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ohmyohpioneer · 6 years

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queliot fic: that leaving wasn’t easing

Summary: He thinks one thing they should tell you about getting better - about making your brain work in some semblance of The Right Way - is that things start to matter.

(Or, Quentin is handling Eliot's absence the best he can, which, frankly, isn't as well as he'd hoped.)

a/n: Damn it’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything (looking at you @sweetestinthegale and @wedlakeserenities - you she-devils). But...how could I not? Fic title from 715 CR∑∑KS. I posted it over on AO3, too, so choose your own adventure.

queliot fic: that leaving wasn’t easing

He thinks one thing they should tell you about getting better - about making your brain work in some semblance of The Right Way - is that things start to matter.

Technically, Quentin supposes, that’s the entire mental wellness pitch: Make Things Matter. Make food taste again. Make taking a shower worthwhile. Make people bright and real and kind again.

It’s just that happiness never mattered to him - magic did.

And somewhere between then and forty incarnations of himself, it’s gotten flipped on its head and magic is a fucking cancer and happiness is the only mystical force that is important and imaginary and unattainable.

When happiness didn’t matter, life didn’t matter the way it does now, no one mattered the way they do now. And Eliot’s absence is as conspicuous as ever and he matters.

---

Julia is there with her long fingers and her cigarettes.

He sees them, how they could have been. Smoking and making rough-edged jokes at his father’s funeral, would have actually been at the funeral. Heads bowed at the cemetery, knees knocking as they sit crowded on the threadbare plaid sofa in his dad’s living room, eating lukewarm casserole after it’s all over, when people stay too long in your house and bestow useless benedictions like sorry and you’re in our prayers .

He wonders if that would be better than this. Wonders who those two people are and if they would know joy - or grief - in the same way this Julia, this Quentin do. Wonders if Julia would even be here if it weren’t for the tumult of magical chaos they can’t or won’t - half the time he’s genuinely not sure which it is - be extricated from.

Recently he’s taken to falling into this thought exercise - maybe it’s a defense mechanism, fucked if he knows: Take one person out of the scene, watch it bend, watch the world crack and splinter, watch yourself change. Adjust. What’s the scene now? Do you say the same words? Do you ache the same ways?

Maybe the more he practices the better he’ll get at absence.

Anyway, it’s an easier game to play than putting Eliot into every scene - into places that he almost always belongs, but isn’t.

He’d be shit at his dad’s funeral. What the fuck does Eliot know about fathers anyway?

This is one of those times Quentin doesn’t let Teddy linger long in his conscious - self-preservation being the running theory on that one. But he’d try. For Quentin he’d try, and Eliot trying is infinity better than anyone else acting in effortless grace.

Maybe he’d hold his hand - they’d probably be fucking freezing like they always are, were - pull out a flask and grouse about how tacky and pointless it all was. Garish and excessive deification of death, his mouth would say around a sharp swallow of bourbon.

But that’s the truth of funerals. You die and then there is a funeral. One, the other. People exist in the world and then they don’t. People stop being and then they have funerals.

People stop being and never have funerals. It doesn’t mean they’re not dead.

Eliot hasn’t had a funeral and he’s dead and Quentin is tired.

---

The book finds him late on a particularly trying afternoon spent with The Monster.

It’s got a plastic dust cover, a Dewey Decimal Number (129) on its spine, and when it crinkles open there’s a pocket with a slip inside that says it was last taken out from Warner Library Serving Tarrytown, New York in 1945. Almost certainly stolen.

Despite the distinctly 70s book jacket, it’s very old. Quentin would venture to say too old to be shelved with, well, most of modern literature, and when he pages to the center, the spell is right there.

“What’s that?” The Monster is standing over his shoulder.

“Oh, uh,” he shuts the book and lies, “Just some old poetry - dulce et decorum est bullshit.”

“Boring.”

He doesn’t put the book back on Marina’s shelf, instead tucks it neatly under his pillow.

---

Wine had been his first choice because, well, when it comes down to it, it takes a lot less work than magic - and also why the fuck not.

But he soon finds that wine poisons him in ways that burn from the inside, that crowd anguish and sorrow into the back of his throat, behind his eyes, grief sublimating from where he’s obscured it behind one foot forward, one breath in, one breath out.

Would all this have gone differently if Eliot had said yes to him, chosen him?

Or a much more toxic thought - the one he has far more often: would all this have gone differently if he hadn’t said a word to Eliot? Kept it tucked deep somewhere instead of breaking whatever fragile balance they had lived in since- since the moment they met?

It’s his fault - the burden he’d placed on Eliot, the shame and regret that suffocate him at the worst of times, throb at the better. You break, you break, you break .

---

It is disconcertingly easy to locate the pyxis.

