Magnus had been smiling, but now he stopped. Alec felt even more alarmed.

“We’re not adopting him?” Magnus asked. “But … can’t we?”

Alec blinked.

“I thought we were,” Magnus said. “Alec, I promised him. Do you not want to?”

Alec stared at him for another instant. Magnus’s face was tense, intent but confused at the same time, as if he was baffled by his own vehemence. Suddenly Alec was laughing. He’d thought he was waiting to be sure, yet this was better, as all the best things in his life were better than any dream that had come before. Not Alec knowing right away, but seeing Magnus know right away. It was so sweet, and so obvious that this was exactly the way things should be: seeing Magnus experience the instant instinctive love as Alec had with Max, as Alec learned with Rafael the slow, sweet, and conscious way of love that Magnus had learned with Max. Opening a new door in their familiar beloved home, as if it had always been there.

“Yes,” Alec said, breathless with laughter and love. “Yes, I want to.”

Magnus’s smile returned. Alec pulled him into his arms, then turned so Magnus had his back to the wall. Alec cupped Magnus’s face in both hands.

“Give me a minute,” Alec said. “Let me look at you. God, I missed home.”

Magnus’s fascinating eyes were narrowed slightly, watching Alec back, and his smiling mouth was a little startled, as it often was, though what surprised him Alec didn’t know. Alec couldn’t just look at him. He kissed him, and that mouth was against his own, the kiss making every tired muscle in Alec’s body turn to liquid sweetness. To Alec, love always meant this: his shining city of eternal light. The land of lost dreams reclaimed, his first kiss and his last.

Magnus’s arms went around him.

“My Alec,” Magnus murmured. “Welcome home.”

Now when Alec asked himself Is this how you want to live your whole life? he could answer yes, and yes, and yes. Every kiss was the answer yes, and the question he would get to ask Magnus someday. They kissed up against the bedroom wall for long bright moments, then both stepped away from the other with a wrench.

“The—” Alec began.

“—kids,” Magnus finished. “Later.”

“Wait, the kids plural?” asked Alec, and became aware of what Magnus had heard: the stealthy sound of tiny feet exiting Max’s room.

“That hellborn brat,” Magnus muttered. “I read him eight stories.”

“Magnus!”

“What, I can call him that. It’s you who can’t call him that, because it’s infernally insensitive.” Magnus grinned, then squinted at his own stained hand. “Alec, I know you don’t really care about your clothes, but you don’t usually come home covered in soot.”

“Better see to the kids,” said Alec, ducking out of the bedroom and the conversation.