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“All our friends are dead.”
It’s a slip. All our friends.
The people waiting back in New York are acquaintances at best. Allies, sometimes. Survivors of the same battles. When the fighting’s over, they don’t matter.
Josh and Fen and -
The people back in New York, Julia and Alice, they’re his friends.
All our friends are dead.
The Clock Dwarf looks sympathetic, but it’s not like he knows her. He doesn’t know High King Margo the Destroyer, the One-Eyed Conqueror. He doesn’t know that she doesn’t have time for feelings because she’s too busy getting shit done. He doesn’t know that her voice doesn’t waver and her vision doesn’t get blurry and she doesn’t - she’s the one who -
It’s just been a long fucking day, alright, on top of a long fucking month, and more months before that, and Eliot made their afternoon cocktails stronger than usual -
Eliot knows all those things about her, that she’s the one who doesn’t get emotional, she’s the one who doesn’t crack. But Eliot’s not paying attention. He’s too busy staring at the giant-sized dwarf with a look like - Fuck. A month of Eliot’s dead eyes and quips that didn’t really land and she thought she wanted to see something in him again, some spark of life, but now that she’s seeing it, that painful tender hope, she can’t look at it. Not if she’s going to be the one to fix this.
So she focuses on the dwarf and she makes her demands. Gives her orders, like the king she is. Wind it back she tells him. Three hundred years is vague enough. She knows what she means when she says it, knows the exact moment when everything went balls up for all of them, but she can’t let that fragile bit of hope in Eliot blossom, not until she’s sure this isn’t as much of a lost cause as everything else has been.
It is. The dwarf is fucking useless.
Just like everything since Quentin decided to take one last shot at saving the world and blew hers to hell instead.
***
Alice came to tell her about Q. Well, probably tell Eliot about Q, because she’s just like the rest of them. She knows Margo has no time for feelings.
Anyway, she didn’t tell anyone anything, just stood there in the infirmary door with her eyes swollen behind her glasses and her mouth trembling. She stared at Eliot on the bed and didn’t say a word. Maybe she thought if she just stood there silently crying at them they’d figure it out and she wouldn’t have to say anything out loud.
Margo figured it out. Not a complicated story, was it?
Eliot was asleep, but he’d been waking up on and off for hours, so Margo didn’t have time for tears and sympathy even if she’d been so inclined. She got the story out of Alice and she got her out of there, because the last thing Eliot needed was to hear this from Alice Quinn. At the door, Alice turned back, looking again at Eliot, probably because she wanted to go cry on his shoulder about it all. Get sympathy from the only other person in the world who looked at Quentin Coldwater and got all melty inside.
(What Alice sees, what Eliot is going to see: Quentin the hero, Quentin saving them, Quentin loving so damned much he couldn’t stick around to use his words and had to go out in a grand gesture instead. Quentin who was too good for them, maybe. Quentin who loved too much.
What Margo sees: Quentin who wanted to save the world, Quentin who wanted to save his friends, Quentin who wanted to die. Quentin who’d maybe lost track of the difference between those things. Quentin the idiot who’d done magic in the one place you’re not supposed to do magic.
Margo’s going to slap him so hard once she fixes this, he’ll see right back into the Underworld.)
She pushed Alice out the door - gently, the girl was grieving, Margo wasn’t heartless - and as she went Margo caught the look in her eyes. Now a month later she thinks maybe she should have stopped Alice right then, or after that ridiculous memorial service. She could use an ally right now and she knows damn well Alice is going to do something crazy and stupid without someone to help channel her grief in a productive direction. That’s why they’re all in this mess in the first place, because Alice was even more about the emotionally unstable grand gesture than her boyfriend, only hers were also selfish.
Scratch that. Alice is just like Quentin.
But that was why they were in this mess in the first place. Margo never said she couldn’t be petty.
