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The Clave fell on a Tuesday.
The exact details would take weeks to trickle down, about a schism and a betrayal and a political stunt that had backfired beyond all comprehension, but by then it didn’t really matter.
But it happened on a Tuesday, and every nephilim knew it. Every nephilim could feel it.
Magnus Bane learned about it because Alec texted him, “Something happened to the Clave. I’m okay. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home, though.”
Magnus hadn’t given much thought to it at the time, other than to be spitefully pleased at any difficulty the Clave faced and vaguely displeased that the Clave’s difficulty spilled over onto Alec. But he was used to Alec occasionally needing to stay at the Institute to deal with various crises, and Magnus had his own unreliable schedule.
On Wednesday, it was the Spiral Council of Warlocks who spread the word to all the High Warlocks that the Clave had fallen. Not just been attacked, not just in conflict, but fallen. Whatever came next for the organizational hierarchy of shadowhunters and government of nephilim might still be called the Clave, and might be structured like the previous Clave, but it would by necessity be something new, because the old one had shattered beyond repair.
The Spiral Council’s announcement had been short and factual. Magnus, who hadn’t left his apartment in more than 36 hours, felt sympathy for Alec having to deal with that political shit show, and promised himself that he wouldn’t visibly celebrate the Clave’s destruction when Alec eventually made it home.
Since Alec wasn’t home, though, he retrieved a particularly nice bottle of wine and poured himself a celebratory glass.
He hated the Clave, even as he knew the world needed shadowhunters or they’d be overrun with demons. But the Clave was a menace who thought they were better than everyone else and if their services were necessary, then they could do whatever they wanted. Having Shadowhunters without the Clave seemed like it would better for everyone. Definitely better for the downworld.
That’s what he’d thought on Wednesday.
He sent a quick text to Alec, with just a question mark and a heart.
He got a response almost immediately, “I’m okay. Busy. I love you.”
Magus found himself smiling down at the phone. The quick response was more reassuring than the words, because Alec would lie about how he’s doing, but the quick response meant he was using his phone to coordinate from the command center at the Institute.
He looked forward to asking Alec about what the new organizational structure would be. Maybe Magnus could help brainstorm some ideas.
The various shadowhunter Institutes around the world would run on their own for a little bit, without the oversight of the backwards and bigoted Clave, and then most likely create a new hierarchy of some sort. Shadowhunters did like their militant hierarchies, Magnus had thought with some internal mockery.
That’s what he’d thought.
It was late Wednesday night, into early Thursday morning that the responses to the Spiral Council’s report started circulating. Warlocks reporting what was happening at their local shadowhunter Institutes.
That was when Magnus began to realize how badly he had misjudged the situation. How badly they had all misjudged the situation.
Nephilim around the world were going crazy.
Massacres and suicides and whole shadowhunter Institutes immolating.
He texted Alec again, not caring what time it was. And Alec responded again immediately: “Still okay. Busy. I love you.”
He didn’t feel like smiling anymore.
He spent all of Thursday at the Spiral Labyrinth researching and reaching out to other warlocks to figure out what was happening.
It was worse than the height of the wars, when the Circle had created a schism within the Clave and it was unclear which shadowhunters were enemies and which were reluctant allies.
Now a warlock couldn’t tell if a nephilim was attacking to kill a downworlder or attacking as a form of suicide. There were attacks and there were deaths on both sides. There were also nephilim whose suicides were more obvious.
It wasn’t even just trained and professional shadowhunters, who were a relatively common sight in the downworld communities; it was also sheltered nephilim civilians who were almost never seen by downworlders. It was nephilim as a species who were going crazy.
It wasn’t Magnus who figured out the trick of using magic sight to see the divine pathways that connected nephilim to each other. That was a warlock in Mongolia who came to the Spiral Labyrinth to report that the nephilim were cut loose from their connection to the divine. She could see the ties but none of her magic could interact with it. All she could do was watch the loose strands unravel.
The connections were angelic and warlock’s demonic powers couldn’t touch them, to either help or hinder.
Nephilim were crying out and dying, and no one knew how to stop it: the cause had already happened. This was the consequences of the Clave having fallen, and there was no bringing it back.
Nephilim were cut off from the hierarchy that had connected them to Raziel and it was driving them crazy.
Magnus had spent hundreds of years coming to terms with what it meant for him that his father was a demon, that he had demonic powers and with those powers also weaknesses. He was suddenly confronted over the course of a few hours with what it meant that shadowhunters, that nephilim, were descended from angels.
Angels weren’t individuals in the way humans were, or even the way demons were. Independence was a human characteristic. Rebellion was a demonic characteristic. Angels were aspects and messengers of God. Obedience was a foundation of angelic nature. Shadowhunters were nephilim and nephilim were descended from angels. It wasn’t a quirk of their culture that made them hierarchical. It was a quirk of their nature. And the world was finding out what happened when nephilim were cast off from that hierarchy.
He left the Spiral Labyrinth every two hours just to make sure his phone had connectivity and text with Alec. Every time, Alec replied within minutes, sometimes within seconds. Each time, his “I’m okay” looked more like a lie.
Magnus had known that the Clave could punish shadowhunters by deruning and exiling them. He hadn’t known how bad that punishment actually was, what it meant for a nephilim to be cut off from their hierarchy.
He’d only known that such nephilim died quick messy deaths from demons soon after.
Now the shadowhunters weren’t losing their runes, but they were cut off from the Clave anyway.
The world needed Shadowhunters and it turned out that Shadowhunters needed the Clave.
Magnus stayed in the Spiral Labyrinth long enough to learn how to use his own magic to at least see the divine connections, so that he could diagnose the problem, if not fix it, before finally heading to the New York Institute.
When he arrived, the New York Institute was pure chaos. Shadowhunters, nephilim, looking drawn and gaunt, moving in groups, and Magnus didn’t recognize any of them.
At first, they didn't even noticed he was there at the entrance, a warlock at a shadowhunter Institute. After a beat, they saw him, and after another, they raised their weapons and looked ready to attack him, except that they still waited for him to attack them instead.
A high voice piping up finally broke the standoff, a child nephilim, a trainee shadowhunter who’s voice was still soprano young. “Weapons down! That’s Magnus Bane, Alec’s boyfriend. He’s allowed here.”
And all the adult shadowhunters lowered their weapons and just stood there until the kid said, “You know where you’re supposed to go. You all had your orders! Keep following the orders!”
The kid’s voice trembled as it tried to stay sharp. Like ordering adults around was his duty and not something so far outside the bounds of normality.
