Work Text:
He walks in on Eliot and Julia hugging in the living room.
Which is an insane way to think about it. He knows that. Walk in on sort of implies a— crime being committed, or something insidious or whatever, right, but it’s… not. Obviously it’s not. His brain poses the question, Should we be worried that Eliot is cheating on us with Julia? and then immediately, like, incinerates itself with the total ludicrousness of that notion, so. It’s not that.
If you think about it, it’s not any more weird than that time he accidentally interrupted Eliot and Alice having some kind of heart-to-heart on the couch, sitting so close their knees were touching, their hands folded up together in Alice’s lap. It’s way less weird than the time he came home to find Alice and Julia hugging in the kitchen, with the way they jumped apart and surreptitiously wiped their eyes, like him catching them comforting each other was at least half as bad as him catching them burying a body together, or something.
He doesn’t have all that much time to think about it, though.
“Hey, Q,” Julia says. She drops back down on her heels, because she’s not wearing shoes and, Quentin’s just now realizing, Eliot is like a whole foot taller than her. “You’re back.” She’s smiling, as she does her happy, bouncy skip-walk across the room toward him. She’s in a good mood, because she’s… friends (?) with his boyfriend (?) and hanging out with friends puts people in good moods, so. That’s normal. This is normal.
“Yup,” he says. She leans in to pop a kiss against his right cheek as she passes, which— that’s still— statistically normal, he guesses, if you average it out across the whole lifetime of their friendship, but, you know. Less.
“You better be ready,” she calls as she heads back to her bedroom. “You’re my sounding board for this metacomp work today, you can’t wriggle out of it.”
Eliot sweeps out around the other arm of the couch. Quentin tries to do something with his face that will communicate, I know this looks basically normal but it feels super weird, can you please explain why and also do you need help?, but Eliot only smiles at him, too. “Hi.” He bends to press a kiss against Quentin’s left temple. “Lunch? I have to run, I’m Margo’s bitch boy for the day, but I saved some risotto for you if you want it.”
There’s what? “You made risotto? For lunch?”
“Oh, yeah.” Julia comes back out with a notebook stuck under her armpit and her hair pulled up into a messy bun. “Have some, it’s crazy good. You like salmon.”
“You made salmon risotto for lunch?”
Eliot kisses him again instead of answering, right on the crown of his head. This time it’s definitely to hide his smile, the curve of it wicked and smug against Quentin’s scalp, so, like. What the actual fuck is happening right now?
“Enjoy,” Eliot says. Julia waves absentmindedly as she tosses herself down on the couch. “I’ll text you later, yeah?”
“Uh, yeah,” Quentin says, because he can’t come up with anything else to say fast enough. “Let me know when you’ll be back, I guess?”
Eliot winks before he shuts the door behind him.
The project Julia is working on is something for Fogg; that’s all Quentin really knows. She does that a lot, picking up what basically amounts to consulting work for Brakebills, but she doesn’t like to talk about it. The Brakebills part, at least.
“So I had an idea on how to beef up the throughput,” she tells him, notebook flipped open on her knee, before he’s even managed to sit all the way down. “I want them to have options when they actually go to implement. But it means I have to transition from Popper 37 straight into the Kahananui Cage, and, I dunno.” She demonstrates, dry tuts over her lap, and— yeah, he can see what she means. There’s a lot of room for error between the outward roll of the wrists and the inward clasp of the palms, more so than there looks. “I can do it, but I’m not sure how it’ll translate to an actual casting.”
“Yeah,” he says, and he shifts around to face her. “Here, let me…”
He still feels weird about it, sometimes. Julia needing him to test drive her metacomp spells feels to him like... Debussy needing clumsy middle schoolers to play Clair de Lune for him, or something. They’ve run into problems before, where Quentin couldn’t match the rhythm of one of Julia’s spells, either because the tuts were too quick or the threads of magic were too different, and Julia has always just… taken it, and gone back to the drawing board. She always says something like, “There’s no point if it’s not usable, Q,” but they both know— If she could cast it herself, they wouldn’t be having any of these conversations at all.
This one ends up being fine, though. He gets it on the first try, and it doesn’t even feel like a fluke. “I wouldn’t give it to the first year Illusion kids, maybe,” he tells her, “but yeah, definitely doable.”
“Perfect,” she says, and she’s sitting up on her heels, tucking into her notebook again, happy enough. Some days that’s the best any of them can get: happy enough. “That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks, Q.”
He sits up to fish around in the chip bowl on the coffee table. “Oh,” he starts, and the little smile that curls on her face is… not auspicious. “Uh, hey, I just remembered. I wanted to ask you...” Julia raises her chin, to show him she’s listening without taking her eyes off her notebook. “About Eliot?”
