Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Eliot,” said Quentin after a prolonged silence of approximately thirty seconds, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but—but, um. I don’t think this is working.”

Melodramatic as ever, his fellow magician threw out a finger to deter Quentin, his other hand wrapped firmly around the unmarked green bottle that could’ve been shoe polish or some kind of liquor [it all depended on how bold he was feeling]. The cords binding their opposite arms together strained with the effort, and Quentin stumbled a little on his knees, tugged inward by the gesture. Eliot half-smiled, then snickered, ending with a snort of laughter that shook his skinny shoulders.

Sweeping his hair back with his own free hand, Quentin Coldwater bit back a sigh of impatience and watched the stork-like man with the wild dark curls study the symbols sketched onto the floor. Another drunken debacle in sorcery—just the typical party night in the Physical Kids’ Cottage. Eliot Waugh had cracked open the forbidden spells on a whim [“bewitchments with blindfolds and beer? Try curses and cocktails, darling, it’s less mouthy and sometimes that’s a good thing.” “By Panic! At the Disco.”] and joyously invited anyone who dared attempt to master them with him to join in. Quentin, fearing for his friend’s safety [and his own, as the last round of partying had rendered the ceiling scorched and two freshmen missing; presumed frogs], had volunteered as tribute.

As usual, it led to some serious self-doubt, especially where his decision-making was concerned.

From what he could discern of the spell, it was meant to be a ward of some kind. The binding was more symbolic than literal; the directions indicating the presence of another magician, preferably one who was already a friend, should invite the…[there’d been a lot of squinting and stumbling at this point as spells tended to be more poetic than pragmatic for the most part]—ah. The fellow magician should then invite “the energy of the universe” to “connect spiritually” with the intended recipient, the original caster. The result, if Quentin read it correctly, would be a form of preventative magic meant to connect Eliot better with his surroundings. A sort of clarification; an anchor, even when intoxicated or otherwise under the influence. A conduit into which Eliot could redistribute his own energies and replenish; renew. How’d it go—renew, reuse, recycle? Something like that.

In conclusion, there were definitely worse spells to be casting.

“Just—just give it a—you know what, you read it,” Eliot suggested, shoving the dusty tome in Quentin’s general direction and taking another mouthful of [hopefully] alcohol from the bottle in his hand. Quentin actually did sigh, this time, out loud—his eyes flickering uncertainly between Eliot and the book of spells. Eliot mumbled something and sat back, disheveled hair half-covering his face and brocaded vest untucked from his high-waisted slacks. Above them, the mate to the book on the floor fluttered like a moth, albeit somewhat less ominous.

Licking his lips, Quentin tried the words on for size in silence for a moment [“do your lips move when you read”], then murmured them aloud. The text this time was—Hebrew, if he wasn’t mistaken, or older. The enunciation was easy enough, and the nervousness of tackling the magic effectively had faded since his first semester at school. It was more of a “well, I’ve probably faced worse” than a “well, this’ll probably go horribly wrong”. A step in the right direction, maybe? Quentin, two drinks in and facing down finals, couldn’t honestly be bothered to care all that much. Chances were, the spell would be relatively harmless—after all, even Eliot knew to avoid the seriously fucked-up stuff when under the influence. Or at least, Quentin hoped so.

Anything would be better at this point than studying alchemy till his eyes literally bled [happened to a girl in her second year, he was told—now she haunted the library…or something].

“…Nothing,” he said at last, and Eliot emitted a noise like a dying whale, theatrically collapsing to the floor. The book, perturbed by this, snapped itself shut, scurried back a few paces, then launched itself into the air, swirling above them to join its other half in the smoky atmosphere of the house. “I’m sorry, Eliot.”

“It’s alright,” said the older of the two from his new position on the floorboards, “I’ve conceded to dying alone and in pain; most likely of dysentery or something equally foul. It’s the only way for me to go.” Quentin’s lips half-turned, a fading smile trying to reignite.

“Come on. You’re not on the Oregon Trail.”

“As if I would ever set foot in Oregon, Quentin, trail or no trail,” Eliot droned. Quentin withheld a snort of his own, this time, and soothingly patted his friend on the arm—surprised to find, much like a certain previous [and unmentionably embarrassing; nigh traumatizing] ceremony, the ropes previously winding them together were gone.

Well, maybe it had worked, then. Whatever it was. Perhaps the universe had decided to take pity on him—or rather, on Eliot. As it stood, Quentin felt no less aware than he had mere moments ago, even with his slow-to-sober consciousness floating grudgingly back into focus. He could only hope Eliot ended up getting something worthwhile out of it.

He decided to put it out of his head until consequences occurred.

That usually served them all best.

Magicians were just fucking procrastinators with superpowers, after all.

“Come on,” he murmured, reaching down to haul the limp frame of the telekinetic up from the floor as best he could, “let’s get you to bed.” Despite Eliot’s protested, Quentin was able to effectively half-drag, half-carry the taller man toward the stairs as he bemoaned his inevitable suffering and eventual demise [“surrounded by no less than four hundred cats—” “Uh-huh, okay, Eliot.” “I know them all by name already.” “Of course you do.” “Oscar Wilde; the end is near! Lord Byron, my time is up…Bernie Sanders, this is no time for catnip…” “Jesus Christ.”].

Behind them, on the floor, the chalk outline they’d drawn together began to glow.

Chapter Text

After a long night of nonsense [though not the nonsense Eliot intended—“ask me about the magic I can do in bed!” “Go to sleep, Eliot”], Quentin managed to eke by his first class on four hours of sleep, the world’s worst hangover [despite having been careful with his intake; or so he thought], a resignation [re: will] to live, and the realization he had two minor essays to finish by EOD.

As usual, mostly powered by anxiety, Quentin didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary until he finally laid down again that night—a blessed evening in the cottage with absolutely zero party potential. Eliot, from what Quentin could tell, had moved only from his bedroom to the kitchen and back again all day, and not much had been seen of him since.

It was only as Quentin sat collecting his thoughts, head spinning and spiraling as it had a tendency to do when he was overtired that he felt something—else.
It was just a flicker at first—the sensation of something brushing against him.

He shot upright in a panic, flinging aside the sheets of his twin extra-long and turning in place. There was nothing there, of course. No threat of a loose moth or any signs of the Beast. There wasn’t so much as a downy feather out of place, the indent of his pillow already re-inflating.

The static of the TV in the other room drew his attention, as all things did when his anxiety kicked it into high gear. He swiveled slowly to examine the rest of the room, running a hand over his face. Keep it together.

Slowly laying back down on the bed, Quentin tried to focus on his breathing. One hand on his stomach, the other behind his head, the magician stared at the ceiling and ruminated on nothing other than the rhythm of his own lungs. Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, release in eight. And repeat as necessary. It was supposedly the correct velocity for one’s breathing when entering sleep. It would help clear his head. Blah blah blah blah, crackpot pseudo-medical meditation. He had as much faith in that as he did the rest of it all—from the meds to the meditation.
Good name for an autobiography.

He’d almost begun to slip into the kind of catatonic state that came from three days on ten hours sleep [divvied between each day, mind] when the sensation came again, a little more solid this time.

More like lips ghosting across his skin.

Shooting upright for the second time, Quentin all but propelled away from the bed, spun around, and framed the room with his hands, bringing one of his spare fingers down like a windshield wiper—effectively scanning for signs of magic or intrusion. His heart was in his throat, the sensation of being touched prickling uncomfortably under his sweats and shirt.

He might’ve dreamt it, he supposed. But then again, that’d never been the easiest or most anticipated explanation at Brakebills.

Shaking off the disquieting sensation of being felt up or watched, Quentin slipped out of his room, down the narrow hallway, and made a beeline for the bathroom. It was late enough that even the Physical Kids had abandoned the common areas, leaving them empty and echo-y, as if the entire situation wasn’t eerie on its own.

Shutting the door behind himself and casting a ward [he’d learned the first time he hadn’t, when Margo had barged in and started shedding clothes, showering and chatting with him as he stood; horrified, trying to brush his teeth and stare at nothing whatsoever], Quentin exhaled. One hand found either side of the sink, and the magician glanced at his tired reflection, wondering, not for the first time, if half of his problems weren’t the product of an overactive and somewhat ill imagination.

But again, that hadn’t been the explanation for anything thus far.

Simply the recurring nightmare.

He shed his loose gray shirt and sweatpants, kicked off his socks and boxers and fumbled into flip-flops—another crucial factor of the Cottage being that if one didn’t invest in a solid pair of flip-flops, one ran the risk of foot fungus and alligator bites. It was a long and somewhat painful story resulting in a very confused plumber and several psychics stifling snickers. The flip-flops did little to ward off reptilian intrusion, but at least Quentin was successfully shielded from a disgusting skin affliction.

The hot water coursing through his hair and down his spine felt good—decent enough to assuage some of Quentin’s rampant anxieties. At the very least, he could feel his shoulders untensing, his mind wandering back to the spell Eliot and he had [failed to] cast the other night. He’d heard nothing further on the subject, what with alchemy and numerology taking up the majority of his time lately—that is, when Margo wasn’t forcing him to practice for one of her many games [“I’m going to make you be on every team of mine from here on out” “but—Margo, socializing is the worst”] or Alice wasn’t quietly staring him down for studying other subjects outside the classroom order. Or when Penny wasn’t threatening to grab him by the hair and give him what could only be described as “a magical swirly”.

Or when he wasn’t worrying about Julia and James.

His head thumped miserably against the glass side of the shower, eyes drifting shut as the hot water ran lukewarm across his frame. He had once again pushed Julia from his mind to make room for magic—it was easy, in a way. She wasn’t here, and his tendency toward obsessive-compulsion was all-consuming—it was like forgetting about paying a bill. The concept of Julia had become more…an annoyance than a friendship. It wasn’t fair to her. It wasn’t fair to their friendship. His heart sank at the thought, and he reached for the showerhead, determined to rinse everything making him tense back up from himself once and for all when he felt it again.

This time was more obvious; easier to describe. It fluttered down his spine, differentiating itself from the droplets in the shower. They danced across his skin in lazy indifference to the phantom sensation of fingers deliberately dragging dull nails across his back.

He swung around so hard his elbow collided with the side of the shower and every bottle of shampoo left there by other tenants fell to the ceramic belly of the tub with a resounding crash. Cringing both in pain and apologetically to all those passed out in the halls below and around, Quentin cradled his arm, rolled his shoulders, looking around once more—unable to find anything out of place. The ward by the door hadn’t been tripped, nor had anyone come or gone otherwise.

Slowly turning off the water without taking his eyes off the area he’d had his back to before, Quentin drew in a breath and slid the glass door open, stepping out of the shower with a wet slap of pink flip-flops [Eliot’s; naturally, secondhand and borrowed to an indefinite degree].

Reaching for a towel, Quentin dried his hair hastily, not wanting any part of his vision to be impaired, then swept it out of his face and set about shaking the rest of the moisture from his skin. The towel slipped around his waist and Quentin held his breath, trying to see if anyone was around or had woken up from the colossal amount of banging he’d just caused. It seemed not so much, which was just as well—he didn’t want to explain what was going on till he knew what was going on. No need to jump to conclusions, even if his mind was screaming “pervy ghost—PERVY GHOST” at the top of its incorrigible and metaphorical lungs.

He decided to try something else instead.

It was a bit harder without the books in front of him or even some swiftly-scrawled notes—or Alice muttering the answers out of the corner of her mouth for his benefit, which was rare and only when she took considerable pity on him—but he tried. One hand clutching his towel, Quentin signed swiftly in the air, the delicate dedication to invite energy in. The mirror was foggy, but necessary, so Quentin focused all of his attention upon it, entrusting it to show him what he needed to see, requesting an answer for a question he wasn’t sure how to ask: was it real, or was he dreaming? Was he having some sort of…psychotic episode? Was the Beast back? Was he haunted by—the girl from the Grudge or…Patrick Swayze?

For some reason, that second option brought a curl to his toes and a confused half-smile to his face. Oddly appealing, that.

Shaking off the sensation he could only surmise as “sleep-deprived confusion”, Quentin finished etching his spell in the air and wiped the mirror clear of fog, fully braced to see a hideous demon reflected in the mirror, or some mysterious floating hand; disembodied and twiddling its fingers.

What he saw instead was a very naïve-seeming young man with too-long brown hair and a too-long grim face, looking a bit puzzled and a touch disappointed. Relief followed, however, and Quentin sighed, once again setting his hands on either side of the sink.

That particular gesture was what gave him pause, however.

He turned his left arm a little to better see what he’d thought he’d seen and—yes. There it was. His heart jumped and his eyes darted away from the mirror, down to his arm, whereupon his skin was a scrawl of lackadaisical black letters vaguely shimmering in the dim bathroom light.

In the mirror, it’d appeared as a gibberish wave.

Below, however, in his direct line of vision, from the interior of his elbow stretching almost all the way to his wrist and trailing the biggest vein on his arm was written the name of Eliot Waugh.

Chapter Text

Quentin liked to believe he wasn’t a panicky type. Not without good reasons, of course. Anxiety aside, he was more left brain than right,

So it wasn’t until the next morning, around 9:00 [the earliest he could rouse Eliot without unwittingly initiating Defcon 4], that he strode into Eliot’s chambers without knocking, sleepless and nerve-wracked with his flannel sleeves rolled up.

“We need to--!” He covered his eyes just in time to avoid witnessing just who it was—who the two someones were—who burst from Eliot’s bed, scrambling for cover. “Talk. E-Eliot, we need to—we really need to talk.”

“Sure,” came the drowsy reply from under no less than four blankets, a duvet, and what Quentin could only describe as “an elaborate, oversized neon doily”. “On one condition: you come join me down here.” Quentin heard a stifled snort of laughter and rustling. “Or, alternatively: give me six hours to become human again.” Peeking through his fingers, Quentin watched the two sophomores scamper away, the scent of sex and patchouli trailing after them. Nature kids. Of course.

“Or at least,” Eliot yawned, pulling the duvet over his head after saluting his suitors adieu, “presentable.”

“No—” once he was sure that they were alone and Eliot hadn’t nodded back off again yet, Quentin relinquished his protection from his eyes and scrambled to jerk the covers away from the taller man [who let out a caterwaul of protest rivaling that of an actual cat]. “Now. Now as in not later, Eliot.” The magician in question grudgingly rolled onto his back and stared up at Quentin, squinting and vaguely hissing when the smaller of the two pulled back the blackout curtains to let in the morning light.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Horrible for my complexion?” Eliot complained, shielding his eyes. Quentin scowled, impatiently pushing his sleeves back up.

