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[rathercommon]

crystal | letter | cease and desist notices slipped under her door | action

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[reshapes]

"Why you're upset."

[rathercommon]

"Tell me, then."

[reshapes]

So he does.

"Because you thin the same thing will happen to you and that no one at all will be bothered about it when it does, and that nothing you did here will make any difference. It will be as if you were never here at all. Because it's funny, isn't it? They had a funeral for you when they thought you'd karked it out there in the world, but it's not like anyone's doing any stuffy old ceremony for any Rifters that melt their way on back into the Fade. No, the reason you're upset by the idea that Mandrake might be gone - really gone - is for the same reason I am. You're worried about what the means for you."

[rathercommon]

The look that she shoots Bartimaeus is - well - Let's just say that it isn't the wounded, vulnerable look of a person who's just had their soul revealed to them. Instead, it's tinged with something that might be classified as exasperation.

"Yeah," she says, "obviously. Everyone feels that way whenever anyone dies. Death makes people scared of dying. That's not exactly an original thought."

[reshapes]

Well, it's not as if he was expecting crocodile tears. But not even a glimmer of remorse--?

Fair enough. All the better, even. Crying is so unpleasantly damp looking, and it's not as if there's any reason to convince anyone to reflect fondly on the likes of John Mandrake, one of Britain's foremost ministers of the government. No, this is all perfectly fine.

"Good, good. I'm so glad we're on the same page. While we're at it - you haven't got a sharp knife on you have you? Bronze or copper would be my personal preference."

[rathercommon]

Kitty narrows her eyes suspiciously. "What do you want a knife for?"

[reshapes]

Sweetly, demurely, positively batting his long feline eyelashes: "For cutting, of course. Why, what do you use one for?"

And then he drops that because, honestly, who has the patience to play twenty questions with Kitty Jones of all people? The lioness turns one of its heavy forepaws, dark glints of nearly talon like claws sparkling in the sickly green glow of the rift shard buried there like especially morbid precious stones at the end of each tufted toe.

"If this is the only thing keeping me here, then I think I can afford to get rid of it."

[rathercommon]

Now he gets the shock, and dismay, and horror. She steps back, clamping a hand against the sheath at her side, as though the knife within it were at risk of jumping free to hack at him.

"Stop that," she says unsteadily. "That's not funny."

[reshapes]

"Who's joking?" He crosses the paws, toes wiggling so as it cast leering green shadows off the edge of the bed, ghost pale light murmuring over the floorboards. "--Oh please, don't be so dramatic. You look at if I've suggested a plan to devour half of Kirkwall and set the other half on fire. Here I thought we might finally be starting to understand one another."

[rathercommon]

"I'm not letting you hurt yourself." But obviously that's not going to work. Saying things like that - He'll just sneer at her for being soft-hearted and rubbish like that. So instead, she shakes her head, then tries with something he might actually listen to.

"Other people have tried that. Obviously. It doesn't do anything."

[reshapes]

"Other people. I'm not like them. The rules are different for me than they are for you, which is, I assume, this rotten thing isn't eating you alive like it is me."

The green light of the rift shard pulses wide, wider. It is a green fire, fingers licking from the lioness's paw. It wreaths the limb with winding snake of flame - burning and unburning, snarling and soundless. It is a thing that makes and ruins. He can feel the pull of it in every part of him, on every plane.

"You are flesh and bone; I," he says, puffing out his chest. "Am a spirit of air and fire. Being tied to a point is as unnatural as being sucked through a straw. Do you know what that feels like, hmm? To be made into a meal for something else?"

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"Of course it is," she snaps back. Her hand balls unconsciously into a fist, gripping tight to hide the mote of light sitting there. "It is eating me alive. Just like you. It hurts, not all the time but a lot of it, and it hurts every time I use it to help people. To close rifts, or - anything. Or when I'm apart from people. And that's the bit that hurts the worst, that I could be somewhere else, properly helping people, but instead I'm shut up in this stupid place with this whole stupid - "

She cuts herself off. Clamps shut her jaw and shakes her head. No; going down that path is dangerous. Not because she'll be punished for saying it, but because as soon as she lets the stopper out of that bottle, there'll be no getting her anger and frustration back in again.

"But of course you don't care about that, do you. Because it's always me, me, me."

[reshapes]

And why shouldn't it be? Me is a perfectly reasonable thing to be interested in, thank you very much, especially when it takes the perfectly benign form of picking up and leaving the rest of you sorry lot to your own devices.

"If that's how you really feel, then hold still. I'll do yours before we do mine."

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That's a sickening enough thought that she reacts instinctually, pulling her hand back and well out of reach. But then, a moment later, she's holding it out again, eyes narrowed, jaw set.

"Sure," she says. "Go ahead and bite it off, why don't you. I mean, that is why you took that stupid form, isn't it. 'Cause you wanted me to be scared. 'Cause that makes you feel better, when I'm scared of you. 'Cause you don't have any other way to feel powerful."

[reshapes]

Which isn't technically incorrect. No, not the part about power. That's so wildly off base that it might even be a little funny if it wasn't so dreadfully misinformed. But the rest of it - the part about the shape of the guise and the the particulars for why he'd chosen it - aren't wrong. It's the sort of perceptive thinking he should by all rights give her at least a little credit for. It's hard work being perceptive through the haze of anger and hurt and the chilling threat of a big cat shedding on your sheets.

