Chapter Text
Quentin normally wouldn’t be very into this sort of thing, but Julia was having a bad month and he decided that today he would try to be a good friend - especially seeing as Julia’s bad month was mostly his fault. It was just… too much, all the time. Every day he had to wake up, pull himself out of bed, put on actual clothes that weren’t sweatpants and a hoodie, shower, brush his teeth, eat at least three whole meals, and then go to bed at a reasonable time so that he could do it all again tomorrow. And for what? Really, he was grateful for being resurrected and all, but he was hoping that maybe life would have started to feel a little more… something by now. Every single task felt like running a marathon or climbing a mountain (he guessed; he’d never done either of those things before). So, anyway, it had been a bad month for him which meant that it had been a bad month for Julia because, like always, he was her personal responsibility. Quentin guessed that this life around, she actually did have some claim on his life since she was the one that dragged him back up from the underworld by the hair, but also Quentin was 27 years old (maybe? Did his time spent dead count? Also his whole other fucking life? Honestly, he didn’t care enough about his birthday to figure it out, so he’s just sticking with 27 for now) and he shouldn’t need a chaperon. WHATEVER, this was just how Julia was, he supposed.
So, this is how he ended up at this hokey karaoke bar on a Friday night. It was way too crowded and everyone was way too drunk and all he wanted to do was go back to the penthouse and lay in bed. Julia was about five drinks ahead of him and it was pissing him off.
“Q,” she crooned in his face, waving around her fourth vodka cranberry of the night. “C’mon, get on my level! I made some new friends over there and they said they want to meet you!”
“Yeah, no, Jules, I think I’m done for the night. You know I shouldn’t be drinking on my meds.” She pouted dramatically and slumped her shoulders because she knew he was right and Quentin rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think that maybe you should be done after this drink? You got so mad at me last time because I had to carry you home.”
“I’m fiiiine, Q. You’re just being boring. Come hang out with me, you promised you would.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just going to go grab us some waters first, okay? Be right back.” Quentin placed his hand on the sticky high top to hoist himself out of his stool, but froze before his feet hit the ground. “Oh no. No, no, nope. Not doing this now.”
“Q? You okay?” Julia had come around from the other side of the table where she had been standing and placed her hand on his shoulder. Quentin screwed his eyes shut and shook his head.
“Um, do you see Eliot standing at the bar over there?” Julia squeezed his arm a little and, presumably, turned to look in the direction of the bar. Quentin kept his eyes shut and focused on his breathing, which was difficult because this particular corner of the bar smelled especially like body odor.
“Oh, yeah actually, I do. That’s weird. HEY ELIOT!”
“Wait, really? No, Jules, don’t bother-”
“ELIOOOT! OVER HERE!” Quentin slapped his hand over her mouth to stop her, but it was too late. Eliot, who had been leaning on his forearms at the bar and staring at the mirror behind it, turned his eyes to meet Quentin’s in the reflection. He looked kind of like how Quentin felt for a moment until his usual walls came up and he spun around to face them. Julia bounced on her toes and waved her arm in the air as if he wasn’t already staring right at her and smirking.
“COME JOIN US!!” Eliot sauntered over with only a little bit of a limp that no one but Quentin would probably have noticed. Still, he was looking relatively good. Better than the last time they saw each other.
“Julia, what did you have to bribe poor Coldwater with to get him to come here? He looks like his childhood dog just died.” Normally, that would have made Quentin huff and protest. An uncontrollable wave of anger overtook him, however, and he glared at Eliot until Eliot looked down at the floor with a very uncharacteristic flush across his cheeks. Julia dropped her hand from Quentin’s arm to envelope Eliot in a tight hug and even though Quentin hadn’t realized she was still holding onto him, he suddenly felt like he was lost at sea without her to ground him. He needed to leave.
“Hey, you know what, I think I’m going to head home. I’m not feeling great. You two have a fun time, though.” He darted away too quickly for either of them to grab him and slipped out the front door into the cool October air.
