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The Prologue
He’s twenty-two and freshly discharged from the hospital when the world tilts.
There’s a bottle of pills rattling in his pocket, a fog around his thoughts, and the sinking certainty that he’s already ruined his life before it ever really had a chance to get started. He’s supposed to go to an interview, pretend to be functional, pretend that the edges of reality haven’t been fraying for months. Go to graduate school. Get a job. Let go of childish things.
He’s not sure if that’s a reality he can actually survive in.
Then the world opens up.
A package for him that shouldn’t exist. An entrance into what must be a hallucination. An entrance exam that can’t be real. And a stranger with a smirk and a voice like velvet telling him, “I’m Eliot. You’re late.”
That’s the first thing Quentin Coldwater learns about Eliot Waugh: he knows who he is and is better than everyone. Even in the middle of impossible magic, Eliot moves like he owns the moment.
Quentin stumbles after him through the building of what he learns is Brakebills.
Everything smells of wood and ozone and spring rain. Magic hums under the surface of things — alive, electric, impossible. He half expects to wake up strapped to a hospital bed again, nurses shaking their heads, saying We thought he was getting better.
But Eliot turns back to look at him, eyes sharp, and amused.
And Quentin thinks — absurdly, desperately — that maybe this is real after all. He hopes it is. If for nothing else, then the promise of magic and the boy in front of him, who seems to be made up of magic himself.
Eliot
He sees it immediately: the too-big coat, the bitten-down nails, the wild, hungry eyes of someone who doesn’t quite believe he’s allowed to exist.
Brakebills always gets a few of those each year — the fragile ones, the dreamers — but there’s something about this one. Quentin Coldwater, the card said his name was. What an odd name.
He’s a mess, obviously. Too thin. Nervous beyond “normal”. But there’s a spark behind the shaking. A need to know. Eliot recognizes it like a reflection — the desperate kind of wanting that magic only makes sharper.
So he decides, in the unspoken way Eliot decides most things, that he’s taking this one under his wing.
Because someone has to. It’s endearing, really, the almost pathetic boy that is Quentin, and how Eliot is so drawn to him.
He doesn’t know yet why Quentin catches his attention more than the others. Maybe it’s pity. Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe it’s the way Quentin looks at the world, like it’s a wound that might still heal if he could just find the right kind of magic.
Maybe. If Eliot thinks very deeply, in a way he often tries to avoid. It’s the mirror of himself he sees within the other boy. The pain and longing Eliot works so very hard to hide, Quentin wears so openly. Two sides of a similar coin. Not that he would ever admit this to anyone.
Whatever it is, by the end of the entrance exam, Eliot’s hooked.
When Dean Fogg finishes the orientation speech and the new students scatter, Eliot corners Quentin before anyone else can. Had been waiting around to see if he passed or failed before truly getting his hopes up.
“Congratulations, Coldwater,” he says, tone light but eyes sharp. “You made it through your first day of hell.”
Quentin blinks at him, startled. “You talk like it’s a bad thing.”
Eliot’s grin curves. “Oh, darling boy. It’s not bad. It’s magic. That’s worse.”
Quentin laughs — small and surprised, like he wasn’t sure he remembered how — and something warm flickers in Eliot’s chest. He thinks, ah. There it is.
Quentin
He spends the first few days pretending he’s fine. He’s not.
He’s surrounded by geniuses, prodigies, people who actually look like they belong here. Every time he opens his mouth, he’s sure he’s saying the wrong thing. He studies until his eyes blur, trying to prove — to himself, mostly — that he isn’t a mistake the exam board forgot to fix.
He was used to always being the smartest person in the room, skating around life, classes, and teachers easily with his intelligence. Knowing you’re better in a way that only the smartest person in a room can know. Until all of a sudden, he isn’t. Of all the things he expected to be shocked at, at a magic school, with magic. Fucking magic holy shit. Being surrounded by people who were just as, and often, smarter than he was. Was not on the list. Yet here he was. Struggling immensely, and ego more than a bit bruised.
The one constant is Eliot.
Eliot, with his wine glass and silk scarf, who seems to know everything about everyone. Eliot, who calls him Coldwater and darling like it’s a private joke. Eliot, who winks during spellcasting drills and makes the air fizz around him.
Eliot, who is 100% the smartest person in the room. Always. And who acts like he isn’t. Like he just couldn’t care less.
It should be infuriating. It’s not.
It’s magnetic.
Eliot starts inviting him to places — at first, casually, then frequently. The Physical Kids Cottage, they call it, though Quentin’s sure it’s really just where all the misfits end up. The ones who break the rules for fun, who drink too much, who refuse to care about prestige or politics.
The first time Quentin walks in, he nearly turns back around.
But Eliot invited him. To a party of all things.
And…it’s Eliot. So, of course, he went.
There’s laughter spilling out of every corner, candles floating in the air, smoke curling from a cigarette and joints that smell like honey and mint. Someone’s levitating an apple, and someone else is transfiguring their smoke into tiny birds.
And then there’s that sign — glowing faintly above the fireplace, wire and fairy lights spelling out one word: TA-DA.
It’s whimsical and ridiculous and somehow perfect. Quentin finds himself staring at it with a grin on his face.
He thinks, for a second, that it’s mocking him.
Then he hears a voice behind him say, “It’s supposed to be ironic,” and turns to see Eliot Waugh.
Eliot looks like he was born here, like the place itself bent around his edges. Wine glass in hand, tie loosened, every movement deliberate and careless at once. He smiles—sharp, a little lazy—and Quentin forgets how to breathe.
“It’s—” Quentin searches for the word. “—a lot.”
Eliot laughs. “That’s the idea. The world’s been a lot for a while, don’t you think? We just try to make it prettier.”
He hands Quentin a glass. Their fingers brush, and Quentin’s breath catches.
“I just—” Quentin starts, but Eliot’s grin widens.
“Adorable,” Eliot says simply. “Come on, let’s get you a real drink before someone tries to make you perform a party trick.”
And just like that, Eliot Waugh becomes a gravitational pull.
It’s been so long since someone looked at him like this — like he’s worth the effort.
Eliot
He noticed him long before that night. Since the second he saw him crossing the lawn for his exam. How could he not notice him? The quiet boy in class who fidgets with his pen, who flinches when people look at him too long. The one who mutters nerdy references under his breath and thinks no one hears. The kind of boy Eliot would have torn apart for sport years ago—before he learned that loneliness was a sharper weapon than cruelty.
But Quentin is different. There’s something about him. Some soft, trembling spark that reminds Eliot of what it felt like to be new here—to believe magic might actually fix something inside you.
So when Quentin stands in the doorway that night, eyes wide, back straight like he’s bracing for impact, Eliot moves toward him before he can think better of it. Because someone needs to.
He knows the type. The ones who slip through cracks. The ones who look at wonder and don’t believe they deserve to touch it.
Eliot doesn’t know why he cares. He just does.
