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“Adorable,” says the not-Julia, the Jules-monster with a hollow version of Quentin’s best friend’s voice and a flat, rough version of her voice, like the monster hasn’t yet quite figured out how to push through human vocal chords –– “So determined. Maybe I’ll keep you as pets.”
And Alice, ever to the point, slams her into the wall.
Quentin can feel the magic they drank from the reservoir coursing through him, like a thousand hot sparks in his blood, like everything he ever dreamed of being dialled right up to eleven, but he can also feel it –– fading. Faster than he’d hoped. They need to get this done, he thinks, adrenaline lighting him up in tandem with the new magic, every inch of his body pulsing. He has the axe, he just needs to get close enough.
Not-Julia stands up before he can make a single move towards her. “Then again, I like my pets strong. You’re weak.”
On any other day, Quentin would agree with her. But the thing is. Not today. He raises his hand and magic is filling him right down to his fingertips and he channels everything he has right into it and ––
Penny 23 appears behind her, and slams the other axe into not-Julia’s shoulder.
She crumples to the ground in an instant, and Quentin’s heart leaps, like, oh my fucking god, can it really be that easy? And please let it be that easy. But this is a god-made monster they’re talking about, so it’s not that easy, of course it’s not. The wound in her back hums golden for a moment, visible through the ragged edges of the ruined black cardigan, but then she’s screaming and it’s still a not-Julia scream, hoarse and feral and loud enough to shake the walls. Penny, still with a grip on the handle of the axe, rears back in surprise, pulling the axe out with him. The wound closes almost instantly; Quentin can see the moment that the leaking golden light seals right back up inside her.
In the next instant, she has disappeared before their eyes.
A ragged noise makes its way out of Quentin’s throat without his permission. They were almost there, they almost had Jules back, they were almost one step closer to –– well, to Eliot, too. But they lost her. How could they have let themselves mess this up? And at the same time, how could they have ever hoped it would be this simple?
“Okay,” Penny 23 says, swallowing around the words and gesturing a little weakly with his axe towards the empty space on the floor. “So this might be a little harder than we hoped.”
“I think it needs –– both the axes at once,” Quentin says, mostly on autopilot. That’s what Margo had seemed to say about them, at least. “It looked like –– I mean, you saw that, right? It –– it half worked, for a second it looked like the monster was –– coming out of her, but then –– uh, it must need both axes. That’s why they come in a pair.”
Apparently an injection of pure magic power hasn’t done anything to cure Quentin’s need to ramble in times of stress. That makes sense. It feels like a lifetime ago that he’d come to terms with the fact that being strong or good at magic would not also make him into the cool person he’d always want to be. He’s stuck as Quentin Coldwater, whether he likes it or not. (Now, of course, is not the time to think about that .)
Now is the time to think about Dean Fogg, who appears, looking only halfway worse for wear, in the doorway beside them.
“May I suggest that we do our theorising about what did or did not go wrong somewhere else?” he says. Quentin feels like he’s lived a thousand lifetimes and been a thousand different people since the Dean first welcomed him to Brakebills, but in the back of his mind, the sound of Fogg’s familiar deep voice always has this small element of comfort for Q. Like he’s always opening up the way to a brand new world. “We should get back to Brakebills. I have something which may help.”
They don’t go back to Brakebills. Not first. They go back to the reservoir, to top up on the already-fading sparks of pure magic they need to do this, to trap the monsters, to have enough power to even fight them in the first place.
The reservoir is empty.
Quentin has to close his eyes for a moment. His head hurts. It’s like he can feel his heartbeat all the way through his skull: thump, thump, thump.
After that, they do regroup at Brakebills, half because they need resources and half because –– well, there’s something about going back to the Physical Kids Cottage that just feels at least a tiny bit safe. Quentin knows he’s an idiot for considering any place safe at a time like this, but it’s probably no less safe than anywhere else, at least.
Also, Josh is there. Which is like, a whole thing now, apparently. He either has some special magic from being a fish or some special magic from being dunked in the reservoir, and Quentin honestly couldn’t care less which one it is. Maybe it will help, he thinks –– even if it is fish magic, maybe it will help. Quentin breathes out loud to try and drown the voice in the back of his mind which is already chanting that all of this is hopeless. Shut up, voice –– we have fish magic now. It’s not ultimately very convincing, but he’s trying to cling to some semblance of hope with his ragged, exhausted fingertips.
Of course, Josh is failing to understand the emotional nuance of the situation, as he so often does. Quentin likes Josh, he thinks. Well, maybe hasn’t really ever spent enough time around him to vastly like or dislike him either way. But right now, all he can do is agree with Margo, and she’s pissed at Josh, so he feels a little bit pissed at Josh too. Or. He would, if he could feel basically anything right now.
Margo storms out of the cottage’s main room to get a minute of fuming in before they all need to regroup and save their friends, and Quentin is left there with Josh.
“She’s right,” says Q, and even he is aware that his voice sounds nothing but exhausted. “Anything where Eliot could die is off the table.”
That’s what it all boils down to, after all. Absolutely all of this. It’s anything to keep Eliot alive. Julia too, now, Quentin reminds himself in the moment. He’s not sure he’s yet processed the fact that the monsters took his other best friend, too. He’s not sure he has space to process it. He’s so used to the pattern of the last few months, to thinking eliotelioteliot at every turn, that it’s worn into him like a groove in a record. And after knowing Julia his entire life, after how many times she’s helped him and saved him from both himself and other things, it really is incredibly, incredibly selfish of him to still be thinking about saving Eliot a little bit more, right?
Quentin marks that down in the list of things to hate about himself later, when he’s got more time on his hands.
And then the monster appears.
He pops into the room with a rush of cold air, and the cloying smell of blood and cinnamon, a smell Quentin will never be able to forget as part of him. Josh nearly jumps out of his skin, bumping right back into Quentin. Quentin barely moves. He’s used to this, by now. He’s used to the way the monster appears everywhere he turns, appears behind him and is touching him before Q has even realised he’s there, sometimes hovers over him when he’s sleeping so it’s the first thing Quentin sees when he opens his eyes.
“Where is my sister,” the monster asks, in his lilting voice, so unlike Eliot’s, and it’s –– it’s not a question, the way he says it, even though he’s asking. The monster never phrases things as questions. He puts his words out into the world and lets everyone else scramble around them, regardless of what he’s said.
