A/N - Hi everyone! Here's the next instalment.

To my guest reviewers: Thank you for your reviews! I'm glad you all enjoy my story, and don't worry Simon will feature again.

Disclaimer: Characters belong to Cassandra Clare.


"Magnus, I'm so sorry I've dragged you into a meeting so early."

It was 9AM and Alec was sat in the prison meeting room, smiling at a clearly sleep deprived Magnus who had just entered the room. Truth be told, Alec felt just as tired as Magnus looked, and the large black coffees he had been buying himself just weren't having much of an impact anymore. Alec knew he wouldn't have been so tired if he had a proper sleep last night, but by the time he had gone through the footage and decided what he was going to do about it, it was already 2AM and he knew he would have to be up at 7 to get here for 9. His insomnia wasn't helped by the difficult decision he had been forced to make last night; he just hoped that Magnus didn't resent him for it.

"Don't worry about it Alec", Magnus' gentle voice dragged Alec away from his thoughts and back to the present. "If I'm honest with you, I've not really been sleeping very well so I had already been awake for an hour when they told me you were coming."

Alec wasn't surprised; a lot of the people he worked with often found themselves suffering sleepless nights once his work started. He supposed the influx of stress and emotion takes its toll on his clients as much as it does with him.

"Reopening a closed case is tough, isn't it?" Alec gave Magnus what he hoped was a sympathetic smile.

"You have no idea", Magnus breathed out looking relieved at the idea that someone understood. "All these years I have resigned myself to the fact that I would never be allowed out of this prison again, but now there's an actual chance that I might be released and sometimes it's just too much. I try so hard not to get my hopes up because I know it will hurt more if you can't do anything, but when I sleep my mind can't stop dreaming of all the possible things I could do with my freedom. I find myself counting down days, wondering when I could get out, but I really don't want to do that."

Alec really hoped that he didn't look too guilty. Before coming here he already hated the fact that he would build up Magnus' hope only to dash it almost immediately, and now he knew what Magnus had been thinking of, he felt even worse. Sometimes, he could really hate his job.

"I'm afraid there's nothing you can do to stop your hope from growing Magnus, but only you can decide how to use it. How about I take your mind off of your case for a while?"

It was only after he said that, when Magnus raised an eyebrow at him and smirked playfully that he realised just how suggestive that last sentence sounded. "Would you get your mind out of the gutter? I didn't mean it like that; I simply meant how about we talk about something else for a little while?"

"Like what?" Alec could see that Magnus still looked amused, but Alec would take that as long as he never had to look at dull, lifeless eyes again.

"I don't really know. You can ask me some questions if you want. I'm still waiting for Jace to call me so we can't really start any proper work until he does".

Alec saw the confused look at the mention of the phone call, but just as Magnus opened his mouth to ask a question, he closed it again almost immediately. Alec was glad that Magnus seemed to trust him, if only a little.

"Okay. Um, I know you have Jace, but any other siblings?"

Alec always loved being asked about his siblings, he was exceptionally proud of all of them.

"Well, I'm the oldest..."

"I guessed that", Magnus cut in.

"How?"

"I don't know. You just have a very caring vibe about you. I can see you as an older brother."

"Well, there's me, and then there's Jace and Izzy. They're both 36, but Jace is adopted. Izzy is a forensic scientist, but she's not attached to a particular police force. You already know what Jace does, so I won't go over that again. And then there's Max, he's 26 and a satirical cartoonist. If you read a lot of newspapers you might have seen some of his work around."

Alec could see the gears turning in Magnus' head as he thought. "I never really paid much attention to the cartoons, but I'll keep an eye out from now on."

There was a pause as the other man thought about another question. Alec could pinpoint the exact moment that Magnus thought of it by the doubt and hesitation that crept into his green eyes.

"Go ahead and ask Magnus", Alec encouraged. "If I don't want to answer I'll just say so, but I won't be upset with you asking."

"You know I studied the history of art because I wanted to protect work from theft and damage, but I was wondering why you wanted to study law."

Magnus looked like he wanted to say more, but instead he bit down on his lower lip as if to physically prevent himself from speaking. Alec wanted to answer him, but at the moment is mind wasn't in the meeting room. Instead it had gone back 21 years to a time that never seemed to leave him alone.

"Come back inside, Alec." His mother spoke gently, as if she was afraid of scaring him off, whilst holding an oversized umbrella over his head.

Alec shook his head, no. He didn't want to go inside; he wanted to stay with his Uncle.

"It's not right, Mum. Someone should have done something. It's not fair." Alec heard his voice break but he didn't care; nothing much mattered to him in that moment.

"I know it's not Sweetie", his mother replied as she pulled him up and into a one armed hug. "But you sitting out here in the rain won't make everything okay. It's not right, but right now, you can't make it so; especially if you just sit out here all the time".

