Chapter Text
(xxiii) if I gave you my hand would you take it?
Eliot notices the rings the day Quentin and Alice come back from their shopping trip, because, well - they’re a little bit obvious. Green and black against Quentin’s skin, where before bright copper had once been, matched in everything but the patterns etched into them. Why black and green? he wants to ask, why anything at all? He wants to ask but he doesn’t know how, and so he says nothing.
He actually doesn’t have a wedding band anymore. He wouldn’t have any of his rings anymore, except he knows a few jewelry conjuring spells and replaced them, except for his wedding ring, the one from the marriage to Fen. It turns out, being mourned in Fillory is the equivalent of being legally declared dead, and being legally declared dead is the only method of Fillorian divorce available.
“Maybe you should consider changing the laws, High King Fen,” Eliot had said dryly when Fen told him this. “I mean, if I’m not actually dead but it still holds, maybe actual divorce can be an option now?”
“Maybe you’re right,” Fen had agreed, stroking Kaisa’s back.
Granted, Fen may or may not be High King forever. Margo is looking for a way to undo her banishment, and Eliot knows Fen is on board for that much. He does not know if Fen will easily give up the throne, or what will happen if she doesn’t and Margo won’t compromise. He… also doesn’t know what he’ll do, because he can imagine both of them looking to have him take their side and that is just -
He’s not a king anymore, and when he thinks of Fillory - Fillory is still a home to him and Cythera, yet it’s not Whitespire he thinks of. It’s a cottage in the middle of nowhere, it’s Teddy’s voice and Arielle’s teasing laughter, Terciel’s bright feathers in sunlight and Ileana mimicking Terciel, it’s Quentin and Ariadne. And Quentin and Ariadne are here, on Earth, and so Eliot and Cythera are here.
For now, so are Margo and Talaus. “Well, I owe Kady’s hedges for you, don’t I?” Margo says, tossing her hair like it’s nothing. “Anyway, we’re still not sure how to fix the exile problem. So I might as well keep myself occupied.”
“I guess you might as well,” Eliot says, and they go back to writing down spells for Kady. “God, I hope she doesn’t ask us to teach, can you fucking imagine?”
“Screw you, I’d be the best teacher they ever had. Also the scariest, and probably the hottest,” Margo retorts with the sly grin he’s always loved so much.
He doesn’t love it quite as much when Quentin and Kady come back from the sandwich shop down the street with their daemons walking close together and all four chatting quietly. They’re friendlier than they’ve ever been, and when Eliot had asked Q about it, he’d only gotten a shrug and a comment that “we found out we actually have a thing or two in common. Also she’s going to show me how to throw a punch.”
He doesn’t love it as much because Margo takes one look at Eliot and the way he can’t look away from Quentin’s hands as he and Kady unpack the food they’ve brought, the green and black catching the light differently than the copper had but still impossible to miss, and huffs.
“Honestly, El, shit or get off the pot,” she murmurs. “You can’t just pine from afar forever.”
“Actually, I am entirely capable of that. But I probably shouldn’t, this is true.” Not least because he made a promise. But the thing that Eliot is finding, is that it’s easy to make a promise to a figment of one’s own trapped mind. It’s easy, in a horrible, painful way, to make dramatic vows to someone who is in a coma and unable to hear them. It turns out that it is a lot harder to look Quentin Coldwater in the eye and tell him the truth now, when he can hear, can react, when he’s real and won’t just… let Eliot have whatever he wants because he’s a conjured-up illusion.
Because here’s the bottom line. Eliot almost lost him. For good. And that - he can’t breathe , just thinking about it. He just - needs Quentin around. Needs to wake up in the mornings with them wrapped up in each other like nothing’s ever changed. And Eliot will keep silent forever if not upsetting the balance means he gets to keep Quentin.
It’s only a fraction of what he wants. But given how close he came to having nothing but a memory, well. He’s reluctant to risk losing it.
Except Quentin went out, with his ex-girlfriend no less - although if Eliot is any judge of things, he’s fairly sure Alice and Kady are in the early stages of circling each other - and bought rings . Rings that he wears where he used to wear wedding bands. A green ring where there used to be a ring Eliot put on his finger.
He can still remember, will never forget that day. The middle of autumn in Fillory, the leaves red and orange and gold like flames against the blue sky, Teddy laughing that it’s about time they made it official after the ribbon had been tied round their hands. “He gets the teasing from you,” Quentin had said, rolling his eyes.
“And you love it in both of us, Coldwater, don’t deny it,” Eliot had said, grinning until Quentin gave up on trying to look annoyed and smiled too. And then, well, their hands were still tied together, how could Eliot not use that to reel Quentin in for a kiss?
Eliot blinks, and shakes off the memory. Margo is watching him watch Quentin, and he can feel her gaze like he’s transparent and she can see right through him. Probably because she can, always has.
Two days later, Eliot and Cythera find Quentin and Ariadne napping in their room, and Quentin has a sketchbook open on his lap because he fell asleep sitting up. Eliot shakes his head and moves the sketchbook so he can nudge Quentin down to lie properly. Soft sleepy grumbles are his response, and, familiar with that, he hushes them with a kiss to the top of Quentin’s head. Once he’s down, curled up almost in a ball, Eliot glances at the open sketchbook -
And his breath catches in his chest.
“Eliot?” Cythera asks, crossing to him and nosing at his free hand. “What is it?”
“I - it -” He shows her, flipping through the pages of a life together, a life he’d spent months trying not to think about, that Quentin decided to memorialize and then never show anyone, because Eliot’s seen his sketchbooks, he’s got a whole collection now. He’s never seen this one out where it can be seen, this one with its swirled pink and purple cover.
Peaches and plums, or close enough.
“We promised to be brave,” Cythera says quietly. “We can’t expect them to come to us this time, Eliot, or even really give us an opening.”
“I know that,” Eliot hisses, as he closes the sketchbook and puts it on the bedside table, gathers the pencils back into their case and puts them back as well. “I just - I will. But I can’t, yet. I don’t know how to tell him so he’ll believe me, Cythera. I don’t know how to fix what I broke.” Because he knows he broke more than Quentin’s heart, he knows that he must have broken some of Quentin’s faith in him too, and that, that is what Eliot can’t figure out how to surmount.
But he will, he knows that now, however scared he is of what it might cost him. He has to. Because he can’t bear this forever.
(xxiv) help me tie up the ends of a dream
“The funny part, the really funny part? My first Fillory copies were my mother’s. She started it, and then she couldn’t tolerate it anymore. She fell in love with a woman who didn’t like kids, she didn’t have the patience for me anyway, and she was basically gone. I should have taken that as a warning, magic and fantasy lands have a punch to the gut behind them.”
Dr. Griffin considers him, her eyes a pale blue behind her glasses, and for the first time Quentin almost considers sketching during a session, except he kind of wants to try and capture that shade of blue, and all he’s got is charcoal. “Do you blame her for your interest?”
“No. I blame her for leaving and then acting like she should still get a say in my life when she decides she feels like it, and for acting like all this -” he waves at the office “- is just me seeking attention. The fact that she set off the interests that led me to the best and worst things in my life is just… a messed up fucking coincidence. But at the same time… I wanted her to meet Alice, once, I want her to meet Eliot. Her meeting Arielle would’ve never been possible, but I wanted that too.”
Quentin almost stops talking, but, fuck, he’s said this much, might as well finish it out, right? “I wanted it with my dad more because I knew he’d want to meet them, I knew he’d be happy and I got to see that a little when I told him about my other life. But I wanted her to know too and I - I don’t know if it’s because I still want her to be my mother on some level, or if I just wanted her to see that someone. Loves me. Even if she doesn’t.”