As soon as the breeze caught his hair and the door shut behind him, he decided to walk home. It was really a beautiful night and without the cacophony from the inside of the bar he was actually able to enjoy it a little. A group of people laughed as they passed him and he was suddenly aware of how little he had laughed or smiled during Life 2.0. The only person he had seen much of the entire time was Julia and, then Alice a couple of times when she came over at the end of the first week to officially break up with him. Which, that was fine. He wasn’t in any sort of state to be dating right now anyway and, honestly, he was pretty sure that that particular relationship had sailed and then sunk a long time ago. They were just completely different people now than they had been when they started at Brakebills. Not that their relationship was ever, like, super healthy, but. He did love her. And she loved him back, he thought. No, he knew she did.
Quentin was okay, though. He missed her, but he was okay.
To be fair, he missed all of his friends. Even Kady and Penny, occasionally. Eliot and Margo had run off to Fillory the day after Quentin had been resurrected and he barely remembered them being there at all. His brain didn’t seem to fully come back online for several days. Eliot had tried to talk to him that first day, but Quentin was practically catatonic when he wasn’t having the worst panic attack of his life, so. That didn’t go well. He had no memory of what Eliot said and then he was too far away to ask him.
He faltered for a moment about a block away from the bar when he had that thought, because he could just go back and ask him, right? But then the anger swelled in his chest again because he was ALWAYS the one doing the heavy lifting in their friendship, wasn’t he? Eliot with his fucking walls and his fucking masks and his fucking armor. Quentin had broken through, obviously, but that was in another lifetime and after literal years of wearing him down. The only lifetime that mattered now was this one and Eliot didn’t seem to care enough to salvage anything so… why should Quentin? He had another fucking chance at life. How many people get that? There was no point in dwelling in the past anymore. Whenever someone used to tell Quentin “life is short” he used to always say back “feels too fucking long to me”. Gods, he hated himself for it, but he realized that they were right.
He crossed the street a couple of blocks down from the bar and looked back, just to see if anyone had followed him out. He saw Eliot leaning against the front of the building with his ankles crossed with that annoyingly careless aura he always did his best to achieve. He had a cigarette between his fingers, and even from such a distance, Quentin felt it in his stomach when they locked eyes. Eliot exhaled and dropped the butt of his cigarette to the sidewalk where he crushed it with the toe of his shoe, never moving his gaze from Quentin. When he started to push away from the wall, Quentin shook his head and turned away. It took, like, way too much inner strength for him to not look back as he speed walked far enough around the corner for him to be out of Eliot’s sight. He felt like he had been punched in the gut and his legs shook, begging him to turn around and just go talk to him, Jesus Christ Quentin it’s not that hard. You two used to be best friends. Get it tofuckinggether.
Quentin stopped and heaved a breath with an arm braced on the wall of the building next to him. What the fuck was his problem? He knew he’d be anxious to see Eliot again, but fuck. He had caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye and for more than a fleeting moment, he swore it was The Monster. He still felt a bit sick from the adrenaline rush it had given him. His hand pressed hard into the rough brick of the wall and the pain helped to bring him back to his body a little more. Julia didn’t know about the hallucinations or the nightmares. She probably guessed, based on how absolutely batshit he acted most of the time, but he hadn’t said anything to her yet. Quentin was dreading that conversation, and it was getting harder and harder to hide. The Monster popped up everywhere now. It was in the kitchen, digging through the fridge, that morning. The night before it had been looming behind the couch where Quentin and Julia had been sitting and watching Mean Girls. Sometimes after he would gasp awake from another nightmare, The Monster was still in his room with him, just sitting on the bed or looking out the window.
The acid in Quentin’s stomach roiled and threatened to come up, so he took a deep breath and booked it back to the penthouse. He hated that they still lived there. Yeah, it was (kind of) free, but it baffled him that none of the others seemed even slightly unsettled living there. It felt haunted.
Quentin made it into the building and up the elevator, rushing out before the door had fully opened and raising his hands to unlock the wards as he walked so that the door opened for him before he even had to slow down.
“Coldwater! What’s got your thong in a bunch?.” Margo was perched on a barstool at the island next to Josh, sipping on something that had a little paper umbrella in it.
