Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They’re just barely visible, the little glowing threads of light seeping through the cracks of the shattered mirror, as minor a mending as any. But they spell doom. Penny knows it; Alice, shrieking in his arms, knows it; Quentin sure as hell knew it when he cast the spell. The fatalistically determined set of his jaw says as much as he hurls the bottle into the newly repaired portal.

When the time comes, say yes, Penny40 told him. Do what he says.

The threads are spreading now, branching out wildly into the dead air in a spray of sharp-edged fireworks, dizzyingly bright. They’ve pierced through Everett’s suit jacket already and Quentin, halfway to the door, will be consumed in less than seconds. Alice gives a desperate heave.

Do what he says.

Penny has never done what Quentin Coldwater says a day in his life, in this timeline or otherwise, and he’s not in the habit of listening to dead people, either. And now? In a situation as catastrophic as this one? This is when he’s supposed to start taking advice from a self destructive super nerd?

Yeah, fuck that, actually.

So Penny acts on instinct. He reaches out for Quentin and he travels.

~

Around the worlds, magicians and hedges and assorted magic users all stop casting at once as they feel the incorporate bond spell go suddenly null. It’s an unsettling sensation, not quite that of a spell ending but rather of it simply not existing anymore. The bottle has passed into the Seam.

Kady feels vaguely nauseous. Looking around the room she can see the other hedges are feeling the disorientation, too. Unsurprising, really. As far as anyone knows this is the first time anyone has ever experienced the feeling of their magic disappearing into the space between worlds. Unspace? Void? God, it’s been a weird day.

Lack of proper terminology doesn’t stop the surge of giddy victory, though, and she laughs aloud, breathless, startling even herself. The hedges gathered in her penthouse look at her, wide-eyed and shaky as she feels. They want to see her next move. Their next move.

She sees the answering smile on Pete’s face before she even realizes she’s grinning, bright and wild. “We did it,” she tells him. She turns back to the room at large, taking in the faces of her people. “We fucking did it!”

~

“It’s done,” says Josh, lowering his shaking hands. “We’re safe.”

“Everyone is safe? The monsters are gone?”

“Yeah, we are officially all good. Certified monster-free and everything.” He lets out a breath that’s half a laugh and half a sigh of relief.

Fen crashes into him as if launched from a catapult, almost knocking him off balance. Hell, he might have fallen over if not for her deceptively strong arms gripping him in a hug that can only be described as ferocious. “We’re good we’re good we’re good we’re good it’s over!” she is babbling rapidly into his shoulder.

“Oh, um, okay,” says Josh, as Fen bounces on the balls of her feet. “Yeah, I’m happy about it too. Hey, let’s throw a party!”

Fen draws back, beaming through the glisten of tears in her eyes. “Yes! A party to announce the good news to the people.” She sniffs and straightens her crown.

“Hell yeah! I’ll get baking.”

~

They land in a hallway. It’s drab, even for the mirror world, almost offensively nondescript. Like the real-world version belongs to a hospital or a public school and any characteristics that could distinguish which have been lost in translation, leaving only white walls and wire-latticed windows and speckled grey tile.

Quentin pries himself free from where the collar of his shirt is balled in Penny23’s fist. “What… what did you do?” he says. His voice comes out weak and wobbly. “You can’t travel in the mirror world, Penny, what did you do.”

Alice, who has been frozen in shock, looking remarkably like a frightened rabbit, or a statue, or maybe one of those little rabbit statues that people in the suburbs put in their gardens, comes to life with sudden fury. “What did you do?” she spits, shoving him in the chest, her own voice raw from screaming. Quentin stumbles backward against the wall as she advances on him. “What did you do? You can’t cast here, you know you can’t cast! But you just had to try to martyr yourself and save the day and pull some stupid blaze of glory bullshit like always! We said we were a team!” She gasps out half a sob, shoulders jerking. “Why didn’t you just give him the bottle?”

“I couldn’t,” Quentin says quietly. “You know I couldn’t. He already had too much power.”

Alice’s face contorts for a moment as she holds back tears. “We could have dealt with that later,” she says. “Like we always do.”

“Oh, like we always do, right!” Quentin feels the mean, bitter laugh in his throat. “You mean like when we killed Ember and fucked over magic. And then when we dealt with that later, Eliot got fucking possessed.” He almost crumples thinking of it, voice going quiet again. “Aren’t you tired of putting out fires just to start bigger fires?”

Alice stares at him wordlessly, lip quivering.

There is the sound of a throat clearing and they both look up at Penny23.

“If you two can put your little lovers’ spat on hold, then, uh, speaking of fires. We got some more pressing issues than your feelings.” He gestures at the hallway they’re standing in. “Like being lost in the mirror world, for example.”

Alice sighs. “Right. Because you can’t travel here, there’s no way to aim.”

“Yeah, well, it seemed like the best option at the time.” He raises his eyebrows at Quentin. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Right, yeah, thanks, Twenty-Three,” Quentin mumbles numbly.

“Thanks, Twenty-Three,” Alice echoes with considerably more feeling, giving him a quick hug.

Penny23 looks pleased, and also like he’s trying to hide how pleased he is. Quentin wonders idly if all the Pennies are like that. “That’s more like it. Now, uh, you nerds have any idea how we get out of here?”

Alice tilts her head, mouth pursing. “There’s a spell,” she says. “A beacon. Someone out in the real world has to cast it.”

“Helpful,” Quentin mutters. Alice glares.

“Kady knows about it,” she says. “And Dean Fogg, and Zelda. They’ll find a way.”

Penny23 nods slowly. “So what you’re saying is, we just…”

Quentin slides down the wall to sit on the tiled floor, suddenly empty of all the drive he had only a minute ago. “Wait,” he finishes dully. “We just wait.”

There’s a brief pause, and then they join him on the floor.

They wait.

Chapter Text

As it turns out, they’re pretty fucking terrible at waiting.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, three impatient people with a tendency toward throwing themselves at problems being less than content to sit on their thumbs in the mirror world. Not that there’s anything actually productive for them to do here.

Alice looks up when she hears Quentin’s footsteps returning, imagines the daggers of her glare manifesting and flying at his stupid, stubborn, sweatshirt-wearing form as it emerges from an empty doorway just down the hall. “Where were you?” she snaps. The tiles beneath her should be worn from how hard she’s been pacing.

“Absolutely goddamn nowhere,” he responds in an infuriatingly gloomy monotone. “This entire place is nowhere. All the doorways I tried just lead back to each other.” His eyes look dead, but so does everything else in this stupid fucking dimension.

“So quit trying doorways,” Penny23 suggests from the floor. He’s literally sitting on his hands, an attempt to prevent any reflexive casting. Alice’s own are clasped in front of her and Q’s are tucked into his pockets.

Quentin shrugs, stony-faced. “There’s nothing else to do. And it’s not like I’m gonna get more lost.”

“Except you could, actually,” says Alice. They’ve had this argument so many times that it’s barely an argument anymore, both sides running low on any real vitriol to put into it. “You could stumble off into some other corner of the mirror world and we’d never be able to find you again, and then what would we do when they cast the beacon?”

“If,” he mumbles.

“When.”

Quentin doesn’t so much sit down next to Penny23 as he does seem to just give up on standing. “Right.”

“Look, man, beacon or no beacon, we should all stick together. I didn’t get us trapped here so you could crawl off in a corner and get dead anyway.” He elbows Quentin lightly in the ribs.

Quentin gasps, nearly doubling over, and whatever anger Alice has been feeling swiftly makes way for alarm. “Q?” She kneels in front of him. “Q, what’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Shit,” Penny23 breathes, prodding at Quentin’s sweatshirt. “Is that wet? Are you bleeding?”

“It’s nothing.” He struggles halfheartedly as Alice tugs his sweatshirt aside and pulls up the t shirt underneath to reveal an angry red mark branded in feathering fractal branches across his side. It looks like a Lichtenberg figure captured in his pale skin. It’s the first color they’ve seen in days and Penny23 is right, it’s seeping blood.

“Shit,” Alice agrees, running her fingers along it gently, then pulling back when Q flinches. They didn’t run quite fast enough.

“It’s noth-”

“Stop saying that!” Alice curls her hands into fists, half in frustration and half afraid of forgetting herself and trying to heal him. “It’s not nothing. Do you know what happens to people who spend too long here?”

Quentin shrugs, jaw clenched, not looking at her.

“They fracture,” Penny23 answers instead. “Like the Fuzzbeat chick. But we haven’t been here as long as she was, we can’t have been. Even if time is kind of weird here.”

“No,” Alice agrees. “But with a magical wound like that? Leaving bloodstains, little pieces of yourself, scattered all around? It could accelerate the process.”

Penny23 leans back, head falling against the wall. “Great. What was it you said about bigger fires, Quentin?”

~

“They should be back by now,” Julia whispers. Her voice will break if she speaks any louder. “They should be back.”

Kady doesn’t say anything, just takes her hand and squeezes. It’s not enough, but nothing would be. Julia’s grateful for it anyway.

They’re sitting side by side in the waiting room. Any minute Margo will emerge and tell them whether Eliot is awake. Neither of them are particularly close with Eliot, but after all they’ve been through together they at least owe each other the courtesy of hospital visits, and anyway Julia thinks Eliot and Margo might be the only people on earth who worry about Q nearly as much as she does. If anyone will help her tear through the mirror world to find him, they will.

“Hey.” Julia almost doesn’t recognize the voice for a second, soft and tired as it sounds. She looks up to see Margo in the doorway, looking, for the first time in Julia’s experience, less than fiercely flawless under the fluorescent lights. “He’s awake. Hurry up, I said I’d be back in just a second.”

They follow her to Eliot’s side, where she folds herself into the chair Julia suspects she’s been spending most of her time in since Lipson let her in to see him.

“Hi,” Eliot murmurs, squinting up at them hazily. “Where’s… everyone else?”

“Q isn’t back from the mirror world yet,” Julia says, the words catching a little on the way out. “Neither are Penny and Alice.”

“What? That’s… that can’t be right.” He looks to Margo. “Bambi, how long has it been? Days, right? You said-”

“Too long,” says Julia. “It’s been too long.” Kady squeezes her hand again. She hasn’t let go since the waiting room.

Margo just purses her lips and shrugs, uncharacteristically helpless. “Can’t argue.”

Eliot’s eyes slide shut. For a moment he looks corpselike, blank and colorless. “What happened?”

“We don’t know,” says Kady. “No one knows. But I think I know our next step.”

~

“Again?” says Dean Fogg.

No one answers.

“You’ve gotten someone lost in the mirror world again. You know, most people never even go to the mirror world.” He heaves a preternaturally dignified sigh. “You kids truly delight in making my life difficult, don’t you. Fucking incredible.”

“Yeah, we get it, we’re a bunch of lousy goddamn millenials,” Margo drawls, a little of her typical fire back in her now that Eliot’s more or less lucid. His hand is still worryingly clammy in hers, but the slow stroke of his thumb is comforting nevertheless. “We know this song. Just skip to the verse where you tell us how to cast the fucking spell.”

“And just how do you intend to do that without Penny? Traveler blood doesn’t grow on trees, as you are well aware. Not to mention that, in the event of a fracture, none of you are at all competent in phosphoromancy.”

“You run a magic school,” Julia points out. “You must have connections.” She sounds desperate and looks even more so; her shoulders have been hovering far too close to her ears since they realized all was not right in mirrorsville. Margo thinks she can empathize.

