Chapter Text
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
—T.S. Eliot
So this is the way it ends. Not with a whimper, but kind of, technically, with a bang. And an: “Ah, ah, Quentin, Q,” and an, “Oh god El I’m gonna — El, El, I’m gonna —” and Eliot burying his face in Quentin’s neck, sucking frantically at his sweaty skin, and slapping one bracing hand down on the mosaic underneath them.
At first, when they turned to such inventive measures to burn off some of the restless tension and madness that repeating the same hopeless task every single day was driving them to, Quentin had been very insistent about not doing anything sexual on the mosaic. Fillory was a weird place, rather obsessed with sex and also incredibly obsessed with traditional marriage and fidelity of all sorts, and who knew what reaction it would have to two dudes from another world, one of whom was technically married to a woman in a traditionally supposed-to-be-monogamous-until-and-after-death Fillorian way, boning on top of the sacred relic of a godly quest.
Quentin had insisted and Eliot had agreed: it wasn’t worth the risk. But after nearly two years of it — of the sex, of carefully avoided conversations and the way they were both oh-so-casually constantly handwaving it like it was just a natural facet of their friendship, and like maybe each time it happened would be the last time it ever happened and that would be no big deal, but of also never managing to go more than two or three days before one of them would frustrate the other on purpose, or pick an argument and then interrupt it with a kiss, or pour a little more wine than usual in the evening and use it as an excuse to crawl into the other’s lap, or — well, after all that, they'd stopped being quite so careful. Sometimes it was hard to resist. Sometimes the extra thirty seconds it would take to get inside to one of their lumpy mattresses seems insurmountable in the face of desire.
Such is sex with Quentin, Eliot thinks, as he bites the crook of Quentin’s shoulder and feels a dizzying orgasm beginning to crest in the pit of his stomach. Eliot, who’s fucked more guys than he could reasonably count, in all manner of magical and kinky ways, has never wanted it so bad as he does with Q.
He really can’t explain it. By all accounts, everything they do together is pretty fucking vanilla. Like, sometimes Q likes Eliot to boss him around a little bit in bed, and there’s some hair pulling, and he’s been slowly trying to teach Q about edging, but it’s hardly the three-day orgies of spine-tingling sex magic and exotic narcotics and a dozen strangers’ dicks that Eliot’s always considered his best sexual experiences before. There’s no logic to explain why he’s more desperate for Quentin’s sloppy blowjobs and clumsy fucks than he has been for anything else in his whole life.
Except, he thinks —
Except —
Except that thing he doesn’t think about, and he’s right on the brink now, and he can’t help it, that he says it into Quentin’s shoulder, the words muffled against his skin, and his brain is short circuiting so in that moment he can’t even think to hope that Q’s not heard it, that it’s drowned out by their groans and the sounds of sex — but right into Q’s skin, Eliot stammers, “Fuck, I love you,” just as he comes.
And then Quentin says, “Ah!”, and his whole body goes tense, and Eliot strains to press the sloppiest of kisses against the side of his mouth, and Quentin comes, too.
They both collapse down onto the mosaic.
Eliot feels light, dizzy as all hell, as the tension of passion gives way to giddy relief and the a burning warmth in his stomach and a tenderness he doesn't know what to do with in his heart. He presses a few weak kisses into Q’s shoulders before pulling out of him and rolling onto his back, the cool tiles a nice contrast against his skin from the sticky summer air, overly warm even after dark. This part of Fillory gets heat so thick you can feel it wrapped around you like a towel.
Eliot is all sensation, right then; no words, not even in his mind. He barely remembers that he’d said anything before coming. He’s actually so dazed from the monumental fuck that he doesn’t even notice for a few minutes that he’s not getting his usual post-coital cuddle from Quentin.
But it soon becomes clear that the left side of his body isn’t comfortably overheating from being clung to by a human-octopus-hybrid, and that just won't do. Even in the sticky heat of summer and the confusing deniability of their relationship, Eliot is entitled to Quentin's warm body clinging to him like a limpet after a fuck like that. He blinks his eyes open, the effort seeming Herculean and certainly something he thinks he should be rewarded for, and he finds Q kind of propped up on his elbows next to him, body still delightfully flushed-red and sweaty, chest still heaving, but with an expression on this face that Eliot doesn’t usually like to see on someone he just fucked the brains out. Quentin actually looks a little horrified.
