Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Quentin 40a

In hindsight, Quentin thinks that it probably shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that his discipline was mending - or at least that it was object-related. Like Alice said at the time, he’d always been very good at minor mendings, and in general he’s always had a knack for object-based magic. Object summoning, transmutation (or transfiguration), size-change spells, all of it. He’s always been good at it. He once spent an afternoon changing an entire deck of cards; the face cards became his friends, while with the lesser cards he mostly just messed with the colors.

(He has reason to suspect he’d been doing actual magic with his card tricks for years. Sometimes it bugs him to think it wasn’t just his years of practice that made him so good at it, but other times it’s an oddly comforting thought to know magic was there all along.)

It’s the thing he’s best at, but Quentin isn’t really sure how that can translate into a full-time job. He starts asking around at the clinic where he does outpatient therapy, and at first he doesn’t really have much luck. Oh, he gets a few one-off freelance jobs, and Natalie, who isn’t a patient but whose brother Daniel is, works magical freelance herself and helps him figure out reasonable pricing.

“That’s not a bad start,” Eliot insists when Quentin worries about it, and it’s true. Also, there’s still money from his father’s life insurance policy and from selling the house in New Jersey. It’s not like Quentin’s mooching off Eliot or anything. It just feels vaguely crummy, like how he’d decided to get his Master’s in philosophy mostly because he’d figured he was useless for anything but academia. 

The problem is that magical academia means either Brakebills or the Library, and neither of those are exactly appealing. Which leaves Quentin with freelance mending and spell refreshment jobs until he can find a proper job. He’d even consider a Muggle job, but his qualifications for that are even worse. 

It’s chance that shifts things, about a month after Quentin started asking around. Angie Devereaux is one of the physical therapists, but not one whose area of expertise is much help for Quentin. She mostly does treatment for people who are trying to recover more delicate mobility than Quentin - regaining full use of hands, things like that. 

“I hear you’re looking for a full-time job connected to mending,” she says, catching him as he heads out. 

“Uh, yeah. Do you know someone hiring?” Quentin asks. 

“Not purely for mending, no, but have you ever looked into crafting magics?” 

Quentin shakes his head. “I’ve read a little about them, but Brakebills didn’t really…” 

“No, because Brakebills is a whole facility of ivory tower academics,” Angie says dryly. “Nothing wrong with that, I guess, a couple of my cousins are basically that themselves, but it’s not exactly ideal when the whole school is made up of them. I’m told they try to make up for the lack of practicality with mentors, but I’m not convinced.”

Quentin remembers Eliot and Margo obsessing in their own ways over Mentor Week, and smiles to himself. Out loud, he says, “I don’t know, I never finished my second year - hell, I never properly finished first year but I was moved up anyway. The only Mentor Week I was around for, I had… personal shit on my mind.” Thinking of his dad is still hard, but it gets easier. Another thing therapy helped with.

“That makes me even less convinced,” Angie informs him. “Anyway, you know Runes and Relics? It’s a New Age and magic shop in Brooklyn?” 

Quentin does, actually. He’d gone there in high school because they occasionally had card trick books he hadn’t read, and when Julia had her Tarot phase in eleventh grade he’d bought her a few things there. 

“My cousin Toph manages the storefront - it’s partly a cover, that place. By which I mean, yeah, it’s full of stuff to sell to the mundanes, but there’s also a lot of real shit. Even the stuff for the average Muggle has a little luck or wellness magic to them. They make a lot of the stuff themselves - the whole building belongs to my uncle, who owns the business. They do mail-order magical work, and someone who can not only mend magicked objects but can up the power level? They’ll be interested in you. Just tell Toph Angie sent you.”

Quentin is not a caster; he might be a hedge by some definitions now, but that’s all. That being said, he’s overheard bits and pieces of conversations among other patients or staff here at the clinic, enough that he knows to say, “Does working there tie me to the Devereaux family?” 

Angie blinks, then laughs. “No, don’t worry about that. If you wanted to be bound to us, there are ways for that to go down, but I get the sense that you and your lovely boyfriend aren’t interested in that at all.” 

“No, not particularly,” Quentin says mildly. “Thanks, Angie.” 

That night, Eliot looks at Quentin over the top of the glasses he’s only had for a week. “Caster shop, huh?” 

Quentin shrugs. “I called Kady and I wrote Alice a message before you got home from Yolande’s - apparently the Devereaux clan does work for everyone regardless of specific magical affiliation, and they hire based on ability, not connections. Kady had actually heard they’ve been looking for a mender since their last one quit, but with being out of town so much she hadn’t thought to mention it to me.” 

“Hm. So, you gonna go?” 

“Might as well give it a shot, right?” Quentin says with a shrug. 

And so the next day finds him at Runes and Relics, feeling weirdly like a teenager again as he steps inside. That faint smell of incense is still there, and the wall of tea blends made in-house. Except that now, when Quentin touches the little jars of looseleaf, he gets the faintest hint of something. Not quite a flavor, not when he isn’t touching the tea itself and the spells are mild, but like water that has an extra taste too faint to identify. 

“Are you Quentin?” comes a voice, and Quentin turns to the counter. 

The man at the counter is about Quentin’s own age, with honey-blond hair and bright blue eyes. He’s very pretty, actually, as pretty as his cousin Angie. “Hi, I’m Toph,” he says, offering a hand. 

Quentin shakes hands, and a chocolate taste fills his mouth, rich and dark like the fancy truffles Margo likes so much and will occasionally deign to share. He wonders what discipline that means, but doesn’t ask. He’ll find out eventually if he’s hired, he assumes. “Yeah, hi. Angie said I might be interested in working for you, but I’m… not really sure…” 

Toph grins, and if Quentin’s heart weren’t already fully engaged, that smile might make him melt a little. As it is, he finds himself thinking he’d like to see this guy’s charm in action - as a spectator - because it must be quite a show. “Angie said you renewed the spells on your prosthetic yourself, right?” 

“Yeah. I have an ability to sense magic, and the spells at full power cast by someone else weren’t agreeing with me, but when I cast the ones I could and renewed the ones I couldn’t while mending a broken prosthetic, it worked better. I can also strengthen spells as I mend, though I haven’t tried to do just a strengthening on an unbroken object.”

He’s thought about it, maybe as part of transmuting something if he has to be working other magic at the same time, but he hasn’t tested it. 

“Come on in the back,” Toph says, and as they head for the back door a woman a little younger than Quentin comes out, and she looks a lot like Toph and Angie with big blue eyes and blonde hair, but hers is streaked with pink. God, is this really a family operation?

Yes and no, it turns out. Runes and Relics is on the first floor of what used to be an apartment building, and Toph explains that the top two floors are off-limits because they’re still residences. But that leaves four floors in between, and apparently all of them are like the fourth floor where Toph and Quentin get off the elevator. 

On the fourth floor, it looks like most of the old apartments were knocked down, replaced with smaller offices and workrooms of multiple sizes. Some of the doors are open so that Quentin can see that no, not everyone here looks like a blond relative. Almost none of them, in fact, and it makes him breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Hey, Bree, got Angie’s new recruit for you. This is Quentin Coldwater. Quentin, this is Brianna Nolan.” Brianna Nolan looks as Irish as her name, pale and freckly with long dark red hair. Also very tall when she stands up and offers her hand - six feet, or just about. Quentin thinks she must be somewhere in her late thirties, and when he shakes her hand her magic tastes of fresh-baked crusty bread. 

Harmless, if a strong flavor, he thinks, until he goes to pull his hand back and Brianna Nolan doesn’t let go. Quentin looks up at her, caught by her grey eyes. He can’t look away for a long moment, and then she lets go and he can, staggering forward against the desk and reaching up to rub at suddenly aching eyes. 

“What was that?” he asks, barely managing to keep even a semblance of a polite tone. 

“I was scanning your magic - that’s my discipline. And you... Mending and magic-twisting, with affinities for summoning and transmutation. Can you sense spells within objects? That wasn’t clear,” Brianna Nolan says, her voice crisp with no accent Quentin can pinpoint, the perfect blank newscaster voice. It makes his skin creep, just a little.

“While I’m mending, yes. If I’m just touching them, I can usually pick up that there is a spell, but not what.” Seriously, his introduction to magic school involved a near-complete lack of explanations and the dean yelling at him, then confiscating his meds. Now this is his job interview? What the fuck? “Is this usually how you screen your applicants?” he asks, as footsteps make him glance over to see that Toph is walking away. Great. 

“Yes,” Brianna says. “Have a seat, Mr. Coldwater.” 

Quentin considers walking out, but in the end he takes the offered seat. “How many people walk out after that one?” 

“About half, but you’ve seen scarier, haven’t you?” 

Oh crap. Eliot mentioned this after his interview with Yolande, that apparently their names and exploits got around. He’s got a couple choices here; he could try to avoid the question, or he could refuse to be cowed. So he sits a little straighter, and it makes his pants ride up slightly so that his prosthetic is visible. Strangely, when Brianna looks at it like she can’t help herself, that helps Quentin decide on the latter.

“Yeah, I have. So is the scan the interview or is there an actual interview?” Think of it like a card game, Margo suggested when he asked her once how to be more confident, so Quentin thinks about cards in his hand at a Push table and he just knows he can nail the next spell.

“The scan is the beginning of the interview.”

Most of the interview is also kind of familiar from what Eliot told him about meeting Yolande. Brianna has Quentin fix several broken objects. Some of them are mundane but tricky like the watch with tiny smashed gears, while others are magical, like the snow globe with an actual tiny tundra inside, literal cold air escaping from the cracked glass. 

(Quentin would love to learn how to make something like that, and when he says so, Brianna smiles and says he just might get to.)

There’s also an amulet, snapped in half, and when Quentin has the two pieces floating in the air over his hands there’s the faintest ring of bells - the magic of things ‘sounds’ like bells to him when he works like this, while the wood of the amulet itself sounds more like… maybe a flute? Under the sounds is the aftertaste of mint - real mint, as in the plant - and he’s beginning to think tastes on spelled objects match the flavor of the person who laid the magic. 

