Work Text:
The first time Alec wakes up drowning he is five years old.
He draws blood clawing at his throat, desperate to breathe and unable to tell that he can. It’s Izzy’s tiny body colliding with his that jerks Alec out of the water and into his bed at the Institute and the room he shares with his baby sister. It’s Izzy’s two-year-old hug, not understanding but comforting in spite of the fact, that brings the warmth back to his bones that have frozen on the sandy ocean floors, trapped in a coffin of metal.
When Alec stops gasping, his heart finally calming down, it’s with Izzy in his lap, her tiny hands wiping away at the tears on his face.
“Thank you, Izzy-Bell,” he whispers, pressing kisses of apology to her chubby cheeks eliciting a bout of giggles from her. It’s his favourite sound.
When she refuses to let him go Alec shifts them so he’s between her and the door, curling up around her protectively. His little sister falls back asleep quick and easy while Alec remains awake, haunted by his dream. Not so much by the drowning anymore, not with Izzy pressed up against him in a delightfully warm, tangible reminder, but because of how scared he’d felt.
How scared she had been. The woman down there with him. Wild eyes and screaming, desperate to be rescued from a forever of drowning.
By the time he’s ten and baring his first rune Alec doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t dream of the woman in the water.
He and Izzy don’t sleep in the same room anymore. That had stopped on his sixth birthday, mere months after that first dream, when their parents had decided he was old enough to start his training.
But that night when he goes to sleep, with the Enkeli rune pulsing freshly just below his left elbow, Alec dreams not of the woman but of two men. They don’t fight with swords but with mundane weapons, guns that The Clave look down upon because they cannot be used in combination with their Angelic Runes.
The men move as if they are parabatai, dancing together as they fight their opponents, ruthless and beautiful. One falls to the ground, shot in the neck and the other stands over his body as he fells the rest before dropping to his knees besides his partner. Hands not quite touching the dead man’s face as he hovers over him, murmuring words in languages that Alec doesn’t yet understand.
And somehow Alec isn’t surprised when the dead man bucks up with a silent gasp, his hands already reaching for his other half.
“Nicolò,” the dead man breathes and Alec knows they aren’t parabatai. Not from their lack of runes but because of the way they kiss, heedless of the blood and gore they are covered in. Even at the age of ten, Alec knows that the Clave would never allow two men to be together in such a way. Parabatai or not.
Alec wakes up with tears on his face and a hand pressed to his neck, broken-hearted. Just like he feels the rage and insanity of the woman he feels the man’s pain. Feels the way his heart is ripped out every time he has to watch the other man die.
Alec is thirteen and has just met Jace when he thinks he understands why every time he dreams of the two men (Nicolò and Yusuf, for he has heard them gasp, breathe, speak, scream the other’s name hundreds of times now) and not the drowning woman or the sad man called Booker or the fearless woman called Andy, that he feels a sense of wanting, of grief.
Alec is thirteen and knows that he will never be allowed to have what lies in the deepest recesses of his heart. His parents already talk of marrying him to a nice Shadowhunter girl and it fills Alec with dread.
Jace is beautiful and broken and is the first person to choose Alec. Izzy doesn’t count, Alec thinks, because she has never not known him. There is a difference in this, even if Alec struggles to understand why.
At sixteen and fifteen Alec and Jace make their vows and Alec gives away a piece of his soul. It’s easier than he thought it would be, but that’s only because now Alec knows he has already given a piece of himself to the people in his dreams. The five men and women who cannot die in a way that is different to the Warlocks and Vampires and Seelie that his parents speak so lowly off.
The Clave doesn’t like Downworlders. That was one of the first things Alec learnt. But Alec has spent his entire life dreaming of people who have fought in countless wars each as pointless as the last.
He has watched Yusuf and Nicolò go from slaughtering each other dozens of times to laying down their weapons and finding centuries of near unconditional love in each other.
Alec has never particularly cared for The Clave’s ideals. His first priority has always been Izzy. That has only ever changed to include Max and then Jace.
Alec never really does manage to tell Magnus about his dreams. There never seems to be time.
Because Fray is desperate to get her mother back and Jace and Izzy have decided now is the time and place to forget that they are Shadowhunters and there are laws that they have to abide by and procedures they have to follow. Alec is 23 and exhausted, he feels ancient in the way Andromache is.
Andy of his dreams who is older than The Clave and demons and very likely older than every person Alec has ever met combined. She is so tired of living but still tries to do some good even when things just keep getting worse. If there is anyone in this world that Alec has tried to be like it is her and up until Magnus, she is the only person Alec has ever truly feared disappointing.
