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The issue is like this: Magnus is technically the more dangerous of the two of them.
Which is sort of an odd dynamic because at first glance Alec is the taller and proportionally somewhat larger of the two, covered in visible tattoos and standing around at parade rest like Magnus’ irritated bodyguard. (“Jesus, can you unwind? Are we on a date or a mission?” Magnus often says, swatting him out of it.) But what it means in practice is simply this: while Magnus technically holds court as, you know, the big guns, Alec is the active duty shadowhunter with a paramilitary day-job and does most of the fighting.
Basically, the assassin goes for Alec first.
Alec doesn’t feel the pain immediately. The first thing he feels is the impact, like being punched in the chest and his back slamming into the wall, winding him. For a stunned moment, his head bursts with white and black. He feels his deflect rune scream white hot across his throat, burning a bullet’s worth of kinetic energy into his goddamn soul but the slug still hits him, burying itself in the meat of his pectoral, shattering three ribs, but it does not find its home in his heart.
God, Alec thinks as his vision blackens at the corners, thank fuck he didn’t double-tap.
Alec fights off unconsciousness, fingers digging into the wall behind him. The alleyway spins on a crazy axis, his vision splintering and tunneling narrow. He can’t breathe. His lungs are crimped in a cracked cage of calcium and agony – his nephlim physique and the rune converting a bullet into a diffused impact but it is, nevertheless, a fucking bullet to the heart. He spits up blood. From blown vessels in his throat, or something worse, he can’t be sure. The deflect rune does weird things with killing blows.
His knees won’t straighten. He’s fetched against the wall, his elbows jammed back against the brick to keep himself upright. He still manages to flick his wrist and summon up his seraph blade into his hand and it burns like white phosphorous in his fist, humming with a divine frequency that steadies him, cleaves through him. He finds a ragged, agonizing breath.
He hears screaming.
“Magnus?” He rolls to his left, dragging his free hand against the wall, bracing himself. “Magnus? Where are you? Mag–”
He stops.
He stops because there is a gargantuanfucking Bengal tiger taking up the entire width of the alley way in front of him. It’s bigger than any tiger should be. It’s in the gory process of just mauling someone to death. There’s a person on the ground. There’s a gun on the pavement and person is making horrible animal screaming noises, made difficult by the way their guts have been ripped open and half pulled onto the sidewalk. The noise is cut short by a nightmarish crunch as those great, blood-slick jaws snap shut and crush the assassin’ skull like a soda can.
Alec stares.
The tiger, briefly, stares right back at him. Its eyes are not feline eyes. They’re radiant gold slit up the middle and when their gaze meets Alec’s the tiger bites down again, for emphasis, and a gush of blood spurts between its jaws and runs thick, puddling on the ground. Then the tiger opens its jaws, drops the corpse, and there’s a sliding collapsing suck in the fabric of reality and suddenly it’s Magnus kneeling over the body, still dressed in the nice jacket and button down he was wearing before, but his mouth and throat is just… just absolutely soaked with blood.
It drips from his chin like water. When he opens his mouth it’s to spit out the truly just… a disgusting amount of blood. He kind of gags, spits again, and stumbles to his feet.
“Alec! Are you alright?”
“You were a tiger,” Alec points out, still fetched against the wall.
“You’re bleeding!” Magnus says, ignoring Alec’s somewhat shellshocked observations.
He rushes to Alec, fingers burning blue and presses them stacked over Alec’s heart, covering the wound with his palms. An immediate flood of cold healing magic tunnels down the wound, fastening around the bullet and Alec feels the slug wink out of existence. Hears it click on the ground somewhere behind Magnus and the warlock grunts as he starts sealing the wound, knitting bones, just dumping a huge chunk of magic into the immediate reverse of damage.
“Stop, stop.” Alec dismisses his seraph blade and grabs Magnus by the shoulders. “It’s just my ribs. Magnus, the deflect rune got most of it.” Magic continues to sink into his chest. “Did you hear me? I’m okay.”
“Hold still,” Magnus snaps.
“Magnus!”
The warlock seems to snap out of it and looks up at Alec, his eyes blinking from a frantic gold before dimming brown again. The magic subsides a little and then it’s just Magnus standing there, his bare palms pressed against Alec’s chest. His fingers are tacky with Alec’s blood. The assassin’s blood is still all over his mouth, his chin, his throat, sopping his expensive shirt and the sight is… Alec doesn’t know what to do with it.
“I didn’t see him,” Magnus whispers. “I used… I did the anti-combustion cantrip but he already… He’d already fired.” Magnus’ hands close as fists over Alec’s heart. “He would have had you if you—”
“Yeah, if I wasn’t a shadowhunter with a basic deflect rune, Magnus. I’m okay.” He tries to keep it light, but the fact is that assassin absolutely did get the drop on him and that bullet would have found its mark. His aim was dead on. “I’m okay. But we need to cover this up. There’s the fucking body –”
Magnus snaps his fingers and a portal opens beneath the corpse and it drops like a sack out of sight, then the portal closes. No trace left.
“Dropped it in a safehouse,” Magnus says.
There’s sweat on his brow. He’s breathing hard. Healing magic is not Magnus’ forte, actually. He turns and shoves his palm at the far wall and another portal opens, crackling, and through the quantum maelstrom, Alec can see the interior of Magnus’ loft and before Alec can protest Magnus grabs his wrist and pulls Alec with him over three-thousand miles in a single step and they land in the living room of Magnus’ Brooklyn loft… where Magnus immediately falls to his knees and pukes like a pint of blood and what looks like… bits of flesh and gristle.
