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thattreason · 7 years ago

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When Time Becomes a Loop

Title: When Time Becomes a Loop

Author: That Treason (That_Treason)

Fandom: The Magicians

Rating: General

Words: 3800

Written for the 2017 Welters Challenge (@thewelterschallenge), week 3 (”the unseen & what you want”)

This is my first fic in a while, so I’m a little nervous, but I couldn’t resist the theme. I’ve always wanted to know more about Jane Chatwin and her time loops. Here’s one take on how they might have worked. Hope you enjoy!

Note: Takes place in the time loop just before the one shown on the television show.

~~~

“Q, it’s Jane.” Julia whispers in Quentin’s ear.

“Jane who?” Quentin blinks for a moment, puzzled. Julia had insisted on meeting in the library at this too early time on a Sunday, and Quentin’s still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Or maybe this is another dream; it’s getting hard to tell. “Jane as in…” he says slowly, “…Jane Chatwin?”

“The Jane Chatwin,” she whispers again, “Fillory Jane Chatwin. “She’s controlling the time loops.”

“Jules…” he starts, brows furrowed, but his voice trails off. Usually Quentin is the one taking Fillory-related leaps of faith, and it throws him off a bit to be on the other side of the conversation.

She rolls her eyes and grabs his hand and drags him off through the entirety of the all-but-abandoned library, not stopping till they reach a dusty nook in the farthest corner, mainly used by couples avoiding roommates. She seats herself on one side of a solid wooden table.

“Look, I know this sounds crazy. I need you listen to me first and then you can tell me I’m crazy all you want, ok?” she asks, content to stare at him till he perches on the chair across the table from her.

“Listen, then crazy – check.”

“Here are the things we know:” Julia begins, with a smile, “We’re stuck in a time loop – we confirmed that yesterday with the spell, right? Time is going around in circles, centered on us and certain events. It doesn’t stretch back over our entire lives and it definitely doesn’t continue through to any natural end. Some event cuts us off and it’s likely that it’s a fight with the Beast.”

“More like the Beast murdering us horribly rather than a real fight,” Quentin mutters, “which is still entirely likely to happen any second now, and regardless of any time loop resetting us it’s still going to hurt.”

Julia holds her hands up, a gesture asking for patience. “We know it’s not a natural phenomenon and it’s not some magical accident. Someone – someone really good with time magic is controlling it.”

Quentin’s fingers trip his hair back behind his ear. “Just because someone is controlling it, that doesn’t necessarily conjure Jane Chatwin out of the books.”

Julia rolls her eyes. “You and I both know that Jane Chatwin is real and is screwing with us right now. I know you’ve had dreams about her, I have too.”

“Bu–”

“And then we also have another mysterious someone who calls herself Eliza–”

“You think Eliz–”

“Q, listen to me, for ten seconds,” Julia snaps. “Eliza is Jane. Jane is Eliza. They’re both prone to cryptic pronouncements that always seem to lead us into trouble. They pop up whenever they feel like it, mess with us, and then disappear.”

“That’s pretty thin, Julia,” he says, apologetic. “I mean, I know that I’m the first one of us to leap on anything that gets me closer to Fillory, but it’s a stretch even for me.”

“That’s why, I didn’t come to you earlier. I needed harder evidence to prove it to you. I had this really strong feeling, like I was trying to remember something that was wiped from my memory. I couldn’t get away from this feeling of dread. And the feeling gets stronger whenever I’m in the same room as Eliza, so…”

“So?” Quention asks.

“So, I followed Eliza around for a while. I wanted to see where she goes when she disappears all the time. I figured, she has to sleep sometime, right? So I tagged her with a Carmichael’s line.”

Quentin squints. “Carmichael’s? That’s for, like, wandering puppies and small children.”

“It worked for what I needed. Low power, doesn’t last long, but it’s not easily detected by anyone but the caster. You have to stay within a certain radius and apply it by touch, but otherwise it works really well for tailing someone, if you follow the tugs from the other end and never try to tug back. I followed her all over campus. For a while I was worried she was going to disappear out through the wards somewhere and I’d lose her–”

“I feel like I should pop some popcorn or something, this is great,” Quentin laughs.

Julia smacks at him across the library table, but her eyes are laughing with him and her mouth is quirked in a smile.

“I thought I was going to lose her,” she continues undeterred, “but then she went into this broom closet.”

“A broom closet, why didn’t I think of that.” He can’t help but sound incredulous.

“It wasn’t a broom closet on the inside, obviously,” she says. “Well, ok, yes, the first two feet or so were definitely a filthy broom closet, but if you pushed through the mops in the corner, you end up in this woodland-apartment-thing.”

“Uh….”

