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Magnus takes his time on the second attempt at mixing the martinis. On the first attempt, his hands were shaking so badly he spilled gin everywhere. He needs to pull himself together, because this conversation isn’t over; Alec won’t let go of it that easily.
How did he manage to get so completely blindsided? He should have known after rebuffing Alec’s request to move in, and being caught reminiscing over the memento box, that the day when they had to deal with this issue was fast approaching. He just wasn’t prepared for it to be this day.
He thought he’d have longer to just be.
This conversation traditionally goes one of three ways:
Most often, it spells the beginning of the end. Whoever he loves just can’t cope with the reality of what being with Magnus will mean. Magnus’s immortality taints things, somehow. From the moment of realization onward, things change. Sometimes they become more urgent, frenetically so, as though his lover is trying to compensate for the inevitable end. Or they become despondent, as though the relationship is no longer worth trying for. In the end, it just falls apart with varying degrees of acrimony.
Other times, his lover will either repress or manage to deal with the reality of what the relationship will mean, but eventually things unravel because sometimes that’s just what relationships do.
On rare occasions, however, things play out to the very bitter end. It’s only happened a few times, but it has happened, and it never gets less devastating.
Time inevitably marches on. Magnus is trapped in its web, witness to its ravages but cruelly untouched by them.
Every line of Alec’s body spells misery and confusion when Magnus returns with the martinis, but he tries to push past it and not let it ruin their evening. This is what they do; they carve out a little time for themselves, between Alec attending to administrative duties during the day and overseeing demon-hunting operations at night. This is their time; he desperately wants to hold onto it and not let it be spoiled.
Magnus tries to fill the fraught silence with information about his clients, but his heart isn’t in it. And Alec is absolutely wretched at making idle small-talk.
This isn’t going to go away, no matter how much Magnus wants it to.
“I never just move on, Alexander,” he says finally, staring down into his martini. He should have made his with vodka, in honor of the drink Freddie famously downed before recording the most breathtaking track of his career. The one whose lyrics Magnus always suspected he might have influenced.
“Sometimes are less devastating than others. Not because the person I’ve lost is less important than any other,” he adds quickly. “But sometimes I’ve had more time to prepare, or I’m in a better place to cope, and I have a better support network around me. Other times I just wish I could die too. Sometimes I’ve even been tempted to actually try it.”
Alec sucks in a sharp breath at that. “Magnus—”
“I told you I’ve been there myself, and I’m certainly not the first warlock who eventually couldn’t face going through it all again.” He manages a weak smile, shaking his head. “But no. I only ever came close once. Still. Sometimes it takes me years, even decades to recover. And each time it gets harder, takes longer.”
Alec’s jaw flexes for a moment, like he’s chewing on the words he wants to speak, tasting them before deciding which ones to go with. “You said you’d closed yourself off for a century before me. Was George the reason—”
“No.” Magnus down his martini and goes to make himself another, and this one he does make with vodka. “Losing George was sudden but not unexpected. He was a soldier, after all, going off to war. I think I was already numb to it before he died. It was a betrayal that made me decide I couldn’t do that to myself again. A few decades ago, there was another relationship. Brief, but powerful. It ended for other reasons, but he passed only a few years later. That was enough to remind me why I’d shut myself off from all that.”
“Until me.” There was a rasp in Alec’s voice, and he cleared his throat in the silence.
Magnus turned to see him hunched over his empty glass, and the love that swells up within him is so powerful it nearly chokes Magnus. “Never say never, I suppose is the lesson I must take from that. Prognostication has never been one of my talents.”
“Bull,” Alec says bluntly, lifting his head to meet Magnus’s eyes squarely. “If anyone has the lived experience to predict the future, it’s you.”
“Educated guessing doesn’t count.” He slides onto the sofa next to Alec instead of across the room in the chair, and lays a hand on his knee. “There’s always something you can’t know to expect. You were an unforeseen variable, Alexander.”
“At what cost to you?” That rasp is back in Alec’s voice, and this time he doesn’t try to clear it away. “You threw yourself into this—into us—knowing what it would—”
“I don’t know a damn thing, Alec,” Magnus says shortly. “That’s what I’m trying to say. You could outlive me.”
Alec shakes his head sharply but Magnus doesn’t let him reply, squeezing and shaking Alec’s knee as though to punctuate each word. “Yes. It could happen. I know you’re sometimes a little awestruck by my power, and it’s flattering, but I’m by no means indestructible. Just a week ago, Valentine raised Raziel with the intention of ending me and all my kind. A few weeks before that, I escaped the massacre in the Institute by mere minutes. We can’t know. We can’t ever know.”
He draws a shuddering breath. “If I tried to predict the future, all I’d be able to see is a unending series of one shattering loss after another. I’d get lost in imagining picking myself up and putting myself together again, over and over, and that’s no way to live. That’s why I can’t...can’t let myself go there. Can’t think about what may come. It will hurt too much, enough to make me forget all the joy we can have between now and...whenever.”
Alec puts his glass on the coffee table and stays there, with his arms wrapped across his stomach as though doubled over with some ache deep inside.
“How do you live with it?” he asks finally, and there’s something so desperate and needy in his voice that it makes Magnus ache with him.
“By living in the moment. By understanding that now is all we have. It could end tomorrow. It could end next week. It could end fifty years from now. It could end with me dying just as easily as it could you.” Alec shakes his head again, but it lacks the vehemence that it did before. “If we spend our time looking forward, raging against all the things we can’t control, it will consume us. It will spoil what’s here, now, right in front of us. I have to live in the moment, or I could never live at all.”
Alec’s eyes are shiny when he looks over at Magnus, but he nods slowly. “I think I understand. I’ll try. It may take me some time to really...really get my head around it, but I’ll try.”
He leans into Magnus then, and Magnus opens his arms and welcomes it. Kisses the top of Alec’s head, smelling his own shampoo as he buries his face in Alec’s hair and Alec’s breath warms the side of Magnus’s neck.
“Would it help you to hear about them?” he offers gently. “The people whose memories I keep in the box? To understand what they meant to me and why I need to remember them?”
“Maybe?” Alec draws back, frowning a little as though he’s not sure. “I think so.”
Magnus kisses his brow and rises. “I’ll be right back.”
When he returns with the box, Alec has refilled their drinks. The sit together on the sofa and reverently, Magnus opens his box.
He starts with Freddie and George, of course. They’re closest to the top. One by one, he gives Alec just a little bit of information about them. About where they fell in Magnus’s life, why he needed to preserve them.
When they’re all laid out in a row on the coffee table, Alec’s fingers pass lightly over them, his lips moving silently. Then he swallows and gives Magnus a startled look.
“There’s seventeen here.”
Magnus flushes and looks away. That night in the Hunter’s Moon, he’d produced that number and then choked on it, unable to follow through on what it actually meant.
Now Alec knows.
“There have been others, of course. Many others. Sometimes for a night, or a few weeks, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes just sex, sometimes something more. These...these were the lovers who changed things for me, somehow. In different ways, but all of them impactful.”
He sees Alec chewing on that thought as he begins to tenderly place the items back in the box. He can almost hear the question Alec won’t let himself ask. The one that he thinks is probably too ridiculous, or needy, or might get an answer he doesn’t really want to hear.
When Magnus closes the box and sets it aside, he lays his hand along Alec’s jaw, forcing him to look at Magnus.
“You’ve changed things for me, too.” He sucks in a deep breath and makes himself speak the thing he never wants to consider. “And if it ever comes to that, you would be eighteen, Alexander. Not seventeen thousand and one.”