Margo's returned to Vallo, Quentin's been kind of a mess since Julia and Eliot disappeared. He fills her in on that, plus some other stuff, and they drink
a lot.
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MENTIONS OF TRAUMA, CHARACTER DEATH, AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE
The second Margo had been released from DOA custody - after she cursed out everyone and their mama when she found out she had been gone for two months and then spent the next half hour apologizing to everyone and getting Chinese takeout for the intake team - she headed to the Physical Cottage, ready to take a long ass bath and get drunk.
She hadn’t asked about who was still here, who was gone now, what had changed. Because she knew something was going to be fucked up, but she wanted to be well and truly drunk before she learned about it.
Shouldering her way through the front door and the wards that protected the Physical Cottage from unwanted persons entering it, she loudly called out, “Honey, I’m finally fucking home!” before she stomped over to where the wet bar awaited her. A tiny meow came to her from one of the couches in the living room and her annoyance at life melted a bit, when she caught sight of Milo.
“Aw, you’re still here, you little fucker,” she said with a fond smile, one hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle of vodka. She walked over to the one eyed cat and scooped him up with her free hand, the little thing still small enough to be comfortably carried in one hand. She promptly pulled open her shirt and dropped him into the front of her bra, where he nestled between her tits and started to purr in contentment. "Yeah, I know you must have missed them. Sorry I was gone so long," she said into her shirt.
Q’s life the last few weeks had felt kind of upended and mostly for the bad, which really wasn’t out of the norm for him, unfortunately. Between his stay in the hospital and Eliot disappearing, he hadn’t exactly been in the best of spirits as of late. Also not exactly out of the norm. He’d taken a few things from El’s room after his disappearance to keep for himself, but had more or less left it untouched otherwise -- sometimes things disappeared with the person who left, sometimes it didn’t. Q had no explanation for it. No one did, really.
Which would probably be convenient for the woman who’d just arrived. Or come back, really. After two months.
He heard Margo’s voice coming from downstairs while he was laying on his bed, a book open against his chest, and he paused. Then he grabbed his phone and checked the network. There was nothing on there to indicate her arrival, and yet she knew where the Cottage was. Had someone at the DOA told her where it was?
Putting the book aside, he climbed off the bed and hurried down the stairs, stopping at the foot of them to look into the sitting room space. Another pause. Was this a different Margo? The same one as before? What timeline was she from? There were too many questions, so he just settled for a “Uh. Hey, Margo.”
Margo had been in the middle of making a vodka tonic, when she heard someone coming down the stairs. She looked up in time to see her favorite floppy haired hot mess. "Hey Q. Where the fuck is everyone?" She held up her drink toward him, an offering for answers, before starting another one for herself.
Milo, meanwhile, started to shift between her cleavage, the purrs coming from him loud.
His eyebrows furrowed slightly and he took a moment. It was when he briefly noticed the kitten nestled in her bra that it clicked. Any other Margo probably wouldn’t be so comfortable with that cat so quickly. He felt relief, albeit briefly, until her question.
“Um. I think Fen’s out somewhere? I don’t know, exactly. I’ve been in my room reading most of today so far.”
Q crossed over to the bar and took the drink. “It’s good to see you again.” And he admittedly felt a small bit of hope that maybe if she could come back, then El would, too. “You’ve been missed.”
"Damn right I've been missed. I'm the shit and you guys are lucky to have me," Margo blustered, trying to not take to heart that Quentin has only mentioned Fen. She wanted to ask directly about Julia and Eliot, but she had a sinking feeling that she wasn't going to like the answer he was going to have for her.
She downed her drink a lot faster than she should have and winced, as a cough hit her. Milo meowed, clearly annoyed by the disturbance, and clawed his way out of her shirt and onto her shoulder. "Not this shirt, brat," she said between coughs, as she pulled Milo off her and put him down on the ground.
Then she took a look at the bottle of vodka she had been pouring from and narrowed her eyes at it. "Who bought this subpar crap? We're not Burnett's people, Quentin, and Eliot should know better than that."
Taking her cue, Quentin tossed back his own drink and coughed, though only a couple of times. He’d clearly grown more used to the cheaper vodka — his own fault for going through the bottle Eliot had last purchased maybe a little too quickly in his absence.
He glanced down at the kitten who sauntered over to where he was standing and rubbed against his legs affectionately and then crouched down, giving Milo a gentle scritch under his chin.
