Chapter Text
Before
The Mosaic
Eliot rolled his tongue against the nub of Quentin’s nipple. Delighting in the gasp it tugged from his throat. God—the way it made him wind his big strong hands in Eliot’s hair tighter. The way it made him writhe beneath Eliot’s touch where he was pinned against the door.
“Remind me, uh—” Eliot laughed, breathing hot against the center of Quentin’s chest, a grin on his mouth as he tipped his gaze slowly upward. “Remind me again what we’re supposed to be doing. Something about a… puzzle?”
Quentin laughed, giving Eliot’s hair the softest tug. “We’re gonna finish it soon,” he said, knocking his head back against the front door. “I feel it. Don’t you? We—we’ve got this. So we can totally…” He sighed, corners of his mouth turned up. In the light spilling in through the cottage’s windows, Eliot watched Quentin’s eyes slip shut. “We totally deserve a break.” He laughed. “I mean, it’s been like three hours since our last one and that’s basically forever, so…”
Eliot froze with his mouth half-pressed to Quentin’s collarbone. Suddenly—it felt like the bottom of his stomach was dropping out. “Yeah, uh…” He tried a laugh, was pretty sure he didn’t actually feel it. Pressing his face right into the center of Quentin’s throat. “We’ll be out of here in no time at this rate.”
Quentin made a sweet little sound. Eliot felt it pulse inside him sure as the beat of his own frantic heart. “Hey, you know, uh…” Quentin gave Eliot’s hair another tug, drawing his gaze upward again. The smudge of his face painted gold with slats of afternoon sun. “It’s, like—really stupid that you aren’t kissing me right now. Just saying.”
Eliot’s face softened at once with a smile. But down in his belly—deep, dark fits of anxiety refused to let him go. “Sorry,” he said with a sweet little hum. Pulling back and rising up until he towered over Quentin. Pressing both his hands inside the open front of Quentin’s shirt. “In my defense your nipples are very distracting, Coldwater.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Quentin laughed, drawing Eliot in with two big greedy hands wound in the back of his shirt. And in his mind’s eye, Eliot could see it—the way things were going to be on the day they were finally finished with the puzzle. After they had the key, after the year and change they’d spent in this place was finally behind them. They’d go back to Brakebills. They’d finish their quest. Inevitably, Eliot figured, this thing that had sparked between them in their isolation would be over. Quentin would get back with Alice. He’d want to. He’d have choices then. It was the natural order of things.
“Oh, you are more than forgiven.” Eliot’s stomach was tight as a fist pressed under his heart. Squeezing and squeezing. He knocked his forehead against Quentin’s, nuzzled the ends of their noses together. “And for my terrible sin of neglecting your smart little mouth for thirty whole seconds, I think I know a way I can make it up to you.”
Quentin inhaled, exhaled. His whole body trembling gently where it pressed to Eliot’s. “Okay.” His voice was little more than air in his throat. “I’m listening…”
Eliot’s tongue burned with the taste of a thousand words he’d never be able to speak. “You,” he said, pressing the softest, sweetest, hardly-there kiss to Quentin’s mouth. Fire sweeping down his throat and making a meal of his heart. Roasting his belly, turning Eliot to ashes all the way down to his toes. It was the natural order of things. “Get to choose…” He smiled, pulling back just a little and tracing the bow of Quentin’s mouth with one finger. “Exactly where and how you want me to fuck you.”
Eliot pressed tight to him again, and grinned, and ghosted his mouth over Quentin’s, not quite close enough to touch. Aching to kiss him but wanting to make it last even more. Wishing he had the sort of magic that could slow time until everything stretched forever and ever all around them.
“That, uh—” Quentin let a soft little laugh flutter out. “That sounds really…” His hands were working, moving. Untucking the back of Eliot’s shirt from the waistband of his pants. “Yeah…”
Quentin’s hands pressed up under the back of Eliot’s shirt, making everything go all loose and spinny at once. He was so goddamn warm. Jesus. Eliot was reeling. Heartsick and horny in equal, dizzying measure. He cupped the sides of Quentin’s neck with his hands, his eyes half-shut as the ends of their noses brushed together. “Go on, then,” he purred, calling on every last ounce of his strength to keep his voice from shaking. “Tell me.”
Quentin drew a breath, the softest little gasp in his throat. Eliot felt it moving in his own body like a single thump of his heart. Make it last. The soft pink swell of his bottom lip brushing Quentin’s like the shadow of a kiss. Make it last make it last make it—
“Go, uh—maybe you, um…” Quentin pressed his warm palms to Eliot’s back up under his shirt. It felt like he was melting in all the places he and Eliot touched. He felt like he was turning to putty under Eliot’s fingers. “Maybe you sit down in one of the kitchen chairs and I ride you?”
Desire kicked so hard between Eliot’s legs it nearly doubled him over. Make it last make it last make it last. “Well,” he said, the sound of his voice low and easy. Not a single wobble in his cadence. His hands on Quentin’s neck not even close to shaking. “If I must. As an act of contrition, of course. To try and…” He planted the gentlest fleeting kiss on Quentin’s mouth. So soft and airy it was hardly there at all. Make it last. “Earn your forgiveness.”
Quentin exhaled, warm hands slipping down Eliot’s back slowly, slowly. “You know, I have a feeling, um…” He laughed, and Eliot felt it dripping through him slow and sweet as honey. Make it last. “I have a feeling you’re going to be forgiven.”
—
Before
Brakebills
It was morning. The sky beyond the infirmary’s windows a gloomy shade of white streaked with grayish-blue. Eliot was just numb enough from his most recent dose of narcotics that he couldn’t feel the damage Margo’s axe had done to him. Could barely feel his face or his fingers. The only true sensation in his whole body was a dull, thudding pain in his chest where his heart should have gone.
There was a curtain half-drawn around his bed that separated Eliot from the rest of the infirmary. Not that it mattered all that much, really, seeing as how he was the only one there. Even Margo was gone. There was nothing, nothing, nothing but Eliot’s shattered body lying like a corpse in his bed. Plunging a little deeper into the bottomless numb with every passing second.
All he wanted to do was stand up, totter back to the Cottage, drink himself into an oblivion so absolute he’d never find his way back to sobriety again. He probably still had weed and pills in the stash box under his bed. He could almost certainly get coke from Hoberman, maybe even something stronger. He’d anesthetize himself to the gills to ward himself from the sadness. He’d pummel his brain with chemicals until he couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. Until he was barely a person. Poison himself so completely he might finally—finally—forget that Quentin was gone.
He reached up with groggy fingers, gripped the edge of his blanket and tossed it back, revealing the bandage that stretched like a snowy trail across his torso. His limbs too heavy for the rest of him. His veins felt blackened, bulging with sludge. Rotten and numbed from the inside out with grief. Running his hand along the bandage and feeling the strange hum of the magic that lay in the wound underneath it.
He felt like he was being held together by nothing more than staples and string. A cage made of faulty wires straining to keep the badness inside him from being set free. And when he tried to move his legs they felt like they weighed ten thousand pounds apiece. He was useless, hopeless, totally broken. Didn’t even have enough left inside him to muster up a single broken scream.
