#Kitty Mumbles | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

qqueenofhades · 1 year

Note

With full acknowledgement that you're not actively looking for prompts from the spoopy season list, I do want to do my part as a self-confessed enabler and say that assorted pairings from the Bartimaeus series would lend themselves very well to Fall Semester, Dim Cobbled Street, Chilly Evening, Stargazing, or anything Beyond the Veil related :)

By now, it's Kitty's third year teaching at the University of London, but the first day of term is always extremely strange. She's almost (almost, but not quite) stopped feeling like an interloper, surrounded by chattering commoner students who are just young enough to not fully grasp what a miracle it is that they are here, able to actually study their own country's past in something approaching honest detail. That's Kitty's job, as it's been since she came on as a fixed-term lecturer and has only just, budgetary approval pending, been made the formal offer to convert it into a permanent appointment. However, she isn't sure if she's going to take it. Teaching The History of the Magicians' Empire, 20th-21st Centuries is beyond any doubt important work. She just doesn't know if it's the rest of her life's work.

She ducks into the ladies' loo, checking her makeup. She doesn't usually wear it, but it helps her feel more confident at the front of a lecture theater, and smooths out some of the disunity between her face and her actual age. The silver threads in her dark hair and the lines around her eyes, lasting legacies of the Other Place, make her look an attractive forty, forty-plus. She's barely twenty-five. She doesn't tell the students; it's easier to command their respect if they think she is considerably their senior, instead of barely. They call her Dr. Jones, which is -- well, technically, whenever she gets around to submitting her final revisions on the long-reworked PhD thesis, also a comprehensive and deeply unflattering history of the magicians' empire -- true. She hasn't entirely let go of the fear that a black car will speed up, throw a bag over her head or an imp in an orb, and make her suffer for the things she says, but she says them anyway.

Kitty decides that she looks presentable, clicks up the marble stairs of Senate House in her high heels (another unfortunate concession to women's fashion, definitely not good for climbing fences or staging illegal break-ins -- not that she does that anymore, or at least not very often) and steps into her classroom. It goes well, as much as the first day does. She dashes down to the canteen for lunch, has another class in the afternoon, and by the time she steps out in a chilly rain around four PM, fumbling for her brolly, she wonders if this will be the year she finally stops feeling so damn disconnected from everything and everyone. Maybe she should try again to meet someone, but it's so hard. She doesn't even know who an age-appropriate partner would be. Men in their twenties are rancid; men in their forties are either freaked out when they discover her actual age, or creepily, perversely intrigued. She's not opposed to dating women; maybe she should give that a try. But it's still just a giant --

"Hello, Kitty."

She looks up with a jolt, almost spilling the contents of her purse across the wet cobblestones of the courtyard. She hasn't seen the slight dark-skinned boy, wearing a too-large hooded sweatshirt and floppy trainers, until just now, and she opens her mouth to ask if he's one of her students, though he looks barely old enough for sixth form. But then she catches sight of his eyes, she sees his face, and she knows beyond any doubt. It's been a long time since she's seen him, four or five years at least. She assumes he's been enjoying a well-earned rest in the Other Place, or at least she hopes. But this --

"Bartimaeus." Her voice sounds croaky. She swallows. Of course he looks the same; Ptolemy never ages, and neither do djinn. "I... hello."

He smiles thinly, an eclipsed fingernail, acknowledging that he's startled her. "I see you've gone legitimate these days."

"More or less." Kitty is still thrown from the shock of his appearance, like something from an old life she's almost forgotten, and she can feel her heart racing in her throat. "Coming to check up on me? Make sure I'm not throwing smoke bombs in the classroom?"

"Entirely your own business how you decide to teach the nippers." Bartimaeus tips a cheeky wink -- almost, if not quite, as sardonically uncaring as his old ones. "Suspect a few bombs of any variety could only liven the place up."

Kitty can't really argue with that. It's a miracle that they're letting a former Resistance member in the building at all, and she is always braced for someone calling her to the Head of School's office like a misbehaving child. She looks at him, and he looks at her. Neither of them seems to know what to do. Then casually, as if it's nothing to him either way, Bartimaeus says, "D'you fancy a drink?"

"I -- " Kitty thinks about that. She can't see why not. And she's missed him, more than she can articulate or even admit. Him, and --

Well, never mind. It's no good dwelling on what can never come back. At least she can talk to this one. At least while she still has time.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I think I would."

Bartimaeus, of course, doesn't actually drink. He pays for hers and a plate of supper (no use asking where he got the wallet or the quid), and sits in the booth across from her, watching with those unblinking dark eyes. When she's gotten enough food down her to be moderately more sociable, she says, "I didn't -- I hope you're not back here because you've been enslaved again, are you?"

"No." Bartimaeus shrugs. "Not really anyone who dares to do that any more, not that I miss it. But the gate works both ways, you know. You went to the Other Place, so I can come to your world when I please, without a summoning or a master. Normally I pop down in spring, closer to when -- well." He pauses, as if about to wag an admonitory finger. "Don't get me wrong, now. I don't miss it."