Then he sighed and stood back to his full height, which was only a matter of inches taller than her own. “El does know better, he just…” Q took a moment to clear his throat, his nose briefly scrunching as he swallowed back his emotions. “He, uh, disappeared. A couple of weeks ago. And Jules disappeared a little over a month ago, right after I got out of the hospital. So it’s just been me and Fen lately and… I kind of went through the last of the vodka El had bought.”
Well, that answered that question. Margo almost regretted knowing this, her face visibly falling at the fact it was just her, Q, and Fen now. She didn't bother to ask about Kady or Marina yet.
Staring down at the bottle instead, Margo sighed and then started to pour another glass. "Alright, well, that just means we gotta finish this shit and get something they won't shame me or the spirit of Eliot." She held out the glass for Quentin to take and then brought the bottle to her lips and started to chug.
Blerg.
"Sorry he's gone," she added, throat burning, but still able to speak.
He took the glass and turned it a bit between his fingers, anxiously, trying to keep his feelings over Eliot not being around anymore somewhere underneath the surface. He struggled with that though -- he’d barely been able to talk about it with anyone, and here Margo was again and him having to explain it.
Shit.
Q knocked back the glass and grimaced, coughing again once before he replied. “Me too,” he said quietly, offering the glass to her for another refill.
“It fucking sucks. A lot. But I’m pretty sure if I talk about it anymore, I’m going to end up blubbering all over myself and I’m already annoying enough on a good day. You don’t need that right after showing back up here.” Honestly, the last thing he wanted to do was scare Margo off into deciding to crash somewhere else.
Normally, Margo would fuck off somewhere else to go get laid and forget about the fact that people she gave a shit about weren’t around. But it was obvious even to her that Quentin was struggling with this and while she didn’t have the relationship with Quentin that Eliot had, she did consider him a good friend.
So she rolled her eyes, tossed back another swig of vodka, and then hooked her arm around his neck and dragged him over to one of the couches nearby. “If you aren’t going to blubber on me, who are you going to blubber on, huh?” Collapsing back on the couch, she pulled him down next to her and pushed his head to rest on her chest. “Go on, get comfortable and tell me all the horrible shit that I’ve missed and get your feelings out. One time offer.”
Sometimes Quentin wasn’t exactly aware of how short he was by comparison to others, but when he didn’t really have to bend down much for Margo to be able to drag him over a couch with her arm around his neck, he became Very Aware of his height in that exact moment. It made a brief rosy color blossom in his cheeks, but then again, he was easily flustered and with the two vodka-heavy drinks already in his system on an empty stomach, it certainly wasn’t going to take much.
“Um.” He went a bit rigid when she pulled his head down to her chest, eyes looking dead ahead for a moment before he sort of tried to look up and over at her without actually… turning into her cleavage directly.
Not that his face hadn’t been in her cleavage before, but that wasn’t the point.
“Well, uh, not long after you disappeared Vallo did what it always does and there was some… fuckery abound. This stupidly tall vampire lady thing decided to take a bunch of us hostage via mind control. I became collateral damage in the fight, wound up in a coma for a week, can’t hear out of my left ear anymore. El… never really left the hospital, from what I know. Only came back here when he had to.” Q’s voice went a bit hushed when he said that, his mind going back to their conversation from when he woke up.
“Jules disappeared not long after that. Between her and El, I haven’t really paid much attention to everything else that’s been going on.” He bit back a sigh and closed his eyes for a brief moment, even taking the opportunity to sort of gently snuggle against her side. Margo had never been much of a cuddler with him, but they had their moments from time to time. “I ended up getting one of those bullshit memory dumps from home while I was in that coma, too.”
Margo was not a soft person. Hard armor, sharp edges, the whole shebang. But, for a very select few, she was capable of lowering her guard. That, with the amount of vodka she had imbibed, her face softened enough that she didn’t sound like a complete bitch when she said, “Well, shit, Q. You guys really know how to get fucked up without me around, huh?” She honestly didn’t think her disappearance was responsible for the bullshit that had followed after she had left, but she couldn’t help but think she could have stopped some of this shit from happening. Maybe not the disappearances, but at least this coma bullshit.
Running a hand through his hair and touching the shell of his ear, she asked, “So 100% loss or…?” She couldn’t help but think they could grow him another ear drum or whatever the hell lost. Because that just sucked.
