Work Text:
Podfic Length: 27:16 (m4a)
On an unremarkable sunny day in 1999, a boy and a girl had escaped the eyes of their parents, more or less watchful, for an afternoon, and were busying themselves scouting the hiking trails of their local park for good sturdy sticks and locations with “an inscrutable aura,” or so the boy had put it. It was a phrase that had been applied to him only the week prior, and he’d been itching to use it since.
Sticks were found, and the girl thumped hers into the ground at the sight of a little footbridge over a small creek winding its way through the trees. “It’s perfect! This side can be the Darkling Woods,” she dropped her knapsack and ran across the bridge, “and this side is the Northern Marsh!”
“And there’s the Great Salt River! You’re brilliant!” The boy beamed. His friend was so cool, and had the best ideas! Especially since, so far, they hadn’t contradicted his own. He flopped down on the bank, graceless but unbothered, and rifled through his bag. He brandished the towel he pulled from it like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “And this—” he made sure his friend was watching him before he carefully spread it out on the ground, “is Ember’s Tomb!” The answering cheer was exactly the effect he’d hoped for.
The girl returned, clutching a handful of twigs. “Arrows for Jane’s bow!”
“Great!” Not to be outdone, he pulled out a putty knife he’d sequestered from his dad’s workroom for the purpose. “And this is Martin’s dagger that I’ll use to—” He stopped mid-sentence, his face going a bright red.
“Coldwater! What’s your problem? Why did you stop?”
The boy stammered. “I… I didn’t mean to assume that I’d be Martin. I mean,” he started speaking faster, “you’d really probably be better at it, and you’re the boy and all, and probably the boys should play boys and the girls should play girls, really, and you’re stronger than me and I—”
“Ew! No! No—I wanted to be Jane!”
The two stared at each other in silence.
“That’s… that’s not weird… is it?”
The boy made a show of considering. “No. No, definitely not. I mean—you went and got all those great arrows!”
“And you brought that dagger! ...It makes sense to go with the weapons that we brought.”
“Yes. Yes, definitely.”
“Good. Then that’s settled!”
The two valiantly journeyed across the bridge and down the path away from Castle Knapsack, fighting and outsmarting all kinds of enemies, until the heat of the afternoon gave way to the cool breezes of dusk. They had spotted a perfect golden leaf, clearly enchanted, and the boy had bravely climbed high into the tree to get it, when the sky took a sudden turn for the darker.
“Jane! The Shadow Stalkers have found us! Take this and run!” He plucked the leaf from its perch, dropping it to the ground, the tension of it falling ever so slowly making their peril ever more dramatic and precarious.
“I’ve got it! Quick! Get down here!”
“There’s no time, Jane! The important thing is that we got the Golden Bough! Run now! I’ll fight them off.”
The girl, far from moving, dug her heels into the ground.
“Run! Run, RUN! DON’T LET MY SACRIFICE BE IN VAIN!”
“Fiiiiiiiiiine.” SHe turned tail and ran a respectable distance away. But not too far.
The boy shouted in anguish as he dropped his way down the tree, letting himself fall the last foot to the ground. “Our kingdom is safe! Truly I may die at peace!” For good measure— “Ack.”
‘Jane’ sauntered back to him and gave him a little kick. “Okay! We did it—I brought the Bough back to the Safe Place and it’s okay now.”
The boy nodded, before remembering that the dead really shouldn’t nod.
“So now I use my Clock and reset back to the time before the Shadow Stalkers got you!”
“Hey!”
“I’ve got time powers! No arguing!”
It was decided that, though the boy would live, resurrection and time travel were very tiring, and they should go home and pick up tomorrow.
— — —
The creaking of the stairs alerted Quentin’s mother to his reluctant presence in their kitchen.
“Good morning, dear. I read your note.” Mrs. Coldwater sipped her coffee, barely looking up from her newspaper. “So, you’re a transsexual now. Did Julia put you up to this?”
“No.”
Well, only kind of, Quentin thought. She had been so much happier—like there was a weight off of her. He could do with carrying less weight around. He’d had a few days of panic after she had first told him—largely around whether or not her transness made his crush on her gay. He’d just come to terms with the fact that, yes, it did, when the bigger, scarier revelation crept in that maybe it didn’t. Maybe there were other circumstances. Julia had laughed when he told her he thought just maybe he might be trans too. Duh.
The newspaper twitched. “What does your father think about this?”
“He’s fine with it.”
“Of course he is. Probably imagines he’ll get a new fishing partner out of this.”
