Archive of Our Own

Eliot fucks Quentin all the time.

Not just in the ‘insert Tab A into Tab B’ sense, philistines. Of course, Tab A, Tab B (Eliot’s dick, the sweet, tight clench of Quentin’s ass) features prominently. Top billing, one could say. The star, the prima donna. But a chameleonic one: eternally adaptable, endlessly versatile. Quentin on his hands and knees, on his back, on his belly, bent over a couch, a chair, a table. Eliot spooned up behind him. Quentin riding him. In bed, on a couch, in the shower, in a bath, in the gardens at Whitespire as a party throws rectangles of light onto the black lawn. Morning, afternoon, evening, the middle of the night.

Can’t leave Tab B into Tab A out. It’s a variation, not a different class. Eliot fucks Quentin by riding his dick, Quentin gaping up at him and making little punched-out grunts every time he pushes his hips up into Eliot, or by drooling into the pillows, grinning in primal satisfaction as the blissful feeling of fucking into a welcoming body overcomes Quentin’s last stubborn vestiges of shyness and he pounds into Eliot, selfishly chasing his own pleasure with full-throated cries.

Even beyond that, leave Eliot’s dick out of it entirely, and Eliot fucks Quentin in a truly breathtaking number of ways. Eliot thinks he could write a book about it.

It’s an idea that strikes him one unremarkable Sunday afternoon. He and Quentin are in bed together. They’ve been in bed together all morning, rolling around in the sheets, kissing and laughing and dozing and kissing some more.

Now, Quentin is dozing. Lying on his stomach, arms crossed under the pillow, head turned to the side resting on top of it. His eyelashes are very long. Eliot contemplates this for a minute or five before gliding his hand down Quentin’s spine. His vertebrae a road for Eliot’s fingers to dance down, leading Eliot’s palm to the plump pale swell of his ass, the soft downy hairs creeping in dark from his thighs. Eliot slides his thumb from it’s perfect home in the dimple in Q’s lower back, to trace and part the cleft, and move in, in—

Eliot can’t see but he can feel: the sudden yielding twitch of muscle, as Eliot presses his thumb in circles. What he can see: the warm laughing eternity of Quentin’s eyes, smiling right into Eliot’s as they drift drowsily open.

“Hi,” Quentin says. Shifting against the mattress. “Oh. What, what are you—thinking?”

Eliot woke Quentin up with a blow job. Quentin kindly returned the favor. This bed is their oyster. “I was thinking that I should write a book.”

“Um,” Quentin blinks, thrown. “What...what about?”

What a darling. Acting like Eliot really could, that the only question is about his chosen subject.

“Fucking,” Eliot says brightly. “Fucking you, specifically.”

*

But Eliot’s getting ahead of himself. It must start—the gathering of the material that is the subject of Eliot Waugh’s masterwork—with Quentin Coldwater’s miraculous return from the dead.

There was a prologue. A prequel? Maybe just an alternate start, the fondly regarded but flawed base for future strivings at perfection, never discarded but put in a drawer for safekeeping. Eliot doesn’t read and so he’s at a disadvantage in regards to form. Or maybe not: there isn’t, to Eliot’s admittedly meager knowledge, any book like the one he would like to write, certainly none on the subject of the only thing he could ever presume to the expertise he imagines necessary for writing, and so maybe a lack of available examples would force innovation anyway. It's a volume that can have no ending, that he will have to keep updating as long as he shall live, and one where the question of beginnings is somewhat fraught. The mosaic exists and exerts its influence as powerful memory, hazy yet potent, sketched largely in misty mental watercolors with the occasional sharper recollection pricked out in pointillist strokes. But one has to draw a line somewhere. The task of adequately documenting one ongoing unfurling lifetime of fucking Quentin is impossible enough. That other life will have to be, all in one, helpful index, research material, cautionary tale, supplementary appendix, necessary background, beckoning promise, intriguing hypothetical, alternative history, thought experiment, case study, shared language, common lore, mutual dream.

A book is not a natural choice of medium for this, given Eliot’s status as a voluntary illiterate. He’s visually oriented, and when it comes to this important subject he thinks he’d be justified in opting for the moving image. The same questions of genre and structure remain, but at least he could discard the question of how to ever textually render the bowlike curve of Quentin’s lip. How to capture in mere language the feeling of being inside Quentin? OK, fine, on a physical level it’s pretty straightforward. Hot. Tight. But how it made Eliot—

Not that a tastefully pornographic video, had Eliot gotten the chance to make one, would communicate this with any more clarity. But at least there’d be something fun to look at.

Eliot’s hopelessly out-of-order again. Because the idea of a Book of Quentin really first came one particularly sleep deprived night during the period where Quentin had, let’s say, existed firmly in the past tense. Books were everywhere. On tables, on chairs, in teetering stacks on the floor. Books bound in calfskin, in leather, in cardboard; books in vellum and parchment and papyrus, books that are not exactly books at all, but scrolls, fragments, cuneiform tablets, fragile collections of delicate, powdery paper trapped between only slightly thicker paper in slim folios, all liberated from where they languished in archives from a village library in the Languedoc to an abandoned Soviet lab in Kazakhstan to tombs in an ancient city sunken in Saharan sands.

Eliot is there at all of them, plays assistant at each traveller enabled heist. He’s less helpful with the translating and analyzing and cross-referencing and spell-crafting that furiously follows each bounty they bring back to the penthouse, but he can carry things. He’s been to all seven continents by now but he sure as shit couldn’t write a travel memoir. Eliot catches sight of stone farmhouses amid golden vines heavy with their harvest and feels the bite of the frozen wastes of the steppe and is licked by the hellish grit of a desert wind only in disorienting snatches as he and 23 blip in and out of their various far flung targets.

They then give over their loot to Julia and Alice. They read, Eliot reads. Their hungry eyes seek out references to resurrection in Old Provençal songs and Sanskrit epic and Ge’ez hagiography, their fingers frantically copy out necromantic spells from Icelandic and Hittite and Malay.

One day they are looking at a series of spiral bound notebooks written in modern American English with a ballpoint pen. Their author is a Dr. John Macgregor, Brakebills class of ‘13 (1913, that is.) His only claim to remembrance by posterity was that spent decades trying (unsuccessfully, Fogg was very careful to emphasize when he’d graced the penthouse with a supremely awkward visit to gift the notebooks to Julia, after first denying all existence of any relevant materials at Brakebills beyond what was available to them in the library) to resurrect his wife, who had died only three months into their marriage. It is quickly apparent that there’s nothing much helpful at all, and that Fogg was probably, in his own irritating way, trying to tactfully suggest the futility of their mission. It is not long into their study of the first of the dusty cardbook box full of notebooks that, in Alice’s furious phrasing, they realize the guy was a “fucking crank.” Totally cracked, and not an especially talented magician. Yet, by some unarticulated shared compulsion, Eliot and Julia and Alice read every single one.

The break comes shortly before midnight. They are one notebook from the end. Well into the 1940s. Jack (he became Jack to Eliot sometime around notebook #3) seems to have had his own midnight meltdown. It’s scrawled in the margins in a cramped hand, curling sinuously around one of his increasingly incomprehensible theorems, read in Julia’s cool voice: Her laughing hazel eyes...that party at Chesney’s right after the war...when Imogen climbed the fence.

Eliot stands up so abruptly the room spins and says, “I have to—sorry— ”

This kind of thing is not an unusual occurrence, so Julia and Alice don’t look surprised. Just tired. Cavernous shadows beneath their eyes in the lamplight.

He walks very calmly to the hall bathroom and turns on the sink to muffle the sound of him taking in great panicky drafts of air.

