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[sunbrights]

[fic]: like an hourglass glued to the table

Julia stiffens, but keeps her voice light. “I can’t just check in on a friend?”

Quentin would probably also want Eliot to be at least polite to his oldest and dearest friend, but Eliot’s too tired, too bitchy, too not fucking good enough to do that, either. “We’re not friends.”

Julia nods, silently conceding. Eliot’s a little disappointed; he would have thought she’d argue back, what are you talking about, we’re totally friends, the three conversations we’ve ever had have like so bonded us for life, and he’s kind of spoiling for a fight.

Then she says, “But you were his friend.”

Eliot barks a bitter laugh at that. In his head the sunlight is streaming through windows at the throne room at Whitespire like a blade through his ribcage. I’m just saying, what if we — “Newsflash: I’m a shitty fucking friend.”

exchange fic the first! 6366 words, T; for @sunbrights, a look at eliot & julia’s friendship in three late night conversations across a complicated resurrection process, ft. a balcony & a busted AC, pancakes & pad thai, meta-math & memories, and two people with very jagged edges figuring out how they might nonetheless fit.

read on ao3.

[sunbrights]

It really was frankly criminal, for a nice padded window seat like that to go unused and gathering dust. And Quentin doesn’t always come over, but the days that he does he spends curled up there like a rabbit in a burrow, surrounded by books, soaking up sunlight and chewing straight through his pens and his hair and whatever new baking experiment Eliot feels like churning through that day.

This time, they’re shortbread cookies he made to go with his coffee.

when we have any power by @sunbrights as part of our discord exchange

[sunbrights]

fic: a ghost out of his grave

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: it's queliot ghostfic, except the other one is the ghost rating: m

“You think we’re getting haunted by somebody else’s ghost?”

“It isn’t a ghost,” Alice says tightly. “The concept of a ghost has a specific definition, and—”

Kady flaps her hand at the ceiling. “Somebody else’s disembodied consciousness. Whatever.”

(The Monster gets exorcised from Eliot's body. It works a little bit too well.)

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

fic: feldspar

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: queliot babey rating: t

fuckin' around with inktober again this year! this is for day 1, "crystal."

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The morning Eliot left Indiana, he stole an heirloom crystal wine glass from his mother’s china cabinet.

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

My piece for @magiciansbigbang ! Everyone go read the fic !!! @sunbrights worked so hard on it! I was honored to get to be it’s illustrator :’)

[sunbrights]

the greatest people you will ever meet 

fic by @sunbrights​ | art by @werewolfest​​ relationships: marqueliot. wickinn. a big focus on quentin&julia. rating: mature wordcount: 52k warnings: no major warnings. canon-typical references to mental health and substance use. summary:

He doesn’t care that Julia became the undisputed Queen of Brakebills basically overnight. He doesn’t care about her new group of friends who hate him, or her ultra-rare discipline, or her mentorship with the dean. That’s not what any of this is about. 

Friends don’t date exes. They don’t keep the ‘dating-your-ex’ secret for two straight months. They don’t wait for you to find out on your own, in the middle of the day, in the middle of campus, and humiliate yourself in front of everyone. 

 But Quentin has new friends now— and they don’t fight clean. 

 (Brakebills, but make it Mean Girls.)

[sunbrights]

Magicians Big Bang Posting Schedule

Excited for the upcoming fic and art? So are we! Here are the dates to keep track of. Mark them in your calendar, and we’ll see you this Sunday!

[sunbrights]

fic: when we have any power (7/20?)

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: eliot, quentin, and margo-focused. big queliot and margo&eliot, with a nice side-helping of quentin&eliot&margo. rating: m summary: Soulmates aren't found. They're made.

(The Good Place fusion.)

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He plans for summer. Tempting fate, maybe, considering Janet told him that she, “Doesn’t take requests from individual residents that would impact the entire neighborhood,” when he asked, but the whole thing would be irrevocably fucked without it anyway, so— if he’s the seersucker captain going down with the metaphorical ship, so be it.

Well, hypothetically seersucker. He makes sure he has options, obviously. He knows better than to try and confine himself to a single aesthetic; he spends the night before curating a respectable spread of outfits to choose from in the morning, from mid-Atlantic yacht party to New England dining club to SoCal beach festival.

