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Magnus has spent eternity searching, wandering the expanse of the world, waiting for his love to return to him only to watch him die time and again.
It is a cruel joke, a curse placed upon them both centuries ago. One that ensures Magnus will never die while the other half of his soul will never live.
A promise that Magnus will never forget, while his love struggles so hard to remember.
Yet Magnus still searches, still finds him in every life, in every age, because the years where he is gone are the true curse. The ones spent digging, waiting, hoping in agony until he can look upon his face once more.
The last time it had taken him fifty years to find him. He had lived over half a lifetime already without Magnus, had found a partner to love, two children to raise from the man’s previous failed marriage.
The love of Magnus’ very long life had grown old beside another and for the first time, he had not been able to find the courage to tell him the truth. To kiss his lips and watch the way his eyes always shift as the lie of his current existence washes away in the flood of the past. Of their past. Of their truth.
Magnus had bought a nearby flat instead and watched for twenty-five years as his soulmate lived and died in the arms of another man.
Almost as if it is a gift from fate itself, he is younger this time when Magnus literally stumbles upon him. Barely into his twenties, which should mean decades together before they’re forced to part.
But when he comes down the stairs in the club, passes by Magnus without a second glance, angel runes glinting in the dim light, Magnus both blesses and curses his ages-old luck. Because he has found him again, but what he has found is not the kind of gift that lasts.
He is a Shadowhunter this time, and Magnus has known enough of them over the course of his many lifetimes to know that they rarely ever ripen into old age.
They cross paths again later that evening, surrounded by death like that is simply their lot in life. And when he – Alec – asks Magnus if they know each other, the tiniest flicker of recognition present in the hazel of his eyes, there is a rush inside of Magnus’ head so strong he can hardly even hear himself think.
What he wants to say is, “Yes Alexander, you do know me. My name is Magnus, and you and I have been in love for centuries. If you would only let me kiss you, you would see.” But he has tried that before, and it has always failed.
So he lies and allows Alec to walk out of his loft, taking comfort in the fact that he is at least not walking out of his life.
Their paths keep crossing, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. And it is a special kind of torture, knowing the story more fully than those around you. But Magnus has learned patience more deeply than most and so he is content to wait as long as that waiting involves Alec, present and alive.
But then…
Then he almost dies. A demon attack, venom in his veins and Alec’s Shadowhunter friends bring him to Magnus, begging for healing magic. And it is like a sword through Magnus’ own gut when he looks upon Alec’s face, skin so pale, lips blue already. Lips that he has not kissed in almost a century and he cannot wait any longer for him. He will not survive another day, let alone another generation without him.
He will live, but he will not survive.
So he pulls on Alec’s life with everything he has, reaches into his soul, drags him back from the brink he is about to fall over. And he has watched Alec die too many times to count, but there is not one single part of him that has become used to the sensation. Used to saying goodbye to the only constant he has ever known.
“Alexander,” he breathes across Alec’s lips as his magic continues to pour from his body. “Please, stay with me.”
He does. He lives. And Magnus is so desperate to make sure things stay that way that he almost does not let them take Alec away from him. But short of explaining a reality they will never believe, there is no peaceful way to keep Alec under his charge. And so he allows them to bring him back to the Institute where he can heal up more thoroughly from the wounds given to him by a life that really only knows how to take.
He waits, day after day until one cold, rainy night he looks out his window and sees a figure pacing in front of his building.
He would know the slump of those shoulders anywhere, in any age.
“You’ll catch your death out here,” he jokes as he steps out into the rain in the hopes of drawing Alec in.
“Good thing I know a warlock who can save my life,” Alec replies, but though he is trying to be as light as Magnus, his tone falls flat on the pavement.
“Do you want to,” Magnus starts to ask as he tips his head back towards his building.
Alec nods, and that simple gesture is enough to nearly undo Magnus completely.
