damage control for a walking corpse

by theheartischill

Chapter 6

Los Angeles, CA

Quentin wakes up to sunlight glaring through hotel curtains and the sound of water running in the bathroom with an acid taste in his mouth and a murderous headache and reaches for his phone to check the time and sees that it’s 7:23 in the morning, on Friday, June 19th, which —

—Is this the new Caro? Oh, I can’t wait!

—I wasn’t sure if you’d read this one yet, but the guy at Barnes and Noble said it came out just a couple weeks ago, so —

—No, I haven’t had time — it’s perfect, Curly Q. Thank you. Come here, kiddo.

—I’m almost nineteen, Dad, I’m not a kid anymore.

—I know, but you’re still my kid, no matter how old you get. And every single year, you’re the best present I could ask for.

—I have to go — Julia and I are meeting some people to go see the Avengers movie —

—That’s great. I’m so glad you’ve made friends at college.

—They’re not really my friends, they’re Julia’s — but she’s waiting for me, we’re going to be late —

Yeah, no. Nope. Absolutely fucking not.

-

“How are you feeling?” Julia asks, coming over to sit beside him once she finishes getting dressed.

Quentin shrugs. “Fine?” He’s feeling pretty great, actually — he took one of the Santa Fe pills and one of the Vegas pills and a couple of other pills he doesn’t remember getting while she was showering and there was a weird off-kilter moment before the last white one had kicked in but now he feels like he’s a balloon floating about seven feet above his body.

“I know you haven’t really wanted to talk about — anything, really,” Julia says, “and I want to respect that, but if you did want to talk about anything, today, I’m here. And I promise I won’t — start the whole therapy conversation, or whatever. You can just talk, and I’ll — be there. I just wanted to say that, since… you know.”

Quentin tries to frown like he’s puzzling over a crossword clue. “Thanks, but — I don’t know, actually.”

“It’s — your dad’s birthday, right?” Julia says. “I just thought —”

“Oh,” says Quentin, “is today the nineteenth? Wow, I have totally lost track of time out here.” He stands up to get ready. When he does that his head swoops around while staying perfectly still. He feels like he’s walking on the moon. Light and frictionless. “That’s really sweet, Jules. I appreciate it. But I’m fine. Really.”

-

“I think I’m too high to get it up,” Quentin says into the phone. “So whatever you were thinking, save it for next week.”

His pleasant mood from earlier has soured. Unmarking hedges at a ranch house in Ladera Heights had taken fucking forever because he was so out of it he kept screwing up the spell and by the time they left he was coming down unpleasantly and Julia was giving him intense mom face, equal parts disappointed and concerned with just a splash of barely suppressed irritation. He tried to re-up at the hotel once he finally convinced her he wasn’t going to slit his wrists in the bathtub if she went to catch up with a friend from college but whatever combination he landed on isn’t getting him out of himself far enough or fast enough. Realizing that he couldn’t even count on a hateful and fucked up but — speaking from a purely physical standpoint — admittedly mind-blowing orgasm hadn’t helped.

“What the hell did you take?” Eliot says. Undoubtedly wrinkling his brows, raising the one, incredulous and confused — maybe just a shade judgmental. Dick. “I mean that’s happened to me, but not, like… often. And I’ve taken a lot of shit.”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says. “I still have this stuff from Santa Fe, some I think from Vegas a couple nights ago — I think those were a mistake, people will sell you fucked up shit in Vegas. Couple others from wherever, you know. Leftovers.”

“You don’t even know?”

“I didn’t fucking check out my regimen with my prescribing doctor, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And you’re doing this regularly?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Not like, all the time. It’s a special occasion. We finally hit the West Coast. God. Between you and Julia I’m starting to feel like I should be looking for fucking cameras. Is Dr. Drew about to break the door down and cart me off somewhere?”

“I wasn’t saying…” Eliot trails off, like he’s not sure what he wasn’t saying. Like he thinks maybe actually he was saying they should be shipping Quentin off to some facility where he’ll sit in a circle and talk about his attachment issues with D-list celebrities officially hospitalized for “exhaustion.”

“Anyway,” he says, “is this like, new information? Like have I been coming across to you as a person overly concerned with his physical health? Like, ever, honestly, but especially lately? Because if so, maybe you’re the one who’s fucking high.”

“No, but —” Eliot sounds — lost, almost, or — god what is his fucking deal. “I didn’t think — I don’t know, Quentin. There’s drinking, or smoking a bowl to relax, or even doing E once in a while for fun or whatever, and then there’s — I mean, what, are you just popping random pills by the handful?”

Quentin has to laugh at that. “Do you hear yourself? You sound like a parent on a high school show doing a very special episode.”

Eliot gives a little huff. “Well, sorry there’s not really a snappy way to tell someone I care about that I’m worried about all the drugs he’s doing.”

Quentin keeps laughing, covering his eyes with his hand. “Are you fucking serious? Is this really what my life has come to? I’m getting wellness tips from Eliot fucking Waugh? You spend six months drinking in fucking moderation or whatever and suddenly the guy who wandered into my room my first year because he thought he was being incepted and Joseph Gordon-Levitt had told him there was a portal in the closet to take him out of the dream is lecturing me about fucking sobriety?”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe that’s why, Quentin?” Eliot says. “You’re right, I am a firsthand expert on getting fucked up. And it’s taken me a long time to see that I wasn’t just, like, partying too hard or whatever, that I was trying to find a way not to deal with —”

“Oh please spare me the fucking therapy crap,” Quentin snaps. “Congratulations, you’ve figured out that your tragic childhood gave you a bunch of unhealthy coping mechanisms. What a totally fascinating and novel insight. That’s completely worth a hundred bucks a week.”

“What, and you’re so original, right?” Eliot says. Quentin feels his knuckles curling white. “There’s nothing cliché about a guy fucking his way across America while stoned out of his mind.”

“At least I’m fun,” Quentin says.

Eliot laughs. Quentin could hurl every offensive spell he knows at him without breaking a sweat. “Yeah, you seem like you’re having tons of fun. Positive oodles of it.”

“As opposed to what?” Quentin demands. “As opposed to sitting in my room, freaking out all the time about the stupidest shit, too afraid of my own shadow to fucking — talk, or do anything? As opposed to staying up all night running through the greatest hits of my fuck-ups? As opposed to giving myself heartburn worrying about what every person I’d met in my goddamn life thought about me? Because let me tell you, asshole, that wasn’t fucking fun. Being that loser fucking sucked. Even I didn’t want to hang out with me.”

Eliot says, very quietly, “I liked that guy.”

“That’s right — you were in love with him, right? Your big star-crossed romance.” Every time Quentin remembers it’s like a fresh hockey stick to the windpipe. “What the fuck did you see in him, anyway?” Eliot starts to answer but Quentin doesn’t actually want to hear it. “Did you like how fucking sad he was? So you could kiss and make it better? You liked playing guardian angel to your pathetic little nerd?”

“Q —”

“You liked, what, how fucking sweet he was? How much he fucking cared?” Quentin laughs hollowly. “How he was so fucking desperate he’d impale himself for anyone if he thought they’d like him for it? So lonely he felt lucky just to be allowed to breathe your fucking air? So miserable that getting fucked in a goddamn shack in the woods could feel like the best thing that ever happened to him? I mean what the fuck, Eliot — how broken does a person have to be to enjoy getting time-locked out of his actual life?”

“That’s not —”

“You liked how much he needed you?” Quentin is shouting into the phone by now. He feels like he’s about to combust. “Did that make you feel like less of a fucking waste of space? Or, or how he was so fucking crazy that he made you seem like a functional adult by comparison? Is that why you wouldn’t let him stay at Blackspire? Because you couldn’t stand to lose your walking ego-boost?”

—This is not what we agreed on.

—I didn’t actually agree on anything, but —

“You couldn’t fucking stand it,” he says, “that he might decide his life meant something that had nothing to do with you. And you fucking loved that you knew he would just — forgive you for it, no matter how clear you were that your life had nothing to do with him. Because he could never stay fucking mad at you. Is that right?”

Quentin lets Eliot fumble his way through this one, feeling every word like salt on torn-up skin. “I couldn’t say good-bye — and I couldn’t — I couldn’t let you throw your life away like that, Quentin…”

“Because you were so fucking in love with me,” Quentin says. “But guess what, Eliot? I threw my life away anyway. You weren’t there to fucking stop me. And it was a great call. I saved the fucking world. And now, I don’t fucking need you anymore. And I’m gonna stay mad at you till both of us are dead.” He hangs up before Eliot can respond.

His whole body is trembling, every muscle like a coiled spring. He feels — he could just — he wants to — with a burst of violence he hurls his phone at the wall, listening to the thwack it makes on impact. It’s something. Not enough.

After another minute he pushes himself up to go retrieve it from where it fell, picks it up to see the jagged cracks across the screen. Automatically he goes through the tuts to cast to fix it before he remembers he can’t, and then he yells “Fuck” and hits the wall again, with his fist this time, hard, over and over until his knuckles start to bleed.

-

Julia is typing on her laptop in the other bed. She came back sometime while he was passed out, having given up on the pills and opted for a bottle of gin that made him feel dizzier but not any better. He blinks himself awake feeling unmoored from the usual functioning of gravity and still so angry at Eliot he could fucking choke on it and he hates the billionth featureless hotel room ceiling and the billionth stiff white quilt that always smells the same and the sound of Julia’s fingers on the keys, that ruthlessly efficient clackety-clack. Patient Julia writing to someone who belongs in her clean fucking life, ever inoculated from the dark shadow at her side. Like when she met James, the first time they hung out as a trio, and he could see with a sudden sickening clarity that this was the world Julia had belonged in all along.

“Maybe after we get back to New York,” he says to the air, “I’ll sew rocks into my pockets and go jump in the Hudson. Very literary.”

Julia ignores this. Quentin clenches his jaw.

“Or I could jump in front of the 6 train,” he tries again. “Kind of public, but quick if I time it right. I could take a bunch of painkillers on the steps of Butler, for nostalgia’s sake. Find a tree to hang off in Riverside Park. And the bridges are always an option.”

He doesn’t look but he can hear Julia close the laptop. “How am I supposed to respond when you say this shit? Tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll give it to you, but seriously, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”

Quentin shrugs. “I’m just thinking out loud. You’re overdue for a new project by now. It’s been, what? Like twenty years? I feel like a new lost cause would be a fun change for you.”

“You’re not my project,” she says. She sounds so tired. What the hell has she been doing? “You’re my friend. My best friend.”

“Yeah. Friends.” Quentin hears Eliot’s stupid fucking voice: I liked that guy. “Because I have a great track record with friends. I was such good friends with Eliot, and such good friends with Alice, and look at how well those friendships turned out.”

“I’m not them, Q,” she says. “You and me, we’re our own thing. I’m not going anywhere.”