“Oh, shit,” Quentin says, through a rough, breathless voice. Eliot would ask what’s wrong, but he’s still feeling a bit like his brain just shot out of his dick and he’ll never be able to form words again. Quentin may be feeling the same if the way he stammers is any indication, words sticking in his throat even as he weakly slaps Eliot’s chest. “El, I — uh, I, uh, said I wouldn’t —”
What he’s trying to say, Eliot realises as he forces his head up, is that he’s come all over the mosaic.
With the remarkable amount of fucking they’ve done in the past two years, it’s actually probably impressive that this is the first time that’s happened. Because while Quentin had given in to sex-by-the-mosaic several times by now, they’ve still made a point of not splatting jizz right on the god-enchanted tiles which are supposed to represent the ultimate beauty of the universe. It seemed only sensible.
“Oh,” El says, still rather dazed, and weakly pets at Quentin’s hair, mostly just trying to tug him down for a snuggle. Eliot’s never shy with physical affection with people he even is platonically friends with, but while he and Q are still pretending all this is just friendship, right after sex is the only time El actually gets to drape all over and cuddle him the way he wants. They carefully separate that sort of thing out when they’re not fucking, and Eliot’s certainly not going to waste this precious post-coital glow just because of a bit of wayward spunk. “Don’t worry, baby Q, I’m a master at getting jizz out of important things. We’ll clean it up later. Just come here.”
But Quentin shoves away Eliot’s grabbing hands, not even looking at him. Eliot takes that as a personal offence, and finally regains enough strength to push himself indignantly up onto his elbows, wondering what the fuck could be more important to Quentin than curling up in the tender embrace of Eliot’s manly arms after a good hour of the most expert sex of Q’s life.
Roughly one second later, Eliot forgives him.
“El. Are you. Do you see that?”
“It's a little hard to miss, dear.”
In two years and three months at this fucking task, they’ve never seen anything change. They’ve made nearly two thousand patterns — Quentin's keeping track of the exact number, while Eliot just describes it as a fuckload. They’ve attacked it with magic, math, and emotion. They’ve poured their hearts and souls and creativity into it, and at the end of every pattern, a grand total of nothing has happened. Today they’d spent all day working out a beautiful fractal fibonacci pattern, and it hadn’t done anything, and they were so freaking frustrated that they’d needed to scream their heads off one way or another, which was how the fucking began in the first place.
So it’s hard to miss the fact that all of a sudden, one of the fucking infuriating mosaic tiles is glowing gold.
It happens to be the tile Quentin just came all over. Eliot is one hundred percent sure that is maybe probably relevant.
“Q —” he says, voice weak, but that’s all he can get out. All he can get out, and apparently Quentin’s lost for words too, because they are both absolutely fucking silent, both half-sat, stark naked, sweat cooling on their skin and only sounds of the forest at dusk surrounding them, as they watch.
The tile glows gold, and then it slowly, oh so slowly, sinks down into the earth below, leaving a hole in their pattern.
And then, in its place, half submerged in the dirt, is a key.
A key.
Two years and three months of nothing but this, nothing but them, in this tiny hut, living like Fillorian peasants, tending their little vegetable garden and shitting in an outhouse and trading magic in the local town for jars of honey and telling each other ridiculous stories until they ran out of imagination and began confessing their pasts and darkest secrets just to keep entertained; two years and three months of contorting their brains and delving into the depths of their souls to try and figure out this puzzle, scraping their hearts raw as they shared vulnerable little ideas of what they considered maybe the most beautiful things about life; two years and three months of drinking terrible Fillorian wine and changing the boundaries of their friendship and growing secret feelings and not talking about some things but talking about everything else until they knew each other inside out, learning each other’s habits through to the bone from the sheer necessity of having no space, driving each other crazy, fighting, fucking, laughing, kissing, crying, comforting, repeating to each other more than once that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but still doing it.
Two years, and three months, and there’s a key.
“Quentin,” Eliot breathes.
Quentin reaches out, with trembling fingers, like he thinks it might disappear before he can grab it.
It doesn’t. Quentin curls his fist around it, and it’s just that. They have it. It’s the middle of the night and they’re naked under the stars and they hadn’t even been trying but Quentin has the key.
The whole quest comes rushing back, all at once, and Eliot only realises in that moment that he’d sort of forgotten. Obviously not about the quest entirely, but forgotten, at least, that there was more to it than this. That their life’s purpose wasn’t finding just this key, but finding all of them, bringing magic back to another world and another time. They've seemed so far away from it; they've been so consumed by this singular task. They've written new rules about their every existence around this one key.