Once they are inside, something in Alec’s voice changes, the timbre of it lower, softer, and full of a confusion that Magnus has memorized.
“While I was out,” he starts to say before Magnus can even offer him a drink. “I saw you. In my head. But not… it wasn’t you. Or it wasn’t you you, or now you, maybe? Damn it, I’m not making any sense.”
The last bit is muttered, trailed off as Alec drags a hand back through his hair and pulls.
“It is okay,” Magnus tries to soothe, risking touching Alec’s other arm, the one hanging loose at his side, in an attempt to encourage him to continue.
Alec’s voice is now so quiet Magnus almost cannot hear it over the heavy thunder of his own heartbeat.
“It was like memories of you. Of… of me… me and you. But… like… it was different. Different time periods. I think… I think I was a Roman soldier in one, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been to Rome or, like, the year 400 but I was there and you were there and just…”
He trails off helplessly, his eyes begging for an answer only Magnus can give him. And so he does. His own voice like a sack full of broken glass when he asks, “May I kiss you?”
Alec balks at that, but only slightly. His eyes betraying that it’s not the idea of kissing Magnus that is startling – if he truly did have memories of them come to him in his haze, then Magnus is one hundred percent positive that kissing was a large part of them. But the timing is what seems to get to him, like he cannot see how kissing him at a time like this will solve anything.
“Please, may I?”
Alec nods tightly, just once. And the nod is so very small, almost imperceptible. But it is permission, one that Magnus tries not to jump at because it’s been nearly a century and he wants…
He needs.
He can feel something shift as soon as their lips touch. It’s just that, a mere touch, nothing more because that is all it ever takes. Like a key perpetually ready to open the same old, beautiful box, the touch of Magnus’ lips to Alec’s – to Christopher’s, to Ignacio’s, to Clark’s and Steven’s and Antonio’s – is all it will ever take for his soul to return.
For his soul to remember.
Every time, Magnus asks him what it’s like, as if the question will one day garner a different response. How it feels to go twenty or more years in ignorance, not knowing who he is, not feeling that desperate need to search.
The answer rarely varies, though. It feels like nothing, he’ll say, and then everything, as if that makes sense to the one doomed to remember everything in the first place.
Sometimes he doesn’t believe him, even after the kiss. Sometimes this goes on longer than others, leaving Alec, with whatever name he’s wearing, older than others. Those times, he runs. But in the end he always shows up at Magnus’ door, sobbing his name and begging for a forgiveness he will never need.
Magnus is never asked what it’s like for him, this first kiss. And for that he is eternally grateful. For it is a cruel twist of fate that the first kiss completes the release with Alec, flooding his memory with lifetimes filled with love, while Magnus is forced to relive every one of his lovers’ deaths.
He does not need the reminders. He has them all memorized.
So few of them include died of natural causes.
Alec breaks the kiss with a sob as his head sinks to Magnus’ shoulder, Magnus’ arms seemingly the only things holding him up right now. A moment later the sob turns into a cough, which a moment after that turns into a choking fit that is not unusual. So Magnus simply rubs a hand gently in between Alec’s shoulder blades and waits it out.
“Just breathe,” he says soothingly. “It will be all right. All you need to do is breathe.”
He settles eventually, as Magnus always knew he would, and when he lifts his head to look in Magnus’ eyes this time, he is there. All of him.
This is the moment Magnus lives for.
“Magnus,” Alec says, the word half a question asked by someone awaking from a deep sleep, the tendrils of a dream still trying to leave their mark. But the dream has ended for Alec, the last remaining hint of it will fade away come morning, and though he will remember the twenty or so years he has lived in this body, the memories will be of a different shade now.
They will belong to him, but he will belong to someone else.
“Alec,” Magnus says, breathing the word like the prayer it is. The prayer it will always be.
This time, it is Alec that initiates the kiss. Not even bothering to ask permission because he knows now that he doesn’t need it. That he never will.
Because he knows now that he is home.