Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As he rises through the layers of unconsciousness like dark water, his own name is the first thing he hears, spoken in a soft, unfamiliar voice that seems to resonate through his bones, strangely compelling.

“Alexander. Come back to me, Alexander. Come back, open your eyes. Wake up, just for a little bit. Good. You can sleep in a moment, but just for now—”

He blinks, opens his eyes.

“--wake up,” finishes the man leaning over him. A warlock. That much is obvious from his eyes, which are a shifting, luminous, inhuman shade of gold. Beautiful, Alec thinks, before he can stop himself. The man leaning over him is beautiful, with his dark hair and his sharp cheekbones and the soft bow of his mouth, which curves into a smile that seems entirely too warm to belong to a total stranger when Alec finally manages to focus on him. “There you are.”

His hand rests on Alec’s cheek for a moment. He can feel the fizz of magic against his skin, which means that the warlock must be healing him, but something about the gesture seems… uncalculated. Familiar, in a way that unbalances Alec. He licks his lips with a tongue so dry it feels like sandpaper, and his voice is a hoarse rasp when he speaks. “What--what happened? Who are you?”

A spasm of something unreadable crosses the warlock’s face, and he lets his hand drop, sits back a little. “Of course. My apologies. You were attacked, and you’ve been unconscious for a few days. I’ve been helping the healers attempt to unravel the aftereffects. My name is Magnus Bane.”

“You’re a warlock,” Alec whispers. The name brings a faint twinge of recognition, but it’s not something he can dig out of his foggy mind right now. The corners of his brain seem full of static. He must have been in really serious trouble if they brought a strange warlock into the Institute to work on him, but as far as he can tell, there’s not even a guard in the room. He and the warlock are completely alone under the cool fluorescent lights.

The smile that crosses the Magnus Bane’s face is a faint shadow of that first one. “I am.”

“You have, your—” Alec lifts one hand, which feels way too heavy, and gestures a little, vaguely. He’s never actually seen a warlock mark this close up. Not attached to a living person, anyway. There aren’t many warlocks who’ll let their glamours drop around shadowhunters. “Eyes.”

“My eyes,” the warlock repeats. For an instant, he looks entirely blank, almost baffled, and then he winces slightly and squeezes his eyes shut for several seconds. When he opens them again, the irises are dark brown, entirely ordinary. Human. “There. Better?”

“I--I didn’t mean, just, they were—” Pretty, he doesn’t say. God. His filter is completely fucking shot, and there’s a too-handsome warlock leaning over him, close enough to reach out and touch, and even glamoured his eyes are way too intent, and Alec is… really not coherent enough to deal with this right now. He clenches his teeth together before he can let anything else slip, then says, “Jace? Izzy--Isabelle, my sister--are they okay?”

Jace is okay, at least. He can feel the echo of his heartbeat through the bond when he focuses, half a beat slower than his own. Sleeping. He feels steady and calm in a way that he--hasn’t, actually, in a while, which probably means that Izzy is okay too.

“They’re fine,” Magnus Bane confirms. “Sleeping, for now. It’s been a very long few days. Would you like me to wake them? I know they’ll want to know that you’re—” he pauses, almost infinitesimally. “Awake.”

“No, ‘sfine.” Alec yawns. “Let ‘em sleep.”

“You can go back to sleep too, if you want.” He smiles a little. “You really should, actually. The healing took a lot out of you. I just needed you awake for a moment to assess the, ah, after-effects.”

“What—” What happened, he starts to say, but he doesn’t quite manage to get it out. There’s an itch at the back of his throat, rasping and dry, and it catches when he breathes in, a sudden hacking cough. He tries to muffle it with the back of his hand, too late. At the back of his mind, somewhere under the fog of exhaustion, he’s embarrassed to be flat on his back, helpless and useless and weak in front of this man, who even under the wan unflattering infirmary lights looks polished and powerful. And gorgeous. Strikingly so.

Don’t, he thinks firmly at that stupid part of himself, the one he’s never been entirely successful at stomping out, and braces his palms on the mattress to lever himself upright, eyes watering. His elbows feel like loose hinges, head spinning when he moves it, and for a moment he thinks that he might actually tip over before strong hands catch his shoulder, bracing.

“Here,” Magnus Bane says, “let me just—”

There’s a puff of blue magic that blows coolly across his skin, and a glass of water appears on the bedside table. The warlock steadies Alec easily as he curls in on himself coughing, reaches across to tuck the pillow behind his shoulders before pressing the water glass into his hands. Helps him hold it steady as he drinks, too, which is humiliating but probably necessary, given how weak Alec feels right now. He’s shaking so hard that the glass rattles slightly against his teeth.

“Thanks,” he mumbles when his coughs finally subside. He can’t quite meet the man’s eyes.

“Of course,” the warlock says. His voice is soft; his fingers warm where they’re still curled around Alec’s. “Better?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Magnus Bane lifts the glass out of Alec’s hands and sets it back down on the table, sitting back, and Alec curls his fingers, feeling oddly bereft. “You really ought to get some more sleep, though.” He lifts a hand, magic sparking from his fingertips, glittering in the dim light and catching on the multitude of rings adorning his hands. “I can help, if you’d like.”

“What, just magic me to sleep?” Alec says, skeptical.

“I’ve done it before. You always—” he breaks off. His mouth quirks into a smile that Alec can’t read. “That is, I can if you’d like. It’s up to you.”

He actually considers it for a moment. But as unexpectedly kind as the warlock has been so far--as good as he looks--Alec isn’t quite at the point of letting strange Downworlders mess with his mind, even just to make him sleep. He’s pretty much tilting off the edge of consciousness already anyway. He shakes his head, shifting down until the pillow is tucked under his cheek again. It’s a little awkward, and he’s almost certain he sees the warlock reach out abortively to help him, fingers splaying in the air for a moment before subsiding in a graceful sort of twist as he sits back in his chair.

“‘S’fine,” Alec murmurs, and yawns again. He still feels strange and unsettled, but his eyelids feel like they have weights attached to them, and really all of this can probably wait until morning. “Just. Stay?”

He doesn’t know why he asks. He’s not a child, to need someone to watch over him while he sleeps safe in the infirmary; he’s never had anyone sit up with him other than Jace or Izzy, and that only occasionally. Magnus Bane is a stranger, a warlock, someone who, for all his solicitous, baffling kindness, is only here because he’s being paid to be here. Alec has neither reason nor right to ask that of him, and yet the words slip out of his mouth unbidden.

The warlock’s expression twists slightly, strangely, and then he says, “Of course I’ll stay. Close your eyes, Alexander. Go to sleep.”

No one calls me that, Alec thinks, but it feels like a soft and distant thing as his eyes slip closed. Layers of darkness pile over him again, and as he slides off the edge of consciousness he could swear he hears the warlock speaking softly in a language he doesn’t recognise; could almost swear that he feels the warm curl of fingers around his hand.

*

The next time he wakes up, the warlock is gone, and Jace is sprawled in a chair with his legs kicked out, his head tilted back against the wall, snoring softly. Beside him is a vaguely familiar redheaded girl, sitting with one leg tucked up under her and peering down at her phone. She lifts her head when Alec moves, face brightening. “You’re awake! Hey, Jace!” She jabs him in the side, none too gently, and he jerks upright with a snort. “Alec’s awake. Wake up.”

“Ow, Jesus,” Jace mutters, shoving his hair out of his eyes. His face softens when he looks at Alec, though, a sudden relieved warmth suffusing the bond. “Hey. Good to see you back in the land of the living.”

“Good to be here,” Alec rasps. “What—” he breaks off coughing before he can finish the sentence. Jace is up in an instant, pressing the half-full glass of water on the nightstand into his hands. It’s lukewarm and slightly stale on his tongue. Jace helps him steady it for a moment before Alec shoves him off, and that awakens a twinge of memory, something dreamlike and fuzzy in the back of his head. “There was… was there a warlock here last night, or did I imagine that?”

Jace looks at him for a beat longer than normal. “You mean Magnus?”

“Magnus, yeah. Magnus Bane,” Alec says. Apparently he was real after all. But the look on Jace’s face is bothering him, and he’s pretty sure he’s not imagining the sudden unease thrumming through the bond. It makes his stomach twist, anxious. “I was pretty out of it. Thought I might have dreamed him up.”

He wants to bite the words back as soon as he says them. They’re a little too close to the things he never admits to anyone, not even Jace, who already pretty much knows anyway.

“Yeah, no,” Jace says slowly. “He was here last night. For the past couple of nights, actually. He, uh. I made him go home and get some rest, he’s been… Alec, how much do you remember?”

“I don’t…” Alec shakes his head. His mind feels clearer now, but no less bewildered. If anything, he’s more confused than he was last night, with a beautiful stranger leaning over him and talking to him with a gentle intimacy that seems… strange, in retrospect. That felt more than halfway like a dream. This is just an ordinary morning, in the infirmary after another patrol gone south, with Jace hovering by his bed and doing a bad job of hiding the worry that’s now thrumming through their bond like a swarm of angry bees.

And there’s another stranger here, sitting behind Jace and staring at him with a similarly worried expression.

No, wait. Not a stranger. He shakes his head, and the name suddenly surfaces in his mind, bringing a prickle of annoyance with it. Fray. Clary Fray. Jace’s mundane girlfriend, who is apparently not content to just show up and upend Alec’s entire world; now she’s following Jace into his infirmary room and staring at him while he’s flat on his back and helpless. Alec jabs a finger in her direction and doesn’t bother to hide the ire in his voice. “What’s she doing in here?”

Jace actually glances back toward Fray like he’s expecting someone else to be there. “What?”

The never-very-distant edges of Alec’s patience are fast approaching. His head is pounding and his stomach is unsettled, and every interaction he’s had since he woke up has been baffling, and the frustration of that is grinding into the bones of his jaw. “Look, just because you have a—”

“I’ll go,” Fray interrupts, standing up. She’s staring at him with wide eyes; her face is so pale and anxious that he almost feels bad for snapping.

“Clary,” Jace starts, looking unhappy.

“It’s fine. I’ll wait outside, okay? I’ll call Izzy and Magnus, you can...” She trails off, makes a vague sort of gesture. “You know. Explain. Since I guess Magnus didn’t.”

“Okay,” Jace says finally.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Alec,” she adds, glancing at him, quick and stuttered, almost frightened. “We were all really worried.”

Before he can even think of a way to respond to that, she’s slipping out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her and leaving him and Jace alone in the empty, brightly-lit infirmary.

“Shit,” Jace sighs after a long moment, sinking back into his chair. Unease twists in Alec’s gut, and he can’t even tell how much of it is his. That warm relief of a moment ago is long gone; Jace is a bundle of cold anxiety beneath his mask of practiced calm, and even that is cracking.

Alec pulls himself upright, relieved when he can manage it without help. He still feels too weak, but he doesn’t feel like his bones are about to disintegrate inside him, which is a start. He braces his palms against the rumpled sheets and fixes Jace with a stare until he lifts his head. “Jace. What happened?”

Jace rubs a hand over his jaw, which is rough with stubble. He looks exhausted, actually. “How much did Magnus tell you?”

“Not much. He said…” Alec lifts one shoulder. “I was pretty out of it. He said I’d been attacked. That was pretty much it.”

“Shit,” Jace says again. He rocks forward in his seat, and then says, quickly like he’s lancing a wound, “Yeah, you were. You almost died, Alec. We weren’t sure Magnus would be able to pull you out of it, and you, uh. He said you might lose some time, and I guess you did. What’s the last thing you remember?”

Alec opens his mouth, then realizes that he’s not actually sure how to answer that. His mind feels fuzzy and vague. He can remember flickers of movement, darkness and something sparking, but he doesn’t remember gearing up for the patrol. He doesn’t remember what he last had for breakfast. He doesn’t know what day it is, or how long he’s been here, or anything. Jace will be able to feel the sudden trickle of unease, but it’s long-standing habit that keeps his voice steady and careful. “I’m not sure. We were on a patrol?”

“Someone summoned a soul-eater. It killed a bunch of mundanes and went after a training patrol, and when we went in to trap it…” Jace shakes his head. “Alec, look. Do you know what the date is?”

“Yeah, it’s…” He stops. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in the infirmary, but more than that, he doesn’t know what the last date he remembers is. It was… spring? Warm air on his morning jog and the smell of cut grass and petrichor, a distant spooling echo of some mundane’s car radio playing a song--he shakes his head. The trickle of unease is becoming a flood. “Uh. May?”

Jace stares at him. “What year, Alec?”

The fact that Jace is asking that is worrying, but at least it’s something he can answer. “2016.”

Jace rubs a hand over his face. “Okay. That’s about what Magnus was thinking, I just hoped—you remembered Clary, right?”

“Are you going somewhere with this?” Alec manages. He can feel the burn of impatience on his tongue, anxiety coiling in his gut. Some of it is Jace’s, but not all of it. “You’re the one who brought her into the Institute. Against my strenuous objections. Of course I remember her; I wish I didn’t.”

“Jesus, I forgot what you were like about that,” Jace murmurs, shoving a hand through his hair. Then he takes a short breath and says, “Okay, look, it's just. It’s been three years.”

“What’s been three years?” Alec asks slowly. There’s something like horror unfurling inside him, threading delicately through his veins, and it’s worse when he sees Jace’s face. He does understand. He doesn’t want to, but he understands. “No.”

“It’s 2019. June fifteenth, if you want to be exact.”

“That’s not possible.”

“The soul-eater got her claws into you. You were--you were disintegrating, Alec. Magnus grabbed you and that interrupted it, but--Jesus. I almost watched you die. I could feel you dying.”

“I’m sorry,” Alec says uneasily, because he doesn’t remember it at all, but the look on Jace’s face is kind of awful and the feeling echoing through their bond is worse.

“Don’t be sorry, you idiot. Everyone else who came into contact with that thing is dead. You--we’ll get your memories back. Magnus is the best there is at what he does, and he’s pretty fucking motivated right now, believe me. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

“Okay,” Alec says, and rubs a hand over his face, trying to get his thoughts in some kind of order. Three years. He doesn’t even know where to start with that, and he’s suddenly desperately glad it’s Jace here with him. He’d be panicking if it was anyone else, but Jace has always been there to steady him, a counterweight that Alec can balance himself against. Whatever else has changed in the time he’s been missing, at least he still has that; at least he’s not waking up to this with a stranger. Again. “Okay. What do I need to know?”

“What do you want to know?” Jace asks carefully.

“If I knew what questions to ask, I’d ask them,” Alec says, and it’s brittle and sharp enough to cut, but Jace doesn’t even flinch. It's like somewhere along the last few years Alec has lost the ability to bruise him with a careless word, and he’s not sure whether or not that’s a relief.

It’s a shift, anyway, in the bedrock of the one thing he’s always been able to count on.

“Sorry. I am, seriously, I can’t imagine how confusing this must be for you. I just…” He breathes out a laugh. “I don’t know where to start. It’s a lot of time to cover.”

“How about you start with the patrol,” Alec says, tamping down as hard as he can on the impatience in his voice, although his ears tell him that he’s not particularly successful and Jace would be able to tell in any case. He’s not sure if it’s worry or proximity or something else, but their bond is more open than he can remember since they were kids, a smooth reciprocal flow of warmth and emotion. Alec almost reaches to close it off, habitual wariness reasserting itself, but he can’t quite bring himself to step away from that simple comfort. Things have been… difficult with Jace recently, especially since Clary Fray showed up. It’s nice to have them easy again, even if it is just because Jace is worried about him. “Tell me about the soul-eater. We can go from there.”

Chapter Text

Interlude: The Soul-Eater

The dockside warehouse door opened silently to their approach, not a hint of clanking metal or creaking hinges even though it was battered and bleeding reddish-orange rust through the dirty white paint. A warm whisper of magic flickered over Alec’s skin, a brief, soundless greeting. Magnus was in place, then.

He didn’t exactly relax, but some of the painful tension in his shoulders loosened a little. It had been a long week, and Magnus, the promise of finally ending this tonight and going home and curling into bed beside him—just to sleep, even, as tired as they both were—it was a tempting thought.

For now: focus. “Okay, everybody, look alive.”

“No can do, sorry,” Simon said from a few steps back, and Alec pushed the laugh that wanted to surface down into a scowl. Now was not the time.

“Not talking to you, Lewis.” He scanned the dark warehouse, looking for movement and finding none. Good. “You’re here on sufferance as Izzy’s pair, so keep a lid on it.”

“Alec has no sense of humor when we’re on a mission,” Izzy whispered, and Clary coughed something that sounded a lot like, Or ever.

“Ouch, cold,” Simon added, then subsided before Alec could snap at him for real.

“Just be quiet,” he murmured. “Until Magnus pinpoints its exact location, we have to assume—oh,” he finished, as Magnus slipped out from between two pallets a few yards ahead with catlike grace, as silent as a shadow. Magic twined around his arms, shifting the loose glimmering fabric of his shirt and lighting his face from below. “Hi.”

“Hello, Alexander,” Magnus said archly, rolling glittering light across his fingertips. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Oh, so they get to banter,” Simon said, sotto voce, and then yelped as someone—probably Jace—stomped on his foot. “Ow! Not cool!”

“Sorry,” Jace said, sounding not the least bit apologetic.

It was enough to jolt Alec back into work mode. Never mind that he had barely seen Magnus all week; this thing had already killed a dozen people, including two of his shadowhunters, and they couldn’t afford to lose focus. Even just trapping it would be hard enough. He cleared his throat, straightening. “Okay, everybody clear on the plan?”

There was a chorus of agreement, and Clary and Jace joined hands and stepped forward, as did Simon and Izzy. Magnus lifted his hands and the coiling magic thinned and paled, looking like nothing so much as a gossamer thread spinning out from his fingertips as he wrapped one end of it around Jace and Clary’s clasped hands.

“It’s made a nest near the center of the warehouse,” he said quietly as he worked, twisting the thread of magic like he was weaving something solid. When Jace and Clary’s hands were bound together in a cocoon of shimmering white, he moved on to Izzy and Simon. “I’ll link us up once everyone’s in place. The thread can move through solid objects, so don’t worry about avoiding the pallets. Just focus on moving in unison. And--I cannot emphasize this enough--don’t let go of one another’s hands.”

“How likely is it that it senses us coming and tries to eat us?” Jace asked. He didn’t sound especially worried, and the tension that thrummed through their bond was more adrenaline than fear, that bright battle-lust that Jace always carried into dangerous missions. It was a much-needed jolt of energy against the exhaustion dragging at Alec.

“Not terribly likely. It’s resting now and it shouldn’t wake without serious provocation. It’s already—” Magnus broke off, grimacing. “Fed.”

“Ugh,” Clary murmured, shuddering a little. “So don’t provoke the soul-eating monster, got it.”

“Ideally, it won’t wake until it’s already trapped. They’re deadly creatures, but they’re not particularly intelligent.” Magnus pulled away as the shimmer coalesced around Izzy and Simon’s hands. “Alright. That’s you two done. Why don’t you get in place while I finish, ah, binding Alec?”

His smile was so suggestive that Alec found himself blushing, and he wasn’t the only who’d picked up on it, if Jace’s snort and Izzy’s sudden quiet giggles were anything to go by. They started moving without any further commentary, though, splitting off to either side and slipping into the maze of pallets.

“Very funny,” Alec murmured as Magnus slipped up next to him, a warmly magnetic presence, fingers lacing together with Alec’s, free hand shaping the spell to bind them together.

“I thought so,” Magnus said, sounding entirely too amused and looking entirely too attractive as he started to weave magic around their joined hands. There were shimmering streaks in his hair and on his eyelids that caught the light and sparkled lazily as the spell built around them; it made him look like he had bathed in stardust. “Although these weren’t quite the circumstances I had in mind. Perhaps after we’re done here we can adjourn to the loft and I can give you a demonstration?”

“Like I’m gonna say no to that,” Alec retorted, and Magnus smiled up at him, so sweetly teasing that Alec couldn’t resist the urge to drop a quick kiss on his mouth. His lips tasted like static and metal, the same way they always did when he was working magic, and he sighed when they pulled apart, the remnants of the spell settling into place between them.

“I suppose we both have something to look forward to, then,” he murmured, and then shifted a step away from Alec, expression turning businesslike. Magic sparked from his fingertips, and Alec felt his ears pop as the relay charm settled over them. “Everyone in place?”

“Almost,” Izzy murmured, voice echoing slightly through the charm. A soft grunt, and then, “Some of the pallets are knocked over, it’ll take us a second to get around. Sorry.”

“We’re ready,” Jace added from the other side, and Clary murmured an assent.

“Ready,” Simon said a few moments later, and Magnus lifted his free hand. The magic binding their hands together shivered across Alec’s skin as the spell manifested, strings of light flinging themselves across the outside of the warehouse to either side of them and out of sight. He felt the jolt when they joined with Jace and Clary, then Izzy and Simon, and then a larger one when the other two pairs linked up, closing the circle.

“Alright,” Magnus murmured, voice echoing through the charm and in Alec’s ears, an odd reverberation. “Move forward on my count and make sure the lines stay tight. One… two… three… four…”

His count continued, soft and steady as a metronome as they moved into the dark warehouse. Alec moved in step with him, focused on keeping an eye out for obstacles in their path, since he was pretty sure that right then Magnus wouldn’t see anything unless he walked face-first into it. The electricity was working; he could see the exit sign lit up red over to his left, dim emergency lighting at irregular intervals, but it was just barely enough to keep him from tripping over his feet. Not enough to see if anything was moving in the shadows or coming up silently behind them. The back of his neck was prickling, and he became gradually aware that at least part of it was the smell of the place. It was getting warmer the deeper they got inside, and the scent of stale air and dust was giving way to something tarry and scorched and horribly alive, like the air around him was breathing. Like they were walking down the gullet of some enormous beast.

“Anybody else smell that?” Jace murmured, right on cue.

“Yeah, oh God, that’s awful,” Simon said, sounding choked. Alec made a face. As unpleasant as it was to him, the smell had to be ten times worse to someone with vampiric senses.

“Means we’re getting close,” he said, still moving with Magus’s quiet count. The threads of magic were thickening, growing brighter. “Keep it down. We don’t want to wake it.”

“Right, sorry.”

They passed another row of pallets, and now he could hear breathing, heavy, hoarse and low. It shifted the air around them, hot and damp, and then they stepped into the open center of the warehouse and there it was. Curled in the middle of a nest of smashed pallets was something out of a nightmare. It was human-shaped, more or less, but he’d never seen anything that looked less human, a twisting darkness that defied edges, that crackled and slithered and didn’t stop moving. It hurt his eyes to look at too long, and the smell of burning rot was thick enough to choke.

Across the way, he saw Jace and Clary emerge from between two pallets, joined hands glowing with magic that lit their faces from below and reflected eerily in their wide eyes. Jace nodded briefly at him; Clary was too busy staring at the soul-eater with an expression like she was trying not to gag. A moment later, Izzy and Simon emerged from the left, and Magnus made another twisting, spinning motion, the strands of magic linking the six of them thickening, then splintering out into a dome that stretched over and under the sleeping monster, sinking into the floor beneath it.

Two more steps, he whispered silently through the charm. On my mark. One—two—okay, stop.

His free hand flared up, a crackle of magic burning through the room, followed by a percussive noise like a thunderclap. The thing in the center of the room reared to its feet, screaming, a shrill rising sound that made Alec’s ears feel like they were imploding. White light cracked the darkness, a sudden pulse of air and power blowing through the warehouse, and then the shriek cut off as quickly as it had started. He shook his head, his ears popping painfully, and realized that he was gripping Magnus’s hand so tightly that his knuckles ached. He loosened his hold slightly. “Everybody okay?”

“Ow,” Izzy said plaintively, and then, “yeah, we’re okay.”

“Yeah,” Jace added, although he was shaking his head like he was trying to clear water out of his ears.

“Just give me one moment to snip the tethers and—there we are,” Magnus said. “Alright, it’s stable. You can let go. Well done, everyone.”

The cage flared as the magic faded from their hands, then steadied. The monster inside it spun slowly, prowling the perimeter. It was vaguely shaped like a woman now that it was on its feet, or like a tarry shadow where the shape of a woman had once been. Tendrils of seeking darkness tested the edge of the cage, breaking against an invisible plane. Alec shuddered and looked away. Demons were one thing, but this was somehow even more unnerving. According to everything they’d been able to dig up, soul-eaters started out as humans. Now it was nothing more than a void, a terrible endless hunger that turned every living thing it touched to ashes.

“Are you okay?” Magnus asked him quietly.

Alec nodded. “Pretty sure my ears are bleeding, but I’ll live.”

“Here.” He released Alec’s hand to settle his fingers on the sides of his face. Magic fizzed coolly against his skin, and the ache in his ears abated. “Better?”

“Yeah. Thank you.” Alec smiled at him, fully aware of how loopy he had to look and unable to care in the least. Magnus’s eyes were soft, the faint glimmer of gold betraying his own exhaustion, and his fingers were warm as the healing magic faded. Alec leaned down just enough to steal a quick kiss from his mouth. “That was some nice work with the cage.”

“Oh, I can’t take the credit for that one, it’s an old invention of Catarina’s,” Magnus said lightly, but he sounded pleased.

Alec rolled his eyes. “Take the compliment, Magnus.”

“Oh, fine. If you insist.”

“I do.” He twisted his shoulders, stretching some of the tension out of them. “Okay, well, it’s contained, anyway. Can we transport it?”

“I can open a portal to the Institute containment cells and send it through,” Magnus said, and then swayed slightly on his feet and added, slightly chagrined, “...although it might be better to wait until my magic is replenished. It should be secure here for the time being.”

“Okay,” Alec said. “We can set up a guard until we’re ready to move it.”

“Why can’t we just kill it?” Jace asked, stepping closer to the cage, seraph blade in hand. “It ate like twelve people, including two shadowhunters, and I’m pretty sure this is more of a rabid animal situation than anything that needs a trial.”

Magnus sighed. “You’re not wrong; it’s just that they’re not easy to kill.”

“I could stab it.” Jace shrugged, but there was a thread of anger slipping through the bond as he glared at the monster. “Mendoza was a friend of mine. I feel like sticking a seraph blade in that thing’s face would be therapeutic, at least.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Magnus said impatiently. “They’re impervious to corporeal weapons. And if it gets close enough to touch you, you’re dead. There are ways to banish it, we just need to—” he broke off suddenly. The air crackled around them, and then he swore, sharp and sudden and vicious, a corona of magic flaring around him. “Get back, all of you!”

What—? Alec thought, but an instant later he saw what Magnus had seen. The cage was splintering, one of the main lines disrupted, ends fraying in the dark. The soul-eater flung itself against the wall, and he could hear that awful screech again. It was breaking. The cage was breaking, and Jace was there, too close, way closer than anyone else—

The light shattered, and the next thing Alec knew was a rushing darkness closing in on him faster than he could react. Something sharp sank into his arm, agony skittering up his veins like lightning, spreading through his entire body, the world splintering into fragments around him.

From what felt like a great distance, he heard Jace shout his name, panic spiking through their bond, and then a blast of percussive force shook the room and Magnus’s hand gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

Light flared between them. He felt himself jerked backward against the solid strength of Magnus’s body, saw Magnus’s lips shape his name—and then the white light burned up his field of vision, burned up the memory of Magnus’s face, burned up everything and cast him into darkness.

*

Infirmary, Part II

Jace sighs, sitting back. “Magnus managed to get it contained again, and we got you out of there. That was four days ago. Took two days before we were sure you were ever going to even wake up at all. You kept—it tried to rip your soul out of you, and it almost succeeded. You kept flatlining. We thought—it was fucking awful, Alec.”

Alec rubs a finger across his knuckles, looking down at his own arm. There’s a bandage there, just barely peeking out from under the blue infirmary scrubs he’s wearing, but when he prods at it there’s just a distant ache like a healing bruise. Jace has pulled back on their bond a little, but he can still feel the echo of a fear so deep that he doesn’t actually know how to handle it. They don’t do this, him and Jace. They get hurt, they walk it off. That’s the job.

Of course, neither of them has ever gotten hurt quite this badly before. Or at least, not as far as he can remember. That’s an unsettling thought, so he puts it aside for the time being to focus on practicalities. “Is it secure?”

“The soul-eater?” Jace asks after a second, like that wasn’t at all where he was expecting Alec to take this. “Yeah. Magnus and a couple of the other warlocks portalled it into the containment cells in the sub-levels. It should be secure there until we can figure out how to get rid of it.”

“You’re sure. Because the last thing we need is something like that loose and roaming the Institute.”

“I mean, as sure as we can be. The other option was to leave it at the warehouse, which seemed like a bad idea after what happened. Even if it gets loose, we can contain it at the Institute better than out in the middle of Red Hook.”

“True.” Alec straightens up, considering. There’s a low, deep ache in his back and shoulders that’s probably the result of being in bed for the better part of a week, and it isn’t helping the throbbing headache pounding through his skull and interfering with his concentration. “Any idea what happened with the containment field?”

“Not really. It’s possible that it just managed to break out, but—”

“But you don’t think so,” Alec finishes.

“No. Like I said, Magnus is the best there is at what he does. I’ve never seen one of his spells fail like that for no reason.”

Alec considers that. He almost asks just how sure Jace is that they can trust the warlock, but he has to admit that there’s no good reason to suspect him. Jace has clearly worked with him enough to trust him implicitly, and there’s part of Alec that recoils at the idea of even voicing the thought, for reasons he can’t quite explain even to himself. Something about the man’s baffling, unnecessary kindness in the infirmary last night, the way he looked at Alec like they knew each other, which, actually, it looks like they did. Well enough to work together, at least. “So that leaves sabotage, then.”

“Yeah,” Jace says. He hesitates, then says, “That’s the thing. I was way closer to the cage than the rest of you when it failed. I mean, I was right there. It should have gone after me, but it didn’t. It went straight for you, didn’t even look at anyone else.”

“Good,” Alec says immediately. Jace makes a face that’s half-pained, half-exasperated, and he adds, reasonably, “Look, the, uh—Magnus, he was right next to me, right? It sounds like the only reason I survived was that he was able to interrupt the feeding right away. So yeah, I’m glad it was me. But you’re saying that you think I was targeted specifically.”

“I’m saying that it’s a possibility,” Jace says. “Right now we don’t know. I don’t even know if that thing has enough of a mind to set on a particular target. But if you got killed on a routine patrol, it would...well. It would make things a lot easier for certain political factions, to start with. And we still don’t know how that thing got into the city in the first place.”

That makes it sound like Alec is a hell of a lot more important in the world of Clave politics than he actually is, but it’s not like assassination is unheard of, and the Lightwood family isn’t without enemies. And plenty could have happened in the past three years to make him a target.

A knock on the door interrupts that disturbing line of thought. Jace lifts his head, and Alec straightens up as much as he can, calls, “Yeah?”

Clary Fray slips back into the room, pausing just inside the door. She has a tray that looks like it came from the commissary in one hand and an anxious expression on her face. “I talked to Izzy, she’s in the middle of running analysis on the residue from the soul-eater. I guess it’s kind of unstable, but she’ll be up as soon as she’s done. She told me to give you a hug from her—don’t worry, I won’t,” she adds, in response to whatever face Alec is making at the thought of that. “And I grabbed some breakfast. I figured you had to be hungry, and believe me, I know how much infirmary food sucks.”

He is. He’s starving, actually, and when the warm sweet smell of syrup and pancakes hits his nose, his stomach lets out an embarrassingly loud growl. Jace snorts, and Fray gives Alec a tentative, hopeful smile that makes him feel like the worst kind of asshole.

“Thanks,” he says, taking the tray when she holds it out to him and settling it in his lap. And then, only a little grudgingly, “Sorry. About earlier.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s not even close to the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She’s still smiling as she says it. Alec doesn’t know how to deal with that, or with the possibility that sometime in the past three years he and Clary Fray have managed to become friends, so he drops his eyes and applies his attention to his food.

“Oh,” she adds, stepping back toward the door. “Also, I should probably let you guys know that Councilor Rothburne just got portalled in, and she’s on the warpath.”

“Aw, shit,” Jace groans. “I thought we’d have more time. Council’s in session now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, well, apparently the death of her favorite nephew is enough for her to take a leave of absence.”

Alec swallows his bite of pancake, the taste suddenly too sweet, sticky and cloying on his tongue, then says, “What?”

“Sean Rothburne,” Jace says. “I don’t think you remember him, he just transferred in from the L.A. Institute last year--he was one of the ones the soul-eater killed on that first patrol.”

“And now his aunt is here demanding an explanation,” Fray finishes. And then, to Jace, “She wants to talk to Alec.”

“Well, that’s not happening,” Jace says, before Alec can even open his mouth. “If word gets out—”

“Exactly. And you know she’s on the committee, so—”

“Yeah.” Jace stands. “Okay. I’ll go head her off.”

“Wait,” Alec says. It comes out sharper than he means it to, and his half-eaten breakfast is sitting like a lump of lead in his stomach. Jace pauses by the door. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“You remember how I said it would make it a lot easier on certain people if you were dead? Rothburne is one of them. I don’t think she had anything to do with what happened,” he adds quickly, at Alec’s expression. “Assassination isn’t really her style, and she wouldn’t endanger her own family to go after you. But if she finds out what happened, she’s going to take full advantage of it, trust me.”

Alec considers that. He doesn’t like it, but Jace is probably right. The last thing he needs right now is to end up in a meeting with a hostile Clave representative with a good chunk of his memory missing. “Okay. But you’re going to fill me in on everything later.”

Jace nods. “Yeah, of course.”

“I can stay,” Fray offers.

“That’s not necessary,” Alec says. He’s not up to being alone in a room with Fray, especially since his stomach is starting to feel unsteady. He really doesn’t need the potential humiliation of puking into a bedpan in front of someone who is for all intents and purposes a stranger. He dry-swallows against the nausea, then says, “Go handle it, then you can come back here and catch me up.”

“Okay,” Jace says, after a long, searching look. “We’ll be right back. I promise.”

“Take your time.” He shrugs, hoping that the gesture doesn’t betray the tension winding down his spine. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

*

After the door swings shut behind them, Alec sets his tray aside, rubs his hands over his face, then kicks the blankets off, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Probably what he should actually do is try to get some more sleep, but he knows himself well enough to know that’s never going to happen now.

