Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

…like I helped it wake up and remember what it was before.

It’s very cold. Like too cold to shiver, too cold to sustain human life kind of cold. That’s the first thing he understands.

The next thing is a voice, very familiar and dear. Alice’s voice. She’s saying, “Something’s wrong! Eliot, it’s Margo, the preservation spell isn’t—”

Alice is alive. She made it, he thinks in relief, even though she sounds upset right now. It’s fitting that she should be the last thing he hears, the last person on his mind before he—

“It’s all right, Bambi, let it go,” comes another voice, and he feels it sink into his bones like the first drop of warmth he’s ever felt, quelling the ever-thrumming anxiety that’s been there for weeks and months.

Eliot. He did it; he saved Eliot. Now, if he lets go, if he doesn’t survive this last effort, it’s all right, because it hasn’t all been in vain, it’s meant something, his life has—

“I can hold it!” barks a third voice, and it’s Margo, never far from Eliot, and they’ll be all right, they’ll be all right together…

“You don’t have to, Bambi, let the spell go. He’s waking up.”

“How do you know?” Fourth voice, concerned but strong. “If you’re wrong—”

This is a funny deathbed conversation to overhear, but he supposes that the scene couldn’t be complete without his oldest friend in the world standing by and arguing with someone.

But wait. They weren’t all with him when he—is this dying?

“I’m not wrong, Julia, look.”

The arctic cold is receding. Something’s shaking, and gasping, and he realizes with a start that it’s him, it’s Quentin. Like the flame of a lighter that’s been struggling to spark in a blizzard, and now, suddenly, sputters to life…

“Q, it’s okay, take it easy, you’re okay!” Two soft hands are holding his hands, he feels, just about the same time he registers that he has hands.

I have eyes, he thinks, and blinks them open to see Eliot, standing a few feet away and staring back at him. He’s half-supporting Margo, who’s struggling against his hold even though she looks like she’s about to collapse.

“For fuck’s sake, I can stand, El, and your leg—”

“My leg is fine, and no, you can’t, given that you just fell over,” Eliot tells her, not looking away from Quentin.

Margo harrumphs, but deigns to relax some of her weight into the arm that Eliot’s wrapped around her. She looks at Quentin, too. “Well, come on, say something nerdy so that we know it’s really you,” she says, carelessly sharp tone belied by the intent, worried expression on her face.

“Q?” asks Julia, from his right, where she’s got one hand clasped in hers, and Quentin reluctantly tears his gaze from Eliot to look over at her.

“Quentin,” pleads Alice, and she’s on his left, gripping his other hand tightly.

He glances forward again. Eliot’s still staring at him, silent and transfixed, eyes full of some terrible, familiar emotion that Quentin can’t name, but feels suffusing the air all around him.

“So, um,” he says, finding his voice, “I’m guessing I was only mostly dead?”

Quentin is in and out of consciousness over the next few days, but there’s always someone by his side whenever he wakes up. He gets the story in bits and pieces.

There’s Julia, turning the pages of a textbook before she looks over and realizes he’s awake. “There was a ritual,” she explains, “to build you a new body. Since yours was—lost—in the Mirror Realm.”

She goes on, but he drifts off again.

“It’s normal that you’re sleeping a lot,” Lipson says later, when asked. Maybe she rode the 23-Uber in, or maybe she’s staying in the castle for now, Quentin’s not sure, but she’s been stopping by to check on him. “Or, I’m not sure anything about this situation is normal, per se,” she adds, with a displeased frown that suggests she wasn’t aware they were doing the ritual beforehand, “but given that this body has never been alive before, it makes sense that it tires easily. It’s perfectly healthy, though, from all the tests I’ve been able to run here. I suspect the body—your body—will get accustomed to typical circadian rhythms again soon enough, and you’ll be able to stay awake longer.”

There’s Margo, arguing in hushed voices with Fen, or Josh, or both. “I’m fine. All I did was apply my fucking discipline, so how about we focus our caretaking impulses on our recently reanimated little narcoleptic here instead of me. Way to take a cue, Q, that is some good timing,” she adds, seeing that Quentin is opening his eyes. She snatches the glass of water Fen is offering her, and shoves it in Quentin’s face instead. “Water?”

So they built a new body, he learns, which needed to be preserved, hence super-concentrated Cryomancy of some kind. Hence Margo’s magical exhaustion, which she’s denying at every turn.

There’s Alice, sitting on the side of his bed with one hand on his knee when he wakes up next, but talking to someone else. “It doesn’t make sense,” she’s saying. “Julia said you guys didn’t find anything. I’ve been rechecking all your sources, and I even heard back on the request I put in to the Underworld branch, but there’s nothing. No one knows anything about how his soul got back to the body.”

“Maybe we just take the win this time,” Eliot suggests, stepping into view, eyes meeting Quentin’s for a second before he focuses on Alice. “Maybe this is the universe finally throwing us a fucking bone.” He clasps Alice’s other hand in his, briefly, and they share a meaningful look. Since when do Eliot and Alice hold hands and share looks? “Hey, Q,” he adds lightly, and Alice turns her body back to face Quentin too.

“Q! Are you—how are you feeling?”

Quentin, slowly, struggles his way to a seated position. Alice shuffles pillows around to help, and generally fusses over him. It’s nice. “I don’t know,” he says, feeling his limbs out. “I feel a bit better, I guess. Like maybe I can last five minutes before this body gives out.”

“Well, stamina’s important, and something every young man should work at,” Eliot offers sanctimoniously.

Quentin rolls his eyes. “You want me to throw one of these pillows at you? ‘Cause you don’t look like you can dodge that well, right now,” he says, tipping his chin at the cane. No one’s really explained to him how Eliot, or the Monster, had injured Eliot’s leg. No one has really brought up the Monster, or anything before death, to him at all, and he hasn’t been awake for long enough stretches of time to ask.

“Yeah? Well, you don’t look like you can lift your arms up right now, baby bird, so I think I’m safe,” Eliot fires back, all fondness and no sense, and for a second Quentin can imagine they’re back in the Cottage at Brakebills, before any of their lives got so fucked up.

Quentin smiles a little and turns back to Alice, who still looks anxious. “I’m okay,” he reassures her.

“But you weren’t,” she says, voice shaking slightly. “You died, Q. I saw it happen.” She doesn’t go on, but Quentin hears the rest anyway, and feels something cold slip into the bottom of his stomach. Maybe he should have been grateful that everyone was holding off on the discussion, actually, because he knows this part too well. This is his dad in the hospital, the first time, awkwardly asking, “Those cuts, curly Q, did you—?” or Julia in college, lying down beside him on the floor and breaking the silence with, “You wouldn’t do something without coming to me first, right? Promise me. If you ever felt like you wanted to—” or most starkly, any one of his therapists across the years: “Do you think about killing yourself? Do you want to die?”

And Quentin wants to say no, because he doesn’t want to hurt them, and he’s ashamed of being such a burden, and because he might think about it and want it, even, but he wishes he didn’t; but then he also wants to say yes, because maybe they’re asking for the truth, even if it’s only true sometimes, and maybe if he tells someone they’ll be the person who’ll understand, who can help…

The answer is, actually, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what the right answer is, what the truth is, not when it changes from day to day, and moment to moment. All he’s ever known is that being alive means he can keep thinking about the question. Death is a more permanent answer, one he can’t come back from if it turns out he’s wrong.

Except it turns out that maybe he can come back, so what does that even mean in the grand scheme of things?

He definitely doesn’t know how to say any of this to Alice, who was apparently one of the masterminds of this whole resurrection operation, who was gone from him for so long, in so many ways, and who he just thought he was getting back in his life, right before he… died. Before he killed himself? He’s not sure. This whole situation is very strange.

“Alice…” he says.

“We don’t have to talk about this now,” she whispers, blinking tears from her eyes determinedly.

“It’s okay, you kids chat,” Eliot interrupts. “Sorry, I’d make a more discreet and elegant exit, but.” He waves the cane. “You’d hear me go anyway.”

“No, you stay,” Alice says. “You can sit here. I have to—there’s some stuff I have to check on, for work, and then back at Brakebills. We’re figuring out how to get you back there, to recover. And to start building up your magic again; we don’t know how this body will… Lipson’s been staying here, but it’ll be easier to monitor you with more healers, and without having to account for the ambient parameters in Fillory.”

“Oh. Yeah. That makes sense,” Quentin says.

“It wouldn’t be right away, of course. But if you’re okay with it?” she asks uncertainly.

“Yeah. I think it sounds good,” he says, and she leans in for a very careful hug.

“I’ll see you soon, okay? We’ll talk more.”

“Serious conversation, can’t wait,” Quentin says, and that earns him Alice’s tiny reluctant smile, the one that always made him think that maybe her facial muscles weren’t used to pulling that way, and that made him want to keep making her happy until the day that they were. He hadn’t managed that so well, their first go-around, had he? Or the second, he supposes, what with the whole him-dying thing. But they’ve got another chance now.

Eliot pats her shoulder as she passes him on her way out, then sinks down on to the bed in her place, at an angle so he can face Quentin where he’s propped up against the headboard with his small army of cushions.

“So, hey there, stranger,” Eliot says brightly.

“Uh, long time, no see?”

“Yes, well, I suppose death does create a certain distance.”

“Yeah. So does possession by an ancient, unkillable, nameless monster.”

There’s a split second in which it might turn awkward, but Eliot beams at him, wide and true, and Quentin feels his own smile stretching the unused muscles of this brand new face, and he feels like a person, maybe for the first time since he woke up in this brand new body that looks just like his old one. Maybe for the first time in longer than that.

The world and magic are probably still fucked in some way or another, and Quentin apparently died and came back to life and there’s a lot to unpack there, but just for now, he thinks, he’s earned this moment of happiness with his friend.

“You know, it’s considered extremely offensive, in some cultures, to touch someone who has recently returned from beyond the veil,” Quentin invents on a whim. Eliot blinks. “But you, uh, you should probably hug me right now.”

He’s barely finished his sentence before Eliot pulls him in and hugs him tight. There’s nothing tentative about it: he doesn’t treat Quentin like his new body is breakable, but like he desperately wants to make sure it’s as solid and real as it looks, and the only way to confirm the truth is with the test of his embrace. Quentin squeezes back with these new arms (both flesh, no hollow wood to be found), and relaxes into the familiar warmth and strength of it.

Finally, Eliot pulls back to extricate himself partially, but maintains a light hold on Quentin’s arms as he speaks again. “Naptime now?” he asks, teasing but solicitous. “Did that use up your batteries for the day?”

Quentin is starting to feel tired, actually, but he says, “No, stay a few minutes. I, uh, have some questions, and I keep falling asleep before I ask them. About what happened.”

“Oh,” Eliot says, looking down. “I don’t know if I’m the best person—as much as I’d like to take the credit for this sort of universe-altering magic, you know it was Alice and Julia who put the spell together.”

“Yeah, the spell for the body—my body,” Quentin corrects himself. “But what was Alice saying just now? No one’s said anything about how you guys got—well—me back, from like, the Underworld, I’m guessing?”

Eliot shrugs. “Your guess is probably the best guess in the world, right now, Q. We built the body; your spirit just showed up with suspiciously good timing to re-inhabit it. Do you remember being in the Underworld? Is that a thing one remembers?”

Quentin searches his brain for it, but he’s got nothing. “I remember going there before, with Julia, so I guess people do remember it if they get back to their bodies. But this time, I just remember doing the mending, and then waking up here.”

The crippling cold, which must have been Margo’s preservation spell. Eliot telling her to let the spell go, he’s waking up.

Quentin blinks away the flashback. Eliot’s talking again.

“Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it’s just your mind protecting you. I mean, being blown to bits seems like it might be a tad traumatizing for the psyche, no?”

“Just a bit,” Quentin acknowledges. “And well, I mean, I was in the Mirror Realm. Who knows if death there takes you to the Underworld in the same way? My spirit could’ve just been trapped somewhere else, and found its way back when the new body was built, right?”

“Exactly,” agrees Eliot, sounding relieved, “so maybe we don’t look a gift horse in the whatever.”

He’s right, Quentin knows, but he can’t let things go as easily as Eliot is suggesting. Especially not plot points that could come back to fuck him over royally, and given his history, probably will. He says as much. “I mean, we’re not exactly lucky, when it comes to these things.”

“Okay, well, no, but maybe that means we’re due some good shit happening, right about now, of the uncomplicated variety.”

“I used to think that,” Quentin muses. “That all the suffering had to mean something, that it was for something. That if you kept caring, and trying, and working through things, that some power in the universe that weighs good and bad would eventually fall down on your side.”

He doesn’t know if he believes it anymore. All those weeks and months after Blackspire, being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the quest and the betterment of the magical world, and he was rewarded with one hit after another. His dad for magic. Eliot being taken by the Monster, Julia by the Monster’s sister. He thought he’d lost his belief for sure, standing in front of a fucking plant and yelling and trying to make it bloom with the power of hope, when he felt like all he had were its ashes.

And then he died himself, and he’s still not sure if it’s what he meant to do, or not.

“Mm, I used to think the opposite,” Eliot replies. He’s staring off into the space next to Quentin’s head, and almost seems like he’s talking to himself. “That all the suffering was pointless, and there was no meaning in the world at all, so why bother caring about anything? Hedonism, oblivion, hit a few good highs on your way to lights out, and that’s the best case scenario.” He shrugs again as he refocuses on Quentin, a good imitation of his Brakebills self, but his eyes give him away. They’d always given him away, Quentin thinks, if you knew where to look.

“And now?” he asks, instead of sharing that observation, which Eliot would certainly not thank him for.

“And now you’re here,” Eliot says, voice wavering minutely before he smiles away the hesitation, and continues more briskly, “and I’m here. Against some pretty long odds. We all made it through, more or less. And, having experienced the alternative, I know that what we have now does mean something. So. Maybe I was wrong, before.”

“Maybe we both were,” Quentin says, through a yawn. He tries to hold on to his train of thought, but his eyelids are growing heavy and the tracks are getting crossed. “Maybe the answer isn’t one or the other, but something in between, or we’ll never know. I think… El, I’m not sure…”

“What, Q?”

“Did I do something brave to save the world? Or did I just… slip?” One or the other, or something in between, or the answer changed from one moment to the next? His eyes are burning, and he wants to curl up and go to sleep, for all that he’s been wishing he could stay awake longer all week, and he hates this about himself, how he sometimes gets so weak and tired that all he can do is cry and sink into the mattress like dead weight.

“Slip?” Eliot asks gently.

“You guys did a lot, to save me. And we don’t even know how I… what if whatever magic brought me back costs us all, down the line, and it’s all because I was too weak, and I gave up? If I did this to myself, how is it worth whatever price we might have to…?”

“It’s worth it,” Eliot interrupts. “Listen. Even if you slipped, it doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve to be saved.”