So that night, in the infirmary, she pushed Alice out the door to find comfort from Julia or Twenty-Three or someone and she went to take care of the person who would only accept comfort from her. She thinks maybe Quentin would have approved.
Or maybe not. Maybe he’d like the idea of the loves of his life sobbing in each other’s arms over his heroic, stupid death.
Well, he’s dead. He doesn’t get a say.
***
The thing is, it’s not like Margo had a lot of free time as High King.
Eliot should know this, since he was High King too, but Eliot was a… she’ll charitably call it a “different kind of King.” Eliot made champagne. Eliot redecorated the throne room with tasteful patterns. Eliot only ever engaged in the kind of diplomacy he could carry out with his dick. Eliot decided to avoid wars by fighting hopeless duels… fuck, he and Quentin really were made for each other, weren’t they?
Eliot got himself exiled and overthrown and out-voted and left Margo to do the real work.
It took up a lot of time and energy, High Kinging. Dealing with the courtiers. Dealing with the talking animals who couldn’t talk when you needed them to. Loria, all the goddamn time. Dealing with Fen, who - Margo loves her, she misses her, she is going to find whatever descendents of the headsman who executed her might still be wandering around Fillory and rip their balls off just on principle, but Fen is exhausting.
(Was exhausting. Technicality.)
All that, plus she’d been worried about the Monster and Eliot and then there had been the axes…
It’s not like Margo had a lot of free time, those short months of her reign, to indulge her childhood fantasies of digging her way to the center of the planet and finding the Clock Dwarf just for fun.
“Do you think it’s, like, a slur?” Quentin asked. He was drunk, so he was making no sense, per usual. Quentin was always drunk in those days. It was two weeks after the whole niffin Alice disaster, about two days before Quentin’s perpetual inebriation got annoying. “Maybe we shouldn’t say dwarf. Maybe he’ll be insulted.”
“Why would it be a fucking slur, Q? He’s a dwarf. It’s his…” It took her a minute to come up with the word. Okay, she was a little drunk too. “His species.” She sat up to fumble around over the side of the bed for the last bottle of the royal orchard’s latest attempt at a dry white. Eliot was snoring on Quentin’s other side, because “the liver of a descendent of four generations of alcoholics” wasn’t much use when you drank twice as fast as everyone else. Wedding stress and all. “Anyway, when are we going to address the Clock Dwarf? He’s a myth. And underground.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Do you think any of the cool stuff about Fillory is real or is it all… horrible?”
Margo rolled her eyes, because that part of Quentin’s grief-spiral was already very annoying. “If I promise to allocate funds to dig a giant hole to the center of the continent, will you go one night without crying us all to sleep?”
Quentin’s face lit up, just for a second. “We’ll find him. You’ll see. Something about this place will turn out to be worth it. Just like we imagined when we were kids.”
“Are you so drunk you think I’m Julia?”
“Nah.” He grinned, self-pity and grief banished for a few hours. Now if she could guarantee he wouldn’t wake up at three a.m. to puke in her shoes, she’d consider this night a success. “I just know you.”
“You know shit, Coldwater.”
She’d started the project, but the reign of High King Eliot turned out not to have much in the way of extra funds, so it stalled. High King Margo did better. There were some local construction types who needed wages or they’d riot. And if you had a time magician living right beneath your castle, it was probably something you wanted to check on.
And a Monster was wearing Eliot, and maybe Margo thought if all the other plans failed…
She didn’t dig the hole for her own entertainment, was the point.
Anyway, it was useless. She’d been right, she thought as they climbed back up the slide.
You know shit, Coldwater.
***
“If it were me, I’d be driving a semi down fury road.”
That one’s not a slip so much as - she’s getting desperate, okay?
