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Eliot’s busy calculating how long until he can reasonably go for lunch when Quentin Coldwater saves his life.
Or, as other people would probably phrase it, when Quentin gives him a plausible excuse to stop Alastair Fenwick from prattling at him about Lorian herb exports or whatever other snoozefest he was bringing up this week. Eliot wouldn’t know. He invariably tunes them all out.
Quentin does it with three awkward words, what Eliot considers as maybe the three most beautiful words in existence:
“Uh, excuse me?”
When Quentin says those words, for a moment Eliot isn’t delighted. Because the view doesn’t compute. Quentin! Quentin Coldwater! In Fillory! And damn, just like the finest wines that Eliot adores, has Quentin Coldwater aged well. He’d been attractive before, but age—or was it maturity?—has been far kinder on Quentin than he’d ever been on himself in his entire life.
“Fenwick, you’re excused,” Eliot says, the instant that realization kicks in.
Alistair Fenwick starts spluttering, and Eliot levels his most Kingly look at him. “Or are you seriously telling me that you are going to protest an order from your High King, when he’s welcoming a Former King of Fillory to the throne room? Because Queen Janet has made some pretty good amendments to our castle dungeons, I can arrange to give you some first-hand experience. First-wrist, second-wrists, both ankles, maybe your—“
“I’ll be on my way, Sire,” Alistair yelps, starting to shuffle backwards while frantically bowing like one of those cheap tacky nodding dogs Eliot hawked one summer trying to make enough money for a decent CD player. Christ, those were terrible days to remember. “My deepest and most sincere apologies, your majesty—and your, uh, former majesty.”
“Nice to see you again,” Quentin says, politely, as Alistair smiles obsequiously before taking off at a clip that’s so frantic Eliot can still hear him when Quentin carefully shuts the door behind him.
“Do you even remember him?” Eliot asks as he skids off the throne excitedly, but he doesn’t really give Quentin time to answer—he just wraps his arms around Quentin, and sighs inwardly at how right it feels when Quentin automatically melts into the hug. He’s solid and real and here, finally here! Eliot would be busy checking his own sanity (surely one should be suspicious when your favorite daydream comes true?) if he wasn’t already busy surreptitiously smelling Quentin’s hair. Was that weird? Well. It’s not like Janet’s around to notice him doing it, and Quentin’s about as observant of things like that as a brick. Eliot should know. He’s never told anyone, but he’s got years of surreptitious Quentin-sniffing under his belt.
That phrasing is so creepy that there may be a reason he’s never told anyone about it. Eliot thinks if they could just sniff Quentin too, maybe they’d understand. He smells like adventure and home and day-old coffee. Eliot must be as weird as Janet tells him he is, because he’s into it.
Eliot pulls back before the welcome home hug becomes too awkward, but he preens when Quentin looks a little disappointed. He inclines his head over to the bar, and thank goodness, Quentin’s still the same old wine lush—Quentin immediately follows Eliot, and his gaze is definitely going to the line of Fillorian reds that Eliot’s been working on for the last few years.
“Alice not with you?” Eliot asks, because it sounds less desperate than how long do I have you just to myself?
Quentin looks baffled for a moment, but then startles, like a difficult equation has just clicked for him and now makes brilliant sense. “Oh, no. Uh, turns out I didn’t get all the niffin out of her after all? She’s been working with Professor Van Der Weghe for a couple of years now. It’s a project in time—turns out it’s quite handy to find out what spells were being taught in early magical foundation when one of your research team can randomly bop back in time as an invisible observer whenever they feel like it.”
“Oh,” Eliot says. Wait. That’s probably not what a friend should say in this situation. “I’m sorry?” he tags on, belatedly. The question mark is an accident. He doesn’t know if he really means it.
“I’m not,” Quentin says, and Eliot’s surprised to hear no note of that being a lie anywhere in Quentin’s voice or on his face.