Quentin closes his eyes against the aching feeling that brings, and keeps them shut because of a great wave of exhaustion that crashes over him, almost peaceful after all the emotional upheaval. What is it about Eliot that makes Quentin so happy, but also allows him to be so sad, too? He’s never had a friend he could share the extremes of himself with like this, just free to be, he thinks vaguely, not even Julia. Just pure, easy acceptance, and he’s never had to work for it, not since the day they met.

Anyway, it’s because it’s Eliot that he’s able to voice the question that he thinks might always be lurking at the back of his mind. “Shouldn’t I be able to save myself by now? I’ve been trying long enough. Why am I so fucking useless at it, at life?”

He feels more than hears Eliot’s sharp inhale. “Hey. You’re not useless. You’ve been saving yourself this whole time, and I don’t mean like a virgin. When you feel like you’re going to die and you don’t, and you don’t think you can go another day, but you do… and just now, to dare to be honest about what you’re thinking and feeling and what you’re afraid you’ve done…”

He trails off with a little laugh that Quentin’s tired brain registers as unnatural, anguished, somehow, but goes on with his tirade before Quentin can question it further. “Just take it from me, you’re the bravest person I know. And anyway, so what if you can’t save yourself sometimes? When your brain chemistry is fucked up, and your life is objectively fucked, and you’re left alone to deal with all the shit, it’s not a personal failing to need a little help. Your friends, the people who love you, we’re your safety net, okay? We’re supposed to catch you if you slip, and it’s not a burden, not ever, because we love you. And ideally the catching should happen earlier than say, after your death, and I wish I’d been there for you then instead of making it worse, I wish…” He laughs again, brittle. “Well, never mind that.”

Quentin thinks he’s got the gist of it, even as some of the details confuse him, and he wants to say something grateful in response, but what comes out is: “Hmm?”

“Oh, I think we’ve hit the undead jet lag again,” Eliot says softly. “Definitely need to find a medical term for that.”

“Hmm?” Quentin asks again, trying to blink his eyes open, but generally failing. Eliot’s voice is really soothing. He thinks he feels fingers carding tenderly through his hair, hastening the onset of a deep, warm slumber.

“Nothing, Q. Just sleep.”

It’s weird, being back at Brakebills. Quentin settles into the Infirmary for a couple of weeks, although his strength and ability to stay awake are improving in leaps and bounds. It’s for monitoring, Lipson explains, in case the kind of untested and poorly understood magic that was used for his resurrection makes it dangerous for him to do magic going forward. So he reviews basic spells, and learns a few that he didn’t have the chance to before, under the watchful eye of the healers.

He doesn’t realize he was expecting to move back into the Cottage once the healers cleared him, like he still has a room there, until he’s taking a physical therapy walk across campus. The bright sunshine, pristine walkways, and clean-cut lawns haven’t changed a bit, but he doesn’t recognize most of the people he passes. There’s a new class of students and school is back in session.

It’s still Brakebills, the place he discovered that magic was real, the first place he ever felt like he fit in, but it’s not the same. There’s no Eliot, waving him over for a drink and a chat, or Margo, clicking along beside him in her tight skirts and high heels, or even Penny, their Penny, pushing him up against a tree and yelling at him to strengthen his wards.

Quentin always thinks back on those few months he had at Brakebills as an easier time, a happier life, but honestly, everything with the Beast started practically in his first week. He’s not even sure how much of the time he recalls so fondly now he actually enjoyed. But still, he misses it. It’s a strange, aching feeling: missing something that’s right in front of you.

He’s still got Alice, the holdover of that old life. She comes to see him every few days, tells him about her plans for the Library, listens to him talk about the spells he did without exploding himself like she hasn’t been getting regular reports from the healers too. It’s nice, spending time with her again, but as they walk past the fountain where her brother died and she almost did, or the rooftop where they bared their skin and their secrets, or when she leans in to kiss him, that’s not quite the same, either.

Quentin doesn’t flinch from the kiss, but he feels inert to it. He doesn’t melt forward, give back the way he thinks he should. It’s like he’s Pygmalion’s statue, only Alice’s kiss doesn’t bring him to life.

“Q?” she asks, looking troubled by his response, or lack thereof. “Do you not want…?”

“I—can we just talk for a minute?”

“Sure,” she says, and sits down on a bench nearby, smoothing her skirt. He comes over to sit next to her.

“I love you,” Quentin starts, because he knows that much is true. “And before, when we talked about us, about trying again, I do want that. I meant what I said. But ever since I got back, I just—I don’t know. I think I’m doing better, mentally. At least, I don’t feel as bad as I did before; I think those last few months with the Monster and everything were the most horrible I’ve ever felt.” He goes on quickly, not wanting to linger on those memories, because he suspects that the secret to doing better mentally is not dwelling, at least for now. “But I don’t feel like myself, in this body, yet, maybe? So when you kiss me, or you know, if we tried to do more, I’m not sure—I’m sorry.” He breaks off, a little embarrassed. Ungrateful, maybe. His friends had literally built this body for him, and he is, as always, ruining it.

But Alice takes his hands, and says earnestly, “It’s okay, Q. I get it. After I was a Niffin, when I felt like I was pure light, and knowledge, and magic, and then got crammed back into this tiny, powerless thing, I didn’t feel like myself, either. Not for a long time.”

She sighs.   Quentin remembers how tormented she was, back then. He remembers the bacon. He remembers the desperate, crashing-together sex, and how it didn’t mean what he thought it meant, at the time.

“I made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to undo what I did, and wondering if it’s even possible. But then…” She smiles tremulously at him.

“What?”

“You, Q. You were there; you believed in me, you reminded me who I was, before. You mend things, like the cup, and you make me feel like even broken things can be whole again. We fell apart, but if we try, we can get back to how we were.”

Alice is looking at him so hopefully, and so brightly, that he feels illuminated by it, the phosphoromancy of her belief in him. What a lovely thing for someone to say about Quentin, who’s always felt broken himself, and like he’s only ever broken everything that matters.

He recalls telling Alice, not long after their first time at Brakebills South, that despite everything else that was going on in their lives, just being with her made him happy. And he remembers her telling him, far more recently, that she thinks of their short time together the same way, like he was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Is it possible that they can get back to that, to the happy people they were together? Quentin’s not sure, but if they can, if he can find his way back to that person who lived the life he’s nostalgic for now, isn’t that worth trying?

“Maybe we just take it slow,” he suggests.

“Yeah,” Alice agrees readily. “The physicality of it, of resurrection, I mean. I don’t know, I felt so awful, for a while, like everything I sensed with my body was painful and disgusting. I just wanted to feel something good. But in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have fallen into bed like we did. So let’s just, like, table that, for a while.”

He’s always loved this about her, the way she takes everything he says and considers it reasonably. Tries to understand. But the thing is, he’s not sure she does understand. Quentin isn’t repulsed by the physicality of his body. He just isn’t quite sure what to do with it. Sometimes, he has these moments of disconnect, like he doesn’t quite understand where the difference lies, between being a body, and being a person.

But maybe it’s like what he said, about the cup. He’s woken up in this new body; he’s just got to remember what he was before. Being with Alice can only help with that.

Alice squeezes her hand when she leaves, and he squeezes back, but she doesn’t try to kiss him again.

“And how are we affording this, exactly?” Quentin asks. It’s perfect: an upscale, two-bedroom apartment, not as nice as the penthouse, but not a typical Manhattan shoebox, either.

Before Julia can answer, someone else cuts in. “Fillorian royalty golden parachute,” Eliot announces grandly, stepping into the living room from where he was apparently hiding in the kitchen. “Since so many of us are getting deposed or forcibly retired, these days.”

“Eliot!” Quentin says, half running forward to meet him. Eliot takes the embrace sideways, like it’s his due, wrapping an arm around Quentin affectionately.

Margo clears her throat from beside them, and Eliot pulls her into his other side. “This generous pension plan brought to you courtesy of co-High King Bambi,” he adds dutifully.

“That’s right,” she says. “And don’t you forget it.”

“What are you guys doing here?” Quentin asks, delighted. He’s just about finished with his period of observation, and since the healers have been politely hinting that he stop taking up space, he and Julia have been out apartment hunting all day. They had both decided, not long after returning to Earth, that moving back into Kady’s place wasn’t the best option for him.

Julia, in typical fashion, had brought a bulleted, researched list and dragged him from place to place, saving this one for last.

She’s smiling at him now. “Thought you might like this one,” she says. “Surprise?”

“We ran into Julia at Brakebills when I was there for a check-up,” Eliot explains, rolling his eyes at the need for basic medical care after life-threatening injury.

“And?” Quentin asks.

Eliot releases Quentin and Margo from his hold so he can step a few feet away, holding his arms out meaningfully. “Notice anything missing?”

“No cane! Oh my God, El, that’s great.”

“Yes, yes. But anyway, we were going to drop in on you, but Julia mentioned your homeless troubles. So we figured we’d lend a hand, and see you at your surprise housewarming, instead.”

“Housewarming? You mean, this is our place?”

“We got the landlord to change the move-in date to today, and discouraged the other applicants,” Margo says, sharing a glance with Eliot. Quentin decides he’s not going to ask any more questions about how they achieved that miraculous feat.

“Hoberman is bringing food, Kady is bringing liquor. Alice is bringing herself,” Eliot says, ticking them off on his fingers. “Julia brought you. And we, my dear friend, come bearing gifts.”

“I thought yours and Margo’s presence was the gift. And the apartment, I mean.”

Margo smiles and pinches his cheek, mocking but kind-eyed. “Aw, he’s sweet, El. I’d forgotten how sweet he was. You were right.” Eliot nods knowingly. “Once upon a time, Eliot convinced me that a little first-year nerd was worth adopting. I was reluctant, but he grew on me. I missed you, Q.”

“Well, we are sort of friends,” Quentin says, and hugs her carefully, without Eliot in between.

“Now your gifts,” Margo says, and no one mentions that she looks a little emotional, post-hug. She takes out a pouch from her pocket and withdraws two finely braided strings, one black and one green. She sets them down on the kitchen counter. “Hold out your arm.”

He does, and she arranges it so the strings are lying under his wrist. Then Eliot steps up, closes his eyes, and does a complicated series of gestures. The strings loop up and tie themselves in an impossibly intricate set of interlocking knots, forming a bracelet. Quentin watches them in wonder, and he watches Eliot’s hands: the way Eliot does physical magic is always so breathtaking.

“There,” Eliot says. “All done.” He opens his eyes. Before Quentin can lift up his arm to examine the bracelet in more detail, it fades away into thin air.

“What is it?” Julia asks.

“Horomancy, bitches,” Margo says. She gestures at the Fillory clock, which Quentin hasn’t noticed standing innocuously in a corner of the living room until now, the only piece of furniture that’s present.

“Since we’re living on different worlds and all, we thought it was about time we figured out how to prevent any inconvenient and jarring time jumps.”

“I hate when shows do that between seasons for shock value,” Margo says emphatically.

“So uncreative. So much of a cop-out to any kind of genuine emotional resolution,” Eliot agrees.

“So we fixed it,” Margo continues.

“All of us wear our friendship bracelets.” At this, Eliot and Margo both lift their wrists, on which nothing is visible, and Eliot goes on, “And voila! As long as at least one of us is always in Fillory and on Earth, the timelines run together. We’re anchors.”

“It’s like our cycles have synched up,” Margo finishes, which makes Julia laugh in disbelief. “Fen’s holding the fort down now; we timed the spell for when Eliot and I stepped through the portal, which means about a two-hour time difference. Julia, you’re up for the gifting next.”

Quentin’s half laughing himself. “So, you’re telling me, you two fixed the Fillory-Earth time zone issue? A problem that’s literally been going on since the Chatwin era, if not longer? How?”

“Ember and Umber were a dysfunctional family of assholes,” Margo says. “But when they were together, they brought balance.”

“Yeah, Ember was chaos, Umber was order.”

“But the whole ‘hundreds of years might randomly pass, ha, ha, ha’ thing always smacked a lot more of Ember’s bullshit.”

Quentin thinks about it. “Yeah, well, Ember was stronger, I guess. And then Umber was banished, for a while.”

Margo shrugs. “And now they’re both dead. Balance again. With them out of the picture, and the Wellspring working properly, we figured things might be malleable enough that we could shift the balance to something that works for us. Align the time zones with a spell.”

“Margo, that’s amazing! You got all that from Ember and Umber being dead? That is like, straight up Fillorian lore mastery.”

She glances at Eliot slyly. He looks away. “Actually, I didn’t come up with the idea; El did. He won’t tell me how he thought of it, but I think it’s because he’s still pretending he hasn’t read the Fillory books.”

“I’m sort of surprised El read a book at all,” Quentin teases, which makes Margo laugh. “He really must have missed me.”

“Ah, alcohol,” Eliot says airily, seeing Kady coming through the door. “I know where I’m wanted,” he adds, floating the bags she’s carrying telekinetically out of her hands and over to the counter. “Bartending has always been my true discipline.”

“Listen, Q,” Margo says, more urgently, pulling him further away from where Eliot is unpacking ingredients in the kitchen. Kady’s helping, and Julia has gone over to greet her. “Use the clock, okay? Come see us. I know I was shit at checking in with you last year, with everything going on, and I want us to do better.”

“Yeah, me too,” Quentin says, touched. “I want to see more of you guys. I’ve missed you, too.”

She hesitates. “And—look, I want you to be okay. You’ve got to take care of yourself, that’s número uno. But if you’ve got the bandwidth. When you see him. Look out for El, too, okay?”

“Why? What? Margo, is he not okay? What did the healers say?”

“Nothing like that,” she says, stealing another glance in Eliot’s direction to make sure he’s still distracted. “Just… he won’t talk to me about what happened with the Monster. And when you were gone, he was fucked up, Q. I’ve never seen him like that, not even with all the Mike stuff. I think he’s doing better, now that things are more settled, but I just. He’s sad.” She pronounces the word like a profanity. “I get the feeling he’s not telling me something. So maybe he’ll tell you.”

Quentin frowns. “I mean, if he’s not telling you…”

“You’re the only other person I trust with this, with Eliot. Maybe it’s just post-Monster PTSD, but I’m worried, and I can’t watch him all the time.”

“Of course I’ll look out for him,” Quentin promises. “It’s El. I would do anything.”

“I know,” Margo says. “That’s why I’m telling you to look after yourself, first.” 

Life goes on, strange as it is. Eliot and Margo go back to Fillory, after making the time stabilizing bracelets for everyone, and teaching them the spell themselves, in case there’s any trouble. True to their word, Quentin has a more than comfortable direct deposit of income coming into his bank account now, so over the next few weeks, he and Julia get down to the business of setting up their place.

He and Alice spend a nice morning picking out living room furniture while Julia’s off with the other Penny somewhere, and once it’s delivered, Alice spends the afternoon sitting on the new couch with him and chatting about her week. Quentin, for his part, listens attentively, asks questions, and smiles. He doesn’t really have many positive feelings for the Library, but he admires Alice’s energy, her purpose. He thinks she looks a lot happier than she has in a while, and he’s glad for it.

