Archive of Our Own ^beta

    “Look, playing kings and queens has been fun,” Alice sighs, in a tone which fully gets across how not-fun hunting the Beast has been-- there are a few other things that Eliot would call distinctly un-fun, for that matter, so logically he doesn’t think he can fault her for anything she’s saying, but he still feels on edge.

    “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

    “But I’m ready to go back to my real life.” She shrugs. To her credit she doesn’t say ‘duh’, or anything to that effect, but it still stings.

    And he should have seen it coming. Well, he did, sort of, but not… not so fast and not so blunt and not so total.

    “Already? I mean… we haven’t even had a victory ball.” He says, aware that as protestations go, it’s pretty weak. They should have had one by now but budgeting has been hell, and he and Margo have standards, and the council has made some things very clear, about fiscal responsibility… and besides, they haven’t got champagne yet, and he wants to be able to toast their spectacular win in style, and at least he can say his agricultural efforts are starting to bear fruit-- so to speak-- but they’re a long way off from a prosperous harvest, at least the kind that would support throwing a kingdom-wide party…

    But don’t they fucking deserve a party? He’s had so many parties just for fun and now for the first time he really deserves it, and he needs it, and he wants his friends there, they all earned it with him and don’t they need it just as much?

    Maybe not. Maybe Alice is the kind of serious functional person who doesn’t need a fucking… stupid party to live. Of course she is. She’s always had her head on straight, she’s always understood things like actually buckling down and doing what you need to instead of what you want to, not in a superhuman way but in an adult way. Which is admirable and all, but for her, being an adult means going back to school and having a life and for him it doesn’t, now. And it feels unfair that they could fix things between them only to wind up in different worlds.

    “I’m not really into balls.” She gives him a sad smile and he doesn’t even make the obvious joke about how much he is. “I’m tired, Eliot. That’s all. After all of this? I’m tired. Penny’s taking me back after I say my goodbyes.”

    “Well. Don’t be a stranger.” He squeezes her shoulder, she nods, they part. 

    He wanders over to a window, lounges on the wide sill and tries to look unbothered, while Alice goes about the business of saying goodbye to Margo, to Quentin. He could try to convince her to stay, but Eliot doesn’t think she will, whatever they say to her. Margo can talk about how they have a responsibility here now to do what they can and she ought to try to split her time, Quentin can talk about… he doesn’t know, their no-longer-romantic-but-still-important bond, or how she’ll learn so much about real magic if she stays. But they won’t press her very hard, and she won’t be swayed. Penny hasn’t got any responsibilities. 

    Eliot could try harder to convince her, but he doesn’t think it would do much good, and he doesn’t really feel like pushing the guilt angle. She can go back to her life, he’d be a pretty shitty friend if he couldn’t just try and be happy for her. 

    So he’s happy for her.

    She’s just the first to get tired of ‘playing’, it’s not like she’s… it’s not like it’s an Alice problem. He’d be exhausted if he’d had to do what she did. He’d want to go home.

    If he had one.

    One by one… they’ll all want to go home.

    “El. Did Alice talk to you?”

    He turns, seeing Quentin standing by. Fillorian garb suits him-- color suits him. Clothes that aren’t shapeless and greyed out suit him. Soft linen trousers and a silk shirt in sage greens, embroidery in lavender and gold, around the yoke. It’s not really fit for a king, just on its own, but it suits Quentin in a way Eliot’s wardrobe wouldn’t-- like the youngest prince in a fairy tale, who must begin his arduous quest in disguise, whose natural beauty makes him golden even when he tries not to be. Makes him look all… soft and pretty. 

    Not that he needs any help looking soft and pretty.

    “She said her goodbyes. I take it she did with you, also…”

    “Yeah. It’s, uh, weird, isn’t it? Her going.”

    Eliot shrugs. “She’s free to. She’s tired. Can’t blame her.”

    “It’s weird that there’s… just going to be the three of us, that’s all. Like… you know?” He hops up onto the windowsill, leaning against Eliot’s knees. Turns those big puppy eyes on him. “It’s just weird.”

    “Sure.” Eliot reaches out, putting a hand on his shoulder. 

    “Is that not what’s bothering you?”

    “It is. And it isn’t.” He shrugs. “I just wanted to have a party, Q. But I can’t make her stay for it. I can’t make anybody stay.”

    Quentin hooks an arm over his legs, twisting around a little more to face him. “Margo’s staying. I’m staying.”

    “You don’t have to.”

    “No. I don’t.” He smiles, leans against him a little more. “I want to. I mean… have you met me? This is all I want. Where else would I go?”

    “Home. You could want to go home.”

    “Fillory’s always been as much my home as Earth has. Sure, I can… visit. I should, like, at some point, probably see my dad and stuff. But why would I want to go back for good?”