Magnus waited until the crowd was moving again, before making his way towards the child nephilim, although stopping a good ten feet back to avoid being threatening. At least the kid didn’t look as traumatized as the adults did. Whatever had happened to them, he was protected from. He just wasn’t protected from seeing the traumatized adults. “Where is Alec?”
“He’s in the command center. You can go find him there. I’m on duty in this room.” The kid raised his chin high, daring Magnus to say anything about such a young kid having a duty station.
Magnus wouldn’t dare say anything about it. “Okay,” Magnus said instead. “Thank you.”
He did know the way to the command center, although he’d never walked there unescorted before. Most of the shadowhunters in the hallway ignored him although a few nodded in his direction. They clearly recognized him, but he didn’t recognize them.
When he got to the command center, Magnus's eyes went immediately to Alec, the center of the chaos and the obvious leader, and yet it still took a moment to recognize him. Alec was strained in a way that Magnus had never seen before even with everything else they'd gone through. He looked like a honed blade held without a sheath, as focused as if he were leading a battle even though he was in his own Institute’s command center.
Magnus had to pause to consciously use his new skill to see the divine cords around Alec and at least they didn’t look like the tattered loose threads that other warlocks had described. But this was a new technique and none of them knew what exactly they were looking at. To his sight, Alec looked like a knot of threads, each one taut but going every which way. He didn’t know what any of it meant yet, but at least it wasn’t the unraveling that other nephilim were suffering through.
He could see those unraveling threads drift through the air from most of the other shadowhunters in the room. But not from Alec.
Then Alec looked up and saw Magnus and he smiled with relief, as though he'd been worried about Magnus rather than the reverse. He was still talking on a phone as he walked right into Magnus's arms and leaned down to give Magnus a deep and desperate kiss.
"Mmhmm," he said, into the kiss and also into the phone he still held to one ear.
Magnus wasn't sure if he should be offended or not, but wasn't going to object to such a public display, even if Alec wasn't as focused as he might have wished.
When Alec finally pulled out of the kiss, he said, "I love you with every fiber of my being. That said, I'd also like to open a tab for your services, High Warlock."
He still hadn't ended the phone call, Magnus was delighted to notice. It put him in a better mood than even the kiss, it was a public claiming. "Of course. What can I do for you?"
"First a portal for three to the Omaha Institute, and twenty from the Omaha Institute. Then assistance with a patrol. Then returning, for further assistance."
He raised an eyebrow at that shuffling of people with Omaha of all places, but nodded and snapped his fingers for the portal.
Alec then spoke into the phone without a hint of blush, apparently fully aware but uncaring that the other side would have heard everything. "The portal is open. I’m sending my people through." He gestured for three people, although Magnus only recognized one. They nodded, and walked through the portal. "Send through your twenty."
The twenty that came through looked nothing like the three that had left. They looked half dead and yearning for the other half. They looked like they were teetering on the edge of insanity or maybe already over that edge and only held by the hard grasp of one of their companions who was in turn only holding on by their fingernails. And to Magnus sight, the loose trailing threads bled out into nothingness, hollowing the nephilim out.
"I’ve received them. I’ll keep you updated." Then Alec hung up and turned to the new arrivals.
“Welcome to the New York Institute. You’ll be going on patrol immediately under one of my patrol leaders. Reyna," Alec gestured forward a young shadowhunter that Magnus had last seen as a trainee only a few months ago. "You're going to lead a patrol. You know how to do this. Magnus will accompany you."
Reyna looked pale but determined. "Yes, sir!"
Then she turned to the group of recent arrivals. "I'm Reyna, your patrol leader here at the New York Institute. Introduce yourselves."
And the shadowhunters did. They were all older and clearly more experienced than Reyna, but they stood up straighter and seemed calmer for shuffling themselves into order and stating their names and declaring, "I am in your care and under your command." Each and every one of them said that. It was a ritual of some sort. Magnus realized that he could see bindings reach out, fragile but there, tying the newly arrived nephilim to Reyna. And he could see Reyna struggle with tying them all to herself even as she accepted them.
As she stood firm, he could also see a similar binding from her to Alec getting thicker as she relied on him.
Watching that connection let him interpret the cords that went from Alec outward. The mass of growing ropes of responsibility that he was pouring strength down. Leaving himself gaunt.
"Magnus, please accompany Reyna on the patrol and provide what assistance you can. You are there as my contractor, not hers however." Then Alec lowered his voice to nearly subvocal. The others wouldn't be able to hear. "She needs to come back alive. The others, I hope they survive; I want them to. But if it’s between them or Reyna, pick Reyna. And if it’s between them or a civilian, pick the civilian."
Magnus masked his surprise, nodded his understanding, and set his determination that he'd ensure that kind of choice never came up. He would bring them all back alive.
Alec hadn’t asked for his help in any of their text messages. He’d only asked when Magnus had shown up in person, volunteered, and even then he’d asked that they set up a tab, to keep the trade of favors professional, even after he’d kissed him in the middle of the command center.
Magnus would figure out what was happening and how to fix it.
He followed Reyna along with the rest of the patrol. It was an easy loop of a twenty-block radius. Under other circumstances, it wouldn’t have been a bad first assignment for a new patrol leader.
As it was, demon activity was high, and the shadowhunters were weaker than he’d ever seen them.
The patrol was too big for an urban patrol that normally topped out at eight; the new people wildly outnumbered the one experienced person; the experienced person wasn’t experienced enough to be a teacher; the students were too mentally fragile to be trusted on the streets.
Reyna was micromanaging the members of her patrol, but it seemed to be helping them. They looked better after every order they received and carried out, even if that order was to scale a fire escape, take the lay of the land, and report back what they’d seen.
The spiderweb thin threads connecting them to Reyna strengthened with every successful interaction. Those thin threads were growing, though still nothing in comparison the thick cords that he could see hanging loose and getting looser, bleeding out more than could be received by the thin new threads.
There wasn’t much to see on this path and Reyna explained, “this is the first patrol pattern for most new trainees in New York. It’s a chance to get the lay of the land without getting into too much trouble. With so many strangers coming through, it’s being patrolled twice a day.”
That would do it. Even in these times, no demons were going to settle in within the twelve hours between patrols.
He was still thinking that when the patrol found a minor demon about to eat a civilian child.
A minor demon against twenty-one shadowhunters should have been over before it started. Instead, the shadowhunters looked like they were wading through molasses.
Magnus had to step in just to prevent the demon from getting away, before one of the shadowhunters succeeded in killing it.
“How did you get this role?” Magnus asked Reyna, after the second time he’d had to step in to prevent a disaster.
“My training instructor is the acting head of the New York Institute.”
