Fandom: The Magicians

Ship: Julia/Kady

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 1,166

Genre and tags: Time loop, angst, post-S4

Julia wakes, naked, in Kady's bed. There's no moment of fuzzy confusion, no customary where-am-I before understanding sets in. That stopped happening a while back.

"Fuck," she says, much too loudly for an early Tuesday morning. She extracts herself from Kady's grasp and shakes her, gently, by the shoulder. "Kady."

There's no sleepy morning-after fog in Kady's eyes, either; they snap right open. "God fucking damn it."

"Six times," Julia tells her. It feels important. They shouldn't lose count. She rolls off of the ridiculous bed and grabs her clothes from the floor. "What did it this time?"

"Fucked up the spell. Again."

"I died first?"

"Don't you always?"

There's a note of hysteria edging into Kady's voice, so Julia turns, still tugging her half-buttoned blouse over her head. When they get out of this she's going to burn the fucking thing.

Kady's sitting up in bed with her face in her hands. She's not bothering to cover herself. Julia still tries not to look.

"Kady," she says. Funny how her voice softens like that, all on its own.

But Kady doesn't look at her. "I know."

"We're going to—"

"Fix this. Yeah, Jules, I know."

"Hey." Julia climbs back onto the bed to kneel in front of her. She waits, and after a moment Kady lifts her head. "We didn't do this."

"Really?" Kady's voice is incredulous, her eyes wide. "After all of this, you still think— six times, Julia."

"I don't care how many times it happens. We didn't do this."

"You disintegrated. In front of me. Fuck, at least when Penny died he died like a person. And you somehow still think it's a coincidence that this started the first time we—"

Slept together, Kady had said the first time they'd gone round this conversational mulberry bush. Fucked, each time thereafter. This time around she doesn't even bother to finish the sentence.

Julia wants, with a fierceness that alarms her, to kiss Kady. She wants to take Kady's face in her hands and kiss her, to hold her until she believes everything Julia is saying. Until she stops blinking like that: like she might give in, after everything they've been through, and cry.

Julia can't do that. She has to fix this first.

"I do think it's a coincidence," she says instead, and wills Kady to believe it. She reaches out and tucks a strand of curls behind Kady's ear. "We need to get up. I thought we could try recruiting Alice again."

So they get up. Julia leans on Penny, leverages his guilt, and he ubers them to Alice. It takes some time to convince Alice, but less than it did before. Julia and Kady, both of them, are quickly learning which buttons to push.

"We were trying to save Quentin," Kady says finally, casting Julia a defensive look over Alice's head: What? It's true. Alice's eyes go wide and wobbly. She agrees.

It's a variant on Mayakovsky's timeshare spell this time around, the one that Quentin used to get the incorporate bond. The idea, Alice says, is to find their way back to before the loops started. Then they can do some recon and start figuring this out.

Didn't work the last time they tried it, but hey, that was physical time travel, not psychic. Maybe their bodies staying behind will trick the loops into letting their minds through. It's worth a shot.

There are preparations, then ground rules—try not to change anything, time magic is complicated, the usual—and at long last Alice is ready. "Okay," she says, "one of you needs to get up on the table."

Kady shoots Julia a look; Julia is way ahead of her. "One of us?"

Alice sighs, sharp and impatient in that way she does. Sometimes Julia can see exactly why Quentin loved her, but that honestly kind of makes it all worse. "Yes," Alice says, slowly and clearly. "So I can prepare the spell."

"And you can't do it with both of us?"

"Oh. Well." Alice's eyebrows knit together. "I could. But it would be a lot less stable. I really wouldn't recommend it. It's much safer with one person."

Fucking magic. "Fine," Julia says, and steps toward the table.

"Whoa, whoa, time out." Kady grabs Julia by the arm. "No fucking way are you doing this alone, Jules. I'm going."

"What? Why?"

"Why does it have to be you?" Kady returns, and—and Julia doesn't have an answer for that, really, except that it does. It has to. Kady's eyes on Julia's face are piercing and she has that look, the determined, desperate one, the one that's always made Julia want, obscurely, to crawl inside of Kady and burrow under her skin. She can't. "I'm not— Jesus. Six fucking times."

Julia can't argue with that. She needs to; she has no argument to spare, other than the panic welling under her skin, inside her bones. It's a white noise building in her head. She has to do the spell. "Okay," she says softly. "We'll both go. Can we both go?"

Alice says something, but she isn't the one Julia's asking. Kady squeezes her eyes shut, frustrated. Furious, probably. At last she says, "Fine."

"Good. We're both going," Julia tells Alice, and to Alice's credit, she doesn't argue. Who knows, maybe she can relate to a girl being psychotically, pigheadedly stubborn. Together Julia and Kady climb up on the table.

They wind up facing each other, mirroring each other, hands in position. It's probably for the best: the panic inside Julia is still churning, still whiting out her nerves, but it's always been quieter when Kady's with her. Almost as though she can hear the thought, Kady offers Julia a small, sad smile.

Julia wants— Kady is—

"Hold on a second," Julia tells Alice. She says it without looking at her, dropping her hands. "I want to test something."

She steps forward, cups Kady's face in her hands, and kisses her, gentle as she can. Kady makes a soft, surprised noise, but she wraps one hand loosely in Julia's blouse and kisses her back.

Who knows, Julia thinks again when she steps back. Maybe for once it is that kind of magic.

Alice clears her throat, but when she has their attention she only says, "What would you like me to tell the past versions of you? When they arrive?"

"Oh," Kady says, which—yeah, Julia had kind of forgotten about that part of the spell, too. "Uh…"

With full honesty, Julia says, "I...don't really care?"

Beside her Kady nods, and down on the floor Alice sighs again. She doesn't fight them, though. She gives them the signal, and they get in position. They cast the spell.

The white noise gets louder. Deafening. Her vision goes blurry. There's a static in her ears now, sharper by the second, almost as if—

Julia wakes, naked, in Kady's bed. Fuck.

"Seven times," she says. She doesn't kiss Kady. She gets to work.