, lips spit-slick and swollen, eyes looking down shyly. “I wish you could stay,” Alec said.

A part of Magnus wished he could stay, too. It was so bittersweet to leave this version of his Alec, this world where Maia and Jace were a family, Cat and Clary were at peace, and Ragnor was beautifully whole and healthy and obnoxious. It wasn’t anything Magnus would have ever thought to ask for, but he couldn’t have found a better solution for them all.

And yet--

 He brushed his hands through Alec’s hair, willing it to memory. Though he’d never believed he’d taken a moment with his Alexander for granted, didn’t everyone, at times, forget what gift these small moments could be? The dark smudge of his eyelashes, the stubble of his cheek— throughout their time together, Magnus had only ever really considered his own pain in this regard, how he would live in the after. He thought watching Alec age and fade would only break his own heart.

Foolishly, he’d thought their only enemy was time, and he’d consoled himself with the thought of the decades stretched before them. 

How differently would he have lived out his years with Alec if he’d known that he might have so few of them? 

Alec bit his bottom lip anxiously, worrying the skin there with his teeth. “I hope you find whoever that kiss was for.”

 Magnus thought of the asphodel that he spilled earlier. It was an ancient flower, the flower of regrets. Magnus had lived so long, through so many lifetimes that he’d assumed that he was too old, too wise for regrets but there was no such thing. It was a relief in a way: having no regrets meant loving nothing. And n o one could be truly alive and love nothing, not in any meaningful way.

It didn’t mean not being grateful for where you were on the journey that had gotten you to where you were, but regret was a smoke trail, an ache that meant you loved and had been loved. It didn't mean that you weren’t enough, just that things could have gone differently, and to be flawed was to be human. The best parts of him were human.

 He kissed the spot where Alec’s deflect rune should have been.

 “Go, live your life,” Magnus told him. 

 “Yeah, let me guess, go live your life without regrets?” Alec let his head thunk against the porch rail. “That’s what everyone tells me anyway."

Magnus shook his head. “No, that’s bullshit. We all have regrets – and in a way, I think that’s the sign of a life well lived. It’s sometimes better to make the wrong choice than never making a choice at all. We can use our regrets to inform our choices in the future, but I think never having anything to regret would be a real tragedy."

He kissed Alec chastely on the cheek, then staggered to the car and drove back to their hotel. Maryse was going to give Ragnor a ride back later. He used the battered card to let himself in, kicked off his shoes, and lay on the closest bed. 

T his whole time, he'd thought he was working his way towards Alec, but maybe he was just working his way back to himself. Alec had been his guiding light and he’d let him, maybe had always let people have too much control over the course of his life. If anything, these forays into other worlds had shown him that he was someone who helped others, that he was a fighter, and that he was brave.

He was still learning, and still growing.

Magnus had been all these things before Alexander and he would be after him, again, too. Though all his loves were important, he had the suspicion that Alec would be the love that he would use to measure against all others. For better or worse, he had set Alec as his origin point by which he would measure the trajectory of his life, but that didn’t mean it had to revolve around him or that Magnus would lose who he was by going all in with Alec. 

When Ragnor got back to the room, he immediately started pawing through an open suitcase haphazardly thrown on one bed. “I’ll edit and upload the video tomorrow before we leave.”

“Hmm?” Magnus said, “Oh, yeah.” He’d forgotten that was their job, and not just like, a tragic side quest. He rolled onto his belly as Ragnor slipped into the bathroom. 

A few minutes later, the light flickered next to his bed as Ragnor finished his shower, a cloud of vapor chasing him as he closed the bathroom door behind him. 

He sighed gustily as he slid into the bed across from Magnus. “We’re too old for this, Magnus. My god, man, we’re middle-aged.”

“Speak for yourself, old man,” Magnus wheezed into his musty pillow. The day had not been kind to him; even his ass muscles hurt.

“Time for the young bucks, I think.” He made a thoughtful sound. “Those kids today, they seemed to quite enjoy themselves.”

“Yes, they did,” Magnus agreed, “in between the bouts of terrified screaming.”

“They can travel across the country in a van, solving mysteries and hunting ghosts.”

“Like the Mystery Machine, but way gayer,” Magnus said, pleased with the thought of Jace, Maia, and Alec traveling the country, hunting ghosts and other strange things. And speaking of strange things, maybe they’d even take Simon along. 

“Back to the law firm for me, I think.”

Magnus propped himself up on his elbow, fed up with the bullshit pretense. “You’re a lawyer? What the hell are you doing here?"

“Spending time with you, of course.”

