Archive of Our Own ^beta

But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

That the world should be ending in the most mundane of ways within weeks of very nearly ending in the most ridiculous of ways was, Eliot thought, exactly what he should have expected. Not that the world was actually ending, not this time around, but it was impossible not to feel that way, not with the slow, creeping dread of February, which eventually burst forth into crisis, sure as the first daffodils clawing their way through the frost. That it hadn’t seemed so bad at first was only fitting, now that it was as bad as it was, because Eliot had lived through his share of life-and-death, his piece of apocalypse pie; he knew that it always, always got worse.

Against his better judgment, he refused to quarantine at the cottage. It was bad enough that he had ended up there in the first place, without anyone he loved and with only his oldest vices to keep him company. It was a pantomime of the Happy Place, a house filled with ghosts he never saw but that tugged at his hand every time he passed the kitchen in which he’d made countless hangover breakfasts; their fingers lingered behind his neck each time he walked by Margo’s old room, where his life had been made as much as it had come apart. To live there was to submit to a haunting, and while he had agreed to it in the fog of grief and bewilderment that followed the world seed, it had been less an active decision than it had been for lack of any other option.

So he left, back to the ill-advised city, back to the apartment, where memories still lived but where ghosts were thinner and farther between. As he made his way through the series of portals and walked the final block to the gleaming steel and glass building that had been his post-possession halfway house, he wondered what he would find. It had been two months since the others had disappeared, and he had only spoken to Julia and Penny once, despite the fact that he and Penny now shared a faculty lounge. Kady had returned to work with the hedges and he had not seen her but for one or two times when she’d come back to use the library.

As he passed the doorman and felt the wards open up around him, he could only hope that Marina was long gone from the apartment, and found that, blessedly, she seemed to be.

He let out a heavy breath as he stepped inside and set his bags down. Though nothing had much changed, the apartment had the air of an old house that had been shuttered for the season. It felt as though the furniture should be covered in sheets, the curtains drawn and tied shut. Instead, it was just as they’d left it; mid-afternoon light streaming through the high windows, the last pair of flats that Margo had exchanged for heels askew by the door. Four plates with dried out muffin wrappers still sat on the counter. He stared at them for a moment before he scraped them into the trash and took the half-empty bag to the chute.

When he came back, he picked up Margo’s flats and arranged them beside the shoes on the rack in the hall closet, next to the oxfords that Quentin had purchased first year but never worn, at least not when Eliot was around. Without thinking, he picked one up and held it, running his thumb along the slightly worn edge of the heel. Apparently Quentin had worn them and Eliot wondered, when had that been? He touched a scuff on one toe and wondered not how it got there, but how there was only one, given what he knew about Quentin’s clumsiness. He pressed his thumbs into the instep to feel the place where the delicate arch of Quentin’s foot, which he had once kissed in a moment that was as much teasing as it was a love for the tender places of Quentin’s body, had once rested before he returned the shoe to its place on the rack.

Even as he made his way to the kitchen, he could feel the ghost of Quentin’s skin against his lips, the feeling of his hairy ankle where he’d held it in his palm. He allowed himself one long, miserable second, hands braced on the quartz countertop, eyes shut tight; he allowed the wave of grief to crest behind his sternum but did not let it go any further, pressing it down once he felt his throat tighten with tears. He shook his head; he blew out all the air in his lungs.

"Okay," he said out loud, "food," and went to take inventory.

He was well stocked with flours and sugars and various dried fruits and chocolate thanks to Josh; thanks to Julia, there were several boxes of Cheez-Its and a couple bags of honey mustard pretzels. Still, the milk and eggs were bad, and there were no vegetables that could be salvaged. He resigned himself to the task of grocery shopping in the early days of a pandemic, slipping a mask over his face and clumsily casting the first protective spell he could remember.

The day that Martin broke every bone in his hands— even his ulna, he’d realized, which seemed excessive even by the standards of someone who had declared himself Beast— a pain blossomed in his palms and extended outward into his fingers and would not be dulled. It was different from the pain he’d been in after the Monster; it did not leave him exhausted in the way he had been then, perhaps because this time he did not seem able to heal. And while his magic still thrummed beneath his skin with a certain sort of violence, his pain made it difficult to harness, leaving his once sure gestures more stilted, halting.

And so Eliot’s spellwork was haphazard at best, and though the threat of illness gave an undeniable edge to his trip, he tried to take comfort in his youth and, since he’d stopped smoking, his relative health.

When he returned, exhausted and anxious but in possession of enough produce to get a small family through the month, his immediate thought was, God, I need a drink. First, though, fridge, cupboard, pantry; everything in its right place, everything in order before he gave himself permission to fall apart. So he shelved the milk and the eggs and the butter, put the vegetables in the crisper and the cheese in the center drawer that Josh had designated specifically for brie. He ignored the sore feeling in his heart as he threw out a forgotten bag of shredded Mexican Blend, the same brand he’d once seen in the cottage kitchen when he’d found Quentin making quesadillas at two a.m.

His old flask, while still functional, only produced mid-tier whiskey, the best he’d had at twenty-one when he’d first learned the enchantment at a hedge bar in Chelsea, and he’d never bothered to fix it. So he went to search the liquor cabinet, and then the secret stash he knew Marina kept for guests with expensive taste and those she wanted to rob. When he found a bottle of twenty-year scotch, it seemed like something he deserved, a reward for completing basic life tasks while the world seemed barely able to keep spinning.

"Hello," he said to the leather box. His aching fingers seemed to relax at the mere feeling of its pebbled surface. "Hope you didn’t have other plans tonight." He half-laughed as he opened the box and uncorked the bottle— day one and he was already talking to objects? As if in answer, he shrugged to himself and poured himself a glass before settling on the couch, taking in a long stretch of silence while he decided what to do. The alcohol burned and settled in his belly, sending the familiar and pleasant tingle down his limbs. The tightness in his chest ratcheted loose, only just.

There was something to be said for being alone, he thought, tipping his head back and allowing the silence to curl around him. It was the space between the loud voices of his childhood, the space that cradled him in the aftermath of the parties that left him exhausted and aching. Over the years, he had learned to love loneliness, to find comfort in it. Though Eliot did not consider himself an introverted person, even now he felt loneliness welcoming him, opening up its arms in a way that felt equal parts Welcome home and I always knew you’d be back.

Brakebills had not been any help. He was not yet qualified for anything beyond first-year lectureships, which meant a steady stream of anxious and overeager twenty-two year olds in and out of the office he shared with three other instructors. That he was barely half a decade older than most of them did not help; he felt ancient and weathered next to their bright curiosity, their eyes not yet rimmed in dark circles. They asked endless questions and flirted with him on impulse; they were loud and anxious and needed far more reassurance than Eliot felt qualified or able to give. And so to be alone, as lonely as he had been, felt like an improvement.

