Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

                                                                                             

Some entirely unforgiving conspiracy seems to be at work in the world on this particular evening, targeted solely and with great prejudice at deterring those in dire need from indulging in a refined and well overdue alcoholic beverage.

Which is to say - if one more interruption prevents Magnus from sitting down with his martini glass before the evening is out he’s liable to start taking truly drastic action. He hasn’t decided on what. 

The wards pulse for the third time in as many hours, magic prickling like a honed sixth sense at the nape of Magnus’ neck; a sort of pressure on a bubble as some sentient presence steps in range. They’re not hostile, at least, or there would have been a rather delightful backlash instead of a reluctant give, but considering how his evening has been shaping up so far, they’re undoubtedly not Magnus’ top pick for an unexpected visitor. 

He sighs as he sets a steel shaker back down onto his drinks cart. The olive waiting in an otherwise pitifully empty tall-stemmed glass seems to sag on its skewer and Magnus finds himself agreeing with it even as he strides off, through the loft and out to the foyer.

The knock sounds on the dark door just as Magnus reaches it, and he feels perhaps a little too smugly satisfied when he opens it fast enough to startle the vampire standing in the corridor beyond.

“Oh, why not?” Magnus says, rhetorical and sardonic as he steps back. “Let’s make it a whole Downworlder rave. Do come in. You might as well.”

“Um,” the vampire says, eloquently, hesitating on the threshold like he’s re-evaluating all his life choices, up to and including his death, probably. “I’m…looking for Lethe?”

“You and everyone else, apparently,” Magnus says. “Are you in or are you out? The door isn’t fond of being held open.”

The vampire blinks, perplexed and swallows uncertainly before his brain apparently manages to squeeze out a full thought. He steps hastily inside the apartment, eyes darting around, too quick to actually land on anything and lending him a more than passing resemblance to a cornered rabbit. There’s something faintly familiar about him, but between the pale skin, brown mop of hair and generic accent, it’s hard to tell what or whether Magnus has simply helped one too many of the Night Children adjust to the afterlife over the years. If he’s local perhaps Simon knows him.

He throws the door closed with a quite decisive bang. The vampire jumps. Magnus feels so very far away from his skewered olive.

“This way,” he says, beckoning idly with his fingers as he strides back towards the living room. He wafts an arm grandly over the spectacle that’s taken over the floorspace. “Is that Lethe?”

He knows it is, but deprived of a good drink or not, there is always time for theatrics.

(Interesting name - Lethe - there was a bit of a boom a decade or so back and all the old mythology names got popular again. Magnus met an Orpheus and a Persephone in Brazil just thirteen years ago. There are three Perseuses just in the greater Manhattan area at this moment, all of them just approaching college age and likely enjoying rather more alcohol this evening than Magnus himself is. Perhaps it’s time he took another PhD).

The girl in question, however, is a Shadowhunter. She’s leaning against a long table that fetches up against the back of a long black couch, her skin an intricate dapple of vitiligo under the stark black of angelic Runes and her thick hair braided haphazardly over a shoulder. A boy with a fair complexion stands at her side, pouring intently over a dog-eared doorstop of a book and there are two more with them; another boy with dark skin and a defeated set to his shoulders and a second girl. She’s the only one of them not kitted out in Shadowhunter gear, despite the obvious Rune on her wrist. She’s folded into the corner of Magnus’ couch in an oversized sweatshirt with sleeves pushed to her elbows and dark jeans, tearing into her own lip with her teeth. 

More books and various archaic notes are spread out around the room, punctuated by glossy new printouts and glowing tablet screens of yet more research leaving the stained wood floors and dark leather furnishings looking rather like the opulent backdrop to an exasperating study group on demon family history.

“Is this party at capacity?” Magnus asks the room at large, “Or should I expect other additions to the guest list? Catering will have to be informed.”

Four faces all turn up; one mildly distracted, two apologetic, and the fourth slides right past Magnus - rude -  to settle on the vampire.

“What are you doing here?”

The vampire scowls. “Lethe told me to come.”

As the requisite infighting starts to kick off, Magnus slinks back to his drinks cart. His fingers have barely touched the shaker when the gentle displacement of air at his side has Magnus turning yet again.

The blonde girl swamped in her sweatshirt looks the most apologetic of all, and Magnus forces a smile between his teeth, feeling just a little of his frayed edges knit themselves into some threadbare compassion.

“Yes, my dear?” he asks as pleasantly as possible.

“I’m sorry,” she says, throwing a complicated look over her shoulder at her friends. The fair haired boy with the book and the vampire are hurling expletives at one another with a viciousness that many years of experience tells Magnus they’re likely to end up horizontal together at least once before one of them inevitably murders the other.

At the very least the disagreement seems to stem from their own issues. It’s been some time since Magnus witnessed deep rooted Downworlder prejudice from the Nephilim first hand.

“I didn’t mean for this to take over your evening,” the girl continues and she gestures tentatively towards the dark skinned boy slumped forward on the couch. “But Nav thought you might be the best person to help.”

“I seem to have been cultivating the wrong impressions as of late,” Magnus ponders idly, then he tips his head to make sure he has her attention before he winks to soften the blow. They are children, really, and he doesn’t need to take anything out on them. “I am being a wizened old grouch, don’t worry your delicate head. It has been a long day - a long month, in fact - but if I can help then I will try. Just as soon as I have-”

There’s another small buzz of magic, yet another press against the wards and Magnus lets his fingers fall away from their hopeful reach towards his shaker yet again.

“Just how many of you are there?”

Nav steps up to them, waving what amounts to a phone these days - a thin glass panel that fits in his palm. “That’s Terra,” he says, eyes not quite meeting Magnus’ with something like guilt. “She said she just got here. She thinks she knows what we’re dealing with.”

“Wonderful,” Magnus says, at least half genuine. “Then we can all move this along.”

He picks up his shaker, determined, and snaps his fingers, throwing open his front door in a rush that should have had it rebounding off of the wall if it weren’t for magical buffers.

It only takes a few moments more before another girl joins them, stepping tentatively into the living room and thumbing back over her shoulder. “Uh…the door- it was…open?”

“Indeed it was,” Magnus agrees, finally sipping at the drink he’s been able to pour. The sharp notes of the gin burst on his tongue and while it will take a great deal more to begin edging him towards the realm of tipsy, the taste is calming and fortifying all the same. “Very astute of you.”

“Terra,” the blonde girl says, intercepting quickly before the expression of uncertainty on her face can decide if it wants to turn into a frown. “This is Magnus; High Warlock of Alicante. Magnus, Terra is-”

“Someone with excellent taste in brocades,” Magnus says approvingly. “And a werewolf.”

Terra looks down at what she’s wearing - denim overalls and a shirt - a lightweight silk blend, if Magnus isn’t mistaken, and he rarely is when it comes to silks - with a floral design that looks like it’s from early in the last century. It’s woven in threads of purples and reds that somehow don’t clash with the auburn curls of her hair.

She visibly debates a response for a moment then, eyebrows raised, looks directly at Magnus and shrugs.

“About time someone noticed.”

Magnus smiles, delighted. The gin must be working.

“She’s from the Syracuse pack,” the blonde girl says. Magnus really must get all their names. “Did you find anything?”

The arguing from the other half of the room has fallen quiet, the boy and the vampire both shoulder to shoulder with aggrieved expressions despite their proximity and Lethe a rigid line of anxious tension. Magnus slinks backward as Terra steps up, and he’s blissfully forgotten as the pack of teenagers in his loft all converge together.

Magnus backs himself into the embrace of an impressively overstuffed vintage armchair, that promptly folds around him like an enormous venus flytrap, and there he sits, swirling and nursing his well earned martini, letting the chatter wash over him like the staticky background noise of a twentieth century old radio until-

“...means they didn’t give her a potion, they took them out. A Memory Demon has them.”

Magnus blinks, slow for a beat as the words sink in.

He looks into the last sip at the bottom of his shallow glass and wonders if maybe more gin settled there than usual then shakes his head.

“Run that one past me again,” he says, loud enough to pull all attention to him.

Six young adults look up, their little minds clearly spiralling into mayhem, and stare at him like they’d forgotten he was there. It’s not like they came into his house or anything.

“Uhh,” Terra says haltingly. “Gala’s memories? They weren’t suppressed with a potion and the warlock I spoke to said he recognised her symptoms. A contact of his was commissioned to remove them and they were given to a Memory Demon.”

Magnus nods at his glass and feels like letting the armchair swallow him whole for the rest of the week. “That’s what I thought you said.” Then, with absent interest, “Which one of you is Gala?”

“Me?” the blonde girl says, like it’s a question. “Galatea Cartwright?”

“Ah,” Magnus intones, apologetic as he can make one syllable sound. “Greek mythology. Of course.”

Gala opens her mouth to ask and then apparently decides better of it.

“That sounds bad,” Lethe says, regrouping them all, a furrow digging into her browline. “Why would they have been given to a demon?”

Nostalgia drips through Magnus’ bloodstream like opium, something warming and pleasant about it, if at the same time kind of distant and numb. Irony, amusement and weariness tangle together like balls of yarn left under the supervision of kittens and the entire complicated lot of it sinks into his chest. The olive in his glass wants more gin. Magnus agrees.

This looks set to be a long night.

“Because,” he begins, since clearly no one else is going to, “Sometimes a Memory Demon is the safest place for them. Unless they are merely suppressed but still quite present, which comes with its own risks, then for anyone set on messing with memory in the first place, removal is the only other option. You could store them in some enchanted vestibule, or leave them within the warlock themselves who performed the extraction - both of which I doubt I need say leave them vulnerable to theft or tampering. With a Memory Demon, there is really only one way for someone to gain access to them. I promise you - the practice of guarding memories this way is quite ancient.”

“This has happened before?” Gala asks.

Magnus snorts into the dregs of his glass. “Quite.”

Looking like they are preparing to tackle a nest of Shax demons armed only with toothpicks and a severe lack of action montage backing music, the young gaggle of Downworlders and Nephilim in Magnus’ loft all appear to come to one conclusion. Sometimes Magnus does hate his penchant for reading a room so well.

“We need to get them back,” Nav says.

“Hmm,” Magnus puts in, even though no one asked him. “Are they vital, these missing memories?”

The group blink at him. Magnus rolls his eyes.

“Merely suggesting that memories are removed for many reasons and barring the fate of the entire Downworld resting on their safe retrieval - if you happened to know where a lost Shadowhunter relic might have been hidden away in order to stop a psychopathic maniac from starting a war, for instance - sometimes things are better not tampered with.”

There is another round of astonished, wary blinks, and then Nav scowls and the fair haired boy says “What” in a tone so dead that his vampire not-boyfriend should probably find it a coffin.

Sorry. Casket. Although fancy biodegradable pods are all the rage these days. Magnus digresses.

“We can’t just leave them,” Nav bursts.

Sighing deeply, even though he knew it was a long shot, Magnus tips back the very last of his drink. “I suppose not,” he agrees placidly. “Very well, as you wer– By the Angel , how many more of you are-”

There’s another pulse of magic, another press on the wards.

But then.

They don’t give under the approach of a peaceful entity, the way they’ve been quietly and reproachfully conceding all evening - with the same relative energy of a weary and mildly annoyed doorman who none the less recognises that allowing visitors through is a necessary evil of the job. No. This is different. The magic is warm at the back of Magnus’ neck, trickles down the top notches of his spine and the wards swell, reaching out, trying to pull this encroacher towards them, greedy and jubilant.

His droll exasperation snuffs out and something wild, bright and fierce beyond all earthly reason floods out to fill every atom under his skin in its place.

Magnus is up and out of the chair, his empty glass abandoned on the drinks cart so fast the base sings against the metal as it spins, steadied by a thoughtless toss of magic. He’s out in the foyer and reaching for the door with barely a memory of crossing the space, only vaguely aware of the startled teenagers left in his wake. He’s in time to see the elevator at the end of the corridor ping softly, the gilded doors falling back and-

And Magnus’ heart trips, catches itself on a rib hard enough to bruise, knocking his breath loose. His fingers tighten on the doorhandle to keep himself upright.

Alec steps out, gaze lifting from the floor and finding Magnus instantly. His stride barely falters, and the weariness clinging to his edges turns soft and then melts down under the strength of the smile that settles on his face.

Life, experience and wisdom have settled him into his own body and skin, but outwardly he looks much the same as he did the year they first met; all lean muscle, broad shoulders and ridiculously long legs, the distinctive deflect Rune bolting up the cord of his throat and his dark hair a messy tousle. He’s still tall as ever though he has long been carrying himself now with a quiet, radiating confidence that quite aside from adding to his presence is decidedly hot as hell.

What really catches Magnus’ attention - more than just the long overdue sight of him in general - is the attire.

He’s wearing hunting gear; form fitting sturdy black leather, zips and buckles glinting darkly, strewn all over the place like Picasso was reincarnated as a seamstress. His bow is unglamoured, fitted next to his quiver over his shoulder where the string has pressed a groove for itself into his jacket. There’s a seraph blade sheathed over his other shoulder, and his stele is a flash of silver from the thigh holster strapped around his leg.

Something primal shivers down Magnus’ spine as Alec stalks right down the corridor towards him, pulling the weapons off over his head.

Magnus has seen every version of Alec there is; from the quietly intractable high-standing Clave leader to the pliantly debauched lover and everything in between. Sleep-soft and dream-quiet in the early morning, standing by the loft’s windows in loose sweats with a terrible bedhead, Runes and lovebites translucent on his skin in the pale, watercolour sunlight is one of Magnus’ personal favourites.

Still, this is a sharp reminder that demon-hunter Alec is also quite high on that list, and at least thirty-nine percent of the carnal appeal is the thigh holster alone. It’s been years since he last saw Alec dressed for a hunt - the downside of his being technically retired, and in the moments when he’s not, still more sought after for his extensive knowledge of Shadow world history and law than his remarkable fighting skills.

“Well,” Magnus starts, just slightly breathless, all his blood rushing through his veins, “This is unex-”

Alec reaches him, cutting off Magnus’ idle greeting by swallowing the rest of it.

It’s the kind of thing that might catch someone by surprise, but Magnus frankly doesn’t have the time for it. He presses himself up into Alec’s body instinctively, lacing his fingers together at the back of Alec’s neck and opens his mouth into the kiss, entirely bypassing sweet and affectionate for insistent and thorough. Alec curls around him, a hand palmed around the hinge of Magnus' jaw; the metal band of his wedding ring a concentrated point of bright heat against the cord of Magnus' neck.

The rush of his blood is strong enough to make his veins feel raw, flashfire spearing out in a nebulous branching under his heated skin. His heart tumbles at a suddenly frantic pace and the tide of his want and relief make his mind hazy as the world narrows to the taste of Alec’s tongue as he curls it behind Magnus' teeth and takes.

Magnus’ many rings press into warm, firm skin at Alec’s nape, and all six foot three of him shudders, a low, rich sound rolling at the back of his throat as several heavy somethings clatter to the floor at their feet.

Alec doesn’t stop to bother with it so Magnus doesn’t either. Alec kisses him harder, mouth moving with purpose and so bold it aches.

The hand on Magnus’ jaw slips down, and the other joins it, free of weapons. The touch treads a practiced boundary between reverent and covetous as Alec’s fingers map the bars of Magnus’ ribcage, the strong grooves of muscle framing his stomach and the cut of his hip bones, scrunching and creasing the silk in the way as he goes. Magnus’ hums into the kiss, his chest tight on a lack of air as muscle and magic jump under Alec’s hands, igniting the fibres holding him together until he feels like an exposed nerve, pulled taut and shivery with it.

Alec’s palms spread on his back, firm and encouraging. There’s wiry angelic strength in the tendons and sinew of his forearms, and if Alec were inclined, it would take some real effort to break free. His body is strong and lethal, his heart familiar and relentless, and he’s here, smells like a rainstorm and tastes like home and Magnus is only- well, not entirely human, but the point stands.

He unlinks his fingers to draw the collar of the hunting jacket into a tight grip, buckle biting into his palm. The leather creaks and Alec’s groan spills over Magnus’ tongue like a smooth, sultry whisky. He resists against the force for just a beat - long enough to make it clear that he can - and then he gives to it, sinking into the pull, arching his tongue with renewed purpose into Magnus’ mouth and chasing the answering catch of his breath right back down his throat. The burn of his lungs wringing what oxygen he has left doesn’t seem like nearly a good enough reason to withdraw.

If anything, Magnus uses his hold to reel himself closer then lets his magic slip free to tug at the jacket’s sealed opening.

Alec manoeuvres them back before he can get the zip more than a few inches.

Thick pile carpet scuffs under Magnus’ loafers until they locate the stretch of wall just next to the still open apartment door and Alec's full weight presses Magnus against it, rattling a framed mirror somewhere to the right. It jars them just enough for Magnus to snatch in a ragged half breath before they fuse themselves back together, uncaring of pretty much anything else. The world spins behind Magnus’ eyelids, senses going cottony and pulling like warm taffy at the edges, his magic swelling under his skin and pulse thrumming with want.

The rest of the evening - and longer, in fact - up to this point seems quite distant, and rather muted in comparison to this; pinned under the lean, capable line of Alec’s body and kissing clandestinely in a corridor, frantic like they don't already share a home and a life. He's been drifting somewhat vacantly through the past weeks of clients and lonely nights, and for the first time in a while, Magnus feels just as grounded as he does alive.

Then Alec shifts in his hold, pitching to the side and Magnus tightens his grip on instinct, bites at his lower lip and follows him up because he’s not ready to let him go yet. He’s owed several more minutes of ‘glad you’re home’ and ‘you’re back early’ making out at least.

Alec makes a low, drawn moan in response and Magnus would smirk if his mouth wasn’t far better occupied. He makes a note to bite him again later, properly. Alec does pause though, half folded half upright to curl his hand back under Magnus’ jaw and turn the kiss into a playful but fierce reassurance, like he knows what Magnus meant - and then he continues moving.

Not pulling away - twisting them around.

He falls back against the wall, rattling the mirror again, and tugs Magnus forward wherever he can reach.

And, yes, that’s actually perfect.

Alec slouches down, planting his feet to brace them both and it evens out their height difference. Magnus falls into him, pressing his body between the open splay of Alec’s legs and pins him in place instead, all solid weight, though his magic begs to help. He grazes teeth at the seam of Alec’s mouth again, dragging a hitched sound from him that verges on desperate, then tongues easily inside, chasing another.

Head tipping back into the panelling holding them up, Alec’s fingers hook around the tangle of necklaces draped over Magnus’ clavicle and heat sears up the back of his neck where the links dig in.

His whole body feels faintly feverish as Alec lets go again, just to be able to push both hands up underneath his shirt, distinctly unapologetic and possessive. His palms - broad, warm, etched with familiar archer’s calluses and still that blazing solid band of his wedding ring - coast up over Magnus’ ribs and then sink back down the long planes of his back, fingertips digging in just enough to graze in a searing tease as he goes before coming to settle just above the curve of Magnus’ ass, too low to be at all appropriate for a hallway, and yet not nearly low enough. It leaves white heat liquifying his entire spinal column and pooling low in his stomach. His skin tingles with sense-memory pathways, repeating the touch in endless loops and his magic coils tight, pulling at his blood.

Alec tastes faintly like lightning, under the familiar notes of cinnamon and spice, summer rain and woodsmoke, and Magnus wonders if there’s magic on his tongue, trying to pour itself down Alec’s throat and make a home in his lungs.

Alec shifts under him, fingers tucking just beneath the waistband of his lounge pants, and he presses down firmly to ride their hips together. The friction and feel rips an involuntary shiver from Magnus’ spine and he makes an encouraging sound into the kiss. It’s chased by another punched out groan from Alec and the grip of his legs flexing, as he apparently realises that there’s still more bare skin under the relaxed fit linen. It’s not like Magnus had planned on company tonight.

The straps of the thigh holster rasp against Magnus’ hip and he can name fifty things he wants to do with it, and Alec, and little else, just off the top of his head. The fact that they’ve done at least forty two of those things before hardly lessens the appeal - if anything it’s just solid proof that with the right incentive, Alec can find the holster as much of a turn on as Magnus does.

Magnus slips two fingers under the closest strap and feels his way up into the dark mess of Alec’s hair with his other hand, gripping just hard enough that Alec’s hands clench reflexively, now definitely too low to be hallway appropriate, and he finally breaks the kiss to let out a sharp, broken exhale.

“I have had,” Magnus says, voice scraped raw, “A terrible month.”

“Shit, me too,” Alec gasps.

Magnus leans right back towards him but Alec’s hands tighten again, thumbs pressing into his sides as he withdraws them to a slightly more respectable place and he says a still breathless, “Wait, wait- your-your eyes-”

The affection hits Magnus perhaps even stronger than the lust, hard as warding magic backlash, almost enough to make him dizzy considering how white-out hazy the world has already gone. Magnus blinks his eyes open obediently, drawing down their usual glamour.

Everything sharpens.

A flash of gold reflects for a second in the thin ring of hazel in Alec’s blown eyes. His mouth is kiss-bitten and slack with an easy, gentle smile that turns soft as gossamer. His chest rises and falls heavily, breath rapid and hectic to match the flush working its way into the hollow of his throat and the wild pulse that beats there, skin just catching the light with a sheen of sweat. Yet his hands are steady, still spread on Magnus’ skin, like Alec finds it just as grounding to touch him as Magnus finds the reverse.

“I missed you,” he breathes.

The blood in Magnus’ veins goes molten, all warm and glowing, like if he bled it would run gold. His magic slips through the loosened grasp of his control and immediately reaches out for Alec like a cat winding around its owner’s legs or a child begging to be lifted. Bright, luminous blue wisps lick up over his arms and tendrils uncoil like vines stretching towards sunlight to stroke at the Rune on his neck, at the tab of one of his zips, the strong, elegant tendons inside of his wrist right where it disappears under Magnus’ shirt.

Alec’s smile grows, shifting from that heartache softness to something more overtly pleased and enticing as he watches it. “You missed me,” he says, knowing.

Given Magnus’ magic is currently crawling all over him, it seems likely that Alec is basing this assumption rather more on solid evidence than vague guesswork and as much as Magnus enjoys their banter on any given day, he quickly dismisses the notion of denying it.

“Always, yes,” he answers. “Very much so.”

Alec’s expression shifts gears in an instant and he pushes off of the wall, standing straight and taking Magnus’ weight easily with him. He kisses Magnus on the forehead which inexplicably and abruptly makes him want to burst into tears no matter how many times he does it, but little more so than in this moment since it comes from a change of pace that twists Magnus’ heart into faerie knots.

Then - hands slipping from bare skin - Alec folds them into a fiercely quiet hug.

Magnus exhales.

He buries himself in the curve of Alec’s neck, inhales sandalwood, leather and cinnamon, coloured with the faint afternotes of sulphur and copper; the telltale signs of a demon hunt and spilled ichor. In a filmy layer over that is the trace of petrichor from fresh rain and staticky ozone from a recent portal.

He holds it in his lungs for a count then exhales again in a long, low breath that rattles his ribcage and purges all of the exasperation, impatience and loneliness from their strangleholds in him.

For the first chapters of his long life, Magnus has only had himself to truly rely on in a world where discrimination and oppression were unavoidable and abuse and betrayal ran rampant. He had learned through experience, and not all of it good, that he - his magic - was strong enough to protect himself should the Shadow World descend into war and he ever find himself in danger but he’s always had to be alert, careful, guarded. Even knowing he can defend himself and that he has a place to retreat to, looking over his shoulder has been a fact of his life.

Until Alec.

Alec had been cagey, scared and suffocated when they met, but when asked, he had offered his strength to Magnus with barely a second thought and Magnus had realised then just how much of it he had to give. As he grew, so did his ceaselessness, his refusal to settle or conform, forcibly dragging his own race into a better future.

Magnus hasn’t been alone in a long, long time. He hasn’t had to be constantly alert and watchful in just as long.

This Nephilim was raised both a warrior and a lamb for slaughter, all sharp edges and snark, Angelic grace and fury in his veins. He was born a Lightwood from a line of prejudice and duplicity and bore its weight from too young of an age. It’s in him that Magnus found true refuge.

It was a strange thing to adjust to after centuries without, but with Alec curled around him, Magnus feels safe .

Building a fortress of wards and brick where your body can settle, he’s learned, is very different to finding somewhere your heart can rest.

Magnus meant it when he said it had been a long month.

Alec was called away to Idris to assist the new Consul with some advancing legislation, and really - after all this time, four weeks is very little to them, but right now Magnus isn’t feeling too charitable about that opinion. It was quite long enough for him to go idle, get morose, start another business model, fund a new vineyard, narrowly avoid a diplomatic incident in Portugal, binge watch two new tv shows, name the pigeon intent on roosting on the kitchen windowsill and nearly adopt another cat. Those last two are utterly unrelated, should anyone ask.

Spoiled by Alec’s permanence in his life he might well be, but Magnus likes it like that.

