Julia found him in the woods behind the Cottage after he'd excused himself from the heist-planning committee, stumbling over his own feet with a barely-mumbled excuse as he grit his teeth against the pain in his back and Alice's screaming in his brain. He'd hoped nobody would find him at all, that no one would bear witness to the shame that was about to quite literally tear him apart. Now, seeing her confused face somehow made all of it worse.
Alice slammed against his ribs, bashing against them like jail cell bars, and he groaned in pain.
"You okay?" Julia asked carefully as she approached.
Lying was pointless, now, and so Quentin told her, "She's coming," before violently doubling over as Alice chewed a hole near his shoulder blade.
Julia rushed to catch him. "Who, Q?" she asked, hands gripping his jaw. Alice slammed against his ribcage again, even more desperately, like his body was a burning building she was trying to escape.
"Alice." The next blow cracked a rib, and Quentin cried out, reflexively wrapping his arms around his torso before forcing his hands back in front of himself so he could start to form a spell. There was no time to explain anything, everything was too fucked up and complicated to explain anyway, and he tried to pull his face from Julia's grip but she held tight.
"Alice? Where's Alice? Talk to me."
"I trapped her." Another heavy blow, and Quentin felt certain that the skin of his back must've visibly stretched and strained under the fabric of his shirt like he had a chestburster trying to break out of his ribcage. "She's inside of me" - he panted against the pain and shook his head to try to keep his mind clear - "and she's breaking free."
Alice was getting stronger, and a blow against his spine knocked him backwards out of Julia's grasp. Underneath his skin, he could feel the heat of her getting nearer and nearer the surface and growing larger as she elbowed and kicked and chewed her way out of his sigil. That last part was no joke: he could feel her teeth, gnawing against his flesh. Hands shaking, he tried to cobble something together, a ward that he could wrap around himself like a fire blanket to keep her contained and to keep her from tearing him apart.
Julia went quiet, and Quentin briefly tore his eyes from his spellwork to glance desperately at her. She was already building something in front of herself, a spell he'd never seen before: the space in front of her took on a purple-green glow as she mumbled a steady stream of ancient Aramaic, only a few words of which were familiar to Quentin's ears: mana, btam, dna.
Spirit. Bind. Submit.
Gritting his teeth against the burn as Alice crawled her way out of his sigil and into his chest cavity, he began to ask, "What are you making?" but then Alice grew larger and the air went out of his lungs. The spell fizzled in his hands and he doubled over, coughing and squeezing his eyes shut, every muscle in his body tensed against her thrashing.
"This is going to hurt," Julia warned, before unleashing the spell into his chest like a burst of lightning. Tiny pricks of magic swarmed over every inch of his skin like aphids made of pure heat and light, covering him completely and flowing into his ear canals, his nostrils, down his throat and into his tear ducts. For a moment, Alice quieted. Her claws retracted, and he could no longer feel her digging her way through his muscles.
"Fuck," Quentin panted, hands braced on his knees.
Placing a hand on his shoulder, Julia asked, "Did that work?"
"I think so?" The itch under his sigil was already beginning to recede. Ears ringing and heart pounding, Quentin closed his eyes and focused his consciousness, searching for Alice. "I think you locked her in."
"Good." Julia released the breath she was holding, reaching out to him. "Let's get the Dean and get you to the infirmary, okay?"
"Yeah," Quentin nodded, taking her proffered hand, before he heard Alice laugh, deep in his belly. And then, one by one, his bones began to break.
"Quentin!" Julia screamed.
Quentin's bones broke so slowly that he could hear them strain like the steps on an old wooden staircase as they resisted the pull of Alice folding them in two. Creak-snap. Creak-snap. It started with his feet, all the little bones in his toes crunching up like accordions. Every protective spell he might've prepared on the tip of his tongue and the tips of his fingers evaporated, replaced by a pain so black and so deep there was no chance of fighting his way back out. All he could do was scream.
And then, quick as the blink of an eye, the pain became distant, as though it was happening to someone else.
Alice, fighting under his skin, dragged him backwards with a jolt as she slammed her way through his body looking for an escape route. Shock overtook him like cold vines under his skin and he watched, uselessly, as his ulnar and radial bones folded backwards, bending further than he thought possible before finally snapping and tearing through the skin of his forearms and he thought: That's all, folks. It's over. There's no coming back from this.
"Julia," Quentin began to say. He wanted to tell her not to bother. He wanted to tell he that he was okay with it ending this way, that he was stupid for ever thinking he could fix the unfixable thing that happened to Alice. That he was selfish, recklessly selfish, locking her up in his body like one of those depressed orcas at Seaworld, the ones with the collapsed dorsal fins and dead eyes - all so he wouldn't lose her. Because he loved her, because he needed her, because he was afraid to be alone again.
Alice deserved better. She deserved to be free.
"I'm gonna fix this, Q," Julia told him, launching into another spell. Intricate, ancient words flowed from her and this time Quentin had no idea what she was creating.
Alice tore through his left kidney, bouncing against his hipbone and he finally stumbled to his knees, his forehead and mangled elbows meeting the ground like a prayer. There's no coming back from this, he thought again, as Alice clawed against the skin of his belly.
