Work Text:
“Jace!” Magnus yelled, panic rising in his chest. “Jace!”
It was unnecessary, Jace was already running towards them.
Alec shifted under Magnus’s hands, coughing wetly. “Is— ‘s he okay?”
“Yes, your brother’s fine, darling, don’t worry,” Magnus assured him as Jace skidded to a stop by Alec’s head.
“What happened?” he demanded, eyes wild, hair slick with ichor. “Magnus?”
“Poisoned claw,” Magnus said, reaching his magic into Alec’s chest and curling it around the strands of poison that were spreading rapidly through his bloodstream. Alec grunted from the pressure, and Magnus soothed him with a hand on his cheek. “When I tell you, draw an iratze. Only when I tell you.”
“Okay.”
Magnus closed his eyes. He just had to trust that the others would hold any remaining demons off of them, because this required all of his concentration. He focused on the fragile network of Alec’s blood vessels he could feel through his magic, focused on entangling his magic with the poison and only the poison.
And yanked.
The poison surged out of Alec’s chest, invisible to the eye but blinding to Magnus’s sense of energy signatures, a dark bruise blossoming in its wake. Shit. Not careful enough. He’d torn some of Alec’s blood vessels during the extraction.
Guilt weighed heavy in his chest, but he didn’t have time to focus on it right now. The poison was a strong demonic energy, and it yearned for the blood it had claimed—Magnus could only contain it for so long. “Jace, now!”
Jace drew a messy iratze on Alec’s chest, and the wound closed. Magnus compressed the energy between his hands until it disintegrated, which took more out of him than he was comfortable with, but it wasn’t like he had a choice.
Alec coughed once, hard, and when he next took a breath, his lungs sounded clear. He reached up to pat Magnus’s cheek. “Thanks, babe.”
Magnus tried to catch his breath, the exertion of healing and the waning panic catching up with him. “Any time.”
“What about those?” Jace was pointing to Alec’s chest, where Magnus realized, with a new surge of guilt, there was still significant, deep bruising.
He swallowed. “Those were, ah... caused by me, I believe.”
Jace looked alarmed. “What?”
“The poison was deeply entangled with his veins,” Magnus explained, “when I pulled it out, some of them got... torn. Hence the bruising.”
“It will heal, right?”
Magnus looked critically at the bruises. “Not with the aid of magic, I don’t think. In their own time, yes.”
That the bruises hadn’t been healed by the iratze concerned Magnus, but he didn’t voice this to Jace. Instead, he probed gently at the wound with his magic, and found that under the skin, it wasn’t entirely healed, though it did seem to be clear of demonic energies.
Frowning, Magnus pushed a little deeper—
—and a surge of feedback zapped him, making him retract his magic with an involuntary yelp. He shook the sting off his hands, and his magic, unsettled, curled back under his skin.
“What?” Jace demanded. “What’s happening?”
While Alec said from the ground, “Magnus? You okay?”
And Magnus wasn’t. He couldn’t breathe, suddenly. “His body is reacting to my magic. Re- rejecting it.” He said it to Jace—he couldn’t bear to look at Alec. Alec had never been anything less than totally accepting of his magic, if Magnus had caused this change—
Alec pushed himself upright, trying to catch Magnus’s eye—which Magnus studiously avoided. “Magnus?”
Magnus twisted his hands together, tried to drag himself back to the present.
“How is that possible?” Jace was asking.
“His body was already fighting demonic energies,” Magnus said. “I suppose that, when I extracted the poison, some wires got crossed and his angelic magic confused my demonic energy for the poison.” It made sense, but Magnus didn’t know how to fix it. “It probably didn’t help that I shredded several dozen of his blood vessels,” he added bitterly.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Alec turn to Jace. “Give us a moment?”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Please?”
Jace nodded and reluctantly retreated.
Alec turned to Magnus. “Magnus? Can you look at me?”