Quentin is so, so fucking tired. He allows himself just a moment to close his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see that thing wearing Eliot’s body, at least for one more second, while he figures out what to say, what’s least likely to get them all killed where they stand. His heartbeat is pounding in his head: thump, thump, thump.
And then, behind them, Dean Fogg.
“Why don’t I take you to her,” Fogg says, and before anyone –– even Quentin, or even the monster –– has a chance to ask what he means, he’s throwing something out, and the monster disappears in a cloud of acrid smoke.
The waiting is the worst part of all of this. They have a plan. Quentin is sick to his stomach and nearly vibrating out of his skin, but that’s how he’s been for months, so it doesn’t matter, because they have a plan. The problem is, the plan involves getting in touch with every hedgewitch they can muster, all over the globe. It’s not an instant thing. There are –– things to be arranged.
The idea of having to fucking round people up like a guest list while Eliot’s body sits out there somewhere, lost and with nothing but a confused, spelled-up monster to pilot it, is rather ridiculous.
All that, plus they still need to find not-Julia. Dean Fogg is taking care of that, because he’s the only one who can get her to the forest with not-Eliot anyway, and for once, Quentin is just tired enough to sit back and let someone else hold the fate of his friend in their hands. Just for a little while. Just until the part where he can be useful comes in again.
In the meantime, he goes to sit on the stairs, because there’s not much else to do, and the stairs feel appropriate at times like this: not very comfortable, because sitting in a nice armchair or something would feel entirely undeserved while his friends are out there at risk of dying, and also in good view of the door. Not that he’s looking at the door. His eyes drift close as soon as he sits down, and he leans into the banister.
His head is still fucking killing him. The idea of taking an advil at a time like this seems outside the bounds of ridiculousness in the same way sitting in an armchair would, so he’s just letting himself feel the headache. It’s not the worst thing he’s felt since Eliot was taken and he’s sure there are worse feelings to come. So Quentin just presses his fingers into his temples, and tries not to have any memories, none at all.
( The morning after the most excessive party of his life, just a couple weeks after Quentin moved into the physical kids cottage and while Eliot was still inexplicably trying to take Q under his wing, where he woke up to Eliot bursting into his room wearing a mostly-undone silk robe, cigarette smouldering between his lips, with handful of painkillers and a glass of water he immediately shoved at Quentin, grinning rakishly, before jumping into the bed with him. Quentin had just groaned and taken his painkillers and then tried to crawl all the way under his duvet, but Eliot had cheerfully tugged him back out, and offered him the cigarette, and launched into a very ridiculous story about the psychic guy he’d hooked up with the night before, and Quentin had ended the morning laughing so hard that he forgot he was hungover at all.)
(Fillory, in their life that never happened, when Quentin had gotten sick for no other reason than being a human being with a fallible immune system, and Eliot had emptied out his wineskin to fill it with cold water instead, and held it gently against Quentin’s head while Quentin whined in their bed, and several times told him to “stop being such a baby, Q,” like he did when he was trying to not sound worried about things, but he hadn’t left Quentin’s side all day and Quentin had seen right through him.)
Quentin is so busy not having memories (having a lot of memories) and not having a headache (pushing back a pulsing pain which hurts right down to his eyeballs) that it takes him a moment to even realise someone has joined him on the stairs. When his eyes flicker open, he swallows.
Oh. Alice.
His –– girlfriend?
Quentin’s not sure, at this point. He’s not sure of anything. He’s not sure that he wasn’t having a bit of an emotional breakdown when he asked her to give things another shot. He’s also not sure it’s not what he wants, because –– he does want her in his life. Historically, though, the only way Quentin gets to have Alice in his life is when they’re at least sort of together. Maybe he wants to be with her. Maybe he just wants something to cling to.
How is he supposed to know the difference? For someone who’s been through as much therapy as he has, Quentin always thinks he should be better at telling his own emotions apart. But he’s not. He never has been. Everything he feels for every thing and every person always balls up into a big pile of unsortable mush in his head, leaving it all overwhelming and foggy any direction he looks. It’s been the same his whole life. He’s never been good at being certain. Never been good at just knowing what he wants.
Well. Maybe with a couple of exceptions. But if he thinks he wants something and is immediately rejected, it doesn’t really matter that he ever wanted it in the first place, right?
( Peaches and plums, motherfucker, he doesn’t think, and definitely doesn’t think about the tiny metronome of hope that’s been ticking away in the back of his mind since that day, wondering why El chose those words in particular.)
“Q, I’m worried about you,” Alice tells him, and she looks sincere, her brow all furrowed, eyes searching right down to the depths of his soul in that way she has. Quentin goes to tell her that he’s fine, but all that comes out is a deep, trembling breath, and then a few seconds of unbearable silence.
“Are we –– together?” he asks, which is not what he thought he was going to say. It actually probably isn’t even in his top ten guesses of what he thought would come out of his mouth right then. Alice seems to agree, because she blinks at him and darts her head back, confusion washing over her face.
“ Aren’t we?” she says, “I mean, that’s what you said you wanted.”
“Yeah,” Quentin agrees, hollowly, because it is what he said he wanted, isn’t it? Or was that how he said it? He remembers telling Alice he wanted her in his life, because that felt true, one tiny bit of emotion he could separate from all the rest. He doesn’t remember anything else he said in that conversation, not really. He remembers kissing her for a couple seconds, but they’ve barely touched since then. “I guess it’s just… it doesn’t feel like we are.”
Silence, for a long moment. Quentin looks at his shoes. He’s picked a bad time to do this. He doesn’t even know what this is, what he’s hoping to get out of this conversation. Maybe just a tiny, tiny bit of clarity, of truth, before he goes off to do the hardest thing he’s probably ever done in his life.
“I guess it doesn’t,” Alice agrees, after a long stretch of silence. Her voice sounds wooden and forced, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. “Not like it used to, at least.”
“We’re such different people than we were back then.” Quentin’s voice sounds almost desperate, he thinks, distantly, as if he’s observing this conversation from a great height. Alice shifts just a little further away from him on the stairs, and the space between their bodies feels like a thousand unsaid things, a thousand past mistakes. “Alice, I’m sorry.”
“No, Q, you don’t –– you don’t have to be sorry.” Alice reaches across the cavernous space between them, as if it’s just that easy, and brushes the lightest of touches across his shoulder. Quentin lets out a ragged breath, and sinks into his body just a little bit more. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I fucked up way more than you.”