Maybe they should throw in the towel now, before they forget Quentin’s eyes. Maybe they should redirect their energies to an exhaustive cataloguing effort, to trying to preserve him in amber, right now when their memories are fresh. Write it down. Assemble documents. Preserve a photographic record. Compose an exhaustive account, multivolume in small print. Quentin’s eyes were brown and Eliot cannot fathom it’s possible he would ever forget—

Because for Eliot it hasn’t, unlike for Dr. Macgregor in the writing, been more than two decades since the first notebook. It was only hours ago that he opened the faded cover to see where a dead man had neatly pasted a copy of a dead woman’s passport and so Eliot remembers that Edith-always-called-Edie’s eyes were in fact brown. The stupid bastard had forgotten the color of his wife’s eyes, and he’d never gotten her back, and he’d never ceased trying—he’d only been stopped when he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1949. Also, as far as the evidence available to Eliot goes, his wife never laughed. There she is in all those grainy black-and-white pictures, a pinch-faced elegant solemn-eyed girl. There is not a single picture of the woman so much as smiling. The woman who laughed at antics involving Imogens and fences existed only in her husband’s memory and apparently that was shit and now she doesn’t exist at all anymore because he’s dead too. Are there any pictures of Quentin laughing? Eliot is distraught at the conviction that there probably are not. Maybe some with that closed mouth, hesitant, yearbook picture day smile. Perhaps even some with the afterimage of the laugh evident in the deepened lines at the corner of his eyes and mouth. But certainly Eliot never took a picture of him laughing, that laugh that had so deliciously surprised Eliot the first time Quentin made it that Eliot spent the first half of the school year high on getting him to make it some more. One might argue this was not the best turn of phrase considering how Eliot spent his second semester. Eliot would politely disagree: one only first got high because it felt so fucking good, because it lifted you so cleanly out of yourself, because it washed away all the self-loathing in purifying liquid bliss. Of course, things quickly went south. But those first sweet hits, before it reached the level of compulsion or so you could imagine, those moments where it was just good and you could foolishly delude yourself that it would always stay good, that’s exactly what it had been like, that was how Eliot had felt, in that moment when some pathetic quip of his caused Quentin’s eyes to widen in shock at realizing that he was actually experiencing amusement, caused Quentin’s lips to sputter indignantly at this assault on his mournful dignity, to finally make him emit a squeaking, hiccuping, totally absurd noise, eyes crinkling, mouth crinkling, his whole face creasing in these irresistible folds of delight, throwing his head back to stop Eliot’s breath with the rippling column of his throat—maybe Margo? Please God let Margo have captured that specific laugh, just once. She’d been a committed photographic chronicler of their school days, an unexpected and endearing seam of sentimentality running through her practical core. Eliot certainly hadn’t. Not of that laugh. He’d been too busy coaxing it into being to document it. Eliot observes, in a distant way, that he’s having what might most appropriately be termed hysterics.

Of course they’re already doing some of this already. When they aren’t tits deep in arcane texts searching for the hidden key to a miracle, they all sit around and drink and talk about Quentin, try to rip their memories out of the ether and wrestle them into some verbal expression. What’s awful is Eliot is starting to sense they’ve exhausted all the things they can bear to share. There are things that are private, and things too painful to touch, and if every night Eliot spends lying sleepless in bed scrounging around in the dusty corners of his mind for one more memory only to jealousy hoard whatever his grubby fingers uncover (second year fall, Quentin sitting on Margo’s bed bemusedly watching Margo and Eliot do their makeup before some party, snap it up from the encroaching dark and try to crystallize what Quentin had looked like, shoulders hunched, eyebrows baffled, his broad hands with the square nails, the sly tilt to his mouth, hammered down through the desperate accumulation of irrelevant details: Margo’s spangled green dress, the lemony taste of the cocktail Eliot was drinking, the sounds from downstairs as the necessary losers early to the party arrived to start it so they could swan in late) maybe so do the others. But the stories that form the public domain of Quentin Coldwater have been retreaded and mutually poured over countless times, and by now the conversations sound much like the good doctor’s inchoate scratchings (who the hell was Chesney? What was so funny about some broad named Imogen climbing a fence?): that field trip to the aquarium in seventh grade...that party, right after midterms...unremarkable things weighted with meaning, flimsy markings with loaded currents beneath, hollow and impenetrable for anyone else, suggestive outward signs of everything that cannot be said.

(Quentin at the aquarium, where a shriek from the class bully caused Julia and the rest of their class to turn and look to see him turning his back back upside down, moaning in disgust to the guffaws of his cronies as the revolting texture of a mostly melted McDonald’s milkshake sliding to floor along with wet books and deconstructed homework, Quentin not turning with the rest, face carefully blank as he read a plaque about jellyfish, and Julia knew, that despite long torment which Quentin took with passivity, when Julia became a target because of her too spirited defense of Quentin, he’d taken action, specifically at their stop for lunch. The otherworldly glow of the tank, chocolate sludge: Quentin’s kindness; his sly humor; his love for her.)

(Quentin at the Cottage, a quiet corner away from the bustle of the party where these two wallflowers could bloom, and Eliot drawn to them—Eliot, maybe you remember, I think you were there too—a busy bee drawn by some inscrutable pull to their shy openings, to see Quentin shuffling cards nervously, his dorky patter, his stuttery ums and ers as he explained that it turned out the reason he was so good at card tricks was that without realizing it he had performing small acts of real magic all along, the anxious way he darted looks at Eliot slouched against the wall beside him as if Eliot’s appearance had thrown him off his game and Eliot’s realization this was Quentin trying to flirt, adorable, his flush at Eliot’s encouraging wink—no, no, the last is Eliot interposing his own impressions or his reconstruction of his impressions, Alice wouldn’t have taken much notice of him, her eyes like Eliot’s were all for Quentin—pick, um, pick a card, Eliot couldn’t believe he was doing this, card trick pick ups at literal magic school, couldn’t believe it seemed to be working as Alice, with no small amount of satirical amusement and that exhausting barbed wariness lest a joke ever be made at her expense, and after a glance at Eliot to exchange an incredulous silent is he for fucking real right now? actually took a card and then her small wondering pleased oh, a blush, downcast eyes, Quentin looking away too, both of them simply hopeless, as she flipped the card she’d pinched between her thumb and forefinger over to reveal a Queen of Hearts transformed into a portrait of Alice Quinn, and that was Eliot’s cue to leave: Quentin’s sweetness; his shyness shot through with odd arresting streaks of boldness, an earnestness and passion that could transform even the most cringeworthy shit into something breathtakingly real and true and winning; his love for her.)

It reminds Eliot of high school English, Mrs. Eddings wearily offering up symbols for them to dissect: what is Fitzgerald trying to say with the eyes of T.J. Eckleberg? Fuck if Eliot knew. He hadn’t even gotten that far in the book. The stupefied, fidgety silence of his classmates returns to him now, as does the burst upon the silence of Ashleigh Wiggins, who was only in the slow kids' class with Eliot because she lived in the trailer park behind the Wal-Mart, finally venturing the opinion that it had to with moral decay and American capitalist excess and God’s judgement, when Julia and Alice read a story of resurrection in Middle German and try to determine if a woman being brought back to life as a bird of prey by a necromantic priest is an actual case of magic or Muggle literary invention or what the recurrence of the color green in stories of mythical rebirth might signify, magically speaking. Billboards and green lights: an eagle; spring growth. Shakes; cards. Eliot has started to giggle, a ghastly sound.

(Quentin at the mosaic...Eliot has a glut of material, a mass of memory that feels like it is slowly suppurating where it lives under his breastbone, leaking poison into the bloodstream, which perhaps if not lanced through disclosure is destined to kill him slowly. But Eliot has resigned himself to letting Quentin’s spectral alternate self turn gangrenous. Maybe this is selfishness: Eliot cannot face the thought of his memories being picked clean for meaning by loves other than his. Maybe there is the tiniest sliver of selflessness in it, too: why taunt Julia and Alice with everything that Quentin will never get to become if they fail?

Really it is fear of another sort of failure, one predestined and unavoidable: the knowledge that even powers of portrayal far superior to Eliot’s would never be able to depict that life with any accuracy and so it is pointless to even make an attempt. Although he knows he would do far worse himself it does not stop him critiquing the others’ carefully crafted memories as his own devouring love scours them raw. He thinks there’s a real failure to attend to the physical. The forelock of brown hair Quentin aged twelve might have ducked behind is known only from the pictures Julia has shared and good thing too because Julia didn’t mention it. The studiedly disinterested expression of the terrible liar, the one Quentin must have worn one day in 2004 as he pretended to be more absorbed in facts about marine life than the results of his actions—Eliot couldn’t have gotten that from, and the whole time he’s just going ‘wow, Julia, did you know jellyfish don’t have brains?’ Eliot had to imagine it; he’d had to fill in the blanks. Alice made no mention of the grace and assurance with which Quentin handled cards, so atypical of his usual fumblings when it came to manual action. She didn’t recall the way she chewed at his bottom lip, the way the cards trembled a bit when he thrust the pack out to her in their flawless fan, the happy twin depressions that formed in his cheeks as he responded to her charmed smile; she said: he was so nervous.