Damn it, how had he ended up talking about his mother? They’d started out with his first considered suicide attempt, the incident with the pills and whiskey and Ariadne clawing at him till he stopped, then suddenly he was talking about Mom. Ariadne is curled on his lap today, while Dr. Griffin’s kakopo daemon sits in his usual bookshelf nest. Quentin wonders sometimes what that deceptively silly-looking daemon thinks, watching him every session like he does, but he tries not to brood on it. At least he’s less judgey than the last two therapists’ daemons. They’d both had monkeys, and the judgment had been obvious on their faces.
“You used the present tense with Eliot,” Dr. Griffin says mildly, and Quentin shrugs.
“I’m still in love with him. I don’t think I’m going to shake that, or ever stop hoping, a little. It’s just part of me now, I think I’ve accepted that. And he’s - I don’t know. He was always good at mixed messages, and the thing is that... In our other life we didn’t have to talk about it, I feel like he’s trying to tell me something but he won’t say it.”
“Have you thought about asking him?”
“Well, yeah, obviously,” Quentin huffs. “But I don’t want to - it’s good. We’re good. I’d rather stay in the in-between that’s good than risk upsetting the balance and things go wrong. Does that make sense?”
Dr. Griffin watches him steadily. “Does it make sense to you?”
“You know, doc, it would be really nice if you could just cast a damn spell and tell me how to fix everything screwy in my head, but magic can’t do that any more than it can cure cancer. I said this before and I’ll say it again, who made this system up, this running on pain crap? I have depression, shouldn’t I get, like, super-charged?”
Dr. Griffin raises her eyebrows, but she lets him change the subject. Quentin likes this about her, actually - he gets very stream of consciousness and he knows it, and Dr. Griffin usually follows his tangents more than his other therapists did. “You tell me. How is your magic, after working with me and taking your medication?”
Quentin shrugs. “Better, I think, actually.” Weirder, also - he has a hunch, lately, that he can feel it when something has magic in it, but he’s not sure if he’s onto something or not yet. He’s keeping it quiet until he has a better sense for it. “I can focus more, anyway. So there’s one strike against the bullshit about my pills I was fed on day one, right?”
And, frankly, now that he’s figured that out, it pisses him off. But there’s not much he can do about it, so he tries not to dwell. It mostly works.
After the session, Quentin goes back to the art supply shop. On something that’s almost a whim, but feels like more than that, he buys a case of colored pencils. He also, before leaving the coffee shop - today he couldn’t settle and three pages of his sketchbook are full of little doodles, but nothing complete - buys two dozen mixed muffins to take back to the loft. No real reason, except they make great muffins and he should probably learn to share.
No one’s in the kitchen or living room when he gets home except for Penny 23 and his eagle, which gives Quentin and Ariadne half a moment’s pause. It’s strange, being around 23, these days. Strange because their original Penny and his eagle - a golden eagle instead of a crowned eagle - are fresh in their minds all over again, strange because 23 is the other witness to Quentin’s suicide attempt, and not only a witness, but…
Quentin sets the muffin box down on the counter, and without looking at Penny, he asks, “Why did you listen to me?” Ariadne leans against his leg and he’s not sure why he asked, it’s not like he regrets ensuring that if he did die, no one else but Everett would, but something about it bothers him.
“What, Coldwater?”
“In the Mirror World, when I told you to take Alice and go. You don’t like me, I’m pretty sure half the time you look at me and see the Beast. Which, OK, I probably would too in your shoes, I can’t help that or anything, but you didn’t even argue with me. I just wondered why,” Quentin says, tap-tapping his fingers against the counter. There’s gold flecks in the countertop if you look closely enough, and it makes him think of gold sparks and how they burn.
Fuck.
“He told me to,” 23 says, and Quentin turns enough to see him, the uncomfortable scowl on his face, the way his crowned eagle - Theia, their Penny’s daemon was Theia, Quentin assumes 23’s is also Theia - takes flight with an unhappy shriek. “Dead me told me to ‘do what he says’, I don’t know why, though from what I heard he used you as a messenger so I’m guessing he used me to make sure you got there. Can’t say I appreciate being jerked around like that.”
And, OK, Quentin can relate to that because he’s not entirely pleased to have been used as a messenger either, though he gets that Penny at least believed it was the only option. If Sean’s timing had been just a little off, Quentin knows he might well have chosen to move on, without ever knowing he had another option. “Fair enough. I just - like I said. Wondered.”
“Yeah, well, if I’d known I was signing up to pull an assisted suicide, I might have been less inclined to go with it instead of grabbing you by the damn hood and dragging you out with us.”
“Well, that’s blunt,” Quentin says after a moment’s pause, turning to look Penny 23 full on. “But I guess you could say I’ve earned blunt. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that, I’m sorry - I wasn’t planning that but it was still a screwy thing to do.” His thumbs rub along his rings, an old habit he’s fallen easily back into. “How much did you hear, from my head? Our Penny used to rant about how loud I was.”
“Enough to know you were fucked up, not enough to know how much. Enough to know I couldn’t call you out too much for playing along with that thing , because in your shoes I would’ve too.”
“Christ, I’m really starting to get sick of being obvious to all the wrong people,” Quentin mutters before adding in a louder voice, “This is probably where I turn the tables on you and pull the ‘if you hurt my best friend’ shovel talk but, uh, I’m probably not that convincing and anyway, I’m not sure it still applies.” He’s not sure it should apply; he’d finally gotten the whole story of Julia’s turn human, which had turned out to involve 23 making the decision for her instead of reading her mind.
“Your guess is as good as mine on that one,” 23 says, sounding tired. And there’s something - Quentin is not on 23’s side, here. He is very much on Julia’s side, on the side of his friend who has had her choices taken away from her way, way too many times. But he wonders, uncomfortably, what he’d do, what he would have done, in 23’s shoes. He’d like to think he’d do better, do differently - that he’d learned from forcing Alice back to humanity when he was in love with her and thought it meant he knew what she wanted. He’d like to think that, if they are using the same analogy, that if he’d lost Eliot, then was maybe getting him back in a new reality, he’d not pull a similar stunt just to keep him. He’d like to think this but he wonders sometimes.
Then again, Quentin actually can’t imagine being willing to replace Eliot that way to begin with, by pursuing another version of him. It seems kind of creepy, though in fairness it’s probably the kind of thing you can’t be certain you’d refuse to do until the issue comes up. Regardless, he can’t really see himself in 23’s shoes.
And yet… Penny’d made Julia smile, for a little while. In a way almost like how a teenaged Julia had started to smile at James, Quentin seeing it and having to turn away and make himself breathe through the jealousy. Jealous of both of them, he can admit now, just like he can admit that Ethan (first kiss, first fuck, first everything but love) had blond hair like James and brown eyes like Julia and both of these probably had something to do with why Quentin wanted him in the first place.
Well, that and they had a lot of fun trying to out-cheat each other at poker.
“Try an apology with no excuses, and if you pull a stunt like this again, I’ll see if I can’t pull off acting on a decent threat after all,” he says to 23 and leaves the room, because really, he’s not sure what else there is to say.
“So, that was weird,” Ariadne says when they’re back in the room they share with Eliot and Cythera. A side note, here; it is ridiculously unfair to share a room with Eliot, because between the multiple shampoos and the hair product, aftershave and cologne that are definitely paired by their smell as well as effect, the whole damned room always smells like him.
It is just - not fair.
“Life is weird,” Quentin says, reaching for his salve. The scars on his back run down to mid-thigh or so, and they’re mostly not bad, except for when he showers. He used to like hot showers but now, it’s probably sense memory and not actual damage but the hot water makes him feel like the sparks are burning through him again. So, he runs the water cool now. But the sunburst scars on his palms… He has stress balls he squeezes every day, and he has this magicked salve, all to keep the scar tissue from hardening and giving him trouble.