When she gets up, he walks her to the door, and then, awkwardly, pecks her on the cheek. Her smile is brilliant, like she’s proud of him for this smallest attempt at being a normal person.

After she leaves, though, Quentin sinks back on to the couch and thinks about his week, and how he’d had basically nothing to tell, besides apartment shopping stuff. He died, and came back to life, and he’s wasting it, wasting his second chance sitting around and doing nothing.

Quentin doesn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, in the epic ongoing battle between the fatigued inertia of depression, and the hyper-acute, palpitating energy of anxiety, anxiety wins out. Quentin: vacuums the apartment, calls the magician-catering mental health clinic Lipson had told him about weeks ago, calls the pharmacy to fill a prescription, looks up recipes online, makes a shopping list, and actually goes to the fucking grocery store to buy things. He’s putting stuff in the fridge when Julia comes back to the apartment.

“Hey,” he says, “I didn’t hear you come in last night.”

“No, I—um.”

“Stayed with Penny?” he asks curiously, because Julia sounds weird. Come to think of it, she’s been out a lot the past few days. Also, where does Penny even live?

“No, no, we’re just trying to be friends. I actually spent the night at Brakebills,” she confesses.

“What?”

“So, back when you were in the Infirmary for a couple of weeks, you know how I sat in on some classes?”

“Yeah…”

“Dean Fogg actually asked me if I wanted to stay on as a full-time student, now that I don’t have my goddess powers anymore,” she gets out in a rush. “I told him no, because I mean, fuck them for offering it to me now, when they rejected me before for no reason, and besides, you and I had plans to be roommates and take a long staycation, but I’ve been thinking.”

“You want to do it,” Quentin realizes.

“I love magic,” Julia says. “I really do. And being a goddess means I leveled up, skipped a whole bunch of steps, but now… there’s still so much to learn, that I missed the first time around. The theory, the practice. Did you know I was a Knowledge student, in all the other timelines? I know it won’t be the same as divinity, and I’ve been struggling with that, but I still want to learn.”

“That’s—that’s great. You’re going to be brilliant, Jules. You’re going to love it,” Quentin says. He’s excited for her, but he feels like his heart is sinking.

“Q, would you come back with me?” Julia asks. “I mean, if you need a break from it, or a rest, I understand. But it would be so much fun, doing this together, like we should have, the first time around, you know? And I don’t want to leave you alone here, either way. I can always portal in and out to classes; I don’t have to live there.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’d have to stay there a lot of the time, or you’d never get any work done. But…” Could he go back, for real? He loves magic too, of course he does, he always has. And eventually, he’s going to have to think about what he wants to do with his life, beyond the grand accomplishment of getting groceries and planning a single-dish dinner menu for one. But Quentin’s not ready. He’s not ready to face those ghosts yet, go back to that uncanny version of Brakebills that both is and isn’t exactly what he remembers. The thought of it makes him feel unspeakably wrong.

“I’ll be fine here,” he says. “Don’t worry about me. And maybe I’ll be able to come back, some day, but I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

Life goes on, Quentin thinks again. But is this living? Is he really living?

It feels like all of his friends are doing something, being someone, and he’s just caught in the mire. It’s not like it was before, when Eliot was possessed and magic was fucked and he was wading waist-deep, then neck-deep, in so much acute misery that eventually he stopped feeling the rushing submergence of emotion, and just felt the cold and the numb.

He’s not miserable now. Sometimes, he even approaches contentment, surrounded by the people he loves, seeing them out of danger, and succeeding in their individual elements. But he’s just stuck, and he doesn’t know why. No one knows how his spirit made it back to this body, he thinks. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he didn’t.

Quentin begs off dinner and drinks with Julia and Kady, citing his partially executed groceries and cooking plan, and then forces her out the door when she offers to stay in with him instead.

He’s not a bad cook, exactly, so much as a very indifferent one. He doesn’t relish the minutiae of the finished product, or take pride in the preparation; he doesn’t enjoy cooking. And that shows. But he’s doing this anyway.

Basically, it’s not really that much of a tragedy when the door of the Fillory clock bursts open out of nowhere, and startles Quentin into dropping his plate before he takes a bite.

“Fuck!” he says anyway, heart racing.

Eliot surveys the scene in mild befuddlement. “I didn’t think you’d be home,” he says.

“Uh. Okay?” Quentin says, after a moment, and waits for Eliot to pass through on his way to wherever he’s headed on Earth. It’s like the apartment is a way station, he thinks, resigned, for people actually doing something with their lives.

Eliot stares at him a bit longer, then laughs. “I don’t actually have plans. I just wanted to be—elsewhere, for a while. I’d ask to join you for dinner, but.” Stepping closer to the kitchen, he takes in the tableau: the faint smell of burning, the less-than-appetizing-to-begin-with meal that looks even less appetizing as a splat on the tile, and Quentin, barefoot, standing with a million pieces of former plate scattered on the floor around him.

“Yeah. You’re not really missing out.” Quentin feels kind of like a disaster, but with Eliot there, it’s funnier, and less weighty. “Takeout?” he suggests.

“Delivery,” Eliot decides. “You’re treating me. Order it, my phone is dead on arrival, as always. Why the fuck Fillory drains its batteries when it’s off—hey, watch out!”

Quentin, who had been about to grab his phone from the counter, stops with one foot raised over a sharp piece of ceramic. Oh, right. Then, he remembers that his discipline is actually Repair of Small Objects, and reaches for the fragments of the plate that he can feel calling out to him, to be whole again.

The odd thing is, though, that they don’t come together right away. They want to, but they’re also being pulled away, toward the trashcan. Eliot, he realizes, has instinctively reached out to them too, and is using telekinesis to try to clean up.

“Are you doing that?” Eliot asks, a puzzled expression on his face, as he tugs at the pieces of ceramic that are now hovering motionless in mid-air, halfway to the trashcan, but also half-forming a loose, floating map of the plate they were once. 

“Yeah,” Quentin says. It’s an odd, exhilarating feeling, coming up against Eliot’s magic like this. They’re working in opposite directions, but in close quarters, magically speaking. It feels like pressing up against someone as they push back with equal force; like being intimately aware of the texture of their skin against yours. “I discovered my discipline, did I tell you?” Quentin asks rhetorically, still concentrating on the task at hand.

“Q, that’s amazing,” Eliot says. Quentin doesn’t look up, but he can hear the smile in his voice. “A real physical kid, not that you could’ve ever been otherwise. Well, show me what you’ve got.” Eliot pulls at the shards of the plate once more, playfully, before spreading his fingers wide and abruptly releasing his magical hold on them.

Quentin, who has been pulling against resistance but suddenly isn’t, feels thrown by the force of his own magic, unencumbered. The pieces of the plate fly back together like a rubber band snapping back on itself, tension released into the wild. He laughs, breathless. Such a small thing, but it feels so right when it all comes together like that. He realizes too late that he’s stupidly mended the plate in mid-air, just as it’s about to fall again, when Eliot kindly catches it and floats it into his hands.

“Minor Mending,” Eliot says. “Of course it would be.”

“Right?” Quentin examines the plate, poring over it with his fingertips. Something doesn’t feel quite—ah, there’s a tiny chip missing from the bottom. He searches for it in his mind, or in the world, with this magical sixth sense, because he can feel all the surrounding edges of the object trying to close the gap, but meets resistance when he pulls at the missing piece. A very familiar resistance. “El…”

Eliot snickers, and opens his hand to reveal the little shard. Free of his magical interference, it returns to its rightful place.

“How did you…?” Quentin wonders.

“Oh, a little distraction, a little sleight of hand. Let you feel the brunt of my magic being released, and it’s easy to miss one tiny piece held behind. Thought you were supposed to be a lower-case-m magician, Q.”

“Caught it, didn’t I?”

“You did at that,” Eliot says, in a strangely raw voice, and then sighs. “You know, actually, maybe I should just—”

Quentin’s only half-listening, recalling the sensation of the plate trying to knit itself together. “It wants to be whole,” he muses.

Eliot stops in his tracks. “What did you just say?”

“I could tell it was missing something, because I could feel all the surrounding pieces trying to come together, to make up for the missing piece. But I couldn’t tell exactly what was missing until I looked. I wonder… how small a defect would I be able to fix; like, what if I couldn’t even see it? Or, does a repair require that all the pieces of the whole be present and accounted for? Could I recreate a missing piece of something I had never seen, if the piece was lost somewhere far away? I don’t know, objects have a sort of sense-memory that’s not fully understood; they remember what they were before.”

Oh, he’s rambling again. Quentin looks up, expecting a glazed over expression, but Eliot’s smiling at him, if a little wide-eyed and wondering. It’s not exactly attentive, but it’s present. “What?” he asks, a touch self-conscious.

“Sounds like the start of your thesis,” Eliot says. “Mayakovsky could be your advisor,” he adds, and ugh, he shouldn’t even joke about that.

“Julia’s going back to Brakebills,” Quentin says, feeling the uncertainty sink into him again. “Or, going for the first time, I guess.”

There’s a long pause. “And you’re not,” Eliot says, in his usual way of making a statement when he wants to ask a question. Sometimes it’s annoying (why doesn’t he just ask?), but right now, it allows Quentin to sidle up to the thing that’s making him uncomfortable at his own pace.

He picks up his phone and flicks through the delivery app as he talks. “When I was there, at the Infirmary, there was a part of me that thought, well, that’s it. Magic’s fixed, I can go back to school, move back into the Cottage, things will be just like they were before. And this—everything that’s happened—will just be a bad memory. I died, and you were possessed, and magic was gone, and—what, I’ll just do the make-up work and get enough credits to graduate? Find a real job, whatever it is Magicians do out in the world?” Settle down with Alice? Weekend visits to his friends in Fillory? When they’re all together, they’ll reminisce about “those crazy few years” when things were absolute shit, from the distance of the happy lives they’ll lead?

It’s hard to imagine. Once upon a time, just the discovery that magic was real struck him as such an adventure. Now, with everything that’s happened, the life of an ordinary Magician seems almost mundane. It’s not a bad thing. But Quentin’s just not sure he knows how to live that life.

Eliot hums understandingly, but lets it drop. He’s standing over Quentin’s shoulder. “Get that,” he suggests. “No—”

“Just pick out the mushrooms and give them to me.” He orders a couple of curries, some rice, and some eggrolls. That done, he wanders over to the couch to wait; instead of sitting next to him, Eliot settles down on to the floor beside him, back against the couch and legs stretched out. He tilts his face up to look at Quentin until Quentin slides down too. They sit together in comfortable silence.

“Didn’t think I would be in the mood for Thai food again, not after my ill-advised and haunting analogy,” Eliot says after a while. He shakes his head when Quentin goes to ask him what that means. “Never mind. But hey! Did you know, my wife is now theoretically my widow? Or ex-wife, I guess. I’m not actually sure what the term is.”

“What?”

“Fen went through Fillorian mourning for me when she thought I was dead. There’s no legal mechanism for declaration of death there, so theoretically, even though I’m back, it’s like we were never married. Which is convenient for her, because I think she’s got it bad for Bambi.”

“What?”

“But,” Eliot adds with relish, “somehow, my being gone tilted the world off its axis, because Bambi’s apparently with Josh. Which, what the fuck?”

“Right,” Quentin says, because he knows that, but it really is sort of bizarre, if you think about it.

“So yeah, Margo and Fen are co-High Kings, but what it really means is high drama. Heaving bosoms, intrigue, and jealousy.”

“You’re loving it,” Quentin surmises.

“I—I guess,” Eliot says, but his face has fallen. He hitches a smile back on to it. “I do, as you know, enjoy the drama. But.”

“El?”

“I guess we’re both back from the dead, in some ways, Q,” he says finally. “It’s like, you get your life back, and everyone’s happy you’re there, but they’ve just—the world has just—”

It’s moved on around you. The people you love have left you a place, they missed you, they want you to get back into the stream of it, but you’re not sure how. You’re not sure you fit, anymore.

He looks at Eliot, and Eliot looks back, and there’s this wordless comprehension that passes between them that feels like a constant in the shifting world: it was there before everything happened, and it’s still there now, warm and comforting. They’re still together, still on the same page.

There’s a knock at the door. Eliot nudges Quentin with his foot. Quentin shoves back.

“I was crippled.”

“I was dead. And I ordered.”

So Eliot gets the food, and the conversation moves on as they work their way through it, along with a couple of glasses of wine.

“That fucker,” Eliot complains as an aside. “I can’t drink the way I used to, after the years he took off my liver.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” Quentin points out, not mentioning the fact that Eliot had probably done plenty of damage on his own, pre-Monster.

Quentin doesn’t like to dwell on the Monster, as a general rule. But in a curious turn of events, Eliot is the only one he feels at all okay discussing the experience with. When he and Julia had decided to find a new apartment immediately post-Brakebills instead of staying with Kady for a few weeks, they had both been concerned that spending time in the space where he had been so miserable and like, traumatized, for months, wouldn’t be the best mental health decision. He had been afraid, for half a second, that spending time with Eliot would be some kind of trigger as well, but thankfully, it hasn’t been like that at all.

The Monster had worn Eliot’s face and eyes, but there are people, Quentin thinks, that you know subliminally: the way they breathe, their little gestures and touches, the nuances of their voice across the emotional spectrum. When Eliot hadn’t been there, the Monster had been viscerally disconcerting: the closest facsimile of Eliot there was in the world, but so, so wrong. It doesn’t work in reverse, though. Now that Eliot’s back, there’s no chance of mistaking him for the Monster.

Eliot rolls his eyes, but sticks to water after the second glass of wine. “Speaking of self-care,” he says. “If Margo and I find out you’re not taking good care of this brand-new body built for you…”

“You’ll what?” Quentin asks, when Eliot doesn’t continue.

He laughs a little ruefully. “Fuck, sorry, I just realized I sound like my dad when he got his one and only new tractor. Like I wanted to take that heap of junk on a joyride.”

Quentin must be silent a moment too long, absorbing that, because Eliot glances over and then. His face freezes comically.

“Tractor?” Quentin asks.

Eliot seems to unfreeze, although he still seems rattled. “Uh, right. So, yeah, grew up on a farm, never told you that, thought I did, I guess.”

“What the fuck,” Quentin says, because yeah, he figured Eliot hadn’t grown up in the most supportive environment, from the few snippets of his childhood he’s let slip, but “Eliot plus farm” is not a particularly coherent image for his post-resurrection brain to handle.

Maybe it’s not the most appropriate reply to a confession like that, Quentin worries belatedly, but then Eliot literally says, regaining some of his normal tone, “Thank you, Q. That is the ideal response. It means I’ve done my job correctly. And on that note, if you mention this highly exclusive scoop to anyone ever, I’ll kill you. Brand spanking new body or no.”