    “Because Earth has flush toilets, and iced coffee, and molly.”

    “Well, I only care about two of those things.” Quentin laughs.

    “You don’t drink iced coffee?”

    “Uh, sometimes.”

    “You’re going to miss flush toilets sooner or later.”

    “I meant molly.” 

    “Right. I knew that.”

    “I’m not going anywhere.”

    “Q?” He rubs Quentin’s shoulder, doing his best approximation of Quentin’s effortless puppy dog eyes. “When you do go visit? Would you bring me back an iced coffee?”

    “And some molly?”

    “Ugh, I’d better not. I’m responsible now.” He rolls his eyes, drinks in Quentin’s laugh. Trails one fingertip from his shoulder across his chest, and up to tap at his nose. “I like it sweet, and strong.”

    “Molly?”

    “Iced coffee.” He chuckles, and contemplates Quentin’s lips. The shape of them. How much he’d like to touch them and how much… 

    How much he doesn’t get.

    “You can send me on a Starbucks run any time you want.”

    “Mm, then I want an iced caramel macchiato. With an extra pump-- no, an extra two pumps, of vanilla. I deserve it.”

    “It’s yours.”

    “And a cake pop?” He gives Quentin’s tunic a little tug, straightening it out, gives him an imploring pout. “Daddy’s had a hard week.”

    “Are you sending me to Starbucks now?” He laughs, his hand comes up to wrap around Eliot’s wrist. “Are you going to remember what you asked for by the time I’m back?”

    “No, I’m not. I don’t-- I don’t want everyone going at once. I don’t-- I don’t want you to miss the party. There’s got to be a party.”

    “It could be a long time before you get that iced caramel macchiato.”

    “I’ll live.” He says. And he doesn’t give voice to the irrational worry, he knows it’s irrational-- that if they all go at once, then no one will come back for him.

    No. 

    Not for him. 

    To Fillory.

    There’s a difference.

    He’s really got nothing to do with the responsibility of monarchdom. He’s definitely not an incentive for Alice’s return. He’s not the reason Quentin would come back.

    Maybe Margo is staying half for him. He’d stay for her. With just the occasional supply run back to Earth, but she’d want him to.

    “I wouldn’t dream of missing your first Fillorian party.” Quentin promises, his smile too warm. In other loops, did he smile like this? Did Eliot kiss him? Was he ever allowed? But then… they never made it this far before. They never beat the Beast. They never…

    “This is the longest we’ve ever known each other.” He laughs.

    “I guess… that’s always true. Oh! Oh-- yeah. The loops.” Quentin does as well, nodding. He’s still holding Eliot by the wrist. He still has an arm draped over his knees. “It’s the longest we’ve… lived. Is that terrifying or is it just me?”

    “I mean it does mean we’re working without a road map. But so is everyone else.” Eliot shrugs. “It’s not like we remember any of the loops anyway… I wouldn’t want to.”

    Which is true. As much as he may wonder what their lives were like, it would mean remembering their deaths, and he’s seen enough of that doing the probability spell. He’s had nightmares about the things they saw, the deaths they didn’t have, the last thing he needs is to remember ones they did.

    When Quentin had gotten separated from the rest of them, and they’d been struggling to make their way through Fillory without him, he’d had nightmares. A combination of all his recent trauma, unamenable sleeping conditions, and coming down from Josh’s acid carrot. Coming down from everything, except the slight opiate effects of the air-- but he’d adjusted to that pretty quickly, it stopped doing anything special for him before it stopped affecting anyone else.

    Makes sense. Popping an oxy doesn’t do anything for him, either.

    Coming down from it if it went away would be highly un-fun, but it certainly wouldn’t keep him from having horrible nightmares. 

    He never saw Margo die in any of the probability visions. He thinks sometimes they went together. Sometimes they got separated, or split off for tactical reasons. Mostly, he went first. 

    There are not a whole lot of things about himself that Eliot would say he likes. He likes that given the chance, a full ten times out of ten, he put himself between his best friend and mortal peril. At least, that’s what he remembers. If he had the chance, he always tried to buy her the time.

    The nightmare he’d had had been about Quentin, though. Which probably also made sense, because Quentin wasn’t with them, and his brain was… well, his brain is fucked up, it was fucked up even before he added extra fuck ups onto it, which he’s spent the last few years doing, but even a relatively unfucked brain would probably take the combination of a horrible vision of seeing your friend ripped apart by the Beast right in front of you, and that friend’s sudden unexpected absence from the group, and concoct a few nighttime replays.

