Once Upon A Time In Brooklyn

Chapter Twenty: Childhood Stories

"There was once a clever deer called Kancil. One day he was out, walking around and thinking about how intelligent he was, when he failed to watch where he was going and fell down a hunter's hole..."

*

"C'mon... C'mon!"

Magnus' hands scrabbled against the brick wall of his prison, trying to climb to the open top of the strange, circular cell he was trapped inside. The walls were only around eleven feet tall, but still too far for him to jump up and he had no furniture within the cell that was tall enough to allow him to balance on it to reach the top.

If he still had his magic, he'd have been able to get out without even trying, but perhaps because fate wanted to screw him over, or perhaps because Camille somehow planned it that way, he had been unable to use it since he'd woken in his darkened prison cell.

Camille had thrown down clothes, food, even the occasional bottle of alcohol, but had refused to free him.

She was waiting for something, she said, and Magnus wasn't sure quite what it was. If it was the end of the curse, she was probably in luck. By his own calculations he had been down here for weeks already.

Long enough to feel like he might, perhaps, be going totally insane.

At first he'd hoped that the shadowhunters would come for him, seraph blades blazing, and free him. Surely Alec couldn't have written off what happened between them in the Steed of Bells' stable as just a mistake on Magnus' path to true love...? But Alec didn't come. Clary didn't come. Hell, he'd have even taken Jace at that point.

His next hope was that Raphael or Simon would discover his prison and raise the alarm. Yet he'd seen neither hide nor hair of them while he was down there. Whatever had distracted the shadowhunters appeared to be keeping his two favorite vampires busy as well.

Either that or Camille had him somewhere so secret, so hard to find, that not even Raphael was able to find it.

He heard a sound from above, a carefully manicured hand reached out over the top of the cell. Magnus knew it was Camille's from the nail polish. She dropped down a bag and was gone before he managed to get a word out.

Overcooked rice, boiled vegetables and undercooked chicken wings. Vampires were not exactly connoisseurs of fine food after all. Magnus guessed this was probably the best Camille could do, unless she had somehow hired a cook for her prisoner... Something Magnus doubted.

"You have got to be kidding me..." he sighed and began to eat his drab meal, wondering how much longer he either went so stir-crazy he tried something mad or the curse came for him with a vengeance.

*

"At first, Kancil thought it was hopeless for him to escape, that he would never manage to escape such a well put together trap. But soon an elephant came and saw him..."

*

"So no one told you life was gonna be this way," Magnus sang loudly, adding the claps after by himself by banging two chopsticks against the lid of a chinese takeaway box he'd repurposed as a drum. He'd taken to singing to take his mind of the pain of his ripped hands. "Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O-"

"Who is singing?"

Magnus stopped singing immediately, looking up at the top of the cell. It was the first voice he'd heard that wasn't Camille's or his own since he'd been put down here.

An old face peered over the top of the cell, an oddly vacant air about it.

"You... You're that subjugate!" Magnus said, eyes wide. The man stared down at him blankly.