Chapter Text
Summary of "Gonna Need A Spark To Ignite": Going canon-divergent from 2x17 after Magnus confronts Alec about the Soul Sword: An angry and heartbroken Magnus visits the Seelie Court, and with the Seelie Queen on board, they take down the wards at the Institute. Magnus, having underestimated what the Seelie Queen would do and the lengths she'd go to cause him and Alec pain, has to watch as the Seelie Queen has Alec whipped, taking his blood in compensation for the Seelie dead after the activation of the Soul Sword. She further infects him with a demon powder, which inadvertently sparks a war in his blood that results in the gang having to work a magical ritual on Alec in which he gains some level of warlock power, and his runes turn gold. His powers have limitations - they all work through the prism of Love. (Story: "There's a tear in my heart where your lies left a mark and now nothing is clear")
The Clave, furious at Magnus for breaking the Accords, and Alec, for what he said while under duress to the Seelie Queen, sentences them both to death for treason, but Alec calls upon his right to undergo an ancient angel trial known as the Trial of Hemarton to clear both himself and Magnus of their supposed crimes. During this trial, Alec communicates with the Angel Raziel, who reveals to him the location of the Mortal Mirror, that Valentine has spies within the Clave, and that if Alec can defeat Valentine he will be in a position to lead an independent faction of Shadowhunters into the future. (Story: "But innocence is gone and what was right is wrong", "Bodies and souls collide when all the stars align")
Alec reveals the location of the Mortal Mirror to the Downworld instead of the Clave, and while Magnus, Luke and Raphael are away at a summit of Downworlders to discuss what to do with the Lake, Alec is taken captive by Jonathan, who threatens Max to get Alec to reveal how he became what he was - a being that is both Shadowhunter and warlock. Alec reveals enough secrets to save his brother's life, but Jonathan cuts off his binding runes and then stabs Max. Alec goes after Jonathan in revenge, and Max is revealed to have been the Seelie Queen in disguise - she had also wanted to know how Alec became what he was. (Story: "I had to learn the hard way that salvation has its price")
The missing binding runes send Alec into a magical coma as his soul screams for its bonded partners - Jace on the Shadowhunter side and Magnus on the warlock side - resulting in them losing consciousness as well. While Jace and Magnus navigate Alec's dreamscape to stabilize his soul so that they can all awaken, a showdown between Inquisitor Imogen Herondale and Maryse Lightwood is just the latest in a series of disagreements with the Clave, who seem to be more interested in Alec's powers and style of leadership than fighting Valentine. After a last confrontation with a dream manifestation of Asmodeus, Magnus' demon father, who gives them dire warnings about the future, they awaken, and bring Alec out of the coma. (Stories: "We go deeper than the ink beneath the skin of our tattoos", "I'll love you past the breaking point")
By this point, the Downworlder summit has dispersed, and Magnus and Alec meet with the High Warlock Council to go over what was decided - the Shadowhunters would need to be at the centre of a binding on Lake Lyn to protect it from Valentine, and Alec's Shadowhunters would have to come up with something that would allow Shadowhunters and Downworlders to fight as equals against Valentine. Alec's inner circle is taken to the Silent Brothers, who awaken their dormant angelic magic, and then, together with a matched group of warlocks, they perform the warding on the Lake. (Story: "Everything could stay the same or we could change it all")
After returning to New York, and becoming aware of other Institutes worldwide that had also been cut off by the Clave, Clary comes up with the Alliance rune, which would allow the Shadowhunters and Downworlders to fight as equals. When it becomes known that the Seelie Queen has given aid to Valentine's forces, Alec is able to extract a promise from her to change her mind, so that Valentine only thinks that she has aided him, but this comes with a heavy promise for the future - the Seelie Queen tells him that there is a boy protected by one of the Shadow Markets that she can't get to, and that he has a valuable artifact that she wants, and when that boy loses that protection and comes to look for it with Alec instead, he is to give that artifact to her.
In the ensuing battle with Valentine, he raises the Angel, but is not able to use the wish. Luke kills Valentine, and Magnus ends up claiming the wish from the Angel - and he wishes that he and Alec would be able to provide a safe haven for any and all Shadowhunters or Downworlders who need it. Following the battle, after the Silent Brothers caution the Clave that if they do not allow Alec and his forces to leave peacefully, the Clave would lose any right to call on the Silent Brothers, Alec and Jia Penhallow, the new Consul, negotiate a peaceful separation from the Clave for the New York Institute and any allied Institutes.