“I did my fair share,” Quentin insists. It’s true. It’s not even just the self-hating part of him making him say it. He thinks that, probably, Alice has done worse shit to the universe at large than he has, but he’s done worse shit specifically within their relationship. “We were just so bad for each other. And we never really talked about any of it.” Nearly desperate to make her believe it, Q adds, “I do want you in my life in some way, Alice, I wasn’t lying about that.”
“I know. I know you meant that.”
There’s pain in Alice’s voice. Quentin’s the reason it’s there, and he feels like absolute shit. In some ways, that’s –– not a good thing, but something. All Quentin has felt for a very, very long time now is very, very numb. Feeling shitty isn’t better, but it’s at least a reminder that he can feel things, that the world still makes an impact on him, that he still makes an impact on the world.
Maybe that’s why Quentin suddenly finds his eyes prickling with tears. He reaches a hand to scrub at his eyes before any of them can spill over, but his head is still pounding and his body is shaking and out of the corner of his blurry eyes he can see Alice’s face, all concern and confusion as she reaches out towards him. Quentin doesn’t want her to touch him, not right then, half because he just doesn’t want it and half because he doesn’t feel like he deserves it, so he pushes himself back into the banister of the stairs, curving out of her reach as he sucks in a few frantic breaths.
“It’s going to be okay, Q,” Alice says, her hand still half-raised in the air like she wants to reach for him again but won’t. “We’re going to save them. Fogg’s getting Julia to the forest as we speak.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know it’ll be okay. If anything happens to them ––” Q gasps out, pressing his hands harder into his eyes. “To her, or to –– or to Eliot ––”
A half-sob escapes him, frantically fighting its way to the surface, and Quentin swallows it back down in the next moment. Alice is looking at him, and he glances just out of the very corner of his eyes. There’s something like recognition in her stare.
“The way you say his name, sometimes,” she says, as cautiously as if she were tightrope walking towards the words over a pit of fire, “It reminds me of how you used to talk about Fillory.”
That’s what does it. The fact that Quentin thinks she’s going to say how you used to talk about me , but she brings it back to Fillory instead. Quentin’s most treasured concept. The place he’d lived a lifetime with El. The place he and Eliot proved, for half a century, that people like them were allowed to be actually happy, that it wasn’t impossible, that nothing was impossible, even when the universe and the gods and their own very minds were working against them .
A dam bursts inside of Quentin, and months of terror and denial and grief and a lifetime of devotion just slam into him, all at once.
“I can’t –– I can’t ––” he gasps, and he lets the tears spill over at last, bracing himself on the stairs with a grip so tight his knuckles go white as he shudders, cries, tells Alice, the last person he should probably be telling these things, “There was this –– quest, and we lived a whole life together, and he –– I was happy, the most really happy I’ve ever been, and I –– he changed my life, he was my life, and even if he –– didn’t think we’d work, in the real world, I wanted us to, I asked him to, and then it all went to hell and if he dies –– if he dies, I won’t –– I won’t be a person anymore.” His voice tremors and breaks, vowels sticking in the back of his throat with the thickness of his tears, and Quentin can barely get air into his lungs. “He’s the love of my life, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, even if he doesn’t want me the same way he’s the love of my life and I miss him so much and I need him back, whatever that means, I just need him here, I need him back, I need him to at least be alive, and every second that he’s locked in there I’m just breaking and I don’t know how much longer I can go on before I’ve broken into too many pieces and I can never go back together, so I have to get him back.”
It isn’t fair of him, Quentin thinks, to have laid all that on Alice, just moments after he –– broke up with her? Did he even do that? Did he say it in as many words? Was there even anything to break to begin with? It isn’t fair of him, but there was a time when he and Alice talked about things, years ago now, back before they tried to be more and then she died and then nothing was ever okay ever again, and right now, he really just wants her to be his friend.
He’s kind of grateful to the tears clouding his eyes as he keeps gasping through his sobs, because at least he doesn’t have to see the look on Alice’s face. He’s not sure how surprised she’ll be. She knows he sucked Eliot’s dick during that distant threesome that ruined things the first time around, but he never exactly mentioned his hazy sexual identity to her, and she never asked him about guys or anything, so maybe she’ll even be surprised about that. More than surprised by the man of it all, though, he has this horrible feeling she’ll be hurt, by all the rest of it . Because no matter how much Quentin wishes they were on the same page, he can’t help but remember coming back from his time spell, and finding Alice kissing him. Past him, but current her. He can’t help but think she maybe wanted things for real –– things Quentin could only say he wanted because nothing else in the world felt clear cut.
It’s better to tell her now, though. Better that she knows. No matter what happens next.
Still, Quentin’s expecting her to leave. Storm off for a little bit, at least, or say something cruel and deserved about him leading her on, give him something to pile a little further on his heap of self hatred today.
She doesn’t.
She’s quiet for a very long moment, and then Alice does a very un-Alice thing: she reaches out, and hugs him.
“It’s going to be okay, Quentin,” she tells him, softly, right into his ear. “I promise. You’ve got people here for you, no matter what. But if you need us to save Eliot, we’ll save Eliot.”
Quentin folds himself into her embrace for one long minute, shaking and crying into her hair, and lets himself feel relief, relief, relief.
“If you two dickholes are done crying about your feelings , I’ve got a best friend to save,” says Margo, pulling Quentin out of the hug not very long later. Quentin wipes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths and turns to Margo, who isn’t fooling him, not anymore, with her gruff words, when behind the eyes she looks like she’s an inch away from breaking down as much as Quentin is.
“Does that mean we’re ready?” he asks, pulling himself up off the stairs and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his hoodie, because –– really, he doesn’t give a shit about being gross right now. “Fogg found Julia?”
“She’s been dosed up with confusion and poofed off to the other side of the forest with Darth Eliot, yeah. And the hedges are on standby.” He notices for the first time that she has her axes slung over her shoulders. Seeing her holding them looks a thousand times more natural than when they were in the hands of him and Penny. “So. It’s go time, Q.”
“Oh.” Quentin thinks it’s either very good or very bad that he chose now to have his breakdown. On the one hand, he feels like he might have snapped and burst into tears in the middle of saving Eliot if he hadn’t. One the other hand, he feels like a bit of a shaky mess now anyway. But that doesn’t matter –– he’ll pull himself together with nothing but stubborn determination if he has to. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
“Hell fucking yeah let’s do this!” Margo chants, sounding for all the world like a sort of bloodthirsty cheerleader. “Let’s go get our boy back, Q.”
Quentin doesn’t have time to unpack that statement, but he knows his cheeks are flushed bright red as he follows Margo away.