Alec uses the bravery of Nicolò and Yusuf to walk away from Lydia and towards Magnus. He has watched them spend centuries hated and killed for their religion, for their skin colour. For who they happen to love. If they can have that kind of bravery for centuries, then maybe Alec can be brave for a minute. For just one lifetime.
He and Magnus fall apart and come together again multiple times until they come together for the final time and marry, surrounded by all the people they love.
Alec is 29 and painfully mortal when he dreams of a woman having her throat slit; as he lies on the sandy rug beside her he feels her fear.
Where it was once Izzy’s tiny, toddler-soft hands that had drawn him out of the dreams, it is now Magnus’ larger hands, just as warm and familiar, that soothe down his back.
When Magnus asks, he is only able to shake his head before twisting to press his face into the safe curve of Magnus’ neck. It’s not the first time Alec has reacted so viscerally to the deaths he dreams of.
But it has been a long time since Alec has reacted quite so outwardly to the deaths he dreams of. Drowning has become an old friend and the blades and bullets and poison are nothing compared to having Jace’s soul ripped from his own. To watching Magnus collapse lifeless in front of him.
He’s had his throat slit more times than he cares to think about; but it is her fear that has tears falling down his face.
Alec loves Magnus more than he thought possible. He knows that Magnus has survived centuries without him, but he still fears for Magnus. Not only that Magnus will leave him, but that he will inevitably leave Magnus.
And she –Freeman, someone yells her name– is so scared of leaving her people and family.
They die together on a dirt floor in the dry desert heat, scared and so very desperate to live; and Alec jack-knifes up in bed.
Alec is 36 when he finds himself slumped alone in an off-shoot of the subway in fucking Jersey.
He coughs, wet and bloody, and knows that before he managed to send it back to whichever hell dimension it came from, the demon managed to puncture his lung. He can feel the venom in his veins, burning its way towards his heart. He’s dying, there’s no denying it. The only unknown is whether he’ll bleed out, drown in his own blood or succumb to the demon venom first.
For the better part of two decades Alec had felt more apathetic than anything to the idea of his own death, but that’s changed since Magnus came into his life and flirted him into the man he is today. Magnus makes him a better person because Alec wants to be the man Magnus sees and believes him to be. The man his sons see him as.
Alec coughs again and only just manages to avoid covering himself in even more blood. Not that it would matter, the front of his shirt and pants are already soddened with blood and ichor.
As he struggles to breathe Alec knows that he’s drowning in his own blood. Alec isn’t scared, he hasn’t dreamt of the woman being under water for a few years now, but after nearly three decades of dreaming it the idea of drowning is almost comforting, something familiar in his last moments.
He hadn’t understood it before, that first time he watched Yusuf die. But he does now. Why they both fear the eyes they love won’t open again, that air will not be sucked back into those lungs and he will be left here alone when he has not been alone since that first time over 900 years ago.
Because the only thing that terrifies Alec more than Magnus dying, is leaving Magnus even a second before necessary.
He wonders, distantly, as his eyes slip shut, if the mundane girls he’d found the demon towering over managed to get away once he’d drawn the demons’ attention to himself and lured it from the public.
Sucking in a ragged breath Alec mouths a silent apology to Magnus, praying that he and the boys will be alright. Begs their forgiveness for leaving them so soon.
With his last conscious thought Alec draws up his side of the bond, blocking Jace off as much as he can.
Alexander Gideon Lightwood-Bane dies a million deaths before he draws his final breath.
Alec is 36 when he finds himself not bleeding to death in fucking Jersey.
If there is anything he is sure of it is that he should be dead.
Even in the dark, as he looks down at his open chest the only evidence that remains of the fact that he’d been stabbed by the demon is the pincer shaped hole in his blood and ichor-soaked shirt. There isn’t a wound, there isn’t even a scar.
There is no sign of the iratze Alec would have tried to use if he hadn’t destroyed his stele jamming it into the demon’s eye.
Gingerly feeling for Jace along their bond, Alec doesn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Through the semi-open bond he gets nothing but a content happiness and the normal exhilaration Jace gets from a good hunt or an exceptional sparring session.
Alec doesn’t know when he stopped wondering why he dreamt of these other people, or why they have come to mean so much to him even though he doesn’t have any solid evidence to the fact that they actually exist. But ever since he’d realised the fact that he would one day leave Magnus, Alec hasn’t let himself hope that he might be like them.