He poured himself another two fingers before he found the remote.

"Who’s even paying for this?" he asked out loud as he clicked the Netflix icon. God, he should— get a cat, or something, anything to make himself feel less insane every time he had the urge to talk. Had he been like this as a kid? he wondered. Had his adolescence driven him to talk to the air or the walls in the same way that his decidedly urban quarantine made him converse with liquor? He could not recall any imaginary friends, though certainly he must have given voice to stuffed animals and Hot Wheels and the dolls all boys had and called action figures.

Impulsively, he navigated to the payment information and stared at the name on the page, Joanne Bloom. He knew it, he was sure, but couldn’t place it, and started through the checklist of his friends’ names, Hanson, Diaz, Orloff, Wicker, Adiyodi, Hoberman, Quinn, a deep sigh, unconscious, Coldwater—

Grief flared in his chest, that awful thing that made him into so much meat and sinew.

Joanne, Quentin had said, in another lifetime under a different moon, his fingers trailing over Eliot’s shoulder. My mom’s name is Joanne.

My mom’s name was Annie, Eliot had told him, there beneath a thin quilt in their second summer.

The muscles around his ribs tensed, a wrench pulling his sternum tight. He pushed a thumb and forefinger against the inner corners of his eyes, pinching his nose until it almost hurt. He pushed the back button with the same sort of ferocity until he arrived at the home screen.

Well on his way to drunk, he scrolled through the variety of aspirational home and cooking shows, searching for something that did not require attention but that might fill the increasingly oppressive silence of the apartment. After rejecting the first three, he settled on a series featuring the homes of wealthy people, the world that felt the furthest away despite the fact that he could have stolen this apartment from any of them. There were long drone shots of mountains and of lakes, of the bright greenery and of expansive desert, and he longed suddenly to be outside, to feel the cool breeze over the ocean or even the muggy air of an Indiana summer.

How long had it been since he’d been in nature? Not long at all, back in Fillory, he supposed, but that was different. Nothing there felt natural, all of it candycoated or else halfway to rotting. It was haunted, too, with the memory of who he was, of who they all used to be. It no longer felt like it belonged to him in the way it had when he was king, lost to new monarchs and his own interminable grief.

But then, he supposed, it had never really belonged to him at all.

Halfway through the fourth episode and a third of his way through the scotch, Eliot found himself immensely restless. He wanted to make something, to give his hands something to do. His weeks of persistent pain and subsequent boredom left him twitchy, almost, like he held in his hands all the love he had nowhere to put, all the longing that no one wanted. His relationship with magic, fraught though it had been since those early days when he had first discovered its violence, had at least been something consistent; while he did not love magic in the way that Quentin had, nothing so bright and pure and sure, in his young adulthood he had come to accept it as a part of him. To be cut off from it by a failure of his own body felt like nothing short of a death, even though it was still there, in his blood and in his bones and in his hands.

But— still. He was alive, in whatever fraction of life he could call it. He could find ways to mitigate the pain, take up yoga or gardening or other habits of the old and aching. And if none of that, then he did know how to bake, and baking was good, he knew baking, understood that baking powder required an acid to activate it, that egg whites would only come to good peaks if left for an hour on the counter. It would feel good, he reasoned, it would help to do something he knew. Help what, exactly, he didn’t know, but the reasoning was sound, felt tangible and real and like something resembling self-care. So he stared at the pantry for a few minutes, swaying only slightly, before deciding on something simple, gathering the flour and sugar and the darkest chocolate he could find, then setting water to simmer while he went to the fridge for butter and eggs.

This recipe was practically carved into the back of his hand: six squares of chocolate, a stick of butter, two eggs, a cup of sugar, ⅔ cup flour, a splash of vanilla, a pinch of salt. It was the same recipe his mother had made for countless bake sales and that he had licked off of innumerable spatulas; it was the recipe he had whipped up at the end of almost every party, to feed those who might still be left after three, beginning in undergrad and ending in Whitespire.

As he watched the butter melt into fatty puddles, he thought, inevitably, of Margo. He wasn’t certain, but he thought that the last time he had made these had been for her, after midnight in the kitchen of the castle after her coronation, the brownies a peace offering as much as a gesture of affection. He could almost feel her weight pressed against his side as they swayed in front of the stove, a little drunk on plum wine; he could almost smell the smoke and floral perfume in her hair, and feel the ghost of her breath where she had kissed the tender skin beneath his ear. It was the last time they had been together like that, soft and unburdened and without the barbed wire of grief and mourning between them. It felt like a lifetime ago.

For years he had thought that what they had was special, though he was never so gauche as to say so. They had been a pair of far-flung stars, orbiting each other like some rare system, and he could not pinpoint the moment when they had begun to drift apart, their orbits shifting and elongating until they only passed each other in acts of cosmic cataclysm. Had she grown tired of his grief; had it been the Monster? Had it begun earlier than that, with the way he’d treated her on their shared throne? Or had it been something more quotidian, something as achingly normal as passing through your twenties and emerging at the end to find that neither of you were the same as you had begun?

It did not feel that way. It felt like a catastrophe.

The chocolate melted and he mixed in the sugar, then the eggs. His wrist ached and he thought of everyone else, wondered if they, wherever they were, remembered him. If they wanted to. Did they mourn for him like he did for them? Did they wonder if he was all right? Or had they assumed he was dead and moved on, like his father had before them, building new lives without care for his memory or regard for his absence?

It was entirely possible, he reasoned, that his friends mourned him a year ago, and were now relieved of their grief. It seemed just as likely, a bitter voice in the back of his head whispered, that they had never mourned him at all.

You are not alone here, he had told Quentin once. But now Eliot was alone as it was possible to be. There wasn’t anyone in the apartment, the city— on Earth— who loved him.

He buried the thought beneath each layer of batter that he scraped into the pan. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. But at least he could have something warm and sweet to eat, something to give him pleasure rather than simply dull the pain.

Later, he did not remember turning the oven off, but he must have done. He did not remember if he had another drink or three, though it likely skewed higher. He barely remembered eating half a pan of still-hot brownies, gooey and rich and tasting so strongly of nostalgia that he had wept while, on the television, wealthy people described what it was like to live forty miles from the nearest supermarket.

At seven a.m., Eliot woke up with a start in the middle of a dream so real he could still feel the light touch of fingertips on his forehead. Whether his surprise stemmed from the reality of the dream or the fact that he had not expected, had not hoped, to wake up at all, he could not say. So he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, his body hot and cold and parched, then stumbled to the bathroom to gulp water out of the faucet before he crawled back under the damp covers. He had the acute sense of being too old for this, this state he’d been in every weekend, it felt, since he was nineteen. The sweat that covered his body was cold but he was burning up, that awful hangover fever, and thought that if someone dipped him in cold water he might shatter, skin and bones and all.