Eliot’s smiling again, though, and resting his arm idly on Quentin’s forearm, which means Quentin feels comfortable enough to ask, incredulously, “When the fuck did you think you told me that?” It seems like the sort of consciously repressed tidbit Eliot would relate on purpose, if he absolutely had to, not accidentally.

He’s just teasing, casting around for something to say that isn’t too probing, but for some reason, it makes Eliot blanch again. He recovers more quickly this time, though. “Just forgot you weren’t in Fillory for the magic-less farming debacle, that’s all. Ah, my dear departed days as High King of that fine land,” he laments.

“Yeah, what a lark,” Quentin says, and the conversation moves on.

But much later, as they're clearing up dishes in the kitchen, Eliot says, "Hey.  You remember when we went to see Umber, and I was trying so hard to get back to Fillory somehow, because. You know?”

“You said Fillory was your home,” Quentin recalls, just going with the non sequitur, because random conversational turns feel less tortuous at midnight. It’s like, a rule.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, and for a moment it seems like he’s not going to go on. But then, he continues, “It saved my life, you know. Henry Fogg asked me what I thought would happen, when I stumbled into another land in a drunken stupor and tripped on a crown, and the truth is, I honestly thought I would die.”

“El…”

“Yeah, okay, but. A knife told me that I was High King in my blood, and you put a crown on my head, and the weight of it saved my life. I had to try, so I kept trying. My own people tried to assassinate me, and then the gods kicked me out, and I tried to get back. I got back and then I was ousted from the throne, and then deposed in a landslide election by Bambi. And then I was possessed by a monster, and when I woke up, you were dead, and I went back again.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, not entirely sure where this is leading.

“I—it’s always been easier for me to believe that I never had a home, not the way other people did.” He doesn’t mention the farm again, but he doesn’t have to. “And I told myself I didn’t need one, that I didn’t need to come from anywhere, not to become the person I was going to be. But then, Brakebills was the first place I ever felt like… and Fillory saved my life. They both became my home. So when Fillory was in trouble, I owed it. I wanted to help.” 

“Yeah. I get that.”

“But, Q. I’m not a king anymore, and I don’t think I want to be. But if I don’t stay in Fillory, where do I go? I can’t see myself at Brakebills either, anymore. So I’m just homeless, again. Except, this time, I know what it’s like to have a home.”

Margo’s right to be worried. Eliot does sound sad. And he is telling Quentin about it.

“I don’t know,” he says. He’s thinking about Brakebills again, about going back to the way things were. “Home is this weird idea, because like, is it the place you come from? Where you stay most of the time? Or the place you keep coming back to, no matter where else you go, throughout your life?”

“It’s the place where you feel like you belong,” Eliot answers quietly, and he sounds terse, the way he always does when he’s biting down on a feeling.

“But maybe that’s something you have to build for yourself as you go. With the things, and the people, you love. And only you know if that’s still in Fillory, or Brakebills, or somewhere else, for you now. It doesn’t have to be static.”

“Yeah. You give good advice, Q.” Quentin hears the unspoken “Why don’t you take it yourself?” loud and clear, and it’s not wrong. Hasn’t he been feeling as homeless, as selfless, since he got back?  He needs to figure out what he wants his life to look like now, he realizes, even if it’s not the same as it was before.

Eliot adds, “And you’re right. I mean, if Bambi didn’t desperately want to stay on and rule in Fillory, I don’t think I’d go back, this time. And Brakebills wouldn’t have been home without her, either. Or without, well. Don’t get a big head, but.” He casts Quentin a look.

“You know how prone I am to overinflated self-esteem,” Quentin snarks, but he’s smiling. “You’ll get there, El. You’ve just got to think about what you want to do. And so do I.” Maybe it’s just always easier to comfort and believe in someone else, but for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable task for Quentin, either.

“You love magic,” Eliot says suddenly. “Just listening to you talk about it… fuck Fillory, and fuck Brakebills too, but don’t let it go, okay?”

It’s like Eliot is speaking Quentin’s thoughts out loud, just as he settles the idea in his own mind. “Hey,” he says, putting a clean coffee mug on the counter. “Break this.” For a moment, he remembers breaking model airplanes at his dad’s, with the Monster, but the pang is transient. This is different. It doesn’t feel like going backwards.

Eliot doesn’t question him, just pushes the mug off the counter with a deliberate, telegraphed gesture, like a cat. It shatters on the floor.

“Now, pick a piece, any piece, and hide it. I won’t look,” Quentin says, closing his eyes for effect.

“What is this, a magic trick?” Eliot asks, fond smile in his voice again, presumably floating a piece off the ground and pocketing it. “Done.”

Quentin opens his eyes. “Take it to Fillory, while you figure things out. Keep it safe. I’m going to work on mending the rest, here.”

“For your thesis,” Eliot says slowly, another statement as question.

“Maybe. I just. Maybe I can’t go back to Brakebills full-time yet, or ever. But you’re right. This is important to me. There’s no harm in like, doing some research, talking to a few professors, part-time, right? It’ll give me something to do.”

“‘Minor Mending Across Worlds’? Suitably dramatic title,” Eliot offers.

“Well, yeah. If I work on it with one piece in Fillory, will my magic draw that piece back here? Or will I be able to recreate it from the negative space left behind?” It’s not a full thesis question, but it’s a place to start.

“Q, I’m starting to believe that if anyone could do it, it would be you,” Eliot says. There’s something hopeful and frightened in his eyes. He takes a breath. “Listen—”

That’s when Julia walks in, though, and Eliot takes his leave soon after, seemingly forgetting about whatever he was going to say. Quentin walks him the few steps to the clock, which makes him feel like he’s walking his prom date to the bedroom next door, but the awkwardness dissipates when Eliot hugs him without hesitation. “Come see us, okay? Keep me posted on how your studies go.”

“Really?”

“Come on, I’m fascinated to hear about your research. After all, I’m such an integral part of it; I expect to see my name in the acknowledgements.” He pats his pocket, where he must have tucked the fragment of the mug, and vanishes through the portal.

“Studies?” Julia asks, from where she’s standing somewhere behind him. When Quentin turns around, she’s giving him a kind of odd look. It transforms into joy, however, when he explains his idea of going back to school part-time, doing independent research and study on his own terms. She agrees to bully the faculty and administration with him, although she points out that they have absolutely nowhere to stand if they try to reject Quentin, who is literally responsible for their continued ability to teach magic.

She says that, and Quentin thinks, if he had died for good, it would have meant something. A clear-cut sacrifice, easy to assign worth or value: Eliot saved, magic back in the world.

Quentin’s alive. It’s not as simple an equation.

But he’s here, isn’t he? He gets to hear Julia theorize about the highest levels of magic, and see Alice go up against centuries of autocracy in the Library. He’s going to watch Margo and Fen revolutionize the rule of Fillory, and Kady unite hedge covens that have always been at odds. Sure, it feels a bit like he’s living by proxy, vicariously through the achievements of his friends, but he’s living, isn’t he?

As for Eliot… it’s not that he’s happy that Eliot feels as fucked up and aimless as he does. It’s just that it gives Quentin something to do and worry about that’s important, but not urgent. Eliot’s sad and lost, in some ways, but he’s okay; he’s not possessed, or trapped on another world, or dying. They can portal back and forth and chat, like normal friends do, about their problems. They’re not alone; they can find their way, together.

Quentin doesn’t know why he’s here, or what his purpose is. But if Eliot’s quiet when he comes into the apartment, or the circles under his eyes seem deeper and darker, Quentin can ramble about his most recent attempts at mending the mug until the lines ease a little, and Eliot’s face softens into a fond smile.

(And if Quentin wakes up shivering, unsure of where he is, the blankets fallen away from his body, and it feels like the moment he woke up from the dead again… he can take a few steps into Fillory, say “I didn’t sleep well,” and Eliot will enlist his help in some involved task or share the latest developments in the Fen/Margo/Josh drama until the anxiety resolves.)

He looks at the cup he’s partially mended, with its conspicuous missing piece, and thinks about the many different ways he can approach fixing it completely, and the frustration and the satisfaction it’ll bring him to try.

Maybe it’ll be the small things that give shape to his narrative, rather than one, dramatic, final sacrifice. But instead of his death, maybe his life can mean something, too.

So things settle into a routine, and yeah, Eliot looms large in this second life Quentin’s figuring out for himself. But he’s always been an undeniable presence, sort of by his own design, and anyway, their friendship feels so normal and comfortable that it honestly doesn’t occur to Quentin that anybody might take it the wrong way, until, well. Someone takes it the wrong way.

It’s Friday night. Julia’s staying late at Brakebills working on a group project, and will probably not be home over the weekend, but Quentin finishes up some reading in the school library and returns to the apartment to meet up with Eliot. They do switch off between Fillory and Earth, but lately, the apartment has become the hangout of choice. Quentin likes to catch up with Margo, and chat with Fen and Josh, but it seems like there’s always some demand on Eliot’s attention when they’re in the castle, which he would rather avoid.

Beyond that, Quentin has complicated feelings about Fillory. It’s true that the idea of Fillory saved his life, once upon a time, and when the fate of his best friends depended on him tapping into that old love, he was able to do it. But after that conversation with Eliot about home, and what it means, going forward, Quentin isn’t sure he wants to think about Fillory like that anymore. Remembering what it meant to him is all very well, and maybe reconciling that with the terrible disappointment it turned out to be is just part of being an adult, but that doesn’t mean he has to live it and love it the way he used to. You can remember something without reliving it, he thinks, and it feels like freedom.

On the other hand, Eliot’s confided that he gets antsy spending too much time at Brakebills nowadays; when he was possessed, his mental landscape was apparently a revolving loop of his years there, which has soured the memories a bit. So, apartment it is. Sometimes, they get the Earth-side group together, whoever’s free and in town, but tonight, it ends up being just him and Eliot.

It’s late when Eliot turns up, harassed (“Sorry, diplomatic dinner with the talking animals turned into something of a stampede—”), and later still when he gets up to leave. It’s one of the nights when there’s something heavy and tired lurking behind his eyes, even as he’s been joking and laughing his way through his stories of what happened all week, and they linger together by the clock, reluctant for the respite of their time together to be over.

“It’s late, do you want to…?”

“I’m sorta tired, can I just…?”

For a second, Quentin’s about to suggest that Eliot just stay in his room, before he realizes that would be a little weird, since the apartment actually has a second bedroom that no one’s using. It’s Julia’s in name, but in reality, more of a guest room than anything now that she’s at Brakebills so much.

“Here. You can stay in Julia’s room,” he says, leading the way.

“Excuse me,” Eliot replies. “I believe that the Constitutional Monarchy of Fillory, of which I am an honored representative, is financing your humble abode. So I think that whatever room you’re offering me is already mine.” He opens the door before Quentin can, and peers inside. “However, as it’s sadly devoid of taste, we can continue to call it Julia’s for now. I’m appalled. Is this what my tax-Fillorian-currency-units are buying?”

“Have you ever even paid taxes in your life?”

“I’ve had them taken out in trade,” Eliot says, raising an eyebrow. “I mean, I have done a lot of lying back and thinking of Fillory.”

“Right,” Quentin says, pushing Eliot in so that he can follow.

The room is pretty bare, actually. Neat and tidy, but lacking in personality. Or maybe it just feels starker and smaller because Eliot’s flung himself down on to the bed dramatically and takes up so much space by contrast.

It’s well past midnight. Quentin should probably take his leave now, and let Eliot get some rest, or even get some sleep himself, but he doesn’t want the night to be over. He feels like there’s still more to be said, somehow, the way you want to stay up talking all night at a sleepover about everything and nothing. So he hangs around awkwardly until Eliot rolls on to his side and props himself up on his elbow, facing him.

“What are you standing all the way over there for? Get over here,” he commands, and Quentin comes to sit on the edge of the bed. “No, not like you’re sitting a candlelight vigil at my sickbed. Haven’t we done enough of that for each other?”

They really have, Quentin thinks, and swings his legs up, lets his body fall back so he’s staring at the ceiling. He can feel Eliot looking down at him from the side.

“Better,” Eliot says. “Like a proper twelve-year-old sleepover.”

“I was just thinking that,” Quentin admits.

“Not that I was ever invited to one. I think the town elders were all collectively afraid I would corrupt the crop of good straight boys, even before I understood what kind of corruption they meant.” He throws it out casually, obviously not meaning for Quentin to pick up the thread and continue the conversation, but. Sleepover rules, right? The lights are low, it’s approaching the witching hour, and nothing you say can be held against you in the morning. It makes it easier to be vulnerable, to find intimacy, for lack of a better word. You can ask questions you wouldn’t normally ask, share truths you wouldn’t normally speak out loud. Eliot’s childhood definitely falls into those categories.

“Yeah?” he prompts, rolling on to his side to face Eliot too.

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “Well, I mean, I made up for the deprivation with the college sleepovers. And I really did corrupt more than my fair share of straight boys, so in retrospect, they were right to be concerned.” He grins a little. It’s a joke, and Eliot clearly means it at his own expense, but it rubs Quentin the wrong way.

“Corrupt,” Quentin scoffs.

“Yes, well, they enjoyed it,” Eliot says dismissively, which is sort of exactly the point Quentin is trying to make.

“Um, are you sure they were straight, then?”

“You mean I should say ‘previously straight’?” Eliot considers, still sounding annoyingly amused. “I don’t know, I didn’t stick around to see their sexual histories post-me.”

“Just, you shouldn’t say you corrupted them, or even like, converted them.” It’s not fair to either Eliot, or these other random guys Quentin doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he’s pushing it, but he feels like he has to. There’s something he wants to get out. “I know I wasn’t there, but. Maybe you helped them realize something about themselves they didn’t see before. Or maybe they always knew, but were afraid to act on it, before they met you. Or maybe they knew and they were just fine with it themselves, but it wasn’t like, central to how they saw their own identity, at that time, and it had nothing to do with you. You know?”

Eliot gives him a weird look, but grows serious in turn. “I—I guess I never gave them that much thought, Q.”

“I get it.” He really does. Growing up ostracized and punished for being yourself — some people respond to that by hiding away, others by wearing the objectionable parts of their identity unapologetically, gloriously, openly. Must be hard for either group to understand the other, and no prizes for guessing which one Eliot falls into. “But not everyone is like you,” he adds.

Predictably, Eliot answers, “No one is like me,” and it makes Quentin smile, eases the air between them. This time, he’s about to let the subject drop when, less predictably, Eliot goes on, “I should have, maybe. Thought more about it. I think… I was afraid.” He flicks his eyes at Quentin, then looks away again, hesitating, or choosing his words carefully. “Like, if they didn’t want me, by light of day. It’d be easier if I’d already decided that was going to happen, because they were just straight boys and I was just their wild night experiment. I could uh, control the situation.” He bites his lip, then smiles away the sting ruefully. “To be fair, some of them really were assholes the next morning. So no regrets for not wasting my thoughts on them.”

