Work Text:
Over the several centuries he’d been alive, Magnus had learnt well how to love himself, if only because nobody else did.
Well, that wasn’t quite accurate — there were plenty of people, Cat and Ragnor prominent among them, who cared for him — but it was certainly true that there were more people willing to hate Magnus, for anything and everything they could think of. His skin colour, his sexuality, the way he dressed, the makeup he wore, the words he spoke, his demonic heritage — there never seemed to be any shortage of reasons to hate him, and it took his hardest, sharpest walls to keep all the cruel words out.
Or at least most of them. Some slipped through: not the majority of the senseless bigotry, but the whispers to which Magnus was himself most susceptible — the ones that told him he wasn’t, couldn’t be, good.
Coloured people don’t have morals. Bisexuals cheat on their partners. Men who dress like that are predators. Those were usually possible to block out, based on obvious ignorance as they were; it was harder to not listen, though, when it was warlocks are inherently evil because of their demon blood.
For most warlocks, of course, any such claim was easy to dismiss, but Magnus wasn’t most warlocks. His father was a Prince of Hell, and — worse — Magnus had once done his bidding. He’d been young and misguided and desperate for kindness; he’d latched on to the man with eyes like him, who told him the mark that’d killed his mother was a mark of power — but sometimes he couldn’t remind himself of that. Sometimes, all he could remember were the screams he’d caused at his father’s bidding, piling on top of his step-father’s screams as Magnus burned him alive.
Magnus’ magic brought death and destruction. It was powerful, and he did his best to do good with it, but it was never as good at healing as Catarina’s; he trained it to build portals and wards and potions, and he was good at that, but there was always that faint whisper of destroy break crush tear it all down that lingered in it, threatening to turn blue into red. Help into hurt.
And it was made all the worse because he had hurt before — he’d killed his stepfather, first of all, his panicked instinct to kill; he’d killed under Asmodeus’ thumb, gloried in the praise Asmodeus gave him; he’d even killed since then, usually but not always in the heat of battle, usually but not always feeling bad about it afterwards, often enjoying it in the moment. They were all bad people, those he’d killed, but everyone had the possibility for redemption — he had to believe that, if he was to forgive himself — and he had snuffed out that possibility for them.
Usually, he knew that none of that meant he himself was evil; usually, logic won out over insecurities. But sometimes he felt darkness rise in his mind that whispered with the voices of others that he was eternally doomed to cause naught but pain; sometimes logic only reminded him that he did feel that impulse to destroy; sometimes he wondered if the world would be a better place without him in it.
It rarely got that far, and when it did, he was always pulled back from the brink but friends or family or, once, Camille. But it was less rare for him to wonder whether the Shadowhunters’ whispers were right, at least in his case — whether he was inherently evil, doomed to turn on the world and use his father’s power to burn it to the ground.
(Because he could do that, if he wanted to, and that was terrifying. Tessa was the only other child of a Prince of Hell that he knew, and her power was insufficient to match his — she hadn’t yet grown into her full strength and anyway, Belial had always been weaker than Asmodeus. If Magnus gave in to the temptation to destroy, he could bring the whole world down with him, and there was nobody who could stop him.)
It wasn’t a problem, most of the time — he refused to let Edom’s siren song pull him in, channelled his magic into creating and not destroying, reminded himself that had it been anyone else, he would’ve been far more forgiving than he was of himself. It cropped up only occasionally, a bad day or two that he passed in bed or with his friends, fading away with time.
With Alec, it was even less of a problem. There was something about the way Alec looked at him, whether he was wielding magic or washing dishes, eyes glamoured or warlock mark on display, that helped close up that gaping fear inside. Alec blocked out the cruel whispers Magnus didn’t want to believe (but did anyway) with warm words and glowing smiles; he made Magnus feel like he was good, when he was with Alec.
That, perhaps, was why he didn’t have one of his bad days until a year after their marriage. It was longer than his usual between bad days, long enough that he wondered if maybe it was gone, but (of course) it wasn’t, only faded slightly into the background. He’d hoped that having Alec had — magically, impossibly — cured him of that insidious insecurity; when he woke up one morning to the old whispers, the old darkness, it felt like he’d fallen back to how he was before.
