Who: Quentin Coldwater & Alice Quinn When: Post battle in 50s Texas Where: Caves What: Bottling up your emotions is bad, mmkay? Also lots of feels Rating: PG-13?? Warnings: Lots of Q being a depressed mofo and so many self hatred and talks about character death and stuff Status: Complete
Once the fighting portion of the night was over, Quentin had come back to the caves with Eliot and Margo. He’d noted the time that had passed as Eliot had, but stayed where he was once it was time to drink from his canteen. Whatever blank feeling that had taken over was gone the moment he finished and he slowly curled on himself. He felt the emotions crushing him, pressing in on him from all sides. He remembered this feeling before, but this was somehow worse.
At some point he’d ended up on his side on the ground, curled up in a ball and tense. His hands were pressed to his ears and he was very much crying. Not so much sobs as just heaving breathing with tears. All of the feelings that had been building up and pushed down over the past few days were coming up and out, amplified. He didn’t know how to stop it or make it easier. He regretted his decisions, but he regretted everything and with all of his emotions overwhelming him, he wasn’t sure he could really identify any of the things he was feeling at that moment besides regret and depression.
Fools.
This was what Alice had shouted at her fellow classmates as they bottled their emotions up in foreign, filthy containers. Had they learned nothing from the last time they'd done this? It was going to end horribly and Alice knew this. Perhaps they had, too, but it didn't matter. She felt the need to remind them. One could debate she was telling them solely out of spite, to emphasize what pain they'd feel upon the return, but another could argue that some part of her, deep down inside, cared.
Her shade was part of her once more, after all.
Alice, herself, would not admit to this. She was still angry whenever in the vicinity of Quentin, Eliot or Margo. She didn't want to be here. She didn't want to be tethered to a pointless body. She wanted to be free to search the realms. And instead she was stuck in a world before even Elvis was famous.
It sucked.
Coming up towards Quentin, she stood over him, frowning. "You had all that time to get better at this," she retorted. It was true. If he'd focused on learning to do battle magic without the need for emotion bottles, instead of trying to find her shade, he could have mastered the skill. He did have potential after all.
Quentin tried to focus on Alice’s words. He just knew it was her voice and all it did was make his chest tighten. It felt like there was a clamp on his heart. He didn’t move despite the clawing desire to move away from Alice and her disapproval, her disappointment. He just curled even further in on himself for a moment.
“Shut...up.” His voice was shaky and slowly he pressed himself closer against the wall. “I can’t think.” He didn’t know if he could do anything. There was nothing to numb the emotions, the alcohol already hidden away from them. He just wanted to go to sleep until it was over, but it wasn’t going to happen. He couldn’t even get his breath under control, much less get himself to a place where he was able to fall asleep.
"No," she immediately said, with an almost insulted expression, arms crossing over her chest. Her eyes didn't leave him though and for a moment she registered the tears. "Crying really isn't a smart idea, you know, what with the limited resources of water," she commented, before shifting to sit down by his side.
Her head leaned back against the cave face and she was silent for a moment, looking out away from him. Then she sighed heavily. "Come here," she demanded, shifting to get more comfortable on the ground, her arms moving to rest at her sides.
It wasn’t like he could help it. He hadn’t been keen on crying in front of an entire cave of people. He wasn’t happy that he was doing it even now in front of Alice. He didn’t need to be told that it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. He just wasn’t able to do anything about it. At least not at this moment.
It was confusing to feel her moving to sit by him and even more so when she told him to come over to her. He crawled his way closer, putting his head in her lap. The concept of sitting up seemed to be too much, so this would have to do. He felt a little better being close to someone, but it hadn’t really changed the heaviness that came with the emotions. “I hate this,” he mumbled.
"You knew it was going to happen," she reminded him, though she didn't add on any extra to the statement. It wasn't like she didn't have more she could say. After all, he didn't need to play the part of a hero. It wasn't his fight. He could have stayed back. But she didn't say any of this and when he was laying with his head in her lap, she shifted some, so her arm was wrapped around him.
She didn't say anything else for awhile as he eyes stared out ahead of. "Did you kill anything?" She asked after the silence began to feel too awkward, even for her.
“I know.” He had known. He’d known very well what would happen. He remembered the last times that it happened. That hadn’t stopped him. Neither had the fact that it wasn’t his fight. It hadn’t mattered. People needed them, so they chose to help at their own detriment. His body relaxed a little as he felt Alice’s arm around him.