“No, Eliot--!” Thrusting his bare arm into the air and displaying the signature on his skin, Quentin motioned fervently to it with the opposite hand. “This.” The telekinetic blinked once; twice, thrice in the groggiest of ways before sitting up a little more, carefully adjusting the sheet around his middle.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Eliot,” Quentin pressed further, a note of near-frantic urgency in his voice. “Do you. Know. What this is?” The sun caught the blue of Eliot’s eyes and washed it out to near-whiteness.

For a brief moment, his friend appeared frozen. Then:

“Could be anything, it’s—probably sharpie. Somebody’s idea of a joke,” Eliot said slowly, running a hand through his tousled waves and pursing his lips. Quentin caught a glimmer of concern behind his eyes, however, and, like a moth himself, went for the light.

“No—no, it’s not sharpie,” he shot back, approaching the bed with a restless flexing of fingers and a furrowing of his brow. “And you know it. I think you know it—I—I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think you clued me in on—on what, exactly, that spell was. Or whether or not you knew its consequences.”

“Consequences, schmonsequences,” Eliot said, though the sass had slipped out of his voice somewhat, leaving it lower and meeker than usual. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Quentin, honestly—magic’s idea of a practical joke…” He moved and Quentin finally caught it; this time, on the opposite arm in the early morning sun: his own handwriting; like a drunken doctor’s, shaky and sharp, written black and bold on Eliot’s creamy skin.

“Oh, really,” Quentin breathed, disbelief making the words fill up with scorn. “Because it looks to me--” he reached for Eliot before the other had time to react. “Like we should be concerned!” His fingers wound around Eliot’s wrist before the other could protest and his world briefly went black.

And then, like the birth of a universe, it filled back up with color, light, and sound.

It was slow at first. The darkness trickled out of his eyes the way stars did when one stood up too fast, or didn’t drink enough water in the hotter months. Little by little, the shade was replaced with deep, vibrant blues and flurries of gold, earthy tones following vigorous spring greens and the lush, rich reds that resonated heat, heat which coursed down his spine and flooded his nerves with power, from the connection of his hand around Eliot’s arm all the way back up to his brain, until Quentin was sure he was about to tip over, but it didn’t stop there.

It was as if he’d only seen with one eye before, and now, he finally had two.

The colors and temperature changes rippled deeper than his skin, sinking into his muscles until the grip he had on Eliot’s arm relaxed to less of a vice and more of a caress. He drank in the sensation of this—conduit, this current of raw electricity and ecstasy with every atom of his being, feeling like, at any second, he was going to fly apart from the sheer force of it all. His stomach unclenched; filled with bubbly, fluttery butterflies [moths, Quentin, the logical side of himself argued softly, beware the Beast]. Bare feet gripped the floor with a fresh curl of his toes despite the warning and Quentin [stifling some obscene sound] felt his eyes roll back in his head, knees weakening to the point he thought for sure he was dying—if not, drowning.

The mark on his arm began to burn.

“What--” It was Eliot who broke the contact first, in the most vehement andunexpected way possible—a telekinetic shove that sent Quentin stumbling back; reeling in place before staggering into the other’s bureau. The older magician looked briefly terrified, a look Quentin had never seen before etched into his face. “Are you doing?”

“I—I don’t—I didn’t…do this,” Quentin stammered, running a hand over the words on his arm, feeling the heat fade away a little at a time. “This was—this has to be the spell. The spell that—that you did, God, I should’ve never listened to you…” Eliot’s look of unease shifted into one of hurt; quickly masked by a lifting of his chin and setting of his jaw. He wound his hands into his hair and slouched against the bureau, staring at Eliot, who, coincidentally, hadn’t taken his eyes off Quentin. “What was that spell, Eliot?” The other neither moved nor spoke; expression that of a man witnessing an accident directly in front of him on the freeway. “Eliot.” Quentin gestured at him emphatically, and the other jolted, one hand half-lifting to ward off the motion instinctively. “Come on. Help me help you so we can fix whatever this—!” He waved to his arm again, brows raising. “Is!”

“A binding spell,” said Eliot at last, breathlessly. Quentin gazed at him, arms slowly dropping back down to his sides, too-big flannel pajamas practically swallowing his skinny frame.

“A binding spell,” he echoed numbly. “What—does that mean, exactly, a—a binding spell?” His mind flickered briefly; erratically, to Charlie, and his stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch. Eliot’s eyes finally darted away, the stork of a sorcerer swinging his legs over the side of the bed, bowing forward to put his head in his hands. “Eliot. Please.”

“I don’t—know,” Eliot said, tossing his hands out and getting to his feet. Quentin’s eyes flicked down, then away, the shorter of the two crossing his arms and fixating his gaze on the wall nearby. Unclothed, the other magician continued to gesticulate theatrically out of the corner of his eye, voice rising considerably. “And quite frankly, I think you’re—you’re overreacting to having shitty penmanship on your arm when it could’ve gone so much worse. You KNOW it could’ve gone much worse. You’ve SEEN--” Eliot took a moment in his tirade to swallow, voice finally coming back down to a reasonable level. Quentin was grateful for that—when Eliot got this upset [and he didn’t, not often, not since the last season finale of How to Get Away With Murder], the inanimate objects in the room had a tendency to shake, levitate, or even explode. To his immediate left, the lamp on the bureau had moved six inches to the left already.

“Look. Just--know that I would never intentionally or unintentionally pick out a spell I knew would do you harm. Even whilst under the influence of several cabernets, a magical margarita or four, and numerous Jaeger bombs.” In spite of himself, Quentin felt a laugh fluster its way past his lips. Eliot’s shoulders dropped somewhat, and the intensity of how he clenched his jaw lessened likewise. Quentin wet his lips and tried to find his voice, focusing on Eliot’s eyes when he came close enough instead of focusing on—well, anything else.

“It’s—it’s not that I’m upset about—about having your name on my arm, it’s not like the sixth grade when Tommy Lawrence wrote ‘DICK’ on my forehead and it didn’t rub off for a month--”

“Okay, sad and disturbing, which I’ve come to expect from you,” Eliot cut in, lips twitching a little, “but genuinely—is everything alright otherwise?” Quentin frowned faintly as Eliot peered at him. “No cause for concern; just—writing that mysteriously appeared and will most likely fade in a few days time…?”

“You didn’t feel…?” Eliot lifted a brow and cocked his head to one side. “O…kay,” Quentin muttered when his fellow magician said nothing, tugging on an ear and shrugging facially. “Just—just me then.” The doubt that filtered through his words was borderline disheartened.

Maybe it WAS all in his head. As delusionally usual; he’d…concocted some fantastic possibility outside of the ordinary. Why reach for Occam’s razor with the Scissor Sisters this close by, though?

“Quentin,” Eliot said teasingly after yet another moment of unsettling silence, “I always feel something when you’re around.” Quentin made the mistake of looking down again and murmured a faint, “oh, Jesus” before turning away, heat flooding his face. Chuckling, Eliot flounced over to the closet to sort out his clothes for the day, throwing open the doors with a flourish of billowing silks and fluttering satins.

“Besides,” Eliot said brightly, fishing a violet shirt out of the darkness to hold up to himself in the full-length mirror, “if there was something magical between us, don’t you think I would’ve monopolized on it immediately? It’s probably just residual magic you’re feeling; fading from something totally unrelated to our nighttime adventures. Truly unfortunate,” Eliot added with a morose sigh, motioning vaguely for his favorite scarf to make itself known from the tangled snarls of his walk-in. It drifted out of the ether; a chiffon ascot ghost of paisley display. “We could’ve had it all, but it wasn’t meant to be.” The off-key would-be Adele turned as he did up the belt on the black skinny jeans he’d squeezed into, arms crooked in a pose to rival a pin-up girl’s. Quentin, lifting his hand from his eyes again, smiled vaguely and golf-clapped. Eliot dropped his arms with a melodramatic sigh, waving Quentin away.

“Oh, just go, you’ve seen me without my face on and I’ll never live it down. Next time, take a deep breath and knock before you come barging in.” He paused halfway out the door to the bathroom, left brow cocked as he gave Quentin the usual onceover. “Or don’t. Surprise me.”

It was only after he’d left the baffled Quentin in the room to puzzle through what was real and what was not that Eliot allowed the smug expression to slip completely from his face, his fingers absently tracing the mistake he knew he’d made.

Eliot could only hope his words hadn’t been complete bullshit—that this WOULD fade in time, and he could forget the way he’d felt when Quentin laid hands on him--

Just like he’d always wanted.

Chapter Text

For days, Quentin tried to put the situation with Eliot out of his head.

He wore long sleeves; he took the lowest possible dose of his dwindling meds, and [most importantly] he tried to avoid Eliot as much as possible.

It wasn’t that difficult to do. Margo had pushed Eliot to take advanced classes more suited to his intellect rather than merely skating by this semester, and the upperclassman had been bogged down with a fresh wave of work to slog through. Quentin himself was inclined to bury himself in homework likewise, because it was what he was most used to—what he was good at. Or at least, decent at. Well, he enjoyed it at any rate—or at least, he enjoyed ignoring his actual issues in favor of ones he could solve with logic and reason.
There was just nothing logical or reasonable about the things Quentin happened to feel.

The foreign sensations didn’t stop, though.

No matter how many antidepressants, no matter how many drinks, no matter how much he slept or didn’t sleep, nothing seemed to hold any sway over the words on his arm. They spelled out the same thing they always did, but with them seemed to come an unspoken gospel silently whispered against his skin. Touches not his own; the constant sensation of someone standing close by and looking over his shoulder—the dizziness that comes from tipsiness when he hadn’t even drank anything yet, or the hollow, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach: loneliness, even when surrounded by others.

The last sensation shouldn’t have felt foreign to him, though. It was an old, familiar not-friend at this point, his constant companion in the form of a vacant childhood and abandoned connections. It was the feeling he got when he looked at Julia and James; the dread void that yawned for something more. Quentin felt bottomless and limitless as much as he felt carved clean and gutted.

And yet, it wasn’t his. Quentin knew it. He couldn’t place why, but it felt wrong. It felt out of place, like a bone that didn’t set right after breaking.
Yet Eliot seemed convinced that all of it was in Quentin’s head, and appeared entirely unaffected otherwise [which should’ve told Quentin something; honestly, as Eliot, if nothing else, always appeared affected by something to some degree].

It could’ve been something non-magical, he supposed one dreary April morning, motioning for his oatmeal to mix in a handful of raisins he levitated from one end of the coffee table to the other. It’d been a while since he’d—well. His face flooded with color as Quentin stopped that thought mid-meandering and poured a dollop of cream into the steaming concoction he only half-felt like eating.

This definitely had nothing to do with not getting laid in a while.

That being said, the feeling of fingers running through his hair was difficult to ignore.

Sitting back on the couch, Quentin mulled over his options, trying to ignore the lull that came from having his hair played with. He could go on pretending like nothing was wrong, or he could try to understand this. Like, for example, why it had felt like a firework going off in the back of his brain when he’d grabbed Eliot’s arm. Or anything that followed.

“Maybe it’s a type of magical sickness,” Alice had suggested, adjusting her glasses and studying Quentin through a pair of slightly-enlarged blue eyes. Quentin, absently twirling a pen in the air and glazing through his notes, hadn’t initially latched onto the concept…but he supposed it made sense.

“Like a…hex, or--”

“No, more like a spell having side effects like anything else you put your body through,” Alice had said, twisting a lock of white-gold around a fidgety finger. “Like ‘don’t do this spell if you’re allergic to shellfish’.” Quentin had snorted at that, lost his vague concentration, and dropped the pen. “But more aptly; ‘do not attempt if you have a weak mental barrier.’”

Quentin had opened his mouth to protest, but he could FEEL Penny’s glare from across the room. Slowly sliding behind a stack of books, Quentin had reasoned with himself that the theory was probably solid.

Coming back to reality with a sudden splash of cold water that smelled of aftershave & spices, Quentin sputtered and rose from the sad excuse of what was left of a couch in the Cabin’s main living room.

Wiping frantically at his face, the magician turned, frantic to see where the water had come from, only to find no source of the liquid—nor any liquid whatsoever for that matter.

All he saw was Margo studying him from about three feet away, a manicured nail tapping her cheek and a look of pure bemusement written on her face.
“I—I wasn’t—it—there’s a leak,” Quentin said faintly.

“Uh-huh,” Margo replied, unconvinced. “A leak.” Quentin nodded fervently, touching his face again as if trying to figure out what just happened. “Maybe in your head there’s a leak, but this house--” Her pointer fingers flicked upward. “--is solid.” As if on-cue, the ceiling creaked and wheezed dust down upon them—Margo managing to step out of the way, but Quentin got coated.

“Like I said,” Margo was biting her inner cheek to keep from snickering. “Totally solid.”

Flinging out his arms with an exasperated puff of what he hoped wasn’t asbestos, Quentin coughed and tried, in vain, to wipe the ashy substance from his sweater.

Margo, taking pity on him, closed the distance between them, conjuring [either from her purse or nowhere on her person at all] a handkerchief to assist him.

“You need more sleep,” she pointed out calmly, rubbing at Quentin’s face with the determination of a mother and the gentleness of an MMA fighter, “or you’re going to crack.” Not unlike the ceiling, Quentin thought grimly, scrunching up his face from the force of her well-meant attack.

“Margo,” Quentin asked, once the sisterly assistance had dissipated enough for him to move his face again, “do you—think magic can have…side effects?” Margo squinted at him as she waved the handkerchief away and dusted off her hands before folding her arms with a jingle of bangles. “Like,” Quentin went on hesitantly, “the type of side effects that—last? For days?”

“…oh, hon,” Margo said, voice a little softer than before. “Did you get into the hard stuff?”

Opening his mouth to respond, Quentin was interrupted by the appearance of Eliot, who gallivanted down the stairs in a flurry of a red housecoat gilded with phoenixes, his head tossed back and his hand across his brow.

“How do I look? I feel it screams Elizabeth Taylor; maybe mutters a little Madeline Kahn, and whispers Audrey Hepburn whilst maintaining its own…” He waved a hand vaguely. “Thing.” Margo grinned and applauded as he sauntered down the remainder of the stairs, dark underclothes catching the light with flashes of gold and copper accents. Quentin shrank back a little to give them room as Eliot promptly dipped to scoop Margo up, spinning her around in a lackadaisical waltz. Margo squeaked with delight, flinging one of her hot pink stilettos off in the process. Quentin barely managed to duck out of the way in time, gathering up his bowl of oatmeal to ensure it, too, didn’t get caught in the crossfire of the very special relationship that was Eliot and Margo’s.

It was only after Eliot set Margo down that he seemed to even notice Quentin at all, brows raising and demeanor shifting ever so slightly to the more professional.