“Have you been very you about everything? Holing up and ignoring the world?” Margo knew how that could go, had seen Quentin at some of his lowest moments, and she truly hoped their friends came back because if she was left to be handling the emotional side of their group dynamic, she was definitely going to fumble the ball there. “What memories from your world did you get?” Margo truly hoped it wasn’t memories of his death, that it turned out that he was the Quentin from her world where he never died.
“Vallo hated that you were gone, probably. It didn’t know how to function without you.” A hint of something amused pulled at one corner of his mouth, but it was gone almost as quickly as it appeared.
When her fingers began to comb through his hair, his body relaxed a bit, eyes still closed. This felt better. Fen had been fine for company the last couple of weeks, but she had a tendency to be just as awkward as he was when it came to certain things and the talk of disappearances wasn’t something either of them really wanted to breach with one another. “Close enough to 100%. I think if someone yelled directly into that ear I’d hear something super muffled, but that’s it. Otherwise it’s basically dead. Which considering I almost did die, coming out of that with just partial deafness to show for it was a lucky thing.”
Q fell silent for just a few beats, thinking over her question before giving the smallest of nods. What was the point in lying? “George’s shop has been closed for a little while so I haven’t really had much to keep me busy.” He’d more or less been keeping to himself at the Cottage except for a few small social gatherings. “Um, I… well. Everything? From my world. Up until I died there, anyway.” Sorry, Margo.
“Yeah, I buy it. People are always useless without me.” Case in point, Eliot. He was fully capable of being a real boy, but he simply chose not to be most of the time. The man had to be bullied into it.
However, she wasn’t thinking of Eliot or the things she missed, when Quentin revealed that he wasn’t the Quentin of her world. She sighed, knowing that it had been a long shot anyway, since all the other Magician bitches seemed to be from elsewhere too, save for Fen. “I’m sorry your world sucks. I’m sorry you had to get memories of it too. It’s bullshit, what happened there.” She was 100% convinced that she was from the superior world, this just confirmed it. “Guess that means you’re never allowed to go back.” She chugged some of the vodka in her hand, before offering the bottle to Q. “You know what would help? You gotta go hit up someone on Tag and get fucked silly. Live out your ho phase, Coldwater.”
“I’m sorry my world sucks, too. Like… what the fuck, you know? I get the circumstances that led to it. I understand every decision and if faced with those same things, I don’t think I would change anything because…” Well, because it saved Eliot and Julia, and ultimately the world.
He didn’t finish that sentence though, instead glancing over at the bottle. He took that as his cue to sit back up, taking a healthy swig from it and cringing before handing it back. Vodka had never been his favorite.
“Are you seriously suggesting I get on a dating app? Because I’m not awkward enough already.”
In favor of a topic that wasn’t all gloom and doom, she raised an eyebrow and said, “Umber’s tits, absolutely not suggesting that you get on there to date,” Margo clarified, running a hand up his shoulder and then flicking him in the forehead with a finger. “That’s dumb. You’re awkward and clearly still hung up over someone. I’m just suggesting you smash and dash.” With a delicate little shrug, she took the bottle back. “Use and lose, you know? Don’t gotta stay for breakfast, don’t gotta remember names.”
He winced a little at the flick to his forehead and pulled his head back away from her hand, eyebrows furrowing in that sad puppy dog sort of way they had a tendency to do. And then at the suggestion that he was still hung up on someone -- obviously, Q had never been that good at hiding his feelings -- he frowned. Just a little. Fuck did he miss El.
“Yeah, cause I’m totally one night stand material, too.” Quentin sighed and let his head fall back against the couch, eyes wide and staring up at the ceiling. “Though I’m sure Eliot would be proud of me if I managed to get it together long enough to do that.”
“If you think that look is going to work on me, you got another thing coming,” Margo said with a snort, as she watched him sad eyes her like she was Eliot. “Please, you were able to hit this,” she gestured toward herself with what was a quickly emptying bottle of bad vodka, “And not fall in love with me while you were all kinds of fucked up. Twice. You can do it.”
She shifted until she could kick off her heels and then put her feet in his lap. Wiggling her toes at him as a way of asking for a foot rub, she said, “But we’re done with you now. Tell me all the other hot gossip that I’ve missed.”