They return home, and Alec reveals to Magnus what he promised the Seelie Queen, meanwhile, the Seelie Queen herself talks to her prisoner, and tells them that their mother is much more interested in Alec than she is in her own child. (Story: "Get your weapons ready for tonight is our battle")
* * *
Magnus stepped out of a Portal, dropping onto the lawn of the New York Institute as the sun was beginning to set. He breathed easily - unlike years and centuries past, this Institute didn’t fill him with dread, because it felt of freedom, and of peace.
Peace felt good.
He walked up the front steps, the doors opening to his touch. It wasn’t only Shadowhunters who could come and go freely from the Institute, they had much more in their lives now.
Magnus walked through the Ops Centre, glancing to the classrooms and training rooms to the sides of it, glad to see that everyone was working hard. He exchanged nods with a few of the Shadowhunters on duty, but they all already knew where he was headed.
Magnus rapped on Alec’s door lightly, and it swung open to admit him. Alec was already standing up from behind his desk, coming to meet him.
“Hey.” Alec said softly, pulling their hips close as he pressed a kiss to Magnus’ lips.
“Hey yourself. Are you almost done here?”
“For the day, yeah.” His eyes flitted upward. “Paperwork, that is. I do still need to make the rounds upstairs. See if anyone needs anything, you know.”
“Of course.” Magnus said, bringing a hand to stroke over Alec’s jaw. “That’s why I came, to see if there was anything I could do.”
“Maybe.” Alec said, walking back around to his desk. “We’ve had reports from some of the young warlocks that there’s someone new in town. Someone - they’ve felt their presence when they’ve been out, but whenever they’d follow it, whoever it was had just Portalled out. But definitely someone new, someone young, staying in the area, just nervous to talk.”
Magnus nodded. “I’ll talk to some of them, consult with Catarina. They might be young enough, or inexperienced enough, that they don’t fully understand everything yet. Might not have even had an official contact with the Downworld.”
“Great. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with that.”
“Careful, your paternal instincts are showing.” Magnus teased. Alec smiled sheepishly. “Oh, you know I love it. I never imagined our lives to be like this. But I wouldn’t change any of it for anything.”
“I know.” Alec said easily. “I just need to finish this report on the demon nest that Clary found and make sure that it has been sealed properly.”
“You’re still doing so much paperwork.” Magnus tutted. “You’d think leaving the Clave would make less of it.”
“I want to make sure everything’s in order.” Alec said. “I’m - just imagine, Magnus. It has been five years. We have more Institutes joining every year. I think there’s only just the Institutes in Calgary and in Houston that are still affiliated with the Clave here in North America. Most of the others are with us.”
“Well, ever since the Iron Sisters said that they won’t make weapons for the Clave anymore, people have started to sing a different tune.”
“Still though. We won’t bring an Institute on board until we know that they’re not just paying lip service to us.”
“I know, love, I know. But let’s you leave that report for tomorrow, and we make the rounds upstairs now, yeah?”
Alec nuzzled into Magnus’ cheek. “Fine, fine.”
Magnus took Alec’s hand, and they left the office, making their way through the halls to the elevator, taking it up to the eighth floor. While for the weeks following their adventures in Alec’s dreamscape Magnus had been nervous of the elevators, as the changes to the Institute following their departure from the Clave came to pass, that fear eased, and as with everything else in their lives, it turned into something good.
Life was good. And now, when they were going to visit Alec’s most satisfying accomplishment, Magnus could just see the joy that was radiating off of his husband’s body.
The doors opened to chaos, but it was a happy chaos. There were children running through the hallways and the playroom, barely mindful of where they were going, and while the adults on the floor did keep some amount of calm, far be it from them to interfere with joy, when there used to be so little of it.
“Alec!” Madzie barrelled into him, hugging his legs.
“Hey.” Alec said affectionately, swooping her onto his hip, though soon she’d be too big for that. “You helping out here today?”
Madzie nodded. “Marista called Auntie Cat and said that she needed a few extra hands. So I said I’d help.”
“Good for you, sweet pea.” Magnus said, ruffling her hair. “Who has been the greatest troublemaker today?”