But that faint ring of bells means there’s only a little magic left. Quentin frowns a little, focusing on that sound and coaxing it louder, stronger - it feels a little like reeling in a fishing line and a little like slowly increasing the volume on a radio. Bit by bit he draws it out till the chime of bells is a bright counterpoint to the sweet clear sound of the wood itself feeling whole, and even the aftertaste of mint is a little heavier on his tongue. 

And there’s one more thing, a whisper in the bells and flute that almost makes Quentin drop the amulet when it settles in the palm of his hand. Brianna told him what spells were on every object but this one, and he has a feeling that too is part of the test. “This lets anyone who wears it astral project?” he asks, and Brianna smiles slowly. 

“I know they didn’t teach you the symbols on that from Brakebills. They get their traditions mostly from the English school and they never got this one.” Quentin doesn’t totally understand that reference but he doesn’t ask for clarification either as Brianna continues, “So how did you know what the amulet is for?” 

Quentin shrugs. “It was - in there. Objects… they know what they are. They have a kind of memory. My magic just reminds them of it, that’s all, that’s how mending works.” 

“You know, for most people mending feels completely literal - forcing the break to be undone, like detangling hair or something,” Brianna says. “Our last mender didn’t describe it exactly like you did, but they also said it felt different for them than it does for your average person casting mending spells. OK, you’re hired.” 

“Just like that?” Quentin says. 

“I like what I see. Stop in with AJ next door, they’ll get you settled in a workspace. We’ll expect you to start by the beginning of next week but today is just for settling where you’ll be.” 

AJ is as short as Brianna is tall, five feet at most, looking up at Quentin with a hand on their hip, their short spiky blue hair bright against dark skin. The effect is even stronger because they’re wearing a jumpsuit in almost the same vivid blue as their hair. “I can give you Nikki’s space - Nikki was our last mender - but you do transmutations too?” 

“So they tell me,” Quentin says. 

“Hmm. Interested in learning crafting? That tends to be the next thing for people who do mending and shifting magics,” AJ asks as they lead Quentin down the hallway. 

Quentin considers that. “If it’s on the table, why not?” 

“Oh, it will be, at one point or another. Mr. Devereaux doesn’t believe in just letting his employees stick with the skills they already have, especially since a lot of people here begin as apprentices.” 

AJ leaves Quentin in a decent-sized office, with a small desk and a larger worktable. There’s even a bookshelf built into the wall. It’s like the modern version of the wizard’s workroom he used to want as a kid, or it will be when he gets set up. 

The idea makes him smile.

<><><>

Eliot 40a

It should be a little weird, maybe, how easily they fall back into a routine, and in some ways it is. After the chaos of the last few years, Eliot does sometimes feel strange about living with Quentin in their apartment, both of them with jobs and doing everyday things like errands and bickering over what TV show to put on. At the same time there’s a weird deja vu to it, because of course they’ve done this before.

Except they kind of haven’t. 

“What do you mean?” Quentin asks when Eliot, in a moment more like Quentin than like himself, says this out of the blue one day. “We haven’t… watched a movie before?”

Eliot laughs, shaking his head. “No, not what I meant. Also, I didn’t mean to say it out loud, you’re contagious.” 

“Very funny, El. What then?”

“This. Just… living a life together. I guess I’m still a little shocked that we have it.” 

“Because of everything we’ve been through?” Quentin asks, hooking his good ankle around Eliot’s as if he has to find some way to touch Eliot now but doesn’t want to crowd him. Eliot appreciates both sentiments, because it’s more than that, isn’t it?

“That, and… I was never supposed to have this. I was supposed to die young, either because I was blithely driving myself to it with drugs and alcohol or because everyone around me said that’s where I was headed if I didn’t settle down with a nice girl in my hometown and bury everything I am.” He hadn’t even been thinking about that, at least not in the front of his head, but now it spills out anyway. “I know they were wrong. That the adults were twisted fucks and the kids were… kids, echoing the shit they heard at home. But I don’t always know it all through me, if that makes sense?” 

Ugh. This is the kind of shit that should probably make him join Quentin in going to therapy, but he’s just… not sure about it yet. Considering it, but not yet convinced.

Quentin says, “No, I get that. I think we all have things that we know aren’t true but we can’t shake anyway, and you had enough people who tried to make you believe that kind of poison that it’s probably even harder for you than it would normally be.” 

“It’s one of the reasons I panicked, that day in the throne room,” Eliot admits. “I didn’t think I could have this. A life in the real world. Not that Fillory isn’t very real, but…” He drums his fingers on his knee and wishes for a cigarette, but he’s been trying to cut down on the smoking and drinking, if not cut them out completely. “At the Mosaic we had, well, the Mosaic. Technically, no matter how much it became an afterthought most of the time, we were still on the quest for that entire life. That was what I was thinking, actually. That it’s never just been us, until now.” 

“Huh,” Quentin says, slumping back into the couch a little but still keeping his ankle hooked around Eliot’s. “I never thought of it like that, but you’re right. Even living here, up till recently, most of our time was spent working on the timelines mess. So…” He turns his head on the back of the couch to smile softly at Eliot, shaggy red bangs falling half in his eyes. “How do you think we’re doing?” 

Eliot has to laugh. “All right so far, although if you keep making me watch nerd movies I might reconsider that assessment - hey!” he says, ducking as Quentin swings a couch pillow at him. Eliot catches the pillow with his telekinesis, spinning it before dropping it to the floor. He unhooks their ankles and shifts on the couch so he can lean forward, catching Quentin’s hands and pressing him down to the couch. “If you’re going to take a swing at me, maybe I’ll just keep you here.” 

“I wouldn’t complain,” Quentin says, and the gold flecks left in his eyes from the ritual to save Other-Quentin seem to glitter with the same mischief as what’s in the little smile Quentin gives him. 

“I just bet you wouldn’t,” Eliot says, leaning down that little bit more to kiss him. It’s a little uncomfortable in this position, Eliot’s leg giving warning twinges and Quentin’s prosthetic digging into him just a bit, but it’s not bad for a teasing kiss. Bad for making out, at least today, but they aren’t doing that yet. “I think we’re doing very, very well so far,” he adds, punctuating the last words each with a quick kiss. 

Eliot sits up then and after a moment Quentin does too, looking a little more rumpled than might be expected from so little. “Hey, we’re not even thirty yet this time, although you will be next year -” 

“Stop that right now, Coldwater -” 

“And, we already have a home, and holy shit we’re, like, employed members of society.” 

“Magical society. I hope we don’t have to pay taxes.” 

“Eliot, taxes are important, of course we’re going to pay them.” 

“Not with the Orange Ogre in office.” 

“That’s probably an insult to ogres.” 

Which is such a nerdy, such a Quentin observation that Eliot can only laugh. “Actually, probably true. Have we met any ogres? Do you remember?” 

“Truthfully, no,” Quentin admits. “But if they exist they would be insulted. My point was, we’re doing pretty good. Next step, a pet?” 

Eliot rolls his eyes. “We’ll put that under consideration… maybe next year. Although apparently the people with the beehive on their roof across the alley also have a tortoise, I saw their housekeeper sitting outside and she was knitting a tiny tortoise sweater.” Eliot does not mention that said housekeeper, whose name was Ms. Hudson, was a very tall, aesthetically stunning woman who didn't seem much like a housekeeper, but who was Eliot to judge. Also, she'd had a vague resemblance to the late Fairy Queen that was a little unsettling, but she’d been very helpful last week when it had been a cane day and two of his damn shopping bags split open as he walked by the house. 

“A tortoise? That’s a new one,” Quentin says. “Then again, somehow I get the feeling those neighbors are a tad… odd. I get the weirdest magic aftertastes when I walk by there - and if I’m getting them from outside the house, one or both of them must be powerful . At least I think that’s how it works, I’m still guessing a lot.”

“Well, if they’re magicians, maybe we’ll run into them properly one day,” Eliot says with a shrug, catching Quentin’s hand again to tow him off the couch to somewhere more comfortable for making out on this particular day. 

Later, it occurs to him that the conversation had derailed a bit, but really, the fact that it had so easily drifted into just being them is a good sign, isn’t it? It feels like one, anyway, so he’s going to do his best not to poke at it. 

And so life goes on, with work and visits from Margo - a few from Alice, even, as she tries to pull double duty with the Library and with rehabbing the ex-Niffins. Eliot progresses a lot in most of his ward training, but it turns out there is one area in which he just can’t quite get the hang of things, at least not completely. Namely, warding objects. 

He can do it with mild spells, that’s easy, and recently he’s had some success at warding metals without them warping. But somehow, he can’t seem to narrow his focus down enough when it’s anything else - or rather, not when it’s a finished product. For example, the first protective amulet Eliot made that wasn’t just practice was for Quentin, and it was made of smooth ebony wood. 

The thing is, Eliot can whittle, carve, whatever you want to call it. His grandfather had taught all four of the Waugh boys before he died, and it was… 

It’s not that he has fond memories of the man, precisely. No particularly bad ones either, but that could have more to do with the fact that Eliot’s grandfather was bedridden for most of the memories he has, and thus not particularly capable anymore of sharing his son’s methods of ‘discipline’.

It’s not out of respect that Eliot kept up the woodworking when he was growing up, it was more that it was a very rare outlet for his artistic side that was safe, much like singing in choir was a way to sing that wasn’t frowned upon. He mostly gave it up after he left Indiana when he could replace it with the more all-encompassing project of himself. He’d kept carving little things from time to time, just for practice; it was never the occasional indulgence that is Margo taking a weekend to paint in oils, or the soothing habit of Quentin’s drawing. 