“Hmm.” That was true enough, but it wasn’t why. His dad just wanted him to be happy. He wasn’t going to stop when he came to his senses and realized Quentin would always pick a good book over any sport.
She stood up, letting the newspaper drop. Her chair scraped on the linoleum. “Well. You never were any good at being a girl.”
In the echoing silence of the kitchen, Quentin silently corrected her yet again. No, mom, I was never any good at being a person.
— — —
Julia sat in the muted colors of the waiting room, tapping her foot and glancing listlessly at the stack of old magazines, the abstract art, the windchimes making a feeble attempt at a relaxed, comforting mood. This wasn’t the doctor she’d seen—her mother had taken her out of state to a Gender Clinic in Philadelphia full of specialists.I guess the difference is a warmer color palette and comfier chairs, she thought.
The door to the office burst open and Quentin slinked out, shoulders hunched. She knew better than to ask how things went until they were in the safety of the car where any outbursts could go unobserved. That was one of the newfound pleasures of having her learners permit—a private space to have her feelings. It was no lean-to in the woods, but they were too old for that now. Anyway—this one wasn’t reliant on other people being there. This was better.
Quentin slammed the passenger side door of her car shut.
Gently, she ventured a “So?”
He gave a dry little chuckle.
“Did he refuse?”
“He said I’m DEPRESSED!”
“And?” It was the wrong answer. She tried to recover. “Did he give you a letter of recommendation for transition?”
“No! He said we had to treat my ‘depression’ first. And ‘see how that goes.’”
Oh no, Julia thought. That’s a nasty dichotomy to set up for him to pick at.
“I mean, you know why I’m depressed? It’s just because I can’t get HORMONES, you fucker! I’m not like—” here came the finger quotes— “depressed depressed.”
Ah. Fuck. Julia blew through a stop sign.
Silence was, it turns out, also the wrong response.
“What. Don’t tell me you think he’s right?”
“I think you should be able to get hormones now.”
“Fuck you.”
She gritted her teeth. She wasn’t about to kick Q out of the car. Not when his mom had just left him at the doctor. But she didn’t have to dignify an outburst with a response.
She drove on in silence, letting the radio fill the space.
Quentin slumped down in his seat.
“You know what’s depressing?” he hissed to himself. “Your fucking diagnostic skills, my dude. ...I mean—who died and made you omnipotent? Since when does MD stand for Major Deity, huh?”
“I know. I know.” It wasn’t like she didn’t know how dehumanizing doctors could be—even when they were right. “You’ll just have to find another doctor, okay? I’ll drive you both ways.”
It would be fine. She would make it fine.
— — —
“Q? I’m heading out—I might crash at James’ so don’t worry if I’m not back tonight, yeah?”
“Uh huh.” Quentin didn’t move from where he was sprawled on the couch, a book balanced on his chest.
Julia stood at their door and wrapped her scarf around her neck, then patted down her pockets—phone, wallet, keys—check. “Hey, did you check out the trans group I told you about? They’re meeting tonight if you wanted to go.”
“Thank you, Jane the All-Knowing Schedule Witch.”
“Don’t fucking call me Jane, Quentin.”
“Just trying to bring back the good old days.”
“There were no good old days. Nothing about that was good.”
Quentin bolted upright into a sitting position.“Well, congratulations, on pushing through to your shiny new life with James!” He was breathing a little too fast, she noticed.
“Jesus Christ, Q—you’re not still mad about—I just said I hadn’t said anything to James yet, I didn’t—”
“Sorry my parents didn’t send me to boot camp,” he used the words to jump over the side of the couch so he was standing in front of her, “or whatever the boy equivalent of cotillion is!”
Julia scoffed, rolling her eyes. “It was one year.”
“Sorry my parents didn’t call up fucking Principal MacNamara to expunge my deadname from our middle school graduation yearbook!”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she snapped. “Or don’t, I guess, if that’s all you want to do. I thought maybe you might want to do something real for a change.”
“Real?”
Quentin plunged a hand into the pocket of his cargo shorts and Julia’s eyes snapped back to him. “Q, don’t you dare —”
He pulled the ubiquitous deck of cards out. It was the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot this time, and not one of his many dog-eared packs of playing cards.
“You think you’ve got it all figured out, huh?” The pack of cards became a fan, and Quentin jerked it across her line of sight. His eyes, revealed from out behind it again, were a little wild.
