Work Text:
Quentin Coldwater is reading by the time he’s in preschool. He can’t read in his head yet, and he can only read simple things like picture books, but still, he’s reading. Words come so easily to him. His dad sits with him on the floor, teaching him the sounds of each letter with the magnets on the fridge and helping him sound out the words in picture books. Eventually, he stops making his parents read Where the Wild Things Are every night, and instead makes them listen to him read it, though of course he still needs their help with some of the bigger words.
“We wanted to let you know that he’s on the spectrum ,” Quentin’s mother says, when the woman who will be Quentin’s first grade teacher asks why she wanted to meet. Quentin sits next to his mother, both of them in child-sized chairs, looking down at the table from under his shaggy hair. He pulls up his legs so he’s sitting criss-cross-applesauce as he listens intently to the conversation. His mother continues, “we aren’t pursuing any aide or extensive accommodations, because he’s very high-functioning, but we want you to be aware.” At later meetings, Quentin’s mother nods as the teacher explains that he’s incredibly smart, but easily distracted, that he’s very shy, but tends to speak over others and take up class time, that he’s anxious and reserved, but prone to tears and the occasional emotional outburst.
Quentin knows that he’s different - for one, because everyone tells him, but he can feel it, too. He hates gym class not just because he hates sports, but because something about the games doesn’t click with him. It’s not fun; if he participates, he gets singled out and has to know the right thing to do, and if he doesn’t, he gets picked on for standing on the sidelines. He does cry a lot in school, and he’s not proud of it, but when he gets to the breaking point, there’s nothing he can do. And yet he doesn’t hate being there. Sure, it makes him nervous, and over time he realizes that it’s easiest for him to just keep to himself so people don’t make funny faces when he talks to them, but he’s smart . Numbers don’t come as easily as words, but they aren’t very difficult, and he rarely has trouble with science or history. Reading, though, is what he loves. He’s a gifted reader, so he gets to go to the advanced reading groups where they sit at a table and take turns reading pages out loud. They have to write summaries, though, and make lists of words they don’t know (Quentin knows most of them), and the books they read are nowhere near as interesting as Magic Tree House .
If anyone tolerates Quentin, it’s the other weird kids. Julia is in his reading group, and she notices him reading Magic Tree House and shows him that she has the next book in the series in her bag. She’s nervous and smart, not quite in the same way as Quentin, but enough that they understand each other. She keeps her hair in a ponytail and has the kind of neat handwriting that Quentin doesn’t always believe a real person could have, and she’s better with numbers than he is. They start sitting together at lunch, and Quentin asks his parents if he can invite her over. She starts to visit a lot, especially over the summer, though she never reciprocates the invitation. Quentin doesn’t mind, because he has a treehouse in his backyard, so they can pretend to be Jack and Annie. Sometimes, they just watch movies or talk, and she never looks at him funny. She starts calling him “Q,” like the rest of his family does.
For Q’s seventh birthday, Julia gives him The World in the Walls . “I just started the second book,” she tells him, “it’s so good! There’s this girl, Jane, and she’s a lot like me - and Martin reminds me of you!” Quentin starts the book that night, and finishes it within the week. He begs his mom to take him to the library to get the next book, and then the next one. Julia was right: something about Martin resonates with Quentin. Martin is awkward and nerdy and intelligent, but he’s brave in a way that Q could only dream of. Soon all Quentin can think about is Fillory. He finishes the books quickly, and all he wants to do is read them again. His dad gives him a box set as a Christmas gift, and he takes them all to school with him every day, so he can read any chapter whenever he wants.
“Quentin,” his second grade teacher says, when she sees him absorbed in The Flying Forest during snack time, “what are you reading?” Quentin, both too enthralled by his book and too intimidated by his teacher to speak, lifts the book off the desk so his teacher can read the title. “The Fillory series?” she says, a little skeptical, “that’s a little advanced, isn’t it? You shouldn’t be reading those books until sixth grade.” Quentin can feel tears in his eyes, but he doesn’t start crying until later in the day, when all the swings are taken at recess.