He laid stretched out diagonally across the bed that, for months, he’d dreamed of sharing with Quentin, his toes pinched in the tight fold of the sheet. Feeling pathetic, he tried to recall the dream— the cool touch on his skin, the pleasant sensation of a hand resting on the back of his neck. A lifetime ago, he might have conjured the feeling of a body pressed against him, warm and sure and wanting, but here, now, in this blank space in between the life that he had built and the lack of life ahead, he could think only of being held. So he wrapped himself in the duvet as tightly as he could, and tried to remember the last time he had hugged anyone.

To be twenty-nine years old and this lonely felt like some sort of bookend. It seemed so obvious in retrospect that he’d always end up alone; people like him did not get happy endings. Everything good in the last several years had been a fluke, an interlude in the otherwise endurance test of his life. He pulled a pillow over his head and suppressed the urge to scream, until at last sleep dragged him back under.

When he woke up again, it was almost noon, and he felt marginally better. His eyelids felt less heavy and though his body ached and his heart raced, he could hold his head up without immediately wanting to lay back down. His stomach still turned as he sat up, and he braced himself with one arm as his vision swam for a moment.

"I’ve got to fucking drink less," he said to the floor. Eliot considered, as he sat staring at his toes against the dark wood, how he had never really talked about it before. Not with Quentin, not with Margo, not even with Kady, who of all people was most likely to understand him— not even aloud to himself. As if not talking about it would somehow make it less true.

He had some vague notion, months ago, when he’d first woken up to find that Quentin was dead, that he’d honor him by learning to do better. He’d do his mourning right, he thought, in all black and with profound sobriety, a Victorian widow of the highest order. He would deny himself pleasure in the name of facing his grief and he would not use words like addict or recovery.

Underneath it was also a hope, some foolhardy sense that they would always get Quentin back, and that when they did, Eliot would be his best self for him. He would throw away his flask and he would find a therapist or meetings or whatever was best these days; he would submit to the higher power that had set him on this path in the first place. He would do better. He would be better. He would deserve Quentin, when they got him back.

But they did not get Quentin back. It did not seem worth it anymore after that.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, coming to rest in the tangled nest of his hair. He needed to bathe, to treat himself to something material and simple like a deep condition and a slow shave, though he knew he would do neither of those things. The floor was cold in the bone-aching way that meant he’d forgotten to turn on the heat, and he stumbled toward the thermostat before he gulped down a glass of water and forced himself into the shower.

His hangover faded to a dull ache as he washed the days-old product from his hair. It occurred to him that like he ought to drink less, he also needed a haircut, another item in the long list of things that felt impossible under the present circumstances. But when was the last time he’d had one? Not since— God, not since he’d come back, he realized, a sad euphemism for the word possessed, which seemed too absurd, a thing that did not actually happen to people.

Maybe I’ll shave my head, he thought, and laughed to himself as he gently wrung the water from the long hair that now framed his face. As if vanity were not the only thing he had left.

Once dressed, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, he pulled out his laptop. A quest for the day: find a way to spend his time, to make himself less lonely, to give him something to look forward to that wasn’t just his next drink. He needed something to talk to, a living thing that might occasionally talk back or perhaps even need him. So he found a nearby animal shelter and said, "Fuck it," to no one before he picked up his phone and arranged to pick up a cat that Saturday afternoon, leaving him with just under a week to try and survive on his own.

—

Carrier in hand, Eliot decided to take the thirteen flights of stairs up to the apartment. The adoption had been a simple process that Eliot thought should be more difficult; certainly no one should entrust someone as blatantly bedraggled as he was with a living thing. But when he called, a volunteer had only asked a few questions about his living arrangements (Yes, I own my apartment, a small lie, No, no roommates, a truth that did not feel like one), and deposited a carrier and box full of supplies outside of the shelter door, where Eliot arrived at precisely 2:45 p.m.

Now he was home, or almost. The cat howled as he climbed, a piercing sound that activated some part of Eliot’s hindbrain he had not known he possessed. Instead of feeling annoyed, he found himself making gentle cooing noises.

"It’s okay, buddy, I know," he said, to one particularly loud howl. "Me, too. We’re gonna get you out soon."

Halfway up, he paused for a moment to catch his breath, his arms laden with a month’s worth of litter and food and even, he now regretted, a small scratching post. He sat down on a bottom step and peered into the carrier. The cat was young but not a kitten, maybe a year old, and was a pretty cloud-grey color that Eliot had always imagined cats should be, with white boots on each of his feet. His eyes, green and sharp, observed Eliot through the grate. Eliot poked one finger through to rub the top of his nose, which he did not seem to mind.

"What am I gonna name, you, huh? Quasar might be a little dramatic."

At this, the cat let out a long and pathetic-sounding mewl. "Well, maybe it suits you," he said, and started on the next flight.

He had not been in the stairwell before, he realized. There were always too many of them, someone in heels or someone pregnant or else just too tired, and they’d always piled into the elevator. If he closed his eyes, he could see the tops of all their heads, these women around which he had built a life to which he never could have imagined being welcomed. The elevator light reflected off of the crowns of their heads like the crowns they’d once worn, of kings and queens and goddesses, their hair always somehow glossy and well-kept, some symbol against the dying times or else of the effort they had always put into everything. He could not say the same for himself, laughing at his sad half-ponytail and the curls that frizzed around his ears.

"Can you give me a haircut?" he asked the cat as he rounded the final stair. "No thumbs, so I guess not." By then, the cat gave only a half-hearted trill, and Eliot laughed as he fumbled for his keys. He pulled them out and looked up, prepared for precisely nothing but the empty doorway to his empty apartment.

It was not what he found.

"Eliot?"

Eliot stared at Quentin, who in turn stared at him from his place in front of the door to the apartment, a backpack slung over one shoulder. A ringing began near Eliot’s temples and stretched outward until it seemed almost to come from outside of himself and he wondered if Quentin could hear it too, as he stood there, staring at Eliot, his front teeth just visible in his awed mouth.

With a precision once reserved for selecting bitters and knotting ties, Eliot set the carrier on the ground and the supplies beside it. He shaped his shaking hands into an open square and looked through it, expecting to see blurred edges or something obvious or cartoonishly evil, horns or a spiked tail. But it was just Quentin, Q, his hair a little shorter than Eliot liked, in a button down that begged to be tucked in and jeans more flattering than Eliot had ever known him to wear.