“Quentin Cockblocker!” Slightly. Slightly more professional. You know, for him. “As I live and breathe. This is the first time I’ve seen you in days. I thought you’d crawled under a flight of stairs in search of Fillory or your Nimbus 2000, which, coincidentally,” Eliot said in a sidebar to Margo, “would be a great name for a dildo.” Quentin, having the misfortune of taking a large gulp of oatmeal approximately around the time he was addressed, choked and swallowed. “Nice,” Eliot said brightly, “glad you’re not a spitter or a quitter.” Margo elbowed Eliot in the ribs before hobbling away to retrieve her shoe.

“Quentin was just telling me he thinks he might have a magical STD.” Mortified, Quentin pinched the bridge of his nose and hastily moved to set his bowl of oatmeal down, clearing his throat.

“A-actually—what I was trying to say is that I still feel—off, after our spell…”

“Oh, I should’ve known it was you,” Margo, jamming her stiletto back on, cut in before Eliot could. “You never wrap it before you tap it.”

“That’s simply untrue,” Eliot said, lifting both index fingers in defense of his person. “I’ll have you know I always apply every enchanted condom imaginable before attempting a new position.” His digits furled; dropped, and turned. “For my hands,” he added slyly, and unfolded his palms to reveal an espresso cup, still steaming—both Margo and Quentin caught a whiff of Kahlua in the air as Eliot sipped it, pinkie-up.

“Besides,” he added idly, turning the cup in place once he’d downed the dual shot of alcohol and caffeine, “you’re probably just overdoing it.” Their eyes locked and Quentin felt a peculiar tug around his middle, like a fish hook. He took an involuntary step forward, and Eliot swayed to meet him, head cocked to one side. “When was the last time you even got any sleep?” Flourishing one sleeve out of the way, Eliot moved to press his hand to Quentin’s forehead before the other could protest. “You’re probably running a stress fever.”

He almost didn’t hear the final words.

The feeling had come back again, an overwhelming explosion of color and connection. Only this time, it was accompanied by a sudden influx of thoughts not his own. Thoughts such as “soft skin”; or “he looks tired” seemed to flutter in and out of focus like particles in rays of sunlight. Dancing between these wove ribbons of other lights, colors he couldn’t name—reels of film upon which Quentin saw a tall, frightened youth in secondhand clothes, walking down a street in a nameless Oregon town, his footsteps quick and nervous; trailed by shadows…reflected, Quentin realized belatedly, in the shop windows he—the boy—passed by. He saw cracked pavement all too swiftly, all too closely. He felt the sting of pain that came with a bruised nose and the taste of copper.

He felt anger not his own, bubbling up under his skin, resentment and confusion—the events kept repeating, after that, like a bad loop, until—until at last, with one, final push, a real, physical push, he was up and standing. He was staring down the source of his resentment, and he was pushing, pushing hard until it felt like every bone in his body would jump out of his skin. Like he’d shed it and become something else.

Something strong.

With a colossal screech of metal and squeal of tires; a crunch of bone not his own for a change, he felt…liberated. He felt…alive; like he could do anything, like he was a god, and his trembling hands curled like claws, then fists. Powerful fists. He was strong; stronger than he’d ever been, and he wasn’t going to bleed on the ground ever again.

He threw up in the gutter.

Quentin surged back to reality as Eliot’s fingers gently brushed back his hair. He was blinking away spots from his eyes when the others swam into view.

“Quentin?” Margo was asking, her voice losing its usual airy devil-may-care quality in favor of genuine concern. “Are you alright?” Eliot was staring at him, uncomfortably close and uncharacteristically silent. Their noses practically touched. Quentin found himself unable to drag his eyes from Eliot’s own; dark browns fixated on shocks of cerulean. Eliot’s fingers lingered, not quite touching him, now, and the older man swallowed before murmuring a vague, “I’m sorry,” followed by a shaky, “I’ve—um. I’ve got to…” Before picking up his satchel and disappearing out the door. Margo, at a loss for words, stumbled halfway between where Eliot had just been [the door slamming behind him] and where Quentin still stood.

“What the hell is going on?”

Quentin didn’t have an answer for her.

Just like he didn’t have a reason as to why the scent of aftershave and spice hung on the air, or why touching Eliot was the most fulfilling experience he had ever known.
But, Quentin decided, throwing the door open to follow him, he had every intention to figure out why.

With or without logic and reason.

Chapter Text

It took a lot more research, a little less sleep, and a finite amount of irritation at foreign sensations to push Quentin to make the next move.

He’d come across the dustiest, most abandoned part of the library [in which the books growled like feral animals and the lights flickered with horror movie unease], wherein he found the words he’d been looking for all along.

“You tried to make me a familiar,” Quentin snapped accusingly, and threw one of the wriggling, page-thrashing books down in front of Eliot one stormy afternoon. Eliot, taking a long drag from his cigarette, seemed to be enjoying himself immensely as he blew violet smoke out of the corner of his mouth and through the window; open to his immediate left in the Cottage’s study. The thunder rolling in across the rose gardens rumbled amusement, and Quentin felt heat crawl up the sides of his neck, making a beeline for his hairline. He felt awkward and small, all of a sudden, like an overenthused schoolboy eager to prove his point in class despite not having all the facts.

But he’d been so sure. The books had said that the binding of a familiar was old magic; the oldest kind, in fact, said to have existed just short of rituals and actions based in some sort of theistic effort. It was the sharing of one’s energy with another creature; making obedient an aspect of nature through mutual respect to be used at a later date. More poetically, it was a conduit of practicality and energy to be drawn upon in crises.

More pragmatically, a familiar was a perfect storage unit for a magician’s excess magic to be opened like a lockbox and closed whenever necessary. A disposable, if lovable sidekick, as it were.

Needless to say, the concept hadn’t sat particularly well with Quentin Coldwater.

“A familiar,” Eliot echoed, amusement dripping from every syllable, “is THAT what you think.” Long legs slid up from under the mahogany desk to cross atop it. The pattering of rain outside intensified ever so slightly, and, if Quentin didn’t know better, he would’ve assumed Eliot had cast to encourage dramatic flair from nature herself. Crossing his arms, then uncrossing them, entirely unsure of what to do with his hands, Quentin shrugged and pushed his hair out of his eyes, jaw clenching.

“Yes—well, it’s the only thing that makes sense,” he argued, though his voice turned a touch shaky in spite of himself. The curly-haired man across from him did nothing but smile vaguely, still smoking. “You think this is all in my head, but it isn’t,” Quentin pressed on insistently. “I—feel things--”

“Always a bad sign,” said Eliot under his breath.

“A-and I—I’ve been seeing things.” At this Eliot gave pause, his typical expression of borderline-arrogant indifference turning a little more wary. “I—I saw you. At least, I think it was you. The—three days ago, when—when I saw you, that morning, in the—uh—the--” Quentin snapped his fingers impatiently. “Kath—Katherine Hepburn--”

“Audrey…Hepburn,” Eliot corrected him, his eyes closing--making it painfully obvious that he was…actually in pain at the choice in wrong name.

“Right,” Quentin went on, undeterred. “You—you put your hand on my head a-and I saw…you.”

There was a moment of silence wherein only the rain made sounds. The window drifted a little further open to let in the smell of wet grass and damp earth, accompanied by the vaguely herbal smell of Eliot’s cigarette. He turned the item between his pianist fingers, the baton of death twirling an absent cyclone of smoke into the air. A funereal celebration.

“Okay, well,” said Eliot slowly, “obviously you saw me. I was standing right in front of you.”

“Not—not like that,” Quentin grimaced, digging the flats of his hands into his brow. “Look—it was more like, I—I dunno, a vision, or something. It was—it was you, but it wasn’t you, and I just…it was some street, some…rural-looking city, or town, Oregon, maybe…” Eliot’s face had lost its insinuation of a characteristic sneer in favor of something much more alarmed, eyes widening. Lightning, even more melodramatic than the magician in the winged armchair himself, flickered ominously outside. “And there was this other boy,” Quentin added—and then it dawned on him, the way belated realizations do, rolling back the fog of sleeplessness and stress to lead him back to the clear point he’d realized where magic came from. When Eliot had told him where magic had come from.

A not-so-secret secret wherein Eliot was a villain and a murderer; a monster and—

Quentin frowned faintly, realizing with beleaguered focus that those thoughts were not his own.

But judging by the look on Eliot’s face, they were his.

“Oh my God,” Quentin said softly, “I saw you kill that boy.”
Eliot was out of the chair in an instant. Quentin didn’t even really see him move. The cigarette was flicked out the window; a white bullet vanishing into a black afternoon. The taller of the two swept away to the liquor cabinet and minibar behind the desk, throwing open cabinets and gathering items.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eliot said, a little colder and sharper than before. “You imagined it. You’ve an overactive imagination, Quentin, probably comes from reading all those—books of yours.” Quentin’s teeth came together in a silent click of annoyance as he paced forward, cautiously watching the stiff lines of Eliot’s back. The other poured and shook; both the canister and in his hands. The only way Quentin could tell was due to Eliot spilling some of the vodka he poured into the shaker.

One, Eliot never used the cheap stuff if he could help it, and two, he never spilled. Haste makes waste, and all that.

“I know what I saw,” Quentin said stubbornly, “and I know what I felt.” Saying nothing, Eliot poured himself a drink and made no motion to give Quentin one. Exasperated, Quentin tried to catch his friend’s eye, to try and see if he could read his expression, but Eliot avoided his gaze. “And if it isn’t that, then what?” Eliot did a second shot and set the canister down, turning away from Quentin once more. “Eliot!”

“I don’t—know.” Eliot said abruptly, swiveling and gesturing. “Alright? Is that what you want to hear? I don’t know. All I know is that it certainly wasn’t an attempt to make you some kind of—enchanted pet store purchase. That’s so not my fetish. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” There was no laugh from Quentin, so Eliot continued, a little more frantic. “I thought I was making a connection with the universe, but—” Quentin’s gaze drifted back to where Eliot’s red shirt had rolled back to reveal his untidy scrawl. World’s worst tattoo short of the Dark Mark, probably.

“The only thing I seem to have a connection with is you.”

Quentin’s eyes shot up from the writing to lock with Eliot’s, and that unfamiliar-familiar sensation of butterflies in his stomach returned. Eliot, watchful and unsure, ran a hand through his hair in a way that reminded Quentin of looking in a mirror. Dropping his hand after a moment with a ragged sigh, Eliot shrugged loosely.

“I don’t have any answers, Quentin. Only a myriad of other questions waiting in the queue to be addressed maybe-someday. I can’t help you because I can’t even help me right now.” He reached for another cigarette from his breast pocket.

“So you HAVE been feeling—something.” Eliot looked up as he finally managed to snag a cigarette for himself, face strained. “Or—or something,” Quentin finished lamely. Eliot snorted, setting the cigarette between his teeth.

“Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that when I—put a hand on you,” he said with none of his usual innuendo, “I saw you. Following after some—tall man and that hedgewitch friend of yours. And I felt…” Eliot exhaled, repeatedly snapping his fingers in an effort to light the cigarette, but, shaking too badly, he gave up and tossed the item at his desk, shrugging with his brows. “Angry. Alone; rejected, I felt…gutted.” Quentin’s gut tightened. “And I wanted so badly to push them apart and walk between them but I just kept…falling behind. Or they were leaving me behind and…Quentin,” Eliot added, voice quieter than before, not quite looking at him.

“How long were you in that hospital?”

The tightening sensation turned, all too easily, into a deadened drop.

Opening his mouth to respond, Quentin could find no words. Eliot had seen. He’d seen what Quentin had tried to sweep under the rug, or at least, obscure for the sake of his new friends and his new beginning. Eliot knew, about the disapproving looks on the doctors’ faces—he knew about their disappointment when it came to Quentin’s lies to himself and to them regarding his mental state. Just because he was tired of them being unable to help him.

He was tired of trying to stay alive.

“I’m—sorry, I should…” Quentin’s voice cracked and broke as he shook his head and made for the door. Eliot stuck out an arm to halt him, not in a cruel way but in a slow motion; a movement meant to embrace, not simply delay. Quentin, unable to look at Eliot, now, stared at the floor. He’d wait until Eliot moved enough for him to duck by, and—
Eliot’s hand found Quentin’s chin and tilted his face upward.

“You have absolutely nothing,” said Eliot quietly, “to be ashamed of.”

For a moment, nothing else happened. They stood in the doorway of the study, listening to the rain and one another’s heartbeats: Eliot’s a steady hammer, Quentin’s a staccato fox’s. He was caught in some net, some snare, to which he had no name or means to break. He was trying, somewhat desperately, to gnaw himself free, even if it meant taking his own leg with it. Eliot, on the other hand, seemed content to continue weaving and threading his own noose. An elegant cravat or a cat’s cradle, it didn’t matter.
It was suddenly apparent to Quentin that he was not the only one looking to hang himself.

“Eliot,” Quentin began, but was stopped—initially by the pleading in Eliot’s eyes and the things that followed, broken beginnings of images and things like record skips, not the unadulterated explosion of color, sound, and sensation as before, but—disjointed. As though someone had thrown on the brakes of a car when speeding downhill, or someone yanking (hard) on the reins of a runaway horse. Quentin could feel the fight going on beyond what he could see—red balloons drifting away on the wind, harsh gestures followed by angry slaps, the smell of Indiana—Indiana, not Oregon—dirt, corn fields endless and all-consuming—swallow him up and let him disappear, into the woods somewhere, into nowhere, it didn’t matter, he’d die if he couldn’t leave right now, this instant, he’d die, he’d die, he’d die…!

And he knew, from the windows that opened between these sporadic bursts of memories, that Eliot was looking into him as well, and what he saw made the other magician’s face fall.

Stop this—he had to stop this. Whatever it was, Quentin wanted to break it. It was a stupid mistake, unfair to either of them, and, unthinking, Quentin went for the remedy he knew from fairytales beyond Fillory [for Fillory, for once, had no explanation for him here].

His unasked questions were passed on, as Quentin pulled Eliot down and in to kiss him soundly on the mouth.

It was rougher than he’d expected, with Quentin being clumsy on a good day and outright uncoordinated on the worst. The scratch of Eliot’s cheek, the stumble of the taller of the two—all of it nearly made Quentin bail, but he held on. For some reason, he held on, as memory after memory melted away like water off of glass. Warmth flooded him that had nothing to do with embarrassment or uncertainty. It was a gulp of hot tea, or strong liquor. It was the type of heat that came with a curling of toes and a rolling of eyes.
And, after a moment, Eliot slowly began to reciprocate.