He tried to hide it from Alec, but his husband was nothing if not perceptive, and Alec had barely been awake for five minutes before he asked — gently — what was wrong.
“Nothing,” Magnus said reflexively, and immediately regretted it — both he and Alec were trying to train themselves out of that automatic denial of any problems, and he was supposed to be getting better at it.
Alec sighed, but still gently. “You don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to, but please don’t pretend nothing’s wrong.”
“A lot of things are wrong,” Magnus shot back, and then relented. “I’m just — upset. For no particular reason.”
He didn’t feel like he deserved the softness in Alec’s eyes, or his offer: “Can I help?”
Magnus went to shake his head, then paused, aborted a nod, opened his mouth, and shut it again. Alec interpreted it — correctly — as a silent stay that Magnus couldn’t bring himself to say aloud, and promptly took the day off. Magnus protested, but Alec knew him well enough to see his quiet relief underneath it all.
They spent the morning in bed, eating pastries that Alec had summoned with the help of the Alliance rune on his wrist (Magnus hadn’t been able to bring himself to use magic, and as soon as he realised it, Alec had promptly snapped his fingers to do the spell Magnus had taught him not so long ago). Alec didn’t push Magnus to talk and Magnus didn’t offer; that would come later, when Magnus had reminded himself that Alec wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he was a little bit evil inside.
Lunch was sandwiches Alec made using the contents of their kitchen, which were far more numerous than they’d been before Alec had come into his life, and then the two of them curled up on the couch with Magnus half lying across Alec, half sitting in his lap. It was possibly Magnus’ favourite position; Alec’s arm was wrapped around him, his warmth enveloping him. Even if he didn’t deserve to have Alec here, Alec was here, and that was everything.
“Want to talk about it?” Alec asked into the quiet between them.
“I don’t — nothing happened,” Magnus said, words seeming to tangle together in their unwillingness to be let out. He’d never talked about this before, not with Ragnor or Cat or Raphael who already knew what it was, not with any of the people he’d loved who he’d never told about this for fear they’d leave. He turned his head, shifting so that he could see Alec’s face but not yet meeting his eyes. “I just — I don’t know how to… to be good.”
Alec blinked at him for a moment in blatant confusion. “Magnus, you are good. Of course you are.”
“No, I’m — it’s not—” Magnus broke off, shaking his head. “You have such faith in me, Alexander, but I have done… bad things. Things that I regret.”
“And it’s precisely because you regret them that you’re good,” Alec returned. “Magnus, you have the best, brightest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. You love wholly and unconditionally. You give second chances when they’re really not deserved. You drop everything to come help us whenever we need you, without regard for yourself.”
“Edom’s magic pulls at me to destroy,” Magnus said, dully, Alec’s words battering against his defences. “Eventually, I’ll slip up — I’ll get angry or distracted and it might — I might — I could hurt somebody, hurt you, so easily—”
“Your magic,” Alec said with sudden intensity, “has never hurt me and never will.”
Magnus was struck silent by the depth of certainty in his voice. Previous partners had all fallen somewhere between fearing his magic and reluctantly tolerating it; Alec adored it, and it adored him in return. He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he opted for levity instead. “That’s not something I’ve heard many Shadowhunters say.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t have quite the intended effect — a realisation dawned across Alec’s face and he looked at Magnus with a sharper gaze than before. “You’re worried about this because of what you’ve been told in the past, aren’t you?”
It was almost more a statement than a question, so Magnus didn’t say anything — what was he supposed to say to that? No would be a lie, and yes felt like an admission of weakness — but Alec read his acknowledgement on his face anyway.
“There is nothing wrong with you,” he said quietly. “There’s a lot wrong with the world you live in.”
“Perhaps,” Magnus replied, spurred to sudden admittance by the tenderness in Alec’s eyes that chased away the fear, “but it will take a while for me to believe it.”
Alec hummed and pulled him closer, settling Magnus between his arms as they reclined on the couch. “That’s alright. I’ll keep telling you so until you get there.”
Softly, Magnus smiled.