Title: Freeze
Character(s): YOUNG Magnus, Magnus's parents
Rating: PG, for dark mood and implications of abuse and suicide
Word Count: 450
Disclaimer: I may have made up my own little version of Magnus's past, but I do not own the character, anything he says, or any part of his story told in The Mortal Instruments books. Cassie owns everything.
Summary: The constant puff-puff-puff of his breath faded into darkness as he finally figured it out and his whole body just froze. Young!Magnus.
A/N: Okay, so I've been feeling pretty depressed lately. I wanted to write something sad and elaborate a bit on Freeze and Burn, so here… This is set when Magnus finds his mother dead. I'll put up the quote, you'll see. I'll do a Burn one too, I think. (And people who read LooH; that's on hiatus for now. I have more on that in my profile.) Little Magnus is just angstilicious. I must drabble about him more.
Uh… I was listening to a certain song while writing a certain paragraph and, summarily, I cried.
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"You want to know what it's like when your parents are good churchgoing folk and you happen to be born with the devil's mark? When… your mother hangs herself in the barn, driven mad by what she's done?"
-Magnus, City of Bones page 231
There's a scent on the air, stale and cold.
His eyes slide over the house, meeting every object with the same brave façade he puts on for the rest of the word. Their narrowed yellow-green take in the same room he always sits in when he's done cutting wood for the day, flames crackling in the precarious brick fireplace, old rickety stools thrown next to old rickety walls on old rickety floorboards. But his senses, they take in more. Something different.
He doesn't know what else to do, so even though Father will yell and lock him in the dark room where all he can see is his breath again, he gets up to find the thing that sets an icy, choking scent in the air.
Bare feet are making almost no sound even if they're on old rickety floorboards. But the door creaks as he steps out without anything more than his thin indoor clothing on, wincing at the sting of the snow on his toes but going on and taking step after step because whatever it is, it's freezing him from the inside out, so cold it hurts, and he has to make it stop.
He has to find it.
So he races across the white ground, leaving the door hanging open because Father will yell and lock him in the dark room where all he can see is his breath anyway. He leaves his footprints in the snow, only sixty seven of them because he's going quick quick quick and his strides are long, before he reaches the barn and pushes open the door and staggers back, choking.
She's there, her scarf around her neck, but all in the wrong way. It's tied, tied so tight the pretty scarf on the pretty neck is ugly, and it's tied around a rafter too, the same rafter he's climbed on so many times, and he wonders if she was trying to climb too and she fell. At least her scarf caught her. He runs over to see if she's okay, ignoring the scent that makes him want to fall to the floor and cough nonstop, but stops when it comes stronger and stronger, enveloping him, like the cold is going in through his mouth and wedging itself under his ribcage.
He stops, he can't move anymore, he gives up. He falls to his knees, and there are no surprises when his collar is lifted by a pair of huge, brutal hands that hit and then throw him in the room where all he can see is his breath.
The constant puff-puff-puff of his breath faded into darkness as he finally figured it out and his whole body just
froze.