Julia’s voice sounds soft and heart-heavy and sincere and it feels like swallowing razor blades. His head is spinning and his stomach hurts from the drinking and the anger and the eating too much. He hates her unrelenting faith and his broken phone and the fucking memo pads on hotel nightstands and the cough he’s started hacking unprovoked and the taste of gin and shitty cheap chocolate and off-brand trail mix in his mouth and Julia’s fucking worry and Julia’s fucking love and his jeans which dig into the flesh at his gut even when he’s lying down now and his useless hands and Eliot’s useless voice and his stupid discipline and his ugly face and his stupid life and Julia’s soft voice always reminding him that she’s still fucking there.

“Maybe you have a point,” he says. “If I haven’t scared you off by now maybe you really are stuck with me for life.”

“I guess that’s one way you could think about it,” Julia says, ”although it’s not really what I meant.”

“I bet,” Quentin says, enunciating deliberately while he stares at the ceiling, “I could even finally try to fuck you, and we’d still be friends after. Right?”

Julia doesn’t respond. Probably deciding to not engage. Quentin’s chest is tight. Fuck her. Fuck her for not engaging and fuck her for her fucking support and fuck his too-tight pants and fuck the ugly carpeting and fuck the gleaming white bathroom and fuck Eliot’s sanctimony and fuck his impending hangover and fuck Julia again for always being fucking around. She doesn’t get to insist on being here and not engage. Fuck her for thinking that. Quentin rolls onto his side to tell her that, but then he sees her face and — stops.

The first thing he notices is that she’s mad. Not just mad; angry like a vengeful ancient god. Which — Julia doesn’t get mad at him, not really; irritated, frustrated, pissed, hurt, concerned, exhausted, aggravated, sure. But he can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in their two decades of friendship either of them has exploded at the other with actual rage. Quentin was never eager to risk the one meaningful relationship he had, but Julia — Julia guards her anger, her real anger, as vigilantly as countries guard their nuclear arsenals, and for the same reason: once that shit is out there, hell is raining down. The last time she was actually mad at him —

— well. The last time she was actually mad at him, she almost killed him.

Quentin has a feeling he would prefer that to whatever’s coming next.

The second thing he notices is that she’s crying. That’s — worse. By a lot.

Barely aware of what he’s doing Quentin hears his voice say weakly, “It was just a joke.” He’s not convinced the words make it past his throat. The room feels airless enough to suffocate all sounds.

Low and rough and looking right at him, Julia says, “Unbelievable. You are fucking unbelievable.”

Panic is setting in at the back of his neck. There’s got to be some appropriate response here, but he can’t summon it. “Jules…”

“Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck — god, I can’t —” Julia stands up with her laptop under her arm, starts gathering her things. “I can’t be here right now, I can’t — believe, I can’t fucking believe — I have to go, I need —” She yanks her phone charger out of the plug behind the bed and storms over to the edge of the room and Quentin thinks the worst might be over. But she opens the door a sliver and then shoves it closed and wheels around, having changed her mind, and marches back to stand right above him.

“You know what?” she says. Quentin wants to look away but he’s transfixed by her face, trembling with dark fury and wet with tears she hasn’t bothered to clean off. “Maybe you were right. Maybe you do want to be alone. Because you were surrounded by people who fucking stuck their necks out, risked their actual lives — which, just FYI, some people actually value — to bring you back from the dead, and somehow, that wasn’t fucking good enough for you. And I have spent two months thinking that if I could just give you space and time, if I could just make sure you stayed alive long enough to start processing the total fucking insanity I know you’ve been through, at some point that would be enough for you to start acting like a human being again. But you are so determined to make yourself unforgivable —” She closes her eyes briefly like she hates to look at him. Quentin wants to die. “Maybe one of these days, you’ll get your fucking wish.”

Julia takes a long shaky breath through her nose, eyes tilted up as if seeking heavenly guidance. Her forehead crumples for just a second before she smoothes it out to face him again. “So enjoy playing Russian Roulette with your body and finding new ways to destroy yourself with plausible deniability. Have fun fucking your morbid little fanclub and self-medicating until you forget how shitty it feels. Because when you get to the end of your little tantrum, if you survive that long, you’re going to wish you could take it all back. You’re going to find yourself alone, and lost, and you’re going want to fucking crawl back to the life you convinced yourself you so badly needed to run away from, just like you’ve run away from every other fucking thing that got hard — and don’t you fucking open your mouth to bullshit me about Fillory or the quest or the fucking Beast because we both know playing the hero has never been hard for you. Only being an actual person is. And when that day comes, you might be able to convince the others this was all because of your tragic, heroic death. Most of them wouldn’t think to doubt it. Alice will probably buy it. Maybe even Eliot. But I know you, Quentin.” She makes a bitter sound that’s not quite a laugh. He feels like he’s stopped breathing.

“I know you,” she says, “and you can blame dying all you want — it’s a good story — but deep down you know as well as I do that this is the same shit you’ve always pulled. You have always chosen literally any other option except the one that would require you to be honest with yourself for five seconds. You have always been looking for an airtight excuse to give up. You have always put a thousand times more energy into avoiding your problems than it would take to actually fix them, because you’re too fucking scared to try and find out they can’t be fixed. And I never, ever thought that was true. I never, ever thought you were right about how unfixable you were. But —” She shakes her head, an unhappy smile spreading across her face. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe —” Julia closes her eyes again; for one horrible moment cries; then sets her face hard and says, “I have to get out of here. I have to go. Don’t —” She’s halfway out the door when she finishes, “Don’t find me.”

The door shuts with a slam. Quentin is on the bed still, shaking. Flinching from the air like her words are echoing in the room. Her wounded voice, searing and raw. He feels like he’s going to throw up. He can’t stop seeing her face in his head. Her vicious mouth, her knotted brow. Her dark eyes, red with tears.

He can’t imagine ever talking to her again and he can’t believe she’s gone.

He feels like he’s burning alive.

He —

—This is the same shit you’ve always pulled.

—I didn’t actually agree on anything, but —

—Quentin I think you need to —

— needs a fucking drink, Jesus Christ.

-

The lights are on in the room when he half-falls into it not expecting the door to open after two unsuccessful attempts at swiping the keycard sometime around three in the morning. At first he thinks Julia’s back and in his inebriated state the thought fills him with a swirling dread oddly mixed with relief. But it’s not Julia he finds reading some thick paperback sitting up against the headboard of her bed.

It’s fucking Penny.

“Am I in hell?” Quentin asks. “Because that would explain a lot of things about my life right now, honestly.”

Penny snorts a laugh. His roommate, then; Twenty-Three doesn’t have the energy for that particular flavor of scorn. “That’s right. All of your problems are my fault.”

“Why are you here,” Quentin says, leaning against the wall, even though cosmically it feels completely correct that this fucking day should fucking end with Penny Adiyodi, magically arrived to torment him once again.

“Because,” Penny says, “even Julia got sick of baby-sitting your trainwreck ass, but she’s too good a person to abandon you to the consequences of your actions, so I’m here to make sure you don’t get hit by a truck or die in your sleep. If you weren’t back by four I was gonna run a locator spell and drag you out of whatever innocent bystander’s bedroom you were terrorizing.”

“Right,” Quentin says. “And you’re doing this because you’re just so invested in my continued survival.”

“You know me,” Penny says. “I live to do favors for friends.”

“We’re not friends.”

“Not you, dumbass. God you’re fucking self-absorbed.”

Quentin laughs disbelievingly. “Oh, you and Julia are friends now?”

“Uh, yeah,” Penny says. “Because unlike some people, I’ve chosen to use my miraculous second chance at life to work on my flaws and become a better, happier person.”

“Sure. Whatever.” He doesn’t have time for Penny fucking with him. “You can go back to New York and tell your new buddy Julia I’m fine. I don’t need fucking supervision.”

“Yeah,” Penny says, “you’re clearly fine. You definitely look like a person who has a one hundred percent chance of living to see tomorrow.”

“I’m doing great, actually,” Quentin says. “I had sex with two different people tonight.” He holds up bunny-ears fingers to show the number. It takes him a moment to regain his balance.

Penny gasps sarcastically. “Oh em gee, you had sex? Like you went all the way? Wow, you’re sooooo cool. The other tenth graders are gonna be like, so jealous.”

“Fuck you,” Quentin says. He wishes he didn’t sway as he says it, but he does.

Penny rolls his eyes. “Can you pass the fuck out already like your body is obviously begging you to do so I can text Julia that you’ve been tucked in safe, sound, and magically prohibited from choking on your own vomit?”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Quentin says. “I’m chemically wide fucking awake for another hour, at least.”

“Brilliant,” Penny says. “Because the one thing known to make high-strung nerds with anxiety disorders more tolerable to be around is fucking coke. Amazing choices, all around.”

“Why is everyone so uptight lately,” Quentin complains. “And relax, I’m like ninety-five percent sure it was just Adderall.”

“You can still lie down,” Penny says. “I’m getting motion sick just watching you try to stay upright.”

“I’m,” Quentin starts to argue, but then — “Oh, fuck” — his body revolts and he dashes into the bathroom to throw up in the toilet.

He’s down there for a while, the first acrid burst followed by unrelenting spasmic heaves long past the moment his stomach has been emptied. His digestive tract feels like a towel someone is vigorously wringing out. Even once he’s flushed the last vile expulsion from the bowl and wiped the long strings of spit from his mouth he feels sick — too settled to keep puking, too nauseous to move anywhere without risking it. He closes the lid and rests his cheek against the white porcelain, unsuccessfully willing the floor to stay still.

Penny has for some godforsaken reason made his way to the cramped bathroom, leaning against the doorframe. “You must be loving this,” Quentin says. It comes out less snide and more bitter than he wanted.

“Oh yeah,” Penny says with a sarcastic nod, “watching my dipshit grad school roommate’s internal organs turn themselves inside out is so much more fun than being asleep at what is six-thirty in the morning, my time, with the beautiful, brilliant love of my life in my arms. Do you hear the noises that come out of your mouth when you talk, like, at all?”

“Congratulations on your fucking domestic bliss.”

“See,” Penny says, “when I convince someone so incredible that her legit mind-blowing hotness is only like the thousandth most amazing thing about her to fall in love with me, my first priority upon coming back to life is to keep her happy by being the boyfriend she deserves. I understand that’s not everyone’s style.”

“Fuck you,” Quentin says again, but his heart’s not in it. He can tell his inner chemistry has definitively passed the turning point towards gradual and unwelcome sobriety and with it approaches the overly familiar fucking bell jar of despair. The Adderall was a bad idea. He should be asleep for this. His stomach is roiling again and he has to lift his head to gag into the toilet for a minute, dissolving by the end into a coughing fit. By the time he’s set his head back down Penny is waving a glass of water in his face.

“Julia’s gonna be annoyed if I don’t try to get you to hydrate,” Penny says.

“If I drink that right now,” Quentin says, “I am going to hurl all over you.”

Penny clicks his tongue. “Roger that.” He sets the glass on the edge of the sink.