***
Quentin sees his first counselor when he’s nine. His parents had taken him to see someone when he was much younger, when he got the autism diagnosis, but he doesn’t remember her very much at all. But now his parents are getting divorced, so his mother decides he should talk to someone. Quentin doesn’t see much point — he isn’t all that upset by the divorce. He’ll live with his dad most of the time, and he’s fine with that. Still, he goes to a counselor on a semi-regular basis when he’s with his mom. The woman loves to ask him about how sad he is, about what he needs to get off his chest, about how tough this must be for him, how hard it is for a family to split up, how he probably feels like it’s his fault. If anything, though, Quentin needed a therapist before the divorce. It was the tension in the house, the shouts echoing through the halls and the feeling of anger seeping through the doors that was hard, that made Quentin curl up in the dark and rock back and forth and cry and scratch at the skin of his arms. “I’m not sad,” he insists as he fidgets with a wooden puzzle, “they aren’t fighting anymore. It’s better. Everyone’s happier.” She never listens, and, after enough begging, Quentin’s mom finally suspends their meetings.
Quentin had started learning magic tricks before the divorce. Reading Fillory wasn’t enough anymore, so he started picking up books about real magic whenever he went to the library. His dad got him a pack of cards, and even though he struggled with those, there was plenty he could do with coins and pencils. His parents had tended to snap at him while they lived together, so he’d preferred to read to himself in his room. When he’d felt suffocated by the energy at home, Quentin would stop himself from crying by poring over his books, making a pencil disappear again and again and again and again until he could speak without wanting to scream. It’s not until he’s living with his dad that his magic finally has an audience. He only has a few tricks to begin with, and his mom tells him how boring it is by about the third time he pulls a quarter from behind her ear, but his dad is more patient with him. He helps him pick out books about card tricks, and when Q starts to get tears in his eyes because he just can’t get it right , his dad helps him through it instead of yelling. Usually. He tries more than Mom ever does, at least.
***
Julia is pretty much Quentin’s only friend, and he knows it’s because she’s about as much of a mess as he is. There’s plenty of nerdy kids he gets along fine with, and he’ll ramble to them about Fillory or whatever else has his attention at the moment, but eventually he learns to stop. “You don’t know how to leave people alone,” his mother remarks absentmindedly when he realizes his middle school friends have left him in the dust, “they probably think you’re too obnoxious, talking on and on the way you do.” Those words stick, no matter how much he tries to shake them. By the time he gets to high school, Quentin is isolating himself. Even when he has friends, he’s the outsider in the group. He wants to be around people, but he doesn’t know how to do it, and he’s seen how he drives them away. Julia is the only one who feels safe , who he can text any day of the week without a good reason, who he can really be comfortable with. She has a few girlfriends in high school, and one boyfriend, and Quentin can’t help his jealousy. He hates that anyone other than him has her time, her attention, but he was never jealous of her romantic affection, he doesn’t think. He just wants her to be there, and she always is when he needs her, but the fear doesn’t go away.
Late in sophomore year, it occurs to Quentin that maybe he does have feelings for Julia, and once the thought is there, it never stops nagging at him. Really, Quentin isn’t even sure he knows the difference between loving Julia (and of course he does, they tell each other as much almost every day) and being in love with her. But there’s no one else to love, and she’s his closest friend, and the feelings get all mixed up in his brain. He knows part of it comes from their friendship looking like a perfect romance. Even when it doesn’t feel right, he reminds himself that it’s what’s supposed to happen. He’s supposed to be in love with Julia, his girl-next-door best friend, so without realizing it, without wanting to, he convinces himself to fall in love with her, and hates himself for it.
