Work Text:
"You're Quentin, aren't you?" the woman says, her words cutting like a winter wind through the uncharacteristic autumn heat to Quentin's core, relief and frozen shock all in one.
He doesn't answer, merely gazes up at her from the box on the table. His hand freezes on a plastic-wrapped record, half lifted up from the cramped bargain box, and takes her in. Brown hair, falling from a heavy bun on her head, too messy in an attempt to constrain the thick strands. Small, unassuming, but all the more noticeable for it. His eye would find her anywhere, he thinks.
The beat grows into a pause grows into a silence before her eyes widen, bright and green, and her face flushes and she shakes her head, stammering through a laugh, "I'm sorry, we've never met. My name is Victoria. Victoria Winters."
"You must have me mistaken for someone else," Quentin says. In spite of himself, he cocks his head, furrows his brow at her, remembers Daphne.
She knows. Subtlety never wins on someone so easy to read as he pretends he isn't.
She says, hands shoved in her pockets, "I used to work at Collinwood. I was a governess for David Collins," and his eyes are narrowed before she finishes naming the estate. He glances sharply to his left and, without a word, grabs Miss Winters' arm and pulls her, ungently, inside of the coffee shop just next door.
She pulls away from him, or he lets go, or both at once and she takes a stride backward from him, crossing her arms in front of her chest, chin raised at him.
A distinct lack of intimidation that nags at Quentin like salt in a stab wound, but he can't stop now, not when she's nothing but a hurdle and he's more than forty years of momentum behind him. Not now. He can't go back to empty coffins and fresh graves and bloodstains painting the walls.
Not now.
"Carolyn wrote to me about you," she says, succinct and matter of fact, and he grumbles something or other about I'll be right back and pulls out the nearest chair for her. Eyes fixed on him as he stalks away, she perches.
He hardly knows what he orders, tone gruff and impatient with the teenage barista, only knows that the music is too loud and god, god, god he wants to run, needs to run, but she knows. She already knows, doesn't she?
For all of their secrets, nobody at Collinwood ever became good at keeping them.
He approaches the tiny, window-side table with two oversized black coffees in his hands. Hers sloshes over the side when he places it down in front of her, telling her, "Creamer and sugar are at the counter."
Her eyes. Those damn eyes. Springtime on the hill. Sea glass on the beach. She watches him. Her jaw is set, but she clearly says, "Thank you."
Her hands toy with a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table. She's shredded it, winding the strips through her thin fingers.
"Now look, Miss Winters, I don't know what you think you're doing, tracking me down like this -"
"I live here," she says. She hasn't so much as touched her cup's handle. A noise comes from her throat, half disapproving sigh, half incredulous chuckle, and he doesn't watch the way she watches him, scalding his tongue instead on his drink.
She continues, "I was just passing you on the street, and I recognized you. If I'd known you would've acted like this, I never -"
"What did Carolyn say about me?" he snaps.
She shakes her head, freeing another strand of dark hair from the bun. "What?"
"Carolyn. You said she wrote you about me. Tell me what it said."
A scuff of wood against tile as Victoria pushes her chair back. "I don't want to."
Napkin shreds now rolled into a ball in her fist, she drops it on the table, next to the untouched mug of coffee.
"What?"
He watches her stand, watches her tower above him, watches her push the chair in with all the ease and grace that he's never possessed even at the top of his station. She knows, but she won't say.
"I don't want to talk about it," she restates, casting him one final glance, those eyes wide enough to see through his and god, she kills him like Beth.
"It was nice meeting you, Mister Collins."
And she's gone.
He stares at the door, watching her brunette head disappear into the crowd outside as he downs his coffee. The roast is burnt. He doesn't taste it.
His eyes drift downward to stare at the ball of paper she left behind.
-
The morning after the full moon, he wakes up on her floor, and doesn't know how he got there.
She looks up at him from a chair across the way, no hint of malice on her face, just those green eyes he'd managed to forget about and a tired, "I tried to put you on the sofa. You didn't budge."
She smiles, sleepy. His muscles spasm in protest but Quentin manages to push himself up onto his elbows. He catches a glimpse out of a window to his left: the sky is beginning to lighten with the dawn.
He gapes at her, blue eyes wide and heavy, jaw loose. What to say, how to say it, how to explain, how -
"Miss Winters," he rasps.
"You stay there," she mumbles, and something comes from Quentin's throat as she rises from her chair and walks out of his sight, somewhere between a grunt and a no and oh god oh god oh god she really does know, she really does know everything, she really does and it's real.
For all his running, it's still real.
He hears the clink of glass, a faucet, and then footsteps as Victoria emerges back into his view. She places the glass of water on her coffee table before she kneels down, slips her small hands under his trembling ones, and she's so close and he remembers, god, he remembers the napkin and her scent and the way the moonbeams burn through the subway stairs.