“It was outside,” Julia’s eyes look far away and her voice is wistful, “there were trees that formed a canopy overhead, but there was also furniture – a bed, tables, chairs, bookshelves. The carpet was moss, there were these charms hanging from the branches to mark off the space. It was beautiful.”

“Next to the bed I found this beat up old notebook, it’s her journal, or something. Her lab notebook, maybe. It was full of these extensive records for time loops, thirty-eight of them. These are notes about our time loops.”

“Ouch.”

“And it’s not just notes about what went wrong or who did what – she wrote down all her theories and thoughts – her emotional investment in each of the loops. It’s meticulous and terrifying.”

“So where’s the book, d-d-d-did you just leave it there or what, because we might never be able to–” He’s flustered and scrambling his hands through his hair.

“Of course, I didn’t leave it there.” She reaches down to her feet and into her bag. She pulls a slim black and white composition notebook out and flips it across the table at Quentin. “It’s spelled to contain more pages than it appears to have from the outside.”

He quirks his eyebrows up and motions to the book, asking ‘may I?’ with hands and face. Julia nods and looks away down the stacks.

“I think Jane was friends with us the first time.” Julia voice is just a whisper, barely audible even in the dead quiet of the library.

Quentin looks up from the book to stare at Julia.

“She writes about how we were all on this fantasy quest to kill the Beast and save Fillory and win ourselves these perfect little heroic lives. We thought it would be like in the books – chosen few, duel to the death with evil. The heroes never lose, how could we?”

“We had a plan,” she whispers. “And then right at the last minute, we convinced her to stay behind. Specifically, we – you and I. Apparently, I had these doubts about what we were really getting ourselves into. And the first time, in the first loop, the two of us were joined at the hip, so of course I convinced you. We took it to Jane: we needed a backup plan and she had to be it, with her time magic she could stay behind and reset things. Just in case things didn’t work out.”

Julia reaches across the table to pull the book, still unopened from Quentin’s fingers. She flips it open and searches the pages, eyes scanning along until she finds a certain passage.

“Listen to this: ‘I am resolved that subsequent attempts will be managed more systematically. I have recorded here every decision, every pitfall and snare. Everything that went wrong.’”

“It doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, Jules, in theory at least,” Quentin says. “It gives us a real chance against insane odds to defeat something way too powerful for us. And we’re not dead – I mean, dead-dead, obviously we were dead back then but we’re alive now, so–”

“Q, I know that. I thought that too, at first. Listen to the rest, ok?” She says it quietly, eyes never leaving the page. “‘Additionally, I have some thoughts on how to tweak the dynamics of our little troop – just a bit – for the sake of cohesion, to highlight strength and suppress weakness. I am confident in my ability to bring this situation to a satisfactory conclusion.’”

“What does she mean ‘tweak the dynamics’?”

Julia holds up a finger, requesting patience. She traces her fingers along the page and flips. “ Her writing for the first loop is really emotional, with only some high-level analysis of the fight. Then the second time loop finishes after another battle with the Beast. Jane watches us all die horribly again. I guess she felt she needed to record more detail about what happened and what went wrong. We died really hideous deaths and she wrote about it in excruciating detail. Like, right here,” Julia jumps a little and points to a section of the text. “the Beast ripped off your arm and then used it to beat Penny to death–”

“Jesus”

“–and she goes on and on about the sound it made. It’s grotesque.”

“That’s a word for it.”

“The whole book goes on just like that. We try, we die, she writes it all down and then resets time again. Makes us do it all again, over and over. By the fifth run – that’s the word she uses in the journal, ‘runs’ like this was some video game – by the fifth run, you can see her start to doubt herself. She talks about how, maybe there is no win scenario for us. Maybe she isn’t smart enough to orchestrate all the details required for a loop that leads to the death of the Beast. Maybe he’s just better than her. But that thinking doesn’t last long - by the sixth loop she’s figured out the real problem is us.”

“Us? What, you and me?”

“No, I mean, not just us,” Julia gestures across the table at him and then back to herself, “the big us, the whole group of us. And that’s when she really starts to meddle in our lives. She decides there’s something fundamentally wrong with all of us collectively and if she can fix it, she can change the whole scenario.”

“We’re not exactly the most capable group of magicians that’s ever existed.” His hair has fallen back into his face, and he tucks it back again. “Or the most responsible people, in general. I can’t blame her for wanting to improve us a bit.”

“Jane starts to reset things more frequently.” Julia shakes her head. “Sometimes we don’t even make it to the fight with the Beast. She just decides that the overall conditions aren’t right, things aren’t going to work out, and poof. We start over again. Like she’s canceling a baseball game because she’s worried about the rain.”

