"Sometimes the physical kids cottage gets a little wild," Eliot says, but it's so loud in here that he has to sway into Quentin's space. One hand curls around his shoulder for balance as Eliot plants the words directly into Quentin's ear. Quentin swallows; his throat closing, his adam's apple sliding. This close, he has to tilt his head back to look Eliot in the eye. This close, Quentin can smell whatever cologne it is Eliot's wearing, something that smells like the woods just after a rain mixing with the gin cocktail on Eliot's breath. And underneath all that, under the collared shirt with the complicated tie knot and the vest that polishes Eliot's look to a level beyond Quentin's worn sneakers and jeans, Quentin Coldwater can smell Eliot Waugh's skin.
Wholesome Entire Magicians Cast Fluff - Chapter Two
Okay, the response to this post was pretty sweet (thank you everyone, you rock!!), so I’m making my idea a multi-chapter thing. Chapter two extends below the cut (this bitch was over 2,000 words, haha)
AO3: In The Happy Pause of it All
Chapter Two - Thanksgiving Competition: Penny vs Eliot
Josh has reviewed the rules, made his changes, and they were ready to go- one week of prep until Thanksgiving. Kady started taking bets on the side as to who everyone thought would win, and was surprised when even Fen got in the game. Who was gonna turn down the High King of Fillory? Even if she bet two silver and jewel daggers, which was a little unorthodox and would be difficult to split among the winners. But they were really pretty, and bad ass (like me, Kady thought, and laughed), and Kady was certain she could figure out how to make sure she ended up with them.
Quentin decided that Penny and El could get two people each to help them make all the food. Josh concurred, a sous chef and a second assistant were well within their rights to have. It took Penny days to make his final decision, but Eliot knew instantly who he wanted.
Q was only a little put out when Eliot chose Alice (I mean, she can cook and all) and Margo instead of him. Alice agreed, albeit grudgingly, and Margo was pretty sure it was because Kady had talked last weekend about how Penny looked really hot when he was cooking, but of course Margo would never say that out loud… Except she did, because she is Margo. Alice blushed and left the room to go make some tea, happy that Kady was out dealing with Hedgewitch business.
Q put up some token resistance at not being chosen, but his heart wasn’t in it. At least this meant he could watch excitedly (and taste test a lot on both sides) and he did not have to worry about accidentally setting something on fire… Like he did that time he tried to make popcorn on the stove. Which was an event Eliot quickly reminded him about.
“Come on, El! It was ONE time!!”
“Yeah, but the loft smelled like burnt popcorn until Alice came home and spelled it away. We do not need a repeat when the stakes are this high, Q. Alice is gonna be too busy ensuring my INEVITABLE VICTORY to spell away the smell of burnt roast duck.”
Penny went with Julia (no one was shocked there). But for his second person, he chose Zelda, which was definitely a twist no one saw coming. Especially Zelda, but everyone could see how happy it made her. She took the time to adjust her glasses before agreeing, trying to act as though she had seen it coming.
He denied it, but Julia was pretty sure he picked Zelda to make her feel more like one of the group, rather than for a tactical advantage. He claimed that her speed reading would come in handy, and handed her a stack of cookbooks to memorize before the big day.
The night before, at a light dinner of salad and soup (everyone was saving room for tomorrow) El suddenly threw down his spoon - “Fuck!! We never decided on what the loser has to do!”
Penny looked up from his not-so-subtle staring at Julia, shaking his head “I thought we were just doing this for bragging rights? And to know for sure who is the best. Which obviously is me.”
“Well, yeah,” El scoffed “but that is for the winner. What will you… I mean, the-as-of-yet-unknown-loser… have to do when they fail miserably and get CRUSHED INTO DUST?”
Marina, who had been crashing the dinners so often lately they just set a permanent place for her at the table, smiled. “I know.” She said. “And it is perfect. Loser has to clean up all the dishes and the entire kitchen - no magic.”