He spent centuries alone or indulging in fleeting hedonistic whims and here he is now, ready to crawl out of his skin when deprived of one person for mere weeks. He doesn’t entirely hate it, though next time Alec is inevitably begged away from him to fix some Shadowhunter issue, Magnus will insist on a portal commute. Or he’ll pick up the apartment and go with him; he’s not particular and it’s been a good few years since they last lived in Alicante. His decision to keep his outstanding client appointments this time was an egregious misplacement of responsibility and Magnus will be having words with himself. As it is, Alec is back ahead of schedule but Magnus isn't about to question that just yet.

“You okay?” Alec asks him quietly, when several minutes have passed, the two of them simply standing tangled in the corridor.

“As well as can be expected,” Magnus answers lightly, feeling newly magnanimous about how his evening is unfolding. His fingers find a zip tab in Alec’s jacket to toy with, small tugs back and forth that part the dark teeth then gnash them closed, open, closed. “Though I'm about to vastly improve on that estimate when I don’t sleep alone tonight.”

Alec’s fingers coast up Magnus’ spine and then press into a knot of tension just at the base of his skull, rubbing in a way that treads a paper-thin line between soothing and sensual. “Eventually,” he says, sly and warm.

A throat clears awkwardly from not far behind them and Magnus sighs. Alec goes on alert, twisting to look, his head coming up and shoulders setting back, and Magnus tightens his arms around his waist to stay the soldier’s instinct that flares out in every line of his body.

“Ah yes. That,” Magnus says dryly.

As hoped, his lack of concern lets Alec immediately soften, defensiveness morphing instead to dubious curiosity.

Letting his glamour slip back into place, Magnus looks around him and finds Lethe standing there, mottled skin flushed and eyes not quite settling on them, like she’s witnessed something scandalous and thinks it might just go away if she doesn’t look right at it. Shame she wasn’t a few minutes earlier, Magnus thinks idly - perhaps if she truly had seen something depraved she’d have left them to it.

“Um…sorry to…interrupt- we just weren’t sure if…” her eyes catch on Alec’s tall, tapered silhouette, still placed side on between Magnus and his own doorway. His weapons are on the floor, out of arm’s reach, but he doesn’t need them; with the sharpness of his features and the readiness in his spine he looks enough like the honed edge of a Seraph blade all on his own. Her gaze jumps away again, but her blush is fading and she looks like she’s trying to break down a puzzle in her head, intrigue and uncertainty warring in her face. “Nevermind- um. I’ll just…tell them it’s fine.”

She turns and hastily retreats back into the loft.

Magnus sighs again as Alec turns to look at him, eyebrow arching up.

“Are you hosting a party?”

“Hardly,” Magnus scoffs. “If I were then I could tell them to leave.”

Alec’s eyes flicker, and he seems to be drawing accurate conclusions about Magnus’ moderately unenthusiastic state from the teenaged Shadowhunter currently in their home because his expression twists, something protective and unmovable coming to life in the furrow of his brow and the bow of his mouth. For an instant, Magnus isn’t holding his husband anymore, or a skilled demon hunter, or even a practiced parent about to hand out a grounding. Alec is suddenly every inch a formidable Clave leader; someone who ran one of the most prestigious Institutes in the world for years before his expertise and unfailing youth enabled him to turn towards Idris and start to rebuild its government from the inside out.

“I can tell them to leave,” he says plainly, and shifts like he plans to go and do just that.

Magnus tightens his grasp and immediately Alec sinks back to him, waiting.

“Tragically,” he says, “they’re here for business. And this might dredge up some memories - pardon the irony.”

“What?” Alec replies, flat.

“One of their little band of misfits is missing some memories,” Magnus explains directly, watching in real-time as realisation colours Alec’s eyes and his mouth tugs into a dry half smile, half grimace that looks just the way Magnus felt as soon as he heard; disbelieving, nostalgic, slightly pained, altogether too weary and too close to home despite the intervening time.

“Let me guess,” Alec mutters.

“Indeed,” Magnus answers. “I believe they were just about to pick apart the merits of summoning themselves a Memory demon when you arrived home. We hadn’t quite gotten to the details and I’ve been rather preoccupied since.” A smirk flashes across Alec’s face, gone almost as fast. Magnus glances at the door reluctantly. “I suppose I should make sure they haven’t opened a rift to some forgotten hell dimension by now.”

Despite Alec appearing to realise - much as Magnus had some time earlier - that they are apparently not off duty tonight just yet, this statement does make him snort.

“Somehow I think you’d have noticed,” he says even as he finally untangles them from their hold and strides over to his dropped weapons. “Hell dimensions do tend to be messy. And loud.”

Magnus - eyes brazenly roaming Alec’s ass and the straps of the thigh holster as he bends to pick up his bow - says somewhat absently, “I think you’re overestimating me.”

“No I’m not,” Alec refutes, like it’s a simple truth. “You’re the High Warlock of Alicante. You can do anything.” He turns, faltering for a half heartbeat when he realises Magnus is blatantly checking him out, then shakes himself and steps close again, one hand shouldering his quiver and bow, the other holding his Seraph blade backwards by the hilt. The hallway lights glint off of the galvanized metal laying in a wicked arc down the side of his leg, Runes lining the flat edge.

“Hmm,” Magnus hums, and snatches him in by the collar of his jacket one more time, rising up to kiss him, all open wet heat, teeth and tongue, as filthy as he can make it for the scant seconds it takes Alec to catch up.

A snagged, wanting sound breaks in the back of his throat, half in surprise, and just as he starts to push back into it, Magnus plants his fists to separate them. Alec’s eyes are dark, a little wild, his pulse already ticking up again and his breathing fluttering under Magnus’ hands.

Magnus lets his gaze wander across his face, trace the deflect Rune on his neck and then drift down the length of him, sultry and pointed. He says, “If you think I’m capable of noticing anything else at all when my husband comes home in all this and throws me against a wall then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Alec blushes.

Magnus delights in the fact that he can still cause it, even after all this time and the myriad of depraved and indecorous things they’ve not only explored together, but also been caught doing. Alec isn’t exactly shy - never really was, his deeply repressed childhood and adolescence aside - some things are just involuntary, but it’s no secret Magnus enjoys this particular quirk. The flush splashes across Alec’s cheekbones and crowds up under his jaw before it starts to fade. His eyes drop, a flustered, pleased smile crossing his face even as he shakes his head - and then he straightens in amused protest. “Hold on- I did not throw you-”

“A tragic oversight,” Magnus laments happily, cutting him off. He’s enjoying himself for the first real time all evening, coaxing Alec on. This right here is the sense of belonging he’s been missing since Alec was called away to Idris. “It’s something we can rectify.”

“We are not alone,” Alec reminds him, though Magnus notes it was hardly a no.

It’s been a very long time since there was an actual child in their home and Magnus felt the need to be at least somewhat discreet about just how often his priorities veered towards getting Alec out of his clothes. Alec does still like to tease him about his attempts at restraint.

Magnus rolls his eyes, heaves a theatrical sigh that serves as a cover for the very real emotional fortification this evening will need, and then retreats back to the still open apartment door.

“They’re teenagers, I daresay they’ve seen worse than a little groping. But yes, I suppose we had best deal with that first,” he agrees.

Bemused, Alec follows him inside. He stashes his weapons on the racks inside the door - quiver on a hook, blade and bow in a stand beside an ancient purple umbrella and a rather newer portable water-shield - and then takes Magnus’ hand with a quick, soft squeeze. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat with a thick swallow.

“We’ll talk about the wall thing later,” he promises, and then sweeps past him.

A sudden, revitalising smirk slashing across Magnus’ face in response, he follows Alec into the living room.

Chapter Text

In his absence a portal to hell has not appeared, which is really where the positives begin to fall short.

There’s a pause in the flurry of activity around numerous books and tablet screens when Magnus steps through the doorway right on Alec’s heels, and all faces turn to them.

“Oh my god,” the vampire says faintly. He’s staring at Alec with something slaloming between awe and mortification, his eyes incredibly round. Magnus - quite unexpectedly delighted by this reaction - has to sweep his fingers across his mouth to hide his amusement.

The blond boy’s expression darkens like a thundercloud.

“What?” he demands, mullish, then turns to rake assessing eyes over Alec. He only looks further annoyed and Magnus has to bite his mouth firmly closed. People have often measured Alec up over the years in hopes of finding him lacking in some way, and in Magnus’ great and unbiased opinion, all have failed. “Who are you? Did you call the Institute?” the boy tacks on, directing his accusing tone at Magnus. “We don’t need their help - we can do this.”

Magnus would snort out loud, but decorum prevails.

Alec raises an infinitely unimpressed eyebrow at the teenager but before he can say anything at all, the vampire slams his elbow into his not-boyfriend’s ribs, hard enough that a human’s would have cracked clean in half. The boy just winces. Magnus really needs to get their names.

“Cable,” the Downworlder reprimands conveniently, in an undertone that’s still shockingly loud. “He’s not from the Institute.”

Cable - interesting name - Magnus vaguely wonders what fad prompted that one - turns his eyes to the vampire. “Do you know him? How would you know that?”

The vampire’s eyes grow even rounder, burning with an intensity like he’s trying to feed a fully formed reply directly into Cable’s head via telepathy. Magnus has half a mind to tell him it will just give him a migraine.

“ Because,” he says, stressed when Cable just shrugs in a ‘Well?’ kind of way at him. “That’s Alec Lightwood-Bane.”

Something falls with a thunk and a clatter from across the room, and Magnus diverts his attention over there to see Gala picking up coloured chalks from the floor. She looks mildly confused but Terra stands next to her, poleaxed.

“Holy shit,” she says bluntly.

The vampire turns up a hand towards her in a silent ‘See? Thank you’.

If anything, Cable’s confusion just makes him look further irritated. “What the hell does that mean? Miles? Who is he?”

The vampire - apparently Miles - groans through gritted fangs. “Former Head of the New York Institute, former Downworlder Cabinet Representative and founder, former High Inquisitor of Alicante. Former Councillor of Idris. Former Consul of the Cl-”

“Never heard of him,” Cable snaps.

“He’s before your time,” Miles says, tightly between his teeth still.

Cable scoffs hard enough that Magnus thinks it might have damaged his throat and he throws himself down on the couch. “Not a chance. He doesn’t even look thirty.”

“Okay,” Alec cuts in, decisively and entirely done with the performance unfolding. He’s gotten used to recognition and hero-worship over the years and if it still flusters him, he’s learned to hide it well. His patience with it, however, still has a somewhat short fuse. “If none of you informed your Institute you’re here and planning to summon a demon - that’s your problem, not mine. Same goes for your Clan and Pack,” he adds, making it quite clear that he’s easily clocked the Downworlders among them. Miles’ spine straightens at the indirect address and from his snared expression, Magnus can’t help but feel he’d have flushed if he had the circulation to allow it. Alec carries on like he hasn’t noticed, “I don’t need to report you - for a decision that’s impulsive and grossly unprepared, by the way - what exactly do you think is going to happen if you go back into Ops tomorrow with a bunch of memories that you didn’t have yesterday?”

“Do you think we can’t do it?” Cable challenges waspishly, which sidesteps the finer points entirely.

Alec looks impassively back at him. “Can you? No really,” he pushes, without leaving off long enough for a reply. “Do you know how to do this ritual at all? Any idea of the first thing involved? There’s a reason demon summoning still requires a level three sign-off, but I’m not running your Institute anymore so if you want to undermine it then go right ahead. Let them question you tomorrow, bench you from active duty, hell, maybe you get reassigned when they find out what happened, because they will.”

Cable’s expression only darkens, his jaw flickering as he grits his teeth.

Alec takes the miniscule concession that is his silence and gentles a fraction in response. “I’m not going to report you, I just live here, but if you drag my husband into any of the fallout of doing this without a proper sanction or knowing what you’re signing up for - I can promise you’ll regret that.”

Magnus is vaguely aware that his expression is probably something grotesquely sappy and love-addled - perhaps just a touch too turned on for present company as well - but he’s also a far cry from caring. His chest pulls taut, humming and warm with blazing affection and he feels for a moment like he’s swallowed an errant beam of sunlight.

Nav clears his throat awkwardly from behind the table where they’ve spread out a heap of books and research materials. He pulls his glass phone from his pocket with all eyes on him. “I could just…check in,” he suggests.

Looking like it pains him greatly to back down, Cable shrugs and doesn’t try to stop him when Nav thumbs through the device and leaves the room for the foyer. Alec and Magnus haven’t moved far from the doorway and Nav gives them both a generous berth as he goes.

“We’ve been looking it up since Terra got here,” Lethe speaks up into the cloying silence that follows Nav’s departure. She’s doing a better job of looking at Alec now, but she still can’t quite hold his gaze, like she’s still remembering the very different version of him she glimpsed out in the hall, curled around Magnus and can’t quite level it with all the titles Miles dropped on them. “Magnus said that using Memory Demons to keep memories was an old practice so I guess we thought it might not be that difficult to do. There’s archive reports of it.”

Alec’s eyes twitch, mordant, and he rolls his head back like he’s readying himself for a sparring session.

“Alexander,” Magnus says softly to him, adoring and soothing; a thank you and a call for temporary ceasefire in one.

Alec didn’t quite demand everyone left, and he easily lets go of some of the rigidity in his spine the moment Magnus asks, deferring down to how he wants to proceed. Magnus loves every version of Alec there is, but this imposing and assertive one who stepped into the loft ready to defend him, now looming in the middle of the room staring down harmless younglings is unfortunately, currently rather doing it for him.

He places a hand to the small of Alec’s back, pressing a soft wash of magic into him as he does, to make sure he feels the gratefulness and assurance even through the thick hunting leather. He conceals all reaction very well, but the corner of his mouth softens as Magnus lets his hand slip and steps forward.

“Difficult,” Magnus says to the room with gravitas, “Is debatable. In practice, perhaps not the most complicated of rituals, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy either.”

“Great, and what does that mean?” Cable snipes.

Alec shoots him a bland look then asks Magnus sidelong, “Was Jace this bad?”

Magnus does snort at that, decorum be damned, and playfully pats Alec on the shoulder instead. “Worse. I had to share you with him.”

It makes Alec roll his eyes, even as he tries to fight off a smile that’s just a little bit pleased. Magnus always respected the Parabatai bond along with Jace’s place in Alec’s life, and had come to care for him in his own way regardless but both he and Alec have always been possessive of each other, and content with it. Alec still enjoys glimpses of it.

“What it means,” Magnus continues, bracing himself for what’s ahead, “is that sometimes the steps are easy but the demand is not. In this case - summoning a Memory Demon requires a sigil; a quite intricate one, and it must be recreated accurately in order to contain the entity. You need the name of the demon who has the memories, the person from whom they were taken, a Warlock to perform the ritual and three more volunteers to close the pentacle. If all of that sounds simple enough, then be warned you will also be asked for payment if the demon is to return what was taken - payment that you must be committed to give before you begin. Any attempt to back out once the demon is called could unleash him on the city.”

Alec - casually unzipping and shrugging out of his leather jacket - says a just as casual, “The Institute would notice.”

Magnus allows himself a moment of distraction as Alec casts the jacket onto the back of a chair. He’s wearing a thin black t-shirt under it that clings to the muscled planes of his scapulae then follows his spine down, the sleeves turned up just once to keep them out of the way leaving his arms bare right up to the swell of his biceps. Among the usual, there’s a new, temporary fireproof Rune just above his elbow and the curved lines of a tongues Rune on the back of his left wrist, already fading.

Much as Magnus enjoys the jacket for other reasons, it’s designed to be thick enough to withstand claws, teeth, stingers, horns and other nasty appendages. He could feel Alec warm and breathing through it, but not the actual sinew and bone of him. In the hallway, that much sufficed. Now Magnus is reminded that it’s been a month since they were last together and according to Cat they never made it out of their sickening honeymoon phase.

Not that Magnus appears to be alone in his distraction.

The mention of the Institute has Cable turning an irritated look on him - and then his face does something complicated, eyes catching just as Magnus’ have on the broad, graceful slope of Alec’s back, and he spins his head away, twice as annoyed and now a little flush in the face.

Magnus positively swans to his drinks cart.

If he were feeling even the slightest bit more benevolent about his interrupted evening, or about the numerous chips on Cable’s shoulders, he might offer him some sympathy. It may have been some time, but Magnus can still remember what it was like to see the appeal and be intrigued despite himself. As it is, not only is he ever so slightly enjoying the boy’s apparently sexually confused apoplexy on its own merits but the hopeless nature of it has always made Magnus a little bit vindictively pleased.

Alec is impossible to flirt with.

Ninety six percent of that used to be that he just did not notice when anyone was trying to hit on him. Back in their early years Magnus found it something of a personal vice; watching people attempt to approach Alec when they went out to bars or pool halls, only to give up when subtlety failed or have to spell out their interest and be rejected. The remaining four percent when Alec actually realised usually meant a straight shot to the rejection part, with or without pointed references to his happy marriage and husband.

Over time, and with plenty more practice, Magnus suspects Alec recognises the signs far more now than he used to, but out of sensitivity or sass or just lack of any willingness to deal with it, pretending he hasn’t noticed when it happens seems to still be his go-to.

Magnus has always been the exception.

Sue him if he delights in that. Really, no one can blame Magnus for the faithfulness making him a little hot under the collar.

He starts to mix up another martini and behind him, the buzz of voices starts to permeate the living room as the Shadowhunters debate going through with the summoning.

“Well there’s enough of us to do it,” Lethe says. “And Gala is here already.”

There’s the rustle of something that sounds distinctly like the box of recovered chalk and Terra says, “And we have an image file of the sigil. I think I can draw it.”

Magnus thinks of his own set of ritual chalks in a matte leather case, tucked away in his office and ponders whether he feels like sharing them. There’s no real reason that children’s playground chalk from the nineteen-nineties wouldn’t do the job just fine, so it’s really just to show willing anyway.

“And we have a Warlock,” Lethe adds.

Magnus has barely managed to pull an ‘Oh, do you?’ face at his bowl of olives when Alec’s unimpressed voice cuts across the room.

“You’re in a Warlock’s home,” he corrects, whip fast, and Magnus twists to look, “but that doesn’t mean Magnus agreed to do anything for you. And the Accords might have come a long, long way but a Warlock’s magic, expertise, time and energy are still their livelihoods and something they’re paid for.”

Cable winces just slightly, like even he is aware right now just how unwise it was to assume.

“Let me guess,” he says, though not with the same acid he’s been spitting half the night, “The Institute would notice.”

Alec shifts him a look, assessing for a second whether he needs to press on the point. Apparently deciding that Cable isn’t being facetious but actually wryly acknowledging it, he offers instead a mildly approving shrug. “Unless you can pay a Warlock’s fee without it going through their books.”

“I assure you, you can’t,” Magnus chimes in, careful to be airy about it but quite firm. Cable's eyes skip away from him as well.

“Shadowhunters might not get a huge wage,” Miles says tentatively, “but if it helped…I could speak to the Clan. Bonus of being immortal - lots of savings.”

Magnus tuts, amused. “Oh, to recognise the wealth potential of immortality, only to completely eschew it in one sentence.”

“What?” Miles asks, kind of helplessly.

“When you have an eternity to acquire net worth, sometimes other things find themselves of far greater value than money,” Magnus explains with none too fine a point. He swirls his martini glass in the air, just for the theatre of it.

Miles looks momentarily like he might have tasted a lemon; his face contorts into something slightly bitter and disappointed. He mumbles, “I’m still kind of new at this.”

Magnus considers him for a second. “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Miles shrugs. “Ninety two. Or - nineteen when I went into transition but ninety two now. I was originally from Toronto.”

Something faint taps at Magnus’ brain as he registers the mention of Canada and the vaguely familiar something about Miles when he’d shown up at the door.

Before he can quite follow it through, Gala speaks up.

She takes a delicate step forward, fingers toying with the ribbed cuffs of her sweater as she tugs them down over her hands. “Is payment important right now?” she asks. “You said some other things - about the demon. We need to know which it is, but won’t that be the most difficult part? My memories are gone - I don’t know who took them, much less which demon they were given to, and there have to be thousands of-”

“Five,” Cable corrects.

Gala blinks at him. “Five?”

He nods, gesturing vaguely over to the table where he’d been standing earlier beside Lethe, pouring over the archaic tomes Magnus kept hold of in the loft. “Yeah. Memory Demons. Do you think we were just doing the crossword? We found the entries on them. There’s five.”

Magnus clears his throat. “Four.”

Heads swivel to him, confusion mounting. Alec’s jaw flexes as he folds his arms and leans back against a bookcase. His amusement has thinned under the age-old reminder coming to the surface.

“There are only four Memory Demons,” Magnus clarifies.

“But,” Lethe interjects hesitantly, lifting a jaundiced book as she does, “It specifically states in here that five were formed in the dimension known as-”

“And what date was that book written?” Magnus prods gently.

She doesn’t answer, instead looking down at the creased open page and then she reaches dubiously to turn it to the beginning.

“I’ll save you the trouble,” Magnus tells her. “It was never actually published in the manner that you might know, so there isn’t a printed date of copyright or distribution listed in there that might tell you when it was created. But I’ve owned that book since somewhere in the seventeenth century.”

Lethe’s fingers freeze abruptly around the dog-eared pages, her grip turning fearfully delicate as she realises its age.

Magnus waves a hand at her. “Oh, it’s been well protected against a sight more than a good thumbing, I assure you.” Lethe’s two-toned skin colours at the innuendo and Miles makes a choking sound. Alec, over by the bookcase, rolls his eyes and looks slightly less caught up in the past. “My point,” Magnus impresses, “is that some of its content is very much out of date. A lot can happen in a few hundred years.”

“So you’re saying…” Lethe gazes down at the earmarked page on Memory Demons as she gathers the words, “...that this is wrong because - what - one of them was destroyed since? How is that even possible?”

“Isn’t your job destroying demons?” Magnus asks blandly. He enjoys the way the light catches on the rim of his martini glass when he swirls it again.

Lethe pulls a face at the reply. “I-I mean, yes, but these aren’t exactly your garden variety Moloch and Ravener. It says they’re a class of Greater Demon. I didn’t think those could be completely destroyed.”

“I suppose it depends how you would define completely,” Magnus ruminates. He tips back the glass, luxuriates for just one moment on the warming hit of the alcohol, and then tunes back in with a heave of patience. “Dealt a killing blow their atoms will be scattered into the farthest reaches of their home dimension - a state from which it can take centuries or longer to reform to even a fraction of their prior strength. Alec killed the demon Azazel back in two thousand sixteen. The last I heard he’s made his way up to a somewhat goopy residue in the pits of Duduael.”

“Gross,” Terra mutters, reminding Magnus she is in fact still there.

He’s also inclined to agree. What he says is, “For most - given the average lifespan - I assume that feels fairly permanent. So for all intents and purposes, yes, there are only four.”

An array of frowns assemble in response, and Gala opens her mouth, only for Cable to speak up first, eyes sharp and even a little alarmed as they leap between Alec, Magnus and Miles.

“Wait- hold on. You said Alec killed Azazel. You. In the year twenty sixteen?”

Expression quite impassive, Alec shrugs an affirmative.

Cable blinks, something in his face going slack. “But you- that would-”

“I told you,” Miles grits to him, teeth clenched and sounding pained. “He’s before your time.”

“I thought you meant he moved back to Idris or something before we joined the Institute. Not that he was…” his throat visibly closes up. Despite the truth now apparently staring him in the face, he still can’t bring himself to say it.

“I told you he had all those jobs in the Clave,” Miles shoots back.

Cable throws an arm up in some kind of agitated dismissal. It seems clear though that whatever Miles might have said before when trying to inform his friends, Cable simply hadn’t believed it or really processed it.

“Lightwood is an old Shadowhunter family,” he argues. “All of them have had ranking jobs in Institutes and the Clave for generations. I didn’t think you meant him specifically.”

“Are you done?” Alec asks, only it doesn’t really sound like a question.

Cable seems not to notice the implied warning, demanding, “How could you even have done it?”

Something like the echo of a scowl flits across Alec’s features before it settles back into a blankness not out of place in an interrogation room. Magnus is reminded fleetingly of the months when Alec had been around forty and his frozen youth had first been pulled into question. He says, “None of your business.”

Disbelief colours Cable’s face before a very definite scowl makes its home between his eyebrows. “There’s just some-” his words hitch, catching, like an instinctive recoil against the impossibility of it before he pushes through to finish, “-Some immortal Shadowhunter out there and that’s not important?”

“I said it wasn’t your business,” Alec corrects calmly, “Importance has nothing to do with it. It’s not replicable.”

Belligerent, Cable snaps, “How do you know? It might be.”

Coolly, Alec replies, “Because it was a gift. From an Angel. Let’s just say the circumstances were extreme. So no, it can’t be replicated.”

“How does no one know?” Gala asks, somewhat breathless with her shock but before Cable can argue some more.

Alec lifts his eyes to her and a scoff that’s half derisive, half entertained snags in the back of his throat. “What makes you think no one does?”