Just an old habit that he never fully gave up on, but it turns out it is easier to ward objects you make or design yourself than to add wards to someone else’s finished product. So, logically, Eliot had begun by carving protective symbols into wood, or murmuring spells as he shaped it, because he didn’t need to learn the practical parts first like he would for, as an example, glassblowing.

And anyway, wood suits Quentin. Eliot had expected him to keep the carved circular pendant tucked away under his shirts but actually, usually he wears it right out in the open. He says he likes tasting the spices of Eliot’s magic when he fiddles with it, and the shiny dark wood looks good against the blues and greens and deep reds he tends to wear these days instead of black. 

Margo, though. Margo is different. Eliot acquires a piece of glossy black tourmaline, because it’s one of the best protective stones. He asked Yolande why the best protective stone and wood are both black, and she’d said no one really knows, but it works so they don’t push at it. But every time he tries to put spells in it - wards for safety against threats both physical and magical, fetches for luck and clear sight - the stone cracks. This happens with every stone he practices on at Yolande’s workshop, but this isn’t practice, this is for Bambi.

Eliot’s no mender, but he’s good enough to fix the cracks every time. He’s just apparently not good enough to stop them from happening. He could try weaker spells but that would all but negate the point. Which leaves him sitting on the bed midway through a Saturday afternoon, curls askew and new glasses crooked, cursing the air blue as his spells fail yet again. 

“El?” Quentin sticks his head around the doorframe. “Everything all right?” 

Eliot sighs. “Margo’s coming by tomorrow and I still don’t have this goddamned pendant spelled for her. It just won’t work.”

Quentin levers his way over to the bed - he’s having a crutch day, which he does sometimes just to keep in practice - and settles down across from Eliot, good leg curled under him and stump stretched out where it almost bumps Eliot’s leg. “The stone won’t take the magic?” he asks. 

“I’m using too much power. But you can’t cast these with less. It should be able to take it, but I can’t… narrow the field enough. You have to channel this much magic very carefully, and I can do it with metal now without it warping, but apparently stones are not working out yet and metal’s not good on its own for protection. But the stone cracks every time and the spells won’t hold then, obviously.”

Quentin frowns, fiddling with his amulet in a way Eliot usually finds endearing, but today feels like it’s just reminding him of his inadequacies. “OK, so, why don’t I help? I can mend the cracks as they happen, it’s a different kind of cooperative casting, we do it at work sometimes.” 

“Yeah, Yolande’s been walking me through concurrent casting as opposed to the standard cooperative too, but Quentin, I need to learn to do this myself,” Eliot points out. 

“Sure, before you get your credential as a solo wardsmith, but not today for Margo’s gift. Anyway, look at it as practice in alternate cooperative style, for both of us, which you also need to have down pat, right?” 

“‘Alternate cooperative style?’” Eliot echoes, raising his eyebrows. Quentin shrugs. 

“That’s what AJ calls it, though concurrent casting is definitely a little less of a mouthful.”

Eliot rolls his eyes, but it’s fond enough. “All right, let’s give it a shot.” 

So they set the piece of tourmaline on the bed between them, and fall into a breathing pattern - Yolande and AJ use the same one, even if they use different words - before beginning to cast. Eliot starts a beat ahead of Quentin, the stone floating up to hover between them as they work. Quentin’s magic joins the cast a moment later, and - 

Large-scale cooperative magic is a rush, you get flickers and glimpses of being the other people in it. Concurrent casting is smaller, more intimate. Eliot is used to the sense of Yolande by now, cool and flowing water, but he’d been told the effect is stronger the closer you are to your casting partner, and Quentin - 

Quentin’s magic, just his and Eliot’s, it feels like velvet, following behind Eliot’s pricklier magic and smoothing rough edges. And for a moment as the spells crest, one after the other, Eliot thinks he tastes sweet spices and honey and he knows that isn’t him, that’s Quentin’s magic sense reflecting back between them so that they can both sense their magic, both flavors together. That’s - 

“It worked,” Eliot says, blinking open eyes he hadn’t realized closed. He doesn’t even need to look down to the mattress to see, he felt the click of the spells taking hold, he knows it worked.

“It worked, but, um…” Quentin is holding the dark crystal in his palm, and now, instead of being pure iridescent black, all through the tourmaline run cracks of shimmery red. 

“What the hell?” Eliot says, picking up the stone and studying it. “How did this happen?” 

“I think it’s your magic. Other-me, he could see magic as well as taste it, he said yours was a rich warm red, like that. I think maybe somehow the mending… I was trying very hard not to affect your magic, just keep the stone together, keep it strong enough to hold your power. It’s like it took me too literally somehow?” 

Eliot considers this. “Makes sense. Well, Margo will like that it’s different, and I… Actually, I think I like it too.” He does, even if he’s not sure what to make of his magic being red. Red like blood, his darker thoughts whisper, red like flames, but blood can save lives too and it’s just as red then, and he can’t forget how Yolande spoke of fire as equally good and bad. 

It feels like things keep telling him that he’s both, and this is just one more thing. 

But also, this is what happens when his magic mixes with Quentin’s, something lovely and different. “It’s us,” he says after a moment, and Quentin smiles, but there’s a strange thoughtful look in his eyes. It reminds Eliot of something, one of those deja vu moments of Mosaic memory, but he can’t place it, so he lets it go, setting to work wrapping the top of the tourmaline pendant in gold wire so he can make a loop for the chain he bought. 

Their magic really did make something good, didn’t it?

<><><>

Eliot 40b

True to his word, Eliot does tow Quentin along when he goes shopping for new clothes. This actually turns out to be more amusing than Eliot might have expected, because Quentin decides to take his role as captive audience very seriously, and literally brought score cards. When Eliot steps out in the first outfit, a dove-grey suit with a green brocade waistcoat, Quentin holds one up that has the number 9 in thick black marker. 

Eliot almost falls over laughing, and the saleswoman looks more than a little amused herself. Quentin manages that little smirk of his, the one Eliot hasn’t really seen in a long time, and that only adds to the warmth the laughter gives him. 

So, in amongst the outfits that get either a high score or a question mark score card with a note under it - I told you I’d be no help at this - Eliot deliberately finds a few ridiculous ones, like the canary yellow suit with a lime green shirt that gets wide eyes from Quentin and a firm shake of the head even before the 3 card. 

“Truthfully, I’d have said 1,” Eliot comments, wrinkling his nose as he looks down at the bright yellow fabric. There are people who can pull off the shade, but he’s not one of them, not in this amount anyway. Smaller amounts of yellow, paired with something else, maybe, but he’s not enough of a fan to experiment with it. 

It fits you really well, that earned back a couple points, Quentin signs carefully, the hand motions still slow but growing in confidence now as Quentin practices. Eliot suspects that the time spent memorizing tuts is making learning sign language easier - he isn’t progressing with Quentin’s speed, not in using them anyway, but he finds that the tricks he used to learn tuts help. 

And he’s good at remembering what the signs mean when he sees them, which is all he needs to understand Quentin. 

“As if I would ever wear a suit that didn’t fit me,” he says airily, and turns on his heel to go back into the dressing room and get out of this travesty of an outfit. Well. That isn’t fair. It’s a very nice cut, good fabric, he’s sure the right person would look amazing even in colors that make one think of a human Sprite can. Eliot is just not that person. 

Most of the outfits that got Quentin’s question mark card were the suits that are prints, rather than a solid color. Lighter shades, most of them, cream or white or pale grey as a base color and designs in light blues or greens, golds and silvers, some pinks and light purples. The waistcoats mostly match the jackets and pants. He actually doesn’t think he’ll wear a lot of these as they come, but having this much print is good for mix-and-matching. 

Eliot isn’t exactly the undergrad on a shoestring budget he once was, but the trick of buying things you can use in multiple combinations is still a good one. He thinks of it as no different than a painter mixing new shades on their palette. It’s his version of Quentin’s growing collection of art supplies. 

“Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life.” 

The memory still burns, in its way; how easily he fell for Martin’s playacting as Mike. But with hindsight and the distance of having experienced a lifetime since then, Eliot had begun thinking that Martin probably did that more than once. He’d had the same time his puppeteer sister did to study all of them, manipulate them. He can still remember Other-Quentin’s fierce insistence that Jane was at fault for what happened to them all in every timeline, for all that she’d tried to make Eliot think it was his fault that day in the Clock Barrens. 

None of that can ever fully make up for the fact that Eliot ended up killing a man who’d done nothing but have the bad luck to be possessed, but the truth is what it’s always been - he doesn’t know what else he could have done, and it was Martin and Jane who did that to them, who played their games.

But it’s an old guilt, and the truth of what he’d said that day is oddly comforting now, too. Eliot did create himself, once upon a time. The past few years have felt like a study in breaking down his performance, but now he can build it up again. With clothes and hair, like he did last time, but also in - 

In Margo’s visits and Quentin’s eyes bright with mischief, in what he’d seen one timeline over of what his life could be. He doesn’t want exactly what his and Quentin’s counterparts have - he’s not tempted to go looking for the same apartment in a brownstone or anything like that, but the potential of building a life, that was good to see. 

That’ll take time, though, and for now new clothes are a start, a symbol even, of a new beginning. Also, picking them out is just fun. He can only buy so many, but that’s why he picks the ones he can mix and match - it turns a handful of outfits into countless more, when one also has the option to change the colors completely with an easy spell.

Eliot decides to wear the first suit out of the store, carefully folding away the clothes he’d come in - some of his mourning blacks that he hadn’t bothered to color-change, not when he was buying new things anyway. But on his way to the counter he spots a grey leather jacket, soft to the touch and softer lining inside. 

“This is light enough you could wear it inside, and the grey will match most of what you have,” he says, offering it to Quentin, who looks startled. Eliot knows he’s right, because he’s seen most of the clothes Quentin still has. As for the shirts he ordered online that haven’t come yet, Eliot can guess. The color-change spell worked on Quentin’s shirts, but some of his things are gone (donated by Julia while he was dead, Eliot suspects, but she isn’t here to ask) so Quentin went shopping. Eliot’s pretty sure most of the shirts are nerdy t-shirts in any shade not too bright but also not black.