“Not now, Margo,” he mumbled and waved his hand dismissively as he sped into his room. The door shut with a bit too much force and it made Quentin wince. He hated this fucking room the most, but he was too embarrassed to ask anyone to switch with him. Every inch of it was heavy with The Monster’s presence and it made Quentin want to shrink in on himself. It felt like someone had thrown a weighted blanket on top of him and it made his knees buckle. Literally every time he walked into the room, this happened. He pulled one of his shoes off and threw it all the wall with a shout.
Quentin was so fucking angry. All the time, he was so fucking angry. He was angry at Alice, and he was angry at Julia, and he was angry at himself, and he was angry at Eliot. He ripped his other shoe off and threw it at the door before tossing himself onto the bed roughly.
“Q? What the shit is going on in there?” Margo said as she knocked. Turned out he was fucking angry with her now, too.
“Isn’t it obvious I’m not in the mood to talk? Go away.”
“Like hell. Open up, Coldwater, or I’m breaking in.” Quentin took a really fucking deep breath because if he didn’t he was absolutely going to punch a hole in the wall, and he didn’t want to be one of those white boys. Standing on suddenly wobbly legs, he went to the door and opened it a crack before turning back to the bed. Margo flung it open and stood in the entry with her hands on her hips. “Well? Spill. Eliot texted and said that you ran off.”
“Eliot told you that, huh? Didn’t think he cared about my whereabouts.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Quentin. Of course he cares.” Quentin huffed and turned so that he could lean up against the pillows at the head of the bed. With a groan, Margo shut the door and climbed into bed next to Quentin, but didn’t look at him. “Look, I know things haven’t been easy for you since you got back.”
“The thing is Margo, how how would you know that?” They both looked up and Margo’s brows furrowed. “You haven’t been here. You haven’t been here since The Monster, really. So, how would you know what it’s been like for me?”
“Excuse me? I was in Fillory finding a way to save Eliot’s ass, Quentin. You make it sound like I was hiding away on my private yacht.”
“Weren’t you?” Margo stared at him, apparently speechless. It gave Quentin a flicker of satisfaction in his asshole hindbrain to see that she was maybe a little hurt. Her confusion quickly changed to anger, however.
“He was my best friend! He IS my best friend. I couldn’t just stand around and watch when there was something I could do to help him. I would have expected you more than anyone to understand that, Mr. Saves-The-Day.”
“That is exactly what I’m saying. You didn’t have to watch that thing tear him apart every single day! I just- god, Margo, you weren’t there! I thought we were closer than that, that maybe you would have, like, cared enough to check in and be there for me or something. I guess not.”
“Oh my fucking god, you’re not actually blaming me for your death right now, are you? I’ll kick your new baby ass, Coldwater.” Quentin almost said and what if I am?, but instead he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and said,
“I think you should leave.”
“No.”
“Margo, leave. I need to not be talking to you right now.”
“I said no. You’re the literal biggest dick I’ve ever known, but I’m not leaving you alone. You’re fucked up and you’re going to tell me about it.”
Quentin literally saw red, and he squeezed his eyes shut harder because if he had to look at Margo for one more second he knew he would do or say something he would really regret later. But, maybe, that is what his new life should be about, right? Living with no regrets and saying what he meant and fucking cutting it out with the over-thinking. His inability to say what he really felt had gotten him nowhere in his past life, and it was only when he did the unexpected, impulsive things that he actually made a difference. So, fuck it, he was done trying to be the nice guy. He was done with trying to make sure everyone always got along and everyone liked him and nothing was ever wrong. He took in a deep breath to tell Margo how he really felt, when a voice from the doorway startled him out of his thought spiral.
“If he isn’t ready to talk about it, Bambi, maybe you should just leave him alone. What good is riling him up going to do?” Eliot stood there, leaning against the door jamb just as he had been against the wall of the bar twenty minutes earlier, acting totally disaffected and aloof, like he always fucking was. Like he was better than the emotions of mere mortals.
“I’M NOT -“ Quentin shouted and then leaped up from the bed so he could pace. “Would everyone please get the fuck out of my room right fucking now.” He turned his back to them to stand by the window, but he wasn’t seeing the peppered lights of the New York skyline. All he could see was The Monster in his peripheral, standing beside him and enjoying the view.