Nostalgia is a fickle, treacherous thing. Usually, when you reunite with a sibling after a lifetime of separation, there's a swell of orchestral music, a tearful embrace, and the kind of relief that feels like coming home. But when your family tree is rooted in the chaotic soil of Fillory and your brother spent a few centuries as a moth-eating, soul-shredding tyrant, the "welcome home" party tends to involve significantly more screaming and a lot less hugging.
Kai stood in the far corner of the grand throne room, leaning against a marble pillar and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Okay, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't expecting a little bit of repressed feelings from this reunion," he muttered to the empty air, "but can you two not throw insults around so casually? It's devaluing the craftsmanship of the masonry."
After the sheer, reality-warping intensity of the Clock Barrens and a marathon sex that had left Julia and Alicia sleeping like the dead, Kai had sent his girls back to the physical world to recover. He had brought the "remnant" of Jane Chatwin here, to his personal sanctuary: a perfect, atom-for-atom copy of Fillory.
At first, Jane had been breathless. She had wandered through the gardens and the halls, her fingers tracing everything with a look of pure, childlike wonder. It was Fillory at its zenith, pulsing with more stable magic than she had seen in forty timelines. He had even been kind enough to leave out the "basement", the rotting infection of Castle Blackspire was nowhere to be found in his version.
But the tour had come to a screeching halt the moment they entered the throne room.
There, displayed like a grim trophy, was the petrified statue of Martin Chatwin. Kai had kept him frozen in a state of perpetual, stony silence, but to "facilitate" the reunion, he had snapped his fingers and dissolved the petrification from Martin's head down to his neck.
Yeah, that was a mistake or perhaps, a very entertaining disaster.
"You always were the boring one, Jane," Martin's voice rasped out, bringing Kai back to the present. The sound of grinding stone and ancient malice echoing off the high ceilings, "Even as a ghost, you smell of dusty berries and failure. Did you come here to beg this... curiosity... to let you die properly?"
Jane had almost popped a vein. She was vibrating with a rage that had been simmering since the 1940s. "I should have let the Great Cock eat you when we were children," she spat, stepping right into his frozen personal space. "You're a parasite in a suit, and even in a world made of dreams, you're nothing but a paperweight."
"A paperweight who broke you in every way that mattered," Martin countered, his eyes were the only part of him that could move properly and they were darting around the room with amusement, "How does it feel? To be saved by the very power I gorged myself on? You're breathing my leftovers, sister."
"He's partially petrified and he still knows how to get under her skin," Kai remarked to himself, watching Jane's face turn a dangerous shade of scarlet. "I mean, the man has literally killed the main cast in at least a dozen timelines in some ways even I can't think of; I suppose verbal abuse is him being 'polite'."
The exchange was becoming less of a conversation and more of a heated excavation of decades of trauma. Jane looked like she was seconds away from trying to strangle a statue, which, while physically impossible, looked emotionally cathartic.
"Okay, hey, hey, hey! Enough!" Kai stepped between the vibrating time-remnant and the talking bust of the world's worst brother. "I brought you two here for a reunion, not a live-action trauma dump. Seriously, quit it."
Jane whipped around, her face flushed with a centuries-old fury. "Quit it? Kai, he murdered me! He looked me in the eye and strangled the life out of me with his bare hands!"
Martin let out a long, stony sigh and rolled his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, "Oh, please, Jane. You're being so dramatic. It wasn't even as bad as you're making it out to be. It was a very standard, efficient strangling. Barely worth a footnote."
Kai raised an eyebrow, leaning back against a marble pedestal, "A 'standard' strangling? Is that what we're calling it now? I feel like that's a pretty high bar for 'not that bad'."
"And if I'm not mistaken," Jane hissed, leaning into Martin's frozen personal space, "you actually took my head off afterward!"
Martin shifted his gaze to the side, looking genuinely surprised by the logistics, "Okay, first of all, you were already dead, Jane. How the bloody hell do you even know I took your head off? You weren't exactly using your eyes at that point… were you?"