Madzie nodded her chin at a small Shadowhunter boy sitting in the corner, studiously reading a book on runes. “Caledon.”
Alec gave her a skeptical look. “Really?”
“Really really! He might look calm now, but he was driving Marista nuts earlier. She sent him to the corner. I kept him there.”
Alec tutted. “Now, now. Remember the rules with magic.”
Madzie rolled her eyes. “Fiiiine. But if he tries to draw a rune on me again, I’m going to vanish his stele to the Sahara desert.”
“As you should.” Magnus said, nodding in approval.
Madzie dropped down to the ground, and released the shield that had been blocking Caledon in the corner, but he just looked up at Madzie nervously, and then back down to his book, not moving from the corner.
Magnus and Alec moved through the playroom towards Marista, the woman who was in charge of the nursery. They’d started taking in Downworlder children of all factions, as soon as one of Iris’ experiments had appeared on the front steps of the Institute, already in labour.
After Leigh had given birth, she hadn’t wanted to see her child - or see anything, when she came to realize what all of the memory spells she’d gone through over the years meant. Everything that Iris had done to her, and other women, to pump out warlock child after warlock child. So the High Warlock Council led a mission to find the other women that Iris had subjected to her experiments, and many of them were also horrified by the implications of the memory spells they’d been subjected to. This brought the first wave of warlock children into the Institute’s care.
Where the families that Iris had spoken of were, the loving families in which these warlock children would be raised, Magnus didn’t know. That was one answer he’d never been able to get out of Iris, no matter how many interrogations Jia had granted him. He suspected that they never existed at all.
No more interrogations would be possible, now. The Shadowhunter extremists, led by Inquisitor Herondale, had taken over the Clave two years ago, after three years of relative harmony between the Clave and Alec’s Shadowhunter forces, now known as the Diaitites - the Arbiters, short for the Arbiters of Justice of the Angels. The extremists had slaughtered all of the Downworlder prisoners in Clave dungeons, and while part of Magnus was glad that people like Iris and Camille no longer had the small hope of escape or release, mostly he was sickened by the wholesale slaughter irrespective of what crimes each prisoner had committed.
While several Institutes had joined them each year since their departure from the Clave on the heels of Valentine’s demise, the larger exodus from the Clave came only after the coup against Jia. The way Alec told it, it was only by a stroke of luck that he’d happened to be in Alicante that day, and had been able to get Jia out before any blood was shed.
Magnus, by his much more cynical nature, believed that Alec’s presence in Alicante had dictated the timing of the coup - they had hoped to eliminate him as well, and return the Diaitites to Clave control. But once again the Clave had underestimated him, and Jia was once again Head of the Beijing Institute, which was a full member of the Diaitites. Not long after, the Silent Brothers and the Iron Sisters had cut their ties with the Clave, serving only the Diaitites and the independent Institutes that Alec and his Council had not yet brought on board.
Putting the Clave out of his mind, Magnus smiled at Marista as he and Alec walked up. Marista had been one of Iris’ experiments - a woman with the Sight, who had had at least three warlock children. With Catarina’s guidance, she was raising her children herself, and when Alec began looking for someone to run the Institute nursery, Catarina had recommended Marista for the job. Now she lived in the Institute with her children, and along with several other adults was responsible for the thirty orphan children in the nursery, Shadowhunters and Downworlders alike.
“Any issues today?” Alec asked her. “Madzie tells me that Caledon was misbehaving.”
Marista smiled fondly. “A bit. Kids these days, always getting ahead of themselves. He was a bit too enthusiastic about the new runes he’s learning.”
“I remember my brother Max at that age.” Alec nodded. “Caused the Mumbai Institute no end of trouble.”
“Where is Max now?”
“He’s on his coming-of-age tour around a number of our Institutes. In Mexico City right now, but he’ll be on his way to Los Angeles soon. And we’ll be expecting a few special guests from Los Angeles here while he’s there.”
“Oh?” Magnus asked. Out of all of the Institutes, their relationship was still closest with the Los Angeles Institute, as they’d been the first to officially join their organization - and of course Helen, Mark, Aline and Lydia had already been working with them even before the break from the Clave was official.