“What she said,” Eliot mumbles, trying to sit up. Margo gently shoves him back into the pillows. It’s a choreographed routine by now.

“I can try hitting up Zelda for more traveler blood,” suggests Kady. “The Library’s got a few of ‘em. So really all we need from you is the spell.”

Dean Fogg persists in looking unimpressed for a moment, then relents all at once. “Of course I’ll help,” he says with a familiar reluctant warmth. “I simply feel obliged to chasten you first, not that it ever has any effect. I’ll go find the spellbook. Just take care of yourselves, and maybe try getting on each other’s nerves instead of mine for a while.”

“Thank you,” says Julia. “Thank you.”

“Love you, Henry,” Eliot calls to his retreating back.

~

Quentin hasn’t spoken to Alice since they found the ugly aftermath of his spellwork carved into his skin. Penny’s not sure the silence is because of anger, though, as he first assumed, or hurt or betrayal or sadness or whatever. He’s not sure it’s because of anything, really. Quentin barely talks to him, either. It kind of seems like he just doesn’t feel like talking.

It kind of seems like he just doesn’t feel like anything.

Penny isn’t worried. He’s not.

Only, well, this isn’t the Quentin that he blames for his Julia’s death. It isn’t the Quentin who died facing the Beast (and Alice isn’t the Alice who brought him back as the Beast 2.0). This is timeline 40, and this is the Quentin who throws himself on the grenade, over and over again. The Quentin that not-quite-his Julia would be devastated to lose.

So, fine, maybe he’s a little worried. It’s only because of Julia. Mostly. Fifty percent.

God.

He is worried, though, about how long he’s going to be stuck here with the broken lovebirds and the unbearable tension that shivers restlessly through the air between them, or what passes for air here anyway. He can feel the prickly edges of it coming off Alice’s mind, her usually perfect wards grown lax since she can’t renew them. She vibrates like a goddamn tuning fork pressed against his teeth.

Quentin… he’s not getting much at all from Quentin, really. Normally that would be a relief, but all it does now is freak Penny right the fuck out.

Hurry up, out there, he thinks.

~

Quentin’s hands are shaking. They’ve been shaking. He barely remembers a time when they or any part of him was not fucking shaking.

“God,” he gasps; even his voice is fucking! shaking!

“God, god, god, god damn it.”

Chapter Text

The beacon spell requires a connection to call through, and Julia’s got connection in spades. She doesn’t have anything else anymore, but she sure as hell has that. Her life has been tied to Quentin’s since they were children huddled under a table dreaming of far off worlds. Fillory has fucked them all over plenty since then, but now the bond that bloomed in the dream of its sunshine is what’s going to save them.

Or else Julia will actually fucking lose it.

The spell also requires a second connection to cast it, one that mirrors, haha, the one being called through. Because everything about magic has to be so goddamn farcical, apparently. At least it’s convenient in this case.

“I think we’ve got that covered for you, honey,” Margo told her when the spell was explained, swayed into improbable sympathy by just how fucking pathetic Julia is right now. Julia should have been offended, maybe, but all she’s been able to feel since she woke up without magic is like she’s sliding into a downward fucking spiral.

If Q were here he would remind her of all the reasons she’s totally kickass even without magic, and then, if that wasn’t enough, he would take the entire world apart helping her get it back again.

If Penny were here… well, she’d yell at him, probably, because she is totally kickass even without magic, and that includes kicking the ass of the guy whose fault it is she doesn’t have magic in the first place. Even if she does like him.

Neither of them are here, though.

Eliot and Margo are here, running through the spell over and over again, Eliot looking paler with each failed attempt. They’re doing their best, Julia knows, but Eliot is full of stitches and painkillers, and his casting is a little off, and the compact mirror cracks. For the fourth time.

Julia does her best to smile encouragingly at him but she’s pretty sure all she manages is a friendly sort of grimace. He responds in kind.

“El,” says Margo.

“Again.”

“El.”

“Again.”

Margo mends the mirror.

~

The walls aren’t closing in on Quentin, but they might as well be. He would like that, actually, he thinks, for the room to shrink into something small and manageable, for the whole world to become small and manageable, or the mirror world anyway, because that’s where he fucking is, this ugly sprawling goddamn maze of backwards pieces of places, of hallways that curl into each other impossibly, of total bullshit nonsense crazytown and whoever designed this place was clearly trying to drive him up a fucking wall, maybe literally, if that weird Escher-esque arrangement of oddly angled staircases he found a few doors back was anything to go by.

He tries to breathe.

He has to get out of here. He has to find his way back to Eliot and Julia and Earth and Fillory and everything else that’s real, and how the hell is he going to do that if he can’t even breathe so could he please just give it a goddamn rest.

“They’re safe,” he mutters, “they’re safe and they’re fine and the monsters are gone. They’re okay. It doesn’t matter as long as they’re okay.”

Inhale. Exhale. In-hale. Ex-hale. One, two, three, four. Four, three, two, one.

They’re safe.

Maybe he can live with staying here forever as long as they’re safe.

Even if the weird greyish light is like chalkboard-fingernails on his retinas, and the stiflingly still air tastes like sensory overload, and the bloody streaks across his ribs keep twinging when he moves, and everything about this place makes him feel like a cat being stroked the wrong way, and-

God damn it. They’re safe. It doesn’t matter. They’re safe.

~

Alice knows that Quentin gets quiet sometimes. The stream of his babble seemed almost constant when she first met him. It kind of got on her nerves sometimes, at the beginning, before the two of them grew close and she began to find it oddly comforting.

She wishes for that comfort now, because now she knows that Quentin gets quiet sometimes and she knows that it’s often a bad sign.

He hasn’t gone wandering off down the hallway since the last time she scolded him, but he also hasn’t done anything else. He just sits there, staring vacantly, refusing to speak, and dutifully applies pressure to his side when she reminds him to.

“It’s like there’s just nothing going on,” Penny23 tells her. “Like, psychically. Even you’re leaking by now, I should definitely be able to hear him. But there’s nothing to hear. The lights are on but nobody’s home.”

“He’s sitting right there,” Alice points out. “He can hear us.”

“Yeah, and he doesn’t fucking care, which is exactly my point!” He crouches in front of Quentin. “Hello! Earth to dipshit!” Quentin glares at him dully but doesn’t respond. “Come on, give me something, man. Anybody in there?” He raps his knuckles against Q’s skull.

“Fuck off,” he mumbles, feebly batting Penny23’s hand away.

“Well at least I know you’re alive in there, dumbass.”

God, this isn’t right. None of this is right. My brain breaks sometimes, he told her once, a million years ago, when they were different people living in a different world. And, fine, she gets that. Or, she accepts it, anyway. But this? It’s like part of him is-

It’s like part of him is missing.

“Oh, fuck,” she says.

Penny nods, wide-eyed, clearly having overheard. “‘Oh, fuck’ sounds about right.”

~

It’s their second day working on the beacon spell and Eliot is getting desperate. He goes through the motions again and again but his veins are full of molasses and his hands are beginning to shake. The ambient magic is waning with each attempt and he knows they’ll only have a couple more chances today.

He wants to fucking break something. Maybe the mirror senses that, the persnickety little bitch. Damn thing keeps cracking.

“Eliot,” Margo says, in perhaps the gentlest tone he’s ever heard her use. He hates it.

“Bambi,” he responds, hating his own voice even more. He sounds like some kind of lovelorn tragedy. Feels a little like one, even.

“Maybe it’s time to switch gears,” Margo says. “Let someone else cast the spell.”

“I can do this,” he protests. “I have to do this.” His throat is tight and painful. Everything is painful. “Bambi. Margo. Please.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking her for. Please say it’s going to be okay, maybe. Please keep me sane, possibly. Please don’t give up because you never give up on anything and if you give up on this, on me, I don’t know what I’ll do, in all likelihood.

She tucks a loose curl behind his ear. “I know, sweetie. I’m not saying we give up. I’m just saying maybe this isn’t the role we play in getting them back.”

“Then who plays it?” They both look up to see Julia approaching with two coffee cups in hand, apparently back from her outing with Kady. Kady, Eliot suspects, was trying to give her a break from hovering annoyingly over his goddamn hospital bed, judging him while he fails to save the man he loves.

He immediately feels mean for the thought; he knows he would do much the same in her position. “Julia,” he greets her politely, to make up for the unheard slight. “How was your afternoon?”

“It was fine,” she says. “I brought you both drinks.” She hands them off impatiently. “What do you mean, this isn’t the role you play?”

“Look, I can’t be the only one who’s noticed Eliot’s magic is… suffering,” says Margo. “Maybe we should find a different bond to cast this beacon with.” She sips her drink, grimaces, and switches their cups. Sips again. Looks satisfied. “There’s gotta be some other pair of idiots we can use.”

Eliot avoids their eyes and sniffs at the lipstick-stained lid of his cup. Mm, french vanilla. Bambi’s unfavorite.

“Like who?” Julia says. “I don’t know any other friendships as close as mine and Q’s. You two are our best hope.”

“It’s fine,” Eliot insists. “I can do this.”

“El, honey, shut the fuck up-”

Raging bitch.

“-or I’ll increase your morphine.”

His favorite bitch. God, what he wouldn’t give to check the fuck out just for an hour.

But he can’t. “Don’t you threaten me with a good time,” he says, the arch remark falling flat and uncomfortably grim, and Margo looks away for a moment. “What alternative are you proposing, exactly?”

“I don’t know, but there’s gotta be something.”

“Like what?” Julia snaps. She takes a deep breath and continues more evenly under the heat of Margo’s glare. “You guys are the best mirror of me and Q that we have. Unless we, I don’t know, abandon that plan entirely. Use some other significant relationship to call them back to us.”

“Oh, shit,” says Eliot. Margo and Julia give him the same inquisitive look at the same time. It’s a little freaky, honestly. “I think I’ve actually got you covered there.” He sighs, eyes falling theatrically shut so he doesn’t have to look at them. “Know anyone in love?”

~

Quentin is…

Quentin just is. That’s all.

It’s all he has the energy for.

Alice and Penny23 talk to him, and touch him, and are generally grating and frantic in comparison to the sluggishness sinking its claws into him, deeper and deeper with every heartbeat.

It’s like every time he ever couldn’t get out of bed before — couldn’t shower, couldn’t shave, couldn’t eat — compounded. Not that any of those things are relevant here in the mirror world. It’s kind of a relief, really, the ubiquitous stillness, the feeling that he might just stay here in stasis forever while nothing happens continually around him.

It would be a relief, anyway, if the company were quieter.

Mostly he just tunes them out.

He feels like a sack full of wet cement. It’s alright, he thinks. He used to feel awful when he got like this, ashamed of his uselessness, fearful over all the time he was wasting doing nothing, guilty for worrying the people who loved him. Desperate to claw his way back to the outside world, for all it made him feel like an open wound most days. He’d do it, he swore, if he could only summon the strength to push back the covers.

All of that has gone quiet, though. Or, at least, it’s gone somewhere else.

He closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

Marina Andrieski is in love, apparently. The self-serving hedge bitch whose penthouse they had all shacked up in while the monster was their crisis du jour. Julia heard it from Penny23, who heard it from the woman herself while they were off on some kind of interdimensional romp. God, Margo misses so much gossip while she’s in Fillory.