“Alec is still in New York and called you his patrol leader.”
“Alec is currently the acting head of most of North America.”
“A week ago, that wasn’t a thing.”
“A week ago, the Clave received the loyalty of the city Institutes.”
“What about the other continents?”
Reyna shook her head. “I’m not involved in those conversations. All I know is that Jace is in Los Angeles; Isabelle is in New Orleans; everyone under Alec’s command with any type of command experience of their own is being sent to other Institutes to try and help and so far every city I’ve heard is in North America. Everyone without command experience is getting it now, with the transfers who are coming in. And the transfers need to settle into our command structure as fast as possible. Maybe we can keep expanding after that, but we’re already spread too thin.” She grimaced and then shook her head abruptly, as if shaking the very thoughts loose. “But we can grow stronger. We will grow stronger and more experienced. This is what being a shadowhunter is. Protecting as many people as we can.” She was clearly quoting someone. Either her training instructor or Alec.
Magnus held his peace. It would do no good to push her. And that hadn’t even been the right question to ask. The question wasn’t why Alec and the New York Institute aren’t doing more, it was how they are able to do anything at all. “Why are you immune to what happened to these other shadowhunters?”
Reyna looked surprised at the question. “I’m not immune. I still need the chain of loyalty up to Raziel. But I’m loyal to Jonas, my training instructor, and Jonas is loyal to Alec, and Alec is loyal to Raziel. I didn’t lose my connection to the angel when the Clave fell.”
“Why can Alec do this, then? Not that I don’t think he’s special, but what makes him different from every other head of an Institute? Why are they falling and the New York Institute isn’t?”
Reyna didn’t answer immediately. They moved their patrol another three blocks and broke up a downworlder fight mostly by Magnus making his presence known, before she answered.
“You’re what’s different. Or rather, Alec picking you over the demands of his parents and the Clave. He didn't break from Raziel, but he did break from the Clave when he left his own wedding for you. It was hard on him, hard on all of us who's loyalties flow through him, but mostly hard on him. A lot of us didn't think you were worth the pain. But now I think we're all grateful. He cut the Clave out of his personal chain of loyalty. They still had secular power, of course, but he’s been directly loyal to Raziel, bypassing the Clave, for a year now. So we still have to deal with the secular loss, but he took the psychological pain and he protected us from it and he got through it. And he can promise everyone else that it's possible. That they can get through it too.”
“… oh,” Magnus said, quietly, feeling his heart squeeze painfully.
Magnus remembered the times after that interrupted wedding ceremony when Alec had cried in his sleep. Magnus had wondered if Alec regretted his decision and not quite been sure whether to believe it when Alec had sworn he didn't regret his choice, had said that the consequences were painful but he didn’t regret it.
Magnus had reassured himself that it was like breaking Alec out of a cult; that of course there would be times when Alec would want the comfort of the familiar even if it had been painful. He had been proud of Alec for putting himself first over the demands of others.
He’d been worried though, when Alec had asked Magnus' permission to set a shrine to Raziel in his apartment. Magnus had bitten back his first few automatic rejections before managing to say, as casually as possible, "Of course. This is your home too."
He'd wanted his home to be Alec's home too, but he'd never noticed Alec being particularly religious before and a shrine had seemed like a significant step backwards. The way Alec had spent hours in front of that shrine had seriously bothered him, had made him doubt if their relationship would actually work. Now, he was unbelievably glad that he'd kept his fool mouth shut and never said anything like that to Alec.
He had treated Alec like a human, or like a warlock. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of Alec as a nephilim specifically. It hadn’t occurred to him that there was a difference in that way, although he’d never have dreamed of telling a vampire or a werewolf that he expected them to reject their hierarchies in order to show their love for him. Even if it was necessary to make such a demand, he would have respected such an act much more than he had respected Alec’s rejection of the Clave.
He'd liked it better when Alec's prayers at the shrine had become less silent devotion and more like a daily debrief. He'd joked once that Alec was replacing his reports to the Clave with reports to the angel directly.
Alec had grinned back at him and said, "Exactly."
Magnus had thought the grin was because he'd found the joke funny. In retrospect, with this new context, Magnus wondered how much that grin had been from exultant relief. That Alec had managed to replace the Clave. He'd found a lifeline that could replace what he'd cut himself off from.
That had been six months after he’d moved in with Magnus. Six months of recovery. For the members of this patrol, the loss hadn’t been a choice, they hadn’t received any benefit from it, and it hadn’t even been a week.
The patrol continued. It was both the easiest and the hardest shadowhunter patrol that Magnus had ever been on.
The demons weren’t any stronger than they’d been before, but they were more numerous, and the shadowhunters were so much weaker.
And a number of downworlders were taking the opportunity to take potshots at the shadowhunters while they were down. The enraging part of that was how much Magnus understood. There were plenty of reasons for downworlders to hate shadowhunters. Why shouldn’t they mock the shadowhunters who had been brought so low so quickly? And maybe take a few out when they could?
None of those stupid, stupid downworlders gave any thought to what the world would be like if there were no shadowhunters. Or maybe they hadn’t realized that this could be a permanent change.
Maybe they were just like Magnus himself had been five days ago when he’d first heard that the Clave had fallen and poured himself a celebratory glass of wine.
They continued the patrol. Reyna did well enough for a first time under terrible circumstances, Magnus got the information he needed, and they brought all twenty Omaha shadowhunters back, alive and as well as they’d been when they’d left and perhaps just slightly better.
Alec greeted him with another public kiss that Magnus found himself returning just as desperately.
Then he had to go and report back to the Spiral Labyrinth, but promised to return in time to assist with another patrol in twelve hours.
There were no terrifying villains to fight, no massive dramatic magics he could perform to fix this, but he could babysit the traumatized shadowhunters being led by the baby patrol leaders and keep them alive long enough to recover on their own.
He could do that at least.
He could do that and he could open portals. As many portals as they needed, to any places they needed. He kept his tab open and postponed the argument he knew would come when Alec tried to pay him for his services and he refused to accept anything. Alec was spending his own time and energy wildly, profligately, without care for the future because if they didn’t get through the present there would be no future. The least Magnus could do was not cause their financial ruin as well.
He could supervise patrols and he could open portals except that what was easy once, might still be easy ten times in a row, but was noticeably harder the twentieth time without any real rest. The effort accumulated.
All of the shadowhunters with patrol experience, as leaders or even just followers, were rotating through other Institutes. And in return, the most broken shadowhunters were arriving at the New York Institute to work as directly under Alec as they could afford to arrange.
The days stretched out into weeks and the crisis situation was becoming a new status quo and even Magnus was getting tired.