He lets her grip his hands gently and pull him upward; for all the smallness of her frame, she doesn't shy away, takes command as though it suited her all along, and guides him to the sofa. She places the glass of water in his hands and sits down next to him.
The glass is cool in his palms.
"Miss Winters," he says, mouth dry, "I don't know what I did, or how any of this happened, you've got to believe that."
He doesn't look at her, but downs his water. She stays quiet until he finishes, then says gently, "I don't have a reason not to."
She knows what it's like, he finds out, to be displaced. The only constant in her life is a lack of constants, a constant home, a constant year.
She knows.
He tells her he's a magician and it's only half true, but it makes her laugh, and he remembers when spring was happy again. She tells him she's a writer, knows fell into it by mistake when an ex-boyfriend found letters to herself, a sort of diary, assumed they were a manuscript.
She never wanted to write about his family. But it made her feel less alone all the same.
"If everyone else knows," she muses, "I don't feel so cut off from everyone else."
If everyone else knows.
-
He takes her stargazing as a thank you (and not at all because she presents the intriguing idea of safety). They drive into the country in Quentin's beat-up car, still running from the 1980s, music from the tape deck plucking out a slow melody on the guitar as the singer crooned along. Vicki, as that's what he calls her now, laughs in delighted reminiscence as Quentin tells her how he drives it to Collinsport once a year for repairs, because Buzz Hackett is still the best at what he does.
She tells him of Carolyn's dalliances and he wonders why he never made the calculations before.
The clouds roll in before too long, but he shows her Venus, bright in the sky, as they sit atop the rusted hood while the car still runs, music drifting through the open windows into the field.
"I'm surprised you went back," she says through the silence. "You spend so much time trying to avoid your past, Quentin, I never would've thought you'd go."
She isn't wrong. He makes some quip and she doesn't say anything, just a dreamy statement of how this is everything, this quiet, this open air. This is everything, and maybe she'll finally be able to settle.
"I used to think small towns were quaint," he says, lounging on his side as he watches Victoria, toying with the pendant of her necklace. He turns his head to look at her. "Nostalgia, probably, growing up in one. Everyone watching your every move, every peaceful silence heavy with anticipation of your next slip-up. The city lets you slip by unnoticed. Reminds you that things are moving."
He lets himself memorize the way she smiles, the way her lips twitch in humor and god let him be right: understanding. The need to move, the ever-present dread, the need to run, run, run, escape the hands of fate and craft out your own.
Does she understand? Does she understand that he is so tired?
Victoria drops the pendant and it lands on the fabric of her top, and when she lowers her hand to the hood of the car, her fingers brush against his and it's all of that, all of the way she shakes her head and opens her mouth to speak, something about that that makes him lean over and kiss her, and his cold hands reach up to cup her face and Quentin has been terrified, so terrified of the inevitable and the lack of knowing, lack of control and the loud, loud, loud rushing of time like metronome ringing through a foyer but this
This is peace. This is the quiet of morning snow. This is floating on air.
Her fingertips graze his tamed curls before she buries her hand in his hair, presses her mouth to his harder, and this is all Quentin needs to know.
-
The first of the year, she tells him she's moving back to Collinsport.
He's sitting up in bed and she's draped across it, arms crossed on the windowsill as she peers out over the nighttime city. Her legs tangle with his.
He tries to stifle a yawn, fails.
It's better than asking her why. Better than knowing. Better than hearing and knowing she's right, better than facing what's right in front of him, what he revels in every time he kisses her, every time he feels her nails down his back, what chills him to the bone with every, "I love you, Quentin."
Forever is etched into her spine, forever is the curve of her neck, forever is the way she tilts her head, rests it on her forearms, looks him dead in the eyes and says, "I'd like it if you came with me."
Forever drips across Quentin's shoulders, seeps down his back and turns the sheets icy. Forever makes his blood boil. Forever makes him burrow himself into the blankets, makes him say nothing to her in response, makes him ignore how loud the silence is when she leaves.
-
The postcard says, "I miss you," and has no return address, but as he twirls it by its edge between his fingertips, Quentin catches the unmistakable scent of her perfume and the cinnamon of her hair, thinks of coffee spills on tables and a tattered napkin left behind.
He drops it into the leather passenger seat and throws the car in park at the end of the driveway. Surrounded by trees as the sun sets, the crickets already chirping in an eerie harmony.
It isn't as quiet as he thought it would be. There's no instantaneous moment when the sound shuts off, when he doesn't feel the weight of the eras on his shoulders.
But he'll see her. And he'll get there.
He counters it. The lazy guitar drifts from his open windows as he looks outside and sees the spires of Collinwood peering out over the forest.
I miss you.