Julia didn’t even explain the dimension hopping. It didn’t matter. It just mattered that Marina had a serious girlfriend. How serious? Well, she called her her future wife. Ah. Yes, Eliot thought that sounded like a match.

Margo is definitely going to get more out of him on that later.

It isn’t hard to find Marina. She has those deweys to ward herself with, but every hedge witch has to surface somewhere, and Kady knows exactly where to go looking. She works her connections and sends Julia and Margo off in the right direction.

“You’re not coming?” Margo asks. “Aren’t you like, the Hedge Queen now? You could boss her around a little.”

Kady makes a face like Margo just asked how she feels about the idea of fucking a haxen paxen. “Yeah, we’re not really a monarchy,” she says. “And even if we were, Marina wouldn’t be one of my subjects.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I’d kind of rather fuck a haxen paxen than deal with Marina right now.”

Huh. Maybe Margo is a psychic.

“And we wouldn’t ask you to,” Julia assures her. Margo privately disagrees. She kind of wants to ask Kady to fuck a haxen paxen, just to see if she makes that same face again. “We’re just grateful for the help you’ve already given us.”

Kady nods. “Any time.”

And that’s that. They’re off to see the witch.

~

Quentin is-

Quentin is going to fucking die here, curled up under this stupid table, that’s what Quentin is.

And that’s fine.

That’s fine, that’s fine, that’s fine, that’s fine, that’s fine.

That’s- it’s not fucking fine, actually, it’s not fine at all. He doesn’t want to die. The part of him that wants to die is- is off, he doesn’t know, probably dying somewhere. That sounds like something it would do. Stupid goddamn defeatist fucking-

Breathe, idiot.

He’s been chasing his own tail through this maze all alone for days now, or for weeks, or for ten minutes. He doesn’t know. He just has to find Alice and Penny. He just has to find them again and then they’ll all get out of here.

He stands clumsily, frantically, knocking the table with his shoulder. It clatters into kindling far too easily, because this is the mirror world and also it’s hell and nothing makes sense here.

He just has to find them.

~

The woman who answers the door is decidedly not Marina. For one thing, she clearly doesn’t recognize Julia. Or Margo. There’s also the fact that she looks absolutely nothing like her.

She crosses her star-studded arms in front of her chest, obscuring the logo on her band t shirt, and looks them over with round, dark eyes, taking in Julia’s obvious intensity, then the spellbook clutched in Margo’s arms. “We don't want any,” she says.

Julia’s a little thrown off. “Any what?”

“Whatever it is you’re selling.” The woman moves to close the door, but Margo’s foot and Julia’s hand both get in the way. She looks less than pleased about it.

“Wait,” says Julia. “Is Marina here?”

The woman raises a pierced eyebrow. “Who?”

“Marina Andrieski. Is she here?”

“You know,” Margo breaks in, “yea big, black clothes, kind of a superbitch. Possibly your girlfriend.”

“We’re here as… as friends, ish,” Julia clarifies. Ish.

The woman looks skeptical. “She’s out. What do you want?”

“We’re, uh…”

“Cashing in on a life debt,” supplies Julia.

The woman in the doorway stares incredulously for a moment before scrubbing a hand over her shaven head. Apparently this is more than she cares to deal with at this hour of the morning. “Marina!” she calls into the apartment behind her. “Weird friends of yours.”

Marina appears a few moments later. “What? I don’t have- oh, son of a bitch, it’s you.”

Julia wiggles her fingers sarcastically. “Hi there.”

~

Eliot dreams of Fillory, swirled and fragmented and hazy, bits of borrowed memory shining through clearer than the rest.

Fen is king and Josh is a sloth who gives her terrible, bloodthirsty counsel. Tick and the Muntjac have eloped to Loria. He and Margo have spiraling horns and they sit in their twin thrones atop a mountain. From their vantage point they watch a family grow and change and live their lives in time-lapse speed in a little cottage beside a mosaic, and he’s here on the mountain, and he’s there in the cottage, and he feels Margo’s head on his left shoulder and Teddy’s lolling gently onto his right as he falls asleep to a bedtime story that three voices are telling in tandem. One of the voices is his own, though he isn’t speaking. It’s nice. It’s-

Confusing. None of this makes sense.

“Well this is weird,” says Penny.

Eliot blinks at him. He stands on the mountain, before the thrones, though he didn’t a moment ago.

“I don’t remember inviting him,” Margo says. She pulls off the horns admirably, he thinks.

“Well?” asks Eliot. “Did we invite you?”

“No. Jesus, man, I knew you had an ego, but this is a lot.”

Eliot shrugs. “A lot is exactly how I prefer it. Are you really here?”

“On a mountain in Fillory? No, and neither are you. In your head? Yes.”

“Yeah, I figured. You come bearing news, I hope?”

“Yeah. And you’re not gonna like it.”

“You, Q, and Alice are presumably lost in the mirror world. I’m already less than thrilled.”

“Alice thinks Quentin split.”

Eliot frowns. “Split to where?”

“Split in two. Fractured. Shattered. Whatever you wanna call it. There’s another one of him running around somewhere and we don’t have eyes on him.”

Eliot inhales. Exhales. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you just ask the Quentin you do have where the other one went?”

“Because the Quentin we do have is fucking catatonic, man. He just mopes and glares. It’s like Twitchy Coldwater is gone and now all that’s left is Bitchy Coldwater.” His words have the same sardonic edge as always but Penny23 looks genuinely kind of horrified. It is not at all comforting.

“What do we do?"

“Alice says she can fix him, but she needs some kind of prism to do it. And a beacon spell. Talk to Fogg, he knows.”

“We’re working on the beacon already. I’ll mention the prism, too.”

Penny23 nods. “Good. Try to hurry. We don’t know how long we got in here. Quentin is… hurt, sort of. Motherfucker tried to kamikaze himself and now he’s leaking fragments.”

“He did what?” Eliot asks, but Penny’s already flickering where he stands. So is the mountain, and the cottage in the distance, and his hands when he looks down at them.

“Morning, El,” says Margo as she shimmers and fades beside him.

Eliot opens his eyes in his hospital bed.

Things never just get simpler, do they.

~

Quentin is pretty fucking difficult to drag around for a guy the size of a yorkshire terrier. Penny’s less than ecstatic to be learning this firsthand.

He’s got him by the crook of his arm, trailing reluctantly after him like- well, like a dog that doesn’t want to be walked. At least he’s stopped spitting venomous epithets the likes of which would’ve made Margo proud. Penny, in turn, is trailing after Alice, the de facto leader of the search for Other Quentin mostly by virtue of the fact that she isn’t the one hauling Not Other Quentin along behind her. The guy is a serious detriment to Penny’s walking speed.

“This is stupid,” grumbles Quentin. It’s the first thing he’s said in a while.

“Wandering off and losing half your personality in backwards land? Yeah, that’s pretty fucking stupid.”

“No, this. Chasing after him. It’s pointless. You don’t even know where we’re going. He doesn’t even know where he’s going; he never does.”

“What, and you do?”

“Sure.”

“So why don’t you share with the class, if you’ve got better ideas?”

“Alright. Leave him here.”

Penny tightens his grip and pulls him through another doorway. They emerge into another hallway, this one with the look of a cheap motel, though all the room numbers are garbled and unreadable. Alice starts methodically twisting doorknobs to see if any are unlocked. “I’m starting think I’d rather leave you here,” says Penny.

Quentin’s arm jerks in Penny’s hold and for a second he thinks the little motherfucker is trying to escape. But he’s just shrugging. He hasn’t made any real efforts to resist since they hauled him up off the floor in the first place. “Leave us both here,” he says. “Maybe we’ll find our way to each other. Maybe we’ll finally find a way to kill each other.” His voice is calm in a way Penny has never heard it before and yeah, alright, he thinks they’re at the point where he can admit it’s scaring him.

A few yards ahead of them, Alice’s knuckles go white on the knob of door number Ø̵̛͎̯̼͉͂͠Ɛ̷̬̄̈́X̸̛̙̼̖̆͂.

“Stop it, man,” Penny says quietly.

“No. We’re wasting our time. Hey, you’re wasting your time!” he calls to Alice. “He’s not worth it.”

She whips around and her face is ice for just a moment before it shatters. “He is,” she says, like it’s painful, like it hurts that she has to say it. “You are.”

Quentin presses his lips together and sighs. “You’re wrong,” he says. “And you’re smart enough to know that you deserve better than this.”

Alice’s mouth does something that’s almost a smile. “We both deserve better than this, Q.” Then she turns and kicks the door in.

They keep walking.

Chapter Text

“I have to say, I didn’t expect you to ever want to speak to me again,” says Zelda, in that fluttery, flute-y, nervous soprano. Her hands hover at her sides, just below shoulder level, poised as always as if just on the verge of motion, ready to cast. Or to sign.

There’s a lot that Kady never put together, when she stops to think about it. It’s been a while since she had the chance to stop and think.

“Believe me, I don’t,” Kady tells her. “This isn’t a social call.”

“Of course not.” Zelda smiles like she has a brain freeze. “What can the Library do for you today?”

Kady swallows down a few choice words about exactly what the fucking Library can fucking do for her. Turn back time, maybe. Or collectively suck her dick. “You still have that traveler blood hookup?” she asks instead.

Zelda looks surprised for a moment. Then her smile turns a shade more genuine. “I can do you one better,” she says.

The head librarian office is as grey and utilitarian as everything else around here and the majority of it is dominated by a large desk. ZELDA SCHIFF, reads the nameplate sitting on top. Zelda assures her, as she rummages through the desk drawers, that it will soon be changed. Once she finds a suitable successor. She has someone in mind already; she’s just waiting for the right moment to step down.

Finally, she retrieves a white ceramic mug and places it on the desk with a clunk. Kady spends about three seconds staring in confusion. Then she realizes the dark liquid inside isn’t coffee.

“You… kept that?” Kady asks, trying not to sound disgusted. “Like, just sitting there? In your desk?”

Zelda tips her head to the side. “I thought it might come in handy again someday,” she says. “Travelers are hard to come by, and the few I know don’t often care to be bled.”

“How stingy of them,” says Kady.

Zelda ignores the sarcasm, or otherwise doesn’t notice it. “The… unusual temporal qualities of the Library have kept the blood fresh. It should serve your purposes without any issue.”

Kady nods. “Well, thanks, for… the weirdest Starbucks order ever.” She takes the mug and makes for the door. Hesitates. “Hey, uh, Zelda?”

Zelda meets her eyes, the deer to Kady’s headlights. “Yes?”

“Just… good luck, I guess. Making changes. Working things out with Harriet.” For Harriet’s sake, at least, she means it.

Zelda’s smile is real and hopeful this time. “Thank you, Kady. That means a lot.”

Kady nods awkwardly and leaves.

Now she just has to figure out where to keep this dubiously obtained mug full of blood.

God, the things she does out of loyalty.

~

“I just don’t see how any of this concerns me,” says Marina. She’s been singing the same tune since they got here. “Why should I care about your dumb friends getting themselves stranded in the mirror world?”

“Maybe because they did it saving the literal fucking universe,” Margo says. Again. “You know, that place where you keep all your shit?”

“Yeah, and now it’s saved, according to you. I’m not in any immediate peril, and neither is Tara--” she touches a hand to her girlfriend’s shoulder “--and I don’t really give a fuck about…”

“Quentin, Alice, and Penny,” Julia says from her perch on the arm of Margo’s chair. Margo’s getting a little sick of this circular conversation, but she could get used to having a pretty girl lounging ornamentally above her on her throne. Ideally a different one, but she'll take what she can get for now.

