Archive of Our Own ^beta

Some love stories don’t have a happy ending. Some are tragedies. Sometimes a person is gone, and no amount of luck or love – no matter how real, or un-repressed, or potentially life-altering – can change that.

Luckily, theirs isn’t one of those stories.

Eliot is alive, for a given definition of the word. Sure, he has his vices, still (including but not limited to bourbon, misery), but he also has his little joys (bourbon, those moments before you wake up and realize what’s real). He sees his (remaining) friends semi-regularly, when they’re on this plane of existence. He’s living with several of them in a virtually rent-free apartment in New York, if you don’t count the occasional highly dangerous magical errand, and – so what if his hands still tremble? So what if he can’t cast longer spells without having to – so what?

He’s pouring himself another generous double finger of bourbon on an unremarkable and overcast Tuesday when there’s a knock at the door of the otherwise empty apartment, a ping on the wards that almost seems – no, that’s weird.

He winds his way around the unnecessarily expensive end table to open the door. He stubs his toe anyway – fuck Kady and her pointy aesthetic – so the door is halfway open before he sees who has managed to ping so weirdly off the wards that he himself set up.

“Eliot,” breathes Quentin in the doorway, eyes wide with urgency, and then both the bottle and glass Eliot has expertly balanced in his hand shatter immediately on the hardwood floor.

It’s – Quentin is standing in the doorway of the apartment.

His hair is shorter than Eliot remembers, but Eliot would have to say that by far his most notable quality at present is the fact that he is inexplicably alive. He’s had dreams like this. He’s also had nightmares like this. His mouth feels dry, the wound in his gut aches, and if this isn’t a dream –

Eliot feels his mouth open, then close. “I–”

Q starts a little at the noise, like he’d forgotten Eliot’s mouth was for speaking. Still, his eyes are clear, focused on Eliot, and still just as brown and warm and safe as he says “Eliot, it’s me.”

It’s not an unreasonable statement, given their history, but it is perhaps telling that Eliot’s first response to that is I didn’t even take any pills today. ”What the fuck –”

“Eliot.” This probably hallucinatory Quentin is pressing on the wards, because of course they aren’t keyed to him, he’s not real or alive – “Eliot, I know this is fucked, but it’s me. You aren’t drunk, or high –” He looks at the floor, then at Eliot. ”Okay, maybe you are, but I swear I’m here.” He takes a step forward, though the ward keeps him from being close enough to touch. Eliot can see that Q’s hand is shaking a little, reaching out at the level of his chest. “Eliot…” Quentin appears to take a deep breath, and then he smiles, just a little. Eliot’s chest aches. “...peaches and plums. I’m al–”

“Don’t.” Eliot snaps, before he can stop himself, a hand rubbing over the pocket of his button down. “Just – don’t.” Not if it’s not real. He makes a frame with his fingers, then pauses and grabs a lens off of the table near the door, from a bowl of magical detritus and junk mail. Last week Kady had a full conversation with a version of herself that was actually some form of obscure genie, so he’s pretty certain this will reveal whatever the (remarkably good) illusion of Quentin is masking.

When he looks at this Quentin through the frame of his hands, and then through the lens, there’s a familiar glow of magic around him, different from the familiar static of their wards, and his heart hurts at the way he recognizes its shades, its flavors. His fingers begin to shake, and he places it back down, quiets the tremor with his other hand, takes a deep breath. He looks up. “Q?”

Q smiles, and the frown forming on his face has evaporated, just like that. “Yeah? Yeah.”

There are no words. How? Why?.... How? Except. “If you were a figment of my imagination, you’d have longer hair.” Q opens his mouth, but before he can respond, Eliot is stepping into the pieces of shattered glass to get a closer look, ignoring the crunch under his slippers. “Also, how the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Q says, and it’s in that moment that Eliot finally is close enough to touch, so he reaches out into the chill of the hallways to brush his hand against Quentin’s wrist. It is warm and there is – he’s gripping tight enough to feel it – a faint pulse. “I’m here, and I don’t know.”

“Well,” Eliot chokes on the word, the point of contact on Q’s wrist too much for him, just now, to breathe fully. He feels his pulse in his ears, his traitorous heart a rabbit-quick symphony of want. His fingers tighten of their own accord, like he can pin the pulse there with sheer force of will. “I guess you’d better come in, then.”

“Aren’t you, like, a god?” he asks Julia, more powered by spite and painkillers than any kind of hope at this point.

She snaps the volume of historical spellcraft closed with a barely concealed sigh, her other hand resting on her mug of something warm, and he feels the pity oozing from her every pore. Poor Eliot, who just can’t let the adults handle it.

“You know I’m not still –” She takes a moment and breathes sharply, her nails putting half-moons in the soft cover of the book. “If I could have brought him back like that,” she enunciates carefully, and he feels the blade of the words on his throat, none of the warmth there that he associates with her attempts to rouse him to activity over the last few weeks, “don’t you think it would have happened already?”

He’s poking a wasp’s nest, and he knows it, but he can’t seem to stop himself. He sways sharply on his feet, his left leg taking too much of his weight, and he sees her react to the sudden movement – the flinch that she (– and Alice at dinner the other night – Penny, when they ran into each other in the hallway in the light of early dawn –) tries to hide.

He forgets, sometimes, that when that thing was fucking up his body, it was also in this space, in this world, sowing the seeds of fear, disgust, and hatred that Eliot gets the fortune of reaping.

“You should go back to bed,” she says, not meeting his eye again. He hates that – knows why, but that doesn’t make the roiling in his broken torso feel any less unjust. “Margo will kill you if that wound reopens.”

“Well, she put it there,” he replies, childish, “so she can go fuck herself too.” In another life it would have been charming, probably, he thinks – the delivery. Rakish. But now he just bites his lip to deliberately stop himself from adding and she’s not here, is she?

“You really should get some rest.” Julia’s rasp is even throatier than usual, and even under enforced bedrest twenty-three hours a day Eliot knows that she’s been chainsmoking instead of sleeping or eating. He’s jealous. His nerves feel as frayed as his internal organs, and what he wouldn’t give for his old, reliable vices. All he has now are self-hatred and boring prescription narcotics.

“Where are you in this?” he asks instead, gesturing to the books and leaning heavily on the chair next to her. “How close are you? When can we –”

She looks at him with something unbearably like pity. “Eliot, you really need to –”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do.” He breathes through the pain as the axe-wound in his gut throbs, eventually saying through gritted teeth “what I need is for the people who claimed to love him to find a fucking way to fix this.”

There’s an edge to her voice now. “Eliot.”

“Of all people, I thought you’d get that we need to do something.” Julia tilts her head, but Eliot can’t seem to stop himself. “I thought you weren’t willing to take no for an answer. But,” he says, and he sees the arrow hit its mark, acid in his tone, “I guess we all grieve in different ways, now. Some of us make tea.”

She pauses, her lips taunt, and he sees her facade crack, right down the middle. “Fuck you, Eliot.” She gathers the books off the coffee table and heads in the direction of her bedroom. The “take your fucking pain medicine” she hisses over her shoulder doesn’t dull the impact of the exit.

Eliot moves to the couch, alone.

He sends a bunny to Margo first, instinctually, but follows it up with a message to Alice and then one to Julia. It takes him a moment to come up with the phrasing, because how do you even –

He eventually settles on ‘Q IS HERE NOW?,’ and gets a predictable “WHAT DID YOU TAKE” back from Margo almost immediately.

He knows that he should be asking more questions, but the breath driven out of him at the door hasn’t really shown signs of returning as Q delicately pieces the shards of the glass and bottle back together with sure, certain movements of his fingers, setting them on the coffee table. He is sitting now, this Quentin, in pretty much exactly the space on the couch where Eliot had been drinking his sorrow. Eliot wants to listen to every noise he makes, every word and breath, drink it in, but he knows he’s only picking up part of Quentin’s (–Quentin here and alive and how the fucking hell–) desperate attempts to fill the silence. He drops onto the opposite end of the couch, putting his hands firmly on his thighs to stop them shaking. It almost works.

“–know this is weird, but I don’t really remember getting here, I was just outside the door and I knew you were inside, El, and I had to knock, because there’s something – it’s something important, and I need to talk to you – all of you, but we need to –”

He looks up, at his name, and there’s something in Q’s eyes, his very own brand of kryptonite. “Q,” is all he says, and he’s not even drunk, but Jesus, his voice is hoarse. “Q, I –”

He sits back against the arm of the couch, facing so that his eyes can remain on Quentin at all times. He’s still not entirely convinced this isn’t a hallucination, but he’s sort of afraid that if he touches Q again he’ll break something and find out, one way or another.

“El, I know it’s–” Quentin is looking at him, eyes wide, and Eliot wants to call him on it. What? What do you know it is?

There’s a noise at the door, a familiar presence walking through their wards, and Eliot moves away from the hand that Quentin is hovering towards him, covering it by standing and moving towards the door. There’s the matter of Q being a hallucination. And then there’s the matter of if he isn’t a hallucination, and Eliot touching him again and just… not being able to stop. His fingers itch, still, and he rubs them, curses the residual stiffness there from whatever they were used for in his months as a puppet (he prefers ‘puppet’ to almost all the alternative terms that were presented to him, but the aches in his joints remain the same, regardless).

Julia is there first, windswept and skeptical, a look of pity on her face at the sight of Eliot until she sees Q behind Eliot and freezes. Eliot releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding (she can see him too), gripping the doorway for stability, and when Julia breezes past him she takes the time to place a steadying hand on his arm. He’s immensely, pathetically grateful for the contact. “Q?” She is crying pretty much immediately, and Eliot envies her the release.

“Q, how are you – did Eliot –?” she looks over, briefly, and Eliot, who is grasping his now-empty bourbon glass like a lifeline, gives her a quick shake of his head. Quentin stumbles through the same thematic “I-don’t-knows” for a second time, and they sit while Julia appears to drink in his babbling. Eliot understands the impulse, and as has happened so many times with Julia Wicker, feels an awful, jealous want at the ease with which they fall into each other.

Margo appears a short while later, and Eliot is glad to have her, obviously, but also glad for a distraction from the way that Julia is pressed up against Q on the couch, the two of them talking so familiarly that the ache of want in his chest is tempered, just a little, at the sight.

She strides in, his Bambi, and immediately and silently pulls Q in for a tight hug, tears blinking in her eyes. She whispers something in his ear, but comes to Eliot as soon as Julia diverts Q’s attention and digs her nails into Eliot’s arm as soon as she’s in reach, wiping moisture out of her eyes and hissing, “What the fuck did you do?”

It’s not an unreasonable accusation, given the emotional landscape of the last few months, but whatever befucked resurrection magic has done this, he’s as confused as she is. He tries to sound appropriately maligned as he raises his hands in surrender. “Nothing to do with me, he just… fucking apparated at the door.” Like I conjured him with my day-drinking, he thinks, but doesn’t add.

“You’re telling me that Q just happened to show up at the door like a… fucking girl scout –”

“There was a knock. I answered the door.”

“–to be clear, his dick is the cookies in this analogy.”

Eliot is grateful that her voice is still pitched in a low hiss. He pulls her into the kitchen, taking advantage of everyone’s relative level of distraction to voice the thing that has been bothering him since the tiny kernel of hope had allowed itself to sprout in his stomach.

“You really need a manicure,” Margo chastises, taking his hand off her forearm and inspecting it. “Especially if you’re gonna need to re-aquaint Q with the joys of a good –”

“Don’t you think this is all a little sudden?” Eliot hedges.

“You fucking Q? Please, I have –”

“Bambi!”

Her face softens. “What is it?”

“We don’t just get him back, Margo,” Eliot says, watching Q and Julia talk about something animatedly. Q laughs,not at all self-conscious and alive, and a knot in Eliot’s stomach feels like it untwines. “That’s not how it works.”

She hums, which is how he knows that a) he isn’t alone in this thought and b) she’s already in planning mode. “We’ll find the fuckin’ catch, El.” She waits until Eliot looks back to her for a long beat, then laughs, sharp and bright. “You two can get your do-si-do on.” His confused forehead wrinkle clearly annoys her. “It’s a girl scout cookie, Eliot, god.”

“It’s a square dancing move.”

“Weren’t you busy staring at Q’s mouth like it held the answer to your dick’s most pressing questions?”

He does check, but Q and Julia don’t appear to be listening. “Stop it.” It’s duller than he’d like, almost a plea. “I don’t know how he’s here, or why, and anyway it isn’t – it isn’t like that.”

Bambi, sweet child of the devil that she is, appears unconcerned. “Isn’t it?” And then, he sees something in her shift, looking over his shoulder. “Baby, if there’s a catch, we’ll find it,” she promises, squeezing the tremor in his right hand. She knows he finds the pressure grounding, a reminder that the laws of physics still apply – some of them at least – tying him to the world around him. She doesn’t ask if his hands are improving, this time, and he’s unspeakably grateful, standing close to her in the shadows of the unlit kitchen, while their recently dead friend waves his arms emphatically at his own best friend on the couch.

“We’ll find it,” Margo says again, and she must have taken his tremor into her voice, because it’s unsteady when she continues. “Whatever we need to unfuck, El.”

And isn’t that one hell of a promise.

Eliot’s hierarchy of needs has shifted over the years, and he’s always been keenly aware, at any moment, the differences between what he craves and what he needs. The difference, he feels, is in what you can ignore.

He needs Bambi, magic, and the fragile but important version of Eliot Waugh that got him the fuck out of Indiana and to a place where he could fucking breathe. He needs nicotine, alcohol, and the occasional orgasm.

Except now, he knows differently. Because he would give up any of those things, in a fucking second, for the thing he needs now, which is Quentin fucking Makepeace Coldwater alive in this godforsaken timeline. He needs him breathing, needs him picking apart his bagel at breakfast, or wrinkling his nose as he tries to mock Penny’s annoyance at something that is, objectively, incredibly annoying.

Elliot pours himself another drink before they sit down to dinner and pointedly ignores Margo’s eyes on him. She had made vague noises last time she was on Earth about indulging vices which he – he’s cut down a little since then. Enough.