Magnus looked at him. Alec looked shaky, unsteady where he was propped up on his arms. His shirt, bloody and ruined from when Magnus had torn it open to get access to the wound, hung around a chest sheened with sweat and dark with bruising. There were already dark circles under his eyes.
He was beautiful. Magnus couldn’t go near him.
“Magnus?” Alec’s voice was growing nervous now. “Talk to me, please.” He reached out to take Magnus’s hand, and Magnus jerked back out of reach before their skin could make contact.
“Don’t— please, don’t touch me. I don’t want to hurt you.” He— he needed Alec in his arms, needed to make sure he was alright, whole, still here— but he couldn’t—
“You won’t hurt me,” Alec said, but he retracted his hand. “If anything, I’m the one at risk of hurting you. You’ve never hurt me. Your magic has never hurt me.”
“I just did.”
“You saved me.”
“And now your body doesn’t want anything to do with mine.” It was petty, and Magnus shouldn’t lay his own hurt on Alec, it was hardly his fault, but he—
Hurt flashed in Alec’s eyes, but he didn’t move away. “It’s just a temporary reaction, I’m sure of it. I always want you, Magnus. Body and soul.” He reached out again, voice breaking a little as he spoke. “Please come here?”
Magnus moved closer, slow and then faster, and collapsed against Alec, gingerly, careful of his wound, even though it was healed. He tucked his magic carefully away in his core, as far away from the juncture of their bodies as possible.
Alec wrapped still-weak arms around him. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Magnus agreed, “your own personal time bomb.”
Alec sighed and ran a hand through Magnus’s hair, cradling his head in his palm. “Will you stop? You’re not dangerous, Magnus. You’re not. Not to me.”
Magnus wasn’t sure he agreed, but he let Alec have this win. “Okay.”
Alec’s hand in his hair was soothing, and started to calm his nerves, but he was still injured, Magnus had to— “I should ask Catarina to come over, you’re still—”
“Magnus.” Alec leaned back to look in his eyes. “Will you please just let me comfort you for one minute?”
Magnus bit off a retort of you’re the one who’s injured before it could form. “Okay,” he said, tucking his head under Alec’s chin. “Okay.”
Just one minute.
Magnus kept a careful eye on Alec as he debriefed his soldiers, watched how he winced a bit with each movement. Normally, he would have wrapped a bit of magic around him, used it to check up on him, but now he didn’t dare. At least, he thought, Jace would be able to tell him if something went suddenly, drastically wrong.
He was swimming in guilt, but he tried to push it down, even managing to level his voice as Alec asked him to describe what the demons’ poison had been like so they could be more prepared for it in the future.
He could see Alec eyeing him as well, but he didn’t say anything until they were back home. Magnus excused himself to the kitchen under the presumption of making tea, and then just sort of hovered there, unable to move. He felt mired in a burning web of his own making, liable to unravel everything he had so carefully built.
“I know you’re not making tea,” Alec said from the doorway.
Magnus snapped his fingers and the kettle clicked on. “Who says?”
“You’re standing on the wrong side of the kitchen and you look like you were hit by a bus.”
Well, Magnus did kind of feel that way. “I just need a moment,” he said.
Alec took a cautious step closer, and Magnus knew he was just being careful because of Magnus’s emotional state, but it still made him want to flinch. “I know it’s more than that.”
“You’re right,” Magnus said, sharper than he intended, “it is more than that. I hurt you. There’s no excuse for that.”
“The excuse is you were saving my life.”
Magnus dug his hands through his hair. “I don’t want to wreck us.”
“Magnus.” Alec stepped forward in a rush and took Magnus’s face in his hands, and it took all of Magnus’s power not to pull away before his magic could hurt him again. “You’re not. I’m not upset. It’s okay.”
Magnus wrapped careful hands around his wrists. “I don’t know if it is.”
“Stop hating yourself. So maybe the healing didn’t go as seamlessly as you wanted. But if you hadn’t done it, I would literally be dead.”
This was, in fact, true, though thinking about it made Magnus’s hands shake. “And what about the magic? What if your magic just hates me?”