All the while, Quentin only watched him, submitting to his observation without complaint.

"Q?" Eliot said when at last he dropped his hands.

"Yeah, El, it’s me."

Eliot took a step, and then another, until he was close enough that he could reach out and touch Quentin’s shoulder, or perhaps his cheek if he wanted. This was a moment he had dreamed desperately of, the subject of countless fantasies and morphine-induced hallucinations, and it could not possibly be happening.

Despite personal experience, Eliot did not believe in ghosts. This is what he silently insisted as he stood in front of Quentin, who certainly was not a ghost but for whom very few other explanations seemed to exist. He looked around, at the cat at his feet, then out the window, listening for the sounds of the bustling New York City that had existed a year ago but which now, in Eliot’s now, did not. Perhaps he was the ghost, he thought absurdly. Perhaps he had died that day in the forest and had been the one haunting Quentin all along.

Which would be fitting, really, certainly more so than the reverse. But it seemed that Quentin was here, and alive, and looking increasingly anxious, his brow bowing up into the nervous sweep that Eliot knew so well, had seen a hundred, perhaps a thousand times before, in apprehension and in grief, he thought, in sickness and in health.

A sudden understanding gripped him, rising up from the ground and into the soles of his feet before it made its way to his heart. He almost collapsed with need.

"Quentin, fuck, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, I’m so," he said, pushing his knuckles into his eyes. Even behind the starbursts of pressure, he could see the outline of Quentin, the slope of his nose, the flat planes of his chest, the dear lines around his mouth which were not even an outline and yet there they were, blinking like neon again Eliot’s eyelids. He let out a gasp and opened his eyes, daring the certain ghost to leave.

But Quentin still stood there. It was, in so many ways, exactly like him: stubborn, unyielding, only leaving the room when you desperately wanted him to stay.

Then— then. As if Quentin had only just realized that he had come back from the dead, he shrugged off his backpack with a violent twist of his shoulders.

"No, shut up, don’t," he said. "Apologize later, not now, don’t ruin this."

Then he was in Eliot’s arms, his chin hooked over Eliot’s shoulder. It was urgent and gentle; he did not press hard against Eliot, and so it took Eliot a moment to wrap his arms around his waist and pull him firmly close. Then, with a gravity not unlike the water behind a broken dam or a satellite falling out of orbit, Quentin pushed his face into Eliot’s neck and breathed with all the life he had.

Eliot felt his chest break open like shattered glass. In case of emergency, he thought wildly, and his lungs expanded into the newly open space as if he hadn’t breathed properly in months.

"Fuck," Quentin breathed into his neck. "I saw you, at the bonfire, I was there, I saw you and you were alive but I couldn’t, I was fucking dead, Eliot, what the fuck." Eliot felt his breath hitch against his chest, felt his arms squeeze tighter around his middle. Holding him like this, Eliot could smell the familiar scent of his awful cheap shampoo, of Old Spice, of every stupid drug store thing that he must have purchased on his way from whereever he had come from.

Christ, where had he come from?

"What the fuck," Eliot said against Quentin’s temple. "What the fuck." At this, Quentin seemed to laugh, then he was moving back and Eliot was looking down at his face properly for the first time. His brown eyes were full of tears and the early wrinkles around his mouth were deeper than Eliot remembered. It occurred to him for the first time that he had missed several months of Quentin’s life and he suddenly wanted to know everything, how he’d felt, what he’d seen, where he’d been. He wanted to be a part of Quentin’s story again.

But there would be time for that later.

And so before he had time to think about it, he cupped the back of Quentin’s head and pressed a kiss to his lips. It was not, he thought, a romantic gesture. They did not open their mouths; they did not make any sound. Eliot focused on the feeling of Quentin, warm and alive, and of his steady breath. He gathered up all the love he had in his bones and envisioned pouring it into Quentin, as if it might make him more solid, more likely to stay. He pictured it flowing out of him and into Quentin, filling up the space between his ribs and his lungs and between his toes, like raw earth, like the moss on the stones in the creek behind Eliot’s childhood home.

Broken hands notwithstanding, Eliot was a physical magician. It felt like something he could do.

"Do you want to come in?" Eliot said weakly when he pulled away.

Quentin laughed and squeezed him. "I lost my keys."

It was hell to let him go, but Eliot saw no other option to get the two of them and the cat into the apartment. Eliot gathered the carrier and his, Christ, his cat’s accoutrements.

"Who’s this?" Quentin asked, crouching to peer into the carrier.

"Quasar."

"Quasar?"

"Yes. I was thinking of changing it, but I’ve already called him by it and it seems unfair to pull one over on him now."

Quentin nodded, as if this was reasonable. Eliot’s stomach did something like acrobatics, the first pleasant sensation he’d felt in weeks. He almost mistook it for food poisoning.

Once inside, Eliot busied himself setting up the litter box for a moment, trying to collect himself as he dumped the sandy litter into the plastic tray. Behind him, Quasar shouted from his crate.

"I’m coming, you goblin," Eliot said. He heard Quentin snort.

Satisfied with the set up, he released the cat and watched him sniff the couch, then a chair before he settled in a sunbeam, his grey fur silver in the bright light.

Then Eliot turned to Quentin, who stood with his hands braced on the countertop. The air in the room had shifted. The closest thing he could compare it to was running into an ex that you didn’t want to be exes with at a coffee shop, neutral ground, the tension of everything unspoken, except it was nothing like that, because Quentin was dead, and now he was alive, and they stood in the apartment where they had each mourned the other, and there were things that should not, could not go unspoken.

Not everything feels like something else, he told himself as he walked toward the liquor cabinet. He poured two glasses of what remained of the good scotch and handed one to Quentin, who winced at his first sip.

"So what," Eliot began, and took a drink, then another, for fortification. "How, I mean, did you—?"

"I got your letter," Quentin said, simply, and Eliot’s knees quivered like they had the first time he’d stepped off of a rollercoaster the summer he was thirteen.

"What?"

"Down, you know, down there," he said, shrugging, kicking lightly at the wooden floor. He stepped back from the counter and shook his head, took another sip, then knocked back the remainder of his drink. Eliot did not understand why neither of them could bring themselves to use words like alive or dead, as though their utterance might cast the pall of reality over them and break whatever had managed to pull Quentin out; that is, whatever ritual or spell had brought him back from the dead.

"And then, what, you decided to grapple hook your way out of the underworld?"

