Chapter Text
(i) grab my feet and hold me tight
It’s… strange, to be alone with Alice again, for the first time since returning from Brakebills South to find out things have gotten that much worse. Fuck. Julia. Oh God. She’s been taken over again, her control stolen again, and it’s his fault, it’s his fault because if he’d just gone with the plan to banish the Monster, or Penny 23’s plan to destroy the last stone before the Monster could take it.
But Eliot. It would have meant killing Eliot, or losing Eliot to the Monster forever. He couldn’t. He couldn’t . And now he’s lost them both and - oh God. He can’t think about this, he has to think about something else or he will break down and then he won’t be any good to anyone.
Ariadne and Perdix are sitting across from each other, Perdix in the form of a wildcat of some kind as well so they’re a pair of cats in a staring contest. With Perdix’s fur all gold now, Quentin can’t identify the species, though he’s pretty sure it’s not an Asian golden cat like Ariadne. Perdix has been unsettled since Quentin brought Alice back, and as far as Quentin knows he never returns to his old settled horse form unless absolutely necessary. He wonders if Perdix will ever resettle, he wonders how Alice feels about it.
“So, Margo and Josh, huh?” he says, to break the awkward silence. Quentin supposes that he’s… happy for Margo, and for Josh. If they can make it work, good for them. But it’s a distant feeling. Everything is distant except grief and fear and, and a renewed warmth when he looks at Alice.
“Yeah,” Alice says, and Quentin thinks of the looks they’d exchanged while Margo had gone off on her realization of feelings rant. Thinks of how, for a moment, it had felt like old times when they could communicate silently, before everything had gone to shit. And it aches, because he misses that. He misses Alice, and it’s like he hadn’t even realized it until now.
He clears his throat, but despite all attempts, his voice wavers when he starts to speak. “Okay, here's my thing. Um, I didn't think that I could ever trust you again. And now…”
"‘And now’?” The look in her eyes is so hopeful, and Quentin doesn’t know what to do with that except be honest, so he presses on.
“I find myself wanting to.” Quentin groans, trying to find the words, trying to explain. It’s hard, though, to explain what he doesn’t fully understand himself. Still, he gives it his best shot. “When we first met I was clinging onto some naive, idealistic notions of what the world should be. How people should be. And I think that I have realized, if I just throw away all that childish bullshit, I can forgive people.”
He sighs, the sound halfway to a quiet sob. “I can forgive people. For not living up to my stupid expectations.”
“Like yourself?” Alice asks, watching him carefully. Perdix is moving closer to Ariadne, also carefully, like he’s not sure if she’ll welcome him or swipe at him. Truthfully. Quentin isn’t sure what his daemon will do either, but he watches them and -
He doesn’t know what he wants, but he watches their daemons and he realizes, he’d been about to ask Alice to try again. She’s the only one who’s noticed at all that he’s sinking, she’d come to save his life, and he remembers past Alice telling him he’s the best thing in her life. He thinks of that moment of understanding, when he’d fixed that mug.
But he watches their daemons and how wary they are. And his eyes fall on Cythera, sitting motionless by the couch. The Monster had split Eliot’s daemon away, cutting the distance tie so it didn’t have to cart around Cythera who, because of the possession, is practically catatonic. It had left her in Quentin’s care, one more little horror to go with the touch of its stolen hands on Quentin’s hair, his skin, his daemon.
And yet… Quentin thinks about how determinedly Ariadne has curled up with Cythera every day, trying to wake her up, or soothe her at least. How she won’t even touch Perdix now, both of them tense and guarded like alley cats who might spring into a fight as easily as play together. And it occurs to him, that one of the childish things would be clinging to him and Alice, how they were, when it’s -
When they aren’t those people. It would be childish, and it would be cruel. And he can’t do that. He loves her, but he’s not in love with her, and if he was the best thing to happen to her once he’s already been a horrible option for that. He can’t be an even worse one by lying to her and himself both, can’t fail yet another person he loves.
“Like myself, like you, like all of us frankly because there is not a single member of our fucked up little questing team that hasn’t blown everything to hell at least once. And… I want you in my life, Alice. Not - you were the one who said once, it wasn’t the cheating you were mad about so much as losing our friendship. And I want that back, but I can’t - I can’t offer more, not anymore.”
Alice takes a deep breath, and Perdix abruptly shifts into a bird, Quentin’s not sure what kind, and flies over to Alice’s lap where he shifts again to a lemur that she wraps her arms around. “Because you want to trust me, but you can’t?”
Quentin shakes his head, and his throat is so tight his voice comes out strangled. “No. Because I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore, and I’m - I am , with someone else, who doesn’t want me, but that doesn’t turn it off and - fuck, Alice, I’m sorry, I’m just not. Not him anymore, not that guy you were suddenly with again, and that fucking timeshare spell was cruel to you and I -” He leans his head against the fridge, the coolness of the metal sinking into his skin, and he tries to breathe. Tries to remember how to.
“Don’t be sorry,” says Alice’s voice, closer than expected, and she hugs him, and that’s not like her, it surprises him, but for a moment he feels a little less cold, a little less adrift. Quentin holds on, hiding his face in her hair and trying not to cry, wishing he could cry. “Don’t be sorry for being honest, and anyway, I kind of knew - I heard you in the Brakebills library, and who knows better than me what you sound like when determined to save someone you love, against all odds? We’ll get them back, Q. I promise we will.”
Quentin doesn’t cry, he isn’t certain he remembers how, but he shakes silently apart as he holds on to Alice and she lets him, holds on in return and is just - just there. And, God, he’s so grateful for it and he feels so guilty for using her like this, all at once.
It’s almost the last quiet moment, and after that, Quentin has to yell at a plant, and he says “Shouldn’t the idea of Fillory be enough?” while thinking of the taste of plums on his tongue, Teddy’s voice in his ear and Arielle’s hair in the sun, and Eliot . Feeling the texture of the crayons he and Julia used to draw their map, his bed dipping as Margo sits down and confesses to playing Fillorian ambassador. He can’t speak of the memories, all tangled with fear and grief and confusion as they are, but he thinks them. A childhood, a start, a lifetime, he thinks of it all.
Isn’t the idea of Fillory enough.
“We work best as a team,” Alice says on the stairs at the Cottage, in one last quiet moment. And Quentin agrees, but when the time comes, when the moment arrives -
The Seam-mirror wants him to fix it. And so he does, a twitch of his fingers, hand behind his back. “Take her, do it now,” he tells Penny 23 and then Everett wants to know what he’s done, and Quentin looks him straight in the eye.
“Just a Minor Mending.” And he throws the bottle into the Seam.
He should run. He knows he should run. But - why should he run? The lights are beautiful, why would he run from them? He’s so tired, his feet feel like lead and he could just… stop… fighting…
“Quentin!” Ariadne screams his name like she did the first time he had a handful of pills and a bottle of whiskey to wash them down, when she clawed his hands until he put the whiskey back and flushed away the pills. “Quentin!”
And he remembers then, Margo and Alice and Julia and Eliot , he remembers that he loves them, he doesn’t want to leave them and he runs, he runs but the door is too far, the sparks are spinning through the air and burning him, and his legs are folding under him and -
- something catches him around the waist and lifts -
Darkness.
(ii) I know hindsight’s 20/20 but I still don’t understand
“So, you remember that when the moment comes, I said, ‘Do it.’ Do what he says, OK?”
“No, not OK. Vague as shit.”