Having met gods, and finding them to be, on average, capricious and narcissistic assholes, he doesn’t place a whole lot of credence in the idea of Fate. But the hand he is slowly being dealt is feeling more and more like it is one that is meant to be played. He wouldn’t bet on the universe being kind, but maybe this one time it’s being just.

It had been Julia’s idea for this particular field trip with The Monster. Explore the antiquities of The Met for clues as to what the gods have taken, while the Scooby Gang tracks down any answers that might point to killing the unkillable.

It feels suspiciously like window shopping - The Monster stopping, crossing Eliot’s - Eliot’s - elegant arms, tilting its head and frowning before ultimately deciding, no, this just wasn’t the piece of Mycenaean earthenware he was looking for today.

Quentin eyes the small jar on display amongst the other Fifth Century Greek art. Small, clay sides curving out gently. Figures silhouetted on white. Moirai , according to the plaque.

“Do you like that one?” Fucking Quentin swore he was going to put a bell around The Monster’s neck.

“Huh?”

The Monster shifts the - Jesus Christ - canopic jar cradled in the bend of his elbow, and points to the pyxis, “That jar? You were looking at it for a very long time.”

“You can’t,” Quentin feels his hands hover in a frenzy over the goddamn ancient artifact that is at present being held like a bottle of eight dollar wine, “You can’t just take that. That’s- that doesn’t belong to you.”

“No. It belonged to Ahmose the First. He is dead. He does not need it now,” The Monster agrees cheerfully. “Look! It has a bird on it.”

He uses his thumb to tilt back the falcon-headed lid in a jaunty motion.

Quentin is pretty certain he is having a heart attack. When did he even get to the Egyptian wing?

“I will get you the jar, Quentin,” he assures him, and Quentin would argue but there is only so much fight left in him at this juncture, especially when The Monster’s voice is soft and he hears his name from Eliot’s - Eliot’s - lips. “Julia has told me about the custom of gift-giving. You have brought me on this ‘field trip,’ I want to express my gratitude.”

Before he can attempt a protest - even a perfunctory one - The Monster has smashed the glass of the display and alarms are blaring.

“Though,” The Monster reaches easily into the case of priceless pottery, “I do not understand why you want this one.”

He points to the figure of a woman in divine vestments, “Atropos is a bitch.”

---

Quentin’s intimately familiar with the overwhelming press of not belonging and it’s fucking ironic - or something, he was never clear on when things were ironic and when they just sucked - he doesn’t know how to claw through the collapsing of losing the place you belong.

Eliot was his belonging and he knew it, he knew it, because in those dreary, somnambulant weeks following Eliot’s rejection, when Quentin wasn’t his choice, he’d had dreams about the White Lady. Sitting in the brush on the forest floor, he’d wait in darkness and aim and hit her right at her heart, and a wish, no, his wish, to forget . Again and again, nights on end, she would tell him: sadness will find you , and his world would begin to cave - Eliot seeping out of the lonely places he never could fill, washing from the warm places that they’d built on mosaic tiles, Eliot leaving .

A cold sweat would jolt him to waking and he’d press his palms to his eyes to keep Eliot in, to not forget.

When you destroy the place you belong, you’re nowhere.

---

“Penny Lane” has been playing on loop for the past hour - The Monster seems to have figured out how to operate Marina’s turntable - and Quentin regretfully commits himself to a life that will never again include Magical Mystery Tour as he lies awake in bed.

Whatever hesitations have been holding him back the past few days have eroded and what’s left is raw and rough and ready. He just needs a minute to breathe, just five fucking minutes of quiet .

The book and pyxis are there - faithfully or threateningly remains to be seen - by his side. Nighttime is the best, he’d decided slouched over Lucky Charms one morning, with all in the apartment sleeping and the magical reserves at their fullest - his aching at its most acute.

One breath in, one breath out.

What should have shocked him, but came to him as a massive, crushing relief, was how easy it was. Sequences of simple movements that grew more fluid as he built a rhythm - just five minutes, just five minutes, just five minutes.

Rending his shade from his body, hurt like a motherfucker, as it turned out.

Agonizing seconds stretched to goddamn eons as he pulled each of the gossamer strings that tethered all of him together, the pulsing light dimmer than he thought it should be, like it’d been tarnished or worn too thin. And then -

Quiet.

Methodically, he removes the lid, places his shade gently in the stolen jar, and fits the top back on, setting it carefully on his nightstand beside an old pair of his glasses and half a stick of used lip balm.

Being okay was a mental and emotional state he knew so intrinsically he would never achieve, that it never occurred to him to think about being above emotion. Lying back down, Quentin folds his hands across his stomach and doesn’t forget but doesn’t feel as he watches a solitary moth land on the ceiling above him.