One of his closest friends during high school is Mason. He’s gay, like most of the friends Quentin makes, and he’s into Star Wars . Really into Star Wars . It’s not Quentin’s thing, but he finds himself mesmerized by the way Mason can talk at great lengths about the smallest details of the universe, and whenever they spend time together Quentin just listens. Sometimes Quentin talks to him about Fillory for just as long, and he sees a lot of himself in Mason. Their friendship is fleeting, but before it ends, Quentin has realized that his feelings go beyond friendship. The revelation isn’t hard to accept. He’s already autistic, he’s already a geek, and it just feels like another thing that makes him weird. It’s not his favorite thing about himself, but then, nothing really is. His sexuality can’t push anyone further away than he’s already managed to push them.. It’s not pride, but it’s not hatred, either, so he manages to make it out of high school alive. He knows that’s thanks to Julia, and Fillory, but by that point they’ve become the same thing. Even when Quentin becomes far more invested, isolating himself in his world of magic tricks and books, she’s there with him, supporting him, and never, ever making fun.
***
College is a process. Quentin gets in, manages to push himself through the complexities of applications, financial aid forms, and interviews until he’s able to go to Columbia, but it’s not easy. It takes last minute submissions, sitting over his dad’s shoulder because he’s too overwhelmed by the tax forms to do them for himself, and a decent amount of crying. It’s not much easier when he moves in. Thanks to his diagnosis he’s able to get a single room, and he doesn’t leave much. It’s tough. He’s lonely. He wants to go out, to meet people, to have friends, but he can’t .
Julia’s there with him, but she’s growing out of him. She doesn’t say it, and she doesn’t mean for it to happen, but Quentin can feel it. She’s smarter than him, in tougher classes, spending all of her time on her schoolwork and with friends at her academic level. Quentin does fine, in fact he does better than fine, but that’s not always enough. He’s majoring in literature, and all of it is incredible. He thrives on the energy that comes with sitting around a table with his peers and sharing ideas, even when he struggles to articulate his own. As much as people roll their eyes and remind him it’s kid stuff, he never shuts up about Fillory and Further . He talks about it, writes about it, does his senior thesis on it, and loves it, and does well. Because the thing about Fillory, for Quentin, is that there’s not anything like it. He can never fully describe it, really, the feeling he gets just knowing that these stories exist, but it’s something warm, something that fills up and tightens his chest every time he thinks about it and brings him close to tears. Some kind of longing, to be closer to the stories, to experience them again for the first time, to know everything he possibly can, to immerse himself in this world (other people talk about feeling like this online, and they call it a “special interest”). Nothing else matters, not in the way that this does, because nothing else makes him feel like this. Nothing else, he realizes as he gets older, makes him feel at all.
***
Quentin doesn’t like to think about the ugly parts. They’ve always been there, eating at his mind, infiltrating every moment of his life no matter how much he tries to ignore them, directing his every move. The meltdowns are the scariest, but there’s also the shutdowns and the constant feeling of embarrassment, and he knows it’s not just autism because there's also the panic attacks and the depressive episodes and the bottomless pit of symptom after symptom keeping his life from ever being right.
It gets bad when he’s in middle school. He’d needed new shoes, and rather than go to the trouble of taking him shopping, his mom had simply handed him a pair she bought without telling him. The problem is, they’re not right. They fit, technically, but they’re a little too tight in some places and yet they come loose every time he takes a step, and the sole itches his foot and everything about them is just wrong , but it’s too late because his mom already bought them, and the longer he wears them the worse they feel, and finally something inside him just snaps . He cries, and cries, and kicks his feet, and pulls the shoes off and slams them on the floor and throws them across the room, and he can’t stop himself, and he reaches a point where he’s not even sure what he’s upset about anymore. Reality is so far away; all he knows is that his body is filled with energy that he needs to get rid of, and he wants to break a table and scream at the top of his lungs and peel away his skin. All he can do, though, is sob, and try to string together a sentence, and tug on his hair. “You’re not six, you shouldn’t be throwing a tantrum,” his mom says, “you need to pull yourself together.” He doesn’t stop, he can’t, and neither does she: “God, are you psychotic? Do I need to call the emergency room?” She doesn’t, it’s an empty threat, but a few weeks later it happens again and Quentin’s dad does just that.