He also knows that in the bag by Quentin’s feet are multiple pairs of blue jeans. The color-change spell, for some reason, doesn’t like denim as much as it does other fabrics, so while turning some of Quentin’s black jeans blue had resulted in interesting blue-grey or grey-white shades that even Quentin liked, some had just… not worked at all and managed to look more like tie-dye gone wrong.

Thus, before giving most of the day over to Eliot’s shopping, they’d stopped at a little store in Brooklyn and stocked up on some more blue jeans for Quentin. 

“I know you said hoodies don’t feel right anymore, so why not give it a try?” 

Quentin looks skeptical but shrugs the jacket on. Eliot knows it’s a lock just watching Quentin’s fingertips rubbing at the sleeves, finding how soft they are. He wears it out of the store too, and it occurs to Eliot that with his own grey suit and green waistcoat, with Quentin’s green shirt, in their own different ways they nearly match. 

The idea makes him smile as he catches hold of Quentin’s hand and they walk down the street together, slowly because Quentin still has his blue cane in his other hand, and is still not back up to his old speed. “You know we match,” he says aloud, and Quentin turns enough to look Eliot in his suit up and down, then to look at himself, his expression almost comically skeptical. But then Eliot sees realization dawn and Quentin actually laughs, bright and easy like Eliot only heard a handful of times even in fifty years.

He still can’t talk - maybe never will, they don’t know - but he can laugh , which is enough.

They stop at an art store near the penthouse, and Eliot lingers briefly over a woodcarving tool set, thinking of a little collection of wooden animals that had once sat on his windowsill in his childhood bedroom. They’d all been carved by his own hand and are now hidden away at the bottom of a shoebox of keepsakes. The only things he’d brought with him. He’d whittled at the Mosaic too, something to pass the time - and he’d made a rough flute for Teddy’s tenth birthday, Quentin had almost killed him - but he… He glances up to where Quentin is eyeing the painting options instead of the drawing supplies, a packet of some kind of markers already in hand. 

Hm. Eliot leaves the carving set where it is, picking up a few packets of modeling clay and a medium-sized sewing kit instead. He’d gotten away with making little sculptures too once, because his high school actually had a small art department and he’d been allowed to spend his free periods in the room that served as both art studio and home ec classroom. He hadn’t been able to keep any of what he’d made there, not least because that’s also where he’d learned distinctly “girly” sewing as well as the practical mending anyone on a farm might occasionally get stuck with. That would have gotten his teeth knocked out if his father found out. 

Maybe it’s time to do something with those old skills? Some of the plainer things he bought today could use some decoration, and the idea of doing it himself is… kind of amusing, at least. Worth playing around with, anyway. He’d done that with some of his undergrad clothing, and occasionally at the Mosaic, and he vaguely remembers hearing something about symbol-based spells done with thread, which could be interesting. The clay is just fun.

Maybe he’ll make a tiny collection of clay Margos just to see her face when she’s next in and spots them. The one golden summer they had between first and second year, Eliot spent a week posing for her as she set up her easels and oil paints - one of various extracurriculars her father had paid for, apparently normal in the well-to-do childhood Eliot affects having had but in truth can’t imagine. He never asked what happened to the paintings, it had seemed gauche, but maybe he should. 

She’d painted a lot in that one week, before putting all the supplies and finished canvases away somewhere. Not all of it had been Eliot’s poses. 

He hasn’t thought about that in ages. 

Quentin tugs on Eliot’s sleeve and Eliot blinks, realizing he’d stopped at the corner to wait for the light and then just never crossed, lost in thought. “Sorry, got sidetracked,” Eliot says, and with no free hand to try and sign with and no notepad, Quentin can only give him a worried frown before he almost walks into an electric pole and has to watch where he’s going instead. 

The truth is, Eliot feels a little restless in his own skin now that things are calming down. It’s not that he wants to go back into crisis mode, or that he doesn’t value the time to heal. It’s just - it’s - he doesn’t know, really. He feels strange, is all, even as the person he sees in the mirror starts to look more like the person he’s trying to rebuild. It’s helping, and he knows what he wants to do, but it’s just not all quite clicking yet.

Eliot’s pretty sure once he figures out why not, things will improve, but he’s not exactly sure how to go about doing that.

A few days later, Eliot finds Quentin sitting cross-legged on their bed, drawing on his own arm. “What are you doing? Giving yourself a tattoo?” he asks, sitting across from him.

Quentin gives him a lopsided smile, setting aside the marker - actually, the open pack next to Quentin says it’s a tattoo pen? - and picking up one of his gel pens to write on his notepad, Sort of. I want a real one, at least one, but I can’t do that for myself. I’m thinking maybe wings on my back or something, what do you think? 

“Sounds hot,” Eliot says lightly, which earns him an amused huff. “What’s with the sudden taste for body art? Or, wait - no, you’ve been doing this for a couple weeks, haven’t you, except with gel pens until now. I meant to ask but I kept getting sidetracked. I forget why exactly.” 

Well, we were helping Alice and Margo with their plans, and then Kady wanted us to demonstrate poppers for some of her baby hedges, you wanted to go shopping and both of us have been doing sign language practice? Quentin points out.  

Eliot laughs a little. “Fair point. So why the self-inking?” 

Quentin shrugs, letting his hair fall over his face. Eliot’s fingers itch to brush it back - he used to wheedle Quentin into letting him braid it back sometimes in their other life, so that he couldn’t hide behind it. But he resists the urge, waiting Quentin out. 

My body feels wrong, sometimes. A little too tall, or my hair looks like it’s the wrong color, too light or too something, I’m not sure which. And I lost all my scars. I’m NOT complaining, El, you and Alice and Margo built me a body, that’s fucking amazing, I think it’s just adjustment issues. But anyway, it helps to draw, to put designs on my skin that I know I put there. It’s like it’s part of learning to… inhabit my new body? It sounds dumb but I can’t explain it better.  

“I don’t think it sounds dumb at all, actually,” Eliot says. “I think it makes perfect sense, and if I can help you feel more you… Whatever you need, Q.” 

I know that. You OK, though? You seem edgy lately.

Eliot sighs. “Honestly? I think I’m not exactly sure how to handle peace, and recalibrating is taking longer than expected.” He reaches over to touch the green and blue vines Quentin has colored in on the soft inside of his forearm, not even thinking but acting on impulse. He traces the line of them and hears Quentin’s breath catch, his own fingers seeming to tingle at the almost-innocent touch.

But he isn’t sure - they decided to take this slow and Quentin’s level of recovery isn’t certain enough to push anything, so Eliot clears his throat. “What would you draw on me?” he asks, which might not actually be the best distraction, but it’s the first thing he thought of. It makes Quentin grin, all amused mischief, which also doesn’t actually help but is still always a good thing to see. 

It definitely doesn’t help when Quentin lightly cups Eliot’s wrist, studying the bare skin of his inner forearm with thoughtful concentration. Because then Eliot can’t help but think of Quentin’s warm palm pressed to the red braid mark of the spell Eliot brought him home with, of those fingers wrapped around other things. 

But - slow. They’re taking this slow. Right?

<><><>

Quentin 40b

Quentin is not an entirely oblivious person. OK, most of the time he definitely is, but Eliot is different. Quentin has the cheat codes for Eliot - not all of them, but more than enough of them to know exactly the effect he’s having as he considers what to draw. And the thing is, part of him wants to just stop, to reach for his notepad instead and tell Eliot that he would very much like to make out now, thanks, and if that leads to more he’s healthy enough, but - but - 

A little of it is the idea of writing that down, since he doesn’t think he knows all the signs for it yet. But mostly he doesn’t want to have to stop what he’s already doing to talk. He’s used to it most of the time, and he still thinks if his voice is the only price to pay it could be much worse but he still - it still fucking sucks , sometimes. 

Except - he has his tattoo pens, doesn’t he? One of them is red, and it’s not quite the same warm vivid shade of the red braid mark wrapped around his right wrist and Eliot’s left - that red is almost the color of Eliot’s magic, but like it’s mixed a little with some other color, gold-brown maybe. Quentin can’t recreate that with a temporary tattoo marker, probably not even with paint, but the red tattoo pen is a nice vivid shade, and it’ll make his point. He’s already holding Eliot’s left wrist after all.

So he picks up the red, and carefully starts drawing a Celtic knot on Eliot’s forearm, a twined shape of little braids like the mark they share. He hears Eliot’s sharp indrawn breath as he realizes what Quentin’s doing, but Quentin doesn’t look up, hair falling to hide his expression as he keeps working on the design, lip caught absently between his teeth. 

“You should think about learning ink magic - you’d be good at it,” Eliot says with just a hint of a catch to his voice, and Quentin hums an acknowledgment. Actually, it’s not a bad idea, but, later. Now he has a point to make, and that little catch to Eliot’s words tells him he’s making it. 

Cheat codes, and all.

Quentin finishes the last curve of the knot and sets the pen down, shifting his grip on Eliot’s wrist so he can rub his thumb over the red braid. Eliot looks at the red woven knot, looks at Quentin’s hand, and says in a voice gone slightly rough, “Are you trying to drive me nuts here, Q?” 

Quentin shakes his head, looking up at Eliot with a smile, and then leans in to kiss him, slow and deep. Eliot kisses back, but his free hand rests only lightly on Quentin’s shoulder, and that just won’t do, that is not taking the hint at all. 

So, Quentin climbs into Eliot’s lap and lets go of his wrist to thread both hands into those dark curls like he always wants to do, since the first time he saw that one curl always fall loose from Eliot’s careful styling. Eliot makes a small sound muffled by the kiss and then his hand comes up to grip the back of Quentin’s neck as he kisses back with real heat now. 