He’s seen the way they heal from death. He’s seen the way they heal from wounds of every severity in the same way. Suffering the wound only as long as it takes for it to heal with no outside influence.
Alec had to use an iratze just the other day when Maia saw fit to stab him with a fountain pen during a meeting. He’s seen them heal from messy bullet wounds in less time than it took for the iratze to stitch together the tiny puncture.
Instead of sneaking back into the Institute, Alec just walks in through the front doors. His usual attire of complete black easily hides the mess they are soaked in and his jacket, now zipped up, hides the gaping hole in his shirt.
Even he though he is perfectly capable of sneaking into the New York Institute –a skill he perfected at age 13– he is the Head of the Institute. He doesn’t need to explain to anyone why he’s walking into his own damn Institute at three in the morning if he doesn’t bloody well want to.
Within the privacy of his own office Alec strips off his shirt and throws it into the fire, his pants quickly joining. Redressing in the set of clothes he keeps in a draw for just in case. Not even magic could get all the blood and ichor out of them. And even if they could be cleaned and repaired, Alec isn’t sure he could ever bring himself to wear them again.
Sitting on the floor by the fire, Alec picks up the dagger that normally resides affixed to the underside of his desk. Taking a steady breath, he brings the blade to his arm and with the part of him that’s more like Jace than either of them care to admit, slashes the skin just under his elbow.
By the light of the fire Alec watches as within seconds the cut closes up, a thin line of blood the only thing to show for it.
How long he sits there, repeatedly drawing bloody lines on his arm and watching them close up again, Alec doesn’t know. But when his phone buzzes Alec gets up and returns the cleaned dagger to its home and puts it all aside in favour of being the leader his people need him to be.
Alec is 36 and walking home after patrol in the morning light when he spots a familiar face.
Giving no sign that’s he’s seen his tail, Alec keeps walking, ducking into a mundane café and ordering the most caffeinated, sugary concoction they offer. After a day of paperwork and meetings with the Clave followed by a graveyard patrol because they were in the middle of a demon surge, Alec was in no way prepared to deal with this without coffee.
Not walking home to Brooklyn, or back into the Institute, Alec keeps going until he finishes the stupidly big drink that Magnus would probably chastise him for drinking.
He’s never dreamt of a thing that would show them knowing of the Shadow World. And none of his research of Clave records or Downworld legend mention these people. He’s found allusions to them in mundane literature and culture, shadows and traces scattered throughout history, but little else. They are more hidden from the entire world than the Shadow World is hidden from the mundanes. But then it must be easier with only a few of them compared to the thousands that live in the Shadow World.
Casually turning into an alley, Alec quickly scrawls a rune on his arm, glamouring himself as the random mundane he uses when he needs to not be recognisable. Alec thinks on it for all of a second before swiping the stele over his stamina rune, breathing through the burn as he feels the rush of energy. Another rune and he jumps into the portal, striding out of another alley some blocks back on the other side of the road.
Following the woman, Andy, Alec waits until he feels the prickles at the back of neck before ducking into yet another alley.
Easily scaling the building, Alec crouches down on the roof, pausing only long enough to slash his stele through the seconds old rune, removing the glamour. Having intended to go straight home the only weapons he’s carrying are his bow and quiver, the twin daggers in his boots and his stele; his thigh holster unfortunately empty.
Jumping across to the next building over, Alec silently grabs his bow off his back and nocks an arrow.
Stepping forward until he’s just behind the sniper lying prone on the edge of the roof, Alec says calmly, “Tell Andromache she should have just asked to get coffee.”
The sniper freezes before snorting in laughter as he releases the gun, rolling over to raise an eyebrow at the arrow Alec has pointed at his face.
“Boss,” he says into what Alec assumes is a hidden mic. “We’re bust.”
With his hearing rune still active Alec is able to hear the voice in the man’s ear as well. “You lost him?”
“More like he found me,” he says with a smile, his eyes still locked on Alec’s. “I think I like this one,” he adds casually.
Several voices come over the earpiece as Alec lowers his bow and returns the arrow to his quiver.
“Grazie,” he says as he sits up and begins to break down the rifle.
“I’m Nicky,” the man says when he stands, holding out a hand.
He takes the hand. “Alec.”
“Coffee?” Nicky asks. Alec can’t help the grin that spreads on his face, it’s good to know these people are his kind of asshole in real life too.
Alec is 36 when he sits at a bench in Central Park with the people from his dreams.
