Disclaimer: I do not own Bartimaeus Trilogy.
A/N: It's AU as it progresses. The (numbers in parenthesis) are like the footnotes that Bartimaeus uses in the books.
There's not enough slash for this fandom! Rule 35 (and I do mean 35 XD) demands it! Although there's no lemon in this fic... but still! XD
Warning: You might get cavities. We're talking FLUFF here. Angsty, angsty fluff.
"Bartimaeus, how long do djinn live?"
I looked over at him out of the corner of my eye, halting in my repairs of the pants he was making me patch up for him. The needle was in one of my current form's three hands, in the air, the black thread dangling from it. It was all sickeningly domestic, and I often wished (and expressed to him that I wished) he wouldn't treat me like his wife. (1)
Besides. It was, you know, Nate.
But it was in my nature to be testy and sarcastic at all times, which I knew secretly turned him on anyway. "Why? You trying to figure out how long you can keep me as your house servant?"
He frowned as if I were missing something very obvious. "No."
He was making that face I hated so I told him so. "You know, your eyes will stick like that if you're not careful. It's truly not a good look for you, my love."
He turned as red as he always did when I called him 'my love,' making me grin, and he glanced around to make sure no one else was near us. He wasn't exactly out of the 'ol magician chest of drawers, if you know what I'm saying, and it would be even worse if his superiors were to find out that not only was he flaming, and not only did he sleep with a djinni regularly, but he was taking it from this djinni. He was the girl. Although, really, once the other magicians found out that there was sex and djinn involved, there would be a serious problem, no matter who bent over for it.
Anyway.
"No!" he insisted. "I just want to know, dammit!"
He was still glaring at me, and I really should answer his question, but I was having too much fun. As long as he didn't break out any of the various tortures, I was happy to bother him further. I knew (or at least strongly believed) that he would be unwilling to torture me at this point, because for some reason he was in love with me.
So I just taunted him more.
I pasted a put-upon expression onto my face, taking the form of some guy I had once caught Nathaniel staring at as he passed on the streets. I had been saving this for a while, so it totally blindsided him and he imitated a fish for a while. Speaking much more loudly than was even remotely necessary, I wailed, "Oh woe! Woe, I say! My HOMOSEXUAL LOVER, JOHN MANDRAKE, is so cruel to me! How could you treat me like this, JOHN MANDRAKE! You make me cook for you, clean for you, make me put out, and now you're asking how long I'll live so that you can calculate how much more you can squeeze out of me! DAMN YOU, you cruel, evil bastard!"
I watched, grinning even larger, as Nathaniel all but had a stroke. He lunged over to me and clamped his hands over my mouth to shut me up, but I just grew another mouth on the other side and kept spewing abused nonsense. I didn't really mind cooking and cleaning and sewing; it was the principle of the thing. I am a djinni. He is a magician. He's supposed to make me do back-stabby, asshole-y stuff, not summon other djinni to do the actual djinni work while leaving me at home to slave over a hot oven. Freak.
"Bartimaeus! Cut it out!" he cried, reaching around my head to cover the other mouth I had sprouted. In doing so, he had to put his arms around me.
I put away the second mouth and grinned with the now free one in front. Our faces were inches apart and he turned a bit redder. That was just endlessly amusing to me. I was sure I'd never get over that.
"You know, this is a pretty compromising position right now. If your boss walked in here right now, even if they didn't think I was a djinni, I'm still currently in the form of that man you slobbered all over the sidewalk about the other day. That would just be aw-"
He kissed me to shut me up, as he often did. To encourage that behavior, I always did shut up, because those kisses were another thing about him that I'd never get over.
I placed my fingers on either side of his face, drawing him closer and deepening the kiss. He relaxed into it (the only time he ever relaxed) and submitted. Yet another thing I'd never be able to forget about him, even a thousand years after he was dust.
I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. "Forty thousand years."
He blinked, his eyes a bit glazed with lust. "What?"
"Forty thousand years, Nathaniel," I repeated uselessly. I wasn't going to spell it out for him. This was fairly secret stuff, here.
Finally that brilliant mind of his clicked and he understood. Awe evident in his voice, he whispered, "Djinn live for forty thousand years?"
"No. Forty thousand years more," I replied quietly. "Me, personally, as the name you humans forced my essence into. I'll live for about forty thousand more years, give or take a century. Humans live maybe 90 years. Djinn live much, much longer. Marids live longer than you can imagine."
Instead of the fascination that I expected, or perhaps the quick scribbling of a pen, he just went quiet. Finally, he whispered, "I'm sorry."
My brain screeched to a halt. Had Nathaniel actually just apologized for something? Like, actually apologized, without anyone making him? Or even asking him to?
"...Who are you and what have you done with my lover?" I demanded, somewhat ruining the moment.
Nathaniel rolled his eyes and pulled a chair over, sitting on it. Now we were about the same height, face-to-face. Ptolemy was the last human to ever do that- show me any kind of respect.