“Fair enough,” Quentin agrees.

“Some of them, though… if I’d been braver, maybe it would have been different.” Eliot shrugs as much as he can in his current sprawled out position, but he sounds almost wistful.

Sleepover rules, Quentin thinks. Bare a truth for a truth. “I never really came out,” he says in a rush. He doesn’t look at Eliot, unsure whether the expression on his face will be surprised or unsurprised. He’s not sure which he would prefer, actually. “Not to—to Julia, or my dad, or to you, any of you. I mean, Julia knows, and you—well.” He makes an indeterminate hand movement meant to convey “remember that time we had a threesome under the influence, never talked about it again, and wrecked my relationship, but now I’m back with my girlfriend and it seems like we’re letting bygones be bygones?” and figures Eliot will understand what he means. “And I guess, to someone like you, coming from where you… come from, not talking about it might make it seem like I’m ashamed, or repressed, or unsure of what I want, or whatever. But it’s really not like that?”

“Okay,” Eliot says.

“There’s just always been so much wrong with me,” Quentin says, finding the words as he goes along. Eliot makes a little sound, but doesn’t interrupt otherwise. “The, uh, depression stuff, and anxiety, and generally just being socially maladjusted, like Margo would say, or weird, or whatever. So liking guys too, or finding anyone attractive, or more like sympathetic, finding someone I felt connected to—it was always a good thing, not something that I had to stress about, or talk about too much. If anything, it was a respite from overthinking everything and feeling like shit about myself, because it made me feel like a normal person. Someone who could just love other people, and be with them. So I’ve always kind of gone for it, the few times I’ve ever really liked anyone and hoped they might like me back.”

He thinks about standing in front of Alice, falling in so deep, so fast, and trying to convince her that what they were feeling was real. She’s the most important example, but there were a couple of others, in college. They didn’t pan out, but he doesn’t regret taking the chance. “Maybe I’m super awkward and intense about it, but I’m like that about everything, so why the fuck not try? Maybe I’ll get shot down, but maybe I’ll get something real and beautiful out of what I feel, for once.”

The only exception in his history is Julia, but that’s because somewhere, he always knew his feelings were a hopeless crush, and that their friendship wasn’t worth wrecking over it. It would take a lot of hope, and more than a crush, nothing short of true love, to want to risk a friendship that was already so important to him.

When Quentin looks up, Eliot is staring at him, expression unreadable. “‘Why the fuck not,’” he echoes, then sighs. “You’re really brave, Q. I’m not sure you can understand it, but not everyone is like you, either.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Seriously,” Eliot says, and looks like he’s about to say something else, but then he doesn’t. He untucks his elbow and lets his head touch the pillow instead, closing his eyes. “Thanks for telling me.” His lashes are very dark and long at this angle, and his face looks soft in repose. He’s been softer and more open overall, ever since Quentin got back.

“Yeah. Thanks for telling me, too.”

And look, Quentin knows Eliot loves him, all right? For a guy who prides himself on caring for nothing, it’s blatantly obvious how much he cares for the people he loves. Obviously he had mourned Quentin. Almost certainly blamed himself. And here he is, willingly talking about feelings in a way he would never have done before, like Quentin’s death had unlocked a deep wellspring of emotion that had previously only ever surfaced in fits and spurts, when it bubbled over.

Maybe it’s actually the trauma of his possession, not a response to Quentin’s death. Or maybe this softness is just what Eliot’s growing into, as he gets older, and as life (fingers crossed) calms down. Regardless, it’s a warm, lovely thought: being here to see the person Eliot settles into, the way he’ll be in ten years, or twenty. Quentin’s not dead. He’s living; he’s here to see the changes, and that’s a good thing.

“I’m tired,” Eliot mumbles.

“Me too,” Quentin says. “It’s late. Night, El, I’m going to—” He should get up and go to his own room, but he’s really warm and comfortable. He’s happy.

“Mm,” Eliot agrees, and waves his hand without even looking. The lights go out.

Quentin will get up in a few minutes. Just a few more minutes.

When Quentin wakes up, sunlight is streaming into the room, and there’s a warm, solid weight over his heart, and something soft is tickling his chin. He blinks his eyes open slowly and realizes that he’s in Julia’s room, and Eliot is tucked up next to him, still asleep. It’s actually pretty adorable, Quentin thinks hazily. For all that Eliot likes to sprawl out and flaunt his unfairly long legs at every opportunity, he apparently sometimes sleeps curled up in a tight little ball, like he’s trying to burrow into something for comfort and warmth. In this instance, the something is Quentin, since he’s angled himself diagonally on the bed, resting his head on Quentin’s chest and knees up against Quentin’s side, with his normally perfectly coiffed hair in dark, wild disarray under Quentin’s chin.

Quentin shifts a little and Eliot makes a displeased sound, snuggling in closer. “Shh,” Quentin hushes, and brings a hand up to pet his head, smoothing the culprit curl away from his chin in the process. He’s thinking that the tickling sensation was what woke him up, and is about to close his eyes again, when he has the sudden awareness that he’s being watched.

Julia’s standing in the doorway, mouth slightly open and eyes wide. “What the fuck?” she mouths.

Which is how Quentin ends up spending far too many minutes awkwardly trying to extricate himself without disturbing Eliot’s much needed rest, leaving him with a pillow to curl up around, so that Julia can whisper-yell at him in the kitchen.

“Q, what the fuck?”

“Um. I’m sorry? You said you weren’t going to be back this weekend, and it was getting late, so I told El he could stay in your room.”

“And crawled into bed to cuddle with him in case he needed a security blanket in a new place? Look, I’m not judging, you looked adorable, but what would Alice say?”

“Oh. What? Why would she…” Quentin asks reflexively, before he connects the dots. “Oh, no, it’s not like we were, like, doing anything. Come on! We just stayed up late talking, and we fell asleep. You and I have done it dozens of times!” They were fully clothed, for fuck’s sake, and they’re all adults. A little innocent, affectionate cuddling is hardly damning.

“Yeah, but that’s different,” Julia says, like it’s obvious, which it’s not.

“How? El and I are friends, too.”

She stares at him. “Because Alice didn’t break up with you because you and I slept together? Along with another one of your friends?”

Oh, that. Right. “That’s not—look, Alice and Eliot are okay, now, and she knows I—we—aren’t like that.” Quentin knows he hurt her horribly, but Alice isn’t insecure about that, is she? He fucked up, but it’s not like she thinks that he would do that to her now, or she would hardly have wanted to try again, right? “It was just a—how did you know about it, anyway?”

“You were dead, Q. We did actually, like, talk about you, sometimes?”

“And that was what you all reminisced about?” Uh, that’s weird. He tries to imagine Alice, Eliot, and Margo swapping stories about what he’s like in bed, and the image doesn’t compute. He doesn’t know what to think about that, but it makes him squirm.

Now Julia looks a little uncomfortable. “I mean, it was kind of relevant. For the body spell. Which had a component of sense-memory, like, people who knew your body best.”

“Okay, that’s weird. That is like, super creepy.”

“Not like that,” she clarifies. “Well, not entirely like that. It was like, I knew you the longest, so my memories mattered. But Alice knew you in a different way, so her part mattered too. So it came down to Margo or Eliot, as the final piece, and so they talked about who remembered what. Not just sexually, but like, in life. But anyway, that’s why it came up. Threesome, really, Q?” She’s grinning a little stupidly now. He rolls his eyes.

“Oh my God, Julia. It was a long time ago, and we were really drunk and fucked up on magic, all right? And clearly it ruined everything with Alice, and then Alice… it’s just, not a good memory, not fun, not the way you’re thinking.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” she says. “I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me about it.”

“Well, we weren’t exactly talking at the time. And then when we were, there was a lot of other stuff going on. Besides, I don’t remember a lot of it, anyway. Just flashes.” He’s lowered his voice, and glances at the door of the bedroom, where Eliot is still sleeping. It’s stupid, since obviously Eliot knows it happened, but they don’t really talk about it. The closest they’ve ever come was Quentin’s oblique mention last night, and that feels different, somehow, than the knowledge being open for discussion, out in the world.

Julia follows his gaze, and keeps her voice low too. “But Q. You and Eliot. There’s seriously nothing going on there?”

“What?” Quentin says. “No! Why would you—”

“You guys are just… you’re really touchy-feely together, you know?”

“We’re friends,” he repeats. “And Eliot’s a touchy person. Not like touchy-irritable, but touchy, you know. And I’m—” Well, Quentin likes the affection. He likes to be touched. Innocently, not like that.

“Feely?” Julia suggests, like an asshole. Quentin groans. She lifts her hands up in surrender. “Okay, maybe I’m wrong. But really, you guys are kind of intimate and weird. I’ve noticed it more, since you came back. And since I found out about the threesome thing, at first I thought it was just like, you slept together that one time and have some unresolved tension there? But you’re not like that with Margo at all.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you see him practically every week even though you literally live in different worlds. You go to Fillory, and when you get back, you always tell me about something ‘El said,’ or did, even though you saw the others too. And the way you look at him, sometimes, it’s like—come on, Q, I’ve known you forever. I know what you look like with a crush.”

She kindly doesn’t mention his onetime crush on her. Small mercy in this deeply disturbing conversation.

“Jules, you are way off the mark, here. Maybe you’re too used to looking into people’s souls with your goddess powers, and forgot how to observe as, you know, a human.”

Now it’s Julia’s turn to roll her eyes. All right, maybe that was kind of dickish of him. “Too soon, Q.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Look, I was scared,” she says more seriously. “When he was possessed, and you were so focused on getting him back, and had to deal with the Monster wearing his face, and daring him to strangle you, and kill you… I’ll never forgive myself for that, for letting you spiral that much. I know you’re you, and you care, and you want to save everyone, but it felt more intense, somehow, because it was him. And Eliot, when you were… I don’t know him as well, and he keeps his cards close to his chest, so it’s harder to say. But I worked with him, on the spell, and he seemed really empty. Just drained.”

Quentin swallows. He doesn’t like to think about it, either the way he was before his death, or the way his friends had to deal with the aftermath. The only person he’s felt comfortable talking about it with, ironically, given this conversation, is Eliot.

“So anyway, if you tell me there’s nothing there, I believe you. But I don’t think I’m that crazy for wondering. And I’m just saying. Even if there is, and it’s complicated, you can tell me anything. I know I’ve failed as your best friend before, but I’m here for you.”

“You didn’t fail, Julia. You know it’s not like that.” She shrugs. He sighs. “And look. When you lay it all out, I guess I can see where you’re coming from. But I don’t know what to tell you. El and I aren’t like that; we never have been. Maybe when I first met him, I was, like, a little starstruck, or whatever. I admired him. I mean, don’t tell him that, he’ll never let me hear the end of it, but. That’s not how it is, now.”

Quentin thinks about it. He has been spending a lot of time with Eliot lately. But a lot of it is just catching up, since Quentin’s death and Eliot’s possession hadn’t left a lot of time for them to spend together in the past year. As for the more important stuff, Quentin doesn’t know. It’s just easier to share things with Eliot than it is with other people, especially since they both got back.

“He just makes me feel better, you know?” Quentin continues, trying to put it into words. “Not like a crush, and not because he’s a better friend than you, or any of you, but it’s like, you have Brakebills. Alice has the Library, Margo has Fillory. Kady’s got the hedges. And I’ve been feeling kind of, lost, I guess? Like I don’t know why I’m back, or how I got back, and what that means, what my purpose is. And I guess he’s been going through something similar, post-Monster.” He doesn’t elaborate; Eliot’s secrets are not his to share. “He makes it better,” he says again. “Like even if we’re lost, at least we’re together.”

Julia is staring at him with her eyes wide and mouth open again. She’s about to say something when they hear the bedroom door open.

“Fuck, I almost wish we hadn’t fixed the time fuckery, because then I’d have an excuse to be late for this council meeting today. Margo will kill me; I’m already on shaky ground with her because she thinks I’m going too soft when it comes to border negotiations. And Fen will look disappointed, which is basically worse. Charge my phone while I’m gone?” Eliot asks as he reaches Quentin, handing it over without pausing for breath.

Quentin fumbles when their hands touch, hyper-aware of Julia next to them. “Sure,” he says, trying to sound unbothered, because he is.

Eliot doesn’t seem to notice. “You’re coming to Fillory next week, right? You can geek out over the delegation of mermaids from the outer lands. Besides, Bambi’s been complaining that you don’t come see her enough.”

Quentin carefully avoids Julia’s gaze. “Margo hasn’t come to see me that much either,” he counters. She’s always busy when he comes to Fillory, too, so it makes sense that he talks more about seeing Eliot, Quentin thinks. They spend more time together, that’s all.

“She’s a fucking king,” Eliot replies. “I’m speaking for her because I know that’s what she would say. Between you and me, prolonged High Kingship has kind of gone to her head.”

“Right. Like you never threw the title around.”

“How about you shut it, Former King Quentin the Absent?” Eliot asks, imperiously, but with no sting in his words at all, and Quentin grins, before he remembers that Julia’s watching, and tries to straighten his face out. Eliot has made his way back to the clock in the corner of the room. “Hi Julia. Thank you for the use of your space,” he says, very formally, except for the friendly smile.

“Sure,” she says, nothing more than that, but still, Quentin feels weirdly conscious of her presence, and his own behavior. Ugh, this whole bizarre conversation about Eliot has thrown him off balance.

“Hey,” Eliot adds, turning to Quentin, with a softer smile that’s just for him. “Thanks. For my first ever preteen sleepover.”

“Any time,” Quentin promises, and for a second, he forgets about Julia, about what expression she might be judging on his face, about anything except watching Eliot disappear through the clock.

He does go to Fillory. But first, he gets hold of Alice (which is harder to do nowadays, given the interdimensional nature of her workplace), feeling a little guilty that he hasn’t seen as much of her in the past few weeks.

And then Quentin forces himself to ruin their perfectly pleasant date night by embarking on a very unpleasant conversation that he thought there was absolutely no reason for them to have.

This is all Julia’s fault.

“Alice,” Quentin starts.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Can I ask you… before. When we were together, and I—with Eliot, and Margo—you know,” he stutters out, and he sees from the way her eyes shutter a little that she knows what he’s getting at.

“What about it?”

Okay. In for a penny, in for a pound. “How did you forgive me for it? The way I hurt you? I mean, if you have,” he adds quickly. “It feels like we’re… past it, at least, but.”

“I mean, I don’t feel angry, anymore,” she says slowly. “It still hurts, if I think about that day. But with everything that came after, everything we’ve been through, it’s like you said. I want you in my life. That felt more important than being mad at you for something you did to hurt me a long time ago.”

“Right,” Quentin says, reassured. “I just hope you know that I wouldn’t do something like that to you again.”

