Chapter Text
Intrusive thoughts were nothing new for Quentin. They never really meant anything except that he was feeling anxious—which was basically his default emotional state, anyway. What was the point in overanalyzing them? So he just brushed it off when his brain helpfully supplied him with a dramatic rendition of Eliot’s joke about finding and seducing him after he got brain-wiped.
Scene: Quentin meets a tall “stranger” with dark, curly hair and expressive hazel eyes at a dive bar. It isn’t difficult for someone like him to get Quentin’s attention—he’s gorgeous, poised, and well-dressed. Plus, he has a delightfully dark sense of humor.
The stranger chats him up a little, buys him a drink. When he pulls Quentin into the bar’s single-occupancy bathroom, he’s met with less than zero resistance. He pins Quentin to the wall and kisses him breathless. He reaches down to unbutton Quentin’s jeans and…
The actual, real Quentin suddenly realized he was lost in an off-topic mental tangent and he needed to get back to Earth before the real, actual Eliot took offense at him zoning out (or worse—made fun of him). He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his head. Right now, the important thing was to keep searching for a way to avoid expulsion from Brakebills—a fate worse than death, by Quentin’s reckoning.
It didn’t really hit him what had happened until several hours later.
He was sitting by himself on a deck chair on the back patio of the Physical Kids’ Cottage. Over the past few hours, Eliot and Margo’s impromptu barbecue gradually grew into an actual party, complete with excessively loud music and grad students screaming to be heard over the ambient noise. Quentin had taken it in stride as long as he could, but now he was on the verge of getting overstimulated and shutting down entirely. He needed a break from the chaos.
Being outdoors helped. All those grad students dancing, drinking, and fucking in the Cottage had filled the air with so much evaporated sweat and body heat, being inside it made Quentin feel like he was entombed, fully clothed, in an inadequately sanitized sauna. Stepping out into the rain-cooled night air felt like a daring escape. The sound and smell of the wind rustling through the damp woods soothed him, temporarily took his mind off the disturbing events of the past week.
Quentin wasn’t exactly in a bad mood, but he felt antsy and weird in a way that he knew from experience could easily get out of control. It was tempting to chalk it up to anxiety over the thoroughly fucked up events of that week—including the discovery that a malevolent supernatural entity apparently wanted to murder him for reasons he couldn’t begin to guess. But somehow, he knew that wasn’t the thing currently getting under his skin. The way he felt was old and familiar, like the kind of angst he was constantly trying to fend off in high school. Was there a project he was forgetting to work on or something?
Before he could spend any more time ruminating over his emotional dysregulation, Eliot appeared in front of him with two cocktails in highball glasses. “Hey, kid. You look like you could use a refill,” Eliot said genially as he set the drinks on the table in front of Quentin and sat down across from him.
Seeing Eliot caused Quentin’s intrusive thought from earlier to spontaneously resurface—this time with bonus content. It was the director’s cut of his unbidden, deeply embarrassing sexual fantasy about the only real friend he had left.
There they are in the grimy, graffiti-covered dive bar bathroom with no working lock. The “stranger” kneeling, taking Quentin’s rock hard cock out of his jeans and teasingly licking away the precome at the tip, tasting him. The stranger stops and smirks, but his lust-darkened eyes promise more. Wet, kiss-reddened lips hungrily wrap around the head and slide down, down, down the shaft, nearly reaching the base. Quentin tangles his hands in the stranger’s dark curls and playfully tugs, urging him to speed up, to suck harder.
Quentin (in real life) closed his eyes and pressed on his eyelids with his fingers until he saw hypnotic patterns and colorful lights—he wanted to replace the visions in his head with something innocuous, something that couldn’t get him into trouble. “Oh, hey Eliot. Thanks. You’ve got good timing—I’m almost empty,” Quentin said, trying to sound casually cheerful rather than manic, guilty, or otherwise unhinged.
He tossed back the dregs of his old drink and picked up the new one, appraising it. It had layers of amber, opaque pink, and burgundy, served on ice and garnished with a brandied cherry and some weirdly beautiful, alien-looking flower that glowed a rather enchanting shade of purple. The drink looked fancy and complicated to make, and way overdressed for this spontaneous grad school house party.