Dr. Lipson, when he went back for a checkup, said that the drawing probably helps too, at least his dominant hand. The trick is to never go too long without working both his hands, because that will give the tissue a chance to stiffen. He could lose enough hand mobility to have real trouble with magic, if it gets bad.
He prefers to use the stress balls right after waking up and right before going to bed, making them part of his routine. Also, it’s easier because it means Eliot’s the only one who sees, but Quentin is the one who sees Eliot try to go without the cane only to wobble too much and need it. They’ve been here before, as age caught up to them. Whatever they are now, they are safe in this, and know it.
If only it wasn’t the only thing Quentin is certain about, when it comes to Eliot. And thinking that, Quentin pulls out the new colored pencils, and the sketchbook where all his Mosaic drawings live. Because his memories are in color, after all.
He wakes up, later, to find his sketchbook closed and placed on the bedside table, the pencils back in their case and set neatly on top of it. The thing is, the last thing he remembers is feeling a pencil slip from his fingers. “Did I put that there?” he asks Ariadne.
“I don’t think so, but I was sleeping myself,” she says.
Well. Shit.
(xxv) played songs we never heard, but we danced anyway
“I’ve been thinking. There has to be something off about the theory that magic comes from pain,” Julia says, laying back on the couch and folding her hands over her stomach. Next to her, Quentin flips a pencil over and under his fingers while Asterion preens Ariadne’s fur. For a moment, they could be in undergrad again, or even earlier - high school, middle school, elementary school.
“What do you mean, something off?” Quentin asks without looking up from the book he’s reading. He’s looking up something for Alice, she thinks, while Julia tries and fails to cast simple spells. It’s really starting to piss her off, because she knows her magic is still there, she just can’t seem to access it properly.
“Well, I mean, look at you. You said magic’s easier now, with you back on your meds, right?”
“Mm. I mean, I’m not exactly better at it,” Quentin says thoughtfully, closing the book with a finger inside it to keep his page marked. “But I can think it all through more clearly, because my head’s clearer. I can concentrate better. But I think I see your point, I was complaining about it myself. I have depression, you’d think it’d make me extra powerful.”
“Maybe that’s what Fogg was trying to do, telling you to quit your meds, though that’s no excuse,” Julia says. “But, I mean - if it was just about pain, then there wouldn’t be any reason for, let’s say, magic to run in families, but we know that it does. Some of that is probably that fucked up people can end up raising fucked up kids even when they try not to, but that can’t be all of it.”
Julia sits up, shifting over on the couch so she can lean against Quentin’s side, put her head on his shoulder and twine their fingers together. “Maybe once there’s one magician, the link stays open, and can be inherited,” she says aloud, still pondering her theory. “So maybe - maybe pain opens the door to magic, but what happens next doesn’t have to be more pain. What do you think?”
“Could be,” Quentin says, tilting his head so his cheek rests against the top of her hair. “I don’t know, Jules, you’re the one with the knowledge discipline, I just fix things.” And there’s something happy in just the words, she notices. Julia happens to know that Quentin really likes fixing things, outright gets a kick out of using mending spells to fix any little broken thing in the apartment. Like when the kitchen sink got knocked out of alignment thanks to one of Kady’s hedge-students and water was spraying everywhere, for example.
Only a few days ago and Q had been soaked when he was done but smiling in a soft, pleased way Julia’s rarely seen since puberty hit and depression came with it.
So there’s something happy in Quentin’s voice when he says he fixes things, but also something exasperated right now, because he knows that mending isn’t the kind of fix she needs. And that - “Hey. You’re sitting here letting me talk at you, that’s kind of exactly what I need right now.”
“A sounding board? Is this going to be like the time you said I was just a sounding board for the track team and I ended up being the lookout while you guys set up your prank in the boys’ locker room?”
“... Probably not.”
“I feel so reassured, Jules. Really.”
Julia huffs and elbows Quentin in the side as Asterion takes flight with a laugh, Ariadne running around underneath him as he flies circles over all their heads. And then Julia tries another spell. It’s akin to the sing-along spell, the tut is similar, but -
It isn’t pain Julia is thinking of. It’s a lifetime of these two daemons playing together, of this man next to her who grew up when she wasn’t looking just like she did when he wasn’t looking either, except that this moment, this moment together has a thousand thousand echoes in their twenty-six, almost twenty-seven years alive. Maybe the weight of things matters more than what they are, and good things can be as heavy as the bad.
Julia’s fingers flick out in the last motion of the tut and music fills the air in the otherwise empty loft, music followed by her own giddy laughter. “Wait a minute,” Quentin says, “isn’t this -”
“Yep, the song we taught each other to dance with before junior prom,” Julia says, and on impulse she jumps up, using the fact that she’s still holding Quentin’s hand to pull him up with her. “Come on!”
“Jules, this is ridiculous.”
“I don’t care.”
And that’s how they end up spinning around the room while songs they played on repeat in high school run on magic through the air around them. It’s like being five and twelve and seventeen and twenty all at once, and this almost didn’t happen. The thought is enough to make Julia stumble and stop, and Quentin stops with her, blinking down at her in confusion as the music softens but doesn’t stop.
“You promise me, Q. Never again, OK?” Julia demands with a sudden lump in her throat, holding his hands like he’ll vanish if she lets go. “You’re my family, and I’m yours, and I - we’ve both fucked up, and I don’t know - but that’s over, it’s done. And I will be here, if you’ll be here. You got that?”
“You’re more my brother than they’re my sisters, and this is more home than my house,” Julia confessed at ten, on the tire swing Mr. C built for them both.
“And you and Dad are my family, Mom isn’t,” Quentin had told her then, his gaze intent on hers. “Always, right?”
“Always.”
Now those same eyes study her, and Julia holds on tight, thinks of the sunlight dappled through the trees, the gentle motion of the stopped swing. Julia has magic that’s only a little accessible, Quentin has charcoal smears and mysterious rings on his hands, they both have years of hell weighing them down and all the things that, before magic, they’d known how to share. All the things they’ve forgotten how to share.
“Then I guess I have to be here, don’t I?” Quentin says, and this time he’s the one who spins her around, when the spell she didn’t shut off flips to an older song, childhood movie soundtracks now. “I came back, Jules, I’m not about to give up on that so fast. Anyway, can’t leave my little sister just getting her magic back, can I?”
“Little! I’m older than you!”
“Yes, but I’m taller, aren’t I?”
She smacks his shoulder, but he only laughs like she hasn’t seen from him in years, and what can Julia do but laugh with him, and table her payback for later? So that’s what she does, and they spin like idiots around the room until the door opens. Quentin and Julia freeze as one, Eliot and Margo looking at them with identical what the hell expressions as Cythera goes to twine herself around Ariadne and Talaus settles nearby.
“Julia’s magic’s coming back on,” Quentin says with a grin as Julia cancels the spell.
“High school radio hour, huh?” Margo asks as Eliot leans against the counter, his eyes on the rings Quentin wears.
“Oh, nothing wrong with them having fun, Bambi, even if the music’s a little… trite,” Eliot says, and Quentin rolls his eyes.
“I know for a fact that you can sing Nickelback of all bands, OK, so watch it,” Quentin retorts, and Eliot looks as offended as a cat who’s just had water poured over its head. Julia has to stifle a laugh and Margo doesn’t bother to -
And for a moment Julia wonders, dizzily, if it was like this for brief moments in those other timelines when she was a student alongside them. She wonders if, when Eliot and Margo took Q under their wing, she came too, or if she kept him from them, or if other people (other Pennys, maybe, or other Kadys, or other people entirely who she’s never met here) drew her away at the same time as Q went with these two so they still were pulled apart.