Not OK. Penny had wanted to punch his dead-self in the face back when they’d had that conversation, and he wants to do it again now. What the hell did he set himself up for? “Take her, do it now,” says Coldwater, and Penny grabs Alice even as she fights him. He just does it and in that moment he doesn’t question it, his dead-self’s voice ringing in his ears.
“‘Do it.’ Do what he says, OK?”
And then there’s sparks flying in the air and Coldwater’s cat daemon is running for the door but he isn’t, and Everett’s eaten up by the sparks first but -
Alice is still struggling to get out of Penny’s grip as Coldwater finally snaps the fuck out of it and runs after his daemon. But he’s not going to be fast enough, that much is already clear even as his cat clears the doorway into safety. “Perdix!” Alice screams and her daemon flies up, something winged and getting bigger as he soars back into the room and picks Coldwater up , throwing him through the door before shrinking enough to follow him out.
Holy fucking shit.
Penny lets Alice go and she drops down to check on Coldwater, who’s clear of the room but not moving. Penny makes a dive for the door and slams it shut, but the sparks are already burning through, he can tell. “We gotta go!” he says even as he turns, and that’s when he realizes Coldwater won’t be moving anytime soon.
It looks like the magic ate partway through him wherever it landed, and while his daemon’s still there so they’re alive, she’s twitching like she’s having a seizure. “Oh shit,” Penny mutters, and scoops the idiot up and over his shoulder, Alice’s daemon turning to - a cougar, maybe, or a panther? - so he can carry the cat. His Theia flies ahead of them as they make a break for it, scouting just in case (like they should have done coming in, really) as they make their way back.
Through the mirror and immediately Penny travels them back to the Brakebills infirmary. “We need help here!” he says, and even as people come to take Coldwater off his hands Alice’s legs give out and he has to grab her. “Hey, what -”
“Perdix got burned, we didn’t notice, the adrenaline…” Alice blinks up at him, eyes wet and stunned. “He didn’t run, he promised he wouldn’t be stupid and then he didn’t run.”
Yep, Penny noticed that. He’s going to keep it to himself too, the others don’t need to know that shit. Coldwater’s been on the edge of a breakdown for weeks now, but Penny hadn’t expected it to come like this, he’d figured maybe he’d cry himself out or throw things at the wall. Something less… extreme than this, anyway. He feels suddenly guilty about that as they wheel the other man and his cat away and someone else comes to take Alice and Perdix for treatment.
Then he turns to see a white-faced Julia, Julia who is human and furious with him for taking that choice away from her. “What happened?” Julia rasps, her Asterion flying in circles above their heads, and Penny realizes with a sick lurch that he has to tell her. He’s going to have to tell her, and Margo, and - fuck.
The guilt is still there, but he’s also pissed off. At himself, and Coldwater, and his dead-self for sticking the idea of listening in his head to begin with. He should have just dragged Alice and Coldwater both out somehow, and to hell with it. He should have grabbed the other bottle when Coldwater hesitated and flung it through himself. Something, anything, so that he didn’t have to tell Julia what’s happened, and know that she might be the worst one he’s got to face, but not the only one.
What the fuck had his dead-self been thinking, what had Coldwater been thinking? And what had he been thinking, to follow through?
(iii) the water’s high, you’re jumping into it, and letting go
The elevator doors open to reveal Penny, the translucent golden eagle on his shoulder marking him as the Penny Quentin first met, if he didn’t already know. “Hey, been a while. Welcome to the Underworld.”
“Oh, shit,” Quentin whispers, the numbness that’s been a constant companion for weeks starting to fade into - horror, actually, if he’s being honest.
Penny - and is it Quentin’s imagination or is he being weirdly nice? - ushers Quentin down a hallway and into an office. His office, presumably, and he makes hot chocolate which… OK, Quentin’s dead but there’s still hot chocolate, that’s unexpected. He sinks into a chair and curls his fingers around the warm cup, the feel of it enough to ground him just a little. Enough for it to sink in what happened in the Mirror World.
Oh fuck.
“What did I do?” He’s crying, when did that happen? He’d thought he’d forgotten how to cry.
“What do you think you did?” Penny sits across from him and for a moment, Quentin is distracted by how weird it is to see Penny of all people in a business suit, but the thought doesn’t linger. Not now.
“I don't know. It happened so fast.” Except he does know, doesn’t he? For a moment, he couldn’t remember a single reason why he would want to run, why he wouldn’t just let his own magic take him away in a shower of sparks. Then Ariadne had yelled his name, he’d seen Alice’s face and thought of Margo, of Julia, of Eliot, and -
And he’d run, but he’d been too late, hadn’t he? And now the tears won’t stop coming, in front of Penny of all people but he’s not mocking him, he’s just… waiting. Patiently. “This is the part where I can't lie, right? I mean, my whole life is - ”
“Revealed. But it only means anything if you reveal it to yourself.”
What does that even mean? Penny, now, sitting across from him, what does he know? Has he read Quentin’s entire book, learned more than Quentin’s too-loud mind ever told him? He doesn’t know how to feel about that, but he can’t change it, so…
“Okay,” he says, and the tears won’t stop but he almost doesn’t want to stop them now. “Um. Most of my life, I've been in and out of hospitals and. You know, just suicidal thoughts and notes. A lot of notes. I kept them in a shoebox buried in my closet. Planned attempts my daemon kept talking me out of, a couple half-assed attempts I made anyway, and meds, and therapy. And then, then I found Brakebills and all that went away. I - I thought, but…”
“But?” Still that not-Penny gentleness, still patient, softly prompting. God, this is fucking weird.
“Did I do something brave to save my friends or did I finally find a way to kill myself?” He finally says it. Was it bravery, fixing the mirror leading to the Seam, or was it some part of him, some part of that monster he once saw with his own face, on the Muntjac, some part of him finally winning out over Ariadne and over the parts of him that still want to live?
And Quentin doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what that moment of forgetting why he’d want to run means, doesn’t know what it means that he’s tired down to his bones and the idea of stopping, of rest, had been… Is it still suicide if you don’t mean to do it until the moment happens? They say people who survive jumping off bridges usually regret it on the way down, is that all his running after all was? A regret on the way down?
“OK,” Penny says, cutting into Quentin’s spiraling thoughts. “I can see we're going to need the deluxe package, which, it's OK.”
“Uh, hold on,” says a new voice, and Quentin suddenly realizes Penny never closed the office door, and now there’s a newcomer leaning against the doorframe. Like Penny, he’s in a Library-grey business suit, though his long curling black hair kind of kills the professional effect. Also like Penny, his daemon is at his side but translucent - a… clouded leopard, Quentin thinks.
Which is when he realizes Ariadne isn’t here. But, but Penny has his daemon, this new guy has his daemon, the shades he’d met when he and Julia went looking for hers had their daemons, that’s how they got Perdix back for Alice, where’s -
“Hello, Teagan,” Penny says. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yeah, you stole my client. Which, speaking of, you, Coldwater.” The man - Teagan? - turns to Quentin. He has very blue eyes, though that could be an effect of how monochrome this place is. “You didn’t drink any of that hot chocolate, did you?”
“No…” Until now, the too-sweet smell of it had actually turned his stomach, but even as he says that, suddenly it’s like the most tempting thing in the world. He lifts the cup closer to his mouth and doesn’t actually remember doing that.
“Great. Don’t. Put it down. Or, actually, let me.” Teagan snatches the cup from Quentin’s hands, putting it on the table, then turns to frown at Penny. “Really, Adiyodi, what’s this? How the hell did an In-Between wind up in the elevator for Secrets Taken to the Grave? Do you even have any secrets, Coldwater?”