He lands on a short-sleeved oxford in the end, navy blue with some eggshell-white detailing, and pairs it with his dark khaki chinos and suede salmon sperrys. The full-on prep vibe feels right for the moment, or at least this first stage of it. There’ll be plenty of time to switch to something more artisanal later, if he wants. And he will want, if everything goes the way it should.

(Margo Hanson might have mastered the quote-unquote ‘art’ of the haphazard undergrad rager, but so could any frat star with a fake and a halfway decent sound system. Eliot is here to mold an experience. Something cohesive. Elegant. Memorable. If he doesn’t start with himself, then there’s no hope for any of the rest of it, is there?)

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

fic: dynamic equilibrium

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: queliot + the quentin&julia dynamic i always want to be writing + the julia&eliot dynamic i deserve rating: t

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He walks in on Eliot and Julia hugging in the living room.

Which is an insane way to think about it. He knows that. Walk in on sort of implies a— crime being committed, or something insidious or whatever, right, but it’s… not. Obviously it’s not. His brain poses the question, Should we be worried that Eliot is cheating on us with Julia? and then immediately, like, incinerates itself with the total ludicrousness of that notion, so. It’s not that.

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

fic: when we have any power (6/20?)

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: eliot, quentin, and margo-focused. big queliot and margo&eliot, with a nice side-helping of quentin&eliot&margo. rating: m summary: Soulmates aren't found. They're made.

(The Good Place fusion.)

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The next day, Quentin doesn’t knock.

Eliot’s been up for— whatever, a while, by that point. He’s not counting; why sleep when he’s dead, what’s an hour to an eternity, et cetera. He’s been thinking about Q’s thing with the fire pit. Not Q and the fire pit— although that too, yes, jesus, line item number two on the list-of-reasons-this-could-be-actual-Heaven: Q’s throat thrown back in the flickering firelight— but Q about the fire pit.

He’s right, drunk people do like bonfires; Eliot can attest, being the sometimes-savant of reckless drunkenness that he is. But sometimes the bonfire is like the one they had that night— intimate and contained, a setting piece, an evocative backdrop— and other times it’s like the blowout pasture bonfires he went to in high school— chaotic and dangerous and ninety percent the point, something to hurl empty bottles into just to see the shower of sparks when they hit the half-disintegrated logs at the center.

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

fic: when we have any power (5/15?)

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: eliot, quentin, and margo-focused. big queliot and margo&eliot, with a nice side-helping of quentin&eliot&margo. rating: m summary: Soulmates aren't found. They're made.

(The Good Place fusion.)

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Janet indulges him an afternoon of fanciful experiments with colored reflecting pools in the backyard. Eliot’s half-sure he hates them already; they’re just the latest in a string of failed rough drafts, barely any better than yesterday’s fountain debacle, but he’s closer. He thinks. Maybe. Hopefully.

“What do you think of the magenta?” he asks. “Strikes one as a little entry-level warehouse rave, no?”

To be fair to Janet, she doesn’t really do ‘opinions.’ She’s got more of a ‘host at Wednesday night Trivia’ vibe going for her; when he asked what she thought of having one reflecting pool that wrapped around the perimeter of the yard, she’d told him that the longest lazy river in across-the-universe existence was in Waco, Texas. But that decision had also basically made itself after that, so… in a way, Janet’s opinion is the only one that matters.

read on AO3

[sunbrights]

slip

Speaking of things that are a total fucking bummer! 🙃

This one is a timeline-23 fic, from Eliot’s perspective, with a baked-in assumption that the Beast Eliot and Margo are trying to stop when Eliot screws up the spell that kills them is Quentin. 

I originally came at it with the idea of wanting to mirror Alice-23′s lost-love desperation onto Eliot-23, and of wanting to break down Eliot’s alcoholism and the effect it has on the people around him, especially Margo. It is, as you can probably imagine, very messy and very sad.

Real talk, I’m like 99% sure this one won’t ever see the light of day. I got decently far into it and decided it was probably too heavy, even for me. More likely scenario is that I cannibalize the parts I’ve written that I like for other stories. Here’s a piece:

“You want to know what I figured out?” Quentin asks, and it- it happens so fast. He picks his knee up and swings it over, and then he’s just there, straddling Eliot’s lap like he owns it.

