Archive of Our Own

They tell him he’s lucky that the arm which got caught in the blast from the exploring mirror was the one made of wood. The lightning-fissure scars that crawl across it are mostly scorched wood, with only tendrils creeping out into the meat of his shoulder and chest.

He doesn’t feel lucky.

He doesn’t feel much, laying in the recuperation ward at Brakebills, with Eliot and Julia both unconscious nearby. Margo’s been glued to Eliot’s side and he watches them from across the aisle, the little river of foot traffic which separates their cots. Eliot hasn’t woken up yet, since he was stabilized, but he’s– alive.

Not the monster.

Quentin thinks he should feel something about that.

(He does. He feels relief and hope and longing but it’s like trying to hold fog in his hands, he can’t touch it. Can’t get a hold of the idea.)

Everyone pretty much leaves him alone, which is fine. All he really wants to do is sleep, anyway, and if sleep eludes him at least he can pretend. He can close his eyes and listen to the sounds of Eliot’s breathing, of Julia’s. Of Lipson talking to Margo, to Fogg, to Penny.

Alice comes by, and he pretends to be asleep. It feels like cowardice, and he wants to hate himself for it, but when he closes his eyes he can see her face scrunched up in horror and pain as she watched him cast the spell. It’s there, imprinted on his retinas, the moment when the explosion of magic begins to take him, the look on her face right before Penny blinked over to him and then took them both back to the entrance to the mirror realm. He’s not sure how to talk to her now.

She doesn’t stay, though, so he doesn’t really have to figure out how.

He might actually manage to doze for a little while, because it’s quiet when he opens his eyes, and dark though the big bay windows which open out onto the infirmary courtyard. Looking across the little aisle he sees Eliot, still unconscious, but Julia’s bed is empty.

“He hasn’t woken up yet.”

Quentin nearly jumps out of his skin, flinching hard, because unexpected noise and movement means the Monster, except the Monster is gone and it’s just–

Margo.

Margo, who is sitting next to Quentin’s bed instead of Eliots.

“Oh,” he chokes out, intelligently, and the eyebrow she raises at him is half mocking, half amused.

“You know,” she says gently, teasing, leaning over to trail her fingers over the exposed prosthetic on his shoulder. “When boys try to show me their wood, this isn’t usually what they mean.” Her eyes dance, a little, and Quentin breathes out, tries to grab for the bits of himself that are floating around inside somewhere that know how to be Margo Hanson’s friend means.

“You’ve already seen the rest, figure’d we shake it up,” he says weakly, and her grin goes catlike.

“Budge up, Coldwater, you’re the most interesting person to talk to in this hospital right now,” she says pointedly and stands up, making a shooing motion with her hands.

“Because I’m awake?”

“That’s a big part of it, yeah,” She says, grinning that dangerous grin like she might just take a bite out of him. He scoots over to make room for her without thinking. She’s slight, smaller than Alice (though you’d never know it from the force of her personality) and it’s easy to squish them both into the bed, mostly shoulder to shoulder and tilted together, sharing a pillow.

“Where’s Julia?” He asks, because it seems important to know that. It seems like something he should care about. His eyes flick over to the empty bed, and then draw, magnet-like, to Eliot.

“She woke up. Clean bill of health. Ripped 23 a whole new asshole over something, and then stormed out,” Margo shrugs, clearly saying what can you do. “Said she’d be back to check on you, though, so. Don’t get grand ideas of escape.”

“Escape?” Quentin repeats, feeling– confused. Where would he even go? It’s not until Margo nudges him that he realizes he never quiet stopped looking at Eliot.

“I know,” she says quietly, in that vulnerable voice he’s only heard her use once before, on her bed in the Physical Kids Cottage, with Eliot’s sleep-deep breathes behind him. “I swear I spent the first 10 hours just staring at him. Like if I looked away he’d just disappear.”

“Then what are you doing over here?”

“Well, that was almost twenty four hours ago,” Margo says matter of factly. “That would be an excessive amount of pining, for anyone, but especially for me. I’m the stone cold bitch, you understand.”

Quentin doesn’t have the energy in him to laugh, but he does roll his head sideways onto her shoulder for a beat. She smells like hairspray and expensive cream and like she’s been in a hospital wing for over a day. “Sure.”

Silence falls over the ward, settling like a blanket over them as they both watch Eliot’s unconscious body.

“It worked,” Quentin says, after what feels like maybe three thousand years of silence. “Sorrow and Sorrow. You did it.”

“We sure fuckin’ did,” She agrees, and Margo sounds happy. Because that’s how they should both be feeling, but Quentin can’t quite– he stretches for the feeling with both hands and can’t get his fingers around it.

It worked. He repeats the thought to himself, trying to get a feel for it. It worked. The monster’s gone. Eliot’s back. It worked.

Quentin’s shoulder, which should not be able to feel anything at all given that it’s wood, aches.

“So you remember like, sixteen lifetimes ago, when Eliot and Idri were getting married and I pretty much called you a twat for not pulling your weight in the ‘taking care of Eliot’ business?” Margo asks, apropo of nothing.

Confused, he squints at her. “Vaguely? I think I was pretty drunk.”

“You were definitely wine drunk and mopey and I’m not saying I was wrong for kicking you in the ass then, but. You officially have a free pass now, forever, on that front. Your weight is officially pulled.”

“I don’t– what?”

“I’m trying to say thank you, dick,” Margo huffs, face going pinched for a minute than smoothing out. “Listen, I know the only reason he even had a body to wake up in is because you spent nine months in hell. And I wasn’t here, so. Never again do I get to give you shit for not doing your part. Best friend belt officially earned, joint title, literally the only person in the world I will share it with. Be fucking grateful.”

“I just–” Emotion wells up, cloying choking eating burning acid sharp pain, and Quentin blinks it down. Grabs for dissociation with both hands because it’s the only way he can cope. “I needed him to come back.”

“I know,” Margo says softly.

She does, he thinks. She knows.
_

Alice kisses him, and he barely feels it.

She’s there when he wakes up, her sitting on the edge of his bed where Margo had been when he’d fallen asleep. The look on her face is that same hope-pinched-nervous-concern she’s been wearing since they got back from Brakebills South. Alice always looks like she’s feeling so much at all times. How can it possibly not be a deeply exhausting experience, to feel 12 different things at once and none of them good?

“Hey,” he chokes out, struggling to sit up, because– She’s his girlfriend. He should be happy to see her. He knows– or... remembers? Feels like he should know that he wants her here. The idea of wanting Alice feels like it belongs in another life, but so does, well– Everything. Everything about the world feels like it’s kind of just happening at him, and Alice happening at him is something he definitely thinks he should want. Wanted. Wants?

“Hey, Q,” She reaches out, hands fluttering like so many butterflies as he pushes himself up. “How are you feeling?”

How is he feeling? He’s– “Fine?”

“Oh,” Alice breathes, watching him, hope-nervous-worried on her pinched face. Then she leans in and kisses him, and he barely feels it. Like it’s happening to another body, like someone telling him about the idea of kissing or– or– or reading a wikipedia page about it. Her lips are waxy and she smells like soap but–

He tries to remember to kiss her back, because he thinks he wants–wanted–will want, has-could-might-maybe-should want things in general, and Alice in particular. Alice, with all her spiky edges and her whip-smart brain and her fantastic fucking tits, but.

Then for the flash of a moment he’s back in his younger body and the cold of Brakebills South is seeping into him, and she’s climbing on to him, and he’s trying to get her off him without touching her because he doesn’t want to touch her because she’s not his Alice and he doesn’t want his Alice, and he doesn’t want this because he hasn’t wanted this since–

Quentin flinches away, and Alice makes a hurt noise, brows drawing together with concern. “Q?” she asks, voice high. “What’s wrong?”

What’s wr–

Everything?

“I’m sorry,” he breathes out, and her face goes hard.

“You told me you wanted to try again,” she accuses, arms crossing over her chest.

“I know.” He did say that, he thinks, but all he’d really wanted was for everything to stop being so loud. The world was so fucking loud, and so full of demons, and Alice had been the– the easiest thing to understand. “I know. I’m sorry, Vix.”

“You don’t get to call me that if you’re breaking up with me,” she snaps, and his head throbs, shoulder throbs, chest throbs. “Is it because Eliot’s back, now?”

Drawn, magnetically, Quentin looks over to the closed curtain around Eliot’s bed. He’d been asleep when Quentin had fallen asleep, but that’s probably where Margo is now, if Eliot’s woken up. Eliot’s back, now. It worked. Eliot’s back.

“No,” he says, because it’s not like he’d been– Even the flare of hope from peaches and plums, motherfucker had died out long ago, along with everything else inside of him. “I don’t think I can be anyone’s boyfriend, right now.”

“I’m not– You can’t just keep me on retainer, Quentin. I’m not just going to wait around for you to decide you want me.”

No, of course not, that’s not Alice. That’s never been Alice. “I know,” he says, dully, hoping against hope that he’s not going to be mad at himself for this, when he has the wherewithal to want again. He thinks stringing her along would probably be worse, though, when he can barely stand to let her touch him. “Can we– I want you in my life, Alice. I just can’t–”

“Because everything is about what you want, isn’t it,” she snaps, and stands, her heels loud against the linoleum of the hospital ward floor. Backlight by the early morning sun, her curtain of hair glows bright, and she sighs, smoothing her hands down her dress. Softer, she says “I don’t know, Q. I’d like to be friends with you, but I don’t think I know how.”

“Maybe we can figure it out.” Exhaustion prickles at the back of his eyelids, he just wants to sleep. But Alice is settling herself in the chair next to the bed, instead of on it with him, because apparently that project starts now.

“Let me tell you about the Order?” she says, tentatively, and Quentin–

Lets her.

Lets it lull him back to sleep, the careful and familiar tone of her voice.
_

“So am I on suicide watch right now, or what?” Quentin asks, dully, when Julia walks into the ward about thirty seconds after Kady leaves.

It's not even like he and Kady have that much to say to each other, a purely situational friendship built on the fact that they both keep being pulled into the same orbit of ‘save the world or die trying’. Luckily, Kady’s idea of companionship does seem to extend to watching shit on her phone, so they’d spent about an hour cycling through dog videos, and then set up a stand-up routine on Netflix.

It wasn’t a bad way to spend time, but didn’t exactly seem like something she’d voluntarily do on her own. Which left– Julia.

“Why do you think that?” Julia asks lightly, dropping down to sit at the foot of Quentin’s bed, an enormous handbag which could probably fit most of the Brakebills library into it coming to rest at her side.

“Because it’s been almost a week, I think we can pretty much assume there’s not going to be anymore side effects from the magic-explosion, and I’m still in this hospital. No one’s kicked me out yet. And also pretty much there’s always people here.”

“Maybe you should just accept that people care about you,” Julia says, deflects really, and if Quentin weren’t so fucking tired he’d be annoyed at her.

“You, maybe. Margo, even, sure, if she wasn’t mostly here to see Eliot. But you’re asking me to believe that Alice, who I just broke up with, and Kady, who I’ve never had a conversation with that lasted longer than 15 minutes, are just here because I brighten their day? Even Penny came by and sulked weirdly in the corner for like an hour.”

