#i dealt myself permanent psychic damage writing this

[cuubism]

After Life

Alec doesn't know how to live in a world without Magnus's soul in it.

(MCD)

AO3

-

Magnus isn’t sure if he believes in an afterlife.

He believes in the existence of the hell realms, of course. He’s been there, he’s from there, in a sense. And he believes in heaven to the extent that he knows angels exists and they must live somewhere. But he doesn’t know if he believes that mortal—or at least non-divine—souls go to either of those places. He’s never seen any souls in Edom, unless, perhaps, they turn into demons. Perhaps heaven is different, he doesn’t know.

He also recognizes that there are things outside human understanding. He isn’t so arrogant as to think that something can’t exist because he hasn’t experienced it. So Magnus is open to the existence of an afterlife. But believing something is possible and believing something actually exists are two different things.

He also isn’t sure if he believes that consciousness carries on after death. He’d like to believe it, it’s a comforting thought. But wanting something doesn’t make it real.

Try as he might, Magnus can’t quite make himself believe in any sort of afterlife, not even for his own comfort. He doesn’t know if it exists.

But apparently, he’s going to find out.

“What are you thinking about?”

“What do you think?”

“You know he’s still out there, right? Somewhere.”

“…Is he?”

Alec has had the foundations of his understanding of the world shaken many times. He supposes it’s a natural result of growing up in an insular culture where children are repressed and lied to. He would have thought nothing else could shake him so much at this point.

He was wrong.

“I thought I believed in something,” he whispers to Izzy. He shifts on the couch, pressing his thighs into it to find some kind of grounding. The loft feels so foreign right now. Alec never realized how drafty the building is, Magnus must have taken care of that magically. “We were brought up to believe in something. What if they were wrong, like they were about everything else?”

“The Clave doesn’t get to decide what’s true about this,” Izzy says, voice incredibly gentle. She has her hands wrapped around his, but Alec barely feels it. “It’s either true, or it isn’t. Just like anything about the world. What do you believe?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Alec says. His gaze blurs on his ring and he resists the urge to take it off just so he won’t be destroyed all over again every time he looks at it. “Magnus didn’t believe it.”

Doesn’t. Didn’t. He thinks that’s the first time he’s said that.

Izzy’s lips press together. “He didn’t? I would have thought, with magic and everything—”

Alec shakes his head. “He definitely didn’t believe in some good people versus bad people system. Said that was way too simplistic.”

“Well, of course Magnus would think outside of those boundaries.”

“I asked him if he believed in something else and he said, ‘I want to believe it, but I’m not sure that we could be so lucky.’”

Izzy doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Alec frees his hands and takes a sip of his coffee. It’s bitter; they’ve run out of sugar because Alec never realized Magnus just magicked it full.

“What if believing it makes it real?” he asks, voice dry. “And it does exist and Magnus is just—”

He presses a hand to his mouth, suddenly ill, and can’t finish the sentence.

Magnus had always thought there was either somewhere (or maybe multiple somewheres), or there was nowhere. But now he chides himself for his binary thinking, because where he is now is definitely not somewhere, but he doesn’t think it’s quite nowhere either. If it was nowhere, then he shouldn’t exist at all, should he?

Then again, he thinks somewhere might have a different definition now. His mind feels all upside down and turned inside out, but he’s pretty sure somewhen feels more accurate.

Alec? he thinks. He left Alec alone, didn’t he? He didn’t mean to. He didn’t mean to.

He wishes he could have Alec now, but he doesn’t know what having means in a not-place like this. Having requires being. What does being mean here?

Being means going forward, Magnus thinks. Being means going around again.

He wishes he could feel the sun on his skin.

Every couple of months after his death, Magnus went to Ragnor’s grave. Usually, he went alone, though he knew Cat had her own rituals. He wanted to be able to break down privately.

Ragnor was buried outside his country house in Yorkshire. His grave marker was a small black stone with an emerald pressed into it, which Magnus had enchanted so it was impossible to steal—though he was sure several mundanes had tried and come away with scorched palms. Kneeling in the warm soil before the stone, summer wind tickling the back of his neck, Magnus pressed his hands to the last marker of his vanished friend.

