Archive of Our Own

Eliot has always felt safe in the attic. The ceiling is low and it’s hard for adults to stand up here. There is a single window from which he can see the western soybean field but that the afternoon sun makes it hard to see into. It’s safe, here. Even if his father could find him— if he should look up to the window like he so often looked toward God or if he could remember that Eliot has learned to scoot a chair underneath the pull to reveal the collapsing ladder and also learned to push the chair back so as not to leave breadcrumbs for his father to follow— he wouldn’t be able to stand.

The floors are wooden which Eliot likes because the rest of the house is full of carpet. The carpet of course is nice in the winter, but in the summer it feels like walking through dead grass. His feet are always cold and carpet doesn’t seem to help. Yet in the attic the air and the floors are warm. The creak of his movements is easily mistaken for the clank of a radiator, too. No one ever suspects that he is up here. They will all search for him briefly in the basement or in the barn if they’re feeling ambitious but they will not suspect that little Eliot has found his way into the tallest part of the house.

He wonders about the last time he was up here. It feels like it must be ages ago. Eliot is almost grown, now, by his own standards.

When Eliot was small he snuck up a quilt up to the attic. It was the one his grandmother had made for his great-grandmother, or so his own mother had said. It had once been red and had faded and torn because, he learned, red dye is very acidic. Like cherries in spring. The edges were worn, too, and the batting was loose in many places, and despite his mother’s many promises to mend it she had never quite found the time. So he had not felt too guilty when he took it upstairs to make it his wartime pallet.

He sits now curled in that quilt, looking out of the western window into the bright sky. It’s almost white with summer sun, that’s how bright it is. If there are clouds he can’t see them because the sun has lit the blue to hazy white like a purification. If the early autumn wind is blowing them by, he can’t tell. The fields below are cut short and fallow from the recent harvest and will not tell on the wind. Time is going by without him. It’s a comforting thought. He could sit here forever. Maybe he’ll emerge in the rapture, he thinks. Maybe the next time he steps down the ladder he won’t have to be careful because they’ll all be gone and his adolescent unbelief will have at last freed him into the world.

Below him he can hear his father’s pacing. His footsteps are heavy with all six feet of him, with his farm-raised muscles and milk-fed bones and his big flat feet against the carpet which dampens but does not deafen his rage. Eliot’s brothers have all fled from the house, out with their girlfriends or else making themselves plausibly deniable. Their mother’s voice trails quietly behind their father’s footsteps like a late harmony and Eliot listens for warning signs. For the minor key. For now he hears only her voice that follows her husband’s clanging cymbals like an agitated triangle. For now that is safe.

He keeps a coloring book up here, too. He is too old— I am grown, he thinks— for them now but when he was eight years old his mother had purchased him a unicorn coloring book which had blessedly come with a blue cover and intricate enough designs that it had been defensible. Plus it wasn’t only horses, it had narwhals and some rhinoceroses and a few other horned animals which might defend its masculinity. What was most important though was its detail. In the last five years he had only managed to fill in half of it with his increasingly worn crayons.

That’s what he’s doing now. He has colored the magenta and the forest green down at least halfway; they are his favorites, even now, even at fifteen, he can admit that. He longs for richness, for something soft. These colors seem to him like the sorts of things that kings would make into pillows, or else lavish robes that would flow over the arms of their jewel-encrusted thrones. So he colors a big bear lush green and the mane of its equine companion a flowing pink, carefully tracing the insides of the delicate black lines with darker pigment. That’s how teenagers color, he imagined when he was small. And now he is a teenager and it’s how he colors while he hides in the attic from his father who is angry at everyone but himself. Or perhaps himself most of all, though of course he would never ever admit it.

When Eliot is done coloring he pulls the quilt tight around his shoulders. It feels good and he pulls it tighter, imagines being small, even smaller than he is now— Coach Estes says he’ll be hitting a growth spurt any day now, look at how tall your brothers are— and the strong arms of a parent around him. It’s abstract. His mother is hardly a hugger and his father certainly isn’t. It all takes on a Picasso-like quality: their limbs are all misshapen, their noses out of place. He tries to imagine what it must be like to feel his father’s hands sure on his shoulders, not digging his thumbs into the divots beneath Eliot’s unmanly collarbones, so delicate and obvious they might as well be a lace collar or a leather choker. His father might say, Good job, kiddo, and ruffle his hair. The image is so absurd that Eliot almost laughs.

Imagining his mother yields similar results— he can remember her affection when he was very small, but it feels far away, like she hugged a cardboard cutout of him, or perhaps a version of him wrapped in amber. Since he has grown it has been made clear that he is not to ask for touch and that no one is to give it. Not like his mother used to, anyway. He can only punch his brothers and his brothers can knock him to the ground with his arms pinned behind his back until he cries uncle or just cries.

Eliot is fifteen years old. He thinks about what happened with Taylor and he wonders if that was the death knell of his affection. Probably it was, like a rite of passage. Like all rites it had an air of mysticism and secret violence and was just as unknowable as the manhood his father keeps threatening that he’ll grow into. Or else it had been the first real affection he had ever expressed.

He and Taylor are friends now. He doesn’t know how that happened but he is not a little afraid that he will only come to love through anger.

He thinks, I’ll never hurt anyone again. When I grow up I’ll hug all of my friends all the time. No one will stop me. He thinks he’ll have years of pent up need by then, his skin almost turned to reptile scales for lack of touch. His blood turned cold and only warmed under the sunlight of the people he does not yet know.

Another thought— how good it will feel to share a bed with someone. He tucks his elbow beneath his head and leans against the wooden wall, imagining that the worn quilt is a worn shirt stretched softly over a man’s chest. Desire is not new to him exactly. Puberty pulled back the curtains on his want a year ago or more. The urge to touch with his hands and his mouth and to have hands and mouths on his body. His sense of difference at last given a name, the names his brothers called him taking on a new level of cruelty and certainty. The way his father looked at him, with shame, with disgust— with anger— suddenly making sense.

Up until he first called himself homosexual he thought that there was something wrong with him. Something deep and rotten like an apple left too long in the cellar. For as long as he could remember he'd had the sense that he was different from other people and could not name why. A difference that was by its very nature exclusionary, because small towns like his had but one or two in-groups and to be different from either was to remain on the outside forever, pressing his face against the glass of an aquarium like a child hoping to develop gills.

And then, the first pangs of desire. Of stripping his shirt next to another boy before football tryouts for which his skinny body with its limbs like clothesline stretched between new branches was not yet and would never be prepared; of indulgently letting his gaze linger low at the waist of some model on a mall advertisement on a rare trip to Indianapolis in December and realizing with a fascinated curiosity that this was perhaps what other boys meant when they talked about tits, that perhaps it was not what Eliot understood to be aesthetic appreciation because of course tits were beautiful, but perhaps it was something— different.

Briefly, in the weeks that followed this realization, he felt a burning sense of shame deep in his chest; it was not much better than damnation. What happens to homosexuals in hell and in the middle of nowhere, Indiana are really one and the same.

But by then Eliot had already survived a decade of damnation; what was one more thing to add to the list? And so the feeling realized and the name put on the feeling— it ultimately became a relief. A thing he could hold and make his own. Hoping that out there in the world there were boys like him, who might even want to touch him the way he wanted to touch them. He thinks of Taylor again and winces. He didn’t mean to— it wasn’t like that, he tells himself, drawing his hands up around his shoulders and nuzzling into the quilt. Taylor is his most cherished friend and he loves him and he's not afraid to say that but still it ratchets his shame when he is alone.

In the attic he has always felt safe. Here he can call his desire what he wished it had been, that moment in which it had first struck him with the resonant force of a church bell, and what it is now: a comfort like salvation, even though he can barely stand to go to service anymore.

So now in the attic he lets his mind drift. He imagines being 18, 19, 20— those years so near that nevertheless feel an epoch away, a life visible in various fossil records with no connection to his own in the riverbed. He’ll have roommates in some place like LA or New York or even Chicago; he’ll stay out late and bring boys home and learn what it feels like not to hide. Images of bodies, imaginary and drawn from magazines in the checkout aisle at Kroger, from the locker room at school. He sighs, pressing his face against the quilt. He knows, somehow, that it’s out there for him. Comfort and sex and affection and most of all: a life. A life without fear and a life without shame. He has not yet lost the ability to see a future in which he exists.

Outside the sun is sinking. Across the field, he hears the tornado siren blare. He thinks it must be Friday, then, even though it’s too late in the day. They’d never test the siren at dinnertime.

The siren fades and Eliot forgets. The sun relaxes into the horizon, heavy like ripe fruit. A peach in late June. Eliot shakes his head and blinks hard as if to wake. His eyelids droop. He hasn't fallen asleep in the attic since he was very small and he thinks— This shouldn’t be happening, but it is, and a brief flare of panic burns in his chest. For one lightning strike moment, he bolts upright, fear and terror and the knowledge that something is wrong sending his muscles tense and ready to flee.

But he finds that his exhaustion is inexorable. He feels like Neptune, something made for the bottom of the lakes that dot the plains of his home state. Heavy and ready to sink and return to where he belongs. To cause waves but to be subdued. Or, if he’s bold— maybe Jupiter. Enormous and strong and with a huge storm brewing inside me.

Jupiter wasn’t a younger brother. Still he feels the storm in his belly.

Then he is asleep and nothing else matters. He doesn’t dream; instead he sleeps the deep exhausted sleep of a child. His limbs even in unconsciousness are heavy with rest, and it’s contentment that seeps through his bones as he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

He wakes with a start. It’s dark outside now, an unnatural, deep black sky. He is supposed to be looking for something. There was a man, there was a man, and he said, with a voice weak but unwavering, he said, Eliot, you have to keep moving, you have—

It’s then that he realizes that there are no stars. Just darkness as far as he can see, curving onto the horizon and invading it, too. Like locusts, he thinks. Like a plague.

Below the sounds of his father’s footsteps are audible again, their muffled timpani sounds transformed into heavy bass drum thuds. Eliot knows that sound; it means that he’s drunk, even more than before. It means that he's closer. And he has come up the stairs while Eliot slept. The plod of his farm-grown feet grows damp as he searches in the rooms below, every step like he is ruining a pile of perfectly raked leaves set to protect the saplings for winter. The weight of him is immense.

Eliot stands up and finds that he is older than he remembered. His body is tall like Coach Estes promised and he realizes with a start that his hair is curly like his mother predicted and falls into his eyes like his father would never allow. For a long moment he panics, searching around him, his neck crooked against the ceiling. He shouldn’t be here, he knows that, and yet he is. He recognizes the knots in the beams of the attic; the red quilt smells the same, permanently musky and like faded perfume. He would recognize it anywhere.

