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When he manages to sleep — the real, deep, REM kind of sleep that’s all too rare for him these days — Quentin still dreams of the mosaic.
He sees their cottage, worn and perfectly lived-in. He sees his son, back at the age where he was still small enough to hold close to his chest as he’d drift off to sleep (those nights where he’d just stare at him, amazed that something so perfect could exist, that he could be filled with that kind of love). And, of course, he dreams of Eliot.
There’s Eliot’s teasing smiles and soft eyes, his quick feet chasing after Teddy as he toddled off to cause mischief, the steady rise and fall of his chest on the mornings they’d sleep in. The rush of the warm, tender and mundane moments of their life together was enough to crack his chest right open.
He sees him young, standing at his full height, head tilted back with laughter. And he sees him later, his hair greying at the temples, forehead wrinkling as his aging eyes began to strain over the puzzle. He adores them both, different but equally beautiful parts of their story. Growing old with someone you love blinds you to those steady tricks of time, making it all too easy to forget to catalogue the laugh and worry lines.
If it’s a particularly good dream, he can swear he feels Eliot’s hands, steady and sure, running through his hair when they’d lay out late at night and talk about their friends a lifetime away — Margo and Julia, even Alice — and the way he’d reassure him, with a squeeze to the shoulder, a touch of hands, as if to say “I’m here. I’m still here.”
But then he wakes up. He always wakes up in a body that feels too young, with a heart that feels just a little too heavy and, on the worst mornings (or nights) with the stinging reminder that he’d held something beautiful and for all his efforts just couldn’t get it back.
“I know this sounds dumb, but…us. We — I don’t know, think about it, like we-we work? And we know it ‘cause we’ve lived it. Who gets that kind of proof of concept?”
He’d asked, memories surging back as they sat on the steps together, fast and overwhelming but settling over their shoulders like a worn quilt. It didn’t happen, but it did.
For all the words he’d said, the vulnerability he offered in that moment, he knew (he had to believe that Eliot knew too) it was just him reaching across the bed again, asking (begging, really) to know “are you still there?”
And Q knew (since Eliot’s ability to effectively lie or obscure his emotions melted the fuck away within a few years of domestic life at the mosaic), from the way his shoulders moved, the way his eyes never managed to meet his, the way he tried to brush off the real, beautiful twist of Something resting between them— that he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t still there.
Not yet, anyway.