Irritation flits across her face, and Quentin gets the sense that whatever she’d been trying to orcustrate with this (and he has no doubt it’s her, because Margo might care but she wouldn’t think of it), Penny being well– Penny– wasn’t a part of her plan.

“We know you almost died,” Julia says softly, and Quentin winces. The stupid wood in his fake shoulder aches, and he tries not to think you should have let me. Tries, and fails, and okay, maybe they’re not wrong to be worried, but he doesn’t want to be managed. Doesn’t want to impose on their time. What the fuck is he even going to do to himself, in this stupid recovery ward with Eliot asleep half the time on the other side of the aisle.

“I didn’t, though,” he mutters, surly. He thinks he’d be angry at her, if he had any space inside him still capable of feeling anything, for deciding that now she gets to care about him. Now, after he’s already jumped off the cliff, it’s not his fault that someone caught him after his feet left the ground.

“Good,” she says, clipped, and then pulls out a pack of cards and a bag of skittles from her massive fucking bag. It’s a familiar sight, exactly what she used to bring when she’d visit him in the hospital, or in whatever treatment facility he checked himself into. What a miserable fucking rhythm to have with someone. “Now are you going to kick my ass at poker or what?”

He doesn’t have the energy to cheat creatively or magically, but cheating at poker is pretty second nature to him. By the time she’s lost her 4th hand, Eliot is awake and moving around uncomfortably, but Quentin actually can get out of bed and Eliot can’t so they relocate over to him. They end up eating most of their betting pot, but the crunch and grind of the sugar under his teeth is as familiar as the routine of cheating.

It’s not the worst day Quentin’s ever had.

_

The first time he sees the sunshine outside the hospital ward is about two weeks into their convalescence, when Eliot declares loudly (and maybe seriously) that if someone doesn’t let him go outside, he’s going to break out and do it on his own. Lipson takes it seriously, anyway, and frets about it, but Quentin’s mostly still only at the hospital ward because no one’s kicked him out yet and because he doesn’t really have anywhere else pressing to go, so he volunteers to accompany Eliot to– The Outside. Wherever that entails.

It turns out to be The Sea, the big sloping lawn in front of the Brakebills sign, mostly deserted because that “front” of the school as actually the back of the campus, and students pretty much never wandered out there. But it was sunny, and all Eliot seemed to want to do was lay in the grass and stare up at the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and Quentin can do that.

“I owe you an apology, you know,” Eliot says after what could be 50 years of comfortable silence, and Quentin rolls his head over on the grass to look at Eliot’s profile. The bruised look is starting to fade from around his eyes, but he’s hair’s still too long, Monster-long, still frizzy from nine months without whatever Eliot did to keep his curls shiny and smooth.

“I can’t imagine why,” Quentin admits, because he’s just–

Eliot’s here. He’s here, and he’s Eliot. Quentin’s maybe still kind of wishing he’d been able to just die in the mirror realm but– the constant feeling of exhaustion is starting to fade, after days and days of just sleeping, and resting, and being around his friends. And Eliot, who he’d aching to talk to for months, now he can.

They can talk across the aisle of their hospital beds, and come out and lay in the grass, breathe in it’s green smell together. Eliot’s head turns towards him, so they’re both laying on their backs but heads tipped together. Quentin wonders what they look like from above, Eliot’s long legs sprawled out, Quentin with his ankles crossed.

“I can think of a couple things, actually,” Eliot admits. His hazel eyes catch the sunlight, Quentin can’t stop looking at them. Had the Monster’s eyes been that color? “I’m sorry I shot the Monster at Blackspire and I’m sorry I couldn’t get out to you sooner.”

“It’s okay,” Quentin mumbles, because those feel like– distant things. The ancient past.

“But that’s not what I meant,” Eliot continues, careful and measured. He looks scared, Quentin thinks, and that doesn’t make any sense at all. What would Eliot have to be scared of, laying in the sun on the lawn where they met? “I owe you an apology because I lied to you, and I hurt you with it. And I made a promise to myself that I’d stop lying to you now.”

There’s a tremor, somewhere deep inside him, like the warning shakes before an earthquake. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, there’s no universe that exists that I wouldn’t want you, Q. I– We stepped into that throne room in Fillory and it was like– I remembered having a home for the first time in my life, and it terrified me. And you were so brave, and I stepped all over it. And I knew, as soon as I said it, that I was breaking your heart and I couldn’t take it back, but I couldn’t let you go either. I couldn’t watch you walk off to a life-sentence imprisoned with a Monster, so I made a stupid choice, and it cost us both. But I did it because I love you. Because I never stopped loving you.”

It’s weird that there’s still birds chirping. There are sounds everywhere, the world is so loud, when everything should be ringing, resounding silence as the words die on Eliot’s lips. The tremor which had started in Quentin’s chest is spreading out now, shaking, shaking, shaking everything loose a crash-no-breaking-stop-help rush of panic, because– Quentin can’t feel anything but the rushing flood of pain boiling up inside him but he knows–

He knows–

He knows, more surely than he knew with Alice, he knows he wanted this. When he was still a person could want things.

But now–

“I don’t– I need my best friend, Eliot. I can’t– I loved you. And I loved Alice. And I tried that again and now it’s broken forever and I can’t even be in the same room as her without feeling a little nauseous and I can’t– I missed you. I missed you. I m– I miss– El–”

He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until Eliot’s arms catch around his chest, rolling him over so they can curl together on the lawn. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Eliot whispers, holding him tightly in strong arms as Quentin just– breaks.

Breaks apart.

Cracks start inside him, like a dropped cup, unable to hold in all the pain and ache and wet inside him, as he gives in to tears that feel like they’re never, ever going to stop. And it’s so– it’s so– it’s so dumb, he hates it, he doesn’t even know why he’s crying because this should be–

He should want this.

He feels like a part of him probably wants this.

But a much, much bigger part just hurts. Nameless, mindless hurt that feels like it’s strangling him, wound like vines around his breastbone, thorns digging into his skeleton and all the soft things inside it.

“I’ve got you. You’re not alone,” Eliot says, 37 million miles away where he’s a person with a body and Quentin’s a person with a body, and those bodies are maybe twined together while Quentin just– fucking–

Has that breakdown he’s been putting off nine months.

It’s such a soft, sweet, Eliot thing to say. It’s Eliot, who’s not going to lay here and tell Quentin it’s okay because he knows it’s not. He’s not going to promise Quentin things will get better, because they might not. But he’ll tell Quentin that he’s not alone, and that Eliot’s there for him.

It’s what he’s always done, when it comes to giving comfort. It’s kind of incredible how comforting it is. Because Eliot’s there. And he wasn’t, for nine months. But now he is, and his hands are soft and his arms are strong and he’s there, and–

Concepts like ‘love’ seem very ephemeral and confusing, but the undeniable fact of Eliot’s presence is something Quentin can hold on to. Can twist his hands into the soft henley Eliot’s wearing in deference to his healing stomach, and hold on. Ride out the crying jag.

Because Eliot’s there.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he can get out, once he’s stopped sobbing long enough to find words. “I’m sorry I can’t– I’m sorry that I can’t, r-right now.” It catches on another wave of pain, and apparently there’s more in there, more to just fucking– hack up, this tight uncomfortable wad of hurt lodged inside his throat.

“You don’t have to apologize. I just wanted you to know,” Eliot says softly, once Quentin can breathe again, once he’s stopped leaking all over everything, himself and the grass and Eliot. “You deserve to know you’re loved.”

“I don’t think– I can’t be anyone’s boyfriend right now, Eliot,” and somehow it hurts more to say it now than it had to say it to Alice. But Eliot just smiles, sad but real, and reaches out to smooth Quentin’s hair off his face. It’s too short to hook behind his ear, but Eliot keeps petting him anyway. It feels nice. Grounding.

“I don’t need you to be. I just wanted to tell you. I promised myself I would tell you, and I think it’s important that you know. I think if soulmates exist then probably you’re mine, but... so is Margo. I can love you and still be your best friend. I want to. If that’s all you can ever give me, I will be happy to take it and I will still love you.”

“That’s not– I’m not saying never, but–”

“I know. I understand. I really do, Q.” Eliot’s hand strokes the back of his neck, calming, soft, and Quentin lets himself breathe. It’s the first time he’s cried, he realizes, dimly. The first time, since he blinked back to consciousness as Brian left his body.

“Did you know my dad died?” he asks, quiet, which isn’t– on topic, at all, except maybe it’s part of the explanation for why Quentin’s– like this. Like Eliot might not know why he’s like this.

“No, baby, I didn’t know that,” Eliot says softly, his palm a heavy weight on the back of Quentin’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”

“I missed it,” Quentin breathes out, another wave of tears spilling out of him, silent now, but burning in the back of his throat. “I wasn’t there, because I was being dragged around by the Monster.”

“Oh, Q. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t leave again,” he begs, and, it’s probably selfish, like Alice had said, you can’t just keep people on retainer, but. It’s not keeping him on hold when all Quentin wants is Eliot’s presence, right? Curling up, he presses his face against the front of Eliot’s collarbones, and tries not to think. “Please just don’t– don’t go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Eliot promises softly, and then more lightly. “Plus, you know, I have a stomach wound so even if I tried, I think you could probably catch up to me before I got too far.”

Laughing feels weird and wet and painful, and it’s maybe a little forced, but that’s fine. Baby steps.

_

Quentin hangs around in the hospital ward until Eliot’s healed up enough that Lipson feels good about releasing him. The rotation of what Quentin’s come to think of as the ‘Play Nice with Q Society’ hasn’t really let up, except that now Eliot seems to be a part of the rotation, and Penny has gotten less surly.

(“You were going to make me watch you die, man,” Penny said one day, when it was just the two of them, Eliot’s privacy curtains closed and no one else in the ward. “Shit’s fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Quentin had agreed, because, well. Yeah. “Sorry.” And then because it felt like he should, even if he couldn’t fully mean it: “Thanks.”

“Whatever, just don’t need saving again, okay?” Penny muttered, arms crossed over his chest. It was probably as good as they were going to get.)

But once Eliot’s ready to be released, there’s no reason to even pretend Quentin needs to stay anymore, so– Off the go, into whatever’s waiting for them, Margo in toe talking chipperly about how much she can’t wait to get back to Fillory to fuck Josh Hoberman.

Except, Quentin walks back into the condo and promptly has a panic attack.

Everything about the place just bleeds memory, he can’t see the couch without seeing the Monster, or the counter, or the stupid power-trip gold chair. It smells the same, like the residue of god magic and too many bodies, and fast-food take out. Panic crawls up Quentin’s spine like a hundred thousand clammy fingers, bad-stiff-sweaty-cold-no and he can barely– he thinks he’s not–

The world is spinning because he’s not breathing, and when he tries to drag in a breath, it’s too much, too much air, his chest it’s going to explode, and his vision is going swimmy and his legs are turning to jelly and he’s– The Monster is going to kill him if he doesn’t get it together, grab for distance, grab for numbness but it’s flitting away, how is he supposed to cope–

Someone’s hands are pulling him back, and he stumbles, guided somewhere until the hands decide he’s done and he’s allowed to sink to the floor.

