#im gonna need 2 finish this 1 someday i never hit that sweet sweet catharsis

[writinglittlebeasts]

bc i've been in motivation hell i'm looking back through old fic wips + well i was certainly working through some things w/ this 1

Alice is secretly envious of Julia's discipline. While Julia has a natural gift for the acquisition, and almost perfect implementation, of knowledge, Alice needs to claw her way to a thorough understanding of any concept before it will be of any use to her. She needs to resolve her reality with the circumstances of any new information with frustrating hours of study and reconciliation. It's unfair, she thinks, to resent Julia for her ability to accept things as they are and find the truth as it applies to herself, but it's just as unfair that Alice should struggle so much with the nature of magic. And damn whoever had placed so much importance on a magician's belief, that their far-gone decision ought to dictate Alice's success in a world that hasn't given her much of a reason to put her faith into anything! 

This is why Alice gravitates towards Julia, isn't it? Her faith and her talent, which make her the envy of academics. Irresistible, effortless power.

It doesn't hurt that Julia is also so kind and patient. Alice feels almost like a petulant child beside her, something that she can't bring herself to resent Julia for even if the feeling sometimes climbs up from the tips of her toes and leaves its ichor burning Alice's stomach as she pushes it back down.

✩

Autism isn't something that Theodore has ever worried about. In his time, it had hardly mattered if a man kept to himself, or took a moment to think. Repetition was all the rage in manufacturing, intricate muscle memory and tacit understanding of mechanical tasks at which Quentin has always excelled. Even as Quentin has grown into a young man with sharper angles and his environment shapes his behavior, Theodore has never treated his son any differently. Still, Quentin thinks it remiss to pretend that he was without blame in his parents' divorce. He remembers cruelty from neighborhood children that he'd forever let go unchallenged, frustrating Sarah until she shook him by the shoulders and demanded he be a man about it. He remembers sickness at her dinner table, laundry in a mound on the floor and the crawling skin of his hands. He remembers the meltdowns, and he remembers Sarah leaving him for hours at a time to escape his repetitive muttering and flailing limbs. Sarah had left Theodore because she didn't love him, but she had hexed them because she hated Quentin. No amount of paternal acceptance-- though it feels rather like purposeful ignorance --will divest him of this self-loathing.

✩

"Lift this feather," Alice demands. She points down at it where it rests on the side table. 

Quentin folds his hands in all of the ways that she's shown him to no luck. 

"Like you mean it!" she says. 

"I don't know how to mean it!" he fires back. When he repeats the spell, nothing changes. He thinks that the feather must rustle in a breeze. Magic is meant to feel like something, but he's sure that he doesn't feel it. There isn't any electrical tingle in his forehead or dizzying weightlessness to his fingertips. There isn't anything there at all to suggest that Quentin's casting is doing a damned thing.

Each of his friends has a different teaching method. Julia explains a spell piece by piece, with slow, dissected hand gestures and more encouragement than Quentin likely deserves. Alice tells him to imagine the spell in his mind and becomes frustrated when this method does absolutely nothing. Penny and Kady come as a package set, with Kady asking him questions about his thoughts on a given spell and Penny roughly turning Quentin's hands this-way and that, ostensibly trying to guide him through the motions as if Quentin is only doing it wrong. Margo tells him that if he gets frustrated enough, the ambient magic will be too afraid to disobey him. She also tells him that the circus is always looking for new hands, if the magic thing doesn't go his way. 

He would be convinced that the lot of them are tricking him, setting him up with impossible task after impossible task to watch him fail and come crawling back like a pathetic mundane, if it weren't so consistent. 

As a child, in the Library, surrounded by proficient magicians, Quentin had felt out of place. Harriet, closer to his age, had come into her magic before Quentin and Theodore had even arrived. She had seemed to excel at everything, and Quentin had taken up close-up magic in a childish, misguided attempt to keep up. In their shared youth, this difference in skill was inconsequential. Their practices were fun, until they weren’t; until Quentin would become frustrated with his lack of progress in the realm of real magic, which came so easily to his sister. In her moody adolescence Harriet had grown tired of his insistence on being her hanger-on, self-pitying whelp that he had been, and their shared lessons had abruptly stopped.

No; the effort that the physical kids put into trying to teach Quentin magic could be better spent elsewhere, and everybody knows it; their frustration can't be misconstrued as amusement to any degree.

✩

Sarah flicks cigarette ash into the ashtray, one eye on the pot on the stove and the other far away in dreamland. She dreams about her youth, before the husband and before the boy. Life was simpler when she had no attachments. She'd been too young and had too much to lose to get married, Sarah thinks now. Not that she'd had a choice, once the baby was on the way. 

It's easier to pretend that she hadn't been excited to be a mother before the little thing had come bawling out of her and become the sorest pain of her life. She feels less the model of a simple, terrible mother when her baby's crazy isn't why she doesn't want him. In her old diaries she has magical portraits of herself, beaming, with Quentin's infant head squished to her cheek. She had wanted to love him. He'd only grown wrong.