It was agreed, this seemed perfect- completely in harmony with the spirit of the event. And Alice had agreed to be a sous chef, so it wasn’t fair to assume she’d clean the kitchen as well.
Josh dragged a chair over so he could watch the whole event “to prevent cheating/maintain his unbiased outlook and ensure no travesties against food were commited” but everyone knew it was because he wanted to enjoy every second of being valued so much for his skills, and it was kinda cute tbh.
Penny went with a classic Thanksgiving feast, the only time he ran into an issue was when he wanted to have canned cranberry sauce - Josh said that was a no-go because it was a cooking competition. After a quick team huddle Penny had to send Jules out for more ingredients and he thanked his lucky stars that Zelda had memorized 6 different recipes for the jellied berries, so they put their heads together to come up with the perfect combo recipe.
Quentin kept stealing marshmallows that were supposed to be for the sweet potato casserole, until Penny shot him a look that was so reminiscent of back when they were roommates that Q backed up all the way over to Eliot’s prep station and stayed there for a good fifteen minutes. Peeking out from behind El’s back he waited Penny was adequately distracted and swooped in again. Zelda was making candied nuts, and all the wrath in the world couldn’t stop him from sneaking a few here and there.
Eliot was going all-out. This was a gourmet feast that would make Emeril Lagasse quake in his boots. Alice was a whirlwind behind and around him, definitely not putting on any extra flair for Kady, who was watching while leaning against a pillar, smiling gently. Margo was the most focused she had been since her quest in the dessert, attacking each task Eliot gave her with a voracious passion that made Josh shift a little in his chair and Fen bite her lip and unconsciously twirl her hair around her finger.
Of course Eliot also had themed drinks which he was crafting with care, crushing the mint delicately and lining the cup rims while keeping an eye on Quentin to make sure he wasn’t eating all of the sugar crusted flower petals because those were for garnish goddamnit. But he had to smile, because thinking back to the start of it all, his plan definitely worked. Q was eating regularly and his clothes all fit again. Taking a quick pause to look around, El was filled with a happiness that he never had in the mind-palace-situation, even in the physical kids college, because this? This was home. This was a family that knew him and loved him for who he was. This was everything…
“Quit your fucking daydreaming and mash your goddamn potatoes, Eliot” Margo snapped, hands never stilling from perfectly slicing apples and arranging them into rosettes. But then she looked up at him and smiled, and he knew that she once again saw him and understood where he was at, what he was thinking… But that this was a competition, and they had priorities.
Soon the entire apartment filled with the scent of happiness and home and good cooking, the savory notes of rosemary and turkey mixing with the sweetness of apple and pecan pies, offset with the spiciness of cardamom and ginger. Q was hopping all over the place at this point from the sugar high of his taste-testing, and eventually both Julia and Eliot agreed they had to banish him from the kitchen because he kept getting underfoot. But even as she made him leave, Jules smiled and snuck him another handful of marshmallows to tide him over.
Quentin decided to use all this energy to set the table, and as he was setting down the last of the dishes, everyone started trickling in. Fogg had brought his record player, and got some mellow tunes going in the background. In the past, none of the group would have thought Frank Sinatra was thanksgiving music, but after today everyone would smile and remember every time they heard “the way you look tonight” on the radio. Alice even sometimes added it to the queue of the playlist they normally had softly going in the evenings, just to ease tensions. She thought the way everyone’s face lit up was even better than the taste of bacon.
Marina came with a box of little gifts for everyone, which made everyone think that the universe had flipped upside down and pigs had wings, until her girlfriend came in behind her, all smiles and happiness and Marina passed off the box to Fen with a smile and a muttered “the things I do for love,” shuddering slightly before going to collect her girlfriend’s jacket to put in the other room.
Harriet came with a couple other Hedges that only Julia and Kady knew, so they added in the extra panel to the table and set more plates, and made sure they knew about the competition and why there were two completely different but complete meal options currently being prepared. Harriet pulled Kady aside and told her that these Hedges had nowhere else to go, and Kady just smiled and said “well, it is good that we have enough food for an army, then!”