“Hey, put your head between your knees, come on,” Eliot’s voice coaxes, somewhere above the rushing waves of panic.

“I fucking– know.” He snaps, because good god damn he’s been dealing with panic attacks longer than Eliot’s been dealing with him–

But then Eliot’s hands are holding his, squeezing tight, tight, tight for the count of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then going loose for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Squeezing tight, and Quentin breathes in, on instinct, head between his knees. Breathes out when Eliot’s hands go soft, ten beats to let hyperventilation leave his body. Seven, and Quentin squeezes back, breathing in, breathing deep until his lungs ache from being so full. Ten, and Quentin relaxes his hand with Eliot’s, breathes out slow and steady until he feels hollow.

They’re sitting in the hallway outside the condo, Quentin can see that once he lifts his head. Eliot’s kneeling in front of him, still holding his hands, while Julia and Margo are hovering off to the side, talking in low voices, which can only mean they’re talking about him.

“I’m sort of getting the feeling we shouldn’t be here right now,” Eliot says, lightly dancing around the single most obvious statement in history, which is you can’t be here right now.

The only problem is, there’s nowhere else to go.

Julia’s loft in Brooklyn is long gone, lost to her time as Kimmy and the thoroughness of Fogg’s spell. They’d come back to the condo in the first place because Eliot had taken one look at the Physical Kids Cottage at Brakebills and gone sheet-white. Quentin’s father’s house had been sold. No one had any family in the area except Julia, and she’s not on great terms with her parents after everything.

“You could always come back to Fillory,” Margo points out, and Quentin feels– That rush of anger and sadness he’d felt in the drowned garden, that aching sense of losing something intrinsically a part of himself.

“No,” He hears Eliot say, softly, right before he checks out completely.

It’s nice to float in oblivion for a while. Safe. Eliot’s still holding his hand, and that’s enough to keep him tethered, balloon-like, to the ground.

The growl in his stomach is what brings him back, sitting half-folded up in the hallway of the condo building. Eliot and Margo are both sitting with him still, but they both have... rice bowls? Something that smells warm and sharp and Mexican, balanced in their laps. Eliot’s eating one handed, his right hand still holding on to Quentin’s, a little sweaty like he hasn’t let go for hours.

“Well, hey,” Margo says, her eyes dancing as he starts to shift. His wooden shoulder creaks audibly, and he winces. “Look who’s back. See, told you food would get to him.”

“You are wise and all knowing, Bambi,” Eliot agrees, giving Quentin’s hand a gentle squeeze. “We got you some food, but it’s just chicken and cheese and rice. Should go down easy.”

The thoughtfulness behind that, the knowledge in it, how deeply Eliot knows him and knows how to take care of him when he’s like this– that more than anything threatens to overwhelm Quentin again, pressing hot and wet up against the back of his eyes. He takes the bowl Margo passes him, eats mechanically in an attempt to push down the flood rising in him again.

“So here’s the plan,” Margo says crisply, setting her bowl aside and rubbing her hands together. “We’re gonna AirBnB it for the next couple nights, while we apartment search. Our budget is small but not non-existent, as the Brakebills board has seen fit to pay us damages for mind-fucking us without our consent. Julia’s taking point on that, and you can be as involved as you want to be.”

“Seriously,” Eliot reiterates, and Quentin looks over at him, still feeling– overwhelmed, like all the lights in the whole world are too bright. “If you want to come look at places with us, you can, or if you just want to show up when we pick somewhere, you can do that too.”

“I think I’ll just be fine with wherever you end up,” Quentin mutters, and he feels bad about it, because this is a lot of people doing a lot of things he should be able to do but–

The fact that he wants to go to sleep in this hallway doesn’t bode well for his chances of actually being able to help. Better not to set expectations you can’t meet.

_

The place they end up with is a one-and-a-half story apartment in a renovated house in New Jersey, right across the water from New York City. There’s exposed brickwork in the living room, and tiny kitchen barely big enough to stand in but the counter top doubles as a breakfast-bar and opens into the living room, which Eliot seems to love. The back of the house looks out over the water and a porch, accessible from the living room, stretches out across most of that side of the house.

There are three bedrooms, two on the main floor and one in the attic, and Eliot immediate claims the one with the biggest closet. Quentin quietly takes the one next to his, sharing a walls with him and the living room.

The third bedroom belongs to Margo, in theory, but she’s already got one foot out the door, chomping at the bit to get back to Fillory. He thinks maybe he should be bothered by that, but he isn’t, doesn’t feel much besides that aching sense of loss of self. Quentin half expects Eliot to balk against the location, the Jersey–ness of the whole thing, but nothing comes. At night, Quentin can sit in the window seat in the living room and stare out over the water at New York, remember being a kid who dreamed of making it across that water.

It’s easier than pretending he’s going to sleep. The room he’d claimed is fine, but he finds himself missing the sounds of the hospital ward, the sleeping breath of Eliot and whoever drew the short straw on the ‘Play Nice with Q Society’ that night. From the living room, he can hear everyone else in the house more easily, can remind himself that he’s not– isolated. Not alone. That the yawning pit that feels like it’s threatening to eat him inside out, isn’t, in fact, reflective of reality.

They make a Target run on their third day in the apartment, when Julia swings by with Quentin’s stuff from the condo, and spend about $300 dollars more than they meant to, but it’s... fun? It’s kind of fun, finding little things they want to make space for in their place. Eliot and Margo have similar taste, and Quentin’s got free reign of his own space for the first time since he started college, and they buy probably 6 more scented candles then they need and a lamp shaped like an elephant.

But they also buy like... towels and plates and shampoo and a rug, so. That’s something.

The car was technically Quentin's, left to him by his father, along with the proceeds from the sale of the house. He tries not to think about it too much, though the Jersey of it all is making it hard not to think about the fact that his childhood house is gone, and the last time he was in it he spent the night breaking everything. It was good to have the money, in theory.

The car, though, had been left sitting collecting dust for the better part of a year.

Now, it was in their bay of the two car garage, next to what looks like the downstairs neighbors lifetime collection of boxes and a couple bicycles.

The car ran, but according to Eliot it was in desperate need of a tune up. Which lead to Quentin and Margo perching on the steps of the garage, trading a bag of mini carrots back and forth while they watched Eliot do an oil change.

"You know he's flexing on us, right?" Margo mutters, crunching into her carrot. The little quirk in the corner of Eliot’s mouth means she’s not wrong, but Quentin can’t really be anything other than impressed. He’d been expecting to have to sink a bunch of money into the car, but well. Apparently he just need to have Eliot around, to make tools fly magically around the garage and look generally competent in the warm spring day.

“How do you even know how to do this?” Quentin asks, feeling utterly befuddled. Just driving back from picking up the car from the impound had made him anxious enough to be almost nauseous with it.

“You know how,” Eliot points out, looking over to them from under the hood of the car. He’s wearing an old uncared-about button up and some easily washable pants, but he still looks– Like if Quentin could remember how to want things, he’d really, really want this. And the smile on Eliot’s face is nothing, nothing at all like the Monster.

But he’s right, Quentin does know how he knows this, and there’s a twinge of guilt. That he’s subjecting Eliot to things he usually avoids, except– Eliot had volunteered.

“I don’t think I even know where the oil goes,” Margo says thoughtfully, and Eliot snorts.

“I could teach you, if you want to know.”

“I’m good, sugartits,” Margo laughs, then shakes the bag of carrots under Quentin’s nose. He takes one, absently, and it’s cold and crunchy and surprisingly sweet on his tongue.

The whole thing, sitting off to the side and observing Eliot, feels like a weird roll reversal of his first year at Brakebills. Quentin remembers feeling them watch him, the inseparable unit that was MargoEliot draped artfully over a bench or on a couch or in the grass, touching each other and watching him bumble his way around Alice. Except Eliot’s never bumbled a day in his life, and while Margo’s expression might shade to lecherous when Eliot bends over, it’s only half-assed. Like she can’t quite summon the will to objectify him. Which is kind of sweet, a little, Quentin thinks, and intentionally bumps his shoulder against hers when he reaches for another carrot.

“So,” Margo starts, and it’s like an ice cube drops into Quentin’s stomach. Plonk. No good conversation has ever started with ‘So’. “I’m going to head back to Fillory tomorrow.”

Oh.

“Oh.” It’s not exactly unexpected, even if Quentin had thought, maybe she’d stick around a little bit longer. But no, he hadn’t, not really, not when she talks about Josh almost every day, and is generally constantly trying to figure out a way to undo her Banishment.

The sound of the car hood closing jumps him, a little, from where he’d been sinking into his own brain, and Quentin looks up in time to watch Eliot spell his hands clean, grease lifting off them in a little shiver of golden light. That familiar thrum of something I should want, I think I’m supposed to want this, some part of me definitely felt hunger for you once splashes through him, as Eliot steps over to them, sitting down on the steps between Quentin’s feet and leaning into him. He wraps his arms around Eliot’s shoulders and chest automatically, and it feels... nice?

It feels nice.

Having him close feels nice. It feels warm, like– Like a big bowl of mashed potatoes, but emotionally. Following the thread of something that feels weirdly like wanting, Quentin tips his face down until he can stick his nose into the sprawl of curls on the top of Eliot’s head. Hair gel crunches under his cheek and smells nothing, nothing like the Monster.

“Are you going too?” he asks, because well. MargoEliot.

“No, baby, I’m not,” Eliot says, and it’s gentle but not irritating. Everyone else walking on eggshells around Quentin feels irritating, like he’s too broken for them to touch without them being worried about getting cut up in the process. With Eliot it just feels like kindness.

“Oh. I thought– I mean it’s not like I want you to go. Either of you.” Quentin shoots a sheepish look over at Margo, and she flashes him a grin, and sticks a carrot in his face.

“Yeah, well tough. I’ve got a kingdom to run. Eliot’s been thoroughly and truly deposed, now, though, and also everyone thinks he’s dead, so.” She shrugs, making a ‘what can you do’ kind of face.

“Seems like as good a time as any to take a break,” Eliot fills in. Quentin gets the distinct sense that there have been conversations about this that he wasn’t privy to, that things have been decided by the two of them and they’re just filling him in now.

“If you want to go–”

“I don’t,” Eliot cuts him off before the anxiety can build up steam. “Listen, I’ve still got a stomach wound, okay? I’m in no position to lead a rebellion. Also Bambi’s not staying gone forever.”

“Nope,” Margo agrees, crunching into another carrot. “I paid for a third of this place, bitches. I’m sleeping here at least a third of the time.”

How, he wonders, how are you going to get back and forth? But the portal clock has moved from the Physical Kids Cottage into the living room of their apartment, a strange and out of place relic that stood out amongst their IKEA furniture and Target lamps. He supposes that’s answer enough, and if it isn’t, he’s not sure he has the energy to care.

“Send a bunny when you land?” he asks, face still half buried in Eliot’s hair.

