Fandom: The Magicians

Ship: Eliot/Quentin

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 2,955

Genre and tags: Doomed timeline, apocalypse, shadeless Eliot

Notes:

Ain't it a gentle sound, the rolling in the graves?
Ain't it like thunder under earth, the sound it makes?
Ain't it exciting you, the rumble where you lay?
Ain't you my baby?

Now.

The sun is setting and it's beginning to rain, little pin-pricks of icy cold against Quentin's face that promise to become something much heavier and harder to ignore. Before him, Eliot holds his hands out at his sides, palms up, and shoots a pleased look at the sky above. He's at the edge of a cliff on some mountain near Vancouver but he faces away from the steep drop below, away from the astonishing, forested expanses of the other mountainsides nearby. Instead he turns that darkly satisfied smile on Quentin.

The warm red sunlight at his back seems to make Eliot glow, unearthly and radiant. Eliot has always had a flair for the dramatic, a taste for the twin aesthetics of decadence and destruction, and the apocalypse suits him well.

"So?" Eliot prompts.

Quentin's heart races. The rush of adrenaline is, he estimates, about one-third terror of heights and two-thirds Eliot. "You look like you belong on stage at a Radiohead concert," he says, half-giddy with it.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"You know." Quentin holds his own arms out dramatically, less like he's feeling for the rain and more like he's on a cross. "From a great height…"

He's still dragging out the last, warbling note when Eliot steps closer and winds an arm around his waist. Eliot swings Quentin off-balance—showing off a little, holding his weight—and in a voice far less biting than it might once have been, says, "What decade are you from?"

"You tell me," Quentin says brainlessly, and Eliot kisses him like the leading man that Quentin has always known him to be.

Finally, setting Quentin back on his feet, Eliot says, "I meant so, where to? and you know it."

It's true: Quentin did know it. He considers badgering Eliot some more, seeing if maybe he can get Eliot to feel him up here on this mountain ledge, but some very base, animal part of Quentin is, actually, still afraid of rolling off that cliff.

So instead he says, as he so often does, "Wherever you want."

Then.

Quentin first kissed Eliot on the patio outside of the Physical Kids Cottage, with the taste of a fruity pink cocktail on his tongue and goosebumps on his skin from the cooling summer evening.

Julia had, that morning, all on her own, asked Quentin if he would explore Brakebills campus with her. There was a pond of babel fish deep in the forest, someone had told her, or at least fish who made you good with languages for as long as you could hold them, but wasn't that kind of like a babel fish, Q? Had Douglas Adams known something? When it came time to wander, though, Julia had kissed his cheek and apologized and ditched him for a study date with Alice Quinn. Quentin moped, because moping was what he did.

Eventually, though, Eliot found him. Eliot handed him a drink and led him outside, and when Quentin's stupid fucking mouth started talking, saying things like "brain" and "pills" and "everything is pointless," Eliot didn't look away. He didn't make a joke, or an excuse to leave. Instead he told Quentin a story—told it as if he were compelled, maybe by the same force that always seemed to want Quentin to spread his misery around.

The story was short and it ended abruptly, and Eliot didn't quite look at Quentin after. He didn't leave, or even turn away, but he looked off into the distance. He held a glass of red wine loosely in one hand and his hair, artfully tousled, looked impossibly shiny and soft. He was handsome and Quentin wanted to hold his hand, or kiss him.

Above all Quentin wanted to be the kind of person who might kiss him. So he did.

"Um," Eliot said after. His eyes fluttered open, plainly startled, and he held himself as still as if Quentin were a deer who might notice him and bolt. It was sweet, Quentin decided as he sat back and took another sip of his drink. "So, not kinkshaming—do you have a murder fetish that I don't know about?"

Quentin squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself not to choke. Death by poorly-timed giggles did sound like the kind of shit that would happen to him but he still preferred that it didn't.

"Nope," he replied when his glass was safely on the bistro table once again.

"Okay." Eliot set his own glass down, then promptly picked it up again. He tilted it back and forth and watched the wine swirl as he said, "Why, then?"

God, Quentin's chest hurt. Why did his chest hurt? Eliot was keeping his voice so deliberately even. Quentin said, "I just wanted to."

"I mean, who wouldn't," Eliot said airily, and this time Quentin let himself laugh.

A silence fell around them, one of those comfortable kinds that Quentin had heard so much about. For a minute or two they sat and drank, and Quentin watched a nearby squirrel dart jerkily towards a tree. It made false start after false start, jumped out and then scurried back, evading some unseen predator who might, Quentin presumed, take its acorn.

Then Eliot said, "If you happen to want to again at some point, I'd probably allow it."

Now.

"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," Eliot says just before he snaps a zombie's neck at twenty yards. He has an endless bank of movie quotes, it seems, but Quentin's still a bit surprised it took them this long to get to Die Hard. Eliot gives the place a cursory scan and then strolls across the foyer and into the dark, calling over his shoulder, "Q, honey, let me know if you find any more of them."