And maybe—maybe it’s selfish. Maybe he just likes the way Quentin looks at the world like it might break any second, and the way Eliot’s voice makes him relax, even if only for a moment.
When he hands Quentin a glass of actual liquor after appreciating the sign for a minute, their fingers had brushed. Quentin flushed immediately, his eyes darting away. Eliot pretends not to notice, but his heart does a strange, too-fast thing in his chest.
He takes a sip of his own drink and says, “To new beginnings, darling. Or, at least, to better endings.”
Quentin laughs softly, startled, like no one’s ever toasted him before.
It’s alarmingly easy, falling into rhythm with him.
Eliot tells himself it’s mentorship. He likes helping the new kids, the bright ones with ghosts in their eyes. It’s a hobby, like mixology or flirtation.
But Quentin isn’t like the others.
He doesn’t try to impress. He doesn’t posture. He’s awkward and earnest and too damn honest for his own good. When he laughs, he lights up the entire room. When he frowns, Eliot feels a strange ache to fix it.
He starts watching for him — at breakfast, in class, during study groups. And when Quentin inevitably isolates himself, Eliot finds him, always with some excuse. Wanted to see if you’d tried the new wine. Thought you might need a smoke. Figured you could use a friend.
Quentin looks at him like he’s not sure what to do with that word.
And Eliot — who has built his entire personality around being untouchable — starts to feel dangerously exposed.
Quentin
He hasn’t had friends like this before.
He hasn’t had anything like this before.
At Brakebills, even when everything feels overwhelming, there’s Eliot. Someone steady in the storm. Someone who teases him but never pushes too hard. Who tells him he’s not broken — or, at least, that everyone here is a little bit broken, and maybe that’s what makes the magic work.
Like Eliot told him- It comes from pain afterall.
Eliot’s laugh becomes home before Quentin realizes it.
There’s something about the way he moves through the world—like he’s already survived every version of disappointment and learned how to make it look like charm. Quentin envies that. He wishes he could wear his damage like silk instead of armor. Or maybe that is what Eliot is doing, just in a different font.
Eliot has a way of knowing everything about everyone, and having people feel like they’re so close to him. But Quentin notices one thing: No one really seems to know Eliot. They have a perceived sense of closeness because Eliot lets them open up to him, but not the other way around.
Except Margo. The exception. And maybe himself a little bit. He did share something with him afterall.
Maybe Eliot being…who he is, is the same kind of armor.
One night, Eliot finds him outside, sitting on the back steps, staring at the trees.
“You’re brooding,” Eliot says, appearing with a cigarette and a bottle of something expensive. “It’s very on-brand.”
Quentin snorts. “I’m just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.” Eliot sits beside him, close enough that their knees brush. The night is warm. Fireflies flicker across the grass like fairy lights gone rogue.
Eliot looks over at him, eyes glinting. “You know, you don’t have to keep pretending you hate it here.”
“I don’t—”
“You do,” Eliot says gently. “You think everyone else already belongs and you don’t. Like you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But that’s the trick. None of us do. We’re all just pretending until the magic sticks. Even then, magic doesn’t fix what’s broken…and none of us could be here if we weren’t a bit broken.”
Quentin stares at him, stunned. Because it’s true. Because no one has ever said it out loud before.
Eliot takes a slow drag of his cigarette and exhales. “The thing is,” he adds, voice softer, “sometimes the pretending works.”
And Quentin feels something uncoil in his chest. Like maybe he could belong here—not because he’s fixed, but because Eliot makes it seem possible.
It shouldn’t make Quentin want to cry, but it does.
He looks down at his hands. “I was in a psych ward just…right before I came here. I thought I was losing my mind, I wanted to- want to die, and now I’m here doing literal magic. How am I supposed to—” He breaks off, shaking his head. “It doesn’t feel earned.”
Eliot’s voice softens. “Magic doesn’t care if you think you deserve it. It’s not about worth. It’s about want.”
He nudges Quentin’s knee with his own. “You want it, don’t you?”
Quentin nods helplessly.
“Then it’s yours,” Eliot says simply. “That’s how it works. That is how…everything works.”
Quentin can’t name what he sees in Eliot’s eyes, but they are looking into him so intensely that he almost forgets how to breathe.
Eliot
There’s a particular look Quentin gets sometimes — like the world is too bright and he’s afraid to blink in case it disappears . It hits Eliot right in the chest every time.
He’s been at Brakebills long enough to know better than to believe in fairytales. But Quentin makes him want to.
He’s sharp and shy, brilliant and broken. And when Eliot teases him, Quentin glows. He likes that power — not the cruel kind, but the kind that coaxes people back to life.
He starts bringing Quentin little things: food when he forgets to eat, a floating candle shaped like a fox, a bottle of wine with a label that shimmers drink me.
Each time, Quentin protests. Each time, Eliot insists.
And each time, Quentin smiles a little easier.
Eliot thinks it could melt ice, how warm it is. How beautiful it is to be able to care for someone in such a way. He’s not good at caring about things, but then again, he can be very good at caring about things that matter. That are important. Quentin might be the most important thing that’s ever come across Eliot’s life. What a thought. He may have to drink on this later.
Quentin
It happens slowly, and then all at once.
Weeks of shared jokes and late-night study sessions blur into months of something like routine. The cottage feels like home now — loud, messy, alive. He learns that Eliot can drink most people under the table and still remember every line of a sonnet. That he hides his tenderness behind wit. That he’s braver than he lets on.
Quentin starts to think maybe he could stay here forever.
One night, it’s just the two of them. The others have gone to bed, and the fire’s burned low. The TA-DA sign glows faintly, throwing shadows across Eliot’s face.
Eliot is on the couch, sprawled elegantly, eyes half-lidded. “Show me something magical,” he murmurs.
Quentin laughs, nervous. “You’ve seen every spell I know.”
“Not true,” Eliot says. “I haven’t seen you.”
It’s a line, obviously. But the way he says it makes Quentin’s stomach twist.
He picks up a deck of cards from the table and murmurs a small mess of words. The cards lift into the air, spinning lazily in a soft spiral. The light catches the edges, making them shimmer gold. A play on what got him here in the first place.
Here.
To Eliot.
Eliot watches, transfixed. “Beautiful,” he whispers.
Quentin’s cheeks burn. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t diminish it,” Eliot says quietly. “You made something out of nothing. That’s the whole point.”
The cards fall one by one, scattering around them. The last lands in Eliot’s lap. He looks down, then up, eyes warm and serious.
“See?” he says. “Even illusion takes work.”
Before Quentin can answer, Eliot leans in and kisses him.
It’s soft, tasting faintly of wine and smoke and something so uniquely Eliot. Quentin’s heart stutters. His hand finds Eliot’s shoulder without thinking, like gravity.
When they part, neither speaks for a moment. The fire pops. The TA-DA sign glows. The air feels charged.