Eliot is in the attic of his childhood home and he has to get out.

From what sounds like far away, he hears his own name— ELIOT!— bellowing like a storm. The lightning flash of the L and the thunderclap of the T reverberates down his spine and he counts the seconds between footfalls. His father’s voice is loud and deep below the floorboards of the attic. Eliot doesn’t move. The knob of his spine presses against the roof but he knows with unmistakable certainty that if he takes a step his father will hear him.

When he was eighteen he left and he was taller than his father then but still he is sick with fear. He is— he is twenty-seven or twenty-eight, he thinks, and his father is only a memory but he is here and alive and he is yelling Eliot’s name and Eliot thinks he might vomit half with terror and half with the anger that he is not more angry. He is so afraid. He has to get out. In this house there are only loud voices and split lips and black eyes and years and years worth of mumbled apologies that break the following silence like a bone. He can’t remember how he came to be here.

There is only one way out: the small window on the north side. The drop is probably twenty feet, maybe more. Maybe a little less. His fingernails scrape against the flaking lead paint which pushes into the beds of his nails like splinters as he pries at the pane. That someone must have painted over this window to seal it shut feels like nothing less than an omen. A threat. Pain shoots up into his knuckles and at last he wrenches the window open and when he does the air outside smells exactly like the first rain of the year, sweet and soil-scented, humid and cool. He inhales deeply and thinks of green buds on trees, of daylilies bursting through the mud.

Below, Eliot hears the ladder to the attic creak with regret as his father pulls it down. The sound is shrill and horrible and nevertheless he thinks— he thinks it is apologizing to him. One last tender word from a friend.

And then he jumps.

On light feet he runs across the fields. The grass is wet and the dew soaks through his socks and it’s soft as summer, so soft he almost wishes he could stop. Unbidden: the memory of a Cub Scout picnic, the memory of fireflies warm and soft like little futures all across the horizon. He wants to stop but he knows he can’t even though it might be safe, here in the grass, this lawn where he tossed baseballs with his brothers when he was still very small.

With a burst of coiled energy he runs into tall papery cornstalks and he’s confused because they haven’t grown corn in years, not out in the west fields, these have been soy since he was at least eight years old. He remembers his father’s grumbling and how that May he had even stayed home a few days from school to help with the planting. Never will he forget the humid smell of motor oil or the way his father had seemed so angry, how his brothers and he were quiet. They hadn’t said one cruel thing to him.

Behind him, his father is crushing through the fields. He hears the stalks snap like cracking knuckles and the acrid taste of fear fills his mouth. It grows louder, sharper; it sounds like the destruction of a thresher, the full weight of that begrudging machine breaking the stalks and leaving their unready grain to rot in the dirt.

Eliot realizes with a cold rush in his chest that whatever is making those sounds is too big to be his father.

Beneath the mechanical sound is something worse, something shrill and piercing and like the tornado siren that Eliot knows now was not a siren. Whatever it was has been coming for him for a very long time. And it’s close. It’s so close and Eliot can hear its rustling feathers and smell the rotten stench of meat.

He keeps running. The corn is bright green and even though he’s well over six feet tall it seems to arc impossibly above his head, as if the farm would deny him his own adulthood. The fibers scratch at his bare arms and he tries to remember where he left his shoes but it doesn’t matter, because there is nothing to do but run through the darkness.

At last he is borne from the field and there, across the clearing, a parking lot: a church. The church. Red bricked with mildew streaks from every window. Even from out here he can smell the rot of that place. He imagines its insides, the wood and the dank of it. Outside the lampposts are willowy with thin roots, swaying in the breeze. The church is like a cave, he thinks. Roots have been growing through the pipes for years.

But he doesn’t have a choice. He sprints toward the sanctuary and his muscles burn now but he can hear behind that whatever chases him has found footing on the asphalt, the click of claws and the heaving breath of a mammal. His chest aches and he wishes for his childhood inhaler and he can see on the side of the building a cellar door that reminds him absurdly of The Wizard of Oz. For half a second he allows himself to breathe. He clutches his chest and wills his lungs to open.

Then, the footsteps slow. They are deliberate. A predator stalking, he realizes. Like a good prey animal Eliot doesn’t think anymore; he lets his long legs carry him to the cellar, to safety. Without thinking he rolls his fingers and the joint in his small finger aches as it pops and the lock of the chain is broken and he is throwing open the doors and he doesn’t see the thing descending on him before he slams the door shut and throws a web of light across it.

Safe inside the cellar he marvels at himself. At his lungs for breathing, at his legs for running. And at his hands— at his hands for whatever it is that they have done.

How did I know how to do that? he thinks. How am I alive?

It’s a question he has never stopped asking.

He takes a moment to collect himself. The fluorescent parking lot has blinded him like a moth and slowly the cellar comes into focus, the half rotted beams and the traces of mice, their scrabbling feet in the dark.

He makes his way out of the cellar with its low ceiling, its cobwebs and its mildew, and into the basement. Most of it was finished in the 1970s, he’s fairly sure. Wood paneling and white vinyl tiles, peeling at the corners in defiance of the glue applied by the pastor’s wife. In the basement there are chairs arranged in a circle— for Bible study, he realizes. Or else the men’s group that meets Tuesdays or the women’s group that meets Thursdays. It’s never occurred to him to wonder why they meet separately but now inexplicably as an adult, haunting this place like a ghost, he wonders. Were they even studying the scriptures at all? Were the groups just a place for men to smoke indoors and laugh at their wives, while the women sipped lukewarm coffee and complained about their husbands?

Or did perhaps they study scripture too deeply, such that each group had their own secrets? Either possibility seems equally likely to Eliot, who left before he was old enough to attend.

He did go to youth group here, though. Across the flimsy floor he hears echoes of Sophie Tollefson earnestly recounting a chapter of The Purpose Driven Life, and Logan Schroeder’s insistence that they ought to interpret the Bible themselves. He wonders why they don’t appear in front of him, like his father so readily had. Their voices are almost audible, their insistence and their youth and their sneers pushing waves through the sounds like pulses in water. He shakes his head. He carries on.

The stairs to the main level are down a long, lightless hall. Eliot gropes blindly in the dark. He raises his foot where he remembers the first step being and thinks, Is this faith? For a small eternity he lets his foot hover above where he believes the step will be. He thinks of the countless times he’s run up these stairs. He thinks of his small feet on the steps and in these halls and he remembers another boy who looks like him but doesn’t but does and it’s strange, so strange. He doesn’t know who the boy is but his chest swells around his heart, pushing it into his throat until he’s gasping for air.

He has to keep moving. He pushes his heart back into his chest. His foot lands firm and sure on the step.

Slowly, he ascends. He takes care on the third step, always known to whine, and keeps his hands on the railings on either side of the stairwell. It’s an essential part of being quiet, levying his weight onto his arms and into the walls, and being quiet is essential. Above him, at the end of the well, he can see the door to the main level which leads to the back of the nave. Its frame glows like a halo. Sharp and holy and entrancing.

A sense of awe fills him as he steps toward it. The doorknob turns, sticking and digging into his palm. Welcoming Eliot like it always has— with no little resistance.

Still it opens, however unwelcome its greeting.

Inside the nave is small and old but Eliot never thinks of it as anything but shining. The pews are oiled each summer, the scratches in their oak filled in with oil on stained rags. Every March the whole thing smells like turpentine with the stain and the bleach they use in the grout to ready for Easter. It burns his nostrils and he loves it, the smell of new things. Renewal sharp as spring.

Eliot is seven years old and he loves many things: the magenta crayon in his 64-crayon set with a sharpener on the back. The cinnamon rolls his mother makes from a can on the last Saturday of a month, their special orange icing just for Eliot, his mother promises, since none of his brothers like the tang of it. He loves the goats born this last spring and has named them fantastical things: Cordelia, Tatiana, Mrs. Cuthbert. For the last year his mother has read him Anne of Green Gables each Saturday while his brothers and his father haul hay and castrate pigs and do all manner of adult farm things. He doesn't like to read on his own but he loves his mother's voice and the way she pronounces things with midwestern precision, her hard Ts and perfectly spherical Os— he could practically learn geometry from her speech alone. Soon he will be expected to join the men, but for now he sits on the floor and listens, admiring the blonde hair that crests over her finely veined feet.

He loves too the felted stories that line his Sunday school classroom. He loves Jonah's whale and Daniel’s lion and all of the other animals he can never remember, the cows and the doves and the lambs. This Sunday they are learning about the Book of Isaiah and he is admiring the clean bright yellow wool of the lion. He thinks of its sharp teeth and its soft mane, ruffed in regal profile, and the teacher chides him to pay attention. He snaps his gaze toward her as she approaches his desk. He feels very small.

The teacher grabs his wrist and he remembers suddenly: this has happened before. He knows her low dark ponytail and her pale skin which is wrinkled like the crepe paper at his birthday party at her eyes and around her knuckles. He knows her— Mrs. Knapp. Not Ms. and certainly not Miss. Mrs. Miss-us. Her place in the hierarchy of things unquestionable and immutable as God Himself.

Eliot clicks his tongue against the roof of his closed mouth in recognition. And around his wrist her fingers are tight and it hurts and her fierce expression pushes toward him with the deliberate slowness of an aquatic predator, teeth showing, eyes black, her nails digging harder and harder into his skin. Even at this age he knows that the worst thing he can do is cry, so he doesn’t.

Her voice is shining as steel when she says, "Nothing holy rests in God's left hand."

Eliot stares at her for a moment. His wrist aches beneath the pressure of her fingernails. He drops the small nub of a pencil he holds and watches as it rolls onto the floor. Unthinking he turns away even though he knows it will bring her anger. He can’t stand to look at her and he turns his eyes instead toward the tapestry on the far wall. He longs for the soft paws of the bear and the big simple wings of the dove with her three feathers. He wants to see the lion that reminds him of Mufasa, a father that does not remind him of his own for reasons he cannot yet explain.

Eliot scans the horizon of the banners and he feels a leaping terror in his throat. The lion has moved. It has turned to face him. Mrs. Knapp gives his wrist one last punishing squeeze, a warning, a promise, and makes her way back to the front of the room.

It goes on like this for a while. Mrs. Knapp with her low ponytail and her long blue skirt talks at the front of the class. Eliot thinks she is saying something but what, he isn’t sure. Each word seems to flow from her and into him and back out into the world without ever finding a definition. He underlines the correct words to complete a verse on the page, and nothing sticks. Mostly he watches the lion.

