The Shadowhunter boy was good at soccer when he was concentrating, but he was constantly abandoning the game and zigzagging back to Magnus, hovering by his side like an adoring bumblebee.

Janus envisioned what Magnus had become in his world, the pitiful thing his body had been. It was odd to see Magnus whole and well, sitting under a cherry blossom tree. He was wearing buckled purple boots, skinny jeans, and a tank top that had BABE WITH THE POWER scrawled on it in pixie dust. He was leaning against the tree, cat’s eyes slitted lazily, but he smiled whenever the Shadowhunter boy returned to him, and after the fifth time he made a small gesture, and the falling cherry blossoms began to circle around the boy’s head, winding intricate patterns like bracelets around his arms, brushing against his plump cheeks and making him giggle.

The warlock boy was very intense about soccer, short legs pumping furiously over the grass. Eventually he seemed to become concerned Alec might win, and he picked up the ball and ran away with it, back to Magnus and the other kid.

“I won!” announced the warlock boy. “I always win.”

Magnus kissed the boy on the cheek and laughed, and the sound of his laugh made a smile light on Alec’s face as he jogged up to them. Janus had forgotten how much more Alec had begun to smile, once Magnus was in his life.

“I heard you lost your soccer game?” teased Magnus. “I heard the Consul is a big loser?”

Alec shrugged. “No kiss for me, I guess.”

He was flirting, Janus realized. Alec hadn’t lived long enough to learn how to do that, not in the confident way he was now.

“Oh, there just might be,” said Magnus.

The Shadowhunter kid was still playing with the floating blossoms. The warlock kid put his ball on the ground and trotted after it as it glided gently away.

Alec leaned down, taking Magnus’s pixie dust shirt in both hands to pull Magnus up toward him. Magnus’s spiky head tipped back, and one of Alec’s arms went around Magnus’s waist.

Janus remembered another world. Alec had still been clinging to what Magnus had become, at the very last. Those strong scarred archer’s hands, always swift to protect and defend, held him fast. Even in death, there seemed no way to break Alec’s grip.

Janus hadn’t had the chance to take Clary in his arms one last time, as Alec had with Magnus. Janus understood the choice his parabatai had made, the only choice he could’ve made with evil on his threshold and all he loved in ruins.

When Janus and Sebastian found them lying together in the rubble, Sebastian had been furious. He had wanted to capture Alec alive. Alec knew secrets about the resistance, about small pockets of hidden free humans: information Sebastian craved and that Alec had died to hide.