There’s a pile of clothes folded on one of the chairs, a stele and phone lying on top and a pair of boots on the floor beneath it. They look clean, so it’s probably something someone brought down from his room. Izzy, most likely. She’s the only person he knows who would bother thinking of clean clothes after a crisis. Or the only one he thinks he knows, anyway.

That’s an unsettling thought, so he tries to stop thinking it.

What he really wants is a shower, but he settles for stripping out of his slightly sour-smelling scrubs, shivering slightly in the chill air as he pulls the clean clothes on. His injured arm twinges when he lifts it, but when he peels the bandage away to look at it there’s just a pale set of healed-over claw marks. Five of them, spread like human fingers, each mark an inch or so long. It might just be his imagination, but the skin over them feels cooler to the touch than the rest of him.

There are more scars on his body that he doesn’t recognize, including a deep puckered mark just below his sternum that looks less like something made by a demon’s claw and more like he was impaled by something very narrow. He prods at it gingerly. The knot of scar tissue is deep, the surface of it slightly numb to the touch. Whatever did this very nearly struck a killing blow. Even with an iratze, he must have been in the infirmary for days. And he doesn’t remember it at all.

He shudders and reaches for his shirt, yanking it down over his head. The dark green fabric is soft, well-worn, and smells of something sweetly smoky instead of the industrial detergent he’s used to. For just an instant he thinks he remembers—

—a warm palm cupping his cheek, the cool shapes of rings against his skin and soft sheets that smell like sandalwood beneath him, laughter in his ears—

Sandalwood, that’s the smell. He’s not sure how he knows that, just like he’s not sure if that brief visceral flash of sense memory was real, but it unnerves him all the same. He tugs at his sleeves to straighten them, wincing as the fabric slides across his still-healing injury, and it’s only then that the glint of metal on his left hand catches his eye.

Alec freezes. Then slowly, very slowly, stretches out his hand, spreading his fingers wide.

It’s his own ordinary hand, bowstring calluses and blunt nails and broad palm, all completely familiar save for for one thing. A handsomely carved white-gold band circles his ring finger, the metal reflecting the light. It’s warm and smooth to the touch, and when he works it off his finger, twisting slightly to get it over his knuckle, it leaves a pale band of skin that contrasts sharply with his tan, a faint indentation, as if the jewelry has sat there for so long that it’s become a part of him. There are carvings around the inside of the band, words in a language he doesn’t recognize.

A wedding ring, he thinks dazedly. It seems too heavy in his palm, and he curls his fingers around it, squeezing tight like he can crush the tremors out. It’s a wedding ring. He’s married.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

It’s far from the first time Alec has ever slipped out of the infirmary without getting properly checked out, but he doesn’t ever remember feeling like this, shaky and panicky and like his heart might explode at any second. It would be kind of reassuring to think that it’s just because he’s still recovering from a fairly major injury and shouldn’t really be on his feet yet, but it isn’t. Not entirely, at least. Physical weakness is something he knows how to push through, but this—

The ring feels like a stone in his pocket, a tiny hard shape that’s impossible to ignore.

It’s mid-afternoon, the worst possible time to be trying to sneak through the Institute without having to talk to anybody, but Alec grew up here, spent his childhood mapping out every last shortcut and secret passage, and he manages. He doesn’t even have a clear idea of where he’s going other than away, but eventually he shoves aside a dusty hanging and finds himself in the hallway outside his room.

Well. That’s one place to start.

He raps at the door, half-afraid that someone is going to actually answer. When no one does, he sketches the unlock rune and slips inside, then lets the door fall shut behind him, staring.

It’s empty. Not just empty: it’s been all but stripped. The walls are bare, as is the mattress, blankets and sheets folded up at the foot. There’s a stack of files on the desk, a half-full cup of congealed coffee on the dresser, but almost nothing personal. His bow rack is gone, as are most of his books, the plants in the window, the odd little knick-knacks that Max likes to get him for his birthdays. There’s a dusty quality to the light coming in through the windows, as though nothing has moved in here in a long, long time.

Moving like he’s in a dream, Alec drifts into the room. A robe is flung over the back of the desk chair, but he can tell at a glance that it isn’t his. The embroidered material is thin and fine in his hands when he picks it up gingerly. It smells of sandalwood, the same as the clothes he’s wearing now.

There’s a fire message on top of the stack of files on the desk, still faintly singed around the edges. In a fine copperplate hand that he doesn’t recognize, it reads, Darling, if you’re going to insist on working late the least you could do is check your text messages. I’m meeting you for dinner, and I expect every bit of your attention for at least an hour, no matter what’s on fire now.

It’s signed, unhelpfully, —M.

Darling. Alec swallows around a lump in his throat that feels more like a rock.

He needs to talk to Jace. He needs to—he needs to get back to the infirmary, so he can be there when Jace comes back. So he can demand an explanation. It’s somehow a lot easier to accept that he was almost killed by a soul-eating monster than to consider how his world has reshaped itself into something alien in the years that he lost.

He doesn’t even know where he sleeps anymore, other than that it’s definitely not here.

He needs to get back to the infirmary, but somehow instead he ends up sitting on the bare mattress, staring at the fire message in his hand. The ink is slightly brownish, the lines thicker on the loops and downstrokes like whoever wrote this was using an old-fashioned fountain pen with a nib instead of a ballpoint. There’s something oddly timeless about it.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been there when the door swings open behind him, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his body. He jerks up to his feet, heart pounding, half-expecting a stranger to walk through, but instead it’s Izzy.

“By the Angel,” she whispers, staring at him with huge, wet eyes, and then she’s striding across the room to throw herself into his arms. He staggers a little as he catches her—Izzy is a lot more solid than she looks—then wraps his arms around her shoulders, feeling himself settle a little at the sturdy press of her body, the familiar smell of her shampoo.

“Hey,” he murmurs.

“Don’t you ‘hey’ me,” she says into his shirt. Her arms are so tight around him that he can almost feel his ribs creak. “We thought you were dying. I thought you were dying. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I… won’t?” Alec offers. “I’m sorry. Izzy, I’m okay.”

“I’m still mad at you.” She’s smiling when she pulls back, cups his cheeks in her hands. Her eyes are wet, but she’s smiling. Alec looks up in time to see Jace slip in the door behind her, looking vaguely apologetic.

“One of the guards said she saw you heading up this way,” he says. “I guess I should have mentioned…”

“That I don’t sleep here anymore?” Alec finishes, straightening up to glare at him. The tension that was so briefly abated knots up his spine again, coils on his tongue, turning his voice harsh. He digs the ring out of his pocket and holds it up. “Or that I apparently got married sometime in the past three years? Because I figured both of those out for myself. Be nice if I had some idea who it was, though. I mean, I know it had to be a political thing—” because it couldn’t be anything else, not for Alec. “But it would be nice to know her name, at least.”

“What?” Izzy says blankly, and then, “Jace, you didn’t tell him? Magnus didn’t tell him?”

Alec stares at her. “What the hell does some warlock have to do with any of this?”

“Some...oh.” A shiver of something Alec doesn’t understand at all reverberates through their bond, and the expression on Jace’s face is… lost, almost. He shakes his head. “Alec, no. He’s not—”

“What?” Alec snaps, just barely controlling the urge to grab Jace by the shoulders and shake him, like he can rattle the answer loose from his teeth by force alone. “He’s not what?”

Jace’s mouth works soundlessly for another second, and then he says, all in a rush, “It’s Magnus, okay, you’re married to Magnus.”

“What?”

“Magnus Bane. Or, Lightwood-Bane, actually. Technically.”

Alec recoils. His breath comes out of him like he’s been punched. He feels like he’s been punched. “That isn’t funny.”

“No, I know it isn’t, trust me.” Jace hesitates, then steps forward to set a hand on his shoulder. Alec jerks away. His chest feels tight, constricted, like his lungs aren’t working right. His heart is thundering. The ring in his hand is an anchor pinning him in place, and he’s never felt so exposed. “Alec—”

“Alec, it’s okay. You’re okay, I promise,” Izzy says, eyes wide, before rounding on Jace. “You didn’t lead with that?”

“He wanted to know about the soul-eater!” Jace protests. “Alec, you need to breathe, buddy.”

Alec sucks a breath across his teeth, his aching lungs expanding, then snaps, “I’m not a fucking child.”

“Okay,” Jace says. “I’m sorry. I should have told you right away. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s—” he stops before he can say fine. It’s definitely not fine. Maybe he should be relieved that he didn’t manage to stumble into a loveless marriage with the first politically-connected woman who’d tolerate him, that he—what, married a Downworlder, a warlock, a man, that he’s supposed to believe Maryse Lightwood of all people just stood by and let that happen—but he isn’t. He just feels raw. He knows they’re not lying; Jace and Izzy wouldn’t lie to him about something like this. But he doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to do with the information. It’s just… wrong. Unfitting to every single thing he knows about himself save one.

Beautiful, he remembers thinking when he first saw the man in the infirmary, but it’s not the kind of thought that he’s ever allowed himself to voice. Let alone anything else.

“You’re happy,” Izzy interjects, something almost plaintive in her voice. “You’re so, so happy with him, please believe me, things are so different now.”

Alec shakes his head. There are a dozen different questions clattering behind his teeth, and the one that makes it out, finally, is, “You expect me to believe that the Clave just went along with this?”

“No, of course not,” she says. “But you never let that stop you.”

That’s so much worse. “So you’re telling me I defied the Clave to marry a Downworlder.”

“I’m telling you,” she says, very gently, “that you defied the Clave to marry the love of your life. I’m telling you that you’re changing the world.”

“That’s not—”

“Don’t,” Izzy says, soft but forceful. “I know you don’t remember, but please, Alec, just don’t.”

He snaps his mouth shut. His face is burning, and Izzy and Jace are both looking at him like—

The thing is, he knows that they both know about him. Jace is his parabatai, shares half of his soul, his heartbeat, his feelings and reactions and the edges of his thoughts; of course he knows. Izzy, he as good as told. It’s been an open secret, at least to them, for years. But now—

Now everybody has to know. His parents. The rest of the Institute, the shadowhunters who need to work with him and respect him and follow his orders. Everyone.

He rubs both hands over his face, then turns away, looking at the empty room instead of Izzy and Jace’s too-sympathetic faces. Tries to focus on something he can wrap his head around. “Okay,” he says. His voice sounds strained, uneven. He clears his throat, forces it to steady. “Okay. Izzy, you were analyzing the residue from the soul-eater, right?”

There’s a long, loaded silence from behind him. Alec closes his eyes, silently willing her to go along with the change of subject. Finally, she sighs. “Yes. I just finished, that’s why we were coming to find you.”

“Anything useful?”

“Alec—”

“Izzy.” He finally makes himself turn around, settling unconsciously into parade rest. Back straight and hands folded behind him, face as calm as he can make it, which isn’t easy with Izzy looking at him like she wants to cry. “Did you find anything useful?”

“We’re not sure,” she says finally. “Magnus thinks he can use the distilled essence to track whoever summoned it, though. He’s on his way here now.”

Alec swallows back whatever it is climbing up the back of his throat at the sound of that name, and looks at Jace. “Okay. So I’m assuming it’s been handled for now, but tell me about the situation with the Councilor.”

Jace opens his mouth, then shuts it, ducks his head. Settles into a soldier’s stance that mirrors Alec’s own and meets his eyes calmly. “I told her that you were still unconscious, so that’ll hold her off at least until we get you up to speed. She’s on the committee drafting the latest revisions to the Accords. You’ve been kind of a thorn in her side for the past six months, seeing as how you’ve been petitioning to add Downworlder representatives to the Council, which as I’m sure you can guess hasn’t been going over all that well with the purists.”

“I’ve been what?” Alec stares at him, all thoughts of Magnus Bane temporarily banished from his head. It’s not that nobody’s ever discussed it; there have been rumblings along those lines from the Downworld for ages, and as far as he can tell there are as many of them against it as for it. There are plenty of separatists who want nothing to do with Clave politics in any shape or form. The Clave itself, though, has never been divided on the topic. There’s no way any nephilim leader would ever allow warlocks and werewolves and vampires—to say nothing of the Seelie—into the Council. The very idea of it is absurd.

If this is what this alien future version of Alec has decided to throw his political capital at, it’s no wonder that someone tried to assassinate him. It’s probably more surprising that he hasn’t been de-runed and thrown out into the streets by now.

“It’s been gaining traction, actually.” Jace shrugs a little. “It’s a different world, Alec. A lot has changed. Leadership has changed. It’s going to happen sooner or later, but you still have fossils like Rothburne who want to maintain the strict separation between shadowhunters and the Downworld. Like any good ever came of that.”

He says it so casually, like that isn’t a borderline mutinous sentiment in the world they both grew up in. And it’s that, somehow, more than anything—more than the disturbing and unfamiliar landscape of his own personal life—that brings it home to Alec. It really has been years. He’s lost years, and apparently a profound shift in the political tides of the Shadow World.

He clears his throat. “What does Mom think about all this?”

“Ah,” Jace says, and glances at Izzy, who winces.

“What?” Alec says slowly. “She’s not—”

“She’s fine!” Izzy interrupts quickly. “Better than fine, actually. Things are really good. She’s been really supportive. She’s actually in Alicante right now as a consultant on the draft—that’s why she’s not here. We’ve been keeping her updated.”

“You’re talking about our mother. Maryse Lightwood. Supporting Downworlder integration.”

“Yeah, it’s a long story,” Jace starts, then pauses as a fire message flares into the air in front of Izzy, who catches it deftly.

She unfolds it, peers down at it for a moment, then says, “Magnus is here. He says he’ll meet us in the labs.”

She glances up at Alec, then quickly away. Alec curls his fingers together behind his back, the hard shape of the ring still in his hand, his body suddenly chilled like his thundering heart is pushing ice water through his veins. There’s a childish, cowardly part of him that wants to send Jace and Izzy to deal with this, that wants to sit here in this room that is no longer his and hide from everything, but he shoves it firmly aside. He’s the acting Head of the New York Institute. He’s a Lightwood. He’s never run from his problems and he’s not about to start now.

He straightens his back, feels his shoulders twinge as tension drags at his muscles and tendons. “Okay. Then let’s go.”

*

Magnus is already there when they get down to the labs. Alec almost asks who let him into the Institute, then bites his tongue before he can voice the question. If they’re… if they’re married, then of course the warlock is keyed to the building wards. For all Alec knows, he has a set of actual keys.

At least now it makes sense that he was allowed to be alone with Alec in the infirmary. Shadowhunters are trained to respect the hierarchy, and nobody is likely to turn away their boss’s husband, no matter what their personal feelings on the subject.

He’s there, anyway, on the far side of the room talking to Clary Fray and a dark-haired young man that Alec doesn’t recognize. He’s dressed in black, a deep red cravat knotted at his throat, and his eyes are glamoured dark brown and lined with black and gold. In the infirmary last night, he seemed halfway like a dream, but now he’s so vivid that Alec doesn’t know how to look at anything else. He only becomes aware that he’s stopped just inside the doorway when Jace comes up behind him, settles a warm hand on his shoulder, and murmurs, “You okay?”

“Fine,” Alec says shortly, but he doesn’t pull away.

At the sound of his voice, Magnus’s head lifts. His eyes meet Alec’s, and he goes suddenly, entirely still, hands frozen mid-gesture for a long moment before he curls them into loose fists and drops them at his sides. He doesn’t look away.

Alec doesn’t know how long they stand there staring at each other. It seems like it must be minutes, hours, an endless, breathless epoch that Alec doesn’t know how to break, but it really can’t be more than a couple of seconds, because the next thing he knows the other man who was talking to them is crossing the room toward him, face splitting into a huge grin. Too-sharp canines dig into his bottom lip; this must be the vampire Jace mentioned, then. “Hey, look who’s up! Good to see you back on your feet, Alec.”

Alec rocks back against the solid comfort of Jace’s hand, ready to dodge any well-meaning displays of affection, and the guy stops. He tilts his head, grin fading, and says, slowly, “Okay, but I’m also getting the sense that all is still not quite right with the world.”

“You could say that,” Izzy says as she slips past him into the room. “Hi, Simon.”

“And hello to the world’s most beautiful weapons-master,” the guy says, wrapping a familiar arm around her hips. He’s still looking at Alec, though, and his expression is worried. “Okay, so what else went wrong? I thought we were all gonna celebrate, like—hurray, Alec’s alive and awake, party! But also track down whoever’s summoning monsters, or whatever. But—”

“But there were side effects,” Magnus says finally, stepping closer. He stops well out of arm’s reach. His voice is soft and deep and impossible to read. “Your memories haven’t returned, have they?”

Alec licks his lips. The thought was in his head that Magnus probably deserves to be yelled at as much as Jace for letting him think—for not telling him last night—but now, looking at Magnus’s face, his softly parted lips and his worried eyes, he can’t quite make his mouth shape the words. He shakes his head instead, and when he speaks it comes out cracked and dry. “No.”

The warlock closes his eyes for a second. “Of course.”

“Should they have?”

“To be honest with you, Alexander, I don’t know. There’s not really a…” his hand lifts, flutters briefly, falls. “There’s no set of guidelines for a situation like this. I’ve never heard of anyone surviving an attack from one of those creatures. We’re in uncharted territory.”

“Okay,” Simon says again, brow furrowed, drawing the word out. “Memories? What am I missing? What happened?”

“Alec forgot the past three years,” Fray interjects, coming up behind them. Alec glares at her, and she shrugs, unrepentant. “What, you were all talking around it.”

“To be more precise,” Magnus says quietly, “everything from the moment he met, well, me.”

“Because you were the one who grabbed me,” Alec says slowly, putting the pieces together. “Right?”

“Right.” The warlock’s lips lift into a brief smile, gone almost as soon as it’s there. “I was the one who interrupted the feeding, and the resonances between us—well. It’s not my field of expertise, but Catarina—that is, a friend of mine who has more experience with magical injuries is looking into it. But yes, that’s likely why.”

“Oh,” Simon says, looking back and forth between them. His eyes widen. “Oh. Oh, man, so you don’t remember—wow. Okay. That’s gotta be a trip.” He pauses. “But they told you, right? I mean that you guys are, you know—”

“Yeah,” Alec interrupts shortly. He can’t meet Magnus’s eyes. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. “They told me. Eventually.”

“I said I was sorry,” Jace mutters, sounding so petulant that it’s almost enough to make Alec smile. Almost. Magnus doesn’t say anything.

The silence stretches out, horribly awkward, until Simon lets go of Isabelle and steps forward, holding his hand out. “Okay, well, then, uh. Hi. I’m Simon Lewis, I’m Izzy’s—I mean, Isabelle and I are… seeing each other. Have been seeing each other. For a while now.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Alec says dryly, but he shakes the proffered hand, inexplicably relieved at the bluntness of it. Izzy ducks her head, smiling. It’s… soft, in a way that he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Izzy smile at one of her boyfriends. “Nice to meet you. Again, I guess.”

“Yeah, you didn’t threaten me with gruesome death even once, this is a huge improvement over the first time.” Before Alec can even think of a way to respond to that, he steps back, clapping his hands together. “So! That was a huge pile of awkwardness, what’s next?”

“What’s next is we find the son of a bitch who’s summoning soul-eaters into New York and we end him,” Jace says. He finally lets his hand drop from Alec’s shoulder, but he stays close enough that Alec could lean just a little and touch him. He doesn’t, but he could.

Instead, he folds his hands behind his back, settling into a soldier’s stance. He doesn’t miss the way Magnus’s eyes flick over him, the odd twist of his mouth, but he doesn’t have a damn clue what to do about it and they have more pressing matters to deal with right now anyway.

“Sounds good to me. So where do we start?”

Magnus stares at him for another few seconds, and then he sighs. A flicker of blue magic skitters up his arms, then dissipates. “Well, we know there has to be a warlock involved. Isabelle, if you were able to isolate the residue—”

“Of course,” Izzy says. She retrieves a small vial from her pocket and holds it out. It’s full of something shifting and black, like ink that has somehow managed to start moving on its own, and as she brushes past him to hold it out to Magnus, Alec feels something cold shudder over him. He glances around surreptitiously to see if anyone else has noticed it, but no one give any sign. Magnus takes the vial delicately, holds it up to the light like a man inspecting a gem.

“Perfect. Gorgeous work, as always—”

“Thank you,” Izzy says, grinning. Magnus’s answering smile is quick and bright, and Alec finds himself suddenly, inexplicably jealous of the ease of that expression. The lack of the tension that falls over Magnus’s face every time he glances at Alec.

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m still not entirely sure the tracking spell will work. Our errant friend has done a good job of covering his tracks.”

“If anyone can manage it, you can,” Izzy says with perfect confidence.

“Thank you, Isabelle.” The vial disappears in a flicker of the warlock’s fingers; even though he was looking straight at him, Alec’s not completely sure whether he used magic or just tucked it away with the fluid deftness of a mundane conjurer. There’s something arresting about the way he moves, a sort of quick grace. “I’ve asked Lorenzo to put out some feelers—I know, I know,” he adds, when Jace makes a noise. “But he’s not any happier than I am about rogue warlocks summoning obscure monsters into the heart of Brooklyn. And he does have a soft spot for Alec, loathe though he is to admit it. He’ll tell us if anything surfaces on his radar.”

“Lorenzo?” Alec asks.

“Lorenzo Rey. High Warlock of Brooklyn,” Magnus says. He wrinkles his nose; it’s incongruously adorable. “He’s nowhere near as talented as I am, of course. But he’s competent enough to keep his ear to the ground when someone tries to assassinate the Head of the New York Institute.”

“So,” Fray says. “We’re definitely treating this as an assassination, then?”

“I don’t know how it could be anything else,” Magnus says. His hands move again, flexing restlessly, metal glinting on his fingers. “I’m not even sure that Alec was the only target, although he was definitely the primary one. It wasn’t an accident that the six of us ended up in that warehouse. Catarina’s binding spell was public knowledge in the warlock community. Whoever summoned the beast knew what we’d have to do to trap it. They likely could have guessed who we’d use. Three couples bound together by love and magic, and conveniently enough we’re all individuals who have been… well. Disruptive to the current power structures to say the least.”

Love and magic, Alec thinks. Love. He looks at Izzy, and the way she has tucked herself up against Simon Lewis; about Clary and Jace, who seem oriented toward each other like a pair of planets in orbit though they’re not even touching. And him and Magnus—

He clears his throat. “Then what happened with the first patrol?”

“Bad luck?” Jace guesses. “I mean, we’re talking about somebody trying to assassinate you—or all of us, I guess—by shoving us in the path of a monster. Would have been easier to just slip nightshade into our dinners.”

“That’s unnecessarily morbid,” Izzy says, wrinkling her nose.

“Be that as it may,” Magnus says. “I don’t think we can assume that the threat is over just because this particular beast has been neutralized. If it’s an assassination attempt, it was an unsuccessful one. They’re liable to try again. We need to find the warlock involved.”

“Not just the warlock,” Alec says, and everyone turns to look at him. “We have to assume that there’s a mole at the Institute. If this was an assassination attempt against three shadowhunters—”

“Four shadowhunters,” Fray interrupts pointedly. And fair enough; she’s wearing runes, so maybe she really is one. Alec rolls his eyes.

“Fine. Four shadowhunters—”

“Plus one vampire,” Lewis interrupts.

“Plus the former High Warlock of Brooklyn,” Magnus says. He’s smiling slightly at Alec, which makes his skin feel thin and hot, entirely too exposed. He digs his nails into the web of skin between thumb and forefinger and doesn’t let himself look away. “Alec is right. It’s very likely that this was an inside job. At least partly.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking,” Jace sighs. “There had to be a shadowhunter involved. That doesn’t narrow it down all that much, though. It’s not like we’re short on people who are unhappy with the direction that the Institute has taken over the past couple of years. Shadowhunter and Downworlder alike, honestly. But given the timing—”

“It’s probably related to the current revision of the Accords,” Magnus finishes. “Yes.”

Alec glances at Jace. “How sure are you that Councilor Rothburne isn’t involved?”

“Like seventy percent?” Jace shrugs. “She’s a politician. She’d be happy to have you removed as the Head of Institute, but like I said, assassination isn’t really her style. And there are a lot of other people who aren’t happy with you right now. For various reasons.”

Alec feels himself stiffen slightly. He doesn’t really need the reminder. “Yeah, I bet. Okay, well. Magnus is tracking the warlock, that means it’s our job to look into the Institute connection. If one of our people is involved with this, we need to know who.”

“Alec,” Izzy starts, but it’s Magnus, of all people, who cuts her off.

“Agreed,” he says. He looks up at Alec, then away. “I’ll reach out to the rest of the warlock community as well. It’s possible that someone has heard something.”

“I’ll talk to the vamps,” Lewis adds. “Not that I think anybody’s gonna know anything, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. And I’ll ask Maya to spread the word to the local wolf pack.”

“Yeah. Do that,” Alec says. His head is still pounding; he resists the urge to unclasp his hands and rub at his temples. He can feel the weight of Jace’s gaze on him, his concern a warm thread through their bond. It’s a struggle not to collapse into it. “There’s also the question of how long we can safely keep that thing contained here. I don’t want to banish it and risk someone getting their hands on it again. We need to figure out a way to destroy it, if conventional weapons won’t work, and we need to do it soon. One containment cage already failed.”

Magnus flinches slightly at that, but his voice is calm when he says, “Agreed. We can’t risk it getting loose again. Especially if it’s specifically targeting you.”

“I can put in a call to the Iron Sisters,” Izzy adds, looking anxiously between them. “If anybody knows of a way to kill a soul-eater, it’ll be them.”

“Sounds good,” Alec says. He lifts his hands, pushes his thumbs into his temples, feels blood pulse painfully beneath the skin. His head is throbbing, and his joints feel fragile and sore. You were disintegrating, Jace said earlier, and it’s like his body can feel the echo of that even if he can’t remember it. “If that’s everything, I think we’re done here.”

“Are you okay?” Fray asks, taking a step closer. “You look kind of—”

“I’m fine,” Alex says shortly. Fray looks at him, brow furrowing, and then at Jace. Alec can’t read the silent exchange between them at all. There was a time when he could interpret every expression that flitted across Jace’s face, but now it’s almost like looking at a stranger, and one who’s in love with this small red-headed girl. There’s a soft, radiant warmth in Jace whenever Clary Fray is near him. It’s like standing next to a banked fire, and it’s like nothing Alec has felt from him in all the years they’ve been parabatai.

It stings, on some deep level that he isn’t really prepared to deal with right now.

Jace gives him a careful look, but he seems to feel Alec silently willing him to let it go, because he just nods. “Clary and I will look into the mole.”

“Sounds good,” Alec says, and Jace claps him on the shoulder again and heads out of the room, Fray trailing in his wake. “Izzy, you can get in touch with the Iron Sisters. See if they have anything that could help.”

“Of course,” Izzy says. She’s still staring at him with wide eyes, but after a moment, she nods and steps back. The vampire—Simon—goes with her. They speak in low voices by the door for a moment before exchanging a brief, familiar kiss and going their separate ways.

Leaving Alec alone with the warlock he’s apparently married to. He was expecting Magnus to portal away, but he’s still there, something hesitant in his posture for a moment before he steels himself visibly and starts across the room toward Alec. Alec squares his shoulders and resists a cowardly impulse to flee.

Magnus stops in front of him, then hesitates again, long enough that Alec finally says, warily, “What is it?”

“Are you…” Magnus pauses, twisting one of his rings on his finger. It’s an oddly nervous gesture that catches Alec’s attention, and he has to swallow back an odd, icy kind of shock when he sees that the ring Magnus is fiddling with is the mate of the one currently shoved in the bottom of his own pocket. “Will you be coming home tonight?”

Home.

Somehow, he hadn’t even considered that. His room at the Institute isn’t home anymore. He’s married to the warlock. And yet until this very moment, he hadn’t made the obvious connection. He lives with Magnus. Shares a home with him. A bed, probably.

The implications of that make heat flare in his face, and he takes a step back. “Uh, no. I should probably—I mean, I’ll stay here. Tonight.” The warlock’s expression flickers, just a little, and Alec feels guilt twist sharp and unexpected inside him. Hastily, he adds, “I just, I think it would be better if I—”

“Alexander,” Magnus interrupts, very gently. “I understand. I’ll portal some of your things to your room.” Again he hesitates. He lifts his hand like he’s about to touch Alec on the arm, then withdraws, conjures up a scrap of paper in a graceful twist of his fingers and a flash of blue magic, and holds it out to Alec with a forced kind of lightness. “Our address. For if you change your mind. Otherwise, I’ll send a fire message as soon as I turn up anything useful.”

“Thanks,” Alec manages, and then the warlock is stepping back, pulling a portal into being with a graceful twist of his hands. He glances back one more time, face unreadable, then steps through it in a swirl of magic, leaving Alec alone in the empty lab.

He breathes in, then lets it out. Glances down at the paper. The address is written in the same elegant hand as the fire message he found in his room. It still seems incongruous, the kind of writing that belongs on a historical document or an illuminated manuscript, not scrawling out the address of a penthouse suite in Brooklyn Heights.

He shoves it in his pocket, scrubs his hands through his hair, and goes to find Izzy. Someone needs to fill him in on what’s been going on lately, and right now she seems like the least fraught option he’s got.

*

His day doesn’t really improve from there. He endures a brief and intense history lesson on the past few years from Izzy, and it’s enough to make him almost glad that he doesn’t remember it. Valentine, the Mortal Cup, the Circle, Jace’s possession by Lilith, a rift to fucking Edom opening up over Alicante—

It’s a lot. And apparently he’s not just the acting Head of the Institute, he’s the actual Head. Because their parents were in the Circle, and now they’re divorced, and his mom has been de-runed.

It’s a relief when the call comes back in from the Iron Sisters and Izzy leaves him with a kiss on the cheek, an order to go get some more sleep, and a fondly exasperated look that says she knows he’s not planning on doing any such thing. He wishes he could; he’s exhausted despite having been unconscious for most of the week, but there’s a nervous tension humming through his veins, and he needs to do something.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing really useful that he can do. He pokes through the active case files in the office that he can’t quite think of as his, but without context, he can barely even tell if any of it is relevant. The only thing that seems like it might be remotely useful is a stack of patrol schedules from the past few weeks, filled out in his own handwriting. They go up to June ninth, which is--he counts back--two days before he was attacked. One day before the other patrol was reduced to ashes outside that same warehouse. Sean Rothburne and Adrian Mendoza, their names were. Rothburne he doesn’t remember at all, of course, and Mendoza is just barely familiar, like he might have crossed paths with the man in the commissary a time or two. Seen his name on patrol schedules. The last few days are missing. There’s nothing immediately suspicious about that, given that he’s been in the infirmary, but he still makes a mental note to make sure that Jace tracks them down. They also need to see if Magnus knows any way of tracking communications between shadowhunters and warlocks.

Magnus—

He’s not letting himself think about Magnus, or about the slight indentation on his ring finger that he keeps finding himself rubbing at unconsciously, or about the ring in his pocket or the scrap of paper Magnus gave him with his address on it, because Alec now lives with a warlock in Brooklyn Heights instead of in the set of Institute rooms where he’s slept since he was twelve.

He’ll deal with it. He can deal with it, as long as he doesn’t think about it too much. He sighs, leans his elbows on the desk and pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. It feels like his head is full of a low, buzzing vibration. Like there’s a swarm of wasps inside his skull, bleeding venom into his bones.

Izzy is right. He should get some sleep. He’s no good to anybody in this state.

The hallway is empty when he slips outside, the windows dark. Afternoon has slipped away into night while he was digging through his files and he realizes belatedly that he’s ravenously hungry. He hasn’t eaten anything other than those few bites of pancake he managed to stomach, hours ago. The commissary has probably stopped serving, but he can still get something out of the kitchen. Hopefully, he can also avoid having to talk to anybody. He can’t manage that forever, he knows, but right now his head is aching and his muscles feel loose and sore and it’s all he can do to keep all of that off of his face. Trying to navigate a conversation in his current state is probably well beyond him.

So of course when he slips into the kitchen, there’s a stern-faced, well-dressed woman sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee clasped between her manicured hands. She looks up when he comes in, and her face twists into an icy sneer that makes him suddenly, completely sure of who she is. “Mr. Lightwood.”

He straightens his shoulders, forcing his expression to blank calm. “Ma’am.”

“I see you’re out of the infirmary. Your parabatai told me that you were still unconscious.”

Shit.

“I was, until recently.” He clasps his hands behind his back, hopes he’s guessed right about this. “Councilor, I want to express my condolences—”

“I don’t want your condolences.” She stands, setting her cup down on the counter hard enough that steaming coffee splashes over her knuckles; she doesn’t even seem to notice it. “I want answers. I want a satisfactory explanation for what happened to my nephew. Can you give that to me? Or are you so busy trying to pollute the Clave with Downworlder extremism that you can’t be bothered to run your own Institute?”

Alec lifts his chin. He might not have the full context for what’s going on here, but he has plenty of experience with hostile authority figures, and some things are just reflex. “I assure you, we’ve launched a full investigation—”

“Oh, I’m sure you have. And I’m sure you can guess how much faith I have in any investigation that you’re heading. You and that warlock that you’ve been—” Her mouth twists. Alec sets his jaw, feeling his face heat with something that might be anger or embarrassment or both, but eventually she just shakes her head, dismissing whatever she’d been about to say. “Fine. Run your investigation, Mr. Lightwood, but don’t think you’ve heard the end of this.”

She moves past him in a breath of expensive perfume, heels clicking sharply on the floor. Alec watches her go. His stomach is in a knot, his cheeks flaming, his hands curled into fists that he doesn’t remember making. He’s definitely not hungry anymore.

*

There’s a stack of clothes on the dresser when he gets back to his bedroom, neatly folded. Pajamas on top, sweatpants and his favorite old t-shirt, which is stretched out and more faded than he remembers. A toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a shaving kit in a handsome but well-used brown leather case. The clothes have that same smoky sandalwood smell as the clothes that Alec is wearing now—the ones that Magnus must have brought to the infirmary for him. Magnus, not Izzy. The same as the robe draped over the back of the chair.

He can’t do this, he realizes abruptly. He can’t just go to sleep here like everything is still the same, like the shape of the world is still something he understands. He can’t pull on the pajamas that smell like Magnus Bane and crawl into his own familiar bed like nothing has changed. That would be the safe thing to do, but he just—he can’t.