"Alec?"

Magnus' concerned voice brought Alec blinking back into reality, his eyebrows raised in confusion as Magnus looked worriedly at him.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine", Alec replied quickly. "I guess I just always wanted to be able to put things right when they go wrong. I haven't always been able to do that, but I guess everyone deserves someone to at least try. So that's what I promised myself I'd do; I'd try to fight for people when no one else wants to".

Magnus was just about to ask him another question when his phone rang, and Alec all but jumped out of the chair to go outside to answer it. "Excuse me a minute", he said quickly to Magnus as he slipped out of the door, telling the guards that he wasn't finished yet. He answered the phone just as it would have rung off.

"Jace; what do you have for me?"

"Nothing good I'm afraid."

Alec's face fell. "What does that mean?" Alec wasn't sure he wanted to know.

"It means you were right. You know, I even convinced Burrows to give me two extra guys just for an hour or two so we could go to Camille's shop and her house at the same time this morning. But if there was anything that explicitly implicated her, it's not there now. She must've been warned. He phone is new so we have no records and we couldn't find the old one in either location. Simon was still at your house so we checked the laptop but she's cleared it properly this time, there was nothing on there either. The diary's gone. The only thing we found was paperwork concerning the business, you know expenditure, imports of stock, sales."

"Shit", Alec said trying to be quiet so as not to alarm the prisoner in the room behind him. "I knew this would happen". He had a sudden, violent urge to punch the wall behind him, but he forced himself to calm down. This was not a brick wall, just a wooden fence and sometimes they can come crashing down at the slightest disturbance. "Then we will go through that sales list with a fine comb, we will look at whether there were regular cash payments or regular card payments and we will take whatever we can from it. Okay?"

"Yes boss...Um, there's something else I have to tell you, but I don't want to do it over the phone. Come straight to mine when you're finished, in the meantime I'll start to go through the lists we have, see what pops up then. Have you told Bane what you decided yet?"

"No", Alec reluctantly admitted. "He looked exhausted and said he couldn't sleep well so I thought I would distract him for a while by talking about something unrelated to the case, but if I'm honest it's more because I chickened out. I'll tell him now and then I'll come see you. I should be there in no more than an hour and a half okay?"

"See you in a bit brother."

Once he ended the call, Alec took a minute to compose himself before he went back into the room. He mustn't have done a very good job, because the second he walked in, the small smile that Magnus had been sporting disappeared and was replaced with a worried frown.

"Bad news I take it?" Magnus spoke before Alec had even sat himself in his chair, and it looked like he was doing everything he could to prepare himself for the worst. If he was being honest, that fact broke Alec's heart.

"Yes", Alec admitted. He wasn't going to lie to the other man; in the long run it did nothing but harm. "But I completely expected it. I told you the last time I was here that when we start making a move, people will start covering their tracks. My brother was just dealing with Camille, and it appears she has covered her tracks very well. I'm going to his house after this to see what we can find in her sales records, but I don't think it'll be very revealing."

"But if she's covering her tracks that means you made the first move right? Did you manage to find anything?"

The hopeful look in Magnus' eyes was too strong, and Alec found that he couldn't look at it. Instead, he stared at a small coffee stain on the table.

"Do you trust me", Alec asked instead.

Magnus immediately replied "yes".

"I know I probably should have consulted you before I made up my mind, but I really think this is the right thing to do."

Alec paused to gather his thoughts as he forced himself to look into Magnus' green eyes, clouded slightly with apprehension. "We went to Pandemonium last night, got a warrant to take the computer and look at the CCTV records. My brother-in-law is a computer expert so we got him to have a look and see if he could recover anything. And it is by no means a complete file, it's only two or three seconds, but we do have undeniable proof that you were at the club that night."

"That proves I didn't do it right?" The hope was back in Magnus' eyes and Alec really hated what he had to do next.

"No".

In all his years as a barrister, Alec had seen people upset. He had seen them distraught, heartbroken, and hopeless. Until now, he would have said that if you could name an emotion, he had probably seen it on someone. But he had never really seen someone crumble, and it was terrifying. It was terrifying to see how one word could completely destroy everything a person believed in; it was a power that Alec sometimes wished he didn't have.

"Oh", Magnus' voice was small.

"I told you the footage was incomplete. We have a picture of you at 3AM; the estimated time of death was between 5 and 5:30 AM. Any competent prosecutor would argue that this new footage doesn't prove your innocence; you would still have ample time to get to Etta's house. What it does show is that Camille and Malachi were deliberately lying which is a criminal offence. It also suggests that if we took it to court soon, we might be able to convince the judges to overturn the conviction on the grounds of it being unsafe."

