Chapter Text
The day after Quentin and Alice break up, Eliot walks into the kitchen at the penthouse to find Quentin standing at the counter drinking coffee. Their eyes lock as soon as Quentin turns his head; Eliot tries not to read this as a good omen. Steeling himself to tell Quentin everything he’s spent months convinced he’d never get the chance to say, everything he knows with every bone in his body he has to say now or regret keeping secret for the rest of his life, he says, “Hey, Q, can I —”
At the same time Quentin says, “El, I need —”
They break off; blink at each other; laugh a little, nervously. Eliot has that first slope of a rollercoaster feeling, a beehive or wildfire let loose in his internal organs, like he’s seconds away from either dying spectacularly or embarking on the best day of his life.
“You first,” says Quentin.
“Are you sure?” says Eliot, even though part of him is convinced if he waits any longer he will throw up, which would kind of kill the mood.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Okay.” It’s go time, says a voice in Eliot’s head that sounds like Margo, which makes him want to track her down and apologize because Margo would never, ever say that. Like he’s back onstage in his high school’s run-down auditorium, Eliot checks his posture; makes sure he’s angled forward; lifts his chin. Deep breath. No going back now.
“I’m in love with you,” he says, to rip the Band-Aid off, and perhaps because some part of him hoped Quentin would hear that, drop his coffee, and start making out with him immediately. Which he doesn’t, but, like, their situation is complicated, so — that’s fine. Eliot perseveres. “I’m in love with you, and I have been, ever since that day at Whitespire, and — I’m sorry. You did the brave thing, the true thing, and offered me something real, and I — did what I do, and shut it down, but not because I didn’t love you, Q. I did. I do. But I was — scared. Scared of feeling something so big, and getting something so good. Scared of fucking it up. Which isn’t an excuse, obviously, what I did was — was unforgivable, and if you want to, like, throw plates at me or whatever, you can. But I loved you then, and not telling you before you died has been my biggest regret. And I know, I know you just had a break-up and my timing sucks and I’m a total mess, always have been, but — you loved that mess, once upon a time. So — I just needed to say, if you could ever give me a second chance — if you could ever want to — I’d do it fucking right this time. I promise. Because what we had back there, for fifty years, that was good. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He forces a smile against the tears stinging his eyes. “Proof of concept, right? I — I do want to give it a shot. More than anything, I want that.”
Eliot feels like something definitive should go here, to punctuate the end of his speech. Like maybe this is the part where Quentin says, Oh, Eliot — you’ve made me the happiest man alive, and flings himself into his arms so they can consummate their bliss. In Eliot’s imagination Quentin inexplicably has a Southern accent when he says this, which Eliot blames on the trashy paperbacks he used to steal from his mother’s shelf to read in shameful secret.
Quentin does not do that. He does not burst into grateful weeping at the joy of having his love at last requited; he does not tell Eliot to go fuck himself, always and forever, because it’s too little too late. Quentin stands with his mug of coffee frozen on the way down from his face, staring at Eliot with the kind of mild horror usually triggered by watching news footage of a car accident.
Quentin says, “Oh. Uh, this is awkward.”
Eliot prays just as fervently as he used to in church, and for the exact same thing: that a hellmouth will open up in the center of the floor and the ensuing inferno will swallow him whole.
“I, uh,” says Quentin, “I was going to say… I need… space.”
“Space,” Eliot echoes dumbly. Space. Quentin needs space. That’s — fine.
“Yeah.” Quentin brushes his hair out of his face. Eliot loves the way he brushes his hair out of his face. “It’s just really complicated for me right now, you know, with Alice, and the… undying, and all.”
“Mmhmm.” Eliot thinks he might be nodding. He is not in full control of his faculties anymore. “Totes.”
“Alice offered to get out,” Quentin goes on, “but honestly, this place — it kind of has a lot of memories for me, that I’d rather not... I need a change of scenery, I think. A break from — like, everything. Julia’s mom has this place uptown where the tenants just moved out, so we’re gonna go crash there for a bit — help me get my head back on straight, you know.”
“Right,” says Eliot. “Of course. No, yeah, that makes sense.”
“I’m actually — like I’m packed, we’re leaving pretty much now,” Quentin says. His eyes catch on something in a far corner of the apartment. Eliot tracks his gaze to find Julia, standing there with a black leather suitcase, no doubt having witnessed his entire humiliation.
She mouths sorry and offers probably the most sheepish shrug Julia Wicker is capable of giving, which is kind of like the most modest tone Margo is capable of summoning. It is less than reassuring.
“So, uh — yeah.” Quentin tries to take a sip of his coffee, then peers into the mug, apparently surprised to find it empty. He sets it on the counter. The very last time, Eliot thinks morosely, that I will ever see Quentin set an empty mug of coffee on a counter. Apologetically Quentin adds, “I kind of wish I’d gone first with my thing, now.”
Eliot waves this off. “No, it’s fine. It’s — you know. Right? So — yeah.”
Quentin nods, like Eliot has produced words that communicate content. It’s very kind of him. Quentin is maybe the kindest and best person Eliot has ever met in his life, and also the hottest, and he used to love Eliot, like a for-real love, a fifty-years actual-husbands peaches-and-plums kind of love, and now he needs space. Eliot wonders if he could find the East River dragon and politely request to be eaten. Or perhaps there’s a ravenous beast in Fillory that could use appeasing.
“Sure,” says Quentin. “I’m gonna —” He puts the mug in the sink, then crosses the room to join Julia at the edge.
Eliot waves inanely. “Have fun, you crazy kids.”
Julia smiles at him. “I’ll be coming around.” She starts explaining something about blah blah Kady hedges Library bullshit, but Eliot’s just watched the only thing he’s ever done right wave Sayonara, suckers! and swan-dive into a volcano, so he finds it hard to care.
-
Margo rushes into the upstairs bathroom in the penthouse where Eliot stands at the mirror above the sink, distressed enough to punch right through it until his knuckles are bloody and torn. “I got your bunny. What’s the matter? Are you okay?”
“Bambi,” Eliot says, full of feeling. “Thank God.” He swings around to face her, clamps his hands on her narrow shoulders, and looks her right into the eye to convey the gravity of the situation. “Is Katchmer’s compass-aligned, or what? I’m so goddamn rusty, I swear, I used to be able to do this in my sleep but I’ve been fucking with it for like an hour and I just can’t get it to start.”