Thirty-nine lives and one, probably all of it happened at least once.
Thirty-nine lives and two , for the two men in the room, though. Eliot’s gaze still catches on Quentin’s hands when Q won’t see him, and Quentin shoots Eliot sidelong looks when Eliot’s looking somewhere else. Julia doesn’t know much; she knows what Eliot told her in anger, and she’s seen the pink-and-purple sketchbook Quentin keeps. She knows what Arielle’s smile looked like and how much Teddy looked just like Q as a kid. She knows from Quentin that he still feels like Arielle’s widower and Eliot’s husband, that he misses Teddy with a constant ache, she knows a handful of stories from fifty years that go with certain sketches. But Q made Julia promise not to tell anyone any of this and so her hands are somewhat tied.
The thing is, this is getting ridiculous now. So after dinner, when Quentin is sidetracked by Kady towing him and Alice off to learn to punch - there’s a thought - Julia follows Eliot out onto the little terrace. Asterion is on her shoulder, Eliot’s Cythera sitting at attention at his side when Julia braces herself against the rail. “Need a light?” she says, offering her lighter.
“Got it, thanks,” Eliot says, and Julia shrugs, lights her own cigarette instead. They smoke in silence and the red-tinged light of sunset for a while, until Eliot says, “Is this a shovel talk?”
“No, this is a ‘dear God please do something before I find a shovel and hit you both’ talk,” Julia says flatly. “I mean, you literally stole his medical chart and justified that by spousal privileges, don’t you think maybe you should try talking to him?”
“Thought about it, sure. Not as easy to do, it turns out.”
“Dear God. Well, I’m pretty sure if you two keep pining, someone is going to snap and lock you in a room until you stop, so, just keep that in mind.”
When Quentin asks, the next morning, what she was talking about with Eliot - how he heard about it she’s not sure - Julia just shrugs. “Angel protecting your future, remember?”
“What does that even mean, in this context, and how worried should I be?”
Julia grins, and wraps her arm around Quentin’s waist. “Don’t worry about it. Now come on, we’re on breakfast fetching duty. Eventually someone’s going to have to start cooking around here, this is getting to be a lot of takeout.”
And that’s that, for now anyway.
(xxvi) when you come close to selling out, reconsider
They all know Quentin’s therapy day routine by now, because they more or less live in each other’s pockets. So Margo knows that when they get one of those super-rare summer days when there’s almost no humidity and it’s not too hot, she can find him in a park three blocks from where his doctor’s office is. Which is, in fact, where she finds him, set up at a picnic table with charcoal sticks and colored pencils, drawing the kids and their daemons running through the sprinklers not far from where he’s sitting.
“Finally decided to add some color to your art, huh?” she asks, dropping onto the bench beside him.
“Oh, hey, Margo,” Quentin says in an almost dreamy sort of voice, before he shakes his head and looks up, closing the book. He sticks the green colored pencil he’d been using behind his ear, blinking like he needs to bring things back into focus. “Yeah, felt like it was time. There’s probably some kind of symbolism or whatever in it, but it’s been a while since I was in philosophy class.”
“Ugh, let’s not go there, Coldwater,” Margo says, rolling her eyes. “Why was that your major in undergrad again?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time?” Quentin says with a shrug, and Margo kind of wants to shake him, because that is way, way too much of a life motto for their Q. Blackspire, letting Niffin Alice live in his back, probably the very fact that he ended up dead in 39 timelines trying to defeat the Beast.
Mending the Seam-mirror.
“I don’t think that’s a life motto that works for you, Coldwater,” is what she says out loud, and Quentin shrugs without answering, so she pokes him in the shoulder. “I mean it, Q. It’s gotten you into a lot of trouble by now, hasn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
She probably should have known he wasn’t going to make this easy. But before she can so much as speak, Talaus does at least some of the work for her, loping after Ariadne and picking her up like a cub. Then he drops her between his paws and holds her there while he washes her, the smaller cat yelping in exasperation but half-laughing too. Margo turns away from them to see Quentin watching her, bewildered but fond too, hair falling in his eyes again. Just long enough for that, not long enough for him to really hide.
Margo lets herself smile soft the way she wants to, reaching out to brush Quentin’s hair back. She can feel the warmth of their daemons, cuddling now, and it helps. “I should have known something was wrong the second I saw you,” she tells him.
“Margo, it’s -”
“Shush, I need to say this and I need you to listen. I still don’t get why I didn’t, except that so much was happening and I’d gotten out of the habit of checking on you. But Tal and me, we made ourselves a promise that awful night -” She stops, giving herself a moment so that her voice stays steady. “I was sitting there by Eliot’s bedside, afraid to leave him, and afraid that door would open on someone telling me you were dead. Both my boys hanging in the balance and all I could do was sit there . And then, I had Eliot barely mobile insisting on seeing you, and we turn the corner to hear Alice yelling at Julia that what happened to you was a suicide attempt.”
“I’m sorr-”
“I don’t want you to be sorry!” Margo yells it before she can stop herself, and she probably wouldn’t have anyway. “You apologize too fucking much sometimes, except when you don’t at all. I don’t want you to be sorry, Q. I want you to not do this to us again. I want you not to do this to yourself , for that matter. You think I haven’t found out since how much you pushed yourself? It’s been a few months now and you’re still too damn thin, you still look tired.”
Margo pauses, takes both of Quentin’s hands. He leaves charcoal dust on the back of her left hand, but she doesn’t care about that right now. “Eliot is my best friend, my other half, you know that. But you - you are ours , OK? You’re my best friend too, and I lost sight of that, and maybe you did too. I should have seen it but you should have known you could talk to me, even in the middle of all the bullshit. I don’t know which of us forgot first, or how, but no more of it, Quentin. You got it?”
Quentin nods. “I’ve got it, Margo. Really. I’m - I am trying. I knew as soon as I decided to come back that I’d have to try. I knew before I actually made up my mind, really.”
“It helped you, didn’t it?” It’s a thought Margo’s had before. The others, she knows, think Quentin is steadier now because the bad shit is over and because of therapy, which isn’t wrong, but. Even when he’d just woken up, he’d been more himself. “Being in the Underworld, I mean.”
“It did,” Quentin admits, nodding. “I know it sounds awful. But something about - having to face what I’d done, having to make a choice so explicitly… It helped. Because I know now I don’t want to die, so that even when my brain says it wants to, I know that I don’t… want to want to, if that makes sense?”
It doesn’t, exactly. Margo has many issues of her own - she’s a magician after all, having issues is part of what makes being a magician even possible - but she’s never actually been suicidal. If anything, Margo’s instincts are to cling fiercely to life, whatever comes her way.
But she thinks of Quentin, dejected on the Cottage steps, breaking over his father and the knowledge that magic wasn’t the cure-all he’d thought it should be. She remembers that as the moment she knew this boy was hers. He’d already been hers because he was Eliot’s, transitive property and all that, but that moment had cemented Quentin as one of Margo’s people with or without Eliot. “It’s the universe deep-dicking us. Lay back and try and enjoy it,” she remembers saying, with no idea just how badly the universe was preparing to continue fucking them all over.
Somehow, Margo had understood then that what Quentin needed was to have people with him. That being alone was what would destroy him. She knows, because they talked about it later, that Eliot had figured out the same thing - she remembers him calling Quentin over when they were grilling in the rain, remembers Q’s bewildered wet-puppy face and silly smile, how Talaus and Cythera had met Ariadne halfway. But Margo had sensed it for herself, and she’d wanted to be one of those people, surprising herself with how much. It hasn’t changed either; even when she’s wanted to smack him she always wants to keep him.