Well, yes, Quentin thinks. His almost-attempts are a secret, no one ever found his shoebox full of suicide notes and Ariadne always talked him out of his attempts before he actually swallowed the pills or got up to the roof. Well, except for the times with the knife, but that had hurt enough even beginning to cut that he’d chickened out himself. And one time he'd been caught before he could make the first cut.
But he has other secrets too, secrets that aren’t… entirely about pain. Things that aren’t supposed to be secret, or at least he never wanted them to be, but since it turned out he’s the only one who feels them, that had seemed more respectful, even in the worst moments. He never quite told Alice even though he referenced it, even though she guessed, he’s never told anyone else at all, so it’s still - secret. Kind of.
He doesn’t say so, though, only asking, “What’s an In-Between? And where’s Ariadne?”
“Shit,” Penny mutters. “Look, the boss sent him here, he wants him moved on. Thought a familiar face would do the trick.”
“Really,” Teagan drawls, tapping his foot. His only foot, actually, because now that Quentin looks, the suit pants Teagan’s wearing cut off to reveal one shoe and one metal peg. He doesn’t think prosthetics ever look like that anymore, so maybe this ghost is older? “I thought Alecto told me of all the gods, the Lord of the Underworld is the least allowed to break his own rules.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes these things happen.”
“OK!” Quentin snaps, loud enough that both of them turn to him. “Can someone please explain what’s going on here?”
“I can do that,” Teagan says, flashing a bright smile that, though Quentin doesn’t know it, once got him onto a ship’s crew claiming to be an excellent cook when, frankly, he couldn’t boil an egg properly. Teagan’s daemon knows, though, and if felines could roll their eyes, she would absolutely be rolling hers. “You aren’t dead, Quentin Coldwater. Well, not yet, anyway.”
(iv) the moment stopped me cold and grabbed me like a thief
Margo doesn’t know Penny 23 that well. She hadn’t known their Penny all that well, comparatively speaking, much less the refugee from the timeline where Quentin went nuclear. And yet, somehow, she knows the second he walks into Eliot’s hospital room that she is not going to like what he has to say.
“The bottles are gone, and the god-wannabe is too, he showed up to stop us,” Penny 23 says, and his crowned eagle daemon circles above their heads, round and round as if her movement lets her human keep still. Talaus growls low in his throat and curls tighter around Cythera’s sleeping form. Margo’s grip on Eliot’s hand tightens too, as if she can protect him from the bad news that way, whatever it is, even though he can’t hear it right now.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she demands, sharp and cold like the High King she is, exile be damned. “Why are you here filling me in and not Q?” She’d expected it to be Quentin, Ariadne trotting at his heels, here to tell her it all went well, it’s over, before he settled in to wait for Eliot to wake up. He should be here, that boy loves Eliot as much as she does, in a different way, so where -?
Oh no. No. Not now. Not when everything is supposed to finally be all right.
“OK, 23, what the fuck happened?” she snaps.
“Everett showed up. He wanted the Monster Twins for his becoming a god scheme. He broke the mirror portal, so Coldwater… cast a minor mending spell to fix the thing, then he chucked in the bottle.”
Well, that sounds fine - oh. Wait. Fucking shit , Quentin cast in the Mirror World. Where magic goes fucking haywire, Jesus Christ. “Tell me you did not just let him die in there,” she says, voice low, Talaus growling softly. Fuck, what is she going to tell Eliot if - “Fucking tell me you didn’t!”
“He told me to get Alice out -”
“ Fuck what he said, tell me what -”
“He ran, but he wasn’t fast enough, OK?! His cat got out but he was behind her, so Alice’s daemon turned into… something, I don’t know what the fuck it was but it had wings and it grabbed him. He’s alive, but he’s hurt pretty badly, so I don’t know if he’s gonna pull through. But nobody let him do anything.”
There’s more to it. Margo knows it, she can feel it. But she isn’t sure she really wants to know, not least because she isn’t sure she wants Eliot to know, and she won’t be able to hide it. Because she’s still going to have to tell him, even if the bad news is… not irreversibly bad. “Get out,” she says, free hand pointing at the door. Penny 23 looks like he might say something, but instead he just sighs.
“Someone’ll keep you posted, I’m sure,” he says, and then he leaves, his daemon on his shoulder. Margo sinks back into her chair, loosening her grip on Eliot’s hand as her fingers are starting to cramp, and reaching for Talaus with the other. Her tiger comes over to her and the feel of his fur under her fingers is soothing as it always is, and yet…
“Goddamn it,” she whispers. “Tal, I don’t want to be the one to tell Eliot about this.” But they both know she wouldn’t let anyone else do it, so that hardly matters. And damn Quentin anyway, they’re all supposed to be fine now, why did he have to take yet another stupid risk? Why can’t they get it through his thick skull that no one wants him to sacrifice himself, except maybe him?
Oh. Oh that’s a bad thought. He wouldn’t, though, not now when things are finally improving… right?
Margo doesn’t sleep, that night. She probably wouldn’t have slept much anyway, because hospital chairs are damned uncomfortable, but she might have dozed a little. She might have been able to relax, because Eliot’s unconscious and he’ll be some time recovering, but he’s out of the woods and will recover. She can’t, though, because somewhere else in this hospital they’re trying to save her other idiot boy, and she can’t leave Eliot to check on Quentin - well, she could but she doesn't trust that her eye won't get stolen if she leaves it here to watch over Eliot. So she has to wait for someone to come to her.
She doesn’t sleep, but she drifts. Remembers how, at first, she’d thought it made sense that “Nigel” and “Brian” were missing, she’d thought oh, somehow they found each other and ran off because of course they fucking did . And then they were there, and - “Not Eliot,” Quentin had said, with shadows in his eyes. Margo had known, she’d known what the Monster put Quentin through, before and after he’d gotten his memories back. But she’d thought, Julia’s here, it’ll be fine, I have to go back to Fillory, El would understand and Q understands.
Julia had been interested in the story of Margo’s axes. Penny 23 had been interested, Kady had been interested. Even Alice had at least seemed curious. But Quentin, who was all about quests - Quentin had just watched her, Ariadne tucked against Cythera. Margo and Talaus hadn’t even been able to look at Cythera like that, catatonic and on a fucking leash so she didn’t walk into walls. She hadn’t seen it then, riding the wave of success and determination, she hadn’t seen the way it was like Quentin wasn’t with them, was drifting on the edges.
Margo thinks of Eliot telling her all about the first-year boy so star-struck by the sight of him he’d thought he was hallucinating, thinks of Cythera and Talaus bonding with Ariadne as easily and quickly as they had with each other. Eliot’s grin and Quentin’s startled smile, her own laughter as the three cats chased each other around the Brakebills lawn. She remembers Quentin kneeling so she could crown him, and how she’d wanted to shake him for volunteering to stay in Blackspire, so calmly determined and so unaware of how wrong it would be.
Margo remembers him, quiet in Brian’s buttondowns, paler than she’d ever seen him, even his hair darker like the brighter shades in it were fading out. God damn it, how the fuck did she miss this? He’d jumped over the couch to plead not to be sent to South with Alice and she’d seen his old awkward self, decided things were fine, and thought no more of it. And now, now he’s gone and - and if he dies, if she has to face losing her other best friend just when she thought everyone was safe, if she has to be the one to tell Eliot -
Fucking hell.
“OK,” Margo tells Talaus, who is watching her, who is thinking the same things she is. “We fucked up.”