When he next looks toward the front of the room, Mrs. Knapp is looking at him with strange kindness. Gone are her narrow eyes and scowling mouth; instead she cocks her head and furrows her brow, like she’s seen something she can’t explain, something about which she is concerned. Urgently, she says, "Eliot, you have to find it."

There were other children in the room before, Eliot realizes. But he looks around and it is just him and rows of empty desks. Him and the lion. Him and Mrs. Knapp.

"Mrs. Knapp? What do I have to find?"

She shakes her head. "The door. There’s a way out of here but you have to find it. You can’t run forever."

Something shifts inside of Eliot, then. A recognition and an obfuscation. He feels a drop of sweat drip down his temple. "Who are you?"

"You don’t remember?"

Eliot shakes his head. Ms. Knapp frowns and her brow furrows more deeply.

"Oh. How odd. I’m—"

Before Mrs. Knapp who is not Mrs. Knapp can speak, the lion roars. It is abrupt. Thunderous. With the clarity of childhood Eliot understands that it’s time to run. He almost thinks to apologize to her for his sudden departure but there’s no time, because the lion has peeled away from his felt and he is large, huge and roaring behind Eliot as he stands. The lion’s big sharp teeth are not soft anymore as he opens his mouth to make a ferocious sound; they are yellow and shining with spit and his breath is hot on Eliot’s back as he knocks over his desk and makes for the door.

His bones ache and his muscles burn suddenly with the ferocity of adulthood. His knees hurt and his ankles hurt and he wants to lie down in a grassy field and watch the cottonwood seeds drift overhead in late May like the smallest angels, to feel the warm breeze ghost over his naked knees and stretch into it as if toward a lover.

But he has to keep running until he is safe. There is no other way, no other path. And so he runs down the hall, his hand-me-down sneakered feet squeaking and leaving black marks along the linoleum. He runs until he comes back to the nave with its PineSol smells and he runs until he hits the door to the basement, his full body weight thrown behind his shoulder so that it breaks the the door off the hinges and now his fucking shoulder— it fucking hurts, God, when will it end? When does the pain stop? He can’t close the door behind him now and so he scrambles down the stairs. If he escaped into the basement certainly he can escape from it; there has to be a way out.

Behind him, the lion’s long claws clip gently against the stone floor like the high heels of the pastor’s wife. They are just as threatening. He takes a deep breath of cobwebbed air and descends.

Down, down, and down. The stairway is longer and the basement is larger than it was before, infinite and labyrinthine and dark, so dark.

At the bottom of the stairs he waits, just for a moment. He listens and he waits like he has learned to do.

Then, above him. In the nave. He looks up and he can see the planks that support the tile. The dust that shifts from them with each step of the thing above.

Above, a pause. He runs.

Eliot’s eyes with their new adult nearsightedness and their incipient astigmatism and what he knows, eventually, will be a debilitating night blindness, a thing which is in him and yet not come to its worst but maybe that isn’t the worst, really, if it means he lives long enough to see it—but it doesn't matter. These eyes he has now can hardly see a thing.

Even as he runs he laughs at himself and he shakes his head in self-serious shame. He runs down the stairs and he laughs, hysterical now, sucking in breath harder and harder until it feels like his lungs might collapse with the effort. Somehow the thing always knows which way he'll choose, its pounding steps never far behind.

He remembers the way he came and yet it cannot help him. First: down a long corridor. Second: bank right. Third: bank left. Do it again and again, he tells himself, until there is nowhere left to turn.

When his lungs burn and his feet are almost flat with effort he stops. He has to, now. He cannot run anymore.

He realizes then that the lion’s footfalls have grown quiet. The moment is long.

Then, the screeching starts. The sound from the cornfield.

Suddenly there is a hand and it is on his shoulder and it is gripping hard like fingers all the way to the bone and he is— on the ground, now, a door slamming shut behind him. A voice says, "Close your eyes, Eliot. You're not a child anymore. Imagine you’re not a child."

Deep breath. Deep breath. Inhale, exhale. Eyes shut, cheeks tense with the force of it. Eliot does his best to follow instructions. His chest heaves and it hurts but it slows. There are hands around his shoulders, on his ribs. Checking for injury, he realizes. He thinks, I'm an adult, I'm grown. That little boy in the church is not me anymore. He tries to remember who he became after, the scrapes and the bruises and the broken nose, the cornfields and the noise of his brothers fighting with his father and the smell of his mother's pot roast the last Easter before he left.

He left. He remembers, now. The crushing weight of a lifetime. He remembers the bus before sunrise, how surprised he was to find that New York was nothing so cold as Indiana. He remembers the couches and the crashing and the thrill of becoming who he'd promised himself he'd be, the joy of fucking in his twin-sized bed in his closet-sized room, the exhaustion and the hangovers and the tired faces of the nurses who administered him an IV or two after pumping his stomach. He remembers learning to pour beer that he never drank from a tap and to peel a perfect orange twist and that day he had stumbled into a vast sea of green and spent fully twelve hours so delighted with the power of his hallucination that it was almost crushing to realize that the luck that suffused his childhood, how when his father threw a cabinetful of dishes, one by one, at his mother, increasingly enraged as not one managed to hit her— that it might not have been luck at all.

When he remembers Margo's sharp warm eyes and Quentin's wry curling mouth he falls forward onto his palms and retches.

Then, next to him crouches the man who he now sees wears renaissance faire brocade, his shoulders darkly backlit and pointed like wings. The absurdity of it makes Eliot laugh again and he shakes his head as his breathing slowly evens. He spits bile onto the ground and sits back against the basement wall, cold and damp even through his shirt and vest.

"I'm sorry," the man says. "I shouldn't have sent you out alone."

"It's okay," Eliot says automatically. "Charlton," the name heavy on his tongue with memory, "don’t worry about it."

Charlton nods and slides down against the wall to sit beside him.

"Where have you been?"

Eliot shakes his head, brow furrowed, frowns. "I was in the attic of my parents' house," he recalls. "I didn't understand why I was there. I felt like a teenager— I didn't remember where I was. That it wasn't real."

Charlton shrugs. He looks thoughtful but unconcerned. It's strangely comforting to Eliot, to see the face of someone approaching such absurdity with such calm.

"And then? This place?"

"This place," Eliot agrees. "My church."

Charlton studies him as if his face holds a key. Eliot fights the urge to look away; there’s no use hiding in his own head more than he already has. "Do these memories have anything in common? Is there anything that connects them?"

Eliot shakes his head. He tries to remember how he felt in the attic, in the church. In those dark and comforting places where he had sought solace, once as a child and once as less of a child. These places that were nevertheless haunted by the ghosts of everything he used to be. By everything that happened.

He squeezes his eyes shut. "They're— moments I felt safe, I think. Places I felt safe. Does that— does it make sense? When you were small, did you ever hide? Were there places that made you feel safe?"

"I think so," Charlton says and tilts his head like a bird. An oversized, ridiculous bird with his thick-stitched wings. "I used to hunt for tadpoles in the pond beyond the astilbe meadow when I wanted to be alone. It was peaceful there. I liked how quiet it was when my aunts and uncles and all of my cousins would come visit for the Rite of Spring—"

Eliot laughs and pats Charlton gently on one cheek. "Yeah. Like that."

Charlton doesn’t seem offended by Eliot’s lapse into condescension; their fondness seems to have become mutual, Eliot realizes. A recognition of each other’s absurdity, their idiosyncrasies. It’s a good quality in a friend.

"I think that makes perfect sense," Charlton says. "Your mind is trying to protect you from the Monster. Why wouldn’t it seek out all the other places you’ve felt safe in chaos?"

Eliot feels his face tighten. "I suppose. But what about the door? How am I supposed to find a door out of here when I keep hiding myself from myself? And what about those things— that thing that’s been chasing me? What the fuck is it?"

"To the best of my knowledge, it’s the former hosts. All of the people that the Monster has consumed in its long life, caught over and over again like my tadpoles. Except they’re taken over by the thing itself and I think that you'll be one of them, too. If they catch you. As will I."

Eliot shudders. His stomach clenches with fear. He has lost too much of himself already. "Well, let’s not let that happen then."

"I agree," Charlton says. "In fact— I think we should go back to your Happy Place, at least for a while. You should rest."

Eliot nods. "Is it safe?" he says, tilting his chin toward the door.

"It’s up to you, remember? Open the door and go home. You always have the door back to your safe place."

"Brakebills isn’t— nevermind." Eliot squeezes Charlton’s shoulder companionably in apology as he levers himself up onto his own tired legs. Steeling himself, he reaches for the door, half-tempted to test it with the back of his hand like he learned as a child, as if what lies outside is simply a fire raging.

But sometimes things are as simple as they seem. When Eliot opens the door, the basement is gone, its decaying linoleum replaced with warm wood floors, dusty moonlight in place of its mildew. The smells of old books and worn upholstery fill his senses and he can’t help it: he smiles. He really was so happy here.

When Quentin emerges from the kitchen holding a bottle of wine, Eliot feels a wave of drunkenness wash over him. Slippery slidey drunkenness, a child on a waterslide, all the way down, down, down, until you crash into a pool where maybe you’ll lose your trunks or break your neck but probably you’ll be just fine. Eliot laughs with so much force that he pitches forward.

"Whoa, El, you okay? I thought I was in charge of getting the wine," Quentin says and he smiles, close-lipped and broad as his face.

"Yeah, Q," Eliot says. He hopes he’s not slurring too badly. He blushes and laughs again and threads one finger through Quentin’s hair, tugs a little. Quentin smiles and Eliot smiles back and for a moment they are held there, blurry in Eliot’s vision. In the low light Quentin looks— soft, so soft, his sharp edges all but gone, his dimples deep and Eliot wants absurdly to lick them, to taste the thin sweat of the day and the sour of wine on Quentin’s breath which he can smell and see in the purple that stains the dead skin at the insides of Quentin’s lips and he is so stupid and so drunk that he just might, he just might do it, if he pulls Quentin a little closer, if he can keep from embarrassing himself a little longer.

"Oh Christ," comes Margo’s voice. "You two are so fucked. Quentin, help me get this boy to bed, please?" Baffled, Eliot lets Quentin heave him up onto one shoulder. He doesn’t blame Quentin for obeying Margo without question.

And so he lets Margo and Quentin guide him up the stairs. This memory isn’t like the other ones, Eliot marvels. He’s not fully inhabiting it, not anymore. Instead he feels like he’s standing three feet beside himself, watching the scene play out as Margo and Quentin get him into bed and he’s heavy, here, his feet dangling off the edge. It makes him woozy and he realizes that he is really quite drunk and the thought makes him a little miserable, that he will barely get to see his friends before he inevitably wakes up in some other long-forgotten place in his mind. It’s all the worse for the fact that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t remember and what he was simply too drunk to notice. Still there’s nothing to do but let unconsciousness take him, swift as an eddy dragging him under.