Eliot pours them both a generous glass of wine. “When did you get into Fillory?”
“Uh, actually about four minutes ago.”
Eliot blinks. “The fountain never used to be that accommodating when Ember and Umber were still alive.”
“They still might not be. I didn’t come by fountain.”
“Oh.” Eliot takes a long draw of wine, focusing on his senses. Scent: woody notes from the wine; faint scent of lingering coffee-and-adventure from Quentin. Hearing: his own heartbeat loudly in his ears, which always happens when he’s mildly confused. Touch: the glass is cool and solid under his fingers. Taste: the wine—rich berries and a woody undertone. Sight: Quentin, his shock of white hair, and his pretty eyes, and his strong capable hands; older, now, there’s a few lines at the corner of his eyes, an extra crease where he smiles. His shoulders seem broader too. If this is an hallucination, it’s impressively real. “Another liminal space, like the bed in the Chatwin house?”
“Nope,” Quentin says, and Eliot narrows his eyes, because Quentin’s pink mouth is slightly lifted at the edges in an amused smirk, and his voice is sing-song. Eliot had almost forgotten how much Quentin enjoyed being a dramatic little shit.
“Did you click your heels together and say there’s no place like home?”
Quentin laughs. “I walked here.”
“You walked—“ Eliot started and stopped. “You got the land working.”
Quentin nods. “Yeah.”
“That’s amazing,” Eliot says, honestly. Plum had told him about the failed one, and Quentin had told Eliot that he might try it again. But then he’d left with Alice, and Eliot had realized too late that with the time difference...that might be it. By the time Quentin got it in his head to come back—especially with Alice to distract him—hundreds of years could have passed and Eliot would be long dead. He's very glad to be wrong.
“I explored it for a while, but—before Alice left—we suspected it was connected to Fillory somehow. I’m sorry it took me so long to figure out where.”
“Your land connects to Fillory,” Eliot echoes. Which. Yeah. Isn’t that basically what Quentin had already intimated?
“Yeah. Is that okay? It’s not by much. It comes out somewhere in the Darkling Woods.”
“That’s more than 4 minutes away from here.” Eliot tilts his head. “That’s a hell of a teleportation spell, considering Poppy and Janet set up anti-portal wards when we rebuilt the castle—“
“Oh, that might explain it. Why it didn’t work like I thought it would. It’s not exactly a portal.”
“Explain,” Eliot says, firmly.
Once you set Quentin off he can talk for hours in more specific detail than most people like, but it seems like the years have at least helped him get his rambling thoughts more in order, and—yeah maybe it’s still in too much detail for anyone to really enjoy hearing—but Eliot’s not exactly listening to every word. He doesn’t mind, not when it’s Quentin. It’s just nice to have him here, especially now Eliot realizes the truth about life—that he’s only allowed Quentin in his presence for short, beautiful bursts, so he has to appreciate and enjoy those brief times to the maximum.
Except—as Quentin prattles about bridges and time and resolutions and the quantum-mechanics of the universe—Eliot does tune in on the words. Because it seems like Quentin is saying... the impossible.
“Wait a second,” Eliot holds up a hand. “You’re saying you created a spell so that Fillory and Earth move at the same time now?”
Quentin grins. “Yeah! The land being a physical bridge almost did it, but there was still a time lag—so I need to form some kind of—quantum tunnel—to join the chronological parts of Earth and Fillory the same way as I connected them physically. All it needed was for me to fit a permanent physical door on Earth, and a permanent one in Fillory. I guess that’s how it circumvented the anti-portal wards, because the spell itself turned out more like carpentry. I had to make a frame. By hand. It’s a little bit wonky.”
“I bet it looks amazing, really like it fits the rest of the castle architecture,” Eliot says, because Quentin’s there and unlike the majority of Fillory, Quentin is highly fluent in sarcasm. "I presume it's somewhere in the castle if it took you four minutes to get here?"