He takes a deep breath. Exhaustion is like a palpable weight dragging at him, but that’s what stamina runes are for. The slip of paper is still in his pocket, and when he reaches to pull it out, his fingers bump against the warm metal shape of his ring. Brooklyn Heights. He knows the neighborhood; the address is a little over two and a half miles away. He can make that in twenty minutes at a jog. Less, if he uses a speed rune.

Decision made, he shoves the paper back into his pocket, activates his stamina rune in a rush of jittering adrenaline that shoves the exhaustion aside, and heads out the door.

*

His certainty starts to falter once the elevator lets him off at the penthouse floor. Everything is so luxurious that he almost can’t bring himself to touch it, feels like he’s dirtying the rich carpet with his large, clunky combat boots. He’s not sure what time it is, but he is sure that it’s well outside the acceptable hours for visiting.

He’s not visiting, Alec reminds himself. He lives here. With Magnus.

He swallows, and before he can start to talk himself out of it, lifts a hand to knock.

The door swings open before his knuckles can make contact. Magnus is standing on the other side. He’s still wearing the same suit he had on earlier, but the cravat is gone, the top buttons of his shirt undone to leave his throat bare. His makeup is slightly smudged, and there’s a half-full glass of whiskey dangling elegantly from his fingers, and he’s so beautiful that for a moment Alec can only stare, enraptured, completely unable to remember why he even came here in the first place.

It doesn’t help that Magnus is staring back at him with an expression that’s warm and open and shocked, or that his voice is impossibly soft, almost hopeful, when he says, “Alexander?”

“Hey,” he manages eventually. “Sorry it’s so late. Can I come in?”

Chapter Text

Magnus stands frozen in the doorway, staring up at him. Alec has just long enough to feel awkward before he takes a short breath, then says, “Of course. Of course, Alexander. Please come in.”

“Thanks,” he mutters. The warlock stands aside to let him in, and Alec can feel the fine hairs on his arms lift as he passes close enough, almost, to feel the warmth of his skin. There’s a small, panicked part of him demanding that he turn around right now, that it was a mistake to come here, what are you doing, Alec, everybody’s going to know—

Everybody already knows. The secret he’s spent more than ten years protecting is entirely out in the open. He doesn’t need to hide, whatever his instincts are screaming at him. What he needs now are answers.

The door falls shut behind them, and Alec pauses inside, shoves his hands in his pockets, staring at the place that he now apparently calls home. He’s never been inside a warlock’s lair, and it’s… not what he was expecting. There’s nothing obviously magical about the place, no floating candles or scorched cauldrons or spells scrawled on the hardwood floors and exposed brickwork; it just looks like an apartment. A nice apartment, large and airy, tall windows open to let in the soft night air and the distant noises of the city below, but that’s it.

The bow rack that was missing from his room is mounted in between the windows, a seraph blade hanging underneath. There are pictures of him on the walls. Pictures of Magnus, of people he knows and people he doesn’t, and Alec finds his attention caught by one on the far wall, black and white and large enough that he can make out most of the detail from across the room. It’s them, the two of them. Alec is in a tux, bow-tie loose around his throat and a champagne flute in one hand, head thrown back in laughter as Magnus leans in to press a smiling kiss to his cheek.

It’s a strange jolt that passes through him at the sight of his own happy face, a moment he can’t remember preserved within the bounds of a handsome silver frame. It’s not just the intimacy of it, although it’s that, too. It’s that someone took this picture. This moment, this kiss, happened where other people could see it, and neither of them seems to care. The Alec in this photograph looks completely fearless. Joyful.

“One of my favorite pictures,” Magnus says quietly, following Alec’s gaze. His fingers graze Alec’s elbow as he passes, a brief steadying touch that leaves Alec’s skin burning even though his sleeve. “Have you eaten yet?

“No,” Alec says. “But that’s not why I—” He shakes his head. His hands are moving, restless. There’s a strange kind of nervousness in him that he’d love to blame Magnus for, but it’s just Alec, it’s always been Alec, Alec and his stupid head and unruly heart and all the things he wants and can’t have.

Except that he does have them. He can see the echoes of himself all over the loft. It’s not just the pictures. His boots are under the bench by the door, his jacket flung over the back of a chair at the kitchen island, his bow rack and bows and quivers, the cup from his favorite coffee place on the counter, all the remnants of a life he can’t remember living and Magnus, standing in the middle of it looking beautifully, intimately disheveled, glass of whiskey in his hand and a cautious expression on his face. He’s taken off most of his rings, but the one on the third finger of his left hand remains. It’s a struggle not to stare at it.

Magnus must have noticed that Alec isn’t wearing his, but he didn’t comment on it earlier and he doesn’t now.

“I don’t know—I’m sorry,” Alec says finally. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I just—maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

“Of course you should have,” Magnus says quickly. He rocks forward on his toes like he’s about to move toward Alec before he thinks better of it. His hand lifts to touch the shell of his ear, a brief, nervous gesture. “I’m glad you came, Alexander.”

Alec shrugs tightly. “Why do you call me that? Nobody calls me that.”

A pause, and then Magnus says, carefully, “Would you like me to stop?”

“No.” The word is out before he means to say it, before he’s even formulated the thought. He lifts his hands, rubs at his temples, then lets them drop. His skull feels fragile, thin and painful like it’s made of cracked glass. “I just, I don’t understand. This. Any of it.”

Magnus opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, and then he pauses, head tilting. “You’re in pain.”

“Headache. I’m fine.”

“Have you tried a healing rune on it?”

That hadn’t even occurred to him. Iratzes are for real injuries, serious injuries, not stupid little things like headaches. He’s still vertical and coherent, so it’s not that dire. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not—” Magnus breaks off, shakes his head, then takes a careful step closer, lifting his hand. “I can take some of the pain, if you’d like.”

It’s like before, when he offered to make Alec sleep. Alec knows he should refuse; whatever they are to each other, right now he doesn’t remember this man at all. He doesn’t need a strange warlock messing around with his head, and it isn’t serious. It’s nothing he can’t power through. He’s fine.

He looks at Magnus’s face, so soft and worried, and another throb of pain pulses through his temples. “Okay, fine.”

It’s not the most gracious response, maybe, but Magnus doesn’t seem bothered. His whiskey glass vanishes in a flash of blue magic, and he steps into Alec’s space, lifting his hands to settle the pads of his fingers against his temples. They’re impossibly warm for just a moment, and then cool healing magic is flowing into him, a flicker of static against his skin.

Alec takes a deep, slow breath as the pain begins to abate. Magnus is standing so close that Alec could count his eyelashes if he wanted to, can see the slight imperfections in his skin, smell the richness of his cologne. Even with magic flowing through his fingertips and into Alec, there’s something shockingly human about him. Like if he wanted to Alec could just reach out and touch—

“The pain is likely a side effect of the attack,” Magnus murmurs, interrupting that terrifying train of thought. “But it could be related to your memories. Your mind is trying to access them even when it can’t. Is that better?”

“Yeah,” Alec says roughly. It is better. His head still feels weirdly fragile, but the pain is all but gone. Magnus’s fingers linger on his temples for another moment before he drops them and steps back out of Alec’s space, and Alec has to swallow down something that’s almost disappointment. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” The warlock steps back again, then claps his hands together with a sudden bright cheer. “So! Dinner, then?”

“You don’t have to feed me.”

“I want to,” Magnus says firmly. “Waffles?”

“For dinner?”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

Alec feels his lips curl into a smile. It might just be his first since he woke up in the infirmary, and it feels strange on his mouth. Not bad, but… strange. “No, I guess not.”

“Good.” Magnus’s answering smile is quick and bright, and Alec's breath catches unexpectedly at the sight of it. “Now, the waffles I can just conjure, but coffee never does seem to come out quite right—what am I talking about, it’s too late for that anyway,” he interrupts himself. If it were anyone else, Alec would say that he was nervous. “Tea, I think. My own special blend, you always used to enjoy it—please, sit. It won’t take a moment.”

Alec considers arguing about that, but he knows—and actually, Magnus probably does too—that he’s worse than useless in the kitchen even when he’s not half-dead of exhaustion. He collapses gracelessly onto a stool at the kitchen island, watches Magnus move gracefully through the room, popping open cupboards and pulling out dishes with a drift of blue magic. There’s something arresting about the casual way that he uses magic. In Alec’s world, magic is runes and weapons of war, bound up in strict rules and brutal purpose. He’s seen warlocks kill with the power they hold in their hands, but he never could have imagined this. It’s unexpectedly charming, and the thought occurs to him that this must be commonplace for him. The way Magnus does it—it’s thoughtless. He isn’t showing off; this seems to be perfectly normal behavior to him, which means—must mean—that Alec has seen it before.

Because he lives here, with Magnus. Shares a home with him. A life.

A plate of waffles appears in front of him, perfectly crispy. An instant later, there’s a crystal decanter of syrup, cut strawberries in a delicate bowl. A knife and fork clink slightly as they appear on the plate.

“I thought we could skip the proper place settings,” Magnus says, over his shoulder. “Since you seem half-starved and I am, unfortunately, entirely too familiar for what passes for food at that Institute of yours.”

This isn’t really why he came here, but now that there’s food in front of him Alec finds himself ravenous, and, well, it’s only polite to eat what he’s offered, right? He applies himself to the meal with gusto, and it’s only once his fork is scraping bare porcelain that it occurs to him that Magnus hasn’t sat down with him. The awkwardness that was briefly stemmed by food returns in force. “You’re not hungry?”

“I ate already.” Magnus glances over his shoulder again, and smiles a little at whatever it is that Alec’s face is doing. Blushing, probably. He feels as awkward and ungainly as an adolescent crow, but Magnus raises a hand to forestall him before he can start apologizing. “Don’t, Alexander. I like looking after you, and I suspect that the conversation we’re going to have will go over much better on a full stomach.”

The conversation. Alec pushes his plate back, suddenly stiff. “Oh.”

“We don’t need to,” Magnus adds quickly. He’s doing something complicated involving the the kettle on the counter and carefully measured scoops of loose tea from a tin. “If you want we could just… I don’t know. Watch a movie. I have an extensive collection.”

“No, we probably should,” Alec says. His own voice sounds tight, too abrupt, and he doesn’t know how to modulate it. “So. We’re married.”

The warlock pauses by the counter. Something almost like tension rolls down his spine, but his voice is steady when he says, “Yes. We are.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“It was mutual. Although technically I was the one who actually proposed.”

Why? Alec almost asks, but he stops himself just in time. He’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that. Not yet. “Technically?”

“You were… planning to. Circumstances got in the way.”

There’s an entire story there; it’s written into the tense lines of Magnus’s back and the way his fingers rattle on the counter before reaching decisively for the kettle. He looks like he’s bracing for a blow, so Alec doesn’t ask. Instead, he drags the tines of his fork through the syrup remaining on his plate and says, “How long?”

“How long have we been married, you mean?” Magnus asks, turning back to face him finally. There are a pair of stoneware cups in his hands, the contents steaming. At Alec’s short nod, he says, “Just under three years. We’ll—we would be celebrating our anniversary next month.”

Alec furrows his brow, counting back the dates. “You’re telling me we got married after we knew each other for… what, like four months?”

“I suppose you could say that it was a whirlwind romance.” Magnus’s hands flutter, and then he says, “Sugar for your tea?”

Romance. Alec feels his shoulders twitch, and his voice comes out sharper than he means it to. “You don’t know?”

“Sugar, then,” Magnus concludes in a very mild tone of voice, turning back to the counter. “It is still polite to ask.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Alec mumbles, after a moment. He’s being an asshole, he knows. It’s just that knowing doesn’t seem to make it easier to stop. But Magnus is being kinder than he has to be—kinder than Alec deserves—and he didn’t actually come here to pick a fight. He’s still not sure why he came here, but he knows that it wasn’t for that. “Sorry.”

“That’s quite alright—” Magnus breaks off before he can finish the sentence, and Alec wonders what he was going to say.

Darling, Magnus wrote, in that fire message he found in his room. Alec wonders if that’s what he was about to say, and the idea makes something warm shiver in his chest.

Magnus crosses the kitchen toward him, cups in hands. He hesitates before Alec, then holds one of them out to him. Their fingers brush when Alec takes it, and it’s all he can do not to jerk away like he’s been burned. If Magnus notices that, he gives no sign; he just smiles briefly and moves past him into the living room, banishing the dirty dishes with a careless flick of magic. Alec slips off of the chair and follows him, feeling more than a little like he’s being drawn on an invisible tether, pulled into the effortless gravity of Magnus’s orbit.

There are two couches and a loveseat arranged in a cozy conversational setting, but Magnus doesn’t sit down, and neither does Alec. He’s so exhausted that he feels wired with it, jittery down to his bones. The cup is bleeding heat into his palms and the pads of his fingers and the tea smells unfamiliar, both sweet and sharp, cleanly astringent. When he takes a cautious sip, it seems heavy on his tongue, but not unpleasantly so, and it burns a pleasant heat down to his belly like he’s swallowing sunlight.

Magnus sips from his cup as well. He’s watching Alec from under his lashes, and something about that look makes a nervous heat blossom in the pit of his stomach.

Darling, he thinks, and Magnus is beautiful in the dim light, and Alec wonders, suddenly, what would happen if he set his cup down and stepped forward and—

He shakes his head, rocks back on his heels, and maybe it’s that sudden impulse, or maybe it’s just that he’s too tired filter his thoughts properly, but the words are on his tongue before he even thinks about what he’s asking.

“Do we, uh—I mean, do we…” he trails off, makes a gesture that somehow ends up a lot more obscene for its vagueness, then drops his hand, mortified heat rising belatedly to his cheeks.

Magnus eyebrows lift. His lips twitch, then flatten abruptly, as if he’s deliberately folding a smile out of existence. “Have sex?”

“Yeah,” Alec mumbles. He’d like to glare at Magnus, but he’s having a hard time meeting his eyes. His face feels hot enough to fry an egg. “That.”

“We’re married. What do you think?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Alec says. It comes out brittle and angry-sounding, even though he’s pretty sure that the prickling thing that rushes through him is anything but anger. But the way Magnus is looking at him, disbelieving, almost amused—it makes him feel too hot, exposed, nervous. “Okay? I don’t remember any of this, I can’t—everything is different, I don’t—”

“I’m sorry,” Magnus interrupts, quick and soft. He lifts a hand, steps closer, stopping outside of Alec’s subconscious threat zone like he knows exactly where it ends. “Alexander, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have...” He hesitates, turning his cup around in his hands, then sets it down on the side table. “To answer your question, yes. We do.”

“Oh,” Alec says. His voice sounds slightly strangled, which makes sense because he kind of feels like he just swallowed his tongue. His face is burning.

It was a mistake to come here, he thinks with sudden clarity. He shouldn’t be here, looking at this man who is for all intents and purposes a stranger and wondering what his mouth tastes like, what his body feels like beneath his elegant clothes, what sounds he would make if Alec dragged his lips across the sharp curve of his jaw, if he unbuttoned all the tiny buttons of his silky shirt to expose his chest, if he—

He shouldn’t be standing here in a home that feels like a foreign country, surrounded by his own things and achingly jealous of a version of himself that he can’t even remember.

The silence between them stretches out, and then Magnus rolls his shoulders, a quick nervous gesture like he’s trying to shake something off and says, “We don’t have to talk about that. I know this all must be—strange. For you.”

It is, but probably not in the way that Magnus means. Alec clears his throat, looks away, and finally sits down on the couch. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Magnus perches on the couch opposite him. “We could—you can ask me anything. Whatever you want to know. Or I could tell you about the tracking spell I’m using? It’s a fascinating piece of magic.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, seizing gratefully on the proffered change of subject even though he knows less than nothing about warlock magic. It’s a distraction from thinking about the way Magnus looks with his hair soft and his face gentle and lamplight casting shadows in the golden hollow of his throat, where Alec can imagine setting his lips and—

“Okay,” he says again, clearing his throat. “Tell me about the spell.”

“Ah,” Magnus says, and his smile is a quicksilver gleam, sudden and sweet. Alec sips from his tea, tasting the matching sweetness of it, and feels something in him settle a little. “Well, it’s a brilliant piece of magic, of course…”

“Of course,” Alec says, and it comes out teasing without him even meaning it to. Like his voice finds the rhythm of the conversation without conscious thought from him. “You built it, didn’t you?”

“Just so.” Magnus waves a hand, his smile loosening, becoming softer. “It’s very thorough, but the downside is that it works slowly, and of course there are still countermeasures…”

So Alec sits there, cup bleeding heat into the pads of his fingers, and listens to Magnus talk about magical resonances and synchronicity and the various methods that magic users of all sorts can use to cover their tracks. He only understands maybe a third of it; warlock magic turns out to involve a lot more theory than he would have expected if he’d ever given it any real thought. But it’s… nice, all the same, sitting here and listening to Magnus expound on magical theory instead of giving himself another headache trying to excavate the detritus of his own life. The tea leaves a pleasant aftertaste on his tongue, and Magnus’s voice is soothing and soft, the constant motion of his hands hypnotic in the dim light. Almost against his will, Alec can feel himself relaxing as he sinks further into the surprisingly cozy embrace of the leather couch.

“...and then there are potion-based counteractions, which would be the smartest course of action,” Magnus is saying. He’s relaxed as well, body curved against the arm of the couch, feet tucked up under him. Something about his posture makes him look startlingly young. There’s purple polish on his toenails, Alec realizes sleepily. It glitters faintly in the light whenever he moves. “The downside for them—or the upside for us—is that it requires extensive preparation beforehand, so if they haven’t—” he breaks off as Alec yawns, then stifles it hastily with the back of his hand. “Oh, look at me, rambling on.”

“No, it’s fine.” Alec yawns again, sets his empty cup down to scrub a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I should—stamina rune must’ve run out.”

“You really should get some sleep.” Magnus sounds carefully noncommittal. “There is a spare room here, I can make up the bed—”

“I should get back to the Institute,” Alec mumbles, but he can’t even muster the energy to pull his stele out of his pocket. He’s going to need to re-activate his stamina rune, and probably a wakefulness rune as well, otherwise he’s liable to stumble right out into traffic.

“Nonsense,” Magnus says gently, uncoiling from his seat. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”

“What did you put in that tea?” Alec yawns. It doesn’t come out quite as accusing as he means it to, probably because he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open. His limbs all feel pleasantly heavy, like his muscles have turned to warm liquid.

“Chamomile, mostly,” Magnus says, smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. He seems soft-edged in the yellow lamplight. Lovely, Alec thinks, too tired to stop himself. “This isn’t my doing, Alexander. You’ve been through a lot, and you’ve been pushing yourself hard today. Your body needs rest.”

Alec would really like to debate that, but the fact that he can’t manage the energy to push himself up to his feet kind of undermines his argument. He yawns again, acquiescing for the moment. “Okay, fine.”

Magnus smiles at him again, stooping to pick up the cup Alec set down as he passes. Alec tilts his head to watch him go, then leans back against the couch cushions and lets his eyes fall shut. Just for a moment. Just a moment of rest, and then he’ll get back up, apply his runes, and take himself back to the Institute. He likes this tentative sort of ease that seems to have settled between him and Magnus, and there’s no need to introduce the inevitable awkwardness of sleeping over and make things tense and weird between them again.

He just needs a few more minutes, and then he’ll leave.

*

He comes awake slowly, too comfortable to really commit to consciousness right away. The world seems warm and distant, the cushions soft beneath him, the smell of sandalwood sweet in his nose. He can hear soft footsteps somewhere nearby, a quiet voice.

“...shouldn’t have been up at all, let alone sprinting halfway across town to…” a pause. “No, he’s sleeping now, I’m not going to—on the couch, Catarina, what kind of a cad do you take me for?”

Magnus. That’s Magnus’s voice. He’s in Magnus’s apartment, on Magnus’s couch. His shoes have been removed, a blanket spread over him, a pillow tucked under his cheek. His back feels slightly stiff, like he hasn’t moved in far too long, and on the other side of the apartment Magnus is talking quietly on the phone.

Talking about Alec.

That’s enough to push him the rest of the way awake. He opens his eyes. It’s dim inside with all the lights off, but judging from the rosy fingers of dawn glowing gently through the billowing curtains, he’s slept straight through until morning. Magnus is pacing with his phone pressed to his ear, his voice low. He must have slept too, because he’s changed out of his suit and into a loose tank top and soft-looking pants, bare feet nearly silent on the hardwood floor as he pads back and forth between the windows, which are open to let in a soft breeze, birdsong trilling over the distant sounds of traffic from the street below.

“No, I know,” he’s saying. “But he doesn’t remember me at all right now, and I’m not going to… Cat, I know, but you didn’t know him then, it was… okay. Okay, I’m listening.” Another long pause. Magnus stops by the window and twists slightly, unconsciously, like he’s working the kinks out of his spine. The movement pulls his thin shirt tight, outlining the muscular curve of his back, his powerful shoulders, and Alec finds himself caught, staring, gut-punched by sudden arousal.

This whole thing would be a lot simpler, he thinks, vaguely resentful, if Magnus was hideous.

“If you think it’s necessary,” Magnus says, twisting the other way. “When he wakes up, I’ll ask him—oh.” He turns back toward the couch, and their eyes meet before Alec can slam his shut. “Cat, can I give you a call right back? Of course. Love you too.”

He ends the call and pockets the phone, takes a step toward Alec, then stops. Alec levers himself upright on the couch, disoriented and too warm. His head still feels sore when he moves, like it’s overfull of sloshing liquid, but it settles after a moment. “Hey,” he says. His voice is scratchy. “Sorry.”

Magnus looks baffled. “Whatever for?”

“I didn’t really mean to—” he gestures vaguely at the couch, the rumpled blankets, himself, awkward and unfitting in their elegant surroundings. “Uh. Was that your friend?”

“Catarina, yes.” Magnus crosses the room, hesitates, fiddling with his phone. “She’d like to stop over before work to examine you in person, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“To see about getting my memories back.”

“That is the eventual goal. It’s up to you, of course.”

Alec nods, trying to project more equilibrium than he feels. He’s not entirely comfortable with the idea of another warlock poking around in his head, but his comfort isn’t really the point here. “Okay. That’s fine. Although I should probably shower first.”

There’s no probably about it. He never did get a shower yesterday, and before that was four days of infirmary sponge baths. He feels actively disgusting now, and he definitely needs to shave. He rubs a hand across his cheek, feels stubble prickle against his palm. Magnus’s eyes follow the movement.

“Of course,” he says, a beat too late. He hesitates fractionally and adds, in a very neutral tone, “There’s an attached bath through the bedroom, and your clothes are in the closet there. Or I could fetch some things for the guest bath if you’d be more comfortable—”

“No, that’s fine,” Alec says, although he actually feels more than a little trepidation at the idea of going anywhere near Magnus’s bedroom. Their bedroom. He shoves the thought aside. He’s already caused Magnus enough inconvenience in the past few days. “Uh, where—?”

“Oh!” Magnus looks momentarily startled, like he forgot that Alec wouldn’t know. Then he waves a hand at a pair of wooden doors at the end of a short hallway. “Through there. Bathroom is on the right, closet on the left.”

He doesn’t try to show Alec around, and Alec is guiltily glad of that. It’s weird enough being in here by himself. The bed is unmade, most of the blankets kicked onto the floor like the occupant was thrashing in his sleep, or not sleeping at all. There’s a phone charger, a spare stele, a well-thumbed paperback novel that he recognizes on one nightstand, so now Alec knows what side of the bed he sleeps on when he sleeps here with Magnus, and he has no idea at all what the hell he’s supposed to do with that information.

Nothing. He’s not here on a fact-finding mission; he’s here to get cleaned up so he can meet Magnus’s warlock friend and—hopefully—fix this. So Magnus can get the right version of Alec back, the one who sleeps in his bed and has sex with him and knows how to fucking talk to him without blushing and stammering and snapping like an ill-mannered child. Alec can’t really see how he could possibly have turned into that person in three and a half years, but it’s evident that he did, and that’s who Magnus needs. That’s who they all need. A leader, a politician, a husband. Not whatever the hell Alec is to any of them right now.

The closet is predictably enormous, and—predictably—mostly full of colorful, elaborate clothing that can only be Magnus’s. A good third of it is in Alec’s size, though, and there are well-tailored suits and colorful button-down shirts in among his own familiar drab clothing. He bypasses them all to grab a pair of jeans and a dark t-shirt, and goes to shower.

He takes the wedding ring out of his pocket before dropping his clothes in the hamper, turns it over in his fingers, then shoves it into the pocket of his fresh jeans and doesn’t allow himself to think about it anymore.

*

Magnus’s friend is there by the time he gets back out, scrubbed and shaved and smelling of the sandalwood shampoo that he found in the shower. She’s tucked up against Magnus on the couch, speaking quietly, a friendly kind of intimacy in their postures that makes something that’s almost jealousy twist in Alec’s throat, especially when Magnus glances up at him and goes tense, expression turning careful like it has through most of their conversations. There was that brief moment of relaxation last night when he was expounding on magical theory, but other than that—

Yeah. They need to fix this.

“Uh, hi,” Alec says as she stands up. She’s wearing blue scrubs and sensible shoes, a hospital ID on a lanyard around her neck; she’s a startling contrast to Magnus, who even in pajamas has a quality of glamour about him, of magic and intrigue. If he didn’t already know this woman was a warlock—and a powerful one, from what Magnus said—he’d think she was nothing more than an off-duty mundane nurse.

“Catarina Loss,” she says, smile bright, holding out a hand. It occurs to Alec that she’s only the second person to actually introduce herself properly since he woke up. “It’s good to see you up again, Alec.”

“We know each other?” he asks warily, although the answer is obviously yes.

“We’ve met,” she says, smile pleasant. “Actually, you’re my daughter’s favorite babysitter, if you can believe that.”

Alec can’t, really. “Okay, well, I don’t want to take up any more of your time than we need to, so how do you want to do this?”

Catarina Loss glances back at Magnus, arching one manicured brow. “I see what you mean.”

Magnus shrugs a little. It’s clearly meant to look casual.

You didn’t know him then, Alec remembers him saying on the phone. It makes him feel—small, unexpectedly. It’s not that he doesn’t know he isn’t the person that Magnus wants, and there’s no reason for that fact to make something in him wilt just a little.

Before he can worry that thought over too much, though, she gestures to the couch, Magnus shifting back against the arm. “You can have a seat, if you’d like. I don’t expect this will take long.” Her kind face creases into a smile, dark eyes warm, just an ordinary woman if not for that same odd, ageless quality that she shares with Magnus, and with most of the other warlocks he’s met. Alec wonders how old she really is, and then wonders, with another odd jolt, how old Magnus really is.

That’s not a useful line of thought right now. He drops onto the couch, leaving a full foot of space in between him and Magnus, and he manages not to flinch away when Catarina perches on the cushion next to him and lifts a hand to his cheek, pale glittering magic rippling over her fingertips.

“I’m just going to do a surface scan,” she murmurs. Her voice is professional. It reminds him of the Institute medics and healers, and something about it makes him relax, almost involuntarily. “It shouldn’t hurt, and if it does, I need you to tell me.”

“Okay,” Alec says, mouth dry. Her tone brooks no disagreement, and he’s smart enough not to argue with medics anyway. Usually. That’s really Jace’s job, anyway.

“He had a headache yesterday,” Magnus murmurs, and she nods but doesn’t offer any theories about that.

“Ready?” she asks, and Alec nods jerkily.

It doesn’t hurt, and he’s actually surprised by that. Her magic feels—different than Magnus’s, in some indefinable way. Cooler, less—prickly. It lacks that stinging electric quality that makes Alec’s hair stand on end; this is more like river water washing smoothly over him and sinking under his skin. It doesn’t hurt, but it does definitely feel very weird. Alec squeezes his eyes shut, and that cool liquid feeling spreads through his body. There’s a sharp twinge as it moves over his injured arm; it’s not exactly pain, more like jamming his arm into a bucket of ice water. He sucks an involuntary breath across his teeth, and Catarina moves away immediately.

“What is it?”

He shrugs tightly, wishing he’d just been able to keep a lid on it. It didn’t really hurt, but he wants this over with. “My arm. It’s nothing.”

“The soul-eater clawed him there,” Magnus interjects, from the other side of the couch, and makes a slightly apologetic face when Alec turns his head to glare at him.

“May I see?” Catarina asks.

Alec shoves the sleeve of his shirt up, suddenly very glad that he didn’t grab something with long sleeves. The marks look pale and healed, but when Catarina settles the pads of her fingers against them, there’s a definitely chill there, more obvious against the warmth of her skin.

“Hm,” she murmurs.

“What?” Alec asks, at the same time as Magnus says, anxiously, “What is it?”

Alec drops his head, cheeks burning. Catarina glances between them, then says. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to check my books, but it seems that there may be some lingering connection between Alec and the soul-eater. It shouldn’t be dangerous,” she adds quickly, when Alec starts to open his mouth. “Not unless it touches you again, in which case you’ll have bigger problems.”

It’s such an understatement that Alec almost has to laugh. “Right.”

“It does complicate things, though. If the soul-eater dies before the connection is broken, that could have... repercussions for recovering your memories.”

On the other side of the couch, Magnus stiffens slightly.

“Oh,” Alec says.

“Something to keep in mind.” She shifts back, out of his space. “It shouldn’t be an immediate problem, since it’s contained for now. We can find a way to sever the connection; I'll keep working on it.”

“I—thank you,” Alec says. “Your fee—”

“Standard consult. I’ll send the bill to the Institute.” She smiles, pats his hand, then stands. “But I would do this anyway. The work you’re doing with the Council is too important to too many of us for me to allow this situation to stand even if you weren’t a friend. And on that note, I do have an actual job to get to. I’ll send a fire message when I come up with something.”

She looks over at Magnus, and an unreadable look passes between them before he stands as well. “I’ll walk you out.”

*

After Catarina is gone and Magnus has conjured a hasty breakfast and then retreated back into the bedroom to, in his words, ‘put myself together—please make yourself at home,’ Alec sits awkwardly on the couch, fiddling with his phone and resisting the urge to go poking around the loft like he actually belongs here or has a right to it. His lock screen just shows the enkeli rune, but he neglected to ask anybody if they knew his actual password, and none of the ones he’s tried have worked. It’s not a huge deal; they can always send a fire message if they really need to get in touch with him, but—

It starts ringing in his hand, and he nearly drops it, catches it just in time to see Izzy’s name flash on the screen. He thumbs the icon to answer. “Hey, Iz.”

“Alec, hey,” she says. “I heard back from the Iron Sisters—where are you? I checked your room but you weren’t there.”

“Yeah, uh.” Alec clears his throat. “I’m at Magnus’s, actually.”

“You spent the night at the loft?” She sounds so cautiously hopeful that Alec has to close his eyes.

“On the couch,” he says. “It’s not like—what do you have?”

Izzy lets out a brief sigh; he can almost hear her make the decision not to push it. “Well, the good news is that they do have something they think will work—”

“Hang on,” he interrupts as Magnus comes back into the room. He’s fully dressed—all in black again, although the metallic embroidery on his vest catches the light in shifting colors. His jacket is decorated with silvery epaulettes that emphasize the breadth of his shoulders, and Alec looks back down before he can get caught staring. “I’m putting you on speakerphone. It’s Izzy,” he adds, to Magnus. “She says she has something.”

“Ah.” Magnus settles down on the far end of the couch with a studied kind of grace. “Good morning, Isabelle.”

“Hi, Magnus,” she says warmly.

“Alec says you have something for us?”

“I spoke to Sister Zeruiah this morning, and she says she’s fairly sure that exposure to pure unforged ademas should destroy the soul-eater. That’s the good news.”

“That’s wonderful news,” Magnus says. “I suppose the bad news is that they don’t want to give us any. Well, we can—”

“Oh, no, they’re sending a courier over with some this afternoon,” Izzy interrupts. Her tone is light, but there’s steel in it, too, the kind of flinty stubbornness that people who expect Izzy to be all surface flash, clever words and a pretty face, never see coming. Magnus doesn’t look surprised at all. “I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it.”

“I know,” Alec says dryly, but he’s proud of her all the same. “Okay, so what’s the bad news, then?”

“The bad news is that there’s no safe way to use it. It works by drawing the souls out of it—starving it in an instant, essentially. But that’ll draw the creature to it, as well.”

“Like a moth to a flame,” Magnus murmurs.

“Only this moth will kill anything it touches,” Alec finishes.

On the phone, Izzy says, “Yeah. So there’s that, and also Sister Zeruiah said that their ademas stores were broken into a month or so ago. A kilo of it went missing.”

“What?”

“Yeah. They’ve been keeping it quiet, to put it lightly.”

“Izzy, how good are your contacts in the Citadel again?”

“Oh, they talk to me,” Izzy says breezily, which Alec can only take to mean that she’s in possession of some top-notch blackmail material. “Anyway, if we can work out a way to get the ademas inside the containment cage without risking anyone, we should be able to kill it. But the robbery is cause for concern. It’s not easy to break into the Citadel.”

That’s the understatement of a lifetime. “So it had to be an inside job,” Alec agrees. He rubs at the claw-marks on his arm, that strange chill burning through his fingertips, then forces himself to drop his hand, thinking. There are a lot of reasons that an unscrupulous thief might want unforged ademas—Downworlders can’t touch it without injury, but there are still a lot of things it can be used for. It would fetch a high price on the black market, and that could be all it is, but somehow he doesn’t think so. It all seems related. It's like a puzzle where he has most of the pieces and just needs to figure out how to fit them all together. “Can you—Jace is looking into the mole, right?”

“Jace and Clary,” Izzy corrects, only a little pointedly.

“Right. Can you have them start looking into connections between shadowhunters at the New York Institute and the Iron Sisters? Focus on newer transfers, but—well, Jace should have a better idea than I do of who we can trust. Tell him to use his best judgement.” He pauses. “Also, the last few patrol schedules were missing from my desk. It might be nothing, but—”

“It also might not,” Izzy agrees. “I’ll have him look into it.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Are you…” she pauses, then says, “Are you coming back to the Institute today?”

Alec is opening his mouth to say, Yeah, of course, when he catches sight of Magnus’s expression. He’s gone suddenly still, brow furrowed.

“I’ll let you know,” he says instead. “See you later, Izzy.”

“See you. Bye, Magnus.”