It’s a weirdly undickish interaction. Quentin doesn’t like it. It makes him feel even more like he’s living out some nightmare alternate reality from which he can’t wake up. He closes his eyes but that doesn’t make it better. Then he’s left with just the dark and himself and the ghosts of everything he’s done and wishes he could wash away.

Opening his eyes Quentin says, “Do you think I’m a sociopath?”

“Man,” Penny says, “I think your life would be… so much easier if you were a sociopath.”

Quentin tries and fails to scoff. “Yeah, my problem is definitely that I care too fucking much. That’s how we got here.”

“You wanna know what your problem is?” Penny says. “Speaking as a person who has been exposed to way more of your problems than I ever wanted to care about?”

Quentin manages to croak a laugh. “Let’s see if I can guess: my hair, my clothes, my face, my taste in music, my taste in books, my taste in movies, my hobbies, the way I talk, the way I move, how irritating I am, how stupid I am, how shitty my wards are… How am I doing? Does that pretty much cover it?”

Out of the corner of his eye Quentin sees Penny shake his head. “Not even close, dude. You — unsurprisingly — suck at this.”

“Then by all means,” Quentin says, “fucking enlighten me.”

“For real?”

“Honestly,” Quentin says, wallowing in masochism, “right now it’s not like I can feel any worse, so. Here’s your fucking chance.”

Penny seems to weigh the possibility seriously for a moment. It’s almost disturbingly bizarre coming from the guy who signed a billion years away without bothering to check the fine print. “Okay,” Penny says. “Your problem is — you are so fucking obsessed with your own misery, you can’t look up for half a second to actually notice when something good shows up.”

That is — even more fucking idiotic than Quentin could have anticipated. It almost cheers him up. “Yeah, because so many good things have been happening for me lately.”

“Uh, the fact that Julia has not straight-up murdered you yet?” Penny says. “Like, icepick-to-the-skull, dump-your-body-by-the-side-of-the-road murdered? That’s more luck than some people see in their lifetimes, dude. If it were me you would have been decomposing somewhere around the Rocky Mountains.”

“I’ll be sure to put it in my gratitude list,” Quentin snaps, “right after I drink my fucking green juice and meditate till my eyes fall out.”

“Oh my bad,” Penny says, “I forgot you only wanted to engage with medically validated, evidence-based treatments for what I believe the psychiatric community calls ‘being a complete disaster.’ That’s why you’re sticking to therapy and meds.”

“According to you I don’t need therapy,” Quentin says. “I just need to count my fucking blessings.”

“No,” Penny says, like he’s talking to someone as stupid as he thinks Quentin is but who he likes a lot more. “You need to see reality as it actually exists. Your life is fucked, no one’s arguing that — although I’d bet a grand that it’s not fucked in any of the actual ways you think. But it’s like you’re too addicted to your fucking tortured sadsack routine to even consider that there’s anything else outside it.”

“I love being myself too much,” Quentin says. “That sounds right.”

“I mean,” Penny continues, “do you know what I would have done to have someone like Julia in my life when I was a kid? To have anyone, for any length of time, besides the fucking Beast?”

“Yes your life is extremely hard and tragic,” Quentin says, “and I’m an ungrateful pussy. Got it. Wow, you would make a great shrink.”

Penny buries his face in his hands and groans. “Oh my god, it’s like trying to have a conversation with a busted ATM. See, this is why I didn’t even bother to be nice to you at school. I knew it would end up like this.”

“Damn,” says Quentin, “are you like psychic or something?”

“Forget the Rocky Mountains,” Penny says. “We wouldn’t have made it to the Mississippi. I would have either stabbed you or driven the car into a lake by Ohio.”

“Sorry that my negativity is really harshing your flow,” Quentin says. He wants to glare at Penny but he thinks if he moves his facial muscles he might lose his tentative equilibrium and slump right to the floor. “Sorry I’m getting in the way of everyone’s fucking new lease on life. You have your fucking — post-resurrection second wind and Julia has her projects and not smoking and Eliot has his goddamn therapist and responsible drinking and everything would just be perfect, just be sunshine and fucking daisies, if I could just get with the goddamn program. It would be the fucking Brady Bunch over here if Quentin could just get the fuck over himself, right? So forgive me if something as inconsequential as dying because I had to save the world has kind of fucked my ability to see the glass half full.”

“Okay, did you forget who you’re talking to?” Penny says. “I am obviously the single person on earth least capable of being impressed by that.”

“I didn’t get to astral project and start a new gig,” Quentin returns. “And my death wasn’t a fucking unforeseen side effect. It was a choice I made for the greater good. How’s that for dealing with reality, or — or running when it gets hard, huh? I saw what I had to do, and I fucking did it.”

“Wait wait wait —” Penny leans in, eyes narrowed. “Is that the story you’ve been telling yourself about how it went down? You did what you had to do?”

“Oh,” Quentin says, “were you there? Would you like to correct my recollection of my own fucking death?”

Penny takes a long inhale through his nose; tilts his chin like he’s debating with himself. Quentin feels an inexplicable flutter of nervousness. “So the Underworld is pretty proprietary about their shit,” he says. “That’s why none of the others are allowed to explain exactly how they got us out, and why you don’t remember anything that happened there. They wiped us both pretty hard. They’re big on no spoilers down there.”

“Fascinating,” Quentin mutters, “please tell me more.”

“But I was down there a long-ass time,” Penny says. “I did a lot of shit for them. They missed a couple spots.” He lowers himself so that he’s crouched eye-level with Quentin. “I ran into my other self at one point — Twenty-Three. That was fucking trippy. We were in kind of a — liminal space, while he was accidentally timeline-hopping. They didn’t think to check for that, when they were sucking out my memories. So I remember our conversation. And I remember the context — why I said the things I said. Why I told him to do what I told him to do.”

“Did you tell him to buy more scarves?”

Penny laughs. Quentin doesn’t like it. He feels a headache coming on. “The Underworld did not want Everett to become a god. Hades had some skin in that game. They had the scribes working overtime, gaming out the possibilities like a weird destiny playbook. There were a lot of versions of the story where he succeeded. We knew that it would be coming down to you, Alice, and Twenty-Three in there with him, and any hesitation could be the butterfly flapping its wings. So when I found myself chatting with my previous iteration, I took the chance to grease the wheels a bit. I told Twenty-Three — when the moment comes, remember that I said, do it. Do what he says.”

—Take her. Do it. Now.

A long harsh laugh snakes its way through Quentin’s spine at this latest punchline of the grand existential joke that is his life and apparently his death. “That’s great. That’s really great. You were the one digging my grave for me before I was even dead. That feels right. You’d, what —” He tries to piece together the scene as it might have branched out from that moment. “You’d seen that I wouldn’t risk Alice, even for that, so you made sure when the time came, I could die easy knowing she’d be getting out. Is that right? Because if so, thanks. That was really fucking considerate of you.”

“Nice try,” Penny says, “but not exactly. See, the way we thought it was going to go down, you took a different gamble. You made Everett go fetch the god bottle, and while he was claiming his prize, you huddled up with the others to travel out.”

Quentin blinks. “But you can’t travel in the Mirror Realm. Alice said —”

“Alice was a Niffin,” Penny says, “not a Traveler. She could guess — but she didn’t know. Traveling’s not a spell. It uses no ambient, and it leaves no residue. You knew that, because you remembered I could still do my thing when magic was shut off. Bringing someone with you is a spell, but if you had it figured right — if the three if you could travel out simultaneously with the spell it would take Twenty-Three to bring you with him —”

“— we wouldn’t be there to see the recoil,” Quentin realizes. Even in his current state the logic of it assembles itself in his mind with the elegant clarity of a geometric proof. He swallows. “But — but we couldn’t know that would work, I mean there’s hardly any information about the Mirror Realm out there, it’s insanely unstable, Alice said even as a Niffin she didn’t know the rules of the place —”

“Yeah,” Penny said. “That’s what Twenty-Three and Alice said when you tried to get them to go. And in the time you spent arguing about it, Everett absorbed the monster, and it was game over. So I told him not to hesitate. Because I knew you were right — shit would go crazy in the Mirror Realm, but you wouldn’t be around to deal with it. Only Everett would.”

“But —” Quentin’s pulse is pounding in his ears. His hands are cold. “But the monster —”

“You thought,” Penny said, “one down, right? Maybe it would wind up trapped in the Mirror Realm long enough for you to figure out a way to shut it down for good, maybe it would escape and you’d come back to it later. But the sister was gone, and as for him — you figured you’d survived him this long, you could fight another day.” Penny shrugs. “As it happened, in the version I saw, Everett tried to fix the mirror himself in a last-ditch attempt to escape. In all the chaos the bottle wound up bouncing right in.”

“I —” His breath is coming shallowly. He feels like he can’t get enough air. “No, that’s not — what you’re saying is, is crazy, it’s impossible, it — you’re fucking with me.” He’s shaking his head, he can’t stop shaking his head. “There’s no way, because if that’s true, that means —”

Quentin clamps his mouth shut.

Penny finishes the thought for him: “You didn’t have to die.”

—It goes bad fast here.

Alice’s worried face; the other Penny watching in horror, then trying to parse the message in Quentin’s eyes. The message he was sending because he’d thought —

—You always were smarter than the books gave you credit for.

Everett’s calm face, his confident voice. The split-second algebra of their bodies in space and the danger at hand and then the answer presenting itself with mathematical precision —

—Quentin I think you need to —

— or even better with the gravitational pull of a story. The comforting rhythms of a story he knew. A good story. The story he had been hearing and telling and wanting his whole life. Because Everett had said —

—You’ll go down as a hero. I’ll make sure of it.

And Quentin had thought: This time, I will.

He’s going to be sick again.

He lifts the lid of the toilet and retches into it, nothing left in him but air and nausea, like his body is rejecting the very concept of peace. Punishing him for everything he’s done to it and every lie he’s told about what it meant. Gagging while his guts convulse until his eyes are tearing and his throat burns.

When he can take in shaky but steady breaths he leans back down, staring into space. Feeling like something is crumbling inside him. Like in his lungs is that room again collapsing in the backfire of his magic. The magic that was supposed to be his, the magic meant for fixing things and which he might never use again. That was the last time, he realizes. The last time his hands cast to make something whole and it was so he could —

What the fuck had he done?

Quentin says, voice hoarse, “Did she — did Julia tell you what I said?”

Penny exhales slowly before answering. “Yep.”

Quentin’s throat tightens. “It — it was bad, right? Like — really bad.”

“I mean,” Penny says, “it sure as shit wasn’t good.”

“What the fuck is wrong with me,” Quentin says. “How could — how did I — when did —” He can’t talk. He can barely think. He feels his heart in his throat like it’s trying to break through the skin.

—Take her. Do it. Now.

—This is the same shit you’ve always pulled.

—This is not what we agreed on.

“I’ve given you my answer,” Penny is saying, “but if you want more free advice, I don’t actually think that’s the most important question for you right now.”

“Then what the fuck should I…” Quentin is starting to cry. “Oh, god. Oh my god. I —”

Penny offers him the glass of water again. Quentin stares at it, trying to remember how to move his hands. “What you should be asking,” Penny says, “is: what the fuck are you going to do now?”