“I’m not sure if it makes sense,” she tells him honestly enough. “But if it helps you stick with us, then it doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to work.”
“It is working, Margo. I promise,” Quentin tells her, and his eyes are as honest as they were that day on a cliff by the ocean. So Margo believes him, her one-time little king, at least for now. And if it stops working, well. She’ll just have to keep an eye on him to kick his ass into gear if it ever proves necessary. Or drag him back from the brink.
Speaking of ass-kicking, though… Margo considers telling Quentin she knows why he’s wearing those rings, that she knows about the Mosaic. But she can’t, because she’s pretty sure Eliot doesn’t want her to tell anyone. “Let’s go for a walk,” she says, and she hooks their arms together as they head off down one of the paths. Ariadne is riding on Talaus’ back, because it amuses them both to do it. Margo finds the sight pretty funny herself.
“So how goes the research?” Quentin asks as they circle a fountain. “To get your exile reversed, I mean? I know the bunnies are having trouble again…”
They are, and that makes Margo nervous. The bunnies seem disoriented when they come, at least as disoriented as bunnies can look. “So far no luck. I think we might be onto a way to let me back into Fillory, but I’d never be even a citizen again, much less get my crown back.”
“Will Fen just… step back down?” Quentin asks. “I mean, she is actually High King now, would there have to be more elections?”
“Truthfully? I have no idea,” Margo admits. “I mean, I can take Fen personally, but no one wants a succession crisis. Or another damned war - and yes, I know how that sounds coming from me, we’re all growing up here, Coldwater.”
“I didn’t say anything!” Quentin objects as their daemons laugh.
“I can hear you thinking, I know you,” Margo tells him, mock-threatening. “Honestly? I want to go back and get my throne, but I kinda like being back on Earth.”
“Much better on, like, the indoor plumbing front,” Quentin agrees, mock-solemn. Margo rolls her eyes and pokes him in the side because she can. He’s right of course, there are a lot of modern conveniences she misses when in Fillory, though the nice part about that High King can never leave thing going by the wayside means none of them will ever be trapped in Fillory again because of it. Even assuming the Game of Musical Thrones stops, and all.
They could end up trapped in Fillory by other things, of course. That’s always on the table because life is a bitch like that. But Margo still wants to go back. And the bunnies being half-stoned does not make her feel better about the situation. Something is wrong, and she can feel it. But she can’t do anything until she can figure out a way to get her fucking crown back.
“Maybe Fen can reappoint you like Eliot appointed you, me, and Alice?” Quentin suggests. “I mean you wouldn’t be High King anymore, and I guess it’s wrong to go back to appointing monarchs when Fillory’s learning about elections, but, well. Fen overthrew you and only you, her, and Josh know you agreed to it, that’s not exactly democratic either.”
“I don’t know if I want to settle for that, and the whole ‘can’t even be a citizen’ rule of the only exile reversal we found so far means it won’t take,” Margo says. “I’ll figure it out. Eliot’s helping me when we’re not helping Kady, and Alice is too sometimes. I think if Zelda keeps pointing out all the knowledge she’ll have access to she’s going to cave about running the Library.”
“Hmm.” Quentin shrugs. “She’s pretty adamant on not taking the offer right now, but you might be right. Jules and I might be able to help you out soon, we’re making progress on her magic so once that’s settled we can help.”
Margo isn’t entirely sure how she feels about that - she still can’t decide how she feels about Julia, even if she is a mostly-decent roommate and she did save their asses at the end of the key quest after Alice fucked them over. But she figures she needs all the help she can get, especially since she just knows something else is brewing. Hell, that something else might even be how she wins back the throne, if she plays it right. “I may take you up on that,” is all she says for now, though.
At the edge of the park Margo convinces Quentin to get lunch from a food truck because she claims to have missed food trucks while in Fillory. He might suspect she’s also pushing food on him - he really is too damn thin and she doesn’t like it, OK? - but he doesn’t say anything.
At another picnic table, Margo nudges Quentin’s foot, waiting for him to swallow his sip of soda before she says, “So, when are you and El going to get your act together? The longing in the air is getting so thick we’re all choking on it.”
“I - I don’t know what you -”
“Bullshit, Coldwater,” Margo says flatly. “I know you, remember?”
“It’s not that simple, Margo. He - he shot me down once already, and I don’t know… It’s, I’m a lot to ask someone to take on, especially when they’ve already -” Quentin cuts himself off, studies Margo with narrowed eyes. “You know, don’t you? About the Mosaic? About the fact that we still remember?”
Suspicions aside, Margo tells herself there’s no reason to lie to a question that direct. “Course I do. And you’re both fucking idiots but that doesn’t mean you need to pine dramatically forever. Honestly. Keep this up and I’m locking you in a room together.”
“I, uh. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“See that you do. All of it,” Margo says, in her firmest High King voice. She watches Quentin straighten up in his seat in response to it, and his face is very serious when he nods. Which is an interesting reaction. But she means it. She wants him to remember every single thing they discussed today.
If he doesn’t, she’ll just have to remind him.
(xxvii) and to those who have seen it
“So I think I should be offended that you haven’t actually asked me to pose yet.”
“What? Of course I have - haven’t I?” Quentin has certainly drawn Eliot countless times - even discounting the memories sketched in the Mosaic book - but surely that wasn’t all drawn from memory or just one of his ‘candids’ of the others in the apartment.
“No, you have not. You ordered me to pose at Coney Island, but you have not asked me, Quentin Coldwater, and I am insulted,” Eliot says, turning his nose up, though Cythera’s amused chirp sort of ruins the effect. Ariadne, tucked in against Cythera’s side, purrs contentedly, enjoying the dramatics. Quentin does too, and he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep the ridiculous fond smile off his face.
“In that case, please pose for me, Eliot Waugh,” he says instead, working very hard to keep his face appropriately solemn. It lasts… about five seconds, then his eyes meet Eliot’s and they both burst out laughing. And it’s - God, even before everything it’s been so long since they were able to just laugh like this, like ridiculous twenty-somethings who might or might not still be grad students.
Even on the Mosaic, Quentin realizes, startled. Even there, they’d still had a job, and then they’d been building a life, a family, and that had been wonderful even when it was horrible, with plenty of silly moments, but the weight had always been there.
There isn’t any particular weight, just now.
“How do you want me?” Eliot asks, entirely too innocent, and one look at his face tells Quentin he knows absolutely what he’s doing. Also, they’re in their room, Eliot half sprawled in the single chair with his feet propped on the bed, Quentin curled on the overlarge windowsill, their daemons cuddled together beside the bed. He’d been reading up till now, a book called Cold Fire from a stash of Marina’s Kady had found, since he’s worked his way through all the Old Kingdom books. But there’s not much to do, in the room. They could leave, obviously, but…
“Get on the bed,” Quentin says, leaning down to pull his sketchbook out of his bag.
“Aren’t you going to buy me dinner first?” Eliot laughs, but he does what he’s told anyway.
“Oh, I see you’re in a ‘tease Q’ mood.”
“Well, it always has been fun to make you blush.”
“Ugh, you’re impossible. Here, no, don’t just sit up…” It’s more than half an excuse to touch Eliot, but Quentin will take what he can get, nudging him into a position on his stomach, like he’s relaxing, looking at something. Cythera he gets to lie beside the foot of the bed, relaxed. Eliot’s healed now, except for occasional leg trouble, so Quentin knows it’s safe. “Maybe you should have a book.”
“This is me we’re talking about. Oh, I know - give me one of your sketchbooks, I can flip through it, you can draw me looking at it,” Eliot suggests.