"That just sounds lonely, okay?" He shrugged. "I wouldn't want to live that long. Meeting people, loving them, and then watching them die. Humans can barely stand it happening one time around. You keep meeting new generations." He paused, surveyed me carefully, debating whether or not to ask what he was thinking. "That Egyptian boy you often turn into. I assume he was real, too? Someone you loved?"
I looked at him for a long moment before I finally said, "Ptolemy."
His eyes widened a little. "The Ptolemy?"
I didn't answer, and his eyes softened. "Look. All I meant was that it's a long time."
He rolled closer to me in his chair and put a finger under my chin. He kissed me gently and I really wished I didn't like that feeling as much as I did. It was so, so wrong for me to be in love with him. Sex between humans and djinn wasn't unheard of (2), but love- the actual desire to protect and be with a master- was. And at this point, I was about as likely to take an opportunity to kill him as he was to take an opportunity to give me the Systemic Vise.
I couldn't find the energy to kiss him back, so I just let him do it until he noticed I wasn't participating and stopped. Instead, he put a hand on my arm. He was cool to the touch.
No, I didn't want to feel like this. I would have to deal with what it felt like to lose Ptolemy all over again, except this would be worse because it was requited. Ptolemy cared for me deeply and treated me well, but he wasn't into the cross-species stuff. Nathaniel had gotten over that a long time ago. He had already had me bound for nine years, although he told me he would dismiss me if I asked him to. He was already twenty, prime of his life, maybe seventy years left. Seventy years. That was minutes to me, and it was all I had left of him. And then he would be dust, the way all humans would.
"I love you," I mumbled.
"Love you more," he replied promptly. He said it every single time.
Damn it, why did this have to hurt so much? Why couldn't I hate him? He was human. He was a magician, the worst kind of human. He was annoying, and prissy, and annoying, and dense, and socially crippled, and annoying, and annoying. So why did I love him? I grinned, hoping it didn't look as feeble as it felt, and tried not to think about how I was going to have at least thirty-nine thousand nine hundred years without him. "Yeah, probably," I agreed as usual, forcing a laugh.
He opened his mouth to say something and I grabbed him and stole his move- I kissed him to shut him up. Hard.
Apparently I was wrong when I said the average human lives to be about ninety. Nathaniel was dying of old age at eighty. Gypped me of ten years, when I had been counting on every second.
He had aged before my eyes like some kind of movie on fast-forward. Like water evaporating away or those time turners made out of sand. (3) He summoned me, I served him, I spent sixty-nine human years with him, and if you asked me right now how long it had been, I would have told you it had been only minutes.
It wasn't right, seeing him like this. He was in sweat pants and an old man shirt, when his whole life he had been so obsessed with fashion. He was lying calmly in bed, when his whole life he never consented to being still for more than ten minutes. He wasn't reading, wasn't learning. The only thing that was the same about him was his eyes. They were still ice cold and bright with consciousness. That was the only way I could know for sure that it was my Nathaniel.
I sat beside him in the guise of an old man, gently holding his hand, talking quietly with him. His master's wife, the only human he had ever cared for, was long dead, so besides me he had no one. He didn't seem sad about it in the slightest. Once again (and it was for the last time) I was amazed and befuddled by him. Most humans would care that no other human in the entire world cared that they were dying. Nathaniel had never been most humans.
He was saying something, so I dragged my head out of my thoughts to put all my focus on him. He would be dead soon, after all, and these words would be the last I had. I needed to hear every syllable.
"What is the afterlife like for djinn?" he asked me. His voice was quiet and forced, his breath too heavy.
"I don't know," I answered. "Maybe it's the same as for humans. But I don't know what's next for me any more than you know what's next for you."
He frowned in thought, nodding. Then his forehead smoothed out (well, as much as an old man's forehead could smooth out) and he smiled at me. "I'll wait."
I laughed shortly, and I tried with what was probably little success to make it not sound broken. "I've got forty thousand more years, remember, old man?"
He looked genuinely confused, and my mind brought me back to the first time we had had this conversation. Mere seconds ago that were actually years.
"I remember," he said calmly.
I snorted. "Who would wait forty thousand years for someone?"
"You wouldn't wait forty thousand years for me?"
"No way, dumbass," I sighed. I leaned down to kiss him on the forehead so gently that it barely registered for either of us, then I whispered, "I'll look for you," even though I knew it was impossible that he would wait that long. To a human, forty thousand years is insurmountable. Especially to be just floating around in the Nothingness, being in suspense about what would happen when you decided you were done floating.
But would I wait that long for him, if the positions were reversed?
I was about to answer aloud my internal question, but when I pulled back to look at him, his eyes were closed.
Nathaniel was dead.
This knowledge was confirmed by the ever-familiar tug on my essence, trying to drag me back. My master was dead, there was no reason for me to still be here, right? The fishhooks seemed to think so.
And I agreed with them. Staring at him where he lay still, imprinting him in my mind, I gave in to the pull and disappeared.
In the Other Place, my essence and everyone else's howled with my pain.