They’d done that stupid memorial thing, for Alice, even for Eliot maybe, but mostly for Julia. Julia who looked more lost and forlorn sitting at that bonfire than she had begging them to help her get money for her demon baby abortion. Not that Margo was particularly concerned about Julia’s feelings, but -
“She needs something to make it real,” Eliot said. He’d put on the black-on-black ensemble she’d brought for him, and he was holding that peach he’d insisted on but wouldn’t explain, and he still looked like a man who’d been stabbed in the gut with an axe a few hours earlier. He looked like he was drifting, like maybe none of this would be happening if he didn’t think about it too hard.
Then - “It’s what Quentin would want us to do.”
That was true. Quentin would want them to all get together and cry and make each other feel better. Quentin would want the people he loved to take care of each other. Quentin would want them to all decide that his life had meaning because of how much he’d changed them. Quentin would want them to heal and move on.
Margo had never wanted to strangle anyone so much in her life as she did Quentin right then.
But, Eliot. “Yeah, alright,” she said. “For Julia.”
Quentin’s crown had been the ugliest of the lot anyway.
Then when it was over, she’d brought Eliot back to Fillory, because, yes, she wanted to get laid and she wasn’t about to apologize for that, but also - there was that tunnel. A dwarf at the bottom, maybe. And it wasn’t like she had a plan, except maybe she did. The whisper of one, anyway.
She was going to talk it over with Josh, after the banging was done. Josh was good for talking things out with, because he mostly just listened. Not like Fen - god, maybe she’d send Fen to talk Eliot’s ear off while she worked out a plan. Fen could teach Eliot to bury himself in all the ugly hoodies Quentin had left lying around the place, and then hopefully after that she’d burn them.
But they got to Fillory, and there was no Josh to listen and no Fen to distract with her chatter. Just her and Eliot.
Which, fine. She could handle it on her own. That’s what she did.
Save Josh, who made a mean coconut-cranberry muffin and could make her eyes roll back with a twist of his fingers but wasn’t cut out for fighting evil magicians.
Save Fen, her very own cartoon princess who wouldn’t last ten minutes with a guy who actually called himself the Dark King.
Save Quentin, who’d sat in that apartment with a monster for months, who everyone said had cared about nothing else by the end. Margo’s not going to apologize for any of that either, because she’d had her own shit to take care of and Coldwater could have said something if he needed help, but still. Maybe she owed him, a little.
Save Eliot, who wasn’t exactly known for his healthy coping mechanisms.
Get angry, she tries to tell him. That’s how you get through it. That’s how you fix it. Get angry enough to tell the whole world to go fuck itself and make it obey your rules for once. Get angry enough to fight. Get angry enough to stay here and help me.
But that’s not Eliot’s way, is it? Not Josh’s, or Fen’s. Definitely not Quentin’s, not the Quentin who’d stopped her from running to Eliot that day in the apartment, with blood on his face and desperate eyes. “It’s not Eliot,” like the whole foundation of the world was cracked and she should have known he was going to pour himself into the fissure to fix it. She should have known then this is where they’d end up.
All of them gone, in one way or another, and Margo left to pick up the pieces.
Just like always.
***
It was the right decision, not to tell Eliot about the Clock Dwarf until they knew what had happened to Josh and Fen, not to even suggest that they might use him to get Q back. For one, it gave them time to find a safe way into Whitespire instead of Eliot losing his damn mind and rushing in screaming “Quentin, I’m coming!” or some shit. For another, once she has to save Josh and Fen too - well, Eliot cares about Fen. He sort of fondly tolerates Josh. But it’s not the same, obviously, not for him, so she can still expect, if not help, for him to at least not cause more problems with a half-cocked plan.
Shooting a monster in the face, to take an example from recent history.
That Margo now has to carry the grief for three where before it was one - just more fuel for the fire that’s going to get her through this, that’s all.
But she needs a minute, so she goes off by herself and closes her eyes to just breathe for the first time in a month or four and that’s not the right decision, it turns out, because now she’s in a fucking dungeon.
And Eliot’s wandered off to a winery or something, probably not even realizing she’s gone.
And Josh left her a fucking goodbye letter.