“Shit,” he rasps, “this rug is expensive.”
“You used too much magic,” Alec says, kneeling. “You didn’t need to heal me, Magnus.”
“Tell that to past me,” Magnus complains, then retches and throws up again. “Oh god…”
“C’mon.” Alec grabs his boyfriend around the waist, grabbing his arm and pulling it over the back of his neck to one-man walk assist the warlock to the bathroom. “I guess ripping a dude face off with your teeth is not the best choice of combat tactics?” He says this through slightly gritted teeth. “Why did you do that, by the way? Fireballs not good enough anymore?”
“He was wearing some kind of magic-deflect armor beneath his clothes.” Magnus sounds completely nauseous now. “I had to kill him manually.”
“He had a gun though?
“Guns are very effective,” Magnus grits.
“Right, it’s just… odd if they were assassinating a shadowhunter.” They reach the bathroom. They are leaving a very nasty trail of gore from the living room all the way to the toilet where Alec gently drops Magnus to his knees. “Christ. Are you sure you’re okay?
“I swallowed,” Magnus chokes. “Tiger stomach is bigger than my – Oh fuck.”
He doubles up and retches blood into the toilet bowl. He pants, ragged, clenches his eyes shut in pain then dry-heaves, gagging so hard his entire spine kind of rolls up under Alec’s hand. Alec can’t do anything but sit there rubbing circles into the warlock’s back, squeezing his shoulder with one hand to steady him while he just… fucking… pukes like half a gallon of dead guy’s blood into the toilet. Magnus moans, hanging his head into the bowl.
“God, I forgot how much this sucks.”
“You okay?”
“I will be. This is just disgusting.”
Alec settles in a little bit, curling an arm around Magnus’ shoulders while the miserable warlock just kind of languishes, occasionally heaving up even more blood until the whole bathroom stinks like copper and bile and that weird ion smell of Magnus’ sorcery. Alec idly strokes Magnus’ hair from his forehead until it seems like the heaving finally subsides. For a while they just stay like that, Alec running his fingers along Magnus’ scalp, listening to his breathing get less and less ragged and watching the tension in his face slowly unravel and smooth away.
Then he fetches a towel from under the sink, soaks it in the tub.
“Is shapeshifting a common warlock combat tactic?”
“No.” Magnus flushes the toilet and the disturbing bloody contents siphons away. He sighs. “A lot can go wrong with a shapeshift, but better to be a grizzly bear than a weedy librarian if someone is—” he gestures vaguely with one hand— “trying to stab you to death or something.”
“What can go wrong?” Alec asks, mostly to keep Magnus talking and not thinking about the significant amount of human blood that’s smeared all over the bathroom now. “With a shapeshift I mean. What’s dangerous about it?”
“Well, just it’s a complicated spell. It’s not like werewolf shifting. Werewolf shifts are a tough kind of magic. Warlock shifts are fragile if that makes sense. Little things like… like if I eat too much as a tiger, then shift back, I could tear my insides apart. Or if I’m too badly wounded as a tiger, I could get stuck and be unable to shift back. Oh. Thank you.” He takes the towel from Alec and starts wiping blood from his mouth and chin. “That has happened to me before. I got stuck for three hours.”
“Well… don’t turn into a tiger on my account next time.”
“Well, get shot less and I’ll resist being a tiger.”
“Deal,” Alec says, grinning a little. There’s a beat, then, “What’s it feel like?”
Magnus blinks. “Huh?”
“Being a tiger. What’s that feel like?”
“Feels like… I don’t know…” He starts yanking his bloody shirt off over his head and tosses it. It vanishes. “Sorry. I don’t know how to describe it. It feels decidedly less squishy than being humanoid. How about that?” He thinks about it, sitting back now against the bathtub behind him, shirtless now and scrubbing at his still bloody skin. “It’s kind of nice actually. You know, outside of battle, it’s nice. Feels… safe.”
“Tiger is your shift of choice?”
“I’ve protected myself a lot with that form. So yes. Tiger is my favored form for a fight.”
Alec takes the bloody towel, tosses it and then takes a seat next to Magnus. He immediately rewarded by Magnus leaning against him and dropping his head against his shoulder, exhausted and… like a cat actually. Alec reaches up and settles his hand against the side of Magnus’ head, threading his fingers through his hair. Magnus makes a low happy sound in his throat.
“Magnus.”
“Mmm?”
“Seriously. Are you okay?”
“Alec, not to be obtuse, but you’re the one who got shot. I’m the one who saved the day. You really should not be the one asking me if I’m okay.”
“Yeah, but I’m feeling great. You’re puking in our bathroom.”
Magnus grumbles.
“Look, I appreciate you protecting me,” Alec begins.
“Ugh,” Magnus says, sensing a ‘but’.
“Buuut,” Alec says, “maybe next time just… I don’t know. You don’t have to go for the kill on my behalf. I’m tougher than I look you know.”
Magnus glances sidelong at him. “So am I, Alec.”
“Right. But it’s not your responsibility to put yourself in danger for me. Okay?”
“Alexander, I hate to tell you this, but if someone threatens you, I’m tearing them apart. Period.”
Alec glances down at him. Magnus is glaring at him now. They could definitely argue about this, Alec could make a fight out of this if he wanted to.
But what he actually says is, “Would you turn back into a tiger if I called Jace over?”
Magnus blinks, confused.
“Like, just walk out of the kitchen as a tiger and scare the shit out of him?”
Magnus beams. “Absolutely. When?”
“Right now. I need to talk to him about that assassin thing anyway. Two birds. One stone.”
“I’m all in,” Magnus says.
Alec smiles. “I figured.”