He tugged the blanket back up to his shoulders and let his eyes fall shut. Silently begging any god-monster-whatever that might be listening for the sweet release of narcotic sleep. To shove itself so deep inside him his heart would be flushed of its misery. If nothing else—to bring Quentin back to him in a dream. But then—
Eliot’s eyes flew open. The curtain that had been half-shut around his bed was suddenly and swiftly shoved back. And Margo was there, gazing down at his broken body in the bed. Steely-eyed and serious, her hair pulled back from her face without a stitch of makeup on.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” she drawled. One hand on her hip with Faye the healer standing stoic and silent beside her. “Ready for Dr. Feelgood to put Humpty together again?”
Eliot frowned at her with his entire face, his entire body, his entire soul. “Bambi, I love you, I do, but…” He sighed, nestling his head down into his pillow. It felt like there was a lightning storm brewing in his center, right where Margo’s axe had gone. “Save the pop culture riddles for something that matters, okay? I don’t—”
“Faye,” Margo said, her eyes trained firm and unblinking on Eliot. “Give me five with my braindead bestie here, hm?”
Faye looked at Margo, then Eliot, then back to Margo again. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever,” she said with a shrug, already turning in the direction of the door. “You know where to find me if you manage to locate his brain.”
The second they were alone, Margo pressed herself right to the edge of the bed, shut the curtain with a furious gust of magic. “Talk,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, husky rumble. “Now.”
“Bambi.” Eliot averted his gaze, trained his eyes on the dull sight of the campus beyond the windows. “I’m trying to rest. We can talk later. I—”
“I gave up everything for you.” Margo loomed in Eliot’s periphery like a shadow stretching over pavement. “Do you hear me, El? Everything.”
Eliot chanced a glance in her direction and immediately had to look away. She was glaring like she wanted to swallow him whole, spit up the bones when she’d had her fill and make them someone else’s problem. “Margo—”
“I gave up my crown. My Kingdom.” Margo’s voice dripped out of her dark and low as a warning. “I almost lost my mind doing what I had to do to get those axes that pulled the Monster out of your dickhole. Down on my knees deepthroating sand and talking to your fucking ghost.”
She leaned in close, and Eliot looked at her. Their wet eyes meeting for a few terrible seconds in the gloom leaking in through the windows. Eliot thought if she dared to touch him right then he’d shatter into a hundred-million pieces, blow away on the rush of her breath all alone.
“So you are gonna tell me. Right now. What makes you think you get to just spit my own load back in my face like some ungrateful little twat.”
Eliot wished he had his flask. The one that never emptied. The bitter comfort of the poison that would carry him off to a gentler land. The numb of the pills was starting to fade and the thought of sobriety was madness. Fuck. He turned away from Margo and set his eyes on his own broken body in the bed. The sterile white blanket they’d given him that felt more like a burial shroud. “He’s gone,” was all he could manage. The sound of his own voice little more than a croak.
“The Monster?” Margo’s voice rose rough and angry there beside him. Eliot kept his eyes on his shroud. “Yeah, no shit. That was sort of the whole point of—”
“That’s not who I mean and you know it.” Eliot turned his head. Blinked at Margo. The shallowest pang of anger rising quickly in his throat. Bitter, acrid taste of it like his body was rejecting itself. “He’s—Q.” That single syllable shuddered through Eliot with all the force of a memory. Q. Quentin. The shape of each letter like ley lines on the map of his broken heart. “He’s gone.”
“Yeah. He is.” Margo’s expression was hard and miserable. She offered Eliot a quirk of her brow. “Died for you, in fact. So how the hell do you think he’d feel if he knew you were planning on rotting away in filthy Brakebills infirmary sheets instead of doing something with it.”
Eliot drew a shallow breath and set his eyes on the ceiling. Blinked. The well of grief inside him so dark and deep he wondered if he’d ever reach the bottom. “You should go,” he said, his voice some gravelly, terrible thing. Like Eliot was barely human. “I just want to sleep, okay?”
A long moment of silence fell between them then. And Eliot shut his eyes, sinking into the blissful empty of the blackness. Swore he could feel the magic Margo had put inside him with her axe gnashing its teeth like a living thing. Like something that wanted to burn him up, something that wanted to swallow him whole.
Eliot almost smiled at the thought. Almost felt the draw of it low and dark as desire in his belly. Somewhere deep inside him almost wishing—
“You’re not the only one who’s fucked up over losing him, you know,” Margo said, breaking the silence at last. Eliot didn’t have to open his eyes to know she had tears on her cheeks. He could hear them in the sad little roar of every word she spoke. “So help me, Ember’s balls, if you make me lose you too.”
Eliot’s head felt like it was filling with blood. He felt like he was drowning in it. He didn’t know what to say to Margo. Could hardly bear the thought of having to open his mouth and force the words to come. He wanted to be where Quentin was. Wanted to crawl through the nearest mirror and walk barefoot and bloody over the shattered pieces of him until their bodies were one.
Eliot drew another shallow breath, and when he opened his eyes Margo was gone.
—
Now
Laurel, Indiana
Eliot finds Javier sitting by the fire pit in the bumpy rectangle of weeds and dirt that serves as their backyard. A hulking circle of bricks surrounded by a handful of mismatched chairs his parents had acquired over their years on the farm. Javier is slumped in one of them looking like he’s been melted. A smoldering cigarette held up to his lips that he isn’t actually smoking.
“Hey,” Eliot says, the sound of the word coming out all wrong. Almost like he’s asking a question. On a scale of one to ten thousand, how entirely have I blown my own life up now?
Javier raises his eyes from the non-existent fire in the pit. Takes a puff on his cigarette, gazing at Eliot in silence before looking away again.
“Uh, so—”
Eliot swallows the sound of his own voice at once. What the fuck is he even supposed to say now? There’s nothing he can offer that isn’t a lie, or something that’s going to rip Javier’s heart to pieces. I’m sorry. It isn’t you. Listen: it’s only that no one will ever be him. So he just—says nothing. Standing there watching Javier smoke in the sticky haze of the Indiana morning. Puffs of white falling from his mouth like they’re begging the air for forgiveness.
“You know,” Javier says after a while, the sound of his voice so sudden in the quiet Eliot nearly leaps from his skin. “I think I get it now. Why you never wanted to talk about him.”
Eliot casts his gaze downward the moment the words leave Javier’s lips. Blinking at the dirt on the toes of his well-worn Italian leather shoes. That constellation of filth like muddy stars streaked across a soft black sky. “Javi, I don’t—”
“You don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Eliot looks up just in time to see Javier flick his cigarette down in the dirt. Stomp the flaring end of it out under the toe of his shoe.
“Of course you don’t.” Javier is looking at Eliot like he wants to set him on fire with his eyes. “How convenient for you.”
Javier stands, turns his eyes from Eliot like he isn’t there at all. Like he’s never been there. Like he’s imagined this whole life in a fit of drunken madness. Like he’s less than a shadow, less than a ghost. And Eliot can only stand there feeling like the air’s been knocked out of him sideways. Watching Javier stomp past on his way back into the house.
—
Before
The Mosaic
Eliot’s pulse howled like a beast in the column of his throat. He was sitting in one of their stiff-backed kitchen chairs and all his clothes were gone. Scattered between their small living area and their even smaller kitchen like confetti on a dance floor. A few short steps away, Quentin was standing, naked and watching him. A gorgeous crimson flush kissing his flesh from his cheeks all the way down to his toes.
Quentin stepped forward. Eliot wanted to open his mouth and drink the raw, unfiltered sunlight from his skin. Make it last, he thought to himself for the hundredth time that day. The brand new mantra floating inside him like a man who’d just found religion. Make it last make it last make it—
“Hey,” Quentin said, reaching out and touching Eliot on his bare shoulders. Hands slipping upward to cradle the nape of Eliot’s neck.