“It doesn’t. I promise.” Alec took one of his hands between his own. “Try again now.”
Magnus inhaled shakily, then let it out again. He let a curl of magic tickle Alec’s skin, swirling around his wrist and up to his elbow. For a moment, Magnus let cautious relief bloom again in his chest. Maybe it had been a temporary reaction, after all.
He brushed a sparkling hand over Alec’s cheek, and—
“Ow!”
They jumped back from each other at the same time, Alec’s hand pressed to his cheek, Magnus’s closed gingerly in a fist.
“Did I hurt you?” Magnus whispered.
“No,” Alec said, eyes wide. “I think I hurt you.”
Magnus had indeed felt the zap of angelic magic pushing him away from Alec. It felt like being nicked by a seraph blade—cold, stinging, but not enough to truly wound. “Perhaps,” he admitted.
Alec scrubbed his hands over his face. “For Raziel’s sake.”
“I’m sorry,” Magnus rushed out, “I shouldn’t have tried to—”
“It’s not your fault. I love your magic. I’m just… messed up, I guess.” He leaned back against the counter, and it hurt Magnus’s heart that he didn’t come closer and try to touch him, the way he probably would have if Magnus was upset about something else, but he understood why.
“I’ll figure it out,” Magnus promised. “I’ll fix it.”
The gaze Alec leveled on him was so sad it made Magnus want to curl up in a ball and hide. Alec clearly knew how much this rejection of his magic pierced Magnus to the core, even if it hadn’t been intentional on either end.
He expected Alec to say again, it’s not your fault, or something similar meant to be comforting, but instead Alec said, “I know you will. I’ll help you, if I can.”
And Magnus realized, suddenly, that this meant a lot to Alec, too. But of course, it did. Alec always bolstered his magic. He fed Magnus energy when he was faltering. He welcomed the brush of Magnus’s magic on his skin. Of course he wouldn’t want to lose that.
And Magnus didn’t want to lose him, either.
“I’ll fix it,” he said.
The first time Magnus had just— just absolutely swamped Alec with his magic was when he had been injured. Not nearly as fatally as a poisoned claw to the chest, but still panic had flooded every one of Magnus’s nerve endings as soon as he saw Alec pressing a hand to a bleeding wound in his stomach.
Magnus had crashed into his side, hands gripping his shoulders and arms bruisingly. “Hold still,” he’d said, almost snapped, before a gush of magic had exploded out of his skin and wrapped around Alec’s body like a hurricane, not so much healing the wound but unmaking it. Alec’s stomach was blemish-free in an instant, and Magnus would probably pay later for that particular type of healing, it kind of violated the laws of physics, he was supposed to knit Alec’s body back together and accelerate cell regeneration, not kind of sort of turn back time a little bit in this pocket of reality so the blood never spilt at all. But Magnus wasn’t thinking about consequences. He was thinking about blood spilling over Alec’s hands.
“Magnus!” Alec had yelled. He looked at Magnus from within the whirlwind, hair whipping around his head. His expression was steady in a way Magnus couldn’t imagine ever approaching again. “Magnus, stop.”
The storm died at his voice. Magnus slumped into him, pressing a palm to his skin where the blood had been. As expected, it was unmade, unscarred. “You’re okay,” he said shakily.
“Yeah, are you?” said Alec. He pushed Magnus’s face up to meet his. His prior calm was slipping into concern. “Whatever that was did not feel normal.”
“It wasn’t,” Magnus said, and turned to the side and spat blood onto the ground.
“Magnus.”
“It’s fine.” He wiped his mouth. “I’m just not supposed to do that. I will try not to in the future.”
“Okay.” Alec swiped away a smear of blood from Magnus’s chin. “I didn’t even know your magic could do that. Be that… all encompassing.”
“You know very little of what my magic can do,” Magnus admitted, somewhat shamefully.
“Well, I’d like to learn it—as long as it doesn’t involve you spitting up blood.”
“Usually not,” Magnus promised, with a grim, but real smile.