“It is compass-aligned, but sometimes the wards Kady’s got on this place shift the ambient’s alignment to magnetic north,” Margo says, frowning. “Opening your index angle about fifteen degrees usually makes up for it. But —”
Eliot turns back to the mirror to run the spell again, following her advice, and — yes, this time it catches. He tugs at the strings in his sixth sense, and this part he really could do in his sleep: twisting here, weaving there, attending to each detail because the details are what makes it, until the last curl falls just so onto his forehead and he’s done. He, Eliot Waugh, has completed his first proper haircut in a shamefully long time. He allows himself a moment to savor it: the artful styling, the familiar silhouette. It’s like a key sliding into a lock: this is the face that has undone young magicians across the state, the face he left Indiana to wear. This is the visage of a man who knows himself and walks through the world with a graceful expertise that’s hard-earned and effortless all at once. The countenance of a heart as frivolous and unbreakable as diamonds, of a spirit that certainly has never cared if certain unimportant individuals have ever needed space. Well-styled and ill-mannered, cocksure and cock-hungry, untouchable except in the filthiest ways — that’s Eliot.
It feels like coming home.
“Perfect,” he declares in satisfaction. Then he plants a wet kiss of gratitude on Margo’s forehead and steps back so she can admire his handiwork. “Well?”
“Uh…” Margo is not nearly as enthused as she ought to be. That’s disappointing. “You look great, but — Jesus, El, was this really about your fucking hair? The bunny said it was an emergency.”
“Oh it very much was,” he assures her. “The split ends alone would have qualified for aid from FEMA.”
“I thought you were dying, asshole.”
Eliot winces, which is — stupid, he and Margo have bitched each other out a million stupid times and he’s never felt fucking guilty about it, god. He really has allowed life to lead him astray. “My humblest apologies. But when you think about it, in like a sort of metaphorical evocative sense, I kind of was. Spiritually, or whatever.”
Margo’s eyes soften. Eliot absolutely hates that. “Is this about Quentin moving out? I’m sorry, El —”
Eliot laughs. It comes out sounding like: HA! HA! HA! “Quentin? What? No. Well,” he concedes, “that was perhaps the catalyst that spurred me to action. But it’s not about Quentin, it’s —” He opens up a tube of eyeliner and squints at his reflection in the mirror to buy himself time. The trouble is, eons ago when Eliot had been humiliatingly unstable because of the ten billion medical procedures and the quasi-demonic possession and the dead Quentin of it all, he had under the influence of various substances spouted to Margo all sorts of nonsense about (gross) “true love” and (yuck) “my greatest regret” and (why) “the stupid fucking beauty of all stupid fucking life.” So now he has to tread carefully.
“Quentin needs space,” he says, very evenly, applying the eyeliner with great care, “which — you know, is fine with me, because why wouldn’t it be. It’s great. Actually it’s really smart, I think, because he’s totally right about how things have been completely fucked for us the past couple years, and frankly we could all use a reset button, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m resetting. I’m rebranding, actually — I was thinking about it and the truth is, Bambi, I’ve completely lost my edge. Hell, I think I might have gotten boring. My hair was a mess — we can check that one off now, at least — my wardrobe is completely out of date, and there are slutty twenty-two-year-olds all over the city who have never even heard my name. Truly, it’s a crime.” Fuck, his hands are — not the steadiest right now. He tuts to clean off the crooked black line, then tries his left eye again. “But never fear — the bitch is back. The vibes are right, the pants are tight. Eliot Classic is relaunching. I’m reclaiming my rightful throne as king of the motherfucking party. These streets won’t know what hit them.”
Margo, dubiously, asks, “Are you on something?”
“Just a little coke,” he promises. It’s mostly true. “And only because I want to lose ten pounds. I have quite literally gone soft.”
“Okay, I would like it stated for the record that I don’t endorse this behavior.”
Eliot twists the cap of the eyeliner closed and turns to give Margo his most seductive smile. “What do you think? Too dramatic? Or just right for a night of celebratory mischief in honor of the dawning of a new and glorious age of debauchery and excess?”
“The eyeliner’s fine,” Margo says, “but we have that dinner, remember? With the Lorian ambassador?”
Eliot widens his eyes in mock surprise. “Oh! So sorry, Bambi, I forgot completely.” This is a lie. He remembered, but upon reflection decided that a serious and potentially consequential state dinner was not in tune with the image he wanted to get back to cultivating, and decided to do a bunch of drugs instead.
“Are you not coming, then?”
Margo sounds almost — hurt, which is totally crazy, because Margo is not physically capable of getting her feelings hurt. Margo doesn’t get her feelings hurt, and Eliot doesn’t get his heart broken. That’s who they are.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Eliot says casually, “but if you need me…”
But of course if Margo has ever needed anyone, it’s her great secret that she’ll take to the grave. Eliot’s great secret is that he figured this out years ago: the quickest way to get her not to need him is to insinuate that she might.
It is perhaps not the greatest act of friendship in history that he’s willing to use this knowledge to his advantage, but — desperate times. Plus, concerning himself with such matters is woefully off brand. Eliot Classic would never.
“It’s fine,” Margo says. Eliot gives her an affectionate squeeze for being so lovably predictable when it counts. “Rafe can take your seat. I’ll catch you up tomorrow. You’re sure you’re okay, though? With —”
“Never better. I swear it.” It’s only a lie if you ignore fifty years, which is exactly what he should have been doing all along.
“Okay, well. Have fun out there, I guess.”
Eliot grins into the mirror, pleased to confirm it makes him look as rakish as he intended. “It’s what I do best.”
Thus it is that armed with the blessing of his lady most fair, exactly the right amount of high and looking honestly better than he has in years, Eliot strides into a magician-owned gay bar in Alphabet City they used to go to when the world was their playground rather than an apocalyptic hellscape of drudgery and pain and worst of all responsibility, where he orders a pair of whiskey sours, scans the room, and slides into place next to the first unaccompanied cute guy he spots. “Hi there. I’m Eliot, I’m on the rebound, I’m a telekinetic, and I have a huge dick.”
The guy splutters into his whiskey. Eliot does not let himself be deterred. “Tick tock, babe. If you don’t want to ride this train I can pull into a different station. What’s it gonna be?”
It takes some doing, but it’s a yes, obviously, and after a few rounds and a bump in the bathroom and some show-offy spellcraft like some kind of primal mating ritual they take off for the guy’s apartment where the guy kisses like a slug but sucks cock like a champion and Eliot fucks into him, flush with whiskey and cocaine and most of all the rush of victory, thrilling beneath it all with the certainty that however far he may have fallen off course, he’s clicked his heels three times and made it back to the person he’s supposed to be. Margo can have her kingdom and Quentin can have his space; Eliot knows he has everything he needs, right here.
-
It really is fine. Eliot is totally fine. Quentin needs space, and that’s super chill, because — oh, like Eliot was going to do the whole relationship thing? Eliot was going to be a boyfriend? He was going to, what, hold Quentin’s strong hand at the farmer’s market and buy him fuzzy green sweaters that would complement his eyes and bake scones for all their other couples friends at game night and get married at a renovated barn upstate with candles floating like fireflies along the aisle and Quentin like a perfect cake-topper Ken doll in his adorable tuxedo crying a little bit when he said the vows they’d written themselves even though Eliot thinks writing your own vows is tacky because love is about compromise and if they couldn’t compromise on the wedding then how could they ever move to the countryside and raise eleven beautiful children together? Eliot was going to go to brunch?