Her eyes snap up to him, her pen looping around one last time and then going still. “What about Eliot?”
“Nothing,” he says reflexively, and then, when her eyes narrow, “I mean, it’s not a big deal or anything. I just noticed you’re— getting along with him? More?”
She frowns, like he’s actually asking her a question, and she actually has to think about it.
“That face doesn’t really make me feel better, Jules.”
“Sorry,” she says, “you were feeling bad about Eliot and me getting along?”
“No,” he says, because— no. That would be stupid, for him to— “Obviously that’s not what’s happening.”
“Obviously,” she repeats.
“You’re both really important figures in my life,” he says. Julia raises her eyebrows, the grown-up facial tic equivalent of her circling the word ‘figures’ and writing Phrasing? next to it in red pen. “I want you guys to get along. It would obviously make me happy if you could be… friends, or close to it, or something. But, you know, I’m not also just gonna ignore the fact that there’s a lot of shit— a lot of shit— that isn’t going to evaporate overnight. So if you guys are, I don’t know, forcing something that isn’t there yet, or- or putting on a show for my sake or something, then—”
“Okay,” she interrupts. “This is fun and all, but I’m gonna go ahead and put you out of your misery.” She goes back to her notebook, and then, just like it’s normal, says, “I’m giving him a best friend test.”
Jesus. Of course. He doesn’t know why he expected any different.
“And you’re doing that,” he says slowly, “by making him cook for you?”
“No, he did that on his own.” She starts marking her scratch paper with the kind of quick, sharp lines that tell him she’s multitasking this conversation with differential equations. “I’m pretty sure he knows already that something’s up. Which he should, if he’s smart.” She smiles, first at her paper, and then belatedly up at him. “Which he needs to be, if he’s going to date you.”
“He’s not going to date me. He is dating me.”
She shrugs. “Semantics, but sure.”
“Jules.”
“Q,” she parrots back. “Look, it’s fine. You don’t need to worry. It’s like law school, right? Only the weakest candidates think all they have to do is pass the test.” She pats his forearm on her way to grab another handful of chips. “He’s ahead of the curve.”
“Jules,” he says again. “That’s not even remotely the point.”
The thing is, he’s not even actually, like, mad about it. He’s kind of annoyed, sure, but only in a fruitless, ingrained, prehistoric way, the same way he’s always been kind of annoyed at her, since before either of them hit puberty. He gets pissed at Julia for being overbearing the same way other people get pissed at the universe for existing. Like, what are you gonna do about it? Nothing, that’s what.
It’s stupid. It doesn’t matter. So he doesn’t know why it’s still— churning, like this, in the pit of his stomach.
“And that attitude,” she says, smiling wide as she crunches open-mouthed through a single chip, just to make sure she annoys him as much as possible, apparently, “is exactly why you need me.”
“Whatever,” he says, because that’s all he knows to do in this situation. It’s all he can do. Let it go. “Just— You can’t do what you did to Trey. Remember?” She remembers. He knows she does. The way her smile goes feline at the edges gives it away. “Also, you can’t tell him about Trey.”
She shakes her writing hand out, and swings her pinky towards him. “Deal,” she says. “Now repeat back the Arabic for me so I can write it down.”
“Oh, yeah,” Eliot tells him later that night. “I’m totally buttering her up.”
“Wait, what?” This is not a conversation Quentin can have while spooning. He wiggles until Eliot gives him enough space to roll over. “You knew about this?” Eliot smiles at him, one hand smoothing indulgently over his ribs. Quentin can hear it in his head: Oh, Q. “You’re going along with this?”
“It’s like law school,” Eliot explains.
“Okay, stop.” Quentin pushes onto his elbows, but Eliot only blinks mildly up at him. “I get why Julia said that, but why are you saying that?”
“What?” Eliot says. “You think just because I’m hot I can’t get into Harvard Law?”
Quentin doesn’t know what they’re talking about anymore. “No,” he says, and he’s never unironically used the word ‘dumbfounded’ before, but now seems like it might be the time. “I wasn’t saying— What?”
Eliot laughs. “Don’t worry about it, baby.” He winds one arm tighter around Quentin’s waist, to draw him back down to the bed. He’s humming now, too, a few bars from a song Quentin doesn’t recognize. “Anyway, it’s fine. I’ve got a whole system. I’ll pass with flying colors.”
And, like— it’s not that important. It’s stupid, but it’s harmless, and Quentin meant to let it go. He was planning on letting it go. Really, he was.
“I know this is always shocking news to everyone,” he snaps, and he even— he hears it, but he can’t stop, “but Julia doesn’t actually have total creative control over my life.”