Magnus missed that. Not the spitting up blood part, but the former—being able to crash into each other without exploding into fatal shards. He hated not being able to just touch Alec casually with his magic, as a greeting or to hand him something or heal a papercut while Alec rolled his eyes. He hated that Alec was so cautious in touching him now, afraid of his magic shocking Magnus again.
Well, at least he was still touching him. Small mercies.
Magnus was having a frustrating time trying to find a solution to this. There were few texts or studies on the interaction of warlock and Nephilim magic, beyond just adamas bad do not touch. Apparently, Magnus was just going to have to write the book on it. He hated how often he had to do that.
“Will you try something with me?” he asked Alec, who was sitting at the kitchen table, reading what Magnus hoped was maybe a casual ebook, but was probably Institute reports, on his tablet.
“Of course,” he said, and Magnus plunked down a cat statue on the table. Alec stared at it, then back at him, quizzically.
“I infused it with my magic,” Magnus explained. “Will you try to touch it and see what happens?”
He wasn’t sure if this would do anything at all. Alec had been able to pass through the wards without an issue, and hadn’t run up against any of the other items in the apartment that were lingering with Magnus’s magic. But Magnus had to start somewhere.
Alec placed his hand on the statue’s head. Magnus waited.
“I don’t think it’s going to do anything,” Alec said.
Magnus rubbed his forehead. “That confirms what I thought, then. Your angelic energy is not reacting to inert, set magic. Only to living, active magic. i.e., magic coming directly from the source.”
“From you, you mean,” Alec said.
“Correct.” This realization kind of made Magnus want to rip his magic from his body, which was a very extreme reaction, not that he wasn’t prone to those. He wouldn’t, of course. But how dare it betray him like this. How dare it make him feel like the monster he always thought he was.
“Hey.” Alec took his hands, as if he could sense Magnus’s thoughts. Magnus carefully kept his magic out of his extremities. “Hey. You’re not a monster.”
“How can you read my mind like that?”
“I can read you. I know you. And besides, it’s my magic that’s causing the problem. Not yours. It’s mine that got confused and somehow thinks you’re a threat to it, when you’re not.”
How Alec could have such faith in him, Magnus didn’t know. “Perhaps I can try to prove that to it. To you.”
“You’ve already proven it to me,” Alec said.
“Well, if it will fix this, I will do it again. A thousand times over.”
“Alright,” Alec said, though he seemed sad about it. “If you think that will help.”
The next day, Magnus sat down next to Alec on the couch, taking his hands. “Normally, I would try to use healing magic,” Magnus explained. “It’s the easiest to read as friendly and harmless. But considering that’s the magic that triggered all this, I’m not sure it would be a good idea. Instead, I’m just going to use cosmetic magic. It’s mild, harmless. Hopefully that would work.”
Truthfully, Magnus was still dubious of this idea. None of the magic he’d touched Alec with since the incident had been aggressive whatsoever, and that hadn’t calmed the reaction. But he had to try whatever he could.
“Putting makeup on me to save our magical relationship?” Alec said, with a half-smile.
“Just so.”
“You know you could try your—” Alec stumbled—“your sex magic.”
“I had considered that actually—” he avoided Alec’s gaze as he spoke— “but I thought it might get us into a… situation.”
“A situation,” Alec repeated. “Yeah.”
“But actually, darling, that gives me a better idea.” He stood up. “Dance with me?”
Alec smiled, and followed him out to the middle of the floor. Magnus snapped his fingers, and a waltz drifted from speakers somewhere. He wondered if Alec knew those speakers weren’t actually plugged in to anything.
Magnus held out a hand. “Dance with me?” he asked again.
Alec took his hand and pulled him close. As he often did when they danced, he brought his own magic to where their hands met, creating a glowing warmth between them. Magnus let him lead, tried to let his magic find ease before bringing his own into the equation. Alec was cautious about it, clearly afraid his magic was out to get Magnus, but Magnus didn’t think it was, it was just reactive, protecting Alec from a perceived threat. In any other circumstance, Magnus would have even been grateful for that.