“Quentin —” Eliot says again, because Quentin seems to have gone mute. And then, suddenly louder and struck with a lightning-bolt surge of adrenaline and disbelief and pure glee like he’s never known it, Eliot leaps up and grabs Q’s hand and laughs and screams, “Quentin!”
That’s when Quentin breaks. His face splits into one of those gorgeous puppy-dog smiles, and he lets out a loud noise which can’t reasonably be called a word but more of an inhuman shriek of syllables, and he flings himself into Eliot’s arms.
Better than a post-coital cuddle, El thinks, as they jump up and down with their bodies pressed together and their laughs intermingling and the metal of the key crushed cold against his back by Quentin’s hand.
“So, game plan. This is all very sudden and all; we didn't even finish that open bottle of carrot wine. Key achieved, it's very grand, et cetera — but do we leave right now?”
After a while of screeching at each other and a frankly searing celebratory kiss, Eliot’s a tiny bit calmer, and they’ve at least pulled their clothes back on. Two years into their Fillorian trial they’re both still stubbornly clinging to the now ragged jeans they’d arrived in from earth, and Eliot has his designer boots even if he mostly lives barefoot, but they both have a few different Fillorian shirts, since their other ones gave up the ghost months ago. The nearest town is still a good couple hours’ walk away and only has the simplest of garments available at their market, but Eliot thinks he’s still pulling off an approximation of his usual elegance with a burnt-orange rough-hewn buttondown.
Quentin would never wear a wrap-tied tunic on earth in a million years, but he still makes it look very cute, Eliot thinks, as he watches Quentin do up the string. He’s fumbling a little, one of his fists still clenched around the key like he’s expecting it to disappear into thin air if he breaks his hold for a single second.
“I mean, I guess?” Quentin says, scraping a loose strand of hair behind his ear and shrugging. The strange tone of his voice feels a lot like the reluctance Eliot himself is currently experiencing. Sitting on their little bench beside the mosaic, Eliot ties the laces of his boot with a sharp tug, and tries not to think about how final this feels.
It’s not that he doesn’t miss their friends, and running water, and personal space, and internet porn, and his waistcoat collection, and food he didn’t have to grow himself. He absolutely does, all that and more. He has no desire to stay in Fillory-of-the-past for any longer than he's forced to. He just — he really hadn’t expected how much this little hut of theirs and the routines they've written into it has come to feel like home. He didn't know he was going to have to rewrite his brain all over again.
“Well, maybe we could wait until the morning,” he tries cautiously, not thinking too hard on his own reasoning for fear he’ll find something he doesn’t want to know. “Pack things up, sort the house out, get some sleep so we appear back on earth dazzling and well rested?”
Quentin looks tempted for a moment, but then sighs, his brow furrowing as he comes to sit next to El and tie up his weird Fillorian sandals.
“I just never know, with the keys. It gave us, what, ten seconds to get through the door when we came here? I don’t know if we should risk waiting and missing our chance to get back. If it even will take us back.”
Eliot’s stomach sinks, but he nods, swallowing around his feelings like he’s so good at doing. “Yeah—“
“I just —"
“No, no, you’re right. As usual, when it comes to all things Fillory. Come on, let’s grab only the most portable of our possessions, and try the key right now.”
Q looks a little guilty, and one of his hands flits towards Eliot, brushing over his knee before pulling back in an aborted little motion. They’re back to this, then. It seems to be their pattern: they get either frustrated or happy enough to fuck, and they cuddle up together afterwards with all the affection of lovers, and then as soon as they get up, they don’t know how to touch. They’ve always been somewhat affectionate anyway, mostly due to who Eliot is as a person, but now it's carefully, awkwardly, always not quite enough to confuse themselves that they’re together.
Now is most definitely not the time to be thinking about that messy clusterfuck of emotion. Eliot tugs Quentin up by the hand, like he’s trying to prove to himself that he can do that without making it weird, in towards their little hut, to pack.
The hut is nothing special, but it’s miles from what it looked like when they first got here. Fresh flowers sit next to a bowl of peaches on the little wooden counter, and the shelves are bursting with jars of preserves and loaves of bread and their own harvested vegetables from the shabby little garden Eliot rules with an iron fist. Embroidered purple curtains cover what used to be a weathered shutter in the windows. There are two beds, just palettes with scratchy sheets pushed against either wall. Embers are still smouldering in the little fireplace, where Eliot had cooked lunch earlier as Quentin restacked the tiles from another failed pattern, occasionally calling mordant comments to Eliot through the open door that had Eliot rolling his eyes.