He sees Alice watch him as he takes a shaky sip of his vodka rocks at dinner that night, silently dares her to say something so he can point out that his arms still give out at the end of a long cast, that he has to use his telekinesis some days to even be able to hold a goddamn pen. He hungers for it, for an excuse to scream back. She says nothing.

Julia doesn’t comment on it anymore, either, not even when he goes in for a second refill at a breakfast that could only generously be called brunch, not since the night she’d pulled him aside, months ago, and quietly insisted that he wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself, El, come on.

Maybe it was the nickname on her lips, or maybe it was the concern in her eyes that he couldn’t stand. He’d bitten back a sharp, vicious, “well, he’s fucking dead, Jules, so he doesn’t get to tell me what he’d want,” and that had been that.

Eliot wonders often, in those moments when he’s said something calculated and vicious, more awful that he would have ever allowed himself, whether all the good parts of him – any kindness, or generosity, or desire to see the world as a place with people who love each other – died when Quentin cast in the Mirror world.

Quentin fixed things. Over fifty years, or five, he’d somehow fused the broken shards of a person at Eliot’s core, poured his own goodness and generosity into the cracks until Eliot was whole. And now he’s gone (– wanted to go –) and all that was holding the vicious edges of Eliot together into something resembling human has been washed away.

Quentin fixed things, yes. But when he was also what was holding those shards together, it didn’t matter.

Broken pieces are broken pieces, and they will always struggle to remember what they once were.

“I could see your timelines,” Q tells them later, squinting a little as though he’s trying to conjure the image, “running backwards in front of me, and I knew I had to pick the right time to – you had a baby, Jules, and Margo, you were on your throne.” Julia squeezes his hand while Margo beams. Eliot sips his drink. “Eliot, you were a teacher at Brakebills, I think, and then you were making out with a ghost?”

Q manages to sound both confused and unhappy about this, and it's that, more than anything, that causes Eliot to choke on his bourbon. He hates that his traitorous heart jumps a little, the word jealous echoing in his mind before he quashes it down.

Quentin doesn’t remember how he got there, he tells them, still sitting on the couch. He just found himself outside the door and knew Eliot was there, and that he should knock.

“Someone was yelling at me to go, already, but I didn’t want to pick a time that was too late because…” Quentin meets Eliot’s eye, just for a second, then looks away.

Eliot’s heart rate triples, but it’s Julia who speaks. “Something happens?” When Q says nothing she moves closer to him. “To who, Q?”

Q’s eyes widen and his arms windmill slightly in a way that deepens the ache in Eliot’s chest. “No! I mean, I don’t know, probably there was bad stuff, but I wasn’t –” He looks uncomfortable. “It doesn’t matter.”

“So,” Julia says, her eyes flicking from Quentin to Eliot, then back, “you think you were sent back, to a time you got to pick, because something’s going to happen –”

“Something – I mean, that has to be it, right?” Q’s forehead is furrowed, like he’s trying to grasp something just out of reach. It’s the same expression Eliot remembers from when he was attempting to study the interactions of herbs and magic with various metals. And when he was trying to unknot a particularly gnarled ball of twine.

Julia’s phone chips, as does Eliot’s. Julia glances away from Q, questions clearly still forming. “Alice is on her way.”

Eliot nods, but finds himself unnaturally preoccupied with studying Q’s face, searching for a reaction to the mention of Alice’s name.

Q smiles, and Eliot does not mentally compare it to every other smile of Quentin’s he’s ever seen.

“What I keep wondering is...is this a Buffy season 6 situation?” Margo asks Eliot later, safely tucked away in the kitchen, and he frowns.

“Who am I in this scenario?”

She tilts her head, considering, and says nothing.

He jolts away from her. “You bitch!”

“I didn’t say it –”

“But you thought it!” Eliot purses his lips. “It feels like –”

“Someone must have done something. But who gives a fuck?” She looks thoughtful, though, and he knows that she’s wondering too.

“I give a fuck, Bambi. Nothing’s free. Assuming Q wants to be here –”

Margo’s lips only twitch, but he reacts like she’d spoken his fear aloud.

“Q would want to be here,” Eliot says with conviction he doesn’t feel solidly anymore, an ache in his chest. “He thought there was no other way.”

Margo hesitates, and he sees the moment she decides not to press it. “We would have worked something out.”

“...Yeah.” It’s not like they haven’t had this conversation before, right after he became himself again, curled up, wrecked. Margo had tried to curl herself around him, then, like she could protect him from the knowledge of what it had cost.

“Do me a favor,” Margo says, adjusting his hair to her liking. “Don’t go all David Boreanaz. It isn’t a good look.” She considers. “Okay, fine, its a great fucking look, but we have shit to do. And we fucking deserve better than some shitty off-brand–”

“Eliot? Margo?” Q’s voice comes from the other room, and Eliot is moving before he can even blink, Margo’s hand pressing him forward. Q smiles at them when they return, standing next to the couch. “We were just wondering, is anyone hungry?”

Eliot looks at Quentin, standing placidly in the living room of the apartment that has often felt like a wake for the past few months. Q’s eyebrows are raised in question, and the sleeves of his shirt are too long for him. There’s a lock of hair in his face, and he’s breathing.

Eliot swallows. “I could eat.”

“Of course I’ve been looking into it,” Alice says to him, and he finds the hurt in her voice steals something from him – a vicious kind of joy, maybe, an indication he was doing something, not just lying around hating himself – in a way he didn’t anticipate.

“Well, clearly not well enough,” he snaps, and her face hardens immediately, chin rising from where it was previously buried in a pile of books on the coffee table.

“There’s not even theory on this,” Alice explains with what passes for patience. “Eliot, understand that I’m working from –”

“Perhaps it’s easier for you that way,” he continues, whatever sense of self-preservation he had left carved out of him by Margo’s axes and the absence of Q’s laugh. “Perhaps with him gone, your life is a little less… messy.”

The silence this time is long, and it is neither comfortable nor kind.

When Alice finally speaks, her voice is more raw than he has ever heard it. “You are way too smart for me to ascribe what you said to total stupidity, so I’m just going to go ahead and I’m going to file it under you-must-be-fucking-joking-right-now.”

Eliot feels the sting of his own words echoed back to him like the slap it is, and – he can’t even argue with that.

Alice has always been the one with the right to mourn. He is an imposter here, encroaching on the grieving widow. Quentin was never his to grieve, not in this life.

“I didn’t – it wasn’t –” he starts, a tinge of panic mixing with the constant ache in his midsection, but Alice just holds her jaw taunt, and he closes his mouth, then flees to the safety of his bedroom.

(“He was pretty in love with you,” Alice offered, and Eliot had wondered if he would have been honest or good enough to have done the same in her place.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I would.”)

It’s several days later, their last private conversation not spoken of since – an ugly knot in Eliot’s surviving gut – that Alice marches into the apartment, throws a large stack of notebooks into his (still injured, thanks for asking) lap, and nearly upsets his bowl of cheerios with a satchel full of what has to be an improbable number of books. He supposes that if anyone was going to use a Mary Poppins charm for books, of all things, when it was no longer required, it would be Alice Quinn.

When he raises an eyebrow, his spoon carefully placed back in the mushy remains, she doesn’t speak, just pushes a torn piece of notebook paper over the table towards him.

She says nothing, picking up one of the smaller notebooks from the pile, and proceeds to ignore him on what he’s slightly concerned might be a semi-permanent basis.

He takes a moment to look at the page, which is completely filled with a complicated series of notes. What he can see, if he squints and looks at it sideways, is the beginnings of a set of circumstances for a spell. Metacomp was a class he took only because it was required, and because he wanted to create recreational spells to improve his quality of life (for example, cut down on the time he spent changing his sheets, which was time that could be much better spent getting them dirty).

“You really are the smartest witch of your age,” he says, glancing over the spell she has extrapolated backwards from what is clearly decades old jargon, and he isn’t sure she even got the reference (she dated Quentin, of course she gets the reference) until he looks up and sees a slight sheen in her eyes.

She smiles, and that is something he has always liked about her, the speed with which she is willing to move on, roll up the sleeves of her cute sweater, and do what needs to be done. “I didn’t come up with these, Eliot. Not entirely.”

He sees it, then. “There’s phosphomancy here.”

“To provide an anchor, yes, it’s a little –” She waves a hand dismissively. “I think it’s to – light the way for something. But this isn’t magic I know.” Her voice lowers in the deserted room, and he can hear her repressing her excitement, feels a curl of something like hope in his healing gut. “I don’t think it’s magic that exists, Eliot.”

She is... brilliant, determined-- both things he knew but found easy to forget when nothing seemed to matter.

They spend two precious weeks following that lead, believing with fervent desperation that this new magic must be out there. It must exist. It must.

Turns out, it doesn’t.

“El, you’re kind of freaking me out,” Quentin says very quietly as they get ready to leave the apartment. All the people who have been alive and living here for the last few months are putting on gloves and scarves, but Q’s stuff is – all he’s wearing is a henley with a button down over it, and he’ll freeze to death, jesus –

“Why?” is what Eliot actually says, pulling a chunky scarf off of a hook and smiling comfortingly. “I’m fine.”

“You’re staring, and I get it, Eliot, believe me, but I –” He stops as Eliot reaches forward and wraps the scarf around his neck, delicately dislodging the hair that gets trapped. “Eliot, the last time I saw you, before – you weren’t –”

“Hold on,” he says, and walks into his bedroom, ignoring Margo’s slightly judgemental look. He breathes, just for a second, then opens his closet, pulls a misshapen lump from a shelf. He holds it, still for a moment, then returns to the front door, where everyone is staring at him.

“Here”, he says, thrusting the lump at Quentin, who takes it, still looking at Eliot like he's a knot he can’t manage to untangle.

“Is that –” Julia says, touching the soft green of the sweater in Q’s hand.

“It’s mine.” Q looks at her, at Eliot, and then back at Julia again. “I thought my stuff was all –”

“That happened to be here,” Eliot mumbles, steers him towards the door, and tries to keep his voice even as Q slides both arms into the chunky knit of the cardigan. It’s a lot of things for him to do at once. “Marie Kondo would be ashamed.”

“I don’t know, this sweater is sparking joy right now,” Julia quips, and he loves her, in that moment, fiercely and truly, for the wide smile she brings to Q’s face.

Quentin is just about to cross the threshold and leave the ward when Eliot – “Wait!” Everyone freezes, and he explains. “What if Quentin can’t – what if he’s manifested here. Specifically.” What if he stays in the wards, instead, where he’s safe.

Alive.

Alice, nearest the door and wearing a truly remarkable number of layers as she flips through something on her phone, her sweet, genuine joy at seeing Q now mellowed into curiosity, appears to consider this. “There didn’t seem to be any kind of geographical tie on him,” she offers, gesturing to Quentin. “Or if there is a geographical tie, it isn’t detectable.”

“If I’m here to help with whatever is going to happen, I need to be able to go places,” Q insists, “I can’t just wait around. That’s not what we do.”

“Actually, historically, quests have involved a lot of waiting around,” Alice points out, not even troubling to move her gaze from Quentin and Eliot. “For years, in some cases.”

It’s not the first time Eliot’s had prolonged or loaded eye contact with Q since he fucking... conjured his way back into this particular mortal coil, but it’s definitely the longest. He feels the corner of his mouth tilt up, and sees Q match it. Something twists in his gut.

“Not to hurry you dickwads along, but –” Margo is gesturing towards the elevator, the chill of the hallway bursting their bubble, and Alice joins her.

Eliot links one arm with Q, his desire for contact overpowering the numbing fear, then offers the other to Julia. As friends do.

Q is propelled over the threshold, that little quirk of a smile still on his face, and Eliot continues to lean into him a little more than necessary, even without the cane he’s only recently started trying to use more sparingly (against Lipson’s recommendation – motherfucking ligaments).

The part of him that has been convinced that the universe was about to fuck him specifically again, whisking Q back to the depths of wherever-the-fuck as soon as they left the apartment, breathes.

Q’s hand on his arm tightens, just a little, as they move into the elevator, and when the doors close Eliot allows himself a singular glance at the way Q’s fingers linger there still, digging into the navy of his coat like he’s trying to reach skin.

It feels impossible to say he’d forgotten that Quentin’s hands on him have always undone him, just a little, but he’s pathetically grateful for the soft wool of his coat, keeping certain dissolution at bay.

“Shall we?” Eliot steps out of the elevator with great importance and feels the buoyancy of Q’s weight in his side. When they step out onto the street, walk the few blocks to the nearest portal, and Margo squeezes his hand before they step through, he finds himself taking a breath that he didn’t know he’d been holding. His eyes keep darting back to the peripheral, where he sees Quentin watching him, something thoughtful, perhaps a little confused, in his gaze.

He can join the club, Eliot thinks, settling against the elevator wall for support as Julia pulls Q back into conversation, and Alice meets his eye, quietly, a single eyebrow raised.

He nods at her, comforted in a way he doesn’t quite understand, and he feels the buzz of his magic under his skin, like it’s finally, truly, grateful to be there.

He smiles.

Eliot has a therapist.

It had taken him a while to get there, months of gentle and not-gentle hints from Julia and Margo, respectively.

What do normal people talk about in therapy, he’d argued – people who haven’t had to interrupt their grad school grind to save magic, get trapped in time loops, and run a kingdom best known as the setting of a fantasy series? Their love lives? Well, Eliot’s last grad school boyfriend turned out to have been possessed the whole time, so in the end he had to murder him. And then – well, the less said the better. Their career concerns? Well, one of Eliot’s best friends is the queen of a faraway land that they visit through a clock, and the other – well, he died throwing himself into a magic void, only Eliot wasn’t there because he was busy having the first best friend slice him through the gut to stop him being possessed.

Is there a pill for that?

But he goes to his twice monthly appointments, now, submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and in between unpacking parts of his deeply repressed childhood, it would not be inaccurate to say that their sessions take on a flavor that could be described as the Quentin Coldwater show.

He’s familiar with the theory of grief. He and his therapist, a magician who for some reason decided that more school was a great idea, have talked about the steps, and goals, and how to find a way to breathe when the lack of someone feels like a hole in your chest.