-

He wakes up to the sound of voices coming from the other end of the room.

“Are you sure you want me to leave you here with him?” Penny. “I can stick around. Or haul his ass back to New York. I can drop him in Siberia, if you want. Leave him at the edge of a swamp.”

“Thanks,” says Julia. “But we’ll be okay.”

“Man, after what he pulled? He’s lucky I didn’t kill him myself last night.”

“It’s really hard for him now. It’s been less than a year since he came back.”

“It’s been less than a year since I came back, and you don’t see me making excuses for treating people like shit.”

“I’m not making excuses. Trust me, I’m fucking pissed. But you weren’t around before he died. It was — a really fucked up time.”

“Okay, but we’ve all been through fucked up times, and most of us are pulling it together enough to be decent people. How long does he get to keep being an asshole before someone says, enough, you’re a fucking adult, now act like it or get the fuck out?”

“I’m not writing off my best friend as a lost cause, Penny.” Tensing now, defensive. It makes Quentin feel — something sick and sad passes through him. Grateful and spiteful and undeserving and ashamed.

“I’m not — that’s not what I’m saying.” Softening. “I know how much you care about him. And believe it or not, I don’t not care about him. I just worry, if you’re taking care of him, who’s taking care of you, J?”

J? Quentin mouths to himself. What the fuck?

“I can take care of myself,” Julia says, but not dismissive or annoyed. Warm, like she — appreciates him? With a shock Quentin remembers her comfortable phone calls. “Trust me, I’m fine.”

“Okay, but you have to promise to let me take you out for a drink when you get back to the city. Or like, a spa day.”

“Of course.” Quentin can hear a smile in Julia’s voice now, one he hasn’t heard for himself in weeks. His stomach churns. “PJ for life, right?”

“You know it, girl.”

PJ? Girl?

“Sometimes I can’t believe it took us so long to click. I mean, now I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Hey, I was a dick before. You weren’t missing much.” Laughter, cozy and easy.

Holy shit, they really are friends. Quentin feels like the earth is dissolving beneath him.

Penny and Julia exchange affectionate goodbyes while Quentin listens to the blood rushing in his ears. Then Penny’s gone and Julia’s walking back in before he has time to wonder whether he should pretend to be asleep.

Julia sits on the edge of her bed, eyes boring into his. All traces of lightness from her conversation with Penny are gone. She digs into her pocket and pulls out a vial with a familiar green liquid. “I stocked up while I was home.”

Quentin reaches out for it, then drops his hand. “I don’t want it.”

“Oh, what,” she says, sounding exhausted, “now Kady’s potion skills aren’t good enough for you? Or is it because I’m the one giving it to you, you’re not done acting out yet?”

“No, I —” He shakes his head as far as his hangover will allow, which isn’t far. “I just — I need to start living with the consequences of my actions.”

Julia flicks her eyes upwards in irritation. “That’s idiotic.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m an idiot, so.”

Julia doesn’t laugh. He wasn’t really kidding. “Fine. Lie there feeling like shit if you want, but I need you to listen to me.” Her face is stone-hard when she says, low and steady as earth, “What you did was not okay.”

“I didn’t mean it,” he offers weakly.

Julia closes her eyes briefly like she’s gathering her strength. “Please tell me you understand that wasn’t the problem with what you said. Please tell me I don’t have to explain that to you.”

Quentin swallows. “I know. I’m — I’m sorry.” It sounds so inadequate. So grossly, miserably not enough.

Julia nods in minute acknowledgement. “You can’t do that again.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t mean — just the specific thing you said last night,” she says. “I mean, there’s having a hard time, and fucking up, and acting like a dick — and then there’s being a complete and total piece of shit. And I have known you too long, Quentin, for you to pretend like you don’t know exactly where that line is, no matter how fucked your head gets. And — you can’t cross it again. Or I’ll —” He watches her swallow back some painful emotion that almost rises to the surface and feels like he’s been flattened by it. “You just can’t do it again. Got it?”

“Yeah,” he says. It comes out barely a whisper.

“Good.” She takes a deep breath, punctuating the end of her statement. Then she sets the vial of Kady’s remedy on the nightstand. “I don’t really care if you want to punish yourself, but we need to get going, so — if you’re too hungover for the car, take it so we’re not late. I’ll meet you down there when you’re ready.” She stands and leaves the room without another word, hoisting her bag over her shoulder on her way out.

Southbound on I-5

The drive is — tense. To say the least. Quentin spends most of it curled up in the passenger seat with his shins against the dashboard, watching cars on the highway.

As they’re turning into the city he asks, “Why didn’t you tell me you and Penny were friends?”

Julia’s mouth tenses, like she’s gauging the probability that he’s asking to pick a fight. “I don’t know. It never came up.”

“Because I didn’t ask,” Quentin says.

She rolls her eyes. “I wasn’t trying to pull some passive-aggressive —”

“No I know,” Quentin says, “I just — I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to start anything. I just meant… I never asked.”

Julia chews on her bottom lip. “Okay.”

“When did it happen?”

She sighs. He almost tells her to forget it but she starts to talk. “Getting you back involved a lot of — bureaucratic wrangling, with the Underworld. Some quid pro quo, so to speak. There were contracts to agree on, and terms to be met. It turns out I have some kind of liminality pass from being — ‘god-touched,’” faded disgust in her voice on the phrase, “so Penny and I wound up as kind of liaisons working pretty closely together for a few months, and we… bonded, I guess. I don’t know. We get along, we have fun. He’s a good friend.”

Quentin doesn’t say unlike me, but he’s thinking it. He wonders if she’s thinking it, too. He thinks he should be glad that she’s had someone on her side while he’s been so — whatever he’s been — but he can’t make himself feel it. He wonders if he ever will. If he even can anymore, or if it’s gone with all the other things he decided to destroy.

San Diego, CA

The safehouse in San Diego is the last in a row of beachfront dwellings along Mission Bay. From the lot they park in it looms modern and imposing, gleaming white with jutting angles and tall windows of blue-tinted glass, but once they step within its wards it reveals itself as an older structure, two broad stories of wooden siding painted a pale mint green with a garden nestled in a set of raised dirt beds on the pavement by its side. As Julia rings the bell, a windchime above them sways in the breeze, making soft chirping bird-call sounds with every gentle collision of its thin metallic pipes.

The removal goes uneventfully, thank god. Afterwards he hangs tight by Julia with his hands in his pockets while she makes the requisite small talk, drawing comfort from her presence even as it stings to watch her chat with a carefree smile so far from the way she’s been looking at him lately. Around her he feels somehow both four inches tall and grotesquely large, with last night like some dybbuk lurking at the corners of his vision, tainting every minute even as he can’t bring himself to look at it directly.

“Yeah, we drove down from L. A. this morning,” Julia is saying to a broad-shouldered Black man in maybe his early forties, one of the older residents of the house. “We were supposed to start heading back east through Arizona — actually probably tonight, since we were going pretty far — but Kady — you talked to Kady, right?”

“Who hasn’t talked to Kady,” says a white woman about the man’s age, honey-colored hair in a long loose braid.

Julia laughs. “Right — well, she actually just texted me that she’s got some contacts in the region, or something, so we’re holding on that until she lets us know what’s up. I guess we’ll find a hotel in the city.” Quentin has no idea about any of this. It strikes him that it’s been a while since she bothered to update him on their plans.

“I’d invite you to crash here for the night,” says the man, “but we’re having our solstice party, so I don’t know how much sleep you’d get. You’re welcome to stop by for that, though.”

“Oh,” Julia says, “do you all do some kind of solar ritual?”

A girl closer to their age with jet black hair falling straight to her chin laughs. “No, it’s literally just an excuse to have a party. But we throw good parties.”

Quentin says, “Sounds fun. Maybe we’ll see you there.” He doesn’t know why he says it. Because it’s what he’s supposed to say. Because he’s running on autopilot like a malfunctioning automaton and that’s how his internal processor responded to the input. Because when he thinks of spending the hours from now until sleep in a hotel room either by himself or with Julia he feels like his skin is too tight for his body.

Julia’s polite smile falters just barely enough that Quentin knows no one else would notice.

When they get back to the car Quentin says, “You can say what you’re thinking. I’m not going to — bite your head off.”

Julia studies him like she’s trying to decide if this is true. “Do you really think you’re in the best shape to go to some random hedge party right now?”

Quentin shrugs. “I don’t know. They seem like pretty low-key people. I doubt they’re going to have anything harder than like, niche IPAs and organic dip.”

“That’s not my point.”

“What else am I going to do,” Quentin says. It feels bigger than he wanted it to. “I mean you’re still pissed, not that I blame you, but it’s like, I’m going to what — see the local sights with someone who doesn’t even want to talk to me? Hang out in a hotel room alone feeling like shit?”

“I’m not —” Julia sighs; rests her fingertips against her forehead like Quentin is giving her a headache. “I’m tired, okay? And I’m — scared, and frustrated, and — yeah, maybe I am still kind of pissed, but that doesn’t mean — we could still do something. Watch a movie, so we don’t have to talk to each other. Whatever.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “maybe.” It sounds insane to say that seems too difficult, so he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have any better ideas.

-

Julia does put on a movie once they check in, but Quentin can’t follow it even to figure out what it is. Trying just to stay still feels like attempting to keep himself cryogenically frozen while the room is on fire. He’s fucking dying to smoke or drink or kick rocks until his foot shatters but he feels like if he leaves the room Julia might — he doesn’t know what. His inner monologue is one long emergency signal, endless danger blaring without any actual words. Every now and then he’ll veer into thinking I can’t believe —, and every time something short circuits before he can complete the sentence.

When the credits roll Julia sighs, studying him. “Okay. You look like you have the inner equilibrium of someone who’s just snitched on the mob.”

It surprises a laugh out of him. “I’d trade places with one of those guys if I could. No questions asked.” At least then he would know what the problem was.

“I don’t actually want to go to this fucking party,” Julia says. “But I feel like if we don’t go together, at some point in the near future you’re going to do something even stupider on your own.”

Quentin wants to tell her that’s not true; he can chill here until he falls asleep, and it’ll feel like lying on a bed of nails in a meat refrigerator but he’ll survive. And the stupid thing is he knows he could survive that, because it’s not that fucking hard. But after the past twenty-four hours the stories he’s been telling himself are scattering out of his grasp like cockroaches under light, and nothing he’s left with feels like the truth. He’s not sure he would even know the truth now if he saw it.

“I could say you’re wrong about that,” he says finally, “but I feel like — I can’t tell if I would mean that or not. I know that sounds like bullshit, but.”

Julia takes this in. Whatever she thinks of it, he can’t read it in her face. “Alright,” she says. “I guess let’s go.”

