"Jesus Christ, Q."

When Eliot finally gets the door open, he finds Quentin on the floor, sat against the wall with his forearm elevated, his elbow resting on his pulled-up knees and his hand and arm blocking his face from Eliot's view. There's a razorblade lying near his feet and, standing in the doorway with his head tilted to the side, Eliot can see the blood soaking Quentin's shirt at the elbow.

The sight makes his heart lodge itself in his throat: can't breathe, can't speak, can only uselessly stand in place and listen to the sound of his own breathing, deafening as a siren. But then Quentin lets out a choked sob and Eliot has to consciously unstick his feet from the ground and start to move towards him, barely remembering to shut the door as he does.

Crossing the bathroom in three quick strides, he kicks aside the razor and drops onto his knees, reaching for Quentin's arm.

"Don't," Quentin says weakly, warningly, but Eliot shoots him a look and takes his hand anyway, straightening his elbow out to get a better look at the damage.

There's too much blood to see much of anything - it bubbles out of the cut like an overflowing cauldron, boiling over and making a mess - and the sleeve of Quentin's henley is blooming with blood, bright red around the edges turning copper-brown as it spreads through the waffle-knit.

(Eliot thinks, distantly, that it looks like syrup oozing through the little divots of an Eggo, the kind his mom used to give him before school when he was little. He'd always take the time, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, to butter every last square and make sure the syrup was perfectly portioned out. Not one pocket left dry.)

He shakes his head and forces himself to focus.

There are droplets of blood on the tile floor and there's blood under Eliot's nails and on his trousers where he's accidentally kneeled in the spill-over. There's so much blood, so much blood, and he knows he should know what to do but he wishes someone else could just take over because this is too much responsibility, right here in his hands (literally: Quentin's arm, hot under his fingertips and sticky on his palms, his blood trickling along Eliot's fate line to soak into the cuff of his favourite button-down).

"Fuck, Q," he mutters, trying to keep his voice low. "Put pressure on that for a second." He stands up to spin around and snatch the cleanest-looking towel from the rack, folding it in two. He moves to place it over the cut but Quentin pulls it out of his hands with a pleading look, embarrassed, and presses it to the cut himself.

"I didn't mean to," Quentin says after a second, avoiding his eyes.

Eliot sits, cross-legged, against the wall beside him and tilts forward to try and read his face. Resting his chin on his hand, he tells him quietly, honestly: "It doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?" Quentin laughs, darkly, and sniffs. "It was an accident. I wasn't trying to off myself or anything like that." He lets go of the towel to wipe at his nose and Eliot gently nudges his shoulder with his own.

"Okay. Give me that," Eliot murmurs, gesturing, and Quentin briefly hesitates before shifting position: his hand rests lightly on Eliot's thigh as his arm drapes across his lap, allowing Eliot to wrap his hands around his forearm and apply more pressure to the towel.

"You're going to get blood on your…"

"Already did. Some more won't hurt."

"Oh," Quentin mutters. He presses the heel of his free hand into his forehead, grinding it into the spot between his eyes. "I'm so stupid." Eliot readjusts his grip to press his palm flat over the spot where blood is starting to pinprick through the white towel. He starts to laugh, something hard-to-read crossing his face as he looks upwards, eyes glued to the ceiling to avoid Eliot's gaze. "So fucking stupid."

Chewing on his bottom lip, Eliot lifts the edge of the towel to get a better look at the cut.

With some of the blood dabbed away, he can see now that there are actually three cuts, all in a row, a couple of inches down from the bend of Quentin's elbow. Two of them are shallower; thin lines brimming with a slash of bright red blood. The other is deep enough that it looks like a gaping mouth, smiling up at him. A dribble of blood starts to seep from the edge and he quickly presses the towel back down to stem it.

Quentin doesn't react, doesn't even wince in pain. He just sits, motionless, eyes staring blankly ahead as Eliot looks him over with red-rimmed eyes. He's not laughing, anymore, but his breathing is hitched: the same hiccoughy sort of sound you make after you laugh so hard your ribs hurt or after you finally stop sobbing. Same difference.

"I'm a mess," Quentin says, quietly, breaking the silence.

