Chapter Text
Day #1
I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. Magnus, I-
The stele made contact with Magnus’ ill-fitting skin and the effect was instantaneous.
Pain. Sharp. Burning. Consuming.
A scream ripped free, a cry for help as his body was ripped apart, cell by cell, and pure agony burgeoned between the gaps. It was nothing he’d ever known before and yet it was everything he had ever experienced.
The pain was every wound, every heartbreak, every insult and jibe, every ounce of grief, and every insecurity of his immortal life searing through the mortal body he was trapped in. It blazed across each nerve, burning so hot it unraveled him. It destroyed him. He was no longer a body of blood and bones, but a vessel of excruciation.
And it didn’t stop. His tormentors granted him no reprieve.
His consciousness frantically tried to separate from his physical being, urging him to just let go and be free . His connection to the world, to life , felt stretched taut - the daintiest of threads strained under the unrelenting assault.
Around his own screams, he heard another — a gut-wrenching sound of desperation. It shouted a name. His name. At least he thought it was his.
Did he have a name?
Did he have a body?
He must have because it was being hacked apart.
Why was he struggling to stay here? Here was torture.
Another lash of pain. Hot. Scorching.
He recoiled further, causing several filaments of consciousness to snap.
Another scream, not his own, tried to reach him through the pain, but he couldn’t do this anymore.
He couldn’t.
So he let go.
He became darkness.
Not a whisper nor a thought.
He was the void and the void was him.
He was free.
Space.
Time.
Him.
Nothing had a limit.
Nothing had an end.
Until…
“Wake up.”
A murmur in the nothingness. A subtle brush against the dark. The first connection in the infinite realm of nonexistence.
“Come back.”
The void shuddered as the powerful voice broke through again, stronger this time. It was a summons, one that couldn’t be ignored.
“Come back, Magnus.”
The world rippled under the command.
And that name .
It meant nothing to the darkness. Yet somehow, it meant everything. In the infinite sea in which he floated, it broadcast like a beacon. A spark of recognition across his consciousness. Magnus.
“Wake up, my dear boy.”
He wanted to push against the boundless dark for the source of the voice. But he was nothing. He was bodiless. He could do nothing. He was at the mercy of the void. He was the void. And he was stuck.
He didn’t want the voice to leave him behind. Until now, loneliness had not existed in the unending dark. But the voice had forced in upon him. He knew what loneliness was now. He understood it. He felt the crushing weight of it. He wanted to be rid of it. He didn’t want the voice to leave him behind. He didn’t want to be left here drifting…
“I didn’t go to all this effort for you to ignore me, Magnus. Come. Back. Now!”
In the end, he didn’t have to beg or plead. A solid jerk and the void shattered with blazing light, and-
Magnus surged forward with a sharp, rasping gasp. His lungs burned as if they had never known oxygen and were greedy for it. He gulped, clutching his chest as his heart sputtered and tripped, laboring to find a functional pace.
He blinked rapidly trying to clear the blur from his eyes. The room's light was dim, but still, he flinched against its assault on his vision. His head pounded, blood pulsing too forcibly through his veins as if unfamiliar with the task.
For several moments he sat there, feeling like one of his apothecary jars scraped empty of its contents. There was enough left stuck to the inside to identify the ingredient, but not enough to be useful. It was how his body felt. It was his. He could feel how he used to occupy it, but right now he didn’t fully inhabit it.
Seconds ticked as he waited to settle back into his form.
As his pulse calmed, his thoughts started firing rapidly to piece together what the hell had happened. Had he gone out last night? Had he been working in his apothecary? It wouldn’t be the first time Magnus woke up confused after overindulgence or overexertion. He had experienced perhaps the worst hangovers on record, yet he’d never woke up feeling quite like this level of shit.
With thumbs digging into his temples, Magnus groaned with achy relief. Some days he hated himself. And as tempting as it was to lie back down and sleep this off, he should get up and deal with the consequences of yesterday’s actions.
Still squinting at his surroundings, Magnus swung his legs off the bed. Before he could properly register that it wasn’t his 200-year-old Persian rug beneath his boots, a deep, velvety voice greeted him.
“Welcome back.”
With his chest still heaving slightly, Magnus’ eyes slid heavily with annoyance toward his father.
Perched on his throne, suit sharply tailored, wisps of black swirling around him, Asmodeus grinned, sharp and triumphant.
Magnus blinked at the Prince of Hell and then around the room. His heart sank to his stomach.
He wasn’t in his loft. He wasn’t even in New York. He was in Edom.
Haphazardly placed candles dotted the throne room, casting distorted shadows and mostly concealing a few low-ranked demons that skittered about doing Asmodeus’ bidding. The stretch of cobbled floor between Magnus and his father was broken and uneven. Spindly black Edomite foliage crept from between the cracks and climbed up the wall. Windows of broken glass allowed dust to float through the air, coating everything with red grime…including Magnus’ throat.
“Oh fuck, what do you want?” he croaked, vocal cords grating like sandpaper. Waking up in Edom never boded well, and he suspected the lack of memory of the last few hours had everything to do with his father.
With the barest flick of Asmodeus’ finger, a glass of water materialized in Magnus’ hand. He glowered over its rim but drank it down.