-

The party is fine. Quentin was right; the house is crowded and the drinks table is amply stocked, and there’s a tray of brownies labeled with an index card bearing a Sharpie drawing of a bright green leaf, but the scene is chill. That hasn’t been making much of a difference to him lately, but it seems to reassure Julia, at least. He expected her to guard him all evening, but she lets herself relax into a conversation about geographic influences in the development of healing spells and Quentin recedes out of her orbit, relieved that if nothing else she’s not having a miserable time.

He does feel better after a few drinks, which — whatever. If that should be on his list of concerns, it doesn’t exactly feel like a priority right now. With a decent buzz going it feels almost like the beginning of their trip, a fun night out with his best friend back when he thought things couldn’t get any worse. He doesn’t actually believe that, but pretending is a welcome break from continuing to marinate in the horror of his actual life.

He doesn’t know how he finds himself talking about the Seam again; once it’s happening, it feels inevitable, like the changing of the tides. The circle of onlookers, eyes impressed and moved and amazed, drinking in the drama and the sacrifice and their proximity to someone who lived for a while in the land of myth. To his surprise, it’s not any harder to tell the story he’s been telling now that he knows what he knows. He’s traced its arc so many times he could tell it in his sleep. Maybe always could.

“I don’t like to think of myself as a hero,” Quentin hears himself say, “because that makes it sound like it’s about me, you know? And it was about all of us. I’m just a guy who did what he had to do.” He catches Julia at the edge of the room listening in, and the carefully neutral way her eyebrows lift is so much more brutal than any actual reaction she could give. Not that he blames her. Hearing his own words, Quentin kind of wants to deck himself in the face.

“It must feel amazing,” some guy says, “to be able to really know what kind of person you are when push comes to shove.”

Quentin’s pulse skips. “It’s — okay,” he says. For some reason people laugh, which — he doesn’t want to be here, suddenly. He doesn’t want to be around their — faces and their laughter and the comforting spell of the story he told them. “I’m going to get another drink,” he says, holding up his empty bottle for emphasis, “I’ll be right back.”

He means it when he says it, but — there it is again, that gloss of uncertainty over every word out of his mouth. Because he slips into the kitchen and he gets another beer and he starts to retrace his steps back to the corner where the voices are rising amiably, but then he just — can’t. Can’t, or won’t, or — he pictures himself rejoining the group, marked permanently now no matter how the night unspools, and he — wishes he hadn’t left his cigarettes back at the hotel — his body just isn’t moving, isn’t going to take him to where he meant to go. It’s hot, suddenly, in the house, hot and crowded, bodies and sweat fighting for space, and loud, when did it get so fucking loud, and he — just needs some space. Just for a moment, and then he’ll — come back in, or else find Julia and tell her he’s ready to go. She would probably be thrilled to hear that.

The house has a wooden back porch overlooking the beach. Once he steps out into the clear night air, his skin feels a little more settled. Better yet when he shuts the sliding door behind him, muffling the sounds of the party: music and laughter and loose friendly chatter. Ten minutes ago he would have said if nothing else that was where he hated existing least, but now — Quentin leans against the porch and drinks his beer, watching the distant waves.

When he hears the door open behind him he turns around, expecting to see Julia. But it’s the dark-haired girl from earlier at the house. He thinks she was in the group listening to him talk. “Hey,” he says, trying to remember her name. He wonders what she wants — if she came out to take a break, too, or if she’s here for him. “Luisa, right?”

She nods. “Yeah, that’s me.” She smiles and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She seems nervous. Quentin begins to brace himself for whatever’s coming.

“You guys do throw a good party,” he says to be polite, holding up his beer in a cheers gesture.

“Thanks,” she says. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything — if you wanted to be alone I can go back inside.” Her eyes keep darting back and forth like they can’t stay still. He wonders if she wants to thank him for his service, or something more. He wonders if he’ll take something more, if offered. He doesn’t think he should and he’s not even sure he’d want to, but it feels like neither of those things have mattered for a long, long time.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I was just getting some air.”

She nods a little too quickly and a little too long. “So, um.” Deep breath, fidgeting with the beaded bracelet on her wrist. “I heard you talking in there, about — what happened last year, and — I really hope this isn’t too presumptuous, but —” Too-bright laugh with anxious eyes: “God, there’s just no non-awkward way to lead into this!”

She’s pretty and seems nice, although neither of those things really matter to him at this point either. He wasn’t planning to make a move on anyone tonight and has no idea if he would have made a move on her, has no idea if he would have hoped she might or if he wants what’s coming, but he can feel himself agreeing already. He feels like a piece of driftwood catching on a new current. “It’s okay,” he says to put her at ease. “I’m, like, the king of awkward.”

Luisa laughs again, still tense but more real this time. “Okay. So, um.” She closes her eyes and when she opens them she seems to have found the steadiness she needs. Quentin takes a drink. Luisa says, “I tried to kill myself when I was sixteen.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, subdued. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, it — was my only time,” she goes on, “so I’m — lucky, and these days I’m fine. Like, really great, actually, better than I ever would have thought back when — but, um, so. So since then I’ve talked about it a lot, you know, kind of counting cumulatively, and it’s gotten a lot easier, over the years. But I realized, a while ago, that — even when I’ve made the choice to talk about it, and even when it feels fine, it still sort of — wears me down, if I don’t… I don’t know, take some space afterwards? Engage in —” She rolls her eyes like she’s annoyed by her own words. “Self-care? Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve become a person who says that. Anyway, so — I saw you talking about — last year, and I know — obviously it’s not the same, like, saving the universe is obviously a whole different ball game from being a crazy teenage girl — and you seemed fine, talking about it, but — I just, I heard you telling the story, and something about it felt — I don’t know. Um.” She brushes her bangs out of her face. “And then you left, and I saw you out here, and I guess I wanted to — check in, just in case. See if there was anything… if you wanted to talk, or really really not talk, or — anyway.” She takes a sip of her own drink and bites her lip, looking at the floor.

Quentin stares at her, trying to process what she’s saying. He doesn’t have a script for this. He takes a drink and watches her fingers around the neck of her beer bottle, thumb sliding back and forth along the condensation. Behind him he thinks he can hear the ocean.

“I’m sorry,” Luisa says, shaking her head in embarrassment, “I shouldn’t have — I don’t even know you, I’ll just leave you alone —”

She turns to go and Quentin finds his voice to say, “No — no, it’s okay. You don’t have to go.” Meaning: stay. Please stay. The words like a language he’s forgotten how to speak.

She stops at the door and faces him, unsure. “I don’t mind —”

“No, really, it’s fine, I —” His heart is pounding. “I was sixteen, too,” he says, and some tension eases out of her shoulders. “Or, not — that was the first time I was hospitalized, for, uh — just depression, mostly, I guess.” He hasn’t spoken about this in so long. It feels like he’s describing something that happened to someone he knew once. “I hadn’t — and then I think it was like a year and a half later that I made like a plan, although I didn’t actually try until — but I did get as far as writing a note that time, which really freaked out my dad, because I was going to college in the fall, and…” He doesn’t know why he’s saying all this, where the words are coming from. “Sorry, we don’t need to get into that whole — sordid history.” He shakes himself a little, trying to figure out what he actually wants to tell her. Finally he says: “So you don’t… not know me. In a way.”

Luisa takes this in; gives him a small smile.

“And you’re right,” he says. “It has been — rough, the past couple weeks, or — really since I woke up. It’s been — well bad, actually.“ He startles himself with a laugh. “Really, really bad. Just a bunch of bad, horrible, awful months.” He can’t stop grinning as he says it, which probably makes him look like a lunatic, but it’s such a fucking relief to finally just — say it, out loud. “Like, just so unbelievably awful, all the time, that I think by now I feel worse than I did before I died, which is, I mean that’s crazy, things were so fucked up then, but —” His throat tightens and he looks pleadingly at her, willing her to understand.

“Yeah,” she says softly. She comes to stand by him against the porch, the two of them gazing out at the beach. “Have people been asking you about it, like, constantly?”

“It comes up a lot,” Quentin says. “Especially now that we’ve been on the road, you know, meeting new people… I didn’t realize how far the story had traveled. But, you know, I have to say —” He laughs a little, ruefully. “I don’t think that my problem is a lack of me-time.”

“Mmmmm,” says Luisa, tilting her chin, “that’s not quite what I said.”

Quentin picks at the edge of the label on the bottle. “No,” he says, “I guess it’s not.”

“For me,” Luisa says, “it’s sort of like — so I did a couple semesters at Blackholly College, before I had to drop out for mental health shit, and —” Quentin is shocked by the wave of gratitude that rushes through him to hear her say it like that. “— You know how in school they always tell you, after a big spell, or something really collaborative, you’ve got to run your runes, or do a couple nights in a salt circle, or chug some ground calendula, to —” She sing-songs: “Protect your energetic hygiene, so you don’t burn out! And you’re like, a brand new magician and an idiot so you’re like, fuck you, I don’t need to run a rose quartz along my meridians!”

“Uh,” Quentin says, “not really?”

“You didn’t get that spiel at — where did you go?”

“Brakebills,” he tells her, “although technically I never graduated either.”

She covers her mouth in mocking amazement. “So old-school! Are they still throwing around ‘magic comes from pain?’”

“They — are, actually,” he says, startled. “Was that — not a thing where you went?”

“Not since like, the seventies, at least.” Luisa says, rolling her eyes. Quentin doesn’t know what to make of that. “Anyway, it’s kind of like that. Like if it comes up for me in a big way, somehow, even if I don’t talk about it, it takes something out of me, and I’m fine, I’ll be fine — but I just need to put something back in, so I’m not running on empty.”

“Right,” Quentin says, taking a drink. It sounds — nice, impossible. All nice things sound impossible, lately. Longer than lately, maybe. He does feel emptied out. Scraped hollow, drained of everything real. Like a ghost, acting out a story he can’t even understand anymore. Like he never really came back from the dead. “Hey,” he says, standing straight and turning to her, “you want to get out of here?” Immediately he hears how it sounds and cringes. “I didn’t — I just meant walk around a bit. Get some space, before we go back in. If you wanted.” He’s nervous. He doesn’t know if he’s more worried about hearing yes or no.

“Sure,” Luisa says. “We could walk down the beach.”

“Is it open this late?” he says.

“I think so,” Luisa says. “But I mean —” She grins. “We’re magicians. We can go wherever the fuck we want.”

“Okay,” he says, feeling — his heartbeat, all through his chest. “Yeah, let me just — tell my friend.” He texts Julia, hoping she won’t be too worried, and puts his phone back in his pocket. “You lead the way.”

“Can do,” Luisa says, smiling. She drains her beer and sets it down on the porch and Quentin does the same before following her down the steps and onto the sand.

Luisa enchants their shoes and socks to hover politely behind them like floats in a parade and they walk barefoot along the shore, away from the other houses, letting the water wash over their feet. Quentin digs his toes into the wet sand, feeling it give under his step, clump along his skin and fall off as he walks. He knows he’s kind of drunk but even so he wonders when the last time was that he felt — just sensation, like this. Just soft grainy muck and cool water rushing over, lapping his ankles. He can’t hear anything but the dull slap of their footsteps and the swelling of the waves.