“Okay…” Alice says, and he hurries to clarify.

“Julia just said that—” Quentin knows he wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly, with Eliot, but as he’s about to tell Alice what led him to bring this topic up at all, he switches tack mid-sentence. “She mentioned that it came up, when you guys did the spell for my body. The sense-memory aspect of it. So I just wanted to make sure we were okay.”

Alice still looks faintly troubled, but she says, “Oh, I see. We’re okay, Q.”

There’s a long silence. “Oh hey,” Quentin says, breaking it with magical theory, always a good option with Alice. “The sense-memory thing. I know a body isn’t the same as small objects, but it’s come up a lot in my research. You know, recreating missing pieces of a broken object from memory, if all the original parts aren’t available, or whatever.”

Her eyes light up. “Yeah, that’s actually where I got the idea to modify the spell Julia found.” She goes on, but Quentin’s mind wanders a little. If objects, and bodies, remember what they used to be in a physical sense, what about the soul? Everything that makes him him, his spirit, his Shade, was it restored to him whole? Blown apart and then recreated in some way, if it was destroyed beyond reckoning?

“Q?” Alice asks. Oh, he’s zoned out.

“Sorry. Just. My spirit. We never figured out how it came back, did we? I remember you were looking into it.”

“No,” she admits. “It bothered me for a long time, but eventually, I let it go. Maybe Eliot’s right, and it was just some god or the universe doing us a favor.” It isn’t like Alice to let things go, and true to form, she doesn’t sound satisfied about it, but if she couldn’t find an answer, Quentin supposes, no one could. “You haven’t been worrying about it, have you?”

“No, no,” Quentin says. “I’m just glad to be here, that’s all,” he adds, and she smiles. 

The next day, though, when he steps through the portal and wanders through the castle, searching for Eliot, or Margo, he considers it. He hasn’t consciously been dwelling on it. Once in a while, he still wakes up in the middle of the night, cold and terrified, like he’s been drenched in icy water that’s sunk into his chest, but it’s happening less frequently. He’d thought he was still lost and figuring things out, and maybe he is, but in the process, he’s stumbled on happiness, he realizes. He’s forgotten to worry about how he got there. He’s forgotten to be afraid.

Quentin stops in his tracks. Somehow, he’s ended up outside the room that served as his resurrection chamber, and it hits him out of nowhere: the cold, the suffocation, the icy grip of fear. He’s waking up.

“Fuck,” he breathes.

“Q?” It’s Eliot, sounding concerned. Quentin realizes he’s half collapsed against the stone walls of the hallway.

“How did you know?” Quentin whispers. They’ve talked about the Monster, and they’ve talked about feeling lost, post-resurrection or post-possession, but neither of them has really gotten into the ritual that brought Quentin back to life, at least not since he first woke up in Fillory and wondered if he’d finally managed to kill himself.

“How did I know what?” Eliot looks at Quentin, and then into the room Quentin is standing outside of, sounding puzzled.

“That it was me? When I—I remember being really cold, and Alice saying the spell wasn’t working. Margo was trying to keep it going, but you said to let it go. He’s waking up. How did you know?”

“Oh. You mean. I,” Eliot starts, taken aback. He recovers himself, and goes on, calmly, “I know Margo’s magic. What else would have interfered with her ability to keep the body cold except something warming it up? Ergo, life. Ergo, spirit of Q.”

It sounds simple when he puts it like that, but what a gamble. What an intuition. What if he’d been wrong? What if it wasn’t really Quentin?

Quentin tries to breathe through the rising panic. “I can’t be here right now,” he manages, and Eliot takes his arm without another word and drags him outside.

“Q, what’s this about?” Eliot asks, once they’re safely in one of the deserted garden walks, and Quentin can breathe again.

“I just… I’m just worried,” he confesses, staring into the shrubbery along the sides of the pathway. “Everything’s been fine, you know? I’m working on my project, I’m working on feeling better, I’m… but then I read about sense-memory in objects, or I remember waking up in that room, and I don’t know how I got there. How do I know if I made it back whole? And I wonder, is that why it was so hard for me to feel like myself? Am I missing something important?”

“Like what, your conscience?” Eliot asks lightly, though his eyes are sharp. “You’re not feeling any strangely murderous impulses, are you? Or is this more like a ‘Buffy fucking soulless Spike’ kind of ‘came back wrong’?”

Quentin laughs a little. “No, nothing like that.”

“I mean, I’m not sure I understood her self-hatred on that score. Angelus, nay, but soulless Spike? Yay.”

Sometimes it’s like Eliot’s not even listening to the words you’re saying, except for the part where he wraps his arm around you and tucks you into his chest, and you feel safe, and warm, and like you can keep telling him anything, forever. No fear of judgment.

“I know I’m not shadeless like Julia was, or like Alice, when she was a Niffin.”

“Hence the emotional regurgitation right now,” Eliot says, but he’s leaning his cheek on the top of Quentin’s head, all comforting, as they stroll.

“It’s just that, I’m back. And I don’t know how I’m back. And things were going well, and I’d half forgotten about it, but then I remember… Julia and Alice, the two people you’d really expect to know their shit about the ritual they performed, don’t know why I’m me. They hadn’t figured out how to get around the soul issue. But then it was like, bam!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Magic always has a price. I guess I’m just waiting to pay it. I’m feeling better, sometimes, I’m even happy, but what if… like, is there some malevolent deity out there with a leash they can pull, and I’ll have to do their bidding?”

“Kinky.”

“I’m serious, Eliot.”

Eliot pulls back, then, just so he can look Quentin in the eyes again. They’ve stopped walking. “Q. Dear, sweet, little Q. Has it occurred to you that that might be the price?”

“What might?”

“That feeling like every second of happiness you have is borrowed time. Like you can’t let yourself believe in all the good things in your life, because they might be taken away at any moment, and then it’ll hurt more. Like maybe you never deserved them in the first place.”

Quentin’s mouth has gone dry. He doesn’t know exactly what Eliot is talking about, but the way he’s talking…

“Quentin. You do deserve them, okay? Don’t live your life like that. Like you’re waiting for the axe to fall.”

“You’re the one who got hit by an axe, so I guess you’d know,” Quentin deflects, fitting his hand over Eliot’s stomach, very gently, healed though he is. There had been so much blood, and so little time, and he had run off with Alice and the other Penny without saying a word to Eliot. He wonders what it would have been like, if he had lived, then, and Eliot had died, and that had been his last memory. That he hadn’t even bothered to say a word. How much it would have hurt. How much it must have hurt Eliot, who’ll never tell.

“I do know,” Eliot says, a quick and complicated expression flickering over his face. “That’s why—you have a chance, to live a life you thought you’d never get to have, to be happy. It’s hard to trust, I get it, but don’t waste it wondering if it’s real or not. You’ll regret not taking your chance, and I don’t want that for you.”

What chance does Eliot regret not taking? Quentin feels the muted anguish of his soft, matter-of-fact words set off a fine, trembling vibration throughout his own body. It calms his own fear, it gives him purpose again. He wants to comfort; he wants to listen; he wants to help.

But Eliot’s closing in on himself, sealing the cracks, mouth settling into something determinedly casual. He’s done talking about this, whatever it is.

There are times when you can push Eliot, and times when the better part of valor is to retreat. This is the latter, Quentin knows. They’re not sharing the hushed, friendly intimacy of a bottle of wine by the fire, bandying raw, uncomfortable truths into the wee hours of the night. This is broad daylight, and Eliot doesn’t like feeling exposed.

All the same, as Eliot tries to start walking again, away from the conversation, Quentin tugs him back with his hand, even as he diffuses with his words. “Margo’s right, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“You have gone soft.” He’s teasing, but he means it too, and it’s not a bad thing at all. This side of Eliot, not new, exactly, but which he’s daring to let Quentin see, more frequently… it’s nice, to feel trusted with that.

“You take that back, Coldwater,” Eliot says, but he’s smiling in that way he has, eyes shining, like every emotion he’ll deny he feels and every word he’ll never say light him up from the inside out, resplendent, beautiful. And as he tweaks Quentin’s stupid in-between length bangs into his face playfully, Quentin thinks: what if Eliot tucked his hair behind his ear instead, and clasped his neck, and pulled him in, and put his mouth on Quentin’s mouth, and… and…

And that is really not a thought he should be thinking about his best friend. His best friend with whom he had cheated on his girlfriend, albeit in a magic and alcohol fueled haze, years ago.

His heart thumps. The open air feels close. He looks up, and for a second he’s sure he’s going to see everything he’s feeling reflected on Eliot’s face, but Eliot’s smiling down at him, completely unaffected. “You know what it is? I’ve diagnosed your problem, Q.”

“What?” Quentin asks, striving to sound normal. It probably comes out awkward, but that’s normal for him, anyway.

“This,” Eliot says, and flips Quentin’s hair again. “Once your hair grows back out, you’ll feel more like yourself. I’m sorry I didn’t get to appreciate this look at its peak, being possessed by an evil monster at the time, because it seems like it would have been super cute, but it’s way too stylish for you.”

“Yeah. That must be it. Fucking Brian.” He’s talking on autopilot, painfully aware of Eliot’s hands and his height and his everything, oh Jesus, what the fuck is even happening right now?

“You’re you, Q. I’d tell you not to worry, but.”

“Yeah.   Worrying is sort of my defining characteristic.”

“Mm-hmm. Anxious and high-strung super-nerd. The one we all adore unreasonably, and can’t do without.”

Shit. Shit.

Since when does he feel like this about Eliot?

Since always, whispers one part of his mind, and okay, that’s not entirely false. But it’s not entirely true, either, he argues back, and God, he’s going crazy, what is wrong with him?

On the surface, nothing has changed. Eliot is his best friend. He’s tactile and teasing and cutting, and so warm and good underneath all his myriad, cool edges. Eliot cares about him, and Quentin’s a sucker for affection, sure. So yeah, there’s something soft in Eliot’s eyes when he looks at Quentin, a sort of unconditional acceptance and affection that Quentin drinks up greedily, but hasn’t there always been?

There’s something more fleeting too—sharper, hotter—that Quentin only catches sideways sometimes, but it’s not like that wasn’t there, before, either. He remembers meeting Eliot and getting checked out, fairly blatantly. He was pretty oblivious first year at Brakebills, or distracted, understandably, but that doesn’t mean he missed some of Eliot’s once-overs. But they weren’t anything special; Eliot’s like that with practically everyone, or at least he was, back then. Quentin felt flattered, if it ever happened, like he’d managed to match his shirt and his jeans in an unexpectedly competent way, but he didn’t think it meant anything.

And well, they did sort of sleep together that one time, but extenuating and traumatic circumstances, much? Quentin spent the hours and days after that event trying to forget it ever happened, and looking away from Eliot.

It’s just that now, he feels like he wants to look directly at him instead. If Quentin hadn’t been with Alice when it happened, if it hadn’t been so blatantly wrong, if it just… if they could just see what would have come of it, if they’d had the space and time to let it evolve. Maybe it would’ve just fizzled out, a one-time thing, and they would have lapsed back into friendship, which is what they did anyway. Maybe it would’ve blown the friendship apart messily, to bits, although he doesn’t think that’s likely, actually. Or maybe…

Quentin tries to recalibrate, to reframe his memories to fit this bizarre, new context. It sounds stupid, but the idea has never consciously occurred to him before. Eliot’s his friend, Eliot’s important, Eliot’s safe: his mind generally stops there, content.

But in hindsight, when Eliot was possessed, and Quentin’s world went gray and numb and faded at the edges, and all he could think about was saving him… oh fuck, was this what Julia was trying to tell him? Quentin truly believes that he would have tried as hard to save any one of his friends, even the ones he’s not as close with, but he probably wouldn’t have felt like everything colorful and hopeful in the garden of his heart had wilted and died. And like the very ground beneath his feet, the beliefs holding him together with string and scotch tape, were crumbling to dirt and ash and nothingness, like he had nothing to cling to as his reality fell away except this one, all-consuming need: to save Eliot.

The only time he’s felt anything akin to that, with all his experience of depression and misery and awfulness, is when Alice was dead. So in retrospect, maybe that should have been his first clue.

Even before that, though, there were these moments when everything sharpened to a point after long absence, like when Eliot burst through the door of the Cottage unexpectedly from Fillory, and Quentin leapt at him like he was drawn by an invisible bungee cord and just held on. Like suddenly, for an instant, his body and his mind allowed him to remember how much he missed Eliot when they were apart.

And now, if he’s honest with himself, it’s like that all the time, basically.

Quentin hasn’t really thought about it, but ever since he got back and settled into this second chance at life, they see each other, and all Quentin can think is “next time.” Something happens, and he wants to share it with Eliot. He’d thought it was just because Eliot was feeling as unmoored and aimless as he was, back from possession the way Quentin was back from the dead, and so they were making their meandering way together while everyone else around them had purpose and responsibilities. But perhaps it’s telling that he sees more of Eliot than he does of Alice, his girlfriend, or Julia, his supposed roommate.

And when he sees him, for fuck’s sake. He’s always thought Eliot was attractive, in a “well, duh,” sort of way, but now... Quentin escapes from the garden that afternoon and retreats to his room as soon as he can, but when he catches a glimpse of Eliot in the hall later that evening, it hits him all over again, the wanting. He wants to scrape his lips raw on Eliot’s stubble and ruck his tunic up and count the spaces between his ribs with kisses; he wants to push Eliot down into a chair and crawl into his lap and see if the sensation triggers any more flashes of that illicit night they shared. If he did, he wonders, what would Eliot do? Would he hold Quentin more securely and tip his head just so? Would he take charge, arrange Quentin the way he wanted, and just take?

Sex hasn’t been a priority for Quentin lately, what with the taking it slow with Alice, and the coming back to life in a strange body that hasn’t felt quite like his, and generally being depressed and numb for months and months before that, but it’s like this realization electrifies that new, untouched body with a cattle prod. He’s seized up with the shock of it, and is held on the edge, yearning for the comedown, imagining how he’ll go hot all over and melt into the bonelessness of real, blissful relief.

I’m alive, he thinks, breathless. This is what it feels like; this body is mine, and I’m living in it. He’s living, and it feels… if he let it, it would feel so real, and connected, and good. The part of him that he told Eliot about, the one that takes a chance, that just goes for it at the slightest provocation, is chomping at the bit. Give it a shot, why the fuck not? This could be amazing.

Julia was right, but she’s wrong too. This isn’t a crush. This is fucking for real feelings. Maybe they’ve always been there, like a scroll rolled up and tucked away, but now unfurling to reveal the full, messy, ink-splattered parchment.

Quentin wants to read it all. Write more at the end. Keep going. He wants to know what happens next.

This is a problem. Because Quentin is with Alice right now. And last time he cheated on her (fuck, is he the sort of horrible sleaze who thinks about the last time he cheated on his girlfriend like there’s going to be a next time?), there had been a lot of alcohol, and the emotion bottles, and maybe that didn’t excuse it, but it at least explained it, a bit.