"Maybe a little bit." Eliot slides one hand down Quentin's arm and absently rubs his thumb across the veins in Quentin's wrist; his tendons, pulled tight as violin strings, slowly relax as he loosens the anxious fist he'd been making.

"I thought that after all this turned out to be real, that I wouldn't…" Quentin sighs and thumps his head backwards against the wall, frustrated. "I shouldn't still be doing this. I shouldn't want to..." He trails off.

"Why?" Eliot says. "Because of magic ?" He spits the word out like a bad taste in his mouth, then sighs. "The fact that magic didn't fix all your problems doesn't make you ungrateful. And you're not stupid."

Quentin quirks the corner of his mouth, a doubtful sort of 'maybe,' and Eliot's heart jumps.

His hands have finally stopped shaking enough that he can let go of Quentin's arm ("You take over," he murmurs) and start to form a spell. There are probably better ones, but his brain feels scrambled and it's the only one he can bring forth from the back of his brain right now with reasonable certainty.

His hands work methodically but cautiously as he moves through the procession: slow, methodical arcs and deliberate patterns. He nearly stumbles on the third movement, a transition from bhramara to Flamel's Interlock, but manages to keep going, the energy building in his hands like glowing coals. Quentin watches him with tired, hooded eyes, tracking the movements with quiet interest; it's not a spell he'd've learned yet, second-year Fundamentals of Wellness spellcasting stuff, and something twists in his stomach as he realizes Quentin is committing it to memory.

Finishing the last movement, a small line drawn through the air paralleling the cuts, he hears Quentin gasp softly.

"They're not healed," he warns, as Quentin reaches over to peel back the towel.

The edges of the cuts have pulled themselves together, as though connected by invisible butterfly bandages, and the pressure of the squeezed-together skin makes the blood pooled in the cuts seep out, running in beads down his arm. All that's left is clean red lines, thin as papercuts.

"Wow," Quentin says, softly, arm lifted to his face so he can examine the result close-up. "Neat." His voice is dark - sarcastic, almost, fully aware of the fucked-up circumstances. Eliot wants to elbow him in the ribs.

"Just because you know about that spell, now," he begins, faltering. "It doesn't mean - doesn't mean you can just use it whenever you…"

"I know," Quentin says, nodding. "I won't." He drags his fingertips across the straight red lines, pulling his thumb across the deepest one and examining the smudge of blood left behind.

"They'll take just as long to heal as they normally would, and you still have to take care of them. Bandages and Polysporin."

Quentin's shoulder is still pressed against his own and he wishes they could stay like this indefinitely - Quentin's weight and heat against his skin, right there where he can keep a fucking eye on him.

"Can do."

Quentin carefully pulls the sleeve of his shirt down, sticky-wet with blood and already turning a bit crusty, and Eliot says, weakly, "Q, you have to bandage those."

"I will. Later."

His lower back is starting to ache, his tailbone screaming against the tile floor, but Eliot doesn't move a muscle as Quentin slides down to lean his head against Eliot's shoulder. He's grateful for it: it's easier to say the honest thing when you don't have to look someone in the eye while you say it.

(A memory comes flooding back to him: fourteen, driving in the truck with his mom. Her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel and the urge rising like bile in his throat to come out to her. A sudden rush of bravery before he swallowed it back down and let the moment slip through his finger.)

"I think you…" Eliot hesitates. Quentin doesn't move, doesn't breathe, as he finds the right words. Maybe not the best words, but the words he needs to say: "You need to get some help, Q." His voice wavers and he watches as Quentin's head rises and falls with his breaths - he counts them out (one-exhale-two-exhale-three-exhale) before he says, stronger this time, "We'll get you help, okay? Get you back on track?"

"Yeah," Quentin says finally, his thumb worrying at his cuts through the sleeve of his shirt. Eliot resists darting his hand out to stop him and, instead, reaches out to wrap one hand around Quentin's wrist, his thumb finding his pulse and resting there.

"We'll get you help," Eliot repeats, leaning his cheek against the top of Quentin's head and breathing him in.

Underneath the tips of his fingernails, Quentin's blood has dried to a rusty brown.