When they’ve been walking maybe twenty minutes Luisa stops. “We shouldn’t go any further,” she says. “There’s a selkie colony out here — that’s what keeps the water so warm. We have a good relationship with them, but they’re territorial about magic-users crossing their boundary unannounced.” She tips her face up at him. “Want to turn around?”

“Not really,” he says. “But I guess we should.”

“We can stay a little longer,” Luisa says. “Here, let’s sit.”

They walk up the dunes to where the sand is dry. Luisa takes out of her bag a miniaturized beach towel — “Always gotta be ready,” she says, “in case someone says fuck it, let’s go” — and unrolls it to its full size and they sit, looking out at the sand and the white froth scalloping the shore and beyond that the sea and the sky, two planes of darkness meeting almost invisibly at the horizon. The moon is either near-full or just past it, shining a wavering trail of white atop the waves to the horizon.

“Your safehouse seems like a cool place,” Quentin says to make conversation.

Luisa wrinkles her nose. “My what?”

“Your — the house, where you live with — I’m not great with names, I want to say…” He tries to recall Julia’s conversation with the guy in his forties. “Ray, maybe? And —”

“Oh,” she says. “God, I forgot the East Coast still calls them that.”

“You don’t call them safehouses here?” he asks, feeling an unfamiliar stirring of curiosity. He can’t remember the last time he had this, or did this: just talking to someone, and listening to what they say.

“I mean, that’s an exaggeration,” she says. “Some people do. But it’s mostly the ones really plugged into, like, hedge politics, you know? There’s a lot of unaccredited magic users in California. Most of them aren’t counting down the days till their next star tattoo.”

“Huh,” Quentin says, considering. “I didn’t know there were, like. Regional differences like that.”

“How is it,” Luisa says, peering at him, “that you’ve been to the literal end of the actual multiverse, and you’re still shocked that things don’t happen the same way everywhere?” She narrows her eyes. “Are you one of those awful New Yorkers who think the world doesn’t exist outside of New York?”

“Oh I’m much worse,” Quentin says, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “I’m one of those people, even though” — he leans in conspiratorially — “I grew up in Jersey.”

Luisa tosses a sweet little peal of laughter into the sky. Quentin feels electrified to hear it. He can’t remember the last time he made someone laugh like that. “Oh, ew,” she says, swatting his shoulder. “That is worse.”

“I told you,” Quentin says, grinning still, “I’m awful.”

“Unforgivable.”

His stomach twists. “Something like that.”

She laughs again and Quentin wonders if they’re flirting or if he’s forgotten what it feels like to have a normal conversation. He wonders what would happen if he tried to kiss her, now: if she would be hurt that he tried to take advantage of her after she offered up her own vulnerability because she wanted to help, or if she would feel that they were two people who had found a connection, temporary but real, and sex was one way to hold on to it a little longer. He wonders what it would be like to go home with her: what she likes, how she moves, how her voice would change once she was talking to someone she was touching. If she would whisper what she wanted, cry out low as he learned her body. If they would keep talking, once they were in bed together. If he could still make her laugh. He pictures it: his hands along the skin of her back; her breasts bare as he kissed his way down her front; her thighs tensing around his face; her hand gripping him to guide him inside her. Her gasping breath. Then afterwards: the two of them sleepy and spent, exchanging words without stakes. Those silly smug smiles. Endeared by her messy hair, curling against her to sleep. Waking up together, bantering through the contented awkwardness of the morning after, uncertain but not unkind. Telling her to look him up if she was ever in New York, and maybe meaning it. Maybe even thinking she might.

He says, “So what’s the deal with the house? How did you all meet?”

“Toni inherited it,” she says, “from some aunt, when she was like eighteen. In her will apparently the aunt said it was her way of apologizing for not being able to get her away from her parents sooner. She and Ray were already out looking for spells every weekend, and they moved in with their friends from that scene. Eventually the others left and they stayed, and new people kind of drifted in over time. She says she likes feeling like she can give something back to magic, since it’s given so much to her. Like it’s good that there’s a house that’s just — a place people can come and be decent to each other and love magic together.”

“Are there like, requirements?” Quentin asks. “Or an application process of some kind? How did you wind up here?”

“Uh, there’s a chore wheel?” Luisa says. “We all chip in for bills, although I’ve lived here — wow, I guess I’m going on four years now, and I’ve never seen anyone kicked out if they couldn’t pay their share. We do a lot of collaborative magic but it’s not like, mandatory. It’s not super formal — they don’t really bring in strangers. Just, you know, friends of friends. Someone’s moving out, they might recommend their friend to take their room. Or someone who used to live here might let us know they have a friend moving to San Diego, could they crash here for a bit. Not everyone stays here long-term. Usually in the summer there’s a field researcher or two doing something with the selkies, or with one of the really fucked up haunted houses in La Jolla. I moved in with my boyfriend, when I first came, and then he got into law school to study magical statutes.”

“You don’t like lawyers?”

“He got into law school in Wyoming,” Luisa says, and Quentin laughs. She studies him, her smart eyes sparking thoughtfully. For just a second he thinks of Julia with a passing ache. “We have a couple empty rooms right now, if you and your friend wanted to stay for a while. No pressure, obviously — you just sort of sounded like you were thinking about it.”

Quentin smoothes out a little patch of sand by his side. “I thought you didn’t usually let in strangers.”

“You’re not a stranger,” she says, playfully offended. “You think I would walk along the beach at night with a stranger? Please. I haven’t been that suicidal in years.” They both laugh at that, even as a pang of envy stings Quentin’s chest. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to say that, and mean it.

“I guess I was thinking about it,” he says slowly. The bay in front of them continues its steady exhalations on the shore, water reaching up before beginning its journey back out to the Pacific. He remembers suddenly the Hudson on the day they left New York: its dull shine like silver under the clouds. “Or I was thinking —” He gives a short sharp laugh, shaking his head. “I was thinking, I came back from the dead, from the literal end of the actual multiverse, and now I’ve crossed the entire continent, ocean to fucking ocean, looking for something to make me feel just marginally okay, and I haven’t found it.” Sitting on the roof with Alice all those years ago, overwhelmed suddenly with the miracle his life had become and how badly he had kept living it. Understanding for a moment what he had understood before and would understand again but had never yet learned to hold onto long enough to make a difference: that there were no secret doors. Not at Brakebills, and not in Fillory, and not in fucking death itself. Always almost seeing it, and always making himself forget. “I keep — pushing, and running, and burning down my entire fucking life over and over again, and it’s — not working, or helping, at all, and it’s — destroying everything I actually care about, so —”

Eliot’s eyes, soft and wounded on his bed in Whitespire, at what he’d thought was the beginning of this mess but was maybe just the latest verse of a song he’d sung before. Julia frightened and furious striding out of the hotel room, knowing exactly who he was. Penny crouching on the white tiles of the bathroom floor, saying: What the fuck are you going to do now?

“So,” he says, caught in a rush of desperation so deep it must be real, “so maybe it’s time for me to try something new.”

-

They wind up crashing at the house after all, Julia exhausted and appeased by the group’s apparent adult conviviality. In the morning Toni, who turns out to be the woman with the honey-colored braid, makes waffles for the residents and assorted leftovers of the night before, while Ray fusses with a coffee maker clearly still usable only thanks to a patchwork of spells until he’s brewed a pot for the group. The atmosphere is casual; Luisa sits at the table to talk to a friend, while another member of the house whose name Quentin can’t remember comes downstairs with rumpled hair, grabs a pair of waffles and a cup of coffee with a hoarse thanks and promises of future reciprocation, and heads back up to his room.

They’ve gotten confirmation on how their route is set to go next. “It turned out Penny had a couple connections in the Southwest that Kady looped in, so we’ll be heading up the coast next,” Julia explains while they’re standing in the kitchen after breakfast, finishing their coffee. The night seems to have thawed her lingering tension for now. “And then maybe crossing Montana for a while on our way back — apparently there’s a huge hedge population out there, proportionally speaking, but they’re super spread out. Our next stop is the Bay Area, but that network is still pulling together volunteers, so we have some time if you want to hang out here for a while, or get there early. We could go back to L. A. if there was anything you wanted to see.”

Quentin nods like he’s considering. He drinks some coffee to steel his nerves and then before he can chicken out he says, “Jules, would it — if I didn’t come with you — like can Kady send someone, or are there maybe some local magicians you could meet up with?”

Julia knits her brows together slightly. “It would take some communicating,” she says, “but we could figure it out. Why? Do you — are you feeling like you need to go home?”

Now or never. “Actually,” he says, looking into his cup to avoid her eyes, “I was thinking of staying here for a while. Like… maybe a long while.”

Julia doesn’t say anything at first. When he dares to look up, she’s still got that expression, somewhere between concerned and quizzical. “Okay,” she says slowly. “Can I ask… why?”

“Because —” His chest feels too small for the hugeness of what he wants to say. He doesn’t know how to make it fit into words. “Because it’s not working, Jules. Sitting in New York wasn’t working, and moving from place to place isn’t working, and I don’t think either of those things is going to change, so — I think I need to do something else.”

Julia nods. He can see understanding start to seep into her eyes. “And you think staying here will help?”

“To tell you the truth, I have no clue,” Quentin says. “But I don’t have any better ideas.”

“Okay,” she says, taking the information in. “Do you want me to stay here with you?”

“Honestly?” He manages a watery smile. “I really, really do. But I think… I think I have to tell you to go.”

“Q,” she says, stepping close and placing her hand on his on the countertop. “I don’t mind, really. I can tell Kady to get someone else. I’m not irreplaceable. And you’re more important to me than this.”

“I know,” he says, “Jules, but I can’t — I can’t ask you to keep cleaning up after me while I keep chasing — I don’t even know what. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, or what I need. And you have your own life, you have other things to do besides watch me — fall apart over and over again.”

“It’s not like that, Q,” she protests. She looks like she might be on the verge of tears, which — god, he’s so sick of making her feel awful. “None of that stuff matters to me like you do. There is nothing I want to do more than I want to help you.”

“I know, Jules,” he says again. “I haven’t — acted like it lately, but I really do know. And I really —” He’s starting to choke up, too. “I really haven’t been acting like this lately, but — you matter to me too. And if — if I felt like the two of us were even barely on the way to figuring out whatever the fuck it is that’s happening in my head, I would say, let’s go to L. A., or let’s both stay here, but — it’s not working, Jules.”

Julia has started to cry. He clutches her fingers against his palm, aching with her, for her. “You know I would do anything to help you, Q,” she says. “I’ve been trying so hard —”

“But I haven’t,” he says. She looks up at him, big eyes sad and full and scared, and he makes himself say what they both know, voice thick. “I haven’t been trying, like, at all. I’ve been — whatever the opposite of trying is. I think — it feels like there is something inside me that doesn’t want to get better.” It comes out of him like the unburdening of a secret he didn’t know he was keeping. “And I don’t know why. I don’t know why I don’t want that, and I don’t know why anytime someone tries to help me this thing just gets — worse, like it digs in deeper, and — I don’t understand it, I don’t get what’s going on with me. But I can’t — I can’t keep letting it take the people I love down with me.”