The second week, Magnus had been supervising a patrol with Reyna when they found a rogue vampire. One of the shadowhunters from Omaha, Daniel, jumped on the vampire. That should have been that. Except the vampire threw Daniel against a brick wall. His head hit the brick and his skull cracked.
That shouldn’t have happened. The strength rune alone should have kept Daniel unharmed from the impact, even if it hadn’t allowed him to overpower the vampire. He should have suffered a concussion at worst.
Magnus hadn’t softened the brick wall. He hadn’t healed the cracked skull as soon as it happened. He’d been focused on the other shadowhunters who were still fighting the vampire, because it took five of them to take it down.
After the fight, it was Reyna who checked on Daniel and Reyna who had told them that she was splitting the patrol in half: nine of them would be returning to the Institute with Daniel’s body, the rest of them would continue on.
A shadowhunter died because Magnus hadn’t been paying attention.
He continued on with the rest of the patrol, wondering how he was going to confess his failure to Alec. He had already apologized to Reyna, but she just shook her head and said, “It’s a risk of being a shadowhunter. You’re not responsible for us.”
Except he was responsible. He had asked to be responsible. He had promised Alec he would be responsible, even if not in so many words.
But when he returned to the Institute, Alec had kissed him with as much fervor as before and apologized to him instead. “You’re not at fault. This is a long hard slog of missions and I’m sorry I’m taking advantage of you. Everything you’re doing is keeping the death count down, but it’s never going to be zero. If you want to leave, you can. Of course you can. But I can still you use, if you’re willing.”
And what was Magnus supposed to say about that?
Alec’s complete refusal to blame him might haunt him more than the death itself. Magnus was the High Warlock of Brooklyn and was supposed to be better than this!
But then again, Alexander Lightwood, Head of the New York Institute, was supposed to be better than this too. While Daniel’s death was the first to happen under Magnus’ supervision, it was far from the first under Alec’s.
Magnus kept going on missions and opening portals and trying to convince Alec to get some sleep even if it was just a couple of hours at a time.
A few days later, Magnus watched as five of the shadowhunters from Omaha, who were just beginning to look two whole steps away from suicide rather than actively contemplating dying right then and there, transferred out to Toronto in exchange for twelve shadowhunters who might as well be in the process of swallowing poison as they stepped through the portal.
Magnus was fairly sure that Alec was taking methamphetamines to supplement the combination of potions and runes he was using to keep himself awake and focused.
Every shadowhunter leaving the New York Institute got a one-on-one moment with Alec, clasping wrists, as he stared directly into their eyes and told them, “I expect you to fight for the protection of the world, to give your faith to Raziel and hold strong through every fear and doubt. You will have fear and doubt, but you must hold strong anyway.”
They stood stronger when they left, but the weight on Alec’s shoulders was getting crushingly heavy.
To his magic sight, Alec was being drained beyond what Magnus would have thought possible. Everything he received from his connection to Raziel flowed back out in a hundred different directions, and every shadowhunter whose arm he clasped and who clasped him back, was another drowning person pulling Alec down.
Beyond his magic sight, though, Magnus could see what Alec was doing. He received reports of his own from the Spiral Council and his network of friends and acquaintances from around the world, so he knew not only what Alec was doing, but that it was working. Slowly and painfully, but the rate of deaths in North America was slowing, even if it hadn’t stopped.
The rate of deaths on other continents were increasing, though, as even those shadowhunters who had held on for days were giving up hope. And the shadowhunters who could have survived this were dying in the way that unsupported shadowhunters died, because they didn’t have patrols of healthy companions to back them up.
As the losses of shadowhunters increased, the deaths cascaded into downworld and civilian populations, no longer protected from demon attacks.
Shadowhunters had been awful to downworlders for decades if not centuries, but their fights against demons had always saved more downworlders than anyone had ever admitted.
Magnus knew that, from a generational standpoint, the losses in the downworld would likely come out even or possibly slightly ahead. The numbers at least, if not the psychological damage. Vampires and werewolves were created more often than they were born, and the worst parts of those communities were going wild in the absence of regular shadowhunter supervision. With so many demons on the loose, the warlock population would go through a boom after this and that was its own horror show. How many warlocks would be born in nine months with no support structure to help them?
In contrast, shadowhunters were born as nephilim and then trained for years in an academy. The sheer number of these deaths would take centuries to recover from, possibly long after even the trauma was resolved. Every week was another century of recovery. There was a reason why the Clave had pushed so hard for Alec to marry and have children, regardless of his preferences: they’d already known that they needed more generations of shadowhunters. Magnus hadn’t agreed with it then and he wouldn’t agree with it in the future, but he could understand their arguments.
Funneling shadowhunters through the New York Institute was working. It was. The situation was infinitely better than it would have been without that.
But it was still so much worse than Magnus could have imagined.
A handful of other nephilim directly loyal to Raziel had been found on other continents where they were trying to do something similar, although none of them had the combination of Alec’s training as a high-ranked shadowhunter and experience receiving and directing loyalty in a chain.
All of them were reaching their limits.
Alec was skirting at the edge of collapse and at the current rate, would crash long before this crisis passed. If this crisis passed.
It had taken months for Alec to stop crying in his sleep, after the failed wedding. And he’d had so much support in that.
If it took all the shadowhunters suffering from similar breaks those same months to recover… every week this continued would be another century to recover from.
And Magnus wasn’t the only one who knew it.
He could see it in the eyes of the other downworlders, and he could see it in the eyes of the few regular New York Institute shadowhunters he met in passing as they portaled from Institute to Institute. And he could see it in the way that Alec didn’t quite meet Magnus’ eyes anymore, even as he took every stolen opportunity to kiss Magnus.
Magnus was returning from another patrol, this time lead by Benjamin, a fresh-faced shadowhunter of fourteen, after Reyna had been sent to Houston with three of the best Omaha patrollers, in order to lead the Institute there after the prior Houston head had suicided into a demon nest – when he heard Isabelle’s voice.
“People are dying, Alec!”
“Do you think I don't know that?” Alec’s voice almost cracked but it didn’t, and Magnus loved him so much and he hated the idea that this was the end. But he knew it was coming soon. Alec was holding back a flood, but he couldn’t maintain it indefinitely and when he finally fell, it would be a second falling and everyone who had been protected before, everyone who had was just getting back to their feet after the Clave fall, would all fall again.
If they were smart, they would be preparing for what would happen when Alec finally used himself up entirely. But Magnus couldn’t bear to think about that, and he was pretty sure everyone else was avoiding that thought too.
The shadowhunters couldn’t even focus on their current pain, much less their future pain, because they still had a responsibility to the world.
