[A/N: Originally written for Yuletide 2013 and published on AO3. Based on the prompt:
"Alice and Julia don't ever meet in the books, which I find interesting. Also, there aren't any sections with Alice as the point-of-view character. [...] [Y]ou could have them meet in one of the gaps in the books, perhaps in the period when the Brakebills are living in the city.[...]"]
"They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them." —Lev Grossman, The Magicians
The bar on Ludlow Street had an Elvis sculpture in one of its large windows. Inside were pinball machines and a pool table, and lots of art on the walls, much of it not terribly good. It was an unreasonably crowded place, so much so that Alice would never have considered going there if it hadn't been very close to the apartment she and Quentin were borrowing.
Borrowing wasn't the right word, of course. The legitimate owners had no idea they were using it, and, thanks to magic, never would. Magic, thought Alice, made everything altogether too easy. There were few consequences to your actions. Except, once in a while, when there were far, far too many.
She was sitting unaccompanied at the long curvy countertop, nursing a whiskey, with people crowded in on either side of her. She made a point not to look at any of them, since speaking to anyone was nearly the last thing she was interested in.
Here and there men tried hitting on her, but they always wandered away once she cast a small spell to make them forget why they wanted to talk to Alice in the first place.
Alice was bored and angry. Q was out as usual, with Eliot and Janet and the rest. She had tried going along with them on their nighttime expeditions, to dance clubs and expensive bars with velvet ropes and doormen who refused entrance to the hoi polloi, and sometimes to parties in huge loft apartments and unrenovated warehouses on the waterfront, and once, in a rusty old lightship docked on the Hudson.
She had wanted to enjoy it — Q seemed to, after all — but it all felt so empty to her even from the beginning, a pointless exercise that wasn't even remotely fun unless you were drunk and likely coked up or worse as well. Why bother?
After a few weeks of it, she had started begging off, claiming she didn't feel well or was too busy with her reading, though neither was ever really true. She had hoped that Quentin would eventually tire of it as well, and spend the time with her instead, but either he was so insensitive that he had taken her protestations that he should go out and enjoy himself seriously, or he was ignoring what she thought was an obvious subtext.
One way or the other, she was alone now most nights, and she hated it.
She also hated what they were all becoming.
Alice had always despised her parents' aimless, useless, indolent lives, which were spiced up only slightly by her mother and father's obvious contempt for one another. After their family had run aground like a pilotless ship in the night when her brother died, they had, if anything, retreated ever further into their persistent detachment from reality.
Alice had lived the end of her teenage years and her early adulthood as a sort of never-ending reaction to everything they had been. She was determined not to descend into that same sort of warmly upholstered hell, and yet here she was, racing towards it even faster than they had. What was the euphemism for a working plane being flown into the side of a mountain because of pilot error? It was there somewhere in her mind. Ah, yes, controlled flight into terrain.
Q had promised her, promised her this wasn't going to happen and it had already started. Didn't he understand? Wasn't it all as obvious to him as it was to her? It had to be.
And here she was, drinking to pass the hours he was away though she hated it, alone at a bar with too many people in it.
She had been doing this a lot lately. She never mentioned it to Q, not that he noticed, arriving home even later than she did, usually stinking of cigarettes and booze and other smells she pretended not to notice. He had stopped being apologetic about it, too.
Sometimes she distracted herself by listening to people next to her at the bar. People spoke too much, though, especially when they were drunk, and often they spouted nonsense.
"I'm telling you," slurred the young woman only a seat away, jammed up far too close, "magic is real, totally real. I can do some already. And I'm going to learn it all, and then I'm going away and I'm never coming back."
"What do you mean, you can do some? Stage stuff? Sleight of hand?" said a male voice.
Alice hadn't bothered looking at them, but she could hear something in the woman's voice. Something about to go off the rails. Something she didn't like.
"No, no," said the woman, who sounded smashed out of her mind, "real magic. Totally real. I'll show you."
Mostly the mirror behind the bar was obscured by shelves of bottles, but a couple happened to be missing and Alice could see a bit of the woman's reflection. She seemed to be about Alice's own age, but there the similarities ended. She was anorexic thin, for one thing, with black-dyed hair, pale skin, and heavy, badly applied eyeliner.
Alice couldn't resist, so she looked to her left, right at her. She was wearing black on black on black and had a small tattoo of a seven pointed star visible on one wrist. It couldn't be more cliched. It was like someone had called central casting and asked for a goth chick.
Goth Girl was starting to move her hands into a series of unlikely, strained positions Alice recognized at once, only she wasn't doing it quite right, perhaps because she was so intoxicated, or maybe also because she just didn't know what she was doing.