Then there are all the things he can’t say, not to anyone but certainly not to Quentin’s best friend and girlfriend. Things that will die with no home better than Eliot’s unworthy memory but would die anyway because they aren’t the thing itself. Eliot can’t capture the wonder of a life where he and Quentin both lived to a contended old age but maybe he could actually express something about this, this thing that is lesser, shallow, basely fleshy, which others are eager to glide over but where the essence of Eliot’s life, the best of himself because he is hopelessly and shamefully carnal, resides. It is lesser, Eliot knows, simply because it’s all lesser. None of it is the thing itself. Still. Quentin in Eliot’s bed, the surprising strength of his thighs locked around Eliot’s waist, the yielding hot heart of him snug around Eliot, the red wet jerk of Quentin’s cock making a mess of both their stomachs where it’s trapped between their bodies, Eliot’s lips against the furry globe of his knee, against the salt-slick fluttering hollow of his throat, at the velvety skin right behind his ear, the way Quentin’s breath stuttered in his chest, his oh my gods and Eliot, El, Eliots breaking off into mindless ah, ah, ahs, into ragged shouts with no recognizable language at all, his immolating eyes, his white-knuckle grip on the headboard that he doesn’t release even as his ass starts to pulse around Eliot’s cock, even as he comes, even as he’s feeling so, so good, Eliot has made him feel so good, because he is so, so good, the best, and Eliot had told him not to let go...)

Eliot comes back to himself with a start at the light pressure of a hand on his back. The water is rushing from the sink taps, at full pressure, and Eliot is hunched over it, the sleeves of his shirt soaked. He fumbles to turn it off and looks up at Julia’s reflection in the not-quite silence created by the cessation of moving water and Eliot’s hitching gasps. She looks so tiny, reflected next to him in the coldness of the glass. Smaller even than Margo although like Margo it’s easy to forget this, to be startled by it afresh. With Quentin he never forgot.

“Her eyes,” Eliot says jaggedly. Julia’s mirror image looks blank and uncomprehending. Both their mirror selves have eyes like pits, all socket. “Macgregor—his wife’s eyes. On her passport they were brown, but just now, in his memory, they were hazel.”

He turns to the real Julia, unable to stand the mirror. Her expression is quizzically bemused, not instinctively following Eliot’s mangled map to this particular patch of desolation.

“I noticed that too,” Julia says slowly, and of course she did. Eliot feels a now familiar pang of fondness for her. With an ache he’s realized there is something to this appeal beyond the simple liking that is Julia’s due: the way he inculcates this attraction, cradles that spark of affection, breathes lightly on it so the flame might catch, all so he might be invaded by Quentin in some way, in feeling something of what he must have felt for her. Ghosts of his awe, his gratitude.

“Her eyes—” Eliot chokes out again, yearning to make himself understood. But Julia has been following her own inward thread.

“I just thought: ‘I bet she was one of those really annoying people who insists their eyes are hazel, not brown.’ Even though they’re obviously fucking brown. ”

Eliot squints down at her in surprise. “This sounds personal, but nevermind. You’re saying maybe he was just respecting her irritating delusions?”

“That’s love, baby.” Her voice cracks on love. There’s the watery promise of a smile hovering around her mouth. She clears her throat and says very quietly, “Maybe he was just remembering her the way she would have wanted to be remembered.”

That’s love, baby. “Maybe.”

“Or maybe her eyes were hazel, and whatever official did her passport just didn’t see it. Maybe there wasn’t an option for it on the form. Whatever gets written down or officially recognized isn’t necessarily the truth.”

Julia looks at him and Eliot fumbles in his pockets for a sorely needed cigarette, even though Kady will bitch about them smoking inside. Doesn’t say maybe, which is starting to sound less like a word and more like some incomprehensible curse.

“Or Edie was just really fucking obnoxious,” Eliot says on his first exhale.

The smile coalesces. “Girl, you aren’t special.”

“Like, get over yourself.”

“What’s wrong with brown?”

The walls begin to close in again, the room shrinking, but it’s bearable now because here’s Julia with him, taking up half of the vanishing oxygen.

Eliot will shortly know exactly how carnal (late Middle English: from Christian Latin carnalis, from caro, carn- ‘flesh’—important etymology to know when engaged in a resurrection—: relating to or given to crude bodily pleasures and appetites; marked by sexuality; bodily, corporeal) he really is. They have Quentin’s soul, his shade, trapped in a strange nine-sided tiny gilt box: thank you, Julia’s mercy, and Hades’ gratitude, and Penny’s mutiny, and the unpredictable side effects of dying in the Mirror Realm. Now they have to determine what to do with it.

“I think I’ve worked out a spell,” Alice says. “It’s a bit...ghoulish. But if we got a—corpse. A very...recent corpse. Then…”

“No,” Eliot interrupts. Chest burning. “That. There has to be some way to get Q back.”

“This would be getting Q back,” Alice insists. “It would be his soul, his mind, his—it would be him in all the ways that matter. Just not his body.”

“Ethically, it’s a little questionable, right?” Julia cuts in. Yes. Fantastic. Exactly what Eliot was thinking . The ethics of the situation. “I mean, taking somebody’s dead loved one and using it as a full body transplant for Quentin without their permission. Unless we could get a magician family to sign off on the world’s weirdest organ donation. And logistically, a nightmare. We’d want it to be a guy close in age to Q, which luckily for the world is probably not too easy to come by, and it would involve breaking into a morgue or funeral home—”

Logistics, yes. Precisely what Eliot was concerned about.

“I admit it’s not ideal. Also, what if Quentin ran into someone who knew the, uh, donor? Not to mention his legal status. Passport, social security. That’s going to be an issue regardless. But obviously with CCTV cameras everywhere, with surveillance technology, it might pose more complex problems somewhere down the line if—”

The security state, right. Sure. Very important. OK, yeah, no, Eliot didn’t give a shit about any of this.

“Fuck ethics,” Eliot bursts out, startling Alice and Julia into silence. “Fuck logistics. If that’s the only way—obviously we should do it.”

Eliot had immediately thought: no no no, I want Quentin. Like a child. He wanted all of Quentin, his eyes his hands his mouth his cock his thighs his smile his laugh his frown. He feels acutely ashamed of this because of course Alice is right. The vehicle for Quentin’s humor and kindness and intelligence and love and care and thoughts and feelings does not matter at all. It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t, but Eliot had loved that body for a lifetime and—it did. It did matter to him. If there was no other option of course it would cease to matter, of course Eliot would take Quentin in any outward guise he could get. But. If there was any other way...

“Yeah,” Julia says. “Not my first choice either, though. Let’s keep that on the back burner, shall we?”

At least Eliot wasn’t solely responsible for the decision to keep Quentin’s soul in a box for however many weeks or months longer while they figured out some other solution, when they could have had him back with them tomorrow. Eliot can fall back on the lie that Quentin remained dead far longer than was necessary merely because of the sheer hassle of corpse-stealing, and not because of Eliot’s own disgraceful want.

Soon enough they have reason to acquire a human sized slab of living clay. It rests, covered by a sheet, in the corner of the penthouse living room, and eventually they are ready to use it.

“Great,” Eliot responds to this news with false cheer, clapping his hands together, “let’s do this!”

Rictus grin. Alice and Julia look at him, then at each other, and have a silent conversation using their expressive genius eyebrows. Eliot wonders if they’ve finally realized he’s totally fucking nuts. A bit late for that.

“Not quite,” Julia says, her forehead wrinkled and her eyes dreamy and far away, doing equations in her head. “We can’t put Q’s shade into a block of clay.”

Eliot feels a surge of acid in his throat. “So we’re not ready.”

“No, we are,” Alice asserts firmly. “It’s just that it needs to be...human shaped. To work.”

“Why are you looking at me, then? I’m not a sculptor.” Alice opens her mouth to correct, to explicate, but Eliot cuts her off angrily. “It won’t ever look like Q. It’ll be fucking Gumby.”

“It doesn’t need to look like Q,” Julia intercedes gently. “The approximation is what matters. It just needs to be...human enough.”

For some reason they seem to be working under an assumption that only Eliot can do this. They insist Eliot is good with his hands.

So Eliot crafts Quentin. His hands get acquainted with inert clay to the soundtrack of Alice and Julia’s theoretical murmur. He shapes a head, a nose, two hollows for eyes. He spends a lot of time on the mouth but finally gives it up as a failure. It’s an approximation of a generic mouth and that will have to be human enough. Eliot remembers being very good with his hands in another life, but there’s no carryover of muscle memory to this one from the self who had whittled constantly to pass the time, who had woven baskets and fixed leaking roofs, who had, despite a lack of inborn fine artistry, once painted a mural of friendly, fantastical creatures above a sleeping child’s bed just to watch the child wake up and exclaim with soft wonder at finding that the content of his dreams had danced out from his head to pirouette and cavort on his wall.

Eliot tries not to think of Quentin at the mosaic. It’s too much, too many Quentins. He has a superstitious fear that he’ll fuck it up, somehow, that in thinking of Quentin as a young father, Teddy heavy on his hip, wedding band glinting on the hand confidently supporting his son’s weight—as he carefully sculpts the whorl of an ear—or Quentin in middle age with one hand wrapped loosley around a mug of ale at a neighbor’s daughter’s wedding, torchlight picking out the lines that with ever more ease and frequency spring into being around his eyes, and with the other scratching calloused fingers through his newly thick beard as he laughs at the neighbor’s good-natured teasing about how soon he’ll be seeing his own son married—precisely delienating the left pinky finger—or Quentin in old age fixing a grandchild’s toy and occasionally his increasingly shaky yet fundamentally assured hand pausing in this solemn duty to reach out and pet the child’s bright head with an accompanying look of wonder, and the child so fond of him and so entitled to such affections that she submitted to this rank dereliction of industry with a smile and sweet chatter—gently rounding the spur of the elbow—he will somehow call these other Quentins into being and not the Quentin he wants.