“Oh. Yeah, all right.” Quentin reminds himself that Eliot’s looked through his sketches before, more than once. But there’s something - he doesn’t know what it is, something in Eliot’s eyes almost like a dare, and he remembers again waking up to find his Mosaic book closed on the nightstand. Well, he’s certainly not giving Eliot that one, thank you very much. His fingers close instead around the first sketchbook he filled, and he hands it over to Eliot, who props his head on one hand like Quentin had directed him, the sketchbook open on the bed. Quentin fiddles with the curtain for a minute until he has better sunlight coming through the window, then settles back onto the sill, sketchbook braced against his knees.
Quentin’s trying to capture the exact tilt of Eliot’s head when he realizes Eliot hasn’t just been staring at one page. He probably should have noticed sooner, but the thing is, when he draws, in a weird sense his awareness falls away. He sees light, shadow, line and angle, the focus of his sketch in sharp relief yet nothing else at all. “You’re supposed to keep still,” he murmurs, voice absent.
Huh. He doesn’t usually talk once he gets into a sketch, and he sounds out of it.
“I am keeping still, but if I don’t actually look, I’ll get bored,” Eliot tells him, and flips another page. Quentin hums and doesn’t try to answer, talking is actually kind of hard when he wants to focus.
He’s trying to figure out what pencil combination will get him the closest to the gold-hazel of Eliot’s eyes when Eliot says, “Q, why are there two of you in this sketch? Some kind of symbolic thing?” But his tone is less curious and more edgy, like he knows there’s more to it. Quentin blinks and looks up to find Eliot’s sat up, holding the sketchbook to show him the picture of Quentin 1 in the replica of their childhood room, Quentin himself as a reflection in the wall mirror.
“Oh. Uh, no.” He hasn’t really discussed his Underworld adventure in any detail. Far as he can tell, no one really wants to know, and he hadn’t felt like discussing anything but the situation with Penny back in the hospital. But Eliot is looking at him with worried eyes, and Cythera is tense beside the bed, on her feet again and watching him with her tail lashing but otherwise still as the Sphinx.
Ariadne leans against his legs as Quentin moves to sit more properly, setting his sketchbook aside. “That, uh, isn’t me. Well, not exactly. I, shit.” Quentin runs a hand through his hair, which is growing in again now. Longer than Brian would have tolerated, he thinks, shorter than he himself usually likes, so not yet as long as that of the other Quentin in the sketch.
(Once, he’d let it grow even longer, he remembers the weight of it. But he’d also stopped hiding behind it, forever and not so much forever, as it turns out. All he has of that now are memories and replacement rings.)
“I mentioned Penny, and Sean Teagan, when I told you guys about Penny having to set me up, and all that. I didn’t mention, Sean sort of… brought someone else in, to talk to me.”
“Because you didn’t know whether you wanted to live or not.” Eliot’s voice has gone from edgy to a terrible kind of flat that makes Quentin’s throat tighten, but damn it. He’s working on it, isn’t he? Isn’t that enough? Isn’t the choice he made in the end, to live, the choice he’s following through on, enough?
“No. I didn’t,” Quentin says, and his voice is clipped, and Eliot flinches. Quentin wants to regret it, he does regret it, but if they’re going to do this then he is going to be honest about it. No one fucking asked him, no one fucking noticed he was sinking when it was happening, and Quentin hasn’t been knowingly angry about that but apparently some bit of him is. Eliot is the only one who wasn’t there but he’s the one who’s asking now, so.
“Look, it was bad,” he tells Eliot softly, gentling his voice. “I was bad. And I’m getting better, I started getting better because of what happened, because it woke me up, but I was really fucked up, El. So, yeah, I needed to think, and I needed to hear things. So, Sean summoned backup. Me. Or, well, not-me. Like our original Penny and 23. That was, um, the original me, from the timeline that existed before Jane’s first reset.”
“Timeline 1 Quentin,” Eliot says softly.
“Yeah. He was, uh. Pretty insistent I come back, actually? Like, more than you’d expect, well, me to be, I guess, even in my worst moments. That, it sort of. It didn’t exactly tip the scales, because it wasn’t all of what I needed to know to choose living, but it weighed in. A lot. So I had to draw him. Because talking to him was the turning point. He told me that he was the last to die, in his world, but when all he wanted was that he could have died instead of his friends, they told him they didn’t want that either. That they’d wanted to just - all survive, you know?”
“I know exactly,” Eliot says, and he’s staring at Quentin like he did that day in the park, when he’d broken through for precious seconds. Staring at him like Quentin is the only thing in his world, and that -
Do you still love me? Quentin wants to ask. Did you ever, really, the way I fell in love with you, or was that whole thing about not a choice you telling me that for fifty years you just made do? But he doesn’t. “And, you know, he also said the rest of my, uh, other selves - and everyone else’s too - would be mad at me if I stayed, which seems pretty intense compared to what Penny said.”
“I’ll point out that, willingly or not, Penny was trying to make you choose to die, you said that yourself,” Eliot says. “But - what did he say?”
Quentin shrugs, and somehow, he can’t quite look at Eliot when he says, “That you’d all be fine without me.” He strokes Ariadne’s fur and watches the way it moves under his fingers, and it takes him a moment to realize that Eliot hasn’t responded. So he looks up to see that Eliot has gone dead white, his fingers clenched in Cythera’s fur.
“Quentin,” Eliot says, and his voice is very, very even in that way it only gets when he’s holding back a lot. “Tell me you know that’s bullshit.”
Quentin shrugs again, wants to look away and finds that he can’t. “Well, no. I mean. I know it wouldn’t be good news but. You’d get over it, if I hadn’t come back. Right?”
Somehow, that… does not seem to have been the right answer.
(xxviii) burning the night like the dawn
Eliot could swear something goes - odd with the world, when Quentin says that Penny told him they’d be fine without him. Things are echoey and he feels strangely cold, like someone dunked him in a tank of ice melt. Maybe that’s why he’s able to keep his voice so calm when he says, “Quentin. Tell me you know that’s bullshit.”
But the answer he gets - Eliot is fairly certain he feels his own heart briefly stop in his chest.
“Well, no. I mean. I know it wouldn’t be good news but. You’d get over it, if I hadn’t come back. Right?”
“You’d get over it.”
“ You’d get over it.”
It plays on repeat in Eliot’s head, bouncing around in there until it’s the only thing he can think of. And he can’t speak, he can’t answer, and Quentin is looking at him with that fucking puzzled face like he didn’t just rip Eliot apart -
And Eliot has had it.
He doesn’t remember getting up. He doesn’t remember gripping Quentin by the front of his shirt and pulling him up either. The next thing Eliot knows, he has Quentin pressed back against the wall beside the window. Quentin is looking up at him, eyes wide and startled. “Eliot -”
“No. Shut up. You’ve had your say, God fucking knows you’ve had it and I’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m done, Quentin. Done . I am tired of you - you carrying around this fucking ridiculous idea that you are expendable! I thought we settled this over Blackspire, I thought shooting the goddamned Monster in the face so you wouldn’t stay with it -”
“Oh, and that worked real well, didn’t it, Eliot!” Quentin snaps. “No one needs -”
Eliot takes him by the shoulders and shakes him. “Stop. Just - stop . I swear to God, Q. Stop talking.” Quentin’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even try to twist out of Eliot’s grip. Eliot holds him there, still, and he’s probably holding on too tight and he doesn’t fucking care right now.
“I am not talking about your - effectiveness as a magician, or whatever it is you’re thinking of by need,” he says, and his voice is level, calm, each word very clipped and precise. Because it’s that or start screaming. And screaming won’t work, he needs Quentin to hear him. “We need you. We wouldn’t be a we without you, you’re the person who brought us together, remember? Maybe Julia and Kady would be friends regardless, Margo and I would be, sure, but that’s it, Q.”