His body is so warm. The fire and the alcohol have been working together to bring a rosy flush across his skin, from his cheeks all the way down past his open collar. He rolls his hips forward, and his hair falls into his face, and he’s smiling, and his eyes— they’re so clear. They really are so clear.

— Fuck. 

No. 

Eliot closes his eyes. He makes himself think about Alice, about Alice crying, about Penny trying to keep hold of her while she screamed, and screamed, and screamed. “Q.”

Quentin ignores him. “I figured out,” he says, breathy and smiling, down against Eliot’s throat, “the things I want? I can have them.” He laughs, throaty and happy. “Literally. It’s that fucking easy.”

Fuck. Eliot’s drunk. His hands are already on Quentin’s hips. “What—” He swallows. He’s thinking about— “What about Alice?”

Quentin laughs again. He sets his lips against Eliot’s ear and murmurs, “What about Alice?”

(As if that wasn’t a fucking Lifetime-movie-level red flag. Eliot thinks about it later, after, constantly— and then he thinks, should have known, should have known, should have known, I should have fucking known.)

the wip title game!

[sunbrights]

time is a motherfucker isnt it

So this one is, probably predictably, a S5-divergence to the tune of “Eliot sends the letter.” Only something must go sideways with the time-dominoes, because sending the letter doesn’t bring back Quentin-40, it brings back Quentin-1. 

(You might be noticing a pattern of me using “the show never fully explains how time magic works” as an excuse to do whatever the fuck I want, yes.)

It’s not suuuuper fleshed out, since I started writing it while S5 was airing, and sorta lost steam due to S5′s.... everything, but! Here’s a lil bit:

“I cannot fucking believe you,” Julia is saying. 

Alice’s voice, higher and tinnier, gets swallowed up by the wood and the soundproofing more than Julia’s. Eliot can’t make out much of what she says beyond the shape of her voice, but it almost doesn’t matter anyway; Julia lets out a choked, screaming laugh before Alice is even finished speaking.

“Bullshit!” Julia snarls. “That is such bullshit. You’re actually going to look me in the eye and—”

Then, low and urgent, gentle and warning, plain as anything, he hears: “Jules.”

It’s like he’s watching the shaky-cam POV sequence of a bad horror movie. He watches his own hands reach for the door, twist the handle, glide it open.

Bambi is there. Fen and Josh are there. Bonus Penny is there. They’re all standing in the middle of the living room in a tight half-circle, around Alice and Julia, who are fighting, and—

And—

Quentin turns when the door opens, just like the others. He had been reaching for Julia’s elbow in the moment, but he doesn’t make it all the way. 

His hair is longer than Eliot remembers it being, closer to Blackspire than the park. He looks thin, and exhausted, and pale, but he takes a sharp breath when their eyes lock, because he’s breathing, because he’s there, because he’s real, and Eliot’s not breathing, and— jesus— fucking christ—  

Margo moves first. She cuts around Alice’s shoulder toward him, hands out with her palms down, like he’s a hyper-excitable dog that needs to have its expectations managed. “El,” she says. “Honey, okay, just—”

“What the fuck,” Quentin says.

Breathes, actually. Gasps, almost. 

the wip title game!

[sunbrights]

aunt julia

Sure thing! This is a S4 fix-it, inspired by this post by @fishfingersandscarves -- aka, I saw that post and immediately word-vomited into a document so I could come back to it later if I wanted, lmao.

The basic premise is: Teddy is early/mid-teens-ish, and (via a sequence of events I have kind of thought about but tbh mostly amount to “this show doesn’t give a shit about the rules of magic so neither will I”) horomances his way into the timeline in an attempt to save Quentin’s life, but overshoots and lands further back than he intended, ie, smack dab in the middle of “Toddler Monster Takes Eliot on a Murder Spree”. He decides that it’s better to wait it out instead of risking anything by trying to jump forward, so when Quentin (naturally) wants to send him back, Teddy lies and says his horomancy-box-thing is broken, and he can’t go anywhere until it’s fixed.