Tick followed Fen around asking questions about absolutely everything until she got frustrated, he was distracting her from watching Margo…. uh, hanging out with the whole group as they finished up with the cooking. So she set him in front of the TV and showed him how to work the remote and left him to his own devices.
Dinner was eaten, everyone was lazing about the living room in various stages of food-coma, and the time for judgement had come. Josh was making a big deal of it, which made Penny frustrated, but Eliot saw as only right given the seriousness of his task. As he ate Josh had been writing notes in a notebook and he spent a good thirty minutes in his throne, er, chair, listening seriously to the input of every guest before adding to the tallies he was keeping.
After an hour, Margo started impatiently tapped her foot, staring at him and caressing Sorrow and Sorrow with a meaningful look. Clearing his throat and nervously adjusting his collar, Josh spoke. Finally.
“This was a close one, and opinions were widely split between the contestants.” He started, as Kady pulled out her list of who bet and what they bet. “In the end, I had to step back a bit. I had to take taste alone out of the competition, and go back to what Thanksgiving is all about. How it is the taste of childhood, the memories of years gone by…”
“And for that reason, sorry El, Penny is the clear winner.”
Penny and Julia let out a whoop from the corner where they were standing, grabbing her around the waist Penny spun her in a circle. Then, catching himself, he put a solemn look on his face and said “well, if you are sure.”
Kady started making the rounds, collecting money. Fogg handed his over with equanimity, Zelda was sheepish, making sure she told the room that she placed her bet BEFORE being chosen for Penny’s team, and thought it wasn’t fair to the spirit of the competition to change her mind. Margo scoffed and sat back in her chair, eyeing Josh up and down as though she had never seen anyone more ridiculous. Eliot dramatically draped himself over the couch, putting his head in Q’s lap. “I’m ruined,” he sighed, placing a hand against his forehead. Q ran a comforting hand through his hair, soothing the taller man as best as he could in the moment of his defeat.
“Josh,” Margo said , “you better explain why I, I mean, Eliot, lost… Right fucking now.”
Laughing nervously, Josh continued “Well, you see, Eliot’s dishes were amazing, no doubt. But Penny’s tasted more like Thanksgiving, and after hearing what the people had to say” he gestured around, spreading the blame as best as he could “I had to go with the meal that best fit the theme. The actual flavors were too neck-and-neck, I couldn’t pick on that alone in the end.” Margo nodded, once, reaching behind her for her purse to pay up, and Josh sighed in relief.
“Fair is fair,” Marina said, her girlfriend sitting in her lap contentedly, “Penny gets the bragging rights and Eliot cleans the kitchen - no magic.” Quentin could swear her eyes were a bit extra gleeful at the outcome, but he couldn’t be sure how she would have reacted if Penny had lost, so he kept the thought to himself.
Pulling himself up from the couch gracefully, Eliot exclaimed “never let it be said that I am a sore loser!!” With a flourish he created a trophy magically, and presented it to Penny. As Margo laughed and rolled her eyes, Penny smiled and polished it a bit with his sleeve. “I now will go… wash dishes and clean floors.”
Walking away, after grabbing Q’s hand to pull him along, Eliot turned around “But rest assured, my friend… There will be a rematch.”
Back in Fillory, present day, Eliot struggles with the rush of memories from a life he apparently lived, even though he didn't. But there's a quest to be finished, a kingdom to be run, and a world with no magic to make it all infinitely more difficult. So what's a High King to do when flashbacks won't stop and Quentin just wants to move forward?
I wanted to play with all the empty spaces from THE scene in A Life in the Day, and explore the fallout from it in the present world that never really got shown. I hope you enjoy!
Also on AO3
“Just give. Me. A minute,” Eliot said through gritted teeth, irritation sharpening the edges of his words until they cut effortlessly.