Getting from point A to point B, from ‘let’s go save them’ to actually getting two axes in not-Julia’s shoulders and knocking her to the ground, is not short, and it’s not simple, and it’s not without pain. Quentin is flung back into a tree hard enough that his head rings, and Margo’s fairy eye is thrown off into the forest, and it’s only Penny 23’s quick travelling that keeps the monsters from getting a hold of them all, but ––
But then, Margo comes up behind not-Julia, and she has both axes, and they land. The golden light which spills out of the wounds is almost beautiful, except for the part where it’s the spirit of a monster which wanted to explode the whole world. It floats right into one of the demon-holding bottles and they cap it there, ready to cast the bond needed to keep her in there for good as soon as they have the other monster, too.
Everything’s happening so fast and Quentin’s head is still kind of ringing, but a tiny part of him begins daring to hope that this might actually go to plan. Penny 23 grabs Julia, who is clinging to consciousness enough to soothe Quentin’s terror of losing her, and blips her out of the forest. He’ll be back any second, Quentin knows, but he’s delivering Julia right to the hospital at Brakebills, which is worth a few seconds of his absence.
Except. Then. From the monster: a sound like an animal, a raw, howling scream as his sister disappears in front of his eyes again. He whirls to them, and the fact that he’s always had an attachment to Quentin, the fact that he’s been growing a new sort of fondness for the human world, it all fades away in the face of his grief. That much is clear just from looking at him. Quentin would almost feel bad for taking away the monster’s most important person in the world once again, if it weren’t for all the killing he’s done too.
The killing, which –– which seems to be the only thing on the monster’s mind just then.
“You took my sister,” he howls, the roughest version of his lilting voice Quentin has ever heard, and raises a hand to them, and Quentin thinks oh shit and he can’t pick up Margo’s fallen axes quite fast enough and ––
The monster raises a hand, the way Quentin has watched him do a hundred times, the way he does before he slashes it down and snaps the necks of everything in his path.
The monster raises a hand, and it’s all going to happen in an instant, and Quentin doesn’t even have time to think of anything except that maybe after everything this is going to be it, he’s going to have pushed the monster one step too far and they’re all going to be wiped out with a single thought, and he’s just waiting for that hand to slice them to pieces through the air.
Except.
It doesn’t.
The monster raises a hand, and in the fraction of a second that Quentin is expecting death, something else happens. Suddenly, not-Eliot’s eyes are fluttering closed, and a whole shudder goes through his body nearly knocking him off his feet.
And a moment later, Eliot opens his eyes.
Quentin knows it instantly, this time. The look on Eliot’s face is enough, before he’s even spoken, for Q to know this is him, not the parasite that’s been walking him around. Quentin’s heart thunders against his ribcage, and he doesn’t know what to do.
“ Quick,” Eliot says, frantic. “I was able to get through again, but it didn’t last very long last time, we might only have a few seconds –– do it.”
Quentin looks at Eliot’s face, so achingly familiar and foreign at the same time, the face he’s been staring into every day this year but finally with Eliot actually behind it, and then he looks down at the axes he’s holding and he just can’t. He can’t, because it’s going to hurt, because it’s Eliot’s very human body he’ll be ripping apart and if he hits the wrong place, does the wrong thing, El could be gone for good.
Quentin makes a noise low in his throat, and shoves the axes towards Margo. Margo is always strong, and the only other person Quentin trusts with El’s life, and he knows she’ll do it.
Except. He glances at her, and the wide-open terror he’s feeling is mirrored on her face.
“I ––” she says, holding onto one of the axes for just a moment, before it slips out of her limp fingers. “ Fuck, El, you’re in there, I can’t look at you and stab you. Maybe there’s some other way to keep you here. Listen, we’ve got the most kickass project of cooperative magic ever attempted on standby ––”
“Ugh, I suppose it’s the burden of my life that I have to do everything myself,” Eliot says, and then, before Quentin even knows what’s happening, Eliot fucking Waugh has grabbed the axe Margo let slip to the floor, closed his eyes, and sunk it into his own stomach.
Blood.
That’s all Quentin can think, next. There is so much fucking blood. He has seen enough blood this year that he should be used to it, but that blood wasn’t Eliot’s, and it wasn’t pouring out of a wound in just the wrong place in his stomach, and everything tilts sideways for Q. All of a sudden, the universe seems to be moving at a very slow frame rate. One second Eliot is there, plunging the axe into himself, and the next thing Quentin can see is Eliot on the floor, and Margo’s crowding over him, and he hears Eliot saying “ Bambi,” and then Quentin blinks again and Penny is casting the motions of the bond over the bottles, so the hedgewitches must all be doing it too, and then Quentin blinks again and someone’s holding onto his arm –– Penny 23, he thinks, it must be, although Quentin doesn’t know that for sure, but Eliot is no longer on the ground, and Quentin blinks again, and they’re in the hospital at Brakebills.
“If somebody doesn’t help him right this fucking second I’m going to rip all your dicks off and shove them down your throats until you’re shitting blood ,” Margo is saying, or more like screaming, because Eliot’s eyes are fluttering closed, he’s limp in their arms, and there’s still so much blood, and all Quentin can think is that his head is pounding with the sound of his own heartbeat once again. Thump, thump, thump. The pain is nearly enough to send him to the ground, but he pushes himself against the wall instead and sucks in a breath and watches as Professor Lipson scoops Eliot away, and tries very, very hard not to wonder if right now, Eliot even has a heartbeat to hear at all.
“It was a bad wound, I’ll give you that,” Lipson says, an hour later which has passed like a lifetime. Quentin and Margo are sat together. They are holding hands. This is not something either one of them has acknowledged. Quentin has never held Margo’s hand before, but right now, he feels like the two people who love Eliot most in the world should be touching, like they’re holding some sort of vigil for him, like their point of contact is an anchor for his very soul. “But he’s remarkably stubborn. We’ll have to sedate him for a few days while the worst of the healing is done, but he’s going to be okay.”
Margo drops her head back against the wall behind them and lets out a noise which is almost a growl, savage in her relief. Quentin just shudders, and sucks in a breath between his teeth.
It almost doesn’t feel real. After how long getting Eliot back safe has been, like, the only thing Quentin cared about. The only thing powering his exhausted, aching body, long past the point that his own convictions and will to live had fled. He feels like some new disaster just must be about to turn the corner. Something they’d forgotten. Maybe Alice and Penny failed to trap the monsters in the seam. Or one of the old gods decided to get pissed about human meddling again and is going to just nuke the whole planet this time. Or some other new enemy is going to pop into the corridor and tear Quentin to shreds for no other reason than just his luck.