Quentin moans softly, trailing his lips down Eliot’s jaw, the prickle of Eliot’s beard against his lips a new sensation but a good one. He rocks himself forward so that Eliot topples back against the pillows and Quentin can stretch out over him, tangling their legs and rolling their hips together. Quentin can feel Eliot getting hard even through both their clothes, and he grinds down even as Eliot fists a hand in his hair, pulling him in for a bruising kiss. And all the while there’s the taste of sweet spices in Quentin’s mouth, familiar now from every time Eliot so much as takes his hand but an extra thrill in this moment.

Quentin wants - he wants to slide down the bed, take Eliot in his mouth before he’s all the way hard, wants to feel Eliot’s cock fill the rest of the way on his tongue, and it’s easier to deep-throat that way too. But, unfortunately, Quentin can’t always catch his breath easily, and a blowjob is probably not the most ideal plan until walking doesn’t sometimes leave him winded. 

So they end up with Eliot’s dress shirt half unbuttoned and Quentin’s Star Trek t-shirt somewhere on the floor, trousers and jeans and underwear only half pushed down as their cocks rub together, hands too busy wandering to reach down and jerk themselves off properly. For all the franticness of not bothering to actually undress, they take it almost slow, until Quentin feels like his blood is sparking but in a wonderful way he’d forgotten, and - 

He comes first, sensitive to contact still, stifling his breathless moan in the bend of Eliot’s neck, and then he does use his mouth after all. He slides down Eliot’s body to clean up the mess he left and then licks at Eliot’s cock until he comes too with a gasp of Quentin’s name and that wide smile he only gets at times like this that Quentin loves to see. 

Eventually, they get just cleaned up enough to stumble shirtless to the bathroom and strip down to shower, hands still wandering as they clean up. Quentin’s three-in-one peppermint soap is gone but he has a candy cane body wash now, and Eliot seems to like having them use the same herbal-scented shampoo (not that you can tell it’s the same after Eliot’s done with the other products he uses). “You are ridiculous, little damn minx,” Eliot murmurs in Quentin’s ear, and maybe Quentin can’t talk but he can laugh and lean up for a quick kiss as the water spills over their bodies. 

“I was trying to behave,” Eliot adds as they dry off and get robes out of the little hamper kept in here for them. That was Eliot’s idea, and literally everyone else had been a little bewildered, but it’s a good idea. Saves needing to remember to grab a change of clothes, anyway. Eliot, of course, has one of his barely-covers-anything robes, in a red almost the same shade as his magic glows under his skin, while Quentin’s is sensible blue cotton and comes almost to his ankles. 

Don’t behave, Quentin signs, and Eliot laughs. 

“Apparently not. We’ll have to work out a signal for if it’s too much, hm?” 

We can do that. Love you. 

“Love you too, baby.” 

And they can do that, signals, whatever. But it’s - it’s not like sex is some kind of cure-all, whatever some of the fics Quentin used to jerk off to as a teenager said. (Yes, he had a healing cock kink. Yes, he got over it.) 

So, yeah, sex is far from a magical cure, but at the same time Quentin feels less fragile knowing that Eliot knows he doesn’t have to be completely careful with him anymore. He feels a little steadier, a little more real when they stop wearing so many clothes to bed, and tangle together under the covers for more than cuddling, as wonderful as cuddles are in their own right.

It feels like just one more building block in this project of putting himself back together, relearning being alive. 

Another is trying something new, which is why Quentin spends a few days watching YouTube tutorials on working with gouache paint, since he has Brian’s muscle memory for watercolors but this isn’t quite the same. Not being quite the same is part of the point. He has an idea in his head, paintings in the colors of magic, but he doesn’t think he’s ready for that yet. He thinks he might need to draw on Brian’s watercolor knowledge, actually, for what he has in mind, but he’s not sure yet. 

He only means to paint the view of the city from the patio, curled up out there with his fresh pad of drawing paper - the guides said that was good for gouache paint too - but somehow the shapes of the buildings shift a little. Not like Whitespire or anything, exactly, but a little… a little like that, and a little like a city Quentin remembers flying over when he was nothing but a streak of dark gold light in a world made of a paler golden fire, and he used a lot of blue like a miniature palace-cottage made all of blue he remembers seeing in the courtyard of a full-size palace, a single city in a sea of sand. 

It’s clumsy, this painting. It would be; it’s his first. But there’s something to it, New York and not, this world and not. Quentin doesn’t exactly remember everything he saw as he ran through the ambient, it’s more like flickers and images that come in dreams, but as he gets stronger so do they. He kind of wants to record them. He kind of wants to share them. 

“What is that, Steampunk Manhattan?” Eliot asks, settling next to Quentin and draping an arm around his shoulders. Quentin shakes his head as he cuddles into Eliot’s side. 

Just practice, he signs, and signing it instead of writing is practice too, of course. It feels like that’s what his life is, right now. Practice walking without the cane, practice his sign language, and now practice painting. Noticing the black looped embroidery on the hem of Eliot’s sleeve, he signs slowly, That’s new. Where? He can’t quite remember all the signs to say ‘where did that come from’ but Eliot gets the gist. 

“I did it, actually. Who says you get to be the only artistic one in this relationship?” Eliot says lightly. 

That’s fair, Quentin replies, and he could point out - though this would probably take his notepad - that Eliot’s entire image is an art project, Quentin has never been the only artistic one in this relationship. But he doesn’t; for once he takes the comment for what it is and just snuggles a little closer, absently tracing the black threads. It looks good, he tells Eliot. 

“So does the painting,” Eliot says, and then they watch the sun go down together like they used to do when they were a lot older, in another life. Things won’t always be so quiet, Quentin knows; he and Eliot are off the front lines, it’s true, but there’s always something happening. They help Kady with the research she doesn’t always have the patience or time for, Margo and Alice call or mirror or portal in with projects they want input on - Quentin has a strong suspicion that he and Eliot are going to get drawn deeper into the Niffin rehab thing, but he doesn’t really mind. He is lucky enough to have a second chance at a human life, so if other people need more help with that same chance, he doesn’t mind doing what he can.

Maybe Julia will come back around one day too. 

But for now, Quentin thinks, it’s just him and Eliot, a sunset and ongoing art projects, ongoing life projects. It’s not a bad deal, all in all, is it?

<><><>

Eliot 40a

When Eliot goes back to Fillory, it’s to get a divorce.

His marriage to Fen is basically null and void anyway, due to the fidelity magic breaking when he was exiled and his time being legally dead. However, the formality of actually nullifying their marriage with a ceremony is… a thing, which Fen has asked him to participate in. 

“If we’re going to make nullification something real that anyone can access, then we should start at the top. High-profile is how Margo put it,” Fen explains to him by mirror-call one day, sounding very earnest about it. “For us, the spell part of the ritual is unnecessary because the magic broke, but we’ve tested it so we know it works and casting it won’t harm us. It just won’t do anything. But doing it like this will tell people it’s all right to do it.” 

Eliot has considered himself functionally divorced for a while now, and he really doesn’t know how common arranged marriages are among the general population, but, well. His own was a fucking mess, to be perfectly honest. If this will help other people in Fillory - people who used to be his responsibility - to get out of bad situations, who is he to say no?

Also, according to Margo, she declared both he and Quentin were princes, so they should make at least one appearance. 

“OK, I am fully on board with the official performance of divorce rituals for the sake of making them feel legitimate for general use, but why exactly did Margo give us new titles?” Quentin asks when Eliot fills him in. 

“On the off chance any of our visits are long ones or if one or both of us needs a degree of authority in an emergency, apparently,” Eliot says with a shrug. “Margo claims it’s mostly honorary, just a precaution. But we have circlets, because why not, right?”

Actually, Eliot suspects Margo is having a little bit of fun with all this, but he can’t really blame her. They had their ways of finding fun as monarchs back in the day, didn’t they? “So, yeah, I have an appointment for a divorce ceremony in Fillory. Want to come?” 

“Obviously,” Quentin says. “Not letting you get divorced without me.” There’s something in his expression that Eliot can’t quite read, there and gone in a moment, but he decides not to press. A memory of Arielle, maybe?

And so, after getting time off from their respective jobs, they go to Fillory, where as far as Eliot’s concerned, one of the best perks is getting to see Quentin in Fillorian clothes. “This is a lot like the stuff I wore on the Muntjac, just different colors,” Quentin says thoughtfully, looking down at the black trousers and deep green tunic Margo ordered him into, the trousers and soft black ankle boots designed to cover Quentin’s prosthetic so that the Fillorians don’t question him. The only fake limbs they’ve ever seen are wooden, living wood or not, and Eliot knows Quentin doesn’t feel like explaining modern Earth materials.

“Little fancier maybe,” Quentin continues, “but still nothing like what you or Margo wear. Which is good, because I would look silly.”

Eliot is in silver, tight trousers and a heavy jacket-style shirt - it’s similar to an outfit he’d worn in his High King days, except there’s a green wash to the silver that means, with the subtle silver embroidery on Quentin’s clothes, Margo planned this for them to be complimentary. He does love that woman - it’s just like her. 

“We look good,” Eliot laughs, putting an arm around Quentin’s shoulders and making him look at them together in the mirror. The narrow silver circlet crowns on their heads are almost identical, except for the stones - Eliot’s is a moonstone to match his favorite ring, white and iridescent in the light, and Quentin’s is a shimmery amber-colored sunstone. 

“Moonstone and sunstone, Bambi?” Eliot had said dryly when she’d handed them over to him, while Quentin was busy listening to a very chattery delegation of Squirrels. 

“Hey, why not? I thought it was a fun little thing - most people aren’t going to get it, but that only makes it better. Moonstone’s your favorite, and your boy gets the counterpart.”

She’s right, it does. Quentin got it, to Eliot’s surprise - but then, he’s learning stones more carefully as part of his work at Runes and Relics, so it makes sense that he would learn to spot different kinds of stone. And he knows the moonstone ring is Eliot’s favorite, too.