When no sparks jumped between them, Magnus let magic swirl lightly around them, as he usually did when they were dancing, binding them in body and in heart, in the real and the supernatural. His magic swirled and jumped like music itself.
It seemed to be going well. Their magics weren’t quite merging, quite dancing together the way they usually might, but they were coexisting, and that was a baby step Magnus could be satisfied with. He leaned in to give Alec a kiss—
Magic screeched between them, and Magnus was flung back, skidding several feet away, miraculously staying on his feet. Alec looked unsteady as well, the whiplash of power almost knocking him over.
Magnus pressed his hands to his face, and felt incredibly furious with himself when he started to cry.
“Magnus…"
The pain in Alec’s voice only made Magnus cry harder. Hot tears slipped through his fingers, and he could feel magic prickling and sparking within them. It felt hurt, betrayed, curling with reproach, as if to say to Magnus, why would you keep doing this to me. And to Alec, why would you keep doing this to him. He hated this. He hated himself.
He felt Alec’s hands, gentle on his face, and flinched away, reeling with the abruptness of the movement. “Don’t,” he growled, and Alec didn’t, but Magnus could sense him still hovering nearby, wanting to touch.
“Magnus,” Alec said, for possibly the eighth time that week, “It’s not your fault.”
How it couldn’t be, Magnus didn’t know. He was the one who had failed in healing Alec properly the first time. He was the one whose magic was so easily seen as demonic, as dangerous, that Alec’s body felt the need to protect him from his own husband.
“Believe that if you wish,” he said, “but I don’t,” and Alec made a heartbroken noise.
“I’m going to…” Magnus didn’t know what he was going to do. “Go. Out. Somewhere. I need to breathe.”
“Magnus…”
But Magnus was already summoning his coat, the remaining shreds of his dignity, and a portal.
He came by Alec’s office later, when he was calmer and no longer crying, to apologize. He knew it hurt Alec when he just left when he was upset. Alec just smiled at him when he arrived, as if he’d already forgiven him, which he probably had.
Magnus came around his desk and pressed a kiss to the top of his head, rubbing Alec’s shoulders. Alec reached up and caressed his cheek.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promised.
“I hope so,” Magnus said, with all the fervor in the world.
“Do you want a distraction?”
Magnus nodded, and stood beside him as Alec showed him reports of a bizarre demon of many tentacles and even more eyes. “Creepy,” he said.
“Fatal,” said Alec.
“Wait,” Magnus said, zooming in on the one picture they had of it. “Look at the claws—and don’t ask me why there are claws on tentacles I don’t want to know—that’s the same one that got you.”
“Really?” Alec frowned, looking closer at the picture. “I honestly didn’t see it clearly when it did.”
“Neither did I. I just saw you on the ground.” He shuddered at the thought. “Fatal, you said?”
“So far. Unless you can get the poison out. Which no one’s been able to do, except you.”
“Which no one’s been able to do…” A thought occurred. The poison, in his hands. The poison writhing and biting angrily, struggling for control. Magnus crushing it with his magic. The sheer improbability of crushing something, anything, into nothingness, into vacuum.
“Lilith’s tits,” Magnus said faintly.
“What is it?”
His magic lurched within him. A warning flare, like the flash of light the wards at home emitted before they were breached. Magnus tasted bile at the back of his throat, and his stomach twisted like he had food poisoning, and suddenly he understood.
“Oh, I am a fool,” he whispered, clutching the edge of Alec’s desk for balance. His head was spinning. “How did I not even consider—”
“Magnus?”
“It was the obvious solution, but no, I had to be so caught up in my feelings that I—”
“Magnus?”
Alec was staring at Magnus with growing concern as he muttered to himself. Magnus gave him a triumphant smile.
“It turns out that I am poisoned,” he said happily, because in Magnus’s mind this was a far better outcome than Alec’s body rejecting him, and Alec’s gaze widened in alarm.