Quentin's still not entirely sure where they are. Somewhere in Spain, he knows that much, and the few glimpses he'd gotten of the building's exterior were striking, but it's too dark yet to see whatever it is he's supposed to see. Eliot had been excited, though, and the anticipation is reaching a tipping point.

At last Eliot returns and takes his hand and leads him down a hall. He takes care to position Quentin in the centre of the room they come to, calculating some precise angle, and then he claps once and the lights come up and the room explodes in colour.

Quentin can't look away. He can barely breathe. All around him are strange, gorgeous shapes, swaths of colour, paintings he doesn't quite recognize in a style that seems to grab him directly by the hindbrain. "Holy shit," he whispers, and swipes absently at his eyes.

"Oh, good." Eliot moves in behind Quentin and wraps his arms around Quentin's chest. Quentin leans back into him. "I was hoping you'd like this one."

"Is this…?"

"Salvador Dalí Museum. The one in Figueres."

They stand like that for a long, long while, in this room and then the next and the next. Eliot stays close, keeps an arm around Quentin's shoulders, and neither of them speak much at all.

Eventually they enter a room that's already occupied: a pack of creatures with brain-breaking biologies huddle in the far corner. They spot Eliot and Quentin only after Eliot spots them, and before any of them can move Eliot pinches together the fingers of his right hand and slashes them through the air. The creatures drop, all at once, in a messy heap.

It should be upsetting to see violence in a place so full of artistic masterworks. It isn't. Quentin wonders sometimes if he was wired wrong or if in another world it might not get his blood racing, his dick hard, to watch Eliot destroy things so effortlessly.

In that world, he thinks, Eliot wouldn't have hated himself. Quentin wouldn't know what codewords make doctors lock you in psych wards. And he'd have known from the start how powerful Eliot is, how untouchable, because Eliot wouldn't have been afraid.

Quentin turns to Eliot and kisses him once, warm and lingering, one hand laid flat on Eliot's chest. "How do you just know all of these places?" he asks, once there's room enough between them again for him to do so.

Eliot kisses Quentin's forehead gently, then pulls him in close. "I actually researched it a lot," he admits. "At Brakebills. Places to take Quentin Coldwater on a romantic global sightseeing tour, no holds barred."

Shivering, Quentin presses his face into Eliot's neck and allows himself to be held. These days Eliot's an adrenaline junkie; he loves to kiss Quentin on top of skyscrapers and inside subway tunnels and once, notably, within the catacombs beneath Paris. Quentin loves it too, and he loves equally to fuck Eliot or be fucked in wide open spaces, knowing that nothing will ever, ever get close enough to harm him. But if he's being honest, he loves this the best of all: to be wrapped up in Eliot while Eliot tells him things that are true.

Then.

In the end it was Margo who told him, Margo whom they sent to break the news or who had the thought herself that someone should tell poor, scared, pathetic Quentin that his maybe-boyfriend was caught on the wrong side of the Beast's last Hail Mary. She let herself into the condo, which meant Julia had given her the cipher for the wards, so Quentin unfolded himself from the couch and stood to receive her news.

"He's alive," she said without preamble. She didn't specify which he, but her hair was a mess and her eyes were wild and Quentin knew of only one person with the power to undo her. "But the Beast got him and we think he took something."

"What does that mean?"

Flashes of dismembered limbs crowded Quentin's brain, visions of Eliot without his eyes, with half a liver, with no hands, but Margo said, "We don't know." She said, "Julia thought it might be this thing they call a shade. Most knowledge magicians don't think it's real, I guess, but it's supposed to be part of your soul, or whatever the shit is inside us. And it's—honestly, I can believe it."

Quentin's heart pounded, but he felt it vaguely, as if greatly distant from himself. "Where is he?"

"Q, don't. He's not Eliot anymore."

"Where?"

"Listen to me, Coldwater." Her voice shook with fury, and with the kind of grief that feels like it can pull your intestines right out through your mouth. Quentin was familiar with that grief, but he couldn't make sense of it here: Eliot's intestines were still inside his body. "I spent most of the last twelve hours with that fucking cheap simulacrum of my best—"

"All simulacra are cheap by definition, that doesn't—"

"Oh my God, would you shut up for five seconds," Margo snapped. Quentin tossed his hands in the air, but he shut his mouth, too. "Sometimes I literally do not know how he could stand you. Okay, philosophy boy, here's some Freud: Eliot isn't Eliot anymore. Whatever the Beast did, it made him not care about anything but what he wants. You know what's one name for something that only wants?"

Quentin stayed pointedly silent.

"Id, Quentin. He's a fucking id-monster now. He looks like Eliot and sometimes he sounds like Eliot but he's not Eliot, because now he has no conscience to rein him in. Got it?"

Quentin, who had seen Eliot flinch away from so many things he wanted in the year since they met, did not, precisely, get it. "Where is he?"

"Jesus." Margo turned bodily away, that classic I give up on you gesture. "I don't fucking know. Could be in Malaysia by now. Just follow the trail of corpses."

So Quentin did.

Now.

