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The new body is creepy, lying there so still in a circle drawn on the floor in chalk. At least they put clothes on him, but in some ways that makes it worse. It makes Quentin’s new body - which won’t breathe until there’s a soul inside it - look like a corpse about to be placed in a casket. So Eliot tries not to look even as he sits down to the right in a chalked circle of his own.
He does remember the way Julia and Alice’s eyes had lit up when he’d told them - how they’d immediately started talking about “what we did before” and “it didn’t work because the magic was off, but now -”
Eliot had tuned them out, trusting them with this much. And he was right to do it, because they pulled it off flawlessly. They made somewhere for Quentin’s soul to go, a new body to inhabit. Getting him here to do that? Well, that’s Eliot’s job. Just like petitioning the new Queen of the Underworld before all of this had been his job.
“This spell used to work to summon Persephone, but the Monster killed her. Hades never lets people try on their own, but maybe if there’s a new Queen…” Julia says when she hands him the scroll.
It’s the only shot he has - after their big multi-world cooperative major mending, magic’s settled again. It’s safe now, to try and bring back Quentin. As safe as resurrection ever gets, anyway. Eliot is determined to try, though.
“If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I’m braver it’s because I learned it from you.”
This is not how Eliot had expected to be brave, but he knows what Quentin would do in his shoes, and he isn’t about to do any less. Not now, not after everything.
Eliot shakes off the memory when Margo kneels next to him. “Eliot - I need you to promise me that you’re going to come back. Whatever he does, you’re going to come back,” she says, voice tight and fierce, the grip she has on his hand actually painful. Eliot looks up at her, his Bambi, and he doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know if he can promise that.
“Margo -”
“No. Look, I care about him too, but he’s already gone . Getting him back would be amazing and it's gotta be tried, but losing you too is not acceptable. If he doesn’t choose you, don’t you choose him. Not like this, not when it means you die. You understand me?”
He wishes she hadn’t mentioned choices. Not when the memory of the throne room, and the memory of reliving it, seem to echo in Eliot’s head every moment that he doesn’t have something to distract himself with. “I understand,” he says, and finally he says, “I promise,” even if he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep said promise.
Margo looks at him like she’s not sure she believes him, but she lets it stand.
Eliot isn’t casting this spell because he’s the subject of the spell. As the girls cast - Alice and Julia and Margo, and their power combined hits him in a rush - he can feel himself getting lightheaded, so he lays back. He’ll pass out at some point and he would rather not crack his head on the floor. But lying like this, he can’t help but turn his head a little to see the motionless form at his side.
They made Quentin’s hair long like it was during the Key Quest, and it fans out on either side of his head, his hands at his sides. Eliot both wants and is horrified by the idea of reaching out to take the hand closer to him, so it’s probably a good thing that he can’t do that or it’ll fuck up the cast. He folds his own hands over his stomach like he’s the one being laid out instead, and makes himself stare at the ceiling until his eyelids grow heavy…
The woman who appears in a flare of purple flame is not Persephone. Eliot remembers what she looks like, for some reason it’s one of the clearer Monster memories that don’t involve Quentin. The ones that do are in high fucking definition, like some extra-sadistic cherry on the grief sundae or whatever the fuck.
Obviously she wouldn’t be. But the thing is, she looks a lot like her, just younger, a goddess who could pass for Eliot’s age. Pretty, dark curling hair falling to her shoulders and eyes that blaze violet against her brown skin even when the fire in them eases. Eliot starts to kneel, like Julia advised for the petition, but the mystery goddess holds up a hand.
“Don’t bother. I know what you want, Eliot Waugh. I know you rather well, after all.”
“You do?” Eliot asks, cautious.
“Thirty-nine lives before this, and you died in most of them. You died fighting, usually, which brought you to me.”
“And… who are you?” Eliot asks, because now he’s confused and also he doesn’t want to dwell on the thirty-nine timelines before this one.