“Hey.” Eliot’s hands were suddenly moving, finding the bare flesh of Quentin’s ass without even meaning to. Like there were magnets under their skin, begging their bodies to be drawn together. His gaze trained upward on Quentin’s pink face. The ring of sunlight that seemed to dance around his head like a halo. “You look like you’re freezing. Why don’t you come a little closer and let me warm you up.”
The cottage was perfectly warmed. Quentin’s skin felt hot like summer. Eliot let his eyes fall from Quentin’s face and trail slowly downward. Taking in the sight of Quentin’s chest, his belly, the gorgeous hard line of his dick. His own erection rigid and upright and pressed to him, almost painful in the way it howled for attention.
“You know, now that you mention it…” In a whirr of heat and light and sweat—Quentin straddled Eliot’s lap. Oh fuck. Big warm hands cradling the back of Eliot’s neck like a precious thing. “It, uh—it is pretty cold in here.”
Quentin pressed his forehead to Eliot’s. And sighed. And kissed him sweet and slow on the mouth. A little tease of his tongue curling against the seam of Eliot’s lips. God—fuck. Eliot’s hands trailed up along the soft knobs of Quentin’s spine and lingered on the nape of his neck. Taking two big greedy handfuls of Quentin’s hair and softly tugging him back. Saying—
“Lift up now, darling. So I can get you nice and ready for me.”
Darling. Oh fuck. Eliot wanted to lob off his own traitorous tongue the moment he said it. If anything was going to ruin this whole thing for him it was that. The way his desire for Quentin—and only Quentin—had become so all consuming he had no hope at all of holding it in. The way he didn’t just want to fuck or makeout or cop a feel while they were working on the puzzle. No—jesus god. He wanted to be soft for Quentin. He wanted to give him things. Take care of him in all the ways Eliot was sure no one had ever taken care of Quentin before.
Eliot tugged Quentin’s hair harder, grinning at the soft little gasp it pulled from his throat. His free hand trailing velvet smooth along the flesh of Quentin’s bare ass. His fingers pressing sweet as a kiss to Quentin’s hole when he lifted up just a little, just enough, just enough…
Eliot muttered the words of Anicent Greek like a prayer he’d been saying since birth. And Quentin gasped the very second the spell took hold. Gripping Eliot’s hair with both hands, muffling a soft little sob against the top of his head. Eliot’s magic working through him like a perfect mirror image of his dick.
Two thick fingers spearing into Quentin all the way to the hilt. Rocking up into him once, twice. Three, four, five, six times before finally relenting. Eliot was so aroused it hurt to breathe, hurt to think. Both of his greedy hands shaking as he lined up his dick and guided Quentin down onto him in one breathless, wondrous go.
“Oh my fucking—” Quentin laughed, fully seated on Eliot with his body quivering all over. He was warm as the mouth of heaven. Warm as summer sunlight making a mess of Eliot’s skin. “God, you are really…”
Eliot’s palms moved up along the bare expanse of Quentin’s back. The whole of him quivering like an engine approaching the end of its days. “That’s it, sweetheart.” Sweetheart. What the fuck. Eliot needed to be gagged and never allowed to speak again. “You wanted to ride me, hm?” He laughed. Darkest sound pushing from the depths of his throat. “Well go on, then. Show me what you—”
Eliot’s voice was clipped at the roots when Quentin lifted up and quickly slammed his body down again. Jesus fuck. Head dazed and swarming with lights. Every thought flushed from his brain at once by the force of the pleasure. Eliot’s whole body felt like it was a tolling bell. Thick, cresting wave of heat pulsing from his cock and out into the rest of him. Fingers tingling like they’d been plunged in ice water, then shoved into the mouth of a flame.
Quentin braced himself with both hands on the back of the chair. His lovely pink mouth parted, his forehead pressed to Eliot’s as he started to move. Quick little snaps of his hips that kissed Eliot’s flesh like ocean waves; a flurry of dark-throated moans falling out and washing over Eliot like blessings. And all Eliot could do was—fuck. Let his arms fall slack at his sides. Eyes squeezed shut as he let Quentin take and take. The chair beneath them groaning sweetly to the rhythm of Quentin’s clever hips.
Heat. Sunlight. A feeling that built on itself like a thousand voices forming a chorus. Eliot’s hands flew upward—two starving, white-belled birds taking flight. Arms wrapping around Quentin’s middle in a perfect circle as he started to come. His whole body shuddered through it as a sob poured out of his throat. Quentin’s body there on top of him working like a goddamn machine. Perfect, unceasing motion of a well-oiled piston. Up and down, over and over. Not pausing for a single flash of a second until Eliot was entirely spent. Then—
Quentin seated himself completely and went still in Eliot’s lap. Panting and laughing and shaking all over with Eliot going soft deep inside him. “Oh my god, I’m so—” Still laughing, he slowly released his grip on the chair. Leaning back just enough to get his hand on his dick. “El, oh my fucking—I’m so—”
He stroked himself quickly in the space there between them. Hand flying over his dick maybe a dozen times before he was through. Spurting hot and sweet all over Eliot’s belly and chest. Little shining trails of it running like honey down his fingers. Leaving the two of them sticky and anointed and perfectly, gorgeously ruined.
After—Eliot found he couldn’t speak. His tongue limp and heavy as Quentin peppered kisses all over his neck and his shoulders. The two of them sweat-damp and absolutely covered in each other. Everything spinning and hazy, but Eliot could feel the scratchy weight of reality settling over his body a little more with every passing second. That wrecked-out, brainless feeling spilling out and leaving nothing but a hard stone of terror in its wake. And he—
Fuck. Eliot hated himself. The fact that he couldn’t just—have this. Allow himself to be content and sated with a naked Coldwater in his lap, nothing more. Keep himself from sinking down into that pit of sorrow thinking about the inevitable moment when he was going to lose it. Hated himself for being pathetic, for daring to have something close to genuine feelings for another person. For ever allowing himself to hope in some deep down dark hidden place that this was something he was going to be allowed to keep.
Against the side of Eliot’s neck, Quentin was laughing, laughing. Eliot’s soft cock slipping from his body slowly, then all at once. And Eliot felt it like a kick, then a sigh, then something close to death. The terrible shock of losing all that heat almost more than he could stand.
“So…” Eliot’s voice came back to him at last. He did his best to keep it natural, casual, easy. One steady hand drawing up the slope of Quentin’s bare back. “I’m dying to know, Coldwater.” He laughed. “Has my terrible sin been forgiven?”
Quentin huffed a laugh against the side of Eliot’s neck. Pulling back and gazing at Eliot with a shaft of sunlight making magic in his eyes. “God,” he said, and immediately started laughing again. “You’re an idiot.”
Before Eliot had hope to react, to hope for death, to form a single coherent thought at all—Quentin was pressing forward and crashing their mouths together.
—
Now
Laurel, Indiana
Eliot sighs. Sitting down in the chair Javier had just been sitting in not a minute ago. The heat left there by him radiating from the seat and pushing into Eliot like a sickness. Ceaseless, driving rhythm of regret pulsing deep down in the marrow of his bones. An endless reminder of the real, true, living thing Eliot’s gone and ruined just like he always does.