“I want to know where you went,” he whispered to the ground. “You have to be somewhere, don’t you? Seven hundred years of knowledge can’t just disappear. It violates the laws of thermodynamics.”

Magnus received no answer but the call of a bird in a nearby oak tree.

“Then again, it’s impossible to say if knowledge has any mass. Or any energy to it. If it does, perhaps it doesn’t disappear. Perhaps it merely transmutes into something else. Oh, you would have loved this puzzle, wouldn’t you?”

The ground was silent. Magnus imagined countless worms and insects and subterranean creatures devouring Ragnor’s body. The thought didn’t bother him as much as he’d thought it might. Most warlocks didn’t believe in embalming or preserving the body after death. They took a more naturalist approach, as Magnus and Cat had done with Ragnor. Magic was mostly composed of energy, and dissipated when its wielder died, but some vestiges remained in the body. Returning it to the earth ensured that the area would bloom for generations. Magnus found some peace in the thought of this spot being overrun by ivy and trees and wildflowers until Ragnor’s house and even his headstone were consumed by his own personal forest.

“If you are somewhere, you owe it to me to try to communicate,” he continued. “Consider it recompense for that time I stopped you from testing your ‘magical wings’ off the edge of a one-hundred-foot cliff. I was very irritated that you did that, by the way. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to do, not you.”

If Magnus pressed his fingertips into the soil, he could feel Ragnor’s magic feeding the nearby roots, accelerating their growth, even if his friend, as an entity, was gone. He supposed that, in itself, was a kind of afterlife.

“Speak to me if you can,” he said, and then stood, dusting the grave dirt off his knees. He conjured a sapling and carefully planted it in the shadow of the headstone. This tree, he thought, would remember Ragnor. Even if, at some point in the future, Magnus was gone.

“Can you leave me alone with him for a moment?”

“Of course. Let us know when you’re ready.”

“…Magnus, I— I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this. You don’t… deserve this. Any of this. You deserve to be here. In our bed at home, or drinking your favorite wine, or— fuck, even sitting in the park with me right now. Not buried.

“It’s so nice today. You would love it. Warm spring air. All the flowers are blooming. I wish you were here with me right now. I don’t know why I’m saying that to you. It’s not your fault.

“I would give anything for you to be here right now. Even just for one minute. I’d give my whole life for one minute…

“Anyway, I hope you approve of this choice. I know you always liked this tree.

“…It took me forever to decide whether to— to— to let you keep your ring with you or not. I was going to, at first, but then I imagined you underground with it forever and I started kind of… panicking. Plus, I imagined what you’d say and I knew you’d think it was foolish to bury it when your— your body isn’t really you anyway. But I wanted you to have something. So… I kept yours, and I gave you mine. I’m wearing it now. It’s nice to have it to hold onto.

“I still don’t know what I believe in terms of where you… are. Or whether you are. I just… I hope you’re safe. I hope— I kind of hope you don’t remember any of this cuz I don’t want you to be in pain. I want you to just— to just— be. If you can.

“I miss you.”

“…Alec? Are you still out here?”

“Hmm? Izzy?”

“You’re still sitting out here? It’s getting dark.”

“Yeah, I— yeah.”

“Alright. Do you want me to sit with you?”

“I— okay. Yeah.”

“…”

“Thank you.”

“What did Magnus want done with his body?”

Something breaks in Alec’s brain when Izzy asks him this question. Magnus’s body. They shouldn’t do anything with Magnus’s body. Even if Alec knows that Magnus is no longer in it.

“I don’t know,” he says dully. He does know, though. They hadn’t talked about it in such explicit terms, had never expected that Magnus would go, but the topic had fallen into their conversation once.

Alec had been struggling with the idea of Max being interred in the City of Bones. They didn’t even respect him enough to include him in their idea of heaven, he’d hissed. They don’t deserve to have him.

That’s not our only option, Magnus had said, carefully laying a hand on his arm. Did you know that warlocks, generally speaking, don’t practice embalming, or use mausoleums or any other permanent way of preserving the dead?

Alec had relaxed into his touch, the first thread of hope winding through him. He’d been under the impression that even most mundanes embalmed their dead, or at least cremated them. Alec couldn’t stand the idea of Max burning, either. What do you do instead? he’d asked.

