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The loft is dark when he finally gets home. Magnus pauses on the doorstep, wavering between disappointment and relief before finally settling on the latter. The outrage of this afternoon has curdled into a cold knot of miserable frustration; Magnus’s temper flares hot, but he’s never been able to hang onto it for long. Not the way Alec can.
The way Alec must be now, since apparently he didn’t come home after storming out of the restaurant earlier. Magnus sighs, kicks his shoes off, and shuts the door behind him, then leans against it. He feels exhausted, sad, ancient in a way that he rarely does these days.
For what must be the first time in decades, he finds himself thinking of the precise shade of blue of the Mediterranean the first time he saw it. The salt sting in the air and the hot Italian sun. There was a boy there that he loved, centuries ago, when he was barely more than a boy himself. Magnus has always been careless with his heart, although at least he’s developed a talent for misdirection over the years.
It ended badly, as so many of his dalliances did in those days. As so many have over the course of his life.
Magnus knocks his head back against the door, staring up at the dark ceiling. He could use a drink, but he knows himself better than to think that’s a good idea right now.
He’s tempted to snap his fingers and summon one anyway when he sees something move out on the balcony. A shift of shadows silhouetted against the soft glow of the street lights below—Alicante is never as bright as New York, but it’s still a city—that resolves itself after a moment into the familiar shape of Alec’s profile.
He did come home, then. Magnus groans softly. It’s a rarity for Alec’s presence to fill him with irritation like this, but he was hoping to put off the rest of this particular argument until both of them have had some time to cool down. Maybe get some sleep.
Magnus could probably do that anyway. Alec had to hear him come in, but he hasn’t come back inside, hasn’t called out to Magnus. In fact, as far as Magnus can tell in the gloom, he’s still stubbornly looking out over the stern grandeur of Alicante. Giving him the cold shoulder like a petulant child, Magnus thinks, petulantly. It would serve him right if Magnus just ignored him in turn and went to bed.
Instead, he pushes away from the door and crosses the dark apartment to step out into the cool September night. Alec is leaned against the railing, arms draped over the edge, staring out into the night. A beer bottle dangles from one hand, the label mostly picked off. He doesn’t turn as Magnus comes up beside him, but a muscle tics in his jaw. The silence between them stretches out into some miserable, leaden thing before Magnus finally leans against the railing, mirroring Alec’s posture. “How did you get home?”
“I walked,” Alec says shortly.
It has to be five or six miles, and that’s as the crow flies; on the narrow twisting streets of Alicante, it’s closer to ten. It must have taken him hours. Magnus firmly stomps out the fleeting impulse to apologize. Alec, after all, is the one who stormed out.
After Magnus called him a reckless impulsive child, but still. He’s not quite ready to apologize for that, although he probably should.
“Clear your head?” he asks, instead.
Alec lets out an unamused-sounding huff of laughter. “Sure.”
Magnus sighs. “Alexander…”
“You know,” Alec interrupts. “We never got to have pets when we were kids.”
“I’m not surprised,” Magnus says honestly. He’s not sure where this little segue is going, but with Alec it’s usually better to let him get the words out in his own time. Especially when he’s upset. Magnus dislikes the random tangents, but he’s learned patience over the centuries. A little, anyway, although the truth is that it’s never come easily to him.
That, and he doesn’t want to fight with Alec anymore. He never does, really, but now he just feels tired and unsettled and sad, without even the temporary fire of anger to warm him.
He just wants this to be over with.
“Yeah. Shadowhunter kids get weapons training, not pets.” Alec tilts the beer to his mouth, then sets it down on the stone with a hard clink. “We used to go to the Bronx Zoo sometimes, when we had the time. Izzy always liked the World of Birds. The parrots. She used to nag my mom about getting one for a pet. She wanted to teach it how to swear.”
“I’ve heard that they don’t make especially good pets.”
“No. They can live for more than seventy years, some species, did you know that?” Alec’s voice is quiet and even, but there’s an edge of bitterness there. Magnus thinks, finally, that he might be starting to see where this is headed. “You get one when it’s young and it’ll be with you your whole life. Then you grow up, move on, lose interest, and you’re still stuck with this fucking parrot.”
He’s drunk, Magnus realizes. Should have realized sooner, but Alec is usually affectionate and handsy when he’s been drinking. Prone to draping himself over any warm body in his vicinity, especially when the warm body in question is Magnus’s.
Not tonight, though.
“You’re not a parrot,” he says, somewhat absurdly.
Alec shrugs, turning back to look out over the city. “No, but wanting someone for fifty years is a lot different than wanting them forever, isn’t it? Especially for you. I just thought…” he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought, I guess.”
Magnus sighs, the last of his anger leaching away to leave something tired and cold in its wake. He moves closer, sets his hand on Alec’s shoulder and feels muscles twitch beneath his palm. An abortive flinch, but Alec doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t look at Magnus, but he doesn’t pull away. That’s something.
Finally, quietly, he says, “You’re not wrong.”
A short, bitter bark of laughter, and Alec does pull away from him, twisting jerkily out of Magnus’s reach. Now that he’s moving, it’s easy to see how unsteady he is. “Okay. Great. I’m going to bed.”
