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It happened so suddenly.
One minute Alec was standing at the table, completely fine and unharmed, and the next he was clutching at his abdomen, a pained groan escaping his lips. His feet slid across the floor as if he was suddenly on uneven ground, and he leaned against the table like it was the only thing holding him up. Magnus and him hadn't talked much since Alec left the loft earlier, but now he couldn't help it as he asked, "Alexander, you okay?" He didn't touch him despite the fact that he desperately wanted to in that moment, knowing it might be unwelcome.
Alec lifted up the bottom of his shirt just slightly to reveal his parabatai rune, which instead of being a solid black mark, was glowing weakly. His breaths came out in short bursts, and Isabelle's face grew more concerned. "His parabatai rune," is all she said, but the implication was clear. Something horrible was happening to Jace, and Alec could feel it.
"It's-" Alec tried to speak, but he couldn't seem to get the words out, staring off into space suddenly, still gasping as he zoned out. Magnus wanted to steady him, to put his arms around him and tell him that everything would be okay. But this was something about Alec that he would never be able to truly understand. He had felt love, had formed connections with others, but never something as complex as what the parabatai rune created. He loved Alec with every fiber of his being, but he could not imagine being tied to his soul so completely that Magnus could feel everything that Alec did. "Jace," Alec breathed out.
He groaned again, louder this time as he fell to the floor, and that's when the screaming began. Isabelle and Magnus dropped to their knees beside him, their hands hovering, completely at a loss. They only had a vague idea of what Alec was going through, and no words or touches could remedy that kind of agony. Magnus settled for placing his hands on Alec's shoulders. It may not have been much, but it was not an option to just stand by and watch it happen. They had been fighting for days now, on completely different pages, but that did not erase the fact that Magnus loved this man more than anything in the world.
The screaming lasted only a couple of minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. The world seemed to move in slow motion as Alec lifted up his shirt again to watch his rune fade from existence. He was gasping for air, unable to fill his lungs in a satisfactory way, and Magnus felt like he was tearing apart from the inside, out as he watched the way Alec's expression turned to one of complete sorrow.
"I-I can't feel him," He said, leaning further onto the floor. He blinked in quick succession, as if he was trying to wake up from a horrible, horrible dream, before he said the final, "He's dead."
Magnus felt like the floor had completely dropped from under them, and they were free falling into a place that they could not come back from, a place where there was nothing but death and destruction. There had already been so many losses, so much pain, so much turmoil, and over what? Because of one man's delusion that the removal of Downworlders would fix all of the problems in the Shadow World?
Magnus thought back to the conversation he had with Alec all those weeks ago, after Jace went missing, and his blood was liquid fury, burning his veins with the desire to act, to get revenge, to rip apart the man that caused this.
"I know what you're going through, Alexander," he said.
"No, I-I don't think you do. Jace is a part of me. Through our rune we are both physically and emotionally connected. If he dies, a part of me dies, too."
Magnus could see it in the way Alec sat there, eyes unfocused and expression saturated with grief, that he had lost a vital part of himself. A piece of him was gone, and he would never get it back. And wasn't that just proof of how corrupt the Shadow World was? No matter how many pieces someone gave of themselves in order to try to better their world, it was never enough to patch the holes that had formed over time. There would never be enough loyalty, or determination, because greed always won out.
Valentine was living proof of that.
As the three of them sat there on the floor, unsure of what they could possibly do to fix what had been broken, Magnus made a vow to himself, and to all of the Shadowhunters that he cared for.
The day would end with Valentine Morgenstern's death.