Which Quentin is it Eliot wants? All of them. All of them. But. The Quentin who stumbled towards him up across the Brakebills lawn like a lost baby deer: no. The Quentin who fucked him and then crowned him: no. The Quentin who turned towards Eliot and whatever he saw there made him for one shining moment in his life say why the hell not with true optimism: no, although the waters of temptation are getting more treacherous. The Quentin whose heart he had broken but who still somehow looked at Eliot for the space of a heartbeat in that park like he held the answer to a question Quentin had never stopped asking, the Quentin who was also the selfish promise that maybe Eliot could fix something for once: God, God, and yet—no. That’s the trickiest one, both in the force of the desire and for the simple fact it was the last Quentin he actually knew. Maybe he should want that Quentin, and not the Quentin he only knows from the look in Julia and Alice’s eyes when they speak of him—the Quentin that wanted to die. Perhaps Eliot should want a Quentin free of at least a few horrors. But Eliot wakes up every day and lays in the bed for long merciless minutes before he can drag himself upright to shower (well, sometimes) and dress (usually) and eat breakfast (once in a while), brutally aware of each unforgiving second Eliot pulls behind him and of how in each of those seconds Quentin is not, and Eliot doesn’t want Quentin to lose a one single moment of life more than he has already. He does not want to rewind or fast forward, erase or hasten past, rewrite or prophesy. Eliot wants to reach into that moment where Quentin splintered into atoms and draw him back together around the instant of rending.

Towards the end Julia comes and kneels beside Eliot, smoothes a calf into being. Alice stays away, seems almost frightened of Gumby as Julia calls it in a half-hearted attempt at a joke. It’s not very Gumby-like now, considering Eliot has given it a dick and balls that Julia is pointedly not commenting on. Eliot was worried about Quentin coming back as a eunuch or a Ken doll (Quentin’s back rolled out in front of Eliot in candlelight, sweat gleaming in the firelight, the knobs of his spine infinitely kissable) but he didn’t want to ask. He wonders what Quentin she is thinking of, as she tapers calf to ankle.

Then Quentin is a body again. It happens in a blink of an eye, literally—unable to bear that excruciating immensity of hope, Eliot’s lids shutter on a cruel image of lifeless clay, and rise to the miracle of writhing human flesh.

Being a body again turns out to be less easy than they’d anticipated because they hadn’t much thought about it at all. Those first hallucinatory hours when Quentin was alive and real, when they couldn’t quite yet believe it. Julia and Eliot hugging his naked new body between them. Crying. So much crying. Weird, dreamlike. They hadn’t realized anything was off at first because Quentin didn’t. He was too shocked from the cold plunge into corporeality, the total overwhelm of resumed sensory experience creating a numbing effect. It’s evening, a violet fall dusk, when Quentin Coldwater is born for the second time. (“This is really gonna fuck with your star chart, did you think of that, dumbass?” Margo says fiercely while hauling Quentin into her arms, heedless of his nudity or of the strange alkaline dampness to his skin no one comments on, until Eliot can’t stand it anymore, the sight of Q wet and shivering and defenseless, and goes and gets a towel and dries him off, Quentin’s tousled head popping up after Eliot briskly rubs at his hair, his weak disused voice scratchily saying, “El—”, all while he remains absurdly cradled in Margo’s literal fucking lap.) Lights dim, candles flickering. The next morning when Quentin finally wakes well after noon—he crashed only a couple hours into this go at existence, bravely fighting to keep his eyes open as long as he could but finally overcome by a deep sourceless exhaustion—he emerges from the bedroom kept in a shadowed shrine-like state these past months in unarticulated anticipation of such a slumber and into the brittle sunlight of an autumn afternoon as it floods in through the many tall windows, and shrieks in pain. Covers his eyes with both hands and collapses to the floor, moaning.

“The light, the light, it hurts,” Quentin wails, as Eliot rushes to him, reaching him a beat before Julia by virtue of his longer stride. With a hand to the back of his skull Eliot presses Q’s face to his chest, and Quentin rubs it against Eliot’s shirt with hiccuping gasps, and his hands, now freed from shielding his tightly shut eyes, grip at Eliot’s shoulders.

“Was it dark?” Alice, voice so hushed Eliot doesn’t think Quentin even hears it. Hovering behind Eliot, hands tentatively outstretched. Was it a dark place, where you have been? The question no one has yet dared ask, something they’d barely articulated.

“I didn’t have eyes,” Quentin says, which is worse.

“It’s OK,” Julia soothes, stroking Quentin’s back as he hyperventilates into Eliot’s collarbone, understandably pretty freaked out by the discovery that sunlight now burned. “It’s like...a baby. Babies always cry when they’re born, right?”

“Yes,” Quentin whimpers. “They do.”

“Because it was dark and wet and warm—”

“Ew,” Margo says, joining the commotion. “Or, you know what, actually, I’d love if the afterlife was dark and wet and warm, if you know what I mean, but since that’s not what you mean, while it does seem an apt comparison—must we?”

“—and now it’s cold and bright and loud and so everything is—overwhelming,” Julia finishes, totally ignoring this interjection.

Margo goes and unearths a sleep mask that says SLUT on it in sparkly faux-fur for Quentin to wear while Alice spells the windows with a sun-dimming glaze that throws the whole penthouse into a cradling gloom to allow Quentin’s new eyes to adjust, and they all turn into creatures of a false and perpetual twilight.

It turns out to be both an apt and inadequate comparison. Acclimatization to material existence proves even more arduous the second time around. Quentin is kind of like a baby, if there was ever a baby that you could gently lead by the hand as it stumbles trustingly after you, blinded by a mask that says SLUT on it. But he sleeps all the time, although aside from that first time only in increments of several hours, and hardly ever through the night. He’s as sensitive as a newborn to physical conditions, to light and sound and temperature. When someone speaks too loudly or laughs—which happens often because Quentin is alive, they brought someone back from the dead, holy fucking shit—Quentin flinches and his hands fly to his ears. He shakes with chills so they crank up the thermostat in the apartment and go around sweating in very little clothing—Margo in a bikini, Julia in a cute lacy bralette and tiny sleep shorts, Alice limp with perspiration in a skirt and tank top, Eliot in briefs, Kady in a sports bra and briefs Eliot has to squint at before determining they’re absolutely something he’d never buy, but the laundry situation has gotten weird, so—while Quentin is piled in layers, henleys and sweaters and socks and thermal underwear.

“Maybe he’s not a baby after all,” Margo says. “Maybe he’s come back as a rare exotic plant, or a lizard.”

Quentin quickly eases into integrating visual stimuli enough so he’s able to take off his mask once night falls, becoming a rapidly blinking, pink-eyed, nocturnal little creature. He’s looking from Margo in an orange bikini to Eliot shirtless to his best friend in expensive lingerie with a blank look of astounded, smooth-brained astonishment at all the wonder the world contains. Julia smiles tremulously at him as if to say, I love you, lizard boy and Margo gives it up and smiles too, oh our slutty baby ficus, and confused, stunned, not quite awake after yet another nap, Quentin’s lips twitch dopily up into a responding smile, instinctually echoing their joy, learning how it works again.

He does ultimately readjust to temperature, but it’s a long, steamy week, and not the sexy kind. Womb-like joyous days and hothouse nights Eliot spends sleepless in the damp puddle his overheated body forms beneath him, staring at the ceiling because he’s too wired to even close his eyes. Quentin naps on-and-off throughout the day and goes to bed exhausted at 9 p.m. and Eliot wants to respect it, Quentin’s need to get enough rest being more important than Eliot’s need to remain within six feet of him at all times. It’s still agony.

Eliot must get snatches of sleep because he remembers dreams. On the second night he dreams of waking up the next morning and going to the kitchen, looking around for Quentin and not finding him. Where’s Q, he says. Still asleep? Everyone’s faces: first shocked, then worried. Eliot, what are you talking about? Quentin’s dead. Dream Eliot is furious at this perverse joke. Quentin is alive, we did it, we brought him back. Margo reaching out to touch his arm, with concern disguised as fury on her face. Julia sad and empathetic, Alice embarrassed and uncomfortable, Kady quipping about what he’d fucking taken last night—which is unfair to Kady who had several times in the months since Quentin’s death silently and companionably gotten shitfaced with him—and Eliot ripping away from them all, their sticky faces and hands and loathsome conviction that Quentin is dead, tearing the penthouse calling Quentin’s name, except in the dream the penthouse has grown, the rooms are endless, infinite, as Eliot stumbles through every one, and in each one Quentin is not, and Eliot knows in his heart that they’re right, that Quentin is dead, dead, dead.

