The memories started to come back to him in sudden, unexpected rushes. They were often blurry and fragmented, and they were rarely the ones he wished he could remember, but Eliot tried his best to dredge the good bits back up to the surface:
The tiny straw-padded bed in the corner of their one-room home. Slowly waking up to the too-sharp Fillory sunrise with Quentin's legs tangled up in his own. Evenings spent cooking dinner over a fire and sipping fruit wine. Quentin mumbling quietly to himself, his fingers dancing in the moonlit air as he traced the mosaic in his mind's eye and planned his next design.
Quentin's fingers, as they slipped across the curve of Eliot's jaw to wrap behind Eliot's neck and pull him closer.
It was usually when he was in the midst of doing something else, shining his shoes or sawing at his dinner with a steak knife, that he would hit on something beautiful and important that he'd completely forgotten. Or, rather, it would hit him – straight in the chest, knocking the wind right out of him so that he needed to grab at something to steady himself and keep from crying out.
It was happening more and more often, now, with an intensity that was starting to scare the absolute fuck out of him. He wasn't sure if it was happening to Quentin, too, or if all this time-travel bullshit had just popped a blood vessel in his brain and the memories were make-believe, nothing more than symptoms of him slowly losing his faculties as his brain rotted. He was afraid to find out but, even more, he was afraid to lose the bits that he'd started to remember.