Julia took an involuntary step back. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”
“You wanna grade this on a reality curve?” He pulled his hands apart, fast, fingers splayed open, and the cards flew between them in a moving tower, accordioning in a way that looked like motion and stillness had crashed into each other and were trying to occupy the same space. Then Quentin collapsed his hands together, and the cards vanished. “Huh?” The Judgement card flashed aggressively in front of Julia’s eyes, almost too fast to see. “Huh? Huh?” Seven of Cups, Two of Swords, The Tower. “You think this is about what’s real?” Now he was firing off cards from nowhere into the air; they fluttered down between the two with heavy, cutting flight paths. “Newsflash, Julia! NOTHING IS REAL.”
The slam of the door as Julia left, though it may or may not have been real in any definable sense, was felt.
— — —
The first thing Quentin looked up when he got to the Brakebills library was magic that could be used for transition. Of course. It existed, up to a point. One could use illusion magic, but it was a consistent low level power drain.
Isn’t everything? said the voice in his imagination that was Julia.
He couldn’t help but picture her reaction, if she were here with him.
Magic is real, Jules. Wish we’d figured that out—another more bitter part said—wish you’d believed me—before spending all this money on hormones and surgeries.
She’d say something like: lol, my mom has too much money anyway. The superpac can handle missing my upkeep costs. Anyway, we’re here now, aren’t we?
Only she wasn’t.
Whatever. He’d just take his shots anyway. It was easy enough and he was already used to it. It wasn’t out of loyalty.
— — —
Being a king wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, Quentin thought, not infrequently. But being crowned…
Very few memories held and continued to hold, unshadowed by later events, the might and majesty that he had always hoped to find in his life, if only for a moment. Standing shivering in front of the Knight of Crowns’ resting place as the ridiculous gave way to the sublime for the coronation of the kings and queens of Fillory, though—that was one of those moments.
He would never forget Margot crowning him King Quentin, the Moderately Socially Maladjusted—the belonging he felt in that moment, surrounded by friends that he knew—really knew for once—wanted him there. But there was another version of that memory, one imagined so many times it’d almost assumed the same weight.
In it, he and Eliot were alone on the stony shore beneath those steel-grey skies.
He crowned Eliot with the same mixture of yearning and joy and rightness, and the cool of the metal crown gave way to the yield of Eliot’s curls and the warmth breathing off his scalp even by the cold, cold sea. Then Eliot told him to kneel.
Quentin did, bowed his head, but then something told him to look up, and it was Eliot’s gaze on him, those tired eyes glimmering for once with a quiet unironic joy.
“I crown thee Quentin the Resilient, King of Fillory,” Eliot said, without looking away, and something in Quentin that he had forgotten was tensed for a blow, something small and hidden that had flinched in anticipation when Eliot looked at him—something relaxed. Some slice of Quentin’s brain had, with the circlet snug around his ears, decided it didn’t need to worry about Eliot.
In this imagination of a memory, Eliot pulled him to his feet. Pulled him to him. Put his fingers back in Quentin’s hair, and Quentin got a warmth from those fingers that stayed this time, not just the moment of it from the crowning. He turned his face up to Eliot looking down at him—like he looked down on everyone—and Eliot kissed him.
That wasn’t just his imagination. It caught up all the other times Eliot had kissed him, for whatever weird, misguided reason Eliot had ever kissed him. The brush of his facial hair, the harder, skillful pressure of his lips, the shock of their bodies meeting at this isolated point.
And that was always where the imagined memory shorted out. This is always your problem, Coldwater, Quentin thought at himself, viciously. If he’d been speaking, it would have been a shout. Wasn’t it enough that Eliot saw him? Did he have to want Eliot to want him, too? Nothing’s ever good enough for you.
— — —
“Julia.” A whisper floated down to her. Gentle, careful. “We’re done—you can come out now.” There were fingertips on her shoulder—the lightest physical pressure, the gentlest anchor back into the real world.
The magic, lingering, felt so peaceful, so deeply still, that it took Julia a moment to muster the willpower to open her eyes, to return to the world outside. She wanted to stay in that green wordlessness. And it was wordless; when she opened her eyes onto too-bright colors, it took several long heartbeats before her brain snapped back to verbal. She felt it reconfigure itself to conduct its inner business in words instead of subterranean sensation.
So it took her extra time to realize the others were filing out. Richard had therapy to get to, Menolly chemo. They called their goodbyes, Kady with a curt nod and Bender with a comradely pat on her shoulder and an optimistic wave.
It wasn’t that Julia had avoided being alone with Silver. The last of the wordless, green peace vanished completely, to reveal faint alarm underneath.
“Do you, um, do you need a hand?” She fumbled getting her spell binder back into her bag. The bag wasn’t quite big enough. It was a fancy laptop bag, stretched a bit from use, handmade leather, leftover from her time at Columbia. A present for making the Dean’s list or something, from her dad, who’d always tried to give practical presents.