“Poisoned? What do you—”
Magnus’s magic, possibly due to the realization of its corruption or possibly just due to incredible timing, chose this moment to vibrate out of every pore of his skin, sheening him in a sweat-like layer of humming energy. It crawled restlessly with filaments of green-black ink. Now that he was looking for it, Magnus recognized the energy signature of the poison he’d pulled from Alec’s chest everywhere within his magic, following its cellular pathways, curling around them, trying to consume them.
Nausea churned in every organ, but nothing could quell Magnus’s relief. He and Alec watched the magic sputter and jump; Alec seemed to have no idea what to do but panic was growing rapidly in his expression. The poison didn’t go away, and Magnus’s magic screamed.
“See?” Magnus said, and started coughing up blood.
He lost himself for a bit. The poison was fierce, and, now that Magnus had discovered it, seemed to be trying to complete its insidious work in one massive rush. It shredded his insides. When he found himself again, he was collapsed in Alec’s arms, dribbling blood over his shoulder as his body spasmed.
Ragnor’s hand was on his forehead, hot with magic. He grumbled with he saw Magnus was awake. “Damn idiot, you didn’t think to ask one person for help when you were having trouble with your magic?”
“Embarrassing,” Magnus murmured.
“It’s embarrassing to be puking blood all over your husband’s office, but that didn’t seem to stop you.”
Magnus responded deliriously, “He’s my husband, he loves my blood.”
“Not when it’s outside of your body.” Alec had a hand in his hair, rubbing gently. Magnus couldn’t see his face, but he could imagine how much trouble he’d be in after this.
“Picky,” he complained.
Ragnor grit his teeth, but Magnus didn’t think he was frustrated with him anymore. “I need to take this poison out, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder now that it’s been entangled with your magic for so long.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Hush. Stay fucking still before I knock you unconscious. Shadowhunter, lay him on the floor.”
Alec did, with reverently gentle hands, and didn’t even complain that Ragnor should know his name by now.
“You should know his name by now,” Magnus complained.
Ragnor ignored him completely. “Hold him down if you have to. I need him still,” he told Alec, who looked troubled, but nodded.
Magnus didn’t like the sound of this, and thought maybe he should just pass out again. “Don’t try to crush the demonic energy, I already tried that the first time. Didn’t work.”
“Obviously,” said Ragnor.
He laid his hands on either side of Magnus’s face, and Alec took Magnus’s hands and squeezed them with a tight smile, and Magnus mentally prepared for something monumentally unpleasant, even more unpleasant than coughing up half of his blood.
Ragnor pulled on something within him, and Magnus’s body lit on fire, fighting and squirming away from his touch, though he didn’t think it was him moving his own limbs, and he bit his tongue to prevent himself from screaming, and wished he could just pass out, and then he got his wish, and did pass out.
When he came to—and he was really starting to get annoyed with passing out and coming to in random places—he was lying in bed at home, Alec, who seemed to be asleep, beside him.
Magnus looked down at himself, took stock of the spidery bruises spiraling up his arms and chest. Alec still had the original bruises of Magnus’s ill-fated healing on his chest, though they had faded to yellow now. He had a new bruise across his jaw, splotches of red and blue underneath stubble that suggested they had been here for a while.
“Oh, look,” Magnus said to himself, looking between them, “we match now.”
This stirred Alec to wakefulness. When he saw Magnus looking back at him, he leaned over and ran a careful hand over Magnus’s cheek. “Hey,” he whispered.
“Hello.” Magnus dipped his head when Alec leaned in further and let his husband press a kiss to his forehead. “What’s going on?”
“Destroyed the poison,” Alec reported tiredly. “Actually, couldn’t destroy it, Ragnor had to throw it into limbo. It was like a living thing, I’m not even convinced that was actually a poison.”
“A parasite, perhaps,” Magnus theorized.
“Yeah. Anyway, it took a lot of effort to get it out of you, and even more to get rid of it.”