“Alexander,” Magnus says. It comes out sharp, banked frustration flaring up again. “Would you just listen to me for a moment? Please? Instead of storming off again?”
Alec pauses, then finally turns, folding his arms over his chest. “Fine. What?”
Magnus takes a breath, then says, “Immortality always comes with a price. Always.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think,” Magnus says carefully, “that you lack perspective. You’re twenty-seven years old. You’re so young—”
“I’m not a child,” Alec snaps, and Magnus grimaces.
“No. You’re not. But you haven’t outlived all the people you love. Your family, your friends. Isabelle and Jace and Max—” That last one hits home, if Alec’s slight flinch is anything to go by. Magnus wishes he could feel triumphant. “You would watch them age and die. And you’d love more mortals, and watch them age and die as well. Over and over again, for centuries. Forever. And immortals, what love is between immortals—” He breaks off again. “Camille was the norm, not the exception.”
“Cat isn’t like that,” Alec says stubbornly. “You aren’t.”
“Until five years ago, it had been a hundred years since I’d spoken to Catarina. In a few decades we’ll drift out of each other’s lives again for God knows how long. That’s what would happen between you and me, Alexander. If we were lucky and things went well and we didn’t end up hating one another a few hundred years from now, that’s what would happen. You can’t be married to a person for centuries. Not without destroying every bit of love there is between you.”
Alec is finally looking at him.
“I could never hate you,” he says.
“Time changes people,” Magnus tells him. “Do you honestly think I’m the same person now that I was when I was twenty-seven?”
The hot sun and the blue, blue sea. The boy with black hair and rough hands and a ready smile, laughing at Magnus’s clumsy Genoese and kissing his mouth in the shadows beneath the olive trees.
It was so lovely, until it wasn’t. Magnus was young then, young and foolish and in love, and honest in the way that only love-struck young fools can be. At twenty-seven, forever seemed romantic.
At least until the decades passed, and the boy with laughing eyes grew gray and bitter and eventually sought out the very solution that Alec is considering right now.
Nicolo Cavanei is in Paris these days, or at least he was the last Magnus heard. A respected leader among the vampire clans of Europe; Magnus has spoken to him in passing perhaps once in the last two centuries. There’s no sign left of the shoemaker’s son he once loved, but Magnus supposes he doesn’t bear much resemblance to the young man he was then, either.
Are you happy? he remembers asking Nicolo the last time they met, sometime in the late 1890’s at some political affair or another. Even then, it was an impertinent question imposed on a near-stranger, and no matter that once they’d shared a life together.
He remembers that Nico laughed. Five years younger than Magnus, and he looked twenty years older. Centuries tireder. Elegant and untouchable.
Are any of us, my dear? he asked in the same lilting Genoese that had so charmed Magnus the first time he heard it in that dark little shop that smelled of wax and shoe leather.
It’s a question that has lodged itself behind Magnus’s heart in the years since, not because he can’t answer it but because he can, all too well.
Alec tilts his head. His expression has softened, and there’s something curious about it. As though it never really occurred to him until this very moment that Magnus was once young.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. That’s softer, too. The consonants slightly blurred with drink, but his gaze seems steady enough. “Are you?”
“Are you the same person you were five years ago?” Magnus counters. “Ten years ago? Do you think you’ll be the same person you are now in ten years? Twenty? Two hundred?”
Alec takes a breath, lets it out, then says, “I don’t know.”
“I do.” Magnus rubs his fingers over his knuckles, over the familiar shape of his wedding ring. “Being immortal doesn’t mean existing outside of time. You still have to live through every damn minute of it.”
“Magnus…”
“I love you,” Magnus interrupts bluntly. Perhaps it’s what he should have led with at the start of this, but pulling apart the tangled threads of grief and regret and fear has never been easy for him, and Alec caught him off-guard earlier. “I don’t want to lose you. Not now, not fifty years from now. But this… it would destroy you, Alec. And I don’t know if I can survive watching that again.”
“Again?”
Magnus closes his eyes. “Someday I’ll tell you. Not tonight.”
“Okay,” Alec says quietly.
“I can’t stop you. If you choose to go through with this, I can’t—but I hope you’ll reconsider. Whatever it is you think you’ll solve by giving up your mortality—it’s not worth it. Please believe me.”
“Okay,” Alec says again, finally. It’s not acquiescence, Magnus can tell, but it is… something. Acknowledgement, at least. Some hope that Alec has been listening to him.
Alec touches his shoulder, tugging slightly, then says, “Can I—?”
Before he can finish the sentence, Magnus is already stepping into the circle of his arms. He wasn’t aware of being cold until now, with the heat of Alec’s body surrounding him like a warm blanket. It feels wonderful, and there’s a childish, cowardly voice that wants to take it all back, that wants to tell Alec, Forget it, forget it all, everything I just told you, forget it and stay with me forever.
Instead, he tucks his face into Alec’s neck and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shouted at you earlier.”
“I shouldn’t have just dumped that on you out of the blue.” Alec’s sigh ruffles his hair, and then he says, “Can we just—go to bed? And finish talking about this tomorrow?”
Magnus nods without lifting his head. There’s a lump in his throat that he has to swallow back before he can speak. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Alec says back, but it’s a long time before he finally lets Magnus go.