And Magnus had told him about the earth, and how the body returned to it. How magic fed and restored the ground. I’m not sure if it works with angelic magic, he’d admitted. But I don’t see why not.

It was far outside his culture, but Alec had far preferred the idea of relinquishing Max back to nature, rather than forcing him to remain in some capacity.

I’m not sure if my family will agree, he’d said, but I’ll try.

“He’d want to be buried naturally,” Alec tells Izzy, however much it pains him to imagine, however much he wants to drag Magnus back into his arms and hold him—illogical though that is. “Warlocks believe in being returned to the earth. Cat can help us make sure it’s done properly.”

“Okay.” Izzy seems relieved. “Do you know where?”

He has no way of knowing Magnus’s preference, now. “Central Park,” he says, “unless Cat says he really wanted to be somewhere else. He loved New York and— and I want to be able to visit him.”

“Pretty sure that’s illegal,” Izzy says, with a small, grim smile. “I’ll prep some strong glamours.”

Once, not long after they’d been married, Alec almost died.

Of course, he’d almost died before in his life, but, even on that horrible night when the Owl had plunged an arrow into his heart, Magnus had at least been able to call Cat to help before the situation became truly dire.

This was much worse. Magnus sat in the infirmary for days, praying to gods he didn’t believe in. Praying to demons he did believe in. Praying to angels that wanted him dead.

At one point, Alec crashed, and, having nothing else to do, Magnus prayed harder. He prayed for Alexander’s safe return from— from wherever he had gone. Or, if he couldn’t have that, then at least his safe arrival there.

He didn’t know where there was, or if there was a there. He had never quite believed in a there. But in the moment, when his brain was conjuring images of his husband smashed into irreversible pieces, he clung to it. He deserved peace somewhere, didn’t he?

Not that the universe had ever seemed to care much about what Alec deserved.

Afterwards, Magnus forced him into a long vacation. Not that Alec had much of a choice. He could barely walk, never mind work. Magnus hovered shamelessly over him, poking and prodding at his injury like it might split apart again if he took his eyes off it, taking Alec angels knew where.

Eventually, they went for a tentative walk in Central Park. Alec leaned heavily on Magnus’s arm, but refused all of Magnus’s offers to take them back home. He needed the fresh air, he said. Magnus supposed that was reasonable when one had come so close to losing air entirely.

When he got too tired to continue, they stumbled over to a stand of nearby trees, collapsing in the shadow of the tallest one—a massive elm that must have been almost as old as New York itself, its branches a zigzagging canopy of grey bark, roots a web that stretched out all around them. If Magnus concentrated, he could feel them, alive under the ground. Reaching, anchoring, feeding the trees around them.

As Alec settled against him, leaning his head tiredly on Magnus’s shoulder, Magnus leaned back against the ancient trunk and tipped his head up to look up at the leaves. They were so thick and vibrant above him that the sky was nearly blocked out entirely, cool shadow eclipsing the summer day. He felt cocooned, almost. Protected.

“I like this tree,” Alec murmured into his neck, just as Magnus was thinking it.

“It’s very old,” Magnus said, touching the bark with his hand.

“Just like you,” Alec said, grinning, and Magnus huffed, affronted.

“Teasing me? You’re the one who married this old thing, you know.”

Alec’s grin never faltered. “I know.” He looked up at the tree’s endless canopy. “I wonder what it’s seen.”

What, indeed.

Alec was still looking up at the tree. “You seem rather enamored with this tree,” Magnus teased. “Should I worry about being replaced?”

Alec laughed. “Who could ever replace you?”

His words put a lump in Magnus’s throat. He held Alec closer, pressing his face into his husband’s neck.

Who, indeed.

Alec had always liked to sit up on Magnus’s roof, looking up at the sky. It felt so freeing, being above it all. Magnus would always sit with him, even though he’d surely seen better skies, better stars than this.

It was always easier for Alec to speak up here.

“When Max died,” he said slowly, hand entwined with Magnus’s as they lay on the rooftop floor, “I think I lost myself for a bit.”