“Macaria, daughter of Hades and Persephone.” Well, that explains the resemblance. “Since my mother’s destruction I’ve inherited her throne, but before that I was the goddess of blessed death. Those who die fighting are among those blessed. And you want your Quentin back. He is mine too, in this life and all those before.”
“But he didn’t -” Quentin killed himself. Suicide by magic explosion. Eliot knows this, he can’t let himself not know this even if it would be easier to think it was just the risks catching up.
“But what brought him to that point was a fight, was it not? Your Quentin has always been one of mine,” Macaria says, and her voice is almost gentle, which is not the usual experience with gods as far as Eliot knows. “But I have him many times over, I can spare this one to have a longer life - if he wishes it, and if you’re willing to fetch him back.”
“What do I have to do?”
Eliot blinks, and he’s standing in a sprawling grey city, bare feet resting on cobblestones. Why is he barefoot? He frowns down at his feet, because that is just fucking strange, and then frowns harder at his outfit. He was wearing this on a day at Brakebills, he remembers the pants made it hard to climb up onto the Brakebills sign so he just levitated instead. Had to put on a show for the new boy he’d been sent to lead in, Fogg’s idea of punishment but if Eliot had to play guide he was going to make a show of it to amuse himself.
“This feels like a fucked up jok-” Eliot’s voice cuts off mid-word when he sees the engraved copper wedding band on his left hand. And, stretching out from the ring is a shimmering thread that shifts colors, pale pastels and the shades of peach and plum. He remembers Macaria’s explanation, how she’d taken this method from the Queen of Mazes - Ariadne, Julia had said later, with a faraway look in her eyes. Follow the string to the center of the Labyrinth.
Or, in this case, follow the string to Quentin.
And so, wearing his wedding ring from a once and never life, dressed in the same clothes he wore the day he met Quentin - his hair is still its new longer self though, so he figures he doesn’t look the same - and with inexplicably bare feet, Eliot follows the thread down a wide cobblestoned avenue.
Buildings in shades of grey darker than the pale grey of the sky rise up on either side of him, their edges fuzzy like the architecture is supposed to be a secret. It’s utterly silent here, and if Eliot had shoes on he’s sure his footsteps would echo. As it is, his breath is unusually loud in his ears. Smaller streets branch off in every direction from the path he’s on, and once he sees very clearly to his right another wide avenue turning toward a blaze of green plants covering a building and the land around it, a tiny figure racing toward the mess.
Eliot hesitates, drawn to it, to this distant color that is the only life here but for the shifting thread coming from his ring. But no, that isn’t for him, Quentin isn’t there. Someone else is there, he guesses, someone else with someone who loves them enough to follow. He pauses a moment longer, wishing them luck, and then he carries on.
His feet blister, but he never actually tires. It’s a weird combination, but Eliot tries not to think about it. The wedding band is slowly warming on his finger, a comfort in this place with its strange chill. Not unpleasant, but wrong somehow. The copper warms and the string widens to thick yarn, then a rope, but it’s a rope of light, it doesn’t weigh his hand down at all.
Then, Eliot is standing in front of a house. It’s not a particularly brightly colored house, but against all the grey it practically sparkles. And it looks like - it looks like someone mashed together the Cottage and the Mosaic cabin and a third house that he’s seen in a few pictures so he knows it’s where Q grew up. The ring sends a pulse of heat up Eliot’s arm and he takes a deep breath, pushing open the door.
He almost laughs when he steps inside. Bookshelves everywhere, the smell of old books soft in the air. Books and broken things, he realizes, seeing a rickety table of broken toys. Reading and minor mendings, Quentin told him in their third year at the Mosaic that fixing things is comforting. And it’s his discipline, that makes sense.
(It’s what killed him, too, but Eliot tries not to think of that. He can’t help but notice, though, that even the surfaces that should be reflective aren’t, as he passes them.)
He finds Quentin in the attic, curled up in a nest of blankets and pillows, a book in his hand. For a moment Eliot freezes in the doorway, holding his breath that echoes loudly in this silent house, because it’s really him. He thought he’d never see him again, had tried to force himself to accept that as he threw a peach into a bonfire, stared at the flames and refused to let his tears fall.
