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The first thing he heard was scratching. Not fingernails on a chalkboard scratching or sandpaper on rough wood scratching. The kind of scratching you get when a cat slinks into your room at three in the morning, gently swiping at your door until it gives and it creeps in, determined to sleep on your chest and leave hair all over your comforter. The sound echoed in his ears and his brain, knocking around and bouncing off the walls of the tiny house in his head and destroying some plates in the process.
Scratch, scratch.
It was tentative, a scratch of a lottery ticket, just a quarter or a penny, maybe a hangnail, and the small hope that this would be it.
Quentin felt far away.
Underwater, his ears plugged with pressure and chlorine, goggles too tight, eyes squinted in the murky rippling light. He blinked and could see.
See?
See nothing.
It was dark, it was bright. There was film there, a slimy coating of something, making everything milky and spotted. Maybe he’d looked at the sun for too long. There was an afterimage, a black spot in his vision.
Once, when he was ten or eleven, there had been an eclipse. His dad had driven with him into the city where they stopped at the local museum. There had been a small observatory and they had gotten complimentary eclipse glasses. Sunglasses made of cardboard and special black plastic. Quentin had looked up, directly into the sun, and it hadn’t burned.
He burned.
His skin crackled and split. He had sparks beneath his fingertips, pulsating and electric. It felt like he had been sliding around in socks, gathering static electricity, waiting to zap someone. Or maybe fireworks. The pop that you feel in your chest when the noise echoes in the night. The rainlike shimmer of the light as it falls. Quentin made fireworks from his hands.
Years ago.
It was proof, proof of concept, proof of something.
A comfort in a prison made just for him, by him, by Julia.
Julia.
Quentin remembered another time, more fireworks. The fourth of July, his first year at Columbia, staying on campus because he couldn’t bare to go home and face his Dad. They’d had a fight- over something he couldn’t remember now. Julia had stayed with him. They snuck out of the dorms and climbed to the flat roof. Julia had “borrowed” some folding chairs. They’d sat together, the two of them, drinking cheap wine and eating microwaved popcorn, making plans for the future. Quentin had brought a tiny portable radio. Big band music played. The fireworks cracked and thundered. Quentin had shivered in the night and Julia had offered him her coat. He hadn’t taken it.
Quentin shivered.
His body ached.
Ached the way it did when he had gotten old, so old. Too old to lift the grandkids, to climb more than a step up the ladder. His body had been heavy. All parts of him sagging towards the ground and the dirt. The weight of it hadn’t left him- after. It hadn’t happened but it had, and Quentin felt it.
He had been young again and not.
Old again and not.
His bones creaked. He could feel them, knitting together.
Bit by bit.
Excruciating. Like when you’re a child just starting to grow, and you’ve been walking all day but no matter how you sit, how you lay, your ankles scream out, sore and stretching, your body growing and changing and growing. Quentin was something. Changing, maybe.
Intangible to tangible.
Transparent to Opaque.
His muscles spasmed and cramped. His fingers clenched involuntarily. He curled in on himself, curled inward and inward. The outside was pain and death and death and more death and he was- other.
His eyes were open or shut or gone. To see and be seen was a missed opportunity. Something lost to him, since Eliot had shot the Monster, since Alice had said she loved him, since before, before. Quentin remembered being twelve and hating himself. He remembered sixteen. The hospital. Dad in the chair that was way too small, nodding off, a stack of Fillory books sliding off his lap. Quentin in his uncomfortable bed and scratchy gown. Julia rushing into the room and telling her sister “I’ll be fine, I’ll text you. I need to be here.” Quentin’s wrists aching. His whole body sore and tired and worn.
He felt stretched thin, too little butter on toast, too little Quentin for the Quest. His ribs poked at him, his hair tangled in front of his face. Quentin flexed his firework fingers and sparks flew.
He blinked and blinked and blinked. His body felt darned, like an old sock. Knit together, sewing and stitched. Molded and shaped. Formed with a loving touch, like Diana for Hippolyta. Someone had made him. Swiped at his brow and washed him clean. There was a kiss in the corner of his mouth, and the memory of lips on his brow. A slap on the back, a firm handshake, an embrace.
Quentin’s throat was sore.
He coughed and coughed and coughed up dust. He rose to life with a hacking sound, like a child struggling to breath. He swallowed air and blinked away dust. He wiggled his fingers, toes. Breathed out through his nose, breathed in. Pushed the hair out of his eyes and felt the weight of life under his skin. Felt his heart, beating.
“Welcome back.” Someone said.
Quentin felt himself smile.