#it’s a no-despair time skip thing so he’s a 20-something just beginning to unravel his traumas

[thisisareallymeaningfulurl]

You know, I’ve never been a big fan of Korekiyo as a character post Ch3 but talking about him with my boyfriend has really changed my feelings about him a lot. Where I once saw someone unforgivable and undoubtedly evil, I see someone who has endured terrible things and who, in any other circumstance, could have one day healed from the things he’s been through and lived a happier life. Anyways I’ve been writing an outline for our fic all day and I’m realizing he might be my favorite character to write for in it

[maximusthewolfe]

peaches and plums | 5/?

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Eliot struggles on their second mosaic anniversary

Eliot had believed, wholeheartedly, that they would be back home by now. When he toasted Quentin a year ago, calling it their "first and last" year here, he meant it. But here they were, on the morning of their 2nd mosaic anniversary, and he felt like a liar. He couldn't have known, of course, but that didn't make the nagging frustration tensing his shoulders and coiling in his stomach any less real.

He'd been awake for at least 20 minutes, staring at the thatched ceiling of the hut, trying to will himself out of bed. Most days, the monotony that awaited them felt tolerable. Some days, it even felt like it had a big, consuming purpose. But today, under the pressing realization that he and Quentin had officially dedicated 2 entire years of their lives to this thing, with nothing to show for it, starting the routine felt impossible. 

The bed felt lumpy and uncomfortable, the blankets scratchy against his skin. Tiny things he rarely noticed anymore were obnoxious and obvious. The way the sunlight filtered in through the window across the hut, soft and grey as it rose above the forest surrounding them felt uncomfortably bright against his eyes. The sounds of the birds chirping, beckoning them awake, grated against his ears. The scent of the peat and moss that he'd begun to associate with comfort was suffocating. Everything about the new day dawning screeched "failure" at him, shrill and taunting.

The only thing that kept him from groaning, rolling over, and telling the world, the mosaic, and, frankly, the quest at large to fuck right off so he could properly wallow in just how spectacularly he'd messed this up was a firm, steady arm wrapped around his waist. Quentin shifted beside him and Eliot sighed contentedly, the breath unraveling the tiniest bit of the knot sitting uncomfortably in his chest. Ok, so maybe he didn't have nothing to show for the last two years.

Their second year at the mosaic had been a mixed bag for the pair of them. Eliot had never been one for defining things. Giving something a clear definition left an awful lot of room for it to disappoint you, or hurt you, and he'd seen enough of both to avoid them whenever possible. Things with Quentin here were no exception. What was the point, he'd asked himself time and time again. It was a ridiculous idea, to get caught up in something here when they were headed back to their real lives any day now. Their real lives, where Alice Quinn was within reach and Quentin Coldwater would never choose Eliot over her.

"Rise and shine, our eternal defeatist task beckons," Eliot said as Quentin re-entered the waking world with a sleepy grumble that twisted something in Eliot's chest.

Eliot tightened the arm settled around Quentin's shoulders, soaked in the warmth of Quentin's body curled against his own for just a little longer. In moments like these, even with the weight of having failed to keep his promise to Q that they would be home by now, Eliot was overwhelmed with what he’d gained in the past year, despite actively trying to ward it off. It was terrifying, to have his heart skip a beat in his chest when Quentin looked up at him with sleepy eyes, a small smile tugging up the corners of the other man’s lips. It made his breath catch in his throat, the unguarded way Q’s eyes softened at the sight of him, the way Eliot could feel his own gaze softening in response. Somehow, he summoned the strength to throw back the blanket and disentangle himself to start the day.

The small ball of warmth he'd created from those last moments in bed didn't hold out for long. After three failed attempts, the weight of their second year settled back on Eliot's shoulders. Every unsuccessful mosaic configuration reminded him that there was only one right answer to this thing, and, as Quentin had so eloquently put it upon their arrival, a shit load of wrong ones. Probability was not on their side, magic was not on their side. Sheer determination and patience were the only things they had to rely on and today, for a hundred reasons, it felt like they were both in cripplingly short supply.

"I'm out, I can't do another one right now," Eliot groaned, exasperated, and stalked away from the completed attempt, balling his fists at his side to release some of the building tension in his body.

"Fine, I'll take a crack at it just let me write yours down first," Quentin said, with an edge Eliot didn't remember hearing from him when they'd first woken up.

He watched as Quentin sketched the tiles and removed them, returning them to the original piles on the outskirts of the now-blank square. Two years. He'd watched Quentin do this, and little else, for two entire years now. Their second year, for better or worse, had been complicated by their first anniversary. Eliot tried to keep it casual. He allowed them both a pass. They rarely saw other people, unless they ventured into the village, which always felt like such a waste of time when the mosaic remained unsolved. They had needs, they trusted each other. It made sense to Eliot that things would fall into a pattern like this. Refusing definition made it easier for him to ignore what the pattern meant, to let his thoughts flit by without needing to reflect on them. He didn't need to wonder why he liked the feel of Quentin's body against his own first thing in the morning. He didn't need to dwell on the fact that, of all the sweet things he tasted on Quentin's lips when they kissed, the sweetest of them was "home." He didn't have to worry about the Alice of it all or what would - or wouldn't - happen when they returned, key in hand.

