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The day dawns bright and beautiful. Birds are singing in the crisp, early spring air, the sun is shining through the window, and Magnus Bane is practically quivering with excitement.
He rolls over in the bed, the warm weight of a scarred and runed arm still draped across his waist, to grin at Alec, who blinks sleepy blue eyes at him. “What’s going on?” Alec asks, immediately suspicious, “You’re never willingly awake this early in the morning, and you definitely never look this cheerful about it.”
Magnus’s grin widens. “We have an exciting day planned today. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.”
“Aren’t we taking the boys to a science museum with Catarina and Ragnor?” Alec yawns. “This seems like an excessive amount of excitement for a children’s science museum.”
“Ah, but you’re missing the most important part. What day is today?”
Alec’s eyebrows crinkle together adorably as his sleep fogged brain tries to figure out what Magnus is talking about. It takes all of Magnus’s self control to not lean over the last couple of inches of space between them and kiss his nose. “Sunday?”
“It’s Saint Patrick’s Day!” Magnus exclaims.
“Magnus, neither of us are Irish, and we’ve never celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day before. Why are you excited about it this year?”
“Because this year my oldest and dearest friend is miraculously returned from the dead,” Magnus says. “And there is nothing funnier than being around a Scotsman who is constantly being mistaken for Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“Magnus, are you using our children as a distraction so you can prank Ragnor?” Alec asks, catching on to Magnus’s implication.
“Of course not, Alexander,” Magnus replies. “I’m using our children as a distraction so we can prank Ragnor. Catarina’s in on it too. It’s a shame Tessa isn’t in town though. She got him really good one year.”
“Tessa did?” Alec says, raising his eyebrows in surprise.
“You’ve never seen how devious Tessa can be,” Magnus laughs. “We lived together for years, so I know how evil she really is under those sweet brown curls. Ragnor was stupid enough to underestimate her too. He only agreed to come to New York that year if Catarina and I both swore our strongest vows to not do anything to him, but he assumed Tessa was trustworthy and didn’t think to make her do it too. We even got him in a pub and drinking a green beer. You know how Ragnor hates wearing glamours, but he sometimes wears hats to cover his horns? While he was distracted, Tessa used magic to switch his hat with one of those leprechaun hats a drunk mundane was wearing. It even had a glittery gold buckle,” Magnus wipes a tear of laughter from his eye at the memory. “It took Ragnor half an hour to notice because he was too busy complaining about the beer, and when he finally did, all of the glasses in the pub shattered. There was green beer everywhere. All of us were totally covered in it, and I had to throw the clothes I was wearing away because I was never able to get the stains out, even with magic.”
“Isn’t he going to be suspicious that we’re going out on Saint Patrick’s Day?” Alec asks.
“That’s the really clever part of our plan,” Magnus replies, gold-green eyes flashing with mirth. “At the beginning of the year, Catarina altered all of the calendars in their apartment to look like this year was a leap year. Ragnor thinks Saint Patrick’s Day is tomorrow, and that the three of us are meeting for brunch. He won’t be on his guard today.”
“What’s the rest of the plan then?” Alec asks, clearly giving in to the spirit of mischief.
Magnus waves a hand and several sheets of sparkly green shamrock stickers appear. “You, me, and Catarina all take turns sticking a shamrock on Ragnor. The person who gets noticed is the loser and has to deal with his wrath.”
“That’s not exactly fair. Catarina is his girlfriend. He won’t notice her touching him, but he’ll definitely notice me touching him,” Alec says.
“Ah, but Catarina has an extra restriction,” Magnus replies. “She isn’t allowed to put any stickers on his back, and neither of us are allowed to use magic, to make it fair to you.”
“Alright, I’m in,” Alec says, stretching and glancing at the clock on the bedside table. “Y’know, you woke up really early today. We have at least half an hour before the boys wake up.”
Magnus scoots closer, reaching up to brush the tousled black hair out of Alec’s eyes before cupping his cheek with one hand. “There’s a lot we can do with half an hour,” he grins, pulling Alec in for a kiss as Alec’s arm tightens around his waist, pressing their bodies together.
~*~
Magnus carefully dresses the whole family in clothes that have a little green, but nothing that would make it immediately noticeable that it was deliberate. The boys wear matching bracelets, but only Max’s has the spell that will glamour his navy skin and hair to the same warm browns as Rafael’s, as well as cover his horns.
