Chapter Text
After that, thank fuck, things pretty much went back to normal.
Winter in New York was as busy as it ever was. Eliot plunged himself into projects: delaying roadworks, overseeing the opening of increasingly ludicrous concept hipster cafés, kicking off a few new bullshit wellness trends. It was no Goop - that one had taken planning, and pretty much ran itself now, which was the sign of a job well done - but it was something to keep him busy.
He hadn't been this productive in decades. Before the apocalypse, he'd mainly spent his days going out or sleeping or watching Netflix, with a rare spurt of work whenever he remembered that he had a job to do, or whenever people were being particularly annoying. Now, if someone made a montage of his life, it would be very Hollywood: someone very Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the starring role, working in expensive cafés and sitting in boardroom meetings and wearing tailored suits. The work was new, anyway, even if the suits weren’t.
It was almost heartwarming. He supposed that coming so close to the apocalypse would do that to you. It reminded you of what was really important.
Now he had time to focus, and a theoretically limitless leash to work with, given that Hell was MIA. That was what it took to turn a good piece of demonic work into a great one: creativity, freedom, and time, all of which Eliot had in spades since the world's lease had been extended indefinitely.
But although he was doing some of his best work, his heart wasn't really in it. That was nothing new; he'd never put his heart into it before, either. He technically wasn't supposed to have one. Caring, or trying, had always felt embarrassingly earnest, slightly gauche.
Now, though - it wasn't that he wanted to care, but he was acutely aware that he didn't. There was a gap between himself and the rest of the world, the negative space of just not really giving a fuck, and he could feel the edges of it, which had never been true before. It wasn’t that he wanted to close it - far from it. That was leaning into can-of-worms, Quentin territory. The option was just there, waiting for him. It was unnerving.
He hadn’t seen Quentin since the winter. When Eliot had woken up in the morning, he’d gone, which Eliot was mildly grateful for. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, a few months without running into him. They’d been on different continents for the better part of the sixteenth century, after all. It was less awkward this way, probably, at least for a while.
Eliot wasn’t thinking about it.
“Uh huh,” said Margo dubiously. They were hanging out a lot post-apocalypse, just like the old days. Margo was technically based out of the West Coast but there didn't really seem to be any reason to stick with that without anyone from below enforcing it, and besides, a good 80% of being a demon in the 21st century was just about being online. They were trialling a kind of jobshare situation, which pretty much amounted to scrolling companionably through Twitter together. It was nice, except for her habit of making out like she knew something about him that he didn't.
“Let me just have this,” he said. “I like my illusions.”
“Mmm,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him. They were in a café two blocks from Eliot's apartment. It was a bright, cold January day, the light making everything look cleaner as it filtered in through the window where they sat.
Eliot decided to leave it at that. Margo started to type something on her laptop.
A second later: “Okay, yeah. We fucked. But it was for the right reasons. It was actually kind of noble, I think. I barely enjoyed it.”
“Sounds like it,” she said. Eliot threw a pencil at her.
“What? I'm just saying,” she said, before looking at him over the screen and sighing. “Look, you bang, you get over it: fine. Happens to me every day. But the getting over it isn't part of the banging. It just happens because I don't care.”
“I don't care,” said Eliot. “This is me not caring.”
“Uh huh,” she said again, looking back at her screen.
“Would you stop saying that?”
“I’m sparing a thought for your illusions.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
They fell into a companionable silence. Eliot idly checked on a few of the sockpuppet Instagram accounts he ran - mainly fake influencers, a few faux-woke brands too. Back in the bad old days, it had taken weeks of concentrated effort to corrupt even one person's soul. Now, he pretty much just had to log onto Twitter for half an hour and he could call it a day. And what he did didn't even account for a tenth of all the shit that happened; he didn't fuck with the really nasty parts, obviously, but humans were so good at causing chaos themselves that he sometimes wondered what the point was of him doing it for them.
Considering this always put him in a terrible mood.
“Do you ever wonder what it'll be like when it happens for real?” he said.
“Are we still talking about -”
“No,” he said hastily. “I mean the actual apocalypse.”
“Who says it's gonna?”
“You think it won't?”
“It was a test, right? Pretty sure we passed. Or failed, whichever.”
“I thought it was more of a check-the-old-machinery-still-works test,” said Eliot. “Not, like, a character test. It would've been easier just to find out Alice's Myers-Briggs type.”
“Whatever. They're too chickenshit to actually make it happen. There's like fifty million of them for every one of us. Both sides.”
Eliot digested this. It was true, he supposed. But then -
“So are we supposed to just do this - what, until the heat death of the universe?”
“Like good little worker bees,” agreed Margo absently, before looking up. Some of the distaste Eliot was feeling must have shown on his face. “Come on, it's not that bad.”
“I’m just struggling to see the point if we don’t even get a gold star for it.”
“The point is it's fun,” she said. “I like fucking with people. I don't care if I have to do it forever. Better that than saving their souls.”
“I guess,” said Eliot.
In April, he and Margo went on a rare business trip, to the Bahamas, where they’d co-engineered an extremely satisfying microcosm of temporary chaos that he was pretty sure would earn them a commendation, if the managers down below were speaking to him, or offered commendations. Flying to England had clearly worked as a kind of exposure therapy; he managed the flight without any major breakdowns, and Margo was there to get drunk with him in the airport bar before they boarded the plane.
Being a few margaritas in already gave him a sense of unearned confidence on the way back home.
“Wi-fi on planes, us or them?” he asked Margo as they started to take off.
“Us,” she said definitively. “As if they'd do anything that useful.”
Wi-fi on planes, us or you? he texted Quentin before he could think too much about it.
He didn't text back until they'd landed, by which time Eliot had had plenty of time to think too much about it. Definitely you. And then, Should I be worried?
No life or death stakes this time. It’s work.
Weirdly enough, that's not reassuring.
Just keeping you on your toes, Eliot typed out, before deleting it and sending :) instead. It was better to cultivate an air of mystery.
After that, they texted occasionally. It wasn’t a big deal; it wasn’t like they’d talked constantly under normal circumstances. Things reminded Eliot of Quentin every now and then - predictable shit, like a Taylor Swift song on the radio or someone with his particular brand of earnest unfashionable shaking a money box in a subway station for charity - and it was easy to text him something witty about it. Quentin rarely texted first, but would often reply a few hours later with a picture of something he’d just seen, totally unrelated to whatever it was they were talking about.
It was companionable, and it loosened a knot in Eliot’s chest that he hadn’t realised was there. It wasn’t that he’d been worried about it, exactly. But everything else had gone back to normal, and it was good to know that this had as well.
By total coincidence, he was texting Quentin while grocery shopping on a Saturday in late July when he heard someone say his name.