When that is also met with a handful of startled blinks, Alec pushes himself away from the bookcase and, rolling his neck to work out tension, finds himself a perch on the arm of an empty chair, legs extended and crossed at the ankles. It looks casual, but Magnus knows better. Alec isn’t far from him, carefully placed in order to look open to their visitors while keeping his back guarded and the foyer archway in view. He might have left his more conspicuous weapons behind, but his stele is still strapped to his leg and Magnus would be prepared to bet this entire apartment that he has at least three knives concealed somewhere on his person.

Whatever Alec’s been hunting recently, or whatever Runes he’s activated for it, clearly the tactician in him is still razor sharp, and he’s taught many a class of Shadowhunters and Downworlders alike so he knows how to quietly command attention.

“I’m sure you’ve been told about the Uprising - the Circle, Valentine Morgenstern, all of that?” There’s a collection of nods. Alec nods back, approving, and he has them invested already, even Cable despite his scowl. “I was a child when that went down,” he continues. “Just five years old when it was blown apart, the members scattered, Valentine into hiding and the Mortal Cup stolen. I’m sure you’ve also been taught about the Resurgence eighteen years later.”

Another round of nods, more attentive this time. Magnus can’t help a smug sort of pride expanding in his chest like the pressurised dome of shield magic. Though he doesn’t much tolerate stupidity, Alec has always been exceptional with kids. The big brother instinct is etched deep.

“I was basically running the New York Institute at the time. The Shadow World was on the verge of war. The Clave was corrupt, the Downworld hunted. The Mortal Cup was somewhere in the city and everyone was looking for it. The Accords had been just about holding but they were a sham; unfair and oppressive and in the search and the paranoia, breaches were made. Valentine’s missing daughter came out of nowhere, and then the son he’d supposedly killed as a child. He was experimenting on Downworlders and Nephilim alike. The Soul Sword was used for a massacre. My Parabatai was almost killed taking him down.” Alec pauses, lets it sink in, and then says, “It gets worse. Much worse. Bad enough that Alicante fell, a rift to Edom caused mass casualty and Angels were seen for the first time in centuries - maybe longer.”

That’s a delicate way of putting it, Magnus thinks wryly, but also rather a good way to obfuscate the specifics. It neatly avoids Raziel’s exact involvement or the carefully concealed truth of an unconsenting Ithuriel’s blood and his years of imprisonment. Some things were better buried. But the rest-

Alec lets his posture loosen slightly, intentionally. He says, “All our names are in those history books. There are archives and reports, data files on the Institute servers going back way further. My name must be in there a hundred times over, for the mistakes I made as much as the good I did, right next to the year it all went down. Anyone who wants to know how long I’ve been around - It’s right there to find if anyone cares to look.”

It’s no guarded secret; most Shadowhunters just don’t care to read back so far - or it doesn’t occur to them to - and it’s information that Alec cannot be bothered to distribute every few decades to keep all the Institutes and Heads informed. So instead, it comes up like this periodically; Shadowhunters who stumble across the truth, get a short, impromptu history recap, and are left to go look up the rest themselves.

On the ground level, the murmurs spread for a while, and then mostly die out again as people age and move on, and Alec is left alone. Only the Council are kept aware, more out of convenience than any sense of duty.

“And the Clave didn’t…” Lethe starts, but doesn’t seem sure how to politely word the rest. Magnus can guess anyway. The Clave didn’t demand answers, imprison him, study him, exile him, eliminate him in some other way out of fear.

Alec’s jaw flexes and dark humour curls around his mouth. “They had questions,” he says, which is generous considering the tests they’d wanted to run. “But by the time it got to the Consul that I wasn’t aging, I had a fair bit of my own power. I’d been reforming a lot of the government, working with Downworlders and Institutes across the world. The laws were better. I had my family behind me, alliances across most of the central US. I was married to one of the most powerful Warlocks still alive, one they’d given jurisdiction over Alicante. And they had trained me as a soldier from birth.”

In other words, Magnus thinks slightly viciously, Alec had been one of the most protected and respected Shadowhunters in history at that point. Any threat to him would have brought a full scale retaliation on numerous fronts. And even though they pushed, the Clave had made him and they knew they could not break him.

“The people closest to me knew,” Alec shrugs, a newly light tone that tells Magnus he’s steering them away from the topic. “They were protective and knowledge passed on for a while. I was still working in Idris, still visiting Institutes, forming more committees between Downworlders. I’d see people I trained grow up, new ones come in. People I’d worked with and grown up with had their own kids, and I trained some of them too, and then some of their children. But any immortal will tell you it comes with its downsides, so when I outlived the people who’d known me, over time those connections just started to branch away.”

Magnus sets down his martini glass without a backward look and takes the four steps separating them.

He props a hip against the back of the chair and then reaches out with a hand to settle his fingers at the nape of Alec’s neck. Magnus feels him breathe out slowly and registers the fractional twist of his body to better curve towards him. He rubs his thumb into warm skin, listening for any flutter of upset as Alec inhales again, any sign that rehashing this took too much from him, but he’s steadfast even as he leans into the touch.

Magnus says, around Alec, “The higher ups of the Clave are kept informed. Easier by far to have the head of the beast kept in the loop than to have to explain it all again every time the government changes hands. The current Consul knows Alexander has a long history doing most of their jobs - and to rather great effect. It’s left him tragically highly regarded even if he doesn’t know the meaning of retirement.”

Alec turns his head to give Magnus a dry look. “Says you. We tried for a year back in the sixties if you recall. I caught you brewing a potion for a client in Sri Lanka at three in the morning and you were relieved when I told you I’d picked off a Raum demon down by the sea a week earlier because it meant we were even.”

Magnus tips his head up, imperious even as he feels Alec lift an arm around his waist, can see the delight flashing through his eyes as he teases. Magnus says nothing, and Alec stretches to kiss the bolt of his jaw around the smirk curling his mouth.

So neither of them have proved all that good at retirement. They both get too easily bored and despite the far better state of the Shadow World, things always seem to need fixing.

His thumb rubbing unseen at Magnus’ waist, Alec focuses back on the teens and closes out the discussion with a tone of finality. “The Clave knows, and now you do. If you want to learn more, the history is right there for you to find.”

Magnus clears his throat, quietly, but with a tiny quelling burst of magic. The room feels heavy and cautionary for a lingering second as he lets it settle. “And I’ll thank you,” he says, “to leave it at that.”

This warning is apparently clear enough, and despite the obvious desire to know more tangled up in uncertainty, awe and even a touch of envy, Cable holds his tongue this time and no one else speaks up.

Miles sticks his hands in his pockets, looking a little starstruck and also smug.

He had known.

Of course, the Downworld has remained a little more up to date when it comes to Alec. The Children of the Night and the Seelies both have longer memories thanks to their own extended lives and the Warlocks are a thriving community so given who Magnus is, it might have been hard to miss just how long he’d remained married. The werewolves are always a bit of an anomaly, but their heritage and history seems to remain greatly intact as it passes down and between packs, so perhaps it’s not too much of a surprise that even Terra seemed to recognise Alec by name if not sight.

Into the choked silence that follows Magnus’ warning, Nav reappears.

He steps in from the foyer, phone in hand and looks slumped with relief for all of three seconds before registering the odd tension of the living room. There he stops, eyes flitting around, before he asks warily, “What did I miss?”

How to begin, Magnus thinks.

Miles opens his mouth but no sound comes out. He catches Lethe’s eyes and offers a hopeful half-shrug.

Sighing, and setting down the old book very carefully in front of her, she says, “Magnus was laying out some of the steps for the summoning. What did the Institute say?”

Looking like he’s well aware there was a lot more going on than that, judging by the deafening quiet lazing about the couches, Nav’s eyes narrow but he doesn’t press.

“They’ve allowed it,” he tells them. “Took a bit of doing, but I think I argued a decent case for it. They’ve insisted that they are kept in the loop, that we inform them of any Downworlders involved before we proceed, and they’re warning the Warlock we have on retainer just in case anything goes wrong. They’re not…uh…” Nav glances at Cable and then away again, “not too thrilled that two of you dipped on your patrols to work on this, so I think you’ll cop some heat for that. And it sounded like they’re not happy Gala found out like this.”

“Sucks,” Lethe says, without any sympathy. “Maybe they shouldn’t have done it.”

Nav holds up supplicant hands. “Not arguing. Just saying- I think questions will be asked when we get back. But…we’re in the clear. So…” He casts eyes around again, “Catch me up - how do we summon a demon?”

“Well we need a sigil,” Lethe begins. “Terra has that covered. A Warlock to do the ritual, Gala has to take part because they’re her memories, three more of us to finish the points or something. I think we form like a cage.”

“And we need to know which demon has them,” Gala takes over. “We were just trying to work that out, but at least there’s only four.”

“Four?” Nav’s eyebrow lifts. “We regularly take out whole nests of Iblis but you’re telling me there are only four Memory Demons….ever?”

“Well there were five,” Cable throws in, saturated with snark. “One was destroyed.”

Nav’s other eyebrow rises to join, but he doesn’t get a chance to ask.

“About that,” Miles interjects, “Greater Demons have been killed before, haven’t they? It’s not like word passes through the Downworld unless it’s a Prince of Hell, though - or, I guess unless someone tries to summon one and it’s a no-show. So how did you know…?”

Miles looks right at Magnus, cogs whirring behind his eyes.

“You said earlier…about memories being removed to protect a lost relic…from a maniac…”

Magnus winces internally. Ah yes, he may have cornered himself there. In his defence though, Alec came home early and he hadn’t quite anticipated the backstory of his immortality coming about in the middle of the night.

Deciding to just deal with it as it comes, Magnus simply waits Miles out. He’d quite like his glass back, purely for aesthetic reasons; just to swirl it around some more. The skewered olive rolling around the bottom makes for a fun metronome and he likes the Gatsbean picture it paints, but that would require extracting himself from Alec’s relaxed hold. He settles instead for carding his fingers through the dark hair curling behind Alec’s ear.

A moment passes and Miles’ expression slacks as he realises. His eyes dart to Alec, then back to Magnus and all the pieces seem to have aligned; Alec’s recounting of Valentine, the crumbs Magnus threw out ages before that hinted at a personal knowledge, and the clear overlap. It culminates with a hushed, “You were there.”

“Here we go,” Alec mutters, but all heads have already sprung to Magnus.

He likes to be the centre of attention, but this isn’t exactly the kind he usually aspires to. Oh well. He’s come this far.

“Indeed,” Magnus says.

Cable’s eyes narrow and his spine straightens. “What happened?” he asks.

Magnus turns a quelling gaze on him in return. “Sorry, I thought you were listening. My mistake. It was destroyed,” he answers, because he’s petty and protective.

Other than Alec and Magnus himself, no one still living knows what happened the night he summoned Valak and Clary was forced to kill the entity to save Jace. Magnus doesn’t intend to ever recount any of the events from that spell circle. They don’t belong to anyone else.

Cable’s expression turns mullish and his cheekbones colour, probably more with annoyance than anything else, but his eyes are still keen. Perhaps he’s making his own guesses, but the details were never recorded anywhere so there isn’t much worry of him getting far.

Thankfully, the non-answer has confirmed something else entirely and that quickly diverts the others.

“You’ve done this before then,” Gala says, her face lighting up with something a little too close to relief. “Summoned a Memory Demon?”

“We knew that, didn’t we?” Nav asks.

She shakes her head, pale blonde strands spilling free from the neck of her sweater. “No, just that Magnus said it was a common practice.”

Magnus believes what he said is that it was an ancient practice, not necessarily common, but he can’t find the motivation to call it out.

Nav reaches up to scrape a hand through his dark hair and then says on a long, weary breath, “I think I’ve still missed some things. What do we need other than a Warlock, you, three other people and a sigil? And the right demon, apparently - how do we even find it?”

“I might be able to help,” Terra answers. She pulls out her own phone - a dark black pane of glass, but positively retro based on the way it throws up a holographic screen when she touches it. “I’ll call the Warlock who passed me this info. He didn’t say much but he must know more, or know someone who does. I’ll see if I can chase down a name.”

She sweeps past Nav, still in the entryway, the hologram screen pulsing with blue light as it tries to connect.

“After that, we just have to worry about paying a Warlock for their services - We didn’t get to that part,” Lethe finishes.

“And the demon’s payment,” Magnus adds, reaching to pull at his ear cuff. “But I’m sure you hadn’t forgotten about that.”

The sea of chastised faces that turn to share looks tell Magnus that they had, in fact, forgotten about that.

Nav - absent during Magnus’ initial shopping list rundown of demon summoning necessities and etiquette - looks barely short of alarmed.

“Demon payment?” he asks, with a faint crack in his voice. “What does that mean? That sounds…important. And probably dangerous.”

Magnus beams at him. “Oh, look who has the Institute brain cell this evening,” he coos.

Alec strangles a snort at the last second, and his knee rocks into Magnus’ hip in a way that’s far too soft to be a real reprimand.

“I thought payment for the summoning was a Warlock’s fee?” Gala asks, frowning.

“No, he said we’d be asked for payment if we were going to get your memories back,” Miles corrects, recalling. “Alec -um- Mr Lightwood-Bane said Warlocks get paid.”

“Alec is fine,” Alec interjects wanly.

Miles swallows, and nods.

“What is demon payment, then?” Nav insists, tugging at his hair. “I did not ask the Institute for permission to pay a demon, and I doubt they’d ever grant that so-”

“It is not for the Institute to grant,” Magnus cuts him off before he can unravel himself further. “You might recall that I said that difficulty was debatable? This is why. Only the people taking part in the summoning can pay the demon’s price - and pay it you all must.”

“Is it blood?” Cable asks, jaw set. “It’s always blood.”

Magnus smiles crookedly. “Blood can be replaced,” he says, with sympathy. “Memories cannot. Demons are cruel and not always specific, so you can’t be sure beforehand exactly what they’ll want, or just how the request will manifest - but for what you’re asking, it will likely demand a memory from each of you in return.”

“Something we’d miss?” Lethe asks, faintly. “And we can’t get it back?”

Magnus tips his head. “There is a reason they call it a price, my dear.”

A tremor of tension goes through Alec. His expression is preoccupied, gaze on the corner of a rug poking from under the book-laden coffee table, but if it weren’t for his closeness, Magnus wouldn’t have been able to tell he had reacted at all. The thumb on his waist has gone still. Magnus presses his fingers into the delicate bumps of vertebrae right at the base of Alec’s neck and he tips his head back into the touch, exhaling slowly.

Suddenly wanting to extract Alec from the entire room, Magnus straightens to survey the teens, all now sharing conflicting looks.

“You should all decide whether this is something-”

“We’re doing it,” Nav interrupts. He looks just a touch wild but Gala’s eyes snap up to him, brimming with something fond and relieved and it seems to galvanise him. “It’s what? One tiny memory? And we won’t even remember we’re missing it. I’m in.”

“Me too,” Lethe agrees, on a deep breath.

Cable nods. “Sure, why not?”

Gala, looking touched and a bit overwhelmed, wrings her hands as she faces Magnus.

“Thank you, for the warning,” she says. “I guess we do need to know now what your price would be to do the Ritual?”

And that’s when Alec’s arm slips from around Magnus, and he stands up tall. Magnus blinks, immediately distracted, but Alec catches his wrist as Magnus reaches for him, squeezing firmly once and smiling in a soft, reassuring way that still touches his eyes despite the way he’s turned from the rest of the room and something is definitely off.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I’m just gonna- kitchen.” He reaches up to hook his fingers around the neck of his t-shirt, drawing it to a side just enough to show a fading mark, turning bruise-red underneath his collarbone. It’s the disconnected lines and half circles of the nourishment Rune and it might have been more effective closer to his actual stomach, but this probably means he drew it while geared up and on the move.

Magnus immediately narrows his eyes. “Alexander, when did you last eat?” he asks, reproachful and wry.

Alec smirks absently. “Yesterday. I’m fine,” he insists. “Really. You…do your High Warlock thing. I’ll be right back.”

He tracks from the room, silent on the floorboards and rugs, and Magnus watches him go, now entirely too consumed by what he thinks might be going on in Alec’s head.

Forcing himself to focus, he turns back to Gala’s hopeful and concerned face.

“Let me be clear,” Magnus tells her, sweeping the others into his gaze as well. “There is nothing you could offer me to summon this demon for you.”

Cable’s jaw gnashes. “So this has all been a waste of time?”

“Certainly not,” Magnus shrugs. “You are all armed with a great deal more information than you were just a matter of hours ago which is no loss at all. And I may not be willing to perform this ritual for you, but I will find you a warlock who is. I’m reasonably certain I can have one here within the hour, in fact.”

“Why won’t you?” Lethe asks, though her voice is far gentler than Cable’s. “If- I mean…If you’ll tell us. You did it before.”

Magnus considers her.

He could refuse easily enough, but this is an opportunity, he thinks. It’s a chance to instill upon the newest generation that everyone has their reasons, and it is not for anyone else to deem whether they are worthy or not.

“Indeed I did,” he agrees. “But things were very different then. I told you what the demon would likely demand, and simply put - the price is too high.”

Cable is perhaps learning, because despite the argument that Magnus can see brewing in his expression like storm clouds gathering, he holds his tongue.

“I will contact another warlock for you. You should discuss between yourselves what you are about to attempt and be sure you are prepared for it. If you’ll excuse me - I need to check on my husband.”

Magnus strides away from them without a backward glance.

Chapter Text

The loft is quieter away from the living room, the dark brick and panelling of the side hall enveloping Magnus like a soothing blanket. He lets out a small breath, sheds some of the tension in his shoulders and heads down to the square arched doorway on the right.

The apartment didn’t always have such a thought out kitchen space.

When he’d bought the place somewhere in the twentieth century it hadn’t been too remarkable, beyond a pleasant layout, appealing architecture and the statement windows overlooking Brooklyn. His magic and tastes had elevated it over time, adding, subtracting, expanding and manipulating, all concealed behind wards and glamours from mundane interference.

Whichever landlord they are on by now doesn’t appear to be aware the penthouse loft exists in her building at all, much less have come poking around for rent. It does make for less awkward questions whenever they want to relocate for a few years.

Given how easy it was to fall into the habit of conjuring or summoning whatever food caught his fancy, Magnus had let the loft’s original kitchen become somewhat of a cramped afterthought in the back corner of the apartment. Gradually, with Alec around more often, and as relations between the Downworld improved, Magnus found himself with more visitors and guests who might occasionally be in need of feeding, and he’d expanded the space somewhat. Then, some hundred or so years ago, he and Alec had taken up a culinary course or seven while on vacation in Europe and promptly made further improvements when they got home.

Magnus leans up against the archway, none too subtly observing Alec for signs that he might have been overusing sustenance runes. Even now he's looking for them, there’s nothing to find.

Alec hasn’t turned on the lights, and the room is shrouded in night-time shadow. The tall windows wrapping around the corner of the building are lit from the clouded moon in the sky and cast a silver-grey wash over the white marble countertops, flashing off of the matte chrome sink faucet. A wide range cooker sits in a recess, the backsplash tiled in swirls of gold, some of which blend seamlessly into the shapes of Runes, not because there's any proof they work when inked into ceramic, but just because they're a part of Alec's culture. The hydrator built into an overhead cabinet is humming softly as a digital timer counts down and two ceramic plates are set side by side on the rounded island.

Alec is silhouetted in the buttery yellow light from the open refrigerator door; a focused point of vibrant warmth in the cool dark of the kitchen.

“You can stop staring at me like that,” he says, without looking up. “I’m fine. I used it once.”

“Yesterday,” Magnus reminds him, but he steps into the room, makes his way around the island and leans himself back against the stretch of counter there.

Alec turns from the fridge, kicking it gently closed, and sets down a tall biodegradable cylinder of orange juice next to the cooker. He reaches for a glass from an overhead cabinet as well, and sets that down too, before shifting over to Magnus and stepping close to cage him against the marble top.

“We were on the move and didn’t want the trail to go cold. I was with Demi but the rest were just trainees. We only got done at six this morning - Idris time. By the time we reported back I was just thinking about getting home, the rest could wait.” Alec leans forward to press their foreheads together and Magnus relents, unwinding his arms to tug Alec forward and curl them around his waist. His warmth radiates easily now, through the thin t-shirt and Magnus’ mildly rumpled silk shirt, and the long muscles framing his spine shift smoothly under skin and cotton and Magnus’ hands.

“Besides,” Alec adds, “If you’re going to give me shit for something, it should probably be the Iratze.”

Magnus jerks his head back from him, his back biting into a drawer handle.

Flatly unimpressed, he says, “The what.”

Alec grimaces slightly, and once more reaches for the neck of his shirt. Magnus bats his hand away just as his eyes catch the curling edge of the Rune and he tugs at the fabric himself.

Like the nourishment one and the speaking in tongues one, it’s already fading - placed right over Alec’s deltoid, the solid joint of his shoulder where the wing of his collarbone dips into muscle and ligament. From the swerved angle of it, Magnus guesses he drew it himself, perhaps as close as he could get to an injury site on his back.

So many years on, Alec has almost completely re-trained himself from a lifetime of having Jace there to guard him, but even now, rarely, he can slip and forget. He watched Demi Penhallow grow up, fought with her before, and he was hunting with her and a pack of Idris trainees. It’s something he and Jace had done many times over the years; taking Institute groups on their first hunts and patrols. In the thick of the fight, it could have felt like just a whisper of old Parabatai familiarity again - just enough for a strike to get past where he was expecting a blade to block.

Alec won’t have a Parabatai again. Maybe one day that could change, but it’s been years, and he’s been sure this far. Outliving one had hurt enough.

At least this is a rare occurrence, and Magnus consoles himself with that, his thumb rubbing at the red lines of the healing Rune. It must be fifteen years at least since Alec last had to use an Iratze; a combination of lifetimes of practice honing skill, and being out on the front lines less often.

Alec rolls his eyes. “Before you start-”

“I never start anything,” Magnus says.

Alec gives him a look, disbelief so dry the Sahara would go green with envy. Magnus rolls his own eyes back.

“Tell me you at least weren’t poisoned.”

“I wasn’t poisoned.” The reply comes so promptly that Magnus wonders for a split second whether to believe it, but they have become very versed in not lying to each other. Alec smiles and Magnus feels something in his chest soothe over with the assurance. “It was just a stinger. Hurt like a bitch at the time - I’m out of practice being injured - but I’m all healed up.”

“I think I’ll be the judge of that,” Magnus says, and pushes at his waist, manhandling him until Alec is laughing quietly but allowing himself to be turned around and Magnus can lift his t-shirt up, all the way to his shoulders.

Admittedly he does look pretty healed up, and the smooth, toned skin distracts Magnus entirely for several seconds, eyes mapping between the bold black of his permanent Runes, and fine threads of faint silver scars before he remembers he’s looking for an injury.

It’s just a tiny, slightly annoyed looking welt on the back of Alec’s shoulder blade, little larger than a nickel and certainly leagues better than when it had happened. By morning there won’t be anything left of it.

One hand still holding the shirt out of the way, Magnus trails his fingers up Alec’s back, stroking over the licks of Runes. A shiver runs through him and goosebumps rise in his skin but he just sinks into the touch. Pleased, Magnus presses a little firmer and carries on, over the knots of his spine, the lacing of his ribs and up to the plane of his shoulder. Alec exhales when he settles there.

“For the record, being injured is not something one should practice at.”

Alec snorts softly. “Noted.”

Regretfully, Magnus lets his shirt fall again, drawing his hands away, and Alec turns back around to him, eyes just a little dark and glazed.

“Now,” Magnus says, slipping around him quietly as the hydrator beeps, right on cue. “Were you withholding your appalling adherence to a meal plan in order to facilitate your timely escape, or was that just a happy coincidence?” Fishing out the pre-prepped food that was a dehydrated foil pack when it went in, Magnus scrunches his nose at the label declaring it to be French toast. “Sacrilege,” he mutters, and banishes it with a snap of his fingers.

“Hey-” Alec protests behind him, though he sounds amused.

With a moment of thought and another pull of magic, Magnus liberates two steaming, crispy pieces of French toast from a little cafe in Tuscany, where it’s just picking up for the breakfast rush. They appear with barely a whisper, drizzled in cinnamon sauce with a few errant blueberries lolling on top and slowly permeating the dark kitchen with a sweet fragrance.

Alec makes a small hum of tolerant approval. He’d have eaten the packet meal without complaint, but Magnus can do better, and Alec is fond of Italy. He’s still upset about Venice going under some time ago.

“So?” Magnus presses gently, turning to offer the new plate to him.

Alec glances over at the doorway as he takes it, and it’s all the reminder Magnus needs that they have guests - all of whom have the means to stretch their hearing if they so decide. Magnus throws up a soundproofing ward which spreads out around the walls and over the open archway, glittering, roiling blue before it sinks into the brickwork and holds firm. Left behind is just the slightly trippy feeling at the back of the brain like they’ve closed some heavy door to the rest of the world.

