greywash

Title: "Buyback"
Fandom: The Magicians (TV)
Relationships: Margo Hanson*Eliot Waugh*Quentin Coldwater, Quentin Coldwater | Brian/OMC
Rating: Mature
Length: ~1,100 words  

Content notes: Warnings for disturbing content and consent issues. I keep my warning policy in my AO3 profile and am always willing to answer private DW messages or emails asking for elaboration or clarification on my warnings for a particular story.

Author notes: For both the "Identity" challenge on Amnesty 42 and the "Revision" square on my bingo card. Technically part of The Marriage Plot (happens about 3 months after "Spell", if you're following along), but should stand fine on its own. [ETA 2019.03.03: this story is now also posted to AO3.]

Summary:

"So there's this guy," Eliot says, and waves a hand, "selling some books back."

Buyback

"So," Eliot says, and Margo jumps, half-turning: he looks—bad, she thinks. He looks— "Uh—there's this guy," Eliot says, and waves a hand, "selling some books back," and then.

Stops.

Margo waits, but he doesn't continue: his face pale and haggard in a way it hasn't been in—weeks. Months, probably.

"Okay," Margo says, finally; and Eliot nods.

"Can you go buy them?" he asks, and then crosses his arms over his chest, his shoulders hunching, and Margo blinks.

"You know him?" she asks.

"No," he says, and then licks his bottom lip. "I—no, I've never met him."

Margo straightens. "Oh," she says, after a second. "Uh. Sure—is there—"

"Big guy, red hair, beard," Eliot says, and then. Flushes; and—oh boy, Margo thinks, but she tucks the gently-used copy of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours they're selling for four dollars—outrageous, it's worth three times that—under one arm and heads over to the buyback desk, and—yep, that's. A giant beardy ginger, that's for sure: looking sort of frustrated as he is saying, to the wisp of a hipster behind the counter, "—look, I know they're—weird, or whatever, but—"

"We don't take textbooks," the clerk says; and Margo says, "I take everything," and smiles up at the redhead. "Janet," she says, and holds out a hand.

"Uh, excuse me," says the clerk, "you can't, like, poach in our store," and Margo looks at him.

"I'm sorry, did you not just tell him that you don't want to buy them?" she asks. "Because I could've sworn that happened. I'm Janet," she repeats; and the guy takes her hand, looking a little confused, but he says, "Uh—Paul. Thanks. Are you—they're kind of weird, though?"; and Margo nods over to the far end of one of the tables, where a couple of very stylish retirees has perched with lattes and a selection of European travel guides.

"Why don't you let me take a look?" she says, studiously ignoring Eliot, who is lurking about three feet away with his collar turned up, pretending to browse the children's fiction, honestly.

So Paul hauls the first box of books over to the end of the table, and Margo starts unloading them while he goes back for the second, examining their edges and covers, trying to look thoughtful and studious, like someone who might plausibly buy a copy of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, or Clarel, or a two-volume set of The Juniper Tree, which she flips open, fully prepared to pretend to frown over fingermarks or highlighting or whatever, only to stop, her heart jumping up under her tongue, at the inside the front cover, on which someone has written in a convincingly childish pen-scrawl: Brian L. Haugen, and a phone number with a 206 area code. It's not a surprise. Still. She wonders what the "L." stands for.

"Who's Brian L. Haugen?" she asks, when Paul comes back, as casually as she can manage; and then sets The Juniper Tree aside.

Paul snorts. "I have no fucking idea," he says. "Honestly, I'm not sure where half this shit came from, I was packing to move and—" and Margo's hearing fuzzes out, as she hesitates, hands hovering, over the cover of a copy of Fillory and Further, Book 3.

"I'll give you a thousand per box," she says, turning towards him; and Paul blinks at her.

"You," he says, and then, "What?"

"They're not all in great condition, but half of them are first editions," she says, and shrugs. "Consider it an investment. Anything else you found while moving that you didn't recognize?"

It's a gamble, but Eliot has progressed to pretending to read a copy of The Canterbury Tales and if his shoulders get any tighter, she's pretty sure they're actually going to snap. Paul frowns down at her.

"Actually," he says, and then stops, his eyebrows scrunching together. A second later, tongue slow, Paul asks, "Who are you?"; and Eliot sets the Chaucer down, already turning, so Margo casts the Stuttgart variation on Zajíc temporary dispell down by her thigh before Eliot can fuck everything up really hard and says, smiling, "I'm a friend of Brian's."

"Oh," Paul says. His expression—clearing, sort of. God, Fogg really didn't give a shit about the Muggle masses, did he? How much suggestibility did he pour into that?

"So," Margo says, "I'd like to buy his stuff back."

"Brian," Paul says, after a second. He sounds sad.

Margo swallows. "Yeah," she says, and fishes out her wallet, from which she produces, with a little bit of fiddling, three crisp thousand dollar bills, and a business card from a gynecologist she'd seen in April, which she glamours with Janet's name and Julia's cell number—she'll have to tell her later—as she hands it over. "Janet Pluchinsky," she says. "Call me if you find anything else of his, okay?"

"Yeah," he says, quiet, and then, "Is he—he's okay?"; and then his expression goes complicated and confused again; and Margo takes pity.

"Yeah," she says, "he's okay," and pulls her spell the free, as Paul blinks at her, at her card, at the money.

"There's only two boxes," he says, after a second.

"An investment," she reminds him, packing the books back into the box. "Igor," she says, and snaps her fingers at Eliot, who shoots her a murderous look, but comes over. "Take these to the car, Igor," Margo says, and loads one of the boxes of books into his arms. "Call me," Margo tells Paul, "if you find anything else—"

—of Brian's, she almost says. "That you don't recognize," she finishes, instead. "Books, or—whatever. Anything, okay?"

"Okay," Paul agrees, and smiles down at her, pleased: well of course he's pleased, she reminds herself. He's spelled to the eyeballs and just made three grand for two banker's boxes of crap he doesn't need.

"Pleasure doing business with you," Margo says, and boosts the second box onto her hip, and heads out to the alley out back where Eliot is waiting: halfway through a cigarette, the box levitating casually at his side. Margo holds out her hand, so he passes the half-smoked cigarette over, and then lights another, smoking it down to the filter in about seven long, emphatic drags.

"Thanks," he says, when he finishes it.

"Yeah," Margo says, "you owe me fifteen hundred bucks"; and he leans over to press a long, fervent kiss to her forehead.