Obviously not. Only a complete idiot would have thought so.
Eliot’s a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. He knows who he is. He just — forgot, briefly. Temporary insanity. Quentin gives really good head. Blow-job madness has driven other men to far unwiser fates. The point is: Quentin needs space, and Eliot is fine.
Eliot’s more than fine, actually. He’s great. He’s fucking fantastic. He’s charming the literal pants off starry-eyed naifs and dad-bod daddies alike; he’s making strange bedfellows of a professor from Colorado and a sweetly snarling hedge with a lip piercing in one intoxicating evening; he’s sexually confusing finance bros with shiny-haired girlfriends by sweet-talking them into a threesome and giving them the best night of their lives. He’s cultivating an aura of mayhem and mystery at the darkest and most erotically adventurous spots magical New York has to offer, and jaunting off to London and Tijuana and Madrid for a couple hours here and a few days there when the right traveler invites him through the nearest available portal. He’s down five pounds already and getting serious about mauve.
It must be admitted that occasionally in the snatches of sobriety he cannot seem to go to bed high enough to completely avoid, the notion strikes him that returning to his true passions, such as drinking and vanity, is not entirely without its frictions. The bars, for example, and the clubs, and the underground raves in unmarked warehouses where glowsticks streak like broken neon under the blacklights, and the queer spaces that host elaborate themed events with theoretically strict costume requirements that in practice mean mostly glitter and fishnets as far as the eye can see, which is fine, because Eliot has killer legs — the haunts of his glory days are positively teeming with youth chasing their own, lurking at every corner with their vapes and their mullets and their unlined faces. His own body, meanwhile, edging every day closer to thirty and therefore to death, has developed an unfortunate habit of protesting the sixth or seventh or twelfth drink with greater vigor than once it did. There are moments when, knives pounding at his temple and mouth like a nuclear wasteland, or squinting at the unwelcome sunlight in some graphic designer’s Murray Hill apartment, Eliot cannot keep certain unhappy thoughts at bay. Thoughts such as why, and oh sweet baby jesus what have I done, and I will never be truly happy again. Thoughts suggesting the traitorous idea that instead of whatever club or party or bedroom, surrounded by faces he wouldn’t remember and names he didn’t bother to learn, he would have rather spent the previous twelve hours literally anywhere else. Some days he catches himself thinking that last night’s grand adventure was in fact regrettable and exhausting, a hollow echo of a pleasure he no longer feels in the shadow of a sweetness he let slip from his fingers.
But who cares what Sober Eliot thinks? Sober Eliot is an idiot who does monstrously humiliating things like convince himself he’s acting the part in some grand romance and then has the terrible judgment to actually share these delusions with other people. Sober Eliot was the one who threw him so starkly off his well-charted course in the first place. Sober Eliot hates fun, and is boring, and no one wants to hang out with him anyway, least of all Eliot himself.
Most importantly, Sober Eliot is wrong. He may have in his aching head images of an Eliot fond of domestic comforts, or content with staying still, or able after a lifetime of self-loathing to look himself in the mirror in the mornings with unshaven cheeks and unbrushed hair and find within himself not one wish to be anything but the person living the life he has somehow stumbled into, or whatever, but those aren’t him, and they aren’t real. They aren’t real like the image of Eliot that he worked so hard to build. He spent some time off his game due to frankly extremely mitigating circumstances, but he has gloriously emerged from his coccoon of trauma and self-pity like a butterfly, once more himself but better now. A slutty, slutty, butterfly. A slutterfly, if you will.
— That one might need work. But the point stands: Sober Eliot can go fuck himself. This is who he is.
-
It occurs to him, as he’s getting mediocre head from a DJ because life is about saying yes, that perhaps he does need just a little something beyond the carousel of sucking and snorting to keep the ennui from setting in. Rule of threes, after all: sex, drugs, and fill-in-the-blank. Eliot’s not one for rock and roll, but it is becoming apparent that the table needs a third leg to stay upright. Obviously nothing in the direction of a “purpose in life” or “true love” or “honest conversations with people who profess to care about him” — the situation is not nearly so dire as all that — but something that will truly reestablish his hedonistic bonafides while shoring up his legend in the only realm that counts. Something big and daring, but carried off with finesse, classic yet totally unique. Something that blares Eliot Classic with the bass turned up, all while pointing the way to the future.
“We should throw a party,” he announces to the denizens of the penthouse at large.
Kady says, “Hard pass,” scrolling through her phone. Alice mumbles something about being busy and shuffles out of the room without making eye contact. Penny simply blips out of the conversation, which, like, rude. Eliot really needs to meet new people.
“I need to meet new people,” Eliot says. “And really, don’t we all need to meet new people? And really, isn’t meeting new people exactly the kind of thing a party is for?”
“You said ‘and really’ twice.” Kady squints up at him. “Are you on something?”
“I’m trying to lose ten pounds.” Technically he hit ten pounds yesterday morning, but that’s none of Kady’s business. “And that has nothing to do with the fact that we as a motley crew of unlikely heroes have in our post-heroic retirement remained worryingly and frankly irritatingly insular and codependent. When was the last time you hung out with someone beyond the bounds of our oppressively tight-knit nightmare fuck-circle?”
“I literally hang out with other people all the time. But whatever.” She shrugs. “You pay rent” — (track down the odd troll to bribe or contribute to a minor summoning as the Baby Yaga requires) — “same as the rest of us. I guess you’re entitled to use the premises for a night. Just, you know — double check your noise wards, clean up after yourself, and let me know when it’s happening so I can arrange to be… not here.”
Eliot claps his hands together. “The hordes of the horny and carousing will sing your name with thanks.”
“Just to be clear, I’ve never liked you. But this —” Kady waves her hand vaguely indicating his general person. “This is definitely worse.”
“Genius is always underappreciated in its time.”
“Uh huh.” Kady hops off the counter stool with a glance backwards. “Enjoy living out your real-life after-school special, genius.” Which is not at all the spirit, but is more or less the plan.
Eliot attempts to recruit Margo into his endeavors and is cruelly rebuffed on the grounds that “some people” have “real jobs,” which is so not his fault. No matter. She doesn’t need him to run her kingdom; he doesn’t need her to revive his. He throws himself into sourcing the gaudiest decorations and the finest drugs, ingredients for cocktails and materials for party favors. He brushes up on his temporary expansion spells; he assembles and fine-tunes a playlist to shake the walls (if he weren’t being very obedient about he noise wards, which of course he is; he’s a hedonist, not an animal). He handwrites bespoke invitations that can play nicely with a standard replication spell and sends them to nearly every single person he knows, and he tells them all to bring whoever the fuck they want, provided they’re willing to submit to the dress code, which is, quite simply, Make it fucking count. He plots out the snack table like an NFL coach doing that thing on TV with the X’s and the O’s. He feels it in his bones that he’s doing exactly what he’s meant to be doing. It feels right; it feels good.