This almost works-- except that Julia, being Julia, ofc has his number and knows that he’s lying. Teddy won’t tell her why he’s messing with the timeline, but he does convince her that it’s serious enough not to immediately kick him back where he came from, so she agrees not to rat him out to Q on the condition that Teddy let her chaperone him and, hopefully, get him back home sooner rather than later. 

It’s mostly Julia and Teddy, with a side-helping of Julia and Quentin, and probably just enough queliot to earn a “Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh (Background)” tag on AO3. Here’s a snippet of the most coherent bit I have so far: 

“You’re sneaky,” she observes. “Where’d you get that from? I know it wasn’t from Q.”

Teddy squirms, exactly the same way Q used to when he was thirteen and knew the answer, but didn’t want to say it. It’s almost spooky, how uncanny it is. 

If Julia learned anything from middle school, it was that sometimes she just had to approach a problem from a different angle. “He met your mom in Fillory?” she asks.

Teddy nods.

“What’s she like?”

“She died,” he answers, very even, very rote, like it’s a question he gets a lot. “When I was little.”

“Oh,” Julia says. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

Teddy shrugs. He’s not looking at her, scraping down the sides of his ice cream bowl instead.

“So it was just you and your dad?” Julia asks, and that— there. His eyes dart away, toward the door.

And Julia… knew. Or, she suspected, anyway. She’s not surprised, because she knows, okay? She knows what it looks like when Q is in love. But she’d always assumed it was Brakebills, before Alice, or— after Alice, or Fillory, or whatever, wherever, whenever. She’d thought it was just another texture of the part of his life she missed out on, that he locked her out of, that she cut herself off from, however you want to frame it. 

She guesses she was right. Just way more right than she ever thought she could be, with Q.

“Oh, kid,” she says.

the wip title game!

[sunbrights]

WIP Title Game

rules: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. send me an ask with the title that most intrigues you and i’ll post a little snippet of it or tell you something about it!

nobody tagged me, seeing these just prompted me to page through some of the wips i have in holding patterns and it made me happy. in 2020 we Choose Joy

all of these have something written for them (though they vary from ‘this is two sentences’ of something to ‘this is twenty pages’ of something). if nothing else, please just appreciate my idiotic naming conventions and my complete lack of chill.

the magicians

chaptered fics (ie, the title is a folder that contains a lot of less-descriptively-named documents)

when we have any power (natch)

the taylor swift songfic

oneshots (ie, things that are currently confined to one document)

aunt julia

charlton deserved better

fen comphet

mean girls

sad juliot

sad margeliot

slip

time is a motherfucker isnt it

weird crossover

danganronpa

chaptered fics

brick by brick 

even of last times

everything that ticked

low falls the tide

sarabande

oneshots

consentfic but it’s fuyuhiko

hzd au

pegging but make it feelings

randos

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i’m tagging @thewildwilds and also all of you who have shit you wanna share. TRY AND STOP ME i want to read all of these, ok. IT’S 2020 CHOOSE JOY

[sunbrights]

one-eyed jack

by sunbrights

What’s he going to do, say ‘Bad,’ so that Eliot can frown and stop what he’s doing and rub Quentin’s shoulders and say, ‘Shit, baby. What’s going on?’ and Quentin can answer, ‘I thought we were out of eggs but we weren’t,’ because he didn’t have the decency to unpack his own mental breakdown before he came out here to ruin Eliot’s afternoon, like. Seriously?

Words: 2003, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: The Magicians (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Quentin Coldwater, Eliot Waugh

Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh

Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, will i ever stop writing things based entirely in elaborate food metaphors? signs point to no

read it on the AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/26151175

[sunbrights]

fic: one-eyed jack

fandom: the magicians characters/pairings: it's queliot fam rating: t

or, I saw this tiktok this morning and couldn't stop thinking about it, so started writing this as a warm-up, and 2k words later here we are

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Okay, first of all, it’s like— it’s stupid.

He stops at the bodega on his way home to buy eggs. When he gets home and opens the fridge, they already have eggs.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. He has a full-scale fucking... meltdown at four in the afternoon over the fact that Eliot bought eggs already, and that Quentin knew that but forgot. It’s stupid, and he knows it’s stupid, and it’s worse now that it’s still happening even though it’s been… however fucking long it’s been. He can’t remember off the top of his head anymore, that’s how long it’s been.

read on AO3