For all the horrors that nephilim had inflicted on the downworld, this was the first time they were failing their duty to protect from demons.
"You have a way to stop this,” Isabelle said and the words didn’t make sense to Magnus. Not at first.
"No, I don’t."
"Alec, Magnus is one person. How many of us will you watch die before giving him up?"
The world seemed to tremble under Magnus as the words made it through his exhausted brain. And then trembled again at Alec’s response:
"All of you."
"What?" Isabelle sounded shocked, but her exclamation covered Magnus' own exclamation.
"Shadowhunters are made to fight and to die. When I became the head of this Institute, I did so knowing that I would be sending my family into danger. I will always do my best to protect you, but you agreed to be sacrificed at need when you became a shadowhunter. I won't betray Magnus for your life. I won’t betray him for everyone’s life.”
"What if it isn't betrayal?" Magnus said, finally stepping forward.
"Magnus…" Alec’s eyes went wide. Isabelle’s didn’t. She had known he was there. She had set this up.
"It's not just shadowhunters who are dying, Alec. And it's not just shadowhunters who give their lives to protect their people."
“Magnus, no.” Alec came to give him the desperate kiss that had become his habit. For the first time Magnus put his hand up between them to block it.
“Alec, if my sacrifice is enough to stop this, then it is better that it happen now, intentionally, and made use of, rather than an accidental death from exhaustion that does no one any good.” Magnus knew such a death was coming. He couldn’t sleep when he was needed, and yet he needed sleep to be useful. He was scrapping the bottom of the barrel of sheer energy and sometimes he was coming up empty. If he could give up his life for this, if he could fix it with a simple sacrifice right now, that would be a relief.
"You don't know what you’re asking for. You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”
“No, I don’t. But I can guess: Isabelle found a way for you to end this madness. And all it takes is the nephilim head of an Institute sacrificing a high warlock for power. Is that right?"
"It’s not about you being a warlock. It’s about you being my lover. It’s about me having chosen you over the Clave." Alec was even more tired than Magnus was. It was three straight weeks of crises upon crises, and he looked to Magnus’ magical eyes like a cracked vessel, all his energy draining constantly, and no end in sight. And yet, he still said, "I'll find a better way."
Magnus loved Alec so much. Who didn’t want a lover who would let the world burn in exchange for him? Except that Magnus couldn’t let Alec do that. "How soon, though? This can't go on. My people are dying. Your people are dying. Civilians are dying. I can't let you put my life above all of theirs. You can’t say that shadowhunters are made for sacrifice and then exempt yourself.”
Alec looked stricken. Then grabbed Magnus’ hand and pulled it down, so there was nothing between them. He kissed Magnus viciously. Then pulled back. "I will never, ever forgive you for this."
Magnus tried and failed to smile. "I know. But we do what we must."
If there was a way out of this, they had to take it.
"Bind your hands to the desk, facing me," Alec ordered.
It was fitting, Magnus thought, that he prepare himself for the slaughter. He summoned a pair of shackles he kept for when he needed to bind another warlock. They inhibited the use of magic and were enspelled such that even he wouldn't be able to break out of them easily. He embedded them in the table and then snapped them closed around his own wrists and felt his magic further retreat within him. Then he relaxed. This horror show would be over soon. He could stop seeing his lover slowly drain himself to the breaking point, and watch people fight and die every day. His magic struggled sluggishly against the binding, but it was weak with overuse and would take at least twenty minutes to break free. The shackles weren’t designed for a warlock of his power, but he was so tired and he doubted this would take long. Isabelle was already handing Alec a ceremonial blade of some sort. She nodded at Magnus as she did so and he nodded back. They both knew this would be for the best.
Alec looked enraged and exhausted and terrified. Magnus knew this kind of thing had to be done immediately, as soon as the decision was made. No take backs.
“Raziel hear me! Your devoted servant, whose loyalty has never swayed, always to you, above all others, above your other servants, above my lover. See me and see my sacrifice in your name, that I might transform all I am into power to spread across the land.”
Even with his magic bound, Magnus could still do some internal works. He wanted to see this work. He could die happy if this this worked and stopped Alec from draining himself dry. He switched his eyesight to see the threads of divinity sprouting out from Alec, a thousand strands of cords draining him of his life and will. They were fragile and flimsy but very much present; Alec was supporting all of them.
“Let me take all my love for this man, all my hopes and dreams for the future, all my desire and despair, all my rage, and all my lust, all the complicated love and devotion that runs through me like a river, carving a canyon in my soul and watering the roots of every part of me that grows, let me take all this love and lift it from its riverbed and cast it instead wide as a river delta, bringing life and nourishment to every nephilim it touches."
As Alec spoke a haze drifted like fog from Alec and coalesced between him and Magnus. Magnus switched his eyes back to regular sight and it disappeared. Then back to magic sight and it shimmered between them.
"Let this be so. Amen."
Alec slashed down with his knife, not at Magnus, but at the shimmering cloud between them. It exploded outward in roiling waves.
The knife implanted in the desk between them, and Alec arched in pain, his mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes rolled back, and Magnus couldn't feel a single thing. He thought he might be in shock.
All that soft cloud that had been a representation of Alec’s love clotted and coalesced and retreated back into Alec, and from there it slid down those thousand bindings turning them from fragile threads to solid chains.
Magnus’ magic attempted to break free without his conscious control, but there was nothing it could do about the shackles he’d put on himself. He was still bound, repeating "no, no, no" like a mantra, as if it could turn back time. Alec arched and twisted in pain, pushing himself up on his toes like the pain was pulling him up. In magic sight, Alec burned with holy fire, too bright to look at. Magnus was forced to look with only his regular vision as Alec strained, twisting and contorting but keeping his hands on that damned knife embedded in the table.
Magnus was still bound to the desk when Alec finally slumped down. His magic was still fighting to free itself and him, so it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. It felt like ten hours. Ten infinities.
Alec’s eyes were his own again, except for all the ways they weren’t. He looked around the room with cool assessment, dispassionate care for his people. He looked like a member of the old Clave. Magnus had always thought the members of the Clave ruling class sacrificed their humanity, and yet it had never occurred to him to think that it might be more than a metaphor.
"It is done. We need to check how far the reach is and where the nephilim are still in distress. Start making calls.”
Alec didn’t even spare Magnus a glance as he pulled out his phone.
Magnus stood where he was, as the shadowhunters around him started making their own calls.
To his magic sight, Alec was shrouded in a lacework of threads and braids of beautiful complexity and incomprehensible order. The ties reached out delicate but firm in all directions and connected him solidly to every other shadowhunter in the room and a hundred more beyond it.