Alec takes a bite out of one corner of his toast. His eyes flutter at the taste and he plucks up one of the blueberries as well, chews slowly, then swallows before he shrugs and answers.

“I didn’t hide it on purpose. Honestly I forgot all about it. I just…the Memory Demon stuff - you were right about it bringing things back, I guess. You have a job to do, and that’s fine, you know it is, but I just don’t think…” he hesitates, considering for a moment, and then exhales in a rush and continues, “It was such a mess last time, and if you’re summoning a Greater Demon I’m going to be here for you, you know I am, I just don’t think I can deal with…”

He trails off again, like he just can’t quite find the words, and then takes another bite of the toast.

Magnus turns around, sending a thread of magic at the English kettle which immediately starts to boil. He opens a cupboard above it and selects a mug covered in cartoon lizards that says ‘Best Roommate’. Lorenzo sighs every time he sees it.

Intentionally light, he says, “Last time was…somewhat extenuating. You are far from the closeted young man hiding feelings for his Parabatai who summoned Valak. It’s not like I’m worried you’d panic again.”

Alec replies, unfazed and bold. “And I’m not worried it would take a memory of Jace this time either.”

Magnus pauses.

It’s not, he realises, like he truly thought that Jace would still be the price taken from Alec in this situation, but he also hadn’t actually thought about any of this at all. It’s been long buried, left in the past after it happened. Things were so very different back then and so much has changed since. Magnus is perhaps not surprised, but there is still something pleasantly warm and assured swelling in his chest to hear it so plainly.

“I knew your affections had moved on,” he says, trying to conceal his smile even with his back to Alec as he uses some more magic to search through a cupboard for a box of tea. He jokes, “It’s Consul Cattington, isn’t it?”

He hears Alec’s snort-scoff of surprised amusement and the droll, “He was one of your favourites not mine. I liked the rescue we got in the eighties,” that follows.

Of course Alec does. A wretched little thing with only one eye but a scrappy ferocity, all black fur and tiny claws and furious mewling. It had gone quiet for the first time held up in one of Alec’s hands and they’d had him for twenty three years. They’d called him Shadowfax.

Reminiscing fondly, Magnus doesn’t hear Alec before he’s being turned around and then effortlessly lifted up onto the kitchen counter beside his mug, which Alec pushes out of the way without looking at it. Somewhere on him, a strength Rune is still active, not to mention a soundless one.

Magnus’ heart leaps and a mess of emotions flush hotly through his blood with it, surpise and amusement sliding headlong into affection and fierce want. Impatience just catches at the edges of his nerves, fueled by four long weeks, and he can't quite pick which feeling to focus on. Alec wedges himself between Magnus’ knees and plants his hands either side of his hips, caging him in for a second time, his outline limned in the muted, moonwashed light from the windows behind him.

The want is winning.

They’ve been here before, many a time, and uninvited guests be damned, Magnus is quite on board - but Alec doesn’t lean in to kiss him, or tug him to the edge of the counter. His expression is something so gentle and real that Magnus finds himself quickly backtracking their conversation to work out where he missed a beat.

“I was never in love with Jace,” Alec says, repeating something that he’s said before with an indulgent air because he knows Magnus still likes to tease it. His voice softens and steadies into something else altogether as he continues, “But yes, he was my Parabatai and even if I was confused and hiding behind him so I didn’t have to deal with who I was, I loved him. He was a part of me. I would have died for Jace.”

Alec lifts one of his hands to settle it around Magnus’ neck, tilting his head up. His eyes roam Magnus’ and he says, “You are everything to me and I wanted to live for you.”

Air punches into Magnus’ lungs; a forceful inhale that catches him off guard.

Even though Alec being here now is proof of that, and though Magnus is very familiar with what Alec’s devotion to Jace had meant, this is not something he’s said before, not in this many words. Choosing to live is, in so many ways, harder than being prepared to die. There’s bravery in it; knowing that the joy of what you keep is worth the pain of the things you lose, and for an immortal, both are long lists.

Still Alec chose him. Hearing the simplicity of that floors him, the shock of his own snatched breath making him slightly light-headed.

“Alexander-” Magnus breathes, without knowing what comes after it. His fingers curl into Alec’s shoulders for balance as he sways towards him on the countertop. Alec's hand slips from the side of Magnus' neck to his hip, almost like he wants to help steady him, though he doesn't seem to be aware he's done it.

A smile nudges the corner of Alec’s mouth, and Magnus might call the expression bashful if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t seem at all flustered or cowed. He looks defiant and sure and Magnus’ heart is a tight fist in his chest, his magic slightly wild and crackling in his bloodstream.

“I’m just saying…” Alec starts, “I’m not needed for this - the kids have enough people for the ritual without borrowing random Shadowhunters. I didn’t think we’d ever be dealing with another Memory Demon, but you need to know that the whole thing - however this goes or if it happens again - I can’t. And it’s not something I’m stepping away from because I’m afraid of having to give up a memory of Jace. It’s because I won’t give up a memory of you.”

For the second time in not even a matter of minutes, Magnus finds himself stalled for breath.

“You deserve to hear that,” Alec murmurs, and then goes and shrugs softly, like he hasn’t just placed something fragile and precious into Magnus’ hands for safekeeping like it’s nothing.

Magnus was in the region of four hundred years old when he and Alec had met. He’d loved and lost several times, some fond and bittersweet, others wounding and destructive, but all of them had shared a commonality; their expiration. Even when he had been with another immortal the relationships had fizzled or imploded; their own expansive wants and beliefs clashing after time, and none of the mortals - Imasu, George, Etta - by their very nature could have lasted forever. None of them had even wanted to, the longest ending after a nostalgic handful of years.

Alec had been the first to look at him and not see someone unknowable and out of reach, not someone to use or pity. He’d been the first person to choose him, despite the sacrifice and the way it shook the foundations of his world. Then he’d done one better, and come home with the means to keep choosing him long after his mortal life would have ended even though it meant leaving everything else familiar to him in an ever more distant past.

In a little over four months, on the twelfth of September, Alec will turn three hundred and ten years old.

Magnus has known him for two hundred and eighty six years - been married to him almost as long - and once in a while, it will strike him that at some point in the near future, he will have lived longer with Alec than he ever did without him.

He’s never been loved like this - in a way that meant leaving everything else behind. It has never faltered or sputtered, never dimmed or waned, only grown and set, tempered like steel when set into flames. It’s no surprise at all, really, that in the hypothetical instance Alec is involved with a Memory Demon again, a fragment of Magnus is the cost that would be stripped from him.

Magnus pulls at him, draws him close and says coyly, “Nor will I.”

Alec blinks, brows furrowing. “What?”

Smiling ever so softly, Magnus shakes his head. “I told them no.”

Because Alec will never ask him not to do this, will not hold it against him if he does, but he deserves to know that he - every single moment and memory of their life together - is Magnus’ choice too.

Alec gapes slightly, glancing briefly back over his shoulder towards the dark, silent doorway. “But-” he starts, grappling for the words for a second and then, “They’re going to do this. You saw what I saw; they’re decided. And what we don’t need is them going off to find a green Warlock who doesn’t get how dangerous this could be and we end up having to clean up after them when it goes wrong.”

Spoken like someone with far too much experience doing the cleaning up when something goes wrong.

“I wouldn’t consider Madzie green,” Magnus says, playfully ruminating, and enjoys the realisation as it flickers into Alec’s eyes.

“Madzie?”

Magnus hums an affirmative.

“No way,” Alec protests, shaking his head, but he’s still soundly closed in around Magnus on the counter, so Magnus figures he’s not actually all that upset.

“She’s almost three hundred,” Magnus reminds him, and Alec pulls a face.

“Don’t do that,” he groans, aggrieved.

Magnus laughs. “Do what?”

“You know what.” Alec shoots him a withering look, but there’s a smile tugging at his mouth in spite of himself. “I knew her when she was a kid, and I’m only just over three hundred. It’s weird.”

“She’s a talented and accomplished young Warlock, Alexander,” Magnus tells him grandly.

Alec’s head drops onto his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. “I know. She’ll do great. Just-” he exhales and the warm rush of his breath spills down the cord of Magnus’ neck, dancing between the links of his necklaces. Wayward fingers tuck under the open edge of his shirt to flick it aside, leaving just enough room for Alec to set his mouth to the solid bar of his collarbone. His tongue rasps, teasing and lazy and hot against the skin and Magnus hisses in a breath at the sudden returning rush of concupiscence that soaks to the surface - then Alec pulls himself back up before Magnus can really begin to enjoy any of it. “You can do this,” he says, reminding Magnus what they were talking about, “if you’d rather it was you. I didn’t mean that you shouldn-”

“Alec,” Magnus cuts him off gently. He’s hyper aware of the damp skin on his clavicle as he sweeps his hands up from Alec’s shoulders, fingers lacing at the back of his neck the same way he had when Alec first arrived home and kissed him in the hallway. He steers Alec to look at him. “My job is important, and I know that you respect that, but I told them I would not do this before I came in here after you and I meant it. You mean far more to me than my title and I can’t give you up either -  not a single memory. You need to know that.”

Alec never would have asked him not to, would have supported him without hesitation, and Magnus knows that like he knows the sun rises in the east. Still, he’d known from the moment Alec stood, let him go and walked out that something was gnawing at him, the tells all too easy after so long even if he might be hard pressed to describe them to someone else. Now, as he watches, it all falls away, sluicing from Alec’s frame and leaving him brighter, more distinct somehow.

“I was willing to do it once,” Magnus offers up, “when I was sure that the worst the demon might take was a fleeting memory of Cat or Ragnor, but then Ragnor died, and it was a cruel reminder that life isn’t everlasting even when you are immortal. And I love you in a way I have never loved anyone, so I will never be willing to take that risk again.”

Alec inhales tremulously, and then he does kiss him, slanting their mouths together with an almost bruising force and dragging him bodily forwards to the edge of the counter.

Immediately, Magnus tightens his hold, gripping Alec’s hips between his legs and nipping teeth into his lower lip, sucking it into his mouth and prying a dark, unguarded moan from the back of Alec’s throat.

If it weren’t for their occupied living room, they’d have been on a horizontal surface ages ago. Perhaps a vertical one. Magnus wasn’t too particular so long as it involved his husband and considerably fewer clothes. Perhaps some rope and Runes.

Alec surges against him, mouth moving ardent and sure and Magnus kisses him insistently back, arching his tongue to coax him on, like Alec hasn’t already come to life, pouring everything he has into him. Without the heavy jacket between them Alec’s blazing warmth, baked under an Idris sun, sears as he moulds them together, enough to wrench a shudder up the length of Magnus’ spine and leave him feeling like glowing molten metal.

The shift and flex of muscle and sinew under Magnus’ roaming hands is smooth and unencumbered, Alec’s heartbeat a fierce pounding overlaid against Magnus’ own; two pulses ricocheting inside his own ribcage, like standing too close to a sound system as it drops a heavy bass. He feels like a drawn bow under the welcome onslaught, mouth going numb, blood running hot, nerves fizzing and magic crackling. Sparks of it break loose - even behind closed eyelids the pull of it is static, like little arcs of lightning playing between his fingers, charged and clamouring for Alec.

Magnus allows it to stretch out as it so clearly wants; just a graze behind the bolt of his jaw; the soft, high point of his carotid where his pulse drums and it presses in like a thumbprint. The kiss breaks thickly as Alec tears away from him, catching his breath.

“Well that was just getting good,” Magnus laments airlessly. His lungs press hard into his ribs with his own breathlessness, his blood pools low in his stomach, thick as syrup and the world is heady with Alec’s taste on his tongue; cinnamon, sunlight and petrichor. Magnus takes his hands back but lets another flick of magic toy with the stretched out neckline of that black t-shirt.

Alec swallows hard but holds up a finger between them, his mouth too ruined to really be admonishing. “Stop distracting me.”

“I think you’ll find you kissed me,” Magnus points out. A thread of magic tucks around the edge of the t-shirt and pulls it an inch over.

Alec bats at it, giving him a dry look. “Yeah. Well,” he says.

Magnus will happily accept that as an admission of guilt.

He leans back against the cabinet behind him, slouching down and widening his legs a little so he’s no longer trapping Alec between them so much as blatantly seducing him. He says in a slow drawl, “I wouldn’t dream of being a distraction.”

Alec’s eyes are hot as they flit from his to his mouth to trace down the length of him, and he sways slightly on his feet, like compulsion is pulling him back in, and then he shakes his head and fixes his focus. Shame. So close.

His hands settle on Magnus’ thighs, palms spread so casually over the light linen. The smooth, polished gold band of his wedding ring looks almost like adamas in the dark; leached of colour in the silvery cast from the windows. Colourless or not, it’s still ever so warm, and it’s not just Alec’s body heat, but the layers and layers of protection enchantments Magnus has seared into it, down to the atoms. Just seeing it, feeling that narrow point of heated contact, no matter how often over the years, still has the inconvenient dual effect of being both an instant source of comfort and also an incredible turn on.

“You’re always a distraction,” Alec says, far too fondly considering Magnus was going for some below the belt action on this occasion. “Can we get back to the newest generation of Shadowhunters currently taking over our living room?”

Magnus sighs and straightens just a little. “If you insist.”

“I do,” Alec nods, hesitates, then adds, “for now.”

Magnus smirks.

Alec soundly ignores him, eyes and tone droll as he says, “Demons. Madzie.”

And yeah, that changes the mood a bit.

“I’ll send her and Catarina a fire message,” Magnus says, sitting up properly. “She’ll want to come as well, I expect, and best to have someone on hand just in case. Madzie may not want to do it either, but she’s more than ready, if she’d like to try. The ritual room will contain this without many added wards and the rest of it is somewhat out of our hands. What do you make of the kids?”

“Professional assessment?” Alec says, shrugging, “Exactly what I said. Impulsive, unprepared. Loyal, brave, a little bit dumb and reckless, but that seems to come with the territory. Institute kids aren’t trained now the way they used to be; we were strong enough and skilled enough to hold the frontline in our cities but ultimately replaceable. There’s a reason all the old families married young. Things are better than they were, but strike first and ask later is still part of the Nephilim handbook when it comes to demons. They seem like good kids trying to help a friend, but that doesn’t excuse them from making dangerous choices without thinking it through. Their self preservation should be better than this.”

Graciously, Magnus does not point out that Alec’s self preservation has, historically, been somewhat appalling. He very much was raised in the old way - lethal but expendable - and even if he hadn’t been, the instinct to lay down his life for his family was innate. They hadn’t trained it into him to protect Isabelle by trying to lock up his very sense of self, and his willingness to break his own body and soul over and over, crushing the pieces back in different shapes just to be what Jace needed couldn’t be taught.

Things have changed. Shadowhunters are raised with things to live for beyond the gleam of a Seraph blade and the splash of ichor. Parabatai don’t have to be chosen so young anymore. And it's been a long time since the Clave held such a backward stance on who their people are allowed to love.

“And unprofessionally?” Magnus asks, truly curious, without voicing any of that.

Alec’s expression doesn’t change. “Cable’s a pain in the ass.”

Magnus laughs in delight. “The poor boy seems to be having somewhat of a trying time.”

Because while it may no longer be frowned upon among the Nephilim, a teenager coming to terms with what attraction means to them is a tale as old as time, and Cable appears not to be an exception. It’s unclear whether that’s what Alec has seen in him, though. He does also appear to be juggling some conflicting emotions around the authority of his Institute and his capability as a soldier.

“He’ll get there,” Alec mutters, which doesn’t help Magnus work it out. “I’ve been down those roads. But he needs to learn better control. And tact.” (Privately, Magnus finds it amusing that Alec might consider he is in any position to lecture someone about tact, given his inclination towards bluntness has been remarked on as long as Magnus has known him. In fairness to him, however, he did have a long and very effective career as a politician and leader, so evidently the tactful deployment of bluntness is something of a talent). Alec shrugs though and continues with less weight, “The others aren’t too bad. The girl from the hallway seems new to leading. And she has incredible timing.”

“Lethe,” Magnus tells him, and Alec pulls a wan expression that says ‘yeah, that makes sense’.

“Are we still in the mythology trend? I thought we’d moved on again.”

“These things do come around,” Magnus shrugs. “Simon took in a fledgling just last week, thirty two years old. Birch.”

Alec’s eyebrow wings up dubiously. “Like the tree?”

Nodding, Magnus sighs, “Some parents are just cruel.”

“Either way,” Alec shakes his head, apparently worn thin on the topic, “timing aside she seems level-headed enough, just needs to build confidence. Interesting to see Miles out here though.”

Magnus frowns at him. “Miles? Why?”

That odd feeling of recognition tickles at his mind again.

Alec shrugs. “We were at the Downworlder Summit in Vancouver, twenty two forty four. Miles was aligned with their Clan then. We only saw him in passing at the talk about blood trafficking, but I’m sure it was him. He said he’d only just moved on from his mundane life. I guess that was in Toronto.”

“Good memory,” Magnus says as it comes back to him.

"There's a Rune for that," Alec jokes.

Most of that particular Summit meeting is somewhat hazy on account of the fact they had booked a no-communications week off in Alberta right after it and were mostly watching the clocks tick down through the seminars. Alec activated a mnemosyne Rune on the second day so the whole thing wasn't a complete wash. It was the first since the Summits had been instated where Magnus himself wasn’t a keynote speaker and Alec wasn’t technically there as a Nephilim representative and people had questions. Simon sent someone in his place as much as he could but Lorenzo had joined in on that trip to take some of the heat off of their low-key appearances before they went AWOL. It was their first attempt at retirement and it had lasted a matter of months.

“You’re thinking about Calgary again,” Alec says knowingly.

“That rental house had an incredible bathtub,” Magnus sighs.

Alec snorts. “You can magic yourself any bathtub you feel like.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Magnus protests, even as he finds himself smiling. “The rental already had a magnificent one. Plus, you were in it.”

Alec, rolling his eyes, leans forward to press a fleeting kiss to Magnus’ temple, and then draws back. “I’ll get into another one for you.”

“Hmm, promise?” Magnus wheedles, which earns him a second eye roll.

“I told you to stop distracting me,” Alec reminds him.

Magnus sags, acquiescing. “Fine, fine. So Miles was part of the Vancouver Clan for a while. I thought he was familiar but it’s so hard to keep up. He’d have been…in his thirties then.”

“Not too jarring but still a clean break from the life he left. He must have aged out,” Alec says, sympathetic. “Why he came to New York though is anyone’s guess.”

“You say that like you don’t insist we return here every few years,” Magnus says fondly. “It’s like you get withdrawal if you haven’t had a slice of one dollar pizza from a street corner at least once a year.”

“It’s good pizza,” Alec protests.

Magnus would quite like to kiss him again. He settles for an agreeable hum and wraps his hands around Alec’s wrists, fingers stroking over his pulse points between the tendons. Alec’s hands flex on his thighs. “Perhaps Miles also values good pizza,” Magnus says idly. “I’m not entirely sure how he got caught up in all of this but he was willing to help which says something. Though he seems to remember you. He seemed quite mortified when you got back.”

Alec pulls a brief face that is somehow chagrined and also rueful. “Probably less to do with remembering us at the Summit and more likely because he heard us in the hall.”

Oh. Good point. They don’t have permanent soundproofing on the loft that stops people inside from hearing outside; neither of them likes being snuck up on. And unlike the Shadowhunters, Miles doesn't have to activate his enhanced hearing capabilities.

“Oh,” Magnus says aloud, though without any shame. “That’s possible, yes.”

Alec huffs a laugh. “Anyway, Miles is Simon’s problem, since he’s been back in town the past couple decades. Madzie can more than handle them, though. I haven’t seen her since January and it was only a flying visit.”

Magnus remembers that one.

It was a drowsy Tuesday afternoon, interrupted with Madzie calling Alec up for a favour, and Magnus only tuned in at the last moment when he heard the word blood mentioned.

“Just a tiny bit,” she’d pleaded, holding up a thumb and index finger pinched close together. “It has to be Nephilim blood and the potion is for a good cause.”

Alec had been ready to portal to her in an instant, no questions asked. Magnus was the one who insisted on tagging along, grumbling good-naturedly under his breath the entire time about impertinent young warlocks and making his husband bleed.

He’d winced more than Alec had as the athame sliced shallowly into the side of his hand.

The last real visit had been Christmas two years before.

“I’ll message her and Cat now,” Magnus says. “You should finish eating.”

Agreeably, Alec withdraws his hands from their home on Magnus’ thighs, leaving him cold with their absence, and he pads silently back to the island to pick up the remains of his french toast. Circling around to sit on one of their stools, he takes another pointed bite.

Magnus slides back to the floor and finally finishes making his tea.

Kettles have improved enough over the years that the boiled water is still perfectly hot even though it’s been waiting on him. As the delicate scents of chamomile and ginger rise up in sleepy spirals from the lizard mug, Magnus flicks his fingers to transfer some orange juice from the cylinder carton right into the glass Alec appears to have forgotten.

Returning the canister to the fridge, he takes both drinks over, sinking onto the neighbouring stool where he summons a slip of paper and a pen.

“You might want to offer coffee,” Alec suggests, picking up another blueberry. “Cat was in Estonia when we last spoke and it’ll be early there still.”

“A fine point.”

Magnus turns the pen between his hands, watching as Alec tosses the blueberry in the air, then catches it in his mouth, all too aware of how he’d much rather be discovering what Runes Alec still has activated from his hunt than writing missives, but the sooner he gets this done the better.

The gold plated nib scratches out an exasperated explanation, twice over, as Alec finishes off the toast and tips back the whole glass of juice. Magnus sends both slips off in a swirl of embers and finally curls his fingers around his mug, inhaling the tea.

Alec turns sideways on the stool and leans towards him.

“You okay?”

Magnus hums, and sips. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow,” he says. “I’m not actually wanted in Portugal, it was really just a misunderstanding over some goiaba.”

Alec’s quiet expression does something patient and complex as both his eyebrows rise. He doesn’t even ask about the dubious legal situation and goes right for the finer details. “The fruit?”

“It’s been handled,” Magnus waves. “Save that for tomorrow - Simon can fill in the blanks.”

Predictably, Alec’s eyes roll. “Of course Simon was involved.”

Magnus hides a smile behind the edge of his mug and adds, “Lorenzo was with us.”

Looking patently unsurprised if perhaps exasperated by this, Alec says, “Are we going to owe him any more priceless pottery?”

Magnus gave him one Ming Dynasty vase one time and Alec hasn’t let him forget it.

“It’s all been settled, scouts honor.”

“You were never a scout,” Alec points out. Then, apparently trying to gauge if he does need to be concerned, says, “I am getting the full story, right? There isn’t an APB out on you?”

“Nothing of the sort,” Magnus promises. “And it’s far less exciting than it sounds, but yes, I won’t leave out a thing.”

Alec relents with a twist of his mouth that reads to wry amusement. “Nothing else happened while I was gone?”

Magnus shakes his head. “Nothing too horrifying, just clients and the usual Downworlder disagreements. It’s been quiet for a while; nothing major since the twenty-two thirties, which probably means we’re about due another full scale Shadow War but nothing’s brewing yet.”

After Valentine, it had been maybe another ninety years or so before there had been a new uprising. This time it broke out in the Seelie Realm, dividing the fae and sending some of them to other Downworlder allies for asylum or help fighting. At a little over a hundred years old, Alec was still adjusting to having outlived his close family at that point, even though their kids and grandkids were still around. Taking up a Seraph blade and his bow to fight with Meliorn and his people had given him something to focus on, to build himself around for a little while. A soldier was something he knew how to be.

It was a little over a hundred years after that when someone else got it into their mind to make a bid for power. A warlock that time; angry, hurt and misguided, but also vicious and callous. Even Lorenzo had winced when they first met, trading blows at a Downworlder orphanage in Prague. Magnus had found himself and his magic stretched thin for the better part of four years, trying to protect and defend his own kind and maintain the borders of the Spiral Labyrinth against escalating efforts to tear it down. He’d had to borrow energy from Alec more than a couple of times before a combination effort had locked up the warlock’s power for good.

For some reason a century seems to be about the right time frame for people to just begin to forget that playing god isn’t a good idea.

Alec grimaces faintly. “Betting the vampires are next.”

Magnus pulls a face back and sips more of his tea. He’s inclined to agree; Simon has mentioned some stirrings in some of the midwest Clans. Synthetic blood options haven’t been well received by everyone and there are still vampires like Camille who hold no value for mundane lives and want the rush of the kill.

“Not just yet, at least,” Magnus steps over that topic for now. “It's mostly been quiet. Most of the businesses take care of themselves, though I did write up a new plan for one. The rest of it will keep. You don’t have to go back to Idris anytime soon, do you?”

Alec smiles, something so gently alight about it. He shakes his head.