He isn’t great at it, he knows, but some days recently he’s felt slightly less like he’s dying from the wound.

He wonders what she would – she will, he’s going to have to tell her, unless he just bails and avoids her altogether – say to “actually, you know that guy whose death nearly killed me? Well, yeah, he’s alive again, so it’s fine, I’m good, thanks.”

She’s a magician, so it’s probably not the weirdest thing she’s ever heard, but Eliot’s willing to bet it’ll make the top five.

If he tells her. Which he probably won’t even need to, because this is probably just some cruel cosmic joke, and the fucking library will realize, and then –

Well, Eliot figures, walking down the street towards the alley where they generally cast their portals, he just shouldn’t get used to the idea, is all.

What was that line from that book Margo simultaneously quoted and hated the author of with a dislike bordering on the pathological? “Nothing gold can stay?”

“If we’re going to have to remake him–”

“His body, Penny.”

“Yeah, if we’re going to have to – it’s a pity you couldn’t, if it works, just, like fix his –”

“Shut up,” Eliot snaps, feels his fingers tug free of where he’d folded his arms. Alice hasn’t paused, still muttering, first in Ancient Greek, then transitioning in Japanese. The author of this spell – a find-what-you-seek spell, of all things, god, they truly are desperate – seemed like a show-off. “Not even remotely funny.”

Penny’s not kidding, it turns out, his voice strangely soft, when he continues. “I just mean, while we’re doing this whole fucking thing, if we have to create a new body, we could maybe look at the whole br–”

“I said, shut the fuck up.” He doesn’t even notice until it’s happening, as his magic winds and twists around Penny’s waist, a whip crack of white hot rage that pulls and pushes Penny into the wall. Julia doesn’t move from the circle, chalk sketching out symbols on the tile, but her eyes are on them.

“El,” Margo says next to him, and he breathes, feels the tendril retract. “Penny, maybe get the fuck out?”

Penny’s jaw tightens, but he halts, nods and disappears.

“El,” Margo says sunnily, head tilted toward the door. “A fucking word?” When Eliot's eyes track to Alice, then Julia, Margo makes a small noise. “You two got this for a sec?”

Julia, watching the spot where Penny disappeared, nods, and Eliot is Bambi-handled out of the room.

“He fucking deserved it,” Eliot pre-empts.

“You didn’t go for the throat, baby, and I’m proud of you.”

He quiets. “He wanted us to fix him, like –”

“I know.”

“He doesn’t need to be fixed, Bambi. He’s not a fucking…”

“El, this is a lot.” She doesn’t point out that they are literally trying to fix Quentin at this moment – in what must be resurrection plan number eighty-something, at this point – for which he is absurdly grateful. “Penny is –”

“Fucking Penny. Fix him? What kind of fucking bullshit is that? Penny doesn’t know anything, okay, like –”

“Like he’s a fucking psychic, who could hear what was going on in Q’s brain when he threw himself into a... magic black shithole vortex?”

Eliot swallows.

Penny had been one of the last to come to him in hospital, after he woke, the sharp blades of his tongue dull as he whispered, “I couldn’t get to him in time. I couldn’t – I didn’t –”

Penny’s eyes had closed, and some deep, dark part of Eliot, the one suspected that there was a monster deep inside him, but that it wasn’t anything to do with his possession, had thought no, you didn’t.

He didn’t say it, but he’s thought it – you got Alice out, what, travellers have a passenger limit now? or bet you haven’t heard the new Taylor Swift album, have you?

He knows the basics of Q’s suicidal ideation, has heard Quentin talk candidly about the darkest times, the ones he thought he wouldn’t survive (and sometimes didn’t want to). They spent fifty years together, and there were weeks and months when Q fought his brain (unaided by his usual daily dose of antidepressants); there were times it seemed horrifyingly clear to Eliot that Q might be losing.

It was a fear, with Eliot, always, bone deep, that the lack of chemicals in Q’s brain might win, that the things Q’s brain told him might be louder than the voices of the people who love him.

He is unspeakably grateful, in that moment, that he is not a psychic.

Something comes up. They think it might be a big thing – at least, Alice frets distractingly about the ambient magic level, and Julia comes up with six or seven different ways to diagnose whether there actually is a lasting problem or not. Spikes in ambient magic aren’t uncommon, but with their history, they know it might be best to keep an eye on things regardless.

Over the course of the next week, Eliot doesn’t even have to try to avoid being alone with Quentin. Margo whisks Q off to Fillory to help her ascertain whether Fillory’s magic is experiencing the same fluctuations, while Eliot gets unhappily roped into research. It is a hell composed of reading old tomes until Julia takes pity on his synapses and gives him the more practical circumstances to test out. It’s a little like school again, and while Eliot spent his time at Brakebills studiously avoiding academics as much as he could, he finds he doesn’t mind sitting at a table and testing out old spells, pressing his magic through his still-healing body and using it to feel the power in the air around him.

It’s strange to feel Q’s absence in the apartment again; he knows Q is in relatively little danger in Fillory, and likely just uncomfortable at having people fawn over him again at the palace, but it still feels – wrong. He gets that it makes no sense, this wrongness and his steadfast reluctance to have any of the conversations he knows they ought to have, but...

Well, he’d be lying if he said that something in his stomach (beyond the organ damage) didn’t shift at seeing Margo swan in, an excited and babbling Quentin in tow.

“So after we talked to the luck dragon –”

“The what?” Eliot offers, although he really should have lost the capacity to be surprised by this point.

Margo waves a finger dismissively and continues. “So after we talked to the dragon, we went to this… fuckin’ –”

“Copse,” Q supplies, and Margo nods.

“–copse of trees, where there were a whole bunch of these weird –”

“–they were, like, ghosts, but solid? Not transparent.”

“People,” Penny offers from the couch. “What you’re talking about is people.” He holds her eye when Margo looks at him like she might set him on fire, just for a little variety.

“Anyway,” she continues, “they knew something was wrong, they sensed a shift in the energy of the wellspring, or something, I guess they’re attuned to that shit.”

Q pulls out a notebook and flicks to a page filled with messy pencil markings. “They don’t think the origin is on Fillory, but they also think it’s not out of the normal pattern–”

Eliot tunes out at this point, watching Q take them through the minutiae of the Fillorian lack of concern.

It can’t be this easy. There can’t be nothing. Q is back, and he must have gotten to come back for a reason.

It’s been gnawing away at him ever since he stopped and thought about it, ever since Margo saw Q back and asked him how he’d done it.

He’s been waiting for the moment, he thinks, all this time. The reveal. The just kidding, actually, fuck you. He dreams about it, the moment when the universe hands them another axe to the gut, a different face each time with a cruel smile and a pitying you didn’t think you’d actually get him back, did you?

They don’t just get to keep this. It doesn’t make sense. And if Eliot has learned one thing, it’s that if something – if magic seems too good to be true, then it definitely is.

Eliot wakes up with his hips and knee aching (a new normal) and so it takes him a few minutes to take his meds, wrap himself in a robe, and stagger towards the kitchen for coffee.

He is stopped in his quest, however, by the sight of Q on the balcony. It’s not so much the fact that Q is out there – it’s a fairly popular hiding spot – that gives Eliot pause. It’s more that Alice Quinn is with him, sitting perched on the deeply questionable patio furniture that Eliot is pretty sure came from the side of the street a few blocks south. The door is closed, and without really focusing he can’t hear what they’re talking about. He is a magician, and lip reading charms aren’t all that strenuous, but he doesn’t really trust his fingers this early, and as he doesn’t need to know what they’re talking about, anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.

Alice catches Eliot’s eye through the glass as he is determinedly beginning to cross the room towards caffeine and she waves, her smile widening and the tension at the corners immediately loosening. It has been a few days, maybe a week since he’s seen her, but that isn’t unusual. He’s light on the details of what is actually happening at the library, but if anyone can unfuck an extremely powerful and oppressive organization bent on controlling magic, he figures it is probably Alice Quinn. Alice Quinn, who has lost so much to magic, who once held immense, unimaginable power and then decided, unilaterally, that a world without it would be better.
Well, when he thinks of it like that, Eliot muses, maybe some of them should check in with her to see how things are going?

The little he’s heard has been positive, though. There’s a power vacuum now, obviously, what with the Head of Circulation having turned out to be a psychopath, and he remembers hearing that some more reasonable members of the Council were all atwitter at the idea of someone having been able to conceal their motives for so long. That was weeks ago, though, and the last time Alice was here she’d seemed confident that progress was being made.

He trusts her, he remembers, and a second later when she makes Q’s nose scrunch up as he laughs, he grips tight to that thought.

Alice is animated, chatting and gesturing towards the apartment, while Q moves from his odd lean against the wall to gesture down to the street, laughter in both their eyes as the incensed murmur of a friendly argument floats through the glass.

Q and Alice are keeping a careful, noticeable distance between them as they discuss whatever it is that those two have ever talked about. Eliot indulges himself as he smugly remembers the easy brush of Q’s arm in passing, the warmth and closeness in the rare moments they all squeezed onto the couches, and Q sliding in beside Eliot before he inevitably contorted to fit the space he decided he was allowed. But there is still a comfort, a familiar ease there; it isn’t as though he didn’t have fifty years to deal with his insecurities about Alice, but it equally isn’t as though they’ve somehow stopped being a nagging voice in the back of his head.

A moment later, when the door opening brings a cold burst of air that makes his knees feel the effort of standing, he sees more; he sees that there is an extremely conscious effort, on both sides, to press through any awkwardness.

“It's a really interesting theory,” Alice is saying, sounding intrigued. “Repair magic is a discipline with a lot of history, actually –”

“– and I’m sure there must be research on that, specifically. That kind of thing – cross-application – doesn’t go unnoticed.”

Alice nods amiably as Q heads for the kitchen. “I can definitely look.”

“Thanks.” Q glances over at Eliot, and pauses in the doorway. “Hi. Alice and I are going to get lunch soon. Wanna come?”

Eliot looks at Alice, who blinks back, and tries to fight the tide of something sour that rises up at the thought. “No, thanks. My knee is acting up.”

“We can bring you something, if you think it would be too much,” Alice says. “I can send you a picture of the menu.”

“That would be great.”

“Did you take the new painkillers?” Q asks. “Because they’re a lower dosage, but –”

“I took them.” He sits, and as soon as he does Alice sits next to him, brushing a hand over his arm.

Q’s phone dings, and he abandons all kitchen related activities. “Julia wants us to bring her back sushi.” Another ding. “No salmon.” He scowls at the phone with a huff of breath. “Which I already knew, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“That should be doable,” Alice says, nodding, and there’s such a delightful awkwardness to their interactions that Eliot finds himself remembering all the jokes he and Bambi made their first year, about the courting dance of the nerds and how they showed their very sincere plumage to each other in the library stacks.

“Let me grab a jacket, and then…” Q trails off as he disappears in the direction of the bedrooms.

Eliot is left with Alice, who smiles at him and leans in. “I know you’re hurting, but I hope you’re feeling better, overall.”

It takes a second for him to realize she’s talking about his knee. “Yeah, I mean, it’s better. Most days.” He clears his throat. “Sorry I can’t join you.”

She shakes her head. “It’s just lunch, Eliot. Although –” she amends quickly, “it’s nice to have the time off, to see people.” She sighs. “It’s been a lot more work than I thought.”

He feels guilty, then. Alice is trying, has always tried, even when her particular cause wasn’t exactly without complication.

Of all the things to envy about Alice Quinn, one of the smartest magicians he knows, he never thought he’d feel this over the fact that she and Q are starting over.

He watches them leave a few minutes later, their practiced awkwardness as Q tries to hold the door. Alice promises to send him a menu.

It’s familiar, coveting the things that Alice Quinn has. And he wants them to have each other, even if the sour taste of fear lingers in his throat.

That, too, is familiar. Eliot makes himself a coffee, and hopes sugar and caffeine will dull its taste.

Eliot and Margo return from another fact finding mission in Fillory a few days later. Q, Penny, and Julia go to talk to a hedge witch who works at a bakery in Brooklyn, in the hope they have some information that’s been lacking from their research. Team Bakery returns that evening with good intel and slices of pie, which they distribute in the living room along with the results of their questioning. Everyone is sprawled on the couches, chairs, and floor: it almost feels like the cottage again, Eliot thinks as he takes the styrofoam container with his name on it and plucks a plastic fork from the pile on the coffee table. Julia and Kady are discussing the new information they gleaned, and Margo is complaining to an unsympathetic Penny that her pie fell apart in transit. He half-notes the scent, but it isn’t until the first forkful hits his tongue that the flavor floods his senses – ripe peach, juicy and sweet – and he has to close his eyes, just focus on the sharpness and the memory of summer baskets of fresh fruit, juice all over their fingers and –

“Should we leave you two alone?” Julia asks flatly, gesturing between Eliot and his styrofoam container. Penny is making a truly disgusted face.

“Please,” Eliot says, his breath unsteadier than he would like. He keeps his eyes firmly on Penny. “The things I would do to this pie would be too much for your fragile sensibilities.”

Q snorts in his peripheral vision, and Penny’s expression does not change. “Would have pegged you for a man with more decadent tastes,” Penny continues, his own cherry pie mostly gone. “But Coldwater was… insistent about it.”

That shouldn’t be a surprise. It isn’t, really.

Quentin is trying to hide behind his hair, which would be fine except his hair is currently too short to hide behind. It reminds him of Quentin at forty, after an ill-advised summer fling with a pair of scissors.

For the first time in what feels like a lifetime, the memory doesn’t feel like he’s picking at a sharp, stinging wound that will never fully close.

Eliot flicks through photos in his phone, speeding up occasionally like if he only glimpses the painful ones for a second, maybe they’ll feel like a contact high instead of just a punch to his already-damaged gut.

“Stop it,” Margo instructs, plucking the phone from his hand with impeccably decorated talons, using her other hand to swat him lightly with her magazine.

“Get a dog, Bambi, if you want to scold things with newspapers,” he says, and this time he manages to wrest the phone back with the use of a few quick presses of telekinesis.

Margo relaxes back into her chair. “You know I don’t do puppy play before noon.”