And no one else will goddamn fight.
Margo is tired. So, so tired, like she hasn’t slept in a year.
“It was that bullet,” she says, out loud. “You tried to throw yourself away and Eliot couldn’t let that happen and then Alice had to throw a damn tantrum and now - “
All of them are alike, really. Quentin and his loves. Cocking shit up with their too-big emotions and their too-small perspectives.
“Maybe that’s the moment I should have asked him to go back to,” she says. Pointless to think about it now, but it’s not like she has much to do in a cell besides read Josh’s tragic handwriting over and over. “I was thinking the mirror realm, before your latest bout of self-destruction got magic all fucked and sent Fillory out of sync, but maybe I would have gone back to the last one. Had him wind us back to the day you came up with that half-assed plan to go live in Blackspire forever and - “
And what? Convince him otherwise? Hide the gun from Eliot and let Quentin go through with it? Shoot Alice instead?
“You put us on this path way back then, didn’t you?” she says. “You thought you could just take yourself out of the equation, like the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart if you did. Like he wouldn’t fall apart if you did. Self-deprecating bullshit, Coldwater.” And there went her fucking voice again, and her fucking eyes all blurry, this was what she got for running on alcohol and no sleep, but at least this time there was no one to notice. “I’m so goddamned mad at you right now.”
***
It’s time for me to ask if you’d like to talk about Quentin, she’d said to Eliot, every day for the last month. He never did.
Some days she thought about going about it a little differently. Maybe she’d say, hey, remember that first day in Whitespire, when all the Pickwicks kept bowing to Quentin and he got flustered and bowed back at them? All day long, up and down like a bobblehead - wasn’t that funny? Or, remember the time I came in to show you my new backless dress and Quentin refused to leave because he was comfortable lounging on your bed, and then I stripped down and he almost had a stroke?
How about, remember the day we met him, how you dragged me up to the first year dorms to meet your latest obsession? ‘He’s an adorable nerd, we’re going to teach him so much, Bambi,’ you said, but I didn’t think this one would last any longer than the others had, a week or two at most before you got bored and moved on. Weird to think about that, huh?
Maybe she could say you remember the night we all fucked, right? I know you were pretty drunk, even more than we were, but you remember how you woke up and he was kissing me? You were probably as shocked as I was, that he wasn’t so intimidated he couldn’t get it up. And then you kissed me too, and it was fun, just like it always was, just good times, but then you kissed him and I thought - I thought maybe this is something else.
But the part you don’t remember, because you were still unconscious then, is how we lay on that bed listening to you snoring and talking about you hurting and I cried. I fucking cried, El, on Quentin Coldwater, over you. And he was really sweet about it. I think he cried a little too. He told me that everything would be okay, that we were all going to Fillory and everything would get fixed. Pretty sure he wasn’t talking just about you, but still. I never cry, Eliot, you know that, but I cried that night, because I was so, so scared, so terrified that I was losing you right in front of me and I didn’t know how to fix you, but he said Fillory did. Magic did. He saw me cry and I think he might have been a little terrified, but he hugged me and never mentioned it again.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was an absolute dick about the whole thing after Alice found out and maybe we never really recovered from it, not like the two of you did, but that night - yeah. We were friends that night, El.
And now you’re falling apart again and he’s not here to tell me you can be fixed, and Fillory sure as hell isn’t going to do it. Just like a few months ago you weren’t here and maybe that’s why he couldn’t be fixed.
But she didn’t say any of that, because she wasn’t about to make this about her, wasn’t about to wallow in feelings when there was a concrete problem to be solved. And it wasn’t like Eliot was asking about her feelings anyway.
Quentin was Eliot’s friend. That’s just the story they were telling now.
***
Eliot comes through after all. With the contents of Jane Chatwin’s garage.
“This is how we’ll take back our kingdom,” he says and Margo snaps, “My kingdom,” but come on. Time magic? Margo’s not an idiot. Eliot’s not worried about taking back Fillory.