“Goodbye,” Magnus says absently.

Alec hangs up, tosses his phone on the couch, hesitates, then says, “Okay, what?”

Magnus blinks, then looks up at him. “What?”

“What is it? You have a…” he trails off, gestures vaguely. “A face.”

“A face,” Magnus repeats, and almost smiles, but he still looks distracted. Tense. “I just thought of something. I think I need to have another look at the warehouse where you were attacked.”

“Okay,” Alec says immediately. “Let’s go, then.”

“Alec, you don’t have to—” Magnus pauses, hands fluttering. “You’re still recovering from a serious injury. You don’t have to come with me.”

“Do you want me to call someone else for back up?”

“Everyone we can trust is currently otherwise occupied, so… no.”

“Then you get me,” Alec says, levering himself off the couch. A wave of dizziness goes through him once he’s standing, but it fades quickly. He shakes his head sharply, then crosses the room to pull his bow off the rack on the wall. The familiar shape of it in his hand makes him feel steadier. He slings it and his quiver over his shoulder, and turns to see Magnus watching him with an expression he can’t read at all. “What?”

Magnus opens his mouth, then shuts it, drops his head, smiles. “Nothing. Nothing at all, Alexander. Shall we?”

He lifts his hands to pull a portal into being in a swirl of color and a static taste of magic in the air. Alec crosses the room to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as it steadies, and Magnus smiles up at him, and together they step through.

Chapter Text

The warehouse district looks stark and washed-out in the light of day, all sharp lines and hard angles and cracked concrete. Magnus’s portal lets them out in a cranny between two rusting shipping containers, and Alec activates his glamour before they step out into the open. He doesn’t see anybody, but it’s mid-morning; there’ll be mundanes around. There are always mundanes around, and just because he doesn’t expect this to turn into a firefight doesn’t mean it won’t; he wouldn’t have brought his bow otherwise. Although considering that the man he’s accompanying is apparently one of the most powerful warlocks on the Eastern seaboard, the bow—and Alec himself, for that matter—are probably superfluous.

He sticks close to Magnus anyway. They fall into step together easily, and Magnus gestures, rings flashing in the sunlight, at a crumbling cinder-block building up ahead. It’s painted a dull reddish-brown and the sign that was pinned to the broadside of the wall is flopping limply over, the letters of the logo obscured. “There’s our destination. I thought it wiser not to portal in directly.”

“Probably smart,” Alec agrees, sidestepping a forklift backing out of the bay doors of another building toward the waiting tractor trailer. The mundane who’s driving it has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smoke curling up under his hard hat; he seems entirely oblivious to the pair of disembodied shadows flitting out of his path. That’s mundanes for you, though. They never pay attention enough to see anything they don’t expect to be there. “It’ll be empty?”

“Should be. I believe there’s a property dispute of some sort going on. We shouldn’t be disturbed.”

“Hopefully.”

“In all things, it is better to hope than to despair,” Magnus declaims cryptically, then glances up at Alec with a startlingly boyish smile. “Johann von Goethe. Charming man. Considerably less heterosexual than the historical record would suggest.”

“I guess you’d know,” Alec says. He keeps his voice as dry as he can make it, but he’s pretty sure he’s blushing.

“Not personally, alas. Although I did meet him once in Leipzig when he was studying law there. Must have been… oh, 1757? 67? It all blurs together after a few centuries.”

Centuries, Alec thinks, with a shiver. He was wondering how old Magnus was, and the answer is, apparently, more than two hundred and fifty. How much more is another question, and one he suspects it wouldn’t be polite to ask.

Not for the first time, he thinks, What the hell are you doing with me?

That’s another thing that it would definitely not be polite to ask, but the fact remains: Magnus is a powerful warlock, he’s hundreds of years old, and he’s chosen to tie himself to an awkward twenty-something shadowhunter who comes with a pile of political and emotional baggage. There has to be something he’s getting out of it, other than Alec himself.

He does actually have some self-control, though, so he doesn’t say any of that out loud. Magnus lifts a hand as they approach the building, and the grimy steel roll up door ascends silently to admit them, flakes of white paint peeling away to flutter to the concrete below like dead butterflies. Alec pauses for a moment, his step stuttering, caught by a powerful but indefinable sense of deja vu.

He’s been here before. He knows that, of course; that’s kind of the point. But more than that, he can feel it. This anonymous dockside warehouse feels more familiar than the living room of his own home. The silent door, the dim space beyond stacked with pallets, the faint dry taste of metal and rot on his tongue.

“Alexander?” Magnus asks. He’s paused by the door, one hand slightly raised, expression concerned. “Are you—”

“I’m fine,” Alec says roughly, shaking the feeling away and ducking under the half-open door after Magnus. It descends silently in their wake, cutting them off from the world beyond.

There are windows set high up in the walls that let in a little light, but the rows upon rows of shelving and stacked unit loads are swathed in gloom. Most of them are wrapped in plastic, dusty and teetering. It looks like the pantry of some enormous hidden spider, which is a thought he really could have gone without thinking.

“Are you sure?” Magnus asks.

“Yeah.” He reaches up, runs his hand briefly along the smooth familiar shape of his bow, soothing and solid beneath his fingers. “What are we looking for?”

“Oh,” Magnus says. “Well, I don’t think we’re about to be ambushed by another monster, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I wasn’t until you said that.”

A brief smile, and then Magnus drops his hands. “It didn’t make sense to me that the soul-eater was able to break the wards I set. I’ve used that cage before—not often, but I’ve used it. Catarina’s spell-weaving is impeccable. It’s never failed me. I never would have suggested it if I thought there was the slightest chance that it would.”

“Okay,” Alec says, carefully, because there’s something in Magnus’s voice that sounds almost desperate. Like maybe he’s been blaming himself all along for how this all went down. “But things go wrong sometimes. It happens.”

“Not like this. Not without reason.”

“What was it, then? Or what do you think it was?”

“I’ll show you,” Magnus says, and starts toward the center of the warehouse. There are faint footprints in the dust, and Alec realizes that this must be exactly the way that they came before. “If I’m right…”

“About what?”

“The nature of unforged adamas. Isabelle was right; it would have drawn the soul-eater. But it’s not… it wouldn’t have been a voluntary thing. Not like she’s thinking.”

Alec nods. “Instinct.”

“No,” Magnus says, firmly, like that’s exactly the point he was trying to make. “It’s not a living thing, Alexander. It isn’t compelled by instinct, not anymore.”

“Okay,” Alec says slowly. “So what is it compelled by?”

“Magic,” Magnus says. His heels click faintly on the concrete floor as they walk. “I’m pretty sure I know what happened to that piece of adamas that went missing from the Citadel.”

“Yeah, that seemed a little too neat to be a coincidence. Who do you think took it?”

“I don’t know who,” Magnus says, “but I think I know why.”

Alec shrugs. “If it was the same person who set all this up, it would make sense that they’d want a way to kill it. Unless they were planning on letting it run loose through New York City after it ate me, which—I mean, I guess that’s possible.”

Magnus makes a pained kind of face at that. “True. But I think killing it was a secondary consideration. If it was one at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here,” Magnus says, instead of answering. They’re nearly at the center of the warehouse; Alec can see a broken nest of bottles and packing material that must have come from one of the demolished units. It looks like something exploded in here. Pallets are splintered and twisted apart, plastic wrapping hanging in shreds. The concrete floor is spiderwebbed with cracks like a blast radius, and the center of it is cratered, completely clear of debris.

After a stunned moment, Alec whistles softly. “I’m surprised any of us survived.”

“Oh, that wasn’t the soul-eater,” Magnus says absently. “That was me.”

Alec looks over the destruction, then back at Magnus, who is crouching down to examine something on the floor. “You did all this?”

“After it grabbed you. I had to get it away from you, and that… took some doing.” Magnus rubs his thumb over one of the cracks, then stands. He spins slowly on his heel, scanning their surroundings like he’s looking for something, eyes narrowed.

“What—” Alec starts, and Magnus cuts him off with a sharp gesture. He’s staring at a particular unit load that has tipped over on its side mostly intact. Magic flares around him in a sudden corona of white-hot color, and he steps up to the it, then vaults up and over it with startling agility. Alec stares after him for several seconds before following. He finds Magnus crouched on the floor on the far side, holding a bundle of dark leather that turns out to be a jacket.

An Institute-issue jacket, reinforced across the shoulders, and bearing the particular wear pattern that Alec recognizes from his quiver strap. One sleeve has been shredded, strips of leather and kevlar dangling. He blinks. “Is that mine?”

“We had to get it off of you to treat your arm before we could transport you,” Magnus says. He’s speaking evenly, but the lines of his body are tense, unnaturally still. “We didn’t even think to check the pockets. Why would we?”

Alec runs his fingers over his bow again, more unnerved than he wants to admit by Magnus’s demeanor. “What’s in there?”

“Nothing, now.” When Magnus finally stands and turns toward Alec, he looks very calm, but there’s a fragility to it, like he’s hanging onto his composure by a single thread, and Alec doesn’t even know why.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “What was in there?”

“Our missing piece of adamas. It leaves a very particular sort of magical residue. I would have noticed it earlier if I’d thought to look for it.”

“Why would they—”

“It draws the creature. Or rather, it draws the souls that the creature has consumed. I couldn’t understand how the soul-eater itself could shatter my wards, but that would have done it. The souls as they were released.” His hands flex, restless. Magic crackles over him like lightning, then fades. “It would have been a very neat way to ensure that it went straight for you, and destroy the monster and the evidence at the same time.”

“Except that you were there.”

“Except that I was there,” Magnus agrees. “If you’d been out on patrol you wouldn’t have survived. We probably would never have even known what happened to you.”

That makes sense, except for one thing. “I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if I was walking around with a kilo of adamas in my pocket,” Alec points out. Adamas is dense; it wouldn’t have taken up that much space and almost certainly would have fit in his pocket, but still. That’s the weight of a good-sized blade. There’s no way he wouldn’t have noticed.

“Not if it was shielded.” Magnus plucks something out of the crumples mess of leather: a scrap of cloth that shimmers oddly in his fingers. It hurts Alec’s eyes to look at it for too long, like his gaze wants to slip past it, to focus on anything else. He blinks, squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them he fixes his attention on Magnus’s face. “I assume it must have been the Institute mole that actually planted it on you, but he wrapped it in glamoured cloth first; any warlock could create that. You wouldn’t have felt anything unless you actually touched it, and maybe not even then. If I’d been paying attention, I would have—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Alec interrupts, because that’s the one thing about all of this that he’s sure of.

Magnus lets out an unhappy little breath of laughter. “There’s no way you can possibly know that now.”

“Look,” Alec says. He takes a step closer, grasps carefully, awkwardly, for the right words. “I know I don’t remember or anything, but I trust Izzy and Jace, and they trust you. And you—care about me, obviously.” Magnus takes a short breath at that, but doesn’t speak, and Alec doesn’t let himself wonder what he might have been about to say. “So, yeah. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t your fault. Sometimes—sometimes you miss things. It happens. It’s nobody’s fault, and you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“Oh, Alexander,” Magnus says. His voice is soft, weighted with something Alec can’t understand, but the unnatural stiffness of his shoulders relaxes a little, so he’s going to call that a win.

“Okay?” Alec says, and when Magnus nods, he takes a breath that feels unsteady for no reason he can understand, grasps for something solid and practical that he can focus on. “Can you use it?”

“I—yes.” Magnus’s fingers curl against the fabric, and then he takes a breath, seems to steady. “Or at least, I can track whoever set the glamour on this. If he’s not our assassin, hopefully he’ll know where to find him. And I’ve got something physical to work with, so unlike my other spell this ought to be quick. Just—” He lifts a hand, gathering blue magic around his fingertips. “Give me a moment.”

“Okay,” Alec says, soft. There’s something fascinating about watching Magnus work magic. The calm focus on his face, the way his continual movement stills, like all the energy that dances around him is pulled in beneath his skin, his focused will. It’s like he’s brighter than everything around him, more vivid. Like if Alec touched him right now he might burn.

The light builds, coalescing around the scrap of cloth that Alec still can’t quite get his eyes to focus on, then flares bright white and vanishes suddenly. The cloth disintegrates to glittering ashes in Magnus’s hand, and he lets it fall, an expression of grim satisfaction on his face. “Got him.”

“Okay,” Alec says. “Then let’s go.”

*

The portal opens up in a quiet apartment block, tall brick buildings with security bars on the windows and a faint air of disrepair. It’s mid-morning, the streets relatively quiet other than a handful of mundanes going about their morning errands. There’s no sign of any magical activity, nefarious or otherwise.

“Here?” Alec says dubiously, as the portal snaps shut behind them. “Are you sure?”

“Very.” Magnus starts across the street toward one of the buildings, neatly dodging a bicycle messenger who goes zooming past with no sign that he’s noticed either of them. The building itself is just another anonymous brick behemoth with a halfhearted little garden out in front, a FOR RENT sign in one of the clouded windows next to the door, which is locked when Alec tries the handle. Magnus gestures sharply, and the lock pops out of the faded wood to clatter on the sidewalk. The door swings open.

Alec glances back at him and raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Just being efficient,” Magnus says, with a tight smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

The lobby beyond is cramped and empty, cracked tile floors and the smell of dust. There’s a bank of mailboxes on the wall in front of them, a CLOSED sign on what must be the building manager’s office, and a row of old-fashioned brass buzzers with handwritten tags next to them, a battered-looking set of elevator doors with a padlock on them.

Magnus crosses over to the buzzers while Alec is still scanning the room, peers at them with his lips pursed for a moment before making a soft ‘ah’ sound.

“Find something?” Alec asks.

“Indeed I did.” Magnus taps one of the names. “Emmanuel Day. We’ve crossed paths before.”

“Is he our guy?”

“He’s a fence with an extensive and unsavory clientele,” Magnus says. He sounds thoughtful. “I wouldn’t have thought that assassination was his style, but for the right price… Well, let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

He reaches for the buzzer, and Alec says, “You don’t think he’ll actually let us in, do you?”

Magnus’s answering smile is sharp, all teeth. It makes him look like an entirely different person, all of a sudden, than the gentle, soft-spoken man who has been so very careful of Alec since he woke up. It makes him look dangerous, and it’s captivating.

“Of course not,” he says, and holds out his hand. Alec looks at it, then at Magnus’s face, and then takes a deep, steadying breath, crosses the room, and places his hand in Magnus’s. It’s warm, strong, the hard shapes of his rings a shade cooler than his skin. A slight jolt passes between them as Magnus looks up at him, and again Alec feels that indefinable sense of deja vu.

It’s just for a second, though, and then magic fizzes across his skin and the lobby melts away, becomes a narrow, dark hallway, the faint smell of stale takeout and weed in the air. Magnus is still holding his hand, and Alec glances down at him, opens his mouth to say—something—

Before he can, though, there’s a scramble in the room beyond, the sound of someone swearing softly, a clatter. Then footsteps in the hallway, a loud, irritated voice.

“What the hell, man, you can’t just knock? You know how fucking rude it is to just barge through a guy’s wards like—” The voice breaks off suddenly as the man comes into sight. He’s tall, nearly Alec’s height but lankier, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a faded t-shirt. A twisting pair of white horns poke up through his messy blond hair. He freezes at the sight of them, goes several shades paler, and then turns as his heel as if to bolt.

Magnus flicks a hand out, freezing him mid-step. “Not so fast,” he says, very calmly.

“Look,” the guy says in a slightly strangled voice as Magnus steps closer. There’s nothing immediately threatening about his posture, no visible magic other than a faint blue flicker over his fingertips, but the guy is looking at him like he’s holding a loaded gun to his chest. “I can explain.”

“I would love to hear your explanation,” Magnus says. “I never thought I’d say this, Emmanuel, but I thought better of you. Or at least, I thought you were smarter than this.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I’m delighted to hear that.” Magnus advances into the apartment and the warlock moves with him, dragged up on his toes by some invisible force. Alec pulls his bow off of his shoulder and nocks an arrow loosely to the string, following along in his wake. The blond warlock doesn’t even look at him; his terrified gaze is entirely fixed on Magnus. “Why don’t you have a seat—” a flick of his fingers propels the warlock into the couch hard enough to rock it back on its legs, “—and tell me all about it.”

The warlock—Emmanuel—collapses onto the cushions like a sack of potatoes, rubs his hands up and down his legs, and stares up at them with an expression that’s edging into panic. “It wasn’t my idea, I swear.”

“Wonderful. Whose idea was it?”

Magnus clearly has the situation well in hand. Alec rocks back on his heels, relaxes his shoulders slightly but doesn’t drop his bow as he scans the apartment. It’s an old loft with echoingly tall ceilings, a balcony overlooking the main section, which is—filthy, actually. A mess of takeout containers and video game controllers all jumbled up with spell books, half-full bottles of dubiously glowing liquid, and something that looks like an oversized mechanical spider that’s emitting purple smoke as it scuttles away under the TV stand.

Somehow, he always thought warlocks were more dignified than this. Magnus’s loft looks like something out of a magazine spread, but this… is disgusting.

Alec wrinkles his nose, turning slowly as the warlock on the couch mutters something about client confidentiality and Magnus lets out a short, incredulous-sounding bark of laughter. “You have got to be kidding me, Emmanuel. Your client took out a hit on the Head of the New York Institute. You didn’t think that was going to come back to bite you?”

“Yeah, I kind of have a problem with that,” Alec adds, tilting his head to look up. There are windows set high in the wall above the sleeping loft, letting in the clear morning light. One of them is obscured slightly, like—

“Look, man, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Oh, save it,” Magnus says impatiently. “You’re not that stupid. You didn’t care as long as there was money on the table. Who’s your client?”

“If I tell you, he’s gonna—”

“Kill you?” Magnus finishes. His voice is pleasant. Conversational. “What exactly do you think I’m going to do to you if you don’t?”

The guy glances up toward the loft and then deflates all at once, shoulders slumping. He scrubs a hand through his hair, scratches at one of his horns, then says, “Okay, okay, fine.”

“Who—” Magnus starts, and Alec sees the shadow that was obscuring the window up above move suddenly. Red magic crackles through the air, and Alec is lifting his bow, drawing and firing in a single smooth motion before his brain has time to catch up with the movement of his body. Before either of the warlocks have time to move.

The bolt of magic that was aimed for Magnus’s face fizzles in the air, then dissipates. From above, there’s the heavy sound of a body collapsing to the floor. Alec’s fingers are still stinging from his bowstring, and Magnus is staring at him, eyes wide and startled.

Alec clears his throat and says, awkwardly, “You okay?”

“Fine,” Magnus breathes. “Thank you.”

On the couch, the warlock says, “Look, in my defense—”

Magnus rounds on him. “Anyone else lurking around your apartment that I ought to know about?”

“No,” the warlock says.

“You sure about that?” Alec asks.

“Yeah.” The man actually has the gall to sound affronted. If he’s bothered by the sudden death of his fellow warlock, it doesn’t show. If anything, he looks annoyed. “Look, you guys barged into my place while I was in the middle of a business deal, so don’t act like—”

“Oh, is that what we’re calling this?” Magnus asks. His tone is edged with hilarity, but that does nothing to diminish the threat in it. “A business deal. And the name of your late business partner who just tried to blast me through a wall?”

“Gray, okay? Phineas Gray, and I swear, I didn’t know anything about an assassination, he was just offloading some adamas on me—”

The name means nothing to Alec, but Magnus grimaces. “Of course it was Phineas. I should have expected that. That brings us to our second question, though. Where is the adamas? For your sake, I hope you still have it.”

“There, it’s right there, over on the table,” Emmanuel says hastily, gesturing toward the kitchen. The table is piled high with what appears to be a random assortment of spell ingredients and garbage, but after a second, Alec sees what he was pointing at: there’s a small misshapen lump of gleaming black metal lying on a piece of cloth on one corner.

“Alexander,” Magnus says softly. “If you would—?”

“What?” Alec says, and then, “oh. Yeah, I got it.”

Because of course Magnus can’t touch it any more easily than any other warlock. Somehow, Alec managed to forget that for a moment. He crosses the room and scoops it up, the lumpy metal smooth and unnaturally cool to the touch. A sharp jab of pain runs up his arm, then subsides almost before he has time to wince.

“Everything okay?” Magnus asks from behind him.

“Yeah,” Alec says, shoving the adamas into his pocket, the one not holding his wedding ring. It sits unnaturally heavy, denser than it should be, like the weight of it could pin him where he stands.

On the couch, Emmanuel shifts, twisting restlessly against his bonds, sweating and anxious. “Uh. What are you going to do with me?”

Magnus surveys him for a long moment with the expression of a man looking at something unpleasant that he just scraped off his shoe, then says, “Nothing. Fortunately for you, I have more pressing matters that demand my attention. I’m transporting you to the Spiral Labyrinth; you’re Lorenzo’s problem now.” He lifts his hands, magic coalescing around them. “I suggest you hold still.”

The blond warlock squinches his face like he’s about the be sprayed by a firehose. A portal opens up behind him, and Magnus sends him through it with a sharp flick of his fingers.

After it snaps shut, Magnus stands still for a moment, staring at the place where it was. Alec hesitates, considers saying—something—and then shakes his head and goes to retrieve his arrow.

The dead warlock is sprawled out on the floor, which is blackened beneath him from the interrupted blast of magic. There’s an expression of faint shock on his face. Alec grimaces, stoops to pull his arrow loose. He closes the man’s staring eyes as Magnus climbs up into the loft behind him. “You know him?”

“Not well,” Magnus says. His voice is unreadable. “He’s—he was—an outspoken separatist and he… disapproved of the direction that the local warlock community was taking.”

“What’s a separatist doing allying himself with a shadowhunter in the first place?”

“If the goal was to disrupt the revisions to the Accords, he might have held his nose and done it.” Magnus wrinkles his own nose as he looks down at the corpse. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to ask him now.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that,” Alec says. “Would have been nice to get the name of his partner, anyway.”

“We’ll just have to trust your parabatai to handle that,” Magnus says, and there’s a faint flicker of a smile on his face, finally. “Well. Shall we?”

“Yeah,” Alec says finally. There’s clearly nothing more for them to do here. “Let’s go.”

*

Jace calls him as they’re stepping out of the lobby, and when Alec picks up he says, without preamble, “Hey, is Magnus with you?”

Alec glances over at Magnus, who is stepping into the sunlight behind him, making no pretense that he isn’t listening. “Yeah. He’s here.”

“Good. You guys need to get to the Institute ASAP. I’m pretty sure we found our mole.”

*

He finds Jace and Izzy in the ops room, the both of them leaning over the display table. Through the bond, Jace is humming with a barely controlled tension, bright quick focus over a deep well of anger as he says, “—take it back five minutes. There. See? You can see him plant it.” He looks up when Alec and Magnus come in. “Sean Rothburne.”

Alec blinks. “What?”

“Sean Rothburne was the mole. He planted something on you—” Jace breaks off, glances between him and Magnus. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah?” Alec says, as Magnus slips past him to approach the table. “Do I not seem okay?”

“You’re wired,” Jace says. “What were you doing? I thought you and Magnus were—”

“Magnus tracked the warlock involved. We retrieved the missing adamas. Which,” Alec adds, with a glance at Izzy, “we should probably notify the Citadel about. They’re going to want it back.”

She nods shortly. “The courier already dropped off the other piece, but I’ll call them back. Did you find the warlock?”

“Yeah. He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He tried to blast Magnus; I shot him,” Alec explains succinctly. “You said Sean Rothburne was involved? How sure are you?”

“Pretty damn sure,” Jace says. “We didn’t find the patrol schedules, but I talked to the Head of Security—Underhill—and he said that you were scheduled to be out on patrol with Rothburne the night he was killed. There was a last-minute Council meeting, and Mendoza ended up taking your place.”

“And you think we can trust Underhill.”

“We can trust him,” Jace says firmly. “Anyway, it’s not just that. We looked into connections between local shadowhunters here and the Iron Sisters like you asked—”

“And you found one?”

“Sister Cliona,” Izzy interjects, pulling up a photo of a stern-faced blond woman dressed in gray, hair pulled back from her face in a severe knot. “Formerly known as Cliona Rothburne. It turns out that she’s been keeping up quite the correspondence with her baby brother. They found some of the letters in her quarters.”

“Yeah,” Jace says, pulling up a video on the screen. The date stamp marks it as June 10. “And there’s this.”

“That’s the day the first patrol disappeared,” Magnus murmurs, stepping up beside Alec. Close enough that Alec can smell him, his sandalwood soap and expensive cologne and whatever it is he uses to make his hair do that. Part of him wants to put some space between them; the other part wants to shift closer, to let his body settle against Magnus’s. He does neither.

The video on the screen is grainy black and white, but it has a clear angle of the hallway outside the ops room. It’s with an odd pang that Alec watches himself—himself from a week ago—striding out of the room, dressed for the field in cargo pants and a jacket that’s reinforced across the shoulders. The same one he and Magnus found in the warehouse; he’s almost sure of it. He must have put it right back on when they went out the next night without ever checking the pocket.

He’s looking at something on his phone, and even in the grainy security footage there’s something unfamiliar about his own face. Something softer, more relaxed, and when a few young shadowhunters walk up to speak to him, the smile doesn’t completely fade from his face.

“Sean Rothburne,” Jace says quietly. “The blond one. And—here.”

Izzy pauses the video, then zooms it in, and now Alec can see it: the blond shadowhunter’s hand slipping into his pocket while he’s distracted talking to one of the others. Beside him, Magnus has gone tense and still. His voice is very even when he says, “That was definitely the adamas we found. Exactly how sure are we that he’s really dead?”

“Pretty sure,” Jace says. “He was expecting to be on patrol with Alec, must have set it up with the warlock—”

“Phineas Gray.” Magnus says. His fingers are drumming on the tabletop, his voice still very steady. “Also deceased.”

“Right,” Jace says. “So we know they were in communication, but it looks like something went wrong. When Alec didn’t end up on patrol with him, he sent out a fire message; that’s on camera too. We’re assuming it was to the warlock—Gray—letting him know to cancel the summoning, but it looks like Gray never got it.”

“Or he did get it and decided to throw his co-conspirator under the bus, so to speak,” Magnus says. “Which knowing him is a lot more likely. With Rothburne dead, there’d be no one to point the finger at him. If he hadn’t been careless about retrieving the adamas, it would have taken me days to track him down. Plenty of time to cover his tracks.” He shrugs tightly. “Or run, which would have been smarter.”

Alec scrubs a hand through his hair, still staring at the image of himself on the screen. “So two out of the three people involved in this are already dead, basically.”

“Lucky for them,” Jace growls. “Adrian Mendoza was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to go out like that.”

Izzy clears her throat. “Anyway. Clary is interviewing the rest of the shadowhunters who were on-duty that night. Sister Cliona was confined to her quarters as soon as they realized that she was behind the missing adamas—”

“Which I have,” Alec adds, patting his pocket. “I’ll send a message to the Citadel. I’m sure they’ll want it back.”

“I should go pay Lorenzo a visit,” Magnus says reluctantly. “He’s not going to be particularly happy about getting dragged into this. Not that I care, but in the interest of maintaining a pleasant relationship between everyone involved—”

“Yeah,” Alec sighs. “Also, I should probably tell Councilor Rothburne about all this before she finds out from someone else.”

“And I should definitely be elsewhere for that conversation,” Magnus agrees with a slightly dramatic shudder that doesn’t look entirely feigned. “That woman wanted my head on a pike even before all of this went down. I’ll portal back over as soon as Lorenzo is done giving me an earful. Good luck.”

His fingers brush Alec’s elbow, and he sways closer, and it’s only when he stops himself with a sudden jerk and takes a quick step back that Alec realizes he’d been about to kiss him. LIke that’s the kind of thing they do, casually, in the middle of the ops room with half a dozen people around. Comfortable kisses hello and goodbye, and Alec has a sudden strong impulse to reach out and catch Magnus’s arm, to reel him back in and—

He clears his throat. His voice comes out slightly strangled when he speaks. “Sounds good. See you later.”

“See you.” Magnus isn’t quite looking at him, doesn’t quite look at him as he lifts his hands to pull a portal into being and step through it.

The silence in his wake is more than a little awkward, but fortunately Jace steps forward before it can stretch out for too long. “Well, you want to go get this over with?”

“Yeah,” Alec says, and it probably says something about him that the prospect of telling a hostile politician that her beloved nephew died in the process of botching an assassination is actually a relief. “Yeah, we probably should.”

*

Councilor Rothburne listens stone-faced the whole time that Alec is speaking, arms crossed and fingers twitching slightly like she’s itching for a weapon. It’s only when he stops talking that she says, “So, you’re saying that he’s responsible for this. That he got himself and his partner killed in the process of trying to murder you. That not only was he a traitor, but he was an incompetent one.”

Alec grimaces. Tact isn’t really his strong suit, but even he knows better than to phrase it like that to a grieving family member, even an awful one. But she’s not wrong. “Yes.”

“And he’s dead, so he can’t contradict anything you say.” Her jaw is set so tightly that he can see muscle knotting, can almost believe he can hear her teeth grinding. “How very convenient for you.”

“Ma’am,” Alec says, as gently as he can manage. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jace glaring, arms folded, but—uncharacteristically—he doesn’t snap at her. Or maybe it’s not uncharacteristic these days. Maybe Jace has actually developed some self-control in the past three years; it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that he’s woken up to. “None of this is convenient for us. And we will be investigating further—”

“Don’t bother,” she spits. “You’ve done enough.”

“That isn’t your call to make,” Alec tells her. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure.” She stares up at him with cold, glittering eyes. “I don’t believe for a moment that my nephew was involved in this plot, whatever ‘evidence’ you think you have. But whoever was—I wish they’d succeeded. At least then Sean’s death wouldn’t have been in vain.”

There’s a surge of fury through the bond, but Jace doesn’t even twitch; his expression doesn’t change. Alec just feels tired. “Well, I’m sorry about that. Sister Cliona has been confined to her quarters at the Citadel and the Inquisitor is sending a team to pick her up for interrogation.”

“Of course. And I’m sure that will be as unbiased as this farce of an investigation was.”

“You’re welcome to attend the proceedings,” Alec says neutrally. “As a member of the Council, you have that right.”

“I don’t need you to inform me of my rights, Mr. Lightwood.” Her mouth twists on his name, as though it tastes bitter in her mouth. “Fine. And I understand you’ve devised a way to destroy the creature?”

Alec glances at Izzy, who steps forward smoothly. “We’re working on it.”

“I expect to be notified when it’s ready,” Councilor Rothburne says shortly, before turning back to Alec. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to send a fire message to the rest of my family in Idris. To prepare them.”

She turns on her heel and stalks out of the room, leaving echoing silence in her wake.

“Well,” Jace says finally, with a lightness that belies the tension still thrumming through their bond. “That went better than I expected.”

Alec snorts. “What were you expecting?”

“That she’d deck you, honestly,” Jace says, and claps him on the shoulder. “Hey. Izzy said you went to the loft last night.”

“What, are you guys spying on me?” Alec twitches away from Jace’s hand, feels adrenaline thrum beneath his skin. Jace just gives him a look. “Yeah. So?”

“Nothing, just—I’m glad you and Magnus are talking.”

“We both are,” Izzy interjects.

Alec shakes his head. “Look, it doesn’t—I talked to Magnus’s friend. Catarina. She’s working on getting my memories back, and then you guys can have—then things will get back to normal. Until then, let’s just focus on dealing with this mess.”

“Alec,” Izzy starts.

Mercifully, Alec’s phone chooses that moment to start ringing. Magnus’s name flashes on the screen, and he turns away to answer. Not like Izzy and Jace aren’t still listening, but at least that way he doesn’t have to see them watching him and exchanging thoughtful looks. “Yeah?”

“Alexander,” Magnus says, voice warm. “I just wanted to let you know that Lorenzo has agreed to handle things on behalf of the warlocks.”

“Okay,” Alec says. He clears his throat. “That’s good news.”

“Yes. I’m on my way back to the Institute now. Would you—” Magnus hesitates, so briefly that Alec isn’t sure that he’s not imagining it, then says, “Would you care to meet me for lunch?”

Something warm coils in Alec’s stomach. He takes a breath, and then, before he can let himself think about it too much, says, “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”

*

They end up in the commissary, which is thankfully relatively empty this time of day. A few shadowhunters are carrying trays or eating at the long tables, but it’s too early for the lunch rush. Magnus’s dapper finery makes him look as out of place as a peacock among pigeons, but nobody gives him a second glance. Nobody seems to find it at all odd for a warlock to be loading up his tray in the middle of the New York Institute commissary, like this is a perfectly ordinary sight.

“I deserve a medal for suffering through Institute food after that exceedingly unpleasant conversation I just had with Lorenzo,” Magnus remarks as they sit down at an empty table near the windows. The light is coming in golden, catching in the faint streaks of color in his hair and outlining his handsome profile in a soft glow. He winks at Alec. “Although the company couldn’t be better.”

Alec takes a bite of his sandwich, which tastes perfectly fine to him. “What’s wrong with Institute food?”

“Darling, if I had to list out all of the things wrong with what passes for cuisine among shadowhunters, we’d be here all day.” Magnus is smiling at him, though, as he peels an orange with a delicate curl of magic.

Alec swallows again. The endearment makes something warm flutter in the pit of his stomach; Magnus doesn’t even seem to have noticed that he said it. “I like it fine.”

“That’s because you’re a glutton for punishment,” Magnus says lightly. The orange peel falls in a perfect coil, and he begins pulling apart sections with his fingers. “Well. Lorenzo is, as expected, less than pleased to have a dead assassin and a live smuggler dumped in his lap, but he has—reluctantly—agreed to handle his end of it.”

“That’s good,” Alec says. “So you’re not in trouble with him?”

Magnus scoffs. “Hardly. Besides, he’s angling for a seat on the Council once they open it up to Downworlders, and he’s more than a little incensed that one of his warlocks was trying to interfere with that dream. How did it go with the Councilor?”

“Well,” Alec says, recalling Jace’s words. “She didn’t punch me. Although I think she wanted to.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yeah.” Alec hesitates. He looks up at Magnus, then back down at his plate. Fiddles with a carrot stick, tapping it against the porcelain, then says, abruptly, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Magnus says immediately, and it’s probably Alec’s imagination that he sounds slightly wary.

“How did we…” he trails off, gestures vaguely at the space between them.