---

He sees it happen, the moment she recognizes the luminescent jar for what it is, when all parts assemble themselves and create the skeleton of story she wishes she weren’t reading.

Julia.

Any signs that she had been about to tumble through his door into his - previously - locked room had slipped by him as he’d traced a route through his mind, where he’d been dispassionately sorting through catalogs of thoughts and emotions he knew he shouldn’t and couldn’t be trusted with.

“ Quentin .”

He works on analyzing her wide eyes, the crease at the space between them, comparing it against the extensive library of Julia faces he has, and lands shakily on: heartbroken.

Tears are surely not a good thing, and she has those, too, brightening her eyes and making them glassy as she stumbles over a discarded jacket and slumps to the mattress. The lid on the clay jar rattles under her shakey command, or lack of. Long fingers, Julia, her slender fingers brush back the hair on his face, the strands caught on his eyelashes, then reaches into the vessel and gently - even by his standards - takes the weakly glowing shade in her cupped palm.

“Do you think,” he asks as she readies herself, “We could find Revolver ?”

Startled. He reads startled in the lines digging into her forehead. “What?”

“It’s a better album than Magical Mystery Tour. ”

No warning is provided as she pushes his shade into his chest and he feels like he is breaking - breakee instead of breaker - ripping apart all over again, aftershocks off grief and anger echoing to his fingers, his ears, spaces in him he didn’t know could experience anguish.

“Fuck,” he hates himself, everything so deeply. Hates the shame he felt at the relief of nothing , hates feeling anything again. Hates the exploding outward at losing Eliot in an infinite loop. Hates breathing, hates being, hates absence, hates funerals, hates belonging, belonging to someone who doesn’t belong to him, someone who is gone.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Julia has him held tight before he’s even aware he’s a whole - broken, shattered - person again.

He’s so tired and he cries.

---

A dull throb pounds a pattern at the inside of his skull and he vaguely realizes he was asleep and that he hadn’t dreamt at all.

Cross-legged on the foot of the bed, Julia is flipping through the spell book, frown stretching her exhausted features further. Shit, he can’t do anything right. She looks up, that Goddess determination she had long before she was a deity.

“Fuck, Quentin,” so defeated, “What the hell were you thinking?”

There are words that fit, probably, that would make it through his dry mouth, but he can’t recall any and he’d have to stack so many against one another and let it tower over them and his bones ache too much for that.

“I really don’t want to argue about this,” she continues because what is she supposed to do with her endlessly, constantly, continually fucked up best friend. Par for the fucking course, Coldwater. “But do you have any idea how fucking stupid that was?”

Self-destructive doesn’t mean he’s not self-aware, “I know, I know. I get it, Julia. I fucking get it.” Of course he knows. Of course, of course .

He’s not who he was - who fucking ever is after the melee of wading through the catastrophe of existing - he’s not that Quentin with no power, no voice, no will to be fucking brave. Because that’s all anything worthwhile is - life, magic, happiness, belonging - the outermost limits of bravery. He knows.

“Look,” he could sleep another four timelines, “Jules. I’m sorry. I had-I had to do something .”

She runs a finger outline of the women on the pyxis, head bent, bowed, he shakes the feeling of funeral . “Yeah,” is all she says.

He wets his lips, cracked. “It was quiet.”

“Um, it was quiet for just a, just a little bit and,” an invisible hand holds his throat, making the words that need to bubble up and out hard to come, “and I just, I miss him?” it’s not a question, “And I love him.”

The plainness of it startles him. “And I couldn’t take looking at his face anymore. It was just a minute of quiet, Jules,” desperate for her to understand, to sympathize, fuck, to make it better. “That’s it.”

Rising to her knees, she surrounds him, soft eyes, soft palms at his jaw, “We need you here, Quentin. We need your heart - fully intact. We’ll figure this out. I promise.”

Promises that can’t be kept aren’t made to be made, he wants to say, but instead says, “Okay.”

---

The next day is Iris and stones that bleed - because obviously - and Alice and too much, too much, after all that Quiet.

Then suddenly: it’s peaches and plums, peaches and plums, peaches and plums .

Hope isn’t a fragment of bravery he allows himself to hold, not usually. But as he lays in bed and idly runs his finger over the smooth clay silhouette of the woman spinning a long, nearly endless thread, he paints a mosaic that stretches out to the edges of his consciousness.

Peaches and plums.

#queliot #queliot ff #the magicians #the magicians ff #quentin coldwater #eliot waugh #julia wicker #fic #quentin and i both have a lot of feelings #and make poor life choices #but i like to think we're lovable scamps anyway #it has seriously been THREE YEARS since i wrote fic

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