"Because it wouldn't be you if you didn't get extra bloody!" she screamed. "You've always had a flair for the unnecessarily gruesome!"
"Hey, can you blame me?" Martin countered with a matter-of-fact tone, his voice echoing off the walls. "For all I know, you had some annoying 'Sister's Revenge' contingency plan in case you were killed. Taking the head off was just being thorough. It was the smartest move so whatever time-loop nonsense you had in place wasn't going to work with that level of... structural disassembly."
Kai just shook his head, listening to the two siblings bicker like they were arguing over who broke a toy in the nursery rather than a series of multidimensional homicides.
"You're a monster, Martin," Jane whispered with her voice trembling, "In the 12th timeline, you turned the entire Brakebills faculty into sentient footstools. On the 15th, you made Alice watch while you turned Quentin into a literal fountain of blood for your garden!"
"To be fair," Martin interrupted nonchalantly, "those footstools were remarkably ergonomic. And Quentin always was a bit of a bleeder. It was practically his main personality trait."
"And the 21st timeline?" Jane's voice went cold, "What you did there... even for you, that was sick."
Martin's stony expression suddenly lit up. A look of genuine, nostalgic pride washed over his face. "Ahhh, yes. Timeline 21. That was a marvelous bit of work, wasn't it? Truly some of my best experimental surgery."
Kai hesitated, then looked at Jane. "Okay, I'll bite. What did he do on the 21st?"
Jane shuddered, "He skinned Quentin and Penny alive, kept them conscious with the wellspring and then... he exchanged their innards. He put Penny's lungs where Quentin's liver should be and vice-versa, just to see if they could still 'sense' each other through the pain."
A heavy silence fell over the throne room. Kai stared at Martin, who was still looking quite pleased with himself, then looked back at Jane.
"Yeah..." Kai sighed, rubbing his face with both hands. "Why the fuck did I even ask? I really need to stop being curious about your family history."
———-
Margo stood by the center table, her hand resting on the heavy, enchanted parchment she'd gotten from the 40th timeline's "buffer." Spread across the paper was a moving, breathing portrait of an older Quentin and Alice. They looked soft, lined with happy years, surrounded by their children, Charlie and Elizabeth, and a bright-eyed granddaughter named Ersa.
Quentin stared at the image of his older self, a man who looked like he actually slept eight hours a night and didn't carry the weight of all this crap and magic on his shoulders, "Wow," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Uhh... wow."
"Yeah," Margo said, "That was... umm. A lot. Even for me."
"It's more than a lot," Julia added, her eyes shimmering as she traced the letter attached to the portrait. In that timeline, the Elder Quentin had named her Charlie's godmother. "It's... a whole life. A real one."
Alice and Alicia stood side-by-side, a rare moment of synchronicity between the original and the "update." They both stared at the children in the photo, their children.
"We had kids," Alice murmured, a small, fragile smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"And they don't look like they're currently being hunted by beasties or gods," Alicia noted, her own expression softening into something uncharacteristically warm. "They look... safe."
The knowledge that in some corner of existence, they weren't just soldiers in a magical war, but a family was almost too much to process. Margo looked at the note again, seeing her own name listed as Ersa's godmother. She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly. "Apparently, I'm a godmother to a toddler in the future-past. If she doesn't have a tiny leather jacket by age three, I've failed as a parent."
Just as the emotional gravity was reaching its peak, a shimmering doorway tore open in the back of the living room.
Eliot stepped out first, looking like he'd just survived a gale, followed by Kady, Penny, Freya, and a very confused-looking Fen. They stopped dead, staring at the gathered group who looked like they'd all just watched a particularly soul-crushing indie movie.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," Margo snapped, recovering her sass with practiced ease,"The king and his merry band of misfits. You're late for the group therapy session, Bambi. Bring snacks?"
Penny didn't answer her as his eyes immediately locked onto the glowing parchment on the table. He marched forward, squinting at the image of the aged-up Quentin.
"What the hell is that?" Penny asked, pointing at the photo. "And why does Quentin look like he's about to give a lecture on the joys of retirement and high-fiber cereal?"