He needs a drink, a bong rip to blast his brain away. He needs to chain smoke cigarettes until his lungs are turned to ashes. But all his shit’s back in the house and he can’t be bothered to stand right now. Instead—he pulls his phone from his pocket. Gazes down at his own faint reflection in the dark screen until he’s certain it’s gazing back. Or speaking. Beaming secrets into his brain that will finally, finally give him the answers he needs to smooth the wrinkled fabric of his life back out.
He pecks at the screen without even thinking about it. All he can think about is the way Quentin’s body had felt pressed against his in the early blue dark of the morning. The heat of him so close it was madness. The way Eliot had felt every edge of every gorgeous living part of him like something he’d pulled from a dream. He’d wanted to kiss Quentin so badly it felt like being blown apart. He’d wanted to crash forward and press Quentin down onto the bed and tear at his clothes until he was naked. Drink the air from his lungs until Eliot himself could finally—finally—breathe again.
His fingers fill the blank spaces where his thoughts can’t reach. Pulling up his recent calls and tapping on Julia’s name without a moment’s hesitation. He doesn’t think he even wants to call her, really. It’s only that he can’t think of anything else he could possibly do that makes sense right now. It’s going back into the house and getting wasted, or it’s this. And when he lifts the phone to his ear he expects anything but for the call to be ringing—but it is. And his heart leaps from his chest to his throat almost at once. And—
Fuck.
Deep underwater feeling in his head like the state of Indiana has turned into an ocean. Laurel the fading gem at its center; its deepest, darkest, most miserable shithole all the way down at the bottom. And Eliot is slipping down deeper into all that desolate dark. And the phone is still ringing and ringing. And his heart is pounding louder and louder. And—
“Okay, asshole. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you—”
“Julia,” Eliot hears someone saying beyond the deep black void that has become his brain. It takes him a long moment for him to realize it’s his voice speaking, his hand holding the phone. “Just give me two minutes before you threaten to put your Popper number four up my ass, okay? Just—”
“Fuck.” Her voice is shaking so badly Eliot feels it clawing through the receiver like a living thing. “You.”
Eliot draws a breath, free hand shaking and useless where it rests against his thigh. Fuck, he needs a smoke. “If you really thought Quentin calling you was a prank you would have blocked my number.”
There’s a silence on the other end of the line for a long moment after Eliot speaks. The sound of his own voice sloshing around like water in his skull. And all he can do is sit there buzzing and wishing he had something to start a fire with so he could toss the phone inside and watch it burn, burn.
“You have sixty seconds,” Julia says at last, voice tense and quivering and terrible. Edged in just enough sadness that Eliot knows she’s trying not to cry.
“So, okay—” Eliot draws a deep breath and slowly lets it out. His head feels like a buoy bobbing, empty and utterly useless under the Indiana sun. “Last night I, uh—I was sitting in my living room watching a movie with my husband.” He pauses for a second to let that particular piece of information sink in. “And suddenly, um—suddenly Q was just…” He shuts his eyes. Picturing the moment just the way it had happened only hours ago. The way Quentin wasn’t there one second and then suddenly—he was. Like flicking a little switch on the wall to make a light come on. Coldwater off, Coldwater on. “He was just… there. Lying on my goddamn carpet like…” He sighs hard, opens his eyes again. His hand is shaking against the curve of his knee. Jesus god he needs some alcohol inside him asap. “Julia, he still looks twenty-six. He is still twenty-six. He had this card in his hand from the Underworld and he—”
“Okay, I’m gonna need you, um—” When Julia suddenly cuts in, her voice is thick and ruined in her throat. “I’m gonna need you to give me a second to…”
“Yeah, that’s, uh…” Eliot can feel his own voice breaking as he tries to get the words to come. The sound of it little more than a single quivering string. “That’s about where I am with it too, uh…”
Shifting, muffled white noise sound on the other end of the receiver. He hears Julia draw a long, deep breath. Slowly, slowly, slowly let it out. “How do you know it’s actually him?” is what comes out of her mouth when she decides it’s time to speak again.
A little ping in Eliot’s center. The sound of singing glass in the seconds just before it shatters. That’s the way it had felt the moment Quentin appeared in Eliot’s living room. The rumbling of magic there in your fingers just before you cast a spell. “I, uh—it’s hard to…” He sighs with his whole chest, gazing down at the flecks of dirt on the toes of his shoes. “I just know.” He lets that sit for a single aching second. “If you come here you’ll understand what I mean.”
Eliot hadn’t realized he was going to make that particular suggestion until he was making it. And the relief is so immediate and intense it almost hurts. Yes. God. That’s what Eliot needs. Someone—anyone—to be here with him who might come close to understanding the depths of his freshly unearthed grief. The things for which no words exist. That singing glass sound in his center.
“Eliot, I don’t…” Julia’s voice is small and quiet on the other end of the receiver. “Where even are you now? It’s been—jesus fuck, it’s been forever.”
“Yeah…” Eliot turns his gaze to the sky and draws a slow, deep breath. The air all around him smells like dirt and sweat and poison. “I’m, uh—I’m in Indiana,” he says, wishing he could swallow the words back down. Make time reverse somehow. Make it all untrue. “In my parents’ house. Well, um—my house now. So…”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
There’s a small silence on the other end of the line. Then Julia says, “I’m sorry for your loss,” so softly Eliot wonders for a long moment after if he’s only imagined the words.
“It’s okay,” he says. It is and it very much isn’t. “I hadn’t seen them since I was seventeen, so—” He gestures airily with one hand like she might be able to see it. “But thank you, um—how…” He breathes deep and slow, coaxing the knot of his stomach to relax just a little. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know…” Julia lets out a bitter sound that might be a laugh. Or a sob. Or a scream. “I’m—honestly.” She pauses for a second. Eliot hears her breath hitch on the other end of the phone. “I have no idea. Uh—surviving, I guess?” The receiver rattles when she draws a breath and quickly huffs it out. “I was—okay. I—I thought I was okay. Uh—but then my long-dead best friend called and woke me up at the literal ass crack this morning and now I feel like I’m losing all of my shit all over again, so…”
“Yeah—” Grief like a flood. Eliot’s chest is bursting with it. Every second of those nine years, two months happening all at once inside him. Balanced and quivering on top of one another like a house of cards. “I think I know that feeling.”
Eliot pauses, waits for Julia to speak. But after only a second or two he can hardly stand it. The silence has a weight in his head. It feels like a physical thing. It feels like a hand around his neck squeezing and squeezing and—
“So, uh—if you want to come here I can text you the address.” His voice is so small and ruined it hardly sounds like his own. But he—fuck. He needs this. Needs her here. He and Julia were never particularly close way back when, but suddenly he can’t stand the thought of being alone in his pain. “It’s kind of bumfuck nowhere, but—”
“I don’t know,” Julia says, stealing the end of the sentence from Eliot’s mouth at once. “I don’t—” She huffs. “Fuck. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I mean—back in the day, this is the sort of crazy shit I would have gone to Q about, but now…” Another little huff comes crackling through the receiver. “Eliot, I just don’t know.”
Eliot swallows around the sour sting of stomach acid climbing up his throat. “You don’t know if you want to come?” He pauses for a flash of a second. “Or you don’t know if you believe me?”
“Uh—both?” Julia’s laugh is a clipped and startled sound on the other end of the phone. “I think I might be in shock, so…”
“Yeah,” Eliot says, his voice some pitiful, shrunken thing. “Me too.”