“ You look good,” Quentin corrects now, drawing Eliot out of his thoughts. “I look presentable, which is a win for me.” He tips his head up a little to look at Eliot. “You nervous?” 

“No,” Eliot says, and it’s true. “But it is going to be a little weird, isn’t it?” 

Quentin can’t really argue that, and apparently he decides not to try, because he kisses Eliot softly and then they have to go.

The ceremony is going to take place in the largest of the castle gardens because an outdoor wedding has to be undone outdoors, apparently. They give Eliot and Fen a few moments alone, which feels like a miscalculation in general, but who is Eliot to judge? 

Weirdly, Fen actually looks more like an Earth bride than a divorcee in her cream and gold gown, but it’s clearly meant to match her crown. The new High Queen’s crown is white quartz and silver, a replica of the obsidian and blackened metal High King’s crown in opposite coloring. Margo’s idea again, Eliot knows, meant to reinforce that the two titles are now considered as equal co-rulers, officially. 

He should have done that, probably, when he was High King. 

“We both look a lot different from that first day, don’t we?” Fen asks, coming to stand beside Eliot where he’s looking down into the decorative pond. Their dim, wavering reflections look back up at them. 

“You can say that again.” Eliot has his cane today, just in case - his leg has been stiff if otherwise behaving, but having it seems weirdly appropriate because he transfigured this cane to look just like the one he used in a different Fillory in another life. “If I didn’t say before, congratulations on the promotion.”

“You didn’t, and thanks, Eliot,” Fen says. “You… seem happy. I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks, Fen,” Eliot says, and the truth is that he’s not sure what else there is to say. Luckily he doesn’t have to puzzle over it for long before they have an audience again, and at that point things become pretty straightforward. He and Fen stand handclasped, a ribbon wound around their hands, and Margo as High King and officiant stands there in front of them. 

“Are you both in agreement to end this union?” Margo asks, and Eliot has to not look right at her because the phrasing sounds nothing like her at all. His gaze falls on Quentin, who is standing next to Josh of all people, but Eliot makes himself focus, meeting Fen’s eyes as she says yes. Eliot echoes her, and then Margo unwraps the ribbon on their hands. She moves her fingers through a tut and then looks up at them. 

“I declare this marriage dissolved.”

And that’s that. So simple, after so much complication. Eliot doesn’t even know what to think; he feels almost dazed. Luckily, it’s not considered appropriate to have a banquet after an annulment ceremony, so everyone sort of… adjourns to wherever they want. Eliot doesn’t look for Quentin now, just starts walking. He needs - something. He’s not sure what. 

But he finds himself in the throne room, staring at the throne where he once sat with Margo at his side, at the dais where he and Quentin were hit with a lifetime of memory. He thinks about both of those things, about being a king, about being a partner and a father, and there’s - it’s - They’re both things he’d thought he’d be a disaster at, and… 

Well. He wasn’t ideal as a king, but he also wasn’t a complete fuck up. The whole reason he’d been exiled was because he was doing his best by Fillory and an asshole goat-man had wanted him to cause hedonistic chaos. Then the fairies got involved, but when Eliot had been in control, he hadn’t done so badly, had he? 

And at the Mosaic… God, he’d been terrified. Arielle hadn’t been, he remembers - Teddy had been a surprise, and both she and Quentin had seemed to view their marriage more as a practical measure than grand romance, but she’d been thrilled. Quentin had mostly fretted about passing on his depression, but Eliot… Eliot had been so afraid that it was - he has a temper, he can be every bit as cruel as the people who raised him when he’s provoked. He’d feared, as he had during Fen’s pregnancy, that a child would trigger off the same violence in him that his father dealt out so casually. Arielle’s baby couldn’t be his by blood but the only way not to be a co-parent would have been to leave, so Eliot had been left to worry.

But when Teddy had been born… It wasn’t as simple as everything cured because he held that baby and fell in love, but he had fallen in love. The idea of harming him had been so deeply, instantly unacceptable that in a way Eliot had almost been angrier for it, because until that moment part of him had really truly believed all loving parents were faking it. The proof otherwise, seen in Arielle and Quentin (later in Arielle’s second husband Merric), and felt in his own heart… It had been hard to face, sometimes.

Still, they’d been a family, they’d done pretty well together, hadn’t they? And he’d been the one Teddy was likeliest to confide in, as he got older.

Equally good at defense or destruction… For the first time the idea doesn’t seem alien after all. Because he can - he can take care of what matters, can’t he? He doesn’t always know the best way how, but he’s gotten better at figuring it out. And he already knows how to destroy, long since decided that for all he hated being good at it he was more than willing to unleash that side of him if it meant someone he loved was all right.

And he thinks maybe it started here, the ability to do that, to be that. There are worse things to take away from a twisted fairy tale.

“Eliot?” 

Eliot turns to see Quentin behind him, looking a little concerned. “Yeah, Q, just thinking.” 

“Deep thoughts, apparently,” Quentin says, walking over to him. He moves a little stiffly and always will, but by now, if Eliot didn’t know that half of Quentin’s left leg was a prosthetic, he wouldn’t be able to tell. Today, Quentin doesn’t even have his own demigoddess-issued cane, so he actually looks more able-bodied than Eliot does.

Eliot shrugs, but he doesn’t pull away when Quentin slips an arm around his waist. “Growing up, mostly, of all the cliches.” 

“Well, we’re circling the last couple years before thirty, it’s probably a good time for a little cliche, El.” Quentin is silent for a bit, fingers rubbing absent circles over Eliot’s hip, which is a nicer feeling than it sounds like, but Eliot can feel the questions hovering so he’s not surprised when - 

“Do you miss it? Being king, and all?”

Oh. Actually not what he’d been expecting. Eliot hums a non-committal sound, sliding his own arm around Quentin as he thinks it over. “Yes and no? I don’t miss the constant risk of disaster, but… sometimes… the idea of doing something that meant something? Yeah. But it’s not the only thing like that I miss. Which is part of the whole brooding you interrupted.” 

“Oh, I interrupted a brooding session? OK, Heathcliff.” 

“I don’t look anything like Tom Hardy.” 

“I didn’t see the movie so I didn’t know he was relevant, but to be fair the book really isn’t either, the first gen characters in particular are all terrible people which is why I hated having to read that book in tenth grade, but he is kind of the go-to for talking about brooding so I went with it.”

“God, you’re such a nerd,” Eliot laughs. “Do you regret not getting to be a king?” 

“I think I regret more the times I said I’d be back and then I didn’t come back, actually,” Quentin admits. “Admittedly, having a Niffin-possessed king, even a secondary one, would probably have not ended well, but I wasn’t thinking that at the time and all other cases were just me being unreliable. Except when magic got shut off because no one knew that was coming. Still.”

“I seem to remember it being more complicated than that at least some of the time, but we’ve both had our unreliable fuck up moments, Q,” Eliot says, because he can’t pretend he never resented it when Quentin didn’t come back - he’d worried, too, and part of him had been even more irritated by that , at the time. But it’s long past, now. “Although it is a pity we never got to have any fun with the roles. I mean, being a king in Fillory was one of your lifelong fantasies.” 

“Technically we’re princes now,” Quentin says, leaning away so Eliot can see his face, and the glint of wicked mischief in his eyes that no one else gets to see. Eliot laughs aloud until Quentin adds, “And, uh, you’re still my king .”

Eliot stops dead. “Oh yeah? And are you here to pledge loyalty? Right here?” He shouldn’t, Margo and Fen would probably both kill him, but… 

“I don’t think my leg would cooperate with this floor very well, actually, so why don’t we take this somewhere more private?”

Eliot laughs and pulls Quentin closer, kissing him slow and deep right there in the throne room. “I think that can be arranged, darling.”

Eliot is expecting sex when they get back to the room. He is not expecting Quentin to all but shove him back on the bed, then crawl between his legs without removing a stitch of either of their clothing, without even taking off his prosthetic before he’s unfastening Eliot’s pants, pushing them and his underwear down just enough for - 

“Fuck,” Eliot hisses, a hand curling in soft hair as Quentin’s mouth wraps around his cock. He’s only half-hard, caught by surprise with Quentin’s speed, but then that’s probably why - he remembers hazily as Quentin sucks him that Q loves this, loves feeling Eliot harden the rest of the way in his mouth.

It’s nice enough, in Eliot’s opinion, but not a sensation he has a particular kink for when he’s the one giving, but Quentin - Quentin loves it, and Eliot loves that he loves it. Quentin can take all of him like this without hesitation, and Eliot has to fight to keep his hips still, to not choke Quentin as his cock fills. The warm heat of Q’s mouth is maddening , and part of Eliot wants to hold Quentin’s head still and fuck his mouth, feel Quentin’s throat work around him almost helplessly, but he holds back, barely.

Q’s eager and messy about it, eyes hot as he looks up at Eliot between his lashes. Eliot bites back a moan, fingers tightening in Quentin’s hair despite his attempt to behave. He’s definitely all the way hard now, somehow aching even with Quentin’s mouth on him, pulling off enough to tease his slit with little kitten licks. Eliot groans, hands twisting in the sheets under him as Quentin lowers his mouth onto him again, then pulls back to tease once more.

“Fuck - that’s - not nice to tease your king,” Eliot manages to say, remembering the hint of a game from earlier. And it was the right thing to say, Quentin’s eyes flashing even hotter as he lowers his head again. He takes Eliot’s words to heart, eyes closing as he focuses all he has on sucking Eliot off, one hand coming up to tease his balls, stroke over his perineum. 

Then it all stops, for a moment, Quentin coming up for a gasp of air and a giddy grin. “Is that better, your majesty ?” 

And Eliot - normally, Eliot would tell him to get back down there but instead he surges up, flipping them and pressing Quentin down to the mattress. “I think you can give me more than that, lovely boy,” he murmurs, voice low and rough in Quentin’s ear. “I think I’ll have all you can give me, and you’ll let me, won’t you? You can be good for your king, can’t you? Pretty little prince, you can do that for me, hmm?”