Eliot wonders how much of her time here she has spent trying to shield him from himself.

She’s only here for another day. After dinner she’ll head back to Fillory, to her throne, and to people who need her more than Eliot does.

It has been, he thinks, as close to a perfect visit as it could be, a callback to their Brakebills days: brunch on Saturday, a trip to some of Manhattan’s most expensive stores, followed by dinner and drinks.

No, they hadn’t gone dancing, and yes, Eliot had needed to take a breather midway through the shopping trip. Margo had settled them on a Park Bench, complete with an iced espresso in a magically insulated cup (her) and a green tea for Eliot. Then there had been a sweater at Saks that had been just the right shade of grey, a stormy color that would be perfect for –

He has stretches of time, now, when he doesn’t think about it. Minutes, definitely, maybe not hours. Certainly nowhere near a day. He still feels guilty about them, after. And no matter how many people talk to him about grief, or how his “loved one” (god, he hates that phrase) would want him to move forward with his life, every time

Eliot, of all people, understands that some things are final. Some things cannot be taken back, no matter how much one might wish it undone.

They had settled in for a movie that night, and Eliot didn’t argue when Margo flicked through the menu and settled on the Wizard of Oz, declaring Glinda a fabulous bitch. Despite loudly declaring himself a friend of Dorothy at various bars in his undergrad days (he even recalls a drunken Halloween costume one year), it had been a while, so he made himself comfortable without complaint.

It was a good day. Penny made “weekend spaghetti'', Q appeared shortly before dinner was ready and insisted on garlic bread, and after dinner Bambi painted Q’s toenails while they all argued about the relative merits of the contestants on the most recent season of Bake Off.

When Bambi had relocated to get a better angle on Q’s left foot, Eliot found himself lounging in Q’s space. It wasn’t conscious, he thinks, but he felt drawn to the warmth of Q’s arm, leaning in to rip apart Paul’s critique on some very creative cupcakes.

It’s the closest thing to normal anything has felt in this apartment, and as he met Julia’s eyes over her glass of wine (her toes elevated on the coffee table to dry), he saw her smile. Her eyes went pointedly from him to Q, then back, and when Eliot narrowed his eyes, she winked.

That night, he dreamt he was doing a puzzle, a giant one shaped like his body. He was missing a few pieces, and looked everywhere, but it wasn’t until a smirking Julia pressed one of the final pieces that he realized he had a heart again.

“Oh,” she said, leaning into him with a throaty laugh. “If you only had a brain.”

He tries not to think about it, the fact that he’s the sole caretaker of that life now. Three lives, fifty years, and all that’s left is the shards in the brain of a fucked up magician with his insides closer to his outsides than any competent medical professional would recommend.

The memories are all his, but they aren’t filed away in the same way he remembers the first time he met Margo, or leaving the hellhole of his hometown in the rear-view mirror. No, these moments were scattered across his consciousness, and he’d come upon them, sometimes, when he was thinking about something entirely. Some are fuzzy, shapeless; some have more clarity.

He’d remember the patter of rain as he and Q tried to get Teddy to sleep, or the peculiar way that the magically enhanced window nearest the hearth would stick when it was warm. He’d be struck, suddenly, by the smell of put-it-all-in stew, Q’s specialty, or the sharp crack of wood the time the two of them had fucked with such a lack of concern for anything but the heat of each other’s skin that they actually broke the bed.

It hadn’t hurt quite as much before, he knows now, because although there had still been a sharp ache, he had known then that his memories were theirs. There was someone else in this world who had been there, who knew the curl of their bodies, the curve of Teddy’s smile, and the brittle joy of what they had been. There was someone else who knew, through fucking proof of concept, that Eliot had been a friend, a father, a fucking... partner.

He has the only living memories of those people and that life, and while he still has trouble with feeling like he’s allowed to grieve Quentin, that life, and the grief of it, belongs to him. It has belonged to him since that day in the throne room, a peach in his hand and a dawning clarity in his head that it had all happened.

It comes in flashes, mostly, although there are some he clings to with such vehemence that he’s almost afraid he’ll misremember them, just by virtue of wearing them through. He’ll hear a phrase, or see a goddamn advertisement with a parent helping a kid learn to draw, and then –
He’ll remember learning to fix the roof of their cabin, working out how to make a very poor man’s manhattan from the ingredients available… learning how to be a partner, a father, a –

He remembers being in his thirties, repeating himself with a litany of “please, baby, if it gets that bad again, you have to tell me – I can’t – promise me, Q.”

He spends his weeks of convalescence curled up in bed, wrapped up in blankets that smell wrong and with a hole in his heart to match his gut.

A lot of fuckin’ good he was.

Once they’ve finished their pie and Julia has gently guilted everyone into rinsing their plastic takeout containers before stacking them to be recycled, everyone splits off to their own activities. Margo heads back to Fillory, extracting promises from Q that he’ll update her on their progress with this maybe-magical-problem. The pressure of her lips is a ghost on his cheek once she's gone, and Eliot finds himself alone in the living room with Q and a pitying “he's here, you dickhead” echoing in his head.

“I should get back to reading,” Q says, not moving from where he is leaning against a chair, and Eliot is suddenly so tired.

He wants to know if Q is here for good – not that it’s an answer Q can give him, that anyone here can give him, but Eliot has never been great about wanting things he can’t have.

It’s not a question any of them have the answer to, and so he picks another, on the tip of his tongue since the day he opened the front door to discover his dead Q – no, not his, not in this life –

“Q, why did you pick this point in the timeline?”

“What? I don’t know.” Q’s mouth forms a line, then, his lips pressing together like they can somehow swallow the answer.

He’s been thinking about it. Q could have waited, could have shown up anytime. Curiosity twists in Eliot, a question he’d thought more innocuous than the alternatives suddenly weighty. “You’re lying.”

Quentin makes an irritated noise, his fingers flexing on the back of the chair as he rocks forward. “Why does it matter?”

Eliot is seated on the couch, now, but doesn’t quite remember moving there. His leg aches. “I don’t know. It seemed to matter to you.”

“It isn’t important.”

“Isn’t it?”

Quentin groans, “I forgot how annoying this is.”

“What?”

“You.”

Q pauses, annoyed, and looks him directly in the eye, eyebrow slightly raised. A thing that Eliot had maybe forgotten over his last couple of months of pining is precisely how bitchy he can be.

Eliot loves him. He says nothing.

“Well, I suppose we can’t all be –” Quentin stops himself, and Eliot sees the effort in the way he bites his bottom lip.

“Q...”

“Why do you care so much?” he asks, turning and scowling into a selection of mismatched socks in the laundry basket sitting on one of the chairs.

“Because I do.” He hears the echoes of a long ago conversation with Julia, and takes a second to consider his next move, then furrows his eyebrows. “Because I’m your fucking friend, Q, jesus christ, and I kind of want to know if you’ve gonna fucking vanish again.”

Q’s jaw tightens, but he inclines his head in what might be a concession.

But the truth is… Eliot doesn’t know why he keeps obsessing over that question. It had seemed important, certainly, to know the why of what was happening, and it’s true enough that the idea of Q disappearing again keeps him in knots into the early hours of the morning. But if Q got some choice, it also stands to reason that he chose not to show up five years from now, or ten. And while the selfish part of Eliot squirms with the question of why not just come back the next day, why did you leave us at all?, this is a thread he can pick at without giving anything (or much, at least) away.

Quentin, who had picked up a couple of socks like he might sort them, instead throws them back down into the basket like they’ve personally offended him. He sighs. “I don’t know, okay, it was moving backwards fast, and I was seeing things, and I was – I wanted…”

Eliot can’t breathe, but it’s probably fine. “Wanted what?”

Q’s voice is quiet, his eyes down. “I wanted to make sure you… remembered me.”

It’s so patently absurd, the idea there will ever be a time when Eliot could possibly forget Quentin Coldwater, that he almost laughs. The only reason he doesn’t is that he’s still trying to wrap his head around this whole concept. “I don’t –”

Q doesn’t meet his eye. “Do you have a cigarette?”

He doesn’t. Nicotine had been the one thing he hadn’t craved when he woke (Q’s smile, cocaine, the strands of hair that always popped out from behind Q’s ear, alcohol, Quentin’s hands touching him like he was worth something –) and he had been so wrapped up in learning how to do basic human things again (walk, drink, cast a fucking spell with his useless hands) that he hasn’t gotten around to picking the habit back up yet.

He does, however, know where Julia hides the pack of shitty menthols that she both ardently denies owning and also chainsmokes on the days when she feels a distinct lack of control. Eliot can relate. He digs the half pack out of the pile of beach towels in the lowest shelf of the linen closet, like a kid searching for where the Christmas presents are tucked away. He moves steadily out to the patio, Q not pressing at his heels like some of the others do, too anxious to keep pace in a world that Eliot must take at his own.

Eliot leans against the wall next to the sliding door and offers him one, instinctual as breathing, but Q stutters when his fingers make an aborted attempt to reach for the pack.

“I know it was my idea – but I actually don’t –” He makes an aggrieved noise, hands moving to muss his already tragically unkempt hair. “I don’t think this body craves nicotine anymore.” Eliot moves to put them back in his pocket, an eyebrow raised, but then – “Gimme.”

Eliot snorts, swings them up and out of his reach, an age-old quest to protect Quentin Coldwater from himself.

It’s Q’s outranged huff of breath, the slight lean onto his toes (like that’s going to compensate for the many inches he needs) that reminds Eliot all over again: he will love this man until his last stupid, worthless breath.

He lowers his hand, and Q takes the packet, fidgeting with it instead of pulling one out as he looks out on what little they can see from the balcony.

“I get that – of course you’d want to know, Eliot. Of course you – you’re my friend,” he says, finally, and while there’s certainty there, there’s also the faintest ghost of a question Eliot is terrified to hear. “I just – I don’t know how much time passed for me – or, like, whether time was even real, or –”

“It’s okay, Q.”

Q’s smile quirks sharply. “It isn’t, but thanks.” His forehead furrows. “I think it will be, probably?”

Eliot’s left knee chooses that moment to give up on him entirely, and when he moves to lean on a sturdier surface he sees Q flinch in a way that he almost manages to hide, right before he takes Eliot’s elbow and ushers him inside. But Eliot sees it, and for some reason (every reason), it hurts more than when it happens with Julia, Alice, or even Margo.

Q still has the crumpled half-pack of cigarettes clenched in one hand, and for some reason it's the way Eliot’s pressed into the couch, Q fussing over getting him some water (“it’s my knee, Quentin, it isn’t thirsty”) that prompts him to eventually voice the gratitude he hadn’t quite found the words for. His simple thank you feels weighty, although when Q nods he isn’t sure the gravity of the words was clear.

He tries to make himself as comfortable as he’s likely to get, thankful for the more supportive couch that had appeared sometime in the last six months. He doesn’t really know where it came from, but he can appreciate the thought, regardless – the way that the furniture in the apartment suddenly became far easier to navigate in the weeks and months after he regained the ability to walk.

It’s hard to notice all the ways a place changes in real time (maybe that was just a result of the painkillers), but Eliot has seen Q notice some of the changes over the weeks; a gesture to put a cup on a side table that has been moved to one of the bedrooms, or a habitual dodge to avoid a corner that doesn’t exist.

He forgets, sometimes, how much time Q spent in this apartment without him – well, with Eliot’s physical self, but –

Eliot wonders how often Q sat in this room, being manipulated and puppeted by the thing that held them both hostage.

He wouldn’t be here without Q. He knows that much.

He clears his throat, trying to make his posture as non-threatening as possible. “It hasn’t come up, but I did get some gaps... filled in. I know that you are the only reason I’m here.” Eliot gestures to himself, then to the room at large. “I could have very easily been just another meat-suit casualty of that thing’s dedication to cocaine and amphetamines.”

Q stops, placing the cigarettes on the coffee table, his mouth smoothing out into a single, worried crease. “It wasn’t that b–”

He can’t bear to hear Q diminish his own (borderline suicidal, reading between the lines) efforts over those months, not now, so he clears his throat. “I know I haven’t – been around as much…”

It’s true only in the most technical sense. He’s been here. He just hasn’t always been able to be here , warring constantly with the desire to check on things (check that Q’s still here) and hide away to lick his various wounds.

If he doesn’t see Q disappear, maybe that means he won’t?

(You didn’t see it last time, the monster in his head reminds him, and he was sure as hell dead then, so –)

“– understandable. Eliot? Eliot, are you okay?”

Q looks worried again, and Eliot wants to kiss the wrinkle between his eyebrows more than he has ever wanted anything in his entire life.

“Yes. Sorry, I was just…” He waves a hand at Quentin. “Continue.”

“It must be weird,” Q says, still eyeing him cautiously for signs of imminent death. “But I missed you.”

Q places his hand on Eliot’s forearm, just below where the sleeves are rolled up to below his elbow, and the sincerity burns in Eliot’s throat.

“I missed you too,” he finally manages, placing his own hand over Q’s and squeezing. It’s the truth (a tiny, miniscule fragment of the ache in Eliot’s chest), and he sees Q smile before he begins pressing Eliot to take some painkillers and catch up on the latest drama in the hedge world.

It isn’t everything, and it doesn’t stop the drumbeat of fear that throbs with the ache in Eliot’s leg, but it’s something. It’s them, laughing, sitting together on the couch. It’s Q alive, and smiling at him like he’s delighted just to be here.

And later, when Eliot’s leg offers him a temporary reprieve, he surveys the fridge, pulls the leftover potatoes out and makes a casserole for the first time in recent memory. His hands aren’t up to chopping anything, not today, but Q steps up immediately, and he keeps things decidedly friendly, steering them both through the steps he watched his mother take from the kitchen table hundreds of times.

It’s so much. It’s bittersweet. It’s too real. It’s not enough.

It feels like a kind of normal, and Eliot will take it, waiting for the axe to fall.

He is eating cereal at the table, like an adult, when Julia breezes in the front door, depositing a stack of books and boxes on the coffee table as she mumbles a hello through a bite of croissant.

He watches her go through the familiar routine of making herself tea – sips his coffee and sees her carefully measure out the leaves, tuck them into the diffuser, and boil the electric kettle in the way he never has patience to.