He took a sip. It was delicious—fruity, but not too sweet, with some interesting flavors he couldn’t identify. He wondered if he was tasting some kind of magical ingredient or if Eliot was just using mundane mixers that Quentin was too plebeian to have tried—maybe “rhubarb shrub” or “orgeat syrup” or some other intimidating-sounding ingredient he’d be likely to see on a menu in a cocktail bar in Manhattan that charges $25 for a well whiskey sour.
Eliot nudged him. “Well? What do you think?”
“I can’t believe I’m drinking this at a house party where people are playing magical beer pong.”
“Just be glad you weren’t around before I banned magical cornhole from the Cottage.”
Quentin choked on his drink. “Pardon?”
“I…banned magical cornhole from the Cottage?”
“You banned magical what from the Cottage?”
Eliot waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t get too excited about the name. It’s just some stupid lawn game for hicks. You toss bean bags into a hole in a board. And sadly, none of those words are euphemisms. See, it’s part of Midwestern culture, so it’s legally required to be disappointing.”
“Wow. Um. I didn’t know you had such strong antipathy towards the Midwest. Or, um, lawn games. Did cornhole players, like, murder your parents or something?”
“God, I wish.” Eliot cleared his throat. “Enough stalling. Finish what you were saying.”
“What I was—hmm…” Quentin furrowed his brow. “Uh… What was I saying?”
“You were telling me what you think of your drink,” Eliot said impatiently.
“God, are you, like, minutes away from dying of a praise deficiency? Don’t blame me for the consequences of your cornhole tangent.” Quentin bit his lip to suppress a giggle. Cornhole tangent. “The drink is delicious and it looks super fancy. Like everything you ever make. Like, you must know that by now? That the stuff you make is always really fucking good?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t know it was ‘really fucking good.’ But it’s still nice to hear it,” Eliot said, rolling his eyes at Quentin’s failure to grasp the obvious.
“Wow, look at you.” Quentin grinned and sipped his drink smugly. “All thirsty for my validation.”
“Oh, spare me. Like you weren’t just begging me to validate you earlier today,” Eliot scoffed.
“Hey, that’s different,” Quentin said, frowning. “I was scared. I needed reassurance. You just want me to stroke your ego.”
“Ooh, say that again. The stroking part,” Eliot said suggestively.
Quentin rolled his eyes and laughed, blushing at the innuendo. But then he pictured it.
Sitting together on a couch—maybe a bed? Irresistibly drawn together as if they were being acted upon by an unseen force. Quentin leaning in to finally, finally find out what it feels like—what it tastes like to kiss him. Their hands frantically fumbling to undress each other. Touching, grasping, stroking. Feeling Eliot’s big, warm hand around his achingly hard cock. Reflexively thrusting into his hand, wanting to feel more, as he waits for Eliot to decide the teasing has gone on long enough. Quentin wonders whether he’ll get to find out tonight what Eliot looks like when he comes.
Quentin closed his eyes and turned away from Eliot before opening them again. He sighed at himself. Why couldn’t he get his imagination under fucking control tonight? When he felt brave enough to turn his head, he noticed Eliot watching him intently with a curious expression on his face.
“Welcome back, Q. Penny for your thoughts?” Eliot said cheerfully.
Quentin scoffed. “Mmmnope. Uh-uh.” He laughed deliriously. He was much too flustered to come up with a witty rejoinder or a convincing excuse. It was late and he’d had a dumpster fire of a day; this was simply too much to deal with gracefully.
“Too good to share, huh?” Eliot grinned rakishly. “Need a cigarette? Or a towel? Clean pair of underwear, perhaps?”
Quentin forced himself to laugh. It came out sounding totally fake. He couldn’t get himself to make the tiniest bit of eye contact—he couldn’t even really look in Eliot’s general direction. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt this awkward. And for him, that was really saying something.
“You know, you’re really cute when you’re flustered.” Eliot’s voice was low and intimate.
Fuck, was that ever unfair. “I’m not fl—um…wh—hm. What makes you think I’m flustered?” Quentin stammered with another nervous laugh. He wasn’t blushing anymore—now he was full-on red faced. He risked a glance back at Eliot and froze—a naïve deer caught in the headlights of a sexually intimidating freight train. Eliot’s eyes were dark, his grin knowing. He absolutely had Quentin’s number. He was probably just trying to decide what to do with it first.