He tasted like lavender and smoke and vanilla and something…bitterer. Something a lot like alcohol and something equally intoxicating; but different. His hands, surprisingly strong for someone who spent the majority of their time pontificating in a supine position on whatever lounge furniture was nearest, slid over Quentin’s face and ran loving thumbs across his cheekbones. Their lips met again and this time; Quentin’s mouth was open not to ask a question, but to engage in silent conversation. Finally remembering to breathe through his nose, Quentin lifted his hands to figure out where they ought to go, the thought half-formed before he managed to catch hold of Eliot’s burgundy shirt and vest of black & gold. There was a momentary pause as Eliot seemed to be considering something, his hands slipping up into Quentin’s hair to shift it out of the way. The hiss of rain outside punctuated the caution of the moment as Eliot changed his mind and the placement of his hands, fingers drifting down to wrap, one by one, around Quentin’s waist.
Next thing either of them knew, Quentin’s back was to the wall, the curtains were caught in a sudden gust of wind and scattered rain, and Eliot was all but drinking Quentin in, teeth grazing his bottom lip and a breathless laugh; some disembodied ghost of humor, drifted in on the breeze.

Quentin’s head swam. It was difficult to discern where he began and Eliot—or—Eliot began and he—that didn’t help any. A cliché was neither informative nor accommodating, and he decided to ignore it for the sake of the way Eliot’s chuckle reverberated in his mouth, a soft hum of sound that pulsed between them. His hands had strayed up to Eliot’s shoulders, keeping him close. Letting himself fall, little by little, into the feeling of warmth that submerged his better judgment. He drowned in it, swimming for purchase through a thickening fog of lust, or—not quite lust, but want. Or—not want, but completion. A feeling of being made whole. Was this what—baptism was supposed to be? Focus.

This was literally the worst time to think of religion.

“E—Eliot,” Quention gasped when they finally broke apart, and he broke to the surface. “We—th—you…” Eliot’s lips brushed over Quentin’s neck and he quailed, failing to complete his sentence. Which was unlike him, to leave it blank. Eliot, on the other hand, was all about the enigmatic omission, as shown by the way his mouth worked the soft side of Quentin’s neck closest to his ear. Quentin swallowed, sharply, and tried to come to. Snap out of it. But every touch was another wave, and every wave was another reason to stop breathing, stop thinking. He was awash, suddenly, in the glow of memories. Lazy mornings and late nights, soft sheets and—

“Nope,” he said faintly, putting a hand on Eliot’s chest to push him back. Immediately obliging, though not without a distant look of dazed confusion, Eliot withdrew. Quentin slowly breathed out, and Eliot backed up, the shorter man’s hand on his chest. Quentin left his intoxication and impracticality at the wall, stepping out after him.

“No,” he said, more firmly than before. “We—don’t know what this is. You don’t, I don’t, and we—can’t be sure that this is even us. That this is what we want.” Eliot glanced down, lifted a brow, and started to say something, but Quentin raised his voice. “Wereallycan’tEliot.” Eliot bit back a smile, though his eyes were troubled.

“So,” Quentin finished unsteadily, “until…until we do, the best advice is to probably just. Not. Do that again.” Eliot squinted at him a little. Quentin, realizing how close he’d drifted [mere centimeters from Eliot again], started like a surprised cat and skirted away, two fingers raised. “Seriously. We’re not doing that again.” Eliot pursed his lips.

“Your loss,” he said with none of the usual sass and all of the hesitation. Quentin made a point to keep his eyes on Eliot until he’d left the room, his quickening footsteps wobbly as a fawn’s in his departure to seek out answers—or Alice, whichever came first.

Eliot watched him go, fingers curling vaguely around the space Quentin had previously occupied.

Chapter Text

Daydreaming had always been one of Quentin’s most appalling character traits. As a kid, even in the accelerated programs, even when he was up to his eyeballs in work, he had a tendency of drifting off into a fancy of Fillory or similar; meandering down the mental pathways in search of dopamine and serotonin rather than calculus and Advanced German.

His mind spun yarns the way a Fate worked her wheel; tireless and promising. While they unraveled with merciless earnestness, what they wove once the thread had been spooled was a world worth living in.

Today was no exception.

[His hand found Eliot’s; palm to palm in the old-fashioned gesture of greeting that comes at the beginning of a dance.

They were indeed dancing—spinning around one another with a fluidity Quentin neither knew he possessed nor expected to ever experience. He was gliding across a floor of polished marble the color of crushed roses, surrounded by a room of exquisite gild and luxury. The glittering chandelier winking overhead gave more illumination than a disco ball, but the cast of its charming light was much the same. They were surrounded by an endless cyclone of silent warmth, the shining speckles freckling Eliot’s face as Quentin finally stopped staring at their surroundings and looked up at his partner instead.

Partner sounded wrong. Or right. He couldn’t really be sure—he was torn on the matter.

Eliot, smiling a little, looked more peaceful than Quentin had last seen him. The lack of stress had left his shoulders looser, his jaw less clenched. The way his hair fell into his face was offset by the cant of his head and the color in his cheeks; creating a tableau that, were he not living and breathing under Quentin’s fingers, the other magician might’ve believed was a Baroque masterpiece.

“Wh—how—where are we?” Quentin asked, bewildered. Eliot’s fingers threaded through his own, and the taller of the two settled his opposite hand on Quentin’s waist, pulling him closer. It was only then that Quentin; giving a start, realized how they were dressed: Eliot in gold and white, the brocade of which was interwoven elaborately in fleur de lis and vines across his chest and shoulders—and Quentin himself in black and silver, a perfect offset to Eliot’s paler hues, albeit his designs were those of branches and crescent moons.

“Does it matter?” Eliot asked distantly. Quentin shot him a wide-eyed look and started to pull back, only to stumble into position again when Eliot switched directions to spin Quentin under his arm. “We’re here together.” Quentin staggered into place against Eliot and watched the lights careen by in a dizzying delay of color and glow. Above him, haloed by the spectacle, Eliot smiled beatifically—looking truly and completely at ease with himself. The type of playful carelessness that came only, Quentin thought, when he and Margo were bantering. But it was gentler still.

And Eliot smelled of strong liquor, leather polish, smoke, and lavender. Quentin’s eyes closed as he leaned up, way, way up, on his tiptoes, and Eliot came down to meet him—]

--As his chin collided with the library table [Penny having shifted his arm out from under him rather sharply]. Alice glanced up from her reading with a disapproving look that only intensified when Quentin shot upright, stung, and scrabbled to throw his papers in Penny’s general direction.

“Quit it,” Penny and Quentin hissed simultaneously. Alice scrunched her face and pushed her book up higher in front of herself to block them both out, hell-bent on studying. Quentin scowled at Penny, who shot daggers at him and pushed the papers Quentin’d flung at him away before settling back in his seat, eyes narrowing.

“What the hell is up with you anyway, man?” Penny’s eyes darted from Alice to Quentin pointedly, and the other’s cheeks colored, brown gaze sliding away. Penny did nothing to lessen his hawkish stare, arms folding. “You’ve been acting shifty—well.” Penny corrected himself with a shrug of his brows. “Shiftier.” Quentin’s scowl intensified, and Alice hid a smile as she turned one of the pages in her book. “And now…” Penny motioned with his head. Quentin followed the movement and found Eliot gazing across the tables at him, Margo talking with her hands [and Todd; enraptured beside her, taking avid notes]. The instant Quentin locked gazes with Eliot, he felt that sudden drop in gravity around his navel and gripped the table ever so slightly.

It didn’t take a traveler or a mind-reader to gauge the reaction.

“Yo, man, what the fuck,” Penny’s tone was more exasperated than anything else. “How many times I gotta tell you: go get that shit out of your system and come back when y--” Penny stopped short as Quentin looked his way again, face darkening. “Not cool.” Quentin squinted, projecting pop music in Penny’s general direction more emphatically than before. If he really tried hard and believed in himself, he figured he could actually blast Penny away with a well-timed techno remix. Penny snapped out a hand to begin furiously gathering his studying supplies, muttering, “Whatever. I just think it’s weird--”

“It’s not weird,” Quentin said automatically. Alice peeked over the top of her book. Penny closed his mouth, clenched his jaw, and tried again.

“Weird that your thoughts sound like him and his thoughts sound like you.”

“Oh,” said Quentin stupidly.

“Fuckin’ right,” Penny said snidely, swinging out his arms. “But you keep catapulting yourself to those conclusions.” He shook his head and swung away to leave.

“…It IS odd,” Alice lowered the book ever so slightly, peering over the top of Potions and Problems. “Seeing you so hung up on someone.” ‘Who isn’t me’ seemed to be the silent additive, but Quentin and Alice both chose to [blissfully] ignore it. They’d recently stepped back to reevaluate their relationship and came out the other side as friends. It wouldn’t do to find themselves back at uncomfortable square one following their wintry fallout during last semester’s finals.

“Don’t you think you should be concerned?” Alice inquired hesitantly. Quentin’s eyes had wandered back to Eliot again, even as Margo tugged on Eliot’s cravat to get his attention back on her.

“No,” said Quentin finally, drumming his fingers against his cheek.

“Why not?” Alice asked, closing her book.

“It’s nice,” said Quentin absently, studying the way the sunlight fell on Eliot’s face.

“Feeling less alone.”

Alice pressed her lips together and softly set her book down on the table. Quentin looked as though he was daydreaming again, watching Eliot laugh with Margo and project crumpled papers with telekinetic fluidity in the general direction of underclassmen. Alice could understand the desire to feel less alone—even though she herself had compartmentalized the feeling, knowing loneliness was next to godliness when it came to her own safety [and the safety of others].

When it came to advice, however, Alice was in all ways and forms ill-prepared to deliver it. She received it [constantly; usually from Margo, between affectionate whispers against her ear when she was trying her best to study and complete her homework]; she was inarguably the best of her class when it came to the practical applications of logic, reason, and magic…but in the delivering advice of her own accord, Alice could only sum up an overall sense of “there, there” without actually touching the person in need of advising.

But, upon gauging the situation as it continued to languidly spiral out of control, she figured she might have to try a little harder.

“Quentin,” Alice began softly. Quentin neither responded nor moved, his hand beneath his chin again. Alice cleared her throat and folded her hands in her lap, gripping them so tightly her knuckles bleached to white. “Q-Quentin. I’m—sorry to interrupt whatever it is that’s--” he still didn’t look up. Alice pressed her lips together and looked at the library ceiling, before snapping her fingers at Quentin sharply; a jolt of white-blue fire flaring at the tips of her fingers just under his nose. Quentin came to with a startled flail that nearly upended him out of his seat.

“I’m worried a-about you,” said Alice shakily, dusting off the tips of her fingers and smoothing them down her fawn-colored skirt. “We all are. Even Penny. H-he wouldn’t bother if he didn’t care to some degree,” she added quickly to Quentin’s look of baffled disbelief. “You just…haven’t been yourself. You’re not—focused, you’re…all over the place, and this th-thing, with Eliot…”

“Are you jealous?” asked Quentin abruptly. Alice snapped her mouth shut and stared at him, now in disbelief herself.

“Jealous of…of what?”

“How I feel about him,” said Quentin, folding his arms. Alice had a brief out of body experience wherein she exited the mortal coil, ascended into the heavens, and returned to suckerpunch Quentin in the face.

Square one it was.

“Are you…even listening to yourself?” The stammer had evaporated from Alice’s voice, her typically-reserved gaze suddenly electric and cold. Quentin bristled as much as he possibly could; which mostly consisted of a vague accentuation to the way he hunched his shoulders and a setting of his jaw. Alice slowly lifted her fingers to peel the glasses away from her face and set them down, pinching the bridge of her nose with both hands. “You don’t sound like you, Quentin. You sound…immature; and arrogant, and…” Alice trailed off, her eyes drifting in Eliot’s general direction. Quentin, determined to be stubborn, focused on staring at Alice instead, just to spite her.

“Like Eliot,” Alice finished quietly, finally breaking her stare to look down; polishing her glasses on the end of her light blue sweater. Quentin’s brows shot toward the sky as he sat up a little straighter, scoffing.

“Like—wh—no. I don’t—I don’t sound like him. And frankly, that’s rude to say--”

“Even Penny said so,” Alice insisted softly, sliding her glasses back into place. “You looked into this a few days ago, didn’t you?” Quentin nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Alice lifted her hands, deflecting his words. “Did you keep digging? Beyond the superficial stuff.”

“Yes—I found the familiar link, and we determined it wasn’t that,” Quentin said defiantly, eyes narrowing. Alice tensed her mouth ever so slightly, fingers turning a pen—constantly fidgeting. “It wasn’t anything, Alice, other than—just—something I’m working out of my system.” His arm itched, and Quentin unwittingly scratched the place where the black letters lay hidden beneath a baggy sweatshirt. Alice (ever-watchful) nodded imperceptibly to herself and rose to her feet.

“Maybe you don’t want to think about it.” Because it’s hard, being lonely, she added silently. Quentin’s dark gaze found hers and Alice held it, determined not to be the first to look away. “But you probably should. Because this isn’t just—romance, Quentin, it’s—it’s magic. I can feel it, I don’t know why you can’t. Or won’t,” Alice corrected herself under her breath. She could already feel Quentin’s attention waning again. “But please try.” Alice picked up her books—all but one, meticulously bookmarked and highlighted, its worn cover of faded gold letters and tattered green leather catching the light through the library window. It winked enough to catch Quentin’s eye, his wandering focus returning to the table; to the moment. Alice peered down at her friend and bit her inner cheek, other books hugged to her chest.

“I’m going to talk to Margo,” she said quietly. “In the meantime, please promise me you’ll a—at least look. At this book.” Quentin’s eyes darted down after a brief roll.

“I’m looking at it,” he said impatiently, flicking a hand in a gesture of dismissal he didn’t entirely mean to make. The book rustled tiredly and Alice, stretched thin herself, had to bite back an irritable response.

“Just—please?” She tried instead. Quentin sucked in a breath and finally looked at the book—really looked at it.

The peeling letters read, without much flourish, “NEPHESH & NEPHESH: Desire & its Soul”. Quentin doubtfully picked at a corner, peeking under it for clues as to its context.

“Is this the Hebrew Kamasutra?” he asked dryly.

But when he next looked up, Alice had gone.

Chapter Text

Soulmates.

That’s what it all seemed to point to. The painstakingly-translated words; the elaborate graphics, the charts and stars. The entirety of Quentin’s research honed in on the concept of bound lives; connected hearts, and invisible threads.

It was sort of sickening.

Sickening in the sense that he’d taken a step, missed the stairs completely, and had been flung headlong into a seemingly endless descent into the deepest possible pit. This was Mariana’s Trench levels of terrifying in the drop. It was the swoop of a roller coaster without the thrilling notion of being able to unseat oneself once the ride was over. The ride was never going to be over.
This seemed…permanent.

At first, he hadn’t wanted to believe it. He hadn’t wanted to think that Eliot could so recklessly pursue such a long-lasting spell. It was practically a curse in its intricacy—its dynamics and the physics of mastering the movements needed were designed to be an unbreakable labyrinth of focus. It was half-finding spell, half-binding spell. Its purpose seemed to inherently connect people to one another—

The gist of it was that, as usual, Quentin Coldwater was utterly and righteously fucked.