Eliot smiles — a little shy, for once. “Welcome to Brakebills, Coldwater. More officially.”
Quentin laughs breathlessly, dizzy with it all. “Thanks. I think.”
And somewhere deep inside, he feels it click — like magic, recognizing its source.
Something has begun.
All The Ways We Find Each Other
The first thing Quentin saw when he and Alice walked back across the Brakebills lawn, after returning from the absolute hell that had been Brakebills south, was smoke rising from the Physical Kids Cottage.
For half a second, he thought fire—but then he heard music, laughter, the clatter of plates.
A grill.
Of course, Eliot would throw a barbecue in February.
He was outside in sunglasses and a linen shirt, tongs in one hand, drink in the other, utterly at ease.
And next to him, turning the ribs with practiced hands, was someone Quentin didn’t quite recognize—broad-shouldered, a soft laugh that fit too easily into Eliot’s rhythm.
Mike.
Eliot saw Quentin first.
“Look who survived Antarctica!” he called, raising his glass.
“Barely,” Quentin muttered back.
Alice smiled politely. Eliot handed Mike a plate and sauntered over, smelling of smoke and spice and sunshine.
“So,” he said, eyes flicking from Quentin to Alice, “you two finally defrosted enough to make it official?”
Quentin blushed; Alice squeezed his hand.
“Ah. She seduced you. Congratulations.”
Quentin blushed before arguing, “Maybe I seduced her.”
Eliot made a face, muttering a quick “Please.” Before his grin sharpened for a heartbeat—then smoothed. “Adorable. I approve.”
It should have been easy—reunion, jokes, food—but everything in Quentin felt a half-beat off. The world had gone on without him. Eliot had gone on. Quentin was sort of with Alice, and Eliot was obsessed with Mike.
The kiss in the cottage and the beginning of the year felt so far away now. It was…confusing. For them both.
Especially because Mike all but moved into the Cottage that week. He fixed the radio, left Eliot humming in the mornings. Eliot loved him. Quentin told himself he did too.
If he loved him, maybe it could help him be closer to Eliot.
But some nights, when the party thinned and the others stumbled off to bed, he’d pass the living room and see Eliot and Mike curled together under the glow of the TA-DA sign. The sight hit like static—beautiful, unbearable.
He’d go back to Alice’s room, hold her tighter than he meant to, and wonder what was wrong with him.
The illusion of everything cracked fast.
Mike wasn’t really Mike. The Beast was wearing his face, and after trying to kill Quentin and hurting Penny instead, everything spiraled so quickly in different parts. Everyone a player on the stage of the nightmare unfolding faster than anyone else could keep up with. Quentin is trying to save Penny, Eliot…in trying to save everyone else, killing Mike.
Once again, creating circumstances that led to them becoming the worst possible parallels of each other. In a way that changed them both.
In ways, they wouldn’t even really start to process much later.
Eliot stopped sleeping. He drank. He smiled too widely. He threw three parties in a week and never once tasted the food. Took drugs that didn’t go together. Became a meaner version of the kind boy who would show up at Q’s door and offer nighttime cigarettes under the stars.
Quentin tried to talk to him once on the roof.
Eliot sat with his legs dangling over the edge, bottle between his knees. “Don’t,” he said before Quentin could speak. “I know the speech. I’ve given it.”
Quentin swallowed hard. “You know…you killed the Beast’s host, not your boyfriend. You saved people, El.”
“Tell that to the part of me that liked him. Did he even love me? Was any of it real?”
Quentin made a helpless noise in the back of his throat. Everything was different, everything felt confusing. They used to be so good about orbiting each other and now…
Eliot didn’t look up. “I’m fine, Q.”
“You’re not.”
“Neither are you.”
They sat in silence until Eliot spoke again, voice raw. “Do you know what it’s like to love someone and have to kill them?”
Quentin swallowed. “No.” But he did know what it was like to love someone and feel dead inside without them to love you back.
“Lucky you.”
He tipped the bottle toward the skyline. “I keep thinking if I drink enough, I’ll forget what his hands felt like.”
“You won’t.”
“I know.”
They watched the sun come up in silence. Quentin wanted to reach out; Eliot didn’t look at him.
—------
When Margo suggested battle magic, they all agreed because not agreeing felt like weakness. And because, to be very honest, what else was there?
Everything was hopeless, and everything was a mess, and it was up to them to fix it despite dying thirty-nine times trying to do the same exact thing.
Thirty-nine times. This would be the last.
“Emotion is interference,” she said. “We bottle it, we control it.”
Eliot laughed softly. “Perfect. I’ve been bottling emotions my whole life.”
The first lesson was in a clearing outside wandering eyes of the school. Candles, sigils, chalk dust. Quentin felt the spell grab at his chest, drawing out every messy thing inside him — grief, hope, want — until he was hollow and light. Across the circle, Eliot was laughing through tears, until it was like he was shut off. A switch dimmed, and the bottled glow reflected in his eyes.
“This is what it feels like not to feel,” Eliot whispered.
It terrified Quentin, but he didn’t stop.
And, in his own way, he thought the same thing. This is what it would be like to not carry it around. Maybe Quentin would always understand the deeper meaning of Eliot and maybe Eliot would always understand the deeper meaning of Quentin.
They had bigger issues at the moment.
They kept meeting, kept bottling things up. Problems kept getting bigger until the emotions came back, and then one night, they had drunk way too much.
Eliot had asked about Chatwin's Torrent, and Quentin felt his very soul ache for the boy next to him. He knew what it was like to wish for it. The only one Q thought ever really understood him in his lifetime was Eliot.
Then they were stumbling to bed, laughing and touching. Margo was crying and he was just… there. Surrounded by Margo and Eliot, the only people he knew he could trust. There are flashes of memory of skin, and scent, and swollen lips against his, the taste of Eliot inside his very being until he wakes up wrapped up in the two of them. Alice watching while they slept.
It almost felt like a relief. The ending of things between him and Alice.
Not to say that Morning wasn’t brutal, it was. Sunlight through stained glass, the hangover of too much magic and truth. Alice’s voice rose from the hallway — accusation, betrayal. Quentin yelled back until his throat hurt. Margo stormed out; the Cottage fell quiet.
Eliot sat in the window, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, hair mussed, eyes unreadable.
“You done screaming yet?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Quentin admitted.
“Welcome to adulthood.”
“This isn’t funny, Eliot!”
Eliot just looked at him, no humor in his eyes, and said, “Oh, but it absolutely is, Quentin.”
Quentin’s voice dropped. “Was any of it real?”
Eliot looked at him for a long time, then away. “You tell me.”
The silence that followed said everything neither of them could.
By the time the next disaster came — whispers of Fillory, of the Beast waiting beyond — they were all, in many ways, ghosts of their former selves. Margo packed weapons; Alice gathered spells and books; Eliot poured one last drink and touched the TA-DA sign for luck. Quentin was…not doing well. The hope of Fillory. Of everything he dreamed of as a child becoming a reality, it was the only thing he was clinging to.