“Meet?” Magnus finishes. “Or how did we get together?”

“I don’t know,” Alec says. It’s the second thing that seems the most impossible, but he’s curious about the first. That’s the pivot point of all of this. Alec’s life has turned into an alien landscape in the past three years, and Alec himself has become someone he doesn’t recognize, and Magnus is the key to all of that. Somehow. And maybe it doesn’t really matter; he’ll be getting his memories back sooner or later and becoming the Alec that he’s supposed to be, but he wants to know. “Either? Both?”

“The epic story of our grand romance, then,” Magnus says, but he’s smiling a little.

“Very funny.”

“I’m being entirely serious.”

“Right,” Alec says dryly. “Okay. Tell me.”

“Well. We met in the middle of a fight, when you dashingly saved my life. I said something clever and witty, you blushed a great deal, I was charmed.” Magnus pauses. “Okay, actually, I made a terrible pun. But you were very charming. In a…” he waves one hand, “...serious, repressed, slightly disapproving sort of way, but still. I flirted outrageously for weeks. You pretended not to notice.” He tips a teasing kind of smile in Alec’s direction. “Not very convincingly.”

Alec swallows and looks away, and Magnus laughs. “Just like that. And then things got… complicated with your parents, and the Circle—” he breaks off abruptly. “How much did Jace and Isabelle tell you?”

“You mean that my parents were in the Circle? Izzy told me,” Alec says, abruptly much less amused. There’s still a white-hot needle of anger in his chest whenever he thinks about it, so he’s been trying not to. His future self has forgiven his parents—must have; Izzy insisted that things between them are better now than they’ve been since they were kids, maybe better than ever—but for Alec, right now, the betrayal is still fresh enough to sting. He hasn’t spoken to his mother yet. He’s not sure he’s going to.

“Well.” Magnus doesn’t remark on his tone. “You decided that the best thing to do to restore the family honor would be to make a marriage alliance with a nice, politically connected shadowhunter girl.”

Alec considers that. Magnus’s voice has a cautious quality to it, but it isn’t exactly surprising news. It sounds, honestly, exactly like something he would do. “Who?”

“What?”

“Who was I going to marry?”

“Ah,” Magnus says. “Lydia Branwell.”

Alec nods. He knows the family. Doesn’t remember Lydia herself, but that wouldn’t really matter much in a situation like that. It’s smart. It would have been a good alliance. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Magnus asks. He looks almost amused.

“Yeah, okay,” Alec says, and finds that he’s smiling, just a little. “I mean. Obviously that didn’t work out.”

Magnus laughs, sounding startled. It’s an unexpectedly lovely sound. “Not so much, no.”

“So what happened?”

“I crashed your wedding at the last minute. Dressed to the nines and expecting to get my heart very publicly broken, if you want the truth. And instead, you—” Magnus breaks off, shakes his head. A small, sweet, disbelieving kind of smile slips onto his face. There’s something private about it, Alec thinks with a pang. Because of course there is. The Alec he’s talking about is someone else—a version of himself that Alec can’t remember and can hardly believe existed.

“What?” he says softly, when the silence stretches on. “What did I do?”

“You walked back down the aisle, grabbed me by the lapels, and kissed me in front of your fiancée, your parents, and half the Clave.” There’s a sudden spark of mischief in his smile. “Thoroughly, I might add.”

Alec stares at him. Opens his mouth, then shuts it again. “There is no way that actually happened,” he says finally.

“Feel free to ask Isabelle or Jace. Or Clary, for that matter. They were all right there.” Magnus cocks his head. “I admit I was… surprised. The best I really hoped for was to throw a spanner in the works, so to speak. Speak to you in private before you did something irrevocable. But you always did like to make a statement.”

He says it easily, lightly, like this is just a known fact of the universe, and something in Alec stutters to be so effortlessly seen.

He takes a slow breath, but before he can say—anything, any of the things that he’s thinking, the lights flicker overhead, flare suddenly, and then go out. “What the…”

“Power outage?” Magnus asks, but he sounds concerned.

“The Institute has its own generators.” The other shadowhunters are standing up, a low murmur of conversation spreading through the room. Alec sets his sandwich down, starts to stand as well, and then pain slams through his body in a sudden burning rush, leaving him breathless. He staggers, gasping, barks his knee hard against the leg of his chair and nearly goes down. Would go down, if Magnus wasn’t right there all of a sudden, strong hands catching him, steadying him. Alec sways against the sturdy column of his body, too far gone to even feel embarrassed about it. He can’t speak, can’t breathe, and it takes him a moment to realize that Magnus is saying his name in a soft, frantic voice.

“—ander. Alexander!”

“I’m.” He swallows. There’s blood in his mouth; he must have bitten his tongue. His whole body is still surging with pain, but his arm is the worst, a numb, stinging agony centered around the marks left by the soul-eater. He tries to make a fist and can’t; the entire limb is hanging like lead, thick and useless. “I’m okay. I’m—”

“What is it?” Magnus says. His hand still gripping Alec’s arm, his eyes wide and worried in the dimness of the room.

Before Alec can answer, the emergency lighting flickers on, bathing the room in an eerie reddish glow. A klaxon sounds.

“Containment breach,” Alec breathes, realization breaking over him like a wave of ice water. “The soul-eater. It’s loose.”

Chapter Text

The ops room is in a state of barely controlled chaos when they get there, and Alec has never been so grateful for the strict training that every shadowhunter undergoes. Every face he can see is grim, but they’re all moving with purpose, and there’s no sign of panic. He catches the arm of a blond man who’s barking orders and says, “We need to evacuate all nonessential personnel.”

“Already on it,” the man says, with a brief smile. “Good to see you on your feet, Alec. Wish the circumstances were better.”

“Underhill?” Alec guesses.

“That’s me.” The man nods to Magnus as he comes up beside Alec. “Mr. Bane.”

“Andrew,” Magnus acknowledges, somewhat coolly. “What happened?”

“Soul-eater’s out of containment.” Jace arrives at a jog, seraph blade in hand, Izzy and Clary on his heels and similarly armed. “The lower levels have been evacuated.”

“Any casualties?” Alec asks.

“Probably,” Jace says, “but we don’t know for sure yet. The thing I’m worried about is, how the hell did it get out? Even if the wards failed, there are eight inches of Chemcor surrounding the containment room. I mean, they use that stuff on the Space Station. There’s no way it could have—”

“Physical walls won’t contain it, at least not for long,” Magnus interrupts. “It’s not fully corporeal.”

“It was corporeal enough to grab Alec,” Clary points out. She’s yanking her red hair up into a ponytail, seraph blade at her hip and a strength rune burning on her arm. “I’m just saying.”

“It manifests physically when it’s feeding,” Magnus says. Alec starts to open his mouth, and he adds, “Even then, it’s mostly invulnerable to ordinary weapons. But the wards are what concern me. The other cage didn’t just fail; it was shattered by exposure to the adamas that Sean Rothburne planted on Alec. So the only way this one could have been breached now is if—”

“If someone brought another piece of adamas close enough to affect it,” Alec says slowly. His arm twinges again, and he flexes his fingers. He still can’t do much more than make a loose fist, but at least the pain is fading. Although he’d take that over this numb uselessness. “Izzy, that piece from the Citadel, where is it?”

“Locked up in the armory,” she says immediately. “Everybody with unrestricted access is here right now—”

“Actually,” Underhill interjects. “That’s not quite true.”

“What do you mean?” Alec asks.

The man looks at him, hesitates visibly, then says in a very neutral tone, “Members of the Council have the master codes for any Institute they’re visiting. It’s considered a matter of operational security.”

Alec stares at him, and then at Izzy and Jace, and sees the same realization taking shape there. Beside him, Magnus has gone entirely tense. “You don’t think…”

“She wanted to know how to kill it,” Izzy says. “Rothburne, I mean. I know she’s been interrogating people. Informally, but still. If someone told her we had the adamas, or what it was for…”

“Question is,” Jace says, “was she actually trying to kill it, or was she trying to let it out?”

“It doesn’t matter right now,” Alec says firmly. He steps closer to the table. “Either way, it’s out. Priority is containing it before anybody else gets hurt, or before it makes it out of the building. Do we know where it is right now?”

Underhill shakes his head. “Camera feeds went down along with the power.”

“But I can probably rig something up,” Izzy adds, stepping up to the table. “We’re still connected to the emergency power, so just…” her voice trails off as she leans over the display, brow furrowing. “Give me a second.”

As she works, Magnus steps closer, rests a hand on Alec’s shoulder and murmurs, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Alec says, and when Magnus gives him a mildly incredulous look, he adds, “my arm hurts, all right? But I’m okay. And we need all hands on deck for this.”

Magnus hesitates visibly, then says, “I’m concerned about your connection to the soul-eater.”

“Yeah, me too,” Jace says, and when Alec gives him a look, he adds, “what, was this supposed to be a private conversation? We’re parabatai, you dumbass. I know something’s wrong. It’s your arm, right? Where it grabbed you?”

“It’s fine,” Alec repeats, a little more sharply.

Magnus and Jace exchange a glance, and then Jace, the traitor, says, “He still can’t feel his fingers.”

“It’s better,” Alec snaps. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s not even really my main concern,” Magnus says, and his hand is still on Alec’s shoulder, his thumb making absent little circles. It’s the kind of thing that Alec would normally twitch away from, but he find himself relaxing into it without even thinking about it. “It’s a concern, to be clear. But Cat said that there was still a connection open, and how you responded when it broke loose seems to confirm that. I’m worried that it might be drawn to you.”

“I’ve still got a kilo of adamas in my pocket,” Alec points out. “If it’s drawn to me, it won’t be because of some mystical connection.” He pauses. “Actually, maybe we can use that.”

Magnus gives him a look. “I’m almost entirely certain I’m going to hate this plan.”

“Probably,” Alec admits. Jace and Izzy aren’t going to be happy about it either. “Izzy, do you have anything yet?”

“Give me just a minute—yeah. Yeah, I got it.”

They all crowd around the table as the screens begin to play. There are half a dozen of them running concurrently, a baffling sensory overload of input, a random scatter of moving shapes. Alec blinks and forces himself to focus. There’s one hallway that he recognizes, outside the containment cells. Another camera next to it seems to be malfunctioning for a second, and then he realizes that it’s not: it’s focused on the cell, and the shifting blackness it contains, something so dark that it’s like reality has been pared away, as if the void is cracking open inside that little room. Magnus is right: it doesn’t look like something that’s alive at all. It doesn’t even look like a thing. It just looks like darkness.

For a moment, the only thing he can feel is a numb kind of incredulity that they actually thought they could contain this thing at all. The hubris of it is staggering. Then his attention is caught by movement on one of the other cameras. A tall blond figure in a severe business suit striding down the hallway with barely a pause for the two guards.

“Shit,” Jace breathes, as she pauses by the elevator and punches in the code unerringly. There’s something clutched in one fist.

“When was this?” Alec asks.

Izzy peers down at the screen. “Eight minutes ago. Give or take.”

“Okay. How fast can that thing move?”

“Going by what it did to you at the warehouse,” Jace says, and there’s a shiver of something unpleasant through their bond, “really fucking fast.”

“It’s fast when it’s feeding,” Magnus murmurs, drawing closer to the table. His shoulder bumps up against Alec’s, but he doesn’t pull away and Alec doesn’t either. “But it’s not necessarily going to—there.”

A moment later, Alec sees it too. The first monitor, the one focused on the cell, fritzes briefly, and then the darkness inside it expands, long tendrils licking at the glowing lines of the cage containing it. The Councilor moves into view, one hand lifting to hold up the lump of metal. It’s a smaller piece than the one in Alec’s pocket, half-hidden within her fist.

For a moment, the soul-eater seems to shrink, tendrils of blackness withdrawing, caving in on itself, and the expression on Rothburne’s face is a hard, fierce kind of triumph. She takes another step closer, holding the piece of adamas high. There’s a flicker of light, and then another, and then a rush of them. Blackness licks up around them as if trying to drag them back.

“It was starting to work,” Izzy murmurs, and Clary makes a soft noise of assent. “If she’d had more of it, maybe—”

“The cage,” Alec says. It’s beginning to glow, brightening enough that it starts to obscure everything else about the image, and the grainy figure of Councilor Rothburne begins to step back, then turns on her heel and starts away. Her steps quicken, become a jog, then an outright sprint that’s actually kind of impressive for a middle-aged woman in three-inch heels.

Not that it matters. The edges of the image are bathed in whiteness for an instant, and then it all goes dark.

“Is it—” Alec starts, then pauses. The camera is still running. Gray lines crawl across the screen, expand, the image becoming visible again.

“Oh my god,” Clary breathes from the other side of the table. Her hand flexes on her seraph blade; her face is so pale that her freckles stand out like flecks of ink.

On the screen, a crackling blackness shifts and flickers. It looks like a flaw in the image, like a sunspot, maybe, but it isn’t. Threads of darkness crawl up the walls, slither over the floor, then withdraw. There’s no sign of the Councilor.

“It doesn’t leave a body behind,” Magnus murmurs. Alec glances over at him; his face is calm and set.

“She’s dead, then.” He doesn’t honestly know how to feel about that. It’s not a death he’d wish on anyone, but he can’t bring himself to grieve her overmuch, especially after she released a fucking monster into his Institute. What’s more concerning is the fact that if it doesn’t leave a body behind the only way they’re going to know how many casualties they have is to do a head count and look for the missing.

That nightmarish duty will have to wait until they have the thing contained, though.

“Magnus,” he says. “Do you know how close it has to be to sense the adamas?”

“Not for sure, but I’d guess fairly close. It didn’t react at the warehouse until we were almost on top of it.”

“But we had a cage then.”

“It’s a complicating factor,” Magnus admits. “We need to call Catarina. She’s the expert.”

“Do it,” Alec says, and Magnus nods shortly. He conjures up a slip of paper for a fire message and starts scribbling without any protest at Alec's tone. “But we can’t wait for her to get here. Can we try that cage again? The one we used before?”

“No,” Magnus says, sending the message up in a flare of sparks. “Or at least, not quickly. We’re missing one of the principals, and even if Simon was here, there’s too much initial preparation before the spell could be set. We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Okay.” Alec presses his lips together, considering. Flexes his fingers, and winces at the stinging numbness of his left hand, the ache that shudders up his entire limb, culminating in a ball of agony at the shoulder joint. Pain is just a distraction. Focus. “Okay. You contained it before, at the warehouse.”

“Briefly. Just long enough to portal it to the containment cell.”

“Could you do it again? If we could get it back in the cell, would the existing wards hold it?”

“Probably,” Magnus says slowly. “The trouble is going to be catching it off-guard. We managed it before because it was resting, but it’s alert now.”

“Yeah, I had a thought about that, actually,” Alec says, and pulls the piece of adamas out of his pocket. It gleams coldly in the dim emergency lighting, drawing every eye in the room. “We can use this as bait.”

After a moment, Izzy says, “Magnus is right. I hate this plan.”

“Thanks a lot,” Alec says dryly. “Look. The adamas weakened it before. We know it’ll draw it. If we can keep it in one place while it’s being drained—”

“It may hold it long enough for me to get it back into containment,” Magnus finishes, sounding reluctant.

“Exactly. Izzy, where is it now?”

“Looks like it’s still outside the cells,” she reports, after a glance at the screen. “It’s not moving much.”

“No, it won’t, not unless it senses prey nearby,” Magnus says, and winces. “Not until it gets hungry again.”

“So we’d better move fast, then,” Alec says. “Jace, you’re sure the lower levels are totally evacuated?”

“Yeah. They’re clear.” Jace grimaces. “Or there’s nobody left alive down there, anyway.”

Right. He’s trying not to think about that at the moment. “Okay. Underhill, evacuate everybody else. Essential personnel as well. You’re going to be meeting Catarina Loss outside the premises. Jace—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jace says, flatly stubborn.

“None of us are,” Clary adds.

“You need to. If this doesn’t work, you’re going to have to use that cage again. Call Simon—”

“What about you?” Izzy interrupts.

“I’m going with Magnus.”

“You most certainly are not,” Magnus says firmly.

“Yeah, no, I’m with Magnus on this one,” Jace adds. “That’s a really bad plan.”

“Besides, we need you two for the cage to work,” Clary says.

“No, you need a third couple,” Alec corrects. He’s not even sure it’ll work with him and Magnus right now. Three couples bound together by love and magic— he has no idea what to call the confusing maelstrom of emotions that Magnus evokes in him, and the version of Alec that Magnus loves is someone he hasn’t yet become. “That’s the backup plan, anyway. Unless Catarina comes up with something better, in which case do what she tells you.”

“I could…” Underhill hesitates, then offers, “If you need a third, I could send a note to Lorenzo?”

Magnus makes a noise halfway between a snort and a cough. “You really think he’d come?”

“If I asked him he would.”

“That’s probably true,” Magnus sighs, and looks up at Alec. “Alexander—”

“We don’t have time to argue about this,” Alec says firmly, dropping the adamas back in his pocket. “You can’t touch adamas with your bare hands. You need one of us to handle it and you should probably have back-up anyway, I’m volunteering, end of story. Besides,” he adds, pulling out what he’s pretty sure is his trump card. “You said it might be drawn to me anyway, and we really don’t want that to happen while I’m outside the Institute.”

Magnus’s eyes narrow at that. “I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?”

“No. And you’d be wasting time by trying.”

Magnus stares at him for another moment, then nods shortly and looks away. Alec clears his throat. "Okay. Everybody else clear the building.”

“I’ll stay here to monitor the feed,” Izzy says, and when Alec starts to open his mouth, she adds, “like you said, we don’t have time to argue about it. You need eyes in the sky. I’ll keep an eye on it and warn you if it moves. Magnus, can you set a relay charm?”

“You children are going to be the death of me,” Magnus sighs, but he lifts his hands, a sheen of blue magic settling over them.

Alec’s ears pop uncomfortably as it sets, then dissipates. He flexes his jaw, fixes Izzy with a glare, then says, “Fine. Everybody other than Isabelle, out. Izzy, if anything goes wrong, you get out too as fast as you can.”

She gives him a long, cool look that tells him that she has no intention of doing anything like that, but all she says is, “Don’t let anything go wrong.”

*

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had, for the record,” Magnus says as they make their way down toward the lower levels, the hallways dim and eerie in the emergency lighting, emptier than Alec has ever seen them.

Alec shrugs, although that stings a little. “You agreed to it.”

Magnus snorts expressively, and then his voice turns serious. “After you set out the adamas, I want you to get out and leave it to me.”

“Not happening.”

“It’s immune to corporeal weapons.” Magnus sounds frustrated, although not particularly surprised. “There’s nothing you can actually do.”

“I can distract it.”

“I take back what I just said,” Magnus says, after a moment. “That is the worst idea you’ve ever had. Please don’t.”

Alec shrugs. He’s not going to argue about it. They pass the silent banks of elevators, their footsteps loud on the tile floors, and Magnus opens the door to the stairwell with a flick of blue magic. The air is stuffy inside, thick and hot, the paint on the railing chipping and uneven under Alec’s palm as he takes the stairs down two at a time. Magnus keeps up with him easily, and as they reach the lower level he taps his ear to activate the relay charm and murmurs, “Izzy, do you have eyes on it?”

“Yeah,” comes her immediate reply. “It retreated back toward the cells. It’s not moving at the moment.”

Alec glances at Magnus. “How close does it have to be to sense the adamas?”

“I told you,” Magnus says tightly. “I’m not entirely sure.”

“How close were we at the warehouse?”

Magnus shrugs, a quick tense roll of his shoulders. “Five yards? But there was a cage interfering that time. This might be close enough.”

“Or it might not.” Only one way to find out. He pushes the door open, steps out into the hallway. There’s a crackling electric feel to the air like a storm surge coming on, and the hair on his arms and the back of his neck lifts, prickling. The hallway is dim, the emergency lighting out. A fine gray powder is scattered across the floor, and it takes Alec a second to realize that this is what’s left of the Councilor. He shudders, tries to avoid it as he walks, but there’s really no way.

A few steps in, though, he pauses. There’s something on the floor by the wall, a dusty grayish lump that looks like burnt charcoal. At first, Alec thinks that it might actually be part of the Ellen Rothburne’s mortal remains, but when he stoops to prod at it gingerly with the point of his seraph blade, the shell of ashy powder crumbles, leaving behind a misshapen lump of dark metal the size of his thumb. It’s heavy in his palm when he picks it up.

“The adamas that Rothburne used,” he says, glancing up at Magnus. “Or what’s left of it.”

“Contact with the soul-eater must have destroyed the outer layers,” Magnus says slowly. “That may have been why it wasn’t completely consumed.”

“Did you know that could happen?”

“No. As I said, Cat is really the expert. But it is… interesting.” He sounds thoughtful, but says nothing more. “We should go.”

“Right,” Alec says. He pockets the adamas as he stands.

Over the relay charm, Izzy murmurs, “It’s starting to move. You guys need to set the bait now.”

“Do it,” Magnus says, and Alec fumbles briefly in his pocket, coming up with the larger lump of metal. It feels as heavy as a shot-put ball in his hand, and he hefts it for an instant, then heaves it as hard as he can toward the far end of the hallway. The air seems to crackle, wavering like a heat wave, and Magnus barks, “Get back, now!”

Alec jerks backward, instinctively obedient to the snap of command in his voice. There’s a rising grating shriek that makes him cringe and clap his hands over his ears uselessly, and then the doors at the end of the hall vanish into darkness.

It’s like looking into the void, if the void was moving, and hungry, and alive. Tendrils of blackness slither over the walls, across the floor, swallowing up all of the light around them. There’s a shape at the center of it that looks almost human; he can see shoulders, the outline of a head, the sharp impression of jagged teeth for just a moment before the darkness shifts and obscures it again. The shriek seems frozen in the air, an endless awful wail, and Alec has no idea how Magnus finds the strength to move, to step forward toward that horrible darkness when it’s all he can do to stay on his feet.

On the floor, the lump of adamas begins to glow. A sliver of pearlescent white flutters through the air, and then the monster is moving, a quick flickering darkness as if it’s being yanked forward. It surrounds the adamas, obscuring it from view, and a wave of pain crashes through Alec’s body, sending him to his knees with a breathless shout.

He blinks through the sudden glaze of tears in his eyes, sees Magnus pause, start to turn back toward him, and rasps, “Do it!”

Magnus’s jaw firms, his face pale, and then he turns his back on Alec and takes another step toward the monster, lifting his hands. The magic that leaves his body this time isn’t the flickers of blue that Alec has become accustomed to but heavy twisting ropes of white-hot power. They coil around the soul-eater like an expertly cast net, and the shriek takes on an entirely new pitch, so high and aching that Alec feels like the bones in his skull might shatter from it. His arm is burning like it’s been dipped in acid, agony threading through the rest of his body, like every cell of him is singing with pain. It’s all he can do to keep his eyes open.

There are more slips of white now, twisting up out of the writhing darkness to dissipate before they touch the ceiling. The soul-eater itself is shrinking slightly. Magnus seems frozen in place, a broad-shouldered shadow against the flaring light of the cage, every line of his body tight with tension as power pours out of his hands. Another coil of magic slips around the monster, and its flickering movements take on a frenetic edge, a desperate animal caught in a trap it can’t escape.

Gritting his teeth to breathe through the pain, Alec has just an instant to hope that this insane plan is going to work—

And then a tendril of darkness slips loose, licking out toward Magnus with impossible speed.

Alec finds himself on his feet with no conscious memory of moving, hurling his aching body forward. He crashes into Magnus’s shoulder, sending him stumbling, has just an instant to see his expression change from concentration to shock, and then fear, and then everything is agony and crackling blackness.

He might scream; he can’t tell. He might hear Magnus’s voice shouting his name in overlapping tones of horror and grief.

He might hear the discordant howls of a thousand strangers’ death agonies, and over it all that shrill inhuman shriek that goes on and on and on—

As suddenly as it began, it’s over.

He lands on the floor hard enough to bounce his head off of the tile. His body is icy cold, ringing with the echoes of that unspeakable agony. His chest aches, and it takes him several seconds to remember how to draw breath.

That first gasp burns in his chest like his lungs are made of molten glass, then he draws another, and another, and then hands as hot as brands are grabbing at his shoulders, hauling him up with near-inhuman strength. He opens his eyes, dazed, to see Magnus staring at him from inches away. His glamour has fallen and his eyes are glowing golden, luminous. His hands grasp at Alec’s face, and there’s something wild in his expression, and Alec realizes what’s about to happen an instant before Magnus closes the distance between them to kiss him hard on the mouth.

It’s fast and bruising, over almost as soon as it’s started, and then Magnus pulls back and hisses, “What were you thinking?”

“I couldn’t—” Alec’s voice is raspy, and he’s not actually sure he remembers how to form coherent words, let alone explain to Magnus that he hadn’t actually been thinking at all. It had been instinct. A reflex born of terror. “It was going to kill you. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“You could have died,” Magnus says. His fingers are trembling slightly. “You could have—I can’t lose you, do you understand me? Not like this.”

“I’m sorry,” Alec says blankly, only because it seems like the thing to say. Magnus breathes out an incredulous-sounding laugh and shifts away from him slightly, his hands dropping, and it’s only then that the reality of their situation starts to trickle in. The hallway is empty but for the two of them. There’s no sign of the monster, although there’s a faint lingering odor of ozone and rot in the air and the floor and walls are zigzagged with deep cracks. Alec is fetched up against one of them, and Magnus is practically kneeling in his lap.

And Magnus just kissed him.

Also, Izzy probably saw the whole thing on the security cameras.

He doesn’t feel prepared to deal with any of that except for the first part. “The soul-eater. Did you banish it? Is it secure?”

“Ah,” Magnus says, as if he’d actually forgotten for a moment. His hands flutter, and he shifts backward out of Alec’s space until they’re not touching anymore. Alec feels colder for the loss. “No, actually. I think you killed it.”

“What?”

“That second piece of adamas, the one that you had in your pocket.” Magnus nods at it, and Alec looks down. There’s a scorched hole in his jeans where the adamas was, and the exposed skin beneath is raw and blistered, coated in grayish dust. It hurts when he prods at it gingerly, but until that moment he hadn’t even noticed the sting. Magnus makes a gesture like he’s about to reach out, then stops and says, “I don’t know if it was the pull of two separate pieces, or if it was because it had already been weakened, but it—disintegrated, the moment it hit you.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “And then you collapsed. I thought you were dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Alec says again, more sincerely this time. There’s something awful about Magnus’s voice, something fragile and frightened, and it occurs to Alec that this is the second time in a single week that Magnus nearly watched him die. He doesn’t really know what to think about that—doesn’t really know what he is to Magnus right now other than an echo from the past wearing his husband’s face—but still. That can’t be easy.

“It’s okay,” Magnus says, and it’s an absolutely blatant, obvious lie, but before Alec can point that out, he makes an odd, abashed sort of face, and adds, “I’m sorry too. About the kiss. I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s fine,” Alec says. His ears feel suddenly hot. “I mean. I didn’t mind.”

It’s such an understatement that it feels almost like a lie. His mouth still feels warm and bruised, and he almost wants to pull Magnus back down, to try and kiss him slower, sweeter, without that edge of panic. He doesn’t do it, though. Magnus is already moving back, getting to his feet and reaching down to help Alec up with a solicitous hand. He wasn’t thinking when he kissed Alec anyway. He was upset, frantic; he forgot—

Alec pauses halfway to his feet, then straightens, bracing one palm on the cool wall to steady himself. Cold realization sinks like a stone to the pit of his stomach.

Magnus pauses too, his hand falling away. “What is it?”

He forgot.

If the soul-eater dies before the connection is broken...

Alec pushes up the sleeve of his t-shirt with fingers that feel suddenly clumsy. His arm isn’t a mass of numb agony anymore; there’s just the same lingering soreness that suffuses the rest of his body. The claw marks are still there, starkly pale against his tan, but the strange coolness from before has faded completely. The skin beneath his fingers feels warm and ordinary, and he takes a slow breath, aware of Magnus’s eyes on him. His heart is suddenly racing in a way that has nothing at all to do with the lingering adrenaline from the fight.

“Alexander?” Magnus is moving closer, lifting a hand as if he expects Alec to topple over again and is preparing to catch him. His eyes are still golden, his face soft and worried. “What is it?”

Alec lets his hand drop, his sleeve falling back down to cover the scars, and looks up at Magnus. He looks—he’s beautiful, even with the edges of distress still showing in his expression. He looks like everything Alec has never let himself imagine he could have. On some level, even now, with the memory of Magnus’s kiss still burning on his lips, he can’t quite believe that any version of him ever did.

“Alexander?” Magnus says again. “Is something wrong?”

Alec swallows, but when he speaks his voice comes out surprisingly even. “The connection wasn’t broken. We killed it—I killed it before the connection was broken.”

He can see the moment when Magnus gets it, the sudden stillness of his expression, the bob of his throat as he swallows. The flash of devastation that vanishes almost as soon as it’s there but still leaves Alec feeling winded, like he’s been punched in the stomach.

I’m sorry, he wants to say, again, but he doesn’t. How can he possibly apologize for something like this?

It’s a horrible moment that seems to stretch on for a lifetime, and then Magnus takes a breath, smiles at him with a visible effort, and says, “Well. You’re okay, and that’s the important thing.”

He spins slowly in place, looking at the destruction of the hallway, or possibly just avoiding Alec’s eyes. His hands twist together; he spins his wedding ring around once, twice, and then curls his fingers briefly before letting his hands fall. When he turns back to Alec, his glamour is back; his eyes are dark brown and there’s a smile on his face. “We should probably get back to the ops room, and Isabelle. The soul-eater may be dead, but this is far from over.”

“Yeah,” Alec manages, pushing away from the wall. He sways slightly on his feet but manages to steady himself before Magnus has to reach for him. His head is starting to pound, like the ache from the rest of his body has settled back into his temples. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

It’s only after Magnus has turned to start back the way they came that Alec lifts a hand, presses his fingers to his mouth for a moment where Magnus kissed him, and swallows hard against an incomprehensible grief.

*

Back in the ops room, Izzy hugs Alec, and then punches him hard in the shoulder; she doesn’t mention anything that happened between him and Magnus, but Alec can see in the curious, worried way her gaze flickers between the two of them that she saw everything.

It’s not a priority. And Izzy is a consummate professional when it really matters.

“I’ve been checking the feeds,” she says, as Alec scribbles a fire message to Jace, sending a pulse of reassurance to him through the bond and feeling him settle a little on the other end of it. “There’s no sign of the soul-eater. I couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but it pretty much vanished as soon as you pulled that stupid, suicidal stunt.”

Make that mostly professional. “Thanks, Iz,” Alec says, injecting a note of dryness into his voice. He’s rewarded by the faint tilt of her mouth, and it eases something in him. The part of him, maybe, that still can’t make himself meet Magnus’s eyes. It’s like the other day, that first day after he woke up, except that it’s so, so much worse.

He didn’t know the stakes then. He didn’t understand exactly what it was he was about to ruin for good.

“I really am so glad you’re okay,” she says, and it’s gentle. Her hand is warm when is curls briefly over his shoulder. “Can we call the others back, do you think? Is it safe?”

“Just essential personnel for now. We need to get a full roster of who was in the building and see if we have any more casualties.” He pauses, sending the fire message off, then adds, evenly, “Also, if she’s available we should get Catarina Loss in here to do an evaluation on exactly what happened with the soul-eater.”

“She is the expert,” Magnus agrees quietly. His hands flicker briefly, and then he adds, “And I need to go assess the wards. The ones on the containment rooms will need to be repaired, and I shudder to think of what that thing has done to the rest of my spellwork. If you’ll excuse me. I’ll—see you back here. When I’m finished.”

He hesitates for a moment, then leaves in a graceful swirl of coattails.

Izzy looks up at Alec, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t,” he says in a low voice. “Please, Izzy. Just don’t.”

He doesn’t know what it is that she can see in his face, but she softens, just a little. “Okay, big brother. I won’t.”

He reaches for a smile and manages to find half of one. “Thanks. Let’s get started on this.”

*

It ends up being nearly three hours later before he finally has a chance to sit down with Catarina in the office that he still can’t think of as his. She’s in street clothes now instead of scrubs, and there’s something a lot more guarded about her than there was this morning. Alec can’t tell if it’s just being here in the heart of the Institute, or if it’s something else entirely.

Something like the way that Magnus is hovering by the door like a pale, tense ghost. Alec thinks they’re both hoping that Catarina will come up with some kind of miracle that she somehow forgot to mention this morning, but he’s a realist at heart and he knows that isn’t going to happen. She’s going to tell him exactly what he already figured out: he’s ruined it. His memory isn’t coming back. He’s losing three years of memories with Izzy, with Jace, with Max and his parents and everyone else he’s met and loved in that time. The Institute is losing a leader who understands the current political situation and can navigate it competently. Magnus—

Magnus isn’t getting his husband back.

That’s not actually the only reason they’re meeting, though, and it’s not the main priority, as difficult as Alec is finding it to focus on anything else right now.

“As far as we can tell,” Catarina says steadily, with a brief glance at Magnus, “the creature is destroyed.”

“You’re sure,” Jace says from the door. He’s the only other person in the room; Izzy is off with Fray running a sweep of the building to make sure there aren’t any casualties besides the two guards on the containment room. They were both newer transfers, names that Alec didn’t recognize. It could have been a lot worse.

But those were still two shadowhunters under his command. Two people who were his responsibility, who are both dead because of him. Indirectly, but still. And there could be more. They won't know for sure for hours.

“There would be resonances if it was still here; that’s how Magnus was able to track it the first time. There’s nothing. So, yes, I’m sure,” Catarina is saying. It’s calm, but there’s an edge to her voice, and Alec gives Jace a warning look. He makes a face and subsides.

Magnus still hasn’t moved or spoken.

Alec clears his throat. “So it was the adamas, then? The second piece, I mean.”

“Probably.” She glances over at Magnus, then says, “The use of adamas in this way isn’t something that the Spiral Labyrinth has studied much, for obvious reasons. You’d probably get more information from the Iron Sisters.”

Of course. Downworlders can’t handle adamas safely, but even if they could, the chances of the Citadel releasing a sample to the Spiral Labyrinth are less than nil. Things have changed in the years that Alec is missing, but apparently not that much.

