Summary: Death always claims its victims. At least, that's what everyone believes. So what happens if someone steps through the gateway to the afterlife, convinced that his eternity awaits, only to find himself back in the world of the living without knowing how, or why? This is the miraculous tale of Quentin Coldwater, a magician who had been brought back to life after his untimely death—and is determined to stay.
A/N:
Hello, The Magicians Fandom!
I have been watching this show since last summer, but I hadn't contemplated writing for this fandom until about two weeks ago. Anxiety had been holding me back, but then the season 4 finale happened, and I thought, to hell with perfection! I write to make people feel things and this is what I'm gonna try and do! I jumped into this story on a whim and so far I've enjoyed every second of it.
Like the title says, "what's fixed will always be broken", but here's my attempt at a little... minor mending. Because the whole fandom needs a hug, don't we?
Chapter 1: A World He Can't Touch
Quentin visits his friends. Kady stops a fight.
From your mouth speaks your lovely voice,
the softest words ever spoken.
"What's broken can always be fixed.
What's fixed will always be broken."
"Your Arms Around Me"—Jens Lekman
Quentin
The metro card disappears from Quentin's hand when he steps through the door. He stands in a stark black space, waiting for his new reality to unfold. His death had happened too quickly for him to wonder what lies in his new eternity. Death must be like this for most people—unplanned, unexpected.
Which is why when things grow brighter around him again, Quentin is surprised to find himself in what looks like New York City. Present-day New York. It's raining out. The water doesn't seem to touch him. Droplets fall through him like he's a visitor in a world he can't touch. Is this it? Is this his new eternity? Wandering around like a—
He doesn't even know what he is.
All he knows is he's not back in New York. Not completely, anyway. There's something about the place he's in that tells him a little too much. He can see where he is: standing in front of a brownstone, built in 1918, although there wasn't enough funding to finish it 'till 21, and the walls inside had been painted over nine times. But not the outside. The outside had stayed the same. Everywhere Quentin looks, he understands something he didn't think he ever could. It's already dark out, but even black has different shades for him to see.
And there are whispers in the air, too, voices that talk over each other like Quentin's the only one who can hear all of them speaking at once. Some words sound like spells, words in languages Quentin can understand even though he hadn't learned them in his time at Brakebills. One voice cuts above all the rest, and it prompts him to follow. He walks towards the source of it, into the brownstone's entryway, up through the elevator, down the hall on the fifth floor. When the door to apartment 501 stops him from going further, he tries phasing.
The walls put up no resistance when he goes through. The kitchen space is bigger than he'd have imagined from the outside. Magically expanded, dimly lit, nothing lying on the counter. All the possessions are packed away into cabinets and drawers like someone had just moved into this space.
Yet for a seemingly new home, a lot of things in this room had been broken here, some more than once. The wine glasses and the plates and the flower vase and the mugs are all perfectly mended now, every little crack magically melded over like nothing had ever happened. But looking at these once-broken chinas, Quentin can make out shadows underneath the surface, all the places they had once been chipped, dented, cracked, shattered over. Mending means reminding something of what it once was, not that nothing has changed since.
And magic? Magic is visible now, every trace of every spell that had ever been cast in this room floating through the air on full display in front of him, ducking and weaving and brushing past each other, peacefully coexisting in such a small space. He can see the ward, too—colorful keywords and phrases and equations weaving around each other until the whole room's trapped in it, little flickering lights all lined up, spinning through the air in a pattern he thinks he should have remembered from somewhere.
Magic is alive in here. Alive in the way he is not.
"Eliot," he hears a familiar voice say.
Margo. It's Margo.
Quentin focuses on her voice, and maybe it's just his imagination, but the spells around the air dim a little when she walks in. And all the whispers from the incantations used to cast them had ceased. Margo is standing in front of the couch across the room, so close Quentin thinks he can reach out a hand and touch her shoulder. He tries but realizes there's no body for him to command, just his thoughts hovering in empty space.
Margo doesn't notice anyone in the room beside Eliot.
Eliot. Quentin's mind gives a jolt. Eliot, who had been on the couch this whole time, blending in too nicely with the dark furniture. It feels wrong that Quentin hadn't noticed El the moment he'd phased in the room. The smoke from the pipe in Eliot's hand clouds over his silhouette in the dim space, making it even harder for Quentin to make out his form. The Eliot that Quentin knew made lights glow brighter just by his presence. Now he's sitting in a space that feels too big to fill, his face illuminated only by the glow from the fireplace.
"Hmm?" Eliot answers, looking up.