Quentin tries to slow his racing heart, and stymie the tide of hopes and fantasies that have flooded his stupid brain. He needs to be circumspect about this, think about what it all means. Much as his emotions are swelling up and overwhelming him in a way that turns feeling into a sort of desperate emergency, it’s not. He has time. He doesn’t need to run to Eliot right the fuck now, everything akimbo and swirling in his mind, and blurt out a confession he doesn’t even know if he can put into words, however much he wants to.

He can do right by Alice, at least as much as it’s possible in this situation. He can talk to her before he does anything else. And he can figure out whether this is worth potentially jeopardizing his friendship with Eliot (it’s worth it, it’s worth everything, sings his heart).

All this decided, there’s no time like the present. He can send a message to Eliot and Margo on the way to the Fillory clock; he should go back to Earth tonight, while he’s got the nerve. So he packs his few things and opens the door decisively.

Only to find himself face to face with Eliot.

“Hey,” Quentin says, and his voice comes out embarrassingly strangled.

Eliot looks startled to see him too, which is bizarre, since he’s the one who’s at Quentin’s door. “Hey.” There’s a pause while he seems to reboot, then starts again. “Listen, Q, I’ve been thinking. About what you were saying today. And, um. I really need to tell you something.”

Quentin vaguely registers that Eliot sounds a little uncomfortable, but he’s so keyed up himself that he can’t really focus on it. His pulse is racing, and he feels like he’s shaking from the effort of not throwing himself into Eliot’s arms and saying, “I need to tell you something too, and it’s that I think you’re my fucking soulmate, you fucker. You know, if you’re like, okay with that?”

“Alice,” he blurts out instead.

“Uh,” Eliot says, nonplussed, as well he might be, because Quentin is doing the thing where he continues a conversation he was having with himself, not the person he’s talking to right now.

“I need to talk to her,” Quentin clarifies, sort of. “So, I’m going now.”

“Right now,” Eliot says slowly. Oh, right, Quentin had begged off dinner since he was busy having an epiphany slash emotional crisis. It’s actually kind of late.

“Yeah, it’s um. It’s important.”

“Got it,” Eliot says, eyebrows raised. “A middle-of-the-night urgent need to talk to the girlfriend issue. You know, we’re all adults here. You can just say it, Q,” he adds with a grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“No, it’s um. I just.” Fuck, Quentin is blushing. He’s trying to look at anything except Eliot’s face.

“Wow. You’d better go before you combust,” Eliot says, laughing and gesturing Quentin out the door. He walks with him down the hall, and it’s not until they reach the doorway of the room where the clock stands that Quentin remembers that Eliot wanted to say something to him.

“Oh, did you—you wanted to talk to me, sorry. Is it—is everything okay? Can it wait a few days, or is it—”

“It’s actually not that important,” Eliot interrupts, waving a hand. “In fact, I think it doesn’t really—you know what, never mind.”

“Okay. But I’ll see you soon,” Quentin says, finally finding the courage to meet Eliot’s eyes as they linger together by the door. “I uh, I actually want to talk to you, too, about—you’ll come visit next week, right?”

“Fen!” Eliot says, apropos of nothing.

“What?” Quentin asks, just as the woman in question says, “Hi!” from behind him.

“Fen, I was just about to tell Q about our plan to visit our not-daughter next week.”

“Oh, you decided—”

“Days ago. As I decided days ago, I’m joining Fen for a little expedition. So regrettably, I’ll miss our standing date, Q.”

“Not-daughter? You mean, Fray?” Quentin asks, puzzled and also disappointed, but trying not to be. “I thought she was your aged-up…” He trails off, seeing the way Fen’s face has fallen and Eliot’s expression remains carefully neutral.

“Oh, you missed that, I forgot. Yeah, turns out Fray’s not actually our natural born daughter.”

“What? But Fen was pregnant when she—oh no, don’t cry,” Quentin cuts himself off, looking at Fen in dismay and then to Eliot, pleading for an explanation, help, or both.

“Don’t worry, Q, it’s not you,” he reassures, even as he gives him a sharp look and puts a comforting hand on Fen’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Fen says after a moment, smiling bravely through her tears. “We’re going to see Fray, who’s wonderful, but she’s not actually — our baby we never knew, before she died.”

“Fairy fuckery,” Eliot explains in an undertone. “They told us Fray was ours, but actually, she was just a random—the baby was stillborn.”

Quentin is horrified. “Fen, I’m so sorry. And El, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I—you guys…” he trails off. He wasn’t there for them. He never really thought about Fray at all, except as a curiosity, but how jarring it must have been, for Eliot, who hadn’t wanted to get married, and who probably hadn’t wanted a child, to lose a baby and then be told she was a full-grown adult. And then to have that rug ripped out from under your feet too: to know that the child of your own blood was just gone, like she had never existed in the first place.

“It’s fine, Q,” Eliot says, understanding, as always, what Quentin is trying to say, and letting him off the hook. He’s so… “A lot has happened over the last few years.”

“Right, but it’s not nothing. You lost your child. You didn’t even know, it’s like she was never born. I should’ve thought about what you were going through—but I mean, I’ve never—” He’s never been a father. He has always thought of it as something he’d like to be, one day, in a distant, pipedream future, in which he’s stable and normal and happy, but it hasn’t ever felt like an idea that has weight. Anyway, this isn’t about him. “I can’t even imagine what that feels like,” he says quietly.

The subject must be bothering him more than he lets on, because Eliot looks like he’s been slapped.

“No,” he says finally. “I guess you can’t.”

As it turns out, Alice isn’t able to meet Quentin for a couple of days. When they do meet up, she looks especially pretty and greets him with an apologetic smile, which makes him feel like the worst human being alive.

“Sorry it took me a while to get back,” she says. “You said you wanted to talk about something important?”

“Yeah. Alice. You know how we were talking, last time, about how I—” Just call a spade a spade, he thinks, and clears his throat so he doesn’t choke on the words. “Cheated on you?”

“Yeah. I remember,” she says, smile vanishing.

“The moment I woke up that morning, I wished I could take it all back. I was in love with you. It was a mistake, not something I consciously wanted to do. All I could think about was how to earn your forgiveness, and get you back. Because you were the one I loved, not anyone else.” He blurts it all out in one go, because it suddenly seems very important that she know this. Even if he’s about to undermine it all in a second, or especially because of that.

“I know that. I get it, Q, and I mean. You fucked up, but we’ve all fucked up. Why are you obsessing about this now?”

Quentin sighs. “Because I’m the fucking worst at being your boyfriend, and I’m about to fuck it up again.” She takes a half-step back, eyes wide, and he hurries to explain. “Not… I didn’t cheat on you. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t do that to you, not again. I’m sorry. I—” He stops talking, like a coward.

Alice saves him the trouble of searching for the words. “You’re breaking up with me,” she surmises, painfully quick as ever.

“Yes,” he says.

“Because. Oh. Because you don’t want to cheat on me.”

“I don’t—I don’t want to hurt you, Alice.”

She ignores that, and carries the thread to its logical conclusion. “But you want someone else.”

“Yeah,” he manages, and looks down at his feet.

“Oh,” she says again, and the syllable is damning on Alice’s tongue, way too knowing. “Well. I guess it’s not Margo,” she adds, and he can’t quite parse her tone. Not angry, exactly, but closer to frustrated. A little wry.

“No,” Quentin admits, trying to meet her eyes, because she deserves this from him, at least. Honesty. “I swear, I didn’t—it isn’t like that, with us, it never has been, maybe it never will be, but it isn’t fair to you, not when I feel like this about—I didn’t know, or I wouldn’t have—I didn’t realize—”

Alice laughs, although she still looks like she wants to cry, too, buttoned up and miserable in the way she had been when he first met her. “You know. I think I realized. But I convinced myself…” She sighs. “The way you were, when he was gone, when all you cared about was getting him back. You get really single-minded when you’re in love, Quentin. It’s pretty obvious, especially for someone who’s been on the other end of it before.”

Quentin knows this about himself. And hasn’t he pretty much connected the dots already, thinking about how he was while Eliot was possessed? But still, there’s something about Alice Quinn naming the emotion that hits him like a slap in the face, punches the air out of his lungs. He’s in love.

“If you knew, why would you…” He doesn’t understand how cruel the question is until it’s half out of his mouth, and Alice is bristling in turn.

“I don’t know, Q, maybe because you were the only good thing in my life, and I’ve been trying so hard to—you know, fuck you. Are you really trying to blame me for you being so oblivious you couldn’t even figure out what you were feeling?”

“No,” he backpedals. “No, I’m—” He’s sorry. He’s honestly bewildered himself, how he could have missed the magnitude of this thing brewing inside him for months and years, apparently.

“Because you know, you asked me. You told me you wanted me in your life.”

“I did. I do. But Alice. It’s not about anyone else, not really. You and me—I think we’re trying this for the wrong reasons.” That stops her flat for a second, and he takes advantage of the pause to go on. “It’s what you said, about going back to how we were. When we were happy together. About breaking and becoming whole again.” He takes a breath and tries to put it into words. “Mending an object, bringing the pieces back together, it’s this amazing feeling. Like I can fix things, go back, undo them. It feels right, and simple, and good. But… people aren’t like that. We’re not… we can remember what we were before, but we can’t be exactly that again. Whatever we’ve gone through, the things we’ve done, the mistakes we’ve made—maybe we can get some aspect of our old selves back, but we’re not objects. We’re people; we’re living.”

They’re living. Quentin’s alive, when he should have been dead, and this second chance at life isn’t a chance to go back to who he was before, not exactly. It’s the chance to go on, to go forward. Maybe he can be whole again, but not in the same form. And maybe it’s trying to go backwards that’s made him feel stuck.

Alice looks stricken. Quentin says, gently, “I wanted it to work. Because I remember you made me so happy, and I was so sad and lost when we talked about it, I thought that if I could just find the person I’d been with you… “

“Me too,” she admits in a small voice.

“But Alice, look at everything you’re doing. You saved my life, and all our friends, and maybe that was just to make up for what you did, but what you’re doing now… you love it, don’t you? You’re using all your power and your brilliance and doing good, not just to make amends, but because that’s the person you want to be.”

Alice looks at him for a long, quiet moment. “And the person you want to be. It’s who you can be, with Eliot?” It’s not forgiveness. But it is, he thinks, with a pang of affection, Alice, trying as ever to understand.

“I don’t know,” Quentin says. “But I think I owe it to that person to try.”

As expected, Eliot doesn’t show up to the apartment the following week. But then, the week after that, Margo sends a message that Eliot and Fen have extended their trip, and she doesn’t know exactly when to expect them back.

Margo sounds irritated. Quentin tries not to feel too disappointed. He puts the mug with the missing piece, the one he gave to Eliot for safekeeping, in the cupboard, and tries to focus on other things instead. His feelings have apparently been brewing for years. They’ll keep a little while longer.

So he’s sitting at the dining table, staring at two identical plates in front of him, and definitely not wondering whether it would be too desperate to turn up in Fillory unannounced and wait for Eliot’s return in his bedroom (in his bed), when Julia comes in.

“So, is it okay for me to use my own room for the weekend? Or are you appropriating it for completely normal friendly sleepovers again?”

“That depends,” Quentin replies, ignoring her teasing and not looking up. “Are you going to throw a party and refuse to let me hide out in my bedroom if you stay here?”

“Most definitely,” she lies, swooping in from behind to hug him and kiss his cheek with a theatrical smack. “What are we doing with the plates?”

“Asking the hard questions,” Quentin says. “If we break both of them along the exact same faultlines, will I be able to put each plate back together with its original pieces? Or are they interchangeable when it comes to mending?”

“Fascinating,” Julia says, and settles down beside him, putting her phone down on the table.

It’s purely coincidence that he looks at the lock screen as it flashes, and sees the date.

“Shit,” he says. “Fuck.” He’s been so occupied with his work, and not thinking about what day Eliot might be back, and how he’s going to tell him, that he’s forgotten…

“What?”

“It’s—I forgot. It’s my dad’s birthday, today.”

“Oh, Q.” When he doesn’t say anything else, she leans into his shoulder. “You’ve had a lot going on. I’m sure he would understand.”

“Of course he would understand,” Quentin spits out. “He was so understanding that he understood that his son would sacrifice his life for a magical quest, and then not even show up to say goodbye. We talked about it, before we went to Blackspire, remember?”

God, he’s been happy. He’s been enjoying magic again, when it cost his dad his life. He’s been falling in love.

“I remember,” Julia says quietly, “that you almost gave the quest up, because you weren’t sure you were doing the right thing. Because as much as you loved magic, and felt responsible for its loss, you were worried about hurting him. Nobody knew what would happen when we got magic back, Q. It’s awful that his cancer came back too, but you didn’t know that it would happen for sure. And if your memories hadn’t been taken away, and the Monster hadn’t kidnapped you, you would have been by his side. It’s not your fault.”

“I knew it was a possibility,” Quentin points out unnecessarily. “I knew it, and I did it anyway. It’s the last thing I said to him, you know? That I didn’t know if it would kill him, but I was going to do it anyway.” He laughs. “I felt like I was being an adult. Making a choice, taking the consequences.” He drops his head into his hands, elbows on his knees.

Julia touches the elbow closest to her, and holds on, but doesn’t say anything. Quentin speaks into his hands. “Jules, he was my dad.” It hits him hard, out of nowhere. Of all his friends, Julia is the only one who knew him too. His dad will never meet any of the others, never see him get married, assuming he ever gets his shit together enough for that, or God, have kids, if he’s ever stable enough to manage another human being besides himself. Quentin tries not to think about Eliot. “He just looked at me, all matter-of-fact, and asked if I was asking for his permission to turn magic back on and kill him, and I—”

Something very strange happens. As he’s reliving the memory, Quentin feels like he missed a step going downstairs, and it was a deep step, or a small cliff of some kind. There’s an awful, jarring feeling of freefall, abrupt emptiness where his mind expects something solid, and it makes him panic. “Uh,” he gasps, breathing fast. “Um.”

“Q? Quentin, just take a breath with me, take it easy,” Julia says, and breathes with him until he manages to find the ground under his feet, so to speak. “What happened?”

Quentin lifts his head up from his hands and shakes it, but it doesn’t fully clear. “I—that was weird,” he says, and tries to pick at the sensation slowly. Systematically. “I told him that I wasn’t asking for his permission. That I just wanted to apologize to his face, and tell him what I was going to do. But I think I… I also told him I got married? And had a kid?”

“What?”

“Yeah. What the fuck?” He tries to remember, but the fragment of memory feels unstable and hollow. It’s like trying to recall a song lyric in a completely random language he doesn’t understand—it doesn’t link up to anything else in his brain, so there’s no familiar threads to latch on to, no context, just free floating garbled gibberish, difficult to reproduce in any meaningful way.