“As if it matters.” Marina stretches out on the couch, draping her legs over Tara’s lap. Tara lifts her arms to accommodate, then lowers them again once her girlfriend is settled comfortably. “I’m gonna need a better reason than cause-you-said-so.”

“How about, oh, I don’t know, the time I saved your life even after you tried to kill me?” Julia bites out.

Tara arches an eyebrow. “Is this that, uh, parallel universe shit?” She asks.

“Alternate timeline, yeah,” says Marina. Christ, Margo looks away to rule a kingdom for five fucking minutes and everyone starts jumping timelines. “And that is a wild exaggeration.”

“Oh, really? Which part, me saving your ass? Or you trying to kill me?”

Marina shrugs. “Take your pick. Either way, I sheltered you guys while you were brainwashed, you got me my deweys, you stole my apartment, I got kidnapped… blah, blah, blah. As far as I can tell, we’re square. Mostly because I’m sick of trying to keep track.”

“Your life is so weird,” says Tara.

“Yeah, cause of these idiots.”

“Fine,” growls Margo, having officially reached her limit, “then why don’t you just do the damn spell so we can fuck off and leave you alone?”

Tara actually, literally, throws her head back and laughs. Marina scowls at her. “What?” Tara asks. “She’s funny.”

“Be supportive, babe.”

“You be supportive.” Tara rolls her eyes and turns to address Julia. “Look. You’re the reason I have Marina in my life, and that means something to me. I'm willing to work out a deal here.”

“So you’ll help us?” Julia asks hopefully.

The three of them look expectantly at Marina, who makes a series of unpleasant faces. She looks conflicted, or maybe just constipated.

“Fine,” she grumbles. “But don’t any of you think that tactic will work again.”

“Don’t care. Heads up.” Margo tosses her the mirror.

~

I can’t die here.

The thought is quiet, apparently muffled by whatever haze is affecting the fragment of Quentin still dangling off Penny’s arm. But it’s there. It’s the clearest thing Penny has heard from him since he split. He never thought he’d be so fucking relieved to hear Quentin Coldwater’s manic brain babble.

I really, really don’t want to die here.

Well, cool, neither does Penny.

I’m totally gonna die here.

Veering a little defeatist, but that’s nothing unheard of.

I am literally almost definitely going to die here why did I do that why did I do that why do I always do this I know I would do it again if I had to and that’s the worst part the worst part is knowing the worst part is that I don’t want to do it again but I will because that’s what my life is that’s what I am I’m just here to take the hits for people who are more important than me god I just have to find them-

“Can you shut the fuck up?” says Penny.

Quentin squints up at him. “What?”

“Shut up. You’re driving me crazy.”

“I didn’t… say anything.”

“I know, but your twitchy little brain is in panic mode and it’s giving me a migraine.”

Quentin stares vacantly. “Um.”

Penny stops walking. Quentin stumbles, jerked to an unexpected halt by Penny's grip on his arm. “Hold on. I’ve barely heard anything from you since you fractured. What have you been thinking about since then?”

He shrugs. “Nothing. The quiet.”

“How about now?”

He shrugs. “Nothing. The quiet.”

Well, goddamn. “Hey, Alice!” Penny calls. She pauses in the middle of flicking an array of lightswitches that don’t seem to do anything useful. “I’m picking up Coldwater FM.”

“You’re hearing his thoughts again? That’s good news, I guess.” She goes back to the switches.

“Nah, this one’s nothing but elevator music.” (“Rude,” Quentin mumbles.) “I think I’m hearing the other one.”

Alice’s eyes widen. “Holy shit. Can you follow it?”

Penny grins. “Let’s find out.”

~

“He did fucking what?” says Margo.

Julia can’t breathe.

“That’s what I said.”

Margo’s mouth twists into something ugly, her eyes glittering under the fluorescent hospital lights, hand tightening its grip on Eliot’s. “We leave that nerd alone for a goddamn minute and he tries to fucking martyr himself?” She sniffs. “What kind of dumbass, dickheaded, guess-I’ll-go-eat-worms bullshit-”

“What happened?” asks Julia. Her voice tears from her throat raggedly, like it doesn’t want to ask the question. “Is he- what happened to him? How did he hurt himself?”

Eliot looks up at her. There’s something in his eyes she doesn’t know him well enough to identify. Sympathy, maybe, or pain. “Penny23 didn’t say. Just that he tried to kamikaze himself and got hurt in the process, and now he’s in pieces.”

Julia swallows hard. Her hands are shaking.

“Alice says she can fix it. I’m sure he’ll…” Eliot clears his throat. “She’s good at what she does. She’ll fix it.”

Margo, perched on the bed beside him, turns and stretches an arm toward Julia. “Come here,” she says.

“What?”

Margo rolls her (still glittering) eyes. “I said come here. I know we’re not friends, but you’re Q’s best friend in the world, and he’s not here. So come here and get hugged and listen to me tell you both that it's all gonna be okay.”

“I…” Well. She could probably use it, anyway. Julia clambers onto the bed and is drawn into just about the last group hug she ever expected to receive. Eliot and Margo smell like roses and sandalwood and cigarettes and hospital blankets and they're warm and it’s weird and she doesn’t mind it at all.

“It’s all gonna be okay,” Margo says, true to her word. “Or I’ll tear the mirror world a brand new reflective asshole.”

And just for a minute, Julia lets herself believe it.

Chapter Text

Dean Fogg helps them with the materials for Bjorn’s Electromagnetic without complaint.

It’s a little unsettling, honestly. His solemn silence serves to underscore the severity of their situation in a way that his usual dry manner wouldn’t. Maybe that’s his intention. Or maybe he’s just worried. They should probably respect it, either way.

“What’s got you so chipper?” snarks Margo.

Or they could do that, Eliot supposes.

“I’ve finally decided to burn this place down,” Fogg deadpans back, and it’s like a little color has returned to the world for a moment. Just a moment.

“As long as you let me move my things, first,” Eliot says, but he’s too worn to hit the right note and his voice sounds oddly flat to his own ears. It’s been doing that lately. Margo and Julia pretend not to flinch; he pretends not to see it. The new normal is a little to the left of the old one. They fall into a silence that is neither easy nor uneasy.

“I do want you to succeed at this,” Fogg says eventually. “You’ve all caused a hell of a lot of trouble, both individually and as a group. But I have no interest whatsoever in burying any of you again.”

Julia’s mouth quirks to the side, then hesistantly unfolds into a smile. Her eyes are tired but the warmth in them is real. “Thanks, Dean. That was almost sweet.”

“Don’t,” says Margo. “You’ll give him a heart attack.”

~

Josh's party is going fucking swimmingly, if he does say so himself. And he would know.

Not that any of the Brakebills crew showed up to see it. They're all busy being in various levels of mortal peril, or whatever. He offered to help out, but they didn’t seem to have any tasks left over for him. It’s fine. Really.

He'll just have to throw another party later, once the aftermath has been sorted through and everyone is free to hang.

"The next rabbit that shows up here had better have some good news from Earth," says Fen, and then she shoves an entire fruit tart into her mouth.

~

As it turns out, panic attacks actually are useful for something. You know, in the event that you’re stranded in the mirror world with a traveler and one of two disparate halves of your fragmented boyfriend, and the missing half of him is catastrophizing loudly enough to psychically track through the sprawling labyrinth.

Alice wishes her life was a little less interesting, sometimes.

In any event, the unusually useful panicking doesn’t magically stop when it stops being useful, as great as that would be, and now she and Penny23 and Q are watching the other Q pace frantically around what appears to be a lecture hall, knocking over stacks of papers and pulling at his own hair and muttering to himself. He’d been so happy to see them just a minute ago. Then he’d remembered they were still trapped here.

“Fucking, do something, say something, calm him down!” urges Penny23, nudging at her shoulder. “Get him to focus!”

“Why me?”

“Cause you’re the one who screws him!”

“That’s- I-” Alice swivels back and forth, looking from Quentin to Quentin, searching for something, anything, to say and- “I think we should break up!”

It is, if nothing else, effective.

“What?” squeaks the nervous Quentin, feet finally skidding to a stop beneath him. “Why- how is- what did I- ?”

(“Yeah, that makes sense,” the other Quentin says under his breath. “Shut up,” replies Penny23.)

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know why I said that.” Alice curls and uncurls her fingers in front of her, fumbling for what to say next. “It was honestly just the first thing that came to mind.”

“Yeah, well that must be for a reason!”

(“I can think of a few.” “Shut up, man.”)

Alice sighs. “Why did you ask me to try again in the first place, Q?”

Quentin looks as though he doesn’t understand the question. “I. I don’t know. I don’t really remember.” He gestures to the other half of him. “I think he’s got the past stuff. I’m mostly just future.”

“Okay, well… do you see me in yours?”

He stutters for a solid ten seconds and finishes on a lame “I mean, yeah?”

(“Ooh, cold,” Penny23 says with a wince. Quentin nods. “He doesn’t sound very-”)

“Would you please just shut the fuck up, Statler and Waldorf?” snaps Q. The pair of them look at each other, then at the floor. “Look, I’m sorry, but I- I can’t really think that far ahead right now! We’re in the middle of a fucking crisis! The only future I’m currently worried about is the one where we all get out of here.”

“But that’s the problem!” Alice cries, suddenly overwhelmed with the relief of finally having the right words. Q flinches back a little and she gentles, sighing. “We’re always in the middle of a crisis, Q. We can’t make all our choices based on some vague hope that one day we won’t be anymore, and we can’t keep clinging to each other just because the world is chaotic and we’re trying to remember the last time we felt normal. If we're not good for each other in a crisis, then maybe we're just not good for each other.”

“I know,” says a voice from behind her, and she turns to see the first Quentin looking at her wistfully, arms folded across his middle. “I really did miss you though.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”

~

Marina’s clearly not thrilled about being here.

Well, fine. It’s not Margo’s job to keep her happy. She is responsible for exactly one person in the entire world, maybe two, and maayyybe occasionally she can be talked into taking a few more into consideration. Maybe. If she’s in a good mood.

Aw, hell.

Anyway, Kady’s explained about how the fragments seem to work, so if they’re going to have the best chance of getting Q all wrapped up in one pretty package today, the casters have to be here to help direct the beacon with their presence. So they’re here, sitting on the bench outside the lab, chatting with Julia about whatever it is hedge witches chat about. Sloppy pinky placement, maybe.

Kady leans against the far wall, obviously uncomfortable.

But Margo has bigger concerns, and they’re standing right here beside her. She presses her cheek to the brocade of Eliot’s vest and closes her eyes. His arm tightens around her shoulders as he leans into her. He’s carrying a fashionably ornate cane, but she’s happy to act as a substitute. The two of them have been leaning on each other for years now; what’s the difference if they take it a little literal.

“You think this will work?” he asks, voice low, for her ears only.

“It better,” she says. “Cause otherwise we’re going spelunking through the mirror world, and I don’t care if we have to bleed Gavin dry to do it. Guy sounds like a total wang anyway.” She adjusts her arm around his waist, careful of his stitches. “We’re gonna fix this. Whatever it takes.”

He smiles thinly down at her. “Whatever it takes.”

“Speaking of which,” says Julia, who has appeared beside them, and how does she keep doing that at exactly the most emotionally inconvenient moment possible? “How the hell are we going to get our hands on ambrosia? I know it’s our fault Marina’s supply got used up but it still seems like a big ask.”