“Is that how you got that bruise?” Magnus asked, thumbing over the mark on Alec’s cheek.
“No, that’s from you hitting me in the face while you were flailing around on the floor.”
Magnus opened his mouth to speak, though he wasn’t sure what to say, how to apologize, but Alec laid a finger over his lips. “Don’t,” he said, very serious, and Magnus realized that however much getting slapped in the face by Magnus’s delirious fists probably hurt, seeing Magnus delirious must have hurt him one thousand times more. So he didn’t.
“Where is Ragnor, anyway?”
“I think he went to consult with someone about the poison— parasite— whatever. Pretty sure he’s coming back though.”
“I didn’t even feel it,” Magnus mused, thinking back on how it was only at the very end, when it had spread all the way through him, through his power, that he had noticed something was amiss. “I just assumed— that I was the problem. But your magic… it knew the truth the whole time. It felt it.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” Alec eyed him carefully. “Magnus, you know I love your magic, right? I don’t care if— if my magic can’t see how beautiful yours is. I can.”
Magnus smiled tremulously. “You truly have a way with words,” he told him, quite genuinely.
“I just say what I’m thinking.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Alec smiled, and Magnus laid a hand over the blemish on his cheek, cautiously letting some now-uncorrupted magic drift from his fingers, healing the deepest layer of bruising. He didn’t dare do more, not when his magic still felt a bit squiggly and upside down within him, like it had been shredded in a pasta maker. But Alec’s magic accepted his touch, and his heart soared.
“Ragnor’s not going to be happy with you for that,” Alec whispered, but his eyes were sparkling.
“He’s been dealing with that for four hundred years. He can deal a while longer.”
Ragnor wouldn’t be happy with what Magnus was about to do next, either, but he did it anyway. He leaned in and kissed Alec, deep and with intent, even though doing so was probably unwise in his current state. But he had missed his husband, they had spent so long at arm’s length.
Alec, normally so pragmatic and stern when it came to Magnus’s health, kissed him back, turning them so that Magnus could settle on top of him, knees bracketing his hips. But he did say, “Careful. You’re more bruise than skin right now.”
“And not the fun kind of bruises either,” Magnus sighed.
Alec’s lips twitched, but he didn’t respond, instead rubbing light hands up and down Magnus’s thighs.
Magnus’s heart had felt like more bruise than skin for a while, too. But now he could feel it healing with each sweep of Alec’s hands. “The idea that you were rejecting my magic was intolerably painful to me,” he told Alec. “Do you know how much?”
“I have an idea.”
“I don’t think you do.” Magnus leaned down and kissed him again, letting a shiver of magic brush his lips. What he really wanted was to flood Alec with it, but his magic was a bit too watery for that at the moment; he’d probably pass out if he tried, and that wouldn’t help either of them.
“I do,” Alec insisted. “I can see it in your eyes, Magnus. You wear your heart on your sleeve more than you think you do.”
“Drat,” Magnus said faintly, somewhat more bowled over by this assertion than he’d expected. “There goes my life plan of being alluring and mysterious.”
“You can be alluring without being mysterious.” Alec’s gaze was fond now, so fond it hurt to look at directly. “And you are. You’ve… allured me since I first laid eyes on you.”
“Oh?” Magnus said. He felt warm, held in Alec’s gaze like that. Held in the softness of his voice. “Do I still allure you, Alexander?”
“Like a light in a window.”
“Have I mentioned you have a way with words?”
He leaned down to kiss him, and Alec’s hands buried in his hair, tugging at the strands. Magnus had missed the hard edge of his touch; he loved when Alec treated him like something precious but he also loved to be wanted.
And he loved to want. He wanted Alexander, who he hadn’t had for so long. He wanted to merge them inside each other the way their magics could sometimes manage but their bodies were prevented to by the curse of three-dimensional space. But he could have the next best thing.
“Thank you for having faith in me,” he murmured against Alec’s lips. “You never gave up on my magic. Not ever.”
“Never,” Alec promised, and pulled him down.