“Send a few,” Eliot corrects, and Quentin smiles against his scalp. “We’ll keep a colony, in case we need to get in touch with you.”

“I think our lease says we’re not allowed to have pets,” Margo points out, but her eyes are sparkling when she looks at them. “You know, I think I’m actually gonna miss you both.”

Eliot’s dry reply of “Shocking,” does nothing to pop the little bubble of warmth in Quentin’s chest.

-

The first couple of days after Margo leaves are hard.

Harder than he expected, to be honest. Now it’s just him and Eliot, rattling around the apartment which suddenly feels too big. Everything feels too big. The world, their place, Quentin’s own skeleton, everything feels big and empty and wrong.

He’s only sleeping in fits and starts, bursts of hours at a time, which leaves him feeling constantly exhausted and unable to get out of bed. The guilt over the fact that Eliot is here and putting up with Quentin and Quentin can’t even do him the courtesy of seeing him some days made everything feel worse. Except it’s Eliot, and he knows how to handle Quentin like this very, very well, and can even manage it without making Quentin feel too much like he was being handled.

So when, three days out from Margo’s departure, Eliot bullies Quentin out onto the porch– he goes. They don’t have much in the way of porch furniture yet, but Eliot had apparently dragged out a couple of blankets and the throw pillows from the couch out to make a little nest on the balcony. It makes the wood comfortable enough to lay on and just absorb sunlight like some kind of majorly depressed plant.

He didn’t notice that Eliot brought a book out until he cracks it open, settling it onto his stretched out legs where he’s sitting with his back to the wall of the house, Quentin’s head on a pillow near his hip. Then he starts reading, his rich deep voice a familiar lulling sound in the quiet afternoon and it’s–

It’s not Fillory. It’s Harry Potter. Quentin’s not exactly been subtle about his complicated feelings about Fillory right now, and Harry Potter is less loaded, easier to processes. But it’s still– It’s still so much, the simple act of being read to, makes the wave of pain and grief for his father and for his son and for Eliot crest inside him until he has to roll over and smoosh his face into the pillow to muffle the sounds wanting to leak out of him. So he doesn’t drown out Eliot’s steady voice.

Eliot doesn’t stop reading, but he does reach down and curl his right hand again the back of Quentins neck. Just holding him, thumb tucked up behind his ear, pressure as steady as his voice.

“Why’d you stay?” Quentin gets out, once the flow of tears has slowed to a slow trickle.

Eliot’s thumb brushes against the side of his ear, stroking along the thin skin behind it, and that warm mashed potatoes feeling grows again in his chest. “Because I love you,” Eliot says, gentle-but-not-too-much.

And Quentin–

Swallows. Takes it, and wraps it around himself like a blanket. Like a cape. Like it can help trap the warmth inside him and keep it there. “I love you too,” he mutters, even as his stupid eyes start leaking again.

Because he does. He can’t– wanting still feels like something that belongs to real human people and Quentin’s not a real human person right now, but. He knows he loves Eliot. In some way, some confusing and ephemeral and messy human way, somewhere inside himself, he loves Eliot.

“I know,” Eliot says, and his voice sounds warm, everything about him is so warm.

I missed you, Quentin thinks, and stuffs his face back into the pillow. Continues to try to photosynthesize with Eliot’s hand resting soft and heavy on the back of his neck. They get through the sorting ceremony before Quentin falls asleep.

Julia turns up the next day, which is maybe some kind of orchestrated plan to get him out of bed again, or maybe just the first time it’s suited her to visit for a couple weeks. It could honestly be either, these days. But it’s nice to see her, and when she hugs him and asks him if he’s showered, he mostly doesn’t want to punch her. Much. It’s her suggestion, though, that prompts them to pile into the car and drive the 45 minutes it takes to get to the beach they used to visit as kids.

It’s too cold to swim, but they spread out a sheet in the sand anyway, and if it means she and Eliot will let him nap there instead, then whatever. There are worse things than sleeping with the sound of their voices around him.

He dozes lightly, but wakes up long enough to hear them talking about him.

“He’s eating, and showering, so I guess it’s not too bad,” Julia’s saying, and it makes something ache in his stomach, these metrics for functionality which can’t help but be apparent to everyone.

“I don’t think the fact that he’s trying really hard means it’s not bad,” comes Eliot’s reply, careful and measured like he’s thinking through each word. “It just means he’s trying really fucking hard. I think sleep is the biggest problem. Things would get easier if he could sleep through the night.”

Which is not... an incorrect assumption. Quentin feels tired all the time, but actual deep sleep eludes him. It’s reasonable to think that, if he could catch it, he might not be so tired the rest of the time. Maybe. He just doesn’t know how, short of stealing Margo’s Ambien, and that probably wouldn’t even go far to helping him feel rested. Sleeping pills have never resulted in deep sleep, for him, and half the time they just end up summoning nightmares.

Which is not something he needs help doing, honestly. They find him well enough on their own.

Sleep hygiene may or may not be bullshit, Quentin doesn’t fucking know, but it’s habit to get up when he can’t sleep at night. So he does, spends nights prowling around the living room and days too tired to move. Eliot’s door is rarely ever closed at night, but usually Quentin doesn’t pay much mind, turning the other way and padding out into the rest of the apartment. A few nights later, though, a soft electronic glow coming from it catches his eye and he pauses, redirects his steps to peek through the crack in the door. Closer now, he can hear the soft tinny sounds of something playing out of the speaker on a smartphone. Eliot’s eyes flick over to him, and Quentin would be embarrassed about being caught except Eliot just taps the phone paused, and asks softly “Can’t sleep?”

“No, I– I tried but. Couldn’t quite manage.”

Eliot hums, and then flicks down the covers on the right side of the bed (my side of the bed) and– Quentin’s heart leaps into his throat, but–

Crawling into Eliot’s bed is easy. It’s familiar and warm, and Eliot makes space even half asleep. Settling with his head on the spare pillow, he can see Eliot’s been watching Friends on his phone, clearly just something to occupy his eyes while he waits for sleep. It’s not a concept Quentin’s unfamiliar with.

“I can put on something else,” Eliot says softly, into the quiet of the room, and Quentin shakes is head.

“No, it’s fine.” He’s not really watching it anyway. Tucked in like this, he feels surrounded by Eliot. The blankets and sheets are all soft and warm and smell like him, and Eliot’s body is radiating heat, fission-bright in the darkness of the night. The episode on the screen of Eliot’s phone feels like a timer, counting down the moments until Quentin’s overstayed his welcome and has to leave, go find a perch in the living room to wait out the dawn. 20 minutes. 15 minutes. 10 minutes.

He scoots a little closer, and Eliot lets him, angles his body towards Quentin on instinct. Eliot, Quentin knows, wants him. He’s not going to ask, but if Quentin– then he could probably stay after, and maybe sleep. So when the episode finally rolls to credits and Eliot shuts off the screen, Quentin stretches up to kiss him.

The kiss is soft, and Eliot’s stubble drags against Quentin’s lips in a way that’s familiar and welcome but – There’s no spread of hunger like he feels like there should be. It doesn’t make him want to crawl out of skin, though, and the closeness is so nice. The feeling of Eliot’s warm body, the smell of his skin, so what if there’s none of that animal hunger, Quentin can fake it if it means that closeness stays.

Except.

Except Eliot’s half awake brain is coming full awake now. He pulls back, and Quentin braces for it, to be kicked out and sent back to his own room. It would probably even be fair. “You told me you didn’t want this right now,” Eliot says, so carefully.

“I don’t– I should. Everything feels so empty and lonely and– You’re here, and I spent a year missing you.”

“Q,” Eliot says softly, touching his hair. “You don’t have to get in my pants to sleep in my bed, baby. If you don’t want to be alone, you can just stay. ”

“That doesn’t seem fair to you.”

“It’s only unfair to me if you’re asking for more than I’m offering. You’re not. I don’t mind sharing a bed in general, and I like doing it with you. But I can’t– don’t try to fuck me if you don’t mean it, okay? That’s not fair to me.” It’s hard to make out his face in the darkness, so Quentin stops trying, rolls over onto his stomach instead to bury his face in the pillow. Tears prickle at his eyes and he feels sick with himself.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Q. It’s really okay.” Eliot’s hand presses into his back, between his shoulder blades. “I like having you close. I’m just not willing to be a thing you use to hurt yourself, and I’m not going to use you to hurt myself either. Sound fair?” Quentin nods, pushing his face further into the softness of the pillow. Eliot repeats, quietly “You can stay if you just don’t want to be alone.”

The pillow smells like Eliot, like his shampoo and his preferred brand of laundry soap, makes Quentin think of Brakebills. Of being 24 and feeling about 14, hiding curled up on Eliot’s bed because Eliot let him, because they were friends and Quentin was drowning in his own drama. He fell asleep like that more than once, but never on purpose. Never like this.

Too-deep breathes, dragging the Eliot-smell into his lungs, and Quentin says, admits, drags out of himself: “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Then stay,” Eliot says simply.

_

“My old therapist is nearby now. Maybe I should like. Go see him.”

Eliot looks up from the tomatoes they’re both aggressively not mentioning he’s growing, to where Quentin’s lying flat on his back on the balcony. He’d brought the blanket nest out with him again, even though it was starting to get a little too hot for being wrapped up in blankets to really be enjoyable. Propped up on his stomach is the third Harry Potter book, which they’ve started taking turns reading to each other. So Quentin’s reading, and Eliot’s definitely not growing tomatoes on their balcony.

“Did you like him?”

There’s a moment of dizzying confusion where Quentin can’t quite parse Eliot’s meaning. Then he gets it, and shrugs. “I don’t know. He was fine.”

“Did he help? Or was it just another obligation eating up your ability to do things?”

Huh. “More that.”

“Then maybe shop around for a while,” Eliot says dryly, stripping the gloves off his hands and turning around more fully. “It might be worth seeing if you can find a therapist who’s also a Magician. Just so you can actually, you know. Talk about your life without sounding...”

“Extra like I need to be institutionalized? Like, more than normal?”

“Yes,” Eliot huffs, and whacks Quentin in the thigh with his garden gloves.

So that’s how they find Lilly. She’s young, a handful over 30, Brakebills class of 2014, and working part-time as a therapist while finishing a doctorate of Clinical Psychology at Columbia. It means she can’t prescribe for him, but that hardly matters, prescriptions he can get from his long-estranged PCP. What he needs, probably, if he’s going to admit it to himself, is someone to talk to who’s not Eliot or Margo or Julia. Someone with a little bit of distance and perspective from the bone-grinder-nightmare that has been his life for the past couple years.

“Do you think she’s too young?” Quentin asks, tilting his head at her listing Psychology Today where his laptop is set up on the breakfast bar, a couple nights later. Eliot’s sitting next to him, doing some kind of complicated spellwork on a fist-sized sculpture of a bunny, which Quentin has no explanation for. Maybe something about automated messenger bunnies?

“Too young for what? She’s got a license to practice,” Eliot shrugs, look up at Quentin’s screen. “Maybe the reason none of your other therapists really helped before is because they were all your dad’s age. She’s a magician, and she’s a millennial. It’s worth a shot?”