Magnus flipped onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. It was about three different shades of white where it had been repaired repeatedly by someone who had as much practical handyman experience as he did. Still, it worked perfectly fine. 

Though it hadn’t seemed like it at the onset, this world had been a gift. “Ragnor?”

“What?”

“You know I love you, right?”

Ragnor rolled over and stared at him. “Have you been drinking again?”

Magnus huffed, “No.”

There was no answer for a while, then Ragnor said quietly, “Same, old friend. Same.”

Magnus had thought he'd reached the pinnacle of his life. But life was a series of mountains and valleys, highs and lows. There was no particular destination and just when you thought you'd found where you always wanted to be, you might suddenly find yourself in an unfamiliar environment, starting from scratch yet again, over and over. And yet, it was perfect. 

Maybe Magnus had a long way to go, but there was beauty in the journey too -- who he was and who he wanted to be and all the space and obstacles between them. Though he had never thought of himself as brave before, he now knew that he could be – for Alec, for himself, for all of his friends. He would meet them again, in one universe or another. 

When Magnus went to sleep, he dreamed of being on a ship, lost in the sea. Maybe this was how explorers felt when they sailed into the unknown, unsure if they would find a new world or the end of the earth. Who knew what he’d find on the other side of his dreams?

Magnus stood on the bow and stared down the horizon, ready for it all.

Anything.

Everything.

---

He woke up, blinkingly sleepily at the white ceiling. His eyes felt crusted shut; something had crawled into his mouth and died, come back to life, then died again. 

Alec was leaning over him, white-faced with punched out looking dark circles under his eyes. His runes stood out stark against his sallow skin; Magnus had never thought he looked better. “Welcome back," Alec said, reaching out to touch his cheek.

Magnus caught Alec's hand in his own and brought it to his lips to brush a kiss against the dry, calloused skin. “My love,” Magnus answered.

Chapter Text

Clarissa had been assigned to him today.

Magnus assiduously pretended not to know that Alec and the rest of their friends were taking turns babysitting him as he tried to catch up with all the work he’d missed.

When Clary had shown up in the morning, he had wordlessly handed over a plate of donuts and turned around, leaving the door open behind him.

Now, Magnus was busy finishing his list of needed ingredients for the next few weeks. Clary sat at the end of his worktable, licking the last bit of jelly from her fingers and grinning slyly. “So, you were Batman, huh?”

They’d obviously been talking about him, the nosey fuckers. Magnus didn’t necessarily mind everyone knowing what had happened if only he could understand it himself.

“Kind of a crappy Batman,” he admitted. “Everything I went through, everything I thought I learned -- What was it for, though?” He rolled a vial of dried hellebore mindlessly between his palms, watching the dried delicate petals tumble together like pastel confetti.

Clary shrugged, looking thoughtful. “Why does it have to be for anything ?”

Magnus sat the jar down unhappily. Biscuit wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for. “How annoyingly esoteric and perceptive of you.”

Clary leaned back on the stool, balancing precariously on the back legs in a way that immediately made Magnus nervous, but Shadowhunters had proven themselves gratifyingly hearty in his experience. Maybe one day Clary would create a rune to make all the Shadowhunters in his life consider the consequences of their actions. One could dream.

“Magnus, after I regained my memories, I spent so much time being angry at other people, at circumstances, but mostly my own decisions.” The stool gave a protesting squeak and Magnus massaged his temples. “Then I realized that it didn’t matter. Couldn’t undo the past and I’m not sure that I would if I could. Sometimes things just happen.” She hopped down from her blasted perch and curled a small hand over his shoulder. “And sometimes we make them happen.”

---

When he stepped through the portal into the Institute, it was to find Alec hunched over a desk, hair falling into his eyes and chewing anxiously on his bottom lip.

Alec had taken Magnus directly home after he’d woke up in the infirmary. But he’d worked from home in between short breaks to check on Magnus and urge him to rest, until Magnus, bored and irritable, had ordered him back to work.

In his office, Alec looked up, blinking his big pretty eyes owlishly. Magnus leaned against the doorjamb and felt a sudden swell of affection, happy and light and blessedly uncomplicated. His Alexander.

“Magnus,” he said, quickly standing, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. “Is everything okay?”

“More than,” Magus said, grinning, and dramatically flung himself into the chair across from Alec. He slung his legs over the armrest and kicked up his feet. “Remember that vacation we planned?”

The vacation that they never took, the one that they had about argued bitterly and repeatedly. The argument that had kicked off this huge mess, as if either one of them could ever forget. It had almost been their last words to each other, and Magnus honestly didn’t know if he would have been able to survive their last words being unkind ones.