“Apparently everyone fucked up,” he says, ears drooping.
Margo nods once, sharply. They did, but this is not the time for panic, this is the time to be ready to do what needs doing. “It’s not over yet, Tal. No way is it over yet.” She is not losing her boys - and if they lose Quentin, Eliot will be lost too. She is not. One way or another, they got that fucking parasite out of Eliot and if they need to break down the gates of Heaven or Hell for Q, well. She’s a fucking king, she’ll find a way.
Margo and Talaus are still waiting, barely talking to each other so that only the monitors Eliot’s hooked up to break the silence as the sky slowly lightens outside. The white-walled room is painted pink and gold by sunrise when someone knocks on the open door to announce their presence. Margo looks up to see Alice, who looks as exhausted as she feels, two coffees in hand. “How’s Eliot?” she asks quietly, giving Margo one of the coffees.
Margo smiles, faintly. “He’ll be fine. They did some magic on him once it came back, to back up the stitches. Lipson says she can’t heal him completely now she’s gone and stitched him up, not unless she takes ‘em out and she doesn’t want to risk that yet. He should wake up sometime today. How’s Quentin?”
She’s half expecting Alice to say he died. But Alice only sighs, holding her daemon close with her free arm - he’s a lemur of some kind right now. “They got him to survive the night, and they said that was the hardest part, they healed everything they could but… But he’s in a coma, it’s up to him now, they can’t do anything else.”
“Goddamn it,” Margo mutters.
Alice only nods, lips pressed tightly together.
Eliot wakes up only minutes after Alice leaves, when Margo is running on coffee and fumes. Cythera wakes up first, cuddling into Talaus’ side with an unhappy groan, and when Margo looks away from the daemons it’s to find Eliot’s eyes open and focused on her. “Hey, Bambi. How long was I out?”
“About a day, give or take. How are you feeling?”
“Like I was sliced open and stitched up. No magic, still?”
“Library fucking rationed the shit out of it, it was used up on a spell to contain the Parasite Twins. Lipson’s used some magic on you since it came back on, but not much, says she can’t.”
“Ah. Lovely.” For a moment Eliot’s eyelids droop and Margo hopes he’s going to go back to sleep, hopes that she won’t have to tell him yet. But then he blinks and focuses again, glancing around the room. “Where’s Q? He around? I’ve gotta talk to him.”
“He’s, look, baby, you’re still hurt, so I’m gonna need you to stay calm, OK?” Margo tries to keep her voice light, but even if she had succeeded, Eliot knows her too well to be fooled. Panic flashes in his eyes and Cythera sits up, tail lashing even as Talaus tries to soothe her.
“Margo. Where is he?”
And so she tells him. Because there’s nothing else for it. “He had to cast in the Mirror World. The magic went wild like it always does in there… He was hurt pretty badly, they got him through the night but they’re not. They’re not sure if he’ll wake up, El. I’m so sorry.”
Eliot stares at her, already-pale face gone bone white, eyes wide and almost unfocused. “He has to. I have to talk to him, Margo, he can’t just die on me now. He can’t do that.” Eliot sounds… lost, like a little boy, and it breaks her heart.
“El…”
“I want to see him.” And he doesn’t sound lost now, he sounds broken still but certain. Margo squeezes his hand.
“As soon as you can get up, OK? I swear, we’ll figure this out, but it won’t help anyone if you get worse.”
Eliot tries to argue, but it’s not long before the pain meds put him back to sleep and Margo is left to the quiet again.
(v) don’t think I don’t notice that our eyes never meet
With magic back on, it’s easy for them to heal Perdix’s burns. That almost feels wrong, that it should be so easy. After all these months of low levels, after Alice’s own knowledge of what those sparks mean…
Anyway, it’s the only easy thing, right now.
Alice waits with Julia through the long night, Perdix as a coyote sitting at her feet and watching Julia’s peregrine falcon steadily. Alice herself doesn’t look at Julia at all, she doesn’t trust herself to. Because she’s remembering all her brief glimpses of Quentin in the past year, she’s remembering things she’d never fully put together until now.
How he had barely seemed to care about his own life, when she’d come to save him. She’d thought, at the time, that his indifference had been because it was her, that his anger at her was so fierce that he couldn’t even bring himself to be grateful that she’d saved his life. She’d thought so until the moment in the park, everything happening so fast, the Monster rambling about fifty years and fruit - except it had been Eliot going on about what must have been something only he and Quentin understood. And for a moment Quentin had lit up, stunned and hopeful and alive in a way he hadn’t been the whole time they’d been working with the stone.
But he’d been locked down again by the time he sent her away, and when she next saw him it had been even worse.
“I hate air right now,” she remembers him saying, what seems like a lifetime ago. She remembers how afraid she’d been for him, afraid that the emotion bottles would set off a spiral - before the fiasco of what they had actually set off. She remembers how she’d known just how to torment him as a Niffin, remembers his expression when shadeless Julia threw him to Reynard - she hadn’t cared then, but the memories are sharp and looking at all of it now…
“It’s a monster with his face and eyes,” Quentin had said, with a broken look in his eyes she hadn’t realized she recognized from those memories until now, sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair and staring at the white wall across from her. Alice stares at the wall like it holds the answers to everything, while Julia stares at her hands as if they hold the same, and Alice thinks. It’s what she’s always done best, or worst, think and question and puzzle out.
What would it do to someone already fighting against a voice in his head telling him not to live, to be faced three times running with a twisted version of someone he loves, that takes pleasure in hurting him one way or another? Every time Alice has seen Quentin since this all started he’s been pale and quiet and tired, and that’s not exactly a new look but it had been worse than that.
She’s never seen him so blank before, like running on autopilot is the only way he can keep going. Even as a Niffin, she’d never seen that.
“I have to call his mom,” Julia says after the doctor’s come and gone, with the news that Quentin is alive but in a coma, and there’s nothing else they can do. Up to him, the doctor said, and all Alice can think of is that awful moment when Quentin just stood there, the sparks flying around him, before Ariadne’s scream got him moving.
She remembers how she used to think the lights were pretty , and thinks she might be sick. “He doesn’t even like his mother,” she says, voice hoarse.
“I know. But she’ll have to know if he - and it’s better to tell her now. It’s not like she’d bother to show up even if she could get in, but it’s… necessary.” And with that Julia walks away, cell phone in hand like some kind of defense, and Alice thinks she gets it. Calling Mrs. Coldwater - or, no, Quentin said once that she goes by her maiden name, so it’d be Ms. Makepeace - is something to do, and so Julia will do it. Alice understands that all too well.
In search of something to do, she goes for coffee, and stops by Eliot’s room to update Margo. In search of something to do, she sends Penny 23 to go fill Kady in on what happened, find out how things are going on her end. And then there’s nothing else to do, and Julia isn’t back for some reason, so Alice takes a deep breath and goes into Quentin’s room, Perdix on her shoulder as a wren.
Q and Ariadne shouldn’t be alone. If they had been less alone, this wouldn’t have happened.
Mostly, Quentin looks asleep. Except that Alice has seen him sleep, and he never sleeps like that. On his back, yeah, but never with his arms at his sides, laid out neatly like he’s - No, Q sprawls in his sleep, or curls up on his side, he doesn’t look like this. But he’s not burned and bleeding anymore, she can see that some of the places on his arms will scar and there’s a vicious red scar on the side of his neck, but mostly -
“Well, they did say they healed the physical damage,” Perdix says in her ear, before flying off her shoulder and going to Ariadne’s side as an ocelot.