Eliot wakes up cold all over, despite the heat. Gagging, fighting to swallow back vomit. Sick and shaking. He wants to rush out of his room and go to Quentin and assure himself that the last few heady days and the preceding six months of effort are real. But how could he trust his own eyes? What if, like in the dream, what he thought was reality was in fact a dream, a delusion? The idea that the force of his longing could play such a trick on him is frighteningly plausible to Eliot.

He goes and finds Julia instead. Eliot can trust her. He can barely get out the words but Julia seems to get it anyway. She nods and takes his hand and leads him to Quentin’s room, opening the door quietly. A shaft of light from the hallway illuminates Quentin’s huddled form under the blankets, curled up like an animal in its den, and Julia and Eliot stand in the doorway and listen to his soft snoring, their hands entwined, a perversion of fond and nervous parenthood. Turning to each other in wonderment. We made this. We really did this, this one perfect thing.

When Quentin comes for him on the third night Eliot must have been asleep, because he reaches awareness with a jolt. Quentin is climbing into bed with him, whimpering. Pressing his chest to Eliot’s, indifferent to Eliot’s nakedness, his sweat with its sharp tang of persistent anxiety and whiskey.

“Quentin? What—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, sorry, god—” Quentin pants out. Not really reassuring. They are chest-to-chest but Quentin is scrabbling between their bodies and Eliot is confused until Quentin manages to get ahold of the million layers he’s wearing and yank them up so his bare stomach meets Eliot’s bare stomach and then Eliot is confused in a different way.

“What’s wrong?” Eliot tries again, increasingly worried.

“Nothing! Nothing, this is so fucking weird, I’m sorry,” Quentin reassures, giving Eliot a little soothing pat on the arm before he continues to fumble, to try to pull everything he’s wearing off over the top of his head without also separating himself from his skin-contact with Eliot. This isn’t really possible. He’s going to take Eliot’s eye out.

“Here, let me,” Eliot says, helping to free Quentin from layer #2, a sweater. Quentin goes still with Eliot’s hands on him except for how he’s trembling all over. What the hell is going on? Is Quentin cold? Eliot wonders these things as he assists Quentin in shimmying out of layer #3, a long-sleeve t-shirt. Like, obviously he’s cold all the time, that’s why he’s trapped in this many clothes. So why is he taking the clothes off? Is he getting colder? Don’t people in the last stages of hypothermia think they’re burning up and strip and lie down in the snow and die?

After layer #4–a second long-sleeve t-shirt—is off Quentin mashes his nude torso to Eliot’s, presses them together from sternum to crotch, and gives a grateful sigh of relief. All questions vanish from Eliot’s head at Quentin’s relieved inhale, as if he’s surfacing from underwater, as if this is his first unimpeded breath of air in hours, swells Quentin’s stomach so it pushes against Eliot’s sweaty one. Eliot breathless at the intimacy of it. How many times in life does a person find themselves this tightly entwined with another without sex being involved? Although this degree of limpet-like entanglement is still more intense than even most post-coital cuddling: Quentin’s arm snaking between Eliot’s arm and his body, his hand clutching at Eliot’s back and upon his fingers finding no purchase on its slick, bare expanse digging in painfully with his nails; his leg inserting itself between Eliot’s thighs, Quentin seemingly indifferent to the fact this means Eliot’s cock and balls are chilling on his knee; his nose burrowing into Eliot’s armpit.

Quentin is still breathing hard, but his trembling slowly eases. Eliot lies motionless, even though having a warm, living Quentin Coldwater basically surgically attached to him is about to make him boil out of his skin. He runs his hand up Quentin’s back, rounds it over his shoulder, the skin snug over bone. Thoracic curve, he thinks, scapula, and the dream Quentin had awoken him from comes back to him: Eliot had been alone in a huge room with nothing in it but a pile of skin and a pile of bones and the knowledge that they were Quentin’s and that his job was to put the bones back where they belonged. He’d sat down and commenced sorting through the tinkling jumble of osseous matter, fitting all the pieces together like a puzzle. Naming them, names Eliot didn’t even know he knew, femur tibia mandible, as he tenderly slides them back into their home of tissue, but before he did he’d licked every single one.

“Q,” Eliot says, voice cracking. “Q.”

For a moment there are no questions that the eggshell bowl of Quentin’s skull in Eliot’s palm and the kiss of Quentin’s lashes ticking against his shoulder could not adequately answer. With a shiver Eliot realizes this is the first time he’s been alone with Q since they got him back.

It isn’t much longer before Eliot gets an explanation for why Quentin has sought him out. Enough time to start working up a frenzy of worry—is something wrong? Should he get Alice or Julia? Take Quentin to Brakebills and Lipson, or Fillory and a fairy healer?—and for Quentin to get bashful and move to put a sharp sliver of space between their bodies, but not long enough for Eliot’s imminent freak out to overtake the staggering relief of Quentin in his arms again or for a more refined consciousness to assert itself and make Quentin awkward at Eliot’s state of undress.

“I was lying awake in my room—”

“I thought you were asleep,” Eliot replies, way too vehemently. He’d thought Quentin was resting peacefully, conscientiously replenishing his infant cells.

“Um, I was. Then I wasn’t. So far I can only sleep for a couple hours at a time.”

Unbearable. Because Eliot is a lunatic and it’s unacceptable to imagine there were whole wasted hours of Quentin being conscious without Eliot lurking around him like a creep. Eliot thinks he can be forgiven for the time being but he hopes this compulsive urge wears off before it starts to alarm Quentin.

“You should,” Eliot starts and has to stop, his mouth dry. “You should come to me, next time. When you can’t sleep. Or, or—to Julia. Or Alice, or Margo.”

Quentin doesn’t say anything, but he moves close again, making the gap between their bodies vanish. His forehead sheltering against Eliot’s throat.

“I was lying there, and I was unable to sleep, and the longer I lay there the less I could feel my body. It disappeared. I felt like nothing had boundaries. There was no border between me and the bed. I was digging my nails into my palms and I couldn’t feel it. I touched the sheets and I couldn’t feel it. Then I became like, super aware of my heart beating and my lungs expanding and my teeth grinding together and my stomach acid and even, I swear, the blood pumping in my veins. But I still didn’t have any fucking skin, so it felt like there was nothing keeping my organs inside, that everything was about to fall out and dissolve and that scared me worse. I just needed to remember I had skin, that I had a body, so—”

Quentin breaks off. Breathes deep with his skin against Eliot’s skin. A body with a body. What does it mean that when he needed to remember that, he came to Eliot, and not Alice, or Julia? What does it signify that remembering means this: his body against Eliot’s, Eliot’s hands holding Quentin’s insides in as he reiterates the fact of his skin.

“So. Skin-to-skin contact. Like with newborn babies. Apparently it’s important. That they have that.”

(Teddy had yelled in vigorous protest at the outrage he found perpetuated against him until he was laid bloody and wriggling against Arielle’s breasts and his cries tapered off into snuffling mewls. Maybe he’d wailed against the wrench of a knowledge before knowledge, that what had held the world and its violence at bay was another body and where there had been that other now there was nothing but a permeable membrane occupied by him alone. But being with another body in the right way could perform the trick of making people forget. Or remember.)

“The baby jokes aren’t really that funny,” Quentin says, and laughs a little.