He gives it all a moment for the next disaster to happen. But nothing does. There is just this: the cool, blinking lights of the hospital corridor. The painful grip of Margo’s strong hand in his. And Professor Lipson saying, he’s going to be okay.
He’s going to be okay.
“Okay,” Quentin says. One more breath. Tries to focus on being now, because now is okay, now is actually okay, for the first time in a really long time. “Take us to see him.”
Quentin sits by Eliot’s bedside all night.
Margo is there too, of course, on the other side. She and Q only let go of each others’ hands when they were able to hold each of Eliot’s instead, but it still feels a little bit like being linked up to her –– not that Quentin is thinking much about Margo right then. He’s thinking about a lot of other things. He’s thinking about how glad he is that he let Alice take the bound monsters away without him, because if he’d insisted on going, he wouldn’t have been able to be here, listening to uneven breaths escape Eliot’s pale lips, watching his chest rise and fall under the blanket –– where it is finally, finally free of that novelty t-shirt, switched out for hospital pyjamas.
He strokes one of the greasy curls haloing Eliot’s face. The monster hadn’t exactly understood the concept of taking showers, or washing Eliot’s hair, and definitely not in the elaborate five-step process of magical shampoos and conditioners that normal Eliot used.
It’s not like a bit of greasy hair bothers Quentin. He’s gone plenty of weeks, even multiple weeks at a time, without showering in his own life, a charming side effect of his worse bouts of depression where even the energy expended to take off your clothes and stand up straight in the bathroom is Herculean. But he can’t help thinking that he’s really, really looking forward to the first time Eliot washes his hair. Not because it bothers Quentin, but because he knows it would bother Eliot, and when Eliot is able to care about things like five-step magical shampoos again, it will be like he’s really, truly back.
“You give him those moon-eyes any harder, they’re gonna pop right out of your head,” Margo says, interrupting Quentin’s silent vigil. Her voice is a little rough, but he mostly appreciates the way she’s trying so hard to sound like her usual self. “And trust me, I’m the authority on eyes popping out of heads these fucking days.”
She’s still wearing her novelty eye patch. Quentin never even noticed whether or not she retrieved her fairy eye from the forest before they left.
“Sorry,” he says, mostly as a reflex, voice ragged from how long it’s been since he used it. “It’s just –– y’know. I never thought I’d see him like this again.”
“Ye of little fucking faith, Coldwater. I always knew we’d get him back,” Margo lies. Quentin knows it’s a lie, because the both of them love Eliot in equal measure, and they’ve felt every step of this journey to the same degree, even in the vastly different ways they approached it.
Quentin has never felt like he has, really, one single thing in common with Margo Hanson. She liked the Fillory books, too; he remembers learning that back in first year, which is at least several lifetimes ago. But other than that, everything about her personality was like a mirror opposite of him. Cold where Quentin was helplessly emotional; popular where he was sidelined; relentlessly confident where he was constantly self-questioning. It even showed in the ways they spoke. Margo’s words were always a beat slower than anyone else’s, drawling like she had all the time in the world to get out whatever fucking sentence she pleased, whereas Quentin stuttered and tripped over himself constantly, as if his allotted time to speak could be cut at any moment and it was just a matter of getting in as many words as possible before then. It’s not that he’s never liked Margo. He’s always thought she’s pretty cool, in a terrifying way. But he’s never thought that she liked him, at all. And mostly, he’s just never understood why Eliot, of all people, picked the both of them. How he could love two such vastly different people in such vastly different but equally important ways.
Of course, right now, nothing could matter less to Quentin than their differences. All that matters is Eliot –– here, alive, bordered by the two people he’d want to be with him when he finally, eventually wakes up. So Quentin is overwhelmingly grateful that Margo is here.
“Well. We did it,” he offers weakly, and Margo fixes him with her one wide bambi-eye.
“Hell fucking yeah we did.”
A breath goes through the room, like Q and Margo and Eliot’s unconscious form all exhale in unison. Quentin flexes his fingers where he’s still holding onto Eliot’s limp hand. His own palm is completely clammy and gross, but there’s no way he’s letting go until Eliot wakes up and pries their fingers apart himself.
He’s also trying real hard not to think about the deep, raw stomach wound just a few inches away from where their joined hands lay, so he’s almost grateful for the distraction when Margo adds, “By the way, Coldwater, now might be a real good time to tell me what the hell’s going on between you two fuckwads.”
At that, Quentin has to laugh. He can’t remember when the last time he laughed was –– a sad thing to realise, but certainly not the first time he’s felt that in his life –– and it comes out startled and broken, but still real.
“Uh, that would require me knowing what’s going on with us.” He runs his clammy thumb over the back of Eliot’s hand, over and over again, in an artless but affectionate swoop. “I dunno. I love him. I’m sure that’s –– not a secret, by now. But whatever he wants, whatever happens, I just –– wanted him back. And we’ve got him. So whatever happens, it’ll be okay.”
He is very, incredibly surprised to find that he really means that. Quentin is pretty much aware that at this point, the love he has for Eliot will stay with him until the day he dies. But having lived in a world with no Eliot for the better part of a year now, his own feelings seem almost small and inconsequential to the larger point. So long as Eliot is alive and in this world, Quentin’s fine. Best case scenario, Eliot wants to run off into the sunset and let Quentin suck his dick a lot the moment he wakes up. But Quentin has never lived in a world where the best case scenarios come true, and he’s learning to settle for middle ground.
“If you think he’s not gonna wake up and suck your face right off while you sit watch at his bedside, you’re a bigger fucking idiot than I thought,” Margo says, in her very Margo way.
Despite his peace with the situation at large, Quentin sort of has to hope she’s right.
They pass the long night like that –– a little talking interspersed with long bouts of silence, lightheartedly teasing each other across Eliot’s prone body before returning to somber quiet. A few updates arrive from their other friends, but Quentin doesn’t process much more than the fact that everyone’s okay, that the monsters are gone, that Julia is still the same in her own room down the hall. That’s all he needs to know. That everything and everyone is just okay enough that he’s allowed to be selfish, right now; that he’s allowed to think of nothing more than eliotelioteliot.
