wasblindbefore | (no subject)

It isn't even December yet, and already the city is covered with season decorations that make Elvis cringe every time he steps out of his apartment. There were probably Christmases he enjoyed as a child, but it's hard to remember those now, all of them overshadowed by the year he was twelve. Holiday cheer just about went out the window the year they found his mother's body. However, while Christmas may very much not be his thing, he does have a girlfriend whose birthday is in a week and a half, and he's got to do something about that. He won't just not get her a present because he hates this time of year. If anything, whatever small celebration they have will be a welcome respite from the weight of the rest of the season, a few hours in which he doesn't have to think about the approach of Christmas, just Gwen.

She's never really easy to shop for — no one is, though he also doesn't often go out of his way for anyone else — mostly because he doesn't buy into all of this commercialistic crap, and he doubts she would want anything along those lines, either. He just wants to find something small and thoughtful. He's wandered into a few jewelry stores, remembering the microscope necklace he gave her the first time they celebrated her birthday together, so far coming up blank, and then into a bookstore, where he's usually likely to find something. He's given her favorite books of his before, something they might be able to connect over. When it comes to science, he's a bit at a loss — or, well, he's good at it, but in a different sort of way than applies to her — so something along those lines is generally out, but maybe he can at least get some sort of idea here.

Rounding a corner into another aisle, he almost doesn't look twice at the man he sees there, until Elvis realizes that he looks familiar. There are many few people in Darrow for whom that's the case, so when it hits him, he figures he might as well ask. "Hey," he says. "You're Magnus, right? Alec's husband."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh!" Magnus noised with somewhat genuine interest. He wasn't particularly keen to learn the ways of the trade, all the gritty and gory details, but it was an unusual line of work, something he rarely encountered. After centuries of having to watch people pass around him, death didn't scare him. Loss hurt, badly; that never changed. But the reality of death was settled in his mind.

There was a dark joke here about an influx in business post-Purge, but even Magnus was not crass enough to go there.

"Do you enjoy it? I know that family businesses can feel more like a burden than a calling sometimes, but other people seem to take to them easily given that that's all they know."

"I do, yeah," Elvis says, brow raising slightly as he nods. He's well aware that it's got to sound weird as hell, and maybe a little insensitive, to say outright that he likes what he does, but Magnus's interest seems genuine, not like he's bothered by the prospect of it, which is a nice change of pace. Most people tend to find it off-putting, if not outright upsetting. "I can't say there aren't other things I wouldn't've thought about doing, but... You grow up around something like that, it becomes normal pretty quickly."

He never had a chance to think about it otherwise. Besides, like all jobs that could potentially be considered unpleasant, someone has to do it. He knows what he's doing and knows he's good at it, so it might as well be him.

"I can imagine." Here was an opportunity for Magnus to tell Elvis about his own past. Being raised by a group of (essentially) monks who had their eyes removed or stitched over, along with their mouths, inured Magnus at a young age to a particular brand of grotesqueness that turned the stomachs of even the most valiant Shadowhunters. But such things were rarely spoken about even with Alec, let alone a friend of Alec's that Magnus had only just properly met.

"You didn't think of doing those other things here?" he asked. "Or are they things like... airplane pilot, which aren't exactly in heavy demand here."