“Babes, look, we don’t have a minute. I need you to get your shit together now.”
Margo’s voice matched his abrasive syllable for abrasive syllable, but Eliot kept the heels of his hands pressed firmly to his eyes. She was right. The quest was waiting. Their kingdom was waiting. Somewhere in the castle, Quentin was waiting. When had the weight of not one, but two entire worlds suddenly landed on his shoulders? And when had he decided he was okay with carrying it all? He may have been miserable at Brakebills, but sometimes he missed the simplicity of burying his misery in drugs and drinks and warm bodies willing to occupy his senses for an evening.
“Can’t magic save itself for once? Let its merry band of idiots take a breather?” he said. His swift answer was Margo prying his hands from his face, an unforgiving look in her eyes.
“What the fuck is this, El? It’s your goddamn quest, you roped me in. And you know I’ll do anything to help you out here because fuck if I don’t miss magic more than that purple vibrator I left in the cottage, but I didn’t ask for this. Any of it. Do you see me moping over some lost past that probably sucked ass anyway? I mean, you apparently died, right? Sounds like a fuckin shitshow to me,” she said, hands on her hips, standing her ground, as always.
Her voice echoed slightly in the high marble ceilings of the throne room, only serving to add to the power of it. Margo had always known how to command a room. Or in this case, an entire castle. Eliot shook his head, a mess of dark curls flying from the places where they stuck out around his crown. “I know. Down, Bambi. I get it.”
“Well,” Margo said, tapping her gorgeous pointed toe boot on the floor, “What I need you to GET right now, is your ass in gear. Q’s called some sort of all-questers-on-deck meeting.”
Eliot groaned his disapproval but stood from his throne anyway. She was right. Margo was almost always right. But she had missed one fine detail. He wasn’t mourning the loss of a past he couldn’t remember. It wasn’t all lost when Margo stopped them from going to the mosaic in the first place. Oh no, not by a long shot. He remembered everything. That was the problem.
“Let’s go see what our sweet, depressive Potter thinks we ought to do next,” he said, raising a hand in protest even as he followed Margo out of the throne room. “Which, I take issue with, by the way. His incessant need to be the big man in charge. This quest was bestowed upon me, technically, and he keeps hijacking it.”
Eliot pretended not to hear the words of the Great Cock ringing in his ears. You have a brother of the heart. With the floppy hair. This quest was just as much Q’s as it was his. It might have been theirs – both of them – more than it was anyone else’s.
“Weren’t you just complaining about not wanting this thing?” Margo eyed him carefully, clearly uninterested in putting up with whatever rabid mood swing was overtaking him.
“Well, yeah, but I want the option of not wanting it, you know?” he said airily, twirling his hand above his head as though that elegant, meaningless movement explained what he meant.
“Oh fuck,” Margo rolled her eyes, “Can you not be a teenage girl for two seconds here?”
Eliot huffed, but he quieted and followed the path to the fairy-proof hallway, linking his arm in Margo’s. When they turned the corner, Eliot caught sight of Quentin pacing back and forth, hands twisting in front of him, long hair creating a curtain over his face. He could practically see the concentration on the younger man’s face, the way his forehead scrunched up, eyebrows practically in his hairline. He was trying to work something particularly difficult out, Eliot recognized the look in an instant.
****
And suddenly, he wasn’t in the pale stone hallway convening with the other questers anymore. He was outside a small hut, staring at piles of tiles around them, looking up to catch that same concentrated, problem-solving look etched onto Quentin’s face in a different world, in a different time, in a different life.
“Um – so,” Q started.
"Yeah,” Eliot paused, understanding what he was trying to say before it was said, “Um… Let’s just save our overthinking for the puzzle, yeah?”
A beat passed where Eliot’s heart was practically in his throat, and then Q nodded. “Yeah.”
And that was that, or so he thought.