"Course you do." Kitty wipes her mouth. "How else would you add new glorious deeds to your many names?"

Bartimaeus blinks, as if unsure whether she's actually daring to tease him. Then he chuckles wryly, though those eyes still remain dark and liquid and deep as the abyss. "I suppose there's that. Though it does feel as if I've had my fill of bloody glorious deeds for a bit. Any other idiots taken over the world while I've been gone?"

"Not yet. Not as far as I know." Kitty fingers the half-empty beer glass. She wonders if she should ask about that pause earlier, that quickly skipped-over moment. Normally I pop down in spring, closer to when the Glass Palace came down. It is probably just her imagination that that is how that sentence would have ended. Does Bartimaeus, despite all the fraught history between himself and his final master, return to Earth to pay his quiet respects on the anniversary of Nathaniel's death? Or is that Kitty's lonely pilgrimage alone?

"I'm sure there will be some eventually," she says belatedly, to Bartimaeus's expectant expression. "Just not now."

Bartimaeus snorts, a remarkably eloquent and wordless remark that when it comes to the fucking British, an idiot who will attempt to take over the world is never far away. He clears his throat. "You doing anything besides teaching a bunch of commoners how awful the last lot were? Seeing anyone?"

"No." Kitty had briefly thought about moving to Prague and reconnecting with Jakob Hyrnek, but it was only a stillborn fantasy, then and gone. "Why? You're not about to ask me out, are you?"

"What? Me?!" Bartimaeus's outrage is a little too instant and piquant to be, perhaps, entirely real. "A human? Even you?! Never. I'd rather hang myself upside down from silver meathooks and let Faquarl play Little Drummer Boy on my backside. No offense."

"Of course not. No." And yet for an unnerving moment, Kitty finds herself actually considering it. He can take on any shape, he can be anyone, he's the only person (or person-like creature) who understands everything about her, and it would spare her the drudgery of finding any kind of human mate. But no, of course not. It's silly, absurd, unthinkable. Especially if she was so cruel as to ask him to, perhaps, take on the shape and soul of --

Kitty seizes her glass and drinks harder, just to get that image out of her mind. She finishes her meal, and when they step out into a chilly dim evening, London fog twining through the busy streets as it has done in any age of the world and effacing the faint stars, Bartimaeus clears his throat awkwardly. "Actually, I thought -- well. Stupid, really, but speaking of the magicians and studying the things they used to be. I, er. I have something I could show you. If you're interested."

"Something to show me?" Kitty blinks. She supposes that she could pop in, take a look at it, make a note for academic purposes. See if it's something she can talk to her students about, the struggle to make them actually visualize what it was like. Most of the time, she's firmly convinced that it's good that they can't imagine it, that it's not an everyday part of their lived experience. Other times, it is so profoundly alienating that she can hardly breathe.

"Sure." Yet again, Bartimaeus sounds as if he's trying a little too hard to be casual, unaffected, gliding through his endless life with a theatrical twirl, a well-timed Detonation, and a sparkling witticism -- as much a hollow shell as Kitty Jones is, something essential hollowed out and the soul not quite what it used to be, permanently put just to one side. "If you want to, of course. This way."

******

The djinn leads her to some small side-street of the kind that exist by the dozens in London: narrow, cobbled, dim and twisted, flower boxes overhanging from seventeenth-century townhouses that lean together unsteadily like drunken revelers at the pub. There's an art gallery at the end, the kind that looks legitimate but is notorious for fencing old magical artifacts by the bushel, and Kitty opens her mouth to ask if Bartimaeus has brought her here for old times' sake, to break the window and clean the place out. She's not opposed, but she'll at least need to cover her tracks. She doesn't customarily keep that stuff around anymore, either. Maybe she should?

Bartimaeus, however, doesn't appear to have larceny in mind (at least not tonight). He unlocks the door and deftly disables the alarm, which these days is more likely to be a commoner device than a lurking foliot, and they step inside. The place is quiet, dusty, and Kitty has no idea what they're doing here. "Are we supposed to -- "

"Shh." Bartimaeus comes to a halt at the far wall, which is hung with several age-darkened oil portraits of magicians; they are all sporting old-fashioned ruffs and constipated expressions. Since that can't possibly be what he's brought her to see, Kitty frowns, until she notices what's hanging next to it. A full-length mirror filled with oddly nebulous smoke, something that even she -- with her very limited talent, never like the others -- can sense is real magic. She looks at Bartimaeus, utterly lost, and he beckons her. "Here."

Kitty hesitates, decides that he probably wouldn't push her through a portal to some nefarious underworld without at least some warning, and steps up, as he backs away. For a long moment, nothing. All she can see in the mirror is her own pale, tired, too-old face, matching more the full century that she feels than the mere quarter of it that she is. Then she catches sight of something moving in its depths. Walking steadily, coming closer, until it takes shape and form. Until the mirror has become clear and insubstantial as air, as a fluttering veil, and she can feel the chill on her face, breathed from somewhere that is neither the Other Place nor London. A different world altogether, a different gate. It's not --

It can't be --

But then he's standing right in front of her, almost close enough to touch if she reached out and risked her own hand turning to bare and skeletal bone, and it is.

