It had to be done; it was probably unnatural not to, at this point. Especially if this was your first time on a ship, an actual ship, not a rickety boat or a cheap canoe. Stepping up to the very edge of the bow, careful not to fall, Leanne realized there was a lot less to hold onto than on the Titanic, which was worrying. However, it was unlikely that she’d fall and not be rescued. Hopefully.
Pausing, she looked around, but the wind made her hair whip back into her face and stopped her from being able to really see if anyone was watching. No one had been around when she’d gotten here, anyway. With a shrug, she planted her legs wide enough apart to really feel stable and took in a gulp of air, spreading her arms.
“I’M THE KING OF THE WORLD! WOOOO!” She shouted, then burst into a fit of giggles. That wasn’t what Kate winslet said but rather what Leo Dicaprio said earlier on in the movie, but hey. It was better than saying she was flying. She still wiggled her fingers in the wind, waving her outstretched arms as the spray hit her face. A while later, Leanne felt the air make her waver. She immediately clapped her arms back down against her hips.“Oh shit!”
Quentin hadn’t wanted to come on the cruise, in truth he hadn’t wanted to much of anything after the memory dump but as he’d told Margo he was getting better. The hardest thing to accept was that when this war was over, he couldn’t go home. He was dead and even if he went back to the exact moment he came from? Well, he would still die. There was also the fact that apparently Alice came back because he’d met their daughter but things could change. Anyway he was tired of thinking about it so he decided to go on the cruise.
He was wandering around deck when he heard someone yell and he rolled his eyes. How many people had done that tonight, he wondered. Hopefully not someone drink enough to actually fall off the boat. He turned the corner just as Leanne waverd and he hurried over to help her down. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t know if my magic will get out of the water.” He knew her face, she played Quidditch but he couldn’t remember what team she as on. “You okay? Nice Leo impression by the way.”
“Oh, oh thank you.” Leanne replied, immediately blushing in embarrassment at the entire thing having been witnessed. Of course with hundreds of people on board it was silly to hope otherwise. She smiled at her rescuer and stepped away from the tip of the bow onto a more stable and spacious area.
“I thought it the thing to do, you know? First time on a yacht, which is the closest thing I’ll likely ever be to a ship, so…” She shrugged, looking down. “I’m all right. And thanks. Yeah, people say we are very similar.” She gave Quentin a sassy grin. .
“No, I think the mustache looks better on him. I can’t picture you with one. Doesn’t he have one these days? I guess I’m not up on my Leo trivia.” Or any trivia for that matter. His world had been turned upside down first at Brakebills, then Fillory and finally by being someone else. As crazy as this place was, he was at least back to being just Quentin Colwater.
“Hopefully the powers that be haven’t thrown an iceberg out there just for shits and giggles,” he said. “I mean they turn people into buttons and penguins and all manner of stuff. Maybe they think an iceberg would be a good time.” He grinned at her. “I’m Quentin by the way but you probably know that.”
"These days is a bit relative. I'm from 2006 so last I checked I think he had some sort of facial hair but not a full on anything. But to be honest I'm not that big a fan so..." Leanne shrugged. She was fine with not having any sort of facial hair, though it took some magic to really get rid of the occasional dark peach fuzz above her lip - but that was neither all that unusual nor any of Quentin's business to know about.
When Quentin mentioned an iceberg Leanne's brow furrowed as the idea, which hadn't occurred to her, suddenly made itself a very real possibility. She looked out onto the water as a reflex. "I hope not. We don't need all that drama. And weather's too good for that, it would just make no sense!" She paused a second, blinking in thought before adding, "not that anything does, really, here."
Leanne looked back at Quentin and smiled sweetly. "Yeah I suspected. We talked when I got grounded by the storm then some people I knew left. How've you been?"
“That’s right, I remember.” he shrugged. “Not that great really. I got one of those memory dumps that people get sometimes.” He reached up to push his hair out of his eyes, not sure what he felt that he could tell her but somehow he felt like he could. No one else knew outside of his immediate circle of friends. “I got about three years worth of memories in one night and found out that I died. I sacrificed to save magic from this lunatic who wanted to conquer the world so at least I died doing something noble but…” he looked up at the sky for a moment before he looked back at Leanne. “I can’t exactly choose to go home now and hopefully one of those things where people disappear without warning happens. There’s nothing to go home to.” There had been a time after Alice had left that he’d thought about it but he had changed his mind since he was happy here.
Leanne's smile faltered as Quentin revealed more about himself and his true situation. She couldn't imagine how he must feel, though she was trying to understand at the very least. But grieving a loved one's death had to be infinitely different from grieving your own, although no less devastating. It was a loss, and people talked about losing oneself enough that the two could clash, she imagined. Leanne didn't think people were meant to know about their deaths like this. Even experiencing one of her own that had turned out to be fake had thrown her for all manner of loops. Quentin's wasn't fake at all, however. There was no comfort to be had there.
Giving him a saddened look Leanne took a few steps closer to him and squeezed his arm in a gesture of comfort.
"Oh, I am so sorry. That must be..." she shook her head, not letting go of his arm. Instead she rubbed her hand over it soothingly. "Must be dizzying. So this is home now then? For good?"
“Yeah I suppose so. It’s kind of funny but according to one of our professors, all of us had been caught in a time loop. We’d lived through 39 versions of the same time period with one thing altered in each one. This one was the 40th one and I had died in all of the others long before we got to the point we were at. Guess I broke that record.” he sighed and looked out over the water. “But if I’m here for good, at least it’s a good place and I can still do magic and I could certainly have ended up in a lot worse places than this.”
It was somehow both disconcerting and comforting that magic in other worlds seemed as wild and prone to shenanigans as in hers. Maybe more. She didn’t know whether to felicitate Quentin on surviving longer in his most recent iteration, though, so she just… sighed.
“I can’t doubt you there, there’s always worse.” She agreed. Leanne then smiled, and gave Quentin’s arm an encouraging pat. “You’ll be happy here, yeah? No dying unless it’s of old, decrepit age.”
“Yeah, I will be. I like it here, I love the magic library, there is so much stuff there that I never even knew existed. As much as I like doing magic, studying it is amazing.” Things that he had never really believed were real, he’d read about in the library, spells that he could never have done before coming to Atlantis.
Leanne smiled. A scholar, then. It was great that he had found a silver lining in all this; she, too, tried her best to do so. “I never was much for studying it, more for doing you know what I mean? But hey, takes all sorts, right? I feel like that’s a subject that’s never really done being studied so you have all that to look forward to.”
She walked a few steps towards the main body of the ship, then held out her hand, fingers wiggling. “Come on, let’s have a drink to second chances and silly movie reenactments and silver linings, yeah? I’ll buy.”