“No. I’m home. The Council has what it needs. They’ll put some of it into effect immediately, the rest will go to a vote. In the short term, Alicante will be offered up to host the next Downworlder Summit, if their leaders agree. They have a couple decades to decide.” Alec seems to pause there, his tongue flicking across his lower lip thoughtfully, but as he opens his mouth to continue, a tapping sound has him twisting, alert and confused.

“Oh, and that’s new,” Magnus remembers. “Meet Arnold.”

Outside the window, on the stone ledge of the balcony, nestled into a terracotta planter right next to the glass is a fat, smug looking pigeon.

Alec’s eyebrow lifts as he studies it, taking in the assortment of twigs and debris it’s woven deliberately around itself on the now somewhat squashed bed of leafy hydrangea. As they watch, it reaches out again, tilts its head and raps its beak on the window several more times. Alec waits for it to stop, tucking its self-satisfied little face back into its puffed out chest, then he turns back to Magnus.

“Arnold appears to be nesting.”

“Indeed,” Magnus agrees, shooting her a scowl. “Boys names for girls were all the rage about sixty years back. Again.”

Alec’s expression breaks and his shoulders rock with a silent laugh. “I still remember Logan’s face when you told her that her parents did a great job of adhering to naming conventions of their time.”

Logan Blackthorn, currently running the Chicago Institute in her late fifties, has grown a lot with life experience, but when she’d first met Magnus at the age of nine, she’d spoken with all the typical bluntness of a child when she informed him his name was funny. Magnus delightedly fired back; something that went over her head and would stay out of reach for almost another decade.

“So,” Alec continues, now looking at him with eyes that are amused and knowing. “When are we getting the next cat?”

Magnus holds out for a good thirty seconds, sipping more tea and playing with his ear cuff, but Alec - for all his lack of patience with stupidity - has always been very good at waiting him out. Finally he sighs and relents.

“I looked up a local rescue. They have four we can meet. I said I was waiting for my husband to get home to choose.”

Alec might not admit it straight out, but he’s pleased by that.

Magnus pushes aside his mostly empty mug, and snaps his fingers to send it off to the sink.

“Time to return to the party,” he says, without a great deal of enthusiasm. Still, it’s a safer, more responsible option than climbing into Alec’s lap and working him up while leaving a bunch of kids unsupervised to doodle pentacles on the magically preserved mahogany floorboards.

Slipping from the chair to the floor, Magnus automatically reaches out to brush a finger along Alec’s cheekbone, fond and familiar, as he sweeps around him and heads back for the doorway. A flick of his wrist melts through the soundproofing ward and the vague impression of being snugly contained in a bubble bursts with a tapering hum of white noise.

“I’ll just text Demi so she knows I got back home. I’ll be right out,” Alec says.

“There’s no rush,” Magnus waves him off. “I’d wager most of the work is done and you’re well overdue a rest so you don’t have t-”

“I’ll be right out,” Alec repeats.

He already knew Alec wouldn’t take the escape route offered, even though it’s not like he really needs back up against a handful of baby Shadowhunters. That’s not the point. It’s Alec’s determination to face anything in the world with him that still hits Magnus the same way a strong whisky does when he knocks it back on an empty stomach. It’s the blossom of warmth in his gut that floods out through his veins, the way his nerves sharpen under his skin as he becomes intimately aware of his own heartbeat and breathing, and the amorphous pastel wash of contentment that clears his head.

Magnus nods and takes one last look back. Alec is still the devastating embodiment of the timelessly popular ‘tall, dark and handsome’ archetype. Runes lick his skin in curls and flicks, his hair is a rakish mess and there’s a slightest shadow of stubble forming on his jaw as he stands from his stool and rolls his head to work out a kink in his neck. None of which would be so affecting if it weren’t for his heart; its strength and capacity woven in threads of gold.

Bottling all that up for later, Magnus summons his professional-warlock face and heads back towards the living room, closing in on the low-grade hum of voices at the end of the corridor.

Chapter Text

Heads swivel to him as he reappears, and the chatter snuffs out as surely as if he’d silenced them all with a snap of his magic.

“Well then, how are things coming along in here?” Magnus asks, to fill the quiet and get the night moving.

Miles points out towards the foyer. “Terra’s on her third phone call. She’s got the name of the demon we need. I think the rest is…uh…ready.”

Nav nods to confirm it. Lethe comes forward, abandoning the side table piled with books as she nods tentatively and vaguely in the direction of the rear corridor.

“Did we…upset him?” she asks.

“Or piss him off,” Cable mutters. Lethe winces and kicks at his leg. He pulls it back to himself, rubbing his shin and throwing her a contorted look of apology and defiance. “What? He said he’d be pissed if we pulled his husband into this.”

“Alec is neither upset nor pissed, as you so eloquently put it,” Magnus interjects placidly. “I realise it may be a bit more than you can truly comprehend right now, but he has been alive a long, long time. A little bit of prodding from some young Shadowhunters isn’t the type of thing that can get to him and if you had truly incurred his ire…I assure you, you would know it.”

“So, what?” Cable asks, though he sounds a bit more contrite than belligerent this time. “He just went to get a midnight snack and he’s not secretly writing us all up?”

Magnus sinks himself down onto the empty stretch of the couch opposite Cable, reclining back against the arm and rolling his thumb across the inside of his fingers. His rings clink together. The simpler bands turn smoothly where the heavier, more elaborate ones catch in place. One of them is a spinner ring Madzie bought him, one is a silver filigree holding a cabochon of polished jade, another is a thumb ring set with a row of chatoyant quartz chips resembling tiger’s eye. The Lightwood family ring still sits on his right hand, between his own initialed rings, the same as the day he put it on; an ageless patina around the historical insignia. His wedding ring - a golden band to match its partner - is where his thumb settles, letting the quiet embed itself.

Some power is easy to wield.

When the room is sufficiently heavy and fidgety under his silence, Magnus finally speaks.

“Alexander is not writing you up.” He burrows his gaze into the teenager facing him, waiting, until Cable gathers himself enough to look directly back. His shoulders sink a fraction as he lowers his combative facade and Magnus presses into the chink of his armour. “As he said; you are not one of his subordinates and if you wish to be imprudent with your life, then it is yours to do so. As it happens, your friend has obtained the permissions you need. If he was going to report you, Shadowhunter, he would not go behind your back to do it.

“Alec has been hunting with trainees in Idris and hasn’t eaten in more than a day. Runes, as you should be well aware, are not a replacement for taking care of yourselves. He is - quite as you said - getting a midnight snack.”

It’s closer to two in the morning, but Magnus isn’t concerned with the semantics.

Cable colours a little, though whether its due to affront or annoyance is hard to say.

Lethe and Gala both turn their heads to glance off down the dark corridor to the kitchen, something wide in their expressions at the mention of Idris. It’s entirely possible that none of these nephilim have actually been there; born and raised in Shadowhunter towns and suburbs around Manhattan before moving to the Institute for their training.

“He left when I asked about the ritual, though,” Gala says softly, a blue twang of apology strangling her voice.

Magnus sighs internally.

Unfortunately, they’re not all completely oblivious.

“He was there too, wasn’t he?” Miles asks, leaning over the back of the couch and perfectly proving the point. “You said you summoned a Memory Demon before, back during the Resurgence. That’s when Mr. L-Alec said he was running the Institute. So he’d have had to sign off on it, right?”

Not precisely how it went down, but Magnus isn’t about to share that. He wants a diversion for this topic, and soon.

“Alec and I have been together for a long time,” Magnus says, choosing his words carefully. “I myself have been alive a very long time. I have lost many people - some that I never expected I would - and what I can tell you, what I am sure you will realise for yourselves in due time, is that memories are precious, and they are not infinite. Memories of people you hold dear, ones who touched your lives, even for just a moment. Memories of places, food, feelings, smells, sounds…they are all one of a kind, unique to a single moment in time, in history. They are the only thing you get to keep that is your own, internal proof that for a time, you existed.”

The room is silent. So silent Magnus could drop a pin on a shag rug and still hear it land.

He doesn’t try, because it sounds like an awkward and embarrassing thing to admit to Catarina when she inevitably discovers he’s stepped on it. Or worse - gotten it stabbed somewhere unmentionable while misusing the rug in question.

Quickly sidestepping that thought tangent, he says, “I told you before that I will not do this because the price is too high. I owe you no explanation for that, but I will give you one. I was willing to do this once; to sacrifice a beloved memory for the greater good - a chance to stop a madman intent on a path of destruction. The one that Valak would have taken that night would have been lost to me forever. That didn’t seem so exorbitant when I believed it would take a memory of my closest friend - a warlock just as immortal as I am. What is one memory in centuries of them and centuries still to come?”

No one answers the clearly rhetorical question, and Magnus swallows down the gritty feeling at the back of his throat that still rises when he remembers Ragnor. Back in the kitchen, the weight of what he was saying to Alec, not to mention Alec’s physical weight against him was enough to keep the rest at bay, but now it comes forward. Ragnor’s loss still an ache all these years later, like scar tissue that pulls when you forget for an instant it’s there.

“Not long after the summoning he was killed in a rogue demon attack,” Magnus continues levelly, pushing past the sudden shock in the faces around him. “All that is left of him now are the memories I have. I can’t make new ones. He left behind a truly staggering number of belongings; the man had questionable taste in antiques though a very keen eye for first edition literature, but he is not kept alive in any material wealth. Even immortals are not always eternal, and it is unwise to forget that.”

“What the demon wants,” he says, sitting up to lean forward, “is almost always a memory of what you love most. Love comes in many forms, which is why it can be hard to predict exactly what you will have to give up. No one can answer that for you - perhaps not even you. What I do know is that for me, the answer is easy.

“The night we summoned Valak is the night I met Alec.”

Magnus now has a captive audience. The teens are all practically holding their breath, even Miles who seems not to have realised in his young age that he doesn’t in fact need air anymore. Nav’s eyes jump across to Gala and then back to Magnus, churning with something unidentifiable.

No sound betrays it, but the happy skip of magic under Magnus’ skin, stretching back over the arm of the couch like a lazy, plaintive cat, tells him that Alec has returned, hovering at the edge of the room to listen. He’s going to have to have a word with his powers about being too obvious. Again.

(Thank the Angel that most aren’t sensitive to the sentience of magic the way he is - or the way Alec is, since he always seems to know what Magnus’ magic is doing even when it’s not manifesting visually. The teasing would be unbearable if everyone else could see the way it’s always reaching out for him).

“Suffice to say,” Magnus impresses, “things have changed since we met, and giving up a memory of him is not something I am willing to risk.”

Silence reigns for another long moment, and then Gala clears her throat. Her voice is thin, almost watery as she says, “I’m sorry I asked - I didn’t know.”

“No harm done, my dear,” Magnus waves her off. “But as promised, I have contacted a friend.”

“Who just replied,” Alec inserts.

The Shadowhunters all startle and Magnus presses his lips together to tuck away the short laugh that wants to spill out. Clearly none of them have awareness Runes activated.

Magnus turns, leaning into the couch to look at Alec.

He pushes off of the wall where the corridor begins, shadows sluicing off of him as he strides back into the room, bringing with him the faintest trace of something burnt. It quickly becomes clear what when he holds up a fire message between two fingers, offering out the scorched paper with the edges still curling and glowing, embers flaking free.

“Why is she messaging you?” Magnus grumbles with no heat, plucking it lightly from him.

Alec smirks. “She likes me better.”

Magnus rolls a scoff around the roof of his mouth and reads the note.

Alec,

Just heard from Magnus. Are you home? Tell me he’s not orchestrating a demon summoning because you haven’t called him today. I’ve got this though - I’ll portal to Madzie and we’ll be there within the hour. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about anything.

If you are there, tell him he should have called me two hours ago. We’ll see you soon.

-C

“Well that’s just rude,” Magnus mutters, full of affection. “It’s like she doesn’t trust me.”

“Do you want to tell her about Portugal?” Alec asks pointedly. When Magnus just as pointedly does not reply, Alec continues. “Last time I had to go to the Mumbai Institute for two days and she had to call and tell me you were opening a rift to some helltown to chase down a lead for the werewolves because you got bored.”

“It wasn’t a helltown,” Magnus sniffs. “It was Cleveland. And the werewolves paid me admirably for it.”

“The point stands,” Alec says dryly.

"I suppose she knows you are in fact here to keep me on the straight and narrow?" Magnus asks.

Alec's eyebrow arches up and there's something sharp and sure in his eyes for an instant before he answers flatly, "Nothing about you is straight or narrow. But yes, I messaged her back."

Magnus doesn't need to know what he said; he can probably guess well enough if he thought about it more. It's enough to know he doesn't need to hurl a message back to reassure Catarina he's not being reckless and she can calm down because this is not like last time, thank you. Which should also not be taken as any admission of guilt of any sort about last time, either. To be clear.

“What does that mean? The reply?” Lethe asks tentatively. “Is someone going to help us?”

Magnus looks up, over the scorched note.

“Yes. Someone is on the way. Fear not - they are more than capable of this and I trust them implicitly. Until then - I believe you have a sigil to draw. Where is your artistic friend?”

Miles points out towards the foyer. “Fourth call. She’s placating her alpha. I think she was meant to be back at pack hq a while ago.”

“Wonderful,” Magnus says, even though this is very far from wonderful. “Just what we need.”

“Is she New York?” Alec asks, heading for the other couch and sitting himself down in the middle of it. Magnus immediately regrets choosing to sit on the one where Cable occupies the opposite end.

“Terra? No, she’s Syracuse,” Lethe answers.

Syracuse might be a bit of a trip from Brooklyn, but one easy to navigate if their standing portal to the Manhattan pack’s base is still operational. What would really make this night even better is an annoyed alpha werewolf knocking on the door because one of their pups hasn’t made it back for curfew.

Alec shrugs slightly though, shoulders folded forwards and elbows resting on his knees. “I know her. Marguerite Levingne, right?”

“Margo, yeah,” Lethe nods. “Took over when the Moloch demon killed Paxton.”

“Knew him too,” Alec says, quieter. “Good man.” His eyes flick up to meet Magnus’. “Margo won’t come down here. She’ll give Terra shit, but if she had a real issue, she’d have called you on the official lines.”

“Well that’s something,” Magnus mutters.

“Um,” Nav says, hesitantly, when no one else immediately picks up the conversation. “Sorry but, uh, I was filled in on…well some things while you were both…anyway. Can I ask…”

He tails off again, apparently entirely at a loss how to ask what he wants to, but based on the way his eyes keep darting to Alec like he’s seeing something entirely new, Magnus has a guess what it’s about.

“Yes,” he says, waving a hand airily. “He really is that good with a bow.”

Magnus can feel Alec rolling his eyes. Unfortunately he’s been rolling them for so many years now that any attempt to convince him they could stick that way has long lost all traction. 

Nav makes an odd sound in his throat, and he looks utterly stymied.

“You’re an archer?” Cable asks, suddenly.

Alec raises an eyebrow again, this time with far less intent. He seems to debate the necessity of answering for a moment, and then nods once.

Looking like he has no idea what to do with this information now that he has it, Cable shrugs, offering a quiet and gruff, “‘S cool.”

“Cable started learning with a compound bow but it looks difficult,” Miles offers, and Cable immediately shoots him a laser focused death glare that says ‘stop talking yesterday’ as clearly as though he’d yelled it with an augmentation spell on his larynx.

Magnus isn’t much in the business of caring what weapons the Institute is currently schooling their trainees in, but fond amusement fizzes in his chest like a glass of champagne left in the sun as he watches Alec’s eyes flicker and focus.

He’s an excellent archer, an excellent instructor, and excellent with kids - an unholy hattrick of talent that’s entirely disarming and entirely unfair. Alec’s general distaste for people might be somewhat of a default setting, but underneath it, his instincts as a brother and as a parent are the bedrock of who he is, of who he’s always been.

“It can be,” Alec says, measured, keeping a keen watch on Cable, likely to check for tics or hints that he needs to drop the topic. “Compound bows load all the draw weight at the start but once the pulleys engage you don’t have to hold on to all that power while you aim. They involve more complexity, more moving parts, but you can often get a higher powered release and greater accuracy out of them.”

“Is that what you use?” Cable asks, looking interested despite himself.

Alec almost smiles. “I have one. But no, mostly I use a recurve.”

“Why? If a compound is stronger and more accurate?”

“Because a recurve is easier to take on a hunt. All bows can need tweaks and changes over time, but recurves are less complex to do on the go. If you’re in the thick of it with a demon nest and you’re meant to be long range support, you need to be fast, and if you’re good, then you can be accurate whatever you use if you know it well. For me, the recurve’s easy handling and interchangeability is worth more than the compound taking some of the draw weight off of me.”

Alec turns his arm out slightly, making a vague gesture to the inside of his bicep, where the hooked, curling shape of a strength Rune is emblazoned, the tip just tucked under the fold of his sleeve. He pulls his elbow back in and says with a note of ruefulness, “Besides, when it comes to strength, most of the Shadow World have an advantage over mundanes anyway - it’s why all the bows and weapons we use are forged in the Citadel. I broke a mundane bow when I was seventeen. It had a draw weight of one-twenty. Any bow the Iron Sisters make will hold its own against a demon, whether it uses pulleys or not. It comes down to the archer.”

Cable absorbs that for a moment, nodding his head just slightly as he takes it in, and apparently sees the reason in it. Then he says, in a tone Magnus would almost call teasing, “So you’re good then?”

Alec’s expression flashes. There’s a small tick upward at the corner of his mouth as he looks up from under the tousle of his dark hair. “I’m good.”

Something hot drops into the bottom of Magnus’ stomach and a current like live electric arcs through his bloodstream. He presses his thumb hard into one of the metal ridges of the armour-plated ring on his forefinger so the bite of it can keep his focus, dull the static edge thrumming in his veins. It always hits different when Alec says it; when he makes any allusion or statement at all to assert his own abilities. He prefers to be underestimated. He’s not in the habit of overextending or drawing much attention to his talents at all, and the calm, subdued certainty when he does is - in Magnus’ great and completely unbiased opinion - one of his most attractive qualities.

Cable might agree, if the way he swallows and ducks his eyes away is any indication. Looking like it’s being prised out of him with the approximate force of a hydraulic crowbar, he shifts himself awkwardly on the couch and after a strained moment admits to the floor, “I am finding it tricky, I guess.”

Magnus already knows what’s coming next.

Alec gentles a fraction, and then suddenly, sitting on the couch across from them is the version of him who was a Weapons Instructor for more than four decades, and that was just the first time around.

“You’ll get it,” he says, like it’s plain fact. “But it takes work, and it comes quicker to some than others. Pace yourself, practice, get to know your bow. And for that matter, get to know other bows. Maybe compound is what you want to do, but there are a wide variety of recurves that are very effective, and traditional longbows pack a huge punch, not to mention they’re more versatile in general - you can use it as a staff in a pinch. Don’t limit yourself if you’re new to the field.”

“That has to be easy for you to say, though.” Interestingly, Cable doesn’t sound argumentative so much as plaintive, like he’s looking to be told he’s wrong. “You’ve had years to get good. Not everyone gets that.”

Magnus can’t help interjecting there. “Alexander was already a considerably talented archer at the age of twenty-three. Mastering an art is absolutely possible within a lifetime. Leonardo and Michelangelo can attest.”

“Again with the name dropping,” Alec mutters, smirking, and then adds his own, “Sofia Ruiz counts.”

“Wasn’t she the glass blower back in the fifties?” Gala asks, coming to life with a touch of eagerness. She’s referring to the twenty-two fifties, so Magnus nods, at the same time Alec does.

“Twelve when she made her first glass sculpture,” Alec says, with a touch of pride that feels almost familial. They’d only met her once, but they own three of her originals. She died in a boating accident at the age of forty three, far too young and too tragic, leaving behind a wife and two chinchillas, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands more incredible things she could have made.

“So you can name drop but I can’t?” Magnus asks without reproach.

Alec’s eyes dart away from him, flickering with fondness as he bites down on a smile and doesn’t answer.

“He’s right though,” Alec says instead. “There are mundanes out there who can use a bow incredibly well, and many of them are still young. There are mundanes who know martial arts, sword fighting, parkour. Ones who’ve specialised in ancient cultures or weapons. Ones who learned to paint, or sculpt or blow glass. There is nothing to stop you from getting just as good, if not better, but it takes dedication more than aptitude.”

Cable falls quiet, but his face is contemplative, and he looks like he’s absorbed with his own thoughts.

There’s a whisper of movement out in the doorway, and Terra steps through from the foyer, shoving her phone into a pocket in her overalls as her shoulders drop with a release of tension. She doesn’t immediately speak, and Nav hasn’t noticed her, taking a step forward with a frown of tentative confusion and intrigue pulling his features.

“So, that’s great. The bow thing,” he says, “but I meant, um- what he said about you having years…they said you were- that you’d been-”

“He’s immortal, Naveen,” Miles ploughs ahead, when it seems clear he needs help voicing it.

Looking now slightly faint, Nav nods jerkily and agrees, “Yes. That. It’s…true?”

Alec sits up straighter, turns his forearms over as though to inspect them, and then looks down at his own body before raising his gaze again. “I still seem to be alive, so yeah, I think so.”

Magnus presses his lips together, face aching as it fights to smile. Cable actually snorts and Gala reaches over to squeeze Nav’s shoulder. Terra, back in the doorway, folds her arms and tugs idly on an errant curl of her hair.

Eyes very round, Nav asks, “Were you really born before the Uprising?”

Lethe snaps her head around to him. “How did you know that?”

Nav shrugs at her. “You said he was around for the whole Valentine thing. What? I read.”

“Yes,” Alec cuts in, before they can spiral off again.

“How did you, like, manage it?” Nav winces slightly as the question trips out.

The atmosphere in the room clenches in response.

“Dude,” Miles mutters. “We told you, it was-”

“Wait!” Nav blurts. “No! No, I don’t mean - yes, they said it was from an Angel or whatever. I’m not- I don’t mean that. I mean…you must have had family, friends. How did you manage, you know…that.”

It’s not much clearer as far as sentences and grasp of the English language goes, but against reason, the meaning manages to come through just fine on the reattempt.

How did you manage losing them all?

Magnus sits up, twisting to plant both feet on the floor and his magic swells through his veins, rushing down his forearms, twining between his tendons and filling his palms with a prickling, furious voltage.

“It’s okay,” Alec says, and even on the other side of the laden coffee table, Magnus knows it’s meant for him. “Really, it’s okay.”

Magnus concedes, soothing the magic back down and leaning back into the couch again. Asking how someone dealt with heart-wrenching grief is a rather personal thing, in his refined opinion, but it’s Alec’s boundary to set. He doesn’t owe them a window into his losses or the scar tissue they left behind, but if he’s willing to offer one, perhaps it can be a learning experience.

Satisfyingly, however, Nav looks suitably chastened without Magnus having had to say a word. The spiky feeling in the air is perhaps his fault, though, and he reels that back in as well.

Alec sighs and stops what looks to be a brewing apology with a raised hand.

“I get why you asked,” he says. “And I’m not going to tell you it was easy, because it wasn’t. But the alternative wasn’t an option.” Alec glances over at Magnus, something soft in his eyes, broken through with hairline fractures of understanding. “As someone wise once said to me - you endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.”

Magnus’ heart jolts in his chest, performing a biologically improbable somersault between his lungs.

Despite the weight of the words - his own - Alec sits firm in the middle of the couch, the black leather winging to either side of him, spilling shadows onto the rugs, and the lamp just over his shoulder casts him under a soft golden nimbus of light. His gaze is steady, his breathing easy, and his hands don’t shake, fingers threaded lightly together. Magnus told the teens that a few questions couldn’t upset Alec, but it’s reassuring to see it’s true all the same.

“I’d already known and lost good people - soldiers, mentors, trainees, friends and allies - before I ever hit sixty years old,” Alec says, matter-of-fact. “My family meant the world to me, but we all knew that living the lives we did, there was a good chance none of them were long anyway. Even if I stayed mortal, losing them was inevitable. If a demon didn’t take them, old age would.

“I couldn’t change that. But I could spare the person I loved most from that same pain. I could spare myself the pain of knowing I would have to leave him.”

He rakes a hand through his hair, ruffling it into further disarray. The fireproof Rune above his elbow has also been fading it seems; the edges turning fuzzy and the flicking lines of it softened already to the bruised pink of healing skin. “It was different, anyway,” Alec shrugs one shoulder. “Kids are meant to outlive their parents. They’re meant to grow up and find their own way. I loved them, and my sister, my brothers - but I wasn’t meant to stay with them. They all got to choose a life with the person they loved. I did too.”

“Just a little longer than most,” Magnus says. He aims for teasing but seems to miss it entirely for something more aching than he planned.

Alec’s gaze shifts to him. The smile toying with his expression is a soft, private thing.

He’s still not visibly upset, and Magnus suspects it’s both because he has practice bearing the losses and because he’s very good at masking his emotions when he needs to. None of the delicately worded answer gives away the reality of the pain Alec bore, that they both bore, though it will always have hit Alec harder. He’s right that all mortals die, but knowing that and accepting his inability to prevent it, are not quite the same as enduring it when you are blood and bone and human grief in the moment it happens.