“Oh fuck,” Quentin says, and Eliot laughs, low and more than a little wicked now himself as he leans back to see Quentin’s face. 

“That’s not the answer, darling. Can you be good for me?” 

“I - yes.” 

“Still not quite right. Yes… what?” 

Quentin’s eyes narrow for a moment, but Eliot only watches him, perfect High King composure with one raised eyebrow. Quentin swallows hard, biting his already-swollen lower lip. “Yes, my king,” he says, and Eliot rewards him with a deep kiss, pressing Quentin into the bed with the weight of his own body stretched on top of him. 

It’s the work of a quick spell to send their clothes off to a corner of the room, a moment more to get Quentin’s prosthetic off and send it telekinetically to rest on the table. But the crowns, well. Eliot’s stays, Quentin’s flies to rest next to his leg. 

Then Quentin is pulling Eliot into a kiss, eager and biting. “Thought you were going to take me , my king,” he says, bratty and teasing all at once and oh, Eliot will get him for that. 

They end up on their sides, Eliot biting at the back of Quentin’s neck as he presses his fingers inside, magical lube but still working Quentin open slowly, feeling him shudder with each twist, with every stretch as Eliot adds another finger or scissors them. “That’s it, just like that for me… would you have been this good for me in the throne room, darling? If I bent you over my throne right there, if I had you kneel before me and use that mouth of yours?”

“I - yes - please -” And Eliot liked the force of Quentin earlier, the wicked mischief and the insistence of shoving Eliot back on the bed, but he loves this too, Quentin trembling and breathless, rocking back on his fingers. 

“Good boy,” Eliot says, pulling his fingers out and slicking up his cock. He turns Quentin’s head so he can kiss him again, swallowing the sounds he makes. “I should have kept you at my side and never let you leave me,” he breathes, and it’s - it’s part of the play but it’s true too, isn’t it? There’s a moment when they both still, the serious weight of it, but then Quentin nuzzles Eliot’s jaw and he remembers himself. He wraps an arm around Quentin’s waist, holding him still as he pushes inside him.

Eliot holds there, hips twitching with the need to move, but he’s waiting for -

“Please,” Quentin gasps again, and now Eliot obliges him, setting a quick rhythm as he moves his hips, all but losing himself to the feeling. He has just enough focus to keep Quentin still with one arm so he can’t match Eliot, can’t urge him to go faster. He can only take what Eliot gives him and Eliot feels it, when Quentin melts into him, surrendering to it.

Eliot comes with a low moan muffled against Quentin’s hair, pulling out carefully before wrapping a hand around Quentin’s cock, stroking until he comes with a shudder and a low whine. “I’m going to have to remember that little kink,” Eliot says when they’ve caught their breath, curled together after a clean-up spell took care of the mess, Eliot’s crown removed too now and sent to the table.

“Hmm,” Quentin sighs, nuzzling Eliot’s chest hair before settling with his ear over Eliot’s heart. “Good idea,” he adds, and then his breathing evens out. Eliot chuckles softly and pets over Quentin’s hair, closing his eyes and relaxing into the bed. 

Hazy-minded, half asleep, it’s easier to think of what had been so heavy earlier. And so Eliot is able to think maybe this is growing up too, slipping off together in the middle of the day just because they can, because they want to enjoy each other. Eliot will think about it later, because right now he has a beautiful man in his arms, a man who is here for keeps. 

He and Quentin have each other, for fun and forever, and they’re out of the game. 

If that is growing up, well. Then Eliot is all for it. 

<><><>

Quentin 40a

The day after they return from Fillory, Quentin sends Alice a message by way of the enchanted notebooks, because he has a particular errand to run that he can only do with her help. Or, theoretically, he could ask Dean Fogg, but that’s just not something he’s willing to do. So Alice it is, and in the meantime, he has something else to occupy him. 

He hasn’t been able to get the image of Margo’s necklace out of his head, the one he and Eliot made together. Eliot’s magic, shimmering red against the shiny black stone, like that kintsugi thing he used to see online but so much more personalized. He tried to recreate it on its own, because since the moment he saw it he’d had an idea, but it doesn’t work when he’s alone. 

He uses a cracking spell to break piece after piece of the moonstones he bought, and his mending fixes them all good as new, but that’s the problem. Good as new. Damn it. 

Finally, he realizes he’ll have to have someone help him, and…  On the one hand, it feels kind of cheap to get Eliot’s help with something ultimately meant for him, but it feels worse to think about doing this particular magic with someone else after he discovered it with Eliot. Maybe it won’t even work with someone else, but Quentin doesn’t really want to try that either.

So Quentin asks Eliot to cast the cracking spell while Quentin casts after him with mending. He brings a handful of the moonstones so that the one pale purple one doesn’t stand out too much. Eliot looks down at them and raises an eyebrow. “Why are you experimenting with various colors of my favorite stone?” 

“Because I was able to get ahold of them easily,” Quentin says. He’s a terrible liar and they both know it, but he deliberately approached Eliot when he was distracted by take-home work from Yolande, since it makes him less observant. 

Only slightly less, though, unfortunately. 

“I think you’re scheming,” Eliot says, eyeing him over the top of his glasses. 

“Well, if I am, you’ll be the first to know, now will you help me?” It’s more than a little embarrassing, under the circumstances, but Quentin will make sure he does everything else himself that he can, so that makes him feel a little better. 

But at least it works. They cast together as they did for Margo’s amulet, and shimmery red lines run through each whole piece of moonstone. The rest of the work is Quentin’s to complete, and he does most of it in his workroom at Runes and Relics when he’s between jobs, because Eliot really will be suspicious if he sees a half-shaped silver ring. It was hard enough just to get his size from one of the rings he’s currently not wearing. 

One day, Quentin may be able to do forging spells that let him make things from raw materials. Today is not that day, however, and so he starts with a simple, thick band of silver. Deliberately too thick to be a ring as it is,  he uses shaping spells and transfiguration to create a ring out of it. Smooth silver, with a setting for a round stone to sit half inside the band. Working the metal leaves him with a sharp tang on his tongue, not quite a flavor he can name but definitely something. 

When he’s mending metal, it ‘sounds’ like drums to his magic, but this isn’t mending, as he finishes it off with charms against tarnishing or bending, and one to keep it from getting lost. 

He turns his attention to the stones then. One of the things Quentin is really good at is color transmutation, so his plan is to change stone and red cracks to the colors he wants. That’s why he asked Eliot to do more than just the stone he wanted, so he’d have ones to practice on. It takes three weeks - first, he can’t change the magic’s color even though the stone changes easily, and then once he does get both changing, the right colors aren’t working. 

Until, finally, he’s got a row of blue and green moonstones, their cracks glittering in multiple colors. Finally, all of them turned exactly the shades he’d pictured as he cast. Which means… He picks up the purple moonstone and focuses as he casts, picturing the pale purple stone darkening to the shade of a plum, and the red cracks shifting, keeping some of their red but adding orange-yellow-pink until the cracks nearly glow in the color of a peach. Actual peaches, not the pinkish shade of peach paint or dye.

Quentin feels it, the soft sigh of magic properly applied, and dares to open one eye just long enough to see that yes, the colors are exactly what he wants, before he focuses again. Shape, smooth, a perfect oval stone and a powdery feeling in his mouth, join that to metal and its tang, set the stone in its place, and hold until nothing will break it. 

For a moment there’s just a hint of the spice of Eliot’s magic, a hint of a sweet sticky flavor that is Quentin’s own, and then Quentin opens his eyes to the sight of a completed silver ring on his desk, set with a purple moonstone like an iridescent plum, the cracks in it shimmering peach. 

Peaches and plums.

Quentin sets it in a little ring box but before he can do anything else, there’s a knock on his door. AJ is leaning on the doorframe, looking their usual vaguely amused self. “You’ve got the Head of the Library here for you? I know you did that shipment of broken equipment from them last week after Quinn requested you, but the payment was in trade?” 

“Just my cut, the business still got paid per usual ways,” Quentin says, putting the ring in his locked drawer and reaching for his cane. He’s carrying it today because his hip’s been acting up. It happens sometimes, because no matter how good it is, a prosthetic will never be an actual leg. It’s not the hospital cane he was issued, but one that just… appeared by his side of the bed one morning. 

It looks like a cliche wizard’s staff down to the amber crystal at the top, but somehow its grip, weight, and length are absolutely perfect. The first time he touched it, his mouth filled with the taste of champagne - Julia’s demigoddess magic. And the little note signed only with her name had pretty much clinched it. 

Shaking off those memories, Quentin goes to the elevators to find Alice waiting for him with an unfamiliar man in a grey suit who turns out to be a Traveler. Before Quentin can do more than say hello to Alice, the guy puts a hand on his shoulder and they’re in Alice’s office. Library Traveler Guy leaves them alone and Alice looks at Quentin, folding her arms. “Nice work on what we sent you, but why do you want to do this, Q?”

“Because we’re responsible for them. You and me, and I guess our 40b counterparts too. I just want to know if they at least managed to survive the Chatwin sibling war, you know?” Quentin can’t think of their fight with the Beast in any other way now. Not after what he knows of Jane’s manipulation of his Timeline 1 self, not after what Other-Eliot said about what Jane told him in the Clock Barrens.

“I did tell you the bridge between past and present was delicate,” Alice says evenly. “We’re lucky a splinter timeline was all that happened.” 

“I know, Alice,” Quentin says with a sigh. “But the fact is still what it was then - we didn’t have a choice, not when we’d had no way to know when Mayakovsky would be himself again. And given that I’m willing to take this as my payment for that mending job you wanted me to do, I don’t see the problem.” 

“You’d make a terrible freelancer if you only do trades, you know,” Alice says, but there’s a hint of amusement behind her disapproval now, so Quentin takes it as a win. “Or are you going to stay with Runes and Relics forever?”