“Yeah.” Alec said. “Andrew sent the request this morning. Tiberius and Livia Blackthorn will be here for a month or so. I know Helen mentioned awhile back that they wanted us to oversee their angel magic ceremony. But they’re still missing their tenth, so we’ll have to do some looking around here for who could be suitable.”
Magnus nodded. “Isabelle will probably have some suggestions.”
“Yeah, probably.” Alec looked back to Marista. “Where can we find Todd? I was hoping he could tell Magnus about the new warlock presence he’s been feeling in the area.”
Marista nodded her head towards the dormitories. “Second door on the left. Be careful, he’s still practicing the summoning charms that Catarina’s been teaching him, who knows what you’ll walk into.”
Magnus shuddered as he remembered the previous day, when he’d been called upon to help clean up the playroom after Todd had decided to summon five flocks of cormorants. Magic was an effective cleaner, but the mess had also reminded him of one of his adventures in Peru where he and Ragnor had been wearing the guano instead of cleaning it off furniture.
Memories of Ragnor still ached, but the pain was not as sharp as it used to be.
Alec opened the dormitory door, his other hand swirling with golden sparks at the ready, just in case they were walking into a huge mess. But at first glance, the dormitory seemed quiet.
Magnus and Alec walked inside, weaving around toys and beds until they reached Todd, who was sitting on his bed surrounded by chocolate bars from the bodega around the corner. He looked up guiltily as he stuffed yet another one into his mouth.
“Todd, you know that much chocolate is bad for you.” Magnus said seriously. “If you eat all of it, do you know what will happen?”
The small warlock shook his head, green hair falling into his eyes.
“Next time you try summoning chocolate, you’ll get broccoli instead. Huge heads of broccoli. Maybe even Brussel sprouts too.”
Todd’s eyes widened and he dropped the chocolate bar onto the bed. He snapped his fingers at rapid speed, and the unopened chocolate bars vanished, while the rustle from a nearby garbage can told them that the wrappers and opened bars had appeared there.
“Good boy.” Magnus said, sitting down on the bed. “Alec tells me that you’ve felt another warlock in the area? Maybe another kid like you?”
Todd nodded vigorously. “Yeah. I don’t know how to describe it, but yeah - I feel the magic, and then it’s gone. Like poof. I felt it in the park this morning. I was playing with Sam and Jesi on the monkey bars, and I thought I saw somebody under the slide, I felt magic like ours. But then when I really looked, there wasn’t anyone there anymore. Just a breeze, like if a Portal had just appeared.”
“Sam and Jesi saw them too?”
“Sam felt the magic. Jesi heard something - something Sam and I couldn’t, because werewolf hearing. She didn’t see them or the Portal though.”
“You’ve felt this before?”
“A few times this week. Always in the park. They were much closer today though. Usually they stay back in the forest or something. But I think they’re watching us.”
Magnus nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. I’m going to ask Catarina if she and Madzie can go to the park with you tomorrow. See if they show up again. They’re probably scared. They probably see you and Sam - without your glamours, of course - and think you might be like them. Catarina can watch more closely and hopefully make contact before they disappear again.”
“Does that mean that we’ll have a new brother or sister here soon?”
“It’s possible. But we need to find out who they are first. Thank you, Todd.”
Magnus and Alec left the room, making their way back through the playroom and to the elevator. Once the doors closed behind them, Alec turned to Magnus with a raised eyebrow.
“Summoning too much chocolate will result in summoning broccoli instead? Really?”
Magnus grinned. “Of course not. But now every time he thinks about summoning chocolate, he’ll be focused on broccoli instead. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to be creative when raising warlock children, Alexander.”
“Apparently so.” Alec smiled, kissing Magnus’ temple. “I just hope that this idea won’t interrupt our date nights.”
“I have much better control over my magic than that. Don’t worry, we will always feast on chocolate mousse for dessert instead of broccoli pudding.”
“I’m thankful for that.”
“I aim to please.”
They were both laughing as the doors opened on the main floor, so focused on each other that Alec missed the fire message until he walked right into it, ashes causing him to cough. He frowned, plucking it out of the air and unrolling it as they walked through the Ops Centre.
Alec stopped dead, resulting in Magnus bumping into him.
“What is it?” Magnus asked, concerned about the worried look on Alec’s face.
“No romantic dinner tonight, I’m afraid. Emergency in Los Angeles. Helen needs us both there. Now.”