38 Graves (or, Miss Chatwin Gets A New Idea) #BattleTheBeast

"How did you lose your virginity?" Quentin asked.

"I was twenty four years old." The Dean replied, easily. "I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. She was considerably older than I, and, oh, much, much more experienced, but -- fuck." He could feel the toxin coursing through his system: the bitterness at the back of his tongue, the tingling in his extremities. "You've managed to dose me. Haven't you? In my tea. You little shit." He sat back down, in no condition for a trustees meeting now that a truth serum was manipulating his every word. "Truth serum is toxic, Julia. And banned."

"Well, you didn't exactly leave us with any other choice." She replied, leaning forward in her seat, exchanging a smile with Quentin that their longshot plan had worked. "We need to know what's really going on here, if we're going to stop The Beast. We know there's things you're not telling us."

"Such as?" He asked, sitting back in his chair, an eyebrow raised.

"How about Eliza, for starters." Quentin offered.

"What about her?"

"Who is she? I mean, who is she really?" Julia had always had a way of picking up on the ends of Quentin's sentences, and a brief flick of her eye towards him confirmed that tag, she was it. This was how they worked.

The Dean sighed deeply, placed the pads of his fingers to the bridge of his nose with one hand, and gestured towards his door with the other. "Well, why don't you just ask her yourselves, then. Jane?" He called out. "Why don't we just get on with it?"

Quentin and Julia spun around in their chairs to find the woman they'd always known as Eliza stepping into the Dean's office and closing the door behind her. "Children." She said.

"'Jane'?" Quentin asked, turning back to his headmaster as Eliza/Jane found a nice piece of windowsill to rest on.

"They were early this time." Jane observed, and the Dean nodded.

"Wait, why did he -- why did you call her 'Jane'?" Quentin demanded, and almost as much to herself as to Quentin, Julia spoke the word that had come to define so much of her life this past year:

"Chatwin." She said, simply. Quentin's head spun around to her, but Julia kept her eyes fixed on the blonde by the window. "Are you... Jane Chatwin?"

"You know, Miss Granger, you really are the brightest witch in your year." An exhausted smile spread cheerlessly across Jane's face.

"Okay, um." Quentin sat up in his seat, anxiety rising in his chest as it so often had. "She's --"

"The Girl Who Told Time?" Jane finished, hopping off the ledge. "Do you remember that one, Quentin?"

"I --"

"When Ember gave me the watch and the locket, he had also given me, a prepubescent child, mind you, near-unlimited power over time itself, which, when you think about it, is a truly fucked up thing to do with a child. But then, I was no ordinary child, was I? I had a job to do... just like you. The same job, come to think of it. Strange to think how much suffering my brother brought to so many generations -- and of children, no less. Funny how history repeats itself. Speaking of which."

"Speaking of what?" Quentin asked, emboldened by the confirmation of Julia's theory about The Beast's identity.

"I created a time loop. I needed more time, more opportunities, to stop my brother's rampage. And so, every time I failed to stop him, I'd just start over again. And over and over..."

"A time loop?" Quentin brought his hands up to his face. "Okay."

"Have we been here before?" Julia asked. "Have we tried - and failed -" The implications of that word, failed, hung in the air for a moment, before she continued on, "- to stop The Beast?"