It’s a similar thing - something isn’t quite right, Quentin gets stressed, and it escalates. He doesn’t know how to describe what he went through, and the doctors conclude that it was an intense panic attack. He’s there for a few days, and he spends as much of them as he can watching TV. They put him on anxiety meds and send him home, but it doesn’t stop. The triggers are always different - sometimes something doesn’t taste good, sometimes he’s struggling with homework or a chore, sometimes someone snaps at him or he just had a bad day - but it’s always the same escalation of stress building up in his chest until the dam breaks and he needs to use up all the energy. He feels helpless, and there’s never anything he can do to stop it. Neither of his parents knows how to deal with it. His dad starts out trying to comfort him, but it never works, and rather than bother with trying, he just gives Quentin his space. His mom, on the other hand, never bothers with comfort, and certainly doesn’t give him any space. She threatens, on more than one occasion, to confiscate his Fillory collection if he can’t “get it together,” which only ever serves to send Quentin further into hysterics.
The meds help calm his nerves, especially once they’ve settled on a good drug and dosage, but that leaves Quentin to discover that his mind is just as horrific when it isn’t racing. Most days he’s apathetic, others he’s completely miserable. He doesn’t read as much, and he hates it but he can’t always bring himself to get out of bed and pick up a book. He doesn’t shower enough, and he can’t stand how greasy his hair gets, but cutting short it would be even worse. He regularly misses school in ninth grade, and when he makes it he’s in sweats and loose t-shirts. Eventually his dad sets up bi-weekly therapy sessions. He gets new meds for the depression, and that takes another round of switching up doses and prescriptions to figure out what meshes well with the anxiety meds. He keeps up the therapy, and things get a little better. He goes to school, gets good grades. But he also lets it slip to his therapist in tenth grade that he still doesn’t want to be alive. An investigation is launched on his psyche, and he’s forced to confess that, while he’s never taken action, he’s done his research. He knows where he could jump, he knows how many pills to take, but he hasn’t done anything yet. It’s terrifying, really. As much as Quentin wants to die, he’s afraid to, but he still gets meltdowns now and then and he’s pretty sure he might do something impulsive. He tells the psychologists this, and that’s the second time he’s institutionalized. He misses two weeks of tenth grade, and leaves feeling about as miserable as before, but a little less afraid of himself. None of the other kids ever know where he was, except Julia.
Then there’s the weekend in his senior year, when he does take too many pills. “I thought you’d gotten better,” is all Quentin’s mother has to say when she visits him in the hospital. The panic attacks come back over the summer before college, worse than they’ve ever been. He’s scared of moving, scared of being around new people, scared of failing. That visit is the longest. He makes it through college all right. He keeps up his therapy and adjusts his meds when he needs to. Things are shaky at times but for the most part his busy schedule and love of the literature he’s studying keep his mind from getting too far away from him. When he graduates, though, he’s lost. He does what jobs he can, gets help from his dad when he needs it, but he has no sense of plans or even goals. Time keeps moving and Quentin feels helpless as he watches. It’s bad, and he knows it’s bad. Knows he’s closer to taking his life than he’s maybe ever been, and doesn’t know what will happen if he can’t get things back in order. He’s still on his dad’s insurance (he isn’t talking to his mom anymore), so he checks himself into the psych ward one more time. It’s the longest one. He loses track of time for a while, but eventually it slows down and by the time he checks himself out he at least feels like he can safely be out in the world, and Julia’s there for him, and he’s interviewing for Yale, and maybe it’ll be okay.
***
And then he finds magic, and he’s thrown into a structured life at Brakebills before he has time to lose it again, and everything really is okay, except that it isn’t. They tell him he doesn’t need meds anymore, but he feels himself going off the rails without them. The magic helps, but it’s not a cure. He doesn’t need Julia in the way that he used to, but now for what feels like the first time, she needs him . It seems like he has friends, but there’s a coldness between them. He has magic powers , but magic is terrifying. He’s back in school, doing the only thing he loves more than reading Fillory ; He’s living it out, and it’s more than he could have ever imagined, but his school is under attack and Fillory is real but it’s horrible.