To his regular eyes, every shadowhunter in the room looked better than they had before, even as their guilt made them look away from Magnus where he was still clamped to the table by the shackles his magic was slowly destroying. Isabelle was the one exception. She did look better, healthier than she had before, but she wasn’t ignoring Magnus. She came and stood where Alec had been, and pulled the knife from the table. For a moment, Magnus wondered if this would be when he died, but instead, she slid the knife into a sheath and tucked it away in her bag. Then she stood there and looked at him; she’d be close enough to touch as soon as he managed to free himself. Magnus estimated four more minutes.
He couldn’t think, offhand, of a worse torture than having to stand here and watch a version of Alec who had given up his humanity in order to replace the Clave. He tried to focus on Isabelle instead.
“You knew this wasn't what I thought you meant.”
“Of course I did,” Isabelle said with a sigh. “And if you had been even a bit less exhausted or overwhelmed yourself, you would have known it too.”
“Alec didn't betray me, but you sure as hell did.”
“Would you have chosen differently if you'd known? If you'd paused to realize that nephilim spells are all about self-sacrifice? It still needed to be done. Would you have kept Alec's love and let the world burn? Would you have made me try to convince him to perform the spell without your permission? He could sacrifice himself for the good of us all, he could even sacrifice you, if it came down to it, but I think betraying you would have truly broken him.”
The other people on their phones in the room were ignoring Magnus and Isabelle, but starting to call out their information.
“Acting Head of Cape Town Institute felt the call! He sends his loyalty to Alexander.”
“Acting Head of Crete felt the call! He sends his loyalty to Alexander.”
Magnus snarled. “You did this to him! You’re his sister!”
“Do you remember what he said to me, when I brought up this ritual? That shadowhunters are made to fight and die? He was willing to sacrifice us all. Well, we’re more alike than different. Because I was willing to sacrifice him too.” Isabelle spoke harshly, but her voice broke. When she continued, she sounded wounded. “I didn’t want to see him like this either. But he wasn’t wrong. All shadowhunters know that we might be called to take a mission without expecting to come back.”
“Acting Head of Tokyo felt the call! He sends his loyalty.”
“Acting Head of Santiago felt the call and sends his loyalty!”
“Head of Dubai survived! He felt the call and sends his loyalty!”
"I never want to see you again," Magnus told Isabelle and meant every single shadowhunter ever.
"That's too bad. Because our species’ survival is now founded on love of you. We all love you. Long past the time that Alec dies, even if he manages to live to old age and die naturally, which has frankly never happened to a professional shadowhunter in recorded history, for as long as there are nephilim descended from Raziel, we will feel traces of Alec’s love for you.”
“You can’t possibly think that makes me like you better.”
When his magic finally broke through the inhibitor shackles, Magnus snapped a portal open, and was about to leave when Alec turned to look at him. “Thank you for your assistance during this crisis. We’ve kept a record for your tab. Can I arrange a time next week to discuss how we can pay you?”
It was polite and professional and Magnus wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry or rage more.
“I don’t want to be paid,” he managed to choke out. “If you protect my people, that’s payment enough.”
Alec didn’t argue. He just nodded. “I’ll ensure it.”
Magnus stepped through the portal to his apartment before he could do anything stupid like demand that Alec love him again in payment.
And then he stood in his apartment that had been their apartment after Alec had moved in a year ago, but it had been three weeks since he’d been here, and the damn wine bottle was still sitting on the table from when he’d celebrated the fall of the Clave, and it wasn’t actually over yet.
He still had to go to the Spiral Labyrinth and report what had happened. The crisis was over to the extent that things were going to stop getting worse. But there was still recovery to deal with and recovery would take years, decades, and centuries. And Alec didn’t love him anymore. Alec had loved him enough that sacrificing that love had reached around the globe. But now that love was gone, used up for a greater purpose than simply loving Magnus, and Magnus had made him to do it.
He portaled to the Spiral Labyrinth to make his report.
The recovery would be extensive and potentially all-consuming.
Magnus welcomed it.
It was necessary and it was a distraction and it was an opportunity to achieve victories, rather than the long losing battle those three weeks had been.
In some ways, the first year was easy.
Alexander apparently shifted to Idris as his primary base, to help rescue whatever remained of the civilian nephilim communities there, although he spent much of the year traveling between Institutes around the world.
Jace remained in Los Angeles, and Isabelle in New Orleans. Even young Reyna stayed in Houston.
Magnus created a new apartment for himself and shut the old one up. He couldn’t destroy it, but he also couldn’t live there anymore. It had been his home for decades before he had convinced Alec to move in with him and it was theirs for just a single year. And yet, he couldn’t live there anymore.
Sometimes he looked back at that text Alec had sent him on what had seemed a random Tuesday: “Something happened to the Clave. I’m okay. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home, though.”
It wasn’t fair!
It wasn’t fair to any of them! Alec hadn’t wanted this any more than Magnus did. And yet, here they both were.
He refused to give up Pandemonium, but he left the running of the nightclub to his managers. During the daytime, the nightclub became headquarters of a disaster response and rescue organization that he was more actively involved in.
So many shadowhunters had died that there weren’t enough to fight demons the way they had before, but Magnus could fight demons and survive, and he created an organization to help other warlocks do the same.
They hadn’t been made for fighting demons the ways nephilim had been, but they could still be trained the way shadowhunters were, and even ways that shadowhunters weren’t.
In some ways, the first year was the most difficult one.
Alexander declared that shadowhunters were going to focus entirely on demons, leaving the downworld to police itself. The old Accords were null and void; new ones would be negotiated.
The old Clave would have shat itself.
The downworld communities celebrated their freedom from Clave oversight right up until they realized that they needed to actually police themselves and then immediately started infighting. Magnus half wondered how much Alexander had foreseen that and intended it versus how much he had simply stopped caring about the downworld population as he’d rewired his whole soul and personality to benefit nephilim.
Alec had sacrificed his own love of Magnus, but Magnus’ love of Alec was left to struggle with this new being.
In some ways Alec was completely gone, replaced by Alexander.
In other ways, an afterimage of Alec seemed always present, haunting Magnus.
Alec had always said that his downworld council did benefit the New York Institute, had shown charts and statistics and hard evidence to the Clave in defense of it. Magnus had been charmed. Now he wondered at his own patronizing view of what Alec had done, because Alexander was re-creating his council on an even higher level.
An ancient Chinese vampire that Magnus had only heard of in legends joined Alexander’s new downworld council to speak for the vampires. Three young werewolves from Ethiopia, Brazil, and Australia joined together to speak for the werewolves. Both the Seelie and Unseelie courts had representatives on the council.