“Q.”
Quentin drops the book, scrambling to his feet and almost falling over, and it’s such a Quentin thing to do that the tears Eliot has refused to shed fall easy as breathing. “El - Eliot - you - you shouldn’t be here, you’re not dead too, are you? What’s going on?” He looks worried, that familiar furrow there between his brows. “What - you’re crying, what’s -” He’s hurried across the distance between them, hands hovering uncertainly in the air like he thinks Eliot’s hurt and it’s not safe to touch him.
Eliot swallows hard, swipes impatiently at his eyes and reaches for him, pulling Quentin in close. And it - it’s Quentin, familiar soft hair against Eliot’s cheek, familiar shape of him in his arms, and yet it’s… it’s like holding a person made of smoke turned somehow solid, no warm weight of him, no presence. No steady breathing because Quentin isn’t breathing at all, doesn’t have to unless he’s speaking because even in the realms of the dead talking requires air.
Eliot knows if he tried to find Quentin’s pulse, there would be none.
But still, it’s Quentin. “I’m not dead,” he says in Quentin’s ear. “And you’re only mostly dead.” After all, that’s the secret, isn’t it?
“Part of him was in the magic - in repairing it, you have repaired that as well,” Macaria explains. “It left Quentin unable to truly cross over, while magic remained restless. Where he is, is a peaceful place, a comforting place. We send the souls of many worlds there who have died after struggle - illness, usually, and his death was in part the end of a long struggle with illness. It is a place where souls find their calm before they can see their own beloved dead, those who left before they did.”
“Wait, are you saying we made it harder to bring him back?”
“No. He could not have been brought back either with things so unsettled. Now, he can go either way. But he must do one more thing, if he is to truly move on, and that is where you have your chance, Eliot. Do you know the story of how my mother came to remain in the Underworld?”
Eliot frowns, because he’s not sure what this - oh, wait. That’s what made Penny’s death final, isn’t it? Someone said as much, he thinks. “She ate pomegranate seeds. Quentin hasn’t eaten any Underworld food? It’s December, he died in April.”
“The dead don’t feel hunger or thirst. Many of them do eat, because it’s habit or it amuses them, brings them some pleasure. I’m given to understand that spirits do many things they did in life not because they crave it but because it’s fun. I myself am not given to such pursuits - though many of my fellow gods are - so I don’t pay much attention to the matter. But Quentin has eaten nothing. He was given hot chocolate, but he didn’t drink it. He was too shaken, I believe.”
“So… what does that mean?”
“It means that he will have a choice, when your time is up.”
“What?” Quentin asks, and he doesn’t step away from Eliot’s hold but he does ease back, enough to study Eliot’s face. “What do you mean, only mostly dead?” He doesn’t sound upset, which is promising, but he doesn’t sound happy either, which is not. He sounds… curious, that’s all.
“You didn’t eat or drink any Underworld food,” Eliot explains, fighting to keep his voice calm and level. “And the way you died - do you know it brought magic back, because the Library dick was killed in the same blast?” Quentin nods, so Eliot continues. “Part of you was in the ambient - we fixed it, it’s a long story and I’ve only got so much time, I can tell you after you come back with me. When we fixed it, that part of you was set free, or something, not sure exactly. But the point is, you’re whole again, and you’re not moved on enough that you can’t come back. So I came to bring you home… why are you looking like that, Quentin?”
Quentin is frowning, and he steps back further, out of Eliot’s arms. Eliot wants to stop him, wants to keep him close even if he is made of solid smoke, but he doesn’t. His body did enough things to Quentin without either of their consent; he won’t push it now, not even here. Quentin steps back, eyes narrowed as he studies Eliot. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, El.”
Fuck. He’d known this was a possibility, of course he did, but… “Why the hell not, Quentin?” He recognizes it too late - that he’s echoed Quentin’s own phrase back at him. Quentin doesn’t miss it either, jaw clenching as he looks away. Then his head snaps back up, eyes meeting Eliot’s, and this is familiar, why is this…
Oh. Oh no. Quentin’s face is set the same way it was when he told them all that he was going to stay in Blackspire. “I saw Penny, when I died,” Quentin explains, so reasonable-sounding like he’d been that day, and Eliot wants to scream, which is also just like that day.