Alice sits with Quentin for a while, as the sunlight creeps into the room and makes her have to pull the shades against it when it gets in her eyes. “When you wake up, I’m going to kick your ass,” she tells him, biting her lip. She’s not going to cry, because he’ll be fine. He did run, in the end, that has to mean something, doesn’t it? “You promised me you wouldn’t be stupid, Q. We were supposed to do this as a team. I think you need a reminder of what that word means. I just got - we just became friends again, this is not the time for you to leave, all right?”
The doctor comes in to do some kind of test and asks Alice to step out, so she does. The corridor is empty and she leans against the wall, remembering Q in the loft kitchen, shaking to pieces in her arms and not even crying. She ought to have seen it then, she thinks, should have realized just how far out on the edge he was, but - She’d known it was bad anyway, that’s why she hugged him, she’d wanted to remind him that someone still cared, she’d wanted to help . Because he’d been her first real friend once, and he’d asked to find that again, and she’d wanted to. She wants to.
Alice looks up to see Julia coming down the hallway, and suddenly she’s furious. “This should never have happened, it should never have gotten this bad,” she says, hands curling into fists.
Julia stops in the middle of the hallway. “What are you talking about? Penny said he wasn’t fast enough, that it was an accident.”
“Do you really believe that, Julia? 23 would say whatever he thought would make it easier for you.” It’s not entirely fair, Alice knows this. But she doesn’t care. If she had seen that something was wrong when she barely saw Q and he didn’t trust her, even if she hadn’t fully understood how bad it was, then Julia, Julia who’s known Q all his life, Julia who’s been with him for all this mess, how did she miss it?
“Alice, what are you -” But Julia’s falcon shrieks and takes to the air like he already knows, and that only makes Alice angrier because if the daemon knew, even if his human didn’t, why didn’t he say something?!
“He’s a mess! He’s been a mess since I showed up knowing the Monster was going to kill him, that thing fucking broke him and you were there all this time and didn’t see it? How could you not see it?”
Julia glares at her. “Say what you mean, Alice, or back off!”
“He didn’t run!” Alice yells, her voice cracking on the words. She thinks she might be crying, she knows she doesn’t care. “He didn’t run till Ariadne yelled at him, that’s why he wasn’t fast enough, why do you think Perdix had to go get him? It wasn’t an accident, it was a fucking suicide attempt !”
At first, Julia’s horrified face seems to be in reaction to Alice, but then her eyes shift to something further down the hall. Alice whirls around to see Margo supporting a barely-upright Eliot, and from the stricken looks on their faces, they heard everything she just said. Alice swallows hard, lifting her chin. She’s not sorry. They had to know.
“You’re sure?” Margo demands, voice tight. “Why would he do that now? He panicked, maybe, but that’s not the same, you could be reading into it.”
But Alice knows what she knows. Margo might deny it, maybe Julia will too. But Alice knows. And she finds her gaze seeking Eliot, and from the devastation in his eyes, she can see he knows she’s right. They both know.
But what good is the knowing now, when it’s too late to stop the consequences?
(vi) all I really need is honesty
“Uh… I’m not dead?” Quentin asks, startled, then turns to look at Penny, who looks… very uncomfortable, his daemon shifting from foot to foot on her perch. “Penny, what the fuck, you couldn’t have told me that?”
“Actually, no, I couldn’t,” Penny says, “because I’m supposed to get you to move on quickly.”
“He’s supposed to have a choice, and to know what all the options are,” Teagan points out.
Quentin is confused and about to get angry at someone, when he glances back to Penny’s daemon and sees her on the ground with Teagan’s, the two of them whispering together. He looks back at Penny, whose face is - too impassive, actually, and at Teagan, who winks.
Look, the boss sent him here, he wants him to move on, Penny said. Penny also left the door open, and his eagle looks very conspiratorial with the clouded leopard right now. Quentin’s a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but he’s not stupid. He’s been set up, he thinks, but he also thinks it might be in a way meant to help him, so probably he shouldn’t complain.
Not yet, anyway.
“So why am I here, if I’m not dead?” he asks. “You said I was an In-Between, um, Teagan?”
“Sean. Sean Teagan, and yes. Tell me, Coldwater, have you ever heard about coma patients who’ve been treated as completely as possible, and the doctors tell their loved ones there’s nothing else to be done, it’s up to the person now?”
“Sure, in TV shows and things, never had a reason to hear it in the real world.”
Sean Teagan nods. “Well, it’s a real thing, and it happens to be your situation at this time. The magic gone wrong ate away at you, physically, but also at your life force. The healers at Brakebills were able to repair the physical damage now that magic is properly available again, but the damage to your life force is something only you can heal, yourself.”
Quentin draws his legs up to his chest, feet braced on the edge of the seat, considering this. He twitches his fingers, wishing he had a coin, a card, a pencil, anything to keep his fingers busy. He wishes Ariadne was here. “Why isn’t Ariadne with me?”
“If your daemon’s in the Underworld, you’re dead,” Penny says. “That’s why, even though the myth about Orpheus is true, and sometimes Hades will let someone try and bring back a dead loved one, it almost never works. Most people can’t tolerate leaving their daemon Above, it’s even more painful than the standard split ritual. Yours isn’t here because you’re not dead yet. But since your spirit is here and your body’s up there, you’re not split.”
“So if I choose to die, then Ariadne will join me?”
“Maybe not immediately,” Teagan says, leaning casually against the wall. “Your choice to die doesn’t mean your heart stops on command. But in a week or two, the doctors will start talking about… what’s that phrase they use now?” he asks, glancing toward Penny.
“Pulling the plug,” Penny says.
“Oh yes, right. Pulling the plug. They’ll talk about that. Eventually, whoever makes those choices for you will have to make them.”
Julia. Quentin made Julia his medical proxy after finding out that his dad died, in one brief moment of practical thinking, because he really didn’t want to trust his mother with that decision. But that means… Fuck, she’s going to be furious at him for leaving her with that choice. Assuming she’s all right, she said she was but she’d looked sick, he’s not sure, and - Oh. Wait, he hasn’t asked, he doesn’t know what -
“Are the others all right? Did, did everyone else make it?” he asks Penny in a sudden rush, because how had he not - Alice and 23 might have been hurt by his magic, and oh God, the last he saw of Eliot he was bleeding out, he’d repressed that to keep going but -
“I wondered when the shock would fade enough for you to ask. Yeah, they’re all alive, they’re all gonna be OK. Whatever you decide, they pull through.”
Well, obviously. Quentin is hardly essential to any of them, he’d never expect his death to be more than just another loss, painful maybe but not crushing. But they’re all right. He won’t be facing any of them down here anytime soon, which is more important. “Good, that’s good.”
“And you’ll see them again, whatever you decide,” Penny adds.
“I thought you were in favor of me moving on?”
“Well… with Teagan here, the rules are back on, no one can stop that now. So it’s your choice, Coldwater. But either way, you don’t lose them forever. Of course, if you stay, you can see your dad again, or your wife and son.”
“Or, if you go back now, you’ll go back knowing you will see them, one day, after a full life Above,” Teagan points out. “I tell you what, Coldwater, why don’t you and I discuss your options in my office, leave Penny to his paperwork. I hear you’ve got someone else coming down the shaft, Adiyodi.”
Quentin, whose breath had caught in his throat at the mention of Arielle and Teddy, gets to his feet almost mechanically. He follows Teagan out, but so does Penny, the three of them going down a corridor together until Penny turns left toward the elevator, where the doors have just opened to reveal an entirely unfamiliar man.