Eliot becomes obsessed with Quentin’s body. Well, obviously not becomes. It’s the form of the obsession that changes, although—that’s not quite right either. This urge has always run alongside and been informed by that other attention; it was at Brakebills Eliot had first discovered his passion for teaching the boy who said things like I really wish there was a Taco Bell around here to appreciate the better things in life. He’d sought out the most exquisite pairings to shape through experience: Muscadet and oysters and sucking brine off their fingers outside on a balmy evening; lamb falling off the bone and a stolen 1961 Bordeaux as snow came down outside. Quentin’s bemused tolerance of Eliot’s excesses giving way to a quiet, sincere gratitude at being fed. This is really good, El, thank you. How all the vanity in it had fallen away in those months after Quentin let Alice go and he was drunk and morose and doing his best to approximate wasting away in a garrett while moping around a castle and Eliot would drag him to Whitespire’s kitchens late at night and shoo away whatever lingerers there were and from a specially designated cabinet whip out a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix to Quentin’s dry observation that, wow, things really have devolved. But Eliot missed Earth. He’d had enough from-scratch for a lifetime. In a robe, cigarette-less, watching a bleary-eyed Quentin lick the bowl clean. Sitting around waiting for the pan to come out of the oven and Quentin saying My dad used to make brownies from the box for school bake sales and that’s the saddest thing Eliot has ever heard except maybe for how his mother had used to make brownies out of the box when Eliot brought home good grades or got cast in a play or yes for church bake sales but she’d always made an extra batch for them and now he will never speak to his mother again before he dies because the day after he graduated high school she told him he’d catch AIDs and die and burn in the fiery pits of hell, and that might just upstage Quentin’s stolid, decent father who is dying of cancer, and what Quentin needs in this moment is to be the saddest little boy in the whole world so Eliot waits while not yet knowing he’s waiting, for a future moment a century in the past where he will try to make brownies out of Fillorian ingredients for an already-dead and as-yet-unborn little boy who is the saddest boy in the world because his mother is dead, but he’s not really sad much anymore because he has the incredible resilience of being seven and extravagantly loved and she’s been dead two years and so that night Eliot will feel sort of selfish because like at least he has a mom right but he finally will tell Quentin about his mom and eating some warm brownies by the stove light with her on a Saturday midnight after the smell woke him and he’d crept downstairs and Quentin will say oh, El, and then Eliot will get to feel like the saddest little boy in the entire universe.

In the present Eliot finds himself preoccupied with simply keeping Quentin’s body running, now that he’s got it back. Julia and Alice dart around trying to figure out what exactly is going on with Quentin’s sensory integration issues although all it earns them is shrugs and the reasonable protest that since no one else has ever brought anyone back from the dead before, correspondingly no one else has any better idea what’s going on. They want to learn how to make the engine work better; Eliot aims to keep the tank full. He’s in the nourishment business.

This turns out to be a complicated task. That first night Quentin had whispered oh my God I’m so hungry, why am I so hungry and to stop himself from fervently dropping kisses all over his face Eliot asked what do you want to eat? Quentin hadn’t been able to decide or say much at all so giddy and sleepless and starving they ordered a bit of everything: an unspoken acknowledgement that putting different things in dough and frying it is one of the high points of human life (potstickers, pierogies, empanadas), fried chicken nestled in styrofoam boxes, noodles in their cardboard houses, shawarma wrapped in aluminum foil, and yes, Taco Bell, which is how the Crunchwrap Supreme comes to take a central place, with the mystic halo of a consecrated object, in one of the few instances of perfect joy in Eliot’s life.

Bad idea, gastrointestinally. They all wake up slightly queasy the next morning, hungover from high emotion and too much grease, so when Quentin takes one sip of his coffee and then turns white and bolts for the bathroom, followed by the distinctive sounds of vomiting, no one is much alarmed.

“That Mexican Pizza, probably not—”

“The best idea, yeah. Nor the Baja Blast.”

Julia is rising from her seat but Eliot is already standing and he beats her to the bathroom. Eliot kneels on the tile beside the wet wrenching hack issuing from Quentin’s huddled form, his own chest burning in sympathy, and places his hand square in the middle of the heaving back. Quentin shudders, ceases. Eliot strokes the trembling space between his shoulder blades and Quentin makes a little relieved sob. Eliot remembers how good this moment had felt when he was a kid, home from school with a stomach bug or too much funnel cake at the state fair. A rare example in his life of pain that another person's touch alleviated. The gratitude Eliot had felt at hunching over the toilet or a trash can, and the longing: the immense radiating peace of knowledge that it hurt and this fact would in this case earn him his mother’s assured kindly hand soothing and then it would hurt less. That there was some hurt in the world that could earn and contain its own relief. The way that palm circling back or fingers pushing his hair back from his forehead let him crest a great height and see an end of suffering.

The rest of them get over their brush with excess quickly, but Quentin has enduring issues with consumption. He is either famished but incapable of holding anything down or the very concept of food repels him.

Eliot devotes as much energy and ingenuity to this as he ever did to the most gourmet three-course fine dining. He gets a notebook and notates Quentin’s food intake with scientific fervor:

Oct 21 9 a.m - piece of toast w/butter and one scrambled egg

Oct 21 11 a.m - didn’t keep down

Oct 21 3 p.m - ⅓ tube of saltine crackers and a glass of lukewarm Sprite

Oct 21 7 p..m - rice cake and peanut butter, ginger tea

He’s not sure why he keeps this chronicle, which is pretty functionally useless and that he shows to nobody because it’s deranged. A record that Quentin was here, as if Death might be trying to prevent Quentin from taking up permanent residence in the world above through the loophole of constant nausea, and Eliot will be called upon to present evidence that Quentin broke bread with the living and kept it down.

Quentin’s guts slowly give up their revolt under Eliot’s patient and rigorous training plan to get his digestive system to work again. Hours of effort expended on food no one would passionately hunger to eat: the pillowy heaped round grains of plain rice, the chicken that Eliot simmers for hours for the luxury of the purest, clearest broth, another bird kept in the refrigerator that Eliot boils unseasoned and shreds into bite-sized pieces with his hands.

Alice comes into the kitchen while Eliot is doing this. It’s late and she watches him for a long minute before going to the refrigerator, emerging from the bloom of cold with a package of bacon which she begins to fry.

“Sorry, I just can’t take it anymore,” Alice whispers. Their repasts the past few weeks have been markedly Lentan in solidarity. Under the cover of darkness, the forbidden world of flavor beckons.

This considerate gesture is wasted. The enticing smell draws Quentin out of sleep and out from his room.

She guiltily tries to hide the sizzling pan behind her and hisses as a disturbed pop of fat singes her arm.

Q smiles and sits down at the counter. “It’s OK. It’s the best thing I’ve ever smelled and it’s torture that I absolutely cannot eat it, but it’s OK.”

Alice’s lips purse against a smile. “At least you’ve kept your sense of humor.” A pause, and then she lets her face do whatever the hell it wants. “That’s good, though—that it smells so good to you. That’s the first step. It was for me, anyway. The moment where how disgusting it seemed was outweighed by how good it smelled.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says softly.

One of their thrilling little tête-à-têtes about their souls’ messy divorce and even messier remarriages to their bodies. Alice had shed her body like dirty clothes and spun off free into the cosmos and a body that eats and sleeps was apparently poor payoff for infinite knowledge and the ability to see beyond the spectrum of electromagnetic light. Although she tries to hide it it’s evident that she feels some disappointment about the same thing that Eliot feels devoutly thankful for: that Quentin remembers nothing of his time beyond. He returned with no new knowledge, except what it was to have a body, gained from a void. A more absolute and complete knowledge, Eliot thinks, than even Alice had achieved.

Eliot has his own experience of leaving the bounds of normal human perception behind, but he can’t participate. He remembers almost nothing from outside the prison of his happy place, and what he does remember is...visceral. Literally. Hot crimson flashes of blood and muscle. A god had inhabited his body, but said god had a fondness for sugary children’s cereals and cold pizza. So.

He can’t help with that, but—Eliot pushes the plate of chicken towards Quentin, along with a bowl of rice. Quentin raises an eyebrow.

“I know. At least it’s meat. And the rice is brown.” Eliot drops his voice into the register of seduction. “With butter.”

Quentin laughs, and eats. The bland but filling chicken and rice disappears quickly. Eliot would have thought he would be tempted to dream ahead, to days of seeking out the perfect cut of steak and cooking it rare, tagines and curries and that fucking shallot pasta, but he finds he is content to keep pace. He hears the crackle and snap of Alice munching on her breakfast meat of choice and thinks of garlicky mashed potatoes and apples with their crisp tart skins and chill white hearts and homemade bread with jam. The chicken and rice seems to be a success. A soup, with the leftover meat and stock, maybe some leek, something with a gentle but deep—

A nudge from Alice’s elbow as she wordlessly offers Eliot a slice of bacon.

Damn. That is good.

Things progress rapidly. Quentin takes a quick leap into teenagerhood, although originally Eliot confuses it for a kind of toddlerhood. There are some similarities he remembers from Teddy. Rebellions against a sense of the world widening terrifyingly beyond its previous bounds, the contradiction of both the desperate longing for the new horizon and discovering the prospect of that expanse is suffocating. He cries constantly, and no media is safe. When he cries so hard at the episode of Criminal Minds where the killer is turning his victims into human puppets that he gets a nosebleed they know to avoid the heavy-hitters, but it’s no use, and as they all observe with sick fascination Quentin silently weeping as he’s overcome by the pathos of Elle’s triumph in the courtroom in Legally Blonde, acceptance of the reality that this just part of the nightly Netflix experience now begins to take hold. Because OK, sure, everyone snots at The Prom, gotta give The Body an extremely wide berth, but sobbing during Beer Bad?

