Soul Deep
Chapter 1
Magnus
In the end, they died together, hands clasped as they bled out on the dirty floor of a ship, parabatai runes burning in pain and grief that finally faded out to something that felt like peace. They hadn't been enough. No matter how hard they'd fought or how their friends and their family fought on the levels above them, they still lost.
They had tried to save Jace-bring him home-and they'd been pigheaded. Strategy lost out to human error and their underestimating the true size of Valentine's forces. They underestimated his strength, his willingness to stab the Mortal Sword into his son's chest when it was already wet with Alec's blood.
Jace was the one that reached for Alec's hand, his grip weak and his heart breaking. He thought Clary's name as he breathed Alec's and the weak grip he got back was the only reply his parabatai could give while blood bubbled from his mouth. Punctured lungs, too full of blood. Bleeding. Drowning. No one was going to find them in time.
Jace thought he heard Alec try to choke something out, but it was too garbled to understand. Something in his gut told him it was his name or Magnus'. It didn't make him feel better.
Isabelle screamed when she found them.
Clary cried.
Magnus tried to heal them, his hands glowing blue as he repeated Alec's name like he was begging, but it was too late. Voice clogged and heartbroken, Clary pulled him away.
"They're gone," she told him, thin arms wrapped around him. He sagged against her chest, numb and sobbing, and watched as Izzy pulled Alec's body into her lap with one hand while the other buried itself in Jace's hair. She bent over them both, murmuring in Latin through the tears and experience told him the words he couldn't hear over the blood pounding in his head. Ave atque vale. Hail and farewell.
"You're Magnus?" Max asked as he lifted his head off Isabelle's chest. He nodded in response and the little boy mirrored it, face serious under his tears. "Did you love Alec?"
"I did," he whispered as another lump formed in his throat. They hadn't had long enough, their time too short for them to ever broach the subject, but Magnus knew his heart and he knew the hold Alec had on him. He still had it.
"He loved you too," Isabelle told him later, hours after Max had fallen asleep in her lap and Clary had cried herself to sleep on the ottoman with Simon's arms wrapped around her. "I know he did."
"He wasn't my brother," Clary said, broken and shaking, when she appeared on his doorstep in the middle of the night. "He wasn't... He thought... We never got to tell him."
He pulled her against him, whispering reassurances and empty promises that Jace knew; that Alec would have told him. He didn't think she took comfort in the hope. There was no way they'd ever know.
He wore white to the funeral, honoring the tradition even if he couldn't wear the runes. People stared, watched him and the way Clary clung to his hand and the way Isabelle wrapped herself against his side. He met Robert's eyes with sadness and saw the man finally understand what him and Alec had had. Maryse glared and he couldn't find it in him to regret the harshness when he said, "He died knowing I cared, but he died thinking you hated him." Harsh. Cruel. He didn't get any satisfaction from the way her face broke, but he held onto the memories of the pain she'd caused Alec.
He couldn't forgive her for that.
Isabelle pressed the bow and quiver into his hands with a shaky breath. "He said they were yours," she told him. "That if anything happened to him..." Her breath hitched and she flattened a hand over her chest like it would stop the pain. It didn't. He knew it wouldn't. "He wanted you to have them."
Alec had been prepared, had his wishes known for if and when he died.
He'd been twenty years old.
The thought kept Magnus up that night, gold eyes staring at the wall while he held the bow and quiver to his chest.
He had exactly one picture of Alec and himself, a quick shot on his phone that he'd insisted on when they'd finally made it out for their first date. The lighting was horrible and his hand had shook just a little too much when he stretched his arm out, but Alec was smiling in it, eyes lit up as Magnus pressed a kiss to his cheek. Happy. Free.
He hung the picture on his wall beside a picture Isabelle had given him of Alec and Jace. That one was clearer, both boys smiling and with Jace's arm slung over Alec's shoulders. He kept them together in his own sign of respect, because even if he hadn't particularly liked Jace much, he understood the bond between parabatai.
Those pictures stayed on his wall over the years, hanging beside an old photograph of Ragnor and eventually joined by others. It became a shrine, he realized one day as he hung Raphael's picture up beside the one of a too-young Max Lightwood. Somewhere along the line, it became a shrine to those he'd lost.
He didn't relish the thought of how big the shrine would become.
Valentine died by Isabelle's hand and Magnus couldn't find it in him to be surprised. She'd mentioned it once after Alec and Jace's funeral, a whisper in the dark as they drowned their sorrows, but she'd sworn it when Max died.
She got what she wanted, her whip curled around Valentine's neck as she drove her blade into his chest. He hadn't been there, but they'd found the bodies. Found Valentine pierced and strangled and Isabelle beside him, her face streaked so much in tears that Magnus knew she'd been letting herself mourn her brothers when the demon came up behind her.
She hadn't had time to react.
He hung her picture on the wall and felt like he'd broken a promise to keep her safe.
He closed himself away after the war, hidden away to mourn and try to heal. The mourning, he did. Healing was another matter and one that he was pretty sure he failed in. He still woke up some nights, breathing Alec's name.
On the easiest nights, he cried himself back to sleep.
On the worst, he cursed Ragnor's memory for urging him to go after Alec. He cursed himself for going to the wedding. He cursed Alec for choosing him just to leave him too soon.
It was no one's fault but Valentine's. Logic reminded him every time the thoughts sprang up, but logic meant very little when he realized he was already forgetting the sound of Alec's voice.
Clary never quite got over Jace. Her eyes held onto the same lingering sadness his did, hurting and without closure. She got his name across her collarbone in memoriam, a true tattoo mixed in with the runes that littered her body.
She didn't flinch at the sting as the artist burned it into her skin, but she sobbed when she saw the finished product.
He held her hand and tried to coax a smile out of her. "Do you remember how bad he was at driving?"
She laughed through the tears.
"Do you think she still loved him?" Simon asked as they watched the funeral pyre burn Clary's body to ash. Her family stood before the flames with straight backs, but Magnus could see the tears staining their cheeks. Her husband stood behind the children, sturdy hands on their shoulders as they said goodbye.
"Yes," he said simply, his voice as hoarse as the vampire's.
"Do you still love him?"
His breath hitched and he closed his eyes, remembering smiles and the touch of an archer's calloused hands. "Yes."
Simon's lips thinned, pained, and he looked back at the fire. "When does it stop hurting?" he asked, his voice soft. "When does losing them stop hurting?"
Ragnor. Alec. Jace. Max. Raphael. Isabelle. Jocelyn. Luke. Clary.
He shook his head once, feeling every single year he'd been alive weighing down on him. "It doesn't."
TBC