“Double ‘M’s,” Quentin mutters to himself, and Eliot snorts, bumping their shoulders together as he goes back to his casting. Doubt swirls in Quentin’s brain, but when does it ever not, honestly? Eliot’s right, it’s not like he’s had a lot of luck in the past with what he thinks therapists are supposed to be like. Might as well try something new.

Lilly works out of a practice in Manhattan, which is pretty easily accessible by train. Quentin’s more than capable of getting himself there, but on the day of his intake interview, Eliot grabs the car keys like there’s no question about it. Maybe there isn’t. Eliot’s a good driver, and he navigates the traffic on the bridge easily and with only mild swearing, and more than anything else, he’s a steady presence at Quentin’s side. If he had taken the train in, there’s a non-zero chance that he might have just stepped foot on the platform and then turned around and gotten right back on, run away from confronting this.

It’s better like this, with Eliot’s profile illuminated in the watery summer light, as he merges off the bridge and sings along to Hamilton playing out of the aux cord in the car’s stereo. Better too, that Eliot drops him off outside the building with a mutter about New York City parking, and Quentin doesn’t have to have anyone watch him walk into the office feeling blindingly terrified.

Lilly is not what he expects, both in his perception of ‘therapists’ and in his perception of ‘people my age’. She’s professional and welcoming, but she’s wearing a romper and birkenstocks, and has an undercut. She talks like he does, checks in if he’s comfortable with her swearing and then does so with great alacrity. The whole experience is uncomfortable and it sucks, but that’s because she’s a stranger and he has a hard time talking about depression with the people he loves. She ends the meeting by asking him what he wants to accomplish with her, which somehow is something he’s never been asked before.

“I want to stop feeling like there’s something about me that’s broken,” he says, after a moment, and she gives him a reassuring smile.

“I think that’s an attainable goal, Quentin.”

Weirdly, he believes her.

Lilly walks him out into the lobby where Eliot’s waiting, and shakes his hand when introduced. She’s tiny, comes up to about Eliot’s armpit, and gives no sign that in the about 25-minutes of coherent talking Quentin had managed to do, Eliot had featured in about 15 of them. Quentin does make an appointment for the following week, though, so– maybe next time he can actually get somewhere.

They detour on the way back to the car so Eliot can get an iced coffee, and he comes back out with a pastry bag for Quentin containing one chocolate chip cookie.

“Chocolate’s good for Dementors,” is all he says, and doesn’t really give Quentin a chance to respond before setting off towards the parking space he’d managed to find. Quentin tags along, doesn’t say anything but he feels–

Warm.

Like a melty chocolate chip cookie, gooey all the way down.

It’s honestly maybe a little too much to handle, on top of the emotional roadburn that is therapy, but if he cries a little in the car on the way back to Jersey, Eliot doesn’t say anything about it. He does drive with his right hand on the stick in the center console, though, easily accessible if Quentin wants to take it. He– wants to?

He wants to.

It takes until they’re going over the bridge to actually work himself up to it, but the smile on Eliot’s face when Quentin does slide his hand into Eliot’s is worth feeling a little rubbed raw.

Eliot drives all the way back one-handed.

_

Movie dates with Margo start becoming a thing, if she’s in town.

Which she is, at least one or two weeks a month. She keeps her word about that, about spending at least a third of her time in their apartment. Sometimes Fen comes along, which Quentin actually finds he likes, and sometimes Josh does, which he takes shameless advantage of. For one memorable 3-day period all three of them come back, which ends with the five of them stoned out of their mind on the porch, watching Eliot and Margo trade kisses with a giggly Fen. It had been nice, a low buzz which felt like the seeds of wanting, but mostly just felt relaxed and lovely.

But more often than not it’s just Margo, and they start going to the movies together almost by accident. It’s mostly an excuse to go see the things that Eliot has no interest in, like X-Men and Detective Pikachu. Sometimes Eliot does tag along, though, if they’re going to see something which piques him. It’s nice, it’s a nice feeling, to be a part of their orbit again, to sit next to Margo and listens to them gossip judgmentally about Aladdin, or to rest his cheek on Eliot’s shoulder during Rocket Man.

But mostly it’s just him and Margo. It becomes a thing.

Then they start getting dinner before hand, because well, why not, if they’re out already? They talk about books and Eliot, which are their go-to conversation points, the two things they have in common, until it becomes a regular enough thing that they start to talk about their lives, a little.

Margo’s not sure if it's working with Josh anymore, but she can’t tell if it’s something she should push through, or let go of before it explodes in her face. Quentin tells her, hesitantly, about therapy. Less than he’s told Eliot, but more than he’s told Julia.

He doesn’t mention that he’s spending just about every other night in Eliot’s bed, and if she knows, she doesn’t bring it up. As the summer crawls on, days stretching long until it’s still light out when they get out of the movies at 8:30pm, the unspoken shape of Eliot between them begins to fade. Then they’re just–

Friends.

They’re friends.

Like maybe they could always have been, if stupid things like sex and The Beast of Fillory hadn’t gotten in the way. At some point, the force of her personality stopped feeling overwhelming and started feeling like a shield, like he’s somehow managed to suffuse himself inside the bubble of it, and now it could act as a barrier between himself and the outside world.

She’s the first person he talks to about Alice.

“I feel like I should miss her,” Quentin admits, pushing around carrots in his rainbow quinoa bowl, which actually tasted a lot better that it sounded like it should. “Or miss the idea of her, anyway. But I just– don’t.”

“And that’s not a part of the whole ‘I’m the saddest panda at the zoo’ thing you’ve got going on?” Margo asks, circling a forkful of spinach salad as thought to indicate a general wholeness of Quentin’s being.

“No,” he sighs, and flicks a piece of rolled up straw wrapper at her. “I’m not even the saddest panda, anymore. Maybe like– the second or third saddest. I mostly feel things, now.”

“I want to make a quip about how I’m sorry you’ve been burdened with this, but I think that might be tactless, even for me.”

It startles a chuckle out of him. “Please, don’t grow tact on my account.”

“Oh, go fuck a spoon,” Margo grouches, then sits back, giving him an assessing look. “So you don’t miss her. And you feel things, again, so...”

“So, I think it’s really over, and I had it right when I tried to close the door on it the first time. Which makes it– pretty awful, that I tried to use her to feel better, later.”

“It was a little shitty,” Margo agrees, crossing her arms over her chest. “Women don’t exist to validate your manpain.”

“I know.” The rainbow bowl, which had looked appetizing moments before, looks virtually inedible now. He pushes bits of it around some more, and listens to the chatter of the diners around them in the little hipster vegan place Margo had picked for their pre-movie meal. The words, when he gets them out, are quiet. “Am I doing that to Eliot now?”

“What... using him?”

Quentin swallows, feeling a burning in the back of his nose, behind his eyes, but he nods anyway. “Yeah, just– being selfish?”

“I don’t think so,” Margo says, with more caution than he’d maybe expect from her. “You’re not using him for anything besides like– a free Uber service, and he fucking likes driving, god knows why. Have you asked Eliot how he feels about it?”

“Do you actually think he’d tell me if it was too much?” Quentin asks, incredulous. He wants to believe that Eliot would, a desperate harsh desire that clings in his chest behind his heart, right in the place where that fear of ‘please don’t leave me’ lives. It’s fucked up, how fear and hope could live in the same place in your body.

“I dunno. He seems pretty serious about his ‘don’t lie to Quentin anymore’ project,” Margo points out, picking her fork back up to poke at a blueberry. “I appreciate you acknowledging that I am an authority on all things Eliot, but I think that maybe this is something he should get to speak for himself.”

“Yeah, maybe.” They idea of actually trying to broach the subject seemed– impossible. But maybe Margo was right.

“For what it’s worth, he’s doing better than I’ve ever seen him,” Margo says, with a flash of that vulnerability which comes as the reward for being her friend. “He’s drinking less and he’s growing a porch garden, like– I don’t even fucking know. Some suburban housewife.”

“We literally live in the suburbs, Margo.”

“Uck, don’t remind me. I’m a King, Coldwater. A King.”

“Yep. With a vacation house in New Jersey,” he says cheerfully, and digs a tomato out of his rainbow bowl.

_

He talks to Lilly about it, before he talks to Eliot.

It’s not the most productive conversation he’s ever had with her. Try as she might, it’s still a struggle for her to parse the depth of his relationship with Eliot, all the facets of it. They don’t fit neatly into any box, they’re not just friends, they’re not just exes, Eliot loves him and Quentin thinks he probably never managed to stop loving Eliot, but they’re not sleeping together. Except for how they physically sleep in the same bed at least three nights a week.

Lilly tosses out the term ‘queer platonic life partner’ but that doesn’t even– the way he relations to the concept of ‘Eliot’ in his brain has never touched on platonic. Maybe simply ‘life partner’ fits, but that implies a sense of permanence that Quentin can’t even begin to quantify, much less apply to his own life.

They end up having a long conversation about what constitutes healthy vs codependent relationships or friendship, which leaves Quentin feeling frustrated and kind of concerned that he’s maybe never had a healthy connection to another human being in his life. That he’s never seen any of his friends have one, either.

The frustration builds and builds until he’s too jittery to stay in the same room as Eliot for very long, the gnawing sense of being a burden, that he’s dragging someone he loves down into something toxic, starts eating away at him.

Margo’s insistence that Eliot be allowed to speak for himself is the most reasonable voice in the crowded mess that is his brain, though. Because well– Eliot hadn’t exactly had the chance to speak for himself, for a while there. She’s not wrong in saying that he should be allowed to do so now, even if opening that door is opening the door to Eliot leaving, despite loving Quentin because maybe loving Quentin wasn’t good for him, and that–

That’s a nauseating prospect.

Keeping him here, keeping him on retainer, felt worse.

So Quentin resolves to bring it up, and crawls into Eliot’s bed for the first time in a week. It’s been a rough week, and he hasn’t been sleeping well, and it’s hard to ignore how much just settling in with Eliot’s shoulder next to his in the dark soothes him. Maybe– he thinks, maybe I can just sleep tonight and bring it up tomorrow. But even thinking that makes guilt turn in his stomach, because that’s– that’s using Eliot.

Like he can hear the gears turning in Quentin’s brain, Eliot reaches over fit his fingers around Quentin’s wrist, thumb rubbing a slow circle around the thin skin on the inside of it. “What’s up, buttercup?” he asks, half-awake in the stillness of the night. Quentin blinks, and blinks, and blinks, until he’s not in danger of leaking more, until he can be composed enough not to be too needy, not to just come out and ask please, please, please don’t go, except please go if I’m hurting you, because I can’t do that ever.

“I hate feeling like you have to babysit me,” Quentin mutters, eventually, into the little bubble of silence wrapped around them in the darkness.

His only answer is deep breathes, for the longest moment, long enough that Quentin would think maybe Eliot’s fallen back to sleep except his thumb is still rubbing over the inside of Quentin’s wrist, lazy slow circles in the only place they’re connected. Then finally: “There’s two things about that which are wrong. I’m not babysitting you, and I don’t have to do anything.”