His moods ping-pong wildly. He gets frustrated on a hair-trigger, and has meltdowns at minor frustrations, when things that should come easy instead come unexpectedly hard, tasks that his new inability to perform independently Quentin feels as the keenest insults to his dignity. Tying his shoes. Basic spellwork. The fact that nobody will let him pop down to the bodega on his own.

“It’s not you, it’s us. We have issues.”

“Really? Really, Eliot?” Tearfully, and with a pointed jerk of his head downward to where Eliot is tying his shoes for him after his own clumsy fingers made a hash of it.

“Yes,” Eliot says evenly. “It’s our complex emotional damage resulting from your untimely death, Quentin, not the hit it’s inflicted on your fine motor skills.”

Quentin laughs, and then cries a little more.

Also Quentin is still a bit shaky whenever he goes out into the city, apt to get overstimulated and confused by the assault of sights and sounds and smells, and it would suck if they got Quentin back only for him to get hit by a bus on a mission to acquire instant ramen.

Mostly, though—how can Eliot pass it up? The treasure of walking in the blue light with Quentin on an early winter day, to the store, to buy ramen.

There are early warning signs that this period is not in fact Quentin 2.0’s terrible twos. A certain moodiness, a tendency to fall into sulky silences, an uptick in time spent abruptly absenting himself from everyone in favor of brooding in his room alone. Understandable. There’s a lot to brood about.

So one day when Eliot is munching on a rice cake (Quentin has moved on to pretzels as his snack of choice but Eliot had bought rice cakes in bulk on a stress-fueled trip to Costco and someone has to eat them, also he finds them oddly comforting now) and looks up at Quentin to see a look of pure dread on his face, followed by the unfortunately habitual occurrence of Quentin bolting for the bathroom, Eliot feels his own dread take up residence again, somewhere between his guts and his lungs. The sight of Eliot eating had triggered something. The Monster. Death and destruction wearing Eliot’s face.

Hovering outside the bathroom door Eliot expects to hear vomiting. He hears little moans of agony. A crying Quentin and the panicked rustle of fabric makes Eliot think that maybe he’s wet himself again. He’s had issues controlling his bladder, so—the terror of a Quentin in pain prompts Eliot to push the door fully open.

Jeans loose around thighs trapped together by hastily shoved down boxers. His hand working furiously on his hard cock. The angry flush of the head popping between Q’s strong blunt fingers. The relieved shudder every time he slides home to himself.

“Oh. Um.” Eliot is about to back right up and out and go somewhere safe to contemplate this information when Quentin frantically grabs at his shirt sleeve and hauls him into the bathroom. His eyes are wild and his grunts almost pained as his hand continues to move.

“God,” Quentin groans. “I’m so sorry, fuck. I don’t know why this keeps happening. It’s insane, it’s like seventh grade all over again.”

“Ugh.”

Quentin nods in miserable agreement.

“Except instead of Julia wearing a training bra, god, it’s you, you chopping vegetables and eating pizza—do you know how unhot it should be, someone eating pizza?—and just fucking standing there, I can’t stand it, suddenly I’m hard enough to hammer nails and I have to fucking flee the room before anyone notices—” Quentin seems to realize the death-grip he has on Eliot’s shirt and lets go, says, “oh my god, I’m so sorry, please, go—”

“Q,” Eliot says, and Quentin falls silent with a sob. He steps forward, lets the door click shut behind him. The bathroom is so dark he can’t see anything. He finds Quentin by feel, by his heat. “Q, please. Let me.”

Quentin shudders again, into Eliot. Hands pawing desperately at every part of Eliot they can reach, as Eliot takes Quentin’s cock in his hand. His shoulder, his Adam's apple. His fingers sliding between the buttons of Eliot’s shirt, between his pants and his hipbone. Tangling in his hair on a hoarse cry.

Quentin’s cock is so hard, so wet. So small and vulnerable in Eliot’s hand. A trembling living blood-hot thing, thrusting up into Eliot’s fist. Eliot pets his fingers down the nape of Quentin’s neck, over his shoulders, and says “Shh, shh, Q, I’ve got you,” and Quentin cries out again, touches Eliot’s nipples with his fingers as he latches his teeth onto Eliot’s pulse point and bites hard like he wants to break the skin and lap at the blood there, suckles hard, and comes.

The next time it happens they’re watching the animated Disney version of Robin Hood, which had at least seemed safe enough when it came to not making Quentin burst into tears. So when Quentin stands up in the middle of the archery contest and walks quickly to his bedroom, Eliot knows what’s happened. He waits a barely plausibly deniable minute and follows and finds Quentin pacing in the middle of his room, hands balled up at his sides, hard in his sweatpants.

“Are you a furry?” Eliot asks. “Did you come back to life as a furry?”

“Shut up,” Quentin says, tearfully. “It’s not funny, I don’t know why this is happening.”

“You’re going through a second puberty. Did you find yourself aroused by dashing animated foxes the first time around?”

“No,” Quentin hisses. “I mean, okay, but not like this.”

“I don’t care if you came back to life as a furry— ”

“I am not a—”

“I’m in love with you anyway,” Eliot finishes wildly, and that’s how he confesses his love to Quentin this time around. “What did you think about that bastard from Zootopia?”

With a strangled shriek of frustration, Quentin surges forward to kiss him.

(This next bit. Eliot’s hypothetical reader might think he’s skipping over some stuff, suspect he’s been eliding some pretty vital shit this entire time. Confessions, conversations. They’d be right and also wrong. It’s all here. It’s all right there if you only know what to look for. If Eliot has taught this faceless audience how to read it right.)

Quentin laid out in their bed. The pulse in his inner thigh with the blood leaping joyfully beneath Eliot’s lips. He takes the silken-salty head of Quentin’s cock between his lips, hollows his cheeks and releases in a dreamy tender suckle, in time with the slow throb of the blood filling it, thickening it, making him saltier, slicker, harder. Quentin’s thrumming blood rising to meet Eliot’s mouth. He rubs little circles on Quentin’s perineum: drawing the blood forth, warming him up. He’s just holding Q’s cock in his mouth, not sucking, because he can hear Quentin gasp and feel the way he’s thrusting his hips. He slides a finger into Quentin and fuck, he’s so tight. Eliot can feel the depth of the resistance. Because no one has been here before. Eliot hopes the newness, the slight edge of pain or discomfort (and there is: Quentin gives a shocked yelp, but when Eliot makes to withdraw he puts a fist in Eliot’s hair and tugs, slurs, “No, no, please, stay,”) will prevent Quentin from—oh, oh, Quentin’s coming, and Eliot swallows and swallows, every bitter drop.

Eliot pulls back to assess the emotional damage. The issue with Quentin and sex, or one of them, has been Quentin coming far too quickly. Eliot finds this delightful—his hips jerk against Quentin’s at the thought: Quentin coming from nothing but one of Eliot’s fingers, from the head of his cock leaking and hot on Eliot’s tongue—but Quentin finds it frustrating. When Eliot raises his head to look at Quentin’s face he finds him with his arm flung across his eyes like a Harlequin heroine.

“It’s okay,” Quentin says stuffily. “Really.”

“It is,” Eliot soothes, rubbing Quentin’s thigh comfortingly. “It is, baby. We’ll get there, it just might—”

“No,” Quentin says, removing his arm from his eyes and glaring at Eliot. “It’s not okay that you can’t touch me for longer than two seconds without me either coming or feeling like I’ve been flayed alive. It’s very much not okay. But it is okay that you are absolutely disgustingly horny about me being a born-again virgin. Even though it also isn’t, I’m being very generous here, because I. just. want. to. get. FUCKED.”

Oh. Well. Yeah. Quentin has always had a way of seeing right through Eliot, hasn’t he. Quentin is tearing up but before Eliot can respond he says, “Please, El, in me—put your fingers in me, I don’t care that I’ve come—” and Eliot does. Avoiding Quentin’s soft, shivering, oversensitive cock, he slides one finger and then two into Quentin’s lax, trembling body, moving gently, so gently, as Quentin jerks into Eliot’s touch and then away, whining, overstimulated, panting into Eliot’s mouth, and Eliot thinks all the time about how shamefully hot it is, Quentin so new and sweet and tight, and how it was just as hot or even hotter when—ten glorious years into being well and regularly fucked by Eliot Quentin would pretend to be a virgin, Eliot had never thought much of Quentin’s skills as an actor and frankly he was still probably not the best judge considering Quentin doing nothing more widening his eyes and breathing wait, wait, it’s not going to fit as Eliot put his cock in him nearly made Eliot blow like a geyser, Jesus—or—the same patience, the same tender solicitous attention to every flicker of Quentin’s eyebrows, every hitch in his breath, as Eliot worked his whole hand inside Quentin’s asshole, and it had not only been the hottest thing to ever happen to Eliot but also the most holy, the closest Eliot has ever gotten to the sacred in the profane—no, OK, this is so hot, so hot that Eliot feels like his head is going to explode, so hot that when Quentin says in a high frantic voice, “Enough, enough, El, I can’t,” and Eliot has to stop his feather-light petting of Quentin from the inside, he flips him over and fucks his thighs, whispering promises into his ear: “I will, baby, I’ll fuck you, don’t worry, we’ll get there, I’ll take care of you, I’ll give it to you,” nearly light-headed with want.