Alec took a deep breath, and before Magnus could build his hope again he said "but I'm not going to". He could see that Magnus was going to complain, hell, who wouldn't when they were told there was a chance they could be released from a maximum security prison soon, only for their barrister to say they weren't going to take it?

"Hear me out Magnus you said you trusted me." Alec waited for Magnus' reluctant nod before he continued. "I need Camille and Malachi out of jail. As long as they are concealing their involvement, they're more likely to inadvertently reveal information I need if I can follow them in their day to day lives. Trust me, once I have what I need they will be arrested.

As for not looking to get your conviction labelled unsafe, there's no guarantee the judge would agree on such little evidence. You also need to remember that being released because of an unsafe conviction is not the same as being proven innocent. Everywhere you go there will still be people who think you are guilty, that you were only let off on a technicality. I don't want that for you Magnus. I want to show the world that you are innocent, but it's going to take me some more time to do that. But I do work for you, and if you want me to submit what I have to a judge I can go and do that this afternoon, I just don't think it's a very good idea."

Alec waited in silence as Magnus thought about what he said. The hands on the large clock in the room ticked slowly, and before Alec knew it, 15 minutes had passed in complete silence.

"Okay", Magnus eventually said, looking into Alec's eyes with serious green ones. "I said I trust you, and I do. If you think it's best I wait, then I'll wait. And if in the end you can't prove my innocence, and you can only get me out on an unsafe conviction, then I guess I'll just have to put up with people doubting me. Absolutely anything is worse than this hell."

Magnus looked so sad in that moment, that before he had thought about it, Alec had grasped one of his hands and held it in both of his, squeezing it a little to get Magnus to look at him.

"Thank you for trusting me. And remember what you promised me; no giving up, okay?"

"Alright".

"I better go and meet with Jace, see what we can get from the sales list. Don't worry about the setbacks okay, there're still plenty of roads for me to take."

Magnus stood with Alec this time instead of remaining seated.

"I won't", Alec was pleased with how assured he sounded, even if his eyes were still drastically sad. "You did warn me it might happen. Take care of yourself, Alec."

"You too Magnus; please talk to someone if you find it hard to cope with what we're doing."

Alec didn't think as he pulled the other man into a quick hug. He just looked so sad, that Alec thought he deserved someone to comfort him, if just for a minute. When they pulled back, Alec pretended that he didn't see how wet Magnus' eyes were. Instead he just waved a little and made his way back out of the prison.

He found that he couldn't immediately bring himself to go and work with his brother so he took a detour on the way back, grabbing himself a coffee as he sat in the park and tried to prepare himself for the next load of hard work. It was because of this break that he only turned up to his brother's house after four hours.

"So what happened to an hour and a half max?" Alec hadn't even gotten through the threshold of his brother's house before he was questioned.

Alec just shrugged his shoulders. "I took longer than expected, sorry. But I brought you cake", he held the white paper bag out as a peace offering.

"Well, I at least managed to go through all the sales information we found."

"And..." Alec prompted as his brother took a huge bite of a white chocolate and raspberry muffin.

"Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No alarmingly regular payments from the same card. A few occurred four or five times, but never in large amounts and there was never the same amount of time between purchases so I assumed that they just really liked the antiques there. All I found were cash payments of at least £1000 that occurred every three months, but there's no record of who it could belong to, so it basically counts for nothing. I don't know how we're supposed to trace the items they bought since there's no note of the shop itself doing deliveries."

"Fantastic", Alec replied sarcastically as he collapsed onto the sofa. "This is not turning out to be the day I was hoping for."

"Oh it gets worse", Jace called out from the kitchen. He returned a minute later with two beers and passed one to Alec before sitting down next to him.

"Do your worst", Alec replied resignedly.

"Don't be mad, but I might have done something a little reckless."

Alec shot a quick concerned glance at his brother. "That depends on what the 'something' is."

"Well", Jace shifted uncomfortably, "I thought that the video footage would be solid enough proof to convince Burrows that something must've gone wrong with the original investigation so I decided to ask if I could get a warrant to search Hodge's house..."

"YOU WHAT?" Alec was so angry. Scrap that, he was furious. "I swear Jace, if you've ruined this investigation."

"Don't worry Alec. He did say no but he promised he still wouldn't mention anything to Hodge. He also said that if we give him concrete proof of Hodge's involvement then he would be more than happy to give us the warrant."

"So what's the bad news?"

Alec was wary when he asked, but it had been a terrible day, and if his brother wasn't happy with telling him over the phone then it must've been really bad. This assumption was only confirmed when Jace put down his beer and turned to face Alec fully, his face careful as if he was approaching an easily spooked animal. Alec tried to prepare himself for the worst, but he still wasn't prepared for what Jace said.

"He said, and I quote here, 'are you just pursuing Hodge because he was the officer in charge of the investigation into your uncle?'"