“Bullshit,” Quentin spits out, the crawling venomous frustration that’s been eating at him bubbling out, spilling over to splash like acid at Eliot’s feet.

“You don’t–” Eliot starts, calmly but seriously, rolling over onto his side so they’re face to face in the darkness. “– actually get to tell me how I feel, Quentin. I’m not here because of obligation, I’m here because I chose to be. Because you’re the only person I’ve ever lived with long term that didn’t make me want to kill them. Because there’s space for Margo here, and she’s actually taking it, which is good for her. Because I like being able to look out the window and see New York and remember that I’m alive and I have choices and I’m not trapped inside my brain running through my memories on loop because that’s a view I never had before. It belongs only to right now.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m not babysitting you.” Eliot huffles out a laugh, shaking Quentin’s hand a little. “Babysitting is Julia and Margo and Alice setting up a rotation so you weren’t alone in the hospital. I’m doing my own thing here, Q. I think I might actually try to finish that Master’s Degree I got two thirds of the way through and abandoned. I suddenly have a thesis’s worth of information about the history of creation that I’d like to do something with. I just like having you in my life. You’re just... a part of it. An important part. I want to do the things I’m doing, and I want to do them with you nearby. For me.”

It’s like the world getting knocked sideways a little, Quentin’s head spins as his perspective starts tilting under him. Hapless, overwhelmed, he turns to push his face into Eliot’s soft sheets. “Now I feel like I’ve been a whole different kind of self-centered which I hadn’t even considered.”

“Maybe.” There’s laughter softening Eliot’s voice, so it doesn’t sting like it might have. “It’s okay, though. You spent a long time not thinking about yourself at all.”

“That’s not true.”

“Q–”

“It’s not. The whole time I was– with the Monster, all I could think was ‘I need you back, I need you to come back.’ Everyone treats it like I was being selfless and I wasn’t–”

They don’t talk about this, and this is why, because Quentin can’t even get the words out before he cracks, splitting open inside and spilling out, noisy messy tears, oh god, he just crawled into Eliot’s bed to cry again, how fucking pathetic–

But Eliot’s just scooting closer, until his chest is pressed into Quentin’s shoulder, and his hand comes to rest on the back of Quentin’s head, sliding softly into his hair. Over the racket of his own sobs, Quentin can just hear Eliot’s soft soothing noises, murmurs of assurance and comfort.

“I love you,” Eliot reminds him, fingers still stroking over the soft hair at the back of Quentin’s skull. “And that’s not conditional, okay? It’s not ‘I love you while you’re sleeping with me’ or ‘I love you if we date.’ It’s just– you’re a part of me, and I love you. Just like you loved me, the whole time I wasn’t here to see it.”

“I feel like my therapist would say that’s not healthy for you.” His voice sounds clogged, stuffed up from the crying jag, and he wants nothing more than to roll over and press his whole body into Eliot’s, soak in the comfort of him like a weight blanket.

“Maybe if it was hurting me, but it’s not. I’m allowed to choose what kind of relationships to prioritize in my life. I’m not sitting here waiting for you, baby. I’m living with you. Please believe that I’m happy to be here.”

“I’ll try.” His whole face feels swollen, stiff and achy, but for the first time in a long time, it feels like there might actually be an end to the font of tears inside him. Like he might actually, actually be able to cry it all out. Like it might help.

By the time he falls asleep, Eliot’s arm still curled loosely around him, he feels cleansed.
_

When the ‘wanting’ turns back on it, comes piece-meal.

It’s a thoroughly disconcerting experience, but not one he’s unfamiliar with. Quentin remembers, with the vagueness and dullness of memory, that he’s done this before. That coming out of a major depressive episode has always felt like this, the moments where the sensation of being a human being is so intense that he almost wishes for the dullness again, because it’s easier to process. But it’s happening whether he wants it to or not, and he– does want it too.

Eating becomes something pleasant again, not just a mechanical task he does because Eliot puts food in front of him. He goes for jogs occasionally, because he has energy and he needs to channel it somewhere, and the pounding of the pavement up through his shins feels solid and real and not at all cushioned by distance in his brain.

He mostly sleeps now, though always better with Eliot. Even on the nights where Eliot’s own dreams wake them both partway through the night, Quentin would rather be there than not. It’s better if he can be there for Eliot to curl around and shake quietly in the darkness of the night, better than to hear him pacing through the wall and not be able to offer any kind of comfort.

You can come to me, he thinks, on those nights, when Eliot’s fighting whatever’s happening in his brain and Quentin happens to be in his own bed. But he knows Eliot won’t, that he’s being careful not to push any of the boundaries Quentin’s set up. It’s surprising, to realize that he maybe wants to be pushed.

It’s given birth to a whole new kind of anxiety, however, the new where am I sleeping tonight worry of wanting– wanting– Eliot close. It leaves him wound up and anxious, full of an energy he can’t seem to shake, pacing round and round in the living room while Eliot pointedly doesn’t watch him do it.

“Can we drive somewhere?” He asks one night, when the restless energy is so bad he’s practically vibrating with it. Like it’s not 10pm and the wrong side of chilly, like that’s a reasonable request along the lines of ‘can I borrow a sweater’ or ‘do you have an extra pen.’ Quentin’s not sure if he feels better or worse that Eliot reaches for the keys immediately.

“Sure. Where do you need to go?”

“I don’t really– There’s not exactly a destination I had in mind,” he tells the sleeves of his hoodie, because right now looking at Eliot feels overwhelmingly difficult, but his sleeves aren’t going to judge him. Well, maybe they are a little, it’s been a while since he’s done laundry.

He’s picking absently at a stain that looks like it’s probably salsa (burritos the other night, which Quentin actually helped make), when Eliot steps into his personal bubble. A hand, strong and familiar, slips around to cradle the base of his skull as Eliot presses a kiss to his temple, warm and sweet.

“Okay, darling. Let’s drive.”

It’s dark, and chilly enough in the fall night air that Eliot flips the heat on when they get into the car. “We should get gas before we drive too far,” he hedges, and Quentin snorts.

“Don’t you want to test out that AAA membership?”

“I’m good,” is Eliot’s reply, dry and affectionate.

They wander into the 24 hour Sunoco store while the attendant pumps their gas, filling up the car. The fluorescent lights of the store catch in Eliot’s hair as he ambles through the alise, and Quentin loses 5 minutes to just watching him through the shelves of the gas station, completely absorbed. Eliot’s one of the most graceful people Quentin’s ever met, and somehow that translates even to this simple moment.

Of course, with all this Eliot-watching he ends up loitering around in front of the snack shelf for an embarrassing length of time. He grabs something at random, which turns out to be a bag of trail mix, and buys a pack of cigarettes on the way out.

Then it’s just them and the road. The radio’s playing lowly, some random top40 station and Quentin settles back into it, lets the rolling of the car lull him. Something warm and sticky settles behind his breastbone when he looks over at Eliot, the familiar shape of him in the darkness. Driving is always a good look on Eliot, but there’s something fragile and precious about him like this, right hand on the steering wheel, left drumming along absently the windowsill. The glow of the headlights on the road illuminates him like a halo, and he’s beautiful.

He’s so fucking beautiful, it steals Quentin’s breath.

It’s like he’s been circling around this knowledge for months and months, remembering how truly, utterly breathtaking he finds Eliot. How deeply he wants to bury his face in the curve of Eliot’s neck and never come out again. Eliot is a masterpiece, a work of art crafted by himself, something worthy of admiration, exciting and alluring.

But even more than that, Eliot feels safe.

He feels like home.

It’s–

It’s a lot to process. It’s a lot to try to remember how to feel, when wanting has been such an abstract thing, something he tells himself he should be feeling but can’t quite touch. Even now, it’s not– It’s not hunger, he’s not horny– But it does make him feel lighter than he’s known how to feel in a long time, realizing that he’s exactly where he wants to be in that moment, with exactly who he wants to be with. Even if that ‘where’ is in a car on route 95 going south in fucking New Jersey.

The silence between them is comfortable, broken only by the hot songs of 2019 and the radio DJ’s grating personality. It’s a good place to process emotions, and by the time they’ve been on the road for 30 minutes, some of the sticky knot in Quentin’s chest has untangled. Enough for him to relax, stretch out a little in the passenger seat and kick his feet up onto the dashboard of the car.

“Get your feet off the dash,” Eliot says automatically, immediately, in an affronted voice like this is an offense against his very character.

“Fuck you, it’s my car,” Quentin replies, easy, a little warm bubble of happiness starting inside his chest as Eliot huffs. “You wanna know something dumb?”

“Is it that your feet are going to go through the windshield if we crash? Yeah, that is dumb.”

“So don’t crash,” Quentin replies, and does not move his feet. “No, what’s dumb is that I think I spent so much of my life chasing magic because I thought it was going to give me something that was missing in me. And that all I really want is to feel whole. To be happy.”

He looks out the window, watches the guardrail of the highway flick by, the reflective markers on it a steady pattern. He lets himself get lost in the rhythm of it, the feeling of Eliot by his side.

“This may come as a shock to you, Q, but you’re allowed to want to feel whole. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be happy.”

“I don’t think I’d know happy it ran over me. I think at this point I’d go for just– settled.” There’s a couple beats of silence, with Quentin’s feet kicked up on the dashboard and the tinny sound of the radio. “I think that’s what I miss most about– when we were at the mosaic. All of those memories, by the time Teddy was born, everything just felt stable. I miss that.”

This is another thing they don’t talk about. Have never talked about, never, not since the throne room at Whitespire. He’s barely even talked about it with Lilly, because touching those memories hurts, with how bright they are. Like staring directly at a light source, or too-warm heat on frozen fingers. Part of him doesn’t want to take them out and look at them too often, least they begin to lose their luster. Another part just can’t handle how good it all felt.

Eliot’s hand goes reflexively tighter on the steering wheel, and then loosens, like he’s forcing himself to push through the reaction. A little crack of hurt, old and worn smooth, aches at the thought that maybe Eliot still doesn’t want to talk about this, but–

“I miss that too,” He replies, and his voice sounds stiff, painful, like he’s exerting effort to be honest here. Project don’t lie to Quentin, indeed. “I miss having an easy task to complete and a creative outlet.”

“I miss making bread,” Quentin says softly, and Eliot laughs.

“You could do that here, you know,” he points out, glancing over at Quentin with a fond look in his eye, before he looks back at the road. “I missed the gardens.”

Quentin knows that, has known that since the first planter appeared on the porch. The little balcony garden has mostly been harvested at this point, but by the end of the summer Eliot had gotten a pretty good collection of vegetables going. Fresh tomatoes for salads, snap peas they shelled or ate raw, carrots and radishes that hadn’t quite come up right but they’d eaten anyway. The little garden had been Eliot’s project this summer, and he’d blossomed with it.

“Farm to table is very trendy right now,” is all Quentin can think to say, to avoid stepping too hard on this sensitive subject and breaking the precious moment Eliot’s given him with it.