Eliot’s hand stills. “She knows that,” he says.
“Do you know that?”
Eliot’s expression does something strange, or— maybe it’s the shadows, but Quentin doesn’t think so. He shifts enough to pull one hand out from under the blanket, to trace Quentin’s hair back with his fingertips.
“Obviously,” he says eventually. “But that’s not really what it’s about. For me, at least.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” Eliot says. Sighs, really. Quentin can feel it like this, tucked together from hip to chest. “I like the idea of running the mundanity gauntlet with you, I guess. You know, spending twenty minutes catching each other up on our boring-as-fuck days. Deciding what to have for dinner. Getting the best friend shovel talk.” The shadows shift again. Quentin thinks Eliot might be smiling now, or close to it; he can picture it in his head, at least, Eliot’s soft, self-deprecating smile. “Normal stuff. For some definition of ‘normal,’ anyway.”
Which is—
God.
Quentin is really fucking stupid.
It hits him, like- like a two-by-four, like a rake in the face, like an anvil in a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s that level of stupid: staring-him-straight-in-the-face stupid. Physics-defying stupid.
Julia. The ancient, familiar lines of their friendship, worn in like a fossil record. Quentin starts dating someone new, Julia puts them through her best friend test. They pass or they fail, and then Quentin refuses to take her advice about any it.
Julia, who hasn’t been able to do a drop of magic for over a year now. Julia, who’s resorting to doing metacomp work for a system and a school that abandoned her, just so that she can feel close to it again. Julia, who was going through all that, and still had to watch him—
Quentin crowds forward. He hides his stupid face into the crook of Eliot’s neck, squeezes his stupid, stinging eyes shut when he feels Eliot’s palm settle against the back of his head. “You should know that it’s not just a shovel talk,” he manages. “It’s, like, a whole thing. A whole Julia thing.”
“Okay, well,” Eliot amends patiently, “I also had to track down a whale heart for my best friend who rules an alien planet today, while you spent the afternoon eating chips on the couch, so. Can’t win them all, I guess.”
Quentin laughs wetly against Eliot’s neck. Eliot doesn’t mention it, even when Quentin has to— take a second, to get himself back together. Maybe a couple of seconds.
He wishes they didn’t have to do this. He wishes they didn’t have to go through any of this: Julia and Eliot, Alice and Margo and Penny and Kady, and... himself, even, most days. But they’re here. The only way out is through. Together.
“Let me know how it goes, I guess,” he mumbles, when he can trust his voice again. “I’m gonna need some advance warning if it turns out I’m, like, contractually obligated to break up with you or something.”
He feels Eliot’s smile curl against his skin, the ticklish vibration of his laugh. “Sure,” he says. “You’ll be first on my list.”
They stay like that, bundled together. They’ll wake up four hours from now, probably, peeling off of each other from all the sweat, between Quentin’s blankets and Eliot’s duvet and the both of them running hot, but— you know, that’s four hours from now. Now, Quentin wants to be here, where he can feel the familiar cadence of Eliot’s voice, and Eliot can feel the rise and fall of Quentin’s breath.
“What was that song?” he remembers to ask. “I liked it.”
Eliot’s chin settles gently on top of his head. “But perhaps, if I made it more clear,” he murmur-sings, soft and drowsy and far away, “that you belong right here, you wouldn’t have to go.” Or… maybe it’s Quentin who’s far away, falling asleep. “‘Cause you know that I’m so much...”
So… it’s fine.
Eliot makes eggs for breakfast the next morning. He takes a couple extra minutes to make a spare vegan omelette while Quentin is making coffee, and sets it aside on a plate at the end of the counter, wrapped in foil and an entropic stabilizer.
Julia has to be on campus early. She hates being on campus at all, hates giving Fogg and Brakebills an inch, even when she’s already exhausted all other options to get around it. She’s always late because she doesn’t want to go, and then she’s always stressed out because she’s late.
“Morning, Ms. Wicker,” Eliot says, when she finally comes clattering out of her room. “Breakfast?”
“Holy shit.” She snatches the omelette off the plate with one hand and hooks the other around Eliot’s neck in a rushed half-hug. “You’re a lifesaver. For real.”
“Good luck,” Eliot tells her. “Give Henry hell for me.”
“Don’t know any other way to do it,” she answers, and then she squeezes Quentin’s shoulder on her way out, eyebrows raised in the grown-up facial tic equivalent of her texting him I TOLD U BITCH in the middle of chem lab after Macy Reynolds asked him to homecoming in front of everyone.
So it’s fine.
Julia can protect him however she’s convinced herself she has to, and Eliot can prove whatever he’s decided he needs to prove, and Quentin will… He’ll be here, until they’re both done.
He can promise them that.