He realizes, then, that he hasn’t seen her cast in all this time, through all the weeks and months of research (her) and interminable misery (him) – he knows some of what happened, knows what It did to her magic, what she had to sacrifice, and –

He hasn’t even asked.

As though he needed another reminder of just how much of a selfish dick he is.

“Julia,” he starts, and she looks up from her phone with a hum of acknowledgement. “How are you?”

The surprise at the question is more of an indictment of Eliot’s character than any (of the many) words have ever been.

“Good,” Julia says thoughtfully, pouring water into the mug. “I’m – how are you?”

His instinct is to snap back that that isn’t what he asked, but it would be just like him to follow up an attempt to connect with another person by telling them that they aren’t doing it correctly.

“I’m fine.” He waves a hand. “I – I see you’ve had a busy morning.” How are you, really? he wants to ask. But he doesn’t feel like that question is something he has a right to, right now. He and Julia have shared things, certainly: to Eliot, it’s felt sometimes, over the past few months, like they might be the only ones who understood each other’s particular grief.

But he realizes now that his grief has taken a shape that excluded everything else. It’s still there, but today it feels like the sea has calmed enough to know that there are other people out there. “Your tea smells nice. Very… floral.”

Julia smiles, and it’s more shy than he has come to expect from her. “A little busy this morning, yes.” She moves to the table and sits down opposite him. It’s a new table, something that appeared one day, and her fingers dance over the unfamiliar smooth surface before they wrap around her mug again. “I had to stop by Brakebills.”

She leaves the sentence there, sipping her too-hot tea and then blowing lightly on it like it has personally offended her by being made of boiling water.

Eliot doesn’t particularly know what to make of this declaration. “Oh?”

“Just briefly,” she clarifies. “I set up an appointment next week.” Her next words are hesitant, and he knows that this is likely the first time she’s voicing them aloud. “I was thinking I might… see if Brakebills would consider me.” She pauses. “Again.”

There are a million retorts that manifest in Eliot’s mind, and at least half of them are unkind. He swirls the leftover cereal in his bowl with his spoon, lamenting that the ratio is always off.

“Is that what you want?” he finally asks, and he finds that he really wants to know the answer. It isn’t that he hasn’t been interested in other people; it’s just that he hasn’t been interested in much of anything.

“I think so.” Her tea must have cooled, because she takes a big gulp. “I don’t have the power anymore, not the god, but I think I –” Her hands fidget with the mug. “It feels like something,” she confesses. “And I want to know if it is.”

“Then you should find out,” Eliot says gently. Considering the way they met, perhaps it should be a strange conversation to be having, but he means it. “Henry won’t know what hit him… again.”

“That’s sort of what I’m afraid of,” Julia smiles.

They sit in comfortable silence for a moment, and Eliot is draining the bowl of sugary milk when Julia breaks it. “You could come, if you wanted.”

He knows what it is – it’s a lifeline. Alice told him last week that Julia worries he’s floundering (a kinder word than he would use for his mental state, most days, but Julia has always known when to pull her punches with Eliot, like he’s a frightened animal who might bolt at the first sign of too much interest). This is an opportunity for them to go back to something normal – like normalcy is anything they can have. Like it’s even possible for Eliot to go to classes, care about a thesis, or want to learn without –

Julia waits for his response, her hands wrapped tightly around the mug again. It’s chipped, and Eliot doesn’t know how it happened, sometime in either the months before – or the months since. He sees that her mouth is pressed into a line as she watches the steam rise from the cup. She looks... doubtful, in a way he doesn’t often associate with Julia Wicker, Hedge Bitch turned Demi-goddess turned … well, maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe, it occurs to him, this isn’t about him, after all.

“I’ll think about it,” he lies, levitating the kettle over to top up her tea. She smiles, and it’s good, it’s right that she is finding something – that all of the others, too, are finding things, presumably (he needs to ask, he should remember to ask).

It’s good, he knows, that people are moving forward.

He knows.

It’s laughably easy, at first.

Shortly after Quentin’s reappearance, Eliot gets a polite voicemail from his therapist’s receptionist, letting him know that he is free to schedule his next appointment at his convenience.

He’s overwhelmed, so he ignores it for a week, then calls after seven o’clock on a Friday night and says that he’s been so busy, but he’ll check his calendar and he’s sure they’ll find something else.

On Monday he gets a voicemail back.

He waits three weeks, then leaves a return voicemail at five-thirty on a Friday.

He does this once more, stretching it out, until he gets a polite email inquiry from Dr. Ro herself. He buys himself more time by calling her office at 5:45 on a Friday. Her office is only open until noon on Fridays.

She picks up.

It isn’t Lou, either – the incredibly professional receptionist who has not yet murdered Eliot for fucking around with their scheduling. The voice is much less chipper, the “Dr. Ro’s office, how can I help you?” pleasant but perfunctory, as though perhaps the speaker already knows the answer.

“Doctor Ro,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting – it’s very late. For you. On a Friday, I mean. Hello.”

“Yes, I’m here a little late today, catching up on some filing,” she says pleasantly. “Eliot, how are you?”

He knows she probably just has caller ID, but he also wouldn’t put it past her to recognize all of her patient’s voices with only a few words. “I’m fine,” he says. “Thank you.”

“How can I help you?” she asks, as though she doesn’t know the multitude of answers Eliot is warring with.

“I was calling to make an appointment, but if you’re busy with paperwork –”

“It’s no problem, Eliot.” There’s a clicking sound. “I have a cancellation tomorrow, actually, if that works for you? You prefer early afternoon, correct?”

“Well, yes, but…” Tomorrow is very soon. Filling someone in on his life tomorrow feels, in fact, like something he does not want to do.

“Are you available at one tomorrow afternoon?”

He’s a little thrown, not having planned to have a conversation with anyone, so it takes him a second to recognize that he’s saying “Sure, that works.”

“Excellent. I hope you’ve been well, Eliot.”

“Yes – I… it’s been a while.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And that’s how Eliot finds himself in what must be a magically enhanced office the next afternoon, although in six months of appointments he hasn’t worked out what she’s used to make the room in a tightly packed Manhattan corporate building feel roomy. It isn’t a dimension-altering spell, because it just feels that way; for all outward and inward appearances it just looks like a small-ish office with a cramped reception area. But just sitting in the chair there, tightly packed against a stack of magazines and Lou’s small desk, it doesn’t feel claustrophobic.

Eliot has to find out who her magician-architect is. And thinking about that fact is more pressing, at the moment, than worrying about the ways he’s going to answer her difficult questions. Like, say, for example, “How are you, doing Eliot?”

“I’m fine,” Eliot says, sitting on Dr. Ro’s comfortable mahogany-colored couch. “How are you?”

“I’m well, Eliot.” There’s a slight pause, and Dr. Ro shifts in her chair, resting her arm next to her notepad. “Why don’t you tell me how things have been going since we last saw each other?”

“Good.” He clears his throat, suddenly parched, and his eyes flit to the little watercooler she keeps near the couch. “I’ve been, you know, fine.”

“Last time we talked you were starting to feel that –”

“Quentin is back,” he blurts out. “He’s alive. Again.”

Any other therapist might blink once – or even twice – at that statement, but Dr. Ro just smiles, with maybe a brief searching look to see if she thinks he’s had some kind of break. “That’s wonderful, Eliot. I take it you and your friends were successful, then. That must be a huge weight lifted from you.”

“Actually, we don’t really know what did it.” Eliot waves a hand. “It wasn’t the ritual I told you about. Some kind of… thing. But yeah, I came here originally to talk about that, and about Quentin dying, so now that’s all taken care of, I’m probably just… good.” There’s a tiny hint of a question in the final word there, which Eliot did not give permission for.

Dr. Ro raises an eyebrow, and it is the closest thing to a “bitch, please” Eliot thinks he’s ever seen on her face. “Of course, if you don’t wish to continue coming, you have no obligation, although I am, of course, very happy to see you. This time is yours. Can I ask,” she continues before he can make his excuses and leave, “how it has been, having your friend back? It must be a unique experience.”

Eliot has never said outright that he’s in love with Q, but he knows that doesn’t mean Dr. Ro doesn’t know from context clues, and also potentially the fact that he’s been acting like a fucking grieving widower since she met him. She knows. He knows that she knows.

“It’s been… great. It’s –” He thinks about Q’s satisfied face whenever he mends something, the burning jealousy at Alice and Q’s hard-won friendship, and the fear he’ll get up one morning and Q will be gone again. “It’s hard, because – I want him here, obviously. Obviously, I… but, it’s…”

She waits, because she often waits for Eliot to fill the silence.

“It’s difficult,” he finally settles on.

“What is it that makes it difficult?”

“I mean, historically, these things have not worked out. Knowing our luck, some magical creature is going to appear and whisk him away again for non-payment, or something.”

“Do you have any particular reason to believe that?”

Eliot laughs. “Sorry, perhaps you haven’t heard, magic fucking sucks.”

Her expression doesn’t change. “I take it you’ve decided not to pursue a romantic relationship, then.”

“It’s better that way,” he says, defensive, and he hadn’t realized he was looking for the opportunity to argue it until it came.

“Certainly, there’s much less potential for pain,” Dr. Ro agrees, and Eliot nods, glad to have someone on his side.

“Exactly,” Eliot continues. “It’s just that it will – I hope things will work out, you know, but if they don’t – it’s easier this way, to be happy with the way things are.”

“And are you?” Dr. Ro asks.

He blinks. “Am I what?”

“Are you happy with the way things are?”

It’s a huge, terrible thing, the silence that follows her question.

Eliot opens his mouth to respond – lie – and then stops. He thinks about all the little lies he’s told since he got his life back from the monster. To get him out of a conversation, to stop himself from having to confront the reality of Q being gone, or just to get through the day. It should be easier, now, but somehow he’s floundering in a new way since things changed again. Since Q came back to them.

“No,” he says slowly, quietly. It’s cautious, like he’s afraid it might be a wrong answer, even if it’s the truth.

It’s odd. If asked, Eliot would certainly be able to laugh off happiness as a concept, just another thing that they – that he – doesn’t get to have.

After a healthy pause, Dr. Ro prompts him. “And, as we’ve talked about before, if you were to think of happiness not as a destination, but as a way of finding moments of contentment, what would help you feel more content?”

He remembers, somewhere in the back of his mind, a conversation at a long-ago Cottage party. It feels like a lifetime ago, but he remembers very clearly an extremely stoned Nature second year telling him that the secret to enlightenment was to find inner peace. Eliot had kind of thought it was a come-on, at the time, but the guy had just patted him gently on the cheek and then lay down on the floor, so maybe there was something to it after all.

What does he want? Quentin, yes. But what’s the thing – the thing that’s stopping him?

He thinks about Julia going back to school, Alice remaking the library, and Margo leading a kingdom.

“I want to not be afraid,” he says finally.

“Afraid of…” The way Dr. Ro trails off is unnerving, and although Eliot knows it’s a prompt, he feels slightly panicked, like she’s the one in the room who should probably know the answer, and if she doesn’t...

Of everything. Of Q dying. Of my magic. Of the way people look at me. Of other people’s magic. Of being alone. Of other people.

Of getting what I want, and then it being taken away.

“We’ve discussed risk before,” Dr. Ro says after what must be two full minutes of silence from Eliot. “Perhaps that can be something you think about. Whether the things you are afraid of risking are worth the risk, and what satisfaction you get from deciding not to pursue them.”

They move on, but for the rest of that hour, and then the subsequent days, Eliot keeps coming back to the idea of satisfaction. For a self-proclaimed hedonist (at least, before the world altered his trajectory from layabout grad student to king and then back, only without the degree), he hasn’t thought that much lately, really, about what brings him pleasure.

What does he want? He knows, in the abstract, but diagnosed self-worth issues aside, where does he go from here?

How much of what he has now is he willing to risk?

Eliot is a solid moderate-to-okay battle mage on his average day, when his emotions aren’t eating him alive, but he’s always been fairly decent at shielding.

The latest Hedge drama (because, of course there’s hedge drama and not, in fact, some magical wellspring related fuckery) has now elevated to a level where Kady has agreed to get more directly involved, and naturally, that means they’re all part of it now, too.

Don’t get him wrong, these hedges sound particularly dickish; it’s just that he’d rather be, say, agonizing over whether he’s looking over at Quentin too often during lunch, as opposed to having a strategy meeting over sub-standard pizza.

They’ve had a lot on their plate, and while Eliot knows that Margo, at least, is expecting he and Q to have some kind of additional heart-to-heart (“NUT UP, YOU DICKWAD,” an extremely fluffy bunny yells at him from the bottom of his bed on a Saturday morning), they definitely have other things to worry about.

For example, capricious powers-that-be, and their tendency to give favors (like, just for instance, bringing a dear friend back from the dead) and then subsequently fuck Eliot right over.

The longer Q is here, the more Eliot wants him. The longer Q is here, the more terrified Eliot is that he’s going to disappear.

But, of course, they can’t do anything about that, because of the fucking Hedges.

It turns out what was once idle gossip about hedges has now evolved into some kind of “apocalypse summoning bullshit” (Kady) involving some “jumped up Hedges” (Margo, who came for “lunch” – a paper-thin ruse to check on Eliot – and who is in no way involved in any part of this problem or whatever solution they need to devise).

“Of course we tried talking to them,” Kady is saying, her disdain palpable. “Pete would have loved to stay and really bond, but he was pretty distracted when they tried to murder him.”

“They’re holed up in a safehouse now that they know people are interested,” Julia adds, “but we know where they’re going to try to actually do the ritual.”

“So we stop them,” Penny says. “What’s the issue?”

“They aren’t all that powerful, from what we’ve seen,” Kady lays out a few pieces of paper from her manilla folder. Eliot has already mocked the folder, and feels this is an inopportune time to do so again, something that has nothing to do with the way Kady has been stomping around the apartment for the last few days. “But the book…”

There’s a lot more. They have an important book – this is basically what Eliot gets from the next few minutes. He’s distracted, both by the ache in his leg and the way Quentin is pressed into the opposite end of the couch, naturally shrinking to accommodate the skirt of Margo’s gown. It’s endearing, Q’s hands carefully petting the exquisite beading as Margo thoughtlessly tucks his hair back behind his ear.