“Yes, we’re very Bohemian Chic, out here in Hoboken, New Jersey,” Eliot agrees, and Quentin smiles, just a little, rolls his head back over to look at Eliot.

“I miss the way it felt, after we’d been there for years, like we were– self-sufficient. Anything we needed we could make or trade. I felt like I knew how to live. I don’t think I do anymore.”

“Well,” Eliot says, breathing it out long like a sigh, shoulders pushing down and back into the seat of the car. “We were older. Probably by the time we’re 40 in this timeline, we’ll feel more settled. I think I feel more settled at 27 now than I did at 27 then.”

And maybe that’s true, if he really thinks about it. The way he’d been before the Key Quest, constantly jittering out of his own skin, constantly getting in his own way. Putting his foot in his mouth with every other word. Uncomfortably obsessed with Alice and unable to focus on her enough to be what she’d needed him to be. That wasn’t who he was anymore.

“I guess you’re right.”

Eliot hums, swapping the hand that’s holding the steering wheel easily, so he can hold his right out in offer. Quentin takes it, automatically, easily, without a moment’s thought. There’s a couple rings on Eliot’s fingers, even this late in the day when he’d been in the process of winding down for the night, and they help make his hand wholly his. The Monster never wore rings.

They drive for another 20 minutes or so, until Eliot seems to make a decision and turns off the main highway, following signs until they pull into the overlook outside a state park. There’s no other cars around, but Eliot pulls into a space to park anyway, leaves the headlights on and says “Come on,” private and conspiratorial, before climbing out of the car and up onto the hood. Feeling a weird mix of affection and exasperation, Quentin follows.

The hood of the car is warm from the engine, and it’s nice in the chilly night, as they lean back against the windshield and look up at the stars. It’s not the clearest night, cloud drifting aimlessly across the night sky, but looking up, Quentin can still find the Ursa Minor easily enough, and from there Draco and Cepheus.

“Fillory had different stars,” Eliot says softly, and Quentin–

–wants him. Wants Eliot’s presence by his side, maybe for the rest of his life. Rolling his head to the side, he can drink in Eliot’s profile, his regal nose, his soft lips, his strong chin. He’s more familiar to Quentin than anything else in the world, as well known and well loved as the pages of Fillory and Further.

"You know, I do love you, El. I never stopped."

It feels like a risk, like maybe it’s too much, too raw, too brittle a thing to offer when he’s not quite– when he can’t give everything he knows Eliot wants, not yet. But Eliot just rolls his head over to the side to look back at him, smiling a little. "I know, baby."

"I'm sorry it's taking me so long to get there."

"Get where?” Eliot reaches out, and Quentin goes easily, readjusting their position so he can tuck himself under Eliot’s arm, rest against him on the windshield of the car. “Sometimes the destination doesn’t matter. You just got to get in the car and drive."
_

His body gets there before his brain does.

Which sort of makes sense. The practicality of The Time Key’s magic and how it allowed them to keep their memories from the mosaic has never exactly been clear, but the fact is that he has way more sense memory of that time than he does narrative memory. He doesn’t remember the day his son turned 4, but he remembers feeling of holding a not-quite-baby-anymore on your hip. He doesn’t remember the process of thatching a roof, except sometimes he can feel the texture of straw under his hands and knows that if you gave it to him, he could do it.

If some memories live in his body, then those are the memories that are easiest to access, even if this body never lived that timeline. And a lot of those body-memories involve Eliot. Holding hands, curling together on the couch, leaning on each other while they cook, all these things feel easy because there is in some way, somehow... a body memory associated with it. Sleeping next to Eliot is the most comforting thing Quentin can think of, because his body spent 50 years sleeping next to Eliot.

His body spent 50 years doing a lot of other things with Eliot, too.

The dream isn’t narrative. It’s not like ‘hello, Quentin, ‘tis I your sexy girlfriend and your sexy best friend, here to make out and berate you because you’re stupidly into people making you feel small’. It’s just– body feelings.

In the dream, broad-strong-warm hands cup his neck, and a hot wet mouth sharp with stubble moves on his. He feels the ripple of pleasure, hot-strong-need, that comes with being kissed good and well before he’s even aware of the kissing, the scrape of stubble against his. The excitement-shame burn of feeling his legs parted by strong hands, the toe-curling anticipation as those hands run smoothly down the inside of his thighs.

The feeling of another body moving inside him, and the to-his-core trust of knowing it’s Eliot, and Eliot won’t ever, ever hurt him. Not in any way he doesn’t want.

It’s a dream, it fragments. There’s too many hands, hand cupping warm on his throat and hands holding his wrists pinned over his hand and hands pressing his thighs apart, but it all feels so good. The nebulous, overwhelming sensation of every erogenous zone on his body being found and loved by the man who had five decades to find all of them burns in him, lighting him up like fire. “Baby,” whispers Eliot’s voice in the dream. “Sweetheart. Darling. Q, my lovely Q.” And lord help him, but Quentin likes that too. Being precious to Eliot feels like a touch in and of itself.

He wakes up disoriented and achingly, achingly hard, thankfully on his back but in Eliot’s bed. In Eliot’s bed, with Eliot’s fancy sheets tangled in his legs where he’s been thrashing, and Eliot’s arm draped over his chest, and his cock is throbbing he’s so hard.

“Q?” Eliot slurs, mostly asleep next to him. “S’okay, just a bad dream.”

It’s all Quentin can do not to dissolve into hysterics, as Eliot pats at his chest, barely conscious, and Quentin’s desperate dick leaks at the innocent touch. “Water,” he whispers to Eliot, carefully picking up his hand and tucking it back next to Eliot’s own chest. “Go back to sleep.”

“Kay,” Eliot mumbles, and promptly does, loud breaths that are maybe snores following Quentin out of the room as he makes his escape.

He barely makes it into his own room before he’s shoving his hand down his sleep pants, getting it around the first erection he’s had in months. He’s close enough to sleep to grab onto the threads of the dream, the feeling of it. The sense of safety that made immense pleasure possible expands in his mind, the feeling of being stretched, filled so fucking full, fucked so deep and well, by someone who had the unfair combination of having a big cock and knowing how to use it.

It’s been so long, and his body is so fucking primed from the dream that it’s over in a handful of minutes, hips pushing up into his palm as pleasure crests, pulls tight, then breaks like a whip, making him arch back off the door as his hips push up.

With half-numb feet, he stumbles back to the bed, finding a tissue he can use to wipe off his hand, and then tumbles onto the mattress. He gets a good, solid five minutes of feeling deeply, deeply satisfied, incredibly fulfilled from the world’s lamest masturbation session, before the freaking out sets in.

Because, fuck.

It’s one thing to think ‘I probably would sleep with him if I was a person who wanted things’ and another entirely to literally actively want it. Even more so when it was a memory, when he knows, in the way his body knows things, just how it feels to bear down against the stretch of Eliot Waugh’s massive fucking dick. To know that, and to want it. He can’t stop thinking about it, even as he feels panic building like static at the back of his brain, can’t stop thinking about what that thick stretch of dick feels like sliding into your mouth, down your throat. What Eliot looks like, the surprised, happy little look he gets when he’s not expecting sex and you start trying to make him feel good anyway.

I know him, Quentin thinks, and it’s startling. I want him, is an even weirder thought. I want him and I miss him and I want him like that, now, is just–

It’s just–

Too much.

He spends the rest of the night freaking out about it. And also most next day kind of freaking out about it, though very carefully not anywhere that Eliot can see, which maybe means he hides in the garage for a while, but the car really does need to be cleaned. They have (he has) been treating the back seat like a trash can. The fact that old ice coffee cups and granola bar wraps don’t really inspire erections is entirely incidental.

Until Eliot decides to come out too and continue his vague project of ‘make car run good.’ Quentin is left to curl up on the steps of the garage and quietly freak out on his own, watching Eliot do about 70 inexplicable things with a wrench and his incredibly lovely hands.

He’s still freaking out about it by the time he has therapy two days later.

“So you had a sex dream about your best friend who you’re maybe in love with, who’s also your ex, who’s also your roommate, and also the physical body mostly closely associated with a boatload of trauma,” Lilly recounts, her foot bouncing in her Birkenstocks. She lets him get away with not looking at her, because she’s usually pretty good about that.

“I– Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, shit.”

This gets him to look at her, because Lilly is never, ever what he expects from a therapist. It confuses him, sometimes, to remember how close they are in age, and that she’s actually qualified to help him. “Are you going to tell me ‘now we don’t have time to unpack all of that’?”

Lilly snorts, inelegant and un-therapist-like. “I don’t know. Do you want your mental health practitioners to make John Mulany references?”

“Is it weird if I say yes?” He jokes, and it’s weak but she flits her fingers dismissively.

“You’re 26 and queer, you’re allowed to want someone to speak your language.” And that’s just it, isn’t it, that’s why this is working, maybe for the first time in his life. “But yes, it’s a lot to get through. Which bit of it is bothering you most?”

He thinks about it for a minute, because she’ll give him the time and the space to do so. What bothered him most about it? It should probably be the Monster, but it’s not. It’s not really the Eliot of it all, either. “I haven’t wanted to have sex in over a year,” he says, finally, remembering the hot-spur-panic moment of waking up in his younger body at Brakebills South and having Alice climb on top of him.

“And now your sex-drive is turning back on, and you’re a little freaked out by it.”

“That sounds pretty dumb when you say it outloud,” Quentin huffs, and Lilly levels him a patient look. “Yeah, I know, self-positive language or whatever. But it’s not like I’ve never had sex before. It’s not even like I’ve never has sex with Eliot before. Or like I’ve got to worry he’d reject me, when I know he wouldn’t. Why am I freaked out about it now?”

“Is it the idea of sex that’s bothering you?” she asks patiently, “Or the idea of something shifting in the thing that’s keeping your life stable?”

Oh.

“Maybe that?”

“Then I don’t think that’s dumb at all, Quentin.” She manages to say it kindly without sounding overly condescending. Or condescending at all, really, it genuinely might be a super power of hers. It’s definitely the reason he’s still coming to see her.

“So what do I do about it?”

“I don’t think that’s for me to tell you,” Lilly reminds him, folding her hands in her lap. “What do you want to do about it?”

And wasn’t that just the fucking question?
_

Well, what he wants to do about it is seduce Eliot. That, however, requires, well.

Seduction.

Anyone who’d ever slept with Quentin would probably agree that ‘seduction’ wasn’t one of his strong suits. But then again, he’d never really had a lot of issues with that, as far as Eliot was concerned. Instinct and half-remembered memory from the mosaic tells him that Eliot pretty much responds best to straightforward want, and that he’d always been open to that as far as Quentin was concerned. It was feelings that made it messy for Eliot, but for once in their lives Quentin thinks they’re both pretty much on the same page about those.

But there’s a barrier, a clear boundary in place, and Quentin knows that Eliot will not not push it.

It might have been easier, in some ways, if Quentin hadn’t been spending so much time in Eliot’s bed. Then pushing open his half-cocked door and crawling up the mattress might have been enough, to communication intention or to even count as a move.

Now, it doesn’t.

