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Brian's apartment was cluttered in a different way than any of Quentin's rooms had ever been. Instead of Fillory posters and enthusiast memorabilia and magic kits, there were papers to be graded and dishes to be stacked and potted plants and succulents lining every windowsill.
Brian also had a cat—a tiny, hairless little goblin named Rupert who hated Quentin more than any creature he'd ever come across—which was curled up on top of the television when Quentin unlocked the apartment and let Margo in. There was a good deal of preparation left for the spellwork and the trap. The last ditch effort to pull everything together was an all hands on deck deal. Alice and Julia were working one angle, Penny, Josh, and Kady another, and that left Margo and Quentin to focus on the last piece: Eliot.
Not the Monster. Not Castle Blackspire.
Eliot Waugh.
The spell would only work if they could both clearly, distinctly separate Eliot from the Monster.
Without waiting to be given permission, Margo started rummaging through Quentin's cabinets, opening and shutting them noisily with increasingly disgusted sighs. Quentin settled down on one of the stools at the kitchen island and rested his chin on his folded arms, watching her silently.
He'd missed Margo more than he would've expected.
As soon as the patch over his memory had been removed, he'd panicked. Penny had been the one to find him, with help from Fogg, after the Monster had taken Brian as a hostage. But it had taken longer to track down Julia and Kady; longer still to free Alice from the Library's grasp. That had left just Margo and Josh as the final pieces to the puzzle, and it had been an agonizing two months of searching before they'd located them both in one swoop.
He'd never stopped to consider how integral Margo and Eliot were to the group as a whole until they were removed from it entirely. They were important to him; they'd always been important to him, but without their barbed comments and contagious laughter, the terror and the quiet had threatened to swallow the rest of them all whole.
When they'd woken Margo up, the first thing she'd said had been, "Took you long enough, you cocks." Quentin had been so overwhelmed with relief and affection that he'd pulled her in for a tight, quick hug before stopping to think of potential consequences.
They hadn't had a moment alone since.
"I'm assuming that fairy eye doesn't come with X-Ray vision," Quentin said dryly as Margo slammed another cabinet.
"Yeah, well, you know what they say about assumptions," Margo said. Something in her tone was fraying, the typical strong-backed snark falling flat. "Do you not own a martini glass?"
"Brian was six years sober," Quentin said. That, along with the cat, had been a joke on behalf of the Library, he was sure. He stood up from the stool and walked around the island as Margo swore her complaints. He knelt down and opened one of the cabinets under the countertop and held out a bottle of Jack Daniels to her. "I don't have shot glasses. I've been drinking it straight out of the bottle. Seemed fitting, given the situation."
"Quentin Coldwater," Margo said, her tone dripping with something that might have been fondness, "Full of surprises."
They settled into the doorway of Quentin's bedroom, facing each other, their legs tangled together. The closeness wasn’t entirely unprecedented, but Quentin couldn’t remember the last time they’d spent enough time alone together to get to this point. It always took a while for them to get under each other’s armor enough to find the physical comfort in each other that Eliot so effortlessly gave them both.
"This might not work," Margo said when they were a quarter of the way into the bottle. She’d stopped partway through a story about her and Eliot’s time at Brakebills South, her fond smile fading into something weary.
"It has to," Quentin said. He was warm and hazy from the whiskey, but this was something he knew with clarity. He wiped the waxy lip of the bottle off with the sleeve of his shirt before passing it to her. Their hands overlapped momentarily as she accepted it.
"I know it has to, but it's not like we don't have a habit of Kirkwalling the shit out of things," Margo said. She tipped the bottle back, taking a longer drink than Quentin had, and then set the bottle down to the side of her, out of Quentin’s reach.
Quentin leaned his head back against the door frame, finding himself fighting a smile for the first time in days. "If we survive this, we're coming back to that Dragon Age reference," he told her.
Margo laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “Eliot never got those references,” she said.
“Did he pretend to?” Quentin asked. He’d never met anyone so dedicated to feigning knowledge for the sake of being in on the joke as Eliot. It was endearing as it was frustrating. Like having a conversation with someone who refused to admit they didn’t speak English.
“Every goddamn time,” Margo said, shaking her head. “I don’t think El’s played a video game in his life, let alone read a book.”
The memory hit him like a bat to the knee. Eliot, sitting at the edge of the mosaic with Theo in his lap, flipping through the pages of a picture book one of the women from a nearby village had made, his voice animated and theatrical. “He read them to our son,” Quentin said.
After a long, quiet moment, Margo picked up the bottle and handed it back to him. He held onto it without drinking again, picking at the bottle’s label as he stared absently into the apartment—seeing not the clean, modern decor, but the wooden walls and dirt floors of the cottage where he’d spent decades with Eliot at his side.
Margo’s voice was low when she broke the silence. "Back in Fillory, I told him to be smart," she said, a bitter set to the twist of her lips. "Better a live hero than a dead moron. We never should've brought that gun to the castle. It was stupid. That motherfucker should've known better. I should have known better."
For a brief, quiet moment, Quentin considered reminding Margo that Eliot hadn’t been the first of them to bring a gun to a magic fight. That Margo herself had pulled out a nine millimeter and shot someone in the Neitherlands to keep Eliot safe. Because he knew what the difference was—Margo had made a decision based in practicality and logic; Eliot had made one from the stubborn, emotional place inside of him that he tried so hard to ignore.
They'd all made monstrous, terrible decisions. It seemed to be a consequence of magic, just like pain was a cause. They'd used their own lives as bargaining chips over and over and over again, and sometimes the sheer weight of everything they'd brought upon the world in the process, no matter their intentions, threatened to suffocate him.
He couldn't let Eliot be another monster unleashed on the world. He couldn't let that happen.
"We're going to get him back," Quentin said. There was no confidence to the statement, no nervousness, no fear. There was only the cold, objective fact of it. They would save him. They would stop this. They would stop the next horrible thing that came, even as it took bites and pieces out of their lives and their souls. What was a missing shoulder, a missing shade, a missing eye, in comparison to everything they'd done? Everything they would continue to do?
Margo raised an eyebrow at him, and he thought, for a moment, that he saw her off-eye flicker, unraveling every bit of bullshit he put forward, but he held her gaze. "Alright, then, Coldwater. Let's do this shit."