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Two days after Alec is released from the infirmary into Magnus' care Maryse knocks on the loft's door. She's purposely given her son and his lover time to cling to each other and reaffirm that by some grace they both went to war and they both lived. Lived when others they loved did not. Maryse knows first-hand many times over how necessary that time is to keep one's heart and mind whole.
But.
It's been two days and Alec almost died four days ago.
Despite her understandably disputed motherly instincts, she needs to see her son.
Magnus physically opens the door with a flourish she's come to appreciate but the fact that the wood swings open to reveal the man himself and not empty air is jarring and a stark departure from what was once normal but no longer.
"Maryse, please come in!" Magnus bids.
"Magnus," she replies fondly in greeting and reaches up her left arm to half embrace him. Her right hand is occupied with a shopping bag containing a canister of bone broth to help Alec with his strength and two bottles of wine to help her and Magnus cope.
Wrapped in Magnus's full hug, her attention is split between assessing the tight lines of his back that speak hyper vigilance and taking in Alec who stands just a few feet away. The exhausted but happy smile her son is wearing is both a relief and a torment.
"Hi, Mom."
Four days ago Alec almost died is a thought that repeats in her mind like a mantra. A mantra she tries to disrupt as soon as she becomes aware of with Four days ago Alec survived.
As he pulls away, Magnus, bless him, smoothly grabs the shopping bag from her hand and allows her to clear the few steps between her and Alec and embrace him tightly with both arms. The way he hugs her back, deflates, stoops down, and presses his forehead to the curve of where her neck becomes shoulder has her shuddering a breath born from loss almost nightmarishly realized.
It's long after the desperation of the moment bleeds away and the force of their embrace relaxes that Alec finally shifts away as well, but not too far. He scrubs at his eyes with the cuff of his sweater and sniffs while Maryse stands proudly with tear streaked cheeks. She offers him a smile she hopes is reassuring.
"I uh, sorry? I kind of..." he says and waves at her shoulder and what she assumes is a wet spot.
Maryse reaches up, cups his cheeks and guides him down so that she can place a kiss on his forehead. "You have absolutely nothing to apologize for," she whispers against his brow and he trembles.
As Alec rights himself, Maryse asks gently, "When was the last time you ate?" She had hoped that that would be a benign question but by the way Alec rolls his eyes with practically his whole body she knows it's so very much not.
"Not you too. I swear. I'm fine. I'm just not that hungry."
She arches an eyebrow at him.
"Why! What do we have here?" Magnus exclaims, very clearly inflating his reaction to cartoonish proportions. "Why it's a lovely container of bone broth! Which, might I add is not something technically one eats..."
"Two against one is not fair," Alec grumbles but the bit of light in his eyes tempers the words from whiny to amused.
"You're right. It isn't," Maryse says feigning agreement. "You're much more formidable than that. How does five against one sound? I can call Izzy and Jace to come over. Get Max on speaker..." Her pleasant threat is only partially insincere.
"And Cat said she and Madzie would love to visit and check on you. Now's as good a time as any, wouldn't you say?" Magnus says and Alec lolls his head to the side and then up and stares at the ceiling like he got stuck midway through yet another full body eye roll. But, he's grinning.
This kind of banter between the three of them is new but it comes as natural as breathing and Maryse is so incredibly grateful. Especially as they wax and wane between decaying terror still so potent that it threatens to suffocate and absolute ridiculousness that belies their age and horrors lived.
It isn't until two hours into the visit Alec's exhaustion becomes a presence that cannot be ignored. Magnus breaks first and addresses it. On his return from the kitchen he casually walks past his chair and goes to Alec's side. Alec turns and looks up at him and the love and adoration mirrored on their faces catches Maryse's breath. Her son loves and is loved with a quiet intensity that children dream of and adults dismiss as fairytales.
Adults like she once was.
Magnus strokes the side of Alec's face gently.
Alec closes his eyes and exhales slowly. "Yeah. I think laying down would be good."
Maryse nods in encouragement and while she mentally gathers herself to leave Alec continues, “But you guys don't have to call it a night. Just...don't be too loud," he says with a smirk.
"We promise. No parties while you rest," assures Magnus. When Alec finally stands, his movements are heavy like his limbs have tripled in weight since Maryse arrived. She gets up and hugs him fiercely one last time for the night. Then he and Magnus retreat to their bedroom with Magnus tossing over his shoulder, "I'm just going to go tuck him in and then I'll be right back."
Maryse carefully thinks of nothing while waiting for Magnus to return. Eventually though, she toes off her pumps. It isn't until she's pressing her feet into the plush rug that she realizes she'll have to use a cloth and polish rather than a swipe of her stele to remove any scuffs she's left on the patent leather of her shoes. The brutal want for the weight of her long-trusted tool and companion rips through her and sours in her heart.