“Well, time to go,” Teagan says brightly, taking Quentin by the arm and steering him to the right, very firmly for a man with only one real leg. Maybe being dead makes that easier?
(vii) and I don’t know how I can do without
It turns out, the way to get a double hospital room with someone is to be caught sneaking out of one’s own room three times in the middle of the night to go to said other person’s room. Eliot is of the opinion that it all would have been much easier if Lipson had just done it when he asked. Politely, like a decent person even, and yet she’d said no, so he’d had to be difficult.
“I don’t think this is going to be conducive to your recovery,” Lipson says sternly, even as she sees him settled in the window bed of the room where Quentin had, until now, been put alone. “You need to focus on yourself, not worry about someone you can’t help.”
“I’d worry either way,” Eliot says evenly. “But I can look to the right and see him , here. So I’ll worry a little less.”
This is, technically, the truth. Because in the same room, Eliot doesn’t have to wait and worry that the next person at his door will be someone telling him that Quentin won’t be waking up. Cythera can curl around Ariadne, nuzzling her and grooming her fur in hopes that wherever she is, she can feel it. Eliot can look over and see Quentin, just as he’d said. A Quentin far too still, lying in a way he never does when he’s actually sleeping, but there and alive.
But at the same time, he looks over and sees a Quentin almost still as death, a burn scar on his neck, probably others where Eliot can’t see them, and, as Eliot finds when he stumbles out of his bed to sit next to Quentin’s, sunburst scars like something exploded on his palms. He wonders if Quentin will need to do hand exercises to keep a full range of movement. He wonders what Quentin will say if he can’t do his card tricks anymore, or has trouble with tuts.
He wonders if Quentin will wake up at all, to say anything.
Mostly, Eliot keeps to his bed, because Margo is usually there and he doesn’t want to worry her. She brings a laptop, he’s not sure whose it is, and sits on the side of his bed so they can start catching up on the shows they’ve missed, what with Fillory and possessions and quests. Margo always stops by Quentin’s bed on the way out and squeezes his hand, Talaus always nuzzles the top of Ariadne’s head, and Eliot swallows back questions because he knows -
Margo was in Fillory most of the time. She wasn’t there to see the signs, until the end.
Eliot drifts more often than not, still on a high dose of painkillers. He falls asleep to the steady beeping of Quentin’s heart monitor, and dreams of Quentin’s pulse against his lips, in their bed in Fillory. He wakes, each time, in light or shadow, to the sight of Cythera curled round Ariadne in the daemon nest, and Ariadne never moves. There are things Eliot needs to say to Quentin but he won’t say them now. Saying them now feels like admitting that he will never get to say them where Quentin can hear him.
So he says nothing, but when it’s just them in the room he stares at Quentin and wills him to wake up. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t seem to make things worse either.
He pretends to be asleep when Julia visits, unless Margo is there and they’re keeping themselves busy. He can’t look at Julia without wanting to scream at her, and Quentin wouldn’t want him to do that. So he bites his tongue and lies as still as Quentin is, pretending to sleep. Julia talks to Quentin about how she’s helping Kady with the hedge witches, about things she’s seen on Facebook regarding the people they knew in high school.
There’s going to be a summer reunion at the Jersey Shore, all years, maybe they should go?
Are you being fucking stupid right now, Eliot wants to say, but he doesn’t.
This sort of thing is habit forming, so when Eliot hears footsteps coming down the hall, he rolls carefully onto his back and closes his eyes. But the voice he hears isn’t Julia’s. “Hey, Q,” Alice whispers, and Eliot hears the chair move as she sits down.
“If you’re whispering on my account, I’m awake,” Eliot says, opening his eyes and reaching to the side so that he can raise the bed. Alice looks like she hasn’t been sleeping that well, shadows under her eyes and her hair messy. Quite a feat, for someone with hair that straight.
“Hi, Eliot. How are you feeling?”
“Like hell, but supposedly I’m improving. Can’t give me the good drugs, thanks to the Monster experimenting, unfortunately.”
“Good, except for the meds part,” Alice says with a faint awkward smile. Eliot does his best to return it, but it feels more like a grimace. An awkward silence falls, broken only by Quentin’s heart monitor and the soft rustlings of the daemons moving about. Cythera is tucked around Ariadne but she’s moving her head to watch Alice’s Perdix, prowling the room as a…
“What is he today? Can’t tell with the gold.”
“A jaguar,” Alice says. “He likes to be a big cat when he’s around other cats.” A pause, and then - “If you want to ask me something, you can go ahead and ask.”
Eliot takes a breath, looking at her sitting there holding one of Q’s hands. There are a few questions he wants to ask, but the one this particular view gives him is - it’s not important. Well, it is, but it’s so secondary. Losing Q to Alice, again, will fucking hurt. But losing him completely… Even the thought is almost too heavy to breathe around. “What makes you so sure he tried to kill himself? Maybe Margo’s right, maybe he panicked?”
Alice looks up at him then, a shadow in her eyes. “No, that wasn’t it. You didn’t hear the way Ariadne screamed for him. They say - I did research on it once - daemons are almost always against it, when their human tries to commit suicide. It’s why there are more known attempts than successes. The daemons try to stop it. Almost always. The way she screamed…”
It only happened once, in Fillory, before Arielle, before Teddy. Eliot remembers hearing the whispered argument between Q and Ariadne, remembers the glint of the knife in Quentin’s hand. Remembers running over to them, knocking the blade away and pulling Quentin in against him. “Don’t. Don’t you dare. You come to me, you tell me if it gets bad, you don’t do this, Q.”
“OK, El. I - I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t leave.”
“Is that all?” Eliot asks, and he’s proud of how even his voice is. His hands are shaking but they’re hidden by his blankets so that doesn’t matter. Alice shakes her head, her own hands twisting in her lap.
“I don’t know everything. I wasn’t here, no one wanted me around. But I came back because I had Q’s book, and the Monster was going to kill him. The day you broke out, um, we were about to do a ritual to banish the Monster back to Blackspire. If I hadn’t gotten involved, it would have taken two more days, the Monster would have caught Quentin, and slit his throat for the betrayal. I didn’t read much more than that but it - it liked him, I know that from what little I did read. And I know how much I hurt him as a Niffin, I know how much of that was because it was my face he had to see. I can’t imagine it was much different.”
“He was in love with you,” Eliot says, trying for dismissive and failing, and now Alice is glaring at him.
“Oh, like he isn’t with you. I’m not blind, or stupid. He always looked your way, even when he was looking at me too. Right from the beginning. He told me he’s in love with someone else, we’re friends again but he told me he can’t offer more, he didn’t say who because he said the person didn’t want him , but I saw enough of him trying to save you,” Alice says, her voice hard as her glare. “I know who he meant. And after he told me that, he stood there shaking against the damn refrigerator, and so I hugged him, and he held onto me and just shook. And his eyes were blank, these whole last days, like no one was really home anymore.”
“Then why the fuck did you take him in there with you?” Eliot snaps. “The others apparently missed it completely, but if you -”
“I thought I could keep him safe! He promised we’d do whatever needed doing together, and I was stupid enough to believe him, all right? I thought I was overreacting, I hadn’t put it all together yet, and 23 is psychic! I was sure if Q was that badly off he’d notice, and say something, if only to make sure things went right!”
“Well, clearly you were wrong!”
“Obviously!”