When he comes to, he feels a little less drunk. Not much, but enough that before he even opens his eyes he thinks, I hope I’m still with them.

What he notices first is that Margo isn’t kissing Quentin like she usually kisses people. She’s moving differently, still hungry, but there’s a slowness to her lips and her hands as they rake over Quentin’s sides that feels like it means something. Quentin is— well. It’s both a terrible surprise and exactly what Eliot expected, to see him kiss the way he does. He’s urgent and needy and his hips hover decently above Margo’s, like he’s willing himself not to touch her. It’s sweet, really. That Quentin is worried Margo will feel his cock while they drunkenly kiss next to Eliot in his bed.

He shouldn't remember this— he doesn't remember this. It's what he hoped happened. What he wanted to happen. There’s a soft quality to this moment, wine-blurred and exhausted and an ache in his temple pervading it all. But still his body remembers. His stomach drops with unarticulated desire and he wills himself to stay quiet a moment longer, too afraid to jolt Margo and Quentin out of themselves, out of each other.

Then they stand up and it’s an excuse at last for Eliot to stir. It feels safer then. He watches as they strip each other’s clothes and waits for Margo, who faces him, to notice that he’s awake. It gives him another moment to slip into the memory of the person he was and he recalls that it should be old hat for them, bringing a boy home. But when he catches her smile and tries on his wolfish grin she looks at him earnestly, like Be patient, like Be kind. It startles him enough that he can’t say anything as she reaches down to undo Quentin’s belt and Quentin’s own strong unsteady hands unclasp her bra.

It’s when Quentin turns to throw their clothes on the bed that he finally sees Eliot, awake, propped up on his palms and observing them with studied nonchalance. Quentin doesn’t look like he imagined, either. Instead of the startled-deer gaze that Eliot expected, he smiles, a little sheepish, but a smile nevertheless. He pushes his hair behind his ear and he says, "Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you."

Not, Oh, is this weird? Not, You know, your friends having sex in bed next to you while you sleep? Eliot should give him more credit. Should have— is there still time?

Eliot shakes his head. He says, "It’s okay," and feels unfamiliarly dumbfounded. He watches as Margo tilts her head with birdlike curiosity and as Quentin beyond all reason looks at Eliot unflinchingly. Like he can see something he didn’t expect, or maybe that he’d always suspected. For a long moment they all stare at one another like points on the Bermuda Triangle. Eliot understands suddenly that this is the last moment they have. This is the point of crossing over. Mind the gap, he thinks absurdly. Nothing will ever be the same after this.

He’s still dressed and perched on the edge of the bed when Margo moves toward him. So small is she that he doesn’t even need to stand; she slots perfectly between his legs and kisses him hard and familiar. Her mouth is hot and firm against his but there it is again, a gentleness on his tongue like a new language. Or maybe one he learned early and just forgot.

Without question Quentin moves back to allow Margo room and she shows him a brief, grateful smile. Then she takes her place astride Eliot’s hips and he lets himself move slowly, lips over one breast, his tongue firm across her nipple so that she arches into him. His hands span the breadth of her back and he loves it, loves how simultaneously small and enormous he feels with her, how the salt on her skin tastes so essential.

For a while he allows himself to hold her to him, chest to chest, to feel the press and warmth of her body through his shirt. He’s always loved kissing Margo, since the first time, when they’d been strangely sober one morning after a party, cuddled together in the late morning sun. And now is no different, the friendly and intimate exploration of each other’s mouths and bodies, familiar and always novel for the way that Eliot finds himself giving and taking in equal measure.

In truth Eliot is never relaxed during sex. He is not, by nature, a calm person, and sex like so many things in his life has required a certain amount of performance with which to engage. Being himself means nothing. He can be the adoring lover, he can be rough or gentle or fast or slow. But it’s always curated, the act of fucking or making love. He watches for the signs and acts, a call and response in which Eliot is always the echo. With Margo the performance is never one sided. He suspects he’ll always love her for it.

Absently he realizes that Quentin is watching them with none of the mouth-breathing fascination that he might have expected, that a dozen Friday nights have taught him to anticipate. Instead when Eliot opens his eyes and breaks away he sees that Quentin stands just to the left and behind Margo. His gaze is hungry but solicitous, oddly gentle. One hand rests softly on Margo’s shoulder, without pressure or grasp. Just resting. It strikes Eliot less as a gesture of insecurity and more as one of reassurance. As if to remind her that he’s there. That this is okay. That they’re all all right. That they’re all here together.

Almost without thinking Eliot moves his hand from where it cups Margo’s jaw and extends it toward Quentin, palm down. He hopes that Quentin won’t notice his tremor.

The half-second before Quentin accepts it feels like an eternity but when he laces his fingers into Eliot’s it feels like something in him collapses. A long misunderstanding, a lifetime of errors and misapprehension folds in on itself like a paper crane in Eliot’s chest. Something with form and purpose. Something beautiful.

He pulls Quentin toward him and keeps his grasp tight as Margo kisses him briefly once more and rises. In another world, Eliot would like to thank her for this moment— their mutual understanding so deep that later he will wonder if it didn’t belie a latent psychic ability, if only between the two of them.

The next moment stretches on and on in Eliot’s memory and in this iteration he allows himself to savor it: Quentin, mostly naked in front of him, his erection obvious and his chest given to a subtle heave. His mouth open with the slightest hint of awe and sparking the slightest hint of smugness in Eliot’s belly. But still above all else are his eyes and his mouth turned down with his newly recovered emotion, the power of it radiating all through his skin and into Eliot and into Margo while they shine back at him. Upon his newfound vantage point of reflection Eliot thinks that never in his life has he ever imagined something like this. With drunken profundity he wonders if this is what newly formed stars feel like. No one has ever been as bright as us.

Then it’s Quentin between his knees, leaning closer, his head bowed over Eliot’s face like a penitent. A moment pulled into eternity, silence elastic and collapsing in an instant like snapped rope when Eliot looks up and sees Quentin’s hungry gaze. He is even more naked than Eliot realized.

With an urgency with which he never took communion, Eliot opens his mouth and receives him.

It’s easy, then, familiar and simple and known, to put his hands where his hands know to be: the small of Quentin’s back, the nape of his neck. To let his palm slide down the back of one hairy thigh and pull until Quentin shifts forward into Eliot’s lap. This is what Eliot is good at. Territory well known and well-loved. A familiar path on which he has led countless men and a handful of women and one that almost always ends to his satisfaction. The weight of Quentin on him, sure like a stone. Whatever Eliot fears, whatever this means, there is a simplicity to it. He can slip into this place and this role as well as any actor, as well as any foot into a shoe.

So he kisses Quentin again and again. He holds their bodies together and he smiles when Margo reaches between them to grip Quentin’s cock and he laughs when Quentin moans. This is easy. This is what he knows. He watches fondly as Margo, naked now, pulls Quentin toward her, as she moves him onto his back. Margo looks over her shoulder at Eliot one last time and if Eliot weren’t so drunk back then he’d swear that the slight quirk to her mouth all but said, Watch this, before she pulled— is pulling— Quentin’s briefs down so that they are both naked in front of Eliot.

Then, the almost painful bolt of arousal, the heavy feeling of blood rushing as he watches Margo stretch out on top of him. As Quentin of all things spreads his legs and hitches his knees around her waist— it is in truth the thing he remembers most about everything that happened, when this happened. There was no reason for Quentin to do this but he did and it had sent Eliot’s head spinning, then, and it sends him spinning again, now in this place that is not a place. The unexpected wave of delight and hunger at watching Quentin spread his legs for Margo and the way she surges forward to kiss him, like they've done this before.

Eliot almost doesn’t speak. He’s afraid to break the spell. But he has to ask—

"Should I leave?"

He says it and for a moment he truly believes he should. He should stand up and leave, he should keep looking, he should find the next door, the right door. He has to keep going and keep looking and really this one— this memory, this place and this time and this entire life that he wholly lived and only half-remembers— it has to be a waste of time. He was happy here. There were no secrets, no hidden paths through the garden. Nowhere he had to hide.

But then Margo laughs. She laughs! She is between Quentin’s legs and he can see the wet of her cunt, slick and swollen, and beneath that he can see Quentin’s straining cock and now he’s laughing, too, while Eliot sits fully dressed at their feet. He feels ridiculous, embarrassed, even. Enough that his cheeks are hot but that might just be the booze.

Margo’s teeth are white and pointed when she says, "Don’t be stupid, baby," before she turns back to Quentin, one hand notched firmly beneath his knee. He realizes that he can’t see Quentin’s face and he wants to so badly to see what he looks like underneath another person.

He doesn’t remember getting undressed. He’s not sure where he tossed his shirt or his shoes. But he’s naked now, and kneeling behind Margo, reaching for her, one hand on her waist, the other dipping down to press into her, to feel the heat of her and hear her gasp in that familiar way, the way she always does at first touch, and it’s as much performance as it is Margo because if there is anywhere she occupies the stages it’s here, in bed, especially her own.

Pulling away he holds onto her hip, squeezing a little like the start of a question, then dragging the head of his cock between her lips like the final lilt in his request. When she looks over her shoulder, she's smiling, and the way she moans as he presses into her is the answer, her hair sliding over her back as he pulls back once and thrusts.

She’s not looking at him when she says, "Quentin, he feels—"

Eliot can’t let himself listen. He can’t bear to hear Margo tell Quentin what it’s like to fuck Eliot, what he feels like. It’s one step too close to self awareness, one step too close to everything he wants.

The fact is that he hasn’t touched anyone like this since he last held Mike against him and buried his face in his chest, since he last licked the sweat from the notch at his clavicle. He hasn’t kissed anyone, not even Margo, since that night— that night that turned out so heavy with fate that Eliot can hardly think of it without feeling like his chest will collapse, like a dying star, full of its own gravity. He hasn’t fucked anyone since he turned into a black hole.

He feels almost as though he’s floating above it all, above himself. Or beyond that, that he is split into many Eliots. There is the him in the bed, who moves his hips and moans and smiles. That one is familiar and the easiest version, the one who fucks and takes joy in leaving his mind behind, who can subsume thought to feeling and sink under the heavy weight of pleasure. For him this is easy.