The party is a smash — or so he’s told; his memory’s not super clear past the first ninety minutes, but isn’t that its own evidence in his favor? He wakes up covered in glitter with a hot guy he doesn’t recognize draped across his chest and the last Pitbull song he remembers hearing still echoing in his head, which was exactly the goal, and even though it’s three in the afternoon and Kady is definitely going to chew him out for leaving out whatever mess remains downstairs this long and his head is killing him, he has no regrets, because he remembers a moment right before the molly kicked in when he had looked through the crowd lit up in colored streaks under the strobe light like a king surveying his court and known as surely as he had ever known anything what he knows again today as he ignores the pesky tapping of Sober Eliot on his mental door in favor of luxuriating in the debris of a night spent the way nights should be, which is: This is where he belongs.
-
It’s a fucking relief, having actual fun again: drunken, illicit, scandalous, glittering fun. Too long has Eliot toiled away under the burden of consequence and duty, laboring at the unending shitpile that should have been firmly marked other people’s goddamn problems. A weight has been lifted, and he’s not just talking about the fifteen pounds (and counting); the new lightness that fills his spirit is only partly the drugs. He’s thrilled to once more careen through nights and sleep through days carefree and unmoored, no longer tethered by the ball-and-chain of consistently impending doom.
As a bonus — a minor bonus, because it’s not like it’s a big deal or like it matters or like it’s totally consuming Eliot from within like fire set upon kindling or whatever — fun is precisely the kind of thing a certain pouty, furry-browed, slump-shouldered someone is congenitally allergic to. This is, of course, only one of many reasons why they are obviously at their very core totally incompatible, and Eliot was right the first time, and all the inane visions he cultivated of intimate nights spent on a loveseat in a room with hardwood floors and extravagant tenth anniversary blowouts on a rented boat were merely the product of a mind subject to, in his defense, soul-destroying amounts of stress. The life in the woods was like a mosaic: the best they could do with limited colors. Out here in the real world, their palettes diverge strikingly; they would never have found a way to fit contentedly into each other’s lives. Eliot knows this, duh, now that he’s been jolted out of that particular derangement. Still, reinhabiting his old and superior self is helping cleanse the last dregs of delusion from his system. Every time he does something ill-advised, spontaneous, chicly tacky, dashingly bold, or gloriously outre, he receives an added frisson from the little voice in his mind reminding him: Quentin would never.
Quentin would never crash a hedge party in Williamsburg and abscond with the host, secreting him away to a nearby bar with a bathroom that locks so they could jerk each other off before the sex mist wore off.
Quentin would never announce a costume ball in an empty storefront on St. Mark’s Place with forty-eight hours’ notice, breaking in three hours in advance to set up the wards and establish the proper ambience and keeping watch over the festivities until a pretty young thing with a healthy fondness for leather caught his eye and they started tearing each other’s clothes off right on the dance floor as a house remix of Fuck The Pain Away was playing, since half a dozen others were merrily fucking to the beat already.
Quentin would never flirt with a square-jawed briefcase-toting silver fox in a commuter bar right by Grand Central just for the novelty of the challenge, nor would he work his way to palming the guy’s crotch through his charcoal slacks right there in public, keeping his expression as cool as anything as he watched the guy’s breath stutter, just barely, as he let himself realize exactly what kind of night was being offered. And when the guy grips Eliot’s wrist with a thrilling possessiveness, Eliot lets himself think once more of all the things Quentin would never do that Eliot wouldn’t think twice of, all the fun his life has room for now that he’s rid himself of his misguided obsession: the pleasures in store tonight and every night, the stories he’ll be able to tell, if Margo ever pulls herself away from her royal fucking duties enough to give a shit, and how much better they’ll be than one boring droning yarn about fifty years where nothing of note happens, day after day. Yawn! He’s so drunk on his rediscovered sense of possibility that it takes him a moment to process the words when Silver Fox leans over and whispers, his breath hot against Eliot’s ear, “My wife’s out of town, if you want to take this back to mine.”
— Eliot swallows. He feels suddenly very drunk. On possibility, but also on vodka. Drunker than expected. That’s been happening lately. It’s to be expected; he’s still skipping lunch most days, and dinner more often than not, because he’s down twenty pounds but he still can’t see his old self when he looks in the mirror, and who wakes up early enough to eat breakfast anyway, and — he’s drunk. And a little bit high still, maybe, he doesn’t remember how long it’s been. It’s hot in this bar, this fucking — fake bullshit Irish pub with a goddamn shamrock in the window, god, will horrors never cease?
The guy is talking, his voice subdued. “If that’s okay with you, I mean.”
He’s wearing a ring, Eliot notices. He feels like an idiot. He can’t remember if he saw the ring earlier, if he put it together or not. But it doesn’t matter, right? This was what Eliot wanted, ring or no ring, wife or no wife. Quentin would never, but Eliot would. Eliot has. Eliot did, all the fucking time, before life ground him down and now, what, he’s so fucking respectful of the sacred bonds of holy matrimony? Please. Bourgeois bullshit in the shape of a god he’s never believed in. Not his problem. He’s not breaking any promises here.
Quentin would never.
But this is who Eliot is.
“Lead the way,” Eliot purrs, and the silver fox smiles with all of his very white teeth.
The guy lives in Mount Vernon, but mercifully he’s well off enough not to blink at hailing a cab. Their hands roam slowly over each other’s bodies in the backseat, over the clothes only, hungry smiles glinting as they drive under streetlamps. It’s all very erotic, Eliot observes with distant approval: the titillation of wanting more that can be had, mounting anticipation, following the little rules while breaking the big ones, yadda yadda. Very hot. Very fun. One could even argue there’s something kind of sexy about the literal white picket fence Fox tells the driver to stop in front of, about the manicured lawn and clapboard two-story house it encloses — the transgressive friction, right, of the juxtaposition between the tidy and the tawdry, the appeal of sullying the clean heteronormative whatever. Sure. It’s fun. All the little details add to the adventure. The birdfeeder hanging on the lowest bough of the tree by the front window. The fluffy dog that yaps at Eliot until Fox calms her down. The photographs on the wall as they walk up the staircase of Fox and his wife: at their wedding, on vacation, with their kid. Their gangly-limbed daughter beaming in a college sweatshirt.
The sex is fine. Or, like, it’s good, it’s hot, Fox is good at all the sex things, he whispers filthy nothings in Eliot’s ear, they come more than once. It’s just kind of all the same after a while, isn’t it? The sex isn’t the point. The point of the sex is to give a point to everything, to have something to hunt for, and then once you get it, you know what you’re getting. It’s fun, but there’s not much to say. Eliot — isn’t sure he’s always felt like that, but it’s been a long time. It’s hard to say.