The book Alice had loaned him described a web of threads interweaving people together. Something about the universal dispersing of energy through matter, like the internet or electricity. This energy traveled through unseen wires—it was, the book said, the reason behind why certain people took to one another better than others. While biology played a major factor [see: why some individuals smelled good and others; horrible despite all attempts at proactive and latent hygiene], it was majorly the flow of energy coming back to itself after a massive deviation in the universe; e.g., the magical “Big Bang”.

All of it had seemed hokey at first, with Quentin boarding himself up in the back of the library, surrounding himself with a silencing spell, trying to ignore various hunger pangs and sensations not his own. With his back wedged against dusty, muttering books and his head turned from the overcast window depicting the gloomy outside world, he pored over the tome over and over, trying to make heads or tails of the factors listed.

Truth be told, he was—relieved, in a way. Relieved, to say the least, that this hadn’t been a form of psychotic break. Relieved, moreover, that it was neither his imagination nor a petty spell that had gotten under his skin.

With relief, however, came anger. The book clearly stated that the enchantments here were gargantuan in scale—it took a sorcerer of considerable drive, talent, and [for lack of a better word] machismo to accomplish something to this effect.

And it was, Quentin discovered, like all magic: deeply rooted in pain.

It came from a desire to be whole again, referencing some myth about Zeus and two-headed monsters. Or two-headed beings, at any rate, and other clichés he’d heard mentioned on the internet forums before. The idea of soulmates, or being soul-bound, twin flames, that sort of thing—had always seemed particularly unsettling to him. For someone like Quentin, who even surrounded by a sea of people felt entirely and utterly alone, the concept of being so deeply entrenched in the mind and heart of another was terrifying. His desire to be self-sufficient, after all, stemmed from neglect and isolation.

As did his manic depression, coincidentally.

He spent hours trying to determine how to untangle the threads now tying him to Eliot, and vice-versa. Quentin was able to illuminate them with a simple illustration spell [something to show him what magic had been cast that, when directed with purpose, didn’t pick up on every stray sneeze of a hex that happened to haunt the Brakebills library], at least, off and on like flickering streaks of neon. Signs flashing in the night, trying to pull him in. To shelter.

To false protection.

He had almost managed to unknot the major chords when his work suffered a cosmically-ironic interruption.

“Quentin, you wouldn’t believe what I found in the bazaar earlier,” Eliot’s distant voice was suddenly closer than it’d been in days, accompanied by a flourish of gold, cream and amethyst and a gust of jasmine and wine. “Well, the bazaar we got to once Margo finished making a portal out of a textbook. It said to summon something from some—faraway marketplace, but we thought, ‘hey, why not just go there instead?’” Quentin could see Eliot gesturing languidly out of the corner of his eye, all but gyrating into frame.
“Anyway--besides the point. It’s a pair of actual seven-league boots. Ugly ones, but effective. Literally, you strap them on and you can be somewhere before it’s even a passing thought in Penny’s mind. Hell, you and I could each put one on, throw our arms around one another, and set off on the world’s quickest three-legged race. Albeit not the kind I’d like to partake in. Ha--!” The laughter was cut short as Eliot fully sashayed into frame, the smile hinging on his face before vanishing entirely. Quentin raised his gaze from the illuminated text; his hands skittering to cover gilded words and old-timey language. Eliot’s cerulean eyes widened marginally, and the taller of the two started forward again, movements sharper than before.

“Quentin…what…” the mirth had not quite cooled in Eliot’s voice, leaving it bemused. Quentin’s eyes dropped back to the pages as he splayed his fingers, returning once again to the beginning, grabbing a glittering light, then another, one string, then a second…

“What are you doing?” Eliot’s words shrank in the air, becoming smaller and more alarmed. The thick fishermen’s boots daintily held in his right hand thumped melodramatically to the restricted section’s floor. Quentin bit his lip as the chords between himself and Eliot; that web of light only he could currently see, sagged and changed positions, once again undoing his hard work the closer Eliot came. Working his hands with a flex of his fingers, Quentin more quickly tried to undo the knots; unsnarl the snares, and ignore Eliot Waugh as much as possible. “Quentin,” Eliot’s voice slid back up an octave; panicky, hands reaching for the book. “Quentin, please—what--!”

“When were you going to tell me?” Quentin asked and stood without looking up, the cat’s cradle of chaos crumpling between his hands as they started to shake. The black letters on his arm shimmered in the lights, ever-rippling tendrils of color and memory. Eliot froze anew, his outstretched fingers curling away from Quentin with near-tangible reluctance. Quentin focused all of his energy on the undoing of what had been done. Eliot, in turn, focused all of his energy on Quentin.

“Tell you—what…?” Eliot started to say, but Quentin snorted and clenched his fists, the spell’s hold slipping and the threads connecting him and Eliot going invisible again. Still they sang between them; tensed piano wires waiting to play the minor chords necessary to amplify how ominous the situation actually was.

“You know what.” Quentin glanced up, his hands trembling as they lowered themselves to the pages once more. Eliot swallowed with difficulty, and for a moment, there was a tense and dusty silence. The library seemed to be holding its breath; the distant din of conversation and rustling pages fading away to almost nothing. The windows above their heads; half-stained glass, half regular, filled with light that shone halos around the particles drifting aimlessly in the air. Quentin and Eliot were briefly surrounded by a dreamscape of a nebulous silence, the faded books behind Quentin a throne of long-ignored literature, the sun behind Eliot a crown of gold. They were, at least in theory, a perfect tableau worthy of historical magic.

Then Quentin moved, putting his back up against the shelves as Eliot, in tandem, swung around to put his back to the door. They circled one another, Quentin gripping the book and Eliot clenching his fists.

“This whole thing, Eliot, from day one—you…” Quentin closed the book and rose, gesturing with it shakily. “You knew.” Eliot started to speak, but Quentin’s voice lifted; angered. “You knew what you were doing. You knew,and you just—went ahead and did it. Without asking me, without considering how I’d feel—why? Because you felt like it? Did you think this would be funny?!”

“No!” Eliot’s retort was sudden, so sudden it seemed to startle even him. Quentin’s jaw clicked with how hard he clenched it, the book under his fingers creaking as his knuckles went white. “It wasn’t a joke—it was never a joke, alright? I didn’t—know what I was doing.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Quentin spat, starting to turn away. Eliot lashed out a hand to grab his arm, purposefully snagging Quentin by the bicep instead of his bare forearm.

“It’s not bullshit--!”

“Yes it IS,” Quentin protested, flinging Eliot’s hand away in a furious shrug and rounding to face him. “Because I’ve read a lot—in the past few days, when you’ve been busy smoking, and drinking, and—fucking whoever it is you please, I’ve been looking into everything I possibly can, trying to figure out what, exactly, the spell was that you cast. And it was a myth, Eliot. You cast a MYTH into reality, do you know how insane that is? How complex?” Eliot swallowed, jaw quivering as Quentin surged on, words quickening with his pulse. He looked like a cornered fox bearing its teeth.

“That you had me help with, even though Margo offered, you insisted it had to be me, why—me, Eliot?” Quentin’s eyes burned, though whether with rage or with [God forbid] tears, he wasn’t sure. “Why did it have to be me?”

“Because…” Eliot looked faded, all of a sudden. His voice wavered, and his hands, usually so fluid and sure of themselves, hovered uncertainly. “It—I…I don’t know, drunken logic; it—no.” Eliot shut his eyes briefly, hands to his temples. “It…it seemed like—I had to trust you. It—had to be you, because…” Quentin waited. “…it was you that I…wanted,” Eliot said finally, tongue darting between his lips and eyes flickering nervously away. A cloud passed by outside; briefly dimming the room. Quentin let the silence drift down, shrouding them. It was a lot like being drenched in an unexpected downpour.

"So--so that's it, then," Quentin said at last, voice rising. "You were just going to--to what? To let me go on feeling crazy, like--like I was the one with the problem? Because of some—some petty, passing crush? Feelings you didn’t want to admit to, or other grade school shit?" Which Quentin found difficult enough to believe as it was—as if anyone would ever have an interest in him. Least of all--

"It wasn't--like that!" Eliot's jaw trembled as his voice wavered. "It--I didn't--I just didn't--"

"Spit it out!" Quentin shouted, temper lost in lieu of his panic.

"I didn't want you FEELING--!" Eliot's voice broke, snapped to kindling, his final word whispered; the hiss of an extinguishing flame. "...trapped," he managed, shaking hands clenching at the air. Quentin shifted back on his heels, surprised, book held taut against his chest like a shield.

“…Trapped?” Quentin asked softly. Eliot nodded a broken nod, one hand swiping the back of his neck and gripping a handful of dark curls.

“I—just. I thought it was the usual, the—” his other hand swung up in half a shrug, “a—a passing fancy. A boring little—infatuation that would fade with, with time, but it didn’t, and then…after everything, after—after…” His voice trailed off, but Quentin understood. He caught, for a moment, the meticulous guillotine force of Eliot’s focused rage; the brutal execution that was his battle magic, and the precision of the cuts he made in the air highlighted by scarlet fire. And the fall that followed; a golden-haired figure hitting the ground in a boneless, soulless heap. He felt the loss in his chest like a hollow drop. Another miss on the steps of life that left his stomach swooping low. His hands went clammy and his head wheeled out of control.

“I just—I needed…” Eliot’s voice filled the silence as Quentin frantically fumbled with the book in his sweaty hands, trying to find where he’d left off. “I needed to know I could…create, instead of destroy. That there—there was hope, a-after. After everything, I…” He suddenly didn’t want to listen to this. No explanation required. He didn’t want to consider anything Eliot had to say as fact, he just--didn’t want to know. The only reasons that mattered were the reasons behind why he felt the need to undo this. It HAD been a trap. He’d had no say. Eliot’s words were a white noise drone beyond the fluttering of fragile pages and Quentin’s frantically-racing heart. “I needed to feel like…I could protect someth—someone who mattered, that I wasn’t just…a killer, that—good things could come from bad, and that I could…” Quentin began to mutter feverishly as he gestured with one hand, the other clutching the half-crumpled spine of the old book. Eliot’s face fell, hands upraised. “Quentin. Please, don’t—you can’t, it has to--” Quentin ignored him as all the strands drawing them together began to shine anew; filling the air in a dreamcatcher of multicolored threads, still chanting and etching symbols in the air. Eliot’s face tightened.

“It wasn’t—this isn’t a game, Quentin, I never…please—stop—you’re only going to make it--” Quentin stumbled over a few words, but his hand was sure, fingers flickering and figure-eighting in the air. The small cove Quentin had taken shelter in to undo the curse began to shake, books dropping one by one from the surrounding shelves. The darkness outside deepened; magic’s melodrama stemming in agony as much as it did energy, the forces Quentin pulled on beginning to affect everything and anything within a certain radius. He was all but making a black hole to suck in all the strands; purposefully cutting and redirecting all the energy, the lines snapping and fading as if caught in a terrible galestorm. Eliot, as if sensing this, feeling this, raised his voice above the clamor that existed only for them.

“Quentin—Quentin!” Eliot’s voice rose; hysterical. “Quentin—I’ll tell you the truth, the whole truth, I swear, Quentin—please, I never did this to hurt you!” The book had slipped back out of Quentin’s hands, both of them conducting an unseen orchestra of magic; an ensorcelled symphony that twanged all the strings, making them sing beneath his unseen bow, the instrument more saw than musical structure.

“It never would’ve worked!” Eliot was shouting above it all. Other people in the library had begun to look up, startled out of their studious stupor from the tremors shaking the walls. They might not have heard or seen what Eliot and Quentin were seeing, but Penny in particular, wedged into the corner furthest from theirs, beyond four sets of closed doors and dozens of shelves, looked particularly uneasy.

In their cacophonous caldera of swirling blue and gold, however, they only had focus for one another. Quentin’s hurt lashed out against Eliot’s panic, electricity waging war with wind. The howling cyclone attempting to tear them from one another was halted only by Eliot’s precision; a concise cut through the fabric of time and space that ended with his hand gripping Quentin’s own, fingers lacing tight to stop his movements. Their black letters paralleled one another; each other’s names caught in the flashes of waving strings of fate. The lashing, whipping tendons of their life clashed against one another as their eyes locked through the sorcerous storm.

“It never would’ve worked if I didn’t already have feelings for you!” Eliot’s voice was all but lost to the spell as Quentin, still chanting, tried to squirm away. “If I didn’t love you already, Quentin—”

Quentin’s vision went briefly black as he lost his train of thought and his words, lips moving soundlessly for a moment before they exploded out of him anew; different, English instead of a stumbling mishmash Hebrew or Aramaic.

“What?” Quentin whispered. Eliot saw his lips move, felt his fingers tighten—

Before the spell went completely sideways and the entirety of Brakebills plunged into total darkness.

Chapter Text

Alice woke with a start, suddenly in her own bed, in her own bedroom, which at present was filled with no less than two dozen white and fawn rabbits.
Her head was pounding. The endless, insufferable racket her brain was making was enough to convince her that laying back down was more important than worrying about the twitchy-nosed wildlife running amok in her room.

Shifting back to lay against her pillows with a groan, Alice brought both hands up to her face and kneaded the tension under her eyes. How she had gotten from the library to her small, shared bedroom in the Cottage was unbeknownst to her. It was almost as bizarre as being the apparent next Disney princess with a room full of woodland creatures and, thankfully, no desire whatsoever to sing. She was hoping; vainly, that if she laid here long enough, both the desire to throw up and the rabbits themselves would disappear.

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” trilled an all-too-familiar voice. Alice dug the flats of her hands a little harder into her cheeks and resisted the desire to throw something in the general direction of said voice. The trip-trap, clip-clop of telltale shoes impractical as they were pretty should’ve been a dead giveaway up the stairs, but she’d been too distracted by discomfort and animal dander.

Peeking through her fingers, Alice watched Margo pirouette into the room with a flourish of magenta fabric, black crinoline and a tiny party hat—one of those English ones; like a tiny top hat with a veil. A lace-gloved hand descended on the doorway, the other propped on Margo’s hip, which jutted out at an absurd angle. She also happened to be making a duckface, which, coincidentally, brought an out-of-place smile to Alice’s own.

Seemingly satisfied despite being able to see said smile, Margo swished into the room and closed the door behind herself with a decisive click. Alice started to roll over, but was stopped by the discovery of two sleeping rabbits wedged under her other pillow. Holding very still, Alice finally brought her fingers down from her face to pin Margo with a dubious, betrayed expression. The other girl spread her hands and shrugged.