Alec tiredly slumped down into his own chair, surveying the desk covered with untidy stacks, lips pressed together unhappily. Sadly, it wasn’t an unfamiliar expression to Magnus. The stress of his job over the years had left their fingerprints all over him, in some more evident ways than others.

It had been a long time since he’d seen Alec’s big toothy grin, Magnus realized. Frankly, Alec was most strikingly handsome when he was stoic, but Magnus didn’t want him that way. He wanted all of Alec, both the good and the bad. He wanted his unkind petty moments, his heartbreak, his joy. Everything that made up the whole of him, Magnus wanted it all.

Still, not many people got to see Alec like this, tired and vulnerable. When in the Institute, Magnus assumed Alexander generally stood at parade rest even when using the bathroom, though he had curiously not had the opportunity to test that theory, and Alec firmly refused to either confirm or deny. The betting poll at the Institute had become astronomical even by Magnus’ own generous standards.

Annoyingly, Alec insisted on using the restroom in private.

Even so, as exhausted and worn down as Alec looked, Magnus was aware that this moment was a gift. Every moment alive was, even if it didn’t always feel like it at the time.

“Of course I do, but I haven’t exactly gotten much work done in the past month, you know?” Alec said ruefully, long fingers pressed onto his bottom lip.

Magnus imagined that if he were to see himself in a mirror, he wouldn’t be in much better shape. Time to fix that.

There came a time in every adult’s life when the simple act of living and carrying on became utterly exhausting and draining in a way that everyone understood and secretly pretended they didn’t. If parents weren’t supposed to talk about how they sometimes regretted having kids, and men shouldn’t say how easy it was to break their hearts, then no one wanted to acknowledge how swallowing the constant little hurts and disappointments of adulthood could wear you down, hollow you out, and sneakily steal all the tiny moments of joy life had to offer.

Magnus swung his feet around to plant them firmly on the ground, the better to make his point. He needed to be grounded, and his Alexander always responded better to formal requests. Magnus would have submitted it in writing if he could trust that Jace wouldn’t hide it or expedite it, depending on how much a shit he felt like being that day. “You know, I learned some stuff recently.” He gestured towards the messy desk. “All these things, all these plans that we made, they could disappear tomorrow.” At this point, he hesitated. Magnus knew what he was aiming for, but it was too easy for emotional honesty to feel like emotional manipulation.

That didn’t mean it still didn’t need to be said though.

“What would you have done if I’d never woken up?”

Alec looked stricken, then closed his eyes. “I didn’t let myself think that way. What good would it have done?”

His beautiful, gorgeous, annoyingly practical boy. “Think about it now then.” He scooted forward and grabbed Alec’s upturned hand. “Don’t you see? If we don’t have the time now for each other now , then we never will. We have to make the time. We have to prioritize each other over strangers. It might seem unkind, it might be the antithesis of your training, but you can’t put out a fire at someone’s house while your own kitchen is on fire.”

Alec squeezed his hand back. “What a dramatic metaphor. “

“What I mean is, you can’t take care of other people before taking care of yourself. Ragnor told me that once.”

Alec took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”

“P-pardon?” He’d been ready for a fight, not easy acquiescence. He realized he’d been squeezing Alec’s hand and hurriedly loosened his grip.

“Okay.” Alec looked around, wiping his hands over the front of his trousers. He was actually sweating at the prospect of taking an unplanned vacation , Magnus realized fondly . “I feel like I should send a memo—"

Magnus hopped up. “No time for that, darling! You can send a group text!” He rounded the desk, grabbed Alec by the arm, and opened a portal, shoving him through before his pesky sense of duty kicked back in.

Sometimes, Magnus thought, you just have to grab life by the--

---

“-balls,” Magus finished, taking a happy hop-skip out of the portal.

“Really?” Alec yelped.

Sometime in the hazy vagaries of the 1960s, Magnus had acquired a home in Azores , and that’s where Magnus brought Alec, staggering to his feet behind him, his admonishment dying on his lips as he looked around.

Alec blinked at the wall of windows stretching across the easterly sky like a mole person seeing the light for the first time. While the dank walls of the Institute did keep Alec’s porcelain skin wonderfully dewy, it did often leave him bleary-eyed and wan once he exited its musty vaunted walls leaving him looking like a perplexing cross between a warrior action figure and a haunted Victorian-era doll.

“It’s beautiful.” Alec looked down at himself, his rumpled uniform of black, and gave his shirt a furtive sniff. “I should probably jump in the shower, though.”

“Care for some company?” Magnus asked playfully, already unbuttoning his own shirt. At the very least, he and Alexander needed to change into something more climate-appropriate, the humid air sticking to them both like second layers of skin.