Now it’s just Quentin coming to bed. And that’s precious, that’s important, that’s not something he’d give up, even if it might make some things easier. And it means he can take his time. He can climb into bed before Eliot, watch him getting ready and think I want you, can get comfortable with the idea. Quentin can watch him strip off his robe, and giggle helplessly when Eliot catches him looking and tosses the robe in his face. He can feel excitement like sparkles on his skin as Eliot, who pretty much always sleeps shirtless, slides into bed next to him.

“You’re being weird tonight,” Eliot says lightly, sliding down to lay with one arm up behind his head, giving Quentin a suspicious look.

“I’m always weird,” Quentin deflects, feeling– giddy? Kind of giddy, honestly, excited and effervescent with it.

Eliot rolls his eyes. “You’re being extra weird.” He reaches out to emphasis the point by booping Quentin on the nose. Which might be kind of rude, except it just makes the shimmery bubble of possibility glisten all the more brightly.

I want you, Quentin thinks, tries the idea out in his mind as he looks at Eliot, casually sprawled in a shameless display. The intensity of the moment grows, folds in on itself as Quentin looks, and Eliot lays there watching him look, inviting him to. Everything about Eliot is complex, slender and strong, masculine and soft, guarded and tender. The soft curls of dark hair on his chest invites touch, and Quentin remembers he loved that once, loved running his fingers through that hair.

“What are you thinking?” Eliot asks, softly, and when Quentin looks up to meet his eyes, they’re curious and careful but– open. “Because you’re kind of looking at me like you want to eat me.”

“I’m kind of thinking I want to eat you,” Quentin returns, and it makes them both laugh; breaks the tension a little bit, lets it suffuse into something– richer. Hotter. “Would you kiss me?”

Something like hope and naked longing flickers across Eliot’s face before he can school it, and Quentin loves him, blindingly, in that moment. Loves him for how much Eliot wants to be loved, and how much bravery it must have taken, to wait on faith that they might get here. To be willing to stick around even if they never did. Quentin watches him lick his lips and lock himself in check to say: “I will if you mean it.”

Quentin smiles, a little soft thing, and shifts around to lay on his side facing Eliot, face tipped towards him. Carefully, he reaches out to brush his fingers against the point of Eliot’s chin, rub against the dimple there. “I mean it,” he promises, soft, in the light of a stupid Target lamp. “I love you.”

“I know you do. I don’t need–”

“Eliot,” Quentin cuts him off, exasperated and fond. “Please, fucking kiss me, Jesus. If I have to jerk off thinking about you again, my dick is going to fall off.”

Which of course makes Eliot laugh, enough so that he’s still kind of grinning by the time their lips meet and it’s kind of toothy and it’s wonderful.

It’s wonderful.

Maybe some part of him, something skeptical and dark, had been thinking ‘it can’t be as good as you think it was.’ Like maybe it was an effect of the memory, or an idea built up in his head to be better than it could actually be, like with Alice. But it’s–

It’s all the cliche things, like safety and home and belonging, but it’s also really fucking hot. Eliot’s mouth against his makes him shiver, just the dry slide of lips and skin, the scrape of stubble, it’s so much better than it has any right to be. Eliot breaks away, and their lips stick together a little and Quentin– kind of whines a little?

Which is probably embarrassing, but being kissed is so nice, being close is incredible but being kissed is better and he kind of never wants it to stop. But he’s had days to process this, so Eliot deserves minutes, at the very least.

“Okay?” Quentin whispers, and Eliot gives a little strangled laugh in response.

“Yeah, I– I’ve been not letting myself think about this for a while,” he admits, which Quentin thinks is probably not something Eliot would have admitted to, before. Before ‘Project Don’t Lie to Q’ and months of practice at being honest.

Giving into want, Quentin sets his hand against Eliot’s chest, scratches his fingers lightly there until Eliot looks down at his hand, then up to his eyes, huffing out a chuckle. Quentin smiles back softly, pushing forward to tangle their knees together, brush their noses, to feel close in every way he can get. But– But.

“We can go to sleep,” he promises, and even manages to not sound a little disappointed when he says it, because god knows Eliot waited long enough while Quentin worked out his own messy brain. He can wait a night or two. “I don’t need it either.”

Something mischievous sparkles in Eliot’s eyes, his hand sliding back to hold Quentin’s neck and oh– Oh, fuck. That touch, which has been such an incredible source of comfort in the past couple months, oh now it’s so much more. “Well. Maybe I want you to need it a little.”

Well then.

The second kiss is more, in every conceivable way. Eliot’s hand, cupping the back of his head, tilts his face to exactly the right angle so their lips can slot together perfectly. Then it’s a dirty sweet slide, wet and wanting. And fuck, it’s good. It’s good, it feels so good, makes heat flare low in Quentin’s stomach, a pleasant ache settling in his groin. Oh, this is what he was missing before.

Then Eliot’s tongue brushes against his lips, soft like warm velvet and Quentin– opens up for him. Eagerly. Greedily.

There’s so much skin for him to touch, but he can’t focus on any of it as Eliot’s tongue just– fucks into his mouth, no real way around that, and why does it feel so good, why is it melting his brain to be had like this?

“Fuck, Eliot,” he groans, once the burning in his lungs becomes too much, and he has to pull away, gasp greedily for air. “Oh, you’re so– Jesus, I want you so much and I’m going to last about 35 seconds as soon as you touch me.”

Eliot’s laughter is warm and low, breathless. “That makes– two of us,” he murmurs between kisses, like he can’t stand to have his mouth off Quentin’s skin for even a moment. Lord, it’s heady, being wanted like that.

“El,” Quentin pleads, doesn’t really even know what he’s asking for, but that’s never really seemed to hinder Eliot.

Moving with purpose, Eliot levers himself up, tugging at Quentin’s shirt until he gets with the program, sits up enough to let Eliot get his shirt off. It’s the first time Eliot, or anyone really, has seen Quentin without a shirt since the hospital, he realizes, shrinking back a little. Wood, even magically enchanted wood, can’t exactly heal over completely. It’s left him with a lightning-pattern of small jagged lines across his shoulder, which turn into red, visible scars at the top of his chest. Eliot’s fingers brush against it, tracing one of the forks of lightning scar down the wood until he hits invisible seam where nerves start again, making Quentin shiver.

“Does it hurt?” Eliot asks, soft and sore through their panting breaths.

Quentin reaches out, brushing his own fingers down Eliot’s stomach until he’s petting around the knot of long-healed scar tissue on Eliot’s stomach, where Sorrow had sunk into him. “Not really. I could never feel anything in the wood, anyway.”

“Good,” Eliot murmurs, and leans forward to kiss at his shoulder, up towards his neck until he hits real skin again, and then further, up Quentin’s neck and to his mouth.

Then it’s more kisses, hot and hungry and distracted, thoroughly derailing whatever bit of debauchery Eliot had planned out next. Because at this angle, Quentin has to strain up to get at Eliot’s mouth, and fuck, it’s working for him, it’s really working for him. Oh fuck, he likes feeling small in Eliot’s arms, protected and contained. Something about it is working for Eliot too, must be, because when Quentin moves just right he can feel Eliot’s hard cock against his hip.

“Jesus, it’s not fair,” Quentin whines, reaching down to get his hand on Eliot’s cock through his pajama pants. “I want you to fuck me and I’m not going to last long enough to get through the prep.”

“Next time,” Eliot promises and Quentin’s head swims with it, next time, later, again and again he can have this. “C’mon, baby Q, get your pants off.”

“No, you,” is probably not the best thing to say, but– can’t win them all.

Pajama pants go flying and then it’s just skin and Eliot’s soft sheets and Quentin being pinned back down to the bed and kissed within an inch of sanity, the long warm expense of Eliot’s body pressing against him everywhere. It’s so much, it’s too much, it’s perfect. Eliot’s tongue fucking into his mouth and Eliot’s strong hands touching him and Eliot’s beautiful cock rubbing against him. Oh, how had he forgotten how to want this?

“Roll over,” Eliot whispers, and Quentin’s– confused? But goes with it. Trusts Eliot with it, lets Eliot’s hands guide him onto his side facing away. Then Eliot’s spooning up behind him, which is nice except there can’t be any kissing and Quentin really likes the kissing, while Eliot’s hand slides down to hook under the inside of his upper thigh and pull it up, gently, which is– a lot. He moans, a little, maybe, at the sensation of being parted like that, hot and embarrassed and needy with it. Then Eliot’s dick is tucking in up between his cheeks and under his balls and it’s– Oh fuck.

“Eliot,” he sobs, helpless, clamping his legs together Eliot curls around him, arms circling tight and tucking him into the curve of Eliot’s body, and it’s. Exactly what he needed. It’s exactly what he needed, to feel contained like this, protected and safe, to feel held. To feel impossibly, impossibly close. Then Eliot’s hips start to work, dragging his cock against the sensitive skin of Quentin’s ass and his perineum and his balls, which are already drawing up against his body, drum-tight.

“Fuck, do you have any idea how amazing you feel?” Eliot whispers, right into his ear, breath hot against his neck, and Quentin shivers. “God, Q, I could stay like this forever.”

“Please.”

“Mmm, please what?” Eliot asks, teasing, because he’s a shit like that. Quentin loves him.

“Please touch me, I’m so–” And then he loses the thread of it as Eliot’s hand curls on his dick. It’s just feeling then, the sparkle of nerves where Eliot’s cock was working against his most intimate places, Eliot’s practiced fist working expertly down his cock.

Even if it hadn’t been months since he even wanted to be touched like this, this would be too good to handle. It builds, bright and hot, starting in his belly and expanding out, the pool of pleasure in his groin going knife-sharp and bright. He comes with Eliot’s name on his lips, wrapped up so thoroughly he can’t help but feel loved in it.

He drifts, happily blissed out after, content to twist his legs together and be held, while Eliot chases his own pleasure. It’s not far behind, and when Eliot comes it’s with a swear and a breath of “love you, Q, fuck.”

Which is so unlike anything he’d have expected from Eliot, and yet felt– right. Perfect, for this new, braver Eliot, who was patient and honest in ways he’d never been before. Quentin rolls over to look at him, feeling kind of helplessly, hopelessly awed. Breathing hard from the exertion and damp with sweat, Eliot’s still indescribably beautiful. He blinks sleepily at Quentin, smiling slowly when Quentin stretches up towards him, thinking ‘Kiss me. Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me.’ When he does, it’s warm and sticky and sweet like taffy.

“Love you too,” Quentin murmurs, once they finally break apart. Eliot’s eyes glow in the lamp light, open and warm. “I know you said you don’t need a relationship to keep loving me, but– do you maybe want to give it a shot?”

The smile that breaks across Eliot’s face is like sunlight, so bright it’s almost hard to look at. Quentin thinks he can maybe count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Eliot smile like this, so big it’s like he can’t stop it. It’s a warm wash, swooping down into Quentin’s stomach, getting to be the thing that makes Eliot smile like this. “Yeah, baby. I really, really do.”

When Eliot leans over to kiss him again, sweet and slow, it feels like a new beginning.