Silence. For a moment—nothing but silence. Eliot’s eyes are open and fixed on the empty pit where a fire should be. Thinking of throwing himself inside and begging the nearest person-god-monster-whatever for the mercy of a match. Thinking of Quentin’s body, the way it would feel beneath the pads of his fingers. All those supple planes of flesh he’d be able to map in his sleep if he needed. The sort of muscle memory that never lets you go, even if it’s from another half-remembered life.
“I think I need to think about it,” Julia says at last. And sniffles. A little rustling sound of movement on the other end of the receiver. “Just—give me a day? I’ll call you, okay? I—I just really need…”
She trails away, but whatever words she was going to speak—fuck. Eliot doesn’t need to hear them. He knows. Understands the way she’s feeling down in the murky marrow of his bones.
Eliot says, “Okay,” when what he really wants to say is something more like—Please. I can’t stand to feel this way a single second more. And he says, “I think it would really be good for him, you know, to, uh—to have you here.” And he feels so weak slumped in the old rusty chair that had belonged to his father he’s certain he’s actually—for real this time—going to crumble.
“Yeah, um…” Julia’s whispered croak of a voice comes through after another moment of silence. “I’ll call you.”
The line goes dead at once. Eliot drops the phone in his lap in a moment of silent defeat. He’s numb all over. He wants to throw up. He needs a cigarette so badly his fucking hands are shaking.
On wobbly legs he manages to stand somehow. Shoves the phone in his pocket and goes into the house, makes a beeline straight for the kitchen. Pulls a cigarette from his pack on the counter and stands there gazing at the dirty dishes in the sink like trying to figure out how to clean them is his only actual problem.
—
Before
Brakebills
Eliot was in the infirmary for a week before he was well enough to stumble back to the Cottage with Margo at his side. The Cottage that for so long had been Eliot’s one and only true home. Before Fillory, the mosaic, Quentin, the Monster—everything. The one place Eliot had known in his heart he could truly think of as his own. But now—
Now. Fuck. The moment he stepped through the doorway, Eliot felt like something changed in war. Shellshocked and broken and blinded to the sight of his home. Ripped apart and remolded until his weary old spirit would never fit into anything like a home again.
He was pretty sure Margo had been magicking his wound while he was sleeping. Doing something to speed up the healing process even if she couldn’t technically heal him all the way on her own. His stitches had dissolved like a miracle overnight a couple days ago. The space where Margo’s axe had split him open now little more than a gnarled, baby-pink scar. Physically, he was completely out of the woods. No longer in any danger of bleeding to death or coming down with a nasty infection. The strange magic that had been pushed inside him was suddenly totally gone. Margo denied knowing anything about it, of course. And when Eliot asked Lipson what the fuck was going on, she’d offered him nothing but a litany of medical jargon and a shrug.
Margo magicked the door of the Physical Kids’ Cottage firmly shut behind them, and just like that—Eliot was home. Home. Fuck. Eliot felt the word pulse like a brand new wound deep inside him. He pulled away from Margo, attempting to make for the stairs and the blissful comfort of the room and the party favors under his bed he’d find when he reached the top of them. But Margo was on him at once. Her arm looping with his like unbreakable links on a chain. Tugging him into the common room quickly and pushing him down on a sofa.
“Sit,” she said, dark hair swooshing at her shoulders as she turned to stomp away. “Stay. I may not be able to cook for shit but you’re washing those pills down with real food and that’s final, okay?”
After she’d gone, Eliot looked around slowly and felt his stomach sinking. Every corner of the room seemed to be a halfhearted imitation of itself. Familiar and unfamiliar all at the very same instant. The very air around him holding the sense he’d never been in this place before. Like when you’ve been away from somewhere for so long coming back feels like slipping into someone else’s skin.
Everywhere Eliot looked—some old aching memory of Quentin lingered: the space on the sectional sofa where once upon a time he’d liked to curl up and study; the window seat where he and Eliot had shared countless smokes; the clock the two of them had walked through to go to Fillory where they’d spent fifty years together in that other, more beautiful life.
Eliot drew a deep breath, and held it. Let it ache in his near-healed belly wound before slowly huffing it out. Dying for a drink, some coke, fucking—anything. The pills he had stuffed in his pocket weren’t really doing the trick anymore. And he was just about to pull himself to his feet and hobble up to his room—Margo be damned—when Alice Quinn entered from around a corner and plopped down right next to him on the sofa.
When Eliot set his eyes on her it was like he was seeing a ghost. Blonde hair, pale skin, shadows under her eyes beyond her glasses. She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink in days.
“Hi,” she said, her voice so small and soft Eliot could hardly hear it. She looked him in the eyes for a fraction of a second before looking away. “I, uh—I came to see you. In the infirmary. A couple times, actually. But you weren’t exactly conscious, so…”
“Yeah,” Eliot croaked. It felt like he hadn’t used his voice to speak to another person in decades, even though he’d only just been talking to Margo minutes ago. “Sorry about that. I was a little, you know…” His eyes were on the darkened fireplace across the room. The endless black within holding Quentin’s ghost so gently. “Mortally wounded and on drugs.”
“Yeah,” Alice said after the briefest moment of silence. “There was a while there where we thought you weren’t going to…”
Alice looked at Eliot then. And Eliot turned his head to meet her gaze. And she pinched her brows and frowned at him for just a second before looking away.
Eliot gazed at her profile sedately. The bow of her mouth like a vault holding secrets. The pale skin that stretched along the honey-smooth curves of her face. There was a hollow in his belly telling Eliot truths he wanted desperately not to believe. Like if anyone was truly grieving Quentin—if anyone in this life was Quentin’s widow—it was Alice. Even if she and Quentin hadn’t been together in the end. In this life, more than anyone, Alice Quinn had been the one who’d had him.
“I guess you might have if I hadn’t taught Margo that spell,” Alice continued after a silence that seemed to stretch without end. Still not looking at Eliot, offering her gaze to Quentin’s ghost where it hovered in some far corner of the room. “The magic in your wound from her axes was…”
Eliot’s stomach turned hard as a rock in an instant. He’d known Margo had done something days ago. But hearing it confirmed so plainly made him feel like he wanted to scream. “What, uh—” He pressed a hand to his belly on instinct. The faintest whisper of pain pressing right back. “What spell exactly?”
Alice looked at Eliot again and pinched her brows together. “It was a homebrew,” she said like it was nothing. And Eliot guessed to someone like Alice Quinn it probably was. “Something to counteract that weird ass magic in your wound and speed up the healing.” She let that sit for a second or two before she spoke again. “Not the most effective thing ever if you’re not a healer, but it was better than letting you die from an acute case of being an idiot and Lipson wasn’t helping, so…”
Eliot blinked. Looked away. Auras danced like starlight in the corners of his vision. Something chimed in his brain, something that felt like an almost-sickness. Flaring, brilliant beginnings of a headache bloom. Images of Quentin appearing over and over before blissfully, terribly falling away. And he pressed his hand to his middle more firmly. Wishing his wound would flare until he was blinded by pain.
“I’m, uh—” Eliot glanced at Alice beside him who was looking down at her hands. “I’m sorry for your loss, by the way. Um—you know…” He followed the line of her gaze slowly downward. Her palms lying upward in her lap like wilting, colorless petals. “Q.”
Alice turned her gaze to him slowly, pale face twisting beneath the weight of her sadness. “I wasn’t the only one who lost him,” she said. And then she huffed a laugh. The sort of laugh that was edged in tears and two seconds away from a scream. “It’s not like we were together anymore. He’d only just barely started talking to me again. He—”
Eliot had to look away. Shut his eyes. Try to breathe. Every line on Alice’s face spinning out another memory of Quentin. Grief like a thousand angry fists pummeling his brain.