And that’s fine. They have time magic, maybe an unlimited supply of it to judge by how much crap of Jane’s Eliot brought back. They can save Josh, and Fen, and Fillory. They can save Quentin.
And Eliot is trying. That alone restores Margo’s determination. She didn’t want to get his hopes up, didn’t want to risk him seeing her fail, but if he’s trying, he’s fighting. Margo is just so relieved, for once, not to be fighting alone.
She doesn’t bring up Quentin. They both know he’s there between them, as much as Josh and Fen, but it seems safer not to talk about it. Safer not to look that hope in the face.
For Eliot, that is. Margo always looks every problem straight on.
They have a lot of options, or at least that’s how it looks at first, when they’re spraying on Permanence and fooling around with the bees. Endless options means they don’t have to fix everything at once, they don’t have to save their friends, all their friends, and Fillory all in one go. Margo doesn’t have to come up with the one moment when everything went wrong, whether it was Quentin in the mirror realm or Quentin using Julia’s magic to visit Blackspire or the day they all decided magic was even worth bringing back, which is good because Margo knows she’s always been lying to herself, a little, pretending there was one moment that would fix it all. But this way they can fix them one at a time, save each of their friends, save Fillory, even get her out of this damned dungeon.
Even after they watch Josh die on Fen’s phone - it’s not the best moment of Margo’s life, obviously, she hopes she doesn’t dream about his face swelling up every night for the next week, but it’s not a tragedy. They can fix it. Time magic! They can fix everything.
But then she reads the history book, reads about Fen listening to the bees and dying anyway and -
Time magic. Just as likely to cock everything up as any other type.
***
The stamps seem like a better option, unless it turns out one of their friends is allergic to stamp glue, and Margo can’t help but notice that there are three of them. She’s not one for fate and destiny and all that bullshit, but three stamps for three dead friends, and this is Fillory, land of whimsical fate-and-destiny-bullshit.
Of course, Fen and Josh are together, so maybe one stamp for them, one for Quentin, one for mistakes? One for fixing whatever mess their fiddling with the timeline causes?
“What I need is one of those probability spells,” she says. “You remember those? The ones we did before we went after the Beast?”
“I remember us all dying horribly over and over.”
Margo’s not losing her mind, sitting here in the dark with no company and no good food and all the weight of everyone else’s lives and grief on her shoulders. She just knows Quentin well enough to guess what he would say. Still, she raises her head from the cot and peers around, just in case another one of her dead friends has decided to haunt her.
But no. No Quentin. No Josh at the moment either. She lays back down.
Quentin would be haunting Eliot anyway. Or Alice. Hell, he died in front of Twenty-Three, maybe he’ll haunt him. The thought makes her grin.
“But yeah, a probability spell. To figure out how I fix all your screwups without just causing more. If we get Josh and Fen to fix this Dark King situation and then they jump back to Earth, do they end up on our Earth or in some 1700’s colonial cosplay? If I send myself a letter, tell past-me to pick up those axes a month earlier and get back to earth to save your asses, does that mean no Everett or something worse?”
The ceiling above her is low and heavy, the light dim even at noon. This must have been a miserable place to die. No wonder ghost-Josh was crying.
“If I send you the letter.... What if you got a letter and it said ‘Quentin, don’t go into the mirror realm, you’re going to die and fuck magic over in the process?’ Would that even change your mind?”
The cell is silent.
“Yeah.” Maybe she’d send the letter to Julia instead. To Alice, or to Twenty-Three, who didn’t give a shit about any of them but was pretty good at getting things done.
She sits up and rubs her hands over her eyes. She has no idea how much time has passed in this cell. The only reliable way to judge is by the arrival of her meals, and she’s pretty sure they’re not feeding her on any kind of set schedule. Especially not since Eliot started knocking the guards out.