He should probably rustle up something for them to change into. He whistled as he shucked off his shirt, absently wondering how Alexander felt about men’s micro bikinis. Personally, Magnus felt that they were both occasion-appropriate and wonderfully festive.

Alec grinned at him, shedding his own clothes and folding them into an exasperatingly neat stack onto one of the plush chairs to join his forever-growing pile of clothes that were not clean but could possibly be worn again if they passed the sniff test later. “Always.”

There were empty vases by the entry to the balcony door. On the way to the bathroom, Magnus took the time to fill them with bright tropic blooms: birds of paradise, plumeria, delicate bougainvillea that trailed down the table's edges. Cut flowers didn’t last that long, but most beautiful things didn’t.

When he got into the bathroom, Alec was already inside the shower, a hazy smudge of bare skin and dark hair. Magnus pushed back the door and slid in behind him , Alec’s face tilted up towards the stream, his shoulders a tense line. Well, that wouldn’t do.

“Hey,” he called out softly, running his hands slowly down Alec’s back and coming to rest on his waist, “Open your eyes,”

Alec turned his head to look at him, wide shoulders blocking the water; tiny droplets beaded on the ends of his eyelashes. He was, Magnus thought , unspeakably lovely at this moment, no less so for how fleeting the moment was.

“Look at you,” Magnus said, pressing a kiss to the side of Alec’s damp neck and dragging his tongue down the stark lines of the rune there.

Alec tilted his head to bare his neck to make more room for Magnus, making a low sound that Magnus felt against his lips. God, he’d missed this. He’d missed everything about this man.

“C’mon,” he said, pulling Alec back against him, rubbing against Alec’s hip, skin hot and wet all over. He tried to press in closer, sucking rosy marks onto Alec’s neck and shoulders. He loved Alec so much, he felt breathless, all punch drunk and stupid and giddy with it.

He reached around, palming one sensitive dusky nipple, drinking in Alec’s sharp hiss as he dragged his fingernail over the sensitive skin, then pushed his hand down, down, tracing the contours of his ribs, his abdomen, down to his rapidly hardening cock.

“Alexander,” Magnus managed to gasp, slotting himself in the slick cleft of Alec’s ass and rutting shamelessly as Alec mindlessly pushed forward into the loose circle of Magnus’ fist.

Bracing against the shower wall, Alec let his legs fall open and shoved back onto Magnus , and Magnus knew that he had to act quickly before good sense fled and they made a series of poor decisions based on impatience and spit.

“Wait, hold on,” Magnus said, taking a beat and resting his forehead against Alec’s shoulder. It was hard to concentrate with miles of Alec’s lovely bare skin against his, but Magnus managed to summon a bottle of lube. The good kind from his favorite boutique in New York, not the bodega version travesty Alec often used. Years ago, they had reached an impasse and had agreed to disagree that getting sex paraphernalia, body wash, and lunch at the same location was not both ideal and practical.

He opened the bottle and squeezed out a generous amount, easing his fingers into Alec , slowly , gradually adding another, deeper, Alec making small breathless punched-out sounds.

He waited until Alec was pushing himself back onto Magnus's fingers, mindlessly mouthing at the flushed skin beneath him, the taste of sweat and hot drops of water gathering at his lips.

“You’re actually killing me,” Alec groaned, one hand squeezing the base of his own cock, right leg bent, twitching and restless.

“Can’t have that,” Magnus said with a laugh and pushed his wet hair out of his face before slicking himself up. He guided his cock into Alec, all tight grip and silky heat until he bottomed out, bodies slotted together, impossibly close.

“I love you, did you know?” Magus murmured.

Alec laughed a little breathlessly, body pulsing and fluttering around Magnus. “Uh, this would be a really awkward moment right now if you didn’t.”

Magnus joined him, laughing softly and then grinning stupidly into his shoulder and gripping Alec’s hips before pulling back and then rocking forward languidly, adjusting until he felt Alec jerk beneath him, tightening reflexively. “There. Oh fuck, there."

Magnus hit that spot over and over, reaching around to stroke Alec in tandem while rocking inside his body, pushing sweet little stuttering gasps out of Alec with each thrust.

He could feel the pleasure building at the base of his spine, balls tightening, and god, he was not going to last much longer, wanted this to go on forever -- but being inside Alec just felt too good, too right.

Besides, they had time for more.

“Alexander, I’m gonna,” Magnus groaned, fingers digging into Alec’s hips hard enough to bruise. Then he was coming, shuddering, cock pulsing, filling Alec up.

He stilled for a moment, trembling and trying to catch his breath, leaning bonelessly against Alec's strong back before gingerly pulling out.