"C'mon--rabbits; Alice, I thought it'd be funny..." Margo collapsed onto the side of her bed with a kick of her legs and crunch of crinoline. Smoothing her hands over her many-layered skirts, Margo bit her bottom lip and contemplated her next words with care. Alice glared at her—well, in actuality, she was squinting a little because her glasses were all the way over on the nightstand, which was, of course, also overrun with rabbits. “You know. Like—Wonderland…anyway,” Margo cleared her throat, scooping one of the smaller bunnies into her lap to pet its downy ears. Alice watched, nonplussed and silent, propped up on her elbow. Margo made no comment as to how Alice’s choice in sleepwear was a too-big-for-her band t-shirt that smelled vaguely like a boy and plaid pajama bottoms. The bottoms Margo couldn’t care less about, but…

The Siouxsie and the Banshees bit had been Charlie’s.

“Why are you here, Margo?” Alice asked tiredly, finally shooing a rabbit enough to reach for her glasses. Margo delicately lifted her own bunny’s ears to wave them in Alice’s general direction, mock-pouting.

“I thought the rabbits were an obvious enough metaphor.”

Alice flashed Margo a blasé expression as she slid the spectacles onto her face, crossed her arms, and waited. “Seriously?” Margo lowered the rabbit’s ears and softly shooed it off her lap and onto the floor, leaving her to fidget with her fingers instead of a pair of velveteen ears.

“So you—know how recently Quentin and Eliot have been…?” Margo made a circle with one hand extended her pointer finger toward it, then thought better of it. One, because when it came to the overtly sexual, Alice had a tendency to close up faster than a budding flower during a sunset time-lapse, and two, because it was [unfortunately] unnecessary at the moment. “Bespelled,” she said instead, choosing her words with care. Alice nodded, adjusting her glasses. Margo took in a deep breath and plunged ahead, voice quickening. “I don’t think they’re the only ones.”

“….What do you mean?” asked Alice slowly. Margo chewed on her inner cheek, then, almost on a whim, started hiking up her impressive, billowy skirts. Alice squeaked with surprise and shot upright in bed, scattering startled bunnies. “What’reyoudoing?”

“Calm down, princess, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” said Margo dryly, turning to show Alice her exposed thigh. Alice glanced at the ceiling instead for a moment to avoid reflecting on what Margo referred to as “study sessions”, then, running a hand through her lank blonde hair, looked back down.

There, on Margo’s inner thigh, was font. Or—not font. But very, very precise, controlled cursive that could’ve easily been a font. The curls of the black letters curved neatly over cream-and-coffee skin, embellished only by the soft slant of handwriting associated with someone in a hurry. Or someone with anxiety.

It was painfully obvious who that someone was, of course, because the name on Margo’s skin was Alice’s own.

Which led Alice to say something she didn’t say all too often: “I don’t understand.”

“Well, nothing breaks bad news like cute fuzzy animals, right?” said Margo weakly, tugging her skirts back down to cover her legs. Alice stared at her. Margo swallowed. “It’s just—the thing that’s been going on with Quentin and Eliot, it’s…they’ve bonded.” Alice lifted both brows. “Like—bonded in the…soul-like sense; like—they’re…destined, or something, and…it’s difficult to explain. I’m not doing a good job of this.” Margo pinched either side of her nose with one hand and motioned with another.

It was like the rising of the sun.

In Alice’s cramped room, full of nonsense items she shared with her roommate, soft glowing trickles like dew illuminated on a spider-web slid into being. They filtered down from the ceiling; they drifted across the windowpane, they flowed up over the bed in baubles of white-gold, gilding the two of them in a fine, gauzy layer of lights. Alice slowly turned her hands over, and the threads of light moved with her, pale and papery and gentle as a chain of hazy will-o-wisps. Margo lifted her hands as well, and, after catching Alice’s eye, slipped her fingers through Alice’s own. A cocoon of the gossamer not-color encased their joined hands, and Alice was briefly overwhelmed by an influx of energy—the sudden urge to sing, to dance, to get up out of bed with vigor she hadn’t felt in months. Years, even. Her mind became a jumble of English and Spanish; bright memories of dusty streets, fresh fruit, flowers in dark hair…

She pulled away, but Margo stayed, watching her closely.

“I don’t—understand,” Alice repeated, albeit differently this time [“no entiendo”]—before clearing her throat and looking down. Margo twitched her lips faintly, either a smile or a sigh, she wasn’t sure, and reached for Alice again.

“C’mon—let’s see where yours is.”

“Wh—Margo!” Alice squawked in protest as the other magician turned her arms over, grabbed her leg and hoisted it high, yanked back her pajama pant leg, looked under her hair, and started to lift her shirt. “Stop stop stop stop stop.” Alice brought her hands down firmly, but gently atop Margo’s, stalling her incessant snooping. “We don’t—we can’t even be sure of what this is yet, and—and if that’s the case, where’s mine?”

“Well, we haven’t looked everywhere yet,” Margo pointed out. Alice opted to ignore her, eyes shifting away.

“And what happened—last night, the last thing I r-remember was the library, and…” Dreams came back to her as if ushered along by the lazy trails of light. Dreams wherein she curled around Margo; abalone to a sandy shore, buried her face in Margo’s dark hair and breathed deep; felt safe. Their fingers laced together; her lips on Margo’s thigh—right where the insignia that was her name lay now; in blank black script. Color rose to Alice’s cheeks and Margo smiled in triumph, about to say something—
When Penny barged in, all red-faced and white-knuckled, jaw set in unspoken rage.

“Where is he?” he barked. Margo rolled her eyes and sat up away from Alice, the light fading from visualization in the room as she turned to pin Penny with a fatal look. “Where is he?” Penny echoed, unperturbed by Margo’s mutinous gaze.

“Whoever HE is, he sure as hell isn’t here,” Margo snapped, shifting away from Alice in annoyance. Alice quickly bunched her blankets over herself and stared at Penny owlishly from her nest of thick willow-patterned duvet and no less than four rabbits. Penny gritted his teeth.

“Don’t give me that bullshit. Where’s Quentin? And what the fuck--” Penny tugged down his loose-fitting shirt to reveal harsh hand inscribed over his heart. It looked as though someone had tried to desperately wipe it away. A bad tattoo. Margo’s anger vanished almost instantly, and Alice felt a sickening lurch in her gut.

“Does this mean?” Penny finished darkly.

The smudged word on his chest was Kady’s name.

Time seemed to briefly hold still. As if the Beast was back; everything turned to stone. Alice felt her stomach bottom out and Margo gripped the sheets of Alice’s bed a little more tightly under her hands. Penny stood ramrod straight, hurt and fury twisting his face into something less-than-human. The only thing that gave away anything other than simmering rage was a vague trembling in his jaw. Little by little, he began to do his shirt back up, eyes drifting toward the floor.

“…C’mon,” Margo said after that long moment of silence. She slipped off the bed and waved the rabbits away; each vanishing in a soft swirl of silvery smoke. Alice slowly trailed after her, unable to take her eyes off Penny and the pain that he hid so poorly under his pointed face. “Let’s go find him. I think we’re all owed some explanations.” Alice adjusted her shirt and reached for her robe, deciding to throw on as many layers as possible. The chill she’d gotten from all of this was enough encouragement, if the way she felt touching Margo wasn’t already.

Had she happened to glance back in the precise moment she shifted her shirt back into place; however, Alice might’ve seen, reflected in her standing mirror, the [backwards] inscription of Margo’s name, proudly and precisely stamped onto her lower back with a zig-zag embellishment and little five-pointed star.

All of this happened in the span of thirty minutes or less; just before dawn, with three people making their way to the room where it happened on the third floor. They had questions, and the only one [or two] who had answers were the ones who’d started this to begin with. Margo led the ragtag parade, if only to prevent what was sure to be a murder in lieu of Penny’s wrath—but he was hot on her heels, overtaking her and her impossible shoes in a few long-legged and angry strides. Alice took up the rear, clutching her robe around herself and avoiding splinters on the leaning Cottage stairs as best she could.

The third floor seemed deserted—either everyone was still asleep or gone for the weekend, perhaps. All but one room seemed unoccupied:

And that was the cozy room in which Eliot and Quentin curled around one another like two halves of a whole; twin a comma and apostrophe without a sentence between them. Arms intertwined around middles; blankets tangled over even more tangled limbs. The birds outside were distant reminders of time’s passing. Eliot’s brow rested against Quentin’s own, his hand protectively cradling the other’s face as he watched him sleep, thumb reacquainting itself with the curve of his cheekbone.

If he had it his way, he would’ve stayed like this with Quentin; perpetual and eternal. Protecting him, or himself, he wasn’t sure. Nothing seemed certain anymore.
Nothing other than him.

“I’m sorry,” Eliot was whispering, over and over as pounding feet made their way toward them. “I’m sorry,” he said again, kissing Quentin’s forehead. The other stirred, slowly dragging himself back to the land of the awake and aware.

“I’m sorry,” said Eliot a third time, as Penny all but kicked the door down and shed light on the shadows Eliot had so unwittingly cast.

Chapter Text

“Let me make myself perfectly clear.” Dean Fogg’s sightless gaze fixed on the wall over Quentin’s left shoulder; his mismatched hands folding with ominous promise. The tension in the room was palpable, with the Dean’s shoulders stiff and his deep voice dipping an octave lower—possibly for theatrics, more likely out of sheer rage. “Do any of you have any idea the calamity you’ve brought on not only yourselves, but the entirety of this prestigious institution?”

The culprits didn’t look at each other—Quentin could no more face Eliot than Eliot could face him, following everything: waking up; the bedroom fallout, the disoriented blur that was Penny all but flipping Eliot’s bed…

Quentin shut his eyes.

How he longed, suddenly; briefly, to be back in his colorless, vacant apartment of cracking plaster and fizzing lights. He wanted, for the first time in ages, to have something understandably [if painfully] ordinary happen. Beside him, just under the dull roar of the Dean’s distant words, he could hear Eliot’s sharp intake of breath—and feel, echoed in his own knuckles, the way the other man’s bones strained against his tendons.

They were both gripping their hands into fists as if their only anchors were themselves and the world had tilted upside-down and spun haphazardly off-course. Beyond Eliot, Margo and Alice had given up all pretenses, as Margo had slipped her fingers through Alice’s for support. Penny held himself tensely; a purposeful outsider as always, his fingers twitching restlessly against his biceps.

“—Meddling with spells both forbidden and dangerous; deadly, even, like the Black Plague in how infectious this particular curse happens to be,” Dean Fogg was saying coldly. Eliot set his jaw and studied the floor. “People lose themselves to this spell; Mr. Waugh.” Blue eyes flashed defiance before lifting; limpid as they were furious. “Did you know that?” Dean Fogg went on to say, lifting a brow. The light of his office caught his fish-eyed stare, reflecting nothing. “Their spirits become so consumed with those of another that those two people cease to exist…” Fogg brought his hands in, fingers interlacing. “And become a new form of life; simply magic and intangible.” Even without his sight; he seemed to look directly at Alice. “Like a niffin.” Margo tightened her hand around Alice’s own. Penny’s fingers dug half-moons into his arms. The Dean settled back, shrugging with his brows.

“It is an act of magic so powerful that its effect can impact the future for hundreds, if not thousands of years.”

“Is there a point to this lecture? A solution; perhaps?” drawled Eliot, but most of the unaffected haughtiness had been wrung out of his words. The Dean fixed him with his sightless stare; unreadable as it was terrifying.

“A few, none of which you’ll like and four of which include the erasure of memories; the severing of souls from bodies, and the high risk factors of DEATH and expulsion.” The Dean’s fingers curled around themselves with mechanical precision. “Now tell me if I have your attention or not, Mr. Waugh, because I can make myself clearer still and throw you to Tim-fuck-tu myself with a few. Choice. Words.” Eliot paled and glanced away. The Dean smiled thinly. “Thought as much.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Nobody could look at each other. In his chest, Quentin could feel a cold fire burning—something like disappointment in the way it prickled the edges of his eyes, but something more like rage in the way it beat against his bones. Eliot was stoic; for him—the vaguely smug expression had been swept away; revealing ashen features thoroughly drained. It wasn’t magic—it was self-sabotage. Quentin knew this; because he felt this.

“You have a week to resolve this issue.” Small, resounding protests picked up and echoed; either in their heads or in the room. The Dean lifted his better hand and shook his head marginally. “Should you fail to find the answers on your own; I will act in the best interests of this institution lest this…enchanted disease continues to spread. I will choose three of you; wipe your minds, and send you packing as far from here as possible in order to prevent further disaster.” Quentin’s stomach plummeted. It was bad enough he’d been hexed; bound to this, but the threat of potentially losing Brakebills was…nothing short of catastrophic. “It is not my job to clean up your mess,” the Dean added, as Margo opened her mouth to no doubt inquire as to whether or not he’d be willing to share other solutions. “You’re dismissed. We’ll reconvene on this issue in a week’s time.” Quentin felt a cold splash of anxiety wash over him as the Dean’s blank stare shifted his way; the imposing figure swelling marginally until the sunny afternoon view through his window was obscured. A dark cloud had descended.

“Figure it out,” the Dean said icily, sweeping out of the room. The door slamming shut behind him would’ve surely broken the tension.

But as it was, it only closed with a tidy click, leaving a room full of disquieted people who couldn’t quite look each other in the eye. Alice’s fingers drifted away from Margo’s own as she curled up in on herself. Penny stood ramrod straight and stiff as a board, his arms crossed over his half-bared chest. Eliot and Quentin stood motionless, half-turned from one another. Eliot opened his mouth after a long moment of silence, but Quentin was already moving—breaking the spell following the Dean’s departure by stalking toward the door himself.

This was, after all, entirely Eliot’s fault.

“Quentin—Quentin, please,” he heard the soft plea as he made it to the hallway, his shoulders once more stooped and his posture horrible in its unease. He moved before the expected hand could find his shoulder, shifting away from prying fingers and watchful eyes. “We need to form a game plan, here—I know I’m the last person you want to talk to right now--!”

“Oh, do you?” Quentin quipped back sarcastically; more venom in his voice than initially intended. Eliot’s hand fell away during its second reach, and Quentin caught the disappointment on his friend’s face out of the corner of his eye.

“Look—I screwed up.”

“Screwed up!” Quentin’s voice pitched itself higher in hysterics. Eliot set his teeth and sucked a breath between them—then, apparently giving up on breathing air, fumbled frantically through his vest for a cigarette. “Is that what you call this—unbreakable, intrusive magic? ‘Screwing up’?” Eliot snapped his fingers, but nothing happened. The cigarette clutched between his pale and trembling lips remained untouched. “I could be expelled for this. I could lose this; lose everything, because you got lonely and drunk and decided to fuck with magic you don’t understand!” Eliot’s eyes burned as he fixed Quentin with a look he couldn’t read, still shakily trying to light his cigarette. “So if you’d just—oh, for fuck’s sake,” Quentin gestured, and the cigarette finally jumped to life with an irritable snap, Eliot jumping almost in tandem with the spark. He inhaled gratefully, and Quentin felt his own lungs fill with phantom smoke. And when he breathed, he tasted cloves and cinnamon; nicotine and death.