The seven of them sit around a table drinking coffee and eating pastries as they tell Alec that he is now immortal. And not in the way Magnus and Max are. Not the way any Warlock, Seelie or Vampire is. For all that they are immortal they are still so fragile in a way that Alec no longer is. They can still die and scar. Alec will bounce back as if it never happened.
There is an oddness in how seamlessly Alec manages to fit in. Never in his life has Alec experienced this kind of instant, easy acceptance.
The dreams only get partially explained. That they’ve only been dreaming of him since he died in the subway in Jersey a couple weeks ago, which is supposedly the way things are normally supposed go. Or as normal as one can assume with a total known population of eight. Alec doesn’t yet tell them he’s been seeing them in his dreams since age five. He’s only had an hour to think about it with their half of the information, but he’s already got his suspicions as to why but is entirely unwilling to get into it just yet, not when he’s probably going to have to read the lot of them in on the Shadow World. His half-baked theories about Valentine’s forays into human experimentation can wait for later.
“You’re taking this far better than I did,” Nile says, looking at him worriedly. As if his calmness is a front and he’s going to snap at any moment.
Not sure how to answer why that is, Alec is saved by his phone ringing.
“Don’t answer that.” Andy snaps the order with millennia in her voice.
But Alec was raised by Maryse Lightwood. Pulling his phone from his pocket, Alec uses his free hand to slam an arrow into Joe’s hand when he goes to grab the phone from Alec, pinning the man’s hand to the wooden table as he jumps to his feet and away from the group.
“What is it, Jace?” he demands into the phone.
“Are you okay? ” Jace demands right back. You’re all over the place. Is it Magnus? The boys? ”
“Everything’s fine, Jace,” Alec says, infusing as much calm as he can into his voice.
A poke at their bond has Alec realising he’s accidentally dropped open his side of the bond, that Jace had, presumably, done the same when he’d been inundated by Alec. Alec can barely think from the relief. He’d, on some level, already known what had happened to him. But somehow, having it explained to him had finally allowed Alec to believe it was true.
He wouldn’t have to leave Magnus.
“I need you take over for a day or two, something’s come up. Get Izzy to take the Council meeting tomorrow and Fray can deal with the Clave if needed. You can handle the general day to day stuff, and no, Jace, I don’t care if you’d rather jump into a Galapid hoard solo.”
Their bond still wide open, Alec felt Jace contemplating. “Scale of Lake Lyn in ‘09 to Jonathan opening a rift to Edom,” Jace says eventually.
Alec considers it for a moment. “Wedding with Lydia, but less public.”
Jace’s confusion rolls through Alec’s chest.
Sending a wave of reassurance to Jace, Alec closed up his side of the bond until Jace was just a small presence in the back of his mind once more. The extra beat to his heart.
“I’ll see you later, parabatai.” Alec says and hangs up.
Still standing several feet from the table, Alec sees that Quynh now has his arrow in her hand and is examining it carefully.
“This is beautiful craftsmanship,” she says.
“Thank you.” Alec turns to Nile and decides that his usual bluntness may as well be best.
Despite the fact that he’s known of their existence as a certainty for all of an hour, Alec has known them his whole life. He trusts them, he loves them. They may as well get to know the real him and not the Clave-grown politician.
“My husband is an eight-hundred-year-old Warlock. I share a soul with my brother. I have the blood of angels and I fight demons on a nightly basis. So, yes, Nile, I am taking this well because it’s not big a deal, not when I’ve been dreaming of most of you since I was five.”
Nicky seems to forget he’s pissed at Alec for stabbing Joe. When even Andy looks shocked, Alec takes a moment to be smug about that.
“You were not scared,” Quynh says, as if something has finally made sense for her.
When Alec and the rest of them look to her she elaborates, saying, “When you were dying, that first time, in the alley. You were not scared even as you bled to death.”
Alec shrugged, not sure if he wanted to admit to a truth he hasn’t shared with even his husband or parabatai. “I wasn’t,” he agreed nonetheless.
“I dreamed of you first,” he says to Quynh when none of them say anything. There’s something like relief in being able to talk about this with people who he knows will understand. “Drowning again and again, endlessly. I was there with you every night for nearly four years until I saw these two in a firefight,” he jerks his head at Joe and Nicky who are sitting hand in hand again.
“After a while it became familiar. Dying like that, drowning, it was sort of…”
“A known thing,” Booker finishes for him and Alec nods. “Hard to be scared of something that’s known.”
“It was comforting,” Alec agrees. Because it was.
Alec is... His age is irrelevant. He’s immortal now.
Surrounded by the family he’s only just found (but has known his entire life) and with the family he fought for in his mind, he breathes easy.