When they meet Catarina, who’s glamoured with her usual dark skin and hair, and Ragnor, who isn’t glamoured at all, in front of the museum, Magnus notices that Catarina’s blouse also has a subtle green flower pattern. Ragnor, on the other hand, has always been allergic to color in his wardrobe and is wearing a tan cardigan over a plain white t-shirt. It’s better than some of the horrible tweed suits Ragnor used to wear during his teaching days, but any shade of brown still made Ragnor look like a tree, in Magnus’s much more fashionable opinion.
The boys let go of Magnus and Alec’s hands and barrel toward Ragnor and Catarina at top speed with shrieks of “Aunt Cat!” and “Uncle Ragnor!”
Catarina crouches down to catch them both in a hug, smiling brightly. Magnus sees her whisper something to them, and when they let go of her, Max grabs Ragnor’s hand, tugging insistently. “Uncle Ragnor, I want to ride on your shoulders so I can see everything! You’re the tallest!”
“Only by half an inch,” Magnus protests, while Alec and Catarina both snort with laughter. Traitors, both of them. “That hardly counts,” he mutters mutinously.
Ragnor swings Max up to his shoulders with a smug look at Magnus, while Max giggles and grabs hold of Ragnor’s white hair and horns until he gets himself situated comfortably. When Max lets go of Ragnor’s horns, Magnus sees the green sparkle of a shamrock sticker on one of them.
That’s cheating, Magnus mouths at Catarina behind Ragnor’s back. Catarina just winks at him.
The game is on.
Max doesn’t last very long on Ragnor’s shoulders once they’re inside the museum and he sees how many things there are to touch.
A science museum had been the perfect choice for a distraction for Ragnor. As immortals, more traditional museums tended to only be fun if they snuck in a hip flask and took a drink every time they saw something inaccurate, which had gotten all of them banned from several museums in the past, and was not generally considered a family friendly activity.
But Ragnor is as engrossed in the interactive exhibits as the boys are, muttering things like, “Oh, that’s a clever way to teach that concept,” to himself every now and then. Grouchy as he was, Ragnor was a natural teacher and enjoyed explaining things to people who actually wanted to learn. He had taught history at the Shadowhunter Academy by necessity, but his hobby interests tended more towards physics, math, and engineering, and how he could apply them to magic, which is what had led to many of his breakthroughs in dimensional magic and getting electronics to work in Idris.
Ragnor had been an expert in most of these concepts before children’s museums were invented, so Magnus knows he had never visited one before. Ragnor is clearly fascinated to see how the basics have been broken down to be introduced to small children, crouching down with the boys to help them with the displays and answer their questions about the science behind them.
Magnus twines his fingers with Alec’s as they leisurely stroll behind the others, watching the boys learn while they’re playing. “This is nice,” he says, squeezing Alec’s hand and leaning into his shoulder as the walk.
“Watching our children have fun, but not actually being responsible for chasing them?” Alec replies as Catarina grabs Max’s arm before he can dart off after something shiny and get lost in the crowd.
Magnus laughs, turning his head to press a kiss to Alec’s temple. “Something like that,” he murmurs. It always warmed his heart to see how much his two oldest friends loved his children, and how much the boys loved them back.
Ragnor says something to Rafael in Spanish, and Rafael corrects a word he had mixed up. As good as Ragnor was at complex math and physics, he was absolutely terrible at languages.
Decades ago, Raphael Santiago had been horrified to learn that a six hundred year old immortal couldn’t speak Spanish, and had insisted on teaching him, despite Ragnor’s protests over having attention drawn to what Ragnor considered his most embarrassing flaw. Magnus thinks it may have been the only thing Raphael had ever been patient about in his unlife, keeping up the lessons through letters and phone calls for over fifty years. Ragnor’s Spanish had gone from abysmal to awkward, but understandable, and Rafael Lightwood-Bane had taken over his namesake’s job of gently correcting Ragnor’s grammar and mispronunciations the same way he did with Alec, who was, admittedly, getting better at Spanish much more rapidly than Ragnor.
Alec pats Ragnor on the shoulder in solidarity, leaving behind a shamrock.
It’s Magnus’s turn then.
“Oooh, Ragnor look at this,” Magnus says, grabbing Ragnor by the elbow to pull him over to a very shiny display about the light spectrum, leaving an equally shiny shamrock behind on the elbow of Ragnor’s sweater.
Catarina stands on her toes next to Ragnor, leaning on his shoulder for balance while she tries to see something over the heads of the crowd on the other side of the museum. “It looks like there’s a biology and anatomy display over there,” she says, with genuine enthusiasm, pointing in that direction, and Magnus sees a glint of green on Ragnor’s shirt, right over his collarbone.