“Magnus,” Alec groaned, desperately fisting his own cock. Magus knocked his hand away and turned him around, kissing him desperately, open-mouthed and sloppy before sinking to his knees and taking him into his own mouth. Alec tasted of clean skin, the lingering scent of perfumed soap, and Magnus took in as much as he could, using his hand to meet his lips, his other hand snaking behind Alec and absently rubbing where he was open and wet, dipping his finger inside and massaging. Alec ran his hands through Magnus’ hair, his tightening fingers the only warning he got before he groaned deep and filled Magnus’ mouth with warm, bitter fluid.

Magnus swallowed before letting Alec’s cock fall from his mouth with an obscene little pop and rising back to his feet. Alec looked about half-asleep already, leaning tiredly against the shower wall. Magnus’ knees hurt like hell, and they made an unattractive little popping sound as he stood up. Time truly stood still for no one.

He kissed Alec, licking into his mouth, Alec’s hand curling around his hip, tickling the sensitive skin there.

"Wanna do that again," Alec slurred, his voice syrupy-slow and husky.

“Later,” he promised. “Plenty of time for that later. C’mon,” Magnus said tenderly, using the showerhead to rinse them both off and then ushering him out of the shower and using a fluffy towel to dry them both off.

He pushed Alec onto the bed, tucking him in before sliding in behind him and wrapping an arm around his chest, the feel of his beating heart a steady metronome against his fingers, the only music he needed until he, too, drifted off.

---

He woke to the sound of the ocean and Alec’s gentle snores. The sun was coming up around the shades covering the massive windows.

Lying in bed, Magnus felt a strange sense of loss.

They hadn't talked about what happened much in the flurry of activity tha t accompanied his return; there was too much to do that had gone awry in his absence, clients to see, reports for Alec to write up.

Business as usual, though Magnus secretly felt anything but. At first, he’d worried that   the buzz be neath his skin, the staticky feeling of wrongness meant th a t this wasn’t the right world or that something had been irrevocably changed. It had taken him a few long days and longer nights filled with dreams and bourbon to realize that it wasn’t his w o rld that had changed – he had. It had been painful to realize that he might no longer fit in a world that had never particularly wanted him in the first place. That the careful space he had carved out for himself seemed all wrong now.

Magnus rolled over to see Alec’s shoulders. He traced his fingers along the runes scattered across his back. Alec twitched, then rolled over. His eyes were still closed, but his mouth was twitching at the corners. Magnus kissed the tip of his nose just to see his nose scrunch reflexively, his eyelashes sleepily flutter. Time and worry had etched deeper lines at the corner of his eyes, but Magnus still found him unbearably handsome and suspected that he always would.

It was funny, Magnus thought, that this feeling of tenderness could creep past the nebulous boundaries of the heart to become a whole-body experience. How extraordinary that love and affection had the power to be more than emotion, but a state of being.

He thought of yesterday, the feeling of rightness. Even if he no longer fit into the world, he fit perfectly here, where Alexander was willing to let him in and make room for him in his body and heart.

“What was it like?” Alec asked without opening his eyes, hands both folded beneath his pillow, where Magnus was well aware that Alec kept a knife and stele within close reach. Even this world was not perfect, it seemed. None of them had been, but this perfectly imperfect life was his home.

Magnus didn’t know how to explain the worlds, the hilarity, the horror, and the beauty of them. They were all different, and yet fundamentally the same. He longed for Alec in all of them, but he was able to let him go when it was apparent they would not work. Was it possible to love someone enough to let them go and live the life they were meant to, even if it meant being away from you?

He loved Alec’s naive hope, the truth he was willing to destroy himself for, all his innocence and bravery. He fell a little in love with every aspect of this man, who was not the sum total of the versions but a strange amalgam shaped and forged by his own personal struggles. It felt a little like being unfaithful and yet, love in its truest and most pure form.

He finally settled on , “Even when you weren’t for me, I loved you. I love everything you are and everything you have the possibility to be, did you know?”

Alec looked a little overwhelmed, licking his lips, and eyes opening with a shy flutter. Magnus knew the feeling. It was almost too much to feel, let alone have it aimed at you. It was hard to imagine. But as he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of Alec’s eyes, he realized that maybe he didn’t have to.

“Sounds like you had quite an adventure.”

“It was,” he said, tired of thinking again about it, dissecting it, and looking for meaning one last time before closing the book on this chapter completely. It was done. What happened in life didn’t matter so nearly as much as what you took from it, and Magnus meant to have it all.

He found Alec's hand and threaded their fingers together. “Now, are you ready for ours?”