Quentin had been fine with the silence even if it didn’t distract as much as the talking did. “Yes.” The word came out as a whisper and it reminded him that they were killers, but the things they’d killed would have killed if they hadn’t. He’d just acted, not felt it. He hadn’t considered anything other than what needed to be done. He didn’t have to deal with the emotions of it until later...and he was.
"Guess it was worth it then," she mumbled. She cast a glance down at him for a second, glad that he was not at eye level, for a small frown reflected on her features. She didn't like seeing him this way, even though anger was still an intense feeling she had for him. Biting down on her inner lip, harder than necessary and just enough to feel her own speck of desired pain, her eyes shifted back to ahead of her. He was going to need to be watched considering his history. Eliot or Margo should be here, not her.
Worth it. Was anything worth anything? Was he? He didn’t feel like it at that moment. He was teetering close to the edge and it wouldn’t take much to push him over it. There weren’t places to go here to make it better. Not in this time period. Nowhere could help him and he wasn’t sure anyone could help him. He felt lost. But Alice was there. For some reason, she was there. Because he’d made her come back. But outside of that. Outside of what he’d done, she still came and sat with him. Probably only to tell him he was an idiot, probably only out of some misplaced sense of obligation.
“I saw you,” he said quietly. “You were the only one and we were all dead and I saw you.” That was how they’d discovered how to get into the Underworld. “And we just got erased or put on rewind and did it over and over.” He curled up a little more. “I saw you,” he whispered again. Because suddenly he remembered the look on her face and she’d missed him and things were terrible and he was selfish, terribly selfish. He’d needed her not to be gone, he’d needed her to be Alice even if she hated him, even if it wasn’t what she wanted. He couldn’t live with himself if he hadn’t tried. Julia had given up her chance of having her shade back to give that chance to him. The side effect being that she hated him. Though, that had been his own fault. Everything was his fault.
She looked back down at him when he spoke. "I'm not following," she stated, though her tone wasn't cruel. She just wanted to understand what he was trying to say. And as she watched him, with his head in her lap, she repressed an urge from her previous life to lift her hand and stroke his hair. She would not do this. That was something, once, that she'd have done gladly. When she was his Vix and she'd never known the power of a God or the feel of the flames.
Quickly, she reminded herself of the disdain she wanted to hold onto. It was gasoline, keeping the fire lit inside her, so that her ambitions were maintained and she did not settle. She could already feel her memories slipping from her. She had seen the cosmos but the images she'd witnessed were going black.
And it was his fault. She scowled some and raised an eyebrow, waiting for the response.
“We did a spell. To find out how to get Julia’s shade back. We saw you. You had the information we needed. A version of you...from the past. And we were all dead. All of us.” He drew in a shaky breath. “All of us but you.” And he hated that. He hated that there was an Alice that lost everything and everyone. “You told us what to do, how to get her shade.” And then Julia had given it up, sacrificed everything and he couldn’t even tell her how grateful he was now. Julia wasn’t here. “Do you ever think about how many times we’ve all died or just one of us or two of us survived? What did we do then? How would we have moved past it all in our lives? Did we? I think I’d have been somewhere for the rest of my life if I was the only one after the Beast…” He didn’t think he was strong enough to be the only one.
“I hate everything.” Which both fit into the conversation and was missing pieces, pieces that he’d connected with thoughts in his mind from the last thing he’d said to the feeling. “It’s all shit. Everything is shit.”
Her gaze shifted down to look upon him as he spoke and she set her jaw to keep herself from frowning in response. She had thought about the time loops before but she had never considered all the possibilities. All the lives they were leading or unable to lead in other universes. How many times had she been the only one to survive? Or Quentin had been? What mistakes had been made? Had she given herself up in those other worlds or was it something she'd only done here?
She could have found the answer, maybe, when she was a niffin. All the answers could have been found. Not now.
She sighed heavily and her head leaned back against the cave face, as her fingers twitched against the strands of Quentin's hair that lay beneath her hands. "I've thought about the loops," she admitted freely. She didn't offer her opinion of what Quentin would have been like if he'd been the sole one to survive. She had a feeling he wouldn't have been himself anymore and he'd have wound up in a hospital. This much, she knew, she didn't want for him. Regardless of the fire and the gasoline that was her emotions.