Idiots, he thinks, with a sudden savagery that startles him. He’s never considered himself much of a rule-breaker, but faced with this kind of destructive, hide-bound stupidity—he’s starting to see why his future self has developed a revolutionary streak.

Or he did. That Alec is gone for good now.

He clears his throat. “And the wards?”

At that, Magnus finally speaks. “They’re repaired.” He glances up, gives Alec a brief smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, then drops his gaze. His hands are twisting together. “Believe it or not, they’ve been through much worse.”

“Good,” Alec says. His mouth feels dry and there’s a hollowness in his chest when he looks back at Catarina and says, “There is one other thing. If you have the time.”

She looks up at him, and her face softens for the first time. “Your memories.”

By the door, Jace makes a soft sound but doesn’t speak. Magnus closes his eyes, a spasm of something Alec can’t read at all crossing his face. He looks away and focuses on Catarina, at her warm dark eyes and the beaded necklace she’s wearing over her blouse, a clumsy colorful thing that looks like it might have been made by a child.

You’re my daughter’s favorite babysitter, he remembers her saying lightly, that morning. At the time, he kind of assumed that she was joking. Now, though, he wonders if it might have been entirely honest. Warlocks can’t have children, but they care for their own. He’s never met a warlock child, but they have to exist.

He’s never met a warlock child as far as he can remember. Catarina’s daughter, whatever she was to Alec—that’s gone now.

“Yeah,” he says. “You said that if the soul-eater was killed before the connection was broken they wouldn’t come back. Right?”

“Right.” Catarina rises out of her chair and crosses over to where he’s sitting. She lifts a hand, a coil of magic slipping around her fingers. It casts an odd shadow, like there’s a sudden sea-blue undertone to her deep brown skin. “May I?”

“Yeah,” Alec says, rolling up his sleeve to expose the claw marks. He takes a deep breath as her warm hand settles over his skin.

It’s different now. He can feel it even before her magic seeps under his skin; the warmth of her hand feels ordinary. There’s no icy chill where the soul-eater’s claws dug into him and tore away his memories. There’s no twinge of pain. There’s nothing. It’s nothing more than an ordinary scar now, and as she pulls away he can see the answer on her face even before she speaks.

“They’re gone, aren’t they.” His voice comes out surprisingly even.

“Yes.” Catarina hesitates. “It’s… possible that they might return on their own.”

“But you don’t think so,” Magnus interjects from the door. His voice is flat. Unreadable. Alec looks down at his hands.

“I—” She breaks off, and when she continues her tone is very careful. “It is possible. Memories are complicated even when magic isn’t involved. But considering that the soul-eater was destroyed while they were still connected—no. I don’t think it’s likely. The piece of Alec’s soul that it took was released with the others, and it doesn’t seem to have returned to him.”

“Okay,” Alec says. He rolls his sleeve back down, then looks up at Catarina. The expression on her face is calm and even. She’s a nurse, Alec remembers suddenly. She’s a nurse in the mundane world and a healer in the Downworld, which means that the delivery of bad news isn’t anything new to her. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she says gently, and squeezes his hands in both of hers before standing. “I’ll keep looking into it. I’ll contact you if I find anything.”

“Thank you,” Alec says again. His throat feels tight.

“Of course,” she says, glancing past him to where Magnus is standing. He pulls the door open, then follows her out without a glance at Alec.

The silence in their wake seems deafening, at least until Jace shifts his weight, unfolds his arms, and says, very carefully, “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” Alec says flatly. His head is still sore and the burn on his leg twinges, not completely healed by the iratze he applied earlier, and his chest feels like it’s been hollowed out, cramped and miserable, but he is. He’s fine. He’s fought through worse. “We’re going to need to start working on a transition plan. I’ll talk to Izzy and Mom, but I want you guys to bring in anybody else you think should be involved. At this point you both know better than I do.”

“Involved in what?”

“We need to figure out who’s going to be taking over for me. Ideally, it should be somebody who’s going to be able to step into the negotiations with the Council right away, but at the very least we need someone who’s not going to undo everything that—that I did over the past three years. I’d prefer either you or Izzy, but if you have a better candidate—”

“Alec,” Jace says slowly, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

Alec shrugs tightly. “I’m not getting my memories back. I can’t stay on as the Head of the Institute. It was one thing when it was temporary, but now—”

“Okay, wait, stop,” Jace interrupts, stepping closer. “Just stop freaking out for a second, would you?”

“I’m not freaking out,” Alec says through gritted teeth. The ache in his skull is seeping into his neck, winding his muscles tight. “I am trying to deal with this situation.”

“Right,” Jace says, and sets his hand on Alec’s arm, a warm familiar weight. There’s a pulse of wordless comfort through the bond, the echo of Jace’s heartbeat, and it’s only then that Alec realizes that his own heart is speeding, his hands shaking. He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself, and Jace adds, “Have you talked to Magnus about this yet?”

Alec twitches beneath his hand, and he knows Jace feels it. “What’s there to talk about? He already left, anyway.”

Jace sighs like Alec is being unfathomably stupid, and it’s that of all things that finally steadies him. “He's still here. Trust me. He’s not going anywhere.”

*

Jace is right: Magnus is still there when they exit Alec’s office. He’s at the far end of the hallway with Catarina; they’re standing close together, talking in voices too quiet for Alec to hear from where he stands. As he watches, Catarina settles a hand on Magnus’s shoulder, then draws him into a hug, and he just—collapses against her, his taller frame folding around her body like she’s the only thing holding him up.

Alec pauses in the doorway like his feet have been rooted to the floor, as Jace comes up beside him. “Go talk to him,” he says softly. “I’ll fill Izzy and Clary in on everything. We can deal with the rest of it later. Okay?”

Alec swallows hard and doesn’t even protest Clary’s inclusion there. “Thanks.”

“No problem, buddy.” Jace thumps him on the shoulder, then heads off in the opposite direction. At the far end of the hallway, Magnus and Catarina are separating. She says something quietly, and Magnus lifts his head. His eyes meet Alec’s.

Catarina’s hand settles on Magnus’s arm for a brief moment. She glances up at Alec, gives him a nod, and then she’s moving away too, heading down toward the main hall and the exit and leaving him and Magnus alone in the hallway. Magnus is still staring at him. Alec feels like all of his joints have locked up, but he finally, eventually, makes himself cross the space between them. Stops in front of Magnus, twisting his hands behind his back, and says, “Hey. Can we talk?”

Magnus closes his eyes briefly. “Yes, I suppose we should. Should we—did you want to talk here? We could go to your office. Or—”

“Could we—” Alec pauses, then pushes ahead. “Maybe we could go back to the loft?”

He hates how tentative his voice sounds, but Magnus softens slightly at that. Like it wasn’t at all what he was expecting Alec to say; like he’s glad to hear it. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

*

The day has slipped away into a clear evening, sunset glowing on the Hudson River when they step through the portal into the loft. Most of the windows face east, and the corners of the large main room are swathed in deep shadows. There’s an unearthly quality to the light, like they’ve stepped into a piece of space that’s been disconnected from the rest of the world, at least until Magnus claps his hands sharply and half a dozen lamps come on, suffusing the room in golden light.

“That’s better,” Magnus says, stepping away from Alec. There’s something brittle about the smile on his face, about the set of his shoulders as he spins briefly in place. His coattails flare gracefully, and his rings glint in the lamplight. His left ear is adorned with a cuff that Alec didn’t notice until just now, delicate silver filigree that catches the light. Magnus lifts a hand to touch it, a quick nervous kind of gesture, then says, “Would you care for a drink?”

“I—what?”

“A drink. I’m certainly having one, after this day.” Magnus starts across the room toward the elegant little cart parked against one wall. A snap of his fingers, and a stemmed glass appears. Alec trails after him, feeling wrong-footed, baffled. Even more so when Magnus glances up at him, smiles briefly, and summons another glass.

We need to talk, he thinks about saying, but the words stick in his throat. Instead, he watches Magnus pour from various bottles into a shaker, movements as graceful and dramatic as if he’s mixing some obscure potion instead of a cocktail that smells like alcohol and fruit.

“The first night you stayed here,” he says, eyes on his task, “I made you something very similar to this. You hated it,” he adds, glancing up at Alec with a quick smile. “You tried so hard to be polite, but you just—” he laughs softly, wrinkles his nose. “You had the most adorable little grimace. Every sip, and you made that face. But you still finished the whole thing.”

Alec shrugs a little. He’s not sure where Magnus is going with this story, if he’s going anywhere at all. There’s something almost fragile about him right now. Like one wrong word, one wrong touch might shatter him into a thousand pieces, and that’s the last thing in the world that Alec wants. “I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Believe me, I know,” Magnus says, rattling the shaker briskly. He pours two light pink cocktails into the waiting glasses, garnishes them neatly with twists of lime conjured out of thin air, and hands one to Alec. Their fingers brush; it might be accidental. It still makes his nerves sing. “Here. Try that.”

Alec sips cautiously from his glass. It’s sweeter than he was expecting, a pleasantly citrusy taste that balances out the bitterness of the alcohol. Magnus is watching him, strangely intent, and it makes heat rise to his cheeks for no reason that he can explain. “It’s good.”

“I’ve adjusted the recipe,” Magnus says. He spins his own glass between his palms, doesn’t drink from it. “For the sake of your sweet tooth,” he adds, a smile tugging at his mouth. “I’m usually good at guessing what people would like to drink the first time, but you were a challenge right from the start.”

Alec looks down at his glass. It seems delicate, almost absurdly dainty in his large rough hands. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Magnus says softly. “I’ve always liked a challenge.”

Alec looks up, meets his eyes. Even with the glamour in place, they’re luminous, magnetic. He finds himself taking a step closer without quite meaning to, drawn in by the effortless gravity of Magnus’s orbit. “Is that—was that—?”

“When we got together?” Magnus shakes his head, stirring his cocktail with one finger. He absently sucks the droplets of liquid from it, a gesture so thoughtlessly sensual that Alec feels his breath catch in his throat, a dizzying swoop of heat that’s almost definitely completely inappropriate right now rushing through him. “No. No, leaving aside the fact that there was an injured werewolf sleeping in my spare room—long story—you didn’t, you weren’t…” he shrugs. “You weren’t ready. And I wasn’t going to push.”

“So we didn’t…” Alec gestures vaguely with the hand not holding his drink. His cheeks and the back of his neck feel hot. He takes another, longer drink, mostly to prevent himself from saying anything else.

“We sat on the couch and drank more than was probably wise and talked about…” Magnus trails off, one hand fluttering, a small, self-deprecating kind of smile on his face. “Do you know, I don’t even remember. Classical literature, I think. I teased you about the fact that you’d never seen Doctor Who. We argued about music.” He breathes out a laugh. “You kept staring at my mouth. I don’t even think you knew you were doing it. I’ve never had to work so hard not to kiss someone who so obviously wanted to be kissed.”

“Why—” Alec’s voice is cracked and dry. He’s having a hard time not staring at Magnus’s mouth right now. Thinking about—things he has no right to think about, not anymore. “Why didn’t you?”

“I’m a patient man. I believe that anything worth having is worth waiting for.” Magnus looks up at him through his lashes. “Believe me, Alexander. You were worth waiting for.”

Alec stares at him, and he stares back, and the moment seems to stretch out for an eternity before Magnus breathes out something like a laugh, shakes his head, drinks deeply from his glass. His throat works as he swallows, and he licks his lips absently, and something in Alec just—snaps.

He steps closer, sets his half-full glass down on the cart with an unsteady clink. Magnus looks up at him. Alec doesn’t know how to interpret the expression on his face, but he feels unbalanced, too awake, his blood thin and singing. Adrenaline humming through him like he’s in the middle of a pitched battle instead of standing in the gentle quiet of a home and a life that used to be his with Magnus Bane watching him, eyes wide and lovely, lips parted.

He wonders if it felt like this the first time—the real first time, the one he doesn’t remember. If this heady mix of desire and terror is just how Magnus makes him feel. He swallows hard, steps closer. “Can I—?”

He expects, honestly, for Magnus to duck away from him. To settle a hand on his chest and widen the space between them. To explain—gently, he’s been so gentle about all of this—that this isn’t happening, that Alec isn’t the person he wants anymore.

Instead, Magnus sets his own drink down and lifts his chin to meet Alec’s eyes with a sudden intensity that takes his breath away. He makes a soft noise when Alec sets a palm on his cheek, and he doesn’t close his eyes when Alec dips his head to press a careful kiss to his mouth.

His lips are warm, and Alec’s heart is pounding so hard that it almost drowns out the soft sound their lips make when they part. Magnus is still staring at him, and this close Alec thinks that he can see the shimmer of gold beneath his dark brown irises, a hint of their true nature.

His expression is impossible to read, and Alec rocks back on his feet with a sinking feeling. “Magnus, I’m—” Sorry, he doesn’t say.

“Alexander,” Magnus breathes, and then his hand curls around the back of Alec’s neck, tugging him back down, and it’s—there’s nothing careful about the kiss this time. Magnus claims his mouth with something akin to desperation, and Alec nearly stumbles, his hands clutching in Magnus’s jacket, bunching the fine fabric. Pulling him in closer, until Magnus’s body is a long line of heat against him, his broad chest and the flex of muscle in his arms, his thighs parting to let Alec settle between them, his hand tangling in the hair at the back of Alec’s head, a sharp bright point of pain that makes Alec groan, and he hears the sound translate into Magnus’s throat and chest. Magnus’s other hand settles on the side of his throat, over his deflect rune, his fingers pressing in like he’s trying to catch Alec and hold him here forever.

Alec drops his hands from Magnus’s face to his hips, gripping the solid curve of them under all those layers of clothing and dragging them closer together. It’s instinctive, unthinking, but something in him stutters when they grind together and Magnus groans softly and he realizes, very belatedly, that they're both starting to get hard.

He tears himself away from Magnus’s mouth. His breath is coming fast and uneven.

“Alexander?” Magnus says again. He sounds slightly unsteady, his grip on Alec’s hair loosening, his hips shifting back until he’s not pushing his hard-on against Alec's thigh, and this… really would be the moment to put a stop to all of it. To sit down like reasonable adults and have a conversation about all of the important things they actually need to talk about.

Except for the fact that that’s the last thing Alec wants to do.

Magnus, however, is starting to move back, his hand dropping from Alec’s neck. “If this is too much—”

“It isn’t,” Alec interrupts, his fingers tightening for a moment before he forces himself to let go. Magnus doesn’t try to pull away from him, though, and that makes a wild, giddy kind of hope rise up in his chest. “I want this. I want you.”

For several seconds, Magnus doesn’t respond at all. His eyes are flickering over Alec’s face, and Alec has no idea what he’s looking for, or whether he finds it.

“Okay,” he says finally, very softly, and then he rolls his shoulders gracefully, shrugging out of his jacket and letting it fall; it vanishes before it hits the floor. When he pulls Alec back toward him, there’s something very deliberate about it. His hands fall on Alec’s waist, warm fingers pushing up and under his t-shirt to touch bare skin. Cloth rides up over his hands. “May I?”

Alec swallows with a dry click. “Yeah.”

Magnus smiles, sudden and dazzling, and kisses him again. “Thank you, darling.”

He tugs Alec’s shirt up and Alec lifts his arms to let him pull it over his head. Magnus’s hands skim over his bare back, fingers trailing lines of fire in their wake, as Alec reaches for his vest. The buttons are tiny and slippery and there are way too many of them, and it seems to take far too long before he manages to get the vest undone, the shirt hanging loose over Magnus’s broad chest and flat stomach.

Alec’s breath catches as he leans in to kiss him again, pushing the material off of his shoulders. He slides his mouth across Magnus’s jaw, feeling the roughness of his beard, then dips his head to press a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the hollow of his throat. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, but his body seems to; he can feel Magnus’s pulse speeding against his lips. Magnus lets go of him briefly to free his arms from his sleeves, then murmurs, “Should we take this to the bedroom?”

Alec lifts his head to stare at him. His heart is thudding wildly. It’s not like he didn’t know exactly where this was heading, but it’s different to hear Magnus say it out loud. Very different. Magnus’s eyes are wide and dark and searching, and Alec takes a short breath and says, “Bedroom, yeah.”

It’s not the most eloquent response in the world, but Magnus doesn’t seem to mind. He captures Alec’s mouth again in a deep, slow kiss and his hands are on Alec’s waist again, walking him backward toward the open bedroom door. Alec goes easily, trusting Magnus to guide him, and doesn’t stop kissing him until his calves hit the edge of the mattress. Magnus topples him backward onto cool silk sheets and then climbs on top of him, straddling his hips and pinning his wrists to the bed on either side of his head as he leans down to kiss him again. His rings are cool against Alec’s skin and his hands are hot, and he’s strong. Alec probably could get loose, but not without some serious effort, and that thought has him groaning helplessly into Magnus’s mouth, his hips rolling up against Magnus’s body, seeking friction.

Magnus breathes in sharply, and when Alec meets his eyes again they’re glowing and golden, slit pupils dilated in the dim light.

“Oh,” he breathes, soft and stunned.

Magnus winces, releases Alec’s wrists, and sits back on his heels, lifting a hand to cover his eyes. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “Give me a second.”

“No, don’t—” Alec sits up too, reaching for Magnus’s hand before he thinks better of it. Magnus looks up at him with a start, his glamour still down. Awkwardly, Alec adds, “I mean, you can if you want to. But you don’t have to. They’re—beautiful.”

You’re beautiful, he thinks, but doesn’t say. Maybe Magnus catches the stray edge of that thought too, because his expression softens, something unspeakably tender overtaking it.

“Oh," he breathes, and his hands lift to cup Alec’s cheeks as he leans in to kiss him again. Alec slides his hands down Magnus’s sides, spreading his fingers wide to feel as much of him as he can, the warm drag of skin beneath his fingers as he falls back onto the bed with Magnus on top of him. The weight of him, unexpectedly solid. The realness of it all. He can smell the tang of sweat on Magnus’s skin over the smoky sweetness of sandalwood, feel his breath shudder every time they break apart.

It isn’t the first time he’s done this, he knows that. It isn’t even the first time he’s done this right here, in this bed. But he can’t remember any of that, and it all feels new. It feels like lightning in his veins, like he might burn up from the inside, like if he did it would be worth it.

He smooths his hands over Magnus’s back, tracing the curves of muscle, the dip of his spine. It feels unreal, that he gets to touch like this. More so when Magnus breathes out the shape of a curse against his mouth and then reaches down between them, propping himself up on one arm as he makes short work of Alec’s belt buckle and button fly. His fingers push inside, hot and teasing over the thin fabric of his boxers, and Alec arches into the touch with a groan. His cock pulses when Magnus grips him through the cloth.

Magnus kisses his mouth, his cheek, his jaw, quick and feather-light. His mouth opens up wet and hot over Alec’s throat, a sudden sting of teeth as he sucks a mark there, and Alec gasps sharply. His hands flex on Magnus’s skin.

“Please,” he breathes. Magnus lifts his head, his expression searching, and Alec manages to lift a hand, to curve it around the back of his head, to draw him down into a lengthy kiss.

“I’ve got you,” Magnus says when they break apart, and then his hands are shoving at Alec’s pants, pushing them down over his thighs. It’s only when Alec twists to kick them off that he remembers he’s still wearing his boots, and there’s a brief fumble when he gets tangled up before magic fizzes over his skin and both boots and pants are suddenly gone, Magnus leaning down to press a laughing kiss to his mouth.

“Okay,” Alec breathes, half-laughing. “But at some point you are going to—oh, god, fuck.” He breaks off with an embarrassing noise when Magnus slides a hand around his cock. His rings are gone, his palm slick with something and sliding easily against Alec’s skin, and it’s all Alec can do to arch up and kiss him, breathless and messy, to thrust up into the tight heat of his grip.

Magnus drops his head to bite at Alec’s throat again. “Okay?” he murmurs.

“Yeah. Yeah, its—” he breaks off as Magnus’s hand slides lower, cups his balls briefly with warm slick fingers, then moves further back, pressing in just slightly. Teasing. “Fuck.”

“Still okay?”

Magnus is still smiling down at him, his unglamoured eyes reflecting the light. He looks confident, but there’s a slight waver in his voice, a catch. He’s close enough to kiss, and so Alec does, a long, languid slide of lips and tongue. “Yeah,” he manages when they finally part. “Still okay.”

He still breathes out sharply when Magnus’s slick fingers press back and in, a slow pressure that burns in the best kind of way. He’s done this to himself before, but maybe it’s the angle, or just the fact that it’s Magnus doing it, or—

Magnus twists his fingers slightly, and a hot spark of pleasure lights up Alec’s nerves, sending every thought in his head flying. His hands scrabble at the sheets and he can feel his balls drawing up, precome smearing on his stomach, suddenly, desperately on edge. His hand manages to find Magnus’s thigh where he’s still braced over him, fingers digging hard into the strong muscle there. Magnus leans down and kisses him again, and Alec can barely manage the coordination he needs to participate, mostly just breathing raggedly against Magnus’s mouth.

“Look at you,” Magnus murmurs, still so close that Alec can almost taste the words. “You’re close, aren’t you? Just from this?”

“Yeah,” Alec pants, twisting as Magnus curls his fingers again, too desperately turned on to even care what he looks like right now, naked and writhing and needy under Magnus’s hands. “Please, just—Magnus, please.”

“Your wish is my command,” Magnus murmurs with a sudden grin, sharp and lovely. He kisses Alec’s mouth again, and then begins to slide down, trailing kisses in his wake. Alec groans when he realizes where this is going, but that still doesn’t prepare him for the feeling of Magnus’s mouth sliding over the head of his cock. All slick heat and suction and he slams his head back against the mattress with a breathless curse. Magnus’s tongue flattens against the underside of his cock and he swallows him down to the root with no sign of discomfort, finding a rhythm that matches the movement of his fingers. Alec finds himself caught, suspended between those two points of pleasure for an impossible stretch of time before his orgasm breaks over him and he’s jerking up into Magnus’s mouth and coming before he can even manage to choke out a warning.

Magnus groans around him, his fingers curling again in a way that has Alec whining in the back of his throat, and he doesn’t pull away until Alec squirms under him, oversensitive. Only then does he shift back, pulling his fingers out. He presses a kiss to the inside of Alec’s thigh, then sucks a mark there. Alec feels his leg twitch, half-ticklish overstimulation and half-pleasure, and Magnus soothes the bite with the drag of his tongue. When he speaks, his voice is rough, pleased. “How are you doing?”

Alec laughs breathlessly. “Good. So good, god, just—” He drags at Magnus’s shoulders, clumsy. “Get up here.”

He kisses Magnus as soon as he’s close enough, groans when he tastes his own come on Magnus’s tongue. Magnus is braced above him, breathing hard, and Alec cups his cheeks, slides his palms down over his shoulders, his powerful arms, up into his hair, like he can trace out the shape of him, solid and pleasingly real.

Then he takes a deep breath and reaches down to cup his hand over Magnus’s erection where it’s straining at the front of his pants. Magnus lets a low, swallowed groan, and Alec murmurs, “What do you like?”

Magnus lifts his head at that, looking startled, the reflection of the light from the living room gleaming in his eyes, and Alec kind of wants to kick himself. Because of course he knows. Or he should know, or would, if he was the person he’s supposed to be.

Before he can open his mouth to say—something—Magnus dips his head to kiss him again.

“Anything,” he says, when they break apart. “Anything, Alexander, just touch me, please—”

It’s that ‘please’ that does it, or maybe the unsteady little crack in his voice. That makes him seem suddenly less like the confident lover who was just taking Alec apart, or the smoothly powerful immortal warlock, and more like just—a man, a beautiful man, leaning over Alec with unsteady breath, his hips rocking slightly like he’s trying really hard not to thrust into Alec’s hand.

“Okay,” Alec breathes, and he reaches down to fumble Magnus’s belt and pants open. He pushes them down Magnus’s thighs, and Magnus shifts away just long enough to kick them off—or possibly magic them away, Alec can’t tell—and then he’s naked, his cock curving into Alec’s hand when he reaches for it. Magnus groans a curse, and then just—collapses against him, the sudden weight of him pinning Alec’s hand between them, and everything is sweat-slick and hot, Magnus’s breath against his ear and his skin beneath Alec’s hand and his hips thrusting increasingly out of rhythm, and when he comes his fingers dig into Alec’s skin and he swears raggedly in a language Alec doesn’t recognize, and then pushes his face into Alec’s throat and just breathes.

Alec strokes a hand over his sweaty back, something giddy and strange fizzing beneath his skin. Eventually, he slides his hand out from between them and wipes it inelegantly on the sheets, and Magnus laughs into his shoulder and rolls away to land on the mattress beside him. He lifts one hand, a spark of blue magic dancing across his fingertips, and a moment later they’re both clean.

“Thanks,” Alec says. He’s grinning helplessly, and Magnus’s smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. He’s sprawled out as boneless as a cat on the silk sheets, and when he closes the distance between them to kiss Alec again it’s sweet and slow, no urgency left in it at all.

His glamour is still down when they finally break apart, his golden eyes warm. He’s lovely, so lovely like this that Alec almost can’t believe he’s real. That this is real. “You’re welcome.”

We should talk, Alec thinks again, but Magnus’s hand is stroking over his cheekbones and back into his hair, soft and soothing, and somehow the words never make it out of his mouth.

*

He doesn’t actually intend to doze off, but when he blinks his eyes open the room is entirely dark, the other side of the bed empty. The sheets are cold beneath his hand; Magnus has been up for a while. Something prickles across Alec’s skin as he swings his legs off the bed, settles his feet on the cool floor. Even though he’s alone now he feels suddenly self-conscious about being naked, and he’s not exactly sure what Magnus did with his pants.

Eventually, he finds them—neatly folded, absurdly—on the floor next to the wall. When he unfolds them to tug them back on, something small falls out of the pocket with a metallic clink and rolls across the floor. Alec catches it automatically.

It’s his wedding ring. The carved surface catches the dim light, shining like there’s a star caught in the palm of his hand. There’s just enough light for him to read the words carved around the inside of the band. Aku cinta kamu. It’s not a language he speaks or even recognizes, although Magnus must, but he can guess what it means. I love you, or Forever, or something like that. Something sweet and devotional, because Magnus adored the man he married, that much is clear.

Alec swallows hard and then, without allowing himself to think about it too much, slides the ring onto his finger. It fits there like it belongs, and he flexes his hand, dresses quickly, and slips out into the living room.

That’s quiet too, and dark. The lamps are off, and the only light is from the moon hanging in the dark sky visible through the windows. The curtains shift softly in the breeze, a quiet sound. Their abandoned drinks are still sitting on the cart, their shirts in a dark pile on the floor. Alec feels caught, somehow arrested in this space, the middle of a home that isn’t his, surrounded by the traces a life he can’t remember and never will. He runs the pad of his thumb absently over the inside of his ring, then catches himself doing it and drops his hand.

It was a mistake, coming here. It was definitely a mistake to go to bed with Magnus instead of sitting down and having a goddamn conversation about their circumstances, and Magnus has clearly figured that out too, since he’s not here.

For just a little while, Alec thought maybe—

He’s not sure what catches his eyes. A shift of the curtains by the balcony doors, maybe, moving shadows on the floor. There’s something out there, the outline of a dark figure beyond the open doors. Alec straightens warily, crosses the room on careful feet, then stops, the reflexive surge of adrenaline fading into something shaky and unsettled.

Magnus is sitting on a lounge chair with his bare feet tucked up under him, a glass of whiskey cradled between his palms, facing out into the soft June night. The sounds of the city seem muffled from here, far away, and he’s so still that he could be a statue, a carved angel perched here to watch over the buildings below. His handsome profile is so composed that it takes Alec a moment to realize that his cheeks are wet.

He pauses in the doorway, the back of his throat aching, then steps out onto the balcony and says, carefully, “Magnus?”

Magnus starts, then swipes hastily at his eyes with one hand. “Alexander.” His voice is rough. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t wake me up.”

“Still. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Magnus,” Alec interrupts quietly. “Are you okay?”

He wants to hit himself as soon as the question leaves his mouth. Of course Magnus isn’t okay. There’s nothing about the tableau he just walked in on that suggests okay. It’s worse when Magnus breathes out a cracked little laugh, sets his glass down next to his feet, and rocks forward to put his face in his hands. “No. Not really.”

“Can I—” he moves closer, carefully. Folds himself down onto the cool floor at Magnus’s feet, the stone rough beneath him. Magnus is wearing an embroidered silk robe that looks a lot like the one Alec found in his room at the Institute; it’s loosely belted around his waist but gapes enough to display his chest, the muscular slope of his shoulders, the startlingly delicate curve of his collarbones. There’s a small dark bruise in the hollow of his throat, and Alec is the one who put it there. “Is there anything I can do?”

Magnus drops his hands, finally, meets his eyes. His glamour is still down, his wet eyelashes clumped together around his light-colored eyes.

“No,” he says softly. “I don’t think there is.”

It’s not like he was expecting anything different, but it still makes his chest knot like his heart is trying to turn itself inside-out. He feels his hands curl into fists on his knees and forces them to relax.

This is why they should have had this conversation earlier. This is why he never should have kissed Magnus in the first place.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if all Magnus wanted tonight was just one last memory. Alec is the one who fucked this up, and it’s on him to fix it, as much as it can be fixed. “Tell me what you need me to do. Should I leave?”

“No!” Magnus says, sounding startled. “No, of course not. Not unless that’s what you want.”

“Okay,” Alec says carefully. “I won’t.”

Magnus sighs, straightens slightly. Composes himself with a visible effort. Alec wants to reach for him, but he’s not sure he has any right to do that now. “I almost had to watch you die today. And what you’ve lost… I’m immortal. I’ve lived for centuries. Three years should be nothing. But it’s—” he laughs a little, shaky and awful. “It’s everything I had with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Alec manages. It’s inadequate, he knows that, but what else is there to say? “God, Magnus. I’m so fucking sorry.”

“No,” Magnus says again, and it’s steadier this time. Firmer. His eyes lift, meet Alec’s. “There are a lot of people to blame for what’s happened here, but you’re not one of them. Please don’t apologize.”

“Still.” Alec shrugs. It’s awkward, half-kneeling at Magnus’s feet on the cold stone floor. It’s awkward just being here, and it has been since the moment he first woke up into a world he didn’t recognize. This—all of this—it’s been like having some beautiful hallucination dropped into his lap only to have it all snatched away. “I know I’m not him. Not really.”

It he wasn’t so close, he probably wouldn’t notice the way Magnus shifts, the soft sound of his breath. “What?”

“I’m not—” he breaks off, looks away. He doesn’t think he can bear to meet Magnus’s eyes while he says this. “I’m not the person you fell in love with.”

“Oh,” Magnus says softly, like a revelation. There’s movement, a whisper of silk, and then his hands are warm on Alec’s, strong fingers curling around his. “Oh, Alexander, no. You are. You’re exactly the person I fell in love with.” His thumb moves over Alec’s finger, and even in the dark Alec can see the shift of his expression, the sudden realization. “You’re wearing your ring.”

“Yeah,” Alec mutters. An embarrassed heat is rushing to his face, and he adds, stupidly, “It was in my pocket.”

“It was in your pocket,” Magnus repeats, and he lets out a laugh that sounds more like a sob, and then his hands are on Alec’s cheeks, dragging him up into a kiss. When they break apart, he rests his forehead against Alec’s, and Alec lifts his hands, carefully, tentatively, to rest over Magnus’s where they’re still cupping his cheeks.

It’s easier to speak when they’re like this, so close that he doesn’t have to look into Magnus’s eyes. Easier to speak, not necessarily easier to find any of the words. “I know—everything is different now. I’m not—”

“You are,” Magnus says, fiercely. His finger press into Alec’s skin. “Alexander—”

Alec curls his fingers around Magnus’s hands, and says, as carefully as he knows how, “I don’t remember you. I’m never going to remember you. I’m never going to remember anything that we had.”

Magnus breathes out, hard, then twitches like he’s going to try to pull away. Alec grips his hands, knows that Magnus could break away if he wanted to and hopes desperately that he doesn’t. “But we could—if you wanted to. We could try again?”

It’s not enough, he knows that. He barely knows the shape of what was between them before. But he knows this, the warmth of Magnus’s hands in his and the way that his wedding ring feels on his finger and the fact that the thing he wants most in the world right now is to stay.

Please, he doesn’t say.

Magnus pulls back just enough to look at him. He’s limned in moonlight, ethereal, like something shaped from stardust. He barely seems to be breathing, and his hands are warm in Alec’s, and his tentative smile, when he finally offers it, fees like a gift.

“Okay,” he says, softly. He leans down and kisses Alec’s mouth, quick and firm, then draws back. “Yes. Alexander, yes. If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” Alec says, because he has to say it. There’s a childish, giddy hope fizzing up in his throat, but he has to say it. Magnus loves a man who’s gone, and what Alec feels for him—he doesn’t even know what word to use for it. They can’t just be married again, just like that. It isn’t that simple. It won’t be. But this, he thinks. This is worth it. Having this, even the chance at it, will be worth it.

Magnus laughs wetly. "Believe me, things were not easy between us the first time around either. I’ve still never regretted it.”

“Okay,” Alec says. The smile that’s stretching his mouth is wide and stupid with relief, and he can’t even try to make it stop. “Okay. But it’s also literally the middle of the night, so maybe we could— go back to bed? And then figure the rest of it out in the morning?”

Magnus fits his hand against the curve of Alec’s jaw and just looks at him for a moment. He doesn't kiss him again, but when he pulls back to stand gracefully, he reaches down to offer Alec a hand up and doesn't let go when he's standing. His smile is watery but real. “That sounds like a wonderful plan.”

He twines his fingers together with Alec’s, and together they step back into the darkened loft.

Chapter Text

They end up going out to breakfast the next morning at a coffee-shop down the street from the loft. It’s both easier and harder; the loft seems full of ghosts, but it’s strange to be walking in the sunlight along the Esplanade with Magnus at his side keeping up an engaging but more or less one-sided conversation about the first time he came to New York back in the 1890’s. He’s an entertaining narrator and Alec mostly just listens, interjects a question or two, and tries not to wonder if he’s heard this story before. He thinks about taking Magnus’s hand at least six different times and can’t quite make himself do it, which is probably a little ridiculous considering that he now knows what Magnus sounds like when he comes.