    So he itches to pull Quentin into his arms, he aches to bring Quentin to rest against his chest, because in most of the probability visions Eliot died first or he died alone, but every time he and Quentin were together, he had to see Quentin go, and he’s… he’s not a fan. 

    But he thinks he gets it.

    And if he’s right, well. The ache to hold him close doesn’t get any easier, if he’s right.

    “Do you want to live, here?” He asks at last, breaking the silence.

    Quentin stares at him a moment, brow furrowing, and then his jaw goes slightly slack, and he squeezes Eliot’s wrist.

    “Yeah. I do. Do you?”

    “I-- That’s a very complicated question for me right now. I don’t… I don’t have options.” He says, but it’s the wrong answer. It’s the wrong answer, because Quentin knows what he’d been asking.

    “Can we, like… make a pact?”

    “What, like a suicide pact?” He asks, before he can stop himself from asking, and he definitely doesn’t want that, he just can’t think of many other kinds of pact. Like… nuclear disarmament? All things considered, suicide’s more likely. And, okay, there’s a romantic and theatrical and not very healthy part of him that wouldn’t say no outright.

    “Like the opposite of that.”

    Eliot nods slowly. His hand slides to curl around the side of Quentin’s neck, and Quentin reaches over to mirror the gesture, leans in as if to press their foreheads together and then thinks better of it. Which still puts them more than a little close. Which means all Eliot really sees is Quentin, his eyes wide and serious.

    “The opposite of that.” Eliot whispers, and holds out his free hand. “Quentin Coldwater the Stalwart, king of Fillory, I do hereby… promise. Not to die if it can be helped. I will even pinky swear it.”

    The smile crinkles up the corners of Quentin’s eyes. It should be less beautiful than it is. But he bites his lip and he blinks, slow, like a cat, and he brings his other hand up and links their pinkies like it isn’t the most ridiculously childish thing two mostly-grown men could do. 

    “Eliot Waugh… High King Eliot the Spectacular… and my king. I do hereby promise, not to die if it can be helped. And… to try really, really hard even if it looks like it can’t be helped.”

    They should kiss. 

    Well, they shouldn’t kiss, he knows that, but damn, it feels like the right time for one. If his life was a movie, the way he’s so often pretended, this would be where they kissed. 

    “Your king…” He breathes. “Is that an oath of allegiance?”

    “Yes.” Quentin whispers, before he can come back to himself. “I mean, it depends on what you’re asking.”

    “Just this.” Eliot squeezes, gentle, at the side of Quentin’s neck, at their linked fingers. “Just this… Stay. Or-- don’t go anywhere you can’t come back from. My king. Your king commands it.”

    Quentin unlinks their fingers, falls forward into Eliot’s chest, folds against him to share the same space. 

    “Your king commands it.” He mumbles the words into Eliot’s ascot.

    “Oh, that’s cute, but daddy doesn’t take commands. Requests… I take requests. But you don’t have to request it, the pact is made. You’re stuck with me.”

    “God, I wish.” Quentin blurts the words out, then groans and turns his face even further down, hiding in a thick ruffle of brocade. 

    “Yeah. Me too.” He pats at him, feels his hair soft and clean, the warmth of his back through his tunic… 

    “Sorry, am I interrupting something?” Margo shatters the moment. And Eliot loves her, he does, even after everything he could never stop loving her, but he’s a little tired. There’s a lingering bitterness he doesn’t know how to address, because to ask her to be sorry for how she behaved is to ask her to be sorry for being herself, being everything she has always been and everything he has always loved her for.

    “Yes, actually, we’re having a very serious discussion about Starbucks.”

    “Okay, well, Alice just bailed on us, so…”

    “She’ll be back, though.” Quentin says. He even sounds like he believes it. 

    “Well when we redo the furniture, I don’t know if it sends the right message to have an empty chair sitting out there.”

    “It doesn’t send the right message to not have the right number of thrones.” 

    “Whatever, if you want to handle the job, handle it. I got the cursed shit removed, you can take over. Have as many thrones as you want to. Make sure mine looks cool. Neutrals-- I don’t want it clashing with any of my outfits.”

    “Your wish is my command.” He holds out a hand, hers slips into it, he brushes a kiss across her knuckles. The moves are all the same but the center will not hold. “Do you want it, like… sexy? Or more badass?”

    “Sexy-badass.” She shrugs, and sweeps out. 

    “What about you? What do you want your throne to look like?” Eliot turns to Quentin, pushing a lock of hair behind his ear. “I’m thinking… eclectic, boho chic-- for the room. Build off the vibe that’s already there, and just… we don’t worry about making everything so matchy-matchy. You can have anything you want. You can zip back to Earth and pick up a Lazy Boy if you want, although… it will pain me if it is ugly.”

    “Like-- Actually, can I show you? Can I draw something?” 