Neither of them sleep, and eventually the warm rays of dawn begin filtering in through the blinds of the hospital room. It feels as if the light breaks their vigil. Everything always looks more hopeful in the slant of sunlight, Quentin thinks, and making it through the first night is the hardest part of so many things. As the birds begin chirping outside, Margo finally stretches, popping her shoulder with a satisfied groan. Quentin releases his grip on Eliot’s hand for a few minutes so that he can go pee, and gets a couple of black coffees while he’s out. When Margo accepts hers she says, “Damn, maybe I do get what he sees in you. I’ll fuck anyone who brings me coffee.” Quentin laughs, and doesn’t even remember that technically, she already fucked him once.
They’ve only just finished their drinks when Professor Lipson comes back in, rested and ready to check on her patient. She makes them both leave while she does a little magic on Eliot’s wound and redresses it, and when they both head back in, she’s upping his sedative.
“I wouldn’t think he’ll wake up for at least another twenty four hours,” she tells them, seemingly immune to Margo bitch-staring her down and Quentin anxiously fretting around the edges of them both, chewing on his thumbnail and trying to tell from across the room if Eliot’s breathing is a little shallower than it was before. “It’s not doing anyone any good for you both to be sat here while he just sleeps. Go home. Take a shower.”
When she’s gone, Quentin sort of surreptitiously smells the armpit of his hoodie. Okay, yeah, he gets her point about the shower. Unfortunately, he doesn’t care.
She’s right, though, that both of them being there isn’t actually helping Eliot right now: they could at least take shifts. He turns to suggest this to Margo, expecting to be met with a fair amount of resistance, and is surprised to find she’s looking at him first.
“I do kind of need to go find my other eye,” she says. Quentin blinks, and remembers all over again that she’s still in her eyepatch. He keeps forgetting about that. “I could hitch a Penny 23 uber, be back before you know it.”
“Yeah, yeah –– of course,” he agrees, wringing his hands in the sleeves of his hoodie. “Go. I’ll stay with him til you’re back.”
“You let anything happen to him while I’m gone, Coldwater –– I mean it. A single strand of that tragic hair is out of place when I’m back? I’ll make it rain with your blood.”
“I get it, Margo, geez,” Q says. There is more affection in his voice than there ever used to be when she threatened him. She heads back to the bed to kiss Eliot goodbye, whispering something Quentin doesn’t catch into his unconscious ear, and then sort of pats Q on the cheek on her way out the door, too.
Quentin returns to Eliot’s bedside, and takes his hand again.
Twenty four hours, Lipson had said. So of course, it’s been less than an hour, with Q’s eyelids just starting to drag down so heavily that he thinks he’s going to fall asleep sat upright in this uncomfortable hospital chair, when Eliot’s hand suddenly twitches in his.
“El?” Quentin asks immediately, eyes flying open again, as he leans over the bed. He watches, heart in his throat, as Eliot’s head turns the tiniest bit from side to side, a gruff noise working its way out of his throat.
Quentin should have expected this, probably. Lipson probably gave him a normal dose of sedative, but if anyone has a discipline in high tolerance to narcotics, it’s Eliot Waugh.
“Eliot? El, can you hear me? You’re in the hospital, so don’t try to move too much, okay?”
And ––
Eliot’s eyes flutter open, and he’s looking right at Quentin, and Quentin can breathe.
“Hey, Q,” says Eliot in a weak voice, reeding in and out of consciousness. “Hey. I promised I was gonna be brave for you.”
Quentin doesn’t know when Eliot promised that or who he promised it to, but he couldn’t give a flying fuck. He chokes out a wet sob and brings Eliot’s hand up to his mouth, kissing it through a smile. “You were so brave, El. You were so, so brave.”
“Oh,” Eliot says, his eyes listing closed, but there’s a smile growing on his face. Quentin knows he’s dosed up to his beautiful eyes in painkillers and probably nothing makes much sense to him right now, but seeing that –– a smile on Eliot’s face, Eliot’s real face, Eliot’s real smile –– oh, fuck, it’s everything Quentin’s nearly burned himself up to see. “Good. I might go back to sleep for a little while, then.”
“Yeah, El,” Quentin says wetly, and gently brushes one long curl back from Eliot’s eyes. “You sleep for as long as you need. I’ll be here.”
Eliot’s breathing evens out and he slips back into unconsciousness. Quentin stays right where he is, in the chair beside Eliot’s bed, holding one of his hands and gently stroking his hair with the other. With each stroke, Quentin feels a little a tiny bit more tension leech out of his own body. With each breath he watches Eliot take, it’s like his own lungs open up a little bit more.
Eventually, Quentin rests his head down on the bed beside Eliot’s chest, close enough that he can feel the motion of it rising and falling with each of Eliot’s breaths, and lets himself fall asleep as well.
For the first time in months, he doesn’t have nightmares. He doesn’t dream at all.
He’s woken up by Margo returning a couple hours later, just like she’d promised, this time with both eyes inside her head and a fresh outfit on. Quentin doesn’t tell her about Eliot briefly waking up, because he has a feeling she’d kill him for letting her miss it. He’s also pretty sure Eliot won’t remember a moment of it when he wakes up for good, because –– well, because he’s seriously fucking drugged. But that’s okay.
Still, Margo insists that it’s her turn to be Eliot’s watcher for a while, and stares Q right out of the room. As much as they’re getting on better now, Quentin is still helplessly intimidated by her, and goes easily.
He wouldn’t leave El’s side if it was anyone but Margo there, but it is Margo there, and Quentin has another best friend fighting for her life in another room just down the hall. He’s been getting updates on Julia without leaving El’s bedside so far, but he knows he needs to see her, too. One thing at a time.
The scene he walks into in Jules’s room is nothing like he was expecting. Normal human healing is the name of the game with Eliot now, but he’d forgotten, as he often does, that Julia no longer always meshes with normal human things. This, Quentin swiftly finds out, is the reason she’s twisted agonisingly on the bed, and also why the crazy old librarian-god-something from that book is there.
“The magic won’t let her wounds close,” Penny 23 says, arcing fitfully towards Quentin in a way he’d never normally do, and Quentin is so surprised that he freezes in the doorway. “He can fix her, but only one way, and they want me to choose, because she won’t wake up. But I dunno how to do that. Dude, you’re her oldest friend, you need to choose for me. Do we make her a human or a god?”
The world swirls around Quentin. That is not a decision that should rest on him. Quentin doesn’t really think any decisions should read in him, ever, especially when he hasn’t slept all night, and most especially not about Jules, who has lost so many chances to make her own decisions about this stuff already. He’s not sure that one more un-chosen change might break her.