Margo shrugs. “We do impossible shit like once a week. We’ll figure something out. Just as soon as we’ve got our friends back.”

“Alice is always full of ideas,” agrees Eliot. “And it’s very useful to have a traveler.”

“Right,” says Julia. Her arms wrap around her middle like she’s trying to hold herself together. “They’ll help. Once they’re back.”

Margo rolls her eyes (and immediately regrets it. The fairy eye has been sticking a little since that time she had to roll it through the goddamn forest. She needs to get some saline solution or something). “Look, I already made the whatever-it-takes speech, alright? I’m not doing it again. Just know that we’re gonna get back your boyfriend, your bestie, and the busty blonde.”

Eliot and Julia both stare at her, eyebrows raised.

“What? It’s alliteration,” she says. “Plus it’s not like we can’t all see ‘em.”

“Brainy also starts with a B,” says Julia.

“Beautiful,” suggests Eliot.

“Can you get off my ass and go save our friends?”

Eliot leans down to kiss her temple. “I’ll give it my best, Bambi.”

He lingers for a moment before entering the lab, shoulder pressed to the doorframe. “Julia. Are you coming or not?”

Julia looks startled. “Me? It’s… it’s not my beacon.”

“No,” he agrees. “But it’s your Quentin.”

Margo pretends not to see the tears in Julia’s eyes as she follows Eliot into the lab. She’s thoughtful like that.

~

The mirror stands before them, sigils drawn. The prism is set up on the table. The compact is in his pocket. Everything is prepared. All that’s left is to do the damn thing.

Eliot withdraws the compact mirror and holds it, trembling, before his chest.

Suddenly he’s terrified. No, not suddenly, because of course he’s terrified, because he’s always terrified, because he doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t trying to mask the sick thump of his heart and the acid taste in his throat. Or, he does remember, god, of course he remembers, but the memory doesn’t belong to him, not this him, not really. Everything since the mosaic has been shot through with urgency, with an undercurrent of deep, rushing dread, crashing frothy-tipped over jagged rocks in the very pit of him.

He thinks maybe he could stand it, if he just knew Quentin would be okay.

He’s terrified that Quentin won’t be okay.

He’s terrified of a lot of things, really.

A hand alights on his where he’s holding the mirror, thin-fingered and gentle, silver rings glinting hypnotically up at him.

“We can do it together,” says Julia. “If you want.” Her touch is light but her gaze is hopeful, grasping.

Eliot nods.

She slips a fingernail under the lip of the compact, prying it just ajar, and Eliot pulls the conjoining halves apart to face the mirror. They stand, wrist-to-wrist-shoulder-to-ribs-hope-against-hope, and they wait.

They wait.

They wait.

Chapter Text

They’re still in the dusty lecture hall when it happens. Alice insisted they all stay put now they’re together, and she was clearly in no mood to be argued with. Quentin knows there wouldn’t be a point anyway. He’s rarely ever won an argument with Alice and he’s hardly in top form now, divided as he is; he can feel how he’s all impulse and drive and hope and wanting and not an ounce of the pragmatism he needs to direct any of it.

So he lets Alice be his direction, and Alice says that wandering around won’t do them any good, it’ll just expose them to whatever potential dangers the mirror world contains, and honestly, Quentin, does he want to split in three?

He doesn’t.

So he’s sitting cross-legged on the desk in the lecture hall, fiddling with a cup full of pens while Alice and Penny23 play twenty questions of all fucking things and his fragment sulks beside them, when the light begins to appear. It comes on gradually, and at first it seems like just another quirk of the mirror world, but it grows brighter and stronger until it’s warm, glowing, the color of sunlight -- real sunlight, the kind he hasn’t seen in days, nothing like the pale mockery streaming hollow through the high windows.

He trips onto his feet.

“Do you see that?” he asks, halfway to breathless with it. He’s not even sure see is the right word for what he’s experiencing; the light encompasses his senses entirely, pooling thick as honey against his skin, seeping through his pores, sinking into the bones of his being, sharp and alive and electric in a way he hasn’t felt since a time when magic wasn’t rationed. It doesn’t taste of peaches or of plums. It doesn’t smell like cigarettes and aftershave, and it doesn’t feel like long fingers threaded gently through his hair, and it doesn’t sound like a voice, clear and sweet and melodic, absently crooning to no one in idle moments, but it reaches into the core of him where those things lie and it pulls them to the surface so they sit just beneath his skin like bruises, like the iron of his very blood is magnetized toward, toward-

And he knows Alice and Penny23 don’t see it even before they answer, because neither of them is holding this, this unbearable beautiful answering light, inside of them-

“Q? Q, what’s wrong?”

He turns to respond but Alice isn’t talking to him. She’s peering with concern at the other Quentin who looks pale and stricken, as though shocked by the tears running down his own face. “It… hurts,” he says, a broken whisper.

And. Well. It does, doesn't it.

Alice reaches for the hem of the other Quentin’s shirt, apparently assuming he’s talking about their wound, but Penny23 catches her hand. “It’s the beacon,” he says, eyes wide. “He means the beacon.”

“It hurts,” he gasps again, “to feel it, to remember, I- how do I stop it-”

“Shut up,” Quentin snaps at himself. They have to get out of here. They can finally get out of here.

“Can’t you feel how it hurts?”

He should empathize, maybe. It is literally him. But he’s been numb before, and he’s felt the pain of that numbness being stripped away, and he knows from experience that they don’t have time for this fucking episode. “Who cares if it hurts,” he says. “Suck it up and let’s get out of here.”

Alice looks confused. “Why would it hurt?”

They don’t really have time for that either.

He turns to Penny23. “Can you see it? In my mind?”

Penny23 nods, slow and wondering. “Yeah. It’s like staring into the sun in there.”

He advances, hand outstretched. “Follow it.”

Penny23 takes his hand and curls his other arm around Alice and the other Quentin.

They travel.

~

The thought rolling around in Alice’s head as she steps through the blood-smeared mirror, now that she can fully appreciate the anomaly of their situation rather than worrying about whether they’re all going to die, is I should really write a treatise on the mirror world; who else has this kind of experience? And if that makes her callous, well.

The academic world needs people like her, anyway.

~

Eliot sees him, and sees him, sees them both come through the mirror, one on each of Penny23’s arms, and it’s like something in him breaks, snaps clean in half, and then quietly fits itself back together before he has the chance to wonder what it was. Not his heart, surely; that would be far too on-the-nose for the sake of both the drama of the moment and his own dignity. So he won’t even hear it, thank you very much. Bad enough he’s standing here holding hands with a girl he wouldn’t have bothered calling a friend last week. He’s not sure what he’d call her now. But her grip is deadly and his equally so and, just now, just in this instant, they keep each other anchored.

~

Alice comes through first. Behind her is Quentin, tugging Penny along behind him, and then Quentin, again, being tugged this time, the procession of them comically reminiscent of a line of wooden ducks on a pull string.

They immediately start bickering.

The second Quentin’s face is streaked with tears and he seems like he’s barely staying upright, falling limply against Penny’s side the second he’s no longer being drawn forward. The first Quentin is shouting at him, something about pulling himself together and being a goddamn adult for once instead of folding under the pressure like always and Julia thinks oh, I’ve heard him do this one before, and she’s so goddamn struck with affectionate familiarity that she almost laughs aloud.

Then Penny has to put himself between them to prevent a physical fight from breaking out, Q-on-Q, and Alice is rubbing at her temples and asking if they could please just hold still for a fucking second, like, please, and the moment collapses back into chaos.

“Jesus,” she murmurs, “it’s like something out of Animorphs. The one with the starfish.”

“Right, Animorphs,” Eliot replies drily, eyes on the Qs. “That’s definitely where my mind went, too.”

She snorts. Before she can chide him, though, she sees that the Quentins are staring now, two sets of eyes gone wide at the sound of their voices, and one of them chokes out “You-” and then he’s crashing into them, full force, limbs everywhere like he can’t figure out which one of them to hug first.

So they gather him up into one embrace, all elbows and knees and tears on each other’s clothing, and hold him tight enough to strangle. “You’re safe,” he’s saying, “you’re safe, you’re okay you’re okay you’re okay,” and she’s saying something back, though she’s not sure what, and Eliot is kissing Quentin’s head over and over again, wherever he can reach from the awkward angle.

Penny’s eyes meet hers over three sets of shoulders -- Quentin's, Eliot's, and the second Quentin's, the weepy one, still clinging to Penny for dear life -- and he looks. He looks. Something. Happy to see her? Sure. Totally exhausted? Probably. Deeply and inconsolably sorry? He’d certainly better be.

But right now Julia is just happy. She can just be happy for another few minutes. Maybe longer. She’ll kick his ass tomorrow.

~

The spell isn’t a problem this time.

Alice has done it before and she knows, now, the ebb and flow of it, knows where to push and where to pull and where to guide the magic with gentle hands so it doesn’t snap and fizzle and split her in two again.

Which is a good thing, because casting Bjorn’s Electromagnetic just once is enough to wipe out all the ambient for a pretty impressive radius. She thinks there’s more in the air than the last time she was here, but it still hasn’t reached anything like its former levels. They’ll have to see what they can do about that. It’ll be their next project.

But for now, she’s tired, and she kind of just wants to sleep. And eat. God, she wants to eat, she’s fucking missed eating.

So she bypasses whatever dramatic reunion is occurring in the lab and shuffles out into the hallway.

Margo is waiting just outside the door. “Alice!” She grips her shoulders. “How are they? How did everything go? God, it’s good to see you, did-”

“They’re fine,” Alice tells her. She tips her head toward the door. “Go on. Join the group hug or whatever it is they’re doing in there.” And Margo is gone without another word.

Her eyes pass over Dean Fogg, and the two hedge witches chatting on the bench, and land on Kady, who’s watching her with the suggestion of a smile.

“You can go in there too, you know,” Alice says.

Kady shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t really… it’s hard to be around…”

“Right, of course.” Alice feels foolish for not thinking of it. Of course she doesn't want to go leap into the arms of her dead boyfriend's doppelganger. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Kady, and then she’s pulling Alice into a hug.

Alice stiffens in surprise.

“I’m glad you didn’t die.”

Alice... relaxes. It’s a concentrated effort, at first, and then the tension just floods out of her and she lets herself slump against Kady, grateful for the support.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Alice tells her when she lets go.

“Yeah, well. Neither was I. But I guess I kinda missed you.”

“Oh,” says Alice. She smiles, laughs a little, even, too tired to bother holding herself at a distance. “Well, for future reference, I prefer this to being punched.”

Kady smirks. “Noted.”

~

Quentin is finally himself again.

All of himself.

It’s maybe not the ideal thing to be, but it’s at least better than being an incomplete fragment with all his chronic depression, all his weariness and regret and cynicism, and none of the furious hope that has kept him alive through it all; or the manifestation of his own nervous energy pushing ever forward and forward and forward without ever thinking critically or asking what happens next.

Or dead. It’s probably better than being dead. He’s had cause to seriously consider that alternative lately.

Still, he’s exhausted in a way he didn’t know he could be, and he wouldn’t say no to a brief coma. Just for the rest. After the strain of being two different people for so long, and of living a constantly escalating fucking nightmare scenario for months before that, he could use the vacation. He feels scooped out and scraped raw. He feels like his heart has been peeled like a fucking onion.

