Who: Eliot Waugh and Karli Morgenthau Where:Threshold When: Saturday February 12, 2019 | late afternoon (backdated) What: Boozy Offerings for the Gods of Commerce Rating/Warnings: Spoilers for The Magicians season 3 Status: Complete
DUTY FREE was stamped on the side of the medium sized crate. Its contents made a muffled clinking sound that preceded Karli's entry into the club-to-be. She hadn't told anyone she was coming, and if no one was there, she was going to leave it there anyway as an opening night gift or whatever.
Looking around, she could see what the space could be if Eliot's evident plans came to fruition. For now, however, the house lights were up, the magic laid bare and plain. She walked up to the bar to set the crate down, but paused when she heard… singing?
Eliot wasn't sure what had gotten into him that afternoon, except that he'd been at it since before dawn—insomnia being a thing that had hit him like a mallet since coming through the portal—and the playlists he'd cycled through on his datapad had long since lost their luster. For at least an hour now, he'd been belting tunes from any random musical that popped into his head, some that he'd discovered himself as a lonely teen and some that he remembered his grandmother watching. He didn't think too hard on its origins in his memory as he belted Defying Gravity from Wicked at the top of his lungs, enjoying the way it reverberated through the space (and also making notes on acoustical changes they'd need).
So when he came out of the back room and saw Karli standing there by the bar, he sort of froze awkwardly on a high note he couldn't quite make himself cut short. When it was done, he cleared his throat and looked a bit sheepish at being caught as he approached her. "Hello. Hi. Welcome. Cover charge for the show is"—he gestured to the box in front her—"whatever that is." He laughed.
Her grin was as unfettered as it was delighted, and all the more precious because of how rare it was. "I'm glad you didn't just stop on my account. Never been accidentally serenaded before." Karli laughed and patted the side of the box, her smile slipping into something crafty and conspiratorial. "Oh, I'd say this would be more than enough to pay for a full concert, but I seem to recall it was more stories on offer than songs. Trust me, you don't want the latter from me."
Using one hand, she easily and neatly pulled the nailed down lid from the crate. Nestled inside it was a case of absurdly expensive vodka and a smattering of other top shelf liquors. "What's this get me, oh noble High King?"
"Next time we'll make it purposeful," Eliot said, recovering a bit of his composure and forcing himself to enjoy the opportunity to show off. He still didn't know Karli particularly well, and that meant she had yet to learn his numerous flaws—which was a good thing these days. "Do you have a preference? I have something of a penchant for '80s and '90s Broadway, but we can work with the decades surrounding if necessary."
His eyebrows went sky high as he leaned in and saw the contents. His expression was a bit awed as he looked up at her again. "Whatever the fuck you want, up to and including my nonexistent kingdom." He pulled out one of the bottles and turned it reverently in his hands. "What did I do to rate this? My stories aren't that good, believe me."
Quite without being invited, Karli slipped up onto one of the barstools and hooked her boots around the legs so she could lean forward with her hands on the edge. "'Fraid you've got me at a loss there. Never been all that musical. I just sorta like what I like when I hear it, but I couldn't say it's confined to any one genre or whatever. You could probably sing me something from CBeebies in that voice of yours, and I'd enjoy myself."
She laughed at his reaction, but it wasn't cruel. "Can't say I've ever seen anyone get quite so chuffed over alcohol, but it kinda makes me wish I'd recorded the moment." Reaching out, she tapped the crate with one finger, her smile gone private and maybe a little aloof. "Got a nice little bonus on a commission I did over the weekend. Told 'em I'd take it in the form of this right here." Karli shrugged even while she squashed the feeling that maybe this really was far too much, and she'd just drawn far too much attention to herself. "I don't got a lot of friends around here, but I've been trying more lately. Kind of seemed like you might could be one, is all."
Eliot clapped a hand over his heart like he'd been shot. Which, hearing that response, he might as well have been. "Such an abysmal lack of music education cannot stand in my presence. We'll just have to do something about that. Starting with—" He cleared his throat and repeated the last few bars of the song he'd just finished. "Defying Gravity, from the musical Wicked. Originally sung by two goddesses of the stage and presently being near-butchered by me in comparison. There will be a test," he added with a look and a laugh.
He stepped through the opening and into the center of the bar to begin unpacking the box. One of those was definitely becoming part of the secret emergency stash. He put that one under the counter, one with the rest of the top shelf liquor, and left some in the crate to join their brethren of backstock in the storage room. "You hanging around long enough for stories this afternoon?" He pulled one final bottle out and patted its lid. "I did promise strong drinks, and I can't let a friend go home sober." He raised an eyebrow.
Given her utter ignorance of the source material, Karli was unaffectedly delighted by the continued performance. She grinned at Eliot and actually pulled out her phone to make a couple notes. "Didn't sound all that butchered to me, but, again, I don't really know the source material. Maybe I should just let you sing them all to me instead, so I won't know the difference and can be suitably blown away."