“I saw Penny, and he… he helped me. He talked me through some things, though I gotta admit he doesn’t understand how depression works, I did kill myself but it was well-meant, I think, when he tried to tell me that not wanting to leave you guys meant I didn’t. Not that simple, but whatever. He showed me my funeral -”
“You saw that?” Eliot chokes. “You saw that, you saw how much it hurt to lose you and you don’t think you should come back? Quentin, what the fuck?”
“It hurt you, but you’re better off,” Quentin says earnestly, and Eliot is so utterly shocked he can’t even respond, which lets Quentin continue. “Penny told me, he said that you all had long lives ahead, that your stories were just starting, and it’s because I did what I did. I did the right thing, and all of you made it, you’d be all right. I don’t want to - if I go back, I might fuck that up. I will fuck that up, just like magic or being the, the volunteer tomato as Jane called me that dragged you all in with the Beast. I did what I needed to do, and now I can be done. It’s better for everyone if I’m done.”
“No,” Eliot whispers through numb lips. “No,” he repeats, louder, grabbing Quentin by the upper arms. There's a chill to him, like Eliot is holding a being of frost, but he doesn't care. “You listen to me, Quentin Coldwater. There is no world, there is no timeline or planet or universe where I am better off with you gone. Losing you broke me, Quentin.”
“I don’t see why - you have Margo, she’s a better best friend than I -”
“I love you!” Eliot shouts, and he can’t help but shake Quentin lightly as Q stares up at him with wide brown eyes. “Fifty years. Who gets proof of concept like that?” Eliot continues, echoing Quentin in the throne room and himself in the park, voice raw. “I love you. I was trying to tell you that as much as that I was alive, I was trying to tell you, you were right and I was wrong. I don’t - I get why you did it, Q, I do. I know the hell that thing put you through, I know no one noticed. I understand. But it doesn’t have to stay this way.”
Now Quentin is the one crying, even as he pulls away. Eliot lets him, because if this isn’t enough, then what can he do? “I’m tired, Eliot,” he whispers, shoulders slumping. “That’s why I died. I didn’t - plan to kill myself. I don’t think there was enough left in my head to understand that stopping would kill me. I just wanted some quiet. I just wanted to rest. Maybe I got more of both than I wanted, but I don’t know if there’s enough left of me to go back. I do miss you but -”
“But not enough?” Eliot demands, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t get angry but he can’t help it. “I’m sorry to bother you then! I’m sorry for thinking you missed us enough to come back, that you meant what you’d said and that maybe you loved me enough to -”
“I do love you!” Quentin cries, wrapping his arms around himself. Eliot aches to hold him again, but no. Not if Quentin isn’t going to come back with him. He remembers the promise he made to Margo and it hurts but - but he thinks he is going to keep it after all. Eliot does not want to die, he wants to live. He wants, desperately, to live with Quentin at his side, but if that’s impossible then… then…
He can’t think beyond the crushing grief just waiting to fall on him, but Eliot suddenly understands that he will not stay here. Something in him knows he isn’t ready for it, Quentin or no Quentin. It may kill him in the long run, but it’s still true.
“But it’s not enough, is it?” Eliot asks bitterly.
“I don’t know,” Quentin says, the words half a sob. “I told you. I don’t know if there’s enough left of me to go back, El. It’ll hurt, and I don’t know if I can take any more. It’s quiet here.”
I don’t know is better than no, Eliot tells himself, stepping forward. “You’re you, that’s enough to start with. And I’ll be with you, I’ll help you, Q. We figured things out for a lifetime, sweetheart, we can do this. Please, Quentin. I’ve missed you so much, my life is -” He doesn’t know how to explain the emptiness at the core of him ever since Margo broke the news. “I’m a wreck without you. And I’m not - Alice told me how you two were just figuring out how to be friends, she misses you, and Julia and Margo, they miss you too.”