“Around the twelfth loop, she starts to wonder if there are cumulative effects of resetting us so many times. She notices your depression gets just a little worse each time. And Eliot spends just a little bit more time drunk or high. And Margot slowly gets more…Margot-y. She doesn’t stop resetting us, or try to help us – nope, just notes it down in her journal. We’re not even people to her anymore.”

“And then loop thirteen happens. Jane starts to write about how ‘this is war,’ and we’re ‘her weapons to wield.’ She drives us really hard – we learn this amazing battle magic, but life is miserable and eventually…

“Eventually?” Quentin asks.

“Eventually, we decided Jane isn’t much better than the Beast.”

“Oh.”

“’Oh’ is right. At the end of loop thirteen, we’re fighting against Jane, not the Beast. We were ready to die for real if it meant we’d be free of her control.”

“So what happened? Obviously we didn’t win.”

“Obviously. We thought we had a way to neutralize her, we even got the watch she uses to manage the loops away from her, but… things didn’t work out. She used everything she knew about us to turn us against each other.”

“Which means?”

“She got us to kill each other. And in that loop we knew really good battle magic, so the deaths were epic.”

Quentin snorts. “Hey, a little silver lining in all this, we got to be badass for once.”

“After that loop, Jane’s much more hands off with us. She gets the watch back and resets things again, just like always, but this time she has almost no contact with us. She just watches us to see how things go without any intervention from her. And things go horribly, just like every other loop. So she goes back to meddling, subtle at first, but now it’s all behind the curtain. She gets the Dean involved so she can exert that much more control over us without interacting with us directly. Over a couple more loops she starts to dial in how much she can personally intervene without causing us to go completely off the rails.”

“She messes with everything. Sometimes she keeps us happy, sometimes she thinks anger or sadness work better. She nudges us into all these different relationships – I think maybe she thought there was some configuration that would be optimal.”

“What like, dating?” he snorts. “She wanted us to date each other?”

“She wanted us to care deeply about each other,” she says quietly. She turns her eyes up to look at him. “In the beginning, you and I were together.”

“Together?” His hand snakes his errant hair behind his ear again. “Together-together?”

“Shocking I know,” she smiles at him. “And it lasts through three or four loops before she starts to think that any relationships at all are detrimental. At that point, she was still interacting with us, so she was able to just discourage us directly. After we rebel, she changes her mind, and tries to find a set of relationships that work for the cause instead of against it. She figures if we’re more willing to die for each other…”

“We might be prone to crazier heroics or whatever, yeah I get it, so–”

Julia laughs to herself; she knows what Quentin wants to hear. “There are a lot of combinations, she has charts in here to help her keep track. Most of them last only one loop, but some of them she tries multiple times. You and Eliot end up together a lot, you seem to stabilize each other. Alice is with Margot a few times. I end up with Penny or Kady or Penny and Kady. I could go on.”

“Can I see the ch–” Quentin starts to reach for the book, but Julia pulls it back, and slides it back into her bag.

“You know that’s not the point, Q. We don’t have time for this right now,” She folds her hands on the table, face gone grim. “I need you to focus and really understand this: no matter what Jane does, we die. We fight the Beast and we die. Over and over and over. And we’re going to keep dying.” Her hands fly into the air and then pound back down onto the table to emphasize her point. Quentin starts a little and looks up at her wild-eyed.

“Jane is pretty sure at this point that the Beast knows something about what’s happening, but she doesn’t know how much. She says he can’t do anything to stop the loops, but he’s aware that time is going around in circles. She says, he knows someone named ‘Quentin Coldwater’ is coming to try and kill him. And we know he’s been in Penny’s head since he was a kid or something. Jane doesn’t have that in the book – so either it’s a new thing, or she doesn’t know about it or she hasn’t written in down or something. I don’t even understand how he’s reaching Penny so far in the past, when Jane can’t reset the loop that far back. Whatever he’s doing, eventually the Beast is going to figure everything out, if he hasn’t already. He’ll kill Jane, get the watch, and then we will all die horribly again, but this time it’ll be permanent.”

“Jules–”

“Q, listen to me – this whole thing is insane. I know you love Jane – I know you love the idea of Jane. I know you love the attention, the mystical dreams, the cryptic clues, and as Eliza she seems to be helping you, helping both of us, but we can’t let her keep doing this.”

“B–”