There is also the him in his head, who can see Margo’s ass and the way his thumbs dig into her skin, who is avoiding but cannot avoid for long looking over her shoulder and at Quentin’s face— Quentin whose legs are spread and who is hardly being touched but who nevertheless moves with Margo, his mouth open like he’s being fucked into the mattress. Eliot almost hates him for the way he meets his gaze, like he knows what Eliot is thinking, like he knows how guilty Eliot feels about the fact that while he’s fucking Margo he’s thinking about fucking Quentin, which is not— usually, when he and Margo do this, he doesn’t fantasize. He knows what he’ll get and what he won’t and anyway he loves Margo and her body and the way they feel together. He knows where to draw the line. But now, then, Jesus fucking Christ, he was and he is thinking about it, Margo is disappearing and he hates it and he hates himself for it but one small consolation is that he is also disappearing, whoever is fucking Quentin isn’t Eliot because Quentin would never and so whatever is happening is a mess and a mystery and doesn’t matter, because Eliot will be too drunk to remember it all, anyway.

Then there is the him that is him, the one who knows that he shouldn’t remember, that he shouldn’t be here, but nevertheless sits at his center and observes everything with a bewildered sort of detachment. That him, the Eliot now, wants to cry. He has never been more turned on in his life.

Margo yells when she comes. She reaches one hand back to grab Eliot’s ass and steady him while she grinds back against him and he can feel how her cunt pulses and how her ribs reverberate with her pleasure and he’s glad, so terribly, miserably glad that his distraction has not been to her detriment.

His memory is too fucked up for what happens next but he is on top of Quentin, now, where Margo has gone is a mystery until he feels her narrow weight settling on top of his back. His dick presses against Quentin’s and he can feel how Margo drips, relaxed and satisfied, onto his skin. She palms his ass and kisses the very top of his spine before she sits up and lies down beside Quentin, kissing his cheek.

Eliot wants to ask if this is okay. To check that Quentin isn’t disgusted, to make sure that he won’t want to die in the morning. But Quentin has already wrapped his legs around Eliot’s waist and before he realizes what is happening Quentin is surging up to kiss him and pull him flush.

Into Quentin's mouth, Eliot says, "I thought this was easy, when it happened."

"Wasn't it?" A string of spit between their lips.

"Not like I thought."

Moving does come easy after. Their cocks slipping against each other, barely slick and there’s a burn to it that makes them hiss into each other’s mouths. Margo’s lips slip against Eliot’s shoulder, her hand over his back. Beneath him Quentin breathes raggedly and thrusts his hips up toward Eliot, his eyes alternately closed and trained fiercely on Eliot’s own in a way that Eliot can only respond to with a drag of his tongue across Quentin’s neck, with fingers over the head of Quentin’s cock, a hand on his ass in implication— anything to make him close his eyes and open his mouth, for Margo’s fingers or for Eliot’s breath, whichever is closest, whichever is most needed.

Eliot’s memory slips again and he is on his back, Quentin’s mouth hot on his cock, face buried and ass in the air. He’s not sure but from their position he thinks that Margo must be fingering Quentin and the image is so miserably hot that he half comes but stays hard, pushing up into Quentin’s mouth while Margo fucks him on her fingers, and it goes on and on, a technicolor whorl of pleasure that crests and crashes and crests again, a feeling that won’t end and that in his state he is not a little happy to remember at all. Quentin comes on his shin and Eliot watches as Margo guides him through licking Eliot's skin clean, a finger or two still pressed inside. After that he thinks he can't be faulted for forgetting the rest.

The next morning comes to him surprisingly gently, like the summer tide. Warm and easy after a storm. He sees Quentin's pale bright shoulder rising over the horizon of his vision and he thinks, One day, baby, you'll be something so much more grounded. Shoulders like hills of wheat, tanned from planting alien vegetables and from splashing in the creek with your son. With our son.

They're not there, though. Not yet. Right now Eliot is hungover in a familiar way that will only become moreso, a harbinger of known pain. What he deserves, he thinks. Aching bones and an aching head and an inexhaustible exhaustion. Waking up at six a.m. still slightly drunk and closing his eyes against the nausea. The room is so bright. He curls onto his side and tucks his face into Quentin's shoulder to hide.

It's a moment of peace in everything. Between what was and what will never be; between Eliot and himself. He closes his eyes and enjoys the pleasant sensation of sunlight seeping into his dreams.

Warm breath tickles his neck. He shifts to avoid it and for a moment everything is still; even the dust motes seem to rest in the sunbeams that fall over Quentin’s body.

A moment later the heat is back. It’s almost wet, the breath, and stinks, like rotten fruit. Eliot shakes his head and says, "Margo, God, go brush your teeth," before he rolls over onto his back.

The heat of breath grows stronger. It tickles his nose and worse, it’s rank, awful and hot and feverish now. He shakes his head and blinks.

Above him, a creature stares. Its face is hidden in the shadows of its cloak but he can see a faint gleam like a cat’s eyes in the dark, blue green as if it’s not morning around them. This one doesn’t have a beak but instead a— muzzle, almost, a long snout but there are no teeth visible, just an open mouth and hot breath and black or maybe blue or maybe fur of another color entirely, matted and disappearing beneath the ruined fabric of its clothes.

It stares at him and inhales. It doesn’t blink. Terrified, Eliot wonders if the glow in its eyes isn’t like cat’s but maybe more like cataracts, something blinding. Maybe it can’t see him at all.

One clawed hand grasps his jaw. Its nails dig into his flesh and he wants to scream but he can’t, his throat is too tight and he knows no sound will escape. He remembers Charlton in the basement— Close your eyes, you’re not a child— and for a long moment he is too terrified to do so. His throat feels like it’s collapsing on itself and he can feel every thread against his skin, his fingers twitching against the duvet, his back suddenly aching. Worse, he’s paralyzed, no longer able to move his head to see if Quentin or Margo are still beside him; he thinks he can feel the warmth of them but he’s not sure and the creatures, he knows, have a way of destroying everyone else in the room, dissipating them like wisps of smoke.

The creature snaps its toothless jaw as if tasting the air, as if that may help it see. Its fetid breath makes Eliot’s stomach turn and he thinks again, Close your eyes, Eliot. You’re not a child. Shut your eyes, please, fuck, Eliot, shut your fucking eyes. Grow the fuck up.

At last he manages it. He is plunged into darkness again.

When he wakes up he is still hungover but it feels less sharp. The hangover of a twenty-one year old instead of twenty-five, a small gap through which his body's ability to heal will soon slip. Daylight drips over the room, syrupy and sweet. Eliot finds it's not as hard as he expects to get out of bed and go through the routine of morning— of afternoon, almost five— before he sits down on the couch to assess where and when he is.

He's almost twenty-one and he lives alone. It's the last time he ever will and he doesn't technically— he has two roommates who spend most of their time elsewhere, with girlfriends or boyfriends or at school or at work or literally anywhere else. He knows he's alone by the silence of it. Charlene during her rare appearances is always cooking and not cleaning and James is always making inscrutable noises in his room, as if a small walk-in closet is enough space in which to make a racket.

After three years in New York he's begun to apply to colleges; he will never finish an application. While he doesn’t know it yet he also rather does, the increasingly pervasive sense that his time as a student has ended and it doesn’t matter, anyway. When he’s done, he’s done. Right now he works alternate shifts pulling espresso shots and pouring PBR for people a few years older than him, some still roleplaying poverty and others their poor youth and he likes it just fine, the ease and the new strangers and the old faces and all of it absent the expectation that he has to be anything but charming, that he is anything but adored.

He had spent so long feeling guilty about everything he felt and everything he was that by the time he got to New York he refused to feel guilty about anything. He would eat and he would drink and he would fuck his way into oblivion and no one would make him feel guilty about it; he would revel in his appetites and his desires and he would not feel guilty about who he was. Fundamentally he still believes this and knows that he was and is right to do so. But he is tired, he realizes. Everything gets old, eventually.

He can feel it, the familiar itch. The need for change. Not in a righteous way, not like some laughable quest for self-improvement. He's just— a little bored with himself. He’s exhausted with his own hangovers, with the dry skin and the telltale burst blood vessel beneath his right eye and the three grey hairs sprouting at one temple. He can’t remember the last time he woke up feeling good and thinks it might not be the best sign that he’s begun to enjoy the heavy languid feeling of waking up parched and dizzy, of chugging a full glass of water before crawling back into bed to sweat through another two or three hours of fitful sleep. He stopped hooking up with people a few months ago, too, simply tired of the fumbling and the bleary morning afters and maybe he should have realized that that was a clue, that the disintegration of his most treasured desires, the ones he’d spent years cultivating in secret before he’d finally found a place in which he could let them into the sun— that it meant that something else, something poisonous even, had begun to dig into him like a noxious weed.

So tonight he's trying something he hasn't done since he first arrived in New York: he is staying home. It's uncomfortable, like a new shoe. But Eliot needs a change and right now he thinks that might be being alone.

A voice in the back of his head: Did it ever occur to you, how sad you were?

He shakes his head. Whether in answer or to clear the thought, he isn’t sure.

He's hungry, he realizes as his stomach growls. It's Friday night and he is alone and a pot of water is boiling on the stove.

Without thought he goes to the section of the living room that constitutes the kitchen. He finds the pasta in its place in the small pantry and tears it open and watches as it swims into shapelessness in the pot below.

Why this one? he thinks. Why this memory? He turns it over in his hands, in his head. It feels like a Rubik's cube. There's a solution but he can't for the life of him figure it out. He’s not sure a solution would matter, anyway. Nothing has yet.

Two years ago, when he first moved into a place with a bed and left transience behind, Eliot found out that he liked plain spaghetti better than anything his mother had ever made. His mother's sauce had been bland and full of green bell peppers. It had never tasted like enough; never enough salt, never enough sugar. The noodles always sadly limp. The force of sensation, of its nothingness, stands between him and his mother like a ditch. Eventually he learned that if he salted the water enough the resistant texture of a noodle would take on an almost sexual quality of pleasure, the feeling hot and slick between his lips like sucking cock. In his memory now, in the quiet kitchen of his apartment, he bites the spaghetti to test for texture and feels a jolt between his legs.

Unbidden the memory of moving down Quentin's body, tanned and furred against his expectations. Of running his tongue over a hip and under the soft weight of Quentin's balls, dipping below and sucking one gently into his mouth. The tender and sparsely haired skin. Eliot's nose buried in the crook of his thigh. Of moving back up to taste salt and skin, his hand around Quentin pausing a while, never sinking down, only sucking on the head pulsing and hot. Smooth and heavy on his tongue. And too, how it felt to toss Quentin's legs over his shoulders in that little shack in the woods, to lever himself up onto his knees and laugh as Quentin whined and said, El, come on, his mouth open and his brow furrowed.

Eliot thinks, Quentin? and gives the pot a final stir before clicking the burner off. The little red light warns him that the coil is still hot.