“How about this one? What if I sent a letter to Eliot - no, to you - no, you know what? I’ll send the letter to me. ‘To Margo Hanson, before she handed Eliot that gun.’ And it will say ‘bury that thing where no one can find it and then drag both those stupid, self-sacrificing idiots out of there by their ridiculous hair - ‘“
She leans over, breathing slowly, eyes clenched shut.
“Are you in love with Eliot?”
She doesn’t even remember when he asked that, except it must have been after the Trials, after Alice, but before they all fucked everything up for him with Alice. Sometime in the second half of his first year, her second, when the Beast was just beginning to loom over them all and Fillory was still a vague dream. When Margo spent all her time watching Eliot, arguing with Eliot, worrying about Eliot. Right after the first time words like “possessed” and “dead boyfriend” entered their lives.
“Are you an idiot?” she asked in turn.
And Quentin rolled his eyes, curled up in the corner of the couch with one of the Fillory books, watching her while she paced back and forth breaking in her new shoes. “I know you’re not dating him, Margo. Maybe I don’t mean in love. But just, he’s your - I don’t know. Your first person.”
“He’s my best friend,” she said, because just being around Quentin you found yourself articulating things that didn’t need to actually be said out loud.
“Yeah, but Julia was my best friend. It’s not the same.”
“Julia’s a bitch.”
He ignored that, like he always did. “Like, if the cottage was on fire,” he said, jumping topics. He’d been at Brakebills long enough that Margo was used to that. “You’d save Eliot first.”
“What am I in this weird fantasy, a firefighter? We’re magicians, Coldwater. We can survive a fire.” The conversation had made her uncomfortable, and she wasn’t even sure why.
“Okay, then, some other situation. I don’t know, a monster of some kind. Another Beast. You’d save whoever you wanted, because you’re badass like that - “
“- you seem to think I’m a lot nicer than I am - “
“- and I, I think I’d be on the list. Maybe?” A little of his dimples showed, so she knew that was a joke. “But Eliot would be first, right?”
Margo never did find out why he was asking any of this. Probably wondering if Alice would leave him to die in a fire.
“Yeah,” she said after a minute. “Eliot first. Then these shoes.” She wiggled her foot and he laughed. “Then maybe some other people.” She gave him a pointed look. “A few. Maybe.”
“The thing is Q,” she says after a minute. “I want Josh and Fen back. I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve gotten pretty attached to those two losers. But I’m a fucking king, and that means I can’t - I can’t want them more than Fillory.” She bit her lip, staring hard at the blank wall ahead of her until her vision cleared. “And - “
Margo had forgotten that conversation until just a few months ago, out on the balcony of Marina’s apartment where he was smoking cigarette after cigarette, her lighting them because his hands were shaking too much for even a simple casting. “The rest of them think we need to worry about, you know, the world. All the worlds, I guess. People the monster might kill.” He put the cigarette to his mouth, dragging on it. “He killed a lot of people when I was with him.”
She thought maybe she ought to say something comforting about that. Eliot would have. She would have, if it were Eliot out here staving off a nervous breakdown with excessive nicotine. But what was she going to say? It’s okay? It wasn’t.
“What about you?” she asked instead.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, obviously, the world. That’s… you know, that’s important.”
“Yeah.” She studied the side of his face, then shrugged. “Not for me.”
“Not for you… the world?”
“Not first.” She gave him a steady look. “I can’t just abandon Fillory, but… I rescue Eliot first, remember?”
He smiled, just a little, the first she’d seen since he stopped being Brian. “Yeah. Eliot first.”
“I want you back too, Q,” she says softly to the wall. “I want you to come back and let me slap the shit out of you, and I want you to be so jealous that I got to see the Clock Dwarf and you didn’t, and I want you to - I want you to make Eliot be okay.” She wipes at her eyes, stupid, stupid. “But… I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know where is the one place where I can change everything and make it work for everyone. Because if I change something and Eliot dies trying to save you, or the monster gets free again - he’s alive right now, and he’s, not okay, but fixable, maybe. And I don’t know how to save you and make sure that still happens.”