Did you do this?? he'd texted a few seconds previously, before sending Eliot a link which read 'Netflix’s Fillory and Further Cast Announced - “Childhood Dream Come True!” says Benedict Cumberbatch’.
HAHAHAHAHA , Eliot texted back, juggling his phone with a bottle of expensive olive oil, and Maybe.
It was partially true. He'd asked Margo to work her magic, anyway; most TV and movies were in her remit, with a few notable exceptions.
He was halfway through texting her Thanks bb when he heard it.
“Eliot?”
Eliot turned. It took him a second, which was unnerving, but at least half of that was because the wrong fruit sprang to mind first.
“Plum?”
She was wearing dungarees, and was holding a basket filled with bougie, unstudenty products. Eliot could see a whole wheel of cheese in there.
“I thought it was you,” she said, with a wide, genuine smile.
“What are you doing here?” Eliot was genuinely taken aback. He'd pretty much forgotten about her as soon as it all ended.
“My parents live here,” she said. “Most of the time. But anyway, I have an - internship.”
“You don't sound convinced,” said Eliot.
“It's unorthodox,” she said, like she was telling a joke that Eliot wasn't supposed to get. Eliot eyed her.
“Great,” he said. “Unorthodox. Well, your family is rich, I guess.”
He checked his phone. I really hate you sometimes , Quentin had texted a couple of minutes ago.
Good thing we're mortal enemies then, he replied.
“You should try this kind instead,” Plum said, popping up by his shoulder and unceremoniously divesting him of the olive oil he was still holding. “It's ethically produced.”
“You have read this room totally wrong,” Eliot told her, but got distracted by his phone before he could stop her putting it in his own basket. Well, if we weren't before …
“Hey, what are you doing now?” said Plum. Eliot had a brief, nightmarish glimpse into what it would be like to have a child.
“I'm not talking to you,” he said flatly. “And I'm picking up stuff for risotto.”
“No, I mean after this,” she said, ignoring his tone. “You should come over for coffee. So we can catch up.”
“I have a very important business meeting,” he said automatically. “Sorry, kid.”
“You sound like Harrison Ford,” she said. “You're not pulling it off.”
Eliot started to walk away.
“Wait, stop,” she said, hurrying after him. “Sorry, sorry - though can I just say your skin is incredibly thin for being beyond the mortal plane? Okay, sorry. Look, I just - it would be nice to talk about it. With someone who was there.”
Unwillingly, Eliot came to a halt in the middle of the dairy products aisle. “What's to talk about? Nothing happened.”
“It happened,” she said. “Come on. I won't bother you again.”
Eliot looked at her. She seemed genuine enough, though maybe that was just because she looked so young.
“If we eat some of that cheese,” he conceded. “What do you need a whole wheel for, anyway? It's the size of your head.”
“This is a judgement-free zone,” she said primly, which was highly offensive seeing as Eliot was right there, but before he could answer, she'd left to pay.
Left in the aisle, he checked his phone again, and in an unwise moment of half-distracted confusion, he texted Quentin back saying You love me really , before shaking himself out of it. This was why he'd repressed all his feelings about the whole episode in the first place.
They met outside the store and walked to Plum’s apartment. Eliot feebly suggested going to a bar instead, but she ignored him.
“You live here?” he said skeptically. He'd been expecting the kind of apartment building that was half-empty because it'd been bought up by oligarchs as an investment. He eyed a rat that looked like it was trying to wear a condom as a hat.
“I'm staying with my boss,” she said evasively.
“Okay, I'm a demon, and even I know that's not right,” he said as she let them in. As promised, she cut them some cheese and opened a bottle of wine with a practiced hand. It was very civilised.
“Where’s your girlfriend, anyway?” he said. “Stuck back in Lower Tadfield?”
“No, she's actually on tour,” said Plum, face softening. “I'm going to visit her back in Tadfield once I'm done here, though.”
“She's in a band?”
“She skateboards for England,” Plum corrected.
“Of course she does,” Eliot muttered. Plum ignored this.
“So, start from when you left,” she said. “Or actually, Adam's story was pretty abridged, maybe you could explain -”
They were interrupted by the sound of someone unlocking the door
“Shit,” said Plum, before they came in. It was Julia.
They stared at each other for a second, before Eliot looked back at Plum. “Unorthodox is not the first adjective I would use for witch school.”
“It is unorthodox,” she said fairly.
“What are you doing here?” said Julia. It was hard to read her face; she didn't look thrilled to see Eliot, but then again, people usually didn't.
“I thought you weren’t going to be back for ages,” said Plum.
“You said you wanted me to tell you about the apocalypse!” said Eliot, choosing to address Plum instead of Julia. “You said you wanted to talk to someone who'd been through it! You share a bathroom with someone who'd been through it!”
“She doesn't tell me anything,” said Plum. “You seemed like an easier target.”
“Yeah, well, forgive me for not wanting to revisit the time my boyfriend got possessed by the spirit of Death,” said Julia, dropping her bag on the side and taking a seat next to Eliot. “But if you’re doing this, I’m staying. Can I have some wine?”
Explaining it all to Plum took some time, particularly with Julia chipping in every now and then to fill them in on what she and Kady had been doing while Eliot and Quentin were in England. It was a strange relief, though, to talk about it in such forensic detail, filling in all the gaps that were remaining in Eliot’s version of events. He’d talked to Margo about it, obviously, but it was hard to do so without thinking of that moment on the riverbed where they’d stood on opposite sides. And Eliot had been so focused on getting things back to normal, anyway, that he hadn’t liked to think about it too much.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Plum was a good listener, with all the right reactions, and Eliot found himself enjoying the telling of the story. They had enough distance from it now that it felt less stress-inducing and more cinematic, almost. Eliot could see it all happening in his mind’s eye like a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. And he was right in the middle of it, he realised with some surprise. He was the Tom Hanks. Or, at least, the Matt Damon.
He’d been there, lived through it. It was strange to think that he was - he heard Quentin again, saying if we were ever going to be heroes . It hadn’t felt that way at the time, though. He wasn’t used to the feeling of being involved and he found it uncomfortable; in all his interactions with the world over the years, he’d changed as much as he could without exposing any of himself. He’d almost convinced himself he’d forgotten about it over the past half year. But half a year was basically a blink of an eye to the rest of his life.
It was enough time for him to look back and recognise, though, that it wasn’t just disconcerting. Looking back at that moment on the riverbed, him and Quentin and Kady and Julia against the end of the world, he felt something that was weirdly like pride.
“So everything went back to how it was before?” said Plum. “I mean, I woke up and it was last week. I had to redo my last assignment of term and everything.”
“Yeah,” said Eliot. “And nobody remembers apart from the people who knew, I think. At least, nobody else has mentioned it.”