An ugly, bloodless tear began to form under his bellybutton as she worked one finger through his skin, wiggling it around to make room for her hand, and then her forearm. Quentin wanted to scream, but couldn't. He was too tired.
Horrified, Julia stumbled over her spellcasting. Her voice cracked and her hands paused for a millisecond before she soldiered on, words spilling from her lips so quickly and smoothly that she might as well've been born speaking Aramaic. In front of her, her spell began to take form: a box, the shape of which was impossible to pin down. It appeared as a cube, and then a dodecahedron, and then some other shape that Quentin's brain didn't have the vocabulary for, a shape that didn't exist on Earth or any other worldly dimension Quentin could imagine.
This is how I die, he thought, closing his eyes. Quietly. Like a lamb to slaughter.
"Quentin," Julia screamed again. Through his eyelids, he was dimly aware of a blue glow growing under him before a hard blow knocked him onto his back and the pain started fresh. His lungs started pumping air again and a long, desperate wail began to pour out of him. "Keep your eyes open Q, come on - listen to my voice, keep those eyes open."
Quentin tried to beg her to put him out of his misery, tried to tell her that there was no hope, but he did as he was told and opened his eyes in time to see Alice staring him in the face. She had crawled halfway out of him, now: the tear in his belly was big enough for her to hoist her head and shoulders through. Her ribcage stretched him open like a gaping maw.
"Hi, Quentin." Alice grinned at him, cocking her head. "Did you miss me?" Blue heat radiated off of her. Nose to nose, sharp teeth flashing as she licked her lips, it was like sitting just a little bit too close to a bonfire. Quentin tried to lift his hands to push her away from his face but his hands flopped uselessly against his broken forearms. Alice laughed.
"Shut the fuck up, Alice," spat Julia. "Don't look at her Q, just stay with me."
Alice planted her hands on the ground on either side of his torso, fingernails digging into the dirt as she began to drag herself out of him, wriggling her hips up and out of his belly. "You're wasting your time, Julia," she hissed. "Just let him go. I can still feel him," she reached one hand out to pet his hair, a mockery of kindness, "and he wants you to let him go."
Ignoring her, Julia's hands continued to work at unimaginable speeds, building something powerful. Her fingers moved in great looping arcs mixed with intricate detailwork. As Quentin's eyes began to glaze over, a very small part of him felt confused that she was infusing her spell with gestures for healing and repairing, and Quentin tried one last time to beg her no, not just because he was at peace with this - Alice, pulling her ankles from his belly with rough disdain, his skin torn all the way up to his sternum - but because he knew what Julia was trying to do and he couldn't possibly let her. It was too dangerous.
He dragged his head up off the ground (it felt so distantly heavy) and he tried to lift his hands again and beg her, "No," but, before the words could leave his lips, Quentin died and everything went dark.
Not in the way a TV goes dark, with a fizz and a hum and a ghostly outline of what was just there in front of you. Dying wasn't like that. It was more like the early-morning, desperate sleep you get in the five minutes after hitting the snooze button: brief, overwhelming nothingness. A blip of lost time. But then, instead of an alarm, Quentin woke up to screaming. It took a moment before he realized it wasn't coming from him, not this time.
And then just as suddenly, the screaming stopped, leaving nothing but the sound of crickets chirping in the distance and Quentin's heart beating strong in his chest.
Consciousness returned to him in a slow, heavy flow.
The first thing he noticed was that Alice was gone. It was only after he registered the emptiness in his body and mind that he realized the pain was gone, too. Unsteadily, he slowly reached towards the hole in his belly and found the ragged hole was closed without a mark. At the same time, he realized that his hands worked again, no longer flopping against the insides of his elbows - the snapped bones of his forearms were pulled back together, no longer protruding out of his skin.
"Julia," Quentin whispered, stretching his fingers out straight before balling his hands into fists. "What did you do?" He dragged himself up to sitting and groggily turned his head to find Julia standing behind him, on fire.
No - she wasn't on fire. Julia was fire.
Blue flames flicked off of her skin, her outline shimmering in the dark of the woods, and even from where he sat ten feet away, Quentin could feel the heat pouring off of her. He wanted to turn his face away from the fire but he forced himself to look her in the eyes. This was his fault.
"Jules!" He choked on her name, tears burning his eyes. His legs were still too exhausted and weak for him to stand, but he crawled towards her across the forest floor. "Why the fuck would you do this to yourself? What the fuck were you thinking?" His voice wavered, and as he reached her feet the heat was nearly unbearable. Looking up at her, he asked again, "Why, Jules?"
She didn't react. Her face was almost serene, except for the wicked glint in her eye and the smirk that pulled at the corner of her mouth. All of the softness had left her face, leaving something hard and stinging in its wake.
"I love you, we can fix this," he whispered, wiping angry tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. "You and me against the fucking world, remember? We can fix this."
Her eyes were blank and unfeeling, almost reptilian, and for a moment Quentin wasn't certain she even recognized him at all - maybe there was no Julia left in the shell in front of him. But then she tilted her head and offered Quentin what he could only interpret as a pitying look before walking away.
The forest floor smouldered in her wake and, too weak to hold himself up any longer, Quentin collapsed, weeping quietly into the dirt.