Somewhere along the line, Eliot felt more than he bargained for. He felt the shift a year ago when they kissed, but it grew, and continued growing until Eliot couldn't ignore it anymore. Now, as he watched Quentin stacking the piles with a furrow in his brow that wasn't usually there, he was at a loss. Falling in love with Quentin Coldwater was never the plan, not like this.

The morning faded into afternoon without much change except increased frustration, a palpable entity that seemed to be feeding off one another's growing restlessness with the day, with the realization that when the suns set this time, they would no longer be on their first and last year at this thing. They would be stepping into year three, with no end in sight. What frightened Eliot most about that concept wasn't the way the failure tugged at him, a reminder that he wasn't as good as he wanted everyone to believe he was. It was that the idea of another year, another five or ten or fifty of doing this didn't seem so bad, if Quentin was the one he was doing it with.

"This is such bullshit," Quentin growled as he placed the last tile in another failed attempt, the anger in his voice shaking Eliot from his reverie. Quentin stood, stomping on the last tile like it might make a difference, and threw his hands up, bending over to take the tile out of its place. He chucked it, it collided with a tree and fell with a ceramic tink at the roots of the tree.

"Whoa there cowboy," Eliot said, picking the tile up, "At least let me write it down before you hulk out on the tiles."

"This is hopeless," Quentin said miserably in response, stepping aside as Eliot grabbed a sheet of paper and the basket of chalk, beginning the work of sketching this iteration.

"Hopeless might be a little strong," Eliot reasoned, though he'd felt that same empty, drained sensation earlier in the day. He was a man torn, a curse he couldn't seem to escape in any reality. Torn between wanting to get back to their lives in the real world, wanting to find the rest of the keys and restore magic, and wanting to stay here, with Quentin, in a world where Quentin had chosen him, more than once. He'd spent the last year fighting the fact that he wanted, needed to be chosen like that, but as his patience for the mosaic waned, so did his ability to ward off the truth of that need.

"No, I don't think it is," Quentin sighed, running a hand through the hair that had fallen from his bun in his display of frustration. "Two years, Eliot. We've been doing this for TWO YEARS. I don't want to do it anymore. Maybe we're not the ones who Jane gets the key from. Maybe this is just some ridiculous joke, maybe the quest just sent us on some stupid detour."

Eliot knitted his brows together as he started disassembling Quentin's work, building the piles by color almost without thinking. It was muscle memory by now, the act of starting over. The mosaic was a source of frustration for them both, but Eliot had never heard Quentin doubt the quest, even on the days when they were so mad they barely spoke a word to one another.

"Come on, Q," Eliot said, trying to diffuse the despair before it hardened into anger. The piles of tiles got larger beneath him without him even fully realizing he was still disassembling it. "We're getting closer, we have to be." He didn't know how much he believed his own words, but Quentin needed to be diffused and he was doing his best, despite not being the champion pep talker between the two of them.

"Are we?" Quentin asked, stomping around now. "It doesn't feel like we are. It feels like we wasted another whole year of our lives!"

He knew it shouldn't have, but the words stung somewhere deep and, Eliot previously thought, impenetrable within him. Without another word, he finished stacking the tiles and grabbed the sheet of paper he'd sketched Quentin's attempt on, picking up the stack of papers documenting the rest of the day's failed attempts from where they were abandoned on a nearby chair.

"Tell me I'm wrong!" Quentin pressed, and Eliot, who had been trying his hardest not to let the flicker of anger rise in his chest until he couldn't put it out, felt the heat of it rush forward now.

"Fine, you're wrong!" Eliot said, tightening his grip on the stack of papers as he moved across the mosaic to place them with the rest of the drawings from the week. "We could be done tomorrow for all you know! We can't just throw away all this time we've invested," he gestured, to the mosaic, to the sketches, the force behind his voice building.

Why couldn't Quentin just look outside of the quest, and the mosaic, for two fucking seconds, to see that there was something bigger happening here? Because he doesn't want it. The thought cut through his consciousness like a trained response, and the fear of it gripped at him. It made no logical sense. It didn't stack up against the man who spent almost every night sleeping with his head on Eliot's chest, or the fits of passion they'd shared over the past year. It didn't match the innocent way Quentin told him a year ago, "I want last night to happen again." It didn't match the ease with which he and Quentin had built this life of theirs over the past couple of years. It didn't match, but it didn't have to, to scare Eliot into lashing out.

"If you want to live your life, live it here," he spat, tossing the sketches on the table, eyes darting to everything on the table, unable to turn around and face Quentin for fear that what he didn't say would be so easy to see in his eyes: With me.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Quentin asked, his tone sharp enough to cut. It only spurred Eliot on. God, sometimes Q was just so dense.