He looks at Eliot, leaning heavily on a cane and gazing back at him as though there is nothing else in the world to see, and thinks he might just shatter again, no mirror magic required this time.

And then Margo -- when did she get here? -- launches herself at him like a fucking puma. “Jesus cocksucking Christ,” she says into his shoulder, says and not sobs, because Margo would never do something so maudlin as to sob into his shoulder. Not in front of people, anyway.

“That’s my name; don’t wear it out,” Quentin tells her.

She laughs wetly into his shirt. And then she pulls back and smacks him hard on the arm.

“Oh, ow, uh- okay.”

“What is this I hear about you trying to fucking martyr yourself, huh? Hey!” She shouts over to Penny23, shamelessly interrupting the conversation he’s having with Julia. “I believe you used the word kamikaze in reference to this twat?”

“I believe I did,” he agrees solemnly.

Quentin winces. “Thanks for that, Twenty-Three.”

Margo turns back to him. “You wanna fucking explain?”

“I… Everett,” he says. He tries to meet her eyes, but his own keep sliding to the floor, or to Eliot, or to his hands. Or to Eliot. “The library guy. He destroyed the portal to the Seam, and I had to, there was no other way, I had to mend it or he- it just, there was no other option. It seemed worth it.”

“Oh, Q,” she sighs, pulling him back into her arms. “You tiny little bitch. Don’t you ever try that again. If you die I swear I’ll fucking kill you.”

Quentin laughs into her hair. It smells like roses, which he’s never really noticed before, but now that he does he realizes he’s missed it. “I know. I love you too, Margo.”

“And don’t you fucking forget it.”

She holds him by the shoulders for a moment when she pulls away. “Alright, be a little more obvious, why don’t you,” she drawls.

“What?” he asks, eyes snapping back to hers. He’s been looking at... not her. It hurts, to look at him, but it’s a good sort of hurt and he can’t seem to stop. Like pushing down on a bruise.

Margo rolls her eyes exaggeratedly, pokes the right one back into place with her pinky, and shoves him unceremoniously toward Eliot. “What, you don’t expect him to come to you, do you? He’s all convalescing and shit, look at his cane.”

And then she’s. Somewhere. He doesn’t know, he’s kind of preoccupied with- hell, he’s just staring at Eliot. Why lie. It’s not like it isn’t mutual, anyway. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

And that hurts too, his voice, aches in him like the beacon ached, like it has him by the insides and he can’t stand the thought it might let go. They’ll have to talk about that. Later. Right now he steps forward, into Eliot’s chest, and long fingers thread gently through his hair, and he smells cigarettes and aftershave, and his stupid heart, red and raw and reassembled, beats, and beats, and beats.

Chapter Text

Josh throws another party.

On Earth, this time, since Margo is still banished. It’s small, just the questers and Fen and whoever else they cared to invite gathered in Kady’s penthouse celebrating the fact that they’ve got a free moment before the next potentially-world-ruining threat appears.

Because, like, with their track record? It’s gonna. Some crazy new catastrophe will kick down the door by Wednesday and they’ll all be back to the old grind. It’s all the more reason, he reflects, to live it up now. The fragility of their shiny little soap bubble of peace only makes it more precious.

Man, he should be a motivational speaker.

Or a professional baker-cum-dealer. He’s already got like three new potential clients, and that’s just from this one party. Kady’s hedge pals have never experienced his handiwork before, and their response so far has been enthusiastic.

Margo returns to his side, apparently done with her rapid fire interrogation of Fen (How has Fillory been? How are its people? Its animals? Any catastrophes? The alliance with West Loria has been successful? And everyone is listening to Fen, right? Respecting her? Margo swears she’ll appear in a cloud of black smoke and threaten the entire fucking kingdom with a withering curse if they aren’t respecting her) and ready to relax.

“Been a minute, Hoberman,” she says, draping an arm around his shoulders.

“Sure has. I missed you. Fillory misses you.”

“Aw, you’re just saying that.”

“Well, kind of,” he admits. “I have no idea if Fillory misses you; it’s a weird magic planet and it doesn’t talk to me about its feelings. But the first part is true.”

Margo smiles benevolently. “How sweet. Guess I’ll let you live another day. Now come talk to these idiots over here, I’ve been pimping out your pastries like a motherfucker.” And she drags him away without waiting for a response.

God, she’s great.

~

Kady's spent most of the party dodging Pete. She's getting pretty good at it, actually. This time she does it by nudging him into the small crowd of people listening to Margo’s sales pitch on cupcakes that make your fingernails horny, or whatever it is she’s talking about. Kady isn’t really listening. She's just running out of polite ways to tell Pete to punch out already so she can have a drink or five in peace.

She settles on the couch with a glass of whiskey, right next to Alice, who seems like a pretty safe bet for calm company. Alice is holding an envelope, turning it over and over in her hands. It’s been unsealed, the flap pushed carefully back into the envelope to hold the contents inside.

Kady gestures with her chin. “What’s that?”

“Oh!” Alice jumps a little, like she didn’t notice Kady was there until she spoke. She probably didn’t, distracted as she clearly is, fingers fidgeting, lower lip pink from being chewed. “It’s- it just appeared on the counter earlier. It's addressed to me. It’s from the Library.”

Kady sips her drink. “Huh. And what does the Library have to say?” She has her suspicions already. Zelda Schiff, hunting through desk drawers, waving her hand at a brass nameplate. Something about a promising candidate for the position.

Alice worries at her lip some more. “I… haven’t told anyone yet,” she says. “I still have to think about it. I haven’t had any time to consider. But…” She meets Kady’s eyes, a spark of excitement shining bright even through her hesitance.

“But?”

Alice looks down at the envelope again. “I know they’ve done awful things under Everett’s leadership,” she says. “But that’s the point. That’s why they need reform.”

“That’s why they need Alice Quinn.”

Alice looks up at her, blinking rapidly.

Kady grins at her obvious surprise, and at the turn of events, and at the way the world is settling into something new and interesting. “So let’s say you were to take the gig. How would you feel about brokering a treaty with the hedges?”

Alice looks very solemn. “I’ll have my people talk to your people,” she says. Then she breaks into a giggle. It’s not a sound Kady ever expected to come out of her, but it’s… cute. Very cute, actually. Huh.

“Excellent,” Kady says, snaking an arm around her shoulders and leaning in conspiratorially. “We’ll be in touch, Miss Quinn.” She twirls a lock of starlight colored hair around her finger.

Alice bites her pink, pink lip and grins.

~

Julia’s not particularly surprised to find Quentin hidden away in a bedroom. She’d be a pretty lousy lifelong friend if she were.

He’s not reading anything this time, just lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling like he’s waiting for it reveal some universal truth to him and he thinks it’s being a little rude by remaining silent. Julia sits on the bed with her knees pulled up and holds out a glass of wine.

Q scoots up the bed until he’s sitting and takes the offering. “You came prepared.”

“I know how to lure my best friend into talking to me.” She clinks his glass with her own and they both drink. “So. Talk.”

“About?”

“Hmm. You could start with what you’re doing in here all alone when we’re supposed to be celebrating how we saved the world.”

“I’m not alone. You’re here.”

“Aww.” Julia pinches his cheek just so he’ll bat her hand away like a grouchy cat. “That’s cute, but it’s not an answer.”

Quentin sighs and inelegantly tips back more of the wine. “I just feel like… like the monster was kind of the only thing holding me together.”

He falls silent again. Julia sips her wine and waits.

“Like, as fucked up and nightmarish as it was, as everything was, I kept going. Because I didn’t have a choice.” He curls in on himself, shoulders hunching. “I couldn’t- I had to keep him alive, Jules, I had to save him. It was the only option. I would’ve done anything. I did.”

“Nothing says love like disposing of bodies,” Julia agrees lightly.

He looks at her like he’s being wrenched apart at the ribs. “Yeah. I guess so. But now it’s done, and he’s safe, and I don’t… know what to do now. What do you do when you devote yourself, all of yourself, to one purpose and then all of a sudden it's over? What do you do then?”

Oh, Q. Perpetually lost and episodically despairing Q. Q who gives himself away until he's convinced there's nothing left.

Well, Julia's not having any of it. She flicks his ear. “You find a new one, dummy. Maybe it won’t be as big as saving the universe from invincible god-killing monsters, but that doesn’t mean you just call it a day. Pick a direction and keep going. Maybe your next purpose is becoming a better magician, or helping out with Fillory, or, I don’t know, learning to knit. Maybe it’s just figuring out how to be okay.” She rests her head on his drooping shoulder. “Or you could always, like, go talk to that guy you’re in love with, since he’s not possessed anymore. Seems overdue.”

Quentin looks affronted. “You know, I never actually said- I mean, yeah, I- would you quit knowing everything about me?”

“Nope. I hate to tell you this, but you’re not subtle.”

“You wound me. I’m wounded.” He sighs and finishes off his glass. “Okay can we stop talking about my problems? This is dumb. You have your own shit to worry about.”

“Mm. About that. I might just have a new mission for you.”

“Oh yeah?” And there’s that smile she’s been missing. Not a full grown Q smile, but the beginnings of something hopeful.

She straightens up and gives him the most serious look she can muster. “How would you feel... about the wild and perilous adventure... of helping me get magic back?”

He blinks. “I can’t believe you would even ask. Obviously I’m helping you. Official sidekick, remember?”

Julia can’t hold back a grin, and Q’s answering dimples make her feel more invincible than she ever did as a sort-of-immortal sort-of-goddess. “Good. Because I still have that magic transfer spell. There’s gotta be someone out there in the world who’s willing to make a trade.”

“Then we’ll find them,” he says decisively. “And we’ll get you your magic back.”

“Glad to have you onboard.” She leans into him again and they stay like that for a while, sitting in silence, just glad to have a moment of calm. Then she remembers: “Oh, by the way, we’re gonna have to get our hands on some ambrosia.”

“Wait, what?”

~

Things have been… different, since they got back.

Well, things have been different since they got lost in the first place, and since they found the Binder, and since the monster, and since Blackspire, and since Penny left timeline 23. Every time he gets a grip on things there’s some new seismic shift, it seems like. But it’s still miles better than hiding out in a ruin of a building in a ruin of a timeline where everyone he ever cared about was dead.

So, yeah. Things are different, generally speaking. More specifically, things are different between him and Julia.

Seeing her again was like nothing he’d ever felt since… well. Since seeing her again. He didn’t sweep her into his arms this time. Just stood before her and hoped she would see how much he wanted to despite the polite distance between them.

She doesn’t forgive him, she says. But she wants to try.

So they’re trying.

It’s been a lot of talking, and a lot of listening, and a lot of things he knew but never knew about this Julia, the Julia that isn’t his. A lot of things that make him sick and angry to think about.

(“Since the day I learned magic is real,” she told him, “the day I learned who I’m supposed to be. Ever since that day people have been telling me otherwise. I finally knew who I was and everywhere I turned someone was trying to take it away from me. Fogg, Marina, even Q. And then- and then Reynard. And then the Beast. And then the old fucking gods. Do you- can you possibly understand that? I lost Brakebills, and I lost the safehouse, and I lost my shade and I lost magic and I lost my humanity and sometimes I thought I was losing my goddamn mind, too. You’ve lived the apocalypse, you know what it’s like to lose things.”

“Yeah,” Penny agreed, thinking: I lost you. I lost you, I lost you, I lost you. What else could matter?