Was she kidding? Only a little.
Her smile turned wry smile in Eliot's direction and shook her head. "Unless you have something back there that could get someone like Steve Rogers drunk, I'd rather hear a story or two. 'Course, doesn't mean I can't enjoy the taste. Go on, then, attempt to dazzle my tastebuds and blow my mind. How does one become a High King and then lose it, anyway?"
"Oh, we'll be finding the source material. And if Wicked doesn't exist in this universe, we'll be rioting. Either that, or I'm going to be the most famous new composer on Broadway very soon." Eliot grinned wickedly at her. That kind of starting over didn't sound so bad. Not that running a nightclub with his best friend was exactly terrible.
"I can't say that I've ever had the opportunity to attempt to get our local Nicest Man Alive drunk, but I wouldn't hate having one. But hey, it still counts if I try to get you drunk, and this way you can try as many drinks as I slide your way without me needing to levitate you home. Which—we're coming back to this whole 'can't get drunk' thing, yes?" He opened the bottle and poured each of them a shot to start. It slid down just as smoothly as he'd hoped, and he closed his eyes and savored it for a second. "I know just the thing." He started pulling out ingredients, which weren't all stocked yet, but he had enough for what he had in mind. "So let's see. The short version is that...um, there was a blood test?" He laughed, because it really wasn't as simple as that. "I guess you have to understand a little about Fillory first."
And then he launched into the tale, starting with its existence in Quentin's books—because they'd always be Q's in his mind—and then getting far too caught up in how he'd met Quentin and gotten embroiled in his life to really get much into the magical land. "And, well, there was this time loop...." He slid the finished drink across the bar to her. "But first, try this."
The more Eliot talked about his past, the more Karli was convinced of something. But that something wasn't a something she felt comfortable asking someone else. Or talking about it in general. Karli had never had the time or even necessarily the inclination toward romantic attachments. Hell, she had trouble enough establishing non-romantic relationships, so it was for the best to leave her observation unspoken. Besides, she was distracted by the burn and then the buzz of one drink after another. They fizzed through her veins, and for just a second she thought maybe it would work, that she could experience something normal.
But then, without surprise, the bubbly feeling faded. At least the fruity flavor was tasty, as was the faint hint of a spice she couldn't quite recognize at the end. "'S good. And you're a good storyteller. But this?" Karli tapped a short nail against the empty glass. "Can't touch me. Same stuff that makes Rogers the big Cap is in me, too. Granted, I didn't get the 'roid muscles or the All American blonde hair and blue eyes, so it's there. But get back to the time loop, yeah? I need more details."
"And what 'stuff' is that, exactly?" Eliot asked with a raised eyebrow. You heard things, being around all these crazy powerful people, but all that information sort of blended together after a while. All he knew was that Steve Rogers was strong and handsome and helpful. He shook his head and retracted the question with the wave of a hand. "No, we'll come back to that. It's one drink, darling. I can keep trying."
He winked and began mixing another as he talked. "Yeah, talk about getting royally fucked in multiple timelines. Well, most of them." His mind went, as it often did, to that timeline, the loop inside the loop that had both ruined everything and made life worth living. He realized he'd gone silent and had to shake himself out of it. The specifics were pretty straightforward, if probably convoluted to an outsider, but he laid them out with his usual flair, capping everything off with pushing a second drink toward her as he said, "So Quentin crowned me High King with this"—he chuckled lowly and decided to ignore how his eyes had gone misty—"absolutely nerdy speech, and Margo and I crowned them, and it was this whole sentimental thing. But it did the job."
She took the third drink with an easy enough smile, but watched him over the lip of the glass with veiled curiosity. A question was stark in her mind, but it was one that wasn't her business. Karli hadn't done much truly personal sharing, even with the friends she'd attempted to make since December—Clark and Rogue chief among them, so she didn't exactly chase it down with anyone else, lest they turn the line of interrogation back on her. Still, whatever was in this latest concoction apparently had just enough staying power for the words to slip out of her mouth anyway: "And was this before or after you fell in love with your mate?"
Eliot only faltered for a second, during which his brain did a complete shutdown and restart, before he said, "Before. Or—yes, before." He'd already had complex feelings about Quentin at that point, but it was so seldom that he made new close friends that it was far too easy to mix them up. Especially with magic-fueled sex in the mix. "I must have put something really sassy in that drink," he teased, leaning over the bar like he was going to take it away. "Do I need to cut you off already, missy?"
After considering another moment, he sighed dramatically and leaned against the bar, regarding her. "That story doesn't have much to do with kings and queens. Time loop aside it's...well, kind of normal life. Which is not something I've had much of, I'll admit."