Enough of this. She picks up the history book, flipping through to the reign of High King Fen. Still dead.
Two stamps left.
But Eliot’s back, and no, it’s one.
***
“I had an idea. It didn’t work.”
The thing about Eliot is, he’s actually a pretty decent liar, if you’re a total stranger. He can bullshit like no one Margo’s ever met, spin entire scenarios that never happened with just a few words. But if you do know him, he’s got a million tells.
Eliot’s lying. Obviously.
And she should be pissed about it, when she’s here running the probabilities in her head with only ghosts and memories for help, trying to figure out how to make their time-travel resources stretch to save everyone, but she can’t be bothered with that. Eliot tried.
Not to reach Josh, obviously, there’s no question where Eliot’s letter went, but -
Her eyes stray to the history book. Fen and Josh are still dead. She and Eliot are still three hundred years out of sync with everyone else they know. And that has to mean the magic surge still happened, and that has to mean -
Her throat is tight, watching Eliot. It didn’t work.
She hadn’t told Eliot about the Clock Dwarf because she didn’t want him to fuck up her plans with his desperation and she didn’t want to see the look of hope on his face if she couldn’t make this work and she didn’t want to see what happened if she failed.
This whole stupid mess, she thinks, is because he tried to save Quentin, and she went along with it and told herself she wasn’t going to let either of them go.
Get angry enough to tell the whole world to go fuck itself and make it obey your rules for once.
She’s still angry - there’s a pit of rage somewhere deep in her, clawing her up from the inside - but it’s a different kind of anger. A tired anger. She’s so fucking tired of this shit.
She sits down and picks up her paper and pencil.
Try to save Josh and Fen again, with no more information than they already have, and maybe make things worse for Fillory, the land she swore to protect.
Try to save Quentin, and maybe the monster goes free and they all die. Eliot dies.
Try to stop it all at the beginning and maybe they all go down in Blackspire, or they live but magic dies everywhere and Fillory with it.
“What can I do?” Quentin had looked so hopeless, that day when they stood in the healer’s chambers watching Eliot and his golem get hooked up to bizarre Fillorian magical medicine.
She’d brushed her hand over his cheek and tried to smile at him, because he was her friend and because Eliot would have wanted her to. “Just be there for your friend,” she’d said.
She curls her fingers around the pencil.
It’s triage. You save what has the most chance of survival.
Preserve the timeline, and everything’s fucked, and their friends are all dead, but they’re alive. She’s alive, and so Fillory has a chance. Eliot is alive, and she can be there for him, and maybe sometime down the line they can figure this whole thing out. But even if she can’t save anyone, at least she’s not sacrificing anything else.
“What did you tell him?” Eliot asks when she hands him the letter.
It occurs to her that maybe she’s reading this all wrong. Maybe Eliot didn’t try to fuck with time, or save anyone. Maybe Eliot’s smarter than she is, or dumber, who knows; maybe he’s not as stubborn or as unwilling to face defeat or as stupidly hopeful as she’s been for the last month. Maybe he sent off the same kind of letter she’s about to.
Maybe Quentin got to die with at least that much.
“I told him goodbye,” she says.
Nothing in Eliot’s face gives away a reaction.
***
Josh comes back. Fen comes back. Even Tick and Rafe and a whole bunch of people who, honestly, Margo has not thought about for even a second, come back. Because Eliot lied. Because Eliot thought of another solution.
And, okay, because Josh and Fen, it turns out, were not too important to the long trail of history, though hopefully no one will explain it to them quite like that. Josh could handle it, but Fen seems a little on edge these days.
But Eliot lied and changed her letter, and it makes Margo wonder, for just a bit. When she steps through the clock back to New York, she looks around. Just for a second, for a familiar face.