But —
“You’re psychic,” he tells 23, nearly hysterically. “Incept her right the fuck now, and ask.”
Julia gets out of the hospital first. She seems happy, Quentin thinks, as far as he can judge these things –– and a part of him is overjoyed to know that he’ll have her around still. His normal, human Jules, back again. Goddess Julia was amazing, but Quentin Coldwater is not somebody who can easily let go of his lifelong friends, selfish as he is and sparse as they are. And she still has her magic, so. Maybe they can get a chance, for the first time in this timeline, to just be regular magicians-in-training together.
It’s a week after the fight that Eliot is, finally, released as well. His stomach wound had been tricky, and there’s some nerve damage that will take longer to heal. He’s weak all over, and complains relentlessly about being told he needs to use a cane, even though Quentin insists through his laughter that it looks very distinguished.
The fact that Eliot is Eliot enough to complain relentlessly about anything would put a smile on Quentin’s face regardless of what it was, of course.
Considering how much healing is still going around, Quentin’s not sure whose idea it was to have a bonfire. He’s not even sure it’s a good idea, in the way he’s not sure anything is a good idea for Eliot right now. Q knows he’s turned into a bit of a helicopter mom since Eliot got out of the hospital this morning, but he couldn’t give a single shit, and is fully leaning into his role as Eliot’s annoying health monitor, constantly buzzing around the edges of him and reminding him not to twist the wrong way, bobbing about to pick things up before Eliot can try and lean down for them, keeping track of his pain meds, asking how he’s feeling every other minute.
He’d feel worse about it, except Eliot seems to find the whole thing amusing. And Margo’s just as bad, in a more aggressive way with a lot more threats to various bodily orifices.
Still, despite his two overprotective shadows, Eliot puts his foot down and insists he wants to go to the bonfire. When Quentin thinks about it later, he wonders if Eliot was the one who set the thing up all along.
It’s nice to see everyone, Quentin has to admit. They haven’t been all in one place since –– well, actually, they weren’t all in one place even when they set up the takedown of the monsters, the rebellion against the library, any of it. So it must have been months. Longer? Since the key quest, even? Because during all this horror, this whole year, they’ve been far too scattered by their own painful journeys to all come together. And even in the last week, Kady’s been off planning things with her hedgewitches, and Alice has been with Fogg, and Penny 23 has been slowly helping Julia re-control her normal magic, and Margo and Quentin have been holed up in the hospital with Eliot.
It’s nice to see all of them together. It’s so, so nice that it sort of clutches at Quentin’s heart, and he feels, ridiculously, like if he’s not careful, he might start to cry.
Eliot brings a big paper bag with him to the bonfire, and he won’t let Quentin look inside until they get there, no matter how much Q bugs him. Quentin rolls his eyes about the whole thing several times, but when they arrive –– Eliot having stubbornly left his cane at home in favour of having his arms looped through Margo’s on one side and Quentin on the other –– and help El down to sit on one of the logs, he finally reaches inside, and pulls out ––
It’s the monster’s fucking t-shirt. The one with the raccoon pun, which Eliot had been changed out of at the hospital, but which must have been laying around somewhere.
“There was no suitable way to dispose of this crime against fashion other than by fire,” he announces. Quentin sits down very close to him on the log, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Their elbows brush together when Eliot leans forwards to toss the shirt into the flames, and Quentin leans into the touch. “Honestly, I could forgive all the senseless murders, but I’ll never forget that any of you let something walk my body around dressed like that.”
They chat around the bonfire, and drink hot wine –– just a little for Eliot (“ You’re on a fucking cocktail of magical pain meds, Eliot.” “You’re acting like that’s ever stopped me from drinking my body-weight before.” “You were just stabbed in the GUT!”) but plenty for everyone else. The drunker they get, the nicer everyone is to each other. Even Alice and Kady seem to be having a nice conversation across the fire, and Quentin smiles when he catches Alice’s eyes. She looks between him and Eliot, the way they’re pressed together in a way which says both nothing and everything, and to her credit, she smiles back.
At some point, someone gets them all singing. They’re mostly all drunk by that point so it’s not very graceful, but Quentin thinks it may still be the most cheerful this whole group of people has ever been in proximity to one another. As Julia giggles her way into a falsetto portion of a song which definitely isn’t supposed to have falsetto, Penny 23 is falling asleep on a log, and Margo has become very invested in describing Josh Hoberman’s dick to the tune of the song.
Quentin needs a moment. He murmurs something brief into Eliot’s ear, assuming El is too busy singing to pay much attention to it anyway, and takes everyone being distracted as his chance to slip away.
When he’s gone far enough that he can still see the glow of the campfire and hear the laughing, off-key singing of his friends without them noticing him and dragging him back, Quentin leans back against a particularly inviting tree, and half-guiltily lights a cigarette. He was always more of a social smoker, but Brian got him properly into the habit, and quitting just hasn’t been that high on his to-do list since then. Truthfully, sometimes it’s felt like smoking is the only way he’s been able to get himself to breathe, this past year, because at least it forces you to move your lungs. Now that everything’s finally calmed down, he’ll go out and get some nicotine patches and at least mostly quit, but he thinks he can justify it for this one last night. He closes his eyes, and listens to the hazy voices of his friends, and takes in a deep, deep breath.
For once, Quentin’s brain isn’t thinking about anything. He isn’t worrying. He isn’t hurting –– not in this moment, at least. There is so much to work through, so much left to fix, he knows that. But he is doing a little bit better at thinking in terms of right now. And right now, Quentin wants to close his eyes, and smoke his cigarette, and revel in the comfort of being nearby to all his most important people on the world. Even if he’s on the outskirts, like he always ends up being, it no longer feels like a solely bad thing.
He’s so busy not-thinking (really not thinking) and not-worrying ( really not worrying) that he gets a little caught up in himself, and doesn’t hear someone approaching him until they’re already there.
“Hey, you,” says Eliot, knocking into Quentin’s shoulder. He’s always so effortless with touch, has been ever since they met, but it still seems new for his casual touches to just light Quentin up the way they do. Q opens his eyes, and guiltily removes his cigarette from his lips. He doesn’t think smoking will be good for Eliot’s healing process, and Eliot technically quit smoking while he was possessed, since the monster never tried it, so Quentin doesn’t want to be the one to re-spark a bad habit. Eliot, of course, quickly spots this train of thought, and rolls his eyes. “Oh, give it here. One drag won’t kill me.”