“– need to grab it, while another group distracts them.” Kady is pointing to a map now. “Alice is going to keep that group hidden for as long as she can, and we think we can set up a portal on the other side of this abandoned apartment building. Q, if you and Alice can –”

“I’m with them,” Eliot says, and everyone in the room turns to look at him.

Kady’s lips are pursed. “I was going to have you on team flash,” she says with a showy gesture. “Me, you, and Penny can –”

“I’m slower,” he says, “I can stick with Alice and Q, and split off if needed.”

It’s not a great argument, and the brain trust of Alice, Julia and Q would definitely make for a stealthier getaway. But Alice isn’t available to offer her opinion (she has some library thing and promised to come by after), and Q is nodding like this logic is anything other than Eliot’s determination that Q is not going to get zapped by some jumped up Hedge with delusions of grandeur or, more hauntingly, see an opportunity to sacrifice himself for the goddamn greater good.

Penny, however, is clearly not clued into this plan and its importance. “Telekinesis is good for distraction,” he objects, skeptical. “And Julia knows the area better, she’d help a lot on the getaway.”

Eliot does not comment on Penny trying to get his girlfriend (is that still a thing? Jesus, he really is an asshole) out of the line of fire, because hypocrisy doesn’t go with this tie.

“It’d be smarter,” Eliot says, “to have someone with them who can concentrate on… clearing the way.”

He sees both Margo and Q frown, because of all the people in the world, he has to be in a room with two people who have historically been able to identify his particular brand of bullshit from a mile away.

Julia is looking more and more convinced, however (she probably wants, he knows, to be closer to the action, and god help him if she gets hurt doing this, but –), and is looking at the map. “It would be helpful to have someone else to protect the book,” she admits. “Someone with… a more reliable reaction time.”

Eliot sees Penny’s eyes go to his hands, which are currently being squeezed tightly by Margo.

“I’ll be fine,” he says off handedly, and Penny’s frown deepens, but he eventually nods.
Margo has moved from holding his hands to gripping his thigh, and he’s sort of wondering if it’s the latest fashion in Fillory manicures to embed blades, because jesus.

Eliot is fully aware that he has never had an especially active sense of self-preservation, and right now he almost sees the metaphorical stormcloud of dissension appearing over the couch next to him. Neither Bambi or Quentin have an actual reason to object to this plan, just years of knowing that Eliot is full of shit and has the self-preservation instinct of a particularly nonchalant moth.

“Great,” he says cheerfully. “That’s all settled, then.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Margo, after a solid minute, and well, she isn’t exactly wrong.

“Will this take long?” he asks in a group meeting, their monthly assignment of tasks from their definitely-not-evil landlord in Kady’s hand. She rolls her eyes at him, and so he fishes his flask out, unbothered when Bambi reaches for it. He gives it over automatically, and waits patiently for her to hand it back. She doesn’t, pressing it into her purse and closing the latch, as though he isn’t fucking telekinetic and can’t just take it right out again.

She casually rests her arm over the latch.

Fine.

He hasn’t seen her in a couple of weeks, not since he got the all clear for strenuous activity, and while he knows she has shit to do – a kingdom doesn’t run itself – it smarts a little that she will just stroll in here for a meeting, resplendent in a gown gilded in what looks like giant rubies, and steal his flask like he’s a teenager who can’t be trusted with the key to the liquor cabinet.

He wondered, for a while, if it was because of the thing that had taken him, the monstrous little god child that had fucked up his body six ways from Sunday, but – Margo wasn’t here for most of that. He knows this, piecing it together from snippets of conversation and Julia and Alice’s reluctant recountings of the saga of Quentin and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Thing-Wearing-Eliot’s-Body-Like-a-Cheap-Suit.

She always comes back to him, his Bambi, but the fact of the matter is that this isn’t where she feels she needs to be, and Eliot cannot find it in his heart to begrudge her anything, not with her weekend trips, her tales of power struggles and whispered palace intrigue.

He still has her. Not in the way he did at Brakebills, where it so often felt like she was the only person who understood him, but here when he has needed her most.

Or, when she thinks he has needed her most.

And he can’t help but wonder, as she meets his eyes over her purse, defiant and entirely unmoved, how long it will take for her life – her kingdom – to have to come first.

He throws himself forward, before the thought is even half-formed in his mind.

Eliot has never seriously thought of himself as a particularly brave person – his attitude has always been that bravery was for people who didn’t carry the millstone of being a lifelong coward. But he meant what he said to the memory of Quentin in the throne room that day: if he is any braver than he was before (and surely thinking it is at least some of the battle?), he knows where he learned it.

Not that he thinks Quentin would necessarily particularly appreciate that argument, in this specific case.

It’s not like he does it for any particularly selfless reason. He, Q, and Alice are at the end of a corridor in some godforsaken derelict apartment building, and Alice has cleverly managed to mask their presence thus far from the particularly angry hedge witches who were just trying to summon the apocalypse and are now pretty firmly set on murdering them.

“Shit,” Q presses the fire escape door and it doesn’t budge. “Fuck, Alice, how long can you keep that up? This is going to – hang on.”

She’s clearly tired, and Eliot moves to help take her weight off the ankle she twisted when one of the less stylistically talented hedges managed to outmaneuver his improvised shield, leaning more on his cane as he does. “As long as I need to.”

Q holds the book they were working from in his hands, trying to cast at the door handle while juggling the cumbersome weight of what Eliot believes to be some petty hedge bullshit. Kady had not appreciated this thought when it was shared with her in the planning stages, but Kady is currently performing a spectacular decoy feat of battle magic in the warehouse across the street, and being chased by about six mediocre mages with apocalypse fetishes, so Eliot feels like he has the high ground.

There is noise, suddenly, from the stairwell at the other end of the corridor, and too soon the nasal tones of one of the hedges float down the corridor. “They have to be here – look.”

Eliot has no idea what they found; he was pretty distracted as they threw themselves up the stairs, but before he can even think to move, a figure in a truly tragic peacoat kicks aside the rubble that was once an exit sign and looks directly at where Alice and he are standing. He hears Q stop muttering behind them, and Alice’s small intake of breath is the only sound in his world.

The figure squints. Alice holds her hands in place, and Eliot tightens his grip around her waist.

One…

Two…

Three…

“Nothing here,” the hedge shouts, annoyed. “Must be up on the top floor.”

Eliot exhales, and feels Alice do the same next to him. Outside the door Q is currently trying to open, there’s the sound of birds cooing. The figure stops. Eliot shifts his weight closer to Alice at the same time she shifts closer to him, and her leg buckles.

One of her hands flies to his elbow as she hisses, and Eliot sees the shimmer of deflective magic collapse around them.

“Hey,” the hedge shouts, moving through the detritus in the hallway. Eliot fixates on a broken plank at the guy’s feet, and feels the tendrils of his magic grip it tight, lift it up, and then –

Thwack.

The hedge takes it, and Eliot really hopes that Kady and her band of un-merry hedges are nearby, because he doesn’t know exactly how they’re going to –

“Got it,” Q breathes, and Eliot feels the chill of outside air behind him. He gently pushes Alice, mutters “get the book out of here,” and picks up an assortment of deeply rusted nails. “I’ll follow.” He cracks his cane on the ground, letting a wave of energy flow through it as he moves his right hand to start casting –

Q makes an irritated noise, and it’s Eliot’s fault, entirely, that he turns to look at Q’s face.

It just takes a second, a single moment, for the hedge to see the bundle in Q’s arms, and by the time Eliot looks back his focus has shifted, and the asshole is casting again. He doesn’t have time to –

Eliot steps three inches to the left, easy as breathing.

It hurts, when it hits him and his negligible shield, of course, and he’s aware of Q’s sharp intake of breath, hands on his shoulders, his cane hitting the ground –

And that’s it, actually, because everything goes dark.

*

When Eliot opens his eyes, it isn’t because he’s awoken peacefully from a restful slumber. It’s more like he’s taken a battering ram to the chest, and also his trusty hip and knee are drumming out a throbbing beat of fuck-you-in-particular.

There’s no conversation now, although he remembers catching pieces while he was unconscious. Margo is sitting in a chair next to him, asleep, and she wasn’t even here, was she? Her head is pillowed on a hoodie, and it’s so reminiscent of the last time, after that thing had been forced to give his body back, that he feels an ice cold stab of terror at the memory of the conversation that came next.

“I’m – El, I need you to look at me, please...”

“...he's gone, El, and they’re not sure we can –”

“...I’m so sorry, baby, for all of us, but especially – I know that –”

It’s a pain of a different kind, a searing ache that feels like it will never stop being fresh, and he feels tears gather at the corners of his traitorous eyes before he can remember why he’s lying here feeling like he’s been run through a thresher.

He touches his chest, feels the tenderness where there are bandages neatly wrapped around his torso. He’s wearing a pair of pajamas that he certainly wasn’t wearing last time he was conscious, and as someone fairly well acquainted with a variety of drugs – both magical and non-magical – he’s willing to bet that his difficulty focusing on what happened right before he woke up here is the result of some combination of the two.

Not enough of them, clearly, considering the fucking throbbing in his left leg, but when isn’t that leg a problem, now, since –

“I cannot believe you.”

And, it turns out, Q is there, back against the closed door like he’s keeping something out, the sleeves of his shirt pushed up and his eyes more tired than Eliot has seen them in a long while.

“You’re okay,” Eliot says, and Q’s frown deepens.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he says, and when he pushes off the door Eliot can see that he leaves a smudge of some kind of chalk behind.

“Is Alice –”

“Alice is fine.” Q tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. It stays in place for approximately two seconds, then swings back. “We were able to block the hallway until Kady and Penny showed up.”

Eliot forces a smile. “So, I take it our hedge friends were thwarted?”

“Everything’s fine.” Q sits, then stands, agitated. “Well, no, actually, Eliot, now that you mention it, it’s not fine, because you shouldn’t just be just – stepping in front of –”

“You had the book,” Eliot says, eyes on the ceiling. “You needed to get out of there. And Alice couldn’t hold that –”

“I’m not blaming Alice,” Q says quickly. “She had been masking us for so long, but Eliot, I can cast a shield, and I would have been –”

“Dead,” Eliot says, looking Q in the eye, because he felt his shield absorb what it did of that spell, and he knows that that hedge was not fucking around (or, at least, was accidentally fairly lethal). Quentin knows that too, if the way he looks at his hands is any indication. “You would have been dead.”

Q was holding the book. And if Q tells him to his face he would have dropped it in a last-second effort to save himself, Eliot is going to call him the liar that he is.

Not that he had time to think that in the moment, when he shifted his weight into the path of a surprisingly competent magical bullet, but it’s a useful distraction.

Q has been quiet, which is strange, as Eliot had expected this to be a build up to a familiar argument. Well, familiar once upon a time, to people who looked and sounded like them. “Margo said…”

There are a lot of things Margo could have said, many less flattering than he would like. Eliot has no intention of steering the conversation, lest it go somewhere he won’t enjoy.

“She said you were… upset.” Q licks his lips, and Margo isn’t here, (how long has he been out?), which means Q’s talking about – “Before.”

Eliot actually laughs. Upset isn’t the word he’d use, and he’s willing to bet Margo didn’t either, but it’s probably the closest Q can bring himself to saying like your still beating heart had been ripped from your chest.

There’s something bitter in it when Eliot finally spits out a response. “You died, Quentin.”

“I –”

“You died.” His laugh is an awful, miserable, clawing thing that fights its way out of his chest. “You died, and there was fucking nothing –” He tries to sit up, and that was a mistake. “I don’t know why you’re here –”

Quentin pulls into himself, and Eliot raises his chin, breathes, and tries to stem the panic flooding through him. “You know I don’t – I mean how you’re here, you don’t just – Alice and Julia spent months looking for ways to get you back – the smartest people in the fucking world – and now you’re just here, and obviously, I was fucking upset, Quentin, and obviously, I’m not going to let some juiced-up Hedge murder you because they think their obscure god is going to usher them into fucking Valhalla with cocktails and hookers, especially not when we already don’t know that you’re going to still be here every morning.”

He takes a deep breath, even that causing immeasurable pain where the magic hit his sternum. He supposes he should be grateful that his ribs took it, rather than the areas of his body more recently subjected to Margo’s axes, but it still hurts like a motherfucker.

“I’m sorry,” is all Quentin says, something tight in his jaw. “I’m sorry that I seem to keep giving you reasons to throw yourself into the path of fucking death.”

“I don’t think you get to say that to me” is all Eliot can really manage, anger seeping through the pain. “Not when the only reason you’re back is because something put you here.”

And perhaps that’s the problem, isn’t it? Fate might intervene. Whatever capricious gods are currently watching over them might let them keep Q. It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened. That doesn’t mean, though, that this life won’t take him. That doesn’t mean that he won’t be killed by magic, or bad luck, or brain chemistry, and the fear is so visceral, so much a blanket drowning out the pain of whatever has been done to Eliot’s ribs, that he tries to breath and just – can’t.

He knows intimately what his body does, now, when it enters a state of abject fear. He knows the fear, the pounding in his ears, and the way that the room seems to start to close in. He’d like to say that he can focus in on Q’s voice, use it to find a way back. But that’s not how it works, and he’s worked with his therapist on this. He focuses on his breath, and lets the seconds tick by until he can hear Quentin’s voice again. “El? Eliot? Can you hear me?” His heart is still beating rabbit-quick, but that honestly could be proximity: Q is a careful distance away, but slightly closer, the concern on his face obvious as he asks, so gently, “El, is it okay if I touch your blankets to give you some space?”

“Yes,” he says, and finds that the removal of the blanket restricting his legs does help, a little. He breathes.

“Do you need anything? Is there something you need to take?”

“No.” He has some pills left, but he doesn’t need them as often anymore. “Maybe some water?”

Q nods, leaves, and returns with a glass a few moments later. It’s one with a solid groove to grip, which his hands appreciate. Q sits, after a moment, at the very end of the bed, and the silence this time isn’t exactly comfortable, but it is calm.