Maybe it was magic like the books. Maybe it would fix everything. Fix him. Fix whatever was so fundamentally broken that he couldn’t even help or truly talk honestly with the one person who really mattered. Quentin knew it mattered. Knew it was important. That they were getting further apart, and if not now, when? If they really were going into a death mission, wouldn’t now be the time?
Quentin was a coward. He always had been.
Is it better to speak or to die?
He was going to do one or the other with how things were going.
Quentin hesitated in the doorway. “You ready?”
Eliot gave that half-smile that always meant no, but I’ll pretend.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s go save the world.”
They all gathered around the button with Penny, carrying all their unfinished sentences with them — two people who had loved each other in a hundred almosts, on their way to the place where, unknown to the both of them at the time, they would finally remember how.
—---
The day the crowns became theirs, they cheered. Made a ceremony out of the intimacy shared between all of them. Celebrated each other. Tried to close one chapter and open another, all of them, and especially Eliot, with tears in their eyes.
What awaited them was not what they would have expected. No Trumpets, banners, or a cheering crowd.
In fact, Fillory was kind of going to shit. And it was just another thing on their group's list to fix and save and deal with. Must be a Monday.
Eliot laughed because that’s what people expected of a High King. Quentin paced because that’s only what he knew how to do.
It should have felt like triumph. Instead, it felt like the end of something they hadn’t finished building.
After things had settled, Eliot stood in the center of Castle Whitespire, his flask, as always, in his hand. The world below looked painted on. Quentin joined him quietly, the new weight of his crown digging into his hairline.
“Behold,” Eliot said, sweeping an arm over the kingdom. “Everything the light touches belongs to us. Except, of course, the parts that don’t.”
Quentin tried to smile. “It doesn’t feel real.”
“Neither do we.”
For a moment, the wind caught Eliot’s sleeve, brushing Quentin’s hand. It would have been easy to turn, to say something honest. Instead, they let the wind fill the silence between them.
The silence was filling more often between them, lately. Quentin wondered if it would ever burst.
The first months blurred into routine: audiences, councils, banquets. Fillory very much far from adoring its new rulers, those odd magicians from another world. Children of Earth.
They called Eliot High King; he played the part well. Took to it better than anyone had expected in some ways, and had priorities skewed in others. Eliot told himself it was a learning curve. At night, though, Quentin heard him pacing the marble halls, footsteps echoing like the metronome of regret. He wondered if he was the only one who really knew how much this was weighing on Eliot. How much did he actually care?
Quentin knew more than anyone that Eliot loved to pretend he didn’t care about anything. Or anyone.
Then, on top of everything else, as it always seemed to go for them, things got worse.
When she ascended—when she burned herself into a Niffin—he felt the world split in two. Half of it was still hers, and half of it was ash.
A new series of problems came and didn’t stop coming.
Quentin did the unspeakable. He killed gods to fix it: Ember and Umber, the twin rams who had birthed this place.
Quentin had killed the gods that had saved his life countless times in his imagination. In the safety of his books. His greatest comfort. The very idea of Fillory is what saved his life.
Unfortunately, reality never quite lives up to the imagination.
The spell worked and also it didn’t; the world shuddered, people came from seemingly no where and then…everything shut off.
You could feel it the second Magic died. A phantom limb. An ache no one knew they would have until it happened.
Magic was gone. And it was Quentin's fault.
Eliot kept ruling because he didn’t know how to stop or what else to do. Margo ruled because someone had to. Quentin wandered between worlds, the reluctant messenger of a dying miracle.
When he returned later, the palace had gone quiet. Margo met him at the gate, fierce as ever.
“Welcome home, your melancholy majesty.”
“Don’t start,” Quentin muttered.
“Start? You two never stopped.” She jabbed a thumb toward the throne room. “High King’s pretending wine is a personality again. Maybe you can interrupt the performance.”
Eliot was on the dais, crown askew, reading petitions with one hand and drinking with the other. He looked up when Quentin entered, and for a second the act dropped.
“You came back,” he said softly.
“Somebody had to check you hadn’t destroyed what was left of this place. You’re High King but, you know, I like to think I’m the favorite really.”
Eliot smiled. “Darling. If anything, we’re hated in equal measure.” He tipped his glass to Quentin with a smile that looked almost real.
They talked that night in the garden—about nothing, about everything. The smell of crushed mint, the stars too close overhead. Every few sentences, their words tripped over what they didn’t say. Quentin wanted to ask Do you still think about me? Eliot wanted to answer every day.
Neither did. They did what they both do best. Ignored it.
Time passed differently in Fillory. Quentin traveled back to Earth whenever the group or the library demanded it; each time he returned, Eliot was a little older around the eyes, a little steadier in the mask he wore.
They became polite again. Letters instead of confessions. Toasts instead of touch.
One night, after far too much wine (if you could call it that. Eliot was trying his best but it was rough and wine really was pushing it in definition.) and too much time spent trying to come up with ways to solve the never ending list of issues the banter between them had returned to a state of almost normal.
Margo teased them endlessly. “Honestly, you two make longing look like an Olympic sport.”
Eliot shrugged. “I always was good with endurance.”
Quentin rolled his eyes, but the joke lodged somewhere under his ribs and stayed there. If he was very honest with himself, and he wasn’t, the longing was chipping away at him every day. Consuming him in ways he couldn’t understand.
He wondered if Eliot was suffering the same way. If it tore him apart the way it did for himself.
Then came rumor—whispered first in the library, then in the back corridors of the castle: there’s a way to bring magic back. Seven keys, scattered across worlds, each tied to a fairy tale Quest.
Quentin found Eliot in the map room, staring at a parchment of Fillory that seemed to shift under the candlelight.
“It’s real,” Quentin said
.“Everything terrible usually is.”
“We can fix this.”
“We?” Eliot glanced up, brow arched. “Since when do we still exist as a grammatical unit?”
Quentin hesitated. “Since always.”
Something fragile moved in Eliot’s expression—hope, or maybe exhaustion dressed as hope.
He exhaled. “Fine. Because everything else is just going so well.”
The journey was long and strange: They found keys in riddles, in dragons, in themselves. Each victory costs something—blood, time, faith.
They stood before the Fillory clock in the cottage, its gears silent since the day magic died. The air around it shimmered, expectant. Until a keyhole opened up.
They looked at each other in surprise.
Eliot reached for Quentin’s hand—hesitated—and then didn’t.
“Ready for another terrible idea?”
“With you?” Quentin said, smiling for real this time. “Always.”
The key slid home. The clock opened up, light beaming through, a portal once more. Time, faithful and furious, swallowed them whole as they walked through it together.
—-------------
Stepping into the clock brought them back to the forests of Fillory.
They looked around in wonder, breathing in the air, the hum under their skin. Eliot was the first to say it. “You feel that, Q? It’s Magic we have Magic.” Before they crushed each other into a hug and a touch between them that hasn't been felt in months.