“What happened to Alice?”
“I don’t really know,” he admitted. “I mean - I guess things worked out with her. Quentin talked her down, I think.”
“Have you spoken to him?” said Julia.
He glanced at her, but her face was impassive, turned away slightly. “I talked to him afterwards. Have you?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked back at him. It was a complicated look. Eliot couldn’t tell how much she knew about it, but he figured it must be at least some. “I haven’t seen him in a while, though.”
“Me either,” he said. “Well - we text.”
“You know, I thought you guys were together actually,” said Plum obliviously, pouring herself some more wine. Despite himself, Eliot looked at Julia, who raised her eyebrows at him. She definitely knew about some of it.
“That was before I knew about the whole demon/angel thing,” Plum continued. “Then I was like, oh, I must’ve read that one wrong. That seems like a pretty significant thing.”
“Exactly,” said Eliot, as Julia said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Ooh,” said Plum. “Fight, fight, fight.”
“I don’t know,” Julia said, looking directly at Eliot. “I think that if we’ve learned anything it’s that the things you would think matter, don’t. Not in the way you thought they would.”
“Hence, polyamory,” said Eliot, slightly bitchily.
“Exactly,” said Julia. “I’m not embarrassed. Look, there are so many ways of being in the world. I’ve tried a lot of them. This one makes me happy. Fuck the rest, right?”
“Fuck the rest,” agreed Plum, slightly tipsily, raising her glass to clink against Julia’s.
“It’s a little more complicated when you’re going to be alive for the rest of time,” said Eliot. “The things you people - want, do, make, whatever - you can do that fine knowing it’ll all be over in eighty years anyway. Eighty years was yesterday for me.”
“Eliot,” said Plum, leaning forward. “Eliot. Look. Shut the fuck up.”
“She’s got a point,” said Julia. “Anyway, as far as we know, the rest of time could be, like, three weeks from now.”
“Mm,” he said, not wanting to argue the point. Julia smiled at him - a real smile, small and personal. Eliot could see why Quentin liked her.
“I love my girlfriend right now ,” said Plum suddenly. “Fuck yesterday! I’m going to call her right away.”
“It’ll be late - okay, too late,” said Julia, as Plum disappeared with her phone into the bathroom. “You know, she’s, like, five years younger than me, but it’s like having an actual child sometimes.”
“I get that vibe,” said Eliot. “What’s her deal, anyway? Aren’t her parents fuck-off billionaires? What’s she doing -?”
“In this shithole?” said Julia. “She wants to learn magic. Kady and I are the best.”
“What are we talking about?” said Plum, reappearing as suddenly as she’d left. “Pepper won’t pick up.”
“It’s, like, 3am where she is now,” said Julia. “We’re talking about your family.
Plum shuddered theatrically. “The less said the better. Though, actually, I wanted to tell your boyfriend about this -” directed at Eliot, who decided it would be easiest to let that one go “-seeing as he’s so interested in the Fillory books. My great, great - uh. Ancestor , was a Chatwin. You know, the kids in the books? We’re the last ones left. The upper classes died out pretty quick in the war, except the ones who went to America.”
“That’s awesome, ” said Julia, unexpectedly, before Eliot could say anything. “Which one are you descended from? Obviously not Jane or Martin.”
“Rupert,” said Plum, looking pleased at Julia's enthusiasm. “My mom owns the old house still. It's not too far from Tadfield, you know. I actually have the keys, for when I visit Pepper next month.”
Eliot was struck by the memory of looking at Quentin look out of the taxi window, so viscerally he could almost smell the musty car air.
“Can I see them?” asked Eliot, surprising himself. “The keys, I mean.”
“Sure,” said Plum affably, retrieving them from her bag. They were just regular keys. Eliot didn't know what he'd expected, exactly. Maybe for them to look a little more mysterious. The battered otter-shaped keychain dulled the intrigue somewhat.
“Underwhelming,” he said.
“It's better inside,” she said. “Lots of Fillory memorabilia. So I hear, anyway. We don't really talk about that side of the family.”
“Sounds healthy,” he said, turning the keys over in his hand, before dropping them. When he looked up, he caught Julia watching him; she held his gaze for a long, uncertain moment before looking away, refilling her wineglass.
The afternoon turned into evening, and despite himself, Eliot got roped into making his risotto right there for all three of them. He put it down to being drunk, though it was nice to be (rightfully) complimented about it, too.
When he left, the sun was going down, and Plum had extracted a standing drinks invitation from him somehow, which was definitely the opposite of not bothering him again, but he couldn't quite puzzle out how they'd ended up there so he figured it was better to just leave it. Julia nodded at him. Quentin hadn't come up again, though he wasn't sure if they'd both been avoiding the topic, or if it had just been him.
Eliot hadn't heard back from him, anyway. It turned out read receipts were not as genius a concept as he'd once thought.
Quentin was probably doing something stupid like rescuing baby crabs from a sewage pit, where he had to wear gloves and didn't have any phone signal. They didn't usually talk about work, but it was easy for Eliot to project the productivity he'd been experiencing back onto Quentin. It made sense as a reaction to the almost end of everything. The difference between them was that Eliot still had that distance, where his heart wasn't. Quentin was the guy who could never possibly hand out enough flyers to assuage how much he cared about handing out enough flyers, getting rained on ad infinitum. It depressed Eliot a little to think about him back there on the sidewalk in his whale beanie.
But that was why it wouldn't have worked, he reminded himself, slightly hollowly.
It was quiet in his apartment, after all the time he'd spent with Plum and Julia. He dropped his empty grocery tote on the floor. Unexpectedly, something clinked.
He frowned at it, then toed it open, before bending down to pick up the keys to the Chatwin house.
There was a hastily scribbled post-it stuck to them. Bring them back before I leave or there'll be hell to pay (get it?) it said, and then below, in slightly different handwriting, Good luck.
Eliot stared at it for a while, even though it wasn't exactly subtle. He felt a strange, manic mix of hilarity and ire. Who did they think they were ? Eliot had spent thousands of years playing the manipulation game. It was different now, but back then, it had taken weeks of careful work to corrupt a person, drip-feeding them the desire to cheat on their husband or depose a king or whatever so that they thought they'd come with it all by their clever little selves. It was inception before Christopher Nolan was a twinkle in his great-great-great-whatever-grandfather’s eye. He was the king of getting people to do things without them knowing it. This - it was amateurish, a crayon drawing by a three-year-old when Eliot was the fucking Renoir of puppet-mastering. Eliot was embarrassed for them, really.
It was clear what they thought was going to happen. There was pretty much one person in the whole world who had any use for the keys, and Julia was perfectly capable of giving them to him herself if she wanted. No: this was meddling. Coming from Eliot, it was a gesture . Cue fireworks and end credits and fuck the rest of time, or the hosts of heaven and hell, or any of the big, universe things that it was so convenient not to think about.