The mosaic itself was increasingly frustrating by the day, but they still worked at it diligently, documenting each failed attempt and starting over again. And again. And again. By the end of the day, they were both exhausted, and by the end of this particular day, Eliot was especially exhausted. He’d been doing his best to follow his own advice, to save his overthinking for the puzzle, but it was difficult when he kept catching vivid glimpses of the night before in his mind.
He watched as Quentin moved through the little hut, anxiety coming off of him in waves as he filed away the drawings from the day according to some intricate organizational system he’d made up, and Eliot had let him run with. He’d thought he’d had a pretty good handle on all of Quentin’s… Quentinisms before they stepped through the clock and into this past version of Fillory, but the level of familiarity every tick, every look, every sigh now held in his heart only proved to him that he hadn’t known as much about the younger man as he’d assumed. So, it was unsurprising to the former (or future? Time travel had never really made sense to him) High King when Quentin looked in his direction with those big, worried eyes.
“Hey, El?”
Eliot blinked away the interest in his amber gaze and replaced it with practiced nonchalance. “Hmmm?” he hummed in response.
“You ever think about what’ll happen if we don’t figure it out?”
The fear in Quentin’s tone was poorly masked, even to the ears of someone not as well trained in emotional avoidance. Eliot’s immediate instinct was to diffuse.
“No, not really. That’s not how this story goes, Q. You’re the hero, and the hero doesn’t die halfway through the quest,” he said dismissively.
“Well, the hero also generally doesn’t kill a God and get magic turned off in the first place, so,” Quentin retorted, “I’m not sure the usual literary epic rules apply here.”
Eliot paused, elegantly wrinkling his brows at his…. friend? Fellow quester? Brother of the heart? Man he kissed and then some the night before? Quentin may have had a point, but if they couldn’t count on fairytale rules in this fairytale land, well, then what was the fucking point of it all?
“So we’re playing parts in Homer’s Morally Gray Odyssey. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Yeah, but what if you are?”
“Then I try to be right again tomorrow. We don’t have a lot of choice here,” Eliot said finally, sighing heavily.
“Huh….” Quentin’s unspoken anxieties were enough to drive Eliot completely mad.
“Come on, out with it,” he prompted, waving at the space in front of him. “The floor’s all yours.”
“No, it’s, it’s nothing.”
In lieu of rolling his eyes so hard he gave himself a headache, Eliot replied, “Convincing.”
“It’s just – “ Quentin’s hands were headed for his hair, a nervous tick Eliot had learned to recognize long before they’d spent a year with almost solely each other. “I know we said no overthinking last night –“
Eliot held up a hand, shaking his head as he stood. He tucked in the olive green fabric of his shirt that had been pulled loose in the movement. “Stop. No, nothing good can follow that sentence. And no offense, but I think I’m about up to my tile-riddled brain in ‘nothing good’ for the day.”
He’d woken up that morning with an impressive amount of hope in his heart for Eliot Waugh. Quentin was lying beside him in bed, his own arm draped protectively over Quentin’s waist. It was something he’d never really been able to stop himself from doing, protecting Quentin. Even when it came at the cost of his own destruction, it was a fee he would pay a thousand times over. In the morning light, Eliot was quite certain he’d never seen anything as beautiful as the peaceful planes of Quentin’s face awash in the golden-pink of the sunrise filtering in through the window. It struck him in that moment how rarely he saw the younger man looking at peace. The calm on Quentin’s sleeping face then was a stark contrast to the intense anxiety that had clouded his every feature nearly as soon as he woke up.
One year. It had taken one year for Quentin Coldwater to break his heart again. But the way he’d looked at him after remembering the previous night; the way he’d practically jumped, and then almost fell, out of bed, tucked his hair anxiously behind his ears, dressing quickly and insisting on getting to work had done the trick. It took everything Eliot had to give him the out earlier that day, he didn’t think he could bear to drudge it back up in order to allow the younger man the space to verbally hammer the final nail in Eliot’s extremely premature coffin.
“El – “ Q protested, but Eliot sauntered away in the direction of the kitchen.