    “Yeah. I’m sure there are furniture guys who can make that a reality. Why, what are you thinking? Are you, like… a mid-century guy, or more-- oh, dare I hope, Hollywood regency? No. Danish modern? We’ll make it work with textiles if we have to--”

    “I want the throne-- I guess it’s not how it looked in real life, but it’s… From the illustrations. From the books.”

    Of course he does… Eliot smiles, and reaches up to toy with his hair again.

    “It’s yours.”

    He knows what happens if he tries to make a move, a physical move. But what happens if he falls in love?

    It hasn’t exactly been a hypothetical, in a while. The pull has always been there, and maybe it wasn’t always something he could call ‘love’, but there’s no better word for what it is now.

    Quentin looks at him, like there’s a question he wants to ask-- not like there’s a question he’s afraid to ask, not even like it pains him to know he can’t ask it. Only… like he has a question, and that question would tip the scales, so he won’t. But it’s there, warm and secret. 

    No-- no, he looks like he knows the answer, to a question he doesn’t need to ask, and the answer pleases him, even if the silence between them doesn’t.

    “What about you?” He asks instead. “What’s your throne going to look like?”

    “Okay, I’m thinking-- and I may have to send someone home for this-- balloon chair. Gilded wood frame, barely pink velvet upholstery. Barely pink. Of course it won’t be exact, I know, I’ll take what I can get, but…”

    “Someone can make one.”

    “It’s my dream chair.”

    “Sounds very fancy.”

    “Yeah.” He sighs. “I… I wanted a world of velvet chairs, and bar carts made of brass and glass, and… mirrored furniture. I mean, not all the furniture. But some of it. Faux fur, real feathers. Everything plush and shiny and a bitch and a half to dust.”

    “Congratulations?”

    “This isn’t quite what I pictured. But… it’s as close as I’m going to get. My fantasy land of choice was always Oz. As you probably guessed based on everything about me.” He gestures. “I wanted to make that leap into glorious Technicolor.”

    “You did that.” Quentin reaches up, pushes one of Eliot’s curls into place. Or out of it. It doesn’t really matter. “I mean… look at you. You’re about as glorious Technicolor as it gets.”

    “Q… Thank you.”

    Quentin shrugs. They’re close still, not so close as before Margo had interrupted, but… close. Close enough to let his imagination run away with him a little. Oh, to live in a world where he could. In a world where he could get it right… but that door is closed. They had to get it right this time because this was the last time.

    Only… they can’t get it right this time. Not the thing that matters, not them.

    Well, okay, destroying the Beast mattered, it mattered kind of a lot. But now that the Beast is behind them, his personal life suddenly feels important again. It hadn’t been, when he was bargaining himself away for the blade, his personal life hadn’t mattered at all in the face of everyone’s survival, but now…

    “So. What are you thinking about, for this victory party?”

    “Massive ball, fantastic outfits. Wine. Preferably wine that doesn’t suck, but you know.” Eliot shrugs. “Just some fun. Just some sparkle. There’s just… there’s so much we have to do first.”

    “A ball.” Quentin nods. “You’re set on that? And not, like… a quiet thing, maybe a board game night?”

    “Oh, Q, honey, absolutely not. See, I’m upper, upper class high society.” He gestures to himself. “God’s gift to ballroom notoriety. And I always fill my ballrooms, the event is never small. All the social pages say I’ve got the biggest balls of all.”

    “ACDC? Not what I’d expect from you.”

    “Please, like there’s a dirty song about male genitalia I don’t know.” 

    “Fair. I guess as co-king, I have to attend this ball, huh?”

    “You said you wouldn’t miss it. I’d be very hurt if you weren’t there.”

    “It sounds like a lot. And I would not miss it. Honest.” He squeezes Eliot’s knee. “I’m going to have to dress up, aren’t I?”

    “I can help you pick your outfit. Pretty please? Say I can dress you.”

    “Why does this feel like a trap?”

    “Come on. I can’t undress you. Call it the next best thing.”

    And Quentin, he blushes so pretty… he glances away with that little smile that says he’s not sure what Eliot is doing but he’s free to keep on doing it, like he doesn’t understand how lovely he is. Eliot could eat him with a spoon.

    Or eat him and then spoon. Whatever.

    He’d really love to know more about the whole fidelity-enforcing magic, because if all it is is that he won’t be able to get it up while with someone else, and there are no lasting never-get-it-up-again effects, maybe that’s okay. It’s the uncertainty that does him in.

    “Does the royal tailor have your measurements?” He asks, and tries not to think about undressing. 

    “Um. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I’m normally pretty off-the-rack.”

    “To say the least. You trust me?”

    “Despite everything, I really do.”