“Then you know. You know. An endless fucking parade of people trying to take away my choices, and then I- and then you. And I trusted you. And you took away the biggest choice I ever got the chance to make.”

And. God, and he couldn’t breathe for a second. Because what do you say to that? What could he say, knowing she was right?

Sorry doesn't really cover it.)

It’s different now, because it has to be. Julia is different. He won’t forget it again.

Right now, though, at this cheesy party, in this breath between battles, she’s turning circles at the end of Kady’s arm, spinning out and then in again, in a move far too sophisticated for the psychedelic synthpop flooding the penthouse. He’s pretty sure it’s all Kady, because he’s seen his Julia dance and he would call her moves cute, or endearing, but the girl does not do ballroom. He doesn’t imagine this Julia has taken lessons either.

He knocks back a glass of- something, he doesn’t know. Eliot made it for him which means that whatever it is it’s exactly what he wants to be drinking right now, so he closes his eyes and lets it burn down his throat and feels the bassline rushing through his bones and just lives inside this moment of sensation. In the next exhale they’ll all be off to parts unknown with a brand new sunrise they’re chasing, and that’s cool with him. He’s made peace with things far less peaceful.

He thinks they’ll be ready this time.

Chapter Text

The revelry is beginning to die down. It's in that awkward in-between stage where the music is still playing, but at a bearable volume, and the people dancing to it are mostly people whose names you can actually remember. Eliot blames the brevity of the event on the fact that he and Margo were not called upon to host, as is their birthright.

He can’t complain, though. The party was fun while it lasted but he’s honestly a little relieved to see it end. He gets tired so quickly now. He doesn’t know if it’s the wound, or the toll the monster took on his body, or the toll that everything else has taken on the rest of him, but he feels… god, he feels old, and he can say as much with some authority. He just hopes it’s a temporary development. He wishes he had any way of knowing.

He wishes he had even the slightest idea of which way the world is spinning these days. All he knows is that it has continued to do so in his absence.

“We would’ve thrown a way better party,” Margo says, draping herself languidly over the counter he’s been leaning on because she has a way of knowing exactly when she’s needed. “I mean, pretzels, Kady? A bowl full of pretzels. Unbelievable. And what the hell is this music, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I think it’s all sort of charming,” Eliot replies.

“Quaint," she suggests.

“Eighth grade slumber party kitsch.”

“Well, I didn’t know it was gonna be a theme night. I would’ve worn my bunny slippers.”

His affected smirk splits into an affectionate smile. “And you would’ve been the belle of the ball, Bambi.”

“As if I’m not already.” She folds herself against his side and he presses his cheek into her hair.

Across the room, Quentin breaks away from a conversation with Penny23, looking vaguely harangued. Or maybe just disoriented by the fact that he isn’t actually being harangued. It’s hard to tell with those two, lately.

“What are you thinking about?” Margo asks softly.

Quentin’s eyes catch on his briefly and then flit away as he steps out onto the balcony. The glance could have been intentional, but Eliot doubts it.

“Sugar cereal,” Eliot answers, “much to my own dismay.” It’s true. His palate has been fucking decimated. “And... time. How it passes. How to use it while it’s here.” And that’s true, too.

Margo nods against his chest. She’s silent for a minute, mouth set in that particular pout that means she wants to say something but isn’t quite sure how. It’s not an expression he sees often. It’s not an expression most people see ever.

“I told you what it was like when you were gone,” she says finally. “What I was like.”

“You were a glorious and fearsome king, of course.”

“Damn right I was. Fearsomest around. I made maidens weep and alpacas tremble.” She looks up at him, steely. “And I traded it all away the minute I heard about a way to save you. I didn’t even know if it would work.” Her voice is trembling now, but her eyes are still bright and hard.

Eliot cups her chin in his hand. “But it did work,” he says. “I’m here. You saved me.”

“I know. But that’s not what I’m saying.” She takes gentle hold of his wrist. “The point is that I love you, El. And there is nothing on Earth, or in Fillory, or any other goddamn place that could change that. You couldn’t change it yourself, even if you were trying.”

Oh.

He holds her close to him and breathes her in. None of his memory-Margos ever got the scent of her shampoo quite right.

“The world is always on fire,” she tells his tie. “Gods and monsters and fairies and bullshit. Sometimes they’re the easy part, cause if they crash and burn it’s not really your fault. Sometimes it’s harder to just be honest with someone you care about.” He shouldn’t have worn silk; he suspects it is getting wet. “But you have to try anyway.”

“I promise.”

“Good.” She pulls away, swiping under her eyes for stray mascara. “Me too. So, honestly, go be brave like you said you wanted to or I’ll turn you into a fish.”

He kisses her temple and lets her walk away, sending a pointed look at the door as she goes.

And he'll do it, he will. He'll be brave. Like he promised. He just needs a few minutes to collect himself, and then he'll walk out onto that balcony and let himself fall right back to pieces. It'll be worth it; it'll be the right thing to do; it'll be what Q deserves from him.

He just hopes it isn't too late.

~

The door opens behind him, letting out the sounds of conversation between the few stragglers still in the penthouse, then shuts again, leaving the balcony in silence.

Quentin didn't even realize the party was over. The magical soundproofing on this place is really amazing, actually.

He knows who it is without looking, somehow. It’s the uneven gait, maybe, or the long shadow, or just what comes of fifty years of knowing a presence so intimately it becomes a part of your own. He takes a pull of his cigarette and nudges at the chair beside his in silent invitation.

Eliot sits stiffly, robbed of his usual grace, but even that is familiar to Quentin. Axe wound or no, a half century of kneeling on tiles does things to the joints.

He can’t... he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Ever since the beacon.

“We should talk,” says Eliot.

Quentin nods.

“I’m glad you’re back. And in one piece. When Penny told me, when he said what you did. I couldn’t breathe, Quentin. I can barely breathe now, thinking about it.”

Quentin shrugs and takes another pull. He’s tried to explain himself enough times to know that he can’t, really. Not to anyone’s satisfaction. Certainly not to his own.

“Please look at me, Q,” Eliot whispers.

And he does. And it hurts. Eliot's posture is rigid, his silk tie stained, his eyes looming wide and glossy over dark shadows. He’s the most spectacular thing Quentin has ever seen and it hurts.

“I need to tell you something,” he says. “And- and it’s not going to be easy. For either of us, probably.”

“When has anything ever been?” The wry tone he intended turns to gravel in his throat.

Eliot smiles, just barely. “Oh, I could name a few things.”

Quentin wants to- wants to reach into his chest, pull his heart out. Set it on the little round patio table. Take it, take it. It belongs to you already and it hurts to hold it and I’m so tired. He drops his cigarette. Steps on it. Lets the moment pass.

“I know what you’re going to tell me,” he says. “I just- I just want to know if it matters. Because it didn’t matter last time and I can’t, I can’t do it again, I can’t. If you lie again I’ll believe you and I’d rather just-” and then he can’t continue, because his voice will not hold steady, and because he doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore. He doesn’t know what he’d rather just. Pull his guts up through his throat, maybe. Lie naked in hot tar. Break Alice’s heart again, and his own.

“You knew?” Eliot’s wide, glossy eyes grow wider and glossier. “You knew I was lying? Because I was, Quentin; I was scared, and I lied to you, and I pushed you away, and I'm sorry.”

Quentin shakes his head. “I believed you,” he says. “When you- when you came back, when you told me you were alive, I. Hoped. But I didn’t know for sure until the beacon.” The beacon, the beacon, the beacon. That indescribable light that poured into him and filled him to the brim and made him bright and heavy with everything between them, everything he’s been unable to say.

“You felt it,” breathes Eliot.

Quentin just nods. It’s all he can do.

Eliot swallows hard. “Well, that doesn’t mean- I don’t get to back out of this now, just because you know the truth. I could love you for another fifty years and I wouldn’t deserve a moment of it, not if I couldn’t say it aloud.”

“Could you?” Quentin asks, feeling it well up in him. Take it. He pushes it down. “Love me for another fifty years?”

“I’d certainly like to try,” Eliot says softly. He clears his throat and looks out at the lights of the city. “So. Here it is: hurting you the way I did is quite literally the biggest regret of my entire life and I have the empirical evidence to prove it. That was how I broke through. I trawled through all my worst and ugliest memories because I knew that was where the escape would be hidden. Wherever the deepest pain was.” He pauses to take a shaky breath and it’s-

It’s all climbing up Quentin’s throat no matter how he tries to swallow it, sharp and uncontrollable as a matarese. Take it, take it, synced to his heartbeat.

“There was… a lot of shit, Q,” Eliot continues. “My dad. Logan. Things you don’t even know about. I never realized just how much I don’t let myself think about until I had to relive it all.” Quentin’s hand finds his on the arm of the deck chair. “But none of it was enough. Not until I stood there under Bambi’s wedding arch and watched myself run away from the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Quentin thinks, briefly, about lighting another cigarette. “You said that it wasn't us. That we wouldn’t choose each other.”

“I say a lot of dumb shit. Especially when I’m afraid.”

“You’re not afraid anymore?”

Eliot laughs, short and bitter, but his mouth turns sweet when he looks at Quentin. “Of course I am, don’t give me that much credit. But I’m tired of being a coward. You deserve better.”

And that, apparently, is more than Quentin can take, because Eliot’s thumbs are brushing away tears he’s certain he didn’t mean to shed and he’s murmuring “Q, oh Q, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“You’re alive,” says Quentin.

Eliot’s hands still but do not leave his face. “Yes.”

“And you love me?”

“I do.”

“That’s enough.” And Quentin kisses him, soft and desperate, sinking against his mouth like a sigh. And he knows it isn’t really this simple, that it won’t really be so effortless, but right now it is, and it's all he needs. And here on this balcony with the man he has doomed gods for, everything seems small in comparison to this truth: it’s enough.

Chapter Text

Pete hovers at Kady’s shoulder like a secret service agent as they make their way to the front desk of the Library. She’s kind of getting used to it, honestly. Both Pete and the Library.

They’ve been spending a lot of time there, sorting through the aftermath of the whole serpent ordeal. The medical wing is crammed full of hedges having blood worms and Reed’s Marks removed. In that order. Pete himself has been Mark free for a couple weeks now.

Alice is at the desk when they arrive, poring over some obscenely thick tome in what looks like ancient Greek.

“Hey, Alice.”

She looks up and smiles politely, ever professional. “Good afternoon, Kady. Pete. I hear things are going well on Earth?”

Kady smirks. As if Alice wasn’t sitting on her couch last weekend, crying at 80s movies and losing popcorn between the cushions and snoring against Kady’s thigh. “Really well,” she answers. “You can feel the magic in the air again.”

“Good. We’ve made a lot of progress in dismantling the pipe system, but you never know how these things might go wrong. You remember what happened the first time we tried to destroy the siphon.”

Kady does remember. The raw magic overwhelmed their control and had some very unpredictable effects. One of the librarians who was on the scene at the time is still an orangutan. “Well, we’ll figure it out,” she says. “We’re a pretty good team.”

The smile Alice gives her this time is smaller, but sweeter.

“Speaking of which,” says Pete, “we have some things to discuss. We’ve collected feedback from the hedge community in the aftermath of recent events, and some of it seemed worth sharing with the Library.”

Kady nods. “Our people have some good ideas. You might even be looking at a few new recruits, if you want ‘em.”