“He wasn’t in love with me anymore. I—I don’t know that he’d ever been. Not really.”
Eliot opened his eyes. They were damp. And he blinked away the tears until the room came into view again. “That’s not true,” he said, the sound of his own voice in his head some broken, pitiful thing. Somehow too thick and too thin for his body all at once. “He loved you, Alice. We both know it.”
“Loving and being in love aren’t exactly the same thing.” Alice’s voice was a high and thready croak. Sorrow crushing her throat like a sad little bird. “I wanted to be with him. He was the one that I was in love with. But we didn’t work. And maybe that was my fault, I don’t know. Maybe I fucked up so badly he could never trust me again. Maybe I still resented him for cheating on me with you and Margo. Maybe—”
Eliot couldn’t bear to offer another glance her way. He couldn’t. He was going to die. He wanted to be dead. Wasn’t thinking too seriously about taking the steps to get there all on his own, but if someone wanted to come along and pull his plug right then he didn’t think he’d give a damn. Scratch that—he would have been fucking ecstatic. Alice in his periphery moving like a blonde-haired ghost. His stomach felt like it was filling with lead. He wanted to slam back the bottle of pills in his pocket more than he wanted anything. Chase them down with a gallon of booze. Chase the whole lousy feeling of it all the way to the bottom. To the Underworld, the place where Quentin was. Oblivion, epiphany…
“Maybe…” Alice started speaking softly into the silence again. “The real problem was that he was always in love with someone else.”
The silence that fell between them this time felt heavy as a mound of dirt. Eliot could feel it sure as death packed in his lungs and his throat. Alice was staring at him sideways when Eliot forced himself to look her way. An expression on her sad pale face that said nothing short of, You know what I’m talking about.
“That’s not true,” Eliot said, the sound of his voice this time cold and dark as a grave. Some woeful thing trying with all that it had to claw its way up from the dirt.
“Yes it is,” Alice said like she was speaking her truest truth. It was a final judgment, the period at the end of a life long sentence. Shining in Eliot’s eyes bright and terrible as the light of day. “He was pretty in love with you.”
Eliot swallowed. And it burned. It felt like there were shards of glass in his throat. Poking at that memory he could hardly bear to look at now. Quentin’s open, gorgeous heart pouring out in the throne room the very second they’d remembered. As proud and true and brave in that moment as Eliot had been a coward. “I’m not sure that I’d say that,” he managed, sounding like some shattered, eggshell version of himself.
“I would.”
For a flaring flash of a second—Eliot hated Alice Quinn with all his heart. Shoving his truth out into the light like it was nothing at all. Like it was easy. Like it wasn’t the ugliest thing in the whole damn world. A friend wouldn’t do that to someone. Wouldn’t take the familiar comfort of their denial away. Only an enemy would do something like that. A callous, blonde-haired monster. A friend would have looked him square in the face and lied through her teeth as she told him—
He wasn’t yours. He was mine. Even if we weren’t together. It’s really as simple as that. He was never actually in love with you at all. So don’t worry, Eliot. See—you didn’t break his heart. Didn’t shove away your one and only chance at real, true love. Change his fate in such a way it probably got him killed in the end. Really, Eliot. It never would have worked between you two. And I know you’re pretty bummed about your friend, but having a death wish about it is a bit much, don’t you think? I mean—I’m technically his widow, and look how well I’m keeping my shit together.
Eliot felt for the line of his scar beneath his shirt with the pointed tip of his finger. The knob of it under the fabric like a hellish rosary bead. And he opened his mouth to say something—anything—but he couldn’t. There was nothing in his head but screaming. Terrible, droning insect sounds. He had to stand up. He had to run away. His legs felt like they’d been filled with cement. His shoes felt like they weighed a hundred-thousand pounds apiece. He—
Just when he thought his brain might actually collapse inside his head—Margo appeared from around a corner. His knight in shining red lips floating a tray of food out in front of her on a whirl of magic. She stopped just in front of Eliot and Alice on the sofa, the tray of food bobbing along there beside her like an obedient dog.
“Oh,” Margo said, hands on hips, eyes on Alice. An expression on her face that Eliot couldn’t hope to read. “Hey. Didn’t know we had company.”
“I was just leaving,” Alice said, sound of her voice all tense and hollow. But before she could hop to her feet Margo gave a little shrug and said—
“Stay. I made plenty.” She smirked, shot her gaze at Eliot. A near-perfect mimic of casual flirtation, but Eliot could see the sadness blooming in her eyes just underneath. “And by made I mean I stole a shitload of food from the communal fridge, cast a spell, and hoped for the best. Come on—” Suddenly—she was moving, spinning around, the tray trailing closely behind like her most loyal companion. “Dining room, yeah? If we’re gonna eat stolen sandwiches we might as well be civilized about it or some shit.”
Margo disappeared from Eliot’s line of sight, and a few seconds later Alice stood and followed her into the dining room. Eliot still couldn’t move his body no matter how hard he tried. No matter how terribly his stomach grumbled. No matter how much he needed to stand up and go to the bar and grab a bottle and slam back all the poison inside in one huge go.
“El.”
Eliot turned his head. Blinked. Forced his eyes to focus. It was Margo, of course. Standing there next to the sofa, the enchanted tray of food no longer nipping at her heels like a needy animal.
“Hey…” Margo’s body language visibly softened. Stepping closer, she knelt down on the sofa next to Eliot and cradled his face in her hands. “Sweetie, you gotta eat something, okay?”
Eliot met her gaze for only a fraction of a second. So overwhelmed by the devotion spilling from her eyes he had to look away. God. Margo. He felt her name rattling around inside him like a second heart in his chest. Margo. His Margo. The way it seemed like sometimes she saved up all her softness for him. All that goodness that hardly anyone knew lived inside her and that anyone but Eliot deserved to see.
“Bambi.” Eliot sighed with his entire body then. Wishing for her slender hands to reach inside him and pull the blackness out. Those warm, familiar hands that felt like love against his skin. “I’m just really not hungry, okay? I—”
“You need to eat.” Margo’s voice was dark and low and meant for only Eliot. “El, honey, you need—”
“What I need is a drink.”
Eliot wasn’t looking at her. He was looking somewhere beyond the boundary of her shoulder. At Quentin’s ghost, the specter of death. But he could read the disappointment in her expression all the same. And it tasted like grit on his tongue, felt like graveyard dirt in his throat. Felt exactly like the sort of misery Eliot was pretty sure he wanted.
“Not with those pills you’re popping like candy, you don’t.” Margo’s words were soft, but Eliot could feel the bite of her anger lingering just beneath the surface. “Although I’d say it’s high time to hop off the opiate train now that Humpty’s got his eggs unscrambled, don’t you think?”
Eliot swallowed around the taste of death in his throat. Opened his mouth and said—“You’re not my mother, Margo.” Feeling just as stunned as she looked when he finally chanced a glance her way. He hadn’t meant for it to come out sounding quite so cruel. So—fuck.
Margo drew her hands from Eliot and sat back on her heels at once. Her body a tight little braid of tension perched on the sofa beside him. “Yeah, never have been the motherly type,” she said, her voice a sad, husky wobble in her throat. “But what I am is the bitch trying to keep your sorry ass alive. So come and get a fucking sandwich before me and blondie eat ‘em all.”