Quentin laughed. "No, not exactly. I just," he sighed, and rubbed his eyes. When he next spoke, his hands curled outward, sweeping across the space in front of him in a gesture so familiar and so quintessentially Quentin that Eliot’s chest ached with fondness. "You know, I didn’t think it was possible to be depressed when you’re dead but it turns out that that stuff, I guess, it comes with you? Or at least it felt like it, for me, almost like even in the absence of chemicals to be imbalanced I guess being depressed was just sort of, imprinted on my shade or something. I’m so used to feeling sad, you know? And when I got your letter, that’s when it occurred to me, that, I guess— being dead didn’t fix anything."

Eliot could not say he didn’t understand that. He nodded and poured more liquor into Quentin’s glass without asking.

"So yeah. I felt less and less connected to everything there. Things got hazy and I was tired all the time but not in a way that felt, like, how being tired when you’re dead should feel— not, you know, pleasant at all. And then I started having these dreams, over and over again, about a door, and walking through it. I kept refusing to go, for I don’t know how long. But then, I did." He shook his head, his mouth curling into a wry smile. "And I woke up yesterday in New Jersey. At Mountainside Medical in Montclair."

Understanding dawned on Eliot for the second time that day, a feeling not unlike being electrocuted. "Like, where you were born?"

"Yeah," Quentin laughed. "I don’t know. I got a bus into the city and realized pretty quickly that everything had gone to shit, but all I could think about was getting back here."

"You took a bus? To Manhattan, from New Jersey. In a pandemic."

Quentin shrugged. "Well, yeah. Apparently no one ever thought to tell my mom I was dead so she wasn’t fucking shocked when I called her." Eliot cringed and clenched his jaw, pinched at the loose skin of his elbow. "It’s not your fault," Quentin laughed. "And honestly it made things easier. She assumed I’d ghosted," he stopped to laugh and it took Eliot a moment to understand, "she thought I’d ghosted her again and wasn’t happy about it, but did eventually pay for a bus ticket."

"Christ, Q, I’m sorry."

"No, Eliot," Quentin stepped toward him and Eliot thought to open his arms to him but in that moment, all the fear he’d felt five minutes or perhaps a hundred years ago came surging back. "What, you were supposed to come back from the almost-dead and find her?" he said, and shook his head.

"Well, I’m glad you made it here," Eliot said weakly. Glad did not seem sufficient, nothing did, but it seemed better to understate the strength of his feelings than to give in to hyperbole; it was important to be cautious, to be safe, to err on the side of too little rather than too much, to not make the same mistake he had when he’d watered the ivy that lived on top of the refrigerator and found it wilted and yellow after.

Quentin smiled. "I am too," he said and tucked his hair behind his ears. "I’m so glad, El, I can’t even, I can’t tell you." He reached out to squeeze Eliot’s hand briefly. "I have a feeling there’s a lot to catch up on."

Eliot nodded. He ran his thumb along the side of his finger, where he and Quentin had touched. Quentin reached to claw a slice of brownie out of the pan that Eliot had left on the counter and he almost thought to warn him, no, don’t, they’re stale, I left them out and uncovered, but it didn’t matter, because Quentin was here and Quentin could share his food again.

"What," Quentin began as he heaved himself onto a barstool, "exactly is going on? What’s happened, where is everyone?"

Eliot finished his drink and resisted the urge to pour another. "They’re gone," he said, shrugging, his fingertips pressing into the hard rim of the glass. Having finally said it, gone, gone like the snow in May, like the leaves in November, like Quentin last year, only irrevocably, impossibly permanent, he felt a new grief unfolding in his chest. He could not bring himself to look at Quentin for several seconds.

"Gone?"

"It’s a long story," he said. "God, it’s such a long fucking story, Q."

He sighed, taking the seat next to Quentin, and allowed his hand to reach for the ducktail at the back of Quentin’s neck. It was soothing to twirl the soft hair around his fingers, and his heart stuttered when Quentin leaned into his touch. Eliot could not comprehend his own surprise, like he hadn’t expected such ready affection, despite what had passed between them in the hall, as though they truly had walked back in time, back to a time when Eliot had not been— gone, before he had broken Quentin’s heart.

"I’ve got time," Quentin said with a small smile. "Unless you had somewhere else to be today."

Eliot tried to swallow but found it impossible, between the urge to cry and the urge to laugh and the overwhelming feeling of love, of fondness, of simple I like you so much. In his grief, Eliot had dulled Quentin’s sharper edges. The Quentin that he had mourned was a tragic figure, gentle and good and always kind. He was not at all this Quentin who teased him, whose mouth curved into that smile that was at once tender and a little cruel but above all alive, whole. Himself.

Eliot closed his eyes and summoned a sort of vulnerability that had once been readily accessible to him. "Can you, can you hug me again? I still don’t really believe you’re here."

He did not know what expression crossed Quentin’s face, if he looked relieved or sad or something else, before he launched himself at Eliot. He was heavy in Eliot’s arms. "You can tell the story like this," Quentin said into the space between his neck and shoulder. "I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t have anywhere to be."

Eliot laughed through the tears he didn’t realize were welling, tucking his own face into Quentin’s cotton shoulder, like puzzle pieces, but simple ones, soft and round-edged like the kind that are safe for toddlers to chew on. Without thinking, he gnawed gently at Quentin’s neck. Quentin’s shoulders shook with laughter before he pulled Eliot’s collar aside to do the same.

"I missed you, God, El, I missed you so much," Quentin said, muffled in Eliot’s skin. "Even when I was dead. They say you’re supposed to find peace but I missed you so fucking bad."

"I’m glad you didn’t find peace."

Quentin laughed and his body shook against Eliot’s. "Thank fucking God," he agreed, and sat back, keeping his hands on Eliot’s knees. Eliot failed to stop his chin from wobbling even as he bit his lip. "Will you tell me now? What’s happened?"

"God, where do I even start with this," Eliot said, rubbing his palms on his legs. "Well, I guess at the beginning."

So he did. What was most important, Eliot knew, were the things that he did not say. He did not talk about his hallucinations, the door he had seen and who he had hoped might be behind it. He did not talk about the distance he perceived to have grown between himself and Margo like a chasm, a break in the earth beneath their feet. He did not talk about how everyone had convinced themselves and one another that Quentin could not come back and how privately, it was all that he thought about.

But there were important details, the bones of the story that Quentin needed to know before he could get to the marrow. So he told Quentin about waking up to find Fillory in shambles, about the world nearly ending more times than Eliot could count.

"The moon?" Quentin laughed. "The fucking moon?"

Eliot shook his head, unable to keep from smiling, despite the steady ache in his chest and in his hands. "The fucking moon," he agreed, and braced himself. What came next required the delicacy of a death notification, a certain tact he was not sure he possessed.

"And well, it turned out, that wasn’t really the problem. It was Fillory."

Quentin tilted his head, the expression of a bewildered puppy, all the worse for the kick Eliot knew he was about to deliver. "What are you saying?"

