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Alec wakes up in a cold sweat. He keeps seeing it over and over again. Everyone was yelling and there was so much blood, Darius’s body just hanging there limply between the shoulders of the two field operatives who had found him. They took him to the infirmary but Alec knew it was too late.
He was already dead.
Alec knows about death. Shadowhunters die often, he’s been to the mourning rites. But it’s different this time. Darius was his friend. Just yesterday he had been teaching Alec runes and now he’s just gone, forever.
Alec feels tears welling in the corners of his eyes as he sits up out of bed. He hesitates for a moment, but then quietly steals out into the hall towards his parents’ room.
When he arrives at the door, he opens it cautiously. He knows it’s not allowed, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He sniffles a bit as he slips into the room.
“Mom?” he calls out softly.
It’s not until he’s almost at her side that she seems to finally hear him, blinking awake slowly, her eyes taking a moment to find him in the dark.
“Alec?”
“I had a bad dream,” Alec tells her, fidgeting nervously near the head of her bed, his eyes still wet. He hears his dad mumble something in his sleep and shift slightly, but his mom sits up fully at the edge of the bed, putting her more or less at eye-level with Alec’s six-year-old frame standing next to her.
“About Darius?” she guesses in a whisper.
Alec nods, and his mother frowns.
“Darius was a good teacher, but he wasn’t a great fighter,” she says, voice still soft to keep from waking her husband. “When you grow up you’ll be better. Stronger.”
But Alec doesn’t want to be a stronger fighter, not if it means he’ll have to fight the monsters that killed Darius someday.
“I’m scared,” he admits, leaning in closer to his mother. She reaches out to cup his face, brushing away the tears from one of his eyes.
“Good,” she says, dropping her hand. “Fear will keep you alive.”
Alec immediately misses the warmth of her touch. Without meaning to, he lets out a choked off sob. His dad grunts and shifts again, and his mom’s mouth goes hard.
“Enough, Alec,” she tells him. “You’re too old to be making a scene like this.”
Alec nods and keeps his jaw clamped tight to try to keep from making anymore noise. His stomach twists with shame, but he can’t make himself leave. He doesn’t want to go back to his room alone, but he can tell his mom has lost patience with him now.
“Go back to bed,” she says. “I’ll talk to you in the morning when you’ve calmed down, okay?”
Alec nods, forcing his feet to move away from the bed and back towards the door. Once outside, he stands in the hallway for several long moments. If he closes his eyes, he can still feel the ghost of his mother’s hand against his cheek – at least until a tear slips down it and ruins the feeling.
Alec scrubs at it angrily. His mother is right; he’s not a baby anymore. It takes a few deep breaths and some lingering sniffling, but eventually he manages to stop crying.
The next time Alec feels like crying, he remembers standing in the hallway outside his mother’s door and he manages to stop himself. He learns how to hold it back.
After that night, he doesn’t cry again for a long time.
---
Magnus wakes up shaking. The wind is howling outside just like the terrible beast in his dreams, and Magnus swears he can still feel it’s hot breath on his neck, see the shadows of razer-sharp claws from the corner of his eyes.
A branch scratches against the window and Magnus jumps, his heart pounding. He knows it was just a dream, that the storm outside conjured an imaginary beast in his mind, but knowing that fact somehow does nothing to calm his racing heart.
He spends several minutes – maybe close to an hour – huddled in his bed, trying and failing to fall back asleep and telling himself that eight-year-olds do not crawl into bed with their mothers when they get scared. But the fear wins in the end, and eventually he jolts from the sound of another snapping tree branch off of the bed entirely, making his way out into the hallway towards his mother.
When he reaches her, she doesn’t respond to his cries and he doesn’t understand why. By now she should have pulled the blanket back and reached out for him, pulling him to her side like she’s done so many times before.
It’s been different, these last few months, ever since the change. She’s been quieter, worried. But she’s still his mother. He knows she’ll still protect him.
After a few moments of hesitation, Magnus finally reaches out to pull the blanket back himself, calling out to wake her. But with the blanket gone, he sees there’s nothing to wake. His mother’s body lies in her bed but she’s not there. She’s not there.
Magnus screams and he screams and he screams. He screams until his voice is hoarse but no one hears him. When his father comes home hours later and finds him, he doesn’t have anything left. The first hit sends him flying across the room and makes him dizzy but he doesn’t cry out. He can’t.