Silver didn’t politely demur. “That would be great,” she said.
She’s so tall, Julia thought, and immediately felt like an asshole.
Julia gathered up crumpled paper cups and greasy napkins. She swept up some spilled sugar into one palm and shook it off into the trash can.
“I think that went pretty well, don’t you?” Silver smiled from the sink. They’d been practicing group magic—not so much a spell as an exercise, sharing magic, moving it between them, feeling its push and pull.
“I guess. I don’t think I'm doing pretty well.” Julia sighed. She could barely remember what they’d attempted; she remembered only the feel of the magic like an ocean weighing down on her and separating her from the rest.
“You’re having trouble connecting with the rest of the group, right?”
“Kady says it’s because I’m holding something back.” Julia tore a crumpled napkin in half, once, then again. That was another thing she’d been trying not to think of—the way Kady looked at her sometimes, with that faint frown like she was waiting for something from Julia, expecting something, wanting something Julia didn’t know how to give.
“Kady knows you pretty well, I think.”
Julia sighed, and opened her hands. The napkin strips floated gently to the countertop. “I’m giving it all the power I have.”
Silver poured Bender’s leftover coffee down the sink, then stood there bracing herself for a moment. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“It’s not power you’re holding back. It’s yourself.” Porcelain clinked as Silver added the wet cup to the stack. “Group ritual magic is all about the connections you’re making with the other magicians.”
Sometimes Julia really missed doing magic with Marina. She shouldn’t. But they’d worked together intoxicatingly well: precise and always a challenge for Julia to keep up, but always rewarding when she did. There hadn’t been anything about selves. Marina’s advice had been more like “Push your hands a little further from your body on this one,” and “Wearing mascara makes it really easy to fake a penitent, I’ve-been-crying look.” Not to mention: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Wicker.”
Silver was still talking. “If you’re wary of letting them feel who you are—”
“If I’m afraid, you mean.”
Silver shrugged. “I don’t think the why matters so much.”
Julia swept crumbs from a table into the trash can and let the lid bang shut. Her hands, she noticed, were shaking a little. “Are you talking,” she took a deep, angry, careful breath, “about being stealth?”
It was the first time she’d ever seen Silver look shocked. “Oh my god, Julia honey, no!” She halfway laughed, still sounding more surprised than anything else. “No, I’m talking new agey shit. I just mean not being afraid of letting us see the person you are.” She smiled, crookedly. “You won’t find a better group for embracing where you’ve come from and what you’ve done, you know?”
Julia smiled just a little bit back. Then she frowned again. “That’s not what I’m here for though. That’s not what I’m asking the Lady for.”
Silver’s face scrunched up. “That’s… sweetie, that’s not what I’m here for either.”
“Oh.” Julia’s hand flew to her mouth. “I just—”
“Assumed.” Silver sighed. “I know.”
“I’m—”
Silver silenced Julia with a relatively polite hand. “Okay.” A breath. “Okay.” She turned her focus back outwards to Julia. “This doesn’t have to be painful.”
“Magic comes from pain,” Julia said, half to herself, automatic.
Silver clasped her hands together, and nodded, slowly. “Julia, come sit down with me. I think you and I should talk.”
— — —
“This part of Fillory isn’t in the book, is it?”
They stood on sloping sand, carved by wind into angled cliffs, stretching off to either side into the fading distance. It was a delicate, perfect lilac, soft and sun-warm under Quentin’s bare feet. The color made him think of cakes and wildflowers.
“No,” he said, and breathed in salt. “There’s the Shivering Sea, and in the fourth book they go sailing to recruit the Great Shark Army and all, but it’s not this.”
They stood on the shore of an ocean. Vast and restless, it took over the world: the earth, the sky. They’d been walking for days, and now they’d come to—to what he could only think of as the end.
The sea was endless. Even its meeting with the horizon, higher up the sky than it would’ve been on earth, did nothing to contain it. The pale purple sands melted into blue sea; the blue sea shaded almost imperceptibly into the blue horizon, a long, faint line that circled halfway around the world. As always, Quentin couldn’t shake a conviction that the water would bear his weight, that it was a gleaming desert before him, promising beauty and solitude with every step.
“After a while, I feel like I kind of gave up on seeing Fillory with you,” Quentin said, quietly, so as not to disturb. He felt a tug in his chest with the memory—a pang at his own, monumental mistakes, and an echo of abandonment.
Julia was staring out over the water, shading her eyes with one hand, but she glanced over and met his gaze when she replied. “To be fair, I gave up on it first.”