Ragnor Fell was invited and spoke on behalf of the warlocks and the Spiral Council.
Magnus was bitter about not being asked himself and yet so grateful to not have to interact with Alexander directly, while having a friend he could quiz about every detail, even under Ragnor’s pitying looks.
Alexander seamlessly worked all of the reorganizations around the existence of warlocks as friends and allies. Because that was the payment that Magnus had asked for in exchange for the help he had provided. It was a magnificent deal for the warlock community. The Spiral Council congratulated him each time it came up, and it came up often.
The money he could have demanded from the New York Institute for his services would have been a fortune, but no amount of money could have bought them the favor of the leader of all nephilim, nor such open friendship built into the structure of the new accords that Alexander was creating.
The first year anniversary came around and it was a day of sorrow and grief; Magnus was surprised at how many shadowhunters showed up to Pandemonium to drink that evening.
He remembered them from that day, when he thought he was going to die and instead had to watch Alec rip out his humanity to become a conduit of angelic loyalty. They had watched and he hated them so much and they loved him. It wasn’t even their love, but love of him running through their souls. He had learned to look for it now, and he could see it, see the bindings of loyalty that tied nephilim together and to their angelic founder, and all of it structured around strands of Alec’s love of Magnus.
He thought about killing them all. Instead, he retreated to his own new apartment. Catarina came to keep him company.
Catarina was silent in the way she sometimes was when considering if she wanted to give him the information she had.
He squinted at her. “What?”
“It is probably best for you to grieve and, eventually, move on. Older and wiser.”
“Or...?”
“Do you really think love is finite? Because in my experience the capacity to love grows over time.”
“They said his love for me was sufficient to spread around the whole world. They're treating him more like an angel than like a nephilim now. Jace is struggling with the patabatai bond because it feels like someone else. Everyone calls him Alexander. No more Alec, no more Lightwood. Just Alexander. And he barely acknowledges my presence. He's not who he was.”
“None of us are who we once were.”
“You think I can get him back.”
“Not back. I think this was a major sacrifice and there's no returning to what was. But I think, if you want to put in the effort, you can try to get him again.”
“Jonas said Alexander sacrificed his capacity to love me. That any love for me will be redirected towards nephilim society as a whole.”
Catarina made a rude noise. "He is not who he once was and you aren't who you once were either. We all change. Any love will not be the same either.”
Magnus thought about it.
He forced himself to think about that awful day when he had demanded that Alec sacrifice him and Alec had told him that he didn’t know what he was asking for. Alec had been right.
He hated even thinking about it. But now he tried to remember the details.
Alec had asked Raziel to lift the river of his love out of the canyon it had carved into his soul and cast it wide as a river delta.
But, Magnus thought, Alec’s care for his Institute and his people had already been a river delta. He’d already been enough to support his entire Institute and even most of North America. He had been stretched thin, but had been managing.
Alec only fell short when he tried to spread his care throughout the rest of the world. When all the world needed a connection to Raziel, Alec alone had seemed like the person capable of being that link. He hadn’t needed a sacrifice to be a river delta; he had needed the sacrifice to become an ocean that covered all the land.
And oceans have currents and tides and even underwater rivers that cut canyons into the ocean floor as well as on dry land.
And Magnus was a High Warlock. For good or ill, his magic couldn’t affect the angelic ties, but that didn’t mean the human aspect of nephilim were immune to him. If Alexander was now an ocean, then Magnus could become a moon, and create his own tides.
Magnus had wooed Alec once and won a prize beyond all compare.
Catarina thought he could win Alexander again. If he wanted to.
Alexander might be halfway to being an angel, but Magnus was a prince of hell!
The next year wasn’t so much easier as it was more expected and this time he had a goal.
He built his network of warlocks, and transitioned his daytime rescue group into an officially registered NGO, Demonstrate Devotion, that civilians as well as downworlders could come to for assistance. Shadowhunters could and did come as well.
Magnus remembered how right after the sacrifice, Alexander had turned to him before he could leave, to discuss the payment for his services. Alexander might not look to him for love anymore, might not be there to turn to him at night or give a midday kiss, but he would pay attention to a High Warlock. So Magnus would be a High Warlock that Alexander could not ignore.
He wormed his way into the negotiations of the new accords. He threw himself into research so that for every meeting he attended he had something significant to say, something that required either careful consideration or appreciation from the council.
It felt like an exercise in self-flagellation each time he succeeded in getting Alexander’s attention, but it was a first step.
On the second anniversary, he held a three-day bacchanal at Pandemonium, and didn’t touch another living soul. He let his magic run free and wild. He built desire into ever more feverish heights without any conclusion or completion and he cast it out into the world, watching it roll over everyone in his vicinity, testing just how far that went.
He had known that that the recovery efforts for those three weeks of horror would be centuries in the work. He would not turn away from years of effort to achieve what he wanted.
That set the pattern.
For most of the year, he grew his power. At first, he embedded warlocks ever more deeply in the global effort to defend against demons, such that never again would one species be solely responsible. But beyond that, Demonstrate Devotion stepped into the vacuum left behind when shadowhunters stopped policing the downworld for anything other than murder of a civilian. Demonstrate Devotion provided rescue services and mediation services that didn’t come with a threat of either arrest or execution. It provided training in skills and teaching of history to downworlders whose local communities were too small give them everything they needed. It was an organization that connected small communities to support each other, so that even when Magnus couldn’t personally help, nor any of his new employees either, the communities could collaborate to help each other.
Magnus worked hard to create and continue to build that organization and he was extremely proud of it. He was even more proud of the way that Alexander’s Clave reached out to him to coordinate efforts.
He didn’t work all the time. He still took days or even weeks off, and delegated most of the work he didn’t enjoy, and lived his life as best he could for most of the year.
But then for three days, he went absolutely wild. He flung his magic wide and let it rampage. He tested how far it reached, how much it affected.
He wasn’t precisely manipulating anyone with his power, but neither was he keeping it under strict control or preventing anyone from being swept up in it. Under the old Accords, what he was doing would have been wildly illegal. The Clave would have hunted and executed him for it. Or at least tried to.
But the new Accords were still being negotiated and Alexander as the leader of the shadowhunters wasn’t stating an opinion. So Magnus mostly just had to defend his actions to the other leaders within the warlock communities, and then they had to negotiate with the heads of the other downworld communities.
The Spiral Council was not happy with Magnus, but they also couldn’t make him stop. The Spiral Labyrinth was a meeting place that many warlocks used, but the Spiral Council was only a governing body to the extent that council members could both agree to and enforce their edicts.