She hopped to her feet, spun around, dark hair like a stage magician’s smoke as she made her silent exit. Leaving Eliot there on the sofa for a good long while before he found the strength he needed to finally work his legs, and to stand. To go to the bar and snatch up a bottle of something dark at random. And make for the stairs. And climb them. And go up to his room. And—
Shut the door firmly and lock it behind him. Feeling like a shadow in the gloomy half-light being thrown through the curtains. Grief carving a bottomless well there inside him as he clutched his bottle of poison.
—
Before
The Mosaic
“God,” Quentin said, stumbling out of the cottage just before Eliot and spinning around to face him. Laughing, grinning. Wild hair pulled back in a halfhearted ponytail. He hadn’t even bothered doing up the ties on his shirt. “My legs are still shaking…”
“Yeah,” Eliot said, the tiniest stone of badness still lingering in his belly. Eyes on Quentin—god. That pink face dappled with fits of golden sun. “Mine too.”
Quentin pressed forward quickly, pressing himself to Eliot at once. That mouth finding its way to Eliot’s bare collarbone like it was coming back home. “So, you ready to finish this thing or what?”
Quentin’s greedy hands pushed inside the half-open front of Eliot’s shirt. He was warmer than sunlight. Eliot wanted to die right there, right then. With nothing but the kiss of Quentin’s light on his skin.
“Yeah, um—” Eliot went instantly tense. The stone of badness inside him quickly growing to the size of a mountain. He wasn’t touching Quentin. His hands were too busy curling into white-knuckled fists at his sides. “I’m ready whenever you are, Q.”
Quentin’s hands on Eliot’s body went still almost at once. The warmth of his mouth pulling away, leaving a dreadful, lonely chill in its wake. “Hey…” He stepped back, frowning up at Eliot with the sun in his eyes. “Is everything all right?”
Eliot swallowed, a sour swell of dread rising like mercury in his throat. “Everything is great,” he said, and the words sounded so false he nearly choked. “We should, uh—we should get back to it. Since you’re in such a hurry to get out of here and back on with your life and all.”
Quentin frowned at Eliot with his entire face. “I mean, yeah. That is, uh—isn’t that sort of the whole point of why we’re here? Getting the key, saving magic.” He sighed. “Getting back to our friends who probably think we’re dead.”
Eliot could feel the bottom of his stomach dropping out. Dropping and dropping without any hope of ever seeing the bottom. He turned his eyes from Quentin, stomping across the puzzle to the work table and opening a chalk-smeared notebook just to give his hands something to do. “We should start a new pattern, don’t you think? Um, something we’ve never—”
“El.” The sound of Quentin’s footfalls approaching slowly from behind. His hand pressed to the small of Eliot’s back for just a second before pulling away. “Hey. Talk to me.”
Eliot shut his eyes, sucked a breath. Held it in until his lungs began to burn. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said on the exhale, voice coming out of him little more than a shattered croak. And when he opened his eyes it was to the sight of his own hands shaped into gnarled claws against the table. Fuck. Suddenly dizzy. Sun pressing spots into his vision like he’d swallowed poison.
“Right,” Quentin said to Eliot’s back. “You’re just suddenly being weird about—wait.” He paused for a single second that Eliot felt like a small eternity. “Do you not want to finish the puzzle or something? ‘Cause last I checked you hated—”
“Jesus fuck—” Eliot clenched his jaw, steeled himself, spun around. Reaching back quickly to steady himself on the table. Trying for a laugh that came out sounding all broken and wrong. “Of course I want to finish the puzzle, Q.” He gestured airly with one hand like it might make some sort of difference. Like it might somehow mask the way his whole body was shaking. “Actually, now that I think about it…”
Eliot’s eyes swept over Quentin from head to foot and back again. And somewhere in some foggy back corner of his mind, he finally allowed himself to think the thing he’d been feeling for weeks, months, years that sometimes felt like centuries. He was—
God. He was in love with Quentin. Had been in love for so long he could no longer pinpoint the exact moment in which it happened. Falling from such a great height for so long he knew he had no hope of ever reaching the bottom. Only most of the time it didn’t really feel like falling at all. It was like he was soaring right up to the heat of it like something with a waxy death-trap for wings. Feathers only just barely clinging to his skin. If they could only just stay like this—the way they’d been since the night of their one year anniversary—Eliot would let that sunlight burn him up forever.
“Maybe.” Eliot could barely get that single word to come. Had to push it up from the dark with all the strength he had just to shape it into a sound. Had to—“Maybe we should, uh… you know.”
He breathed. Blinked away the sun in his eyes. The way the light bounced off of Quentin’s skin was some otherworldly thing.
“We’re distracted.” Eliot’s head was a giant, bobbing water-filled balloon. He could hardly hear his own voice beyond the furious gush. What the fuck are you saying? What the fuck are you doing? Ruining everything because you’re a coward. Just like you always do. You could still have him for a little longer. Years still, maybe. What the fuck?
“Okay,” Quentin said plainly. Everything golden about him seemed to be melting. Like he couldn’t bear to keep his own shape under the heat of his own roiling sun. “So—”
“So maybe we should stop taking our little breaks for a while.”
There was a tiny fissure running down the center of Eliot’s heart. And the moment the words left his mouth he felt it tearing itself wide open. Hairline crack transformed at once into a gaping, yawning hole. A maw of deep black night that hungered to swallow the sun.
Quentin pinched his brows tightly together. The frown on his face seeming to drag down every other part of him. “El, what are you—” He let a nervous little laugh flutter out. “We just had, like—the most amazing sex and everything was fine and now you’re, like—what? Breaking up with me because—”
“Q, I’m not breaking—” Eliot clenched his jaw until it hurt. Heart pounding, knees quaking. Every atom in his body begging him to stop talking and push forward and kiss Quentin until they both forgot this whole stupid mess he was making on purpose. “I’m just saying that… we are…”
“We’re distracted.”
Eliot’s breath caught in his throat like shards of glass. All the little fractured pieces of his own awful heart. He blinked. Pinched his brows together. “Yes.”
Quentin looked Eliot square in the face for a few fleeting but infinite seconds before he looked away. Hanging his head like a puppy who’d just been rejected. “Well, I’m sorry I’m such a distraction, okay? We can just—”
“Q, I never said you were—”
“You’re right.” Quentin lifted his head, set his eyes on Eliot again, and—oh. Eliot felt his gaze like a knife to the throat. Sharp tip of it pressing in and angling for a vein. “It was stupid to think—” Quentin shook his head, gestured with his two lovely hands before quickly looking away. “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. Just—if you wanna start a new pattern you should do it while we still have daylight”
Quentin spun on his heels without giving Eliot even a second to respond. Not a single frazzled instant in which he could hope to form a thought. Instead—Eliot could only stand there watching as Quentin marched across the puzzle. His body a thick knot of tension as one of his feet kicked out behind him. Skillfully and intentionally knocking over a stack of brick red tiles they had balanced along one edge.
“Oops,” Quentin said, the tone of his voice flat and careless. Pausing for just a second to look back at Eliot over his shoulder. Then disappearing into their little cottage and slamming the door shut behind him.
—
Now
Laurel, Indiana
Eliot spends the rest of the morning in a wrecked-out haze. The booze and the weed probably have something to do with it.