The Lightwoods lived longer and better than most Shadowhunter families got the chance to. Alec had decades of happy years with his siblings; fought alongside them when they were all still young, and then turned to teaching with them when Jace and Isabelle aged beyond their prime. Their children had all grown up surrounded with love and encouragement and not a small amount of competitive spirit. And Alec had portaled across time zones and through layers of wards to be there, holding their hands, when they ran out of time.

Magnus went with him for all of it. Over the years they became as much his family as they were Alec’s, perhaps one of the most steadfast and long-lasting ones he’d had outside of just three other warlocks, and he felt their loss keenly even as he held strong, giving Alec something to crumble against.

Isabelle was the last.

She held him close with frail arms, her hair a silvery spill across her pillow, machines beeping in ever more drawn out intervals, and said in a papery voice, “I want you to be just as happy for me, and the life I lived, as I am for you, and how much of yours you still have ahead. It doesn’t matter if I never see you again, because we will always have had this, and it’s been the joy of my life, to be your sister. You don’t have to stay any more, Alec. I love you, big brother, so much. Go live forever. Send me a postcard.”

Time heals all wounds, they say.

Magnus is of the staunch opinion that ‘they’ are unparalleled morons and should probably stop saying things altogether.

Time would not have healed whatever shattered fragments might have been left of Magnus’ heart if Alec had remained mortal and died hundreds of years ago. He doesn’t like to think about what that future would have looked like for him. Time has not wiped all evidence of Alec’s pain either. It can’t.

Magnus grieved them, but Alec was inconsolable for days when finally Isabelle passed, devastated for months longer, and still struck off-guard by painful reminders years after. It was made worse, Magnus thinks, when he aged out of his first century. It was then he was finally confronted, decades after making his choice, with the reality that he would not be following his family to an afterlife. The Seelie revolt had helped to anchor him, not to mention some time with Meliorn during the strategy camps. Some late nights and faerie wine had been involved, Magnus knows, and Alec had galvanised around a steadier perspective and returned more resilient, like tempered steel. The fae always did look at death differently.

Time can teach someone how to go on functioning around a missing limb, but it can’t grow it back.

Even now, over eighty years since Magnus last even saw a traditional postcard, Alec still sends them. The early ones had tears smudged into the ink on the reverse of glossy photos of Greece, Nepal, Seoul or Argentina; Alec apologising for leaving even though Isabelle told him to go. They’re a virtual form of communication now and send instantly with the tap of a button. The ones Alec writes these days are fewer, coloured with in-jokes older than the technology as he tells a ghost about his life and loves her for setting him free.

None of that shows on his face at all.

Magnus watches Alec keenly, looking for a slip, but Alec’s smile shifts, spreading like he knows, and he shakes his head once.

“This was the right thing for me,” he says clearly, because despite all he endured he has never doubted or recanted even once, “but immortality means living with loss, and not just people, but losses you don’t even expect.”

All of the faces look painstakingly intrigued, but are apparently too cautiously respectful of the personal details Alec shared that no one appears to want to ask first.

Magnus takes it upon himself, deciding on a touch of levity to drag them towards something less morose. He says wistfully, “There was a fabulous Merlot that simply faded into the past somewhere around the start of the twenty-second century. Exquisite vintage. There was of course the delightful collapse of Trump Enterprises.”

“Of what?” Miles asks.

Magnus waves a hand. “Not important. Be thankful you don’t know. Oh, and our favourite couch. Handmade in Turkey. It finally succumbed to wear. And I can hardly forget - one of my favourite brands of eyeliner got unceremoniously discontinued. Twenty-two eighteen was not a good year.”

Magnus ranted about it for almost two straight weeks and then bought out impulse shares in Sephora so it couldn’t happen to him again. Alec’s teeth sink into his lip to bite down a smirk, because he knows that and had wisely refrained from suggesting at the time that wasn’t how shares worked.

“There are sadly also harsher losses,” Magnus carries on. “Climate change, deforestation, holes in the ozone. Extinction. The magic of seven warlocks is preventing Antarctica from disappearing from the globe entirely. The white rhino and the snow leopard were lost some seventy years apart.”

“What’s a rhino?” Nav asks, already pulling out his phone to apparently look it up.

Magnus decides to let him find out for himself. Back in the seventeenth century when blessedly drunk and trying to describe a rhinoceros to an Englishman in a cravat, Magnus might inadvertently have started the rumour of the unicorn in modern mythology. Better leave it to Google. He finishes instead, “Some of it has been reversible, but this planet has suffered over the millenia it has been inhabited, and when you live longer, you see the wounds linger.”

He doesn’t say that Venice was lost to the sea. He doesn’t say that California gave way along the San Andreas fault and there’s a stretch of it off the coast now. After the destruction in its wake had been cleared and the people had picked themselves up again, a years-long federal case would ensue over whether it should gain independent status or whether it was still legally part of the United States. These kids would only ever have known it as California and Andreas Island. A similar thing happened to the Australia Gold coast, though it’s less in one floating chunk and more like a dozen fragmented pieces, all of it protected. There are species that will never return to the Amazon rainforest, continents worn away at the edges, places where nature and man have fought for ground over and over.

“There’s good, too,” Alec says, because the mood has sunk again.

“They opened up a new restaurant in Lisbon,” Magnus replies promptly. “Michelin star. Incredible entrées.”

“Do they serve goiaba?” Alec asks innocently.

Ignoring him soundly, Magnus continues, “NASA discovered another planet - Orcus, they called it back in twenty-one fifteen. It was renamed to the Ceres you know when they discovered the atmosphere was conducive to plant growth. Activists have managed to salvage the wild population of Sumatran tigers; scientists found clean energy sources that have advanced our medicine, technology and ways of life without causing further damage to the environment. There is plenty of good out there.”

“I clearly missed some things,” Terra says, and faces whip around to her as she comes forwards. “How did we get onto this?”

“I suppose I was feeling maudlin,” Magnus shrugs, snatching the answer before Alec has to bring up his family again.

Terra seems to accept it with a bland sort of readiness. “Fair enough. Cool about the tigers, though. Also Margo works with a bunch of the deforestation rights activists - donates as much as she can, you know.”

Magnus did not know, but he finds himself a touch more fond of the assertive Louisiana woman whom he has only known by name through Alec to this point.

“What did she say about this?” Lethe asks dubiously.

Terra wrinkles her nose and shrugs. “I’m good. I’m sticking around, just might be a tiny bit grounded for a couple of weeks when I get back. She’s fine. Are we doing this?”

“An excellent suggestion,” Magnus says, since Terra seems to have genuinely resolved her issues with her pack alpha. “You’ve read through the steps - I’m just waiting on-”

As if cued, before he can finish speaking, there’s a billow of pressure on the wards yet again.

“That,” Magnus mutters.

It comes with the added fizzing vibration of portal magic as one opens right into the hallway by the elevator and while the magic boundary is still flexing back into shape around it, allowing Cat’s personal signature through, Magnus flicks a wrist to fling open his front door.

“Let yourselves in!” he calls.

Two sets of brisk footsteps follow, muffled on the carpet in the foyer, and then two women finally appear on the threshold of the living room. They are both a well overdue and desperately welcome vision, in light of how the evening has gone so far.

Catarina’s skin is dark under her glamour and warm against the silvery blue of the sleek pantsuit she’s wearing. Folded in the crook of her arm is a glossy glass tablet and the rolled leather straps of an elegant dove grey handbag sway from her wrist. The poised, confident look is set off perfectly by the dry expression of consternation she turns on Magnus.

“He was gone for three weeks,” she says, fondness mostly hidden under the accusatory tone and entirely bypassing a greeting of any kind.

“Four,” Magnus corrects. “And it’s not like I instigated this.”

Next to Cat, Madzie sniggers quietly.

She’s been fully grown for almost two centuries now, and stopped aging in her early twenties but still never quite cracked five foot three. Her dark hair is shot through with tones of sun-bleached caramel, the sides braided back from her face and her gills adorned lightly with three strands of beachy necklaces; a string of cowrie shells, one of coconut disks and a third with a paua shell pendant the shape of a sea turtle. She’s in a pair of fraying denim shorts, a sun-faded t-shirt and white sneakers, holding a bulging tote bag over her shoulder that says on the side ‘Do something with your life: Save a whale’.

“And I can’t believe she dragged you into this,” Magnus says, even though it was his idea to give Madzie the opportunity.

Cat’s eyebrow creeps higher up her forehead but Madzie beams, her gills fluttering. “Are you kidding? I leapt at this.”

Alec has already stood up and stepped around the couch to reach out for her, and Madzie tucks herself under his arm for a crushing hug that snags Magnus’ heart somewhere on his fourth rib just to see the affection pouring out of them both, Madzie still entirely dwarfed by Alec’s stature. It buzzes the unnameable bit of Magnus’ genetic makeup that always makes him turn to primordial ooze when he sees Alec with children.

“Hi, Alec,” Madzie says, muffled into his shirt.

“Madz,” he murmurs back, as he lets her go. “How’s Hahei?”

“Beautiful,” Madzie informs him. “We’ve pretty much wrapped up there and we’re headed further north again. I’m going to miss Cathedral Cove, but we want to get established in Tawharanui. Season’s almost up so it’s the last spot before we hand over until spring. I figured I could come stay with you guys for a bit before I’m back down there for hatching.”

“You just want to avoid New Zealand winter,” Alec teases.

“And see you guys,” Madzie smiles up at him guilelessly and Alec rolls his eyes but he’s too pleased to protest.

He looks over her head, and Madzie steps aside so Cat can stride forward and fold Alec into her own hug. Magnus sits resplendent on the couch, his chest clenched tight around his heart as it tries its utmost to dissolve into something utterly useless at the sight.

In moments like this, it can be hard to actually remember what it was like, being so lonely and hurt and closed off for so long. They feel like years that belong to a different person. The rain-soaked Magnus who once stood over a bridge, contemplating the rage of the black water below had no way of knowing that one day a Shadowhunter of all people would show him what it truly meant to find a home in someone else’s heart. There are people he will always miss - ones he knows Alec will always miss too - but there is also the family that they chose and that they get to keep. His life has been full and vibrant since Alec shot an arrow into it, since he came into Edom after him, and the monochrome and pain of before is so distant, but still so entirely worth it to have lived for this.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Cat says, with feeling, and Magnus can’t help but think that’s meant as a slight at him. He goes to a hell-rift when his husband is away one time, and apparently never lives it down.

“Me too,” Alec replies, releasing her. “How did your meeting go?”

“Eh,” Cat waves him off. “Lots of waffle, CEOs don’t want to spend money, the usual. I think we talked a good game though and the numbers are sound. It’s already been rolled out to several hospitals in Europe. If they want to stay current and keep their government funding, they’ll want in.”

The advancement everyone wanted and desperately needed; a cell-targeting submersion chamber that can destroy the mutated and malignant without causing harm to healthy, living tissue. Among its expanding uses, still being discovered in the research fields of twenty-fourth century medicine, the main one has already proven it can work. There is a cure for cancer.

Magnus and Alec attended the charity gala where the machine was officially unveiled to the world six years ago. Cat got to do a speech, Madzie and Lorenzo mostly drank champagne. Simon used some vampire wiles to gently schmooze some wealthy benefactors to get the word out. It’s spent the time since then slowly breaking through layers of red tape to be on-boarded in hospitals across the world.

Cat turns from Alec to face the room and the cluster of slightly awe-struck but mute teenagers. Magnus takes the cue to sweep to his feet.

“Cat, Madzie - meet my guests. Guests - allow me to introduce Catarina and Madzie Loss. Two very old and dear friends.”

“You’re way older than me,” Madzie prods at him, all innocence, and Alec smirks.

“And I thought you wanted to stay with us this summer,” he says, all faux lamentation.

“Shutting up.” Madzie salutes him, an armful of colourful beaded bracelets clinking on her wrist. Cat looks wickedly gleeful and Alec coughs into his hand, a broad smile splashing across his face. It transforms him as always, so strikingly, that for a split second Magnus entirely forgets his train of thought.

“As I was saying.” Magnus resumes a beat later with a great air of dwindling patience, despite the fact that this is contending for the most enjoyment he’s had in the last twenty four hours. Not much beats Alec actually appearing between the elevator doors then cutting a path towards him, or the quiet interlude they were able to steal in the dark kitchen, but this runs a respectable third place. “Catarina works in medicine and Madzie works with groups for marine conservation. They are both exceptionally gifted warlocks and they will be able to help you retrieve Galatea’s memories.”

“I’d like to get it in writing that you called me ‘exceptionally gifted’,” Cat says. “I’ll frame it and put it on the mantelpiece whenever Lorenzo drops by.”

“Gladly, my dear,” Magnus replies, because he won’t pass up an opportunity to keep their utterly false rivalry alive.

Apparently satisfied, Cat drops her tablet and handbag down on the end of the couch and stands tall. “Okay, well, let’s get all of this packed up. Portal in five minutes. Gather your research and belongings, all of you.”

Magnus throws her a look that he hopes conveys his confusion. “We have a ritual room here.”

The teens all stall, without having really had a chance to move as instructed, eyes darting between them like observers at a tennis match.

“And what?” Cat asks. “You think you have the only heavily warded room for demon spellcasting? Please. We’re moving this party to my offices.”

The brisk, no-nonsense tone might sound dismissive to most, but Magnus hears it for what it is. She has the same resources in her own offices to contain a greater demon summoning and contacts in the Spiral Labyrinth if they’re needed for reinforcements. Between her and Madzie, this entire endeavour will be kept under control, and it doesn’t even have to happen under Magnus’ own roof. She’s aware Alec only just got home, that they’re both exhausted and have been missing each other, and she’s leaving them alone.

“What if they’d already drawn the pentacle?” Magnus asks, which he knows Cat will read as the thank you it truly is.

She waves a hand at him. “I’ll bring your floorboards back. I did last time.”

Indeed she had.

“The one under the window still creaks.”

Cat ignores that. She claps her hands together instead, and a shower of purple-blue sparks scatter like tiny fireworks. “Research. Belongings. Let’s hussle.”

Chapter Text

The group jumps into action, starting to pile up their tablets, close various books and stack the mismatch of pages that started spitting from the portable thermal printer some hours back. All of it quickly begins to disappear into the yawning backpacks slouched beside the couch.

Alec and Madzie shuffle to the side, engaged in a quiet muttering that could be about anything from the latest sea turtle dive right through to when they next plan to hit up a New York pizza joint. Magnus leaves them to it, slinking up beside his oldest friend until they’re stood shoulder to shoulder.

“How’s Estonia?” he starts.

“Warm,” is the blunt reply. A moment passes and then, “I’m enjoying it. A few more years there, I think, but I’ve already got my eye on an area in Seoul.”

“Oh? Where’s that?” The interest sparks.

“Bukchon Hanok Village,” she replies, with a tiny eye roll that Magnus catches in his peripheral. “Yes, I know that’s where you and Alec went. The pictures were beautiful and the history sounded fascinating. I thought I might do a couple of years there.”

“You’ll love it.” Magnus knows that like he knows the apartment is getting a cat in the next few weeks. It’s a simple fact.

Cat’s expression creases into a smile.

As they fall quiet, a backing track rises; the harried clinking of small glass bottles and the rustle of pouches as a variety of potion ingredients ranging from the useless to the mind-boggling are also rounded up from the table. None of the Shadowhunters had been sure when they descended on him just what had happened to Gala’s head or memories and they had come prepared for a number of outcomes, other than perhaps the one they’d gotten. One by one, the ingredients are sequestered away into the heaving backpacks and a number of pockets.

Magnus spends a decent thirty seven seconds having an internal debate over whether to warn the teens about the hazards of improperly transporting ingredients before ultimately deciding that some things are lessons best learned through personal experience. They’re not packing anything heavy duty enough to do much more than provide a whammy of a magical hangover if it’s bottle breaks and the fumes leech out. Thirty seven seconds of reflection  and it seems Magnus’ conscience has no objections to simply letting that play out.

Cat stands next to him, watching it happen with an expression best described as dispassionately unmotivated, so Magnus figures he’s at least not alone.

And that’s when it unexpectedly smacks him in the chest; the gratitude and adoration, because his brain was right on the money with that one earlier. He isn’t alone.

“Thank you,” Magnus tells her then, genuinely and softly, hidden beneath the flurry of activity as his tone drops.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cat replies without missing a beat, but she sounds more fond than exasperated now. “Of course we’re here for you. I understand why you couldn’t, Magnus.”

“But Madzie will be okay with it?”

Cat glances her way and Magnus follows her gaze.

In what seems barely any time at all, her conversation with Alec over by the windows has expanded to include Cable and Miles, the pair of them holding tight to their share of the books and pages they brought. Based on the focused attentiveness on their faces, they appear to be listening to Alec talk, and going by the small gestures he’s making, fingers curling and releasing in pairs, threes and occasionally drawing back his elbow, Magnus would stake his bet on it being about archery again. Like this he almost looks as though he should be part of Artemis’ hunt; tall and dark and lined in silver, the suggestion of a bow between his hands.

Highlighted in the pallor of overcast moonlight from the tall brownstone windows, clear as if it was broad daylight, he can see that Alec misses this.

Their current attempt at semi-retirement might be coming to a close, but Magnus isn’t all that unhappy to think it. They’ve had a good couple of decades, only pitching in here and there where the need truly arose, keeping light calendars and travelling as the whims took them. Except, evidently, following Alec to Idris a month ago and Magnus is still smarting about that decision, but otherwise it’s been pleasant. Quiet.

It’s just turned into a new century - perhaps it’s time to pick up some old hobbies.

For Alec, that may well be teaching. Magnus will not be complaining if he wants to return to a bit of hunting again though. He’ll just have to heavily saturate his new gear with all the old protection spells and several inventive upgraded ones as well. One Iratze is more than enough for the next thirty years, at least. Not that it has to stop Magnus from a bit of hands-on checking.

“Reel it in just a bit longer,” Cat says beside him. “We’ll be gone soon.”

Magnus doesn’t have the capacity to feel abashed for looking or fantasising, or to have been so easily clocked doing either. It’s not even like he was really focusing as much on Alec’s fingers as he could have been, but he hums and turns his head away to lessen the temptation all the same.

Cat still looks quite amused as she goes back to the question he’d practically forgotten about. “Madzie will be great, I think. She has spent a fair bit of time with mundanes the last fifty years or so, but the marine conservation projects are so important to her, and now that sea turtles have started nesting further south, she wants to do what she can to nurture that. But she’s still in with the local warlocks, and she visits the Labyrinth. Hell - I heard all about it when she needed nephilim blood for a potion and she asked Alec.” Magnus says nothing in what he hopes is a terribly deliberate way. Cat’s mouth twists into a slightly wicked smirk. “Yeah, she said as much. But that potion saved a whale pod off the coast of Kaikōura. She hasn’t let any of her magical schooling slip; she knows her demonology. Don’t worry about her.”

Cat says that like Madzie hasn’t grown up and spent her entire life surrounded by immortal parental figures who will always worry about her and that Cat herself is the first on that list. Magnus graciously doesn’t mention it.

“I didn’t mean because she isn’t skilled enough,” is what he says quietly. “I wouldn’t have messaged you both if I thought that. But the demon will want a memory from her too.”

Cat inhales slowly, measured, and then says, “She knows. She hasn’t found a love like yours yet, Magnus. You were willing to sacrifice a memory once. Maybe one day she won’t be - I basically raised her, and I want her to find that person that she won’t give up - but right now, this is something she’s prepared to do. For you.”

Heart squeezed in the trappings of an emotional vice, wringing it for all the deep affection it has to offer, Magnus blinks and swallows the burn at the back of his throat.

“You did raise her,” he corrects when he thinks he can say it without letting on the emotions doing their level best to strangle him. Cat frowns at him. “Not basically, Caterina. You did.”

Cat’s expression clears and softens to a tiny, pleased smile as she understands. She bumps his arm with her elbow softly and her magic skips across the fleeting connection in thanks.

“Also, she’s excited,” she adds, because sometimes she’s as allergic to sentiment as Magnus is. “We so rarely deal with Memory Demons.”

“Don’t tell the children that,” Magnus mutters, sidelong. “They seem to be under the impression that it’s common practice.”

Cat shoots him a narrow look. It really is a talent, how fast her face can change. “How would they have gotten that impression?”

Suddenly feeling like he’d rather like his martini glass back, to hide behind if not to drink from, Magnus holds up a hand to forestall her. “What I said is that it was an ancient practice - not common. You know what these Nephilim are like.”

An unimpressed eyebrow arches up at him in response. “You married one.”

That has the unhelpful side effect of utterly deflating his argument and he sounds entirely too happy about it when he admits, “Yes, I very much did. He’s excellent in-”

“Please don’t,” Cat winces.

“I was going to say the kitchen.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Practice,” Magnus says, shrugging.

Cat opens her mouth again, but before she can speak, her eyes dart over Magnus’ shoulder, and she falls back a half step, her demeanour shifting from his best friend, Cat, teasing him as always, to Caterina Loss, Respected Warlock.

Magnus turns around, and finds himself face to face with a slightly nervous looking Naveen.

“All packed up?” Magnus asks lightly, aware innately this is not why he’s been sought out.

“Almost,” Nav nods, awkwardly thumbing back over his shoulder. His jacket shifts and bottles in the pockets clack together. “Um. They’re making sure we didn’t miss anything. I just wondered…if I could ask you something?”

With a great show of tact, and probably restraint as well, Cat quietly moves away, blending right into the background bustle of the room and leaving them to it.

“You can always ask,” Magnus says. “It does not guarantee I can answer.”

“No, no, I- I realise that,” Nav stutters, apparently too relieved that he’s gotten this far to know where to begin for a moment. He fidgets again, weight shifting foot to foot, bottles clinking and glances back over his shoulder once. His throat works as he swallows, and Magnus has just started to wonder whether he needs to offer a quieter room for something serious when Nav speaks again. “Just - it’s about what you said. That you aren’t willing to risk losing a memory of Alec. I get it, I’m not arguing, I just mean…what if…what if he was the one who had lost his memories? Maybe ones of you too. If it meant he got them all back…would you risk losing one of yours then?”

And oh.

The question hooks into him, like the barb on an arrowhead, snagging somewhere underneath his ribs and gouging into soft tissue, stalling his breath. It’s a good question. It has possibly bitten into the only circumstance in which he would be willing to give up something of Alec. If he had lost so much, lost their life together, and if it meant restoring all of that and more to him, yes, Magnus would give up a memory in a heartbeat.

It’s a precision question, and yet, it isn’t really about him at all.

Magnus looks across the room, finding Gala alongside Lethe, their heads bowed as they finally cram their thermal printer into a straining backpack. Gala’s pale blonde hair spilling out around the neck of her oversized sweater is almost a beacon in the dim lighting of the living room, standing out against the bluish hue from the windows and the golden-orange glow of the lamps.

Nav follows his gaze, and quickly looks away again. His jaw sets though, refusing to recant despite the vulnerability of being seen. Magnus finds himself admiring the bravery in it.

“If I said no, would it change your decision to do this for her?” he asks, curious. His tone is delicate, but low; this is just for Nav to hear.

He blinks, taken aback for an instant, and then his expression ripples with something like furious agitation before it settles into a cool mask. He says, cleanly, “No. I’d still do it.”

Magnus nods. “Good.”

Nav’s face scrunches in confusion. “What?”

“Whether I would or not, should not dictate the choices you are prepared to make,” Magnus explains simply. “Sacrifice is part of a Shadowhunter’s life, and giving her back what she lost will require that of you, in some form. She means a lot to you, more than one tiny memory.” It’s not really a question, but Nav nods anyway. “There’s your answer.” 

“It’s just…” Nav starts, “after what you said about them - memories - how they’re unique and can’t be replaced…I guess I just haven’t thought of them like that.”

“And why would you?” Magnus shrugs. “I’ve lived hundreds of years. I daresay I have a slightly different perspective but the core remains the same. Memories are relics, but people - they are real and they are alive now. They can be hurt or healed now.”

Memories in payment cannot return someone to life, which is likely a good thing, because if they could, Magnus would give up every single one he has of Ragnor to be able to see his oldest, closest friend in the flesh again and restore everything that he was, even if it meant he couldn’t know him. He failed many years ago to destroy all of his own memories of Alec when each one was just a shard of glass, slicing his heart into myocardial ribbons, pain gushing through his bloodstream with each stuttering pump. He could have lost him then and never had anything that came after. He doesn’t have words for the relief he feels that he didn’t go through with it, but if giving them up had the power to restore Alec to life any number of the times he had so much as come close to the brink, Magnus’ answer would have been scarily easy.

Nav quirks his head, eyes astute, and a tentative twitch in the corner of his mouth looks like the barest suggestion of a smile. He says, “You didn’t quite answer the question but then…maybe you did.”

Something compulsive and earnest claws up Magnus’ throat, bloody and aching.