“Seriously? Can we not Quentin this to death, please?” he said, his voice betraying the exhaustion he felt at the prospect of having to listen to Quentin detail all the ways in which he was “really great, but…” That was typically his speech to give.
“Eliot, for fuck’s sake, would you let me finish a goddamn thought for once?”
Quentin had followed him into the hut’s tiny, primitive kitchen. The forcefulness in his voice caught Eliot off guard. With considerable effort, he stopped himself from speaking again by biting his lower lip from the inside and crossing his arms with impossible grace over his chest. He arched an eyebrow in a sort of challenge for Quentin, conceding him the floor.
“Oh, um. Okay. I didn’t think you were really going to –“ Quentin must have caught the exasperation that swept into Eliot’s gaze, because he corrected himself quickly, “Right.”
“Look, I just – I’ve been thinking and I know that all of this,” his hands flailed around him, trying to encompass the hut, the mosaic, and the time they’d stepped into in one erratic gesture, “Is just, y’know, not at all what either of us expected. And I dunno, it’s a different world, but it’s also not? And you’re still Eliot and I’m still Quentin and I just think that’s something important. That’s something you should know, you know?”
“Q….” Eliot interjected cautiously. Biting his tongue had never been Eliot’s strong suit, but he did his best, motioning for Q to wrap it up, smirking to mask the small spark of hope that had ignited in his chest. It was foolhardy, Eliot knew, but something in the tone of Quentin’s rambles shifted the day’s despair in him slightly.
“What I’m saying – what I’m trying to say is – we’re here. And it’s familiar because it’s Fillory, right? But it’s also totally not because it’s Fillory like, forever ago, and we uh, we don’t know HOW long we’re gonna be here. We could figure this out tomorrow and I dunno, I just mean, if we did, if we do, I don’t think it would uh, I don’t want you to think it would change the fact,” Quentin’s sentence sputtered out there, his left hand raising from the place it had settled deep in his pocket and coming to rest on the back of his neck, his elbow jutting awkwardly out from his side.
“That I – I want last night to happen again.”
A hush fell over the entire hut. In the heavy silence, Eliot’s heart took Quentin’s words and used them as lighter-fluid drenched kindling, growing the spark of hope into a wildfire that propelled him forward. He reached out his arms so that his hands cupped the sides of Quentin’s face a full three seconds (damn long limbs) before the rest of him did, and pulled the shorter man up to him, dipping down to meet him somewhere in the middle, their lips crashing together far less gracefully than they had the night before. He felt Quentin’s arm drop from the back of his neck, felt the uncertainty in the other man’s body as Eliot kissed him like he was the only viable source of oxygen in the room.
When Quentin had started rambling, Eliot wasn’t sure what to expect, but it damn sure wasn’t the confession he received, and if this was a quick lapse in mental clarity brought on by the stress of another unsuccessful day at the mosaic, he wasn’t going to miss his moment. Eliot’s long fingers tangled easily into Quentin’s hair, and after a moment where Quentin’s entire body tensed against the sudden contact, Eliot felt him relax into it, felt Q’s hands wrapping around his waist, hands sliding up his back. They stayed that way for several minutes, Eliot’s tongue hungrily exploring the younger man’s mouth until finally he pulled away but kept his hands on either side of Quentin’s face.
“Done overthinking it?” he asked, a slow, playful smile spreading across his kiss-swollen lips.
Quentin looked dazed, eyes bouncing back and forth between Eliot’s as though searching for some sign that this was all a joke to the older man. He would find no such evidence. After a long moment, seemingly satisfied with his search, Q smiled, mirroring the joy Eliot could feel emanating from his own face, and lifted onto his toes to close the space between them again.
explicit | quentin coldwater/eliot waugh | 32,103 words | in-progress
warnings: no major archive warnings. canon-typical violence
"It's like you're saying I'm heartless."