And their daemons are both up and snarling at each other now, Perdix hulking and larger than Cythera but Cythera is never intimidated by that. Alice is on her feet, fists clenched, and Eliot can barely move but he’s shaking with fury, enough to rattle the bed. Then, he takes a breath and Alice lets one out, and they both deflate. “Obviously,” she says again, sounding exhausted. “But Eliot, if I’d understood how bad - I would never have - I didn’t know enough -”
“No. Neither do I. And that’s going to have to change.” Because when Quentin wakes up - and it will be when, whatever Eliot has to do to make sure of it - Eliot will need to know how bad things got. He’ll need to know because apparently when he’s gone no one thinks to even check on Quentin.
He has nightmares, and hazy memories. Quentin covered in blood, or flying back against a wall, or Eliot’s hands around his throat. Ariadne shaking under Eliot’s hands and Quentin holding himself far too still under the same. If those are real bits and pieces from the Monster, if - didn’t anyone think to ask about it?
“I don’t have his book anymore,” Alice says.
Before Eliot can reply, someone nudges the door open. “Oh, shit, sorry, I was looking for Julia, I’ll just -”
“No you won’t,” Eliot says flatly. “Get in here, 23, I think we need to talk.”
If he didn’t already know for obvious reasons, the look on Penny 23’s face would tell Eliot that he is going to absolutely hate what he hears.
(viii) but now it's January and the bulbs have all burned out
The worst part is, Julia hadn’t missed it. Not completely. She knows Q, she knows him better than anyone. And the guy who had hugged her tightly and asked where she’d been? He’d been worn out and already traumatized by the Monster, but he’d still been her Q.
The person she’d seen leave for Fogg’s trippy forest, and never seen awake again? Hadn’t been.
Julia had seen it, she’d known, but she hadn’t really understood what she was seeing. Because Q’s spirals had always been the kind of thing where he’d retreat, hide in his room with his Fillory books. She’d known he wasn’t himself, but his focus on saving Eliot had seemed almost comforting. It had also been increasingly a problem, as things escalated, because where Julia and Penny would have considered stopping the Monster even if it meant taking Eliot out with it, Quentin never budged on saving his friend. But Julia had thought it was a sign that Q wasn’t slipping, at least not in the worst way.
Because Quentin with a goal had never been a Quentin on the verge of giving up before.
It’s why she’d said what she did when they failed to protect Aengus’ stone, when they’d all taken a moment to stop for drinks, her and Alice and Penny and Kady, but Quentin stayed apart from them. The way he’d stared off into the middle distance, that had worried Julia. So she’d gone over to him and tried to draw him back, an old familiar habit.
“Look, once I finally get this goddess shit straight I need you. To help remind me what it's like to give a shit about other people. To want to risk your life to save them.”
She’d said it because it was true, and to give him a focus, something to do. Because when she’d said it wasn’t over and he’d said “Yes, it is,” that had sounded like a Quentin who might slip away, that had been a flash of the red flags Julia’s familiar with. So she’d tried to give him a new goal. It had worked before. But now Julia has to wonder, did she make it worse? Did she put more pressure on when Q was already drowning? What did she miss to change him this much, that she doesn’t even know what his spirals look like now?
“Maybe Alice overreacted,” she tells Asterion as they head back into the infirmary. “She said he didn’t run, OK, so I’m sure that’s true but maybe he stopped because the first spark hit him, and it was pain that made him stop. Or maybe he panicked like Margo said.”
Asterion, perched on her shoulder, preens her hair even as she walks, lifting his head to say, “Ariadne hasn’t been herself, but she’s been busy trying to take care of Eliot’s cheetah - Cythera, I think her name is.”
“Julia!”
Julia closes her eyes for a moment, as if that will stop Penny from coming toward her. She doesn’t know how to feel about him right now. Part of her wants to forgive him because he had, after all, saved her life. And he does care about her, it’s written all over his face when he looks at her. Except - she’s not always sure it’s her he sees, rather than his Julia returned to life. And he took her choice away. It doesn’t matter that she was in no state to make it, it wasn’t his to take.
All in all, she just… doesn’t want to deal with him right now. She still feels like hell and her best friend is lingering between life and death. She doesn’t have time for Penny. “Penny, I can’t do this now,” she says, trying to walk by him.
“Yeah, fine, I get that you’re still mad, but that’s not - it was why I was looking for you, but not now. If you’re going to see Coldwater, you might want to wait. I was just talking to Eliot, and Alice, but she left. Anyway, he, uh, he’s on the warpath, I don’t think you want to deal with him.”
Julia scowls. Penny seems honestly bothered, his crowned eagle shifting from foot to foot on his shoulder, but she doesn’t care. “I’m not afraid of Eliot. He can say whatever he wants.”
Pushing open the door, she finds Eliot awake in his bed, sitting up and reading - “Is that Q’s chart?” she asks as she settles in the chair next to Quentin’s bed. Someone tried to shave him, she notices absently, and they missed a spot. That always annoys him, he either needs to shave clean or have stubble, a missed patch drives him up a wall. He used to grumble about it when they were in high school and he was still getting the hang of a razor.
“Yep,” Eliot drawls, not looking at her. “Fascinating read, here.”
“You shouldn’t be looking at that, you’re not his medical proxy or his doctor,” Julia snaps, but she doesn’t move to take it from him either. He probably wants that, after all.
“Spousal privilege.” Now he does glance up, a cold little smile on his face. In the corner, his cheetah growls low, and Asterion flies off Julia’s shoulder, circling over their heads as she glares at Eliot.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Do you care, Julia? Because I have to say, I don’t really think you do.” He holds up the chart, waving it like a flag. “Forget magic nearly burning him up, dehydration, malnutrition, general exhaustion? Weren’t you around basically the whole fucking time? You didn’t notice any of this?”
“We were trying to deal with the homicidal manchild inhabiting your body because you got trigger happy!” Julia snaps. “And I was trying to figure out what the fuck I was, so I could get magic back and be more useful in fixing the mess we were in.”
“But you couldn’t take five minutes to check in? Tell me, I have these flashes of memory, what’s the story behind the time the Monster fucking choked him?”
“He was saving your life. It wanted to overdose for fun, and he threatened it. It was trying to make him back down, when he didn’t, it did. I tried to make him stop and think, but all he could think about was getting you back,” Julia says, and she isn’t sure if she’s trying to guilt trip Eliot or just telling the truth. “That’s not Q in the kind of spiral that led him to - his worst lows were always hiding away, do you think I wasn’t watching for that?”
“He doesn’t spiral like that anymore, he gets so focused on one thing that he forgets to function,” Eliot says, shaking his head.
“Well no one fucking told me that ! Apparently no one knows it but you! What - oh. That’s right,” she says, trying very hard not to be snide, and failing. “‘Spousal privilege’, and that fifty years thing when you broke out. Eliot, you can’t blame me for not knowing shit that no one but the two of you know! What was I supposed to do?”
Julia had asked Q about that, what “Peaches and plums, motherfucker,” had meant. But he’d only shaken his head, told her that it was a long story, but he promised he’d fill her in once things were quiet again. And she hadn’t pushed, because after that they were dealing with a mummy and then with the Monster deciding it wanted to test out being a junkie. And then there’d been Poppy, and trying to find Enyalius who turned out to be Aengus, and she just… she hadn’t found a chance to bring it up again.
“Notice that he wasn’t fucking eating or sleeping, maybe? Ask him?” Eliot says, scorn in every word. “Would that have really been so hard?”
“You think I didn’t try? What was I supposed to do when he insisted he was fine, slip him sleeping pills?”