After he drains the pasta he pours himself a drink and his chest hurts. Creaking and tense. The sound of ice in a glass always reminds him of his mother. Pouring over iced tea or Flavor-Aid in the day, the vodka he never heard that followed. The gentle chime of the ice always following her around the house like it follows him now, like he used to follow his brothers to the creek when it was finally hot enough to swim.

He remembers how in the winter the creek would freeze, against all of the odds of his childhood understanding. Shouldn’t something swift like that keep moving? Should the environment matter? But it turned out that no matter how quickly the water moved, no matter how quickly it rushed into the future, there would always be a freeze. Indeed it turned out that ice freezing on the creek and even on the river into which it flowed— that was the easy part. Whatever is on the surface takes a firm shape and holds itself in the memory until the Earth deigns to tilt closer to the sun. Freezing is a given.

But then there is the melt. The melt is harder. There is friction. There is danger. The winter might be long but the melt always comes. You might walk out onto opaque ice and think it is safe to do so, but you will just as quickly fall through. That Eliot has always dreaded the melt as much as he longed for it feels like a giveaway. For much of his life, he has simply stayed on the shore.

Eliot shakes his head and drops the pan he holds. It lands with a clatter in the sink and for a moment he thinks that he has broken something, cracked a bowl or a mug left by his careless roommates. He grips the edges of the sink and breathes the short breath of a person who does not know how to recognize even the smallest signs of panic.

Other things that crack: the wood that split beneath the worn steel wedges that his father used to make firewood. Some falls they had helped clear the underbrush and one specific memory: of the summer they cleared the buckthorn from a neighbor's farm. Probably they shouldn't have burned it. Probably his father knew that risked spreading the seeds to other land, that the act of transporting it at all risked tremendous damage. Yet it hadn't mattered and they'd spent all autumn with fallen berries stuck to their shoes.

He straightens. He sips his drink. Clenches his jaw which clicks and he thinks again of ice and boughs.

Suddenly he feels very tired. He needs to lie down and so he goes to his bed and does just that, curling up on his side and facing the near wall. An urge to cry overcomes him and he feels beyond stupid for it. As if he is not still a young boy alone in his bedroom.

"I'm sorry, baby," Annie Waugh says behind him. Eliot wishes he were surprised to hear her.

"What for?"

"I should've stuck up for you."

He shakes his head, eyes still on the wall. "Thanks for saying so. But this is just— it’s just. It’s what I want to hear." It hurts even as he says it. He wants so badly for it to be real. For his mom to be the person he needed. That he needs.

The bed shifts as he sits up to face her. For a while they stare at each other. He realizes now that his eyes might be hers. He was never sure. She had brown eyes and his father had blue and he has never been able to figure out where he fit in the spectrum in between. But he sees now that her eyes, tired as they are in this particular memory, are wide and bright and round like his. They’re shadowed like his, too.

Eliot remembers this now. How he got drunk and ate a couple of pills from his roommate's stash and spent the evening talking to his mother. Her image spins in technicolor and he calls her a hippie and laughs. She says nothing, which is a more familiar response.

He says, "You know, you never really followed me up to my bedroom. Not ever. Did you know that? I—" he smiles and wipes his eyes. "I always hoped you’d follow me. That it wouldn’t just be me alone. But you never did, or you did, just the once. I guess— I guess that’s why we’re here. What happened, that last time, will you tell me?"

His mother smiles. "Sure, baby." Squeezes his hand with maternal assurance. "You’d come home after some big show. The King and I, I think?"

Eliot laughs. "Yeah. Jason Calhoun had painted on abs. Everyone thought he was ripped, I remember that. I was in the chorus, sophomore year."

"You were so proud. I didn't come to see you, I'm sorry for that. I really am. And when you got home you were still singing—"

"Getting to Know You," Eliot says and shakes his head. He hates that song, now.

Nodding, she says, "Yeah, that's the one. And it was a Friday and your dad was tired—"

"He was drunk," Eliot says. He can feel the sharpness of his own voice, its points a sea urchin caught on his tongue. His body is an ocean, tremulous and vast. His shoulders tighten around his spine like the arms of a well-intentioned octopus. He is so, so fucked up. He wishes he could remember what he took.

"Well," his mother says—

Eliot raises his hand to stop her. His stomach lurches. He thinks without thinking: I want to die.

Out loud he says, "I can't have this argument with myself."

His mother looks at him curiously, like she doesn’t understand. It’s a look Eliot knows well, even as it is without the hard edge of frustration. One corner of her mouth draws up and she squints sympathetically. Then her mouth turns down into a slight frown that Eliot tries hard not to find annoying. He loves her.

"Well. There we are then, honey," she says and kisses his cheek. "Do you want to stay with me a while?"

He nods. His loneliness sits in his center like shot, heavy and leaden. He feels it grow and grow like it's taking on water, until he capsizes with his whole pelagic weight into his mother's lap and cries for a very long time, an eon that passes in a second. His face is wet against the cotton of her too-big pastel button down, his mouth drooling a pathetic puddle into her denim lap. He’s smaller, now. He feels like a tide pool at best.

When the tears have stopped he feels embarrassed. The shame shapes itself into silence around them, a delicate atmosphere that neither of them seems able to break. Eliot’s eyes burn with the remains of his tears and he feels swollen all over. He closes his eyes against the pain and coughs, miserable and wet.

Annie Waugh says, "Did we disappoint you?"

Without looking up, Eliot turns the word over in his mouth. He keeps his face pressed into his mother's thigh, unable to face her. Lets her warmth suffuse his cheek. Presses the word against his hard palate and purses his lips around its vowels. He wonders if it's that simple. If so much of what hurts, of what did hurt and will yet come to hurt, can be distilled into the moonshine of disappointment. Uncomplicated. He pushes the word between his teeth and bites down on his tongue as another wave of tears crests in his throat.

"You didn’t protect me. I think— " and here his voice thickens, in the memory as much in the moment. "I wish I could forgive you for it."

It shouldn't be that simple. But he thinks it might be. It feels like a knife wound but not anything serrated: something sharp and cool and clean. It feels like steel to his heart.

Eliot sits up and waits for his vision to focus. He was fucked up in this memory but now he tries to find a steady center in himself to look at her. To really look. At her face gone soft at the corners as she edged toward forty, the way he remembers her. At her red-blonde hair of which he used to feel jealous, the way it used to shine almost copper in the late June sun. At her nose, delicate unlike his, and her chin, dimpled just like his, and her eyes— the exact same in shape as his own. A few flecks of green noticeable there, too. When he was ten years old he realized that they shared this trait and he remembers the delight he felt, that his eyes were as beautiful as his mother’s.

He remembers too the bruises on her arms.

She was only twenty-four when he was born, which means she was barely nineteen when her oldest child arrived. Nineteen years old and already so consigned.

He hadn't really known his grandparents, her parents. His mother had grown up in what was by his standards a big family, second of six, and the oldest girl. He felt a certain kinship to her in that role, though he was only the youngest of three, all boys. But for him the fold of feminine obligation, of duty, was and is a safe place; for her, he's never been and can never be sure.

No one has ever told him the story of how his parents met, but he knows they were young. For a long time he suspected that this was part of why he rarely saw his grandparents, and he still suspects. But how can he blame them? He certainly doesn’t approve of his father. He doesn’t expect anyone else to.

When he got a little bit older and understood how much his father hated him, he began to wonder if her parents had hurt her, too. If maybe they had more in common than he will ever be capable of understanding.

He looks at her and thinks, I'll never really know what happened to you.

Maybe that’s as far as he can reach. Maybe that’s the best he can ask for: the recognition of the end. He sighs and takes a breath through his nose, harsh and rattling. Oxygen settles in his lungs and he imagines the release like leaves unfurling. He says, "I think I have to go now, Mom."

"I think you do, too." She smiles gently in a way he can’t remember her smiling in life.

Outside the creatures are circling. He can see their shadows down below. They move round and round the building, like crows, Eliot thinks. They found him fast, this time.

There were crows all over the farm where he grew up. They used to caw balefully outside of his windows when he was small, the only birds that never migrated south, save the cardinals, who were silent. Their big bodies hardy against the cold and the snow, their needs always met with roadkill that died no matter the weather. In retrospect, Eliot thinks he loved them. They survive and they do it hard. Not in Eliot’s own half-measures.

Still, his apartment is on the fourth floor. The things that hunt him with their crowwolf bodies can’t reach him here. But sooner or later he’ll have to leave. He’ll have to walk out of this apartment and run, across the street or down to the park or to anywhere at all— all that matters is that he’ll have to leave.

He has always gone to other people's houses. To bars and to clubs and to classrooms, to lovers’ apartments and the homes of married men. Home is not a part of him. Leaving is what he knows.

With little ceremony he stands and puts on his shoes. He doesn’t look back and he doesn’t close the door. He half expects to— nevermind.

When the coast is clear he runs across the street and into a 1983 F-150, its undercarriage half rusted away by salt. As he slams the door shut, he thinks that he is ready for whatever awaits him. He believes it.

His father looks at him fondly across the cab of the pick-up.

"You know, my dad couldn't afford braces."

Eliot flinches. Ready for another line— So pull your weight, El. Don't be a pussy. Don't be lazy. Quit it with that sissy shit and get over here. In my day, my dad would've whipped me for that. As if the lack of violence were itself a kindness.

And then his father would've raised his hand as if that weren't a beating. For sitting and reading or sitting and coloring or prancing or preening or doing anything that might make anyone squint at him across the appliance section at Sears.

But now in the truck on a cloudy day in summer, Eliot is not quite in the seventh grade and his father is in a good mood. Eliot’s buck teeth are now strapped into his face as sure as his body into the truck, his crooked incisor held snugly in place. He half expects his father to make a comment about how if he were really a man, his teeth would be just fine flying out of the windshield.

But he doesn't. Instead he smiles with his own crooked teeth. Eliot smiles back and relishes in the feeling of his lips over the metal.

"How do they feel?"

"Weird," Eliot says, and then he laughs. "It hurts. But it's worth it."

His father nods with the wisdom of the injured. "That's usually it. Anything good comes with pain."

Eliot nods, letting the paternal sagacity wash over him. His father rarely talks to him like this, like Eliot is a person that he understands. Like Eliot is a person at all. It makes him feel warm to be seen, as if his father's affection were the sun itself.

He watches his father's profile as he drives. He observes every twitch of his mouth, the white lines around his eyes where his crows feet had shielded the delicate skin from the sun. He notes the prominent nose they share, that they’ll share even more as Eliot gets older, and winces. Margo loves your nose, he tells himself. It was the first thing she told you after you kissed for the first time.

"Things go bad after this, huh, Dad?"