“There’s no way we can ever beat the Beast. We’re students, we’re barely trained. Brakebills doesn’t exactly emphasize how to kill all-powerful god-like magicians in the first-year curriculum. We aren’t heroes! There is nothing special about us! I don’t know why she thinks we can ever win with the skills we learn here in the amount of time we have–”

“Julia–”

“Q, Jane’s a monster just as much as the Beast. He kills us, but she’s the one who sends us to die every time. We need to get that watch and get as far away from both of them as we can, or we’re going to do all of this forever.”

“You know, you’re perfectly correct, Julia.”

Julia takes a breath and moves to speak, but she can’t. She’s frozen, everything is frozen. She can see Quentin across from her, stuck with his eyes lifted up to gaze above and behind her. He’s staring at someone, and from the voice Julia knows it must be Jane, standing right behind her, out of sight.

Jane comes around into Julia’s field of view, dragging a chair behind her. There’s a booming squeal as it scrapes harshly against the floor that echoes through the hushed library, until it’s positioned at the short end of the table. Then silence returns, pressing at their ears.

Julia finds that she can move her eyes to focus on the woman as she sits between Quentin and herself, but the rest of her body is locked tight. She can’t breathe, but it doesn’t seem to matter – there’s none of the panic that comes from suffocation. Mixed blessings. Jane purses her lips and looks at each of them in turn. There’s nothing in her manner to suggest that frozen time is anything out of the ordinary. They might as well be having tea.

“We have such a terribly limited amount of time to train you all before we arrive back at the Beast’s door.” There’s a note of sadness in Jane’s voice and then, an audible sigh. “Maybe the time has finally come to look further afield for how best to prepare you all for the inevitable.”

“It’s probably a bad idea to remove all of you from Brakebills at the same time,” Jane muses. “Perhaps an infusion of street magic is just what we need to shake things up a bit. I’m probably relying too much on Ivy education to do all the work, but maybe we add a bit of adversity into the mix…” She pauses for a moment, lost in thought, completely ignoring the panicked, pleading look in Quentin’s eyes. “You’re obviously the best candidate for a first try, Julia. I’m quite certain you’ll land on your feet. Quentin… Eliot… Penny – I don’t know that they’ll be able to truly blossom amongst the hedges, as you undoubtedly will. And if it doesn’t work, well, you’ll have laid the groundwork for others to join you the next time we try.”

“Besides,” she continues, “your relationship needs a little shaking up I think. You two are far too dependent on each other. ‘Joined at the hip’ indeed. Both of you need some space I think, some time to wander off the garden path a bit. Quentin in particular, you’re much too willing to run straight at your doom, ready to play the hero. Why don’t we see what you can do without Julia there to prop you up, mm?”

Jane stands and pulls at her blouse to straighten it. Brushes imaginary lint or dust from her thick grey pencil skirt. Neatly pushes her chair under the table. Moments seem to stretch to hours as they sit frozen. Julia looks at Quentin, memorizing his face, but his eyes never meet hers. He’s too busy staring at Jane, begging her with his eyes.

She reaches into the slim brown bag at her side and there it is: the watch.

Jane looks down at them, each in turn. “Don’t look so glum, you two. I have every faith in Julia’s ability to work things out. After all, you’ve been smart enough to figure out the time loops three times so far. And the Carmichael’s line was a genius little trick. I knew it was there, of course, almost as soon as you cast it – Carmichael’s leaks like a sieve if you know where to look, and with the way things are, I’m always looking. But still, excellent use of a spell outside it’s intended purpose. I only wish you’d put all that brain power to use getting ready for the real confrontation,” she sighs, and waves a hand through the air. “Doesn’t matter now, I suppose. I thought it best to allow you both some time to discuss, rather than just resetting things straight away. I confess, I was curious to see if you’d have any useful critiques of my techniques, but…” Her eyes fall away from them. “Anyway, enough chitchat, we’ve got a long road ahead of us, and Beasts to slay before we sleep.”

Jane hums quietly to herself as she fiddles with the watch, positioning the dials and gears just so, before setting the timepiece on the table. She takes a deep breath and begins to move through the complex fingering of the spell, hands fluttering like birds above the watch.

“There is one thing you got wrong, Julia. I never send any of you die. I want nothing more than for you all to emerge victorious,” Jane says, face broadening into a smile. First it’s just a quirk of the lips, but it grows into a bright flash of teeth. “The unfortunate truth is, all of you keep mucking everything up. Do try harder this time, won’t you?”

Quentin finally tears his eyes from Jane to meet Julia’s across the table. They watch each other as the world fades to grey.

#welterssubmissions #the welters challenge #the magicians #fic #not on AO3 yet #week three

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