“That thing put my hands all over him and all over Ariadne! It dragged him along while it killed people, I may not have more than flashes but I know that much, and you didn’t think maybe not seeing the usual signals wasn’t enough to decide ‘oh everything’s fine’?”
The cheetah unwinds herself from Ariadne, snarling, as Asterion shrieks for himself and Julia both, diving at the cheetah’s face. She yowls and Eliot jerks, hand going to where his stitches must be pulling. Then the cheetah’s claws are raking down Asterion’s back and its his turn to cry out, Julia’s turn to sway in her seat.
“Asterion, back off!” Julia calls, and her falcon flies away from the cheetah, onto the arm guard she wears for him. She strokes his head once, to soothe them both, then looks back at Eliot, whose cheetah is by the bed where he can gentle her into calm as well. “He is my best and oldest friend. If you think I don’t care about him, you can go fuck yourself. He knew he could come to me, and he didn’t, and the signals I know are apparently out of date. I did not just let him go , Eliot.”
She didn’t. That much is true. But it’s also true there were things she didn’t see, and maybe now it doesn’t even matter who fucked up what, and when. Maybe the most fucked up thing right now is the two of them attacking each other with Quentin silent and unmoving between them, their daemons fighting with Ariadne as utterly still as her human.
Whoever fucked up, whoever’s to blame, does it matter when there’s nothing they can fix, when all of them are just left waiting ?
(ix) it’s a lonely stretch of blacktop, out into the blue
Sean Teagan’s office isn’t all that different from Penny’s, though there’s no coffee/tea/hot chocolate/whatever set-up on the side table. Just some books. Also, paintings on the walls and knickknacks on the desk. One of the paintings is a dual frame or whatever it’s called, two scenes on one cliff. Two figures dueling, two figures just standing - one of the figures is the same both times, and might be Teagan himself actually. Quentin can’t quite tell.
“Some of my people need time, and some of them need distraction, so I let them have it if needed,” Teagan says when he spots Quentin looking around. “And painting is an afterlife hobby of mine.”
Quentin nods absently. “Arielle and Teddy are here?” he asks, because he really, really needs that confirmed.
“They are. That whole… life, it happened. Magic is strange, time is even more so, and you’re not exactly that Quentin, for all you have the memories, but you might as well be. Because, again, you have the memories. So, yes, your wife and son are here, and if you move on, you can spend time with them. But like I said, one day that’ll be true anyway, and it’s eternity, Quentin. You won’t lose out on time by going back, not really.”
Quentin thinks of Arielle, her head on his shoulder, her hands in his the day they got married. The way she looked holding Teddy, how she’d held out her hands to him when Teddy took his first steps. And he thinks of Teddy, growing from boy to man, with the Coldwater eyes and Arielle’s laughter -
And a smile he got from Eliot.
Quentin remembers - Eliot on their ladder calling out places to lay tiles, Eliot’s hands on him and how it had felt to curl together at night. How Teddy’s first word had been for him, and he’d been so utterly floored by it.
Terciel’s bright feathers under his palm and Ileana’s joy both in shifting and her final form are memories Quentin holds dear, but they are inextricably linked with the memory of Cythera sprawled across his lap like she was a housecat and not a cheetah. “You take care of each other, my boys, all three of you,” Arielle said, before the fever took her ability to speak.
She’d be furious if he came alone now, leaving Eliot behind. And what would he tell Teddy, Teddy who loved both his fathers, who daydreamed about meeting his aunts Margo and Julia? And his dad is apparently there too - fuck, his dad sees him, still only twenty-six and dead, he’s going to think Quentin killed himself, and Quentin’s not even sure he’s wrong.
But he misses them. He misses them so much, and surely they wouldn’t be mad forever, they’d understand if he just couldn’t go back, couldn’t carry on? Surely the others, everyone back in the living world, they’ll understand, eventually, if he just can’t go back?
“How the hell does anyone make a choice like this?” he asks Teagan, who shrugs.
“Well, not everyone is in your situation. A lot of people who end up In-Between do so by accident, or because someone hurt them. They don’t want to die at all, so they choose to go back pretty easily for the most part. And sometimes their bodies give out before they choose, which can be rough. Other times some of them have been struggling one way or another and that makes things more complicated regardless of how they got here. You… you’re one of the tricky ones.”
“Great,” Quentin says, very dryly. Teagan’s daemon laughs.
“Stop that, Irial, he’s allowed to be frustrated.”
“Kevay, remember?”
“Oh, who can keep it straight? Most of my letters still get addressed to John, after all.” Teagan seems to catch himself, smiling at Quentin. “Don’t mind us. The question of names is an old debate between my daemon and I, I’m afraid we fall back into it at the drop of a hat.”
Quentin thinks of being Brian, whose daemon was named Eirene, but he has a feeling the kind of identity debate Teagan’s talking about was more… self-inflicted than the one he’s experienced. He flexes his hands on his thighs, wishing Ariadne was here, sprawled on his lap even though she’s a tad bigger than is entirely comfortable. “Penny said they all survive, my friends. That they’ll be all right, whatever I decide.”
Teagan’s eyes are sharp. “Well, he didn’t lie to you. Everyone lives, except possibly you. And they get through it, if you don’t. Mostly, people do get through it, when they lose someone they love. Not always well, though, not always in ways that aren’t patently self-destructive. I knew a man once, against my better judgment I fell in love with a man once, who had lost his great love and his grief left him ready to burn the world. He claimed it was so something better might come of the ashes, but I was never sure that mattered as much as the comfort of rage.”
Quentin frowns. “Why are you telling me that?”
“Hmm? Oh, I suppose because my point is, survival isn’t always good news in itself, particularly when it means outliving someone. Not everyone finds a way to thrive again, after a loss, and I happen to know at least one of your people up there? Comes down here a good bit sooner if you don’t go back.”
Quentin’s stomach knots. “What - who -?”
“Now, that I’m not going to tell you. I will say, you’re not close to all of them, but you’re the one they orbit, in a way. Time and again you’re the one who draws the people in your circle back together. They don’t need you to carry on, but maybe they need you to not drift away entirely. Now, you also have to consider what you need. And if what you need, more than anything, is to stay here, well. It’s your right to choose that. They know that too, they’ll forgive it eventually. You see them again, whatever happens, Above or here.”
Sean Teagan, Quentin decides, is not a helpful man. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying, there’s no right answer, or at least I can’t tell you if there is one. Just your answer.”
Before Quentin can come up with an appropriately snide comment for that - he could use Eliot’s advice, or Margo’s, they’d both have cut this guy down to size already; Alice too, in the right mood - there’s a knock on a door Quentin had assumed led to a closet. “Ah. Someone else wants to talk to you. Someone who can actually make an argument where I can’t. Go on.”
Thoroughly confused now, Quentin gets up and opens the door. “What the fuck?” It’s his childhood bedroom. An exact replica, down to the smudges on the windows from the last time he’d seen it, when the Monster had trailed him upstairs and tapped its dirty fingers on the window glass.
And Quentin had woken up the next morning to find the Monster curled around him, the scent of blood and sugar everywhere, one wrong-familiar hand threaded through his hair and the other settled along Ariadne’s spine. “You should know that your friend Eliot is dead,” it had told Quentin the night before, and all night Quentin had dreamed of being old and digging a grave, Eliot’s body going cold in the chair behind him.
Fuck. He doesn’t want to think about that.
But this time, it isn’t a Monster wearing Eliot’s body standing by the window, watching as Quentin closes the door.
It’s himself.