Eliot's chest aches as he gathers up his couple of spare shirts and the most appealing selection of their food. He’s assuming the key will plant them back in the Physical Kids cottage now that they’ve completed this leg of the quest, but like Quentin had said, you never know. It would be dumb to end up starving to death in the wilderness because he thought they’d able to get peaches from the grocery store when they got back.
Quentin acquired a battered leather satchel at the market a few months ago, almost identical to the one he used to wear on earth. It always makes El’s heart ache fondly to see him wearing it, like he's just that little first year nervously wandering through campus again, the one Eliot had wanted to tease and play with and possibly ruin, just a little, in a nice way; nothing more to it than that. Now there's a lot more to it than that. Eliot shoves all his own possessions into the bag, and Q adds the small bundle of odd Fillorian novels he’d got into reading, and his notebook with all the mosaic patterns scribbled in it, and the first key, the one that got them here, is already tucked safely into a pocket of the bag.
And that's it.
The entire summation of two years and three months of their lives.
“I guess that’s it,” Q says, looking fitfully around the room. They can’t bring with them the furniture they bartered for, the trees they planted, the colourful eaves they put onto the hut. But Eliot clears his throat, walks outside, and carefully folds up the patchwork quilt on top of their bench, the one they’d made themselves out of scraps of fabric the same colour as the mosaic tiles, as if it just couldn’t leave their minds even in quiet moments, as if they wanted the quest close even when they slept.
“Let's bring this too,” he says, begging his voice to sound as blasé as ever. He is not, he assures himself, bringing the quilt because it’s what he and Quentin first kissed on top of, first fucked on top of, have laid beneath countless times on the nights they shared a bed or occasionally, on hot nights, curled up together outside beneath the stars. He’s just bringing it because it’s the perfect level of soft, and one can never have too many blankets. “On the off chance the key drops us off in the middle of the fucking Arctic and we need to huddle for warmth, naturally.”
Quentin’s eyes go soft watching him from the doorway, and he reaches out.
So often, Quentin is the one to move first in times like this; he always was the brave one. Eliot goes to him, blanket carefully folded in his arms, and is surprised when Quentin reels him in for a soft kiss. It’s not that they haven’t shared plenty of kisses like that before. It’s just that they’ve usually always been a precursor to fucking. Or a part of fucking, during the times that it’s slow and gentle and has a lot of eye contact and Eliot would murder anyone on the spot who dared call it making love. Sometimes Eliot sneaks kisses onto Quentin’s forehead or cheeks in the same casual way he would do with Margo, but they don’t really kiss, actually kiss, when it’s not about sex.
Until now. Eliot loses himself in the soft press of Quentin’s mouth, bending down to meet him, curling one hand around Q’s neck and into the strands of his little ponytail, feeling Quentin’s hot breath against his face. He tries very, very hard not to feel like they’re about to be dropped right back to their old lives, and this is a farewell kiss to this strange interlude in their relationship.
Q pulls away too quickly for it to be a goodbye, though — at least, Eliot tells himself that. Then Quentin sighs and glances around one more time, at the mosaic and all the emblems of their life there, one hand adjusting his ponytail where Eliot had messed it up, the other still clinging onto the key.
“Right. I guess we should, uh, try and use this key, then.”
“Yeah,” Eliot agrees, swallowing and looking away from Quentin. He takes a deep breath, and forces himself to be very, very cool with all of this, the same way he’s been cool with emotional upheavals he didn’t really want his whole life. “Maybe we can come back here, if we ever get to Fillory-of-the-future again. See if the hut’s still standing. And if my gorgeous decorating choices have been totally pillaged by then. I feel like nobody ever appreciated me Queer Eye-ing this place up enough; you're an utterly unappreciative ruffian yourself, you know.”
Quentin laughs, which was the goal, and things feel a tiny bit lighter as they step outside and close the hut’s door. Quentin holds out their newly acquired key and seems to focus very hard, and before they know it, a discordantly gold keyhole is appearing on the hut’s weathered wooden door. Today, at least, it seems magic wants to be on their side.
As they step into the blinding light of the portal together, Eliot doesn’t spare a glance over his shoulder, doesn’t look back. If he doesn’t look, he thinks he can pretend he’s not saying goodbye to yet another home.
— and arriving back in another.
They step out of the clock in the Physical Kids Cottage.
Quentin feels a little bit like his mind is fraying at the seams. He looks around, feeling oddly rubbed-raw and frantic; everything looks the same as he remembers, but it’s not like he has a photographic memory. They could have been delivered back to right when they left, or the week before, or eight years later. How is he supposed to know?