“Then for what it may be worth, to be clear,” he says quietly, “there is nothing I would not do for Alec.”

Except perhaps be willing to give him up. Magnus has been on the other end of that and nothing good can come of it again.

He doesn’t say that, just watches Nav’s face as the certainty sinks in and takes hold.

“Thank you,” Nav says, a drawn out moment later. “You didn’t have to be honest with me, but you were, so thank you. And for everything else.”

“I hardly did a thing,” Magnus waves.

The sincerity makes him slightly itchy.

Nav shakes his head though. “No, you- you let us in, you didn’t immediately dismiss the problem or what we were trying to do. You explained what we were up against and agreed to get us help, and - well I guess it was mostly Alec who got us to clear it with the Institute, but still - and also the history. Not just the Valentine thing you told the others but what you were just saying about planets and Antarctica and even the eyeliner thing. It…you shared a lot, and I wanted to thank you. For that. I like learning stuff - like I now know what a rhino is.”

Magnus blinks at the sudden swerve, but finds this tangent a lot easier to handle than the genuine gratitude. “So you do,” he nods. “And?”

Nav considers it, expression contorted as he visibly seems to be calling up whatever Google image he found on his phone. “They look kind of like armoured hippos, don’t they?”

Well.

Absolutely robbed of any sensible response for a stuttering minute, Magnus finds himself thrown back to his fumbling attempts to explain the creature in the eighteen hundreds.

Armoured hippos, he thinks now, with the same relative spaciness as someone who has been recently clocked around the head with something considerably heavy. Yes, that would have been a better way to describe them than the botched ‘kind of a horse but not a horse. Bigger. With a tapering horn on the head.’

Did he mention he had been incredibly drunk?

All he says to Nav’s patient expression is a measured, “Indeed, yes.”

No need for the boy to ever know.

It’s likely Catarina will have an absolute field day with the truth though. (In the smallest bit of his own defence, he rather doubted the poor man had ever encountered a hippo either so it was hardly likely to be more help).

“And Alec,” Nav continues, chancing a glance over at him now, still by the window, but Terra has joined them. “He- I wanted to thank him too but I don’t want to bring it up again. I’m just - sorry I asked, but it was really good of him to share that stuff. I read a bit about the whole Valentine thing in training but it’s what he said to the others, isn’t it? His name is right there in the records but I didn’t know him, might not have put it together.”

“Not many Shadowhunters do,” Magnus replies, offering him a small olive branch of a smile. “I’m sure you will be shocked to hear that we’ve seen this play out a few times.”

Nav stands a bit straighter. “Do you want us to not say anything? I’m sure I could get the others-”

Magnus reaches out to pat the boy’s shoulder, and his words fall away. “Alec has done incredible things for Shadowhunters and the Downworld his entire life; he has never been a secret.”

Magnus glances that way too, and the scene is like one of many, spreading back through the centuries; Alec surrounded by students. The kids, the settings and the lessons change, but the heart of it remains; a wealth of knowledge imparted with equal parts patience and snark to a clustered, riveted audience. And the closest Institute is only just across town. 

“Besides,” Magnus adds, with that in mind, “I daresay this is not the last you’ll see of us.”

Nav looks intrigued and perhaps a little hopeful by that, and Magnus is entertained for a moment by his own imagination, pondering how Cable is likely to react if he walks into ‘Stab ‘em with the Pointy End 101’ only to find Alec has taken up the staffing position. It’s more amusing than is perhaps entirely fair but Magnus can live with that. Maybe the kid has had it rough, but he has still been somewhat of a brat and Alec looks exceptionally good flipping knives in his hands while casually lecturing about balance.

Despite the look on Nav’s face, he doesn’t quite get to say anything else before an augmented thunderclap echoes in the room. It snatches attention from every corner and all conversation dries up instantly.

And apparently Magnus is a drama queen.

Catarina stands beside the cleared coffee table, shaking the last sparks and flickers of magic from her fingers as she looks imperiously around.

“Everyone done? Ready? Unless you live here, round it up, we’re going.”

“Thank you - and Alec,” Nav manages to say hastily, before he turns and obediently hustles around the couch towards Cat, pockets clinking away.

He gets to her just like a soldier reporting for duty - straight back, eyes front - at the same time that Gala does and they pull up shoulder to shoulder. Terra actually shakes Alec’s hand over by the window, then waits for Madzie to give him another hug goodbye before the two girls make their way over as well. Lethe catches Magnus’ eye and gives him a solemn nod, her hands clasped around the box of playground chalk and one of the padded backpack straps. Cable and Miles exchange just a couple more words with Alec and then they join the group in the centre as well.

Alec turns from the window to make a beeline for Magnus. He’s still completely silent on his feet and the Rune reminder is a hot bolt down Magnus’ spine.

“Well it has been a delight,” Magnus says, interested to find that it isn’t a complete lie at this point, even if he’s distracted.

Cat rolls her eyes but addresses the teens. “Alright, good, outside. Madzie, we need a new portal, right into the ritual room. All of you march.”

And they do. Looking like a little parade of ducklings following after Madzie, all of them disappear out into the foyer with small waves or murmurs of thanks and nods. Cat follows them, picking up her handbag and tablet when she reaches the corner of the couch, and she pauses there.

“I promise you,” she says, “We have this handled. I’ll message when it’s done and I’ll send my fee direct to the Institute. I’ll invoice them your consultant's fee too - you’re welcome. You’re both off the clock. Go do something useful.”

She means sleep.

Magnus does not when he answers, “I fully intend to.”

Alec huffs a soft laugh and his head shakes ruefully but he doesn’t refute it. There’s the slightest flush of colour just under the bolt of his jaw and Magnus wants to set teeth marks over it.

Cat’s eyes slide away from Alec the way they do when she recognises she can’t win an argument against him, which considering he’s said nothing is all kinds of appealing. Instead she settles on Magnus with another of those bland but fond looks. “You’re an idiot,” she informs him. “I love you both. I’ll drop in this summer when Madzie is back. Lock your door.”

She drops the demeanour for a moment just to reach forward and give Magnus a truly affectionate, solid hug that barely lasts, and with that, she strides out of the room after everyone else.

The apartment falls almost unnaturally silent the moment the front door clicks shut.

Alec exhales slowly beside him, his posture now sinking slightly, worn at the edges with his exhaustion. Magnus holds until he feels the pressure on the wards lift - the usual tells that a portal has closed back in on itself, and the hallway beyond the loft is blissfully empty.

He flicks his fingers to deadbolt the door, because Catarina wasn’t wrong about that suggestion, and turns to Alec, suddenly feeling like he’s been run ragged. His magic is good fortification in general, always alive and sentient under his skin with an energy of its own that he can tap into like a battery or small generator. He relaxes instead though, and the humming knot of it loosens, the early hour and the peaceful quiet threading their way into the spaces. Immediately it reaches out for whatever bare skin on Alec it can find. It’s not visible but the suggestion of it is a compelling pull in Magnus’ ligaments and tendons.

A smile whispers across Alec’s mouth and he glances down at his own arm, the tender skin inside his elbow, because he knows - he always does. He once said that Magnus’ magic varied; felt different depending on his mood or intent, but that often when it reached out subconsciously like this, it manifested like the faintest brush of fingertips and a tiny tug in his blood.

“Well that was eventful,” Magnus says idly.

Alec’s eyes roll and he twists his head up and to the side, working out a kink in his neck. “It always is with you,” he says, too fond to be accusing.

Magnus throws him a look too amused to be affronted.

A whisper of a laugh catching on the roof of Alec’s mouth, he takes hold of Magnus’ hand, and draws him around the end of the couch. At the front he lets go as he falls back into the cushions, placed right back in the centre, black leather spread like wings out to either side. His head tips back and his eyes fall closed, his whole body going slack and pliant in a way it so rarely does whenever other people are around. It’s a truly unguarded way to see him and despite the very real tiredness weighing Magnus’ limbs that seems to be rendering the rest of the apartment into a bokeh effect, Alec is so very in focus; beautiful and devastating, painted in the contrasts of silver blue from the windows and honey gold from the lamps with inky shadows pooling in between.

The blade of his deflect Rune stretches up the arch of his throat, bold as ever. The fireproof one is just a dark, dusky stain and the speaking in tongues mark that still lingered on the back of his wrist when he arrived home is now barely there, lost entirely when Alec turns his hands up, supplicant and vulnerable on either side of his legs.

Alec’s fingers brushed the inside of Magnus’ wrist as he let go, and heat blooms there between the tendons, climbing its way up and branching out languidly through his veins.

Tiredness makes him content even as want clenches his stomach.

Undecided, Magnus drops down onto the neighbouring couch cushion, turned sideways so he can keep tracing Alec’s shape with his eyes. His magic trills and beckons at him, insistent and hopeful, like a gaggle of cats when their hapless owner rips open a packet of Whiskers. It wants to go to Alec, whether to curl over him like vines or to crawl inside of him is hard to say.

A tiny pleased half smile cracks the corner of Alec’s mouth and Magnus narrows his eyes.

He says, “It’s not my fault.”

Alec snorts quietly. “It’s your magic.”

Yes, well.

Magnus doesn’t have an answer for that.

He caves instead, loosens his hold even more, and the magic jumps with the extra leash it’s been allowed. Vivid blue and surging in long arcs like a tide, eager tendrils reach across the cushion, just a little over arm’s distance away, and twine around Alec’s arm, stroke across his ribcage and stretch up towards his neck, curling at his nape.

Alec shivers enticingly into the cradle of the couch and his head presses back just a little more until Magnus can feel the resistance in his magic like it’s his own fingers, digging into the muscle and vertebrae at Alec’s hairline. He watches Alec’s throat move as he swallows, the thin skin pulling into the hollow between his collarbones and Magnus remembers the bruise he sucked there the night before Alec left. It's long gone now, but his body tightens with the sense memory of it. He bites on his tongue, tossing out a quelling thought at his own power to rein it in.

It listens, reluctantly.

He sat just out of reach for a reason, and as Alec appears to recognise the subtle retreat, his eyes flicker open, head turning to him. “What is it?”

“Are you alright?”

Asking bluntly has long been the best way. Alec appreciates directness.

He blinks once, the lamps lifting the gold from the hazel in his eyes as he processes the question and considers it.

“Can’t help thinking Jace and Izzy would have gotten a kick out of this whole thing,” he says eventually, but it’s coloured with laughter. “I’m fine.”

Magnus arches one eyebrow. Alec’s amusement steadies into a private smile and he tips his head back again.

“Not what you expected to come home to, though,” Magnus points out, because he can’t not.

A month away, days full of politics and diplomacy, fielding questions and concerns over legislation and then hours or days on a hunt with trainees across Idris only to come back to a demon problem and have to open up some doors long sealed shut. Magnus just hopes the doors haven’t actually opened old wounds as well.

Alec’s smile hasn’t changed, nor has his posture, the trusting openness of it.

“I came home to you,” he says simply. “That’s all I care about.”

Despite the assurance making him warm, Magnus finds he’s soothed more by Alec’s body language than the words. His magic preens, swelling happily, feels all golden and ridiculously buoyant as it takes up all the space inside his ribcage.

Now Alec’s smile shifts into more of a smirk as the blue flames encroach again; weaving across his stomach, splaying out possessively. Magnus finds his throat tight for a moment, adoration and desire crowding his bloodstream, more addicting than Yin Fen with none of the crash. Alec lifts one of his arms, just enough to be able to run his fingers over the closest wispy blue thread of magic, touching the incorporeal strength of it with a singular gentleness but also a deliberate sort of intent. He does all of it without looking.

“I’m really okay,” he repeats, then a half-hitch of a pause before he’s saying, “Actually I think-”

He cuts himself off, his hand stilling, and Magnus feels his own smile pulled up from the depths of his chest.

“Retirement was beginning to bore anyway,” he offers, knowing.

Alec’s head snaps up, eyes startled for just a second before they narrow playfully. “How’d you know what I was going to say?”

Magnus gives him a dry look. “Alexander,” he says, and doesn’t need to say more, because Alec rolls his eyes right back. They are too familiar with one another to doubt. It is the best thing Magnus has ever had and he would kill or destroy realms without compunction to keep him. “I thought Cable in particular was a ‘pain in the ass’?” he says leadingly instead.

Alec’s shoulders rock against the back of the couch in a half-hearted shrug. “He is, but he’s also got time to grow out of it. He does remind me a little bit of Jace - not that much,” he adds hastily, before Magnus can worry that the recalcitrant teenager might be painful for Alec to meet again. “Just…pieces, really. From when Jace was young and reckless.”

“His whole life then?” Magnus jokes.

Alec snorts, allowing it, but they both know he means before everything with Valentine. Learning who he was, escaping the ghost of a father who never truly existed and all the trauma that he had been carrying along with it had gone a long way into helping him stabilise himself. Jace wouldn’t have lived into his seventies if he hadn’t learned impulse control at some point.

Alec turns his head after a moment, his expression open. “I know we haven’t been out of it for very long this time - and not all the way either-”

“What is long?” Magnus shrugs. They’ve only ever managed brief bouts of true retirement anyway. “We get to choose, Alexander. And if it involves more of this you will hardly hear me complaining.”

He gestures loosely in Alec’s direction, even though the most of the hunting gear that really remains are the leather pants, boots and stele strapped to his thigh.

Alec smiles, amused, but settles with his head canted back over the couch again, turned to the side just to watch him. A moment passes, then his expression softens to something considering and he asks, “So if I wanted to work in an Institute again?”

He’s not asking for permission. Magnus has never stopped him from doing the things he wants to with his life and Alec knows that. He wants Magnus’ honesty.

“Which one? And when?”

Internally, Magnus wonders how many arrangements they might need to make and on what kind of timescale. Whatever the answer, he’s merely curious, not reluctant.

“This one,” Alec says, with a small twitch in his features that suggests it’s not purely for nostalgic reasons. “Cable said their current Weapons Instructor is in his late fifties and his daughter is pregnant with her second. He’s been talking about wanting to step down to be a grandfather while they’re still young. It probably won’t be for another year or so but it could work out. It gives us a bit more time - we could still get to Kenya before next November like we planned - but we wouldn’t have to relocate long term. It’s right across this part of the city, you have connections here, I know the place, and I’m still in contact with the current Head as well as the local pack. And Simon.”

Magnus bites down a smile at the put upon addition. All the points are solid and it sounds like a somewhat low key and ideal situation if they’re going to rejoin full time Shadow World work again for a while. It was mostly teasing about Cleveland, but it was true in as much as Magnus does tend to find himself at loose ends without people to see, magic to do and Alec to come home to.

“The Institute will be getting an impressive upgrade. I cannot imagine they would refuse such an offer,” Magnus says, inching a bit closer. Alec’s eyes dart to his mouth and then flick back up. “You know I am behind you if you want to do this.”

That seems to refocus him. Magnus pulls his magic back down, sputtering it out of sight again as he waits.

“I just…” Alec starts, clearly rolling the words around in his head as he picks them. “It’s the ones who light up when they learn, that spark when they get something they’ve been trying and trying at…I see Max in them, Madzie sometimes too. I still remember what it felt like the first time I picked up a bow; like it was mine, that I actually fit inside my own skin for once and like there was one piece of myself I was sure about. Half of that was the bow - the other half was the instructor who took one look at me and put it in my hands and believed in what I could do with it before I did. It’s not just teaching them to fight, Magnus. It’s the look on their faces when they know someone believes that they can…and I always miss it eventually.”

It's something Alec wouldn't admit to just anyone. He's managed to repeatedly establish a reputation for being sarcastic and reluctantly social at best, but one does not manage to do the things he has without being able to read people or genuinely care for them.

“Being able to teach is a skill,” Magnus says. “Getting others to want to learn, to believe that they can, is harder. Less people can claim that talent.” Alec’s skin colours just a little, a bashful recognition of a compliment that he never knows what to do with. “You have always been exceptional at both,” Magnus says. And then, to give him an out, “It is inconvenient.”

Alec’s eyes jump back to his, laughter and confusion vying in his expression. “What? Why?”

“It’s incredibly attractive,” Magnus says, waving at him as though that should have been obvious. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve wanted to push you down on a training mat in front of a sparring class?”

A hundred or so years ago, Alec would have choked, blushed much darker than he is now, and might have been too flustered to reply at all, even if he couldn’t help picturing it.

This Alec doesn’t. His flush doesn’t darken, but his eyes do and his breathing stutters before it goes deep and he asks, both curious and daring, “How many?”

“I lost count while you were working in Madrid in the fifties,” Magnus says.

Alec does fumble at that. “Madrid? But-”

He’d only been stationed in Madrid once in his entire life, and it was the twenty fifties. Alec had been sixty one. He and Jace had both been pulled down there for a few months over the summer - Jace to look over all their rosters and regimes to weed out the weaknesses in their training, and Alec to run classes to kickstart the higher standards. They’d done a lot of it in an outdoor courtyard warded off within the Institute. Flowering shrubs burst from cracks in the flagstone and creepers scaled up the white limestone walls but the eclectic towering silhouette of the building didn’t keep away the bright sunlight and dry heat. No point learning to fight in an air conditioned, shaded hall if they’d have to manage themselves in the local climate.

It just also meant Alec ran a lot of those sessions shirtless. No one really complained, it must be said, other than Jace. It was more good-natured fraternal ribbing than anything else, but he hadn’t been able to resist the jabs about some of them still being physically fit enough to throw people down on mats. There were also a couple of complaints for Magnus to please stop looking at certain people like he was thinking about doing just that.

Alec had gotten a tan that summer that took months to fade. Magnus was left with a pavlovian response to yoga mats, neo-gothic architecture and the scent of flowering oleander that hasn’t faded at all.

He’d realised quickly into their trip that the heat would be much more bearable for Alec’s classes with less layers, and in a truly selfless and herculean effort, had stopped leaving love bites on him. Tragically, Alec’s skin under a sheen of clean sweat and two shades darker, butter soft from heat and exertion over solid muscle was perhaps one of the biggest temptations Magnus had faced in his entire life. He regretted his altruistic decision moments after making it.

It took Alec a week to realise Magnus had stopped marking him up, and one more to reluctantly agree that it was probably for the best, then all of six minutes, bound down on the training mat with battle magic for him to decide his students’ sensibilities weren’t worth it. They were all adults anyway. The rest of that summer is an incredibly fond memory - if one best not reminisced about in company.

“That was years ago,” Alec says eventually.

“I’m aware,” Magnus replies. “As I said. I lost count.”

Alec blinks at him for a moment, then in a tone so neutral that it takes Magnus a second to register the words, he says, “About as often as I think about it, then.”

He doesn’t clarify, but it doesn’t much matter either way. Sometimes Magnus finds himself pushing Alec back, adrenaline and need a furious rush in his blood insisting he lays claim; delighting in the way that someone so capable and ungovernable can so readily give and come apart for him. Other times though, Magnus ignites under a single, dark look, body and magic turning molten and hot and flaying him open into something wanting and malleable. Alec can so easily move him down then, or lift him up, demanding surrender with his body and all that Angel’s intent. When he gets like that, Magnus isn’t about to refuse.

They’ve gotten off topic a little, but Magnus can’t find it in himself to steer them back just yet. The words burn through him, pulling at something deep with the strength of an undertow and the desire clenched tight in the pit of his stomach glows like hot coals, blood ricocheting south.

“Sometimes I know you know what you’re doing,” Alec says, practically conversational, so casually but for the thick sound of the vowels that taste like hunger and awe. Magnus stills. “Like when we go to Pandemonium or a charity gala or something and you want people to see you; to know there’s something more but that they won’t ever find out what. Other times it’s like you don’t even realise. It’s not just the way you move or the way you talk or your magic. You just exist and it makes people stop.”

Magnus’ breath shakes as it trips out of his lungs. It’s not really surprise that he feels - he’s grown used to Alec saying such life-altering things with the same off-hand tone someone might afford the recitation of a grocery list. It’s not surprise so much as just the way the words catch him unawares, slipping through the cracks in his ribs to brand themselves on his heart and rearrange his bones.

“Alexander…” he murmurs, slightly helplessly. The way Alec sees him will never stop amazing him. 

His magic isn’t even tangible, no visible wisps or flickers between them, but it rears up, just intent spilling free, and Alec shudders hard an arm’s length away because he can feel it all the same. It seeks unseen underneath his shirt for warm, firm skin. It’s an unrepentant extension of Magnus, and he can feel the affected flutter of muscle like it happens under his actual fingers.

Sitting so far away is growing inconceivable.

It would be so easy, too.

To push Alec down along the couch, tug him free of his clothes and hitch his hips up for Magnus to settle between his thighs. He could use his fingers to open him up until he’s boneless and malleable, then sink into him, every angelic atom yielding in a way no one else has ever or will ever witness. Alec’s body knows intimately how to beg for more where his mouth won’t. And he’d shake apart with it, clamped down around him, throat arched back and waiting for teeth, his fingers knotted into the leather upholstery or destroying the throw pillows, or if Magnus were really lucky - scoring white hot lines down his back instead.

Just as easy would be to sink onto him where he already is, take him right down to the hilt and ride him into the couch.

Alec wouldn’t go pliant and soft if Magnus did that. He’d gasp up towards the ceiling, a thread of tension holding him together around the quivering of muscle that wants to fly apart. He’d be torn, Magnus knows. He’d want to be held down with his wrists pressed back into the cushion, his breath snagging with each sinuous dancer’s twist of Magnus’ hips, letting him set the pace, whether he rode him hard or drew it out. But he’s also fresh off a hunt, adrenaline still glowing embers under his skin like it’s waiting to catch light again. So he’d also want to grab hold of Magnus’ hips and throw them over, stretch him out and fuck into him hard enough to scrape the couch across the floor.

All of it dancing in images through his head makes Magnus hot and his stomach roll, body clenching on a glaring absence.

He’s watching Alec, running eyes over him, magic tasting the air around them, and he wants it, any of it, but if he’s tired then he knows Alec must be feeling the same slow drag himself, likely more. He contemplates steering them back to lighter ground for a second, and just as he decides to do it, Alec cuts clean across the thought trying to form words in his head.

“Come here.”

Magnus’ heart has no business lurching like that. He’s been married almost three hundred years, for devil’s sake. He still hears his own sucked in breath in the quiet, and it’s hard to miss Alec's pleased response, his mouth curling into a smirk.

“How is your wound?” Magnus asks, making himself stay put. He wasn’t sure he was going to ask until he did, but now the question is out there, he needs to know.

“Come look at it,” Alec answers, eyes still closed and unmoving.

There’s the hint of a tease and a challenge in his tone, but he says it so softly that it’s half air. It’s an invite, so incredibly blatant. Magnus is quite simply not to be held accountable.

He rolls smoothly up to cover the distance on the couch between them, notches his knee into the space between Alec’s legs and presses it up into him. He hears his breath catch at the feeling, sees his body pulling tight, tendons flexing in his wrists and the hard line of him straining at his zip - and then Magnus lifts his leg to Alec’s other side and sinks down to straddle him fully.

All the air rushes out of Alec’s chest as Magnus settles in his lap, the pulse in his throat jumping and his eyes flutter open, blown out and dark. Despite that, he was expecting this. His hands are already grasping Magnus’ hips, the sure, tensile strength in them bearing him down to grind them together. A groan tears out of Magnus reflexively as he feels Alec hard underneath him, the friction between their clothes sending his blood spinning and the world hazy. He lets himself enjoy it for seconds that are far too short, chasing the high, and then he refocuses. 

He grabs hold of Alec’s wrists, pushes them up into the back of the couch either side of his head then lets the itch of impatient magic do what it wants and binds them there, blue coils glowing against the black leather. Alec makes a pulled, desperate sound and his body arches up, giving Magnus something to ride into as he shifts his weight to pin him in place and slot their bodies together where he needs it.

Alec goes still at that, every muscle taut, his breaths catching and heartbeat thrumming. His eyes burn dark in the lamplight, sharp enough to rival a blade though their attention strikes between Magnus' own eyes and his mouth, with little darting glances down between them.

Wound. Priorities.

Magnus considers for a split second pulling at the neck of his t-shirt again and then tosses that idea aside. He reaches for the bottom hem instead and tugs it up. Alec’s shoulders curl off of the couch just enough for it to pull off over his head, and the magic bonds around his wrists allow the fabric to pass through them without letting up. Magnus throws the shirt somewhere behind him, fingers already finding the Iratze he glimpsed earlier.

It’s almost gone now - just a pale pink-silver outline of a mark in the hollow of Alec’s shoulder, muscle twisting elegantly up around his deltoid to where his arms are trapped. Other than the obvious, there’s no tension in the joint and when Magnus feels over the back of his trapezius towards where the welt had been left, there’s barely a marr in his skin. The careful pressure on the tiny imperfection of it makes Alec’s breath stutter and goosebumps break out across his shoulder. He likes a little bit of pain sometimes, but this is not a pain response.

“I’m fine,” Alec assures him. His body rolls encouragingly, pressing thick and heavy right where Magnus needs him and he almost bites his tongue in half at the flashfire heat that loosens his ligaments and tears down his entire spine in a valiant bid to turn his insides to soup.