Magnus squeezed his hand. It was Alec’s sole point of warmth in the cold night. “I remember that.”

“It wasn’t even the grief,” Alec continued. “Well, I guess it was the grief, but not in the way I thought. I missed him, but more than that I couldn’t stop thinking about where he went. I thought, if I knew he was somewhere, then I could figure out a way to move forward. I understood then why so many mundanes are so insistent in their belief in something after.”

“Shadowhunters don’t believe in heaven?” Magnus asked, surprised.

“They do, but not in the way mundanes do,” Alec said. He was still looking up at the sky, instead of at Magnus. Post-rainstorm, it was an unusually clear night for New York, and a few stars were twinkling above them despite the haze of light pollution. “They believe that heaven is a reward bestowed on Shadowhunters who distinguish themselves in battle.”

Magnus finished the thought. “And Max never even got the chance to fight. God, Alec. That sounds like an awful theology.”

“Like anything else the Clave does, it was designed to make more people sacrifice themselves in our eternal war against evil.” Alec pressed his lips together. “I always hated that idea. It took me a long time to figure out why.”

“It’s unfair,” Magnus said. “Unjust.”

“Isn’t the universe unfair, though?”

“I suppose so. Sometimes I want to have more faith in it,” Magnus said. Alec finally looked over at him to find he was already looking in Alec’s direction, his gaze soft and melancholy. “It’s always hard to say if it deserves it, though.”

Alec squeezed his hand. Looking at Magnus always made his sadness recede a little bit, no matter how heavy it was. “What was that thing you once said? ‘Everyone deserves a chance to prove themselves better than we think they are?’”

Magnus smiled. “Are you giving the universe a chance?”

“I don’t know.” Alec blew out a breath, watching it crystallize in the cold air. “Maybe I am.”

Sometimes, Alec thinks he can feel Magnus beside him. He knows it’s just wishful thinking, memory intruding on the present, or the aura of Magnus that lingers in the loft making him think Magnus is still really there.

But he clings to it anyway. He lets himself lean on Magnus’s memory because he has nothing else to lean on. It’s not like Magnus will mind, anyway.

When he gets back from the funeral, something about that presence feels… different. The windows in the living room are open, and Alec can’t remember if he left them that way or not. It’s chilly inside, but he doesn’t close them. He stands in the middle of the room, chest tight with insane, breathless hope.

He feels like he might be losing his mind, but he calls out anyway. “Magnus?”

All he gets in response is the whooshing of the night wind through the curtains.

“I can’t tell if you’re really there or if I’m having a psychotic break,” Alec says to the air around him, “but at this point I think I’d welcome even a hallucination of you.”

Nothing. Alec isn’t sure what he expected. For Magnus to just appear? Then Alec would really know he’s losing his mind.

Then one of the windows swings shut. A candle on a side table flickers on. Alec stares at the small point of light, heart thudding.

“I think,” Magnus’s voice says, quite small, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once and possibly just inside Alec’s own head, “I’m really here.”

Alec’s breath shudders out in a long gust as the pain crashes over him again, as fresh and cold as the day he lost him. But in its wake is more gratitude than he can ever remember feeling. Hearing Magnus’s voice, sounding as real and clear as if he was standing there, even if it’s in Alec’s head—he needed that. He needed that.

Magnus sounds uncertain, frightened. Alec wants to hold him so badly, but he can’t. “I love you,” he says before he says anything else.

Magnus laughs, sounding choked. “I love you, too. I’m so sorry.”

Alec’s heart aches. Tears prick at his eyes, and he’s not sure if Magnus can see him, but he doesn’t try to will them away. “Shhh. None of this is your fault.”

“I didn’t want to leave you.”

“I know, baby. How— how are you here?”

“I don’t think I am, not really,” Magnus says, and Alec doesn’t know what that means, but Magnus continues, “I’m not really sure where here is. Are you at home?”

“Yes. What can you see?”

“It’s… blurry. I think I’m… between states, or something.” Magnus sounds mournful, confused. “I don’t know how I’m… here. I just wanted to talk to you again. I don’t think I have very long, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Alec says, even though it isn’t. “Are you safe?”

“I don’t think that has much meaning anymore. But yes, I think so.”