Quentin swallows, looks up at Eliot, whose own face is showing a complicated cavalcade of emotional vulnerability in a way he'd hate if he knew he was doing it. Quentin’s hand aches with the urge to touch him, comfort him, but he shoves it reprimandingly into his pocket instead. He's never sure whether Eliot wants to be touched, comforted at all, especially not by Quentin, at times like this. El puts up such a strong mask, always; it seems uncharitable to even show that someone's noticed he broke it.
“Do you think this is right when we left?” Quentin looks at the clock, still actually a functioning timepiece as well as a portal between worlds, despite all the odds, but his mind is blank. “I seriously can’t remember what time of day it was when we — y’know, zipped out of here.”
“It was two years ago,” Eliot soothes him, stroking a hand across the back of Quentin’s hair for a second. Quentin pushes into the touch like a cat, barely stifling the soft noise of pleasure in his throat, but Eliot pulls back before Quentin can really enjoy it. When he glances up, another complicated emotion is being wiped off Eliot’s face. “And we've had some fairly important world-saving matters to attend to, like the gloriously attractive heroes that we are. I doubt anyone could blame us for not checking the time.”
Quentin wouldn't have phrased it quite like that, but he supposes El has a point. Quentin reluctantly pulls out of Eliot’s hold to dump their bag down, and plods around the room a tiny bit, poking at a ball on the pool table. It doesn’t seem to be dusty, so he assumes it hasn’t been years since anyone was here, but that’s really all they have to —
Then the front door swings open, and Alice and Julia come marching through.
Seeing Alice’s face is — startling, to say the least. It assuages his fears about what time they might have landed in, since she looks exactly the same as she did they day they left, but it also throws Quentin right into a muddle of memories that he spent the last two years carefully organising and packing away.
Mostly, he thinks, as he stares at her, he’s surprised to realise just how little he’s thought about her lately. He spent maybe the first quarter of a year at the mosaic getting over her, and then another half a year working through all his hideously complex emotions, both in his own mind and aloud with Eliot when he’d had a bit too much wine. But as much as it had been painful, and as much as Quentin had fully given in to his natural disposition to endlessly mope and pine for whoever the unfortunate object of his affections is at that particular moment, he had gotten over her. Like, for real. For most of the second year, he’d been wrapped up in an intoxicating mixture of quest and magic and Eliot, and Alice had been firmly shuffled off to the back of his mind as something so far in the past he couldn't really remember why he'd ever cared so much.
It doesn’t hurt to look at her now, not the way it had last time he lay eyes on her — two years for him, maybe just a few hours for her. He mostly just feels settled, and a little ambivalent, now that he’s weighed up both the good and very bad of their relationship, called it pretty much a zero sum game, and begun to look forward for more rewarding things.
It’s actually very encouraging, to Quentin, to realise that he can look at her now without any of his old infatuation flooding back. He really is done with that part of his life. He thinks they’ll both be better off for him letting it go.
But, of course, Alice hasn't had the benefit of years. It’s still the same day for her as it was when she told him things were just weird, now, and he does get how much that sucks. The second she spots him, she makes a repressed little noise in her throat, shoots him an unhappy look, and marches off up the stairs.
Quentin doesn’t mind. He’s sure he’ll have a chance to talk things through with Alice at some point, but for now he’s more concerned with Julia, who looks utterly out of sorts. Quentin’s entire heart is overwhelmed with love for his oldest friend, his best friend, who he hasn’t seen in two years; who traded crayons with him as kids and told off his bullies in middle school and made up dumb dance routines with him in her bedroom on Saturday nights in high school and came to visit him every day the first time he was in hospital and was the first person to get him drunk and then held back his hair when he puked and came with him to all his school interviews just in case he needed support; who he kind of thought he might never see again.
Quentin rushes over and wraps her in a huge hug, trying to pour all of his love for her into the tightness of the embrace. She startles like she maybe didn’t even spot him in the room until then, and Quentin pulls back after a moment, settling a restless hand on her shoulder, when he realises she’s frozen against him.