Eliot held Quentin tight, and Quentin squeezed him back. How long had it been since they’ve hugged like this? Months? Never?
They were so….touchy. Eliot had always been so tactile. Especially with Quentin. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed it when it had gone away.
They noticed shortly after, they had gone to the past. Not Present Fillory. Which made things more complicated. Whitespire was still in construction, and the world they were in now was not the same one they were Kings in.
After a journey to try to find….something. They stumbled upon a cabin, an old man, and a set of tiles.
Quentin knew instantly; Eliot did not. “The Moasic. We need to create a pattern that represents the beauty of all life, and then the key will be revealed. It’s in the books, Eliot. Did you never read them? You’re the High King; how did you never read the bo-? You know what. Not the time.” He cut himself off, even though Eliot was smiling down at him with a sort of fondness that Quentin had missed for a long time.
“The beauty of all life?” Eliot said sarcastically. “Could it be any more vague?”
And so, with a cabin, a quest, and an infinite amount of possibilities in the tiles before them. They got to work.
They tried to understand it that first day. They learned that magic worked everywhere except on the tiles. The mosaic wasn’t random: there had to be some specific pattern and color happening. The pattern did nothing when they placed the tiles into place, as if displeased. Quentin sketched diagrams. Eliot built a fire and made tea he found in the cabin that tasted faintly of roses and ash.
When night fell, they sat on the cottage steps watching stars crawl across a sky that hadn’t yet learned where it would end.
“Fillory before the fairy tale,” Eliot murmured. “Imagine that.”
Quentin smiled faintly. “You sound almost happy.”
“I’m almost everything. And there's liquor in my tea.” He looked up. “Come on. We’ll start again tomorrow.”
—------
Days became a rhythm: work the tiles, argue, laugh, collapse exhausted.
The mosaic resisted them. Eliot and Quentin tried everything they could think of. One day they tried for just patterns of color; another day they destroyed what they’d built. Quentin kept notes in the margins of a notebook that would never survive the test of time. Chalk to match the colors of the tile. Making sure they didn’t waste time repeating patterns twice. Eliot hummed to himself as he sorted tiles by hue, pretending not to care but always noticing when Quentin’s hand brushed his.
Eliot learned to enchant something else to replace his bottomless flask. They spent the days working hard and the nights curled up together. Sipping from the makeshift flask and talking about anything and everything.
They learned to cook together, to mend the leaky roof, to barter with the farmers who passed through the valley. They learned which berries were safe, which were not, and how to wake each other when the nightmares came. Quentin learned that Eliot was surprisingly a morning person and Eliot learned to let Quentin wake up on his own if he wanted to avoid the grumpiest version of the boy possible.
They worked together and without the pressure of the life they had before, something about them seemed to become easier. More open. They were returning to the state they had started in, that more vulnerable, careless, touchy versions of themselves. Except even better this time. Deeper.
Some days were good. The light would fall just right, the tiles would seem to sing beneath their hands, and Eliot would grin the way he hadn’t since the Cottage.
Other days were unbearable: the puzzle stubborn, their tempers shorter, the silence between them sharp enough to bleed on. Eliot getting frazzled and throwing himself down onto the tiles with dramatics. Quentin had little tantrums in a way that Eliot found oddly endearing.
Once, after a week of failures, Quentin threw a tile against the wall. It shattered into dust.
Eliot watched him for a long moment, then quietly swept the fragments into his palm. “You can’t win by breaking it,” he said.
“I’m not trying to win.”
Eliot’s voice softened. “Then what are you trying to do?”
“Fix something.”
“You can’t fix something you’re actively breaking, Q.”
They stared at each other until the sun dipped behind the trees. The question hung there, unanswered.
Autumn found them still in that same cycle. The castle on the horizon had gained a tower. The mosaic came together differently now, deepening with every season’s work. They had built gardens, shelves of books, habits.
They shared a bed. Spent nights wrapped up in each other.
Eliot started whistling again in the mornings. Quentin found himself listening for it, measuring the day by that sound. Sometimes he caught Eliot watching him in return, gaze unreadable but warm.
They told stories in the evenings, half-memory, half-invention. Quentin would talk about growing up in Brooklyn; Eliot would describe his first party at Brakebills, the first time he met Margo, the moment he’d realized magic could be beautiful and cruel at the same time. A childhood spent as a farmhand and a family that would never ever understand him. They laughed more easily now, arguments fading as quickly as they flared.
One night, after too much wine, Quentin looked at the sky and said, “You know what this reminds me of? The TA-DA sign. Same kind of glow.”
Eliot smiled, faint and wistful. “Different audience.”
“Maybe not.” Quentin leaned back on his elbows. “Feels like it’s watching us.”
“Then I hope we’re worth the show.”
“Please. Of course we are.”
Winter crept in. They patched the roof again, built a second fireplace, and kept working even when the tiles burned cold against their fingers. Eliot's childhood had made him masterfully competent at keeping up with the homestead they had been building around them. It shouldn’t make Quentin's belly swoop, but it does. Time became slippery—days blending into months, laughter into new habits. The field outside the cottage grew quiet except for the two of them.
One morning, Quentin woke to find Eliot already outside, arranging tiles with uncharacteristic precision. Knew instantly something wasn’t right. Frost gleamed in his hair. “Couldn’t sleep?” Quentin asked.
“Couldn’t stop thinking.”
“About what?”
“How much of this will matter when we’re gone?”
Quentin knelt beside him. “Maybe that’s not the point.”
Eliot looked at him then, eyes bright and tired. “Then what is? What is the point of all of this if we never, ever, understand it?”
Quentin didn’t know yet. But he would. The quest had chosen them for a reason. He just had to keep reminding himself of that fact.
By the time the first winter began to loosen its grip, they had forgotten what silence used to sound like.
Snow melted from the eaves of the cottage in slow rhythms, drumming against the tin pail Eliot kept under the leak they still hadn’t fixed. When it stopped, the valley sighed—streams running again, trees creaking back into life.
Eliot was outside stacking wood when Quentin came to the doorway, hair sticking up from sleep.
“You’re up early,” Quentin mumbled.
Eliot balanced another log. “Insomnia looks productive on me.”
“You could’ve woken me.”
“And deprive you of dreaming you were back at Brakebills?” Eliot’s grin was faint, real. “Didn’t seem kind.”
Quentin knew it meant that Eliot was struggling. Didn’t want to talk about it. He left it alone.
Inside, breakfast waited: the last jar of honey, bread a little too dark. They ate without hurry, listening to birds testing their voices. There were days when words felt unnecessary; they had learned each other’s silences.
The snowmelt made the mosaic shine again. Each color seemed sharper, as though the tiles had been sleeping too. They began clearing away the debris winter had left—mud, twigs, a family of small, indignant birds nesting in a corner.
