Pansy Wisteria Parkinson (pugmylife) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2017-06-20 22:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | pansy parkinson, quentin coldwater |
WHO: Pansy Parkinson and Quentin Coldwater
WHERE: Quarantine
WHEN: Shortly after Pansy’s arrive
WHAT: A meeting
RATING: PG
STATUS: completed
Quentin felt weird. It was the sort of weird you felt when you were about to walk into a room and talk to someone who you knew from a series of books. He was fidgeting, which was normal for him. So was the general awkward energy that he exhibited. He was brought in by the military men to a room to meet with Pansy Parkinson. He remembered being on the other side of this window acutely. He could still remember the sound of Eliot’s voice as he talked to him. He cleared his throat as he stared through the full length window. Part of him almost wondered if he should have thought more about what he was wearing instead of just throwing on whatever he found that was clean. He needed to do laundry. “Uh. Hey. I’m Quentin,” he said once he walked over to the window. “I hope I wasn’t too long, but I had to deal with...a few things.” Like talking to people to get inside. *** Pansy liked to think she'd really grown as a person since losing her money, reputation and father on short succession, but no amount of growing could make quarantine any less boring. She'd already read all the material she'd been given and wrestled with the television. Seeing the young man who'd come to visit her, however, she felt a spark of pride. She had come a long way. In the past, she wouldn't have given anyone as sheepishly awkward as him the time of day. She really had grown. Or was that desperate for company. One of the two. “Pansy.” She didn't get up from her chair. “Does it say my name in a little placard on the wall? Along with a few choice tidbits? ‘Pansy Parkinson. Origin: England. Like: dark chocolate and good wine. Will mate with just about any male of the species if sufficiently sloshed.” *** Sheepishly awkward came naturally to Quentin. As did overbearing nerdiness. Anyone that knew him could have told her about it. He thought he was doing a pretty good job of not spazzing out at the moment, however. It probably would have been more difficult if it had actually been Harry Potter or Ron Weasley or Hermione Granger. He was already silently spazzing out about any Weasleys and Luna Lovegood being around. He looked over at the wall before shaking his head. “Nope. Nothing like that. But I guess it’s good to know. I think mine would have said ‘Quentin Coldwater, King of Fillory. Origin: New York. Likes: Fillory, Fillory, not dying, and basically any food that’s put in front of me. Will sleep with just about anyone if drunk enough and after having kept his emotions bottled up in a small container for longer than the prescribed time.’ But then that’s how these things go. At least I’m not the High King.” Okay. He was rambling. *** “Where's Fillory?” Pansy prowled the edge of the cell she was in, ending up on the other side of the glass from him. He didn't look like any sort of king, and she couldn't imagine anyone following him into any sort of battle, but leaders came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Whoever saw Longbottom coming? Or perhaps he wasn't the leadership sort of king, and more the sort to sit back and let others fight his battles. *** Yeah, Quentin knew that he didn’t look much like a king. Eliot was more suited to the kingly look and Margo to the queenly look. He and Alice just kind of were. But he still thought Alice was more beautiful than anyone else. Only things were stupid and he hated everything. But yeah...he was here. And he’d fought. He had the wooden shoulder to prove it. Fought the Beast. But even with all the bad that came with Fillory, Quentin’s eyes still lit up the moment he got to talk about it. “It’s a magical land that you can’t get to unless you’re really trying or it lets you come in. Christopher Plover wrote a book series about it and the Chatwins who traveled there. It turns out Plover was a shitty human being, but Fillory was real after dreaming about it being real pretty much my entire life, it was. Ember and Umber formed it. They’re gods. There’s...there’s just so much to explain that I don’t know if I can do it all without going on for a really long time.” Not that he’d mind, really. If there was anything Quentin enjoyed, it was talking about Fillory...and talking about Fillory. “It’s got talking animals and magical creatures. You’d be familiar with centaurs. Of course. I was around them for a while after I almost died, but they were pretty okay. Got a wooden shoulder out of the ordeal.” To prove it, he knocked on his shoulder. It was still weird that his shoulder sounded hollow. *** A magical world that was hidden from Muggle eyes? That sounded familiar. His explanation, however, raised more questions than it answered. “How'd you know I'm familiar with centaurs? And how did you get to be king?” If she could’ve touched him, she would've poked at his shoulder. As it were, she just pointed at him. “You don't look very kingly.” *** “Oh. Um.” His fingers pushed back his hair, only for it to fall haphazardly back into his eyes. It sort of did whatever it wanted the majority