“…how are we supposed to fix this, Eliot?” Quentin asked quietly, once he was certain Eliot had calmed himself down somewhat. Eliot, motioning with a hand to keep the smoke from filling the hallway and giving him away, funneled the excess smog into a cyclone, containing it. Controlling it as he could control nothing else in his life. His eyes watered faintly—though it could’ve been from the dust in the air or the smoke he so meticulously processed, Quentin felt Eliot’s despair like a punch in the gut.

“…Maybe we don’t…fix this,” Eliot said at last. Past them, in the hall, students flowed—class was letting out. The chattering masses drifted by in a sea of colors and shapes; each blurred beyond the point of immediate vision. Only Eliot stood in clarity, his pale features drawn and his frame somehow—smaller than usual. He’d begun to stoop and curve inward as Quentin did; a frond afraid of facing the sun. “Maybe I just—I should go. Take the fall for this and…” He licked his lips. “Head back to Indiana.” The idea left a sour sensation in Quentin’s stomach.

“…No,” Quentin said quietly. Then, slightly louder: “No.” Eliot’s eyes slipped back to the floor; the delicate Faberge flickers of light through tinted glass windows catching the angles of his face and dyeing them different hues as the winds outside tossed the bare garden branches and scattered the sun. Quentin shifted his mouth into a hard line and shook his head, hair falling out of place behind his ears. Nervous hands tucked it back in; futilely. “That’s—not an option. We--” The realization came to him, a neon “DUH” blinking to life in his head. “…were both at fault. I should’ve stopped you.” If Quetin even could’ve.

Thinking back to that night—Penny reluctantly wedged into a corner of the sofa; Margo doing glowing shots off the chest of a fortunate and overjoyed freshman—Alice with her noise-cancelling earmuffs on, studying herbal remedies, the dumber second-years trying to summon demons with a Ouija board on a whim, the scent of gun-smoke from controlled interior fireworks, dazzling sparklers and the taste of champagne, only sweeter—

And the way Eliot held his hand prior to their casting of the spell. The look in his eyes—the pure, unbridled happiness and eagerness that even then, Quentin could feel. Could taste more than the champagne, and the desire—his, not Eliot’s—to kiss him, then, in the hubbub of the party, in the autumnal glow of the Cottage’s firelight and incense, while everything raged and their fingers connected. Quentin felt as though they had connected, then—

Even before the spell.

"I just wanted to protect you,” said Eliot dully, trawling Quentin out of the sea of memories and to the shore of the here and now. “Distract you. The daydreams. The. The fantasies; the feelings. You're just--so sad, you want to get away, but you can't, not really, not even with magic--"

"It's an aspect of depression; disassociation, Eliot, look it up," Quentin interjected sharply; defensive in light of his illness and having difficulty shaking the warmth of the recollection that colored his cheeks with heat. Elliot's mouth snapped shut as Quentin took the cigarette from him, plucked it clean out of his fingers, and inhaled deeply--not even bothered by the way the ash scalded his lungs.

"My point is," said Eliot much more quietly than before, "what I did; how I cast the spell, holds true. It's based in...” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “In deep affection."

"...in love," Quentin replied slowly. Eliot's nod was almost imperceptible. "You love me." Another nod. "You were--serious. About that."

"And I thought Brakebills was for gifted students," said Eliot; traces of his old sarcasm filling in the cracks of his porcelain mask. Quentin's lips twitched; the ghost of a grin. It was all too surreal to conceptualize--the spell itself, yes, but mostly just...love.

Being loved. And not rejected.

But chosen.

Quentin started to pace, back and forth in the hallway. Eliot stood motionless; gaze sliding toward the hall windows.

There had to be something in the books about magic and love. There was sex magic; after all. And perhaps that was the key to all of this—but in his searching, in the throes of passion not his own, he’d found nothing. Just prickles of discomfort and flushes of heat; albeit nothing compared to the phantom hickeys Alice showed him in discretion; hiding her face in her hands and asking him to help her with a concealment spell. So—sex. Possibly not the answer. Definitely a part of the problem, in Quentin’s opinion.

But love and sex were not the same, Quentin silently chided himself. That was a blurred line in Eliot’s mind. Eliot; who thought of himself as so disposable he had to tether himself to another human being in order to feel remotely worthy of the feeling of love. It was a jumbled, frantic concept careening off the walls of Eliot’s skull; a pinball notion he shot back and forth—that a night with a stranger; being used or using him, would be enough. That love came in the form of reach-arounds and quick goodbyes; or no goodbyes at all. That love was tangled sheets and broken promises. That he; Eliot Waugh, was expendable for the sake of someone else’s pleasure.

Quentin closed his eyes briefly. In light of all this; the spell and his sickness, it was difficult to discern how he himself was feeling.

Before coming here, he’d been—empty. Hollow; somewhat of a shell of a person. He’d been a purposeless animated corpse patrolling the streets and school test lists; hoping, praying someone would take him in and give him a purpose. An effective golem devoid of direction, he’d found hope in Brakebills and magic. He’d found his Fillory, and, in the beginning, what he felt was his inevitable happy ending.

It was an ending that, he realized, began with Eliot. Eliot, being the first person Quentin saw at Brakebills, lounging on a stone wall, cigarette hanging from his lips—dressed to outdo Oscar Wilde, with his Gene Wilder hair and his devil-may-care attitude.

It was, Quentin realized with a jump in his chest, love at first sight. The school and the slim youth on the wall, waiting to welcome him home.

Little by little, Quentin reached out to slip his fingers into Eliot’s own. The smoke cyclone had dissipated, the cigarette in Quentin’s other had burning low. Eliot dared not look him in the eye, his gaze still downcast to the moth-eaten rug on the floor. Quentin shifted closer amidst the sea of students; eyes only for Eliot. Bit by bit, the other returned his gesture, fingers softly slipping into Quentin’s own: a perfect fit. The hallway around them seemed suddenly saturated again, bejeweled tones of color heightening sharply. Their energy hummed, the magic between them alive and jumping, eagerly pacing—lightning lancing up and down their arms, a magnetic force pulling them closer and closer together.

Eventually, their foreheads touched, Eliot having to lean forward quite a bit to accommodate Quentin, who stood on his toes to reach him better. They stood in silence, occupied with one another, Quentin studying Eliot as he would anything he didn’t quite understand: with mild alarm and subtle disbelief, trying to translate him into something he could understand. Eliot, for his part, savored the scent of Quentin: paperback books and ink, fresh rain and the cold air of the distant North. And maybe a little bit of fried food, he realized, as Quentin’s Brooklyn beginnings recurred to him in bits and pieces. Dollar popcorn off the street vendors and narrow alleyways into which beer poured from restaurants—shortcuts home. Places to hide.

Quentin closed his eyes, tiring of trying to decipher Eliot Waugh. Eliot joined him in the darkness, dwelling only on the vibration that steadied their hearts and pulled the pulses into the same subtle rhythm.

The world slowed.

Quentin breathed, and was able, at long last, to think again. Clearly, now.

“…I have an idea,” he said finally, once he’d brought his thoughts to a conclusive decision, his voice distant and strange. Eliot “mm’d” softly, eyes still closed. “We need ingredients from the greenhouse. We need candles; supervision from an outside source, we—we need chalk, or paint, possibly. Something to sacrifice--we need to go find the others. Not for sacrifice, just for spellwork, Alice; Margo—Penny, we need to talk this out with them. Alice—especially, she’ll know what to do, she always knows what to do…” He was rambling, his words slurring together slightly. It’d been an exhausting few days of fucking up.

Eliot “mm’d” again, this time in agreement, and slipped his lips warmly over Quentin’s own.

Chapter Text

“So it’s decided, then,” Eliot said flatly, looking from face to uneasy face in the cramped quarters they’d chosen. “This ends now.”

The plan was simple: severance. In the most literal sense. The only counter-spells the group had come up with were, in a word…unfriendly. The most potent [and likely] of which consisted of sawing away at their connections in a raw and prehistoric form of magic—translated and updated to incorporate modern tools, naturally, rather than repeatedly hitting an illusion with a stone. The biggest setback was, however, that the severance, if performed poorly, had the potential to go incredibly awry. So awry, in fact, that some of the attempts at spells of this caliber resulted in amnesia, loss of self, and eventual insanity.

Not like some of them weren’t already there, mind. Penny, for example, had been nothing short of homicidal since the initial incident and now, following up on that, bore the semblance of a man beside himself. Restless hands drummed on his legs as the traveler knelt and waited, staring agitatedly at Eliot. Quentin had a feeling that Penny, if given the opportunity to forget any of them [as a result of the spell they were about to cast or anything else] would have taken said opportunity in a heartbeat. Less than. How the rest of them felt, however, seemed to be an enigma for the time being.

That is, until Margo spoke up, her voice slightly strained—not the usual devil-may-care quippiness, but actual, genuine concern.

“…There’s something you should know before we begin.”

Olive fingers tugged back dark hair; a jingle filling the air as a ruby earring caught the light and cast a crimson glow across the haphazard scrawl that was Eliot’s handwriting--the handwriting in question which curved around the shell of Margo’s ear like a whisper in written words. Quentin, Eliot, Penny, and Alice leaned in slowly to inspect the script, each more nonplussed than the last.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Eliot asked finally, lifting a finger to lazily prod the soft space behind Margo’s ear. He earned a swift smack for his troubles, recoiled, and sulked as he cradled his offended hand. Margo shook her hair back into place and sighed heavily, lifting her shoulders in a shrug.

Everything had been set to go. A pair of unimpressive scissors lay in a circle drawn in crushed rock salt and white sage, the scent of which filled the parlor of the Cottage with a pungent, heady aroma. The crackling fireplace had been filled with stuff of the same likewise; the sage burning a soft, greenish glow in the heart of the hearth. A dozen candles on varying levels, representing the multiple planes and aspects of magic, cast a protective spotlight across the unusual troupe of enchanters. The candlelight gilded Alice’s hair from white to outright gold; and it framed Eliot’s haughty face in an expression of near-nobility.

They had worked quickly to secure their circle; closed the doors to the room to keep others from wandering in, and as a result, sat in isolated silence for a few hours as they meticulously and painstakingly rendered their circle; their wards, and all the entailed aspects of the spell to break all spells—funneled, they hoped, into the object of their concentrated desire: the scissors.

It was only when they had neared the initial casting of the big [and literal] tiebreaker itself that Margo decided to announce her discovery.

“I found it one morning—dunno if it was always there, but it’s there now, and that’s what matters,” she’d said dryly, tapping her earring. Penny in particular had tensed at the nonchalant declaration, while the rest of them—Alice, Quentin, and Eliot—had been simply nonplussed.

“What are you talking about?” Eliot’d asked. And Margo had showed them.

This had led to an unexpected interlude of self-exploration. Eliot, flipping open Margo’s compact, was startled to find Margo’s name inscribed behind his opposite ear; while Alice feigned shock at the mark on her back bearing the same insignia; if slightly bigger [she’d found it whilst getting dressed one morning and neglected to tell Margo].

Penny was the only one who’d refused, his arms tightly wound around himself and his guard up even higher than his nonexistent [yet prominent] hackles. When Eliot had strayed a teasing hand toward Penny’s customary half-open shirt, the punk from Florida had hissed “bitch, I’ll fucking cut you”, resulting in Eliot’s snide laughter and Quentin’s grim, “but he will, though.”

Following this, there’d been another silence. Alice twisted a sprig of sage between her shaky fingers and stared at it as if trying to dissect the frond with her eyes alone. Margo smoothed her hands across her floral skirt and waited, hands neatly folded, eyes fixed on Eliot. Eliot, for his part, busied himself with setting up the third mirror meant to contain the magic to themselves and themselves alone—something they’d overlooked last time, but wouldn’t now. Penny and Quentin, left to fidget, ignored one another with the hardcore discretion of two sinners in church, their stubbornness translating to disquiet and—

“Are you reciting the monologue from Wrath of Khan in your head right now?” Penny snapped abruptly; disgust edging into his every word. Quentin, very tired of the continuous interruption to his thoughts in the form of a one Floridian asshat, turned to stare at him with a blank and focused expression.

“Why the fuck do you know what Wrath of Khan even is?” Penny’s face was worth it, even if the shove to his shoulder that nearly knocked Quentin on his ass wasn’t.
“Can we focus on our mission here, people, please?” Margo, ever pragmatic, inquired coolly. Penny and Quentin ceased scowling at one another enough to turn their attention on her as Margo and Alice lifted their hands in sync to begin conducting the unseen orchestra that was the unfathomable element of magic.

Little by little, light began to fill the room.
It was neither candle nor sun; fire nor star. It was a long, sinuous, entangled web of a thousand different colors; some of which Quentin did not even have a name for. They spiraled and swept; swooped and dove, twining in and out of one another in a snarl that was more beautiful than the name implied: a braid, for lack of a better term, of sky blues and sunset pinks and pastel creamy lemon yellows, and a dozen different other, earthier things like brick reds and coppers…

The parlor became a nest of illumination; an unraveling yarn that tied them all together. To their stunned amazement, they were in fact…all connected. Sky-colored light was bound from Quentin’s arm to Eliot’s; intertwined with a faintly gleaming bronze—so dull it hardly seemed to shine in the semidarkness of the Cottage’s enclosed spaces. That same sky hue bowed in the air, a wispy thread encircling Eliot’s throat and Margo’s likewise; pinned, seemingly, behind their ears. Alice sat in tense trepidation, all but swathed in the faintest of chrysanthemum colors—a color that tined Margo just under her skirt. Margo glanced down as if on cue, and laughed.

“That’s one hell of an afterglow.” Alice, mortified, sputtered and suddenly found a wall to interest herself in instead of Margo.

It was Penny and Quentin, however, that found themselves at odds once again.

Copper and bronze connected; frayed, but real. It was a wad of strings wrapped taut in Penny’s fist, grappled at the knuckles—across which Quentin could now better see the untidy writing that was his own name. He glanced over himself to see where his own light led, but couldn’t find it—perhaps it was in his head, like most things Penny-related, and therefore…meant nothing.

Penny didn’t actually care about him, after all—did he?

“So what does that mean?” Margo was asking, gesturing vaguely to the threads of light that floated of their own accord. Eliot shrugged facially, studying the lines as one would hieroglyphs.

“I couldn’t tell you,” the tall magician said unhelpfully. Penny tightened his jaw and moved away from Quentin slightly—not enough to break their circle, but enough so that the chords between them seemed to grow taut. They were fragile; the bindings of bronze and copper; threatening to tear in the presence of a sharp breath. Quentin felt the strain—at the back of his head, like an echo of a migraine. Penny hugged himself a little tighter and fidgeted with his fingers. Quentin mouthed “what?” his way, and was rewarded with two middle fingers for the price of one.