Fillory is the worst of it. It’s the one thing that Quentin’s always had, that’s kept him sane and happy and comfortable and alive. And every day, it becomes worse and worse. It’s home to the Beast, and full of suffering, and the magic that’s always been more important to Q than his powers is being taken away from him piece by piece. It’s hard to stomach, but he tries his best and mostly manages, until he visits the Plover estate and his world crashes down around him.
Quentin knows it’s selfish. This isn’t about him, it’s about Martin and the trauma he’s endured. But it’s not fair. None of this has been fair and this is the worst of it. Fillory is supposed to be everything that’s good in the world, this man was supposed to be Quentin’s hero. Of course he can’t look up to him anymore, and he won’t, but it’s near impossible to just pretend the admiration was never there. Fillory is everything to Quentin, and that love will never go away, but now it’s been tainted by the truth about Plover and everything else and it’s sickening. The second he realizes what he’s seeing in the writing room, his heart drops to his stomach and they both seem to fall out of his body together. Tears well up in his eyes and he tries to keep himself from letting them fall, and from throwing up, and he manages until they leave the house. When he gets back to the Physical Cottage, though, he breaks. He has the time to really think about everything, but he still can’t process it. He doesn’t know how to reconcile the beauty of his favorite stories with the horror that lies behind them, and it just isn’t fair. He finally lets a tear escape and once he does he can’t stop. All he can do is keep sobbing while his face turns red and snot fills up his nose and he rolls on the ground and punches the floor. There’s no one to stop him now, so he smashes his side table and topples bookshelves and tears anything apart that he can and none of it is enough. He’s been scared before, he’s been sad, he’s been angry, he’s had meltdowns, but never like this. His favorite thing in the world, the only thing that’s ever mattered, has been stolen , and was never real to begin with. He screams his lungs out and sobs until he can’t anymore, and he’s a little embarrassed by then, but too exhausted to think about it. The worst part is he doesn’t feel any better.
But in the morning, Eliot’s there to comfort him. Eliot’s always there. He’s there to befriend Q and give him a home, promises to be by his side even if he forgets about magic. And maybe Quentin blames him a little bit when Alice leaves, but maybe it doesn’t really matter, and maybe it was worth it, anyway. Because Alice was important, is important, but her friendship is incredible on its own, and whatever is going on with Eliot? That’s important, too. And it’s new. Brakebills has been nothing but change, and Eliot has kept him solid through all of it, even though he was the biggest change of all. He flirts with Quentin, and it’s not a joke, not even a little bit patronizing. Q loves him. It’s confusing, as always; he’s not sure where “treasuring their friendship” ends and “ hopelessly in love ” begins, but the shift comes somewhere along the way between hooking up and being crowned a king of Fillory. Eliot knows. He feels the same. They don’t talk about it much, and it’s one of the only things Quentin understands without needing to talk about it. It’s complicated, with Eliot’s status as High King, but they find what time they can and steal kisses when they’re alone. And Alice is still important, and Quentin does everything he can for her after she becomes a niffin, but she’s never the same. It’s hard for Quentin, the change. Things are easiest when they stay the same, but with Alice, they never do. Quentin loves her, though, he always will, so he does his best and prays that it’s enough.
It’s true that everyone is hit hard when magic disappears, but Quentin is convinced he feels it deeper than most. He knows, logically, that he’s only had magic for a few years, and most of the community has been using it their entire lives, but he also knows that magic did more to fill the hole in his life than he thought anything ever could. Without it, the hole feels bigger than ever. Maybe it has to do with his own involvement in it all. The guilt isn’t unfamiliar – he’d feel it even if this hadn’t been his fault – but he was the one who killed Ember and condemned the world. Every time a magician loses their grip or kills themselves, all Quentin sees is that he did this. Sure, who knows what would’ve happened if he hadn’t killed Ember, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone is suffering, and it’s Q’s fault, and he has to fix it. And he can fix it. There’s a book and a quest and it’s all so poetic. He started it, he can finish it, and all the guidance he needs is in a picture book. Quentin is the one who knows Fillory, knows all the stories and the lore. He can solve puzzles and follow the steps, maybe better than anyone he knows. He can get the world out of the mess he put it in. He’ll fix it. He has to fix it.