It was so obvious . It was insulting that anyone could think Eliot could be that predictable, without even breaking down the gaping plot holes in the rest of it. Not least that he didn't need two pint-sized witches to Chekhov's gun him into having some kind of - realisation , like the plot of a bad romcom.
Eliot wasn't an idiot. He was good at not thinking about things he didn't want to think about, but the thing about being a demon who had been tricked into caring about Earth was that you ended up with more neuroses than an upper-class New Yorker. The more you skirted carefully around something, the better you knew exactly where it was and what it looked like. There wasn't a lot of practical difference between the thought at least I don't have feelings or thank fuck I don't have feelings and - well, the obvious, not when you were thinking it every day. Doth protest, etc.
It was just that what Eliot felt was only the smallest part of it. It was impossible to tell how much of it was organic, and how much he'd just picked up from the ambient noise of humanity over the centuries, like he'd picked up a propensity for smoking cigarettes and owning minimalist pot plants. There was something absurd, a little terrifying, about the thought of what could have happened if the night after the apocalypse had gone the other way, with Eliot performing the kind of relationship he only knew about from other people, like a simulacrum. There was no empirical proof, no body of precedence to assume that he wouldn't wake up one day and realise he'd been pretending all along without his even realising it.
The only thing worse was not waking up and out of it one day; spending the rest of his life, however many hundreds of years that might be, truly, sincerely, earnestly feeling things. Saying: fuck the rest of time. Fuck the hosts of heaven and hell. Fuck the big, wide universe.
It would be like being Quentin. Quentin, who had been so miserable in the world, even as he loved it like none of the rest of them did, that he would have let it end if Eliot hadn't been around. Something would inevitably go wrong: the world had to end one day, after all. Once Eliot had put everything on the line, he would have everything to lose, and six thousand years had taught him that you always lost eventually. It was just a matter of scale. If you invested in the world as little as possible, you would survive. You might even be happy.
Anyway, taking things that seriously didn't really mesh with Eliot's brand, which he liked to think of as 'insouciant’.
He spent a while feeling outraged, before it all seemed to start leaking out of him, like helium from a balloon. Eventually he was left sitting at his dining table looking at the bunch of keys, which miraculously had not spontaneously combusted through the sheer force of his fuming. It would have been easier if they had; it would have solved the problem of what to do with them.
He could send them straight back to Plum with an icy, witty note, which would have the benefit of rescinding the standing drinks invite. But letting on that he knew that they knew would show Eliot's hand. It was bad enough that they already thought they knew something about him. They'd already been more involved than they had any right to be.
He considered getting rid of them. It would be the easiest thing, for sure. He wouldn't have to think about it again, and it was a petty revenge against Plum for making him think about it all in the first place: win-win. But the more he thought about it, the less satisfying it became. With a maturity he mentally patted himself on the back for displaying, he could admit to himself that it felt uncomfortably like sweeping it under a rug. It would come back to bite him in the ass, he just knew it.
And it didn't help that he'd been thinking of Quentin before, because it was impossible to not think of him now, the genuine and uncomplicated delight on his face at the prospect of being in a house where some guy had once written a book. He'd been around for long enough that books had existed for a minority of his lifetime, but this tiny thing got his rocks off. Eliot could not relate, but it was still, despite himself, endearing.
If anyone deserved to actually get some joy out of this , a small and rebellious voice at the back of his mind said. He ignored it, but didn't force the thought away.
He fell asleep with the situation still unresolved. When he woke up, he'd forgotten about it, at least for a few blissful minutes until he wandered into his kitchen to make coffee and saw the keys still on the table.
He stared at them for a second then, without giving himself time to think too much about it, grabbed them, and disappeared.
Then he was outside Quentin's apartment in Boston, barefoot and in the clothes he'd fallen asleep in. There was no going back, though; it had taken a particular alchemical combination of post-sleep vagueness and brazening it out to get him there, and he wasn't sure it would work a second time.
There was no way of posting them through the door. He thought about leaving them outside for Quentin to find, but someone else could come across them first, and anyway, Quentin wouldn't know what they were. He didn't have anything to write a note with.
The easiest thing would be to just teleport in, but Eliot was haunted by the prospect of Quentin walking in on him, and having to explain .
He stood caught in indecision for a few moments before snapping.
“Fuck it,” he said, and raised his hand to knock on the door.
Before he could, though, it opened.
“Oh,” he said. It was like having a bucket of water thrown over him. Having spent a lot of time in medieval taverns, he was familiar with the experience.
“Oh,” said Alice. “It's you.”
“It's me,” Eliot agreed, feeling idiotic all of a sudden. He held Plum’s keys behind his back. “Where's -”
“Quentin's not here,” she said. She eyed him for a few moments, looking inscrutable, before standing back. “You should come in.”
“Oh, that's fine,” said Eliot hastily. “You're obviously going somewhere. Looking very - uh, chic, too! I'll just - go.”
“Come in,” she said again, forcefully, and Eliot was uncomfortably reminded that he was talking to his boss’s kid. He followed suit, meekly.
Alice looked like she'd been heading to class, wearing a deeply unfashionable backpack and a librarian turtleneck which, to her credit, did everything for her boobs. Even without the sense of immeasurable power, she looked better than she had last time, though the bar wasn't exactly high.
She took off her backpack and sat on the sofa, avoiding Eliot's eye. Gingerly, Eliot sat next to her.
He looked around the room. It was distinctly different to how it had been before. Quentin's bookshelves, with their mix of tattered cult sci-fi paperbacks and leatherbound first editions, now also sported the ugly block-colour spines of scientific textbooks. There was a Metric poster on the wall which Eliot didn't remember from before, and a clothes dryer with pretty-but-functional bras hanging off of it.
Sweet, naive Eliot of two minutes ago, he thought. Who had thought that it would be awkward if Quentin was there. How little he'd known.
“I wanted to say thanks,” Alice said abruptly, a millisecond before the silence became too excruciating to bear.
“Oh,” said Eliot. “Don't mention it. Please.”
“No, really,” she said. She sounded like she was speaking under extreme duress, but she was almost as earnest as Quentin. It made Eliot itchy. “I know what you did.”
“I mean, I've never been accused of modesty before,” Eliot said. “But it was Quentin, if anything. I couldn't have - you know. You don't - it's fine.”
You don't owe me , he wanted to say. The thought of a debt between them made him uncomfortable for reasons he wasn't quite sure of. He just wanted it to stay firmly in the past.
“I hate talking about it too,” she said determinedly. “But if it wasn't for you then he wouldn't have - he might have, but it would've been too late. So thanks. Okay?”
