Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He wakes from his dreams like he’s been pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, gasping, choking on air, wrung out and aching and cold to the bones. 

“Quentin. Quentin!” There’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and he scrambles backwards, tumbles back off the the bed and onto the floorboards before he even knows he’s awake.

“Fuck.” He looks up to see Alice, wide eyes, pale, fear painted in the muscles of her face. “What happened?” He’s fighting to get his feet under him, still slack from sleep and tangled in sheets.

“You were screaming . I thought—that the Beast was back, that something terrible had —” She cuts herself off, swallows the rest of that sentence, because they both know that terrible things have happened, will keep happening.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just a dream. About the Beast.” and he keeps his voice steady, but his tone misses reassuring and more lands closer to trying to convince himself and doing a shit job at it, because that’s what’s happening. His mind keeps going back to the classroom, the whisper of moths’ wings in that terrible stillness, an unnecessary hand over his mouth caging a scream with too many long, pale fingers, Dean Fogg’s cooling blood on his cheekbone. In sleep, that scream is working it’s way out.

The door is open behind her, a slash of buttery light from the common room stretching through the darkness. Eliot strolls to the door, muscles slack with liquor, leans against the door frame; it could be a languid slouch or simply that he can’t quite stand on his own.  He drawls, “I know you're kinky, children, but could you keep it down, please?”

Then his eyes adjust to the light enough to see their faces and the smirk dies on his face.

“Sorry. Just a nightmare, Eliot. It’s fine. We’re fine.” Quentin sounds like he’s scraping the words out of his throat with a grapefruit spoon, and Eliot stares at him for a few long seconds, something sharp slipping out through the alcohol haze, as if he might challenge the parameters of what they’re calling fine, call bullshit, before his gaze drifts to Alice.

“You know where we keep the brandy, darling.”

He glides away.

Quentin shuts the door, flicks on the bedside light, sits back on the bed, and turns to Alice. She’s wearing a fluffy blue robe, one bare foot and one pink sock, and she leans back against the desk, the lamplight catching in her hair and haloing her face. She looks younger than she is, softer, it’s an easy lie to swallow though he knows the sharp steel that’s sheathed behind her gaze, iron in her bones and fire in her fingertips. He wonders if the, what did Margo call them, pilgrim clothes ? are a cover, a way of deflecting the gaze, phosphormancy via fashion. He knows that women can dress however they want, self expression, Margo’s makeover montage pipe dreams be damned, it’s not that. If Alice Quinn dressed as she was, she would be a warrior, bright metal and sharp edges, knives in her boots, sword at her hip, blue sky at her back, power in her hands and on her tongue. Instead she armors herself with high necklines and wide-framed glasses.

“It is just a nightmare, isn't it? The Beast can’t get in here, get in my dreams, can he?”

“He can’t get in at Brakebills, at least not to give you nightmares. I don’t know about outside, but this is the one place where he can’t. Before, he only was able to enter because we left a door unlocked, and that was physical; he can’t even whisper to the psychics anymore, since Fogg added another layer of wards. And entering a dream is a lot more difficult in many ways, if you’re unwanted. It's like jumping from stone to stone across a river if you’re wanted, worst case you get wet. Penny was able to enter yours because he’s a Traveller, because you called him, and because he was within the wards. If you’re unwanted, it’s like jumping from… hm. There’s a metaphor in this book in the library, but it doesn’t translate properly from the cyrillic. Say, an airplane into another airplane, without a parachute, while being shot at. Generally you just wake up or get shoved back into your own plane, worst case you get sucked into the engines, but it’s a bit unclear, since most people don’t come back to write about what that looks like.”

She frowns, and there’s a little wrinkle between her eyebrows that he wants to smoothe out with his thumb. “And even if he could get through the wards and jump the gap, it would be terribly unpredictable, because you theoretically have more control over the dream than he would.”

Quentin rubs his eyes. “If anything else, I guess it’s an impractical way of attacking, when he can just wait until we’re vulnerable. Why waste all that energy and take that risk?” This is vaguely comforting, actually. “It doesn’t feel like I have control over the dreams. I definitely have don't have control over the shouting. I mean, I talked in my sleep when I was a kid, but haven’t done that for years. And back then I dreamed I was in Fillory, back when I thought Fillory was like the books, all sunshine and ice cream and talking goats, so it was apparently strange but relatively mild conversations. Still, that’s the first time my parents took me to a shrink. Overactive imagination was the diagnosis. Which I guess was on-point if these dreams are just something I’m unintentionally doing to myself. Shit. Sorry, oversharing.” Alice smiles.