Margo plucks the pipe from his hand and sets it aside on the coffee table. She waves, crossing her fingers and uncrossing (Popper 44, followed by 87, Quentin remembers) to vanish the smoke from whatever drug he's been taking, then she casts another quick spell to turn on the lights. Eliot startles when the brightness hits. She doesn't speak, only gives him a stern look.
"Sorry," Eliot mutters, turning his gaze away. His cane is lying across his lap. He fidgets by rolling it back and forth on his legs with his fingers.
At the tone of his voice, Margo's expression softens. She joins him at the couch and puts a hand on top of his. His cane stops rolling. He turns around to face her. "Kady called," Margo says quietly. "Got a nasty case of Spitegolem possessions in Peru. Hedges, again."
"Okay."
"I'm staying 'till Julia comes over."
"You don't have to," he says. But Quentin knows Margo will stay anyway. She always does.
"I'll be back after midnight." She leans her head on his shoulder. "Don't wait up."
Eliot tenses but doesn't move out of the way. Quentin watches him breathe out slowly. He takes a few moments to relax at her touch before putting his arm around her. The time Eliot had spent inside the monster's mind had apparently made him shy. It's almost like he's unsure how to deal with being back in his own body.
Quentin only knows this as he watches El in real time. It only strikes him now that he has no memory of his Eliot after they'd worked so hard to bring him back. He had only caught a glimpse of El for a few seconds after Margo expelled the monster from his body. All Quentin remembers is blood seeping out of the axe wound on his body, drowning the grass and soil beneath all red; Margo calling his name over and over, the sound of her voice breaking; Penny whisking both of them out of the forest before Quentin can say anything.
God, why didn't he say anything?
"Eliot," Quentin tries to call out. "Eliot!"
Neither Eliot nor Margo turns at the sound of his voice. He can't hear himself, either. He doesn't have a voice anymore; he would have screamed Eliot's name if he could.
Eliot!
The doorbell rings and Margo gets up to answer. It's Julia. It has to be.
Just as Quentin tries to hover closer to the door, to get a look at his best friend, everything fades again. The world is shifting and turning and blurring and coming back into focus around him, moving while he stays put. He's standing in a brightly lit space now. Grand Central Station. People are pushing past him during rush hour without noticing he's there, even though he feels like's standing among them.
All he wants is to go back to where he'd just been. He recalls the Eliot he'd just seen, an unrecognizable shadow of the man he had spent a lifetime with. As Quentin thinks about El, he can't shake the image of the monster touching his cheeks gently with Eliot's hands out of his mind. The touch had left him startled for days, just as it startles him now. For days after it had happened, he'd lay silently at night, wide awake, remembering how the monster's touch had felt so familiar yet wrong in every way. And they had saved Eliot. Eventually, against all the odds, they had brought Eliot back, only to tell him Quentin had left without saying goodbye, without giving them time to make new memories that feel right.
And though his body's gone and he has no heart anymore, Quentin, somehow, feels the heaviness in his chest just the same. A voice tells him to hold on to the pain. The voice sounds like Penny's.
Kady
Grand Central. Kady was supposed to be inside Grand Central five minutes ago, but here she is, three blocks away, trying to keep two idiots from killing each other. They're hedges from safe houses that's been wanting each other dead since the '90s. She remembers their faces from her visit with Harriet three weeks ago.
They'd been one of the lucky ones. Hedges who hadn't been caught by the Library and given Reed's mark. Pete's gonna pissed when he hears what they're doing with the gift of magic that's been ripped away from him.
"Hey. Hey!" Kady shouts. "Break it up!"
They don't hear her. No one ever fucking hears her, not even when she's yelling. She hisses a familiar spell in Hebrew as she curls and uncurls her fingers in a particular order, a formation she'd taken months to memorize when she was sixteen. Ropes shoot out of the palm of her hands as she finishes casting, ropes of glowing red light that gets tighter the more you struggle.
The ropes find their targets and wrap themselves around the two men, binding their arms and legs and torso. Their eyes scream of panic when they lose their balance and start to fall. Kady rolls her eyes and casts another spell that catches them. It pushes them back until they're standing again, facing each other like two thick walls with her standing in the middle.
When she was a kid, deliberate and damaging spells like this drained her like hell, leaving her shaking for hours after one single casting. Considering how much more fucked up her life had gotten of late, it's not even surprising to her how easily battle magic comes these days.
"Library's gone," she tells them. No true, of course, but they don't need to hear about Alice. "Ambient's all back in the air. Stop killing each other."
