Two Buttons

"For the love of... Carefully!" said Penny, gesturing with the bandaged stumps where his hands once were. "Not so fast."

Quentin used metal tongs to lift one button out of the vaporous mixture and then the second. Against the wooden table, the buttons looked weathered and frayed, as if they had just come off a woolen peacoat from the 1940s. He reached down to pick one up.

"Don't—" Penny said.

Quentin's hand stopped.

"You idiot, you need the gloves," said Penny.

"Right." Quentin pulled on a pair of brown lambskin gloves, magically treated to act as a barrier between him and the buttons. Once on, he took a button in each of his hands. "How do I tell them apart?" he asked. He didn't want to accidentally screw them up and send himself to another dimension.

"The black one is for the Beast," Penny said. "It will send him to a dimensional prison. Even if he grabs you, each button will only send one person."

"How do you know where he'll be?" Quentin asked.

"The Librarian had Jane Chatwin's book," Penny said, "with records of the times and dates of when we fought the Beast in other timelines. So I'm sending you to another timeline—one where and when we know the Beast will be."

"How will that help Julia?" Quentin asked, because in this timeline he did not know where she had gone, or where the Beast had taken her.

Penny glared. "You have a knack for being profoundly annoying," he said.

"Well, you didn't explain any of this," Quentin said. "You just said you had a plan and dragged me here."

Penny held up his wrist stumps with a sigh. "Look, Quentin, I learned a lot during my time with Professor Sunderland. Things you couldn't—"

"Don't act high and mighty when you can't even button a shirt," said Quentin.

Penny rolled his eyes. "Leaving a shirt unbuttoned is a fashion statement; not a handicap. Did you really never notice that I've always worn shirts like this?"

Quentin gave him a blank look.

Penny looked at Quentin and shook his head. "Look, the Beast, the thing that Martin Chatwin has become, is the sort of thing that exists as a singular entity through all timestreams. Across multiple timelines, there is only one Beast. Therefore, if I send you to a different timeline and you erase him there, then you erase him from everywhere. So no matter where Julia is, she'll be safe once the Beast is gone."

"You're sure?" Quentin asked. In his hands, the tiny buttons seemed inconsequential. "You sure it will work?"

Penny pointed at him with a single stump. "If you get close enough to touch the Beast with the black button—If you can do that one thing, then yes, it will work. So just try not to fuck it up. I have faith in you."

Quentin looked up at Penny, an eyebrow raised. He opened his mouth.

"You never did know how to let a good thing lie, did you, Quentin?" Penny asked. He attempted to wave him away, but his handlessness made the action not quite as effective. "Go on, then, get in the circle. I'll cast the spell."

As Quentin approached the circle—an outline in chalk, sand, and blood on the floor—his stomach began to roil with nerves. Would he be quick enough? Would the buttons work? He couldn't know. He looked down at them again as he stepped inside the circle, and held up his left hand, which held the button that was light brown. "This one's for bringing me home, right?" he asked.

"Yes," Penny said with a sigh. "Try not to lose it." He then began to chant, and did a series of arm waving and pop-and-lock that Quentin supposed were adaptations of magic to handlessness.

The circle began to glow. Quentin's toes felt warmer.

"Hey, if—if I don't make it back," he said, "tell Alice I'm sorry."

Penny rolled his eyes while continuing to do his arm waving and foot stomping. Quentin supposed that was the best he was going to get.

In a flash of light like a camera shutter, Quentin felt himself lurched away from the room. He felt like he was being tugged through a thick, viscous liquid. His body was drawn through the sieve of the multi-verse.

And then he stood in a slightly darker room, his stomach fluttering in panic as his eyes tried to adjust to the dim firelight. Standing way too close for comfort was the Beast. Quentin knew it was him even with the moth swarm gone, replaced by the round, soft face of a middle-aged Brit. The Beast smiled.

A blue fire flickered in the room, drawing Quentin's eyes. The flame leafed its way up a pair of arms—Alice's arms. Her expression contorted in something between agony and ecstasy as she screamed.

"Oh God!" Alice cried. "Quentin, I'm burning! It's burning me!"

Quentin felt like all of his bones had fused together. He wanted to run to her, but he couldn't move. The blue flames were devouring her. He had to do something—

He took one step forward on the sand and stopped. He had to remember that this Alice, as much as she looked it, was not his Alice.

Quentin did the only thing he could think of, which was what Penny had told him to do. While the blue flames smothering Alice's body kept everyone distracted, he sprinted at the Beast and slammed the black button directly into his temple.

Quentin stumbled and sprawled across the sandy floor as he fell straight through the spot where the Beast had stood. The black button had gone, and it had taken the Beast with it.

Rolling to his knees, Quentin surveyed the cavern, which is what the room appeared to be. In this universe, there was an Eliot, a Margo, a Penny—this Penny had lost his hands, too. And there was another Quentin, as useful as a lump of flesh for all the help he was being—though he did seem to be bleeding a great deal from his shoulder. But one man stood among the others that Quentin was shocked to see alive. As if frozen in time, watching horrified as Alice went up in flame, was her brother, Charlie.

Quentin switched the brown button to his right hand and tugged his left glove off with his teeth. He should leave, he thought. Get out before any of the others realized that he was there and that there was more than one Quentin in the room. But he couldn't pull his eyes away from Charlie's face. The wide-eyed, chest-clutching devastation aged him ten years. Quentin had seen that exact expression on the Alice from his own timeline. When? When Quentin had sealed her brother's ghost inside a box.

The button in Quentin's hand was like a tiny brown beacon. He should just touch it—just go home. But something stopped him.

The blue Alice roared upward through the ceiling in a blast of light and flame. With her gone, and the Beast making no sign of reappearance, Quentin knew that the others in the cavern would be okay. Eliot and Margo and Penny, and even the other Quentin—these other versions of himself and his friends could come back from this. They could heal. He believed that they could still put their lives back together. All except Charlie.

Quentin, of course, never believed he'd get a happy ending. For everything good that had happened—attending Brakebills, meeting Eliot, loving Alice—he had never thought that happiness was something so simple that he could grab and take hold of it like a button.

So Quentin let it go. Clutching the button in his gloved hand, he tried to imagine the Alice of his own timeline smiling in a way he had never seen—a smile of relief, of heartache, of love—and lobbed the brown button, underhand, at her brother.

"Charlie, catch."