“Good thing I’m not a freelancer then, but believe me, if I ever go solo, and I might, people will pay. Brakebills, for example, is gonna pay through the fucking nose if they want to hire me. But for the head of the Library, when she’s someone I trust? A few trades here and there just to make sure I don’t get a rep for being a pushover seems good enough, don’t you think?” 

“I think you’re spending too much time with your boyfriend, you’re starting to sound like him.” 

Quentin doesn’t think that’s really true, but he also knows that for Alice to joke even a little about him and Eliot is - real progress for them. So he just smiles. “Well, these things happen. So, do we still have a deal, Madam Head Librarian?” 

OK, that might have sounded a little like Eliot. Or a lot, judging from the force of Alice’s responding eyeroll. “We have a deal, and you are impossible. Why not just use the Brakebills one again, anyway?” 

“Because the last thing I want to do is ask Henry Fogg for a favor, that’s why,” Quentin says as he follows Alice out of her office and down the hall. “So… How’s Charlie doing?” 

Alice sighs. “He has good days and bad ones. They all do. It’s not like I was, it’s not even like what other-you went through after he woke up. They all just… reverted back to humanity. They weren’t dragged out of the magic into corporeal bodies. He says it feels like a dream he had, a lot of the time, except that he knows the dream was real every time he sees his reflection. They don’t really remember how human bodies work , what hunger or thirst or tiredness means. So it’s touch and go.” 

“And how are you doing?” Quentin asks. “With everything, I mean?”

Alice shrugs, running a hand through her hair. It’s not a gesture he remembers her doing much before, but it’s shorter now so maybe that helps? “I guess you could say I’m touch and go too. Having Charlie back is… bittersweet and a damned miracle all at once, but it brings back memories. Mostly I’m just glad that I have the resources to help. I’m setting up ways to track all the Niffins - Margo might have mentioned it because she wants to check through Fillory?”

“Yeah, she did. What are you gonna do?” 

“A bit like the Brakebills globes, actually. It turns out that the returned Niffins have a slightly altered magical signature, something about the way they were returned, I think. Anyway, it’s distinctive, and I think I can tweak the magic-tracking spells to look specifically for people with the mark of being Returned, as they’re calling it. And I’m setting up spaces for recovery. Actually, I wanted to ask you, what was the name of your therapist?” 

“Miranda Barlow, why?” Quentin asks, a bit puzzled by the turn in the conversation.

“Because anyone who runs a long-distance network like you said she does might be able to consult with me on how to do that. A lot of the Returned are going to need therapy. They’re people out of time, most of them. Some to degrees that are horrifying. That’s on top of the possible guilt for things they may have done.” 

Alice’s jaw is set, and Quentin reaches for her hand on an impulse, squeezing it quickly before letting go. It gets him a fleeting, tired smile. “Some of the ex-shadeless are having trouble too, in that sense,” she adds. “But I’m - I like doing something that matters, you know? After all the awful shit the Library did, it feels right that one of my first big projects will be to help a bunch of people. That one of them is my own brother, and that what they’ve all experienced is very close to something I’ve lived through… Well, that only makes it feel more right.” 

“I guess it would,” Quentin says, and then they’re at the Library’s Tesla Flexion and he doesn’t have time to say anything else. It doesn’t look all that different from the one he used to talk to Alice 23 back in the day - it just has the same vague greyness and odd tilt that everything in the Library has. 

He steps inside and waits, one hand gripping his cane so tightly that his fingers start to ache. 

“Now, if he’s still alive, this is going to be Quentin 41 from today’s date in his world, not from 2016,” Alice reminds him before she starts the machine, waiting until Quentin looks over and nods before she does so.

And then, once again, he watches a person from another reality take shape in front of him. “What the fuck,” says Quentin 41, looking around with wide eyes. “Where - how -” 

“Calm down,” Quentin says quickly, remembering the unconscious younger self in the dreamscape. This other-self in front of him is as far from that half-grown boy as Quentin himself is, it’s there in his eyes, but probably in very different ways. He’s wearing Fillorian clothes, similar to the ones Quentin wore for Eliot and Fen's divorce ceremony but the tunic is deep blue and the trousers a soft grey, trimmed in paler blue embroideries. Someone not Quentin 41 had a say in the look, Quentin would bet quite a lot on it. 

His hair is long enough to be braided back, and on his head is a familiar silver crown. “You’re actually doing the kingship thing?” Quentin asks before he can stop himself.

“You aren’t? Who are you anyway?” Quentin 41 asks, crossing his arms.

“Timeline 40, or half of it at least - it’s complicated,” Quentin says. “So it worked then. The tips you were given.” 

“Tips?” Quentin 41 says. “Actually, that explains a few things. Yeah, I guess you could say that, 40. Thanks for creating us, by the way, you pissed Jane Chatwin off really badly.” 

“Good,” Quentin says flatly. “Is - is everyone alive, in your timeline? El and Margo, Alice, Jules, Kady, Penny? They’re all OK?” 

His counterpart’s face softens and he smiles a little, lifting a hand to adjust his crown. “Yeah, so far so good. Is that why you called?” It’s his left hand that he’s using to fix his crown, and on his pointer finger he wears a ring that looks very much as if it’s designed to look like the High King’s crown.

In Fillory, engagement rings are worn on the pointer finger of the left hand. Isn’t that a funny little coincidence.

“That’s why I called,” Quentin confirms, remembering the feel of the second of his two wedding rings, because that had been the one he’d gotten to wear as both engagement and wedding ring. “Wanted to make sure.” 

She said we’d already won, Other-Eliot told him, weeks ago. I asked her to help me save my Q and she told me to let the dead stay dead because we’d already won. 

It’s very possible there’s a part of Quentin that’s been afraid for the fate of Timeline 41 ever since he heard that, despite Jane Chatwin being manipulative as hell even at the best of times. Timelines 1-39 were on Jane, but 41… Like he’d told Alice, Quentin feels kind of responsible for them, enough at least to have felt the need to do this, to know one way or the other if everyone lived, at least.

“Thanks for checking in? And for the tips, I guess, though they got kinda lost in translation,” Quentin 41 says. 

“Technically the tips weren’t me, 40 kinda… doubled. It’s a long story, and so not your problem in any way so not worth telling. But you could say both versions of us and our Alices are why you exist?” 

Quentin 41 laughs. “Thanks for that then. Most of the time.” There's a glint of gold on his right hand - another ring on his right index finger, but Quentin can't make out any details from here.

Two minutes isn’t a very long time at all. After a moment of silence, he’s gone, this new other-self who apparently actually is the king Quentin once asked to be and never lived up to. 

For one flicker of a moment, though, there’s another Quentin there. Not solid, just a ghost, a Quentin with loose long hair and golden eyes, dressed in what actually looks like a red Fillorian tunic but with faded blue jeans. It’s the Quentin from 40b, Quentin is sure of it, and he actually laughs, lifting a hand in a wave that gets him one in return, the red braid mark on Other-Quentin’s wrist almost the same color as his tunic. 

And then - 

Then Quentin is alone. Alone in his skin, alone in his timeline, with the two other surviving versions of himself back off to their lives, as he should be off to his.

Quentin takes a deep breath and steps out of the Tesla Flexion, managing a weak smile for Alice. “Well, that’s that then, isn’t it?”

“They’re all alive,” Alice says. “That’s more than we managed.” 

Quentin isn’t sure if she’s thinking of herself or Penny, or even Quentin 40b. He supposes she could really be thinking of all of them - all of it would be true. “It is. Alice, look - thanks, I appreciate it.”

Alice smiles a little. “Well, you weren’t wrong when you said we are a little bit responsible for them. I wanted to know too, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to have any more conversations with myself.” 

“Can’t blame you there. I’m glad to be done with it - we did good but it was… definitely weird, and I’m ready for things to be quieter. That being said, I - if there’s anything I can do, with the Returned or the ex-shadeless, you have my number.” 

“I thought Eliot said you guys were on research-only duty.” 

“Yeah, we are, but I think helping you with something like that is mostly research-related, so it’s all right.” 

“Hmm,” Alice says. “Well, I’ll keep it in mind. You heading home?” 

“Yeah - well, by way of Kady’s place. See you around, Alice.” 

“Bye, Q.” 

And so Quentin leaves, thinking somewhat inexplicably of a night in the penthouse kitchen, closing a book. He doesn’t know why, but it’s the image he carries in his head for the rest of the way back to the penthouse portal. Kady looks surprised to see him but only says, “Next time warn me when my place is going to be Grand Central?” 

“Fair enough,” Quentin says. “Oh, Toph said to tell you that your special order’s in, come by to pick it up whenever.” 

“Cool, I should have time tomorrow. Thanks, Coldwater.” 

“Anytime.” 

Quentin goes back to Runes and Relics, collecting the ring and going to AJ’s office. “Hey, can you just check my spellwork, make sure it’s all sound?” he asks, handing them the ring. 

“Sure.” And AJ is thorough, which is why Quentin went to them in the first place. Quentin watches nervously as they examine the ring, with lenses and spells, even dipping it in a bubblegum-pink potion that turns crimson as the ring falls to the bottom of the beaker. 

After that last test, AJ cleans off the ring and puts it back in its box, handing the box to Quentin. He curls a hand around it, trying to hide his nerves. “Excellent work. We’ll have you making things for us anytime. Was that a trial piece to prove you were ready?” 

Quentin rubs a thumb over the fake velvet of the box, thinking of the ring like a High King’s crown on Quentin 41’s hand, Other-Quentin’s red braid. Funny, how things seem to echo each other across lives, but always a little different. He knows that better than most, after his dreams of other timelines. 

Maybe that’s a good sign, or maybe Quentin was right all along and destiny is bullshit. But a pattern is a pattern, and the patterns here are promising, in the long run. 

“Actually,” he says with a smile, thinking that he wants to just ask Eliot tonight but he won’t, because while he’s no showman some effort is the right call here, “if all goes well, it’ll be an engagement ring.”