There was nothing Eliot could really say to that. “Look, this is too weird. Can I leave these here for Quentin? Tell him - I don't know, whatever, say a cartoon bird dropped them in your lap while you were singing a little song, he already pretty much thinks you're a Disney princess, it won't be hard for him to believe.”
She took the keys from him, turning them over curiously. “What are they?”
Eliot paused, before saying, reluctantly, “The keys to the Chatwin house. From -”
“Fillory and Further,” Alice said. She looked up at him. “I know.”
There was something in her face that looked, unbearably, a bit like pity.
“I just happened to find them,” he said defensively. “It's not a big deal.”
“It's nice,” she said, and looked sorry. “It’s a nice idea, Eliot. But he's not here. I told you.”
“You don't have to do it right this minute,” he said. “I mean, the longer it takes, the better. Gives me plausible deniability.”
“I mean he's not in the country,” she said.
Eliot stared at her. “What?”
“During spring break,” she said. “We went to England. To see - you know. My brother.”
“I thought he died,” said Eliot stupidly, then, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Anyway. I came back; Quentin stayed. He wasn't happy here.”
“I know that,” said Eliot, instinctively proprietorial. “It's never - that's old news. Something else must have happened.”
“Well, yeah,” she said, levelling a meaningful look at him. “Or didn't happen.”
Eliot moved swiftly on. “But why England?”
“It's peaceful, I guess,” she said. “It was convenient.”
“Quentin doesn't do peaceful,” said Eliot surely. “He does stupid adventures. He'll be bored in ten minutes.”
“Well, it's been a few months,” she said. “My lease on the apartment downstairs ran out when the summer vacation started so he let me stay here. He's staying with the witch. Anathema.”
There was no way Plum hadn't known, which only added insult to injury.
Alice was looking at him. “Are you...okay?”
“Fine,” said Eliot. “I just have a miniature witch to murder.”
Alice paused. “What?”
Somehow, without Eliot consciously deciding to tell it, the whole story came spilling out of him.
“And it's like - like Airpods,” he concluded expansively. “Built-in obsolescence. Anything you invest in is going to crash and/or burn eventually. That's what the world is like.”
Alice looked like she wished she hadn't asked. To be fair, it had sounded a lot better in Eliot's head.
“You obviously already know about the crashing and burning, so feel free to back me up on that,” he added, a little feebly.
Alice frowned. Begrudgingly, he appreciated her taking it seriously. “Well - okay, I mean that's not wrong. But it's an inaccurate analogy. You can't compare a break-up with the apocalypse.”
“It’s all a matter of scale,” he tried.
She shook her head. “You're being obtuse. If you really weren't invested in the world, you wouldn't have bothered saving it.”
Eliot sat back. “That's - that's different.”
“I thought it was all a matter of scale,” she said coolly.
Despite himself, Eliot felt a flicker of liking. She was clearly stone-cold, despite what Quentin thought. Her roots were strong. Eliot could respect that.
“Anyway, I thought you and Quentin - you know,” he said, not quite intelligibly, before giving up and making an obscene hand gesture.
“Charming,” she said. “No. We're friends.”
Eliot raised an eyebrow and waited, hoping it would help him regain his footing in the conversation. Sure enough -
“We weren't - it was obvious it wouldn't work,” she said. “To both of us. It wasn't good.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you just know,” he said pointedly.
“Yes,” she said. “I did. And now I don't think about it, or come up with weird, convoluted - you're the only person I've ever met with more neuroses than me, you know that? It doesn't have to be this hard.”
“What, leaving this conversation?” said Eliot, standing up. “It’s not! See you around, Alice. Or, and no offence, hopefully not.”
“Wait,” she said. There was something uncannily Adamlike in her expression; it was impossible not to pay attention. Eliot sat back down.
“Look. I was in a really bad place in the autumn. My brother died last year, and my parents haven't exactly dealt with it well, and school is really fucking hard and meanwhile everything in the world is going wrong and the planet is dying, and - it was such a tiny thing that day. When you're already on the edge, it just takes one sign that you should just leap off for you to do it.”
“Profound,” Eliot murmured, just to be a dick. Alice ignored him.
“My mom emailed me saying they got rid of Charlie's things, and they hadn't even asked if I wanted anything. I just - it just made me wish everything was over. And then it would have been, and you guys showed up, and it wasn't anymore, and I still - I don't know if it's better this way. But it might be, and that’s worth me having to live with that choice for the rest of my life.”
“That’ll be, like, sixty years,” said Eliot. “Not the rest of time .”
“You and Quentin,” she said, jaw set. “You helped me. I owe you.”
“No, you don't,” said Eliot quickly.
“Not after this,” she said. “If you needed a sign, this is it. You should go to England.”
“No,” said Eliot. “I don't - it's fine. I'll see him sometime.”
“That's not the point,” she said. “You have to choose.
“I don't -”
“It doesn't have to be this hard,” she said again, gentler. “Look, I don't exactly have my shit together. But I know that.”
Eliot hesitated. He was dimly aware that he was teetering on some great precipice. The last time he had felt like this - like he actually had a choice, one that mattered - the fall had been uncomfortably literal. It was fighting the avoidance habit of a very long lifetime to even consider it.
I need to get the fuck out of here , he thought, clear as a bell, and before he could devote much energy to the parts of his mind where his neuroses lived, he nodded.
Alice's face relaxed. “Thank you.”
There was silence for a moment, before she said, “Um, I meant you should go, like, now. I have class.”
This time, Eliot spent the flight over determinedly asleep.
He was feeling distinctly odd. He had been since before Boston, probably, though he'd had the wherewithal not to acknowledge it until then. But it was different now. Before, it had been an uneasiness deep in the pit of his stomach, easy enough to ignore. Now, it was like someone had taken out all his insides and replaced them with cotton stuffing. Or clockwork, leaving him to run on autopilot. It made it easier to fall asleep, but when he woke up, it didn't feel like it was all the way, and walking through arrivals, it was like he'd left some important part of himself 50,000 feet in the sky.
It was kind of like the apocalypse over again; the wheels were turning, but he didn't have any control over where they were going. Somehow, running away from the inevitable, he'd managed to double back on himself, and now here he was, watching himself chase it down. A crash landing seemed likely.
It felt like no time had passed before he was standing outside Anathema and Newt’s cottage, which was even more beautiful in the early summer than it had been back in the fall. It was a clear, warm day, the air soft on Eliot's skin like the most expensive of blankets. It was like being inside a painting. Still bizarrely dreamlike, he rang the doorbell, startling a nearby dozing chicken.
It took a few moments for someone to answer, which it turned out was all the suspense he'd needed to shock him part-way out of the fugue state.