Eliot forced himself to meet Quentin's gaze. "I’m sorry, Q. Fillory is gone. That’s— that’s where everyone is. They made a new planet, and those of us involved in the spell got sucked in. I don’t know where they went or where the planet is or how to get there."

Quentin squeezed his hand, seeming to shake in his weak grasp. "Jesus Christ, El, I’m so sorry."

"For what?" Eliot said, helpless. He had not known what he’d expected, but certainly not pity, not pain on his behalf.

"For— God, Eliot, for all of this. How could everyone just disappear?"

Eliot looked at him, dumbstruck. "Fillory is gone, Q. Don’t you get it? It’s gone and it’s never coming back."

Quentin gestured broadly, as if dismissing each of Eliot’s worries. "Listen," he said, "I don’t know how much anyone told you about what happened while you were, you know, otherwise occupied. But me and Fillory? Legally separated at best. We can talk about it later but." He shook his head. "I can’t say I’m sad to hear it’s gone."

Eliot wiped at one eye. He thought there was more to it than that, there had to be, that Quentin certainly couldn’t just wave it away, not the loss of so much he loved, not the very legs of his childhood table. But it was not, he supposed, the time. They had time. There would be time later, to talk about these things. He hoped. So he said, "I wanted to try and find them but I don’t even know where to start and it—" he paused as his breath hitched and his eyes burned. Without looking up, he said, "It felt impossible to do alone."

He observed where Quentin’s hand rested on his knee and considered his sturdy wrists, the straight lines of them; his surprisingly oval fingernails, the slight softness in their round tips, the only tell of his delicacy, the only thing that gave him away as what he was: a mender, someone who made things whole. He took one of Quentin’s hands and examined it for a moment, touched the smooth surface of a nail.

Then Quentin moved and for a moment Eliot’s heart sank, heavy with rejection. But it was not long dredged; not a moment after that, Quentin touched his cheek and opened his palm to cradle it, broad and warm and welcome.

"You’re not alone anymore, I promise. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll figure it out. We’ll get them back."

Eliot nodded against Quentin’s palm. He felt almost overstimulated by the constant contact, how Quentin had barely stopped touching him; he could not explain the way that loneliness had made its home in his body and the way that Quentin’s presence was comforting at the same time it seemed to push against every boundary that Eliot had built, like tropical vines around a tree. He flexed his hands and his knuckles cracked without effort.

"Are you hungry?" Eliot did not say what he wanted, which was, Let me feed you, let me take care of you.

"Yeah," Quentin said. "Yeah, I guess I could eat."

So they did. Eliot already had something in mind, a simple pasta with collard greens and chevre and lemon, something nutritious but also hardy, filling, a little rich. He set Quentin on getting the water going and chopping the garlic while he washed and stripped the greens, tasks his aching hands could manage, and felt not unlike he had been punched in the solar plexus when he recalled, unbidden, the image of Quentin peeling some Fillorian allium and burying it among carrots and turnips in an iron pot over the fire. The smell of it and the root vegetables and the cold wet ground, fungus and dead leaves under melting snow, filled his senses and he longed for spring in another life.

"Cooking wine?" Quentin asked as Eliot mixed lemon juice into the cheese, then tossed the garlic and the greens into the hot pan.

"Please." Eliot smiled when he accepted the glass, touching it gently to Quentin’s. "Cheers to you, well, being alive."

"And to you." Eliot’s heart tensed at the way Quentin tipped his head down to smile at him from beneath his brow, that way he had of somehow making himself seem larger by virtue of his humbleness, that face that said, a century ago in a forest on another planet, I love you, and I like you, and I want you.

Quasar howled at his feet, doing one lap around his ankles and letting his tail drag across his shin. "Oh, shit, I forgot about you," he said, and went to feed him while Quentin monitored the stove.

By the time they sat down to eat, they were on their second bottle of wine. Eliot tried not to think about it, because they were celebrating, because it wasn’t everyday that a dear friend— not just a friend, Eliot’s heart nagged —came back from the dead, and if Quentin wanted to drink, then who was Eliot to deny him?

Eliot waited while Quentin took his first few bites, raising his eyebrows for assessment and only relaxing when he groaned and shook his head and shoveled another forkful of greens into his mouth.

"Fuck, El, it’s so good," he laughed. "I forgot what vegetables really taste like."

"What do they taste like?" Eliot asked with a smile.

"Like dirt," Quentin said. His smile was broad but showed no teeth, his eyes disappearing into it like Eliot hoped they would. "Like dirt and grass and, like, I think like life? Is that corny?"

Eliot shook his head. "No, I don’t think so." He tried to taste every granule of soil, the chlorophyll, the Earth itself. "I don’t think so at all."

Quentin smiled and Eliot had a sudden appreciation for the thoughtful lighting over the kitchen island— soft gold rather than stark blue-white. His brow cast a soft shadow over his squinting eyes, his dimples forming up to meet them, and Eliot thought of tessellations, those fish scale patterns from the fourth grade in Ms. Scott's so-called gifted math class that he had filled in with only cool colors, because that was what made sense, to apply blue and green and mauve to those patterns which he could only make sense of beneath an ocean which, at nine years old, he had not yet seen.

It was not like that now, not with Quentin's face warm and soft in the light of the apartment. I am not afraid of the water, Eliot thought, but I've always preferred the sun.

They finished their meals and the second bottle, left their dishes in the sink in a way that would bother Eliot under less exceptional circumstances. Feeling pleasantly tipsy and, oddly responsible for Quentin in that moment, he filled up two glasses of ice water before he retrieved a third bottle and settled next to Quentin on the couch.

"I can’t believe Julia had a kid," Quentin laughed. "I knew it was gonna be, like, traumatic to show up on her doorstep, but now I have to video chat with her and meet her kid and her— Penny, really?"

Eliot laughed, too, his shoulders shaking with it. It was unfamiliar, the feeling of so much oxygen in his lungs, the flex of his abdominals. He had half a mind to question the fact that alcohol reduced your respiratory rate because then, in that moment, a little drunk with a boy he’d made love to for a lifetime, he thought that he had never breathed so deeply. "I know. I guess I’ll text her tomorrow? Or something? I have no idea how to tell someone their best friend came back from the dead. It seems like it should at least involve hugs."

"It really should, God," Quentin said. "Everything is fucking insane."

"When has it not been for us?" Eliot said, a bubble of fondness beneath his lungs. Quentin turned to him and smiled before shifting so that he sat cross-legged, facing Eliot. He mourned the loss of their shoulders touching.

"Can I ask you something?" Quentin said, only a little serious.

"Of course."

"Your letter."