“Oh, excellent! We’re so understaffed right now; any offers of help are welcome.” She makes a few deft hand movements to duplicate the page of the book she’s been looking at, then a few more to conjure up an envelope. “Let me just send a message to Earth really quick. I think I’ve got a lead on that ambrosia.” She folds the page into the envelope, seals it with wax, and inserts the whole affair into a pneumatic tube. Then they all depart to the conference room.

The moment the door shuts behind them Alice’s distantly cordial demeanor falls away like a sheet from a painting. “Oh my god I’ve been so busy. You got the memo I sent you about the revisions we’ve made on our standard contracts, right? Because we desperately need more hires and I am not dooming anyone to a billion years in the Underworld branch without any vacation days.” She grabs a donut from the box on the table and shoves half of it in her mouth without even looking at it. “Sorry, I skipped breakfast today. What are these ideas you mentioned?”

Kady guides her into a chair and sits down beside her. “Okay, first of all: breathe.”

Alice takes a deep breath. And another bite of her donut.

“Second: yeah, I got the memo. We made copies and sent a bunch out. Word is spreading about your reforms, and people are taking it pretty well. So, third: Pete?”

Pete pushes an accordion file across the table. “These are all the suggested revisions we thought were worth showing you, plus a few résumés.”

Alice opens the file. “Résumés?”

Kady grins. “Told you people were taking it well. And, uh, fourth:...” She flicks a stray sprinkle off Alice’s nose.

“Oh,” says Alice, going a little wide-eyed, the way she always does when Kady touches her casually. “Thanks. Sorry I’m all over the place, I’ve just been a little bit overwhelmed with everything.”

“No problem,” Kady says. “But it’s good, right? This is what you want to be doing?”

Alice looks startled for a second and then breaks into a grin. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s really good. It’s a lot but it’s good.”

“I think I know the feeling,” says Kady. And she does.

~

“Guys! New lead!” Julia strides into the apartment waving the envelope she found tucked into the door.

Penny and Quentin both look up from the books they’re perusing. “On which thing?” Penny asks. It’s a fair question; they’re kind of juggling two different goals here. Everyone else is pitching in, obviously, but they’ve formed the core team.

“Ambrosia,” Julia responds. “Alice sent one of those weird Library letters.” She drops the envelope in Penny’s lap.

He skims the letter, then the page stuffed into the envelope alongside it. “Huh. Is this… a recipe?” He passes it to Q, who’s making grabby hands at it.

“Sure looks like it. It’s not gonna be easy but…”

“But we knew that already,” finishes Quentin. “And this looks actually doable.”

Julia grins. “Exactly what I thought! Now we can get started tracking down ingredients.”

Quentin nudges Penny with his foot. “Hey, nymph ichor. You can just pop us over to Fillory for that.”

“Don’t touch me with your fucking feet, man.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I’m wearing socks, it’s not weird. Quit being cranky.”

Penny glares. Q stares back at him, unperturbed. Julia figures she’ll leave them to it.

She’s just sat down and opened FuzzBeat on the off chance they have something useful when Penny clears his throat. "Hey, uh. Julia?" he asks. He looks tentative.

“Yeah?”

“Just… like, is this really our priority? Paying Marina? Isn’t getting your magic back more important?”

“Not really your decision,” mutters Quentin. The remark would be a lot more pointed if he wasn’t busy squinting down at the ambrosia recipe.

Julia sighs. “I’m working on that. It’s just not the sort of thing you can really research. Like, there isn’t a directory of people who have magic and don’t want it.” She slouches back into her chair. “Right now my best idea is looking through hospice units to see if anyone wants to give me their magic before they die. Like, ‘Hey, I see you’re not using that anymore. Do a girl a favor?’” She grimaces.

“I mean, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing we’ve done,” says Quentin. “Maybe Lipson would have some ideas.”

“Oh, right, the crazy lady who zapped Central Park with sex magic. She seems reliable.”

“In my timeline, she blew up one of the labs,” says Penny. “Like, on purpose.”

They take a minute to absorb that. “To be fair,” says Quentin, “probably half the people at Brakebills have blown something up.”

Julia snorts. “Probably. We’ll look into it. I just…” she trails off, sighing. “I guess I don’t really know what I’m doing on this one.”

“Hey, we don’t know what we’re doing,” corrects Q.

Penny looks incredulous. “You are so shitty at being encouraging. How is that any better?”

He shrugs. “‘Cause we’re all in this together. I can sing, if you want.”

“I am literally begging you not to.” He pauses and screws up his face in pain. “No. No. I can hear that, Jesus Christ, would you fucking cut it out.”

“Sorry, it’s stuck in my head now,” says Quentin. He ignores Penny’s stream of grumbled insults and moves to sit on the arm of Julia’s chair. “Hey,” he murmurs, looping an arm around her shoulders. “Remember what you told me? Pick a direction and keep going.”

She leans into the sideways hug and nods. “I remember.”

“So we keep going?”

Yeah, she can do that. She’s been doing that. What’s a little longer when she’s got her official sidekick and the rest of the magical X-Men to back her up? “We keep going.”

~

Fillorian Law is really unbearably fucking dry. Margo knew this already, of course, from her stints as High Queen-then-King of the place, but it never ceases to amaze her how the assholes who wrote this stuff could take tales of talking trees and magical monsters and royal intrigue and turn it into boring jargon. That’s gotta be some kind of talent. Like, the opposite of creative writing. Reductive writing. Ugh.

She might be a little biased, though, since she’s spent like four hours staring at historical law documents today. And yesterday. And the day before that. Suffice to say it’s been a while. But she is going to find precedent for Fen to unbanish her, damn it. If she doesn’t die of boredom first.

“Hey, Mar-”

Eliot and Fen clear their throats very loudly in unison.

“Right, uh, Janet,” says Josh.

Margo flicks back a stray lock of straight black hair. It’s not nearly as nice as her own. Nothing about this glamor is; that’s intentional. She’ll disguise herself while she’s in Whitespire, sure, that’s just a practical measure. But she’s not going to insult herself while she does it. “What, you found something?” she asks.

“No,” says Josh, “but look at these courtroom drawings of two porcupines demonstrating dance moves deemed ‘vulgar and inappropriate’ by the high court.”

She snatches the scroll. “Oh my god. How do they even do that without hurting themselves?”

“So many spines,” agrees Eliot, peering over her shoulder.

Fen stands up and leans over the table to see. “Huh. I think my grandmother was arrested for that one.” She points to an image of the two porcupines in some complicated arrangement that has the rest of the court looking scandalized.

Eliot snorts, and then Margo giggles, and then they’re in hysterics, leaning on each other so they don’t fall out of their chairs. Fen and Josh look varying levels of bemused and fond. “Jesus, Mary, and Kevin Bacon, this place is fucked all the way up,” says Margo. “Sorry about your grandma.”

Fen shrugs. “Eh, it wasn’t the first time. She got in trouble a lot. Granny was pretty wild.”

“She sounds fun,” says Josh.

Fen beams. “My father always says I take after her. Though he doesn’t usually mean it as a compliment.”

“Your father married you off to a man he’d never met before,” Eliot points out. “Who is he to judge you?”

“I think that worked out pretty well, actually,” says Fen, adjusting her crown.

“But he had no way of knowing that it would. I was a total stranger. What if I had been some kind of misogynistic creep?”

“El, honey,” Margo cuts in, sensing this conversation could run long, “much as I would love to discuss the fucked up social trend of using women’s personal freedoms as currency at literally any other time, we’re kinda burning daylight here. And I would really like to make some actual goddamn progress on this.”

His eyes soften. “Of course, Janet-Bambi. We’ll get you unbanished, I promise.”

“Seconded,” says Josh.

“And thirded. Motion passes!” Fen thumps a law book on the table authoritatively. “Now keep reading. The High King commands it.”

Regality is a good look on her, Margo thinks.

~

Eliot gets back around midnight to find that Quentin is still awake, nose buried in a book as if he’s back in his first semester at Brakebills, studying for one of Sunderland’s brutal exams. He looks up at the sound of Eliot’s arrival and smiles in that particular way of his that dimples up his whole face.

“Hey. How goes Margo’s unbanishment?”

“We’re working on it. How goes Julia’s remagickification?”

“We’re working on it.”

Eliot settles on the couch and Q immediately leans into him, draping Eliot’s arm around his shoulders and nuzzling into his side. Eliot feels, just for a moment, too warm and full to speak. He catches hold of the feeling, turns it over and over inside him, commits it to memory, and then lets it slowly dissipate. He presses his face into Quentin’s hair. “When did this become our life?”

“What, fantastical magic quests? Because, like, almost immediately after we met.”

“No, studying.” He pronounces the word with nothing less than righteous disdain. “I mean, god, we both stare at books all day. Although, you’ve always been a nerd. You must be rubbing off on me.”

Quentin hums. “Well, not at the moment.”

“Cheeky,” Eliot scolds, unable to restrain a fond smile. He presses a kiss to Quentin’s temple.

“Hey,” says Quentin, the way he does when he means something else, quiet and certain. He looks up at Eliot and that too-warm-too-full feeling is back, spreading through him like a sunrise, terrifyingly gentle. He thinks he sees it reflected in Quentin’s dark eyes.

“Hey,” he echoes.

And Q smiles and says “I choose you.” Like it’s simple. Like it’s easy. Like there was never a question.

And maybe there wasn’t, really.

Eliot is working on this, on the whole choosing thing. On recognizing when he is being chosen. On expressing his need for clarification. On expressing his needs in general.

It turns out, and it is turning out, that choosing doesn’t really work the way he’s always feared (the way he still fears, really, because the grip of doubt is not broken overnight), where you pick someone once and that’s that until the end of time, calling in less desirable alternates as needed. It’s more like: you wake up beside someone you love and you choose to sweep the hair off their forehead and whisper good morning into their ear so you can see that sleepy smile. You pick out your outfit for the day and you choose to wear that shade of purple you know he likes on you. You order chinese for dinner and you choose to get extra dumplings because Q fucking loves those dumplings, will eat them out of the fridge cold for breakfast the next day, incurable disaster that he is. You choose and you choose and you choose in a million little ways, all these things that he already does and knows how to do, and you try to see the ways that you are being chosen in return. And you ask to be reminded when you need to. Eliot isn’t great at that yet but he learned it once. He can do it again.

He hopes, anyway. Margo has been threatening him with self help books if not.

“I know,” says Eliot, when he can speak again. “I choose you too.”

Quentin tugs him down for a kiss. He suspects it was meant to be brief, but the moment his fingers touch Quentin’s neck Q thoroughly melts, opening his mouth against Eliot’s, pressing close to his body with a slow-burning heat that does not need urgency. What else can Eliot do but take hold of his hair, tug lightly to tilt his head back, kiss him until he is gasping? What else can he do but discard all pretense and just feel?

Eliot could do this forever, he thinks; he doesn’t need to sleep. Doesn’t need food or water or genre television. None of it, nothing he can name, could possibly hold any fascination for him in the face of Quentin Coldwater, tasting like tic-tacs and needing a shave, holding onto him like a lifeline.

Quentin draws back, just a breath away. “Can we go choose each other in bed? It’s been a long day.”

“Baby, we can do anything you want in bed and you know it.” He stands, offering Q a hand to pull him up. And they retire to the bedroom, tired and touch-warmed and irretrievably in love.

As it turns out, all they do in bed is fall asleep in each other’s arms. But that’s fine. It’s incredible, actually. And, besides: there’s always tomorrow.