Apparently I was wrong when I said that I would live forty thousand years more. I hadn't given my immune system enough credit, because it was forty-three thousand, two hundred and fifty-nine years. Gave me three thousand, two hundred and fifty-nine more years, when I had been counting every damn second.
It wasn't that I was so devastated to lose him that I lost the ability to function. No, I was perfectly fine on my own, and not being tied to a human was actually a bit of a relief.
It was just... boring. Lonely. Cold. Slow, like wading through molasses.
The ages had passed before my eyes like some kind of hallovision program in slow motion. I had been summoned a few times, seen the rise and fall of new leaders, new countries. I watched the humans fix the planet and restore it to a state healthier than it had been before they got there. I watched the humans systematically delete violence and hate from their personalities, and for the last ten thousand years of my existence there was no war.
When I was summoned, it was to build, never to fight, and they were always nice about it. We were treated so well that it was rare for one of us to kill a master. Often it was just easier and more pleasant to do the simple task that he politely asked us to complete. We were always given 'free to go once the task is done' commands, and I strongly suspected that they had some kind of register about who had been recently summoned, so that no one would summon one servant too many times back to back. There may even have been laws created specifically to protect us.
It was wonderful, actually, but if you asked me right now how long it was, I would have told you it was forever. The perfect world means nothing if it's not your world. If you have no connection to it.
Plus, humans without their violence become passive and devastatingly friendly. They need that drive, that intensity, or they're just flesh like any other creature. In my opinion, they were never more of 'animals' than when they were perfectly civil.
And it just made me miss him all the more.
Djinn do not have perfect memories. As time passes, as we age, we forget things, just like humans do except we have nowhere to write stuff down. I could no longer remember Nathaniel's magician name. Or the color his hair had been when he was young, or his height. I couldn't remember how he felt about tofu or if he loved or hated Thomas Wolfe. I was losing him piece by piece, but I was never able to forget him, even when, for a period of about seven hundred years, I tried to. Anything to stop that dull, pulsing ache.
As I slowly turned to sand, observing with mild curiosity as particles of my being blew away on a nonexistent wind, I wished I could care that I was dying. I was pretty sure I was supposed to be at least mildly upset. But Nathaniel had been right. It was lonely, watching everyone I met die, then meeting more people, then losing them, then meeting new ones and losing them again. There were no friendships in the Other Place, so those humans were all I had and I hated them for the soft, distinctly not-Nathaniel creatures they had become.
That, and the memories of Nathaniel that I was slowly losing.
My consciousness twitched and went dark.
When I opened my eyes, my world was in various shades of grey. I looked around, blinking, disoriented.
Then I heard a voice from behind me.
"Told you I would wait."
I sucked in a breath and closed my metaphysical eyes. This wouldn't be the first time I had imagined his voice in times of stress, and it hurt like a Yoglavian Slug Beetle sting every time, even as the small timbres of his voice were lost to time and my aging memory.
When I didn't respond, he sounded concerned. "Bartimaeus?"
No one had pronounced my name correctly in thirty-six thousand years, when the 'B' sound became an 'F' sound. Needless to say, I had been peeved the first time I had been called 'Fartimaeus.' I heard it that way so often, in fact, that even in my auditory hallucinations was I called it.
That was how I knew it was him.
I whipped around and grabbed him into my arms, pulling him close and squeezing him. For the first time ever, I could use all my strength without fear of breaking him. I roughly grabbed his face on either side and stared at him. For a while, neither of us spoke, then, "I can't believe you waited."
"I said I would."
"How did you keep from going crazy?"
"I made passing spirits teach me whatever language they spoke in life. I dare say I now know more languages than you." He laughed.
I hadn't laughed in forty-three thousand years. I let my fingers slide into his hair, tilting his face up, and I held him there, hard, eyes absorbing him, relearning every little thing I had forgotten. He smiled gently at me and my heart- if I had one- stopped in my chest.
"I love you," I breathed.
He grinned. "I love you more."
Right. This is why I had loved him so much. Why I was willing to put up with forty thousand years alone, all for the seventy years I got with him. I smiled, really, for the first time in forty-three centuries. I couldn't help it- it was ingrained in my subconscious from so, so long ago to smile when he smiled at me like that. With those cold eyes going all gentle and warm with how he felt about me... how he still felt about me after all this time...
My heart would have been pounding if it hadn't just stopped a moment ago. Instead, it burst and I yanked him into me again, wrapping my arms so tightly around him that I doubted it was physically possible to separate us at that point. That would have been fine with me. Maybe we could become one entity.
I buried my face in his hair, and into his ear I whispered, "Impossible."
(1) Although, to be fair, it was a step up from slave.
(2) Except, for some reason, from the magician's point of view. They seemed to think it was impossible and/or evil. Just like a modern magician to completely remove one of the few perks of the job. Some magicians in ancient times used to summon us as sex slaves and we'd do all kinds of delightfully depraved things. As gigs went, that wasn't a bad one.
(3) Humans are ugly creatures to me anyway, so I didn't really care about how he was physically changing. A non-wrinkly human is just as disgusting as a wrinkly human, to me. It was horrible only because it happened so fast.