"My letter," Eliot conceded. He examined the white edges of his fingernails, scraping a bit of dirt out from his middle finger. He had known this conversation would come from the moment Quentin said that he had received it, though he had held out hope that it would not be so soon, that they could have one night without touching the still-raw parts of themselves.

"Did you mean what you said?"

A feeling like molten wax began beneath Eliot’s sternum, miserable and slow and burning. He could not bring himself to face Quentin, who was never supposed to see that letter, who was never supposed to know how desperate Eliot was, the lengths he would have gone to. What could his messy heart have stumbled upon in that moment of grief, aching and active like Chernobyl? Surely they should not step on such ground so soon. Surely it needed time.

But— but. Time did not mean the same thing anymore. To have more time did not mean that they should waste it.

He sipped his drink while he tried to decide what to say, what words could possibly confirm the truth of that letter, an outpouring of selfishness so profound that he had, in the end, chosen not to send it.

At last he settled on, "Yeah, darling. I did."

"Don’t," Quentin said sharply. Then, softer: "Don’t call me that, unless you mean it. Unless you’re sure. Please."

Eliot felt every instinct he had— to lie, to keep secrets, to say anything but the truth —raise its hackles. But what was it worth, now, to keep secrets at all? Those instincts had kept him safe for years but now stood to ruin everything. He dug the fingernails of one hand into the meat of his thumb, as if it would ground him. "I mean it, Q."

At last he looked up to meet Quentin’s gaze and could not bear to see the expression on his face, the way his brow furrowed at once in empathy and hurt. He had provoked it enough.

"Did it really take me dying to make you realize—?"

"God, Q, no, I always," Eliot said, and swallowed, swallowed again, the truth fighting its way up his throat. "I always wanted you." He reached forward to wipe a tear from Quentin’s cheek. The feeling he’d had before of open air and easy breathing was gone, replaced by a tightness in his chest like his lungs were crushed in a fist. "I was afraid, I’m always so fucking afraid."

"Of what?"

"That it was just the quest," Eliot gasped and— there it was. What he had tried to tell Quentin forever ago; the terror he had tried to express but had come out, then, in that moment, as flippant and cruel. He said, "I didn’t want to be your foxhole fuck or your, I don’t know, your silver medal. I wanted you to want me, my whole fucking miserable self. Do you, don’t you understand why I didn’t believe you? I am not lovable, Q. I’m not. I am hard to deal with, I’m sad and furious all the time and I’ll never fucking tell you about it. But I wanted you to love me anyway, and I wanted you not to be dead because I’m selfish and I loved you and I never got to say. So yeah, I meant it, Q, I did. I do."

Eliot felt as though the floor beneath their feet might melt away, exposing the steel and the concrete and the ground beneath it all, bedrock and limestone and clay. In all his life he had never admitted to anyone this, not without an edge of irony, the twist of lemon with which he served gimlets and French 75s. And worse, it was not the confession of love that made his head spin and his stomach contract; it was what he knew to be the truth, the foundation upon which his selfhood was built: the knowledge that he was fundamentally cruel and shallow and addicted and lacked the skill or the wherewithal to do anything about it; that he had built himself a persona that would stand forever in the hollowed out place where good things might have lived, once, where all the love and affection and care had rotted away in the years between the first time his father had raised his belt and his brothers had called him fairy and Logan had cornered him in the seventh grade locker room and Mike who had not been Mike had not wanted him and worse, culminating in a throne room of a kingdom where he was no longer king because he wasn’t even capable of that despite the fact that it was in his blood, in that room where he had stomped out the last flicker of hope that anyone would ever love him for what he was because what he was was unloveable.

Or perhaps, he thought with a wracking pain in his chest, it had not ended there. It had ended when Margo had gone to die and he had not tried to stop her.

"Eliot," Quentin said gently. "That’s not fair. You know that’s not."

"Well, that’s me, I guess," Eliot laughed, rueful, so sure of his own selfishness. "I’ve never been one to care about what other people want."

"No, Eliot, it’s not fair to you."

"Like hell," Eliot said, and laughed again before he began to cry. He could not contain it. He could only lean against Quentin and sob against him until his collar was soaked through, even though he did not deserve the comfort of Quentin’s embrace, of his warm breath against his temple.

His chest tightened and his throat burned and his mind would not stop circulating the only thoughts he could manage, which were: I am terrible and I don’t deserve you and Why, why the fuck are you here? Eliot’s whole body seemed to ache with the knowledge of it, what he was and what he wasn’t and what he had done. As sure as he knew the pattern of the freckles on his forearm and the way his cowlick would never settle, he knew that he did not deserve anything that Quentin might give him. Because he was the sort of person who could not see what love looked like, even when it was held out in front of him, in Are you being honest with me? and in Why the fuck not? and in every other question he could not answer in between. He could not perceive it, a sort of colorblindness, a genetic deficiency that could not be corrected through any sort of intervention but could only be diagnosed and at best, managed. Because he had known the love of a lifetime and the love of twenty-two, of seeing himself for the first time reflected in another person, and he still could not recognize it.

If he had seen it, he had never known how to make it stay.

"El," Quentin said, his fingers tight around Eliot’s shoulder. "It wasn’t just the quest. Of course it wasn’t. You were my partner for our actual, entire life. Do you really think I don’t know you, and how you can be? Of course I do. You can be a real asshole," he laughed. When he leaned to kiss Eliot’s forehead, Eliot felt the dampness of his tears.

Eliot couldn’t help it; he let out another sob against Quentin’s chest, pushing closer to him as he did so.

With a familiar stubbornness, Quentin said, "But you’re also good. You took care of me and you took care of our family and you did it so well that you made a metaphor into real life." He sighed and Eliot felt his own breathing begin to even out alongside Quentin’s chest, the steady beat of his heart. "I knew when we got back that I wanted it all again. And not just the good parts, I wanted to, I don’t know, I wanted to learn you again. I wanted to figure out when you needed space and when I needed to push you to let me in. I wanted to learn when to walk away because I’m being an asshole. I wanted all of that again and I wanted it with you." By the time he finished, his voice was quiet, like he was embarrassed or ashamed. Eliot forced himself to look up, to see Quentin’s tearstained, determined face.

"I don’t know, Q, I don’t— I fuck everything up. I just don’t understand how you could possibly see me that way."

Quentin let out a heavy sigh and shook his head, visibly frustrated in a way that filled Eliot up with a guilt he could not name for what it was. Because here he was, being given the rarest of all things: a second chance, and he could not stop himself from trying to ruin it.

And then, like some sign that Eliot resolutely did not believe in, Quasar chose that moment to hop up beside him and settle with two paws on his thigh. It was this that finally broke the spell of his miserable, racing thoughts and he let out a thin laugh through the snot and the tears as he stroked one finger over a tiny paw.