"Hello, Kitty," Nathaniel says, in almost the exact same tone Bartimaeus used. "Long time no see."

Kitty's tongue is locked to the roof of her mouth. She can't speak or move. She thinks wildly that this is a trick -- this isn't Nathaniel, just some strange shade inexplicably summoned out of the mirror's depths, or at most his long-dead fetch -- but just then, it almost seems possible that it is. He looks older than he was when he died: still pinched, thin, dark-haired and pasty-pale, but a man, not a boy. She doesn't know if that's another illusion conjured by her own perception, her own mind trying to picture how he would look now, if he had lived. Just like her, he looks too old for his body, but... handsome. Wise. Serene. All the things he never was in life, as if the ever after has bestowed the learning he drove himself crazy attempting to acquire. They stand there gaping in mutually and excruciatingly awkward silence, like two old friends who ran into each other in the street and aren't sure what to say. Are they friends? It seems like the wrong word, as if they speed-ran right past that and became much more and much less. Possibilities only. Nothing else.

"Nathaniel," Kitty manages at last. "You look... dead. Well. I mean well. For being dead. If you are."

"I am." Something flickers in his eyes, half wry humor and half unbearable grief. "You can have my word on that. Honestly, I'm not sure how we're managing to speak -- wait, you're not -- ?"

"No." His flash of sudden concern is slightly searing, and Kitty doesn't let herself think about it. "I'm in London. There's a mirror. I don't know how he found it, but that's probably beside the -- "

Nathaniel's unearthly eyes flick sideways and spot the dark figure lounging just out of frame. He smiles, shakes his head. "I should have guessed. Hello, Bartimaeus."

"Boss." Bartimaeus snaps off a louche salute, but his eyes are still on Nathaniel in the mirror. "Wasn't actually sure it was going to work this time. It didn't for me -- can you imagine it? It's as if it didn't even know who I am -- but I thought Kitty might have a crack at it."

"You were actually trying to see me again?" Nathaniel raises a skeptical, elegant eyebrow. "That must be a first."

"Yeah, yeah. Shut up. Don't read too much into it." Bartimaeus huffs, hands jammed into his too-tight dungaree pockets. "Look. Here you are. You've seen us. We've seen you. Lots of seeing going on, Natty boy. Now you can faff off and be defunct again."

"It's interesting on this side," Nathaniel informs the djinn. "Very interesting. Plenty to study, to learn, to look at. Not really defunct."

"Well." Bartimaeus seems nonplussed -- and though this too is surely Kitty's imagination, slightly choked up. "I'm, er. Glad you're enjoying it. The benefits of your heroic sacrifice, and all."

A pause, weighted between three worlds, three creatures, three planes of existence. The three of them glance at each other, unsure whether to fall back into their old barbed banter or whether this moment is entirely something else, far past all ordinary divisions or decisions. Then Kitty steps closer, raising her hand as if to reach through the veil, though she knows that she can't. Nathaniel does the same, mirroring her gesture like her own reflection -- which technically, she supposes numbly, he is. "You look good," he says, simply and without pretension. "Beautiful, actually."

"I... thanks." At one point she would have loudly scoffed that off, but it slips the lock into her raw, hunkered-down heart and softly turns the key. "Nathaniel, I -- "

"Yes?"

She wants to say so much that she can't, that she can't get her tongue around, even when he's miraculously standing right in front of her, even or perhaps especially because she knows that he has to go. His eyes are as deep and patient as the sea, as the starless shores of the world after death, a place where he still can surface from, but not very often, and not for long. Their fingers ghost as close as they can without touching, they raise their other hands to do the same, and for once, Bartimaeus offers no sardonic comment or other inopportune interruption to break the moment. Kitty almost thinks she can feel Nathaniel's breath on her cheek, but she can't. He has no breath, and it is only the cold chill of death. Their eyes, their noses, their lips are just a few inches apart. If she took the plunge, if she kissed him, if she leapt through the veil right now --

It's an unsettling, alluring feeling, like walking too near the edge of the cliff and being possessed with the urge to jump, and she can't. Not now, not for a while. She swallows, struggles to clear her throat. "It's good to see you, Nathaniel," she says, and steps back, as if to divorce herself from the temptation that still pulls at her hand, that tells her to go through, to learn even more than him, to solve the one mystery that she or her students alike will never know without being so themselves. "We won't... we won't keep you long here. On this side."

Something flashes over his face that she can't read, something that is only the secrets of the dead, that perhaps he could not tell her even if he tried. He smiles. "No," he says gently. "No, you won't."

#tobsjpalfrey #ask #bartimaeus trilogy #nathaniel x kitty #fic prompts #you are all enablers #ENABLERS #mumble mumble #spooky season #anyway HAVE SOME FEELINGS!

27 notes · View notes