Even when godless creatures are rising from the depths of the earth, it seems, people want to get paid. Or they want a routine, some semblance of normalcy, but Quentin usually suspects it's the former. Whatever the reason, when Eliot brings Quentin to his favourite restaurant in Italy, it's still operational.

"Holy fuck," Quentin mumbles around his first mouthful. He hadn't known pasta could even taste like this.

"What did I tell you?" Eliot is visibly pleased. He takes a bite of his own meal and frowns a little, then waves their server over. "This is a touch overcooked. Could you ask your chef to try again?"

The server bites her lip hard, in that way that means motherfucking Americans. Quentin hides his smile in another heavenly mouthful. "Of course," she says mildly, and leaves.

The fingers of Eliot's hand start to tap restlessly against the tabletop. Quentin switches his fork to his other hand and lays the newly freed one over Eliot's. "No."

Eliot pouts, but his eyes on Quentin are soft and crinkled at the corners. "You're no fun. But fine."

Tragically, the happy, tingly feeling of having his own instincts trusted is interrupted when Quentin is grabbed from behind and traveled away somewhere.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Julia," Quentin says before he's even turned around. Sure enough, there she is, tiny and glaring and just releasing Penny's arm.

Penny blows Quentin a kiss, condescending and cruel, before he disappears again. Julia gestures wordlessly to the large, flat boulder behind them, so Quentin sits. She's brought them somewhere fairly scenic this time; a large, rolling green hill that overlooks tumultuous waters.

"There's no reason you couldn't just stick around for once. I was really enjoying my food."

Julia drops down beside him. "Yes, there is. And this is the part where you say he won't hurt me, and I say I can't trust your judgment, and you say some bullshit about not needing rescuing, so let's just… not." She sighs. "How are you?"

"Honestly? I'm fine, Jules." A rustling noise somewhere off to their right distracts them. Julia shapes out a complicated series of tuts and a filthy corpse drops from a tree to the ground, dead once more. Quentin adds, "I'm not the one kicked off the apocalypse."

It's cruel, no matter how light he keeps his tone. He knows it is. He knows that if he were Julia, brilliant and overpowered, and he'd tried to save everyone and overshot, if he'd instead called forth—whatever this is—

He isn't Julia, though. Sometimes he can't resist twisting that knife.

Edgily, Julia says, "I'm fixing it."

"Some things aren't fixable." He's been telling her that since they were eleven years old.

Way off in the distance, a light bursts in the sky. It morphs after a moment into the Bat-Signal. Quentin almost laughs aloud.

"He'll be here soon," Quentin says, though he's sure that Julia can guess. "How are you?"

Her shoulder bumps his. "Fine. Still breathing."

"I'm not coming with you."

"Yeah. I know."

Penny snaps into view bare moments later, which means Eliot is close. Wearily—as wearily as Quentin has ever seen her—Julia stands.

"Stay safe," she tells Quentin, taking Penny's arm.

"You too," he replies. "I miss you." In the next breath they're gone.

It's not long before Eliot strides into view, emerging theatrical and resplendent over the waves below. He can never resist the whole walking on water thing. As he gets closer Quentin notes a plastic bag swinging from his wrist.

"I brought your leftovers," Eliot calls, and Quentin grins and goes to meet him.

Then.

Margo was wrong. Quentin had suspected so immediately, but he knew the very moment that Eliot jumped from a skyscraper in Manhattan and landed in the classic superhero pose that this was still the Eliot he loved. Different now, sure, that much was obvious in the lightness with which he moved, the carefree way he hummed pop anthems while he waded through nests of the undead—but Quentin wasn't afraid of different. Quentin, who'd taken many kinds of pills designed to make him different, whose brain could at a moment's notice flatten everything into two dimensions or conjure up invisible creatures for Quentin to run from, that Quentin knew different.

And besides, Eliot wasn't an id-monster. He didn't want things more post-Beast, or want them differently; he just didn't yearn the way he once did. Quentin knew this because he'd asked.

"What did he do?" he'd asked, emboldened by Eliot's arm over his shoulders and by the glow of the distant fire they watched. It looked like someone had set flame to a tower in Midtown and Quentin liked how it lit up the sky. "The Beast, I mean? Margo said some stuff."

Eliot sighed, all for show, and tousled Quentin's hair. "I'm sure she did. Bambi's never been very good with change. I don't know, Q, it's hard to explain, but he thought he could use me to get to Julia and Alice, so he offered me something. I said yes."

Down the street a couple of muggles approached, a man and a woman, holding hands and hugging the side of a building. Eliot held up his free palm and conjured a miniature sun. The moment the muggles saw it, they fled.

When they were gone, Quentin asked, "What does it feel like?"

Eliot hummed a little, drummed his fingertips against Quentin's shoulder, and for a long moment didn't answer. When he did it was with an exhilarated tone that infected Quentin's body, spreading warm through him to his fingers and toes.

Wondering, almost breathless, Eliot said, "It doesn't hurt anymore." And he said, "Can I kiss you?" Of course Quentin said yes.