Quentin does pass the cigarette over, because, well, he can’t really deny El anything at this point in time. Also just the tiniest bit because he’s always loved the way Eliot’s mouth looks when he’s smoking. Now is no exception, and Q stares for a couple beats too long as Eliot leans back against the tree trunk –– clearly aiming for his usual louche look rather than admitting he’s still too weak to stand unassisted for more than a few minutes –– and takes a puff.
The smoke looks a thousand times more appealing when it’s pouring out of Eliot’s parted lips. Quentin is definitely looking, even as he reaches to take the cigarette back after giving El his promised one drag, and Eliot has definitely noticed. His lips quirk up at the edges, and he glances down, leaning further back into the tree.
The night’s a little chilly. Quentin shuffles closer to Eliot. For warmth, of course.
“So, Q,” Eliot begins, and Quentin blinks, because this sounds like the start of a conversation, and he wasn’t expecting this to be a conversation rather than a quiet little nothing-moment. “As you know, I adore my Bambi with all my heart, but her being around every single second since I woke up hasn’t left us much time to –– talk.”
“We need to talk?” Quentin says. His brain says be worried and his heart says, but what if ––
“The whole possessed for months, brink-of-death deal does wonders for putting my shit in perspective, Q.” Eliot looks down at him wryly, and oh so slowly, one of his hands raises to rest in the crook of Quentin’s neck. Quentin stops breathing. “Look, I have a historically catastrophic track record with emotion. It has only ever really ended in disaster, in my experience, and I was scared. I didn’t think I could handle it if we were a disaster. But the truth is, I love you, Q. And I don’t know where we stand anymore, I know I’ve been gone a long time and I never expected you to just be waiting around for me, but on the off chance I haven’t ruined my chances, I just wanted to let you know.”
Quentin’s heart swells and crests like a wave.
There are a lot of things he could say back. But talking has never, not really, been Quentin’s strong suit. And he’s tired. And he has Eliot in front of him, saying things Q hadn’t even dared dream about, except occasionally in a self-indulgent way that left him despising himself afterwards.
Right now, he doesn’t despise himself, not at all. He mostly just feels seen. It is a long-forgotten and intoxicating feeling, but he shouldn’t be surprised that something about Eliot Waugh is intoxicating.
“All I’ve cared about, all year, is getting you back,” Quentin admits in a soggy voice, and then realises he’s going to get really pathetic if he keeps talking right now. They can discuss the shit out of absolutely everything for months after this, they can work through the thousands of issues that are bound to crop up in their own sweet time, but right now, he thinks he can get away with simply saying, “If I’ve got you, then you’ve got me, El.”
Something beautiful wavers on Eliot’s face, one of those rare emotion-filled expressions that he usually tries so hard to hide; that Quentin has only ever got to see in rare circumstances too. But right then, Eliot doesn’t seem to try to hide it at all. He’s looking at Quentin the way he did when Quentin made him kneel down on a beach and crowned him king of Fillory. He’s looking at him the way he did at the mosaic, one year in, when Quentin kissed him for the first time in their new life. A little bit wondrous. A little bit like he can’t believe it. A little bit like he doesn’t think he deserves it.
A little bit like he wants to be kissed.
The sounds of their friends’ laughter and joking around the bonfire are muffled under the sound of Quentin’s heartbeat in his own ears, and he flicks his cigarette to the ground in the next second, before grabbing Eliot’s face and pulling him down.
Their lips brush, and it’s like the whole world starts. Quentin pushes closer, no time for being chaste, not when he has a year’s worth of emotion exploding inside of him and looking for a way out. He backs Eliot into the tree, conscious at least of the fact that El’s still injured and should lean against something, and kisses him again, and again, and again. Pulls Eliot’s lower lip between his teeth, licks into his mouth, swallows Eliot’s soft noises and the harsh panting of both their breath, twists into Eliot’s hands where they grip him at his hip and the nape of his neck, presses into the warm space between their bodies until they’re touching at every possible point, twines himself around Eliot and never, never wants to let go.
Every one of Quentin’s senses is being smothered and soothed in Eliot. He can smell the familiar floral scent of Eliot’s aftershave, worlds away from the blood-and-cinnamon the monster had always stunk of. Can taste the remnants of wine on his tongue as it pushes against Quentin’s. Can feel where his skin is cold from the night air, but still soft when Quentin lets his fingertips drift down El’s neck, hook into the collar of Eliot’s shirt as Eliot uses one arm around Q’s waist to drag Quentin up onto his tiptoes and kiss him harder. It’s nearly overwhelming, being this wrapped up in every part of Eliot, except for how it’s the first time Quentin has felt real and home and safe in a very, very long time.
It is –– actually not great, Quentin thinks, that he’s only just realising what a terrible state he’s been in all this time now that it’s ending. He didn’t notice that it had felt like he couldn’t breathe while the monster had Eliot until now, when the contrast becomes clear as Eliot’s kisses force the air right out of his lungs. He hadn’t realised he’d been teetering on the knife’s edge of shutting down altogether until now, when he’s finally waking up. And in his own mind, the part that can manage to think anything at all while being so wrapped up in El, he’s realising –– he hadn’t necessarily seen this coming. This whole thing where Eliot is back, and they’re kissing, and the stars are out, and Eliot’s hands are warm as they sneak under Quentin’s shirt, and it’s okay.
He’d thought they’d save Eliot, yeah.
But he’d also sort of thought he’d die trying. And with everything –– with Quentin’s history, and just with how insurmountable this past year seemed, that had felt sort of okay.
As he curls into the space of Eliot’s body now and stutters something against his lips , Quentin realises, for the first time, that sacrificing himself to save Eliot wouldn’t have been a good thing. It wouldn’t have been better for Eliot. It wouldn’t have made Quentin into the hero he always wanted to be. It would have just been –– over.
And there’s a lot here for him, still, in this world. There are his friends. Quests. Magic. A lot of minor mending to do. He still doesn’t even technically have his degree yet. He maybe has an unclaimed throne left in Fillory, and a magical boat he’d like another trip on. He has this man, pressing soft kisses under his ear, and all the endless possibilities of things which may grow between them if they give themselves time to explore.
Quentin isn’t ready for any of that to be gone. He isn’t ready to close the book on himself, with so many possibilities still branching out ahead, only waiting for him to take them.
It’s good, he thinks, and for maybe the first time in his life he means it –– it’s a good thing he’s still here. Because he can’t wait to see what happens next.