"Where did you go?" Magnus asks because of course he noticed her sudden descent into grief. "Surely that dour expression isn't for your Manolo Blahniks. And, by the way, even when I found you loathsome as a person, I've always found your sense of brutalist fashion rather exquisite."
"Thank you. And, by the way, even when I found you a repugnant downworlder, I always found the way you mix textiles and colors absolutely divine."
"Well, I should hope so," Magnus begins with flair, "after all my father is a prince of hell, which is a kind of divinity," he finishes with a smile filled with teeth and a roll of his wrists and splay of his fingers that has all the airs of magic on display if Magnus still had magic.
Maryse withholds any reaction and gives him space to realize what just happened, or rather what didn't.
She waits for the sorrow of his loss to yank the rug from under his performance.
She waits for him to erect a pleasant facade.
She only has to wait a beat. That's all the time he needs to cycle from recognition to repression. It's all so subtle and fast that most would be none the wiser to what just happened.
Maryse is not wise, but lived experience acts as a viable substitute.
"I can't tell you that it gets easier," she says. "But, over time, the void left by the part of yourself that you've lost will become overgrown by the life you chose to live and the love of those you surround yourself with. The void will still be there, a thing to be stumbled upon, but the things that have grown around and over it will catch you when you fall."
"And if they don't?" Magnus asks and it is the youngest and most vulnerable she has ever heard him sound.
"Then," she begins, leans towards him, and reaches out her left hand which he takes tentatively, "you use that spine of yours that carried the weight of being the High Warlock of Brooklyn and you fucking claw your way back to us."
Magnus eyes widen and he huffs a laugh. His smile is a small honest curve of his lips but filled with so much gratefulness that Maryse has to restrain herself from getting up and embracing him as she would Izzy, Alec, Max, or Jace.
"I am glad that we quarreled but never battled, Maryse Lightwood," he tells her, tone reverent. The force of his conviction causes her heart to clench and it feels like maybe she's taken one step of the thousands she needs to towards redemption.
"As am I, Magnus Bane," she says and matches his tone and depth of feeling note for note.
They let the weight of the moment dissipate naturally so that when he squeezes her hand and lets go it does not feel like a broken connection but rather a natural evolution. Like her, Magnus seems somehow a fraction more settled in his skin as he casts his gaze to the half empty bottle of port. "More wine?" he offers.
"Absolutely," she replies with a smile and a raised glass.
After that their conversation flits from frivolities to mundane oddities to fuckeries of their respective worlds. It's all topped off with adamant oaths to attend a few shows during Fashion Week as if the future is a guarantee.
In the morning when the sun has barely crested rooftops, Alec emerges from their bedroom and stops short, no doubt taking in the scene before him.
Maryse is sitting on the sofa, posture soft, and right arm draped along the arm rest. Magnus is asleep, laying on his side on that same sofa and using Maryse's thigh as a pillow. She is gently stroking his hair.
With Alec awake and present it strikes her how, regardless of how uncommon it had been, it has been a very very long time since any of her children have done what Magnus is doing.
Once his brain breaks whatever lock it's in, Alec shuffles forward and drops none too gracefully to the floor in front of the sofa and sits facing them. His eyes meet hers for a moment and then he tips himself against the side of her left leg, rests his head on her knee, and hugs her calf with one arm like he's five again.
"He's a good man," she tells Alec and he nods. "And his family were damn fools not to appreciate that." She knows Magnus is awake now and is fairly certain that his eyes are what have captured Alec's gaze.
"Maybe," Alec begins and stops, obviously working himself up to say what he wants and it breaks her heart that the way she raised her children fostered this hesitation. Finally, though, Alec finds his voice, "Maybe we can be his family now."
The steady rise and fall of Magnus' chest freezes.
Alec's words are plainly not a request and Maryse does not believe for one moment that Magnus' standing within the Lightwood clan is what Alec is after. Rather, his words are a trial balloon to determine how much of her previously demonstrated virulent bigotry lives on.
Maryse is equal measures proud of how much Alec's political skills have flourished and gut twistingly disgusted beyond measure with her past self's atrocities.
"Oh darling," Maryse begins, keeping her voice light even though it is a struggle, "Half way through the third bottle of wine I was drafting articles of adoption in my head before it occurred to me how awkward that would make things for the both of you."
Magnus' stillness is broken by a bark of laughter. All pretense of sleeping gone, he turns his head and looks at her with watery eyes.
And Maryse knows right then and there that she will do whatever is in her power to protect, help, and should it come to it, avenge this man and she will do so with the particular kind of fury only a mother knows.
Even a mother with understandably disputed instincts.