of the time. “I thought...since you’d done the weird showing up in places thing you might already be used to people knowing about...the books and stuff?” He felt like an ass now, though. Not that that was an unusual feeling. “We’re in a TV show apparently. The Magicians. It’s some kind of fiction-ception. Fiction inside of fiction. I keep trying to make it less weird, but it’s kind of not. But then things were weird before this started.” As for how he got to be king. “Um. Well, only children of Earth can be the kings and queens of Fillory. There was a test to see who the High King was. They use a knife that will only draw the blood of the High King. That’s Eliot. Margo’s the High Queen and Alice and I…” He paused here, a look of pain flashing across his face. He didn’t say her name often because every time he did, it reminded him that she hated him and that she wasn’t here. There was nothing. “Eliot dubbed me King Eliot the Moderately Socially Maladjusted.” He shrugged. Like it wasn’t a big deal, but it had been at the time. It had been huge. “I’m not very kingly. I’m just a mostly depressed asshole who happens to be king. Margo and Eliot do most of the ruling. Alice was dead, but now she’s back...only she is mad about it, so she...we haven’t exactly gone back yet.” A pause. “Well, I was on my way back with Umber. He was fake dead. We’re tricking him into going back...essentially.” He’d lost most of the excitement that he’d started off with. There was a lot of stuff to deal with. “But before this gets too depressing, where were you before this?” *** “Dreadful, boring town in Indiana,” Pansy said promptly. She saw no need to linger on that particular topic. There wasn't much to say about it, or at least there wasn't much she wanted to say about it. “I did hear there were books. I even read them.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Horribly one-sided and biased, of course. But that's common for that sort of thing, isn't it? In order to have a hero, you need villains. Apparently I do better as a villain.” She mentally backtracked over the information he'd blurted out to her. “Margo’s the one who claims to have excellent taste in alcohol? How'd you manage to run with the likes of her?” *** “It sounds unfortunate.” But he’d never been to Indiana before. Texas was dreadful enough. He wasn’t sure if he could handle Indiana. Quentin considered it for a moment, finding that it was something similar to what Eliot had said about the Star Wars movies and Kylo. By all rights, he should have side-eyed Pansy given how he acted toward Kylo. But she hadn’t actually killed anyone from what he remembered. “Probably. Our villain is the Beast, but also, he is kind of like if Voldemort was more charming and sang and whistled. Definitely one of those people that knows what he’s doing is wrong and does it anyway because he likes it.” He was the reason for Quentin’s shoulder, Alice’s death, and Penny’s hands going missing. “Um. Kind of by accident. She’s best friends with Eliot. Eliot met me at the entrance of the school.” He shrugged. “They put me in the cottage with them even though I don’t have an exact discipline, but there was space there.” He shrugged, deciding against mentioning that he’d had a threesome with the two of them. It was a bad story and he’d accidentally cheated on Alice. “But now we’re…” Were they friends? He never really knew for sure even when they acted like friends. “Co-monarchs.” *** Pansy could believe that. It was hard to imagine him becoming friends with someone as spirited as Margo - from what little Pansy had seen of her - naturally. Forced cohabitation did create bonds that were difficult to break. As was comonarchy, it seemed. “Is it a let-down?” She at him curiously. “To go from king to...well. Whatever you are here?” *** He’d had Julia most of his life...even if everything was still a bit weird now. They were still working things out. She wasn’t exactly Margo, but she was more outgoing than he was. Most of his friends tended to be more outgoing than he was. He was happy enough to sit in a room by himself reading and with the depression on top of it, it was hard to motivate himself to get to know people. But Eliot had sort of forced his presence on Eliot and Margo came with that. Then, of course, a lot of things happened between that first day and now. It was kind of hard to imagine his life without them. There was a version of them where Alice was the only one that survived their encounter with the Beast. “I gave it up once before...after Alice died.” Only she hadn’t really died. She’d turned into a Niffin. She was pure power and knowledge and...much meaner. “I think not being able to do magic was the worst part of it. But now we’re trying to save Fillory and I’m technically still king. I think, however, not having Brakebills is going to be stranger than not having Fillory.” He paused. “Brakebills is our Hogwarts. Only it’s more like...grad school. We don’t start school till our twenties.” *** It was strange, how both similar and different this Fillory was from the world she knew. It was looking out the window at her garden through a fogged window. She could see the general shapes, but details were distorted. “That's odd,” she said. Tired of just standing there, she pushed off and went back to sit