The candor came as a surprise; she'd mostly been expecting him to tell her to go to hell and throw her out. Maybe it wasn't some huge personal epiphany or even a big secret or anything, but Karli couldn't help but feel both pleased and a bit honoured to have heard that kind of personal truth. She had to fight with her eyebrows to bring them back down from her hairline. It helped when he made her laugh, and she made quite a show of snatching the drink closer to her chest. "Bet you're more afraid at this point that I'm gonna drink you out of your fancy arse liquor than you are my level of sass. And I'm pretty sure no one's ever used that word about me before, but I'll take it over anything stronger."
Tilting her glass at him in salute, she then sobered as she put it back on the bar. Made the perfect excuse to get a little lost in the swirl of colour as her thoughts turned self-reflective. After a beat, she gave him a small nod and glanced up at him. "Yeah, normal's not something I had until half the world got snapped away. And you can just imagine what that brand of normal looked like. Or maybe you can't. Just like your time loop, it's not something a body can easily get, unless they lived it." Karli offered him a knowing smile that then turned wryly curious. "He know? Your mate?"
"I can get more fancy arse liquor," Eliot said, doing a terrible job at imitating her accent. "There's always more liquor somewhere. It's the attitude that's in pitifully short supply in the right places." He did a quick tut that tugged the glass out of her hands, pulling it over to his waiting grasp. He winked at her before sliding it back across the bar to her. "People keep talking about that." He snapped his fingers. "And I confess I spent a good part—or, okay, all of my first couple of weeks very drunk and didn't quite follow what it means, except that it was bad. People died bad. And then...it got better? Like I said, didn't follow."
Deeming her current drink situation sufficient, he quickly mixed one for himself before moving around the bar to join her, pulling a stool to a comfortable talking distance and sitting. It should have been strange to talk to someone about this, uncomfortable even, but he'd promised himself he wouldn't hide from it anymore. That, given the chance to banish the Monster from his body (or into that little box inside his head, which mostly counted), he'd stop being ashamed of the wrong things.
It was a work in progress.
"Yes? And no." He blew out a breath, which ended in a sheepish sort of laugh, and the dampness was back in his eyes. "We were married. Had a family. Grew old together." He shrugged and tried to feel casual about it, but it was definitely not that. "The loop started over, went a different direction...but somehow we remembered. And then I fucked it up." He downed his whole drink in three big gulps. A shameful waste of a flavor that should have been savored, but he needed it right about now.
"Half the universe," she murmured against the rim of her glass after getting it back from the charming use of magic. She didn't expand on it, however, because Eliot seemed like the kind of bloke who had more than enough shite to deal with, without factoring in the utterly incalculable reality of a universe emptied of half of all its living population. Most days Karli had a hard enough time wrapping her brain around just the Earth itself, and she'd lived through the whole thing. That much death in about ten seconds, and then more besides from accidents—it was unfathomable. So, she didn't put that in her friend's head along with everything else in there.
Turns out, she was capable of kindness.
And also didn't react immediately with violence or force when she'd felt the glass being tugged away. If she had, it would have crumbled in her hand, and the course of their conversation would have been very different. Now, though, she simply tilted her head at him just a little. Affairs of the heart weren't her forte, but she was a student of the human condition, which sometimes included love. "No one's ever accused me of being a starry-eyed optimist, by any means, but even I know this world, this time, these events—they're a second chance. Or third, or fourth, or even… how many loops were you up to when you got here? Regardless, you get to do something new here. Most people don't get that chance. But I'm probably telling you things you've already told yourself. You're a smart man, if a bit on the self-destructive side. But who isn't these days, eh?"
Eliot whistled lowly. The magnitude she was describing in such bare terms was the unfathomable kind, well beyond anything he'd personally experienced—and that was saying something. He was suddenly very glad all over again that he and Margo and Quentin had ended up here and not one of the (apparently) infinite other possibilities.
He couldn't recall if anyone had ever called him smart before. Streetwise and clever, yes. Attractive and accommodating, often. But smart? He wasn't stupid, and he knew that, but it was just an odd description that he'd never really considered for himself. "I don't remember." There had been a number. Q would know, but so many details like that had gotten pushed aside when the Monster had taken him over. "We don't remember them all. Only that one." He shrugged and began to wipe down the bar where he'd been mixing drinks. "Things were bad before I ended up here. This might actually be the only chance now." He forced himself instead to muster up a smile even as he poured himself another shot. "Now, enough of my drama. Let's talk about the magic 'stuff' that means you have to miss out on one of life's finer things." He tossed back the liquor.
Rather than press for details, Karli simply reached out and lightly touched the back of her new friend's hand. It was tantamount to giving him a hug. Karli might not have truly understood what Eliot had gone through, but she knew from leaving a bad situation behind. Walker, Wilson, Barnes, even Carter—things that had seemed to be going on an upward trajectory were, instead and with the benefit of hindsight (foresight?), spiralling. Now, however, she had other things to focus on. Maybe even better things. She drank the last of her tasty drink and then set it down with a quirk of her lips. "Well, to answer that, I've gotta ask: how much do you know about Captain America?"