He sits in his father’s former study slash office slash den slash mancave slash that one room in the house where he’d always go to hide from his family when he couldn’t be bothered to expend energy stomping around pretending like he gave a fuck. Taking nips from his flask and smoking a joint before nodding off on the sofa watching trash TV. Waking minutes or hours later with a mouth dry as death and the terrible grit of sand haunting the back of his throat.
On wobbly legs he stands. Fetches a bottle of water from the mini fridge he has tucked away in one corner. Chugs it down, crushes the empty bottle in his fist. Tries to toss it into the trashcan near the desk where his father’s old desktop computer sits like a yellowing plastic monolith and misses the mark by a mile.
He slumps down on the sofa again. Gazes at his reflection in the darkened screen of the TV. Blinks at himself. Feels the air moving in and out of his lungs as his reflection blinks right back. He feels only marginally human. More animal than person. More something born in the dirt and bathed in death than a real live upright human being. His buzz is wearing off and it’s terrible. He needs to be wasted again. And he’s just about to reach for his weed when the door swings open and Quentin steps in and the shock of his big wide eyes immediately lock onto Eliot’s.
“There you are,” Quentin says, shutting the door softly behind him. He’s wearing a pair of Javier’s jeans and one of his soft old shirts. “I was in your, um—your old room for a while and when I came out the house was, uh—really quiet. So I thought maybe you had…”
Quentin lets his words trail into nothing. He takes a step away from the door. And Eliot jumps to his feet so quickly he almost stumbles. Steadying himself carefully on the arm of the sofa. His body heeding the call to greet the dawn that is Quentin rising like the sun.
“Hey,” Eliot says, a cotton candy fuzz sweeping over his brain. “How are you, uh—”
“Did you talk to Jules?” Quentin has his hands shoved into the pockets of his borrowed jeans. His whole body a tight braid of nerves in Eliot’s vision. He’s practically bouncing out of his skin.
“Yeah, uh—” Eliot tries for a laugh but it hardly comes out. “I did. And I think she probably believed me, but she… you know. She, uh—”
“Is freaked the fuck out and needs some time to process?”
Eliot blinks, and for a moment it feels nearly impossible to keep looking at Quentin. It’s like the sun in his eyes. “Yeah,” he manages, somehow fighting the urge to look away. “She said she’ll call, so…”
Quentin gives a near-imperceptible nod of his head. Turning his eyes from Eliot to gaze at his own bare feet on the floor. Then raising his eyes to Eliot again not a minute later. Blinking. Eliot feels like he’s slogging through the moment at the approximate speed of death. Time has stilled and everything has ended. There’s nothing left in the world but Quentin, alive and standing there across from him. Then—
Everything is moving. Every molecule in the room blurred into a mass of shapeless color and air. Eliot’s brain feels like it’s overheating trying to keep up with the sight of—oh fuck. Quentin. Barreling right toward him at the speed of infinity. Helios mapping his wild arc across the clear blue sky. And Eliot flying higher, taunting the heat with his hubris. Head spinning, legs quaking, every atom in his body begging, begging, begging to burn. And then—
Eliot is no stranger to death. If you ask him he’ll tell you he’s died a thousand times before. And mostly he would mean it. It’s just like riding a bike, he thinks. All instinct and muscle memory, the way he finds himself in arms of the Reaper. He knows it like the backs of his own eyes in the blinding dark. The way your breath catches like stuck gears deep inside you and your heart goes cold in your chest. It’s exactly what Eliot feels right now in this moment: death. He’s dying, he’s falling, the floor has been ripped right out from under his feet. He’s—
Oh.
No.
It isn’t death. Eliot feels his heart beat once deep inside him. Fiercely, loudly. The floor is solid and real under his shoes and Quentin has him. Up on his toes with both of his hands gripping the back of Eliot’s neck. Kissing him—fuck. Quentin is kissing him breathless. Tongue curling at the seam of Eliot’s lips, all that warm sweet breath sweeping into him like he’s being born again.
Delirium. Eliot’s whole world has blown itself to pieces. He feels poleaxed through his center from the shock of it all. Pulsing light in the space where all those years ago Margo’s axe had gone. Intoxicated on the little sounds that pour from Quentin’s mouth as they kiss. And without even thinking to do it—Eliot is drawing Quentin nearer. His arms forming a chain around Quentin’s middle; Quentin’s arms reaching up and thrown around Eliot’s neck. And for a moment it almost feels like they’re dancing when they start to move.
Eliot leads them blindly backward and they tumble onto the sofa. His body splayed in one corner with Quentin fitting perfectly there on top of him. Like this is their truest form—just this. Quentin’s thighs bracketing Eliot’s hips like puzzle pieces all snuggled up together.
Eliot can’t think. He’s pretty sure there’s something he should be thinking about. Something that should worry him. He’s pretty sure he should be scared to death. But there’s nothing, nothing, nothing inside him but fuzzy bits of starlight and static. His body is capable of nothing, nothing, nothing but this: one hand pushing up the back of Quentin’s shirt, the other pushing down inside the back pocket of his jeans. Spurring Quentin’s rocking hips forward as he lets himself be kissed, devoured, left in fiery ruins until he’s nothing but cinders.
The rhythm of his pulse between his legs is like an ancient drum. Like a song stirring deep inside him and waking the beast of his hunger. Eliot’s body is a balloon filling up until he’s certain he’s going to burst. Quentin’s hands winding in his hair as they kiss deeper, harder. Kissing like they’re trying to crawl inside each other’s skin. Kissing like they’re different people, yet more themselves than they’ve ever been before. Pawing at each other with greedy, heartsick fingers until Eliot swears he can feel the sofa underneath them lifting from the floor and reaching for the sun and—
“Q—” Somehow, Eliot finds himself just long enough to take Quentin by the hair with two hands and tug him back. Fuck. His head is so fuzzy and his cock is so hard it feels impossible to form a sentence. “We—I’m—you—”
Eliot releases his hold on Quentin’s hair. Slowly lets his hands trail down the slope of Quentin’s back before falling away. And Quentin gazes down at the ruins of Eliot for a fraction of a second before diving back in. Kissing Eliot again. Softly, slowly, a little less hurried this time. Dripping sweet as honey from the back of a spoon; running like shivers all down the length of Eliot’s spine.
“Hey—” Eliot whimpers, tugging Quentin back just enough to break the kiss again. Their mouths hot and panting, their foreheads pressing together. “Quentin, I—I have a…”
He sighs with his whole chest. The realization washing over his body in terrible, sickening waves.
“I have a husband, Q.”
For a long moment—Quentin says nothing. Just stays there on top of Eliot, pressed so close their noses brush together. Desire making waves between Eliot’s legs and all up the line of his neck. He wants to touch Quentin again so much it’s maddening. He wants it more than drawing breath. Wants it more than booze or drugs or food or sex. He wants it more than he wants to keep living. He—
“Um,” Quentin says, breaking the spell abruptly and at last. Pulling back slowly with the cold veil of reality settling over his face. “Shit.”
Quentin pulls away just as quickly as the two of them had come together. Jumping to his feet with his hair and his shirt—Javier’s shirt (what the fuck)—a total wreck from Eliot’s hands. He nearly trips over his own feet in his maddening rush to put distance between them. Not sparing a single glance back at Eliot as he slips through the door and shuts it firmly as goodbye behind him.
Leaving Eliot there all alone, splayed on the sofa like a dead thing. Buzzing and hard and confused. “What the fuck,” he says to the open air all around him. Knocking his head back against the sofa with a terrible sigh in his chest.