He slides his hands down Quentin’s arms, feeling him tremble slightly under the touch. “We need you. You’re one of us. And you - you keep trying to fall on your fucking sword like that’s what you think we expect. No one expects that, no one wants that. When you were - we didn’t know if you were going to wake up, no one was anything less than gutted, Q. And -”
“I’m not saying no one cares, El, just that -”
“Just that we’d be fine without you,” Eliot snarls, deliberation forgotten in a rush. Quentin isn’t getting it, how can he not see? “Oh, yeah, sure, Q. Maybe a few of us would be but fuck that. Fuck that. ” Eliot shakes him again, because that puzzled look is back and he can’t bear it. “You hear me? You think Julia or Margo would be OK losing a best friend? That Alice would just move on without a blink? That I -”
Eliot’s throat tightens and he swallows hard. “You think I can do this without you, Quentin?” he asks, his voice a low hiss. “I need you. You can’t just - I would have torn the Underworld apart to get you back if you left me, Q. I can’t lose you, do you hear me?”
“You said -”
“I know what I said! For fuck’s sake, Q, I was lying! Because I was scared, and when I get scared I run away. And I had to face that. I did face that. When I broke through to you, the way I did that was by finding my worst memory. And you know what that was? Rejecting you that day in the throne room. But it wouldn't be that now, Q.”
Eliot pauses, seeing shock and confusion on Quentin's face. “God, I need you to stop that, looking so damn confused that people care,” he says, voice softening in spite of himself. “I promised my memory of you that I'd be braver, that I'd tell you the truth. But then… then I woke up, and Margo told me what happened, that you might never wake up and - that would be my worst memory now. Waking up to a world where you might never be there again.”
“Eliot, I -”
“I love you,” Eliot cuts Quentin off. “I'm in love with you. And maybe you moved on, maybe you can't forgive my rejecting you. Fine. But you need to know that. And you need to know I need you, as my friend if not my partner, I need you in my life. Please believe me, you are not expendable, no one would be all right without you. And it would destroy me, to lose you.”
Eliot stops talking, then, because there’s nothing else to say. He’s told Quentin everything he thinks might matter, and Quentin isn’t answering, is just staring at him. Out of the corner of his eye Eliot sees Cythera has Ariadne pinned, but Ariadne isn’t struggling any more than her human is. Quite the reverse, she’s all but limp under Cythera, as if welcoming being overmatched like that.
“I’m sorry,” Quentin says quietly, and all of Eliot’s focus is on him again. Quentin’s eyes are wide, a little darker than usual, intent on Eliot’s face. “I - I guess I should have listened to myself a little more, believed him a little more. And to what our friends have said since I woke up, now I think about it. But I - it’s going to take time, Eliot, and I’m never going to be fixed . I need you to know that. That I can work on this, on all of it, for the rest of my life, and figure out how to mostly be OK, but there will still be bad days. And I know that you, you were there before, but you might have thought modern medicine would fix it. It won’t, not completely.”
“I don’t want to fix you, Quentin. I want you as you are, good and bad,” Eliot tells him, needing Quentin to believe that much, at least.
Quentin shrugs a little. “Either way. I needed to say that, needed to tell you that. And I can’t. I can’t promise that I’ll always just - believe that I’m not expendable. Some days I won’t. But I believe you mean it, and that the others care, and is that enough to be a start, El? Because there’s something else.”
“It’s a start,” Eliot agrees, because it is, because it’s the first step to convincing Quentin and he’ll take that, he can definitely work with that.
“OK, good. Because the thing. The last thing. You said maybe I moved on.” Quentin shakes his head, and oh , Eliot knows that smile. The first time he ever saw it, Quentin had just kissed him on their anniversary, that night on the Mosaic. That smile that managed to be bold and sheepish all at once. “I don’t think I’m capable of it. I’ve been in love with you, to know it, since the day you walked back into the Cottage from the Neitherlands, and I practically jumped on you because you were literally all I could see, all I cared about, in that moment. I love you, and I want everything you’ll give me, you have me in every way you could ask for.”
Eliot stares at him, and he realizes then - he hadn’t expected Quentin to still want him. Not, as he’d claimed once, because he’d thought Quentin didn’t mean his offer. Not anymore. But because Eliot had broken his heart, and why would Quentin trust him with it a second time? But he has. In spite of it all, Quentin still trusts him enough for this. After all the fear, all the doubt, to have what he’d hardly dared hope for is... It’s staggering .
Eliot lets go of Quentin’s arms, framing his face with both hands as he pulls him in for a kiss.
He’d kissed the memory version almost exactly like this. But this is vivid and real and Quentin has his arms around Eliot’s waist, is pressing in close even as he opens for him, and it’s so much more than a memory could ever be. “Stay with me,” Eliot whispers when the kiss breaks, trailing his lips along Quentin’s jaw, his neck, pressing the words into his skin. “Be with me, don’t leave me.”
“I won’t, not again, not going anywhere, but you - you can’t either. Eliot. You can’t. I can’t bear it again,” Quentin tells him, voice and body trembling, and Eliot kisses him quiet, stroking a hand through his hair until he settles.
“I won’t,” Eliot promises, resting their foreheads together. “You and me, this is all I want. I’m not going to be stupid enough to leave you behind again.” He turns them around, backing Quentin up until his knees hit the bed and he lands in a sprawl, so that Eliot can cover Quentin’s body with his own. He rolls his hips as Quentin arches his own up to meet them, a rhythm easy as breathing, like coming home as he kisses Quentin again, swallows the little noises he makes as they move together.
“You always respond so well for me,” Eliot murmurs, sucking a mark just under Quentin’s ear, another one just above where a shirt collar might hide it. “Even if we’re quiet, everyone’s going to know…”
“ Good ,” Quentin says with a sudden fierceness that surprises Eliot, as much as Quentin’s hand tangled in his curls, pulling him into a harder, almost desperate kiss does. But he can match him, one hand twisting in Quentin’s hair, pressing him down into the bed.
“Let’s see if I can remember the spell…” He can, of course he can, and their clothes are gone, vanished and reappeared in a pile on the floor. Usually he can make them fold themselves, but while he’s making sure it worked, Quentin bucks under him, enough to get a little space between their bodies, and he’s got his hand wrapped around both their cocks, fingers slick enough that he must have been doing a little casting of his own. So, you know, imperfect casting can damn well wait.
“ Fuck - ” Eliot bites Quentin’s neck as he rocks into his hand, the friction lovely but not what he wants, not this time. He kisses Quentin again, deep and filthy, fucking his mouth with his tongue until his hand falters, and then -
“Eliot!” Quentin tugs his wrists where they’re suddenly pinned on either side of his head, but they don’t move, held fast by Eliot’s telekinesis. He can feel Quentin’s muscles working under his hold, an almost-synesthesia that always heightens his own need. He trails a hand down Quentin’s chest and stomach, over his hips, just avoiding his cock.
“You were going a little too fast, sweetheart,” Eliot tells him with a grin. Quentin rolls his eyes because he is a little shit, but he shivers every time he tugs on Eliot’s hold and fails to break it, he loves this as much as Eliot does, they both know it. Eliot grins as he leans down to kiss Quentin again, pressing their bodies together in a way meant as much to tease as to indulge in how it feels to be so close, skin-to-skin.
“I love you,” Eliot murmurs as he sits up again, looking down into Quentin’s face, his blown-black eyes. “And I’m keeping you this time, so you’re staying right where you are.”