“Jules?” he checks, suddenly anxious, as she stares at him. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I —” Her voice sticks in her throat, and she clears her throat in the prim, familiar way she always does when she’s trying to pull herself together. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“That’s okay,” Quentin assures her. How many times has she just sat with him in silence when he didn’t want to talk; how many times has she done ridiculous things just to distract him from woes he wouldn’t even say aloud? An idea quickly takes form in his mind, from the seed of how much he's missed her, and how important the progression of the quest feels but how much he, at the same time, doesn't want to let her go. “Hey, what are you doing right now? Because we’re —” He glances over his shoulder at Eliot, checking — “Trying to get to Whitespire. The key seems to work in the clock to make portals now, uh, somewhat unpredictably, but, like, it's the closest thing we've got to a Fillorian uber these days. Will you come with us?”
Julia blinks at him, looking uncertain. Quentin thinks the last time she was in Fillory was maybe when she was still shadeless and she burned down that forest, but he could be wrong. He’s lost track of a lot of what happened back then. It feels like a different life.
“Okay,” she says, her voice mostly distant. He’s not fully convinced she knows what she just agreed to, but he’s encouraged by the fact that a moment later, she reaches out to pluck at his Fillorian tunic. “Hey, what the fuck are you wearing, Q? ”
Quentin laughs, and the laugh turns a little wet halfway through. He pulls Julia into another hug. “It’s, uh — god, Jules, I have a lot to explain. It’s been so long since I saw you. Not for you, I know, but for me, and — well, come on, I can tell you when we’re there. You really do look like you could use a break.”
“I could,” Julia admits, and this time, she lets him hug her.
Quentin and Eliot take very quick showers. Separately. Quentin wishes they weren’t separate, but he tries to not think about that in the shower, because he knows it’ll just create a problem that he doesn’t have time to pause and deal with right now, no matter how good the hot water beating down on his skin feels after two years of bathing with river water in a metal tub. Quentin changes into some fresh clothes — jeans without holes in has never like such a luxury in his fucking life, and shedding the Fillorian shirt for one of his comfortable hoodies very nearly makes him cry, the overwhelming mixture of comfort and relief and being home combined with the confusing loss of the life he’d just begun to adapt to and the calmer, simpler person he thought he was starting to become.
He doesn’t linger on that too long, either. Within half an hour, he and Eliot and Julia are back around the clock, and Quentin is wielding the key.
The keys and the clock really do seem to like each other. Just as before, a keyhole appears when they think hard enough about it, and Quentin slots the key into it to find a blinding white light filling the inside. Another portal.
Julia steps into it without hesitation. Quentin and Eliot share a glance, halfway terrified and halfway eager, and it feels to Quentin a little bit like a thousand words pass between them in that look. That’s something you get good at, too, spending all your days with the same person — speaking without words, knowing what they’re thinking, what’s passing behind their eyes with just a shadow of expression. Quentin’s heart clenches, but there’s too much going on, new quests and fairies in Fillory and a troubled Julia and Margo still about to get married, for him to spare a second digging into his emotions. Emotions he probably shouldn’t even be having.
Still. Without talking about it, Quentin and Eliot’s hands link together the moment before they step through the portal after Julia.
The portal, this time, takes them right to Whitespire. But while it's not decades away from where they need to be, they are, as it turns out, still just a few moments too late.
They stumble into the room just at the right time to see Tick pronounce a blood-splattered Margo and some chipmunk faced adolescent lawfully wed.
Margo nearly falls into Eliot’s arms as soon as the wedding party has dispersed.
“You dick,” she says, although she doesn’t really sound mad at him, more mortally terrified. “Where were you? They made me get fucking married, Eliot. And did you see the kid? If he has more than two fucking pubes yet I’ll fuck a centaur!”
“Now, now, no centaur orgies for you, you're a married lady,” Eliot says, but the joke is weak and falls flat as he pats at her hair. “I’m sorry, Bambi, I tried to get here. There have been magical interventions of utterly crude proportions. But we’ll figure this out.”
All of which means, now, it's come to this. Quentin has Julia, who looks desperately like she needs a bed to curl up in and someone to stay at her side, and Eliot has Margo, who desperately needs help not going to her own bed and avoiding the person who would like to be there with her.
So, for the first time in more than two years, Quentin and Eliot have separate quests.
The parting moment is strange and small. Eliot wishes they could have a minute just the two of them, but then he’s not even sure what he’d say. They’re in the castle together, still; it’s hardly like they need some grand goodbye. They'll see each other tomorrow, if not sooner. But for two years now, they furthest they’ve been apart is when one of them took a trip to the local village for half a day. There was one night, one single night, when Eliot got too drunk at the tavern in that town and didn't come home, and that was the only night they spent apart in all that time. Mostly, they haven’t left each other’s sides or sight in all that time, and certainly haven’t had their other best friends with them to talk to, confide in, help. Separating now feels unnatural, like one of Eliot’s arms has detached itself and gone off with a new body.