Magnus had done, and was continuing to do, more for the benefit of the entire downworld than any other warlock, and this was just three days a year.
By the fifth year, the annual bacchanal of Magnus Bane was legendary and even civilian populations were beginning to comment on the increase of birthrates nine months later.
Alexander continued to move around the world from week to week, impossible to know where he would turn up next, and Magnus was setting roots down deep into New York City, but his reach was growing; his voice was increasingly respected in negotiations over the course of the year, and his bacchanals grew wilder during the three days of anniversary revelry.
Other people – warlocks, other downworlders, and even mundanes – started to host their own bacchanals to coincide with his. The downworlders at least understood what they were celebrating, more or less, either the fall of the old Clave or the creation of the new. The mundane celebrations were simply surfing on the wave of euphoria that Magnus infused into the aether every year.
At the very center of the growing revelry was Magnus.
Magnus dancing in a celebration of life and devotion and carnal pleasures. And also a call for such things. It might almost have been prayer.
His magic roamed free, without direction; it had no ability to directly impact the divine bindings that connected nephilim to their hierarchies and from there to their angel. But maybe it could just skim gently against that latticework of connections reinforced by Alec’s love of Magnus: a declaration of love that Magnus was sending out to the world at large.
He danced and drank and celebrated and pined and ran his hands over his own body because no other hands could touch him.
Everyone with friends was warned to not approach Bane himself on these annual bacchanals. He danced alone and looked like sex incarnate, but with a careful space around him, because his magic burned so fierce and wild that even a drop of his sweat burned like acid where it landed.
By the sixth year, anyone who touched him during those three days died in orgasmic pain from a tidal wave of magic. Most years, someone still tried to test it, although a volunteer community of guards tried to keep strangers at bay.
Magnus didn’t pay any attention to them or to the suicidal strangers who thought they might have a chance with him.
He danced with mindless fervor and they did whatever they wanted.
His power was wild and demanding, and growing. It was becoming a threat to the stability of warlock society, such as it was, with some warlocks trying to defer to him rather than to the Spiral Council. He mostly sent them to Demonstrate Devotion, because he wasn’t going to turn down freely offered labor in his name. But he also ensured that Demonstrate Devotion in turn clearly deferred to the Spiral Council.
It was just him, Magnus Bane personally, whose power was growing beyond what the Spiral Council could easily restrict if it ever came down to it. But he refused to hold back until it had achieved what he wanted, no matter how impossible that was. He was so close!
Alexander started paying attention to Magnus now. Not just to Magnus’ ideas or inventions or missions with Demonstrate Devotion, but to Magnus himself. Sometimes they even talked about things that weren’t specifically mission critical. In the eighth year, Alexander asked him, unprompted, about the bacchanals he hosted, and Magnus laughed with delight.
“It is a great working,” Magnus explained, “that I am attempting. I’m not sure of success, but I’m hopeful.”
Alexander had looked at him with curiosity but hadn’t pressed further. Magnus had continued anyway. “Success or failure, I don’t think it will harm anyone. I don’t intend to hurt our society, nor to conquer it either.”
Alexander had nodded and said, “I trust you.” He looked just as surprised by that statement as Magnus was.
Magnus wasn’t sure how much Alexander actually remembered of his life before the sacrifice. He clearly remembered something but just as clearly didn’t remember everything. At a guess, it felt like a distant dream, remembered without emotional impact. And yet, Alexander said he trusted Magnus! Magnus doubted he would ever get over how pleased that statement made him, and how much just remembering Alexander say it could lift up his emotions afterwards.
They shared meals because Magnus scheduled as many of his meetings with Alexander as possible over meal times.
They worked together and built a better world together and it stopped feeling quite so much like torture for Alexander to look at him. Magnus wasn’t sure if it was because he was becoming used to Alexander’s dispassionate gaze or if, perhaps, Alexander’s gaze wasn’t quite so dispassionate as it had been right after the sacrifice.
And once a year, for three days, Magnus sends out his magic as a lure and a prayer for love.
It is the tenth year when Alexander shows up at Pandemonium, on the third day of the bacchanal. A guard of shadowhunters surround him, protecting him from the crowd. The protection is necessary, because Magnus’ magic responds to his presence by lashing the crowd into even higher heights of ecstasy.
Alexander ignores the crowd, ignores his own guard, and instead walks directly towards Magnus himself. When a volunteer guard tries to stop him, Alexander pauses to listen to the man before shaking his head and stepping around him. He walks into Magnus’ own bubble of space and then keeps going.
He walks right up to him and puts his hands on Magnus shoulders and doesn't burn. Of course Magnus’ magic would never burn Alec.
Magnus puts his hands on Alexander’s hips, and feels his magic pour through Alexander in a rush, and still Alexander doesn’t burn.
Instead, he pushes Magnus back until his back hits a wall and keeps going until they are pressed chest to chest and still Alexander doesn't burn and Magnus doesn't rein in his magic. He looks up at Alexander, exultant.
"How are you doing this?" Alexander says, but doesn't pause for an answer before lowering his face to Magnus’ and taking his lips in a deep kiss. "How can I want you so much?" He says, when he finally comes up for air, speaking against Bane’s throat, as Bane has thrown back his head.
"You sacrificed me, Alec. But I never sacrificed you. I'll carve my place back into your soul no matter how many times you try to give me up.”
Alexander shudders in his arms. “Good. Never give me up.”
Magnus wraps one arm around Alexander’s waist and strokes the other up the side of his body until he can bury his fingers in Alexander’s hair. Then he tugs Alexander’s head back, so he can see his face.
“Ten years ago, you texted me that you didn’t know when you’d be able to come home.”
“Isn’t it too late?” Alexander asks. “It’s been so long.”
They are surrounded by a crowd of dancers high on desire. Magnus is vaguely aware of their audience and suspects Alexander is too. But none of them matter. It is just the two of them. He lets his hands drift once more across Alexander’s back and reach under his shirt.
Alexander’s hands are wandering too, relearning the shape of Magnus’ body.
“You have to want it,” Magnus says. “Do you want to come home?”
“More than anything,” Alexander replies, and then grimaces as if in pain. “More than anything other than avoiding global calamity.”
That startles a sharp laugh out of Magnus although it isn’t exactly funny. It is fair, though. “Are you ready to come home to me?”
Alexander shakes his head, but it is uncertainty rather than denial. “Let’s dance until we exhaust ourselves and then find out.”
Magnus smiles with triumph and his magic surges and the crowd howls. They’ll dance for hours or possibly days and then he’ll bring Alexander home.