It’s a new kind of nightmare then. The beasts aren’t imaginary and they’re everywhere. They’re even inside of him. There’s no safe place, not anymore.
People will comment on it later, over the course of his long life. Idly over coffee, or with confused concern in the middle of the night.
“You were screaming in your sleep,” Camille tells him once, memorably, on an anniversary he hadn’t managed to drink enough to forget, “but you didn’t make a sound.”
Magnus pretends not to remember the dream, but he does. By then, it’s been years – decades even – since the last time, but it’s always the same. The details haven’t faded with time. If anything, they’ve just grown sharper.
Camille smiles at him and her fangs remind him of the imaginary beast who hounded him as a child. He smiles bitterly at the irony.
Now he would give anything for that beast to terrorize his dreams again. He would welcome it.
---
Madzie wakes up with a scream. She calls out for her nana, her heart racing as she takes in unfamiliar surroundings. It takes her several panicked moments to remember where she is, but almost as soon as she does her door is opening, bringing in a soft light from the hallway and two very concerned faces.
“Madzie, darling, are you alright?” Magnus asks, coming in to sit at the edge of her bed, while Alec hovers anxiously beside him.
Madzie’s heart slows as she comes more fully out of the dream, the details of the nightmare flitting away before she can grasp them and leaving her feeling mostly embarrassed. She's almost twelve; she’s way too old for nightmares.
“Sorry,” she says, hating that her voice is still rough from screaming. “I had a nightmare, I guess. I didn’t mean to wake you guys.”
“We were still up,” Alec says, but it’s an obvious lie, his bed head is almost comical. Still, he says it easily, with a soft smile, and Madzie feels some of her embarrassment slip away.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Magnus asks.
He reaches out for her tentatively, then begins to rub gentle circles along her back when she leans into his touch. She’ll admit, she was wary of them in the beginning, but it’s getting easier and easier now to believe that they really do just want to help her. It doesn’t make any sense, but they’ve made it hard to stay skeptical. Even for her.
“I don’t even remember what the dream was about,” Madzie tells them honestly, shrugging her shoulders slightly.
“Do you want us to let you get back to sleep?”
The sharp “no,” is out of Madzie’s mouth almost before Alec has even finished asking the question. She feels her cheeks heat up and she clenches her jaw shut, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“No,” Magnus agrees casually, as if Madzie hadn’t just made a complete fool of herself. “I’m not tired either. I was thinking… movie?”
He hasn’t stopped tracing soothing circles against her back. Madzie unclenches her jaw and tries to take a deeper breath.
“But something funny, yeah?” Alec suggests. “I don’t think I can do another one of those sad romance ones.”
Magnus gives a dramatic gasp of mock offense.
“The Notebook is a classic love story, Alexander-” he starts, but Alec cuts him off, rolling his eyes.
“Okay, okay. Madzie, your call.”
She thinks about the early days, when Nana had found the little apartment with the big windows and the old tv in the den, and how she would get up early to watch cartoons as the light slowly filled the apartment, bathing everything in gold.
“How about cartoons?” she suggests, slightly timid, but both men just smile in response.
“Yes, perfect!” Alec agrees. He comes forward, crouching down slightly with his back to Madzie.
“Your carriage awaits,” he tells her, and she laughs, moving to climb onto his back.
As soon as she’s secured, he jumps up spinning and racing through the loft, looping through several completely unnecessary rooms on their way to the den. Madzie laughs, clinging to his shoulders tightly until he finally drops her onto the couch.
Before she can even catch her breath, Alec is settling down beside her and Magnus is coming around the other side, shaking his head at their antics. When he takes his seat, she’s nestled between them. Warm and safe.
The promised cartoons start playing but Madzie doesn’t pay them much attention in the end. Instead, she focuses on the warm weight of Magnus’s arm across her shoulder and the soft press of Alec’s lips against her forehead just as she’s about to drift off. When she wakes again, she’s back in her own bed and the sun is shining in through her window, casting her room in a familiar warm glow. It’s hard to find anything to be scared of in the light of a new day.
Years later, Magnus reminisces about that night and Alec’s eyes grow fond in recognition, talking about the early days of their little self-made family. Madzie smiles at them, at the story, picturing the three of them watching cartoons in the middle of the night, Alec carefully carrying her back to bed.
But try as she might, she finds she doesn’t really remember it.