But it’s different here, outside in the world. There was an unreal quality to the loft last night that lingered into the morning when he woke in a tangle of silk sheets with one arm slung across Magnus’s chest and Magnus already awake, watching him with an expression that was both soft and unreadable.

Out here, everything seems real. It’s a hot hazy morning and Magnus has, possibly as a concession to the heat waves already shimmering off the pavement, dispensed with the suit in favor of loose pants and a soft red shirt that’s open halfway to his navel, displaying a tempting expanse of golden skin and an intricate tangle of necklaces.

Alec wonders if it’s an intentional statement, but if so it’s one he has no hope of deciphering now. He’s trying to be encouraged by the lightness of Magnus’s voice and the sidelong glances he keeps casting his way, but his body is still humming with nerves, half-pleasant, half staggeringly anxious.

He’s acutely aware right now of how easy it would be to fuck this all up.

“Here we are,” Magnus says when they come upon the shop, little more than an alcove in a sea of worn brick, a blackboard sign on the street listing out an assortment of drinks and sandwiches with clever, unlikely-sounding names. The door is propped open to the summer heat, but the long, narrow room on the other side of it is still cool, the air redolent with the smell of good coffee.

It’s not until after they’ve acquired their drinks and ensconced themselves in a booth by the window, where the light reflecting off the river is just visible across the street, that Alec sets his palms flat on the table and says, “So, what happens now?”

Magnus pauses in tearing a croissant apart with his fingertips, stills, then says, “Ah. Yes, I suppose we should talk about that, shouldn’t we?”

“Yeah.” Alec flexes his fingers, sees sunlight catch on his ring. That fluttering nervous feeling is stronger now. Last night on the balcony was awful, but it was also easier in some ways. Simpler, anyway. Comfort is something he understands. This—he has no idea how to do this. “I’m just not really sure where we go from here.”

“Well, I probably ought to suggest that we take it slow,” Magnus says, and smiles at him over the brim of his coffee cup. “But I think that particular ship has already sailed.”

Alec ducks his head, feeling his cheeks heat. “Yeah. I mean, we could, though. If you wanted to. I could move back to the Institute while we… I don’t know. Figure things out.”

Magnus sets his cup down. “You could,” he says neutrally. “Is that what you want to do?”

It isn’t, honestly. But this isn’t just about what Alec wants. “What about you? What do you want?”

“I—” Magnus shakes his head, drags his finger through the crumbs on his plate, then laughs a little, self-deprecating. “I want you to come home. I want you to stay with me. I want you to sleep with me in our bed and wake up with me, and—” he stops again. “I want everything you’re willing to give me. I always have. But I don’t know…”

“If it’s a good idea,” Alec finishes softly. He doesn’t know how to put a name to the feeling rising up in him at Magnus’s blunt frankness, but it’s warm and soft and almost embarrassing. In a good way, or at least he thinks so. “Yeah.”

“It is a unique situation,” Magnus agrees, an edge of wistfulness to his smile.

“You can say that again,” Alec mutters. He rubs his thumb absently across the back of his knuckles, trying to think. To strategize, he realizes, and almost wants to laugh at himself. Last night he wasn’t thinking at all, and now here he is trying to approach this tentative rekindling like a battle plan. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also all he’s got.

He doesn’t know how to be a lover, let alone a husband. Not anymore. “Okay. I should probably get back to the Institute at some point today. I need to talk to Izzy and Jace, and there’s still the issue with the Council, and dealing with the clean-up from the attack, and…”

“I would suggest you take some personal time after all this,” Magnus interjects, gently teasing, “but since I’ve met you before, I won’t.”

Alec laughs, startled, and feels something in him settle unexpectedly. “Maybe—maybe afterwards we could meet up, though? Go out for a drink?”

He has no idea if it’s the right thing to say, but the words feel right in his mouth, and Magnus softens a little more at the sound of them.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s do that.”

“It’s a date,” Alec agrees, relieved, and when Magnus reaches across the table to touch the back of his hand, he turns it palm up and lets Magnus’s hand settle into his, lacing their fingers together.

*

There’s a Clave representative and half a dozen aides waiting for him in his office when he gets back to the Institute an hour later, and it occurs to him that he probably should have sent a fire message to Izzy or Jace instead of just letting Magnus portal him in directly. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t be wandering into a hostile political standoff in a t-shirt and jeans with what he suddenly hopes isn’t a terribly noticeable hickey on his throat.

Too late now.

Izzy is there at least, wearing a tailored suit that makes her look unsettlingly like their mother and speaking quietly to a gray-haired, severely dressed man he doesn’t recognize with an expression that probably looks deferential to anyone who doesn’t know her. The corners of her smile are tight and her hands are folded behind her back, though, and Alec winces slightly at the sight of it. He’s going to get an earful for leaving her to deal with this alone, and he’s going to deserve it.

“...so interesting that Councilor Blackthorn isn’t with you,” Izzy is saying as he steps through the door. “Since she’s been working so closely with Councilor Rothburne. In fact, I’m surprised that you’re the only member of the Revisions Committee who could make it today.”

“If you’re implying something, Miss Lightwood, perhaps it would be best if you came out and said it.”

“I’m not implying anything,” Izzy says coolly. “I would never imply that you’re the sort of person who’d go behind the Committee’s back to further your own agenda. I’d certainly never imply that you’ve been exerting your influence over the Citadel to prevent them from looking too deeply into the theft of adamas before it nearly resulted in the assassination of an inconvenient political leader. I’m just observing how interesting it all is.” She glances up at last and sees Alec in the doorway, and her smile softens slightly. “And here’s my brother now.”

The man she’s talking to turns toward him with a chilly smile, and says, “Mr. Lightwood. So good of you to join us at last.”

Over his shoulder, Izzy mouths Councilor Hayhurst. Great. Alec knows the name, if not the face; the man’s been on the Council for years, and his influence in Idris is far-reaching.

“Councilor,” he says warily. “How can I help you?”

“I feel like I should be asking you that very same question,” Hayhurst says. “By the sounds of things, you’ve had a very eventful week.”

“That’s an understatement,” Alec says, and holds out his hand. Hayhurst eyes it like it’s a dead rat before looking back up at him, and Alec meets his stare flatly; a moment later, the man reluctantly takes it, shakes it gingerly, then lets it drop. “I assume you’re here about the incident with Ellen Rothburne.”

“The late Councilor Rothburne, yes,” Hayhurst says icily. “A fine woman.”

Alec doesn’t allow his expression to change. “I didn’t know her well, unfortunately.”

“I’m not surprised. I don’t imagine your efforts on behalf of the Downworld leave you much time for collaborating with members of the Council in Idris.”

So it’s going to be like that, then. Alec lifts his chin, straightening. He’s got a full head of height on the Councilor, and by the way the man’s eyes narrow he’s entirely too aware of that fact. It’s a petty kind of pleasure, but under the circumstances, he’ll take what he can get. “I’m always happy to work with the Council on matters of importance.”

“And I take it this doesn’t make the grade, in your eyes.”

“That depends on what you’re talking about.”

“Councilor Rothburne is dead. Before that, her nephew died after he was under your command for less than six months. His sister has been arrested for treason. That’s three respected shadowhunters who had reservations about this little integration project of yours.”

“Yeah,” Alec says. “You might want to look into why the opposing faction is resorting to assassination. Kind of undermines the rule of law, don’t you think?”

“You’re still beating that drum, are you? Convenient how no one’s left around to contradict you.”

“Unfortunately,” Alec says coldly, “Sean Rothburne didn’t survive the attempt. Neither did the shadowhunter who had the bad luck to be on patrol with him that night. Adrian Mendoza. He was acceptable collateral, I guess.”

“The Councilor—”

“Was killed mishandling adamas in an unsanctioned attack on the soul-eater, which was safely contained at the time. She’s also directly responsible for the deaths of the two guards who were killed when it escaped.”

“And you have evidence of this.”

“Security footage,” Izzy interjects smoothly, her pretty face a pleasant mask that does nothing to hide—at least from Alec—the fact that she’s fantasizing about snapping Hayhurst’s neck with her whip. “Which has been submitted to the Clave per the Inquisitor’s request. I’m sure you’ll have ample opportunity to review it in preparation for Sister Cliona’s trial.”

“How very thorough of you.” Hayhurst eyes Alec. “You, on the other hand, seem remarkably healthy for a man who just survived an assassination attempt.”

“Yeah,” Alec says. “Well. They weren’t very good at it, clearly.”

“Clearly. Of course, if you need more time to recover, we can always delay the hearings on the Accords to the next session of the Council. I’m sure the rest of the Committee would understand.”

“You mean cancel them.”

“Delay indefinitely,” Hayhurst amends, a thin smile on his lips.

Alec stares him down. He may not remember the last three years, but he knows how ad hoc committees work. They’re politically unstable, and if the revisions don’t come up to vote during this session, they won’t get another chance for years. They’d be rebuilding from the ground up. He isn’t sure just how much Hayhurst knows about his current condition, but the man is clearly gambling on him being too trusting or too ignorant to understand the realities here. It’s almost insulting, how obvious he’s being. “That won’t be necessary.”

Hayhurst’s mouth twists like he’s bitten into something rotten, but all he says is, “Well, in that case, I’ll see you in Alicante, Mr. Lightwood.”

“I look forward to it,” Alec says, and holds his hand out for the man to shake, just for the expression on his face.

It’s only after the door swings shut behind the Councilor and his aides that Izzy turns toward him. “So.”

“Thanks for handling that,” Alec says. “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, I should have—”

“Jace filled me in. So I take it you and Magnus… talked.” There’s a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth, but her eyes are kind.

Alec straightens, folding his arms. “Yeah.”

“And how did that go?”

“Fine.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Izzy says, and takes a step closer, reaching up to poke at the spot under his jaw where he knows there’s a mark. He bats her hand away, flushing, and she grins, but there’s a gentleness in it. “I’m just teasing. I’m happy for you, you know that, right?”

“It’s not—we’re taking it slow,” Alec says, like he’s not wearing evidence to the contrary on his neck for everyone to see. Maybe Izzy has some concealer he could borrow, not that he’d have a clue how to use it. Before she can give him more than a skeptical look, though, he says, “That’s not really what I came back here to talk about anyway.”

Izzy nods, straightening. “Right. You’re not still thinking about stepping down, are you?”

“The Head of the Institute needs to be someone who understands the current political situation and can negotiate with the Clave,” Alec says. It’s not a yes, exactly. Jace was right last night; he was panicking, not thinking straight. But he’s more or less clear-headed now, and he still doesn’t see any way he keeps the Institute. “I’ll stay on until the hearings, anyway. They’re expecting me to be there, and I have two weeks to read up on my notes. Although I still don’t see how the revisions have a chance in hell of passing.”

That isn’t really the point, though. After everything he’s lost for this—everything Magnus has lost—he’s going to see it through to the end. He couldn’t live with himself if he did anything else.

“You’d be surprised,” Izzy says. “There have been a lot of shake-ups in the Council recently, especially after everything with Valentine. Hayhurst is a snake and Rothburne was… well.” She makes a face, and Alec knows that she’s biting her tongue rather than insult a dead woman.

“Unsympathetic,” he offers.

“Yeah. That. But you’re not the only one who’s been championing the revisions, and the idea is gaining momentum. Hayhurst wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t worried.”

Alec sighs. “I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” she says lightly. “And since I’m always right, you should listen to me when I tell you that you shouldn’t give up the Institute like this. Your memories could still return, for one thing.”

“Catarina Loss seemed pretty confident that they wouldn’t, and she seems to know what she’s talking about.”

“But she did say that it’s possible. Alec, you’ve worked your whole life for this. You can’t give it up now just because…”

“Just because I don’t remember anything I need to know to actually do the job?” Alec asks. She winces, and he sighs. “Like I said, I’m not going to make any decisions right now. But my responsibility is to the Institute and to the Shadow World. I can’t just keep a position I’m not qualified for anymore because I want it. And it’s not like we’d be handing the Institute over to just anybody. You could take over. Or Jace.”

“Jace was in charge for all of a week after Aldertree left—I told you about that the other day—and it was an unmitigated disaster,” Izzy says bluntly. Alec has always appreciated that about her, that bluntness, and the fact that she wouldn’t mince words even if Jace was standing right here in the room with them. With Izzy, everyone always knows exactly where they stand, and he’s glad to see that that hasn’t changed even now that everything else has. “I love him, but he’s not cut out for it. He knows it too. He won’t take it.”

She’s probably right about that, honestly, given the way Jace reacted yesterday. But still. “You are.”

“Yeah, fine, I want an Institute to run someday, but I don’t want to get it by stepping over your body, okay?”

Alec rolls his eyes. “That’s dramatic.”

“You’re dramatic,” Izzy retorts, and he feels a reluctant smile tug at his mouth. “Fine. I’ll leave it alone for now, but don’t think we’re done with this conversation.” She nods toward his desk. “Your files on the Accords are over there. I thought you might want to look them over. Good luck, big brother.”

*

The day has slipped away into late afternoon by the time he finally emerges from his stacks of legal precedent and handwritten testimony. He feels like a dreamer waking from a deep sleep when he finally rubs the incipient ache from his eyes and peers up at the clock, startles, and swears out loud. Drinks. Magnus. Right.

Somehow, he managed to work right through dinner, which he probably should have noticed by the deepening dusk that’s swallowing up the corners of his office and dulling the colors of the stained glass window behind him. He digs his phone out of his pocket, thumbs it on, then stares at the screen, belatedly realizing that he never did figure out the code to unlock it. Maybe he could just wait for Magnus to call him, or…

It’s already after seven. Magnus is probably waiting for him to call; this whole thing was his idea, after all.

Cursing himself for an idiot, Alec goes to find Izzy. She’ll laugh at him, but she’ll probably help.

*

Magnus picks up the phone on the second ring, sounding both pleased and slightly surprised when he says Alec’s name. He laughs out loud when Alec tells him that he had to have Izzy go through with him and help him guess his passcode. Alec doesn’t mention the part where he scrolled through about three hundred photos—most of them random mundane bullshit, a few gory shots of crime scenes clearly taken on patrol to be texted back to the lab.

And all the pictures of Magnus. Of him and Magnus, some of them, but mostly just candid shots of Magnus. Magnus on a bridge at sunset in a city he doesn’t recognize, rolling his eyes with a kebab halfway to his mouth, Magnus in the loft, shirtless and sleepy with his makeup half-done, Magnus laughing, blurred at the corner of the shot as he leans in—Alec assumes—for a kiss.

He felt like a thief looking through them, but he doesn’t know how to explain that. He’s grateful when Magnus suggests something easy, drinks at a bar that he’s pretty sure he recognizes from a patrol. Hunter’s Moon. It has the sound of a Downworlder dive, although it isn’t necessarily. Mundanes like that kind of thing too.

“Have we been there before?” Alec asks, before he can think better of it.

Magnus pauses long enough for Alec to start wishing that he could swallow the words back down, but when he speaks his voice is soft. Wistful, maybe, but not unhappy. “Yeah. We have. We can go somewhere else if you—”

“No,” Alec interrupts. “I mean. That sounds great. I’ll see you there.” He pauses. “Um, if you can text me the address.”

“Of course. See you,” Magnus says, and it sounds like there’s a smile in his voice. Alec can feel an answering one tugging at his lips as he ends the call.

*

Hunter’s Moon is a Downworlder bar, but it’s clean and bright and the music is good. Half the people there seem to recognize him, and he’s greeted by several werewolves and a handful of languorously flirtatious Seelie in street clothes before Magnus puts a beer glass in his hand and drags him over to the pool tables, and suddenly everything is simple. Pool is simple; it’s all just geometry and precision, putting the skills he uses as a shadowhunter to use just for fun. It’s not something he lets himself do that often, and he savors the ease of it, Magnus’s eyes on him as he clears half the table before missing a tricky shot and leaning back with a sigh.

“You know, the first time we came here—” Magnus falters a little as he steps up, pool cue in hand, then smiles, shakes his head. “The first time we played pool, you missed a shot on purpose to give me a chance.”

He sinks three balls neatly in quick succession. Alec eyes him, the skillful way he handles the pool cue, his dark glamoured eyes on the table, calculating angles. He clearly knows what he’s doing. “Are you saying you hustled me on our first date?”

“Ah,” Magnus says, and looks up at him with a sheepish kind of smile. “Yes. I suppose I did. You were a very good sport about it, though.”

He sinks another ball. Alec finds himself laughing as he rests his pool cue against the floor. “You know, when we were kids, Jace and I used to sneak out at night and hustle pool at a couple of really shitty mundane dives. Got into a lot of fights like that, although I think that was kind of the point of it for Jace. I quit after Mom started training me to take over for her, but…” he trails off.

Magnus is smiling at him, soft and bright, straightened up on the other side of the table with his cue held loosely in his hands and Alec… really has no idea what to do with that look, so he takes a hasty, too-big swig of his beer, and then he’s too occupied trying not to cough to worry about it. A shard of pain lances between his temples, then dissipates almost as quickly, and the sound of the music in the background seems to warp and waver for a moment like a badly tuned radio trying to play two stations at once. As soon as the impression is there, it’s gone, and there’s just Alec, flushed and trying not to cough his lungs out. “Sorry. You’ve probably heard that story before.”

“I have,” Magnus admits, circling the table to thump him on the shoulder until he stops coughing. He lets his hand linger, the warm press of it through Alec’s t-shirt anchoring. “But I still like listening to you tell it.”

His smile seems genuine enough, so Alec sets his pool cue against the table and launches into the story of the time he had to skip out halfway through a night on the monitors to break Jace out of a mundane drunk tank. Magnus laughs at all the right places, his eyes sparkling, and every time Alec looks at him he feels like something in him is caught, winding tight.

A whirlwind romance, was how Magnus described it the first time he asked. Their first time around, it was a whirlwind romance, and that should feel alien to everything Alec knows about himself, but it doesn’t. They’re supposed to be taking their time this time around, and yet—

And yet here he is, watching Magnus laugh, watching him handle his pool cue with an easy grace that seems both perfectly natural and entirely out of place on a man dressed like a glam rock wizard, and he already feels like he’s standing on the precipice of some wild affection that he’s not yet ready to name, eager for the fall.

They wind up back at the loft afterwards without really talking about it, mildly buzzed—or at least Alec is—and perched on the couch together, close but not touching as soft music plays from unseen speakers. Magnus fills most of the space between them with rambling stories, quick graceful gestures, his rings glinting in the air, and Alec leans his head against the cushions and watches him, feeling that unnameable fondness expanding in his chest.

It’s late by the time the conversation drifts into a silence that feels more comfortable than it probably should. Alec feels warm, sleepy, relaxed as he watches Magnus tilt his head back against the couch to finish the last of his drink, then banish the glass with a snap of his fingers. He doesn’t open his eyes as he says, quietly, “Will you stay here tonight?”

“Yeah,” Alec whispers.

“Should I make up the spare room?”

Alec breathes out, then says, “No. Not unless you want to.”

“Okay,” Magnus says, and the slight curl of a smile at the corners of his mouth tells Alec that it was the right thing to say.

They don’t have sex that night. Magnus doesn’t even kiss him, and Alec can’t bring himself to breach that particular distance between them when he’s not being propelled by the strange desperation that had ahold of him last night. But after the lights are off and they’re under the covers, facing each other but not touching, a cool night breeze winding through the room, he reaches into the space between them and finds Magnus’s hand. Magnus makes a soft noise, then laces their fingers together, and Alec falls asleep to the soothing feel of his thumb making slow circles against his skin.

*

Jace is the one who calls him the next morning, which isn’t surprising, but he definitely talked to Izzy, going by the fact that he actually apologizes before saying, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

From the kitchen bar, Alec watches Magnus pour coffee out of a carafe he could have sworn was empty a moment ago into a matched pair of blue cups, and considers asking just what he thought he was interrupting just to see if he can make Jace squirm.

On the other hand, it’s Jace, so Alec is way more likely to embarrass himself if he tries. “No. What’s up?”

“The rest of the Revisions Committee is portalling in early this afternoon for an ad hoc meeting. Apparently Izzy put in a call to Helen Blackthorn after that bullshit with Hayhurst yesterday. So you might want to... I don’t know, put some pants on and get over here before then.”

“Very funny,” Alec says, and hangs up on Jace’s answering snort of laughter. Magnus crosses the kitchen to place one of the cups on the counter in front of him.

“Duty calls?” he asks delicately.

Alec sighs and takes the coffee. “Thank you. Yeah. Apparently the Committee is on their way into town, so I should probably…”

“Go?” Magnus asks, a wry little smile on his face. He pats Alec’s hand, then squeezes it briefly. “At least let me conjure up some breakfast first. Committee meetings should never be faced on an empty stomach.”

“Yeah, okay,” Alec says. He’s actually starving, but he’s pretty sure that has nothing at all to do with the sudden butterflies in the pit of his stomach. “Thank you.”

*

After everything, the Committee meeting is actually less awful than he was expecting. Hayhurst glares at him the entire time, and there are another half-dozen Councilors and Institute Heads who are firmly against the integration project, but Councilor Blackthorn actually hugs him when she portals in. She jumps back a second later, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, sorry, I know—not really your thing, I just—Aline and I were so worried, Izzy let us know—”

“It’s… fine,” Alec manages, trying not to look completely wrongfooted. “Aline Penhallow, you mean?”

“Yeah of course, you—” She shakes her head. “Of course, you don’t remember. We’re married.”

She holds up one hand, displaying a delicate ring with a diamond chip, and Alec manages to say, “Huh. Congratulations, I guess?”

“Thank you,” she says, beaming, and then, mercifully, another portal opens up and she takes herself off into the meeting room with a quick smile. Alec takes a deep breath, settles himself.

He can do this. He’s going to do this. He owes it to the ghost of his former self to see it through, but it’s not just that. Integration needs to happen. He’s seen for himself how the balance of the Shadow World has shifted in the three years he’s forgotten, but the Clave is still clinging grimly to the remnants of its power over the Downworld.

That needs to change.

Unfortunately, his newfound resolve does nothing to make the negotiations any less frustrating. The two factions argue themselves to a standstill half a dozen times for every compromise they manage to make. A good hour is derailed on a hostile debate about the adamas theft before Helen Blackthorn manages to wrest them back onto topic, and by the time the meeting is adjourned Alec’s jaw is aching from how tight he’s been clenching it.

He’s been so focused that he doesn’t actually think about Magnus until after the last of the Councilors has left, and when he does the anxiety hits him like a ton of bricks. They didn’t talk about it this morning, so he’s not sure if he’s supposed to call, or if Magnus will, or if he’s supposed to leave it alone for a while—

He’s being ridiculous, he’s aware of that, but it doesn’t actually help him stop.

Fortunately, his phone buzzes before he can dither too much, Magnus’s name popping up on the screen along with a message. isabelle said you’re done. meet me outside the institute?

Alec pretends that his fingers aren’t fumbling as he texts back, Sure.

*

Magnus is sitting on the front steps when he gets outside, face lifted to the late afternoon sky like he’s sunning himself on the warm stone. He opens his eyes when Alec comes down the steps, smiles up at him, and there’s that by-now familiar swooping feeling in the pit of Alec’s stomach. “Alexander. You appear to be… more or less in one piece. How did it go?”

“Ugh,” Alec groans. It’s probably a little too honest a reaction, but Magnus bursts into laughter, and he feels the nervous tension in his shoulders start to unwind, his headache dissipating.

“Well, if you’re feeling up to it, I thought we could maybe go for a walk? Talk a little more? Not about anything serious,” Magnus adds hastily. “I just thought we could try to get to know each other.”

“Again,” Alec says, and Magnus ducks his head. His smile crinkles the corners of his eyes, sunlight catching on the gold lines across his upper lids and the dark fringe of his eyelashes. His hair is done up in some kind of asymmetric pompadour and there are faint streaks of purple amidst the black, visible only when he moves. He’s wearing the silver filigree cuff on his ear again, and when he lifts a hand to touch it his wedding ring flashes in the sun. Alec doesn’t know how to name the warm twisting feeling inside him at the sight of it, but it’s good. Terrifying, but good.

“Again,” Magnus agrees, a little wistful. “But I had fun the first time. We both did, I think. And this time we won’t be doing it in the middle of a war.”

“Something to be said for that, I guess,” Alec says. “Yeah, okay. That sounds fun.”

He’s not really sure if it counts as a date, and he’s not even sure if that matters. They end up in Central Park eventually, dodging skateboarders and oblivious tourists, and when Alec finally reaches for his hand near Bethesda Fountain, Magnus’s smile is as bright as the sun.

*

It’s hours later and he feels loose and relaxed, sun-drunk almost, by the time Magnus suggests dinner. They find a food cart on the edge of the park selling some kind of Mediterranean fusion thing that Alec’s never heard of before. He picks off the menu almost at random—he’s never been a picky eater—but whatever it is it’s good, spicy and complicated and loaded with garlic. Sauce spills down his wrist as they settle in the grass, and Magnus laughs at him when it drips down his elbow onto the knee of his jeans before he can catch it with a napkin.

“Very funny,” Alec says, but his mouth doesn’t want to stop smiling. “A little help here?”

“Maybe I’m just enjoying your distress,” Magnus teases, but he leans over a moment later, a soft fizz of magic across Alec’s skin as the spill vanishes like it was never there at all.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Magnus says, and then he leans in just a little more to press a quick kiss to Alec’s mouth. He’s still smiling when he pulls back, but there’s something anxious about it. Like he’s suddenly worried that he overstepped, which is probably a little absurd, but maybe it’s not just Alec who’s feeling awkward and careful here, like he’s picking his way through a dark room full of obstacles. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” Alec says softly. And then, before the moment can get too serious, “For me, anyway. I don’t know about for you, with the garlic breath.”

The faint tension at the corners of Magnus’s eyes dissipates, and he’s laughing as he leans in to kiss Alec again. “I really don’t mind at all.”

*

He doesn’t really plans to actually move back into the loft; or rather, he mostly plans to move back out. He fully intends to go back to the Institute to sleep after that first night. This is supposed to be a fresh start. Magnus can have space to himself, Alec can stop feeling like a ghost haunting his own home, they can have some more pleasant dates where Magnus teases him over dinner and tells outrageous stories about him that he insists are true and laughs at Alec’s skeptical faces, and then he can have—maybe—a good night kiss at the door and go back home. It can be a new beginning for both of them.

That’s not what ends up happening, though.

“I don’t really have to stay here every night,” Alec says, after the third time they’ve ended up on the couch together after an evening out, empty cocktail glasses on the table and soft music he doesn’t recognize coming from the unseen speakers that might not actually exist. He feels loose and comfortable, mildly buzzed from the drinks Magnus was mixing and sunk so deeply into the couch that he’s not sure he’d be able to get up if he tried. Something about this space just seems to settle him, and he doesn’t really want to go back to his chilly, empty Institute room, but still.

On the other side of the couch, Magnus lifts his head. The dim lamp light reflects in his eyes, glamoured dark. “I like having you here. But I can make you a portal back to the Institute, if that’s what you want.”

His voice is hard to read, but he’s straightened up against the couch. Not quite tense, but not far off from it, either.

“Not really,” Alec admits, which must be the right thing to say. Magnus relaxes back against the cushion again, putting his head back. His chin tilts up to bare the long, clean line of his throat, the jut of his Adam’s apple. Alec thinks about stroking a finger down the tendon standing out under his skin, thinks about leaning over and setting his mouth against the hinge of his jaw, and does neither. After that first night, they haven’t yet gone beyond slow, soft kisses on the couch, Magnus’s hands holding him close but never pushing beyond that, and Alec has spent basically the entire time torn between gratitude and sexual frustration. “But, I mean. It has to be hard, having me here all the time, when I’m not…” he waves a hand at the pictures on the wall, his own face frozen in time. The little trinkets and gifts that he picked out for Magnus and Magnus picked out for him, some of which he’s heard the stories to and some of which he hasn’t. Magnus is generous with anecdotes of their life together, but there’s still so much he doesn’t know. “When I’m not still the same.”

Magnus breathes in slowly, then lets it out just as slowly, and then lifts his head. When he fits his hand to Alec’s cheek, it’s gentle, as is the kiss he presses to Alec’s mouth. “I like having you here,” he says again, simply.

“Okay,” Alec breathes, and tilts his head to kiss Magnus again. This one is slower, deeper, languorous and sensual enough for a coil of heat to wind down to the pit of his stomach, but before he can think about pulling Magnus closer or working his fingers beneath his tailored shirt to feel the heat of his skin, Magnus shifts back, breaking the kiss.

He’s breathing heavily too, and the space where he was seems colder, and Alec watches him swallow and reach for his drink. He takes a long swig, swallows, takes another, sets the glass down on the table, then says, “So. Tell me about the negotiations, how are those going?”

Alec slumps back against the couch with a sigh. His skin feels hot and tight and there’s a prickle of pain behind his eyes, like he’s been staring too long at a bright light. He’s been getting those more and more, sometimes accompanied by that strange sense of dislocation he felt at the Hunter’s Moon.

He hasn’t said anything to Magnus about it yet. They both know that his memories are gone; these disorienting moments of deja vu are just a cruel tease, nothing more.

“That bad?” Magnus asks, a teasing lilt slipping back into his voice.

“No,” Alec says, and reaches for his own glass, mostly for something to do with his hands. “It’s just. Weird. I met Lydia Branwell today.”

“Ah.”

“It was weird,” Alec says again, squeezing his eyes shut. The ache is settling into his skull, a dull, distant thing. He doesn’t know how he feels about it, or how he feels about telling Magnus about it. Lydia Branwell was beautiful and poised and polite, but she warmed up a little after the pleasantries were over. Asked after Magnus and his family. If she’s still holding onto any resentment about how their engagement ended, there was no sign of it at their meeting today, and apparently she’s been one of the staunchest supporters of Downworlder integration. But the knowledge that he’d once been planning to marry her—it’s weird. “She was really nice.”

“She is,” Magnus agrees. He hesitates, and then the couch cushions shift as he moves closer. “Your head is bothering you again.”

“It’s fine,” Alec murmurs, but he doesn’t protest when Magnus’s warm fingers settle lightly on his temples.

“You should talk to Catarina if the headaches don’t get better,” Magnus says. There’s a static prickle of magic across Alec’s skin, sinking into his skull and pushing the pain away.

“Thank you,” Alec murmurs.

Magnus presses a quick kiss to his lips, then sits back. “Talk to Cat.”

“I don’t want to bother her about this if there’s nothing she can do.”

“All the gods above and below save us from self-sacrificing shadowhunters,” Magnus says dryly, but he lets it go. “The hearing is next week, right?”

“Wednesday,” Alec says, scrubbing a hand through his hair and sitting up. “There’s still so much to do, I should…”

“Get some sleep,” Magnus interjects, reaching over to pluck Alec’s glass out of his hands. “I completely agree.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Alec complains, mostly for form’s sake, but Magnus is already banishing both their glasses with a graceful flick of his wrist and a flash of blue magic, climbing to his feet and reaching down to pull Alec up with him, and Alec is too tired to argue against something he wants to do anyway.

It’s not until they’re settled in under the covers, curled toward each other like a pair of quotation marks and not touching, that he says, quietly, “I wish I could remember.”

“Alexander…”

“Not because—I mean, I wish I could remember because everything wouldn’t be weird between us now, but also just…” he trails off. He’s never been that good at putting things like this into words, maybe because he’s spent so much of his life doing the exact opposite. It’s left him unprepared for this in more ways than one, and for once Magnus isn’t swooping in to help him out; he’s just watching, a dark shadow limned in moonlight, a warm counterweight on the other side of the mattress that Alec’s body knows in ways that his mind just… doesn’t anymore.

“I just wish,” he says eventually, “that I could remember you.”

Magnus is quiet long enough that Alec starts to wonder if he’s actually dozed off. Finally, though, he shifts on the mattress, rolling toward Alec. “It’s possible for me to give you some of my memories of us. If you wanted.”

He sounds slightly reluctant, and Alec frowns. “Would you still be able to remember them if you gave them to me?”

A sigh in the darkness. “No.”

“Oh,” Alec murmurs. And then, “No. You should keep them.”

“Okay.” Magnus’s voice is quiet. His hand reaches between them, pets at Alec’s face until he finds his jaw, curls his fingers around it to tilt his chin up, kisses him briefly. He falls back on the pillow, then says, “There is one other thing I could do.”

“What?”

“I could…” Magnus lifts a hand, blue light twining around his fingertips and illuminating his pensive profile in an unearthly glow. “I could show some of them to you? It wouldn’t be the same, but…”

Alec swallows, then says, “Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”

Magnus glances over at him, then spreads both his hands wide like he’s flinging something up into the air, and the dark ceiling above them is suddenly a galaxy of shifting light.

It takes Alec a moment to make sense of it all, and it’s still a shock to see his own face, laughing as he reaches down to swing a little girl up into his arms. She’s talking a mile a minute, but the sound seems like it’s coming from underwater, garbled and unintelligible, and then Magnus is reaching to take her from him, beaming.

Another scene. The rooftop balcony, his own profile thoughtful, looking out into the night. Then a kiss, strange from this perspective, Magnus’s be-ringed hands catching at his face and pulling him in as they crash down on the mattress, laughing and undressing each other—

Himself, standing at the altar with a woman he recognizes as Lydia Branwell, the crash of a door, his eyes going wide, turning away to stride back down the aisle with an expression caught between determination and terror—

Himself, standing at the altar with a Silent Brother behind him, his mother and father and siblings, Jace, Clary, Catarina Loss, so many people he doesn’t even know and they’re smiling, they’re all smiling as he leans down to kiss Magnus on the mouth, a soft gentle press of lips that’s brief only because he’s beaming too wide to do it properly.

Pain slides through his skull, as sharp as a knife, and he turns away with a gasp. The image flickers, then dissipates, and Magnus is turning toward him, concerned. “Alexander? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Alec says, and it comes out rough in a way that has nothing at all to do with the pain that’s already subsiding, leaving a strange hollow ache behind. Magnus makes a worried kind of sound, and he says again, firmer, “I’m okay, Magnus. Thank you. For showing me.”

Magnus makes a soft noise in the darkness. It sounds like a laugh, or maybe a sob; Alec can’t tell, and he can’t see Magnus’s face well enough to guess. And he doesn’t know how to do this, how to do any of this, but when he reaches out to catch at Magnus’s shoulders, Magnus curls into his arms like he was just waiting for the invitation. His breath is hot on Alec’s neck when he murmurs, “You’re welcome.”