“You need rest,” Magnus returns tightly, because he’s right, and it needs to be said even if it’s not the first pick for either of them, and he can perhaps admit he's not helping.

Predictably, Alec tenses up against the magic and they’ve done this enough that Magnus knows it’s because instinct said to grab hold of him. The blue coils waver for a second, like they’re considering letting go, but Alec doesn’t fight through and they burn brighter instead.

“I’m fine,” Alec insists firmly again, shifting restlessly. He spreads his legs a little more, sinking Magnus’ weight closer, more solidly against him. “I’ve fucked you when I’ve been worse.”

The reminder pulses through Magnus, clenches in his gut and has him rocking thoughtlessly down. Silk loungewear has no right feeling this restrictive. The movement drags an unsuspecting moan from Alec. All his stomach muscles tense and forcibly release, Runes shifting in his skin and he’s so hard that the friction sears even through the remains of the thick leather gear.

“Doesn’t mean it should be a habit,” Magnus says, slightly breathless.

He’s talking nonsense; knows he’s mostly arguing for the sake of arguing now, and maybe just a little to rile Alec up. He likes how he gets when he’s just on the edge of vibrating out of his own bones. It usually ends well for him.

“Too late,” Alec replies, dark. “You like it when I come to you after a fight - the political ones just as much as the demon ones. You like holding me down, but you also like that a Shadowhunter can take you apart when we’ve got all that extra energy to burn. Idris in seventy three is one of your favourite memories.”

Magnus might have said as much to him. More than once.

But really - can he be blamed? As far as he’s concerned, he’s actually entirely faultless. Probably.

That day had been a battle of both kinds; Alec had been holding ground in a tribunal, fighting for stronger Downworlder rights and more open access within the Nephilim homeland when there had been a breach of Deumas demons in the Council halls.

By the time Magnus got the alert and portaled in, half the Shadowhunters on duty were armed and fighting and he’d joined the fray figuring wherever the action was, he was most likely to find his husband. He got a front row seat to Alec in a suit, splattered with ichor and blood, looking more than a little feral but still focused and controlled as he dispatched everything that came near him, arrows flashing through the air and a seraph blade whirling in arcs, whichever got there first.

Then, when the dust settled, all of that focus turned on Magnus.

The ache and wear of combat tempered with active Runes and searing adrenaline, all of it tearing up under Alec’s skin looking for an outlet had made for an immensely enjoyable memory. He thinks they destroyed a wall. He certainly felt it for days.

“Just you,” Magnus says in answer to that, because this is important to him. “Not ‘a Shadowhunter’, Alec. Just you.”

The much more common version of his name snags Alec’s attention. His eyes lock on, steady and hot for a moment before he says, “So let me.”

The promise in it drags a shiver down the malleable remains of Magnus’ spine.

“You could give me my stele,” Alec suggests, “but-”

“No,” Magnus interrupts before he can finish. He curls a hand around the back of Alec’s neck so he can tip his head and keep looking him right in the eyes. “Enjoyable as your stamina Rune is, Alexander, I have no doubts you’ve already relied on enough in the past few days and I wish to insist you don’t use any more until you’ve had real rest.”

“Fine,” Alec concedes, all too quickly - a speed that says he knew he’d be refused. “I don’t need it. Magnus…” He says his name and then nothing else, like he just wanted to roll it over his tongue. Or, perhaps, like he thought about coaxing him and swallowed it back.

“When I implied we would not be sleeping any time soon I was being facetious,” Magnus mutters. His fingers start to trace down Alec’s chest anyway, summoning little flickering curls of blue magic to play over his bare skin. The looping shape of his agility Rune sits on the arch of his sternum, just along the lower rung of his ribcage, glittering black. Magnus traces that. The stamina one brackets the other side of his diaphragm, a pretty shape characterised by little sweeping flicks. Magnus strokes his fingers over that too.

Alec snorts very softly, air tugged out of him as his abs contract under the delicate touch winding its way down his body. “No you weren’t,” he breathes out, amused. “Maybe when you said that to Cat, but not when we were in the hallway.”

That’s true.

“That was much earlier. I did not expect any of this to take so long.”

He’s curious to see what Alec will do - if he’ll just talk and let Magnus make the move, or if there’s still enough latent energy left in his veins that he’ll break through the gentle hold of magic on his wrists and flip them. Magnus has truly restrained him many times in the past, but they both know his magic well enough to know that right now, this is just a suggestion. If Alec really tried, it would give way.

He doesn’t do anything though, and it occurs to Magnus that there is a secret third door he often overlooks. It’s why Alec stopped after saying his name. He’s waiting for Magnus to decide, to see if he truly wants to withdraw, because if he does, he will accept it.

“If you’re not going to follow through,” Alec says eventually, equal parts teasing and honest, voice thick, “I’m going to need a minute.”

Magnus lifts an eyebrow at him, something delighted and wicked expanding in his chest and dragging at his mouth. “Oh?”

Alec hums an affirmative and then falls quiet, breaths measured out to steady himself.

Since Magnus lacks any true ability to deny Alec something - especially when he wants the same thing - he finally folds forward to kiss him.

It’s an answer Alec recognises and he seizes against the bonds at his wrists, his body jackknifing. Magnus has to roll his weight down to stay seated, his own moan catching him by surprise. He slants his mouth over Alec’s, uses teeth to nip at his lower lip until he opens up with a small jagged gasp and then tongues his way inside. He still tastes a little like cinnamon and rainfall, undercut with the woody sweetness of blueberries, backlit with something honeyed and golden. Magnus kisses him firmly back into the couch, swallowing the sounds he makes and chasing new ones.

Any self respecting teenager would call it a solid make out by the time he’s done, pulling back with his lungs burning and jaw aching as Alec’s gasp for air washes ever so loud into the room between them. He’s a little ruined, mouth swollen, eyes dilated and the lean spread of him flushed hot, warmth emanating out, seeping through Magnus’ silk shirt like it’s not there, and the colour in his skin reaching right down to his sternum. 

“Fuck,” Alec pants succinctly.

“If you want,” Magnus returns, and Alec nods, semi frantic.

“I don’t care,” he says, before Magnus can ask. “Anything - just-”

He’s clearly on edge if a few long minutes of kissing can work him up to this, so Magnus settles him for a moment, fingers stroking at the back of his neck until his breathing evens.

“You are so…” Alec starts, unexpectedly soft, and Magnus raises his eyes. He’s prepared for something teasing or blatantly sexual, so it trips him completely when Alec looks back at him, expression candid and reverent and continues, “How are you real?”

Magnus blinks, but Alec isn’t done.

“Everything about you is captivating,” he says, again in that mildly infuriating casual way. “Holding court in our living room like that tonight, telling Shadowhunters to back off - the way they watch you and the way you talk about history, how you get defensive.” Magnus has half a mind to be indignant about that, but before he can summon it around the heart palpitations he’s currently enduring, Alec flicks him a dry look. “You do,” he affirms, and then, pleased, “You get protective of me and it’s hot as hell.”

Magnus finds his voice finally. “That does it for you, does it?”

It certainly does it for him, the other way around.

Alec doesn’t rise to the bait. He shrugs a little, wrists still ensnared. “You do it for me.”

Magnus exhales in a shaky rush. He considers a routine joking response of ‘all in a day’s work’ but the glowing sincerity in Alec’s voice pulls something more honest out of him.

“It’s been my job to hold court - and to tell Shadowhunters to back off, as you put it. I’m not sure anyone else would describe it as captivating, but I’ll take the compliment regardless.”

Alec smiles, but interestingly enough there’s something about it that’s patient and knowing.

“You’re wrong,” he says, just the faintest bit teasing. “Naveen had a small case of hero worship going on there. I think Cable was having a minor crisis every time you looked his way and I think even Gala wanted your approval. And it’s not just them - I’ve seen you at Downworlder Summits and cabinet meetings, in Pandemonium and on commission work at Institutes. It’s everyone. And it’s not their fault.” He shrugs and the flex flows through his whole body. Magnus rocks closer and Alec’s breathing stutters but he pushes on anyway, slightly airless. “You’re just the kind of person who makes people want to be worth more. They want you to look at them twice and they light up when you do.”

Magnus stares at him, breathes out his name and then decides nothing he can say in reply will be strong enough, so he kisses him again instead.

When he draws away, Alec chasing him up mindlessly until he can’t, he’s still stupidly emotional over it. He knows Alec loves him, values him, sees so much in him that he can’t always see himself - that it’s been true since the beginning. He remembers the trepidation, strong enough to strangle him, when he’d first turned to Alec with his real eyes and instead of the recoil he was bracing for, seen something far more devastating, something with the power to alter the course of his life.

It’s not like Alec doesn’t find ways to tell him, but every time he hears it, always different words and sometimes different languages, it rocks him. He knows Alec enjoys his magic, that he likes his body, but when he talks like this, it’s rarely about either.

It’s ironic, truly, that Alec can see him so clearly, even the parts that aren’t tangible, that he can read a room in a single sweep and has an apparent sixth sense for when someone is interested in Magnus, but that he still can’t always tell when someone is blatantly interested in him.

“Cable had a crisis whenever he looked my way because of how often I caught him looking at you,” Magnus says pointedly. He has nothing to say about the others; they are young and their regard for him was innocent, more to do with gratefulness and reputation than anything else.

Alec blinks into the middle distance for a second, considering that, then offers a wholly unmoved, “Huh.”

Magnus catches himself smiling. He asks, curiously, “Is that what you wanted too? For me to look at you twice?”

Alec focuses back on him, unguarded. “Yes. I was terrified of everything you evoked in me but when I stopped wanting to run from it, I just wanted to be worth it instead. Back then you represented something, you gave me a reason to look at my life, at what I wanted, and the strength to fight for it, but I got to know you and that’s what made me want to stay. I don’t have any illusions about you, Magnus. I’m not in love with the idea of you.”

Magnus stops breathing for a moment and his heart drops several beats in a neat row.

At this rate, Magnus is going to need to take a minute, and he's going to have to spend it asking Catarina to put down the nice Memory Demon and please do a quick cardiac check on him.

Alec is the only person who took the time to see past all his illusions in the first place and then love him for everything he was without them.

“I didn’t give you the strength for that, Alec,” Magnus says quietly when he thinks his heart is doing its job again. “That was always yours.”

“Maybe,” Alec allows. “But you still gave me a reason. You were enough then. You always have been.”

A punched out exhale and Magnus’ chest cracks open under the pressure of his heart expanding, filling the cage of his ribs with the relative force and ruination of a dying star. His magic arcs like sheet lightning in his bloodstream, a static burst through his skin and Alec’s breaks out in gooseflesh, a shudder rocking him in direct response. Across the room, several books fling themselves from the shelves and the drinks cart rattles ominously. Not his fault.

“A repeat for the record,” Magnus says, his voice ground slightly raw, “Other people might be looking, but I looked at you twice the night you took out a Circle member at Pandemonium, and I’ve been looking at you twice ever since.”

Alec already knows that, but it doesn’t stop his eyes flashing; nostalgia and contentment and something like gravity.

“They can look all they want,” is what Alec says, entirely unconcerned. “I don’t know how anyone couldn’t. You’re always the brightest thing in the room. They just can’t touch. You come home to me too.”

Again with the casual tone over words that have the power to shape a person’s sense of self. He absolutely knows what he’s doing, Magnus thinks with a vicious kind of adoration. He must know.

“Yes, about that,” he says, before they forget about this for the rest of the night, or possibly the next couple of months, “I’m going to have to request that my husband not become a live-in member of staff on the Institute’s docket. Cat seems to think I’m liable to do something quite drastic.”

“Not a chance,” Alec agrees readily. His hands curl and release, tension and want and remembered impatience. “Plenty of the locals commute in and keep their homes these days, no one will even blink. Are we done talking now?”

“You’re the one that got us off topic,” Magnus points out, amused.

Alec rocks his hips up, trying for friction or to encourage Magnus to move again, then huffs when neither quite works. “What? It’s amazing watching you - I’m not allowed to say that?”

Magnus has no right whatsoever to be pleased enough that he feels an actual blush heat up his cheekbones. Or, technically he has every right but it doesn’t stop it being ridiculous.

Married almost three hundred years, he reminds himself, and kisses Alec to shut him up.

He cheats and uses magic to banish the rest of Alec’s clothes, and swallows the harsh gasp he makes when he realises what’s happened. Everything speeds up suddenly.

The back and forth of foreplay and conversation since they sat down seems to have been a slow drip for hours, even though it can’t have been that long since everyone left. The moon outside has shifted, the sky turning to an amorphous haze that hails the pre-dawn light, and the slow drip becomes an open faucet.

Magnus curls a hand around Alec and starts to move. They’re too worn to drag it out, and too wired for it to last long. He knows Alec’s body almost better than his own, and it’s easy to find a rhythm that quickly splinters him apart, keeping his mouth occupied through the pulls and licking the gasping groans as they tear up his throat. He goes slack after, breathing hard as Magnus draws back, but it only lasts a moment.

Without a hint of warning, Alec breaks his wrists free. The magic vibrates at the shock even as it gives way, and Alec stretches forward still trembling, curling both his hands around the nape of Magnus’ neck to tug him back in. He kisses him almost furiously, though the stroke of his tongue is soft and sated, and it’s just distracting enough that Magnus misses the moment his shirt is unbuttoned.

He feels it pushed off his shoulders and bites down on Alec’s lip.

Cursing as he pulls away, Alec determinedly continues, tugging at the drawstring of Magnus’ linen lounge pants. His knees stay closed around Alec’s hips both for balance and because he can’t make himself move away, but Alec’s bicep flexes as he grips the waistband and something wild punches through Magnus’ chest as he tugs and the fabric tears.

Honestly he wishes slightly he was the type of man to be indignant and reproachful about that. They were a perfectly comfortable, stylish pair of pants. The sad truth is they’re easily fixable and even if they weren’t, he’s actually the type of man who just finds it mind-numbingly hot.

“I liked those,” he gasps anyway, because sometimes he’s an instigator.

Alec doesn’t even contemplate an apology. “I like them on the floor.”

Magnus folds forward into him when Alec gets a hand around him in return. It’s not quite what his mind conjured up, but it’s not like they haven’t made even more egregious use of the couch before, or won’t again in the future. For tonight, this is perfect. His blood burns up in his veins and the knot at the base of his spine twists tighter with each pull, sending out flickering waves of white heat as sweat slicks his skin.

Alec noses into the juncture of his neck, sets his mouth there with just a hint of teeth and sucks hard, and Magnus shatters like glass dropped from a height, every atom flinging itself into far reaches as his vision flares red, white and gold. When he pieces his mind back together, Alec’s fingers are stroking through the hair at the back of his head, his other hand firm and stabilising around his thigh.

They breathe for a moment in the silence of the loft, until Magnus’ heartbeat has started to ease itself back into rhythm, and then he gets rid of the tacky feeling drying on their skin with a burst of magic. Sated contentment and belonging take up all the space between his bones. it soothes through his frayed nerves and swells up his throat in a faint humming sound as he exhales. He stretches forward to place a kiss on Alec’s temple.

It’s nice, being elevated enough to reach.

Alec’s expression is serene, eyes half lidded as he looks back at him with a fine, filigree smile playing ever so gently at his mouth. Magnus brushes a thumb along it and the smile grows, steadies.

“Thought you wanted me to throw you into a wall,” Alec says after a moment, voice rasping slightly.

“There’s time,” Magnus shrugs. Maybe he can even convince Alec to put the hunting gear back on for it. There’s a re-enactment in their near future - a what-if Alec had come home tonight and there weren’t a handful of wayward Shadowhunters in the apartment. It probably wouldn’t even take that much convincing.

Alec’s fingers tighten at the back of Magnus’ head, and he pulls him in, kissing him softly, so different to the last one, just as familiar.

Magnus skims his fingers down Alec between them, following the lattice of his ribs and then the toned shape of his obliques until he reaches the divot that runs along the vee of his hip. He traces that right into the line where soft muscle delineates the join of his thigh to his pelvis. He doesn’t even need to look to know he’s in the right place, but as Alec’s breath catches and the kiss breaks, he does anyway.

There’s a Rune there, glittering black, distinct and unfading. It’s somewhere no one would see unless Alec were as naked as he is right now, and for good reason.

Just because it’s not replicable doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be questions or curiosity, and curiosity in this case, got people killed.

It’s not any Rune from the Gray Book; not a Rune that even really exists at all, as far as history is concerned. It’s an elegant thing, small enough that Magnus can cover it with his palm, big enough to have changed the entire landscape of his life and the future of the Shadow World.

It’s true that Alec’s immortality was a gift from an Angel. What he leaves out of the story is that the gift was passed to him through Clary Fairchild.

Almost two years after their wedding, months after she’d come stumbling back into their lives with a fractured set of memories and a few vague names and faces at best, she had approached Alec. Her time in the Shadow World had been reinstated in pieces, but she had an almost complete picture by then, and between Jace, Izzy and Simon, she’d mostly been caught up on the year she missed as well. It led to her standing in Isabelle’s office at the Institute, wringing her hands and pacing in front of the hearth.

Magnus got the story from Alec two hours later.

Clary had handed him a piece of paper, cautious but determined, and told him that the Angel Raziel had spoken to her in a dream. For their efforts in service to the Nephilim and the Downworld, for stopping Valentine and Lilith and Jonathan - they would be rewarded.

Clary was returned her ability to create Runes, with the caveat that if she felt the Angels’ resistance again, she would not ignore it. On the paper was a Rune they had insisted on.

Immortality, for the bearer. He could still be killed, be maimed or hurt, but he would not age, weaken or grow sick from any natural cause.

“It’s for me,” Alec told Magnus later, still somewhat in shock as he gazed down at the page, fingernails trying to score out the creases from the even folds. “It…Clary said - the Angels said - it won’t work on anyone else. It’s not- not really a Shadowhunter Rune its just-”

“A gift,” Magnus suggested.

His entire world had tilted on its axis, first with stunned hope and then, immediately, with terror.

It had never been possible before so he’d tried not to think about it, but in that moment - handed the means with which to keep Alec with him forever - he had to face the possibility that Alec wouldn’t actually want it. Magnus had lived through the loss of loves before, had grown used to not being wanted for a lifetime, much less eternity, and it had been enough - everything - that Alec wanted to stay with him as long as his mortality allowed.

But sixty years was not the same as six hundred or six thousand. It was an unfair thing to ask, and yet he wanted to ask it. He wanted Alec to want it, and even considering that he might not was crippling, not in the way that losing a limb was crippling, but in the way that standing too close to a bomb blast was.

So tied up as he was in his imminent panic attack, Magnus had taken a beat to realise Alec was watching him, assessing and hopeful, like he was realising something as the seconds ticked by.

“I can’t work out,” he’d said, “if you’re trying to find a way to tell me you didn’t want to be married for eternity, or if you didn’t think, given the chance, I’d want to stay with you forever. I’m starting to think maybe I know which, though.”

That was the first time something blazing and bigger than life came to rest in Magnus’ chest like it could actually build a home there. It was a tidal wave of hope, the cold fear slipping out of his bloodstream like he’d opened a vein.

They talked it all over. For many reasons they’d discussed and agreed on, they decided to wait, but they’d gone to sleep, exhilarated and peaceful in the knowledge that it wasn’t an if but a when. There wasn’t a clock hanging over them, no hourglass running out. It felt like the first night of a second engagement.

Alec got the Rune when he was twenty-seven. It gave them three years to go over everything, tell Alec’s family, prepare for every outcome and the time to simply live with the decision. Mentally adjusting to existing forever is no little thing, and Magnus knows many are not cut out for it, but Alec was undeterred.

Clary drew it on him, in a rather awkward exchange that involved a lot of blushing and apologising on her part, and a lot of rigid discomfort and avoided gazes on Alec’s. He’d managed to at least stay covered up, but it had to be her. The Rune took, glowing gold for days when it was new before settling down. It then appeared to do very little of anything at all for the next few years.

Alec didn’t come down with the same flu that took half the Institute including Jace the year he turned thirty two, but it wasn’t pulled into question until around a decade later when it started to become clear he did not look like a man in his forties.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Magnus traces the shape now, the path of his finger along the flicks and curls is ancient to him. He’s been doing it since the day Alec got it, a compulsive little habit that started out as disbelief and reassurance; proof Alec chose him. These days it’s simple habit and comfort.

He can almost feel Alec’s tired smile, and his hand closes around Magnus’ thigh with a soft squeeze when he’s finished trailing the last stele stroke. A contented exhale sinks his chest, his breathing deep, his heartbeat steady as a metronome.

“We should sleep,” he says. 

“Hmm,” Magnus agrees vacantly. “I don’t suppose here would suffice?”

Alec's answering laugh is a threadbare thing, lost in the quiet the moment he releases it. “I’ve missed our bed,” he says.

And yes, okay, he raises a good point. An excellent one in fact.

Tomorrow’s calendar is clear and bed rest seems in order. They’ll most likely sleep through noon, which will be far more comfortable on the memory foam mattress in their bedroom, not to mention much easier for not so restful activities when they’re more awake. Who said morning sex had to happen in the morning, anyway? Magnus would like to strongly disagree.

“You’ve convinced me,” Magnus says magnanimously.

Alec stifles a smirk and wisely doesn’t point out that Magnus seems to have mostly convinced himself with very little outside input.

It takes a moment, trying to breathe through the prickling feeling of bloodflow returning to his left leg, and Alec’s hands on him to keep him upright, before Magnus regains his own sense of balance and stretches up tall beside the couch. Alec’s eyes are a heated weight travelling down his spine as he feels it pop pleasantly, muscle and ligament loosening in a way that feels well earned.

“Save that thought,” Magnus tells him. “Sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alec agrees, and he’s still moving silently as he stands up as well.

Magnus tries valiantly to take his own advice, but he can be excused for looking, surely.

Alec’s body is a weapon, but cast in shadow and pre-dawn light, sinew shifting under skin scattered with Runes and silvered scars, he’s beautiful more than lethal, every inch a fallen angel with a fierce heart and a sharp tongue.

“Save that thought,” Alec teases, stepping close in behind him and leaning down to kiss the side of his head. The playful chasteness of it almost takes Magnus out at the knees again.

“Yeah, yeah,” Magnus throws back at him, rolling his eyes and Alec laughs, moving around him for the bedroom.

“I’ll need my clothes back from wherever you put them,” Alec calls over his shoulder. He doesn’t sound too concerned.

Magnus starts after him, pausing in the doorway to the rear hall to glance back over the room.

Two black couches arranged around an artisan coffee table; the overstuffed armchair next to the abandoned drinks cart; a long, elegant but scuffed side table against an exposed brick wall. Bookshelves line the walls, rugs overlap on the floorboards and plants burst from all manner of pots across various surfaces. His torn pants are discarded under the edge of a couch cushion, but that's neither here nor there.

It’s home; familiar down to the scratches in the doorframes and the floorboard that still creaks funny since Cat put it back, but tonight it feels like it’s also been an elaborate set piece to a drama in five acts.

Flicking his fingers to kill all the lights and turning to follow his husband, Magnus thinks ironically that tonight just forged yet another memory, worth its weight in magic and gold, and too invaluable to ever give up.

I can’t love you the rest of my life, it’s gonna be a lot longer than that.

.

.

Timeline
(Please note this is not exhaustive as I've almost certainly forgotten other events mentioned in this story and where they fit. I've also excluded events that have no specified position in time (either by approximate date or Alec's age). Ie, the San Andreas fault. What I have done on some others is put a date here for ease of reading even if in the story the date wasn't specific, for instance, Jace dies in his late seventies but just for simplicity I picked a year).

1993 - Alec is born (0)
2016 - Show events (23)
2020 - Alec gets the Immortal Life Rune (27)
2035 - Clave discovers Alec is immortal (42)
2054 - Alec and Jace spend the summer in Madrid (61)
2073 - Deumas demons attack Idris (80)
2075 - Jace passes away in his late seventies (82)
2089 - Isabelle passes away in her nineties (96)
2107 - Seelie war (114)
2115 - NASA discovers a planet - Orcus (122)
2117 - Merlot gets discontinued. Everyone weep (124)
2149 - Snow leopard goes extinct (156)
2215 - Warlock rogue uprising (222)
2218 - Eyeliner gets discontinued. Everyone weep more. Magnus buys shares in Sephora (225)
2222 - Last time Magnus sees a traditional postcard (229)
2223 - White rhino goes extinct (230)
2235 - Sofia Ruiz makes her first glass blown sculpture (242)
2244 - Downworlder Summit in Vancouver, Malec's first retirement (251)
2284 - Lethe and her friends are born (291)
2296 - Charity gala to launch the cancer treatment machine (303)
2298 - Paxton is killed by a Moloch and Margo takes over the Syracuse Pack (305)
2300 - Christmas with Madzie (307)
2302 - Alec's blood saves a whale pod (309)