“Ouch.” He tucked his hands into his pockets.
Julia gave him a light little kick in the shins. “I’m not going to say sorry. You know.”
“Fuck, Jules—if we started, would we ever stop? It is what it is. Magic comes from pain,” Quentin recited.
Julia’s mouth pulled sideways, a hint of some pain reappearing. “Silver—a woman from Free Trader Beowulf, the hedge witches I was with for a while—”
“Yeah—I met her in the bowling alley of the dead.”
“Right—god, we live a life—well, she said something about that to me once. She said ‘magic can’t come if you brick up your pain and pretend it was never there.’”
Quentin whistled.
“She was trans too, so she knew what she was talking about.”
They looked back out over the water, as if by mutual agreement. The white sound of the crashing waves took over for a moment.
Almost conversational, Julia continued, “She helped me get over some things—some trauma, I guess. ...Of course, then a few weeks later she was brutally murdered in front of me.” She paused, kicking up a cloud of sand. “They sure aren’t kidding when they say recovery isn’t a straight line.”
A sharp laugh escaped Quentin. Julia glanced sideways at him. “Understatement of the year.”
Julia was studying the sea like it was a problem to be solved. “We should go in the water.”
Water moved in clear strong ripples under its surface. Quentin could see right down to the sand, grain by grain, glints hidden and then flashing to life as the water moved. “Looks cold.”
“Definitely,” Julia agreed. Her sly smile reappeared.
Quentin’s mouth quirked. “On three?”
“On three, or after three?”
“On three,” he said firmly, and then added, “and we’re just jumping in, right? With our feet.”
“No.” Julia’s smile widened. “All or nothing, Q. Hair has to get wet!”
“Augh, fine. Okay. One, two—three!”
It was, of course, freezing. Cold shocked up his legs as he waded in, waves slapping against his torso and bringing even more cold. Sand and water eddied around his feet, coiling when he took another step. The sea leaned its weight against his legs as he forged ahead. It slapped against his hips, and he stopped and glanced over at Julia just in time to see her take a deep breath and plunge face-first into the water.
Quentin let out a whoop and—without pausing to think or worry—dropped straight down.
It was a full-body assault. Water closed over his head, and its freezing pressure shocked against him and through him. It jolted right down to his heart, like his flesh was insubstantial as sand.
The cold was all he could experience for a long, wordless moment.
And then the pain was gone, and the water enveloped him, not assaulted him, and he opened his eyes to catch a brief glimpse of golden ripples of light suspended in the sea before the shallow water buoyed him back up like a cork, and he broke back into the sky.
When he resurfaced his lungs felt numb and he had to gasp for air, dragging it in by the lungful. Julia popped back up with a yelp, and Quentin, shocked, exhilarated, and too happy to feel self-conscious, finally managed enough breath to scream “FUUUUUUUCK!”
They staggered together, grinning, and steadied themselves on each other’s shoulder, water pouring from their hair and faces.
“How tragic,” Julia started, and Quentin briefly but intensely panicked before he processed her dramatic tone, “that our quest to—to map the outer isles has seen us shipwrecked on this desolate shore!”
“Shipwrecked… by pirates!”
“They captured us, too. We were bound in chains—”
“—magical chains—”
“In the dank and dark hold of the pirate queen’s vessel.”
“But they never found the, the—” Julia plunged a hand into her pocket, fumbling around before she triumphantly produced a bedraggled piece of elastic. “The magical hairtie!”
“We hid it under our tongues and pretended we were cursed to be unable to speak,” Quentin put in.
“Oh, nice,” Julia murmured appreciatively before raising her voice again. “We were chained there for days before we managed to… befriend one of the crew and convince him to let us out for a few moments at sunset.”
“And then we knocked him out and had to chain him up ourselves! But for a good cause.”
“Nooooo, we were going to, but he felt sorry for us and he let us sneak away.”
“Okay, okay. So we plunged over the side of the pirate vessel—”
“—and managed to swim to shore.”
“...Honestly, this just sounds like last Friday.”
Quentin felt his shoulders go from ice to mountain runoff. He experimented with taking a deep breath, and laughed quietly at himself under his breath without realizing it at the sensation that he could float not just on the water, but into the air and back over the earth.
“This is nice.”
“This is nice. ...It’s gotta just be the opium in the air, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Julia agreed with mock solemnity. “We couldn’t possibly actually be happy.”
They looked at each other. Then, at the same time, they started laughing.
It wasn’t what they’d imagined. They wouldn’t have thought the sand would be lilac, for a start. That was it all over—one shade off. But it would do.