The guy is gone by the time Eliot wakes up the next morning, but he’s left cash for a cab back to the city, which — sure. Eliot grabs some Advil from the medicine cabinet and makes himself coffee in the guy’s Keurig and steals a travel mug to nurse a second cup on the way home, figuring the guy can afford to buy a new one. If he even notices this one’s gone. He avoids the eyes of the pictures on the wall as he lets himself out of the house and into the much-too-bright day.
When he arrives at the penthouse the caffeine hasn’t quite perked him up, probably because these days he needs something a bit or a lot stronger than caffeine to achieve any meaningful perking, and his head is fucking killing him. To make matters worse, he opens the door to the sight of Penny and Kady sucking face by the fridge, because this stupid fucking apartment has a stupid fucking open kitchen plan because rich people have no fucking taste, and because they are disgusting. They do this all the time and usually Eliot barely notices, but something about the particular flavor of today’s hangover combines with the grotesque display of heterosexual monogamy in front of him to send shockwaves of revulsion through his spine. Loudly he says, “This is homophobic.”
“That’s racist,” Penny shoots back, without even sparing him a look.
“Damn it.” Eliot hates being outplayed. “I’ve got to fucking move.”
-
A change of scene — yes, that’s what he needs. The wilds of New York continue to beckon him, but how is he supposed to reconnect with his truest self sharing an apartment with a bunch of roommates from his grad school days who moved him in while he was fucking possessed? Besides, half the point of his adventuring is that he has no interest in fucking anyone he’s going to see twice. New York is a city of eight million people, but in the right scenes it can still be claustrophobia-inducingly small. Better to set up home base somewhere he can truly leave the day’s journeying behind on the occasion he wishes to retreat to the privacy of his own abode.
Unfortunately, the relocation to Whitespire is not quite so rejuvenating as he might have hoped. For starters, Margo is not any easier to to talk into mischief on what is now her home turf than she was from across the border between worlds. On the contrary, sharing even a very large castle with her proves to have a nasty way of reminding Eliot several times a day of exactly how many things that are not him now make demands on her time. Which is as it should be, of course; Margo has blossomed into her shining world-conquering self, as she was always bound to do by the unshakable destiny of her own ferocity, and Eliot — well. The opposite of that. It was inevitable that they should outgrow each other, and frankly a miracle they’re still friends, if “friends” can be used to describe two people whose conversations consist mostly of either Are you busy tonight? Again? and Yes, I’m sure I’m okay, why do you keep asking me that?
Furthermore, while he certainly breathes easier away from Penny and Kady’s aura of domestic bliss — it’s really extraordinary that two people who individually are so sullen and unpleasant can somehow combine into a vortex of such noxious happiness — Whitespire is not quite a haven from the horrors emotional entanglement. The Josh thing Eliot has known about and failed all this time to understand, but Margo has apparently also taken up with Fen, who’s maybe also fucking Josh, who’s fucking it seems half the local ladies and exchanging the occasional handjob with one of the royal cooks because he believes it’s important to broaden one’s horizons, all of which is information Josh cheerfully imparted to him under the delusion that fucking Margo means they’re now friends and which Eliot desperately wishes he could erase from his mind. Josh really seems to like both Margo and Fen, though, who seem to like both him and each other too, which is the part that’s really inexcusable, as now Eliot cannot glimpse any pairing among the contentedly polyamorous little triad without wanting to jump through the nearest pane of stained glass as a matter of principle.
Those glimpses come unrelentingly. While Whitespire has distinct advantages — a whole new set of rooms to pass out in, kaleidoscopically beautiful orchards to stare at while high out of his mind, an operational staff with a surprisingly high average level of hotness and no more lines of ethics or divinity drawn between them and the now definitively former High King — somehow despite its size and its sprawl, the castle seems to have less privacy than the penthouse in New York did, and its inhabitants are certainly less inclined to mind their own fucking business. He can’t stumble through the clock, or weave his way just a touch tipsy towards his chambers at ten in the morning, or so much as wake up under a doorframe without someone (anyone) seeing, nor without someone (Margo) having something to say about it, or at least some expression when next they meet of judgment or (worse) concern. Tick sells him out for retreating to the armory to wait out a k-hole; Abigail, of all people, tattles on him when she finds him curled in the fetal position in the lower court’s bathtub. Eliot finds himself having to explain to Margo, over and over, that he’s doing not just fine but actually great, and is in fact thriving in the way he was meant to thrive, and he doesn’t understand why she can’t just be happy for him that with all the stress of their lives in the past he has elected to follow his bliss, and he’s very sorry her life is still so stressful but that’s not his fault, and she would remember that absolutely all of his behavior is totally normal and perfectly in character if she could just think back five years to when they used to do this all the time and she used to be fun. The repetition wearies him.
Josh finds him in the pantry and gives him a cautious “Hey, buddy,” like a guy can’t even sit on the floor shoveling spoonfuls of Nutella into his mouth anymore without inviting the Spanish Inquisition. “You okay there?”
“I didn’t have lunch,” Eliot says. He’s also a little stoned, but it’s just weed, so that’s basically exactly the same as being totally sober. “I’m trying to lose ten pounds.”
Josh nods slowly. “Uh… huh.”
Eliot clutches his tub of Nutella to his chest. “If you tell Margo about this, I’ll tell her to have you beheaded. She’d do it, you know. If I asked.”
Josh tilts his head to consider this. “I don’t… think she would.” He has the decency to sound less than totally certain.
“Did you come in here for a reason, or just to judge me?”
Josh holds up his hands in a show of peace. “No judgment here. Just grabbing some spices.” He assembles a collection of jars off the rack. Eliot glares at him while he does it. Honestly, some people just have no class.
-
So — fine. Maybe, occasionally, in those first bleary moments of morning or early afternoon or if the previous night was particularly eventful late afternoon, there’s a sad, pathetic part of him that wishes that instead of waking up cotton-mouthed and squinting in an uptown hotel between a pair of Swedish decathletes, he was in a cozy cottage nestled in the middle of the woods, opening his eyes to catch the sunlight falling on the same sweet face he’d been waking up to for years. Maybe sometimes in the space between hungover and drunk enough, memories filter back in of companionable silence and long afternoons spent talking only for the pleasure of each other’s company, of warm stew by firelight and the diamond glints of a cool river on a summer’s day, of sex spectacular and mundane, wild and cozy, and of falling asleep to the familiar rhythm of Quentin’s breathing, feeling the skin of his back against Eliot’s chest going up and down. Maybe, caught unguarded, he’s still struck nearly paralyzed by how much he misses it, when he doesn’t stop himself: the long shared days, the simple laughter, the easy, unhurried touch. Maybe it stops his breath, how bitterly he longs even just for the days before he knew he had fucked it up for good.