He was going to see Quentin, and they were going to have to talk. What the fuck was Eliot supposed to say? This was the sort of thing that happened to other people. He wasn't even sure what he meant by being there.
The Chatwin keys were burning a hole in his pocket. They didn't have to mean anything, he reminded himself. Eliot wasn't going to be that obvious. Or would he have to be? Maybe other people just leaned into the obvious. Maybe that was how they figured out what to do.
Eliot was so out of his depth. But then again, what else was new?
He was shaken out of it by the door finally opening.
“Eliot,” Anathema said. “Alice called ahead. It's good to see you.”
Unexpectedly, she leaned forward and enveloped him in a hug. Eliot's hands hovered over her back in surprise for a second before he gingerly patted her head. She laughed into his shoulder and pulled away. Eliot eyed her with some trepidation in case she did anything else alarming, but she just looked happy. Happy to see Eliot, like they were old friends.
“Come in,” she said. “Lots to catch up on.”
“Is Quentin -” he said, unable to stop himself.
She looked curiously at him. “No, he's at work. He'll be home in a little bit.”
“Okay,” said Eliot, disappointment warring with relief inside his chest, and followed her in.
“He's volunteering at Oxfam,” she continued, as they walked down the hallway to the kitchen. They'd repainted the walls, Eliot noted abstractedly. “Stop me if you know this all already. It’s set the village about its ears, I can tell you, an American who wears his hair in a bun pricing the paperbacks. The old biddies haven't had this much excitement since the old air base closed down. I think they don't know whether they should disapprove or fall in love with him.”
“The eternal dilemma,” said Eliot, amused despite himself. Anathema looked back at him knowingly, which immediately dampened it.
“Newt,” she said, as they came into the kitchen. “Look who’s here.”
Newt looked up from where he was carefully plaiting bread dough. “Eliot!”
He looked genuinely pleased to see him, too. It was like walking into the Twilight Zone. Eliot hadn’t met so many friendly people in such short succession in decades, not since a brief flirtation he’d once had with the Amish. It immediately put him on his guard.
“Eliot’s here for Quentin,” said Anathema, and they exchanged a loaded look.
“Ah,” said Newt, significantly. “Say no more.”
“What?” said Eliot suspiciously. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down,” Anathema said. “Don't loiter. It's good we could have a word with you.I It's about Quentin.”
“What?” said Eliot. “What about him? Is he okay?”
“Well,” said Newt. “He’s a bit - out of sorts.”
“He’s two weeks away from donating all his clothes to charity and adopting a kitten with three legs,” said Anathema bluntly. “He’s full-on having a midlife crisis.”
“And we don't want to presume,” said Newt earnestly. “About - the nature of - your relationship -”
“Please just kill me now,” said Eliot. “It would be kinder.”
“These things are difficult to talk about,” he persevered. “Especially if you're less in tune with your emotions. I was just like you, you know, before I met this one.”
“We thought something might have happened,” said Anathema hastily, perhaps sensing how close Eliot was to losing it. “With you both. We're worried. We've gotten to know him. He's a nice kid.”
“Okay, he is thousands of years older than you,” said Eliot. “And he's always been like that. St Quentin of Masochism. If he's any worse now, it's because he finally snapped. He just stopped the world from ending, did you not think that might be it?”
But Eliot hadn't, either, he thought with a sudden surge of - guilt? Regret? Eliot had thought Quentin's life had gone back to how it had been before. He hadn't imagined this.
It was disconcerting to think Eliot might have misjudged him.
“I don't know,” said Newt. “He goes on so many walks. I think he, er - “gets high” out there, if you know what I mean.”
“Unfortunately,” Eliot said.
“And my god, the music,” said Anathema. “Every night, it's Miserable Bastard hour. Any depressed fucker from the past twenty years is fair game. He's very considerate of the baby, and of course I like R.E.M as much as anyone, it's not about that. But - we said he can stay here as long as he wants, and we meant that. But I don't know if it's as good for him as he thinks. It's like he's regressing. I don't know if you ever were teenagers, but he’s certainly acting like one now.”
“You can't outrun your problems,” said Newt wisely. “For all your lot are supposedly divine and immortal, you don't seem to be very mindful.”
Eliot stared between them. He'd thought Crowley and Aziraphale had gone native for adopting a witch, but Quentin had let the witch adopt him . The situation had escalated beyond anything he'd ever thought it could be.
“He obviously cares about you,” said Anathema. Eliot bit his tongue. “And Alice - on the phone, she didn't say very much, but -”
“I get it,” said Eliot irritably. “You want me to talk to him. No offence, but at this point it's starting to get unoriginal.”
“So you will?” Anathema said, but before anyone could say anything else, the door opened. Eliot's stomach swooped.
“Hey,” Quentin called, sounding far away through the old rock walls, before the sound of footsteps trudged up the stairs above them.
“Come on,” ordered Anathema, and pulled Eliot by the wrist out into the hallway to the foot of the staircase just as Quentin rounded the corner.
“You've got a visitor,” she called after him. Somewhere in the house, the baby started crying. Anathema swore guiltily and climbed up the stairs, brushing past Quentin, who had turned around.
“Oh,” he said. “Eliot?”
“Hey, Q,” Eliot said.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “Is - I mean, is everything okay?”
“It's good to see you,” said Eliot, apropos of - he didn't know what. He shook himself out of it. “I mean, yeah. No bad news this time.”
Quentin started to come back downstairs. His hair was, in fact, up in a bun. Eliot had vaguely expected something integral to have changed about him, but he looked just the same.
“Why don't you two go for a walk,” said Newt loudly, popping up next to Eliot's shoulder and winking unsubtly at him. “But don't do anything I wouldn't do!”
“I truly do not like you,” said Eliot devoutly.
Newt held the door open, looking expectant. Eliot looked back at Quentin, who raised his eyebrows at him. His face was mostly unreadable.
Eliot wavered for a moment, then bottled it.
“Actually, we're borrowing your car,” he said, grabbing the keys from where they hung on the side. “Hope you don't mind, don't really care if you do.”
“Oh - well, no objections here,” said Newt. “But just so you know, it doesn't always go.”
“Whatever,” said Eliot, and made his escape.
Quentin waited until they were reversing down Newt and Anathema's stupidly narrow driveway in Newt’s deeply ugly car and Eliot was regretting all his choices before speaking. “Can I just ask -?”
“No,” said Eliot, teeth gritted. It had been a long time since he'd driven anywhere, which had been a point of pride until right then. Then again, it was possible that a few scratches would actually improve it.
“Great,” Quentin muttered, and turned on the radio. There was a moment of silence before Freddie Mercury started up. It's the terror of knowing what this world is about -
Eliot reached over and snapped it off again. Quentin didn't argue.