“Um, you don’t have any kids, right? As far as you know. The dragon egg didn’t count.”

“That was later, anyway,” Quentin says distractedly. “No. I—did I lie? Why would I…?”

“Just checking. What did you say, exactly?” Julia asks.

Quentin squeezes his eyes shut and imagines his dead dad, the way he saw him alive for the last time. He had said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m going to do this,” and his dad hadn’t said, “It’s all right,” or “I understand.” He had just smiled and said…

What was his name? Your son?

“I named him after you,” Quentin whispers.

“What?” Julia repeats. She sounds very concerned.

He opens his eyes. “I wouldn’t have lied, not to his face, not about that. I—Julia, I think there’s something wrong with me.”

He’s been feeling it all along, hasn’t he? Something’s missing.

Julia is Julia. She believes him without question. So they go to Brakebills, of course.

Even though memory manipulation falls under the Psychic discipline, Julia drags him straight to Fogg’s office, and the man examines Quentin himself. “I don’t see any residue of a memory erasing potion, or magic of any kind, Quentin,” he says. “Psychic magic includes other methods of blurring or corrupting memories, which leave less of a trace, but there’s always a magical echo. A brokenness in the psyche where the fragment was removed, which the Magician often blankets with a false memory, to hide it. The more significant the memory, whether positive or traumatic, the harder it is to do subtly.”

“Yeah,” Julia interjects grimly. “We know,” and oh fuck, they’ve come so far from it that Quentin had forgotten, but even before Fogg messed with all their minds, Julia’s had memory magic performed on her before. Not once, but twice: first, when she didn’t make it into Brakebills and managed to break through the mind wipe, and then, a crude patch…

“Jules,” Quentin says. “Are you—”

“We don’t know what happened to you, Q. We don’t know how we got you back. What if this disturbance in your memory has something to do with that, or what you went through…”

No wonder she’s so worried about this.

“So you’re saying, we stop messing with it?” Quentin asks, stomach sinking. He thinks about Julia, tears leaking down her face, telling him about how she begged Marina to cast the memory spell on her after what Reynard did. He remembers Jane Chatwin telling him that the patch over Julia’s memory was there for a reason, and if you still care about her, protect her. And then being helpless to watch as Ember tore it away, and knocked her to the ground with the trauma of her own forgotten experience.

Maybe it makes sense to leave it alone, he thinks. After all, he had died in the Mirror Realm. No one knows what happened to his spirit after death. It’s possible that he went through some impossibly horrifying, inhuman torture that his living mind won’t be able to handle, and it’s rattled his memories in some way.

But it’s human nature. Now that he knows it exists, he wants to remember. And this anomalous fragment he’s stumbled upon — it’s been jarring to try to access the memory, but the memory itself…

If he closes his eyes and tries, he can hear the wonder in his own voice, even if he can’t find all the words he said. He feels the softness. The magic of it. He doesn’t know where it comes from, or where it leads, but it’s important.

Quentin’s afraid, too, though. All this time, everyone’s been telling him to let it go. He’s been telling himself that, trying to focus on the things and the people that make him happy, in this second chance at life. But if he was right all along, and there’s something truly wrong with him, does he even want to know?

“No,” Julia counters unexpectedly. “I’m actually saying we need to figure it out. We’ll be careful, in case it’s patching something… something that would hurt you, to remember. But.” She squares her shoulders. “You should know.”

“Julia,” Quentin says, as gently as he can. “You asked for your memories—”

“I know what I did,” she replies. “I don’t blame myself; it’s what I needed, to survive that moment. But if I had never remembered, it wouldn’t have changed the things that happened next. Reynard would still have come after me. I wouldn’t have known I was pregnant, and I would’ve been completely vulnerable. Staying in the dark is not the answer, even if the knowledge hurts. We’re human. We can’t always control what’s done to us, but we can get better. We can make a choice to go forward.”

I’m not as strong as you are, Quentin wants to say, because he’s humbled by her: how she was “gifted” godhood through a sickening act of violation and brutality, but managed to embrace her spark on her own terms, to help humanity. How now that she’s human, again, not necessarily by choice, she’s still here, still taking ownership of the person she is and charging ahead.

“We should get Alice,” Julia continues. “I found the spell for the body, but she definitely refined it, and double checked all the research Eliot and I did on getting your spirit back. She might have found something about the effect of that kind of magic on memory.”

Well, this is awkward. “Um, maybe we should leave Alice out of it. Just for a while.”

“What? Q, I know she’s been busy with the Library stuff lately, but it’s not like she wouldn’t come back for—” Quentin looks away. Julia is his oldest friend, and catches the look anyway. “Oh. What the fuck?”

“So, yeah. We’re not, like, together, anymore. But it’s fine, and that’s really not the—”

“It’s fine?” she interrupts. “You and Alice, love of your life Alice, aren’t together anymore, and it’s fine,” she repeats.

“Yeah. But anyway—”

“When did this happen?”

“You know, a couple of weeks ago,” Quentin mutters, waving his hand uncomfortably. There are disadvantages to having someone around who’s known you since you were in grade school.

“You really are fine,” Julia says, with a weird expression. “I mean, you’re upset about your dad, and this whole psychic thing, but…”

“If I can interrupt,” Fogg sighs forlornly, but Julia ignores him.

“Alice didn’t break up with you, did she?” she guesses shrewdly. “You did it. Because of—”

“Seriously, can we not…” Quentin starts, which is of course not a denial.

“I knew it!” she exclaims. Despite the seriousness of the situation, she sounds triumphant in her rightness. Asshole. “Oh my God, the way you were with him…”

“Really not the time, Jules,” Quentin grits out, but he can feel himself flushing. It’s all too much, reliving his last memory of his dad ad nauseum, the lingering worry that he’s somehow come back to life wrong, and the way he’s hurt Alice, again, but even still, the thought of Eliot is still making his heart skip a beat and stomach flutter, and that’s like, embarrassing and weird, right? This isn’t the time, he tells himself sternly.

Fogg pinches his nose in despair. “As riveting as your relationship drama with Ms. Quinn and, I’m assuming, Mr. Waugh, is,” he says, which is just not okay, why does he know that, “I’ve been privy to it on several prior occasions and don’t really care to relive it now.”

“Wait, what?”

“I—oh, we—in the other timelines?” Quentin stutters, interested despite himself. Was it always just him fucking up and cheating on Alice with the ill-advised threesome, or was there a timeline where he and Eliot actually…

“Timeline,” he says again, and it’s not enough, it’s not the whole memory, but it’s enough of a memory cue to knit some fragments together, suddenly. Eliot, timeline, this inexplicable story he told his dad… “The quest. That’s it, that’s it!”

“What quest?”

“Our quest, the quest to get magic back. Eliot and I got the Time Key, remember? We went back in time, and solved the Mosaic, but then there was no way of getting back to our time. So apparently, we lived out our lives there, and I wrote Margo a letter, told her how to get the Time Key in our timeline, and she got it and stopped Eliot and I from ever going back in the first place,” Quentin explains in a rush. “I saw the letter, but I don’t—so there was this whole aborted timeline where we got old and died, but we don’t remember any of it, because it didn’t really happen.”

Julia absorbs his explanation, looking understandably confused. “So you told your dad about it,” she surmises finally. “To, what, explain what you were doing? The key quest?”

“I guess so?” Quentin strains to recall, and the swooping, uneasy feeling that comes with the disconnected memory is a little easier to deal with now that he expects it, or now that the memory has some context, at least.

On this quest, I’ve lived a whole life.

“That makes sense, I guess,” he says, even though it doesn’t, not entirely.

I grew old, and I got married, and I had a son. Who grew old. He doesn’t really understand what he was thinking or trying to share with his dad at the time. Like, even if you don’t live to see me grow up, I did?

And what was all that for, if it’s not for this? So what, he could hold up a whole life he doesn’t remember and say that it was more important than this one, with his dad? Like that life was enough to make the quest for magic worth completing?

“Another mystery solved,” Fogg says, reminding them that he’s still in the room. He’s probably going to usher them out of his office like errant children in a second.

“No,” Julia cuts in sharply, her teasing tone from earlier completely gone. “It doesn’t explain why you were so panicked about it, Q. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Anything that can fuck with your memories like that is serious.”

“No,” Quentin agrees, because he’s almost always got a bad feeling, but this time, he has something more solid than that too. “The thing is, I saw the letter that I wrote Margo. Which is trippy, because if it never happened, how could the letter exist? But anyway, I told her about the time travel, and getting old, but… I’m not like, a hundred percent certain, but I don’t think it said anything about me having a son.”

Julia looks at him. “I guess it’s time to go back to Fillory.”

Quentin can feel Julia’s stare boring into the side of his head the whole way to the apartment, but she takes his hand and doesn’t ask questions when they step through the portal together.

They find Margo in the throne room, scanning over some treaty documents, in a fairly bad mood.

“Oh, wow,” she says, looking up. “I didn’t think I merited a visit if El’s not around.”

Quentin carefully doesn’t meet Julia’s knowing gaze. All right, maybe he’s been super obsessive and focused on Eliot in a horribly obvious way, to everyone but himself. Fuck, does that mean Eliot knows?

He’s going to know soon anyway, Quentin reminds himself, and shoves his nerves back down into his chest. This is not the point right now.

“Hey, Margo. You okay?” he asks.

“You know, just back to doing the middle management, even though I’m High King now, and El’s supposed to be—but no, he just vanishes on a family vacation with the ex-wife.” She sounds upset, actually, underneath the more obvious irritation and anger, but Quentin doesn’t really know how to comfort her without bringing up emotions that he suspects she’ll deny having, and which Eliot probably shouldn’t have shared with him.

So he sticks to the problem at hand. “Um. You remember how we got the Time Key?” he asks.

“You mean, do I remember finding out that my best friends were dead, and having to dig up a dead body? Yeah. Sort of memorable.”

“Do you still, uh, have the letter I wrote you? We wanted to see it. It’s sort of important.”

“Sure, sleep with it under my pillow every night,” she says, glaring at him incredulously. “What the fuck, Q? I know you’ve been M.I.A. for a while, but there have been a few regime changes and shit here? I kept it then, but I don’t know where the fuck it is now.”

“But from what you remember,” Julia intercedes, calming. “Eliot and Q went back in time and got the key. You got a letter telling you that…”

“That they were dead, and I had to go talk to Jane Chatwin about getting the Time Key. And then I stopped you guys from going through the clock in the first place.”

“Nothing about children, or a family?” Julia checks, and Margo shakes her head, looking more concerned now.

“So we never remembered,” Quentin says. It doesn’t make sense. He and Julia have been worrying that he’s forgotten something, but if he never remembered, then what was there to forget? And if the fragment about telling his dad is meant to be a false memory patch over something else, why use this odd isolated recollection from so long ago? He wouldn’t even have thought about it under normal circumstances, without the coincidences of today.

Julia seems to be thinking along the same lines. “Maybe it’s not that you forgot something you knew. Maybe coming back from the dead allowed you to access these memories that you didn’t have before? From the life that never happened?”

“No, because I don’t remember that life now. I just remember remembering it, somehow, and telling my dad. It doesn’t make sense at all. Unless it’s like… I used to remember that life, and told my dad about it, but then the memories of it got taken away somehow when my spirit came back here?”

“But if that were the case, wouldn’t somebody else remember it too? I mean, if you went through this whole other life where you solved the Mosaic and you remembered it, why wouldn’t you talk about it with one of us?”

“Wait, what?” Margo asks, and they tell her what’s been going on. “No, you guys never remembered. El never said anything about it, either, and why wouldn’t he have told me about solving the Mosaic?”

That’s an indisputable point. There’s very little that Eliot wouldn’t tell Margo, and, as Quentin is generally the person he tells instead if it ever occurs, he knows that it tends to be touchy-feely self-doubting stuff that he doesn’t want to burden her with, when she needs him to be strong by her side. Bragging about solving an unsolvable puzzle hardly falls into the category, and neither does the fact that Quentin apparently got married and had a child, unless it somehow...

Maybe it’s not about the Mosaic, after all.

So all this frantic panic, Quentin thinks as he and Julia walk back to the rooms kept for them in the castle, and it’s gotten them nowhere. Except Fillory, where he’s been trying to find an excuse to turn up for days, because he’s in love with his best friend, and he thinks that maybe there’s a chance that…

The worry of the day hasn’t subsided completely, but now that he’s here, and Eliot will be back sooner or later, the emotion swells up inside him again, and he can’t help but think about that, too.

Again, Julia’s on the same page. “Are you going to tell him?” she asks, as they reach her room.

“About the memory?” Quentin says. “Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s a moot point, if Margo doesn’t remember it, I don’t think Eliot ever did either, but I’ll ask him.”

“No, Q,” she cuts in. “Not about that.”

“Oh. That. Yeah. I mean, yes. I’m going to.”

Quentin’s afraid. He doesn’t know where this will lead. And his friendship with Eliot is so important to him, so vital, that he doesn’t know how he’ll survive it if he tries for more and loses what he has. But God, he has to try, doesn’t he? He has to trust that Eliot loves him, even if it’s not like that. They won’t lose everything, even in the worst case scenario.

And he does trust Eliot. Eliot’s the only one he’s ever trusted, with everything, with all of himself.

He doesn’t hear what Julia says, doesn’t register her smile. He’s walking back to his room in a daze, heart thrumming, when he literally runs into Eliot.

He’s walking with Fen, still in his traveling clothes, and startles spectacularly when he sees Quentin in front of him.

“Sorry, Fen, I need to borrow Eliot right now,” Quentin says, grabbing Eliot by the hand and dragging him away to the nearest empty room in the castle before he can even say a word.

“Q, what’s up?” Eliot asks, breathless, but all of a sudden, seeing him after what feels like so long (it’s only been a few weeks, but it’s the longest they’ve been apart since they both came back to themselves, and oh, how had Quentin missed the fact that he was in love?), Quentin has no words.

“I missed you,” he says finally, and for some reason, Eliot’s face falls before he straightens it out again.

“It’s good you’re here. I have to tell you something, actually.”

“Me too,” Quentin says. “I mean, I want to ask you something. But then I want to tell you something, too. You want to go first?”

“Not really,” Eliot replies. “But I should. I’ve been putting it off for too long, because I didn’t know how to tell you. And because I’m a selfish, cowardly person.” He waves off Quentin’s protest before he makes it, and squares his shoulders. “Listen. You know how no one knows how your spirit made it back to life? And you’ve been worrying that you’re missing something, that you came back wrong, somehow?”

Quentin is taken aback by the coincidence. “Yeah, actually. I was going to ask you—something happened today, and I thought I had it figured out, but then… like, remember the Time Key? I thought maybe we remembered more about that life than I thought, and I lost it when—but I talked to Margo, and she didn’t remember it either, so I think I was wrong.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “About that.”