Maybe he can’t quite forget that the mosaic was the best thing that ever happened to him.
How could it not be? What happened was this: he followed Quentin through a clock and into a new life, starring a version of himself he could never have dreamed into existence back on Earth. An Eliot who tended the garden and smiled for no reason, who gave his unworthy heart away and received actual goddamn happiness in return. An Eliot who raised a son and loved him in all the holy terror he’d never thought fatherhood could be, who taught the little boy his first simple spells and wept when he left home. An Eliot who didn’t run away from the hardest thing he’d ever done, who spent his days working on something that mattered and his nights at home with his family. An Eliot for whom words like home and family signified something other than violence and shame and a past to define yourself against. An Eliot who was a fucking morning person.
It was impossible. It was a miracle. It was, strangest and most wonderfully of all, easy. Easy, it turned out, to drop the armor that he came to see had never kept him safe, only alone.
What a crock of shit. Fillory is a literal fanasy land; that’s its whole shtick. Anyway it’s all in the past, now. And Eliot has never been one for dwelling on the past. God knows his past has never rewarded dwelling on. Well — except for that one time where it allowed him to escape quasi-demonic possession long enough to save his life and maybe the universe depending on how you trace the chain of causality there. But that was — whatever. Extenuating circumstances. Exception that proves the rule.
This, though — this is who he is.
-
He wakes up in an unfamiliar bed with no memory of the previous twelve to twenty-four hours. A promising start. The bed is cloudlike, the sheets luxuriously soft on his skin: even better. Despite the gap in his memory, his body feels — fine? More than fine, actually; refreshed, replenished, totally lacking any of the usual aftereffects of various memory-impeding substances. That’s odd, but hardly a red flag. Magic can fuck you up worse than any drug if you get nasty enough with it.
When he opens his eyes to find Margo in a chair next to him, mouth a thin line, eyes red from lack of sleep or — it’s probably the sleep thing — that’s when he starts to get worried.
He gives a little wave of his fingers. “Morning, sunshine.”
“Fuck you.”
Eliot winces. He can’t pretend that’s surprising, but it’s not exactly unprecedented, either. He sits up, leaning against the ridiculously plush pillows, and looks around the room for clues as to last night’s misbehavior. It’s not really a room; the floor is grass and dirt, the walls billowing curtains white as everything else in sight. The vibe is somewhere between a hospital and a spa. His stomach churns unpleasantly. “So, are you going to tell me what grave offense I committed last night, or shall I try to guess?” He ticks off possibilities on his fingers while Margo glares at him, stone-faced. “Caused a diplomatic crisis by interrupting a state dinner? Seduced an inconvenient stakeholder in a local initiative? Way too honest about Tick’s fashion sense?” Eliot’s skin prickles in irritation and anxiety as Margo remains silent. “Am I getting warmer here? Can I get a hint? Because, speaking personally, I’d love to skip to the part where I’m very sorry and promise never to do it again and you begrudgingly forgive me because I will definitely make it up to you by catering the shit out of the next palace function.”
“Fen found you.”
“Oh.” That — wasn’t what Eliot was expecting. He swallows. “Found me, like, in flagrante, prompting an uncomfortable conversation about how when Daddy and Daddy love each other very much —”
“Found you unresponsive.”
The word catches him short. Its clinical tone. The image it forces unpleasantly into his mind. “Oh,” he says again, more quietly. “What, um. Where —” His mouth is very dry.
“On the floor of a hallway in the East Wing,” Margo says. “Couldn’t wake you up, started screaming bloody murder. You’re lucky Penny was home. And you’re damn lucky the centaurs were willing to work the graveyard shift.”
A nauseating feeling is crawling up his throat. It takes a moment to identify it as guilt. Even Eliot knows Fen doesn’t deserve to be dragged into his shit like this. “I — I really am sorry.”
“Yeah. Not good enough.” Margo shakes her head. “You need to stop this.”
Eliot’s hackles go up. Objectively he’s in no position to play defense here, but he didn’t get where he is by being an emotionally mature and well-adjusted adult. “Stop what, exactly?”
“Stop —” Margo gestures tensely with her arm. “Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing.”
“Stop having fun?” he demands. “Stop enjoying my life for once?”
“Is this fun for you? Passing out ice cold on the fucking floor?”
“Obviously, last night I got a little carried away, but —”
“Last night you almost fucking died,” she snaps. “The centaurs had to basically pump your fucking stomach with whatever the fuck you took. They said a couple more minutes, and —” She clamps her jaw shut.
“How embarrassing.” He can’t make himself look at her.
“El, can you please cut the bullshit for five seconds and talk to me like we’re real people?”
“There’s no bullshit,” he says. “I’m sorry that it turns out I don’t have some kind of grand passion for governance and statecraft, or that I — was out of it and mixed my uppers and downers, or whatever, but all I’m doing is living my goddamn life the way I want to live it. The way I always wanted to live it, before everything got fucked to hell and back. I’m happy for you that you found your new thing, really I am, but — that’s not me. This is. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to live to see thirty.”
“Well, that makes one of us.” Margo’s face does something horrible at that. “Joking, Bambi, obviously.”
“I mean it, El.” Her voice is pained. “If this was actually just — blowing off steam, or whatever, I wouldn’t give a shit. But it’s way beyond that, and it’s been way beyond that, and if you keep pulling this shit, you’re going to destroy yourself. And maybe that’s what you want. Maybe it’s your fucked up way of punishing yourself for god knows what. I don’t know. But that’s not acceptable to me. I can’t live with that.”
“Oh, so that’s what brought this on? I’m not acceptable?” He still can’t look at her. Whatever. Eliot’s a coward; that’s hardly news. “So funny. For a moment there I thought we were concerned about me. But if you’re just worried I’m bringing reputational damage on your glorious throne —”
“That’s not what this is and you know it, asshole. What I’m saying — or what I’m trying to say, because I’m not exactly good at this shit either —” She exhales through her nose in frustration. Dread mounts in Eliot’s stomach as her eyebrows sweep together; as her chin dimples beneath her trembling lower lip; as her red eyes fill with tears. “I’m trying to say… I need you.”
Eliot stares at her in horrified disbelief.
Margo doesn’t need him. Margo doesn’t need anyone. Never has, never will. It’s her cornerstone, her foundation, in her very DNA. It’s who she is.
And yet here she is, tears spilling down her cheeks, as she says it again. “I need you, El. I can’t keep pretending I don’t. I lost you once and I can’t — I can’t do that again. You can’t do that to me.”
Eliot fumbles for any kind of response to this most impossible thing. “So, so what? I’m supposed to get my shit together because this is all so hard for you? I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how interventions work.”
“I’m not an expert, either,” says Margo. “I’m a selfish fucking cunt. I’ve never pretended to be anything else.”
Eliot starts to cry.