Alec exhales. That’s something, at least. “Will you—” He almost doesn’t want to know the answer to this question. “After you go… wherever you’re going, will you still be— be you?” Can I talk to you again? he wants to know. But even if he can’t, he wants to know if Magnus will still be out there. Somewhere.

Magnus hesitates, and that alone gives Alec his answer. “I don’t really know. To be honest, there’s not a lot I really know right now. But I don’t think so, no.”

Alec’s tears start flowing in earnest, then. He doesn’t think he can handle that thought. He feels like Magnus has opened a black hole in the center of his chest. But he doesn’t say so, because Magnus doesn’t deserve to feel bad right now.

“I think the universe is a lot messier than we ever thought,” Magnus says. His voice wavers, and Alec thinks he must be crying, too, whatever that means for him now. “I always thought there must be some kind of defined answer after death. But there— it’s more complicated than that. Please don’t go looking for answers. You won’t find them, and I don’t want you to— to spend your life like that.”

“Okay, Magnus,” Alec says, because he’d give him anything right now. Magnus sobs when he says his name.

“Say it again, please, darling.”

“Magnus. I love you.”

“I love you, Alexander.”

Hearing Magnus say his name almost breaks Alec entirely. “Please stay safe,” he whispers. “I’ll miss you.” He already does. More than anything.

Alec doesn’t get a response, and he crumples to the ground, hands pressed to his eyes, sobbing. He wishes more than anything that Magnus would come back but he knows that isn’t going to happen now. It’s permanent this time. It’s permanent. Alec has to live without him. There is no Magnus now.

Alec doesn’t know how he’s supposed to live with that.

Magnus doesn’t know if visiting Alec was real or just a lasted twisted attempt of his mind to cling to some form of presence, of being. He hopes it was real. For Alec’s sake.

Then again, he’s not sure he understands what real is. Everything he knows is rapidly receding into a sort of… universal sense of everythingness. There is everything, and there is nothing, and somehow these are both true at the same time. He can feel time slipping around him in twirls and streams like the wind rushing down the long corridors of Manhattan. All times exist at once, layered around and over each other. Going backwards is the same as going forwards.

He thinks he’s somewhere— somewhen— else, now. It feels… early. Early in his life, early in the world. Earlier, anyway. Somewhere around him the sun is rising and bringing a new and watery day. Springtime. Morning. Birth.

He can feel the wind rushing past him now. Somehow. And the sun, and the light sprinkling of a sun shower. Somehow. And he can feel the restless energy of the world, changing, growing, ripping through time. He’s never felt it quite like this before. The world feels earthier, now, more organic, more green, more growing. He feels a part of it. He feels… he isn’t he anymore.

He feels…

Alive.

People keep telling Alec, Magnus is still here, because you remember him. But that isn’t true. Magnus isn’t here. Alec does keep him in his heart, but that doesn’t mean he’s here. If he were here, Alec would be able to hold him. Would be able to apologize to him, for not stopping this, for not protecting him, for not going in his place.

There are traces of him around, though, and Alec clings to them. His unfinished notes and projects are still scattered across the loft. His clothes are still in the closet, his cosmetics in the bathroom, pieces of his jewelry lying on the nightstand. Alec finally reopened his box of memories, determined that if Magnus couldn’t be here to remember these people, then he would.

It’s all immensely painful to look at. And he knows he’s going to have to reorganize someday, or at least clean, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

He’d buried Magnus with a few things, even though he knew it was a useless gesture. A photograph of them together, his favorite necklace, his omamori charm, for protection. Sometimes he wishes he had that back, but he knows Magnus needs it more.

Magnus’s work is everywhere in the Shadow World, and Alec knows he’ll live on through that, is grateful for it.

At the same time, every time he sees someone open a portal, his heart breaks clean in two.

He doesn’t want these sharp-edged, scattered reminders. He just wants his husband back.

When Alec dreams of Magnus, he is always holding him. Usually, his dreams of Magnus are a bit hazy, and all he can really make out is the low tone of Magnus’s voice, the press of his body.

His dream after Magnus’s… visitation, on the other hand, is vivid. In it, Alec is in the darkened living room when Magnus comes tumbling in through the balcony doors. He lets the cold night air in with him, and it raises goosebumps along Alec’s arms.