“You said this spell was based in…” At this, Alice hesitated, her fingers curling. Margo glanced sidelong at her, setting a hand softly on her arm. To her benefit, Alice didn’t do the usual shying away maneuver, but rather, leaned into the touch, swallowing quickly and forcing herself to continue speaking. “The concept of soulmates--love, or—or something--”

“Oh, bullshit,” said Penny under his breath, face twisting up with displeasure. Eliot fixed him with a look fit to boil men alive and he restrained from further commentary—possibly because that look alone, Quentin knew, came with a telekinetic clench around Penny’s throat.

“Eliot,” said Quentin quietly, and almost at once, the other magician relinquished his invisible grip and went back to examining the notes in his lap, jaw tensed. Penny rubbed his neck and fell silent, staring Eliot down with a look of unbridled loathing. But as long as he wasn’t talking, that was nothing new.

“Love isn’t the same a-across the board,” Alice pointed out, continuing as if uninterrupted despite the stumble in her words. “It’s—it comes in a lot of f-forms.”

“It’s true,” Quentin said, nodding, “the Greeks had a four-category system for love--”

“Agape, Philleo, Storge, and Eros,” Penny cut in sullenly. “Yeah, yeah, Q, we all went to smart people schools.” Quentin twitched his nose and heaved an exasperated sigh.

“The point is—maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.” It would make sense—considering the fact that the idea of a romantic relationship with Penny was even more surreal to Quentin than one with Eliot Waugh, of all people. At this, however, Eliot’s shoulders rose and the rest of him followed, a purposeful straightening of his spine that spoke defiance in Quentin’s general direction. “In—certain situations,” Quentin added hastily. “F-for example—Eliot, you and Margo connected. As we established--” he leafed through the papers in the center of the circle, pawing for answers—a fox digging through snow—and came up with a few leafs of circled words. “these connections already existed; universally. They were formed outside of purposeful magic—you and Margo were already friends before you even met me; obviously, you know that, but what if this connection…” Quentin reached out despite Alice’s mute movement of protest; a silent “no” on her lips, to twang the thread between Eliot and Margo.

(Immediately, the room filled with a sudden ripple of wider light—a window opening to reveal a shimmery, desaturated landscape in which Eliot sat, strangely stork-like, on the sofa of the Cottage. The room was sunless and bleak; the fire in the fireplace dying low. He looked—unkempt, to put it mildly, with a blue checkered shirt Quentin was certain he must’ve burned by now. Younger, but older, with a harshness to his face that translated in the form of a sneer tucked against his steepled fingers. One leg bounced anxiously, foot tapping the floor.

It was only when the door fell in, frozen off its hinges that the room flooded with fresh color—Margo swept in over the threshold in a wave of magenta and gold, her laughter evident as the triumph on her face filled her expression with glee both devilish and innocent, somehow, simultaneously.

“What the fuck are you supposed to be?” She grinned, stopping short atop the door, made a little taller by that and her ever-unbelievable stiletto heels. Eliot, who’d risen from the couch, stared at her in stunned silence, apparently overwhelmed by the salacious entry that interrupted his heavy brooding. “The farm act at the local exotic dance parlor?” Eliot, uncharacteristically speechless, gazed at Margo a little longer—long enough for her to raise both eyebrows and wave a hand in front of his stunned face. “Hello? Earth to literal Magic Mike?” Eliot snapped back into focus and adjusted his shirt, looking Margo up and down. He seemed to be gauging a response appropriate for such an affront accordingly.

“Better a farm act than a two-bit LA hooker.” Margo’s mouth opened in surprise.

“I’ll have you know, sweetie—this dress? An Alexander Wang special.”

“See? It’s even got ‘Wang’ in the name. If you stood outside, ‘sweetie’, and stuck out your arm, it wouldn’t be a taxi that pulled over, I can promise you that.” A wicked grin split Margo’s face, mirrored in spectral form on Eliot’s sallow face. She extended her hand daintily; wings and bracelets winking in the midday light behind her.

“Margo.”

“Eliot,” he said, and kissed her hand. )

The window closed in the parlor, and Eliot and Margo stared at one another, then away—awkwardly as two such people might be when, say, they were being sung to: the song in question being “Happy Birthday” as performed by several enthusiastic and drunken people…in public. Penny slowly shut his eyes, clearly unable to believe he had to sit through this nonsense [feelings were, in fact, still bullshit, after all], while Alice smiled a little smile. Quentin nodded to himself, satisfied, and rubbed his hands together.

“Is platonic,” he finished smugly. He had the distinct feeling that Penny was going to hit him, and thus leaned a little further away from the traveler. “And some love…” He still refused to look Penny’s way, eyeing the ceiling instead, deep in thought. “Is familial. Formed by friends, to—to compensate for…you know, a lack of…” he trailed off. Then, little by little, he felt Eliot’s hand sneak into his own, filling his senses with the warmth of a middle-America sun-on-field sensations, summer in his skin and fresh cherries on his tongue—stinging, cloying. Sweet as they were bitter.

“Family,” Eliot finished for him quietly, and Quentin nodded, leaning into Eliot’s shoulder after a moment of consideration. What he didn’t see, with his cheek nestled against Eliot’s arm, was the taller man glance heavenwards to blink away something damp and unmentioned. He did feel, however, the moment Eliot’s lips touched the top of his head.

“…So what happens now?” Alice asked at long last, once another silence had crept in and curled around them all like a lazy cat. “We—sever these bonds, obviously…regardless of cost, and--” Margo’s expression stopped her cold, and Alice sighed.

“…I don’t want to forget you,” Margo said—to Alice first, but to Eliot, too, her eyes drifting between the two of them. “That’s a risk I’m not willing to take. If I have to live with constant worries about grades in my head from now on because of it; courtesy of Alice Quinn, then so be it.” She tried on a smile, but it fit strangely, and slipped off her face the longer Alice looked her way.

“…we can’t continue like this,” said Alice. “Not with the interruptions; the memories, the…phantom sensations. We have to finish this. Keep it from potentially spreading.” Quentin’s gaze drifted back open and settled on the scissors, glimmering dimly in the center of their circle. Winking and waiting.

“I know,” Eliot said, apology accentuating the two words without the usual flourish of scorn. “I know.” The hand not keeping Quentin against him reached for the scissors, and Quentin had half a mind, strangely, to stop him—though he couldn’t be sure it was himself or Eliot who didn’t want to go through with this.

Which is why, of course, they had to.

“Wait.”

Strangely enough, it was no one expected who spoke—but Penny, whose hand descended on the blades to keep Eliot’s hand at bay. The older man looked up, surprised, and Penny fixed him with a steady gaze. The name, “KADY”, in bold black letters was even more evident when he leaned over; just under his clavicles and over his heart.

“…these tethers keep us together. Right?”

“Glad you could make it to the party, Pen,” Eliot sniped at him, but the traveler, for once, didn’t rise to the jibe.

“Look—I don’t have an anchor anymore.” They knew—Brakebills South. The scraping of flesh and the way Penny favored his arm for days following was evidence enough of yet another stupid decision. Or wise one—it was always difficult to tell where Penny was concerned. “So…” He wet his lips, eyes finally averting themselves to the papers and the sage; the salt and the solution. “So like. I need something. To get me back.” What he didn’t say, what they all knew, was what it was he was looking for. Love, in his own way. And her.

Kady.

He wanted her back, too. Most of them did. If not all of them. And who knew what she was going through out there—if she had Penny’s name on her skin, and felt what he felt, heard what he heard…

“So—” Penny stood suddenly. “We know how to fix this. And we will, when we wanna, but right now—I don’t.” His eyes shot to Quentin, and Quentin was briefly overwhelmed with a sense of impossible energy—anger, excitement, tension. It swelled between them, silent and electric. The thought crossed his mind that Penny thought he was putting all of them in danger—but none of them more so than Kady. Quentin opened his mouth, then closed it, too stunned to function. Eliot’s hand tightened on Quentin’s side ever so slightly.

“I don’t wanna fix this,” Penny said, standing abruptly without taking his eyes off Quentin. “Not till I fix something else first.”

“But this is toxic,” Alice said. “Isn’t it?” Margo shrugged, her pinkie finger curling a little under Alice’s own.

“Only…” Eliot snapped his fingers, the gesture usually reserved for death in the form of cigarettes or homicide instead igniting the ring of salt and sage around them, “if we can’t find an antidote.” The two snaps; one gold, one blue that followed, a question mark and a golden ratio etched in the air made everything go quiet.

Almost immediately, the threads condensed; slowly sinking inward, dropping lower and lower until they formed a glowing globe of yarn around the mostly-seated party of magical practitioners. Their orb of a hundred hues rotated and swayed; rippling with every vague gesture their group made. Penny glanced overhead at the canopy of color and flexed his hand—releasing the long handful of copper-and-bronze until it pooled around him, free-floating as the rest of the orb.
Only then did Quentin hear the quiet whisper of thought: “home”.

“Home,” it insisted silently, and tugged on his heart. He looked around as the threads drifted downward, coaxed on by Eliot’s mistral movements, maneuvered into a sphere of soundless sorcery. “Home,” it sighed once more, as Quentin felt a vague sense of relief, all the threads relaxing, collapsing, and, without much further fanfare, vanishing from sight. The candles extinguished, beheaded of flames, smoke rising in celebration toward the ceiling and sky beyond.

Their sensation remained, however. Penny’s passion, Alice’s nerves, Margo’s focus, and Eliot’s anguish bumped shoulders against Quentin’s loneliness, until he felt so pleasantly crowded he could scarcely breathe in the best possible way. He wasn’t alone. None of them were, not anymore. Each member of the circle seemed equally amazed; giddy, even. Penny remained standing, motionless for a moment—before he closed his eyes, sucked in a breath, and like the threads before him, disappeared from view.

“Well,” said Margo, slapping her thighs with a smile before offering a hand to Alice [which she took without delay]. “That was…pleasantly anticlimactic, for a change. What did you do just now, Eliot?”

“Contained the spell to us alone,” Eliot said mildly. “I created a miniature universe in which our connection exists; nowhere else, but you know, no big or anything.” The way his nose scrunched and his teeth showed at the declaration of “no big” brought a flurry of mischievous butterflies to Quentin; his gut full of not-moths and muddled emotions. He slid his hand a little more into Eliot’s own and was greeted with a generous squeeze and chilly eyes returning to his own.

“Any reason you didn’t try that to begin with?” Margo asked distantly. Eliot didn’t answer, too fixated on Quentin to respond. “Typical,” said Margo, and drifted out of Eliot’s periphery. “I’m so never getting an answer to that.”

When next their gazes fully met, the world went away. The fire in the hearth jumped; the salt and sage-to-ash swirled into a vortex of herbs and hope, drifting across the Cottage’s scuffed floorboards. Margo, giving up on an explanation and writing it off as “another drunken mistake” glanced sidelong at Alice, motioned with her head toward the scissors, and mouthed, “you sure?” Alice nodded marginally and fixed her glasses into place, her other fingers busy clasping Margo’s own. “Not scissors in that sense, then?” Margo teased as they stepped out of the circle—earning herself an elbow to the side in the process. “Ouch. I deserved that.”

“I’m glad, though,” Alice said to her softly as their feet fell in time with their strides, carrying them away from the scene in the parlor and toward the sunny day, “that you’re still here, Margo.” The world went soft as Margo tugged her glasses out of the way to better see her, and covered her face with a half a dozen kisses .

“Me too,” Margo said, and took one look back over her shoulder at the boys by the fire—before her arm swept around Alice’s middle, and her hand lifted to place the spectacles on her own face. “Now—we should go make an educated breakdown of what just transpired. See if we can’t go make our own little universe.”

“It’s a d-date,” could be heard echoed in the hallways of the Cottage, accompanied by trickles of chiming laughter, until the two girls disappeared up the stairs to [supposedly] get some actual work done.

Eliot and Quentin, as expected, were thus left alone, in the center of a dismissed spell, in the middle of a hurricane. Everything else might’ve been happening around them, but they stayed still—looking at each other, hand-in-hand.

“…So where do we go from here?” asked Eliot finally, thumb brushing Quentin’s hand, over and over. Quentin knew he referred to the two of them specifically—not their group; clique, cluster, whatever it was. Just them. Their connection was—muffled, now, possibly by what Eliot had done, or because Quentin was getting used to it. He wasn’t sure. Eliot seemed almost equally unsure, features wary and shoulders stiff. “Maybe Alice is right; maybe this is…toxic. This—symbiosis I made happen,” he sighed uncertainly, and Quentin felt, rather than saw, Eliot looking for a cigarette. Lifting his other hand, Quentin clasped the side of Eliot’s face, turning him back to face him.

“it’s not healthy,” he said, “but nothing about any of us is.” Eliot, stung, glanced down. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on it.” Eliot looked back up, startled. Quentin smiled faintly. “The connection wouldn’t go both ways if I didn’t feel similarly to you.”

“Platonically, maybe,” said Eliot, traces of his old disdain once more tainting his words. Quentin felt the jab of rejection in his chest like a ghostly blade. He shook his head slightly. Then a little more.

“…Not so much,” Quentin said, squinting after a moment’s contemplation. Eliot’s lips jumped; wavering between disbelief and joy—both out of place expressions on his face.

“You are—for lack of a better word, Eliot, you’re home to me,” said Quentin quietly. “I came home when I saw you; I…came here, and there you were, up on that stupid wall.” Eliot laughed thickly, and Quentin saw in the firelight and smoke the way his eyes filled with briny water. His fingers curved a little more tenderly around Eliot’s jaw, thumb curving under his eyes to catch the tears and dash them away—punctuation in the form of emotions unwelcome in their arms.

“So if we’re going to be like this a while,” Quentin finished, other hand leaving Eliot’s own to join the first on his face, “we might as well try to do this together, instead of pull ourselves apart.”

“You--” Eliot’s voice broke a little. “Sure that’s not the spell talking?” Quentin thought about it. Nodded.

“I’m sure,” he said, for the first time in his life fully meaning it. Like Penny, he’d needed a tether—like Eliot, he’d needed another. Like Margo, he needed focus, and like Alice, he needed answers.

All of these and more he found in Eliot Waugh. And Eliot seemed to realize this the same moment Quentin did—that fear and self-loathing had faded, and they could see now the differences between magic and emotion. Quentin caught a brief look of relief on Eliot’s face as the candles in the room reignited like the light between them, their lips connecting as Quentin’s back hit the floor amidst the billowing cocoon of dust that framed them both like the wings of a moth.

They would entangle their future in flesh as they had in spirit, because in one another, now, [along with everyone else] they had a future after all.

And that future would be together, for as long as it would take.