It all comes up at once, his body crumpling into big undignified hiccuping sobs like a little kid. He hugs his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them, crying and feeling stupid and crying because he feels stupid; crying because he’s not so slowly killing himself, and crying because it’s not going fast enough; crying for Quentin and for Fen and for Silver Fox’s wife and for every one of his miserable stupid regrets; crying because he’s ashamed and scared and in love and he doesn’t know which one of those is worst. Margo moves from her chair to sit next to him on the bed and leans her head against his shoulder and he cries harder because he’s the most worthless piece of shit in the whole world but somehow she loves him anyway, and he loves her more than he’s ever known how to do right.
“It’s Quentin,” he says idiotically through gasps for air, his flimsy defenses disintegrated like they were never there, “it’s Quentin, I can’t — he wanted space and I thought, okay, it’s over, I blew it but it’s fine, I’m fine, I can — I can just get back on the horse, do all the shit I used to do before I ever met him, get back on my bullshit and forget this stupid fucking crush — I thought, I really thought I could just do what I’d always done and it would be okay. I could be the life of the party, the crown prince of fuck city, the belle of the goddamn ball. But I just — I keep trying and it’s not fun and I feel worse and I still miss him, like all the fucking time, and — and I don’t know why it’s not working.”
“Because that’s not you,” Margo says.
Eliot chokes out a snot-thick laugh. “Come on. You of all people know this is exactly who I’ve always been.”
“I’m not bullshitting you. I know that’s who you were. Just like I was the ice queen who could watch you fall apart and keep my mouth shut because pretending it was okay was easier than admitting I was scared shitless about what the fuck you were going to do to yourself. I thought I could rewind the clock, too. But I can’t. That’s not me anymore.” She finds his hand with hers and intertwines their fingers. “And it’s not you anymore, either. I know because I was fucking there.”
“Fuck.” Eliot honestly would have preferred the bullshit. He’d be able to put up some kind of fight against that; he’s spent an entire lifetime building up the case against himself. But she’s come right at him armed only with the things in life he’s most afraid of: being loved and being seen. God, what a bitch.
His bitch. The very best bitch in the whole entire world. He’s never deserved her, but that’s never stopped them. They’re each other’s trump cards; there’s nowhere left to run.
“I love him, Bambi,” he blubbers, the words like glass in his throat. “I love him like — like I don’t, I didn’t even know I could do that. I love him, and I had him, and I could have kept him, and I fucking ruined it, becacuse I ruin fucking everything, and now he doesn’t even want to see me, and I just — how the fuck do I move on from that? How does anyone? How do I stop loving someone —” Good, kind, brave, loyal, perfect. “If I can’t drown it out, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“It fucking sucks,” says Margo. “But El, honey — you know the love part’s not the issue here, right?”
He sniffles like a little kid. “What do you mean?”
“I mean —” She shrugs. “Maybe you can’t stop loving him. Maybe you love him forever. He’s a pretty loveable guy. But love isn’t the thing that has you tearing yourself apart. It’s the other stuff. The shit about how you ruin everything. And I know you’re not gonna want to hear this, but that shit’s not about Quentin. I’ve been there for that too. It’s been fucking you up since way before he came around.”
“But I could — ignore it, kind of, before,” he says. “Or at least forget about it, from time to time. And, fine, maybe compartmentalizing my entire life until I die wasn’t the most sustainable strategy, but — Jesus, now it’s fucking unrelenting. It’s always there, every goddamn waking moment. I can’t forget it, ever. It’s like — like Quentin opened this door, and I can’t close it.”
Margo gives him a gentle shove with her shoulder. “That’s because you’re not supposed to close it, dummy. You’re supposed to walk through.”
“But how?” he asks desperately. How to walk through it when walking through it means walking into everything he’s spent his whole life running from, and this time there’s no medieval soldier or new hope or Quentin waiting on the other side.
“Wish I could tell you. I really do.” She sighs. “But I think it’s one of those things we’ve all got to figure out for ourselves.”
“I did figure it out,” he says. “The answer was Quentin. I don’t know if I can do it again.”
“I know you can,” Margo says. “And luckily for you, I’m always fucking right.”
That gets a laugh out of him. He doesn’t believe her, but — god, he’s fucking missed her. He can feel that now, under centaur-enforced sobriety with her nestled at his side. Does that mean some part of him has missed being this version of himself, as goddamn miserable as this Eliot is? He’s not sure he’d take it that far. But if the choice is Margo or anything else — well. Then it’s not a choice, is it?
“I’ll be good,” he tells her. “I mean, I’m not going to join AA, or whatever. But I’ll, you know. Figure something else out. Or — try, at least.”
“I’m glad you’re going to try,” she says. “I need you to try. And if there’s anything I can do that you think would help, I’ll do it. There isn’t a thing I wouldn’t give up for you.”
“I could never —”
“Shut up. I mean it. You just say the word. But, El, I need you to know — you are good.” She gives a crooked smile. “That part actually has always been true.”
Eliot starts to cry again, because he doesn’t believe her about that, either, but somehow he has to try.
-
The centaurs keep him under observation for another twenty-four hours. Margo stays with him, hushing his guilty attempts to assure her he’s fine, which are admittedly less than convincing. She does the talking, mostly: palace gossip, legislative headaches, local controversies and petty complaints. Eliot appreciates the distraction, even if it’s not totally successful. His own recent escapades are too depressing for him to bring up at the moment. Maybe one day he’ll come full circle and once again be able to laugh telling the story of how he accidentally-on-purpose started an orgy at what was supposed to be a benefit concert for a local hedgehouse. Right now, though, it all just looks pathetic.
Back at Whitespire, the plan is to mope undisturbed in his bedroom until he gets a better idea or dies, whichever comes first. He meant what he told Margo, so he’s not planning to accelerate Option B, but that’s still where the smart money is as far as he can tell. All he can think of is Quentin: his hands, his scent, his dorky jokes Eliot never really got and the way he would explain the necessary context at length like there was any hope that at the end of that it would suddenly somehow be funny. His sweetness and his smarts and the way he loved magic and the way he loved Eliot, once upon a time, the way Eliot had in his hands a love as sparkling and strong as a diamond and with the weight of his brokenness managed to turn it into coal. God. He meant this part when he said it to Margo, too: how the fuck does a person let that go? When you’ve had a glimpse of what could have been and you know the only reason it isn’t is because you were too fucked up to keep it — that’s the reason nothing feels good anymore. Because he found something better than any drug, and — tale as old as time — he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing that impossible high, knowing all the while that nothing will ever compare.
“Eliot? May I come in?”
Eliot startles upright on his bed. “Fen. Of course.”