“My dad would psychoanalyze my dreams when I was a kid, kept dream journals for the whole family. And he was very, very into Freud, so really, everything was phallic.”

“Makes sense,” says Quentin. “Cause, no offense, but your dad sounds like a giant dick.” Alice starts laughing, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders.

“They explained sex to me when I was five. I was traumatized .” She pauses, and they both suddenly realize how close they are, together in the ring of lamplight, half-dressed, nerves jangling with the fight-or-flight catecholamine high that makes people do stupid things in the come-down. He thinks he might see her gaze flick from his eyes to his lips and back again, but she stands and straightens her robe. “Now I’m oversharing. Let’s go see what’s left over in the kitchen; the adrenaline is wearing off and I’m starving.”

“I think there may be pie? Though I refuse to drink anything that Eliot mixes. I’m terrified that he’ll try to be helpful and drug me or something.”

“Probably a good choice.”

“Remind me of that in ten minutes, when he offers me that drink.”

He teaches Alice card tricks, they eat apple pie a la mode; he thinks of the way her mouth would taste of vanilla and cinnamon and keeps himself on the other side of the room, and he falls asleep at three AM, the witching hour, thinking of Alice on the other side of the wall, about how she is very bright and very beautiful and so much more than he deserves. This time he sleeps through the night.

The next night he wakes up with a scream in his throat, Alice’s hand on his shoulder.

And the next. There are dark shadows growing beneath both their eyes; under Alice’s pale skin it lies blue-violet like fresh bruises, like his nightmares have put their knuckles to her face. She sees the best in him, though it bewilders him, and he knows that she would wake with him, fight for him; it makes his mouth dry with how much he wants it.

But just because something is offered, it doesn't mean that you deserve to have it. 

The third morning, he goes to the library, finds that a silencing ward is simple enough that even he can do it. Puts two on his room, draws the chalk lines where they’ll be hidden beneath the bed. Alice looks up from her textbooks to smile at him as he trudges up to bed; again he falls asleep thinking of her. The wards hold, and this time when he wakes screaming from his dreams, he wakes no one.

Chapter Text

It’s three weeks later when Eliot get bored, unpicks the wards. He’d have known better, if he’d hadn't been drinking with the express purpose of inducing short-term memory loss, if he hadn’t left Quentin with Alice, left the brandy for them and taken two bottles of red wine for himself.

The upside was that he’d almost forgotten the look on Quentin’s face, the downside was that he’d woken up at noon vomiting red and wondering whether he’d finally managed to do some permanent damage to his internal organs until he remembered that blood and wine taste very different, both going down and coming up. The other downside is that he's failed to connect the dots between the screaming and the new wards, because Quentin's been working very hard to pretend that he’s just fine, and Eliot is working very hard to pretend that he’s still having fun.

So Eliot gets bored, because Margo and Alice have gone to some spa without him; it was vegan and alcohol free, with spells to turn alcohol into wheatgrass, and he didn’t want to risk any permanent effects on his enchanted flask or his bloodstream; unending wheatgrass might be a fate worse than death. Although (tragically) he’s mostly sober, because Quentin has gone to bed early and is being no fun and it's honestly killing the mood. He resists temptation for a few minutes, smokes a cigarette down to the filter in the common room, because there’s no-one to stop him; his mind drifts to a vision of his mother telling him, idle hands do the devil’s work, as she dried dishes. He shoves the memory down, viciously, stubs out the cigarette, and starts plucking at the lines of the wards.

It only takes a few pushes and tugs to rip a few holes in the wards, and another few seconds to remember what it is Quentin’s trying to hide. Well, this time, Quentin’s not screaming, just saying no, no, no, please, no, and he sounds so goddamned lost that it would break Eliot’s heart if it weren't already in a million jagged little pieces.

Quentin wakes up shaken, fumbling at his wrists, finding them bare, before he even looks around the room and sees Eliot.

“Oh.” He glances around. “Fuck, sorry. I must have forgotten the wards before I fell asleep.” And trust Quentin to apologize for bothering anyone, as if the sound of his voice (screaming, weeping, wrung out of his throat by nightmares) was mud that he’d tracked across a clean floor, dirty coffee mugs left in the sink.