“If this is some kind of penance,” Julia says, “for the other night —”

“No, it’s —” He gives a sad laugh. “It’s way more selfish than that. See, I’ve lost a lot, in the past couple years — well. Some things I’ve lost, some things I’ve — really just fucked entirely to hell and back. But there’s this one really, really good thing that I have somehow been lucky enough to keep, and — and I almost broke it.” He’s really crying now. “And I… I can’t risk that again. Because that would be — the worst thing, if I… I couldn’t live with myself after that. Not ever again. So I can’t risk it, and I can’t — trust myself, Jules, I can’t figure out what’s real and I can’t stop doing things I don’t even think I want to be doing and I can’t — I don’t know who I fucking am right now, okay? But I know that you mean more to me than just about anything. So I need — something, and I don’t know what that is, but I didn’t find it in New York and I didn’t find it on the road and I don’t know if I’ll find it here, but. More than anything, I need to protect that — that most important thing. I need to know that it’s safe. So that whatever else happens, at least — at least I have that to come back to, if I ever — make it out of whatever this is.”

Julia wipes her eyes, nodding. She looks — angry, almost, but he knows her too well to mistake that. He knows she feels worried, and helpless, and sad.

He knows she loves him.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay.” And then she pulls him in for a hug.

Quentin almost backs out there, chin nestled against the familiar crook in her shoulder, pressing her warmth against him. Letting himself be held. He almost says: I changed my mind, I can’t do this without you, please don’t leave. I’ll be better for you, I’ll be good, I’ll do everything right and I’ll only be easy and you won’t have to worry again. But when he tries to picture himself as the person who can keep that promise, the image dissolves. He can’t make it real.

“You’ll call, right?” she says against his ear. “Or text, at least?”

“Yeah, of course,” he says. Reluctantly he makes himself pull back to look her in the eye. “I’m hanging out in California, not joining a monastery. We’ll still talk.”

“Okay,” she says. “Good. That’s good. Because —” She shuts her mouth, like if she kept talking she’d cry again.

“And hey,” he says, “if you have that time — before you drive out, I’d love to spend a day on the beach with my best friend.”

She smiles up at him, eyes sparkling with tears and with love. He loves her so, so much. “Yeah. I’d like that a lot.”

-

Luisa shows them to a trunk in a closet filled with clothes left by previous occupants when they’d moved out — “We run a thorough roster of cleaning spells before they wind up here,” she assures them, “obviously” — and they manage to dig out bathing suits that will work for the two of them. There’s a part of Quentin that’s not thrilled about the prospect of existing in public shirtless for any amount of time, ever and especially right now, but that particular hang-up seems almost comically unimportant compared to the goal of having one decent day with Julia before they part ways.

Julia wants to check out the boardwalk, and Quentin wants to do whatever Julia wants to do, so once he’s convinced her of that they drive across the peninsula to Mission Beach, strolling amidst Sunday crowds of teenagers giddy in their exposed skin and families leading little kids by the hand. Once they’ve walked long enough to be hungry for lunch they get tacos at a place Ray recommended, then head back down to the beach and spread out Luisa’s towel at a spot that’s not too busy to digest on the sand. Julia throws up a discreet ocular UV spell against the midday glare. She seems sincerely replenished by the sun and the sand and the general air of unhurried recreation, flip-flops and umbrellas and genial shrieks from down by the surf, which Quentin finds kind of impressive. Or maybe she’s just relieved that he’s made it fully sober past two in the afternoon.

“Can I ask you something?” he says while they’re lying on their backs. “Like as a real question?”

She turns her head to look at him. “Of course, Q.”

He tries to figure out how to word what he wants to say. “Clearly I have — some information about this, but — besides the obvious, so to speak… what have you been up to these past couple months?”

The grin that spreads across her face is — honestly it feels kind of awful, seeing how happy she is to watch him meet this depressingly low baseline of human companionship. But it helps, too, to have proof he can still be something other than a drag on her life.

They spend a long time catching up. It turns out — in retrospect unsurprisingly — Julia’s been busy as hell. Quentin hears about connecting hedge networks in New York, Kady’s plans to increase access first to magical knowledge and eventually to actual training; about researching magical caselaw to give Alice the strongest argument possible to present to the board of the New Library for opening membership as wide as they can once the stacks are operational again; about scouring pawn shops across South Brooklyn with the Pennys for the Baba Yaga’s latest tithe; about consulting at Brakebills.

“I’m sorry,” Quentin says, grinning by now, “consulting?”

Julia rolls her eyes. “That’s what Henry calls it — I think he just likes having an excuse to email me all the time.”

“Oh, he’s Henry now.”

“He insisted,” Julia says, like that doesn’t make it funnier. “But basically, we’re working towards a world with no gatekeepers, right — a world where anyone with magical facility can develop their talents, regardless of whether one of the schools deems them a worthy investment. The schools hold a lot of sway over issues of access, including obviously the laws protecting their ability to mind-wipe at their own discretion. And there are tons of scholars who support our goals ideologically. A bunch of faculty at Ravensdale, in Queens, signed an open letter to their peer institutions last year encouraging them to reconsider their stance. But institutionally, the schools have a vested interest in protecting their position as the official arbiters of magical education, because —”

“If anyone can become a magician without them,” Quentin fills in, “they run the risk of becoming obsolete.”

Julia smiles. “Exactly. So I’m trying to lay the groundwork for Brakebills to come onboard by convincing them this is their chance to get ahead of the cultural shift. Access is spreading, whether the schools like it or not. No one’s putting that genie back in the bottle, especially not after what the Library pulled. So one way for Brakebills to continue to attract high-talent students is to retool the master’s program to offer more avenues for specialization, more opportunities for students to collaborate with professors on actual research. Expanding the thesis options. That kind of thing. Which, as I keep trying to explain to Henry, is what grad school is in literally every other field on earth. You don’t get a master’s in math to learn twelfth-grade calculus.”

“Right,” Quentin says. “So you’re dragging Brakebills kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. As your like, side hustle.”

Julia laughs. “I’m trying.” She leans back against her hands, arms propping her up from behind. “Can I ask you a question now?”

He’s a little nervous about what she might want to know, but he doesn’t really feel like he has the right to refuse. “Sure.”

She tilts her head to regard him. “Why don’t you want to go to therapy?”

Quentin scoops up a bit of sand, lets it drain through the spaces between his fingers. Swipes his palms together to dust them off. He leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Because I don’t think it will help.”

He waits for her to argue. To say That’s your depression talking, or You can talk through that once you start, or Even if it feels that way, why can’t you try? But she just nods like she’s taking it in, and asks, “Has it helped when you went before?”

He thinks about them: Cheerful Jennifer with her beaded glasses chain and her set of Connect Four, asking him questions about his card tricks. Gravel-voiced Dr. Fuches, serious and kind, with his white lab coat in the hospital explaining to him that he had an illness in his brain. Jason with his ever-present mug of tea and that smile like he desperately wanted to believe he was helping, stony Dr. Jansen writing out another refill on her clipboard. Maura nearly done with her degree at the Columbia School of Social Work, eagerly sympathetic and prone to showing off how much she remembered from their previous sessions. The woman — he hadn’t bothered to learn her name — at Midtown Mental Health, advising him to seek further treatment, meaning more talking. More sympathy. More questions he couldn’t answer, more advice he wouldn’t take. More hours spent trying to craft the story of himself into something that made sense. “I don’t know. It’s like — there’s this hole that I keep falling into. And maybe there have been times when it’s been useful to have someone tell me, hey, idiot, you’re in a hole, get up, or — or it’s helped to say out loud, I am officially, diagnosably in a hole, to kind of make myself… see it. To admit that it’s happened again, so I can… start getting out. And maybe they show me a ledge, where I can start climbing, or something. Point out that first step. But — I’m still the one who has to get out, you know? That part… always feels like it happens alone.”

Julia nods, listening. “Is that what this feels like?”

“I mean —” He kind of laughs. “My nervous breakdowns usually involve a lot less sex with random strangers.” He considers her question seriously. “I don’t know, maybe? I mean you could call it a hole, but it’s — a fucking big one. And this time I feel like on some level I don’t even want to get out. Like every time someone tries to help me, sends down some, some rope, or a flashlight, or whatever, I just… bury it, or… Like I don’t even remember how to live — up there, anymore. Where there’s shit like — direct sunlight, and other people.”

“That sounds hard,” says Julia.

“Yeah, maybe,” Quentin says. He bites at some chapped skin on his bottom lip. “I don’t know. Part of me thinks it should — feel harder. If it did maybe I wouldn’t have…” Some fraction of the belated shame of the past two months washes over him and for a second he has to fight the impulse to bury himself alive right there on the beach. “I really am so sorry, Jules. About — all of it, what I said and — just what a fucking asshole I’ve been, like, this whole time and especially lately. I can’t believe I let it — get to a point where I didn’t even let myself see that I was…” He can’t figure out how to describe it.

Julia doesn’t respond right away. Further along the beach some kids have set up a very half-assed volleyball game that seems like an excuse to either show off their athleticism or scream endearingly for the attention of their crush, depending on any given person’s hand-eye coordination. “When I was shadeless,” Julia says, “I hit a point where I — I could tell that there was something missing. That there was this — empty place, where I should have felt things that hurt. And I could see that I’d fucked things up, because the way I was built inside had gone wrong, but knowing that didn’t show me how to make it right.”

Quentin fiddles with the tassel at the edge of the beach towel. “I mean, that’s awful, but — you had kind of an ironclad excuse. You weren’t you.”

Julia smiles crookedly. “It’s funny. I don’t really think of it like that anymore. Alice and I have talked about this, a bit. That’s the story that makes sense, and maybe it’s even true. But that’s not how it feels, because… you were there. You remember wanting what you wanted, and doing what you did. And you’re the one that has to find a way to live with it in the end, because whatever anyone else tells you about why it didn’t count — when it was actually happening, it sure fucking felt like a choice you were making.”

“Still,” Quentin says. “There was an actual part of you literally missing. It’s not the same.”

“No, it’s not the same,” Julia agrees. “But does it have to be that different? We talk about magic and medicine like they’re separate, but I don’t think we really understand either of them enough to be sure that that’s true. We know that some illnesses are magical in nature, at least partly. And we know that how you feel can interact with your magic — bring it out, make it weaker. Internal circumstances, neurochemical wiring, soul — maybe they’re not all the same, but those are all names for what makes a person a person.”

Quentin thinks about his blocked discipline, the hands that refuse to cast the magic he once shared with someone he loved and injured both. “You figured it out, though,” he says. “Even before you got your shade back, you were — putting it together, how to be a good person.”

“Yeah,” Julia says, “and do you remember why?”

He shrugs. “Because you’re amazing?”