“Oh, sweetie,” Eliot chuckled.
Quentin stared into his drink and wished he knew how to teleport or turn invisible or something.
“You really need to relax. You look like you’re about to have a coronary.”
“I am so relaxed,” Quentin lied (unconvincingly, even by his own standards). He chugged the rest of his drink. Needing to find something to focus on other than Eliot, he started fiddling with the garnishes in his now-empty glass. He popped the brandied cherry in his mouth. If he’d been ever-so-slightly less drunk, it would’ve occurred to him that tying a knot in the stem of a cherry with your tongue had sexual connotations, and indulging in that whim could make things awkward. Correction—more awkward.
But he was exactly that drunk. And he was always fidgety and usually wanted something in his mouth to chew, suck, or otherwise play with to distract himself from all the loud feelings, thoughts, and sensations buzzing around in his body and brain. So he fiddled around with the cherry a bit, and pretty soon he’d succeeded in tying two knots in the stem. He was running out of interesting things to do with the inedible part of the fruit in his mouth, so he pulled out the stem, bit it off, and set it on the table in front of him. He chewed thoughtfully on the cherry. “This tastes, like, way better than those bright red ones,” he observed. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use these instead.”
“I’m, uh…I’m glad you have good enough taste to appreciate them,” Eliot said falteringly. He looked at the cherry stem on the table. He looked up at Quentin, bemused yet intrigued.
Quentin failed to notice the reaction he was getting because he was too busy dissecting the glowing flower from his empty glass.
“You know, you can eat that,” Eliot pointed out, sounding casual in a deliberate sort of way.
Quentin frowned. “It looks radioactive.”
Eliot pulled a petal off his own drink’s garnish and popped it in his mouth. “Trust me, okay?”
Shrugging, Quentin tore a petal off the bioluminescent purple flower. He sniffed it. It didn’t smell like much. He chewed on it cautiously. “Holy shit. This tastes amazing. It’s like…how do I even describe it? It tastes like, um…like the feeling when you get an A on a paper you wrote the night before it was due. And, like…putting on clothes when they’re still warm from the dryer. Like, in winter. And it feels all sparkly. I mean, uh…like, crackly. Like I’m eating Pop Rocks, sort of? Um. This is so cool. What the fuck?”
“See?” The inside of Eliot’s mouth faintly glowed, stained by the flower.
“That is so fucking cool,” Quentin laughed.
“Turns out Nature magic isn’t always boring and pointless.”
Quentin pulled another petal off his flower and ate it. For a moment, he closed his eyes and smiled blissfully. Just a few hours earlier, he was certain he would never get to experience this kind of thing again. He didn’t know he needed it, but it was comforting—grounding, really—to have a physical, sensory reminder that magic was still a part of his life.
Eliot looked appraisingly at Quentin, like he was trying to read something in another language on his face. “Hey Q, you like watching movies?”
Quentin laughed. “Is that, like, the setup for a joke? Who doesn’t like watching movies?”
“I’m asking if you would like to watch a movie with me,” Eliot clarified patiently.
Quentin furrowed his brow. “Like, out? At a theater? Or—wait. You don’t have—um. Alice took me to this, like, spooky closet full of antimagic wards on campus, and the internet actually works in there. Do you have something like that at the Cottage?”
“Ah, yes. The porn closet. I’m familiar.”
“Th—the what?” Quentin sputtered, grimacing. “Oh god, I touched that keyboard with my bare hands.”
Eliot grinned. “Well, some people call it the computer closet, but let’s be honest with ourselves about what people—other than nerds like you and Alice—are really using it for.”
Quentin gave Eliot a salty look, which he ignored.
“Anyway, yes, we have something similar. We play movies on an old CRT TV and a VHS player. The warding to get older technology to work reliably is a lot less fussy.”
“You’re just gonna abandon your party to watch a movie with me in your spooky, um…retro porn closet?”
Grinning, Eliot replied, “It’s more of a spooky retro movie basement. Bigger than a closet. Regrettably little porn. But yes, that is what I’m suggesting. I just thought you might enjoy that more than a party if you’re not in the mood for noise and crowds right now? That’s why you’re out here…right?”
Quentin smiled sheepishly. “Um, yeah. That actually sounds, um…really nice.”
Eliot beamed. “Fantastic. I’ll go make us some popcorn.”