Her worried face at the door brings back Margo’s words from the centaurs’ — whatever the fuck that was: Fen found you. Found you unresponsive. The guilt that floods him is so absolute it temporarily washes away the billion other reasons he has to feel like total shit. “I just wanted to — to see you. If you were…”
“I’m fine.” It’s not totally a lie. The centaurs fixed up his body good. Physically, he’s better than he’s been in months. “I’m sorry. I should have come to you. Margo told me you — you, uh —”
Fen nods, the darkness of the memory clear on her face. Started screaming bloody murder…
“I really am sorry,” he says again. “That you had to — see me like that. I know it must have been — hard for you. Scary.”
“It was.” She takes a tentative step closer. “Margo said it was an accident.”
“Yeah,” Eliot says, looking at the pattern on the quilt. Gold weaving in and out, over a red background.
“But there are different kinds of accidents.”
Sometimes even now, after all they’ve been through, he forgets that she’s not actually naive. That she came to him not knowing anything about the things Eliot found important, like sex and sarcasm and alcohol, but knowing a hell of a lot more about other things, including more than a decent amount about people. “Yeah. That’s true too.”
Fen sits next to him on the bed, her shoulders easing when he doesn’t shoo her away. “It seems like you’ve been unhappy lately.”
Eliot has to laugh at that. “Uh. Yeah. Understatement of the century.”
“I know —” She hesitates, and then plows forward with that same plainspokenness that Eliot has always found so alien, that he used to think was innocent and now thinks is brave. Fen says just what she means, which is both hard and easy to admire if you’ve spent a lifetime devising ways to avoid doing exactly that. “I know your former wife may not be your first choice of counsel in troubled times. But while the legal changes after the gods have dissolved our bonds of matrimony, they haven’t dissolved my care for you. I still consider you a friend, if you’ll have me.”
“Of course,” he reassures her, touched by another gesture of love he doesn’t deserve. “Of course we’re still friends.”
She smiles. “So — if you wanted to speak your woe to a friend… I could listen to your heart’s burden.”
Eliot tries to smile back for her sake. “It’s really not very interesting.”
Solemnly she says, “I’m always interested in the cares of my friends.”
Well. Eliot would feel like a real asshole turning her away after that. He feels like a real asshole anyway, but he may as well not make it worse. He did tell Margo he’d try. “I — lost something, I guess. Someone. Quentin and I — we were, we were involved, sort of. During the quest — while the fairies were at Whitespire. There was this alternate timeline, I guess, which is, uh, it’s like —”
“A Journeying Ripple,” Fen says, nodding sagely. “Of course.”
Eliot — does not have the bandwidth to inquire further. “Sure. That. So — we were together, over there, and then we came back here, or, well, technically we didn’t ever go there — it’s complicated, I don’t totally get how the physics of it works out to be honest — but. He wanted to — stay together. Or get together, or be together — whatever. And I — I said no.”
Fen frowns. “But even before Margo’s reforms, a king already wed to a wife could always take a husband.”
“Yeah. I knew that. I just —” Eliot sighs. “I’m just an idiot, basically. I messed up.”
“I see. Well —” Fen raises a friendly eyebrow in the pleased-with-herself expression she makes when she’s teasing. “If Quentin knows you, he knows that already. Surely he could find it in himself to forgive you if you told him it was a mistake?”
“Maybe he could have.” Eliot hadn’t really considered that possibility. It makes things, somehow, even worse. “But — I left it too long, I think. I tried it, and — yeah. It’s not happening. So.”
“Oh.” Fen’s voice is full of sorrow. “You’re heartbroken.”
Eliot — didn’t know his body could produce this many tears, Jesus Christ. “Yeah,” he says, voice breaking even though it’s not exactly news. It’s just — he hasn’t ever said it quite so plainly, even to himself. “I guess I — shit.” He wipes his eyes fruitlessly, trying and failing to maintain some control. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I, uh, I hadn’t really thought about it like that, I guess, and I — sorry.”
“Crying is a part of mourning,” Fen says softly. “And mourning is good, Eliot. It’s how we let go.”
She’s being so goddamn nice to him it makes him want to bury himself in the dirt. “Why are you here, Fen? I was a terrible husband. A lousy king. And, spoiler alert, I’m a pretty shitty friend, too.”
“You weren’t the husband I’d wanted, no,” she says thoughtfully. “Or the one I’d — hoped for, I guess. But on the worst day of my life, you gave me exactly what I needed. How many people can say they’ve ever had that? How can I ever think of you with anything but gratitude?”
Eliot remembers holding her as she sobbed with all her grief bursting out at last from behind denial. He hadn’t felt it like she had; he’d felt mostly guilt for how easy it had been for him to leave it in the past. For the monstrous relief he had felt when she’d first returned from the fairy realm without a baby in his arms he’d have to learn to love or else put on a show for. It had never been real for him, this creature his body had made without him. He had been like those teenage girls Margo had told him about who left their newborns in dumpsters because they couldn’t believe it was happening, even when it was really fucking happening. He couldn’t make space in his heart for the terrifying future to come, but Fen had. Fen had welcomed the beloved idea taking root in her body, and then it had been gone and there had been nothing for her to love except lies. That night, at the end of it, they both knew what was real: her loss and his remorse. The creature was almost a baby and the baby it would have been was dead; she was sad, and he was sorry.
The dead kid he’d never been a father to hadn’t come up when he was filling an imaginary chalkboard with his all too real regrets, and it occurs to him now that that’s strange. He’d never been so sorry as he was that night, before or since — not about Logan, not about Taylor, not about Quentin even now. But he hadn’t bothered to seek out the hidden door there; he hadn’t even thought to look. Maybe that makes sense, though. The brutal weight of that night was that there was no more hiding, no ugly stone unturned. He had lived it in full the first time, and it had been awful but it had been real. He had told her only what was true: You deserved so much better than me. It had hurt, the way it always hurt to be confronted with his own inadequacies, but he had spoken as the person that he was: not the husband she should have had, but the fuck-up who was there anyway. Who must have come to love her, in some way, because he couldn’t mourn the baby he’d never wanted and never known but he felt her heartbreak as heavy as his own. He loved her enough that anything that was his to give, he would have offered, if she only asked. In the end, she hadn’t asked for much.
Just — space.
“It helped, you know,” she says gently. “Getting away. Being — not here.”
Eliot’s hands are shaking. “It did?”
“I could have drowned in it, staying here,” she said. “It was everywhere. Going somewhere else again — it was like I could remember how to breathe. It still hurt. It still does. But out there, I could see that there were still things left in the world for me besides my pain. Enough for me to keep going, even though it hurt.”
Eliot isn’t convinced he wants to keep going. But he promised Margo, and this might not be trying, but it’s — something. Something to do. Somewhere to go. “Thank you. For — listening, I guess. Being here, after everything.”
Fen smiles, giving his hand a little squeeze. “That’s what friends are for.”
-
Eliot walks down the stone halls to the High King’s chambers before he can lose his nerve and when he opens the double doors he tells Margo, “I think I need some space.”
She gives him a sad, kind smile. “Yeah, babe. I thought you might.”