on the bed. Her voice still carried. “Does your magic not engage until you're in your twenties? Because otherwise how do you learn control and usage?” *** Quentin watched her quietly for a moment, considering finding a chair and sitting down. He was sure there was one around. Then again, he was just as fine sitting on the floor. It wasn’t like it would keep them from seeing each other. The window was floor to ceiling. “Not really sure. I mean, I did magic tricks when I was younger, but I can’t say if that was magician’s tricks or actual magic. I didn’t know it was for sure until Brakebills, though. I’m twenty-three.” He shrugged. “I’m still learning, but it’s kind of amazing all the same. Combat magic is something we’ve been teaching ourselves and there’s a lot of other magic. We have a lot of trials to work through, though. Like tests and everything.” He shrugged before deciding to sit on the floor, legs crossed. “It would be nice if the library showed up, though. So we could keep practicing. We kind of got caught up with being royalty and then saving Fillory. I’ll show you some of it, though, once you're out if you want to see.” *** “I wouldn’t mind,” Pansy admitted. She wanted to see what manner of education these other wizards were getting. It all seemed a low-rent version of the world she knew, but she’d check out their resources nonetheless. “I think it’s appalling, really, to leave magical children on their own, unaware of their powers, until they’re grown,” she continued. “So much lost potential. And what if they hurt someone? Or themselves?” This was why her world was so much better. *** Quentin shrugged. “I didn’t do anything until I was in school. And I doubt the Beast would have had any qualms about killing children. He doesn’t really seem the sort to care.” There was a frown. Now he wondered if they’d tried it with them as kids or if it had only ever been as adults. He had a feeling it was only as adults, though. “We’ve kind of fought him forty times now? I don’t remember the last thirty-nine, though. There was time magic involved and we were just on a continuous loop. Each time we failed, it was started over. We sort of had to succeed this time…” Because Eliza had died. Or Jane Chatwin as she was called before. “It’s a long story.” There were a lot of long stories with them, however. So many fucking long stories and none of them seemed to end happily. He let out a long breath. “We haven’t really hurt ourselves. Or anyone else as far as I can tell. And we did bring someone back from the not really dead. So I think we’re probably okay.” *** “Well, it still seems extremely dodgy.” All that fighting and dying. Pansy was no stranger to that sort of thing, but it wasn’t exactly normal in the wizarding world. Only when someone decided they wanted to take it over. Violently. She stretched. “Tell me about this world, then. What can I expect once I leave this cell?” *** Dodgy. So British. It was almost exciting. Like reading about the Chatwins. The language was always so much more interesting. But the Harry Potter books had been different, he guessed. He’d once read the books that were said to be the “British versions”. There were some differences, but not enough that he thought it warranted an “American version”. Then again, some people didn’t read things that confused them or cared to be confused, so maybe there was a point. “It’s a very small town set up. The townspeople are sort of really...well, I’ve never been in a small town before, but the way TV shows and books write about them, that’s basically how it is. Everyone knows everyone’s business. They have weird rules and don’t like outsiders much. It’s ridiculously hot. I’m not sure how Indiana was with temperatures, but it’s hot. You’ll need sunscreen.” He tried to think of what else to tell her about the town. “Oh. They seem pretty unaware of magic and shit even though weird things happen a lot. At least that’s what I’ve been told.” He thought about it for a moment again. “It’s basically just really strange. But at least there’s places to drink and people who aren’t too bad.” *** It sounded awfully boring to Pansy, but after all the world-jumping she’d done, perhaps boring was what she needed. At least for a few days, after which it would get extremely tedious. She already wasn’t looking forward to it. She gave him a narrow look from the side of her eyes. “Bit of a step down from being king of Fillory, isn’t it?” *** Eliot had told him that they had been in space before, but Quentin hadn’t experienced anything like that, so he rarely thought about it. “I suppose it’s a bit of one, but as you’ve mentioned, I’m not very kingly.” He shrugged slightly. “Something tells me it’s for the best.” But it was likely the pessimistic voice in his mind that figured on things turning out poorly. “Guess I can’t know for sure.” He stood after a moment. “I should probably go, though. Eliot and Margo will be wondering why I was gone so long and probably I’ll be teased for it.” *** “Tell them you were flirting with a girl,” Pansy told him with a sly smile. “Tell them how charmed she was by your bashful awkwardness. They'll still tease you, of course, but it'll be a positive sort of teasing.” She winked at him. “Go on. If anyone asks I'll tell them how utterly charming you were.” |