The day was in the process of stretching languidly into evening, skies clear and bright still, and the silence in the car stretched out, too, turning easier. Without looking, Eliot could sense Quentin's shoulders relaxing minutely as he looked out of the window. It was like the weight of whatever it was that Eliot was going to say, or what had happened the last time they'd seen each other, had just been neatly subsumed into the rest of the history they had with each other. It didn't hang in the air; it was trodden down, worn in, familiar.
And there was something heady about the golden evening air, which was as rich as if it had been filtered through honey. He supposed that was the Adam effect.
As he thought it, they saw him, just a figure in jeans and a hoodie in the far distance, with Dog trotting by his side. He raised a hand towards them, silhouetted against the sun. Quentin waved back. Eliot glanced sideways at him.
“What?” said Quentin.
“You're buddies now?”
Quentin shrugged. “I don’t know, I ran into him a couple of times. Out in the woods.”
Something fell into place. “Oh my god ,” said Eliot. “Please don't tell me the fucking Antichrist is your weed guy .”
“What?” said Quentin again, unconvincingly. “No…”
“This place is a cult,” said Eliot. “I mean, out of all the places in the world you could have gone, Q.”
“It wasn't like I planned it,” said Quentin. “I just - well, Alice wanted to meet Adam. And I figured someone should check out the third kid, too. Just so we'd know if we had to deal with this again.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Eliot, turning right. “I forgot about him. Grimy.”
“Greasy,” said Quentin. “Well - David. Anyway, he's human. But I guess - it felt easier to just stay. And here, you know - everything is good.” His mouth twisted wryly. “There's no suffering.”
“It's peaceful,” Eliot said, the words tasting strange in his mouth.
Quentin looked sideways at him. “You think it was stupid?”
Eliot pulled into a passing point and turned off the engine. “I think we have to walk from here.”
“Are you going to tell me where we're going?” Quentin said, unmoving.
“No,” Eliot said cheerfully. Quentin sighed, sounding put-upon, and opened the door.
They were in the countryside proper now, on a little dirt path stretching down the side of a wide field. Eliot walked delicately and tried not to sneeze.
“I used to work over there,” Quentin volunteered after a second, pointing over the field. Eliot squinted, but he couldn't see anything.
“Doing what, farming?”
“No,” said Quentin. “This is all - you know, the Plover estate. From -”
“I know,” said Eliot.
“Yeah, I was a tour guide there for like a week,” Quentin said, seemingly oblivious to how incredible a statement this was.
“A tour guide ,” said Eliot, delighted.
“Yeah, well,” said Quentin. “Turns out he wasn't that great. So I quit.”
“Oh,” said Eliot. “Wow. Sorry.”
Quentin shrugged. “Things can't just be good, right? That's your whole thing.”
“Yeah, but - I wouldn't want that,” said Eliot. “I wouldn't have done that.”
“Yeah,” said Quentin heavily. “You know, it was stupid. This whole thing.”
“I didn't say that,” said Eliot.
“You were thinking it.”
“No,” Eliot insisted. “It - I thought it was good .”
It came out fiercer than he'd intended, and he paused, surprised, before dialling it back.
“I mean - I get it. It's good that you got out. Are you kidding, Q?”
He stopped himself before he could say something like, you were always braver than me. But it was true: here was as far as you could get from a rainy sidewalk in Boston, and Eliot was glad.
Even if he wasn't sure where that left him.
Quentin looked over at him.
“I thought,” he said, a little tentatively. “That we were in this for life?”
Eliot hadn't expected it, but the reminder was surprisingly easy to take in his stride.
“People, many of them wise and all-knowing, have argued that,” he agreed. “And they weren't wrong. Being wise, and all-knowing. But - I don't know.”
Quentin waited.
“I mean, I'm still working,” said Eliot. “If anything, I'm better at it than before. I got Taylor Swift into Cats, I'm pretty sure that's the best work I’ve done since the Great Fire of London.”
Quentin looked pained. “Cats?”
“Specifically for you, angel,” said Eliot. “Well, that one was fun. But - I don't know. At this rate we'll be going until the sun burns out. I know it's ineffable, but it's starting to feel like that's just a cover-up. Something's off.”
“Exactly,” said Quentin. “Like, I'm still -”
He gestured inarticulately. “Even in this place, you know, it's basically a utopia, but I'm still not -”
“I get it,” said Eliot, rescuing him.
“I’m so glad it's not just me,” said Quentin, with feeling. “I know that's fucked up. But thank fucking God, Eliot.”
Eliot nodded. Something in his throat was tight; it was probably the pollen.
There was a small copse of trees at the end of the path, which Eliot led them into. It was a complicated enough journey that he started to wonder whether it was all an elaborate prank that Plum had played on him. She seemed like the type.
But then they came to a little clearing, and there it was: a stone house, not especially grand, but visibly aged and big enough to house a small army of small English children in the interwar period with a penchant for fairy stories.
“Wow,” said Quentin. “I had no idea this was here.”
“Apparently there used to be a road by the back, but nobody used it, and then a storm blew a tree across it,” said Eliot. There was a bubble of nervousness rising in his chest. It made him feel like he was on fast-forward. “Someone comes and checks on it every once in a while. Uh - here.”
He fumbled in his pocket for the keys, and then dropped them in Quentin's hand. “Plum, she had them. Don't ask, long story. But I just thought since we didn't go before - and I know that it's not the same, but apparently there's a lot of old Fillory stuff that he left the kids, so -”
It took Quentin a second to piece this all together, and Eliot took the opportunity to stride ahead, doubling back to pluck the keys out of Quentin's hands so he could open the doors.
Inside, it was exactly as Eliot had pictured it: a dusty receiving room, the furniture covered in heavy white sheets, still as death. Quentin came up behind him, and they surveyed it together.
“Thank you,” said Quentin, quietly, and Eliot surged forwards to start pulling off the coverings, driven by a skittery anxious energy in the pit of his stomach. He threw open the curtains, letting the warm light shine in and sending dust motes dancing. He was aware of Quentin watching him for a long moment before taking a few steps into the room, looking around, and joining in.
It was bizarrely satisfying, sending movement and light back into the untouched old rooms. Plum had said that the house had been abandoned in the 50s, and if Eliot paused too long, it started to feel like a mausoleum. When they were done with the first room, he stopped at the edge of the room and met Quentin's eyes for a long second, before turning away simultaneously by some unspoken agreement and heading in opposite directions.
It took longer than Eliot had expected to cover his half of the house: it was filled with old-fashioned little nooks and rooms, things like pantries and larders that he'd grown used to not seeing over the past half century. It hadn't been long at all since most houses had been like that, not by Eliot's standards, but it was still jarring to be there, like being thrown back in time.