Quentin knelt, fingers numb from cold, and said, “It’s funny. I thought nearly a year of this would drive me insane.”
Eliot straightened, brushing dirt from his palms. “You say that like it didn’t.”
Quentin looked up, smiling crookedly. “You make it bearable.”
Eliot didn’t answer, only bent to help, the tips of their gloves touching briefly.
They learned to mark time by the smallest things: the way the creek flooded each month; the first sprigs of mint pushing through the garden; the slow fading of the bruise-purple sunsets into summer gold.
When the work frustrated them, Eliot would throw himself backward into the grass and declare the project a cosmic joke. Quentin would laugh, exasperated, then join him, tracing the constellations with his finger. They’d name them ridiculous things: The Snoring Hedgehog, The Eternal Laundry, The Two Idiots Who Never Learn.
Eliot sometimes caught Quentin watching him and would ask, “What?” without looking away from the sky.
Quentin would shrug. “Just… checking if you’re still here.”
“Where else would I go?” Eliot would reply, and for a while it felt like a promise.
Late that summer, the valley blazed with wildflowers. They harvested fruit from trees that hadn’t existed a year before, and the mosaic finally began to cooperate. Patterns apPlumed where none had been, hints of a story neither could yet read.
Quentin spent evenings sketching possibilities. Eliot cooked—sometimes experimenting with what little they had, but with confidence—singing under his breath. The scent of roasting Plums filled the cottage. Sometimes Quentin would lean in the doorway, watching him. Eliot pretended not to notice.
One night, the experiment ended in a minor explosion of syrup and laughter.
“We’re hopeless,” Eliot gasped, wiping his hands.
“Speak for yourself. I’m a fantastic sous-chef.”
“You can’t even pronounce sous-chef.”
“Fine,” Quentin said, grinning. “I’m a helper.”
Eliot smiled back, a little dazed. “You are. My sweet little helper.”
Fillory sometimes brought storms so intense they made the cottage roof leak again; tempers shortened. They argued over the pattern, over whose turn it was to fetch water, over nothing at all. The fights never lasted. There was no one else to be angry with but each other, and no one else to forgive.
One gray morning, Quentin found Eliot sitting on the porch, blanket around his shoulders, eyes fixed on the horizon.
“What are you thinking?” Quentin asked.
Eliot’s breath fogged. “That the sky looks like old glass.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Eliot glanced at him, tired smile returning. “You’re getting better at noticing that.”
They stayed there until the clouds broke and sunlight spilled across the field, lighting the mosaic like a lantern.
The anniversary crept up quietly.
Quentin realized it when he opened his old notebook and saw the date scrawled near the back: day one—mosaic.
He spent the morning cleaning the tiles, brushing away dust and snow. Eliot joined him without asking why. By dusk, the sky had turned clear and sharp, the stars beginning to bloom.
They lit a fire, carried their dinner outside, and sat cross-legged on the mosaic. The stones held the day’s warmth, glowing faintly, echoing a light that once blinked above another home.
Eliot poured wine into chipped cups. “A toast,” he said. “To insanity.”
Quentin laughed. “To persistence.”
They clinked cups. The sound was small and bright.
After a while, the quiet deepened. The stars shimmered in the tiles; the fire crackled low. Quentin turned his cup in his hands, gathering the nerve that had been building for months.
Curled up next to each other in an echo of being curled up together in the cottage, under the light of that silly little sign. A parallel of a life that seemed so far away from this one, but a mirror in its image.
“Hey, so, um—” he began.
Eliot looked up, puzzled. “Hey—?”
Quentin leaned forward and kissed him.
It was soft, startled, inevitable. Eliot froze for a heartbeat, then answered—gentle, steady, nothing rushed or uncertain. When they parted, the fire popped, and somewhere in the dark an owl called once, as if to mark the moment.
Eliot’s voice was barely above a whisper. “That took you long enough.”
Quentin smiled, breath catching. “You could’ve said something.”
“I was waiting to see if you’d figure it out.”
“Happy Anniversary, Q.”
And if they spent that night kissing until their lips were swollen and bruised, if they had giggled walking together to the little cabin, to their shared bed, full of markings of their shared life, and if Quentin had let Eliot open him up and come inside him. Bonding them together, turning them into one, beautiful, magical being? Who was to know?
They didn’t talk about it that night. They didn’t need to. They sat side by side until the fire went out, the stars above them as bright as the sign had been in another lifetime.
Morning came pale and cold. Quentin woke first, the fire gone to ash, Eliot asleep beside him with one hand caught against his own sleeve. For a while, he didn’t move. The valley was washed clean after night rain, the stream louder, the grass beaded with light. It felt like standing on the first page of something new.
Eliot stirred, blinking toward him. “You’re staring.”
“I thought you might be a dream,” Quentin said.
Eliot yawned. “Flattering. Unlikely.”
He pushed himself up, hair falling in his eyes, and for a second the air between them was shy again—two people suddenly aware of what they’d admitted.
The days didn’t change all at once. They still rose with the sun, worked the tiles, and argued over shades of blue. But there were pauses now—small touches that lingered, laughter that broke tension instead of deepening it. Occasionally kissing under the stars together over dinner.
When Quentin grew impatient with the puzzle, Eliot would distract him by inventing new names for the colors.
“This one’s bruise of a saint,” he’d declare, holding up a tile.
“That’s purple,” Quentin said.
“Language is a matter of confidence.”
They learned to cook better, to keep the roof patched, to share the work without needing to ask. Evenings belonged to stories: Quentin reading aloud from a water-stained book of Fillorian fables while Eliot mended shirts by the fire. Sometimes Eliot would hum under his breath, a tune with no name. Quentin began to fall asleep to it. Eliot knew this, and made sure he did it to help Quentin sleep every night.
As months slipped by, affection became routine, like breathing. They would reach for each other absent-mindedly—an elbow brushed when passing, a hand offered without thinking. The intimacy was light, not the desperate spark of new lovers but something steadier: the kind of warmth that builds from repetition.
Once, when Quentin sliced his hand on a broken tile, Eliot caught it before he could pull away. He wrapped the cut in linen, his fingers careful.
“You’re reckless,” he said.
“You’re bossy.”
“I’m right.”
“Usually,” Quentin admitted, and Eliot’s mouth softened into the smallest smile.
Summer returned, their second. The mosaic had still not relented, a spiral of colors that shimmered differently each dawn. They still didn’t know the pattern’s meaning. Sometimes they wondered aloud if there even was one.
One humid evening, Eliot opened a bottle of wine that had survived from their first months. They drank it on the porch, watching fireflies gather at the edge of the field.
“Do you ever think we’re missing the point?” Quentin asked.
“Constantly,” Eliot said. “But I’ve decided that’s the point.”
He looked out across the valley where the half-built castle glimmered in the distance. “We keep looking for endings. Maybe this is about learning to live without them.”
Quentin turned the cup in his hands. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not. It’s just practice.”