Even in the half-light, Eliot can see that his face is wet, eyes glittering. He perches on the foot of the bed, conjures up the voice he used with his little sister when she’d dreamed of monsters under the bed (though he knows now that monsters certainly are real, that they’re more likely to hide under human skin than under a four-poster princess bed).

“Bad dreams?”

“Mostly I dream that I wake up in the psych ward. That this is the dream, just another delusion, another way to run away. And that there’s really nowhere to run to.”

“It’s twelve o’ four PM, you are at Brakebills University, and magic is real. Now you’re re-oriented. You flatter yourself, to take credit for inventing me, darling; I invented myself. And I am very real.”

 Quentin suddenly leans forward, wraps his arms around Eliot, his forehead tucked to Eliot’s shoulder, hides his face even in the half-dark. As if he has to prove to himself that Eliot is flesh-and-blood, not a fiction told by deranged neurotransmitters. As he has to hold onto something to keep himself from falling apart.

Slowly, Eliot returns the embrace. He can feel the press of Quentin’s face against his shoulder, the warm huff of his breath; his hair falls against Eliot’s neck; he smells like sweat and fear and laundry detergent, and Eliot thinks distantly that he ought to buy him expensive conditioner for Christmas, something that smells of honey.

Under his hands, he can feel the wings of Quentin’s shoulder blades, feel the shudder of his ribs; Quentin’s crying, he can feel the heat of tears through his dressing gown, burning like spilt blood, he can feel Quentin shake as though he’s shattered, but Quentin doesn’t make a sound. What does it take, to learn to cry in total silence? Eliot has a decent idea.  Quentin clings to him as though he’s drowning, as if Eliot is the only thing keeping him afloat, and Eliot wants to tell him, but I don’t know how to swim, either.  

Because he suddenly finds the numbness that’s kept him treading water for the last few weeks is evaporating, and he suddenly feels pain and grief, old scar tissue and new wounds making themselves known as his emotions stretch themselves out for the first time in weeks, months, and he feels a deep ache, like the flesh and bone of his body is a cage too small to hold so much. He wants them to stay like this forever, he wants to put his fists through the mirror, he wants to weep, he wants a fucking cigarette, he wants to lick away Quentin’s tears and slide his tongue into his mouth, he wants to burn something to the ground, he wants to feed Quentin milk and cookies and sing him a lullaby, he wants, he wants so badly.

He breathes and breathes until he can’t bear it anymore, and he pulls away first and he knows he shouldn’t but he has to, because if he doesn’t he thinks that he might die. He thinks of Quentin, after the Beast, asking him how to live with himself, as if Eliot had any idea. Magic comes from pain, true enough, but there’s a balance between enough to make a great magician and enough to eat you alive from the inside, and it’s a balance that Eliot certainly hasn’t found yet.  

He pastes a smirk on his face, tries to remember what his face ought to feel like, says, “I’ll get you some brandy.”

“You can't fix everything by getting drunk , Eliot!” He snaps, and Eliot feels his expression slip too late to stop it; Quentin's too close to the mark and he knows it. He buries his head in his hands, tucks his knees to his chest and scoots his back against the wall. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too, Q.” Eliot’s still sitting on the bed, Quentin still a foot away, and Eliot still feels like a chasm has opened up between them and he’s teetering, about to fall in.

“It takes longer to wake up. If I drink. El, I know you're trying to help. ” He’s offering a brittle olive branch, and Eliot thinks. He needs a different solution. At least for tonight.

“I’ll make breakfast. We can eat our feelings, it hasn't failed me yet.”

“It’s midnight?”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” he says archly, “Come on.” Takes Quentin’s hand, gently, and guides him out of bed.

There are spells to do this, unshell eggs, whisk milk and flour into smoothness, but Eliot does it by hand, because cooking is another form of alchemy and sometimes the old ways are the best, something grounded in the whole body and not just a twist of the wrists and a flick of the pinkies. Quentin’s silent while Eliot makes pancake batter, carefully slicing strawberries, and the expression on his face is making Eliot start to wonder whether he should have given him a knife. Finally he says, still staring at the countertop,

“I’ve been institutionalized, know I told you, but it was, it was three times, it was where I spent my sixteenth birthday, it’s why I keep dreaming what I do, like my brain thinks I belong there and not here, like I got what I wanted but I know somewhere deep down that I don’t deserve it..” I’m too sober for this, Eliot thinks, and that thought is starting to become reflex. He thinks about pressing his palm against the sizzling butter of the pancake pan, any excuse. Instead, he does the emotional equivalent.