They wander through the anatomy displays, and Catarina takes over answering Max and Rafe’s questions. Unlike Ragnor, Catarina was used to explaining her field of expertise to small children, as she frequently worked in the pediatric ER. She easily answers their questions about the most disgusting parts of the human body with a nurse’s professionalism, and explains the displays to them in simple enough ways for them to understand.
They all squeeze inside of an ear that is giant enough to just barely accommodate even Magnus and Ragnor’s heights, and Alec brushes past Ragnor in the cramped space to help Max read one of the signs, leaving a sticker in the middle of Ragnor’s back.
When they leave the giant ear, Magnus pretends to see something in Ragnor’s hair. “Ragnor, I think some dust fell on you,” he says, reaching over to brush the imaginary dust away, and leaving a sticker on Ragnor’s other horn to match Catarina’s. He raises his eyebrows at Catarina in challenge behind Ragnor’s back, and Catarina shoots him a wicked grin.
As they make their way to the dinosaur exhibit, much to Max’s delight, Catarina brushes past Alec. “Your move,” she whispers, with a wink.
It takes Magnus a minute to find the new sticker, sparkling green on Ragnor’s back pocket. “Isn’t that cheating?” he mutters to Alec. “I feel like that should count as cheating.”
Alec shrugs. “It’s not his back, so I think it’s technically fair.”
Magnus glowers at him for taking Catarina’s side, and Alec kisses his cheek. Magnus can’t even keep up a pretend glower after that.
Alec seizes a perfect opportunity when he notices Rafe’s shoe has come untied. He bends down to retie it, and subtly sticks a shamrock to the top of Ragnor’s shoe.
Along with the fossils, there’s a display of dinosaur models in a pre-historic habitat, approximating what they could have actually looked like. “Papa, the triceratops looks like Uncle Ragnor!” Max exclaims, grabbing Magnus’s hand to pull him to the correct dinosaur. Magnus has to admit his son has a point. The triceratops is colored greenish, and there’s something in the display dinosaur’s serious expression that is distinctly Ragnor-like.
Magnus takes the chance to pretend to see a spider crawling on Ragnor’s collar. He tries to leave a sticker on the back of Ragnor’s shirt, but he miscalculates slightly, and the edge of the sticker brushes against the back of Ragnor’s neck, probably feeling like an actual spider. Ragnor reaches behind his neck to brush it away and pulls the sticker off. He glares down at the sparkling green shamrock with dawning understanding.
“Magnus what the hell?” he growls. “That godawful holiday isn’t even until tomorrow.”
“Actually,” Catarina admits in her sweetest voice, “I may have altered your calendar slightly.”
She smiles brightly as Ragnor turns his glare on her. “I would say I can’t believe you would betray me like that, but that does sound exactly like something you would do,” he grumbles.
Ragnor angrily hunts for all of the stickers while everyone else tries to smother their laughter. Catarina holds out a hand to take the stickers as he pulls them off to keep Ragnor from throwing them on the floor in his tantrum.
“Two more,” Catarina says cheerfully, reaching up to pull the stickers off of Ragnor’s horns.
Ragnor looks aghast. “How did you even manage that?”
Catarina gives him another look over, making sure all the stickers are gone. “No more green,” she says, and reaches up again to pinch Ragnor’s cheek. “You know you get pinched if you don’t wear green on Saint Patrick’s Day, right?”
Ragnor looks thunderstruck, and is actually at such a loss for words, all he can do is gesture angrily at his green skin. Catarina just smiles and pats his cheek, where she had pinched. “It doesn’t count unless you’re wearing it,” she says in a sing-song voice while Magnus howls with laughter.
Ragnor closes his eyes and visibly counts to ten in his head. “All of you are terrible people. Max and Rafe are the only ones allowed to talk to me for the rest of the day.”
“He’s just upset because someone is after his Lucky Charms,” Magnus stage whispers to Alec, and a sign over their heads sways and creaks alarmingly.
“For fu-“ Ragnor starts to snarl, but Catarina clamps a hand over his mouth.
“Not in front of the boys,” she hisses, then raises an amused eyebrow at Ragnor. “And don’t try to lick my hand, you idiot. You’re not a child, and you know that’s not going to work on me.”
Magnus hopes she’s referring to all the gross stuff she has to put up with as a nurse.