Alan Waugh nods. He shrugs. "You weren't like the others."

"What about my brothers? Your boys?"

"I had to make them strong."

Eliot nods. He understands that he could never be made strong. He loved too much or maybe not enough. The fact that he isn’t sure makes his stomach turn with shame.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Eliot?"

Eliot chews his lip for a minute. He wants to ask this question even though this father is not his father. He wants to hear the answer he already knows.

"Did you ever think about killing me?"

His father shakes his head. He says, "Of course not. Sometimes, though, I wish you hadn't been born."

That's when his father swerves to avoid a deer and the truck careens into a ditch. On June 13th, 2003, Eliot had gone to the orthodontist; he remembers that day now as he watches the world spin through the windshield. His mother had made an uncharacteristically superstitious— superstition has no place in God’s world— joke about unlucky Friday but Eliot had felt little more than excitement at the possibility that he would transform. He would return to school in the fall and did not expect much to change, but felt that on the other side of this he would emerge beautiful, somehow. It was the first time he understood that he was at his own mercy and the high had been so great that he had all but forgotten this part: the part where he and his father tumbled down into a drainage ditch alongside the highway.

As they plummet down the side he wonders, Why this memory? He thinks about Charlton and wonders, What's safe about this place?

So Eliot thinks about the violence of this wreck and the violence his father. He thinks about how it feels like a given, just something that all fathers are capable of, like all trucks are capable of, this careening sense of disaster and fear. Likely it doesn’t help, the amount of kids he knows with violent fathers. He wonders why they all just accept it.

His father has worn a white button down shirt today, as if for an occasion, and soon it will be red with blood and stained with oil and dirt. Eliot looks at his father with his hair dark and in need of a cut, just long enough that he can see the beginnings of a curl behind his ear. For the first time, Eliot realizes how much like his father he looks. He remembers how it felt like they were turning a corner, like maybe Eliot’s straightened teeth would be his first steps into the sort of manhood his father longed for. But of course that was foolish. He knows that now. He doesn’t know why he was so stupid and a momentary pang of self-loathing wends its way through his chest.

Around him the metal crunches and glass breaks. He thinks, You aren’t so special, you know. Lots of fathers beat their children.

He does wonder, though, how many of them hate their sons. There are lots of reasons to hurt your own child, he imagines any lot of them would say, up there in the witness box, as if any of them would ever come to trial. But he thinks it often boils down to this: fathers hate themselves. They are conditioned to stomp out the light in their centers and when their own children show a flare, they must stomp it out themselves.

Still, Eliot isn’t sure it explains what his father did to him. Could a father really hate himself so much? He thinks that might be too easy; he knows it must be something else. Something simpler.

Eliot thinks, Maybe I shouldn't give him so much credit. We're tumbling through the air in a four thousand pound truck and I'm trying to figure out why my own father hates me. When we come to, he'll be screaming at me to help him, blaming me for yammering on and distracting him. For asking stupid questions. When the paramedics arrive and take his pulse and his blood oxygen, they’ll realize that he is having a heart attack and I'll start to cry and my new braces will chafe against my swollen lips as I frown and he, my father, he'll tell me to shut the fuck up and get in the ambulance while they strap him to the gurney.

I'll spend almost an hour in silence on the ride to the emergency room in Batesville and when mom and my brothers arrive, none of them will ask how I am. How I'm feeling. Not even a cursory check for bruises. My oldest brother, Will, he’ll buy me a Snickers bar from the vending machine, and from then on caramel and peanuts will taste of antiseptic and love.

Eliot reminds his younger self, For the next four years before you finally leave for good our father will talk about how you gave him a heart attack and people will think it's a joke but you will know that it's not.

He will talk to you less and less and you'll think it's because you gave him a heart attack. You'll be that stupid and naive until the day he catches you kissing Josh Leighton behind the barn after school and beats you so badly you have to go to the emergency room in Batesville, too, to set your broken nose and get stitches above your left eye. Josh will drive you there in his father’s own pickup— let no one say that you have not been loved. And while you cry into his chest in the room that has curtains instead of walls and he holds your hand, you'll come to understand that things didn't start to fall apart that day you got your braces; you’ll know that they were never whole in the first place.

The truck finally comes to a standstill with an awful iron lurch. Eliot was not awake to see it when it happened in life, but this time, he knows what he has to do.

There are sirens in the distance and he knows the sound, the clanking and screeching of the creatures approaching, their claws clicking and beaks snapping and whatever it is in them making that noise, that horrible childlike wailing. He pauses to consider this— how young did the Monster take them? For a moment he is sick with the thought of something so strong and so powerful overtaking the life of someone who had lived so little, but then he remembers that the Monster is in many ways just a child itself. A young thing abandoned to its own devices with no one to guide it, with no one to care. Something like pity sparks in him.

This time, he’s not afraid. The sounds by now are almost comforting, a sure sign that what he’s experiencing is just in his head. He knows he should be more afraid and wonders if this isn’t what being suicidal feels like, if maybe he’s mistaking a deathwish for calm.

The sirens are still far off, his father’s eyes still closed as a trickle of blood runs down his face. He needs to do now what he could not do then.

He coils his skinny teenage body and kicks at the windshield with all his might. The glass budges and he kicks again and again and again until at last it pulls free.

When he stands, the creatures are gone and he is not in Indiana. There is more than one way to make a door, it seems.

It’s a beautiful day in Fillory— late spring, maybe. The air is heavy with potential. It’s a time for planting, for all of the delicate sprouts and seedlings they’ve kept warm through the winter to move from the safety of the cottage and into the ground, for Quentin’s faithful hands to tend them as he has tended Eliot the last few years. For them to eventually be left to their own to wilt or flourish, like Eliot will now. Now that Quentin is getting married and the garden of his love is full to the brim with Arielle, with her laughter and her kindness and her soft skin, her ease with Quentin’s love and her readiness to give it right back. All of the things that Eliot isn’t capable of. That he doesn't have.

He thinks, I should just leave. There is nothing here for me now. So it only makes sense that he takes comfort now as he did then in a stroll along the creek bed, itself an echo of an earlier life, while Quentin and Arielle make love on the daybed in the warm spring sun.

Back then— now, in this moment, he imagines how their bodies move against one another. How Quentin, who once begged for his touch, now cries into Arielle’s neck, his hips moving and his body covered in sweat so slick he might as well be iridescent. It hurts. It does. The wall between his understanding feels half crumbled now and he feels it equally in present and past: how he ached, walking along the creek that spring. Still, he had felt then, as he feels now, a sense of relief. A sense of understanding: this was how it was always meant to be. He would and will always be alone and alone, really, is what he does best.

He crouches at the pebbled shore and stares into the cool clear water. There are creatures down in the shallow below, not crayfish or even minnows, but strange horned creatures that let off a light glow even at noon. He watches them and contemplates their place in things; if they are predators or prey. He wonders where he falls into this new life of theirs.

Once, it had been easy to slip in and out of people, their lives and their relationships, as an acquaintance and as a lover and as a friend. And yet he finds himself so afraid. Arielle has said, Eliot, you’re welcome here. And Quentin has said, As if I’d want a home without you. He had begged, even, for Eliot to stay. But he can’t imagine it. His power has always been in his own fleeting nature. It is much easier to walk along the creek and look at strange fish and feel alone as he always has than to stare his wants in the face. Loneliness is easy and familiar, a blanket worn thin with use. He is afraid to give it up. It’s better that Quentin turns to Arielle and that they both turn away from whatever he is. His power is as much in the leaving as in the being left.

But there are no doors here. Nowhere to leave to. Just a forest and its trees and its innumerable creatures that even after half a decade in the Fillorian countryside he does not recognize. Still it’s all a comfort, in its own way, in a way that belongs as much to Indiana as himself. He hates to admit it but it feels safer, out here in the sunshine that settles through the trees as gentle as a loving parent’s hand on a child’s back, to say— that there were things about Indiana that he loved. Out here he can admit that he loved the horizon of the plains, that there was comfort in their infinity, in the wind and the rustle of the grass. He was so often alone as a child and he is alone now and in the babble of the creek he recognizes the sound of his loneliness.

He is alone. It occurs to him that this is the first time. There is no Mrs. Knapp, no mother or father. No Quentin or Margo. Not even Charlton. It's just Eliot, here alone on the bank. An echo of the attic in which he used to hide. Except this time, no one will come for him. For better or for worse.

His body suddenly aches. His chest is tight and he desperately wants to cry, to cry and to cry and to cry until his tears flow into the stream and until his body follows it, until he’s nothing more than the distilled feeling of what it is to be alone on a riverbed, an adult who still so often feels like a child, a grown man with a life standing behind him that is everything he fears and everything he knows and everything that he has been denied and worse, everything he wants, a life in which he is loved and seen and maybe understood, and all he wants to do is lie down on the pebbled beach and dissolve into pieces small and smooth and so unlike the mess of himself, simple and easy and without pain.

Or if there is to be pain, if he is to dissolve and fade away, at least it will make sense. It will just be a part of the process.

Eliot realizes now that he is sitting in the stones, his legs finally tired. The pebbles are unexpectedly rough under his bare toes. They dig into the soft places between the calluses he’s developed, cold and oddly unforgiving. He remembers this moment. And then he begins to cry.

At first the tears come slowly. They bubble up like a new spring, gentle and tentative. He sniffles and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Shaking his head, he laughs, quiet and small, a little annoyed at this display of private emotion. For a minute or two he thinks it’s stopped. But like any body of water, there’s little to stem the flow once it's begun.

Of course, this doesn’t stop him from trying. He fights the feeling like he’s always fought the feeling, until his throat aches and his eyes burn and there’s a tension in his arms that makes his hands curl into fists, a tension or a pain trying to break out of his fingertips like a forgotten prisoner. As he fights the throbbing in his hands, his eyes sting and his tears find the cracks in his resolve and come pouring out, sudden and harsh and then his hands are buried in the pebbles and the rocks and they’re cold and smooth now against his skin and he is crying so, so hard. His throat feels full of salt and he chokes on it as he hurls a handful of stones into the creek.

There is no other word for it: he wails. He cries out into the woods and into the creek and he doesn’t stop, not for some time, howling into the trees with their freshly formed leaves and incipient buds and all their potential, all of the pent up need that at last they’re beginning to release. He beats his fists against the shore and kicks his feet like a toddler and pulls at his hair, his nails digging into his scalp while tears fall down his cheeks and make his face itch with their salt.

In the distance he hears the wail of the creatures. It snaps him out of it just long enough that he’s able to breathe, sneaking air in between the sobs. Then another breath, more steady now. The things out there in the woods scream again, like they’re waiting for a response.