“I grew up on a farm in Indiana.” Quentin’s head snaps up and he stares, the knife going still. “I thought we were confessing our deep, dark secrets. Is that not what we’re doing?”

“A farm. Indiana. That must have been… difficult.” Quentin puts an entire world into the word difficult, and it's enough for Eliot to continue on. 

“I mean. I had a perfectly nice family, middle class, two car garage, almost anything I wanted and certainly everything I needed. Spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me; I thought, I should be grateful, why am I so sad? Which makes things worse, really. My parents loved me, but I was, hm. Born different.” Quentin’s nodding, because they both know what that feels like. “My dad was—probably still is— a state trooper, saw my car by the side of the road and thought I’d broken down. I was in the backseat making out with the star quarterback of the varsity team. Just looked at me and walked away. Never said a word about it, but after that– it was like we were strangers. They still call you faggot if you’re bi, in most parts of this country. I graduated six months shy of seventeen and moved to New York, had them send the diploma in the mail.” He shrugs, and his nonchalance fails him.

 “You’re right.” Quentin says, considering. “I don’t think I could have made you up.” He folds and refolds a napkin. “My father is an engineer who builds model planes for fun and treats optimism like a religion. I know Fillory by heart, paid actual money to get a degree in philosophy, and signed myself into a hospital because I was too sad to eat or sleep or go outdoors. He loves me. But he looks at me like I’m a puzzle to solve, a Navier–Stokes equation, wondering, how did this child come from me. ” Quentin laughs but it’s bitter and dark “If it helps– if it helps, I think you’re perfect exactly how you are.” 

His voice is earnest, makes a bone-deep part of him ache, the part of him that got beaten up by Logan Kinnear when he was fourteen and desperate to be seen and loved. And Eliot again thinks he’s far too sober for this, wants ethanol and opiates, has to breathe against the way his heart rattles in his chest. This is why he doesn’t want to feel anything, and this is why he can’t burn it out with scotch, not tonight; they’re walking through minefields and a drunken stumble could rip them both to shreds.

The only way out is through, and he swallows hard. 

“It does, actually. I’m making Mickey Mouse pancakes. What do you think, chocolate chips or blueberries for the eyes?”

“Chocolate chips, please.” Always so polite, our Quentin, Eliot thinks, and feels the need to clarify,

“I don’t tell people about it. Not because I’m ashamed, but because most people are idiots. All the shit we’ve been through, it makes us who we are. It’s a cliche because it’s a truth. All our scars are maps to dark places that we’ve crawled our way out of, proof of things that we survived.” Quentin’s fiddling with the cuffs of his sleeves, drawing them down further over his wrists, and Eliot adds, “Scars, metaphorical or otherwise.” Like Eliot hasn’t seen the scars, getting fainter but still there, still part of him now. Those clean, parallel lines have a clearer meaning, to a stranger, than Eliot’s own.  Eliot has scars on his knees from where he was punched to the asphalt ages twelve to fifteen, has stretch marks on his hips from when he ate himself sick for months after Logan and the bus, more from when he grew six inches and learned to fight, and a tooth mark on his knuckles from when he did fight back. Quentin arranges the berries and avoids Eliot’s gaze.

“I have everything I ever wanted, you know? And I’m still sad. Maybe I’m just intrinsically fucked up. You know, when I came here, Fogg told me that I didn’t need, might not need, my medication. That… you’re not depressed, you’re a magician. ” The corner of his mouth quirks ironically, but his tone is bleak.

“What, like you can’t be both?” Eliot flips a pancake onto Quentin’s plate, and Quentin looks like he’s honestly never considered the possibility. “Fogg is full of shit. We know this by now. We all medicate, one way or another. He’d have told you that we have unicorns here if that’s what it took to get you to sign the paperwork.”

 He flips the final pancake on his own plate, sits across from Quentin, who is staring at the table again. He tilts Quentin’s chin up with a finger, looks him in the eye. “All human beings are intrinsically fucked up. At least all the ones worth caring about are.”

A real smile finally ghosts across Quentin’s face, and the tightness in Eliot’s chest loosens incrementally. “Now eat your fucking pancakes, sugar triggers dopamine release, just like cocaine.” Quentin smiles down at his mickey-mouse faces and starts to eat. 

They fall asleep on the common-room floor in a nest of blankets, and neither one dreams at all.

In the morning, Quentin will find his medication in the bottom of his sock drawer, where he left it. Everyone medicates, he thinks, with a silent fuck you to Fogg.