She swats his shoulder. “Because of you, Q. Because I almost got you fucking killed, and that was so fucked I could feel how awful it should have been when I literally couldn’t feel. That shook me up enough to realize I couldn’t just believe the voice in my head telling me what I wanted, because there was nothing I wanted like I wanted to make sure you never, ever looked at me like that again. You’re so much a part of me that even cutting out my shade couldn’t cut you out. And thank god, because I don’t know what else could have brought me out of the place I was in.”

Quentin watches the boardwalk for a bit: a father balances his toddler on his shoulders, a group of friends walks by, ice cream cones in hand. A runner in a sports bra and neon yellow shorts weaves through the crowd, wiry muscles shining with sweat. “So how do you think of it now?”

“When I think of it now,” Julia says, “I think — something really bad happened to me. Something hurt me so deeply, it changed who I was. And after that, I had to learn all over again how to be myself.”

Down by the surf a set of middle-aged women hold hands as they walk into the ocean, laughing as the water hits their skin. Quentin says, “Penny said… He told me he had some, like, leftover memories from his time in the Underworld. About — how they’d expected it to play out at the Seam.”

Julia watches him, waiting.

“He said…” Quentin hesitates, makes himself plunge forward. “He said in the version they saw, I didn’t, um — I found a way to stop Everett and the monster and everything, and get the rest of us out. Alive. Like, me included. So — I thought, or more like I hoped, I guess, that he was just fucking with me, but — he wasn’t.”

Gently Julia says, “I don’t think Penny would do that.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “This whole time, I thought — I really didn’t go in there planning to die, Jules. You have to believe me on that.”

“I do,” she says.

“I thought — if I didn’t plan to, then I couldn’t have…” He shakes his head. “But the thing is, when Penny explained to me how it worked, this other plan, it was — it was so simple, and not just that but it — like it felt like something I would come up with. It sounded like the way I think, the way my brain — puts things together. It made sense that I would have come up with that. Only I didn’t. It didn’t occur to me at all. Instead —”

—You’ll go down as a hero.

“— instead I saw what I did, and it just — it made such perfect sense to me, instantly.” Not a second’s doubt, once the idea was in his head. Quentin had never been more sure, or less afraid. “It just fit. Not just that one moment, but like — my whole life. And when I look back — I don’t know if it made sense to me because I got to be the one that saved everyone, or because I got to fucking die. And I honestly don’t know which one is worse.”

“God,” Julia says. “I can’t imagine how awful that must feel.”

“So how am I supposed learn how to be myself again,” Quentin says, “if myself is — if that’s how I wound up here in the first place? I mean, what you said the other night —”

“I was pissed,” Julia says.

“You were right.” He looks at her. “I do the same shit over and over again, and — going back to the old version of my shit, like, how does that end any differently?”

“I don’t know,” Julia says. He appreciates her honesty. “But I think you can figure it out.”

Quentin says, “Why?” It comes out more self-pitying than he wanted.

“Because,” Julia says, “this conversation, today? Right now? That’s already more than you’ve ever, ever said to me about your fucked-up stuff.”

Quentin blinks, startled. “That can’t be true.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Do you have a counterexample?”

“I —” But he doesn’t, he realizes. Not once in twenty years has he ever tried to explain to Julia how it feels, to be inside his fractured head and his bruised heart. Not once has he wanted to let her see. “I guess not.”

“See?” Julia smiles. “You’re already doing something new.”

“Maybe,” he says, unconvinced. He’s not sure it counts if it’s only happening because he’s burned himself so close to the bone he doesn’t have the energy anymore to hide. “Hey,” he says, sitting up straight, his stamina for the subject of himself exhausted, “you wanna go in?”

“That’s what she said,” Julia says, huge grin on her face that only widens when he groans; then she stands and says, “Yeah. Let’s get wet.”

-

In the evening they retire to the house on the bay, pleasantly tired out from walking in the heat and swimming in the ocean, and take turns showering and changing for the night before cozying up a little while longer in the room Quentin slept in last night. He wonders if this is going to be his room for as long as he stays here, or if there’s some moving-in protocol no one’s told him about yet. Quentin digs his laptop out of his bag and props it up on the night table by the bed so they can watch their favorite episodes of The Office, sitting up against the wall while Julia lies on her side in front of him, hands folded under her head. When they get five minutes into the episode about Ryan’s website with not a peep out of her, he hunches over to check in and sees her eyes softly closed.

“Jules?” he says. He nudges her shoulder. “Hey, you should probably get to bed.”

“Mhmm,” she says without opening her eyes. “That’s a good idea, Q.”

Quentin smiles to himself. Yeah, she’s out for the night. He wonders if he should get up, go to the room she’d been planning to sleep in. Give her space. But he knows her well enough to know that if she needed space tonight, she would have taken it. Instead she’s here, curled on her side, the rhythm of her breath already slowing. Her face smoothed out in rest. He settles in beside her, carefully so as not to disturb her, thinking of sleepovers like this when they were little kids. Her stuffed panda and polka-dot PJs, his Star Wars T-shirts and beanbag frog. Cereal and toast in the mornings, their legs dangling in her family’s dining room chairs. Long afternoons sprawled on their bellies with crayons and colored pencils. Julia taking his hand in his bedroom while his parents fought in the last few months before they finally split, coming up always with the perfect scheme or game to distract him from the shouting downstairs. Fierce middle school debates over whether Tolkien was sexist about which she was in retrospect obviously correct. The mix CD he burned for her the week her dad went away because he didn’t know what else to do and the way she stared at it for so long he started to think he’d done something wrong before she flung her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder, squeezing tight. Her eyes scanning the crowd outside the school building the day he came back for the first time since the hospital and how when they walked together through the doors a part of him thought that without her he wouldn’t have made it inside. Throwing up in her bathroom sink while she threw up in the toilet the first night they raided her mom’s liquor cabinet when she was out of town. Holding her hand while she cried because Jordan had gotten a handjob from some other girl at the homecoming afterparty and realizing to his own surprise that it felt awful in this case to have been proven right. Shrieking with joy when their acceptances came from Columbia, poring over the course catalogue imagining the people they might become. Shopping together for dorm supplies on 114th, getting pad thai after finals ten blocks down.

For a long time he watches her sleep thinking: All of that. All of that, and he nearly threw it away. Reeling with a kind of awestruck horror at his own carelessness. How close he came to destroying all of that. Their everything, which was his everything.

His whole life.

He remembers what she said on the beach: that he was a part of her, in places even deeper than her shade. A love planted beyond the reach of any wound. He doesn’t know that his love is worth much these days, if it ever was, but he thinks he might understand what she meant. If there’s a part of himself he doesn’t hate, it’s the part where Julia is. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about rock bottom: what lives far enough inside your core that it can’t be moved. The place you reach that won’t yield to your own destruction. At least for now there’s relief in finding in himself something he knows beyond question to be true: he’s done wrecking this. That’s solid enough to hold on to. To offer him a ledge.

Maybe that’s all it is, and maybe that’s all it ever will be. Maybe he’ll never fix his magic or have a real relationship or fuck someone whose last name he knows or eat a balanced meal or have somewhere to go in the mornings other than the swamp of his own misery or talk to other people like a normal human being. Maybe he’ll live his days out as a fuck-up and die alone and forgotten and maybe he’ll never speak to anyone else from his old life again. Maybe dying will always be the best thing he ever did. But him and Julia — he’ll keep the two of them safe. Quentin says it to himself in time with the rise and fall of her back, sure and steady as the pulse of the waves, and it feels for the first time in longer than he can remember like something right and real: I won’t break this. I won’t break this. I won’t break this. I won’t.

-

“So text me when you get to San Francisco,” Quentin says.

“I will,” Julia says.

The two of them stand facing each other outside the car. They’ve been putting off this part so long that now she’s in danger of running late, but neither of them wants to be the one to finalize their separation. The first time they’ve ever split up on purpose longer than a stay at summer camp.

“I feel like I should say something other than good-bye,” Julia says.

“I’m a phone call away,” Quentin says, even though the same sense is tugging at him. “It’s not like — I’m not going off-grid to live in a yurt. It’s barely even a good-bye.”

“Right.” Julia nods like she’s trying to convince herself. “Well, then I won’t say it. But I am going to give you a hug.”

“Of course,” he says, and holds his arms out to pull her in.

The instant she’s close against him, chin on his shoulder and arms around his neck, both of them are seized with an instinct to cling tight, squeezing like they might never see each other again, no matter how reasonably they could talk about it seconds earlier. Quentin closes his eyes, trying to memorize this moment like a talisman to keep him company in the lonesome days to come.

“You’re sure you’re making a good choice with this,” Julia says next to his ear. “You’re sure —”

“I’m not sure of anything right now,” Quentin says, “except you. But —” He doesn’t let go as he thinks about what he’s really doing. Why it may or may not feel right, but it does feel less wrong than everything else he’s tried. “For the first time in weeks, I feel like I am making a choice.” Maybe months. Maybe fucking years. “So — that’s something, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, sniffling a little. She grips him harder to say, “I love you so fucking much, Q. Whatever you need, I want you to find it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. Remember that, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, trying to hold it together. “I love you, too. So, so much.” He realizes then what he needs her to hear. “And Jules — none of this is your fault, okay?”

“I know,” Julia says quickly, but —

“It’s not,” he says. “You have to know that, Jules. You have to.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding against his shoulder, “okay,” and he — hopes she believes it. He hopes she knows.

Finally, reluctantly, they let go, Julia laughing a little as she wipes her eyes. “Drive safe,” Quentin tells her as she slips into the car.

“I will,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Q.”

Hoping he sounds more confident than he feels, he says, “That’s the plan.” She smiles at him and shuts the door.

Quentin waves at her through the windshield as she pulls out of the spot. He stands there watching as she drives away down a street he should probably learn the name of, following the car with his gaze as it shrinks in the distance until she turns out of sight. Leaving him to his mistakes and his regrets, his cruelty and his lies. Every blistering fuck-up and every story he’s told himself to avoid looking it in the face. All those momentary escapes that only brought him back to what he was running from. He doesn’t know how he’s going to live with them or how to stop running or what he needs to do instead, but he knows he’s done making them anyone else’s problem. From now on, they’re his and his alone.

It’s a start.

Notes:

story title is rilo kiley, “portions for foxes,” because no one knows like jenny knows; series title is metric, lead track off an album quentin coldwater and i both spent huge portions of 2009 listening to on repeat in the grips of a nervous breakdown. the next part of this story is here. ten billion infinite thanks and all the love in the world to propinquitous and cartographies for beta-ing and for endless hand-holding and cheerleading while i babbled endlessly about this beast; this has been a very unusual and extremely needy writing process for me, and i feel enormously lucky to have been able to work through it with such smart & talented people. thank you also to all of you who have been reading along; on top of the general loveliness of feeling like this story found its audience, being able to revisit this story by watching people respond has been both motivating and clarifying as i've been working to figure out the shape of part two. i am on tumblr; so are announcement posts for the whole story/last chapter.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of help, i'm alive