The men aren't talking over Kady now that she has their attention. Organizing that whole incorporate bond must've given her some kind of reputation, at least. Not that it was enough to fix what needed fixing. It's never enough.
"He stole our spell book," the first man said. She turns back to him, snapping her thoughts back to reality. He looks to be about her age, maybe a year or two older. There's an uncertainty in his expression, one that his scraggly brown beard can't hide.
The second man scoffs. "We're trying to save lives, boy. You can get your parlor tricks somewhere else."
"What book is it?" Kady asks.
The younger man turns his gaze to the ground. A black leather-bound book had been thrust against the corner, split-open, some of its pages bent. On the bottom right corner of the cover is a round gold seal of a lizard curled up like a spiral from head to tail. One of Harriet's books, then. She recognizes the title in Latin. Victoria sequuntur somnia. The Victory of Nightmares.
"I'll ask Harriet to make another copy." She picks up the book and dusts it before tossing it in her bag. "Leave. Both of you. We'll get back to you."
Kady removes her searing rope spell and walks away, knowing they'll do the same. Hedges don't fight each other as much these days, not when Harriet's back here with her freeform Wikipedia on magic. They're all desperate for a taste after a dry spell. There are enough new tricks on the streets now to last them a while.
Harriet's standing by the Starbucks in Grand Central when Kady finally makes her way in. She stops a few steps away when she spots Zelda next to her; Harriet had always come to meet her alone. Kady knows that since Zelda had left the Library, she'd gone back to Earth to live with her daughter, but Kady hadn't done anything with that knowledge, nor did she plan to. And yet there Zelda is, gazing cautiously at the cramped station during rush hour as commuters pushed past one another. Even when she's out of her uniform, Zelda feels like a stranger here. She's been plucked right out of a world where everything's nice and tidy and filed away and placed amidst the chaos of the city.
"Kady—" Zelda starts but stops herself. Her hands pause in the air on both sides of her, poised with the palms pointing up towards the ceiling as they always are. The gesture, paired with her too-courteous smile, takes Kady right back to the Library.
Kady ignores Zelda and hands the battered book to Harriet, who takes it and tuts her tongue at the sight of it.
Can you make a copy? Kady signs.
Harriet hands the book to Zelda, who immediately starts to blow off the remaining dust from the covers and smooth out the bent pages. Old habits die hard.
I'll scan it, Harriet signs back. This is restricted. Where did you find it?
Just on the street. Kady shrugs. Two hedges were fighting over it.
Which safe houses?
85 and 67, Kady recalls.
Harriet purses her lips, considering. Tell them to go on my Reddit thread at midnight. She looks at Zelda, who frowns but doesn't sign anything in protests. I'll upload the pages there. If they can cast Maadawi's Unmasking, they can see it.
This is the new order for Harriet's side of the magic scene now, more or less. Freedom of knowledge sounds nice in theory, but the execution's a lot more complicated. Harriet knows she can't just lend all the books to everyone; some of these spells can kill someone if they fuck up one syllable. So under Zelda's advice, Harriet had decided that difficult books have to be earned by casting an equally challenging spell.
There's no reason for Harriet to be the authority on this. But so far there's no other candidate up for the job, and everyone who works for Harriet would feel kind of responsible if some place blows up 'cause of a spell gone wrong. Maybe one day they'll work something out with Alice and the New Library. But Alice is still cleaning their old mess up in the Neitherlands, and Kady has a feeling she isn't up for much else these days.
I'll text them, Kady tells Harriet.
Kady accepts two books from Harriet, identical copies of Broderick's Laws on Meta-Composition. One for Safehouse 43 and one for Fogg to replace an old copy at Brakebills, which had apparently grown bored from neglect and disintegrated itself into ashes. Hopefully, Alice can fix up and repurpose the Library drop chutes for them. That'll make it easier on Kady and Twenty-Three.
One more thing, Harriet signs. A few Shadowraiths had been unleashed around Australia. Western Australia, last I heard. I'll double check and text you the location.
Kady sighs, but nods. I'll get Margo.
They part ways before Zelda has a chance to try and speak to Kady again. Their goodbyes are usually quick. Kady's glad that Harriet's back, but considering all their exchanges before were purely transactional, she doesn't know how to go about being friends with the woman. So, for now, she settles for not changing the way things are. Especially when Zelda's here.
Especially when she can't shake the feeling that someone's watching.
A/N:
Yeah, I know the Kady section is relatively shorter than the sections I gave to the other mains, but don't worry! I love Kady as much as I'm sure all of you do, and she'll have more moments to come—through the eyes of our boy Quentin.