They sat until the bottle was empty, the night full of the slow, steady sounds of a world still being born.
They began to notice the seasons differently. The second winter didn’t feel like confinement; it felt like shelter. Eliot would read aloud while Quentin mended tools. When storms swept through, they played chess with pieces carved from leftover tile. The silences between them had changed: no longer heavy, but companionable.
Still, sometimes the quiet frightened Eliot. He would lie awake and imagine the clock reappearing, time dragging them back. The thought of losing what they’d built made his chest ache.
Quentin caught him staring at the ceiling one of those nights. “What is it?”
“Just… thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.”
Eliot laughed softly. “We should go back to sleep before we remember the rest of the world.”
The valley bloomed, brighter than in their first year. They had learned which plants to keep, which to let run wild. One morning, a traveler passed—a woman with windburned cheeks and a cloak too fine for a commoner. She held baskets of Peaches and Plums, offering them with a radiant smile. Her name was Ariel.
Eliot offered her tea. They didn’t know then how much she would change the rhythm of the cottage.
For a while, it was easy. Ariel was clever, kind, and curious about the mosaic. She worked beside them some days, singing to herself in a language that made the tiles hum. Quentin admired her brightness; Eliot admired the way she made Quentin laugh. He told himself it didn’t matter.
Some days, Ariel and Quentin went off, and Quentin shifted his focus from the mosaic, from Eliot into something more…pure. Anyone could see they were falling for each other. It shouldn’t have made Eliot’s insides ache.
But one evening, as he watched them bent together over a drawing, heads nearly touching, something tight and unfamiliar turned under his ribs.
Later, after a fight they had, one of their worst in a long time, he muttered angrily to Quentin as he turned away from him, “If you want to live your life, live it here.”
The words sounded brittle, like glass cooling too fast. What he meant was with me, and the night seemed to know it. Quentin didn’t.
—--
Ariel had been in their lives long enough for the cottage to forget it had ever been a home for two. She moved lightly, like someone always half-listening for a different song, and the rooms seemed to brighten around her. She laughed at Quentin’s endless sketches of the mosaic, teased Eliot’s cooking, filled the house with a kind of warmth that neither man knew they’d been missing.
When she told them she was expecting, she did it as though sharing a secret she could no longer hold by herself. “There’ll be another set of hands to help with your impossible puzzle,” she said.
Eliot blinked, then smiled in disbelief. “Good lord, the next generation of idiots.”
Quentin laughed, but the sound was shaky. He was happy, terrified, full. Ariel reached for both of their hands and held them there, one heartbeat between them that already felt larger than the cottage.
The months that followed blurred into care and wonder. Eliot built a cradle from leftover tile boxes. Quentin painted its sides with clumsy constellations. Ariel hummed while she worked, her voice filling the space between their breaths. They spoke sometimes about the world beyond the valley, but mostly they spoke about the future that fit inside their small house.
When the child came—tiny, red-faced, impossibly loud—they named him Theodore, Teddy for short. Ariel laughed weakly at the seriousness of the name. “He’s a Fillorian miracle, not a bank clerk,” she said. Quentin told her, very quietly, that it was his father's name, in another life. Eliot cradled the bundle in his arms and promised to teach him both table manners and profanity. What he didn’t say out loud was how much he had loved the little being in his arms, and his silent vow to always protect him.
In the first weeks, there was no room for anything but astonishment. Quentin walked the floors at night, the baby’s heartbeat pressed against his chest. Eliot sang nonsense songs until dawn. They took turns sleeping, cooking, laughing at their own helplessness. The mosaic waited quietly outside, patient as time. They had a new focus. A better quest.
It was a fever that took Ariel. Quick, cruel, a brightness going out in a single day. They buried her beneath the Plum tree by the stream, where she had liked to sit and watch them work. Teddy was too young to remember her voice, but her songs stayed in the air; sometimes the wind still seemed to hum them.
After Ariel’s funeral, the valley felt too big. For days, Quentin walked the perimeter of the field because standing still hurt more. Eliot followed him once, said nothing, and only carried a thermos of tea and two cups. They drank by the stream until the sun went down and the sound of the water filled the spaces where words didn’t fit.
That night, Teddy cried for the first time without reason—no fever, no hunger, just loss echoing through him. Quentin held him until the small body shuddered itself quiet. When he looked up, Eliot was leaning in the doorway, face pale, candlelight behind him.
“We’ll figure it out,” Eliot said softly.
“How?”
“Same way we did everything else. Badly at first. You’re not alone here, Q. I’ve got you. Both of you.”
Afterward, the cottage was different again—emptier and somehow more alive. Quentin moved through his grief by caring: feeding, mending, holding. Eliot stayed close because space felt unthinkable. He held Quentin while he cried, covered him with blankets, and took Teddy out while Quentin napped through his grief. And then, as it goes, time gives things space to settle. Life took shape again.
—------------
Raising a child turned out to be another kind of magic—ordinary, relentless, impossible. Teddy learned to crawl across unfinished tiles, leaving handprints in dust. He learned to walk between them, wobbling toward whoever knelt first. The mosaic became his playground; the cottage, his kingdom.
Eliot surprised himself with patience. He had never wanted children of his own, had never wanted to become his father. Felt he couldn’t break the curse thrust upon him of shitty parents doing shitty things.
But, surprisingly, he was …really good at it. He had been the kind of man who left before anyone could ask him to stay, yet here he was coaxing a toddler to eat porridge, mending tiny clothes by firelight. Quentin watched him and thought, not for the first time, that he’d never seen anyone more beautiful than Eliot Waugh bent over a child’s shoe, muttering at a broken lace.
They divided the days by rhythm rather than rule: Quentin taught Teddy to read, Eliot taught him to bake, and both taught him the constellations. The boy called the brightest one Mama’s Star. On clear nights, they would sit outside, Eliot telling exaggerated stories until Teddy fell asleep between them.
The first time Teddy called Eliot “Papa” instead of “Uncle Eliot”, Eliot had wept while Quentin had grinned.
When the boy’s breathing steadied into sleep, Eliot would glance at Quentin and smile. “We’re doing it,” he whispers, half in disbelief.
Quentin nodded. “We are.”
Time widened. Seasons became milestones—Teddy’s first solo flight on a makeshift kite, the year the Plum tree bore fruit twice, the winter Eliot slipped on the porch, and they both laughed until they cried.
They kept working on the mosaic. Progress was slow, but not desperate anymore. Sometimes they’d manage a few new rows before Teddy came barreling out, demanding attention. Other times, Quentin would abandon the pattern entirely to chase him through the grass, Eliot following with a mock-scolding shout. The field rang with their voices; the world felt whole.
On quiet days, Quentin would pause mid-task and realize how completely he belonged here: the smell of baking bread, Eliot humming while he swept, the steady pulse of a life made of ordinary things. Once, while washing dishes, he said aloud, “I think this is it.”
Eliot looked up from the sink. “What?”