Eliot watches Quentin flinch at each name and presses on anyway. He hates to hurt him, but this is the hurt of setting a bone. It’s to help him, to bring him back. “They helped me do this, you know. All three of them cast the spell to send me here, Alice and Julia built you a new body. We miss you, and we’ll be there for you. All you have to do is take my hand, and we will walk out of here. Quentin, please. Come home.”
Eliot holds out a hand. Quentin looks at it, then around at the cozy attic. Eliot swallows hard. “We can make you a room as nice as this somewhere. You want books, things to mend? Fine. We will find ways to make this in the real world, with real things, in life, Quentin. You died when you were only twenty-six, you should have a long life ahead of you, we should have a long life to live together. You said Penny told you all our stories were just starting? Well, fuck yours being done, all right? We can change the story, just please, take my hand and come with me.”
Before Quentin can answer, if he was going to answer, the scent of chocolate fills the air.
“When your time is up, the hot chocolate he once rejected will be offered to him again.”
“Hot chocolate?” Eliot asks, skeptical. That doesn’t seem very… momentous.
“I’ve seen two people with those strange red candies that look like fish,” Macaria tells him, her voice very dry. “This is not about anything except a food or drink that is comforting to the person, that they would wish to consume. If he drinks it, he is lost to you forever. But if he takes your hand, he’s yours to bring home. But if he asks you any questions, you cannot lie to him or you will lose your chance.”
She gives him the spell he needs, and Eliot tries not to worry that Quentin might not cooperate.
“What is that doing here?” Quentin asks, all his focus turning to the cup of steaming chocolate on his table. Eliot swallows hard. It honestly smells good enough that even knowing what it is, he’s tempted. Quentin seems almost fascinated, like it’s compelling him to drink.
Eliot wants to lie. But he knows he can’t. Fuck, all Orpheus had to do was walk and hope for the best. “If you drink it, that’s it,” he admits. “You can’t be saved, you stay here. But, Quentin, Q, I will - you can have a fucking pantry of hot chocolate, we’ll make that work, we’re magicians, just -”
“We both know our lives were never that easy, Eliot.”
“I don’t care. I am trying to tell you there is nothing in the afterlife that could be better -”
“I could see my dad again,” Quentin says, quiet, gaze level. “Eventually, when I’m ready. And Teddy, and Arielle, and the rest of our family. They’re here, they told me. When I’m ready, I can see them.”
“And that will still be true if you come back here as an old man, after a long life!” Eliot says. “They’ll still be here!”
“I’ll still be here,” Quentin tells him. “If I stay. When you die, I’ll be here.”
That’s it then, isn’t it? Eliot stares at Quentin, and he knows he’s crying again, as he watches Quentin go back to his little reading nest and pick up the book he dropped. He holds it, considering, then sets it on the table beside the hot chocolate, tapping a finger against the ceramic. Quentin is going to decide one way or the other, and Eliot is out of ideas to persuade him. "I love you," he says one last time. "And so do they. Maybe you don't believe it right now, but you'll see if you come back. But I won't drag you. It's your call, Q."
Quentin nods, but doesn't speak. Doesn't move at all except for the quick bobs of his head.
Eliot turns away. He can’t do this. He can’t watch Quentin do this. He can’t.
He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing one hand to his mouth to keep the sobs from escaping. All this, all this for nothing. Why did he -?
He doesn’t hear footsteps, or breaths that Quentin doesn’t currently need. So he has no warning, and jumps when a cool hand slips into his own. Eliot opens his eyes and turns enough to see Quentin there, looking up at him with scared wide eyes, but also a tiny smile. “I’m going to be a mess,” he says quietly. “If not right when I get back - if, if maybe a new body and the whole back from the dead thing un-spirals me, maybe - sometime. You know that. Better than anyone.”