Margo ignores that. "And then here comes this guy who doesn't, I mean does not fit your usual criteria. And you don't just flirt with him. You go out of your way to do things that make him happy."
"Giving him that wine was worth it."
"So here's what I think." Margo cradles Eliot's head and gently, slowly tests his range of motion. "I think Quentin is the kind of guy you actually like. The kind of guy you usually avoid. Because he's not a bump genitals I'll call you later type. He falls in love, Eliot. And you want that."
explicit | quentin coldwater/eliot waugh | 28,753 words | in-progress
warnings: no major archive warnings. canon-typical violence
Elliot strides into the clean room. It's--strange. It feels muffled, as if the walls were soundproof. Dull, as if a finely tuned sense of his is gone. Julia's screaming again, bashing her fists into the floor in front of her, a smear of something the object of her violence. She lifts her bruised hands to cover her face as she sobs, and Eliot catches the fluttering movement of a pulverised wing, as if a breeze had caught it. But when it moves again, Eliot spins away, trying to keep from vomiting.
That crushed, broken thing is a Fillorian moth. And it's still moving, because it's still alive.
explicit | quentin coldwater/eliot waugh | 71,707 words | in-progress
warnings: see author’s notes. canon-typical violence
Eliot turns back to his task. All the sod has been cut and set aside. Now he drives the point of his spade deeper, cutting up the soil packed for years undisturbed. It's hard work, but the birds are singing overhead, and Quentin's quietly talking to a stag that walked into the clearing and leaned on Quentin until he gave in and scratched its fur. Robins perch on the stag's antlers, singing and landing on the fresh turned earth to feast on worms.
Blisters ache on palms he had worked hard to make smooth and soft—the hands of a man who had never worked a day in his life, save the writer's bump on the side of his left middle finger. His shoulders and his back protest every time he pierces the ground, every time he lifts a block of dirt on his spade—years of bending and working long forgotten.
But he can dig a grave. He's going to dig Tolan's.
explicit | quentin coldwater/eliot waugh | 35,324 words | in-progress
warnings: no major archive warnings. canon-typical violence
Eliot opens the dream-door to a spacious pre-war apartment. Jazz piano and a trip-hop beat play from wall-mounted speakers, and that smell... Eliot takes in a deep breath and his eyes well with tears because he smells—
His favorite dinner. Chicken squares folded into a neat envelope of pastry dough, the insides filled with chicken and cream cheese, so good he always burnt his tongue on the first bite because he couldn't wait for it to cool. He hasn't eaten a chicken square since—
He banishes the memory of yellow flowered wallpaper and pink gingham kitchen curtains. "Q?"
"In the kitchen."
Where's the kitchen? To the left. Eliot passes through a wide hallway with a formal dining room on the left side and a sunken living room to the right, and Eliot knows he's on the Upper East side, and what is he doing here?
Bright color in the living room catches his eye. The room is a mix of the formal and the comfortable, with waist-high bookshelves on every wall. But he comes closer to a series of three illustrations that look like the artist is actually Arthur Rackham and Louis Comfort Tiffany reincarnated in the same body.
They're a triptych of book covers: Cynosure, Nemesis, Sempiternal: The Cycle of Étaín by Eliot Waugh.
explicit | quentin coldwater/eliot waugh | 38,870 words | in-progress
warnings: no major archive warnings. canon-typical violence
Silence falls on the dream-world kitchen. No more moths. No more voices. Only the sounds of Quentin's sniffing, throaty sobs.
"Q," Eliot says. "It's all right. You did it. You did it."
Quentin doesn't look at him. "You broke up with me."
"I know. I'm so, so sorry. It was shitty and cowardly and I fucked up so bad—"
"It’s okay," Quentin says with a gasp and a sob. "I can fix it."
The kitchen's back the way it was. Water boils in the blue enameled cast iron pot on the stove. Not a drop of blood remains on the cabinets. All the moths have vanished.
Quentin offers his hand and helps Eliot to his feet. "I can fix it. We can be happy. Right here."