But it’s necessary. Eliot can’t do much more than stroke Quentin’s hair for a brief moment, wondering if he’s imagining the way he seems to lean into the touch, and say, “Meet you for breakfast tomorrow?”
Quentin says yes and smiles at him in a weird way that's not quite Eliot's-Quentin-smile, then Q’s off, to show Julia to her chambers and talk to her, and Eliot is left with Margo. His Bambi, who has has missed more than life itself, and who he does feel woefully guilty for wanting to ditch right now and trail after his little puppy of a not-boyfriend. The heart is fickle and Eliot has always been a hopeless romantic. But seeing Margo isn't a consolation prize; half of his soul returns when he pulls her close.
“Bambi, we have much to catch up on,” Eliot says, as he drags her into another hug, half for her and half for himself. “My room? Now? If things are as I left them, I should think I have enough wine in there to last us the night.”
Unfortunately, the murderous little gopher from the wedding chooses that moment to pop up behind Margo.
“My bride,” he says, his voice squeaking and breaking in a way which makes Eliot want to nap for a thousand years just so he doesn’t have to deal with this nonsense, “The reception is over. I made sure every guest has gone myself, just like you said. I believe it is now time for us to, uhm, consummate our union. Let's hurry!”
Margo looks exactly as queasy at the thought of that as Eliot feels, and he can tell she’s rearing up to yell something which will probably start yet another war between kingdoms. While he doesn’t doubt the situation deserves it, he’s also had enough of wars to last a lifetime, and he can’t get engaged to anyone else to get out of this one, so he quickly throws an arm out in front of Bambi and answers the kid himself.
“Fomar, yes? Listen, I don’t know how the — uh, the Floaters do it, but you seem frightfully misguided. See, on earth, it’s tradition for the bride to spend her wedding night with her family. Hearing their wisdom, talking about the road ahead, et cetera. Your marriage would be simply doomed without it. And since I’m Queen Margo’s family here, I’ll be taking her off for the night, now.” Then, when Fomar looks ready to complain, Eliot rears up to his full height and adds flippantly, “Also, I’m High King. If you don’t do what I say, I’ll cut off your dick and feed it to the sloth on my council. She’s savage.”
Fomar's face blances in an instant, and he stumbles backwards for a moment, not tearing his eyes off Eliot, before he whips around and stumbles back towards the wedding chambers. Ah, Eliot thinks, adolescent boys; always so easy to threaten. It's like he's back in childhood all over again.
“I appreciate your big dick energy as always, El, but I could have dealt with that little rotten nutsack myself,” Margo grumbles.
“Without declaring war on his entire kingdom and getting us slaughtered by the fairies while you’re at it?” Eliot asks. Margo elects not to respond.
After that, it’s just a matter of steering them both to Eliot’s chambers, and pouring a couple of generous glasses of wine. Margo chugs her in one go, and Eliot follows her lead, filling them both up again before he kicks off his shoes and sort of — collapses, inside.
He’s been running on adrenaline for however-the-fuck-long it’s been since he and Q fucked on the mosaic and found that key. Reasonably that’s probably only five or six hours ago, but it feels like a lifetime, two lifetimes, and it really has been two worlds since then; Eliot is fucking exhausted, and an unwelcome barrage of emotions are rising up faster than the wine he’s chugging can stop them. He collapses down to sit on his expansive bed next to Margo, wrapping an arm around her and resting his cheek on the top of her head.
It’s so good to see her. Really. No matter what other shit is going on. He’s recalled her face so many times in his mind over the last two years, but there would always be tiny details he’d miss. He thinks of her as taller, always, than she actually is; he can never mentally recreate the complex vortex behind her eyes. As many worlds of emotion as Quentin inspires in him, nothing will ever eclipse the love he has for this small, savage woman right here. Margo was Eliot's first person. She'll always be his truest.
“Fuck, Bambi, I’m fucking sorry. I really tried to get here in time, but the key took us on an unavoidable detour of Odysseyic proportions,” he tells her, and sighs against her hair.
“It’s not your fault the fairy queen gets off on ruining my life in a fusillade of creative ways,” Margo says. Eliot kind of agrees, since technically she was the one who brought the fairies to them in the first place, but he’s not mad about that anymore, and it doesn’t change the fact that Margo didn’t deserve this. “But, to be clear, I will not be fucking that greasy haired little Lannister-wannabe.”