A minute passes. Or two. Or maybe an hour, Eliot isn’t sure. Eventually Quentin speaks. “I saw our – Penny 40. After the seam. He showed me you all – he showed you all saying goodbye. To me. I guess it was supposed to be proof that I’d done the right thing. That it was the right decision.”

Eliot’s throat feels suddenly dry, even as he swallows the water. His fingers twitch. He takes very measured, even breaths. “The – right… he...?”

Quentin looks up. “Eliot –”

“He… fucking –what?” He works hard to keep his voice measured, now, because he doesn’t know how It sounded, when it was him, and one of his many fears is that if he lets go he’ll tap into something. Someone will see It, in his rage or his malice, and it is for that reason, and that reason only, that he keeps his voice unfathomably calm as he says, “I am going to fucking kill him.”

He is struggling with the desire to punch Penny in the face, and at this particular moment he doesn’t even feel picky about which one.

“I don’t remember much after that, still,” Q continues, ignoring Eliot entirely, “but I think about it a lot. About why someone would give me another chance. Not that I’m not – not that I didn’t want it, I wanted, but – I know it bothers you too. Not knowing.”

“Bother isn’t exactly the word.” Eliot meets Q’s consternation with a frown of his own, but this fear, at least, is intimately familiar ground now.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Q says, and Eliot can’t help but show his surprise. “I think I should know, at least, if there’s a time limit on this.” He clears his throat. “I mean, I think I want to know. It’s… I had to think about it. And talk about it. A little.”

Eliot, for whom answers are equally tantalizing and horrifying, conceptually, allows himself to imagine walking into the Underworld and asking to see the manager (as though that has, historically, gone well for them).

But, then again, Eliot has never been much for reading, but he’s pretty sure there’s a mythological precedent for people storming the afterlife to save the ones they care about.

“You know what that means,” he asks quietly, “right?”

“Yeah.” Q is still too far away to touch, but he meets Eliot’s eye and the corners of his mouth lift. “It’s time to go back to the library.”

More days than Eliot anticipated pass before they’re able to align their schedules (more, truth be told, on Alice’s end than Eliot’s), but eventually the two of them are in an overpriced cafe in Chelsea on a Wednesday afternoon, ordering seafood with names that are also 2000s pop punk songs.

(Eliot orders a “Sk8er [Crab] Boil”, while Alice opts for the wordier “All the Sardines” sandwich.)

“Of course I understand,” Alice says, once he’s explained what Q is wanting to know. “Whatever magic brought Q back – it must be something we haven’t seen.” He recognizes the glimmer in her eye, which is why it surprises him when she adds, “I’d want to know, if it was me. But I’d also hope it wouldn’t change things.”

Eliot, who has sort of hoped the answer to “how is Quentin back” will literally change everything, furrows his eyebrows. “What?”

Alice purses her lips. “Well, it may sound odd, but working at the library…” She picks at the chips on her plate. “It needs to be done. And I do find it interesting. But the last few months, I haven’t really...had a life.” One side of her mouth quirks into a frown. “Outside magic, work, I mean, in one way or another. And now that Q’s back, and you all are nearby, it’s reminded that some things – some things do have to be separate from magic. For me.” She smiles, and he finds himself looking for guile in an expression where there is none. “Like having lunch with you.”

It does feel odd to have Alice Quinn, who once erased magic from the earth because of its infinite potential for evil, and now champions its use for good, or whatever (Eliot has not, admittedly, been keeping up with the reformation efforts the way he knows that Q and Julia have), tell him that there’s more important things in life than magic.

“Sometimes, work is so absorbing,” she continues, now fiddling with her napkin. “But enough about me. How have you been?”

The truthful answer, at least the one he settles on, is “okay, mostly,” because he figures that having an existential crisis is a little heavy for a light seafood lunch.

She raises a solitary eyebrow, which is how he knows that someone he lives with has indicated otherwise.

“Alright,” he hazards. “What’s Q been saying, then?”

“Not much,” Alice comments casually. “Which is how I know something is wrong.”

She doesn’t exactly look comfortable with the topic, even though she’s the one who brought it up, and Eliot can’t really blame her. He finds himself jealous, again, although in the light of day it feels wrong, an old wound that throbs a little, but it's a pain dulled by the awareness that he doesn’t have a right to it.

“I think that...when we were together,” Alice says, almost apologetically, “I spent a lot of time wishing that Q and I would just understand each other better. I blamed us both for it.”

In all the months that Q was gone, all the drunken conversations, they’ve somehow managed not to talk about the details of why the saga of Q and Alice had been so filled with implosions of varying sizes. The closest they came was one vodka-fueled evening of biggest regrets, in which Alice had said more than she meant to, and Eliot had felt trapped by not being able to say enough.

“Trusting someone to be their own person is hard,” Eliot hedges. “Especially when you’re on different pages.”

Alice hums, glancing around at the small crowd of patrons in the cafe. She cast a muffling charm on the table when they sit down, but Eliot understands the impulse to check.

“I think I know us better, now,” she says. “After – after everything. And I’d want to know, too, but I just – I hope it doesn’t change things.” She gives him a pointed look. “If he knows what he wants.”

Eliot clears his throat and affects his well-honed air of vapidity. “Well, either way, I’m glad you can help, Ms. Interim-librarian.” He offers his glass, and with a knowing smile, Alice clinks. “Although next time, I’m stealing you away for drinks, too, even if you have work to do.”

“It turns out that restructuring the largest repositories of magical knowledge and power takes time,” Alice replies, sipping her iced tea. “Who’d have thought?”

The rest of lunch is pleasant, and Eliot enjoys hearing the number of ways Alice intends to rip apart the befucked structure of what is definitely an institution better for her presence. For a couple of hours afterwards Eliot is even able to ignore the butterflies in his stomach when he thinks of Alice’s pointed if he knows what he wants.

Q is his own person, making his own decisions. Eliot knows that, even as he studiously avoids making decisions of his own.

He can trust other people to know their own minds. Even when he knows better.

Q can’t go to the underworld, obviously, a point Eliot takes for granted until Q shoves his chin forward, curled up improbably on the couch as they all gather to create this harebrained scheme, and says, “I’m coming, obviously.”

“Like fuck you are,” Eliot says reflexively, and he sees Q’s chest fill with annoyance, his jaw tensing for a fight. “You go there and they say ‘oops, our bad, we’ll just take him back then’, and then–”

“I should be able to talk to –”

“We are not,” Eliot says with all the finality his recovering chest can muster, addressing the room, “delivering them a Quentin shaped package with a fucking bow on it.”

Quentin stands and draws himself up to his full height, which is – well, Eliot loves him, he is reminded, is all. “Don’t you think if someone is going to make a case for me being alive, given the –” He closes his mouth, pauses, and licks his lips to give himself time. “–given my history, don’t you think it should be me?”

And the thing is, he isn’t wrong. Eliot would be lying if he said that Q’s desire to fight didn’t spark something in him, a relief that feels a lot like gratitude. He knows that Q wants to be here (for now, something bitter in him adds), wants to stay, and that, more than anything else, is a compelling argument for letting Q storm into their Penny’s office and demand answers.

But giving them the opportunity to take it back? That just feels like asking to have things fall apart.

“Actually, I think you should probably both stay,” Julia says, and Eliot had almost forgotten they weren’t alone.

He makes an aggrieved noise, gathering himself, and Q scoffs. Eliot has a particular image of himself marching into the Underworld branch and demanding to speak to Penny 40’s manager. Eliot would wear a vest, definitely. Perhaps a cravat. Certainly a hearty sheen of righteous indignation. It’s gotten him through some pretty tough moments.

“I’ll go,” says Julia. “Q can write a letter, and I’ll go.”

There’s more argument, of course. They fight about it for another hour, but ultimately Julia’s unfailing logic and incomprehensible calm win out. Eliot and Q will stay, Kady and Julia will go. (Penny 23, understandably, opts to sit this one out.)

It’s not that he doesn’t trust them, or even that he thinks they aren’t more capable of getting answers than him. But as Eliot watches them prepare, he can’t help but think that keeping Q here should be more his fight.

Eliot lets himself float back to his fantasy of swooping in, righteous in his search for answers.

Instead, he waits.

“Do you ever –” Eliot stops himself, but Q starts from his place sprawled at the other end of the couch. Eliot has never understood why Q can’t sit like a human, but he supposes that when someone has no care for wrinkling their clothes, all kinds of new possibilities open up.

At least when Eliot lounges, he pays mind to the long reaching consequences.

It’s easier to think about the clothes than the words on the tip of his tongue.

Do you remember us the way I do?

Do you remember our family?

Do you remember who we used to be?

Do you remember when we were happy?

They’ve been waiting at the apartment for about six hours, since Julia and Kady took off to meet Alice for an unscheduled appointment with the library. So far they’ve discussed (and discounted) both watching a movie and going to get groceries, although they did eventually reach a ceasefire over what to order for lunch when Q snatched Eliot’s phone from his hand and ordered from the restaurant himself.

They’re now sitting in the living room, having eaten a truly impressive amount of Naan, and while there’s no reason they even have to be waiting here together (it’s not like they won’t be aware of Team Underworld’s return), neither of them seem to have found the will to move. Quentin’s laptop has been silently playing the trailer to a new romantic comedy on the Netflix home page for the last twenty minutes, and although the sound is off, if Eliot catches that wide yellow-sundress flash of the heroine grimacing at the puddle she tripped into one more time, he won’t be responsible for his actions.

“What?” Q asks, curious and not nearly as snippy as he was before there were excessive amounts of naan, as he flicks his phone onto the coffee table. “Do I ever what?”

“I was just thinking,” Eliot says, desperately searching his brain for a question that isn’t any of the ones he almost voiced.

“Okay.” Q tucks his arm behind his head, reclined against the armrest, his book facedown on his chest. “About anything specific, or…”

And this is the moment, isn’t it? Eliot could easily divert to dinner plans, the current status of Julia and Penny, or even Alice’s planned dismantling of the magical establishment. It wasn’t too late to abandon the whole idea, the pieces of something that have been swirling around in his head like a particularly catchy song that just won’t let up.

What was it that Dr. Ro had said that this was about? Deciding if the things he wants were worth the risk of reaching out for them?

Eliot is a man who grew up queer in the conservative heartland, discovered he was a fucking magician, and got trapped inside his own head by a wannabe god.

He does not think he has ever been this particular kind of terrified.

Well, once, maybe. On the mosaic, a year into their little key quest, when Q leaned forward to kiss him and Eliot hadn’t thought, really, just leaned in and –

He’d been scared then, after.

He’d been scared later too, the first time Teddy was placed in his arms and it had felt like the whole world shifted, then, for a moment and then forever after.

So, yeah, he knows. But after those things – after the kiss, and the wrinkly little bundle in his arms – there had been… everything else. Fifty years of everything.

“Why the fuck not?” Q had said, and Eliot sees himself there, then, counting every reason.

I was afraid, and when I'm afraid, I run away.

But.

If I ever get out of here, Q…

This time, he jumps.

He’s already falling, has been for years, so why the fuck not?

“About us,” Eliot says, and then he waits.

“What about us?” Q says, after a long pause, and it’s so careful that Eliot wants to scream.

He wants to scream because they should have had this conversation weeks ago, maybe, or maybe they shouldn’t have it at all.

He wants to scream because they have been bickering about nothing on the couch for six hours, and he didn’t win the argument about lunch and this should be unbearable. But it isn’t, it’s a perfect day, except for all the reasons that it isn’t.

And, most of all, he wants to scream himself hoarse because Quentin was his best friend, and more than that, and because Eliot thought, when he was just a small, nothing boy from nowhere, that he wanted to live a life of intrigue and adventure.

Now, he just wants this.

He opens his mouth, and when nothing comes out, Q sighs.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining it, Eliot, but considering my memory is less than reliable, I really need you to tell me that this whole thing is what I think it is.”

He doesn’t insult Q by pretending he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But there’s just too much between them for that to have a simple answer, isn’t there? “That depends on what you think it is.”

There is another long pause, and then, “No, I’m not letting you get away with that. Not this time.” Q sounds... just a little less sure this time. Still defiant, but there is the smallest note of doubt, and Eliot remembers watching himself in that throne room, lying through his fucking teeth.

And for all the days and weeks and months Q was gone, Eliot had dreamed about this – a chance to take it back. He’d be brave, he promised himself, he’d learned it from –

And this is the fear, isn’t it. The big one: the unsurvivable thing. Eliot breathes, and tries to stay calm. “I want – but if we do this, Q, for real, and they come back and say that you’ll be gone in a week –”

“So, what? You’re just going to never – because I might disappear? That’s a shitty way to live, Eliot.” Q bites his lower lip. “You’re my friend, Eliot. Before...” He waves an arm to indicate the enormity of the last few years (or decades, depending on your point of view). “Before anything.”

Eliot swallows. “And Alice?”

It’s a derailment, which obviously Quentin knows, because he barely even bothers to look annoyed. “Alice and I are friends too – or, we’re working on it. We will be. Which you know.” He stands and stretches, the ratty sleeves of his sweatshirt hanging over his palms.

Eliot does know that. It’s not like they’ve spent the last few weeks footloose and fancy free, though, and actually, with everything Q must have to work through – death, his brain chemistry, and a monster in the form of his friend torturing him for months – is this even really an appropriate time? Q has a lot to deal with. Maybe they should just –

Eliot has that moment again, the one where he realizes all the questions he hasn’t bothered to ask, too wrapped up in the paralytic fear of what-ifs. He fights the instinct to offer to get whatever it is Q’s glancing into the kitchen for and beg Q to sit back down. He tries not to make his next question a change of subject. “How – how are you feeling?”

Q raises an eyebrow at the abrupt change of subject, mouth quirking in something like disappointment, but only moves minutely, shifting a stack of papers from the coffee table to a side table and shrugging. “I guess – going to therapy every week, so… you know.”

Eliot knows that too, thanks to Julia and Alice’s bemused updates and context clues in idle chatter, but he nods like it’s new information. “I’ll bet the coming-back-from-the…” He trails off, clears his throat again. “I’ll bet that was a treat to explain.”