But really. Better to just change tacks and be done with it.

The lioness does not lunge for her extended arm. There's not even a nibbling of fingertips which some might consider a rather serious display of restraint.

"Is this how you treat everyone who asks for your help, or should I consider myself lucky?"

[rathercommon]

"Help?" That gets a noise out of her that might be called a scoff if it weren't so shrill. "Which part was you asking for my help, exactly? The bit where you all but accused me of murdering Mandrake, or the bit where you demanded I help you dismember yourself?"

[reshapes]

Well, when you put it that way--

"Oh please. If I thought you'd murdered Mandrake, I would have put up streamers and thrown a bit of confetti when you wandered in through that door. I was obviously looking for your opinion."

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"'What hole did you push him into?'" she says, hands on hips, lips thin. "Looking for my opinion. You were here to rescue him. Or avenge him."

She shakes her head briskly.

"Looking for my opinion...I don't know which thought is worse: that you're such a liar that you can fool me with lies that pathetic, or that you're so blind to yourself that you think you're telling the truth."

[reshapes]

That licking green fire has faded in the interim, shrunken back to the low persistent glow of the rift shard's natural state. It takes effort to maintain a constant state of jazzed up these days and let's be honest - it's not really worth the effort in front of present company, now is it? Best to save that for people whose eyeballs will go all properly round and huge in their respective sockets.

"Oh, you want the 'truth' do you? All right then. Why don't you step out into the hall, count to five, then come back through the door and we can try this all again your way."

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She purses her lips in return. "If I step out into that hallway, you're just going to leave, aren't you." She shakes her head.

[reshapes]

Flick, goes the lioness' tail.

"Only one way to find out."

[rathercommon]

Well - It's not like he can't simply hop out with her standing here. Of course he wouldn't - she's got no doubt that the prospect of her getting in the last word keeps him from departing with her looking at him - but still, he could. So if he needs the dramatics of her coming back to an empty room? Fine. She'll give it to him.

So she stares at him a moment longer, and then shrugs pointedly. And then she turns and goes from the room.

[reshapes]

These days, rearranging his Essence is less a matter of time as it is one of will - it takes effort to do away with the densely muscled shape of the lioness, to unwind and remake the sharp moon bright teeth and the heavy paws and the short tawny fur. In another place, he might have been a blackbird fast as blinking. He would have popped the latch on the window, pressed open the pane and been away into the night before Kitty had even pulled the door completely shut behind her. But here, it is a matter of both instinct and shackle. Where once the pentacle bound him, he is now strangely untethered. Smoke twisting in an uncorked bottle, so used to the shape of the glass it has been made to fit in that drifting up and outwards seems almost unnatural; where once he was free, the rift shard now snags and snarls like the sharp ends of a particularly pointy bramble bush. How far does he stretch into the tangle, knowing that with each change - with each flex of power -, that he is baiting the thing that wants to devour him?


The point is, it isn't any easier to stop being the lioness than it is to start. Maybe that is why he is still there when the door again comes open.

But that seems unlikely. The shape he's chosen isn't made for evening escapes out of upper floor windows. Sitting cross-legged on Kitty's bed is the boy. It is not, Bartimaeus thinks, any particular one. The shape he had taken to sit in the Inquisition's dungeons had been purposefully anonymous, a familiar face which he sometimes liked to remember turned half away or seen as if viewed from a distance. The boy is familiar in the way all boys are, and he is particular only around the eyes and in the fine white scar on the side of his forefinger. Ptolemy had cut himself there while sharpening the point of a reed pen and he likes to see the mark of it now a thousand years on even as the hands themselves have been formed purposefully incorrect.

The boy sits with his chin in his hand. In the most rapturous, tear-streaked, over the top simpering he can manage, Bartimaeus says, "I've been looking all over and I don't know what to do."

[rathercommon]

The brief hope kindled by seeing him still there, and seeing him wearing a reasonable, recognizable, human shape, is snuffed out very quickly. For just a brief moment, she thought that maybe they'd actually get somewhere - but no. Of course. This has to be just another way to mock and belittle her.

What if she left? Stormed out of this room. Stopped speaking to him. Treated him like he was dead as Mandrake. It'd be a lot less misery in her life, that's for sure. She'd have to endure a lot less insults. Her life would be quite a lot better if she just never spoke to him again.

And yet - she stays.

"Spirits aren't stupid," Kitty says, "and you're not stupid. So I don't know why it is you insist on being stupid." She shakes her head. "You know this isn't what I want."

[reshapes]

The illusion of tears are summarily brushed and flicked away. Is any of this a stunning example of maturity earned over the course of five thousand years of being jerked around at the whims of deplorable strangers like a fish on the end of a particularly sturdy line? No. But it had been worth it for the look on her face.

(Besides, get a load of this! They've practically managed to wander away the top of Mandrake all together.)

With a sigh of surrender¹, Bartimaeus leans back to lean against the wall alongside the bed and stretches his legs out over the edge of the lump stuffed mattress. "I really don't know what you want say, but let's not pretend that you'd really go for whatever it was even if I did. I could be as sincere as a sweet old grandmother and you'd still say, 'Bartimaeus, what are you getting at?'"

For this last bit he's adopted a particularly unflattering falsetto.

1. Or the pretense of it. The first rule of this business is to never commit yourself to anything if you can avoid it.