“It's nothing a little paint and varnish won’t fix later,” Quentin’s cheeks pinken a little. “I set up the first door in Plum’s townhouse. But setting up the connecting door to Fillory wasn’t so easy. I had to...guess.”
“The second door is here in the castle?” Eliot blurts, realizing now how Quentin got to the throne room in under four minutes.
“Yeah.” Quentin grimaces. “That’s okay, right?”
Eliot nearly clocks Quentin just for being so irritatingly oblivious about just how okay it is, because if Eliot is understanding this right—Quentin has built a permanent doorway to Fillory. Quentin can come to Fillory any time he likes. He can see Eliot—every day. Any day. Even if he decides to fuck off from Fillory again, Quentin can come back and decades won't pass inbetween. Eliot could—go back to Earth too (he’s surprised by how little this intrigues him.)
“Of course it’s all right,” Eliot enthuses noisily, because you have to tell Quentin shit in actual human words for him to realise the obvious. “This is great! You can visit all the time, Janet can get some actual caffeine and actually become something approaching human—yeah. It’s okay. Jesus. Wow.”
“Good. Because I was worried you might not be glad of me randomly butchering a wall of your home without consent.”
“You could take out the whole building if it meant I could see you again,” Eliot says, unthinkingly, and it’s not until Quentin’s eyes widen a little that Eliot realizes he never meant to be so honest. Oops. “I may have missed you a little bit,” Eliot mumbles.
“I missed you too,” Quentin says. “Just as much, actually.”
Eliot presses his mouth together. “You don’t have to lie to me just because I’ve made things mildly awkward by admitting I occasionally have functioning human emotions that are a bit—“
“Come on,” Quentin says, cutting through Eliot’s ramble—and he forcibly detaches Eliot’s empty wine glass from his grip, places it carelessly down on the bar, and grabs Eliot’s hand before tugging Eliot with him. Since when did Quentin Coldwater become so forthright?
Eliot lets himself be tugged, and decides he won’t tell Quentin how much he likes it. One embarrassing truth per reunion is more than enough.
“The spell relied on a verbal command to dictate where it ended up,” Quentin explains, still tugging Eliot along down the hallway. They hurry by a couple of gawping maids who giggle after they pass. “I plugged in some parameters. They had to be specific enough to work, but vague enough that I wouldn’t put the door in a latrine or bisect any of the palace staff. And I supported it with some old Grecian magic, the kind that picks up on subconscious intent while you’re casting? It mixes well into the Latinate base I was using for the foundations of the bridging magic, it lets me use Fillory’s inherent magicness to power the temporal corridor on a permanent basis. I basically asked the Fillory door to... go home.”
“Home,” Eliot repeats, and Quentin stops hurrying, and lets go of Eliot’s hand to push open the nearest door. It’s one of the castle’s already pre-existing doors, and Eliot peers through it dumbfoundedly, to see it’s... his room.
It’s his bedroom. And on the short wall, where there used to be a tapestry of naked men dancing under a double moon, there’s a door now. It’s slightly crooked. There’s a curved pattern on it, a blue swirl that turns into grey, that reminds Eliot suddenly somehow of two youths who drunkenly took a boat onto the river when neither of them knew how to row.
The door knob is etched with a design that looks like a small, silver pocket watch.
Quentin asked for the permanent door to Fillory to go home. And home, to Quentin’s subconscious, is... Eliot’s bedroom.
When Eliot turns his startled gaze from the sight and back to Quentin, he can see that Quentin knows Eliot’s already figured it out.
Quentin’s door could have been anywhere in the castle, but it’s here.
Quentin’s home is Eliot.
“I guess as you can see,” Quentin says, “I may have missed you a little bit too.” Quentin looks nervous, his cheeks flushed, but he looks defiant too, and tense, like he’s daring Eliot to say something.
He visibly relaxes when Eliot smiles at him, slow and wide.