The problem is not simply one of shooting off too soon or even pain—although a week later when Eliot gets only the head of his dick in Q’s ass and sees Q’s face spasm as he gasps out, “Stop, stop,” and Eliot nearly jerks out of him, his heart pounding and nausea rising, because he can never hurt Quentin again (his mind flashes to Quentin’s ass red then purple, to Quentin’s bruised throat, to Eliot’s handprint on Quentin’s cheek and the echoing sound of a good smack and his closed-eyed open-mouthed expression of ecstasy), Quentin will assure him that he wasn’t in pain, it didn’t hurt after Eliot eating his ass for an hour and coming once on three of Eliot’s fingers—but rather too muchness. It was too much, to have Eliot fucking him, and touching him. To be a body seeking pleasure with another body. He wanted it so badly and he couldn’t stand it. It made him feel like a bundle of nerves with no skin with a white buzz between his ears, not sure whether it wanted to push towards Eliot or pull away.

A statement so rich in troubling metaphorical significance makes Eliot want to run from the room screaming. Instead:

“During your period of anthropomorphic animal fueled self-abuse,” (“Oh my god,” Quentin mutters) “did you ever finger yourself?”

No, but he’s up for it. Quentin blushes all over and breathes hard as he rocks down on his own fingers while they practice having Eliot touch him all over, in every place he’s turned a splotchy furious pink. His shoulder. His knee. The thin web of skin clothing his ankle bone. The instep of his foot. The back of his neck. He comes when Eliot loses self-control and ventures to run his finger over the delicate rim of one of his brick-red ears.

It gives Eliot an idea. If Eliot’s incredible cock and assiduous love-making are too overpowering, they’ve got options. Thank god for the Internet.

Eliot sits against the headboard, and Quentin kneels facing him, hovering over a dildo, reaching behind himself to hold the base steady while he moves his hips in slow small circles that rub his hole against the silicone head. His mouth opening: that panting pink inside that Eliot wants to hook his fingers in. But he can’t. Eliot can only look, and look, and look. It’s almost a luxury, to gaze at Quentin like this, paying him the devoted attention of his eyes only, barred from showing his devotion with his hands and body. He isn’t allowed to touch, not until Quentin’s got it inside him.

He can see the moment where the head pops inside. In Quentin’s tightly budded nipples and the eager jump of his straining cock. The ripple of his stomach as it moves. His little pleased laugh chased away by a moan. Eliot, stroking himself slowly, moans, and Quentin, eyes closed, lost to some inner vision, listening to his own body’s signals, moans too, babbles: “God, El, are you—are you touching yourself? I bet you look so good...”

“I am,” Eliot laughs. “I am, Q. You’re so gorgeous, I can’t stand it—”

Quentin shakes his head quickly, instinctively. Freezes up, stops the slow rock of his hips down onto the cock in him, because he’s been reminded of Eliot’s eyes on him. Of course the idea of someone looking at him and finding him beautiful gets Quentin hot with shame and desire, but he needs to be a little further in for it to work. That’s OK. Eliot’s got nothing but time.

“OK, tell me what you think I look like then. Or look at me, you can look at me—”

“I really can’t, so. Um. God, your cock. It’s so big—”

“Uh huh.” Eliot can hear his own grin.

“Shut up. God, it’s so big, but your hand—your fucking hand is somehow the perfect size. The way it looks, with your hand wrapped around that big perfect dick, when you—when you play with the head, are you—”

“Yeah,” Eliot lies. He had been, but now he’s pumping at himself, desperate.

Quentin isn’t teasing anymore either. Eliot darts his eyes from his face, where he’s biting his lip and laughing, down to where he’s gotten half of the toy inside him, where he’s already drawing up off it and screwing back down, trying to fuck himself.

“All the way,” Eliot whips out, stern. “Take it all the way, baby, I know you can, and then I can touch you.”

A look of determination crosses Quentin’s face. His chest moving as he inhales, and his hands flying out to grip Eliot’s thighs as an anchor, and finally, finally, the entire dildo is sheathed inside Quentin’s body.

“Oh, God.”

“Oh my God.”

“El, please.”

Quentin uses Eliot’s thighs as leverage and fucks himself, drawing laughing, happy groans from his own throat, and Eliot touches him. Pets his fingers down his shivering throat. Drops kisses across his cheek, his forehead, over his shoulders. Bites at his nipples.

Quentin’s moans have started to change. His cock is red and weeping precome, his balls drawn tight, as he almost bounces on the toy. “I want to come, I want to come so bad, can you—”

Eliot is so proud of him. He’s going to make him come, his favorite way to come, with a dick in him, he’s going to—

The idea strikes like lightning. “Wait. Don’t.” Quentin stills, whimpering. “Hold on just a minute longer, baby. That’s it. Good boy. Can I take some pictures of you, like this? You’re so gorgeous like this, please, just for me—”

“Yes,” Quentin's voice is low, fervent. A full-body shudder rocks him. Eliot gets out his iPhone, not the best quality, but whatever, and with fumbling hands and artless angles starts to snap pictures. Quentin from the front with his hard cock and bitten-red nipples. From the back, Eliot instructing him to “Put your hands on the headboard, fuck yourself, that’s it, perfect,” and then Eliot makes a ten-second video of the dildo stretching Quentin’s hole and all but the flared base disappearing inside him as Quentin shouts, spasms.

Finally Eliot’s hands are shaking too hard to take any more and the sounds from Quentin’s mouth are desperate and so he throws the phone down on the bed and reaches around to get Quentin’s dick in his hand and jerks him once, twice, before he’s coming, pushing into Eliot’s fist, pulling back against Eliot’s chest.

Quentin slumps forward on his stomach, and Eliot carefully eases the dildo out, but Quentin says, one final time that night, “Please,” and Eliot knows. He never wants to hurt Quentin again but sometimes Quentin likes it to hurt a little, and with one hand Eliot teases at him where he’s hot and loose and sore until tears are leaking out of Quentin’s eyes where they’re still tightly closed and with the other he fucks his own fist until his orgasm nearly doubles him in half and he comes all over Quentin’s ass, where soon Quentin will be wet and sorer and leaking from Eliot.

*

“You—what? You can’t write a book about that.”

Quentin is so cute when he finds himself flummoxed by Eliot. That wrinkle right between his brows. The way his face moves into position several moments in advance, ripe with anticipation of the eye-roll he’ll inevitably be unable to stop himself from making. Eliot can’t stand it. He drapes himself over Quentin’s back and kisses at his ears until he giggles.

“Sure I can. ‘One fine weekend morning in June, Eliot Waugh decided to engage in some light sodomy with his boyfriend—’”

“Nothing light about it,” Quentin says. “So, like. Erotica.”

“No, this is a very serious work of literature I’m contemplating.”

“OK, then it can’t be about fucking. I mean, yes, the fucking is the book’s content, but it’s like, it has to be about something more than just sex. Like with Fillory, the books aren’t actually about British schoolchildren ruling a fantasy kingdom they find in a clock.”

“I have to say, if that’s the case, you have done a simply catastrophic job of communicating this,” Eliot says, relinquishing his turtle-shell hold on Quentin’s back and sliding to his side of the bed so he can look Quentin in his pretty eyes.

There’s the eye-roll. Quentin’s face relaxes again, relishing the interval of rest.

“I mean, that’s what happens in the books. But it isn’t what they’re about.”

“What are they about, Mr. English Major?”

“It doesn’t take a degree to see they’re about—childhood, and leaving behind innocence—which is really, you know, troubling now, considering—well. And like, the trauma of the World Wars, and, and a bunch of stuff. So. What would the book be about?”

“What would be the themes of a book about me fucking you?”

“Mhm,” Quentin’s eyes drifting. As lethargic and self-satisfied as a cat, and Eliot not presenting enough entertainment to entice him to stay awake. Quentin, alive, sleepy in the sunlight. Eliot’s throat is tight.

“I’ll have to write it. And you’ll have to read it. And then you tell me.”

“Sure.” Yawning.

“Of course I’m never going to write a book.”

“No?”

“No.” Eliot moves in, kisses the lazy curl of Quentin’s amusement. Rolling him over on his back and kissing him awake. Kissing a smile into his mouth. Kissing him wide-eyed and interested. “No, I’m busy.”