“Of course, Bambi,” he coos, stroking her hair. He’s gotten used to stroking Quentin’s hair like this, the last couple of years, but it’s nice to do it to Margo as well, even if he’s rather less likely to get a blowjob for the gesture. “We’ll come up with a way to get it annulled. Or just cut his balls off if it comes to that.”
At that point, it’s time for another glass of wine each, and then Margo starts taking off her blood-splattered wedding gown. It’s complex to undo; Eliot tries to help with the ties on the back, but she slaps his hands away and contorts to do it herself. As she finally steps out of it, leaving it crumpled on the floor, and picks up her wineglass again as she stands in her underwear, she says, “So, tell me about this fucking detour of yours, then.” She looks Eliot up and down, eyebrows raised. “Because honey, you know I love to judge any time, but even a saint would say something about your hair right now."
And so, because he’s never good at beating around the bush when it’s Margo, Eliot tells her.
“Well, it was a real fucker of a quest. I know it's only been a few days for you, but —" Eliot feels nearly hysterical now, his voice reaching sharp heights as he forces himself to say it aloud, for the first time to somebody who hadn't lived it; "Me and Q have actually been gone two years, Bambi."
"Uh, I'm gonna stop you right there for a really important question. What the fuck?"
Eliot nods, swallows, tries not to let on just how weird he feels about it too, even though it's twisting every inch of him inside. "The key did some time-meddling bullshit — a real trip, and not the good kind. To give you the Sparknotes, we got sent to a mosaic in the olden-days of the Fillorian countryside, and we had to show it the beauty of all life to get the key.”
Margo looks startled as shit, but to her credit, she takes it in her stride the way she does everything. “I guess I can forgive you for being a few minutes too late for the cradle robbing ceremony, then. Beauty of all life? Shit, that’s vague as hell.”
“That’s what I said,” Eliot agrees, remembering when Quentin first told him about this chapter of the quest book. Eliot hadn’t even been sure what the mosaic was, back then, and he'd already known there was going to be some bullshit associated with it. He feels like that was whole lifetimes ago.
“Well, clearly you straightened it out, or you wouldn’t be here,” Margo points out, and chugs some more wine. She still looks a tiny bit dazed. Eliot doesn’t blame her. He’s felt like every room he’s in is spinning, all fucking day. “Two fucking years? Really, El? You better say you missed me.”
“Bambi, of course I missed you. More than indoor plumbing. More than tequila.”
“Damn right you did.” She’s trying to sound tough, but she sits back down beside him in her slip and pulls him into another hug. Eliot falls into it, and his eyes sort of start getting misty too, but he stubbornly blinks it back. Eliot doesn't cry; that's something about him that has been true for a long time.
When they finally pull apart, it seems like hours later, and Eliot’s not sure what Margo’s talking about when she asks, “So, what was it? You know, in case there’s a pop quiz at the end of all this.” At his confused look, she rolls her eyes, and reaches for yet more wine, this time going straight for the neck of the bottle. “You know — the beauty of all fucking life?”
Oh. That old thing.
A hearty load of Quentin’s jizz is how he might put it if he didn’t know Q would get furiously embarrassed; two bodies joining together in ecstasy under the stars and the rest of the universe melting away is what he might say if he were feeling poetic. A tiny, niggling voice at the back of his mind reminds him that come wasn’t the only thing spilled just before the key appeared — there was also Eliot’s confession, I love you, muffled and unheard against Quentin’s skin but definitely expressed. He’s doing his best to pretend that never happened, even in his own mind. He refuses to admit, even to himself, that love might have ever had more to do with it than sex. The mosaic quest is over; what does it matter now how they did it?
Instead, he just says to Margo, “Remains technically unclear. But you know Fillory, Bambi, there’s always a twist. More than anything with the tiles, I think it might have just had something to do with — a moment of pure happiness, maybe.”
He really hopes she doesn’t get the Buffy reference and put it together.
He tells Margo everything, usually; right now, he thinks he wants to keep this thing between him and Quentin to himself for just a little while. Maybe because she always sees through him too easily and he won’t be able to play it off like a few casual hook-ups if Bambi stares him down with her one wide, knowing eye, and an exact understanding of all Eliot’s desperate emotional issues along with the weakness he’s always had for Q. Maybe because their time at the mosaic was so special and unusual that he knows nobody else would be able to understand it, what it meant to him, not even his most precious soulfriend.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t actually know, now that they’re back in their own time with their other people, if it’s even still a thing at all.