(xxix) erasing the borders with each brush of a hand
Here is a secret that is not a secret. Quentin absolutely loves it when Eliot uses telekinesis on him. It’s like a brush of gossamer silk against his skin, strong as iron chains when he tries to pull against it. Even now, when it’s maddening, when all he wants is to touch and Eliot isn’t letting him, he loves it.
“I love you. And I’m keeping you this time, so you’re staying right where you are,” Eliot says, his eyes intent, and Quentin tugs again because he can’t help it, because they both like how it feels when he does.
“I love you too but now you’re just being a tease,” Quentin retorts.
“No,” Eliot says, tracing a familiar spell against Quentin’s hip. It’s one he suspects Eliot invented, that slicks someone up inside and cleans them out at the same time. It makes him squirm like it always does, the sensation of it somehow both strange and arousing all at once. Quentin whines, he can’t help it, and he sees Eliot’s smile turn sharp as he watches.
“No, no what?” Quentin manages to ask.
“No -” Eliot puts a pillow under Quentin’s hips, then slowly presses a finger inside him. Quentin’s breath catches; it’s been long enough for even that to burn a little, but he’s always liked that sort of discomfort. He’s determined to keep still while he can, though, bound hands twisting as he tries to find an anchor. “I’m not teasing you, I’m making a point.”
Later, Quentin will say Eliot was absolutely being a tease even if he was making a point. Eliot works him open slowly, eyes on him the whole time and Quentin almost doesn’t know if it’s Eliot’s fingers or the weight of his gaze, the pressure of his power, that drives him higher. All he knows is the way his thoughts scatter, the way he pushes back against Eliot’s fingers seeking more, biting his lip to try and keep quiet.
“El - please, c’mon - let me - stop teasing and just -”
Keeping quiet, he thinks dizzily, is not going well. He tugs again on the invisible bonds around his wrists even as Eliot twists his fingers in a way that has always driven Quentin mad, and he cries out, arching up desperately. “El -!”
“Shh…” Eliot whispers, leaning forward to press a kiss to Quentin’s knee. “All right, I’ll let you go,” he says with an edge of wicked laughter in his voice. A second later Quentin figures out why, because Eliot flicks his free hand and Quentin’s wrists are free, but then he pulls his other hand out. Quentin whines again at the sudden emptiness, but then he reaches for Eliot, pulling him into a desperate kiss, trying not to beg against his mouth but failing.
Eliot only hums in reply, cleaner hand tangling in Quentin’s hair as he kisses him back, kisses him quiet. Quentin can feel himself being moved, even though it’s not Eliot’s hands doing the moving. That gossamer silk again, catching him up and shifting him into place, ghosting over his skin until he can’t breathe, can’t think -
Eliot must have slicked himself up at some point when Quentin didn’t see, because the next thing he knows, Eliot’s hands are light on his hips as he pushes inside him. Quentin tries to move when Eliot just stills for a moment, reaches for him again. “El - come on -”
Once they find the rhythm, the way they move together is easy as breathing, and Quentin remembers just how to surge up under Eliot and make him go faster, remembers how to catch hold of him to pull him into a wild kiss. Eliot gets a hand around Quentin’s cock as his pace starts to falter, and Quentin cries out into the kiss when he comes, feels Eliot shudder as he falls over the edge right after him.
For a few minutes they just lay there, Eliot collapsed half on top of Quentin, a familiar weight. “So… you had a point?” Quentin manages finally, voice a bit muffled because he’s nuzzling Eliot’s curls.
“Mm. Yeah. You staying right here,” Eliot murmurs into the bend of Quentin’s neck. “With me.”
“Oh. I was already gonna do that.”
“Well. Call it hedging my bets.” After a moment, Eliot adds, “Quentin? Why the rings?”
“It just felt right, mostly,” Quentin says carefully. “I didn’t want to pretend it didn’t matter, that it didn’t happen, anymore. I was tired of pretending. Aren’t you?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” Eliot shifts then so that he’s next to Quentin, sitting up and looking down at him. Carefully, Quentin sits up too. Eliot considers him for a moment, then reaches for Quentin’s right hand, the one with the green ring in place of the wedding band Eliot gave him, once. Quentin’s half expecting Eliot to gently tug off the green ring, rolling it between his fingers, but it’s still a shock somehow when he says, “Let me put it back on you? Not - we do it for real, it won’t be this impromptu, but just. As a promise.”
Quentin finds he can’t speak through the emotion tightening his throat, he can only manage to nod. So Eliot slips the ring onto his finger, and then kisses him again. If the kiss tastes of salt, Quentin thinks that might be both their faults this time.
Much later, after a few cleaning spells and Eliot moving again to wrap himself around Quentin from behind, Quentin makes his way out of bed, easing out from under Eliot’s arm. He doesn’t go far, just pulls on his boxers and the first shirt he finds. It happens to be Eliot’s, and he doesn’t bother to button it as he curls up on the windowsill again, nudging the curtain aside enough that he can rest his temple on the cool glass, watch the city below. It’s night, but it isn’t that late, so he can still see people going about their business.
He can’t see the stars, not in New York City, but the city lights are their own kind of soothing. He’s always been a little in love with New York, growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. It was a kind of promised land to him, when he’d grown up enough to understand that there was no magical clock to a faraway land of magic - or wardrobe, or letter delivered by owl, because Fillory might have been his favorite but he wouldn’t have said no to Narnia or Hogwarts, given the chance. Fillory wasn’t real, or so a young Quentin had thought, but New York City was. Surely, in such a big, bustling place, he could find somewhere to fit, to belong?
Even though that didn’t work out in undergrad like he’d hoped, Quentin’s never stopped loving this place. Even when all he really cared about was finding the best tall buildings, he’d still wanted his last pretty view to be of New York City. And now - now it’s the place where he started learning that he actually wants to live after all, where he started realizing that, yes, his friends really do mean it when they say they care.
Where, now, he and Eliot have found each other again. And speaking of Eliot…
“Q, why do I have two cats in bed with me but not you?” In the light let in where Quentin’s nudged the curtain aside, Eliot looks sleepy, rumpled, and a little exasperated. Cythera is draped over his feet and Ariadne curled up against his chest. As Quentin watches, Eliot pets her, slow and gentle, making Ariadne purr and making Quentin shiver.
There’s a dare in Eliot’s eyes, when Quentin can tear his eyes away from the sight of Eliot’s fingers against Ariadne’s fur. A dare in his eyes and a smile on his lips, and Quentin can’t help but smile back. “I was just thinking,” he says with a shrug, not yet moving even as Eliot scratches that spot between Ariadne’s ears that makes both the daemon and her human go damn near boneless. “El…” he says, voice already gone breathless.
“You stole my shirt, bring it back here,” Eliot says, with all the imperiousness of their first meeting and his announcement that Quentin was late for an exam he hadn’t known he was scheduled for.
“You are ridiculous,” Quentin laughs, but he does get up, slipping back into bed. As expected, Eliot only wanted to take his shirt off of Quentin, and he tosses it back in the direction of the clothing pile.
“It’s already wrinkled to shit, that won’t hurt it. Now, what were you thinking about that you needed to get out of bed for, hmm?” Eliot asks, resting his forehead against Quentin’s even as he tangles their legs together. Ariadne wriggles out from between them, settling at the foot of the bed near Cythera.
“Nothing all that deep. Just that I’m glad I came back,” Quentin says, and while that may not be strictly accurate as an answer, that doesn’t make it any less the truth. He is glad he came back, so stunningly glad in this moment that it takes his breath away.
“So am I,” Eliot whispers, one hand curling round the back of Quentin’s neck to draw him into a kiss. It’s soft, this time, undemanding. And shattering , because there’s a world in this kiss, in this moment. A world Quentin almost walked away from, without really considering what he was leaving behind.
No matter what, he’s determined never to do that again.