He yells experimentally and before he runs out of breath the creatures are crying again. Their voices are so loud and he wonders— how badly must they be hurting to make these sounds? His urge to flee has left him; he almost wishes they would come closer and wonders why they haven’t.

He wonders, then, if he’s been wrong all along. If they aren’t what Charlton said. If maybe they’re not hosts at all, or if they are, then maybe they’re not— previous ones. Maybe it’s simpler than that. It’s often the case, Eliot has recently learned, that things are as simple as he fears. That the worst of his experiences can be reduced to small, simple words. To disappointment. To loneliness. To fear.

And if that’s true, then maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the best parts can be summed up, too, all the little glass fragments that make up the whole parts of his life pieced together into a single picture. They make simple words like love and family and safety.

Out of the corner of his eye, Eliot sees something move. The rustle of a shrub across the bank. Squinting, he can see the smudge where shadow meets feather. One of them is out there, hiding from him now. It makes him smile, makes him feel a little strange to have the roles so reversed. He sucks in another breath and waves at the thing.

It moves slightly, but makes no noise. Beyond it, a few of its siblings are still crying, but it’s quieter now, the sounds of breathing slowed, an almost comical sound of a hiccup. It makes him smile wider and he waves again, gesturing for the creature to come closer.

He wonders again if maybe the monsters aren’t monsters after all.

"Why were you hunting me?" he asks. He doesn’t expect an answer, but it seems— necessary, somehow, to ask. The thing shivers and the leaves around it shake in sympathy. It looks so small, now.

He looks down at his thirty-three year old hands and marvels at his own youth. Wondering if he’ll grow back into that skin, he shakes his head. The creatures chatter in the trees around him, in the brush and undergrowth. The bravest of them looks at him and cocks his head and he knows, remembers, what comes next.

The walk back to the cottage is long. Why had he returned? He can’t remember now. He only remembers that he had. That something in him had shaken his own shoulders and sent him on steady feet back toward love.

Not realizing the extent to which his melancholy had sent him wandering, Eliot takes several wrong turns, mistaking this tree for that. He feels only a little frustrated; buoyed by love, he simply knows that he will end up where he’s supposed to be. All the while, the creatures are on his heels, sniffing and snarling like dogs. Now, though, they feel familiar. They’re just lost. They’re just as scared as he is. He almost wants to reach out and touch one, to stroke its head in comfort. They won’t come close enough, though, not yet.

He walks for what feels like hours. Passing the same trees, the same ponds, the same purple and white flowers. The path swims in and out of his comprehension and he wills himself to feel calm, to not give into frustration. It feels— impossible. He stops and bends to place his hands on his knees and breathe deeply like he has seen Quentin do so many times. In through his nose, heavy breath out through his mouth. The forest around him seems to shimmer as the creatures breathe in time.

Out there, in the real world, Eliot might be dying. And he had wanted to, once. He doesn’t want that now and it fills him with grief to admit it, heavy at his center. This place, this time— it isn’t real and it doesn’t make sense that it should matter so much but it does and he says out loud, "This isn’t real."

Around him the creatures crane their necks, inquisitive. Eliot keeps moving.

At last he comes upon the cottage and against his expectations, he is overjoyed to see it. Everything that came before, the attic and the church and his whole entire life built up around him— all those safeties were temporary. What he had here, what he had with Quentin and later with Teddy and everyone that came after— what he had with himself— it had been something more steady. Less a lean-to built in haste and more something built on solid ground. For the first time his life had felt intentional and it had terrified him and he had almost run away, condemning the house that he had only just begun to build.

A dream within a dream: the first time he and Quentin stumbled into this place. In this memory he remembers it, the way the windflower seeds drifted around them. The feeling of magic all through their limbs like promise. He closes his eyes and inhales through his nose, his fingers outstretched into the air. He can still feel it.

He remembers too how Quentin had kissed the side of his nose with the deranged eroticism of a devoted cult member. Later, the way Teddy laughed sometimes like his mother and sometimes like his father and even, sometimes, like Eliot. A whole entire life, lived and died and longing to live again. He remembers Margo’s toes pressed under his thighs in winter and misses her so badly that he feels almost sick with it.

In another life, Eliot had loved and loved and loved. He had built a house but he had not done it alone. That had to be enough.

Not hearing any sound of Quentin or Ari, he sits down on the daybed. He is so tired. It's a bright sort of exhaustion, tinged around the edges like a sun in wildfire haze. He looks around at the creatures and gestures broadly with one hand, palm open and upturned. He takes a deep breath and, feeling the urge to be a good host rising in his breast, forces himself to take a moment. This is not the time for airs. He drops his hands and sits on the ground and says, "Please, sit. There are berries in the garden for you."

With some hesitance, the creatures make their way from the shadows. In the daylight they look a little ridiculous, with their strange chimera bodies, their beaks and their hooves and their claws, their cloaks tattered so thoroughly it almost looks intentional. He waits patiently as they take their seats, curled up like children or sitting tall with their backs straight; some of them lie back in a way that Eliot almost thinks to describe as lounging, their long bodies draped over the ground, while others can’t seem to sit still. They make an absurd picture, here in the garden of the home that he shares with his family.

Eliot laughs even as his tears well again. It seems so obvious now. It really is as simple as it seems. He can see himself in every one of them.

He joins them on the ground near a bramble and cries, gentler this time. Less the feeling of a dam breaking and more like he can finally hurt. No more closed throat, no more clenched fists. He feels the way his body tries to tense around itself and breathes through it, wills his muscles to release. He thinks of everything he’s lost, everything he has not yet possessed and will never have. The pieces of him that have come and gone. He misses his mother and who she wasn’t; he misses the family he never had. He misses the person he might have been with more love. His tears fall into the dirt and he laughs, wondering if he’s been salting the earth with his grief for years.

Allowing himself a moment of weakness, he wonders if any of it matters. Does the grief ever stop? Does the pain, the knowledge that his life has shaped him into what he is— does it ever feel less acute? He is what he is and there is no stopping it. He thinks he should have been able to live with it by now.

With bemused clarity, he remembers that he is thirty-three years old and he has returned to his home where his family lives. This is the place where he makes bread and wakes at sunrise and kissed his lover, once, and will come to do again. Some part of him is still a little boy in a church; some part of him is still a scared teenager in an attic. But they can live safely here, too, in this garden and this house with their magic and their love. He’s been living with it, grief and all, for the better part of a decade. And he’ll go on living just the same.

Looking around at the creatures, Eliot thinks, I love you. He thinks about the poppies that reseed themselves and spread across the fields, leaving their previous selves behind, and he wonders, is it good or bad? Does it matter? He will never be who he was before; there is no one to return to, no version of himself that was left behind. Every one of his selves sits in the garden. The fact is that the Eliot who was once young and scared has come with him all the way to another planet, to another time, and he wonders if maybe it’s not time to invite him along instead. To hold him to and to care. He must simply take himself with him.

He stands, then. The door to the cottage is ajar, only just. In his periphery he sees the creatures stand and begin to stretch and he almost thinks to push them back, to insist that they have no place in all of this. He thinks better of it, and leaves the door open behind him.

The throne room— Margo’s wedding. White flowers and red garlands strung across the balustrades, the air heavy with a sweet smell like dianthus, like lilies. He knows before he sees himself across the room what’s about to happen.

"Did it happen?"

"Fifty years."

"It happened."

Eliot’s chest tightens at the sound of his own voice. He knows what comes next. What happens now. The confessions to be made, the bridges to mend. It doesn’t matter if Quentin can’t hear him, if he never does. What matters in this moment, Eliot knows, is what he can say to himself.

He watches the conversation a moment longer, letting it unfold like a scene in play. Something that should not be touched, as if he were to observe too closely the whole thing might collapse. Schrödinger’s rejection. He almost laughs but as he watches Quentin push a tear away with one finger, he’s overcome with grief. When this had happened in real life, he had not noticed that Quentin had been crying.

When the guilt passes, he takes a deep breath. This is what he needs to do, he knows.

Behind him— "Eliot?"

Eliot almost doesn’t believe it. Even when he turns around.

From across the room Quentin’s face is covered in shadows. Nevertheless, Eliot can see that it’s not a Quentin he recognizes. This Quentin isn’t his Q. He has short hair that falls over his brow in a delicate fashion that his Q has not yet managed. It looks good on him, Eliot can admit. He looks older and younger. Stronger and more tragic. He looks, Eliot thinks, like a slightly better looking actor chosen to play Quentin in the movie of their lives. It makes Eliot’s chest hurt all over again. He thinks of every love song he's ever heard.

To Eliot, love songs have always been songs to his parents. So much of what is nice about love songs, so much of what is romantic, is a specific sort of intimacy that people with parents don't know they're looking for in others. That the fear of being abandoned is something they only secretly feel toward their loving fathers, that their fear of betrayal is a deep seated thing in the gardens their mothers planted. But Eliot knows. He understands that a wail of lament at a lover's abandonment is a cry for everything else not yet lost.

"Q? Is that you?"

"Holy shit," Quentin who is not quite Eliot’s Quentin says. He rushes forward, and then the weight of his body is against Eliot’s body and he knows that this is not a memory, that Quentin has never buried his face in Eliot’s neck for quite so long, has never been quite so desperate to memorize the contours of Eliot’s back and waist with his hands, his touch lingering and burning Eliot’s skin beneath his clothes.

They breathe together for a moment. Inhale, exhale. We’re not children anymore.

"Who are they?" Quentin asks, half a laugh. His arms still around Eliot's waist, he nods toward the creatures, with their broken feathers and their shadowed faces where they crouch huddled along the wall. Eliot is almost offended by the question, but he supposes that he might have asked, too, if their positions were reversed.

In truth, Eliot wasn't sure if they’d follow him through. And here, in the throne room, in the place of his worst regret, they at last seem entirely harmless. Small, cowering creatures, something like the snakes that Eliot had always learned are more afraid of you than you are of them, no matter how deadly they may be.

"I’m not sure you’re one to be asking questions," Eliot says. He feels the words in his mouth and hopes they are as soft in Quentin’s ears as they are on his tongue. "I’ve been— it’s been a truly wild quest to get here, Q. And anyway, how are you here?" He brushes Quentin’s short hair behind his ear.

"Penny's been helping me incept you," Quentin says, and gestures with one hand at what is the inside of Eliot’s mind. He smiles, sweet and a little annoyed, which Eliot can see in the slight downturn of the corners of his mouth. "But your brain kept me here. There aren’t any doors, or at least there weren’t until you showed up. I couldn’t leave, El. I couldn’t come find you. What's that about?"

Eliot laughs. He presses a long kiss to Quentin's lips. It’s all he can do.