“The meaning. You, him, this. Living it.”
Eliot smiled, eyes soft. “Careful, Q. You’ll make philosophy sound domestic.”
There were arguments, of course. About how much freedom to give Teddy as he grew, and about when to restock supplies from the traders beyond the valley. Once, in a moment of frustration, Quentin accused Eliot of overly coddling their son, being too protective. Eliot shot back, “Sorry, I forgot you prefer your love efficient.” They didn’t speak for an hour. Then Eliot appeared behind him at the workbench, rested a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Next time, remind me that being terrified is part of the job. The burden of parenthood.” That was an apology enough.
When Teddy was fourteen, he asked which of them he looked like. Quentin said, “Your mother.” Eliot said, “Your father.” The boy grinned and went back to his drawings, satisfied.
The cottage aged with them: new roof beams, worn floorboards, a garden that refused symmetry. The mosaic stretched on. Less of the focus each day. When the sunlight hit it just right, the whole valley seemed to breathe.
Eliot went gray at the temples first. Quentin liked it, though he teased him mercilessly. They moved more slowly but laughed more easily. Their love had settled into something beyond speech—a hand reaching across the bed in the dark, a shared glance when Teddy did something foolish and wonderful, a quiet understanding that no matter what came next, they had already found the heart of it.
Teddy left one spring, promising to visit. His shadow disappeared down the road, and the silence that followed was both pride and ache. That night, Quentin and Eliot sat on the porch with their wine, watching the stars bloom.
“You think he’ll be all right?” Quentin asked.
“He was raised by the two most stubborn men in Fillory,” Eliot said. “He’ll outlive us all.”
The area kept changing, growing older alongside them—new trees, softer summers. And so did they. Growing older in age at a seemingly faster pace every day. Eliot’s hands began to shake when he worked the tiles. Quentin took over, humming the tune Eliot used to sing to Teddy. Some days Eliot would nap beneath the Plum tree, sunlight catching the edge of his hair, and Quentin would think, This is still the first day. We just learned how to stay in it.
One evening, as the sun sank, Eliot whispered, “Do you ever think we did it wrong?”
Quentin, setting another tile, said, “If this is wrong, I don’t want to know what right looks like.” He paused and then took a shaky breath. “I have loved getting to love you. Getting to be a father with you. Getting an…entire life with you. What a gift we were given.”
Eliot smiled, eyes bright with unshed tears. “Good answer.” Then, more quietly, “Thank you for loving me.”
—-----
When Eliot’s breath finally left him, the world didn’t collapse; it exhaled. The wind was warm, the tiles didn’t change, and the Plum tree dropped a single fruit that rolled to Quentin’s feet.
He was finally, truly, all alone. And he thought he had known loneliness before, but nothing compared to the tearing inside his chest.
This is loneliness.
That was life. And this was death.
Quentin understood then. The beauty of all life wasn’t hidden in the pattern. It was the pattern—the days they’d lived, the love they’d chosen, the stubborn act of staying. The monotony in the routine of living a life well-loved.
He had planned to bury Eliot near the tiles. Keep him close as he finishes working. There just wasn’t anything left for him to do. And in doing so, found the golden tile, the last piece. The Key. At least before he had to hand it over to a much younger Jane Chatwin.
And then…nothingness.
He was right back in the room at Brakebills. About to put a key into a clock and go on a quest, before Margo came in and stopped it from happening.
—---------
After Margo had explained her side of things, the letter she had gotten from Quentin in the past, letting her know they lived a really good life together, even when they had been stuck there. And after a few minutes of serious emotional processing. Noticing that he did feel older, he felt different. He could tell Eliot did too.
They had to go back to work. They had the key they needed, it was time to tackle the next part of the quest and all of the chaos still happening in both worlds, and more dire, in Fillory.
When they returned to Fillory, Castle Whitespire gleamed on the horizon—rebuilt, but carrying the same echoes. Margo moved through the hallways like a general inspecting her troops. “We’ve got work to do,” she said. “World-saving doesn’t wait for emotional decompression.”
But later, when the three of them reached Margo's room, something stopped them. On the table sat a woven basket: peaches, plums, their skins shining like captured sunlight. A folded note rested beside it. Q.
Quentin reached first, fingers trembling. “I sent this. I remember sending this.”
Eliot’s throat worked. “You sent these.”
Quentin nodded.
They looked at each other—two people who had been young once, and old, and everything in between. Then Eliot took a peach, bit into it. The taste burst through him: summer air, laughter, Teddy’s small hand clutching his sleeve. Quentin followed, juice running down his wrist, and the world fell open.
Images poured in—years, decades, a lifetime. The mosaic glowed at dawn. The smell of rain on the cottage roof. The sound of Eliot’s voice reading by firelight. Ariel’s song. Their son’s laughter. And the ending, Eliot’s hand in his, Eliot's lips on his own.
Eliot staggered, gripping the edge of the table before sitting down in absolute shock. “We had a life together.”
Quentin’s voice broke. “We had…we lived there for so long.”
Eliot looked up, eyes bright. “We had a family. A son…I got so old.”
Quentin’s breath caught. “You died.”
Eliot nodded. “I died.”
They stood there, shaking, stunned, tasting the sweetness that had outlived time.
Then Quentin said, very quietly, “We loved each other for a really, really long time. It worked.”
Eliot nodded, tears tracking down his face. “It did.”
—--------
Things changed after that. They both had the wisdom of a life well lived and two people who knew the shape of each other in any form, back in the bodies and lives of people much younger than they were. They shared a bed. Couldn’t sleep without each other. They kissed and fucked and cried and talked about shared memories of a life that never really came to be lived, but lives inside of them all the same.
A week later, they went back to Brakebills. Margo had demanded they retrieve a few books, some of their old notes. The physical kids' cottage looked smaller than they remembered—half buried in ivy, the air thick with ghosts.
Inside, dust motes danced in the sunlight, and the TA-DA sign still hung crooked over the mantel. Eliot reached up, straightened it, and laughed softly. “Still ridiculous.”
Quentin looked at him, heart full. “Do you remember our first kiss? Right here, before everything?”
“How could I forget?” Eliot’s smile trembled. “You were awkward as hell.”
“You kissed me back.”
“I always did.”
Quentin stepped closer, until the space between them was only memory. “Then maybe we should just… keep doing what works. Officially.”
Eliot leaned in, and the years folded again—past and present, cottage and mosaic, all the lives they’d lived collapsing into one long heartbeat. The kiss was gentle, knowing. A promise made and kept across time.
A parallel of life times. Kissing under this sign, kissing under the stars near the mosaic. All the kisses in between, in all of their timelines, in every life. Two sides of the same coin.
Outside, the afternoon light spilled golden through the windows, glinting off the old glass. The TA-DA sign flickered in the draft, letters catching the glow as if lit from within.
Peaches and plums.
Peaches and plums.
And the world, once again, was beautiful.