When he reached a dead end, in a dark little room which he was pretty sure had belonged to a housemaid, he turned back. The house looked better, but there was still something disconcerting about it. It was as though it was waiting for something.
He went back through the other half of the house, looking for Quentin. He'd found some Fillory stuff, though not much, in an oak-panelled study on the first floor. There was a desk that didn't quite match the decor, shoved in a corner, and a few first editions piled on top of it. In a bookshelf were some notebooks, which he avoided touching. He figured Quentin would be able to make more sense of it.
He was starting to wonder if Quentin might have just left when he finally found him, suddenly, in a room with tall windows that was empty apart from a tall, old-fashioned grandfather clock. Miraculously, it was still ticking. Quentin sat across from it on the exposed floorboards, arms around his knees.
“Hey,” said Eliot, and sat next to him, mirroring his posture. The late evening light streamed into the room from the windows behind them. All the nervous energy that had been pushing Eliot onwards seemed to drain away all of a sudden.
“It's the clock that they went through,” said Quentin, voice flat. “The Chatwins. To Fillory.”
“Did you try it?” said Eliot, mostly joking. He'd seen weirder things, after all. Quentin didn't smile.
“Another world,” he said. “Seems pretty fucked up now, after everything.”
“I guess,” said Eliot.
“You take your problems with you,” said Quentin. “I should've learned that by now. It's not about where you are. It was stupid to think anything else.”
“I think children's book rules are different,” said Eliot, as gently as he could.
“Two of those kids went missing,” said Quentin. “So - who knows. Some people are just made wrong.”
“No,” said Eliot. “Stop wallowing. You weren't - if anyone was, it was me. But I'm starting to think - you were right, before. Living here fucks up the programming. Sand in the cogs, you know?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Quentin, before rolling his head towards him. “Why are you actually here, El?”
Despite everything, it blindsided Eliot. Perhaps it was that the house felt like a dream, dislocated in space and time; everything outside of that bright, quiet room seemed a world away. How could Eliot have thought it was obvious? It felt like a million things were happening at once. The way forward was as obscure to him as if they were sitting in the dark.
The problem was that there was no room for ducking the facts when he was doing it properly. Eliot could do ironic, he could do referential, he could do oblique. But this way - he couldn't look at it sideways. He didn't have any choice but to face it head on.
Quentin had said I like you . It hadn't sounded stupid when he'd done it. Eliot supposed that was the sense of it, whatever it was that he was going to say, but it wasn't right, too. It was too much, not enough - something.
He just wanted to say, yes . Okay . For it to be as easy as that, and for that to mean something easy, a life that he could slip into.
It wasn't hard to want, he realised with some surprise. It wasn't like how he felt whenever he thought about it in terms of the big universe stuff, or how he felt whenever he thought about doing it the way people usually did - gesture, confession, wedding bells. Thinking about that was both stressful and embarrassing.
But boiling it down to just - being around. Talking, fucking, whatever. Looking for Quentin, and finding him there.
That felt like safer ground. Just a different version of how it already was.
“Eliot,” Quentin said again. “You don't - it's fine.”
“What?” said Eliot absently, before shaking himself out of it. “Wait - actually, what?”
“I get it,” said Quentin. His gaze was steady on Eliot's face. Briefly, Eliot remembered how it had been, the night after the apocalypse, Quentin looking at Eliot in the orange light like he could see right through him. “It's fine. I know what you mean. I mean - I know you. You don't have to.”
“No,” Eliot said. “Just - hold on. One second.”
It would be so easy to just let it go. Quentin did understand; Eliot could tell. He could read Eliot as well as Eliot could read him. But then - he remembered how he'd felt at Alice's apartment, like he was on the verge of something real. It would be so easy to let it happen, no questions asked.
But that wasn't the same as choosing it with both hands, and Eliot knew that. There was sort of vaguely falling, because it was easier, and there was making the choice to believe in something every day, though it was pointless enough that it hurt. And there was something in between, Eliot thought. He wasn't sure how to get there, but he was pretty sure that it was an option.
Moment of truth , he thought, and swivelled, so he was kneeling in the sunlight facing Quentin.
“Okay,” he said. “So, before. I wasn't - I still think everything that I said. But - normal is broken, now. It's not the same anymore. Right?”
“Right,” Quentin agreed.
“And - I have this bit that I do,” he said. “Everyone has their thing which we don’t talk about. Yours is the fact that you would wear an actual skin suit if it meant you could be a real boy. With you, we don't talk about it.”
“You bring it up constantly ,” said Quentin. “And I'm already basically wearing a skin suit. As in, my actual skin.”
Eliot threw him a look.
“Sorry,” said Quentin, not looking sorry at all. There was a brightness in his eyes, like he was holding back a smile. “Keep going.”
“My thing,” Eliot continued, pointedly. “is that I've wanted to bang this one guy since the year 4000 BC. And - when that was what it was, I could deal with it. I honestly thought everyone already knew. It was easy to talk around it all the time, like a joke that we all got. But then we actually did it, and - I still want something. Not just to do it again, either. Something else, on top of that.”
Quentin was leaning forwards. Eliot made himself look him in the eye.
“We're going to live for the rest of time,” said Eliot. “I don't know how long that's going to be. But I don't think I really care about fucking with humans anymore. I kind of just want to fuck with you.”
“Okay, yeah,” said Quentin, fast, and tipped forwards into Eliot, gracelessly, pulling him down until their mouths met. It was familiar, now, which was paradoxically new to Eliot, sending a surge of righteous joy through his chest.
Good, he thought, nonsensically. It's good, this is good, it's worth it. He flattened his palms against Quentin's back, the surprising solidity of it.
Quentin mumbled something into Eliot's mouth.
“What?” said Eliot, pulling away slightly.
“I said, you're such a fucking sap,” said Quentin.
“That's extremely bold, coming from you,” said Eliot, before ducking his head back down, shutting them both up for a long while. It was so nice to just make out, like horny teens, until Eliot’s mouth felt bruised and all he could taste was Quentin. Looking at it this way, it was hard to see the downside of having so much time.
When they resurfaced, it was finally dark outside, and the clear skies from before had been usurped by rain. It pattered gently against the windows, and every now and then thunder rumbled across the sky.
“I hope nobody steals Newt's car,” said Quentin.
“Newt should pay someone to take it away,” said Eliot, idly, rubbing his thumb over the slight furrow in Quentin's forehead. “But - we can check on it in the morning. And then -”
Quentin quirked an eyebrow at him. “Then what?”
Eliot hesitated for a second, before deciding. “Oh, who cares. We'll figure something out.”
“Yeah,” said Quentin, grinning at him, and Eliot found himself smiling back. It felt obscene, precarious, terrifying.
But he couldn't bring himself to care too much about it. He had the rest of time stretching out in front of him to overthink it.
There were worse things.