~*~
They had made it through most of the museum by the time Ragnor had discovered their game, and Max and Rafael were starting to drag their feet with exhaustion, so Magnus and Alec had decided to call it a day and take the boys home.
“You know, the worst of the holiday is over,” Catarina says to Ragnor after the Lightwood-Bane family leaves. “Why don’t we find a bar where we can get some green beer and fish and chips like we’re drunk Americans pretending to be Irish.”
Ragnor sighs, but let’s her drag him along. He uses a rare glamour to get through the rest of the day without inviting any Irish remarks, but he seems much more cheerful during dinner, hardly even complaining about how bad the green beer is.
There’s a group of drunk mundanes dancing and leading the rest of the bar through some rousing Irish drinking songs and sea shanties. Catarina and Ragnor have both had a little too much to drink, and Ragnor pulls her up to dance, even adding his Scottish brogue to the chorus of the song they’re singing:
“Whack fol the da O, dance to your partner,
Welt the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn't it the truth I told you?
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!”
“I can’t believe I missed my chance to use that ‘thunderin’ Jaysus, do ye think I’m dead’ line,” Ragnor grumbles, shaking his head, when the song ends.
Catarina laughs, but she holds his hands a little tighter. Ragnor still had nightmares about how Malcolm had brought him back from the dead, and she knew the jokes and sarcasm were his way of giving them less power over him.
A new song about a drunken sailor starts, and Ragnor whirls her into the dance again.
“You look beautiful tonight,” he tells her with a grin when they sit back down at their table, flushed and laughing from the beer and the silliness.
They get home without any beer glasses exploding, and Catarina comments on his surprisingly easy going mood as they both drop their glamours. “I thought for sure you would spend the rest of the night sulking and glaring,” she says with a teasing poke to his ribs.
Ragnor shrugs. “I bought a present for the boys from the gift shop, and it made me feel better,” he says, pulling a Lego box out of his bag.
“Ragnor, why is the box empty?”
“I magicked all of the pieces under the bottom sheet of Magnus and Alec’s bed,” he says with that slow grin he gets when he’s feeling mischievous.
Catarina bursts out laughing, “Oh, that’s actually evil. Magnus is going to kill you. I hope Alec doesn’t throw him down on the bed tonight.”
They’re both still laughing as Ragnor goes to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and Catarina goes to take a shower. She notices something unusual in the mirror and stares at it for several seconds. She waves a wrist to set things back to normal, but it has no effect. She walks back out of the bathroom. “Ragnor, how long has my hair been green?”
Ragnor grins at her over his mug of tea. “Since dinner.”
“And why can’t I undo it?”
“Because it’s a potion, not a a glamour, and your glamour doesn’t cover it either,” he laughs. “The spell will wear off by morning. If it’s any consolation, it’s a beautiful color on you,” he adds with another of his evil grins.
Realization dawns on her. So that’s why he had pulled her up to dance at the bar. His green skin had been glamoured, so she had been the one who looked like the overenthusiastic, not actually Irish, drunk New Yorker.
She narrows her eyes. “Why do you have a potion for turning hair green?”
”Because I knew you and Magnus were up to something, and I was going to get you first. My mistake was not seeing that calendar trick coming, so my plan was for tomorrow.”
Catarina shakes her head and turns on her heel to go take her shower while Ragnor cackles into his tea.
Later that night, right as Catarina is starting to doze off, Ragnor’s phone starts to ring on the night stand, with what appears to be a new ringtone courtesy of Magnus.
“It's not that easy being green, having to spend each day the color of the leaves.”
Ragnor groans and rolls over, burying his face in his pillow. “How did Magnus get my phone?” he grumbles into the pillow, while Catarina covers her mouth to suppress her giggles. “And if I hear the words ‘Kermit the Frog’ come out of your mouth, I will push you out of the bed,” he adds, turning his head so he can narrow his eyes at her. She decides to not test him on that one.
The phone stops singing and lets out several frog croaks as a series of text messages come through. Ragnor picks up the phone and starts sniggering as he reads them. Catarina sits up so she can look at them over his shoulder.
There are several from Magnus, containing some very creative swearing and anatomically impossible suggestions, and a single message from Alec:
Ragnor Fell, as a Shadowhunter of the New York Institute, it is my duty to inform you that Legos are considered weapons banned by the Accords.
Catarina wonders which of them was the unfortunate one to discover that their bed was full of Legos as she curls back up against Ragnor’s side to go to sleep. She can feel him still laughing at his phone as he runs his fingers through her magically green hair, admiring his pranks.