“Yeah, well. She’s a magician, so.”

“Nice find.”

“Penny actually found her for me.” Quentin tilts his head. “Well, he threw her card at me and said, ‘get your fucking head on straight, Coldwater,’ which is…”

“Practically a confession of love,” Eliot says before he thinks, then falls silent. It occurs to him how much he has missed, occupying the same space with Quentin but doing his best to keep a distance between them, lest he press himself to Quentin’s side and never leave.

“The new shoulder feels weird,” Quentin says after another long pause, seemingly without prompting, although he shrugs it like Eliot should be able to see the difference. “I’d kind of gotten used to it.”

“It must be weird,” Eliot agrees, “having a new body.” This conversation has gone to none of the places he feared or hoped it would go, so he’s a little at sea, but Q nods again, like this is somehow insightful commentary.

Q is shrugging his shoulder pensively again, even though he’d said many times that the centaur’s work hadn’t felt different, after a while. He knows that for a few days right after his return, early on, Q had found things just a little too loud, and had found the texture of the flooring a little harder to walk on, as if the new body (okay, he thinks virgin body, then squashes that thought under Q’s well-worn rant about the concept of virginity, and Margo’s corollary rant about the patriarchal implications of the entire construct) was still working out how to just be in this world.

“Q,” he starts, stretching out the syllable. He leans into the couch, the distance between them too little for him to think, clearly, about what comes next.

“It didn’t sound like that, when it called me that, you know,” Q says firmly, and Eliot has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s a welcome subject change, though, so he’ll take it.

“What?”

“Q.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not confused about who you are, Eliot.” Quentin shakes his head minutely, frowning. “You keep, like – You’re not like, scaring me, by being in the same room.”

Eliot hadn’t realized how much the spectre of that fear was bothering him, but he feels a tiny piece of the anxiety in his gut lessen at Q’s obvious lack of guile. “But it did.”

“It wasn't you.”

“But you stayed.” He tries very hard to keep any judgement out of his voice, but knows he misses the mark. It would have been so much... less, if Q had just gotten away – “Why did you stay?”

Quentin is dismissive in his huff of breath, but also manages to somehow be gentle. “You know the answer to that.”

He does? Sort of. The answer belongs in the shadows he hasn’t let himself dwell in, the bright, glinting memories he holds so tightly, lest they disappear again.

Eliot will likely never know most of the things that were done in his body.

Julia had told him a little, in those first weeks, when he was still a little in denial, his body falling apart and his mind unable to wrap itself around a world that didn’t contain Quentin Coldwater. He’d been so hungry, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, and while he went through several different types of withdrawal and tried to teach his limbs to extend without the aid of magic, he’d heard enough to know that without Q, he wouldn’t have had a body to come back to.

It’s something that floors him, even now: the idea that Q was so goddamn brave – or suicidal, a voice in his head offers – that he’d stayed with that thing in his body, allowed it to taunt and manipulate him, forced it to eat and stopped it from doing so much fucking cocaine (or whatever) that Eliot’s heart exploded. Eliot is grateful. He is also, frankly, still kind of confused about why and how Q was able to do it. By killing himself after, that voice returns. It – you – pushed him so far, for so long.

“It – I wouldn’t blame you, if it was hard. It was hard for the others, after… I mean, obviously we were – it was after. But for a while, they couldn’t –” Look me in the eye. Stand to be in the same room with me.

Eliot had always been keenly aware of a flinch, an uncomfortable shift. At first it had been necessary, a closeted kid in the conservative heartland, but New York had amplified it. He’d talked to a friend of his in college one night, high out of their minds, and they’d spoken of the way that larger people – especially men, and especially white ones – should be aware of the space they occupy. He thought about that a lot, later, after he had his body back again and his friends looked at him and saw carnage and despair. Hell, he couldn’t fault them for that; he’d looked in the mirror a time or two in his life and would have said the same.

Q’s jaw tightens. “It didn’t know how you move, or how you talk, or how you touch – things. Well, it knew, probably, in a technical way, but it wasn’t – it didn’t think that was important.”

Eliot, who has been living with the evidence of just how unimportant that thing found his body, stretches out the fingers on his left hand, the ligaments brittle and stiff, and thinks of the withdrawal, the physical therapy. “Yes. Well.”

He is unspeakably glad that Q is looking at him, doesn’t appear to be seeing anything else that might have once occupied his skin.

“You aren’t scary.” Quentin smiles, a tiny tilt of the lips that brings life to his eyes, and it’s honestly every fucking cliche about the sun coming out. “Although maybe…” His tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip, nervous, and Eliot’s fucking heart, jesus. He’s on the couch with Eliot now, who isn’t entirely sure when that happened but – Q’s hand rises, hesitantly, to touch the shorter hair curling behind Eliot’s ear. “Maybe keep your hair this length for –” He swallows, and Eliot’s mouth is a desert. “–for a while.”

Q tugs on his hair, just a little, for emphasis, and it is not until this precise moment that Eliot has truly, profoundly understood that primal impulse, the ones that animals have to bare their throat.

“Should we –” Eliot manages, his breath moving the hair that won’t stay tucked behind Q’s ear, and Q sighs, retracting his hand. And, oh, yeah, Eliot hates himself with a cowardice that he can taste, bitter on the back of his tongue as he swallows. “Right now, is this the best time for us to...”

“Tell me, El, when exactly do you think is the right time?”

He says nothing, and Q snorts in a way that should not be attractive.

Q’s hand is still on Eliot’s jaw and he really just cannot stop himself from leaning into it. “I am free next Thursday, if that works with your schedule.”

Q laughs, just like he hoped, patting his cheek with a fondness that cracks straight through whatever self-preservation or resolve Eliot might have had buried somewhere, deep down. “Eliot, I mean this in the nicest possibly way, but what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“A veritable cornucopia of things, thanks for asking.”

“Eliot.”

Eliot takes the admonishment, inclining his head as Q pulls his arm back. “This doesn’t have to be hard, Eliot. Sometimes we get things. We get to be happy, maybe, to relax.”

Eliot laughs, despite himself, and Q quirks a dangerous eyebrow. “No, not – I wasn’t laughing at – I was just thinking, there’s this line from The Last Five Years –”

Q squints. “Is that the musical about the guy cheating on his wife?”

“It’s about two – it’s a structural – they’re never in the same pl – that’s not the point.”

Q seems unconvinced. “Who are you in this scenario?”

Obviously Eliot is Jamie, who implodes his life spectacularly through song, but that is not the point. “It doesn’t matter.” He clears his throat. “The point is…” He can’t actually remember what the point was.

“Maybe you’re afraid of me disappearing,” Q says. “But maybe it’s also a convenient excuse. The new that’s not you, and it’s definitely not me.”

Eliot swallows, the taste of those words still sour on his tongue.

“I asked you to give it a shot,” Quentin says, and it’s the same look, this time, that he had in the throne room, except this time there isn’t that bright shine of hope. “I asked you to give us a chance, and you said no.”

That is, when it comes down to it, a recitation of the facts, except for the time that Eliot was trapped in his own head and watched it happen all over again.

“You know,” Quentin says, determined, “I’m not trying to force you into anything. If you don’t feel... how I feel, that’s fine.” He bites his bottom lip, and Eliot wants to remember what it tastes like. “But we’ve been – I need to know, because the way we are right now, I can’t keep convincing myself that it’s real, if you aren’t in the same place as me... I don’t want to keep doing this, Eliot.” Q looks at him, then, the exact look that made Eliot cave a thousand times in another life. “I can’t keep feeling like I’m waiting for a different answer to the same question. Either you want this, or you don’t. And if you don’t, then I need to – I need to know. So I can... deal with that.”

“Q...” Eliot says, and the part of him that watched them in the throne room screams. And he can’t – that can’t stand. It really – he truly is not enough of a coward, is he, to let Quentin Coldwater believe that?

“That’s not – of course I want this. Of course I – ”

Q’s reaction is not the instant delight Eliot might have hoped for. His mouth quirks, but he meets Eliot’s eye with a guarded skepticism that Eliot hates.

Q takes a deep breath. “Last time we did this, you said that we wouldn’t choose each other, if we had a choice.” Q’s hands are fidgeting with a throw pillow, but his voice is steady as he picks at a loose thread. “Well, you should know, if you don’t already, that is – uh, actually, total bullshit.” His hands still. “This is me, Eliot, and I am trying to fucking choose you. And if you don’t want me –” the Eliot from the throne room whines – “if you don’t want this, that’s fine, but I can tell you now... we worked, Eliot, and that doesn’t mean we always will, but I want to goddamn try. Whether I’m here for a week, or a – a month, or fifty years, I don’t see why some fucking bullshit magic should get to decide for you.”

Their hands are somehow tangled, now, but the only thing that Eliot can feel is the pulse where Q’s left wrist is settled over his thumb.

“What if it doesn’t work?” is what Eliot manages to croak out, the last of his resolve crumbled to dust, and that’s only for fear that if he doesn’t say something, Quentin will leave. He’ll leave, and all the talk about being braver will be for nothing, because the only person who has ever managed to be brave when it came to them is Q. And he’s done it twice (a thousand times, in another life, but that life is theirs too, isn’t it? It should count).

Q huffs a small laugh at this, his head tilting away. “Yeah. It might not.” Eliot feels Q squeeze his hand. “You are kind of a dick. But – right now… I just kind of want to take all the bullshit and just say...” His lips tilt into a wry smile. “Why not?”

And Eliot was wrong before, because this – this is his second chance. All of these weeks and months, all of the grief and coiling guilt in his stomach led up to this: the chance for them to meet here.

Margo’s bunny emissaries hopping insistently on the end of his bed, prodding Eliot to action, Alice’s late night study sessions, Julia’s patient hand on his shoulder, attempting to steer him towards the path of least (or, at least, less) destruction –

If I’m braver, it’s because I learned it from you.

And the thing of it is, whatever fucked up thing comes next – whoever dares try to add the next layer of bullshit for them to work out with their therapists, after (likely) first fucking it all up significantly on their own – Quentin’s right. There is every chance that their lives will implode, and they won’t get their fifty years this time.

But Eliot has gotten to wake up from two very near brushes with death recently. And waking up from the second one, with Q alive and annoyed, was infinitely preferable to the first.

If he doesn’t wake up the next time, at least he will always have this. He’ll have Q alive again, hours and days of him here, taking a chance on Eliot again.

Why the fuck not? If loving Quentin this much might kill him, why not do it better, and as long as possible, and with a view?

So he kisses him.

It’s the easiest thing in the world, in the end. Magnets, or gravity, or home, or a thousand other cliches that Eliot wouldn’t be caught dead using unironically. Q’s lips are dry, because in whatever lifetime he still can’t keep hold of a chapstick to save his life, and Eliot’s hands tangle in Q’s hair with a now familiar twinge. The hair is different, but when Q casts to move a cushion out of the way, just as Eliot does the same, they surge into the negative space now available to them. He feels the caress of familiar magic winding through his fingers, and – fuck, he has missed this.

Almost as much (not as much) as Q’s laugh, the angle of his frown, the brush of fingers against his wrist, he has missed the soft flick and press of Q’s magic – so different from the cool, comforting cool caress of Margo’s, the sharp edges of Kady’s, or the quiet press of Alice’s.

The kisses are distinctly inelegant, which is a detail that Eliot notes and then dismisses as less important than the incredibly hot way Q is crawling into his lap like if he tries hard enough, they might actually be able to occupy the same space. It’s inelegant, and technically sort of toothier than necessary, and he wants it every single day for the rest of his life.

It’s feverish for a little while. Neither of them push further than hands grasping anywhere they can reach, and if Eliot dismisses a few twinges of pain in the process, he figures that is the smallest of sacrifices to make. There does, however, come a point where Q notices, and he rests a protective hand on Eliot’s shoulder as he shifts to gather his breath in the divot between the couch cushions.

Very much not wanting to dwell on any of the hundred depressing thoughts that could follow, Eliot tries for general levity, and to appear that he is not at all worried. He lets a small smile tilt his lips in a way that has, historically, worked out for him. Q’s hand slides down his arm, and their fingers loosely twine; Q squeezes, but otherwise doesn’t comment on the tremor. “You’re going to break my heart again, aren’t you, Coldwater?”

“First of all, it absolutely was not –”

Eliot silences him with another kiss, which is definitely cheating, but it’s okay, because Quentin’s hand slides under the lapel of his waistcoat, and settles on the soft, unstarched baby blue of his oldest surviving button down. On his chest, just a little left of center.

“Doesn’t feel broken to me.” Quentin bites his lip, and it’s such a Q gesture that Eliot feels, in defiance of Q’s words, his heart crack open with gratitude. “Bruised, maybe.”

You gonna mend it? Eliot thinks, and he almost thinks he must’ve said it out loud, with the way Q shifts off of him, then gently tugs Eliot’s shoulders towards him so he can rest his head.

He really doesn’t mean to fall asleep. He means to talk more (maybe) and get some of their clothes off (probably) and get his hands all over Q for the first time in months (years) while he’s allowed. Q’s right: he could be gone tomorrow, or any of them could, and it would really be a crying shame if they didn’t take advantage of this newfound bravery and fuck a whole hell of a lot before that happened.

But actually, what happens is that he is lying there, legs draped over the end of the couch, Q’s hand gently carding through the little product that remains in his hair, and... it’s nice. It’s nice to be petted, it’s nice that Q is touching him, it’s nice that he really didn’t have to do much of the work at all to make this happen, because he is in love with the bravest little toaster-nerd there ever was. He should probably mention that at some point. But right now, they have the apartment to themselves, and he’s really very tired, actually, and it turns out that being brave, even temporarily, really takes it out of you.

Eliot feels the gentle whisper of Q’s hand on his head, warm and welcome.

He rests, and as he rests, he mends.

*

Eliot wakes up the next morning, and Quentin is still there, starfished with his neck at an angle that is definitely going to fuck up his back. His nose is pressed into Eliot’s elbow.

He wakes up the next day, and Quentin is definitely, definitively alive.

Eliot breathes.

It’s enough.