This could end very badly.
Alice turned more, and grabbed the woman's wrists.
"Stop it. You're too drunk to do that safely."
"What, me?" said Goth Girl, who suddenly looked confused about who Alice was addressing even though she was physically preventing the girl's hands from moving.
"Yes, you," said Alice, letting go of her. "You'll hurt someone."
"You in on the joke too?" said one of the two young men Goth Girl was speaking with. They were standing behind her seat, hovering really. They seemed bland enough — boring, actually, and not the sort she would have expected Goth Girl to like, all button down shirts and crispy-clean blue jeans. Perhaps Goth Girl was too out of it to notice that they came from a different world than her.
Alice wanted them gone immediately — the situation was awkward enough already without including them in the conversation. She cast her usual "go away" spell, which featured equally awkward hand gestures and (of all things) a short incantation in Medieval Welsh. Almost abruptly, the two men looked confused, and walked away.
"What was that? How did you do that?" asked Goth Girl, putting her hand on Alice's shoulder after a moment. "You know how, don't you!"
Alice really didn't like being touched by strangers, but after the way she'd interfered, she supposed it was understandable, and besides, the woman was drunk.
Hell, Goth Girl was more than just that, she was soused — even her breath reeked of it — but she was awake enough to understand that Alice had used magic. She saw it for what it was. This clearly wasn't someone who knew what she was doing, though. Alice would have recognized any Brakebills graduate near her own age, and besides, Goth Girl's technique had been... well, off.
Alice had acted quickly, and without thinking ahead. After The Beast and all the rest she had seen, she didn't want to be around when a spell went wrong. A hedge witch plus alcohol seemed like a recipe for disaster — and this clearly was a hedge witch. Now, though, she was paying the price for stopping Goth Girl's demonstration. She was caught in an uncomfortable conversation, and she hadn't really wanted to get into it in the first place.
"You shouldn't do things you don't understand," said Alice, sotto voce, "and that goes double for when you've been drinking."
"You know! You know it's real!" said Goth Girl, who moved in even closer to her and had far too much enthusiasm for Alice's taste.
She needed to get out somehow, but she hadn't paid the bartender yet, and she was too well socialized to steal, at least from someone who was right in front of her.
Goth Girl's face was filled with undisguised interest. Maybe she could at least do her a favor and keep her from wrecking her own life, attracting the attention of something like The Beast or worse.
"It's dangerous to play with magic even if you know what you're doing, which you don't. People die when you make mistakes."
Goth Girl finally got that Alice wasn't sympathetic. Suddenly, her face darkened, like she'd just been told she wasn't good enough to play with the other kids.
"What's that, just some sort of stupid warning to stay off your turf? You went to that school upstate, didn't you? Don't deny it, I know the place is real."
"I'm telling you the truth. People die. My brother was killed when a spell went wrong. Once, I was there when a girl I knew got eaten by... by something, something horrible because someone messed up just one word in an incantation. Eaten alive, for real. This isn't a joke. You make a mistake and bad things happen."
"You're drinking, too, and you weren't too scared to do that trick to make those guys leave. What was that language you spoke in?"
"I've got training," said Alice, testily, "years and years of constant drilling and practice, and I started when I was a child. You're not that good. If you're going to fool around, which you shouldn't, don't do it when you're wasted."
"I'm not stopping, if that's what you think. There are other people who teach, you know, people outside your precious little school..."
"Why?" asked Alice, exasperated.
"Why what?"
"Why do you want to risk your life learning this stuff?"
Goth Girl was far too trashed to conceal her own thoughts, or to keep them entirely coherent for that matter. Her expression shifted at once, and her voice turned pleading.
"I want it so bad, you don't understand. You had the whole thing handed to you on a platter at your school. You don't get what it's like to be on the outside looking in. After I found out it was real I couldn't think about anything else. I gave up everything for this, college, my boyfriend, my whole life. Everything. I need to learn. I need this to be happy. I can't be happy without it."
In vino veritas, thought Alice.
"I know," said Alice, "what it's like to have people try to stop you from learning magic. And you're wrong."
"No, I'm going to learn. Whatever it takes," said Goth Girl. "I've come too far to stop now."
"That's not what I meant."
Alice fished a $20 out of her purse and put it on the bar. It was much, much more than the cost of her last drink, but she had plenty of money, and getting change wasn't worth it. She wanted out.
"Then what did you mean?" asked Goth Girl.
"It won't make you happy," said Alice.
She walked away as quickly as she could, out of the bar and into the chilly night.