“Alec,” he says, eyes wide and luminous in the dark, “I’m bleeding.”

Alec takes him in his arms and holds him close. He knows Magnus isn’t bleeding. He doesn’t know how he knows. Dream intuition. “No, honey, you’re okay.”

“No,” Magnus insists. He’s shaking in Alec’s arms. “I’m bleeding everywhere.”

“Shh.” Alec doesn’t know how to comfort him, how to convince him that he’ll be okay so long as he stays within the circle of Alec’s arms. “I have you. Stay here with me.”

“I want to,” Magnus says. “I want to.” Then, before Alec can say anything else, Magnus starts crying. “Alec.”

Alec holds him tighter, burying his fingers in Magnus’s hair. “Stay,” he says. “Stay, Magnus.”

The dream shifts. Now, Alec’s holding Magnus in their bathtub, the water rising higher than it logically should, almost up to his chin. Magnus nestles against his chest, one arm wrapped around Alec’s neck, the other tucked between them against his chest. Alec tries to press him into his own body.

His dream self doesn’t know that Magnus is dead. But his dream self does know that something is wrong. He doesn’t let Magnus out of his grasp.

“I feel like I’m floating,” Magnus murmurs. “I’m glad I have you to anchor me.”

Alec pulls him up, careful not to let his hands slip off Magnus’s skin, and kisses him. It’s a strangled, airless, desperate kiss, full of premonition. Alec kisses his husband, and the water rises to drown them.

Then he’s lying on the couch on the rooftop, looking up. The sky is impossible high and clear above them, a million stars scattered over Brooklyn. Magnus lies against him with his back to Alec’s chest, and he's crying again, and Alec hugs him, hugs him, hugs him, hugs him—

“It’s okay,” Alec whispers in his ear. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s—”

On the one-year anniversary of his death, Alec goes to visit Magnus’s grave. Well, he still goes to visit more days than not, but this is different. More painful, more monumental. It’s a milestone Alec never thought he would have to reach. One year without his husband.

He doesn’t bring flowers. He doesn’t bring anything, just himself. And he barely brings himself, because he’s such a mess, so shattered apart and barely holding it together, that he’s not sure he even counts as himself.

He’d buried Magnus underneath that large elm tree in a secluded corner of the park, the same one he and Magnus had collapsed under to rest that time Alec had been injured. They’d both felt drawn to that tree. Felt safe under its branches.

Alec sits under the tree now, letting its trunk hold him up, letting his tears roll over his face, sniffling and trying to breathe. Magnus is buried right beside where he’s sitting—he doesn’t have a grave marker, per se, other than the tree itself, but Alec knows where he is. He could never forget.

There is one thing he brought with him. It’s a photo of Magnus, he always carries it in his pocket. It’s a photo Alec took at their wedding, Magnus smiling at him with a smile far too wide, eyes sparkling, his tie loose around his neck and the top few buttons of his shirt undone. Alec recalls kissing him senseless just moments before this photo was taken.

“I’m still really angry at myself,” he admits to Magnus, “for not saving you, somehow. I know you’d tell me there’s nothing I could have done. That’s probably true. But I’m angry anyway.”

He pauses to take a shuddering breath. “You were the light of my entire life. The best thing that I ever did. And I lost you. And I can’t forgive myself for that. I can’t.”

It’s so… still in the park today. Late spring heat is lying heavy in the air, even under the tree branches where a patch of cool shade is protecting Alec from the worst of the sun. Alec doesn’t know how to be here. He doesn’t know anywhere else he could be.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he tells Magnus. “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to do this. I’m a fucking wreck, Magnus. And you’re gone and I— I don’t know how to understand that. You lived for hundreds of years. You saw so many things, you knew so many things. You felt, you loved. I can’t deal with the fact that all that you are just— just disappeared from the universe. What’s the point of anything, then?”

Magnus smiles warmly at him from the photo, eternal and unchanging. Just like he was supposed to be.

“I just miss you,” Alec cries, crunching the photo in his hand. “I fucking miss you.”

Above his head, the leaves of the elm tree rattle in the wind.