Chapter Text
Since as far back as Quentin can remember (could remember? He wonders if maybe he exists in the past tense now), death had always seemed like a really nice prospect. A rest from his ever-churning mind, a dreamless sleep. The end, full stop.
Except it turns out death isn’t the end. Even after you shuffle off that mortal coil, it all just keeps going. And going. And going. Only now, there are no distractions—no food, no booze, no sex, no friends, no problems to fix, no magic to practice, no mysteries to solve. No color, no light. No love. Hell, there aren’t even any books to read. Death could have at least left a few crappy magazines scattered around the eternal waiting room. Or, y’know, shelled out for a Netflix subscription. He hates that he’ll never get to see the second season of Arcane.
It’s boring as fuck. Jerking off, daydreaming, none of it feels like anything anymore. He still gets off, but orgasming has become merely clinical, a theoretical thrill. His imagination is empty, his pleasure centers numb. In life, his bouts of anhedonia were the worst—so much worse than your garden-variety major depression that leads to whiskey binges and clumsy suicide attempts. The Underworld is nothing but.
One day (if there’s any such thing as days in this gray, timeless nothingness), Quentin rises from his squeaky folding chair in his empty room and shouts to no one in particular, “Hey, could I at least get a Nintendo Switch in here? Would love to play Breath of the Wild!”
There’s no response. There never is.
“Can you, like, stop ignoring me? Anyone? Penny? Fucking please? I didn’t kill myself so I could spend my undeath dying of boredom!”
In the deafening silence that follows, Quentin drives his fist into the wall as hard as he can, then the other, again and again, over and over again. It doesn’t hurt, and he doesn’t bleed. But at least it feels like something, even if that something is agony. After a while, he loses himself in it, hard enough that he actually remembers something from his life, which has become increasingly difficult these days.
Fillory. A timeline erased. A gray day, the smell of coming rain. He’s been on mosaic duty for hours, and his hands are starting to cramp up. So he has a tantrum about it, hefting the tile he’s holding and whipping it fastball-style at a nearby tree. He shouts obscenities when it shatters, even though there’s no one there to hear.
There is someone, though. Eliot, emerging from the trees, a sack of windfall apples slung over one shoulder. He abandons it on the ground and rushes to Quentin’s side when he sees his state.
“Q! What’s wrong?”
“Me. I’m wrong. As usual.”
Eliot visibly relaxes. “Ah. I see we’re having a self-loathing day.”
“You don’t get it, El. I broke one of the tiles. Now we’ll never get back home. And it’s all my fucking fault.” He gestures toward the smashed ceramic sprawled in the dirt beneath the tree.
Furrowing his brow, Eliot lowers his lanky body to the ground and gathers up the pieces. “This isn’t so bad. We can glue it back together with that maple sap Arielle gave us.”
“Since when are you an optimist?” Quentin says, shaking his head in wonder
Eliot smiles softly. “Since I quit drinking and became a fucking forager.”
Quentin presses his hand against the warmth of that stubbled cheek. “It’s a good look on you.”
“Sweetheart, everything is a good look on me.”
Quentin can’t recall the last time a memory came back to him that fresh, like a Twinkie preserved in plastic wrap. Ignoring the ache in his knuckles, he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to summon the rest of that scene. What happened next? Did they fix the tile? Did Eliot kiss him? Did Eliot fuck him while raindrops chimed on the roof?
Nothing. Fucking nothing, like always.
Except there is something, isn’t there? Eliot. He has Eliot again—more than just a blurry impression of a face, like the rest of the people he knew in life. Eliot is vivid behind Quentin’s eyelids, from the patrician line of his jaw to the bags beneath his eyes that somehow only make him look even more handsome.
Quentin left him all alone up there. Well, not alone—he still has the others. Still. How could he? He hadn’t even gotten the chance to see Eliot after they got the Monster out of him.
He’s a fucking asshole—a stinking anus of a person. Lower than dirt, deep beneath the earth.
Ah. I see we’re having a self-loathing day.
“They’re all self-loathing days, El,” he says to the empty room.
He waits for Eliot to say something in response, like, Baby girl, you’re too cute to hate yourself this much.
“I miss you,” Quentin murmurs, sprawling out on the floor, which is neither hard nor soft. It just is. “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.”
He doesn’t know how many times he repeats it, but apparently there is some kind of magic down here in the dark, because incredibly, a door materializes in the wall. Quentin jumps to his feet as a bored-looking woman in an old-timey postman’s uniform steps through.
“Coldwater?” she asks, her voice a dry rasp.
Nonexistent heart racing in his nonexistent chest, he stammers, “Yes. Yeah. Yes.”
“Letter came for you.”
“Wait, we can get mail down here?” he asks as she passes it over.
But she’s already leaving, the door disappearing behind her.
Whatever, there’s an envelope in his hands, a real envelope. It’s addressed to Quentin Coldwater, before he went to the Seam in a loopy, elegant script he’d recognize anywhere.
He tears it open with shaking hands, unfolds the fine parchment, and reads three simple words that change everything:
Come back, asshole.
Screw this. Quentin’s gonna live.