Alec presses a kiss to the top of his head, slides his hand up Magnus’s back, feeling the shift of fabric beneath his palm, the dip and curve of Magnus’s spine. He doesn’t know how to do this, but he can feel it when Magnus starts to relax, hard muscle unwinding under his hands, and it makes him soften too, something fragile winding tendrils through and around his heart. Something like hope.

*

The morning he goes to Alicante, Magnus drags him into the massive walk-in closet and sits him down, somewhat forcibly, on the bench against the wall. Alec watches in bemusement as he paces up and down in front of the racks of clothing, face furrowed like he’s concentrating on a complex piece of spellwork instead of picking out an outfit. It’s actually pretty funny, which helps a little with the flicker of nerves that’s been building since he woke up.

“You know,” Alec remarks after a little while, “I can dress myself.”

Magnus flips a dismissive hand at him. “Of course you can, darling.”

Smiling, he subsides. He watches Magnus examine a dark gray suit, pluck delicately at what might be a loose thread in the stitching, grimace, and put it away. A black one gets similar treatment, as do a series of shirts that look more or less identical to Alec. Finally, Magnus settles on a suit with a subtle kind of pinstripe pattern, a white shirt, a dark tie. He watches Alec dress with an intensity that’s more assessing than carnal, and when he’s done, he places a hand on each of Alec’s shoulders, looks at him very seriously, and says, “You’re going to do fantastically, Alexander.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am.” Then Magnus pats his shoulders, and adds, lightly, “Besides, who could resist you when you look like this?”

Alec snorts, but he knows he’s blushing. “A lot of people, I bet.”

“Well, I’m certainly not one of them,” Magnus says, and leans up to steal a brief kiss from his mouth. He pulls back before Alec can think about deepening it, which is probably just as well; he’s due to meet the delegates in Idris within the hour, and he’s already cutting it close. “I’ll see you when you get back. As my theater friends would say, break a leg.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It just means ‘good luck’.” Magnus kisses him again, then draws back. “Not that I think you’ll need it. You’ve got this.”

*

It takes three separate portals to get to Idris, and he always forgets how overwhelming it is, the ancient grandeur of the city, the throngs of people. His own people, not the mundanes that populate New York. It should feel steadying, but he can’t help but look at them all and see how...very alike they are. There are no Downworlders in Alicante other than prisoners and the odd extremely tense political meetup. Partly it’s because they’re not allowed, but partly, Alec is starting to suspect, is because Downworlders themselves aren’t generally all that eager to put themselves in the heart of shadowhunter territory. It isn’t safe, not for them.

That’s what they’re trying to change here, but he’s starting to realize that it’s a bigger job than he was anticipating. This is just the first volley in a long battle.

He’s spent all this time with the idea in his head that this was the last hurrah, that he’d do just this one thing and then step down and let someone else take over. More and more, though, that’s starting to seem less like responsibility and more like cowardice.

That’s still a decision for a later date, though. For now, he needs to focus.

Izzy is with him, and Jace; Lydia Branwell and Councilor Blackthorn meet them outside the chambers, and Alec can’t seem to stop pacing. He can see Izzy’s eyes following him as he measures the length of the marble floor half a dozen times with his footsteps, but it’s Jace finally standing up, looking tense and exasperated in his dark suit and snapping at him to knock it off that finally makes him stop.

“We’re gonna kill it,” Izzy says when he drops into the seat next to her, but she’s picking at her nails and her eyes are anxious.

“We have solid precedent, and the majority of the current Council is on our side,” Lydia adds calmly. A faint smile curves her perfectly painted lips. “We’re going to kill it.”

Alec breathes out a laugh that feels shaky, uneven, and then the doors to the Council chambers are swinging open and there’s no time left to worry about it at all.

*

He’s still wired by the time he gets back to the Institute that afternoon. Exhausted, at least mentally, but wired. It’s the kind of unsettling combination that he knows too well from all the other times he’s had to play at politics like this; he’s not going to get anything useful done anytime soon. He stops by his unused bedroom to change into sweats and a t-shirt and heads down to the training room to try to work out some of the buzzing tension beneath his skin on the punching bags.

Clary Fairchild is already down there when he gets there, moving through her forms alone in the center of the tile floor, hair tied up and an expression of concentration on her face. She’s got good form, he admits, smooth movement, good balance, at least until she catches sight of him in the doorway, yelps, and breaks form. “Alec! I didn’t think you were back yet!”

“Just got in.”

“How did it go?” She pushes her hair out of her face. “Izzy said you guys kicked ass. I just talked to her like an hour ago.”

He shrugs, trying not to let his tension show. He’s still wound up tight, with nothing to do with all that adrenaline. “They’re going to vote this afternoon. No point in worrying about it before then.”

“Right,” Clary says, eyeing him thoughtfully, almost amused. “Which is why you’re down here looking like you’re about to crawl out of your skin, right?”

Alec rolls his eyes. “Look—”

“I’m just kidding,” she interrupts, crossing over to the rack holding the bo staffs. She grabs a pair of them and tosses one to him. Alec, startled, catches it without thinking.

“You want to spar?” he asks. “Really?”

“You can knock me on my ass and see if it makes you feel better,” Clary says.

For an instant, the words seem to echo strangely in his ears, and then he blinks and the impression is gone. Clary is still looking at him with a challenging grin and he says, “Fine. I’ll go easy on you.”

“You really don’t have to,” she says, and attacks.

She’s right. He’s got the advantage of reach and strength, but she’s quick, and whoever’s been training her over the past few years has done a good job of it. It’s enough of a challenge to keep him moving, keep him engaged, especially once she manages to slip past his defenses to land a sharp crack on his shin, spinning away before he can retaliate.

He manages to lose himself in the familiar rhythm of sparring, the clack of the staffs and the shuffle of their footsteps on the floor, enough that it’s actually a surprise when he hears Jace’s voice from the door. “Hey, if you two are about done trying to kill each other—”

Alec starts, lets the butt of his staff land too hard on the floor as Clary looks up, a grin spreading across her face. “Jace! Are you back already?”

“Been back,” Jace says, and Alec turns toward him too, then pauses. Magnus is with him, a step behind, and his eyes are on Alec, and the expression on his face is… one that Alec’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be wearing in public. He’s suddenly glad that he’s already flushed enough that nobody can tell if he’s blushing.

Other than Jace, of course. He gives Alec a look, then glances at Magnus. “Told you he’d be down here.”

“I never doubted it,” Magnus says absently.

Clary, either oblivious to or pointedly ignoring the sudden tension, drops her staff onto the rack and crosses the room to throw her arms around Jace. Then she pulls back and makes a face. “Ugh, sorry, I’m all sweaty. Let me grab a shower and then we can go?”

“Go?” Alec echoes, wrong-footed.

“Date night,” Jace tells him. He glances at Magnus again, and then at Alec, and his besotted smile looks a lot more like a smirk all of a sudden. “We’ll leave you guys to it.”

“That was subtle,” Magnus mutters after they’re both gone, stepping into the sparring room, and Alec lets out a startled laugh.

“Subtlety isn’t really Jace’s strong suit.”

“Believe me, I know.” Magnus touches the shell of his ear briefly, then looks up at Alec. “I understand the hearings went well?”

“I… think so?” Alec says. “They’re debating now, but hopefully they’ll bring it up to vote by the end of the session today. Tomorrow, otherwise. Izzy’s still back in Alicante, but I just, I’m—”

“Working it out of your system?” Magnus finishes. He glances up at Alec again with a thoughtful, almost calculating look, then says, “Well, since your parabatai has absconded with your sparring partner, allow me to offer myself up in her stead.”

“Dressed like that?” Alec asks, loading his tone with sarcasm to cover the sudden twist of heat that goes through him at Magnus’s words. It’s a game, he thinks suddenly, one they’re both playing. One they’ve both been playing, maybe, and Magnus has just made the next move.

Magnus quirks an eyebrow at him. “I’m a warlock. I’m pretty sure I can manage a simple costume change.”

He lifts his hands, and in a swirl of magic his tailored suit and polished boots melt away into workout gear, soft pants and a loose tank top that leaves his shoulders and muscular arms bare. Magnus is more solid than he looks when he’s wrapped up in all those layers of gorgeously tailored clothing, which Alec already knows, having slept next to the man for the past week and a half while he was dressed more or less exactly like this, but somehow in the middle of the training room, Magnus looking at him with a bright, challenging spark in his eyes, it’s different. Way different. This is a lot more like the dreamlike delirium of that first night, Magnus naked and pressing him down to the mattress, breathing hard against his skin.

He swallows, a dry click in the back of his throat, then says, “Yeah, okay. Staffs, or—?”

“I prefer hand to hand myself,” Magnus says, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. His posture is loose and balanced, and Alec feels a flash of—anticipation, adrenaline, something go through him.

This is probably a bad idea, he thinks.

Out loud, he says, “Sounds good to me.”

Then, without giving Magnus a chance to respond, he attacks.

Magnus sidesteps his initial rush neatly, one hand catching his wrist, hips pivoting in a perfectly-executed throw. Alec slaps the floor as he lands to break his fall, rolls back to his feet without breaking momentum, and Magnus laughs, looking delighted, and then it’s on.

Magnus is clearly trained, and more than that, he’s quick. He doesn’t quite have Alec’s reach, but it’s a lot closer than Clary was, and he more than makes up for it with reflexes that border on superhuman. He doesn’t fight fair, either; two minutes in, Alec catches an elbow to the gut that drives the breath from his lungs and allows Magnus to pin him, knee between his shoulders and one hand gripping his wrist, twisting it up behind his back. It’s not quite far enough to hurt, but it’s far enough to make it clear that he could make it hurt if he wanted to.

“That’s cheating,” Alec manages.

Magnus is heavy above him, his breath fast and hot on the back of Alec’s neck, his grip implacable, but there’s a thread of laughter in his voice when he speaks. “Do you yield?”

“You wish,” Alec rasps, and twists to break the hold. It hurts without his flexibility rune, but it frees his arm, his legs coming up to flip their positions and yank Magnus into a choke-hold, caging him with his body. Adrenaline is singing in his veins and he’s starting to get hard, and there’s absolutely no way that Magnus can’t tell, given their positions. It feels like a rush, like freefall, like—

Magnus goes limp against him, just long enough for Alec to start to loosen his grip, concern slicing through that hot rush. Then he twists in Alec’s arms, fast as a viper, slipping out of his hold and surging up to knock him backward and pin him to the floor.

It’s barely even a hold. Alec could break away effortlessly if he wanted to. Instead, he lets his head fall back and stares up at Magnus, looming over him with his chest heaving, a hint of gold shining through his glamoured eyes. When he grins, pleased and triumphant, the last shreds of Alec’s self-control crumble.

He frees one hand only to catch the back of Magnus’s neck and drag him down into a kiss.

Magnus makes a startled sound, and for a moment Alec is terrified that he’s got it all wrong, that he’s misread everything that’s happening here, and then Magnus groans into his mouth, hands lifting from Alec’s shoulders to cup his jaw, tilt it, turning the kiss heated and hungry.

Alec runs his hands down Magnus’s back, feeling the slickness of sweat on his hot skin. His palms find Magnus’s hips, the solid strength of his thighs, muscle jumping beneath his skin when Alec grips tight, pulling him down closer. Magnus lets go of his face to shove his t-shirt up, fingers tugging at a nipple in a way that’s just slightly too rough, and Alec groans out loud, swallows Magnus’s answering groan as their hips roll together, a sweet perfect slide of friction and heat.

It’s only then that it occurs to him that this is getting completely out of hand. Magnus is still straddling him, a sturdy weight pinning him to the floor, and his hands are halfway up Alec’s shirt, and they are… still in the middle of the training room, where literally anybody could walk by at any moment and see them. The same thought seems to occur to Magnus a moment later, because he sits back, chest heaving, hair mussed.

“Much as I appreciate this particular venue,” he says, half-laughing but gratifyingly breathless, “what do you say we get out of here?”

“Yeah," Alec says, and swallows as Magnus stands and leans down to offer him a hand. "Let’s do that.”

*

They’re kissing again before the portal even closes behind them. Alec sways, almost stumbles, disoriented by the sudden change of the light, warm and golden through the curtains of the bedroom, but when Magnus starts to shift back Alec grabs onto him, holding him close. “No, no. Stay.”

Magnus laughs against his mouth. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m just trying to make sure we don’t both topple over and crack our skulls.”

“There’s a bed right there,” Alec says, and pulls him toward it. He feels lightheaded, giddy with desire, and Magnus’s laughter sends a thrill of happiness through him.

“Are you going to throw me on the bed and ravish me, Alexander?” Magnus asks, sounding delighted at the prospect.

Alec kisses him again. “Yes to the first part,” he says, and then does it. It’s really more of a shove; Magnus is too solid for Alec to actually toss without activating his strength rune, but he goes easily, laughing as he lands on the mattress with a bounce and flops back against the pillows. His dark tank top is rucked up to show his toned abdomen, his pants tented obscenely over his erection, and he looks shameless and turned on and happy. Joyful, even, and Alec still can’t quite believe that he can put a look like that on this man’s face. That somehow, after everything, he can have this.

Magnus stretches and trails a hand up his own belly, dragging his shirt up farther, a teasing light in his eyes that suggests he knows exactly what he looks like right now, and what effect it has on Alec. “And the second?”

“I was thinking—” Alec swallows, and drops onto the mattress next to him. Remembers Magnus pressing him down on the floor, steady and powerful and confident, his breath on the back of Alec’s neck, and the hot thrill that shivers up his spine at that gives him the confidence to say, “I was thinking maybe the other way around.”

“Oh,” Magnus says softly, and then he sits up, drapes himself against Alec’s side. “Are you sure?”

Alec takes a shallow breath. “Yeah. But only if you want to. I don’t know if that’s something we used to—”

Magnus kisses him, hard, muffling the words against his lips and tongue; there’s something almost fierce about it. “It is,” he says when he finally pulls back. “But that’s not why I was asking.”

“Oh,” Alec says, getting it. “Okay.” And then, “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Magnus says, and kisses him again. It’s slower this time, deeper, as he pushes Alec’s shirt up. He pulls away just long enough to let Alec tug it up over his head before pulling him in again. His hands skim over Alec’s skin, then land on his shoulders, maneuvering him gently back onto the mattress. Alec settles back against the pillows and watches as Magnus tugs his shoes and socks off, deliberate and methodical, and tosses them on the floor behind him. His pants are next; Magnus’s fingers skim under the waistband and he lifts his hips to let him pull them down along with his boxers, and then he’s naked, naked and hard and sprawled across the bed with Magnus kneeling over him in the golden afternoon sunlight and looking at him like he’s the best thing he’s ever seen.

“Pretty,” he murmurs, running a single finger down Alec’s body from his shoulder to his chest to the ball of his hip, knuckles brushing almost absently against his cock as he traces the shape of his thigh. Alec swallows back a groan at that fleeting contact, and Magnus smiles, leans down to kiss him. “So pretty.”

“I’m not pretty,” Alec grumbles, but it comes out kind of soft and breathless. Magnus laughs and kisses him again, and he adds, “Why are you still wearing clothes?”

“All in good time, my dear,” Magnus says, but he sits back to pull his shirt off and toss it aside. “Better?”

“So much better,” Alec breathes. Right now, Magnus looks like a vision plucked from fantasies he’s barely ever admitted even to himself. It’s almost enough to distract from that thrum of nerves and anticipation running through his body like lightning. From the fact that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, just that he wants. “How should I—?”

“It’ll be easier if you roll over,” Magnus says, and Alec flushes and does it. He feels vulnerable like this, exposed, especially when Magnus leans over to grab a pillow from the other side of the bed and tuck it under him so that his hips are canted up, his cock slipping against the silk pillowcase. Magnus’s hand skims over his back, leaving a trail of prickling goosebumps in its wake. “Good?”

“Yeah,” Alec says. His face feels hot against the pillowcase, but he is. He’s so good.

He’s expecting Magnus to use magic to slick his fingers up again, but instead he leans over Alec, a casually intimate press of skin in this position, and opens the drawer of the nightstand, rifles through it for a moment, then sits back up. There’s the sound of a cap opening, and then fingers cool with slick pressing into him, and Alec shoves his face into his hand to muffle the sounds that want to leave his mouth.

Magnus fucks him slowly with two fingers, and then three, and he keeps touching him with his other hand, little aimless touches, smoothing up and down his back and up into his hair, down his thigh, and Alec feels like he’s sinking beneath the waves of his arousal, so focused on the sensation that he barely realizes that magic is fizzing between them, that there’s suddenly bare skin against him instead of cotton. Magnus pulls his fingers out and Alec makes an embarrassing kind of whimpering noise, low and needy and choked off when warm hands land on his thighs, pushing them farther apart so that Magnus has room to settle between them.

A crinkle of the condom wrapper and the sharp smell of latex, and then Magnus’s cock slips between the cleft of his ass where he’s slick and spread wide, the blunt head just breaching him. Alec gasps, his whole body wound tight with anticipation.

“Breathe,” Magnus says softly, pressing a kiss to his shoulder blade. He holds himself steady on one hand braced against the mattress, hovering over Alec. “Breathe for me. Relax.”

His free hand finds one of Alec’s, strong fingers kneading gently against the heel, urging him to relax the fist he didn’t even realize he was making. Alec lets out the breath he was holding in a messy rush against the pillowcase, then drags in another, unwinding his muscles, letting his body go loose and pliant.

“Good,” Magnus murmurs against his skin. He rocks his hips forward, just slightly, and Alec shudders helplessly, pushes his face into the pillow and tries to breathe. It’s—a lot. Magnus’s cock feels huge like this, and he’s barely even done anything. “So good.” Another kiss against the knob of his spine, wet and open-mouthed. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” His voice sounds thick, dazed, unfamiliar. It hurts, and it feels good, and he wants, he just wants— “More.”

Magnus breathes out a laughing moan, presses another kiss to his skin. His hand is still curled around Alec’s, pressing it against the mattress. Alec twines their fingers together as Magnus sinks slowly into him. It’s a long, hot slide and the pillow is going damp beneath his cheek with his gusting breaths by the time Magnus is fully seated inside him, his hips flush with Alec’s ass, his chest pressed to Alec’s back so that Alec can feel the speeding drumbeat of his heart.

“God,” he murmurs, “look at you,” and Alec almost wants to squirm at his tone, the breathless reverence of it. He doesn’t. He feels caught, suspended, fragile as glass. His cock, pinned beneath him against the pillow, is only half-hard now, but every inch of his skin seems thinned out and hot, his blood singing. He fumbles back, finds Magnus’s hip, his thigh, grips tight and feels Magnus’s cock pulse inside him.

“You can—” his voice comes out broken, half-muffled against the pillowcase. “You can move. If you want to.”

“I’m working on it, darling,” Magnus says, ragged and laughing. His hand runs up Alec’s thigh, over the ball of his hip and up his spine, then back down again. There’s a faint tremor in him, and it hits Alec that Magnus is unsure of his own control right now. That if he moves he might lose it.

That’s a heady thought, one that has Alec bracing his knees on the mattress and rolling his hips back without any kind of conscious thought, although the choked-off noise that Magnus makes when he does is very fucking encouraging. “Come on. Fuck me.”

“You are a menace,” Magnus breathes against the back of his neck, but he’s moving now, a slow, shallow roll of his hips to meet Alec’s. Just small motions, and the drag of his cock still feels so thick and hot, more intimate than anything Alec could have imagined. It’s different than fingers, less flexible; Magnus isn’t hitting his prostate with every stroke, and Alec’s arousal unspools slowly, not enough to distract him from the way Magnus’s hands flex and tremble on his skin, the uneven puffs of his breath and the soft, wet, aimless kisses he keeps pressing to every part of Alec he can reach.

It’s unexpectedly addictive to feel Magnus start to come undone by slow degrees. To feel him start forgetting to take it easy, his thrusts becoming harder, deeper, fingers digging into Alec’s hips and dragging him up to meet him. It’s not in Alec’s nature to acquiesce but he finds himself pliant in Magnus’s hands, obedient to the direction of his body. He rolls his forehead against the pillow as Magnus pulls him up farther, his cock fully hard now and heavy between his legs. He wants to touch himself but he knows that if he does it’ll be all over, and he’s not ready for that. Not yet. He wants to feel Magnus lose it first.

And he’s getting close. His thrusts are becoming uneven and he’s mumbling words against Alec’s skin, fractured and incoherent and half of them not even in English, endearments and profanity punctuated by kisses and the sharp scrape of teeth. He’s going to have a line of bruises across the back of his shoulders, Alec thinks dazedly, marks to keep under his clothes so that every time he feels them he can think about this.

One of Magnus’s hands slips down to press low on his abdomen, the backs of his knuckles just brushing Alec’s cock, and just like that he’s suddenly, desperately on edge, the warm waves of arousal coalescing to a bright, hot point.

“Fuck,” he breathes, reaches down to stroke himself, rough and uneven, “oh, fuck, that’s—”

He’s so caught up in chasing his own climax, his blood pounding in his ears, that he barely hears Magnus breathe out his name like a prayer. He feels it, though, when Magnus slams into him and then goes still, cock pulsing, his body a tense, shuddering arc. His fingers dig into Alec’s skin hard enough to bruise and Alec lets out a choked groan and follows him over the edge an instant later.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, Magnus draped over him and breathing unevenly into his shoulder, but his thighs are starting to tremble by the time Magnus shifts back and pulls out. Alec sucks in a sharp breath, not quite a wince. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s weird, that sudden empty feeling.

“Sorry,” Magnus murmurs, running a hand up his spine. Alec gives in to the tremor in his legs and collapses on the mattress, rolling to avoid the worst of the mess underneath him.

“Don’t be,” he says. His voice sounds rough like he’s been yelling and his heart is still tripping fast. Magnus disposes of the condom and flops on the pillow, close enough to touch. His golden skin is sheened with sweat and his hair is a mess, his eyeliner smudged at the corners, and he’s so damn beautiful that Alec almost wants to pinch himself to make sure he’s not dreaming. Instead, he cups a hand around Magnus’s cheek and draws him into a kiss. “Thank you.”

Magnus laughs against his mouth, breaking the kiss, and says, “Always happy to be of service.”

His shoulders are still shaking as he pulls back, and Alec finds himself grinning too, giddy and buzzed with the echoing aftershocks. He winces a little as he stretches, and Magnus pauses. “I wasn’t too rough, was I? I did get—a little carried away there at the end.”

“Nah,” Alec says. He’s a little sore, enough to know that he’s going to be feeling it for a while, but that’s. Not a bad thing. “It was perfect. You’re perfect.”

Magnus laughs again, but it’s softer, and the expression on his face is so tender that Alec… really doesn’t know what to do with it at all. “You do have a way with words, my love.”

The endearment lodges somewhere behind Alec’s heart, a hot yearning spark, but Magnus is so soft and happy right now that he doesn’t really want to ask about it and ruin the moment. He just rolls closer, mess be damned, fits himself against Magnus’s body, and kisses him again until they’re both breathless, with no need for words between them at all.

*

Alec is sitting on the edge of the bed in boxer briefs some time later, toweling his hair off while the shower runs in the other room—given how long Magnus is taking, it’s a good thing that the hot water in this building is probably magically enhanced—when his phone starts to ring.

It takes him a minute to find it in the tangle of clothes abandoned at the foot of the bed. The ringing has stopped by the time he does, but it starts again immediately without going to voicemail. It’s Izzy’s name on the screen.

They must have had the vote, then. His heart is suddenly pounding and his fingers hesitate for an instant on the screen before he can make himself pick up. “Hello?”

“We fucking did it!” she yells in his ear, so loud that he jerks the phone away from his ear instinctively. “Alec, we did it!”

“It passed?” he asks through lips that seem suddenly numb.

“Hundred and three to ninety-seven, oh my god,” She sounds giddy, almost wild, breathing hard. “Oh my god, I’m sorry, it’s crazy here, it just went through, I had to call you—”

“Yeah,” Alec breathes. His head is a whirl. Somehow, despite all his preparation—all of their preparations—he never really expected it to actually go through. “We need to contact the Spiral Labyrinth, and the Seelie Court, and—”

“—the vampires and the werewolves, I know, I know.” Izzy is speaking so fast that she’s practically tripping over her own words. “The Clave is putting together an official statement right now, we’ll start putting together the delegations in the next couple of days. I just—wow. Alec, this is going to change—”

“Everything,” he breathes.

“Yeah.” She lets out a shaky laugh. “Sorry, I’m still—I just can’t believe it. Is Magnus with you?”

Right on cue, the shower shuts off. He can hear quiet footsteps in the background, Magnus humming a meandering little tune he doesn’t recognize as he puts himself together. “Yeah,” he says again, and it’s a little breathless now that the reality of it is sinking in. There’s a wide, helpless smile stretching his lips. “I’m at the loft.”

“Good. Okay, good,” Izzy says, and laughs. “Give him a kiss from me, I have to call Simon now, bye!”

“Bye,” Alec says, but she’s already hung up. He drops the phone on the bed, then flops back on the mattress, and he’s still lying like that when Magnus comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later, shrugging a dressing gown over his shoulders.

“Was that Isabelle?” he asks. Alec nods, pulling himself upright. He doesn’t quite trust himself to speak, but apparently the expression on his face communicates plenty, because Magnus starts to smile as he moves closer. “And?”

“It passed,” he manages finally. “A hundred and three to ninety-seven, it passed, it’s—”

“You did it,” Magnus breathes, and Alec is struck again by just exactly what this means for Magnus as a warlock, a Downworlder. This isn’t just a law. It’s a sea change.

He can’t step down now. Maybe it’s a decision he already made when he stepped into the Council Hall to testify earlier, because it doesn’t feel sudden. Izzy was right. He needs to see this through to the end, wherever it leads.

The thought feels like something misaligned sliding suddenly back into place. It’s not just what he owes the man he used to be and can’t remember. It’s what he owes himself, what he owes Magnus, what he owes the rest of the Shadow World.

“We did it,” he corrects, and he’s laughing, light and breathless as he reaches up to catch at Magnus’s hips and draw him in. “Izzy said to give you a kiss from her.”

“Much as I love your sister,” Magnus says, grinning, “I’d rather have one from you.”

“That can be arranged,” Alec says, and Magnus is laughing as Alec pulls him the rest of the way down.

It’s a while before they leave the bed again.

Late afternoon sunlight is streaming through the windows by the time they do, and instead of going out they end up eating dinner on the bedroom floor, an ostentatious spread that Magnus conjured up, or possibly summoned from an unsuspecting restaurant or three.

“You got all this and you couldn’t manage a table?” Alec asks, teasing, as he reaches for a samosa.

Magnus stretches one leg out enough to push bare toes against his thigh, an affectionately casual nudge. He looks loose, easy, younger like this in soft pants and nothing else, his hair swept back out of his face. At some point when Alec wasn’t paying attention, he’s changed his eyeliner, or added to it: the black is now accented with lines of shimmering blue. “Picnics are romantic.”

“And usually outside.”

“Ah, but it we left the loft, you’d have to put the rest of your clothes on.”

“I mean,” Alec says, emboldened. “I wouldn’t have to.”

Magnus’s eyes darken at that. “You would if you didn’t want me to jump on you in some inappropriately public location.”

“Again,” Alec says, grinning.

“Again,” Magnus agrees, and he’s smiling too. He leans over and kisses Alec’s mouth quickly, then sits back. “Perhaps when we’re done eating I can give you another demonstration.”

“Yeah," Alec says hopefully. "Okay. When we're done."

*

By the time the food is cleared away, though, a throbbing ache is starting to settle into the bones of his skull. He tries to hide it, but he’s clearly not doing a very good job, if the thoughtful, worried look on Magnus’s face as he banishes dinner is anything to go by. The pain winds down his neck, spreading across his shoulders and pulling them tight and sore. He curls in on himself with a groan, then straightens, obscurely embarrassed as Magnus drops gracefully to his knees before him and takes his face in both hands.

“Bed, I think,” Magnus says, after an iratze and an application of cool blue healing magic do little more than take the edge off. “And we’re calling Cat first thing in the morning if it’s not better.”

Alec would like to protest, but his skull feels sort of scraped thin and fragile, and he can’t quite manage the energy. Magnus changes the sheets with an absent flicker of magic and guides Alec down with gentle hands, arranges the pillow beneath his head and brushes a soft kiss against his forehead. Alec catches at his hand as he starts to pull back, opens his eyes. Magnus’s face seems to swim before him, the only real thing in a world that seems washed with bleeding color and crackling light.

“What is it, Alexander?” Magnus asks softly.

“Can you just—” His tongue feels thick, his thoughts scattered and filtered through a screen of pain. If it weren’t for the fact that an iratze would take care of any physical injury, he’d be worried that he was having a stroke. “Can you stay?”

“Of course,” Magnus murmurs, and a moment later the mattress shifts as he settles beside Alec. Alec lets his eyes fall shut, but he can still tell when Magnus dims the lights with a crackle of magic that seems loud in the silence. A hand settles between his shoulder blades, stroking in slow, soothing circles, and Alec lets himself sink into that feeling, focusing on the warmth of Magnus’s hand and the way his rings catch and slide on his skin instead of the agony seeping through his skull.

Eventually, he slips down into an uneasy sleep.

*

The sky is red and choked with ash like the entire world is burning down around him. Lightning flickers beneath his skin and Izzy is burning, burning, burning, a pillar of fire where his little sister should be and everything in Alec wants to scream, but instead he reaches out, grasping the hands on either side of him and the fire is licking over him as well and—

—his parabatai rune burns, spreading agony through his body, but what actually makes him fall to his knees is the familiar constant of Jace’s heartbeat faltering and then going silent and he’s alone in his head and his heart and his soul like he hasn’t been since he was seventeen—

—his mother’s hands grip his cheeks and she whispers, “You’ve made me so proud—”

—the hands are Magnus’s, suddenly, and there’s a frantic quality to them, flexing, trembling on his skin, and Magnus’s eyes are full of tears and his voice is soft and quick and desperate, and he’s begging, he’s begging—

“Stay with me, Alec, okay? Please. Stay with me.”

Hands grip his cheeks. Magnus’s voice is saying his name. It sounds worried, edging into afraid, and for a moment it bleeds into the dream until Alec isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t. Blinding agony crashes through his skull, whiting out everything else, and then it abates, leaving him flat on his back, gasping like his lungs have forgotten how to breathe. Magnus leans over him with wide eyes.

“Alexander?”

“I’m okay,” Alec rasps, although he’s far from convinced that it’s true right now. He straightens slowly. His head feels like a cracked eggshell that might fall to pieces at any minute. “Nightmare.”

“I guess so,” Magnus says, sitting back a little. “Are you sure you’re okay? You were—” He hesitates. “Screaming.”

“Oh.” That explains why his throat feels like he’s been gargling acid. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Magnus says, an audible eyeroll in his tone although his expression is still worried. “Would you like me to get you a glass of water before I send a fire message to Cat?”

“You really don’t have to.”

“Which? The fire message, or the water?” Magnus slips off the bed and stands and reaches out; a moment later a silky black robe appears in his hands, and he shrugs it on. “Because the former is absolutely happening, Alexander, considering that you went to bed with a terrible, probably magically-induced headache and then screamed yourself awake. And me too, while we’re at it.”

“I said I was sorry,” Alec says, levering himself up. The movement makes the pain in his head flare, then fade. It’s still mostly dark inside, the first hint of dawn just barely turning the horizon pink outside the window. Magnus has a lamp lit in the corner, but it’s dimmed almost down to nothing, which Alec and his aching skull appreciate a lot right now. “It’s really early. You don’t have to bother her, I’m fine.”

Magnus snorts expressively. “Water first, then.”

He conjures a glass and leans over to press it into Alec’s hands. After a hesitation, Alec takes it, wrapping his fingers around the cool glass. He presses it to his temple for a moment, feeling the cold seep into his skin, then takes a sip as Magnus steps away, conjuring a slip of paper and a pen in another flash of magic.

He holds the water on his tongue for a moment, letting it warm, letting the moisture seep into the parched tissues of his mouth, then swallows. It hurts a little, and while the pain in his head is no longer enough to white out the whole world, it’s still sore. He feels unsteady, too cold even with the comforter draped over his legs. Shaky and feverish.

He finishes the glass slowly while Magnus writes, then sets it down on the nightstand and straightens up. Thin golden sunlight is creeping across the floor, mellowing the warm wood and glinting on the gold stitching of the omamori charm that Magnus has looped around the lamp on his side of the bed. It’s beginning to fray slightly at the corners, and Alec leans across the bed to touch it with the tip of his finger.

“You know,” he yawns, pushing the heel of his hand into the lingering ache between his brows, wincing. “Next time we go to Tokyo I could get you another one of these that isn’t falling apart.”

Magnus laughs, sending his fire message up in a swirl of sparks.

“Maybe, but I’m rather fond of that particular—” He breaks off suddenly. Out of the corner of his eye, Alec sees him go suddenly, completely still.

“What is it?” Alec asks turning back toward him. Magnus is staring at him like he’s seen a ghost.

“Did I—” He stops again, then says, carefully, “I don’t remember telling you about that.”

“No, you didn’t, I—” Alec pauses. “You didn’t,” he says again, soft. He lifts his eyes to Magnus’s face, and it’s like seeing him for the first time in weeks. His messy hair and his worried eyes and the dressing gown he bought in Singapore when they were there last year because Alec was mildly drunk and fascinated by the shimmering embroidered dragons in the dim light of the little shop on Haji Lane.

It’s all unfolding like bright paper in his mind. Tokyo, the last morning of their vacation there, slipping away from Magnus while he was caught up in conversation with one of the local warlocks. The old woman running the street stall, the way her eyes had crinkled with laughter at his badly mangled phrasebook Japanese before she finally took pity on him and concluded the rest of the transaction in English. Magnus in the loft in that evening, gift bag in hand, the simple startled delight on his face.

A gift? For me?

Yes, for you. Open it.

Pain lances through his temples again, but he barely notices it. Magnus is still staring at him. Alec wants to kiss him, and he kind of wants to cry, but in the end it’s all he can do to make his lips and tongue form the words.

His voice thin, stunned, wondering. “You didn’t tell me. I remember it. I remember you.”