"I can’t believe he lets you touch his feet," Quentin said. Eliot thought, hoped he could hear a small smile in his voice.

Eliot laughed wetly, some small lightness in Quentin’s tone casting warmth over him. Unceremoniously, he wiped at his face with a sleeve. Because it was what people did, they bunched up their cotton sleeves and they wiped away the mess they felt but they did not throw it away; they simply lived with it there, for a while, until laundry was due. "Yeah, well. We bonded in the trenches. We’ve only just met but there’s a pandemic, you see."

"Mm," Quentin agreed, and reached out to stroke Quasar’s paw. For a minute, maybe longer, they sat together, a finger each on the cat’s paws as he yawned, his pink mouth and white, pointy teeth shining in the lamplight. Eliot wanted to look up, wanted to face Quentin, but he could only watch as Quasar licked at his paw, then a little at Eliot’s finger.

"He wants you to help him groom," Quentin said quietly.

"What?"

"He’s licking your finger so you can rub it on his face, where he can’t groom himself. Rub his nose with the spot he licked, you’ll see." Quentin took his hand and guided over it the cat’s face to press into the fur, then back so that Quasar could lick it again, then back over his nose, until Eliot understood and went through a few motions on his own. It felt good, Eliot thought, to be trusted with something so small.

Eliot kept on helping Quasar until he returned to licking his own paws, seemingly satisfied with Eliot’s job. The silence around them was not uncomfortable but not yet easy; Eliot knew there was much left to say.

Finally, Quentin took a deep breath. "Look," he said, and hooked his pinky over Eliot’s. "I’m not gonna relitigate all of this stuff right now, okay? I loved you then and I love you now and I spent months trying to get you back. Please, Eliot, just. I want you to know. I forgive you, for all of it."

Eliot could not think of anything to say to that. Forgiveness felt like not just another thing he didn’t deserve, but something he couldn’t even comprehend. He was not sure he had ever asked for forgiveness, let alone wanted it — but that wasn’t true, he knew as soon as he had the thought. He had been searching for forgiveness for as long as he had known how to speak.

"Do you forgive me?" Quentin said and his voice was— it trembled.

"What?" Eliot asked, astounded.

"Do you?"

"What the fuck for, Quentin?"

"You know, for my," he waved his hand in a gesture not unlike something Eliot might have expected from an Edwarian lecturer. "For my thesis statement on our love. For trying to sacrifice myself. For actually sacrificing myself. For all the dumb shit I’ve ever done."

"I don’t— would you take it back?"

"What, my thesis statement?" Quentin laughed, and then, with a fierce insistence: "Of course not. I’ve never backed down from an argument in my life." His expression seemed to harden for a moment before it relaxed. "God, Eliot, of course I don’t take it back. I wish I would have done it differently but I don’t take it back."

Eliot nodded and tucked his face into Quentin’s neck. "Please don’t take it back," he said, quietly, and kissed the stubbled skin there. He inhaled that cheap body wash again, faded beneath the scent of garlic and wine and of Eliot’s own detergent. It was more than he could have ever hoped to smell again, the scent of Quentin, not just alive but with the evidence of Eliot there beside it. He did not notice when he twisted his fingers into Quentin’s shirt.

"Hey," Quentin said, and he turned his head to press his nose beside Eliot’s. It was a gesture so intimate that Eliot, in all his years of sidestepping and arch speech, could hardly comprehend. And it was not the way Quentin moved closer to him, the softer skin of their faces touching even as Eliot would not open his eyes to see; it was not the way that Quentin’s fingers threaded in the hair at the back of his head. In the end, it was the way that, when he spoke, Quentin’s breath ghosted over his lips, alive, alive, as he said, "I don’t take it back. I never could."

Then Quentin’s lips were on his, nothing tentative in the way that he held Eliot’s neck or the way that he opened his mouth, just enough, as if to make sure that Eliot could not mistake him. Briefly, he thought of the snot drying on his face and the salt of his tears caked on his cheeks and how he was disgusting, a mess like always, but then Quentin took his hand in a gesture of confidence so unfamiliar and yet so right that Eliot could not help but think that maybe he could learn a thing or two by coming back from the dead.

"Do you believe me?" Quentin asked against his lips. He did not give Eliot time to respond before he moved back in to kiss at the corner of Eliot’s mouth, to press their cheeks together so that he could whisper into his ear, "Please believe me, El."

Eliot nodded, felt the scratch of his beard against Quentin’s day of stubble. His voice cracked as he said, "I believe you."

For a few minutes longer, they sat together, clutching one another close while Eliot’s breathing slowly evened out and his tears receded. He did his best to memorize the feeling of Quentin pressed against him, the warmth of his chest and the slight discomfort where his chin dug into his shoulder. He was not sure how, but he knew in that moment that whatever had brought Quentin back had done so permanently; he was certain that Quentin was there to stay.

"Let’s get some air," Quentin said when at last he pulled away. He rubbed one thumb across the thin skin beneath Eliot’s eye and cradled his face for a moment before he stood and helped Eliot to his feet and led him to the balcony.

Despite the warmer days, the evening chill had not yet given way to spring and Eliot shivered as he leaned to brace his hands on the concrete banister. He inhaled deeply, at last regaining some sense of composure as the cold air dried the last of his tears. Beside him, Quentin looked out over the city with wide eyes, sodium orange and industrial blue reflecting in them with a clarity that reminded Eliot all over again that less than two days ago, Quentin had not been alive, and Eliot had been alone. He shivered again.

"Cold?" Quentin asked.

Eliot shrugged and gave a small smile. "A little."

Quentin only hummed and wrapped an arm around his waist, tucking himself into Eliot’s side and leaving no choice but for Eliot to pull him in, hold him close. Eliot felt the muscles of his shoulders, which he had not realized were tense, go slack at the contact.

"That’s better," Quentin said. Eliot only let out a huff of a laugh and kissed the crown of his head. "El?"

"Yeah?"

"It’s gonna be okay. I know it doesn’t seem like it. But I’m here now, and we’ll figure it out. We’ll get through all of this."

Eliot held him more tightly. He closed his eyes and listened to the quiet street below, to Quentin’s breath, to the wind that rustled the faux ficus that Margo had purchased months ago, in an attempt to bring spring or joy or something like comfort to the apartment where they had all, at one time or another, made a home. He opened his eyes to look at it, with its tacky plastic foliage and woven basket, and wondered who Margo had become, who this person was that considered a fake plant suitable decor, and realized suddenly, desperately, that he wanted to know.

"Yeah," Eliot said, and kissed Quentin’s temple. "I believe you."