Eliot looks at the table, where the cup of hot chocolate is as full as it was when it appeared. Then he looks back at Quentin, who shrugs. Eliot smiles at him then, reaching up with his free hand to brush hair out of Quentin’s eyes. “I do know that. And we’ll get through it. We can do that. And when it’s not bad, we can make it fucking amazing, sound like a fair deal?”
“Worth a shot,” Quentin says, and it would be too flippant except they both know why he’s saying it that way.
The attic door shimmers and shifts, turning into a door Eliot knows very well. The door to their cabin, the door out of his Happy Place. And now, the door out of the Underworld. With both of them staring at it, it creaks open, whirling stars beyond it. “It looks like the Seam,” Quentin whispers, his hand shaking in Eliot’s.
“It’s not. It’s just a portal,” Eliot says with more confidence than he feels. Quentin takes a deep breath, squaring his chin, and Eliot wonders - is this how Quentin looked when he stepped through the archway Penny 40 mentioned, when he tried to talk Eliot out of this back when he started, before Eliot summoned Macaria?
Probably.
But now they step through together, because they are going home.
“Why are you doing this?” Eliot dares to ask, once he has all the information he needs. He’s afraid it’s too easy, that it might be a trick.
“You and Quentin are of my court - the… twenty-sixth version of you both, I believe. And as I said, I’ve watched you pass through, time and again. I like you both. Also, I am a new queen who must demonstrate that I will be no puppet. I think you can understand that. My father blames your coven for my mother’s death, and would have barred you on principle had you talked to any but me. But in doing this I make clear that I hold my own views.”
Politics. Well, nothing wrong with a win/win, Eliot decides, as long as part of his win includes a living breathing Quentin back in the world.
Eliot opens his eyes and sits up, gasping for breath. “You idiot!” he hears Margo yell, and then she’s colliding with him in half a hug, half a tackle.
“Oof, Bambi -”
“Your heart stopped! You - we thought - never do that again!” Margo says, holding on tight to him. Eliot hugs her back, rocking them both a little, but where he might usually turn his face into her hair, he lifts his head. His eyes dart around the room in a panic until -
Quentin looks like he’s only sitting up because Alice and Julia are hugging him. He’s barely hugging back, Eliot can see his arms only barely moving, can see how he’s really more slumped than sitting. “I’m OK, we’re both OK,” Eliot tells Margo and oh he’s crying again, all right, today this is fine. “I got him back, Bambi.”
“I know you did, because we fucking get shit done,” Margo tells him, sitting back enough to smile at him, a fierce light in her eyes. “But you are never scaring me like that again, you bitch.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eliot says, giddy, as Quentin manages to stir enough in between Alice and Julia to reach a hand out to him. Eliot keeps an arm around Margo’s shoulders and catches Quentin’s hand, warm and real in his now, not the cool solid smoke it had been in that attic room.
“Hey, let us have him!” Margo says, and Alice and Julia let go with sounds between sobs and laughter. They’re crying too, Margo might even be crying, and Quentin definitely is. He looks exhausted, and scared yet, but alive, and Eliot pulls him in even as Q sways where he sits. Quentin curls into Eliot’s chest and only squeaks a little when Margo hugs him tight enough that he’ll probably have bruises.
“Are those Christmas lights I saw?” Quentin asks, and his voice is a croak, but it’s real. As real and alive as the rest of him.
“The spell we had was best on the winter solstice, Christmas is in four days,” Alice says from somewhere above where Eliot and Margo are sandwiching Quentin between them on the floor. She kindly doesn’t mention that Eliot went a little overboard decorating - not because he wanted to, but it was something to do with himself while Alice and Julia built Quentin’s body. But he’s glad he did it now, somehow oddly pleased that it’s the first thing Quentin noticed.
It’s not all over, Eliot knows that. Quentin hadn’t been wrong - there will be rough times ahead. Fillory isn’t entirely fixed, magic is fine again but the Library renegades are still causing trouble, the McAllisters are probably out there somewhere, they’re all traumatized as fuck and Quentin’s brain is going to try to wreck him again. But they’re all here again, they’re all alive again.
That’s all they need. As long as that much is true, the rest is details.