“I journey to that dimension to bring you back from the dead, and this is the thanks I get?”
Magnus choked on the last chug of the glass, spewing water across himself and the grungy floor.
“What? I don’t-” He wiped the back of his hand across his face, aware of how much it was shaking.
“Of course, you remember,” Asmodeus dismissed Magnus’ half-spoken denial. “I restored your every memory, every emotion, and every ounce of the power that you possessed before those Shadowhunters took them from you.”
His father spat Shadowhunters as if the word tasted foul on his tongue.
Magnus slumped forward, palms pressed painfully against his eyes.
Dead. He’d been dead? And his father brought him back? He thought he’d remember dying .
Magnus dared a glance toward his father trying to gauge whether he was lying. Trickery and deceit were as natural to Asmodeus as breathing. But as much as Magnus was inclined to believe the worst in his father, his intuition told him the Prince of Hell was being honest.
Slowly, trickling like a leaky faucet, snippets of memory dripped into his consciousness.
The pentagram. Azazel. Valentine. The cell. Alec. The begging. Imogen Herondale. The Agony Rune. Alec walking away from him. Everything came rushing back. The neverending state of fear-pain-desperation.
“Oh fuck.”
Magnus twisted just in time to empty the contents of his stomach over the side of the chaise lounge he’d woken up on.
He heaved again, his body making a valiant effort to expel the horrible memories with the minimal contents of his stomach.
Another glass of water materialized before him and, this time, Magnus didn’t grumble at the offered relief. He drank it gratefully, recognizing and reluctantly appreciating the space Asmodeus was giving him to come to terms with his own demise.
Magnus had died . The Inquisitor had tortured and executed him.
They had thought he was Valentine - but still.
The Clave and Magnus Bane had a long history, one that was indifferent at best and outright hostile at worst. Magnus couldn’t shake the feeling Imogen might have gone through with the execution even if they had believed him about the body swap.
The thought should probably upset him more than it did. However, his opinion of the Clave couldn’t really deteriorate any further. They had been Public Enemy #1 since Magnus learned who he truly was and made contact with the Shadow World for the first time. It was always Magnus’ assumption that should he die, it would be at the hands of the Clave or a result of his own foolishness.
It seems both assumptions were right.
He knew summoning Azazel had been unwise, though none of them could have predicted it would lead to his bodyswitching with Valentine and death by execution at the Clave’s hand.
Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to the insane plan, but what else could he have done with Isabelle’s life possibly threatened? How could he not have acted when his friend’s life was in danger? When Alec’s family was in danger?
And wasn’t that the true root of his pain? Alec.
Unbidden, the memory of Alec, standing before him in the cold cell confused and angry as Magnus begged him to believe him, played before his eyes.
“He didn’t believe me,” Magnus voiced aloud, the vice around his heart constricting so tight he felt faint. “He didn’t believe me.”
“And this surprises you?”
Asmodeus’ baritone voice was closer than before. Magnus raised his head to find his father standing before him, looking down at him over the bridge of his upturned nose.
“Shadowhunters operate on facts and a strict chain of command. There was no way your Shadowhunter would stop the execution of their most wanted criminal…no matter how much you begged.”
Magnus couldn’t tell if Asmodeus was absolving or condemning Alec’s actions. Either way, his father wasn’t wrong. There was no level of depravity or deception Valentine wouldn’t sink to in order to save his own skin.
Magnus couldn’t condemn Alec for assuming it was a trick.
Still, it hurt - sharp and deep.
The image of Alec backing away from him, abandoning him, would be seared into his memory for the rest of Magnus’ newly restored life.
Through the centuries, many people had looked at Magnus that way. Fear of his eyes and his substantial power. Angry about perceived deceptions or even just his mere existence as a Downworlder.
But not Alec. Never Alec.
Alec had never feared Magnus’ magic. Fuck, before they were even anything, he’d helped boost it by lending his strength. Alec had seen his eyes and called them beautiful. And his eyes were opened to the discrimination against Magnus’ people. Enough that Magnus already felt a growing force of change within him.
Never had Alec looked at him with anything other than admiration, love, and desire.
Until now.
The realization that their relationship was altered forever robbed the air from Magnus' lungs. It was too much too quick. The dust, his father’s overly attentive eyes - all of it pressed in.
Panic began to well up. He felt breathless and even shakier than he’d just been after waking up. The void he’d just escaped from felt too accessible, too close to the surface, too willing to welcome him back into its depths. He needed to run.
“Can I go?”
Magnus asking his father for permission to leave Edom instead of storming out on his own power said a lot about his current state of mind. It was necessary, however. His power thrummed beneath his skin but his current control was fickle, and tapping into it would be like walking one of Edom’s hellhounds through Manhattan with a threadbare leash. Trying to portal himself when he was so shaken could have disastrous results.
Wordlessly, Asmodeus sidestepped and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. A portal, violently swirling, opened in the middle of the throne room. Magnus pushed himself up, barely preventing himself from plopping back down with momentary dizziness.
He gave his father a curt nod - the closest thing to a ‘thank you’ that he’d ever given Asmodeus - and shuffled through the portal.