"You know exactly what that means," he said, shuffling things around on the table with no real purpose other than keeping his back to the man who both held the fuse to his anger and knew, whether or not consciously, exactly how to douse it.

The sound of a stack of tiles tumbling behind him broke his avoidance, and he turned, a steely-eyed Quentin looking back at him. "Whoops," Q said with a dismissive shrug.

"What the fuck, Q?"

"What are you gonna do about it?" Quentin mocked, crossing his arms over his chest in a challenge.

Eliot rolled his eyes, shaking his head and stepping to the toppled stack, realigning the tiles until they were a proper tower again. "Nothing, you're acting like a child."

"Oh my god," Quentin said, throwing his hands up, "God forbid I have human emotions!"

Eliot stiffened, slowly letting his eyes rise to meet Quentin's, his jaw set. "Excuse me?"

"You're just- you're acting like some mosaic-solving robot who only cares about this one fucking thing and I mean - do you even know it's the anniversary of us being here?"

"What exactly do you want me to say here?" Eliot asked, bracing his hands on his knees and pushing himself up.

"I don't know, something, anything that isn't about the stupid mosaic," Quentin said, moving to kick another stack of tiles over, freezing before the connection at the warning in Eliot's eyes.

"This stupid mosaic is our only ticket back home, are you trying to tell me you don't want to get back there?"

Quentin's eyes fell to the stack of tiles he nearly kicked. "N-no, I'm not saying that, I just -"

"Just what, Q? We're supposed to be figuring out how to represent the beauty of all life here, it's not going to be a fucking cakewalk."

"Right, so. Just so I'm clear here. You want me to live my life here, but you want to be a mosaic-solving robot so we can get back home faster?"

"Jesus," Eliot sighed, "No, okay? That's not what I meant."

"Well what did you mean then, exactly? Because I'm pretty fucking confused here, El."

There was something in Quentin's voice, something different in his gaze. Something real, and raw. Something that made Eliot want to run. He resisted the urge, for once. "Q...." he said, scrambling for a way out of this, the anger in him deflating in the face of this thing so real it could only scare him shitless.

"No, don't do that. You don't get to do that!"

Eliot's heart lurched in his chest, his feelings for Quentin warring with his instincts for self-preservation. It was a bloody battle, the casualties mounting with every second he couldn't decide which should win. He knew that he had been well on his way to Quentin before they ever arrived at the mosaic. Ever since their misguided night with Margo, Eliot hadn't been able to rid himself of the feeling, quiet but insistent, that he wanted more with Quentin. There had always been something bigger, darker, more important on the line to distract him from that seed growing. The Beast, Fillory, the loss of magic, the quest. But now, he was stalled. They were stalled in something simpler. Distractions were gone and that seed had grown into a sprawling vine, taking over everything. Facing it seemed inevitable and impossible.

"What do I get to do, then?" Eliot asked. He couldn't trust himself to come up with something on his own.

"Be honest, for once," Quentin said.

Everything inside of Eliot tried to resist it, tried to scramble for a lie that might keep them safe. Because if they did figure it out tomorrow, if they finally placed the right tiles in the right places and the key appeared, they would go home. The quest would continue. Quentin would choose Alice, and Eliot would be left with the sharp, unsolvable pain that only came with true rejection. But there was another possibility, one that wouldn't let him draw a line he couldn't come back from. It was that possibility, however slim, that brought Eliot closer to Quentin in quick, short strides, the space between them diminishing to a few small, charged inches.

"You don't really want that," Eliot said, his voice quieter, lower now. It was a final out for Quentin, one last chance to deliver the blow Eliot expected to come.

Quentin looked up at him, startled. Eliot watched his adam's apple bob in his throat. "Yes, I do."

Eliot's eyes fell from Quentin's eyes down to his lips. He stepped forward, dipping down as Quentin leaned up. They met in the middle, lips crashing together in something familiar, warm, comforting. Eliot's hands cupped Quentin's face as he opened his mouth to deepen the kiss. When he pulled away slowly, reluctantly, he looked down at Quentin, whose eyes were already roving Eliot's face, searching for more. "I'm not good at this, okay? I don't do feelings well, and all of this," he motioned at their hut, at the mosaic, "I don't know what it means or when it's going to end, and that, I don't really know what to do with that. But, I can't change the fact that I love you, Q. I've tried not to, believe me, it'd be a hell of a lot easier if I could just...turn it off, but I can't, and I -"

"I love you, too, El," Quentin interrupted, softly, leaning back up to close the distance between them again.

"Happy anniversary," Eliot murmured against Quentin's lips. Quentin wrapped his arms around Eliot's waist, pulling their bodies flush against one another. Eliot let his hands tangle into Quentin's hair, let emotion pour out of him in a way he rarely did, giving it all to Quentin, replaying his words on a loop in his head. I love you too, El. Maybe it was temporary. Maybe it would disappear the minute they got back, but Eliot thought for once, for at least tonight, he could let himself believe it would last.