#my current debate is (1) is a bookshelf worth it (2) can i find one for cheaper somewhere and (3) how the hell am i supposed to fit in car

[bamsara]

trying not to spend money but also I desire....bookshelf....

[angelofrainfrogs]

A Recollection

Fandoms: The Bartimaeus Trilogy 

Description: Upon finding a book about unexplained events in human history, Bartimaeus recalls one of the many times he and Faquarl were forced to work together towards a common goal.

Rating: K+

Genre: General/Humor

Read on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322109 

Note: This fic is dedicated to rat man and was written for the 2020 Holiday Secret Santa in the Bartimaeus discord server. The request was to write something including Faquarl and as I was thinking of historical events to write about, the one included in this fic came to mind and wouldn't leave and, well... here's the result! Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

A Recollection

“So, Nat… any pressing tasks I need to take care of?” I asked, leaning on the corner of the boy’s desk and resting my chin on my palms, staring up at him with wide, imploring eyes. “Would you like a cup of tea? A shoulder massage, perhaps?”

A noncommittal grunt was the only response I got, Nathaniel’s eyes glued to the stack of papers in front of him.

“Maybe you’d like me to go fetch some fresh water from the Thames? I’m sure it only has a few hundred toxins that could kill you.”

Another grunt, this time accompanied with a vague hand gesture to go away. I sighed, annoyed.

“Or maybe, you’d like a kick in the—”

“Bartimaeus, will you shut up?!” Nathaniel snapped, finally acknowledging my existence for the first time that afternoon. “I don’t need anything right now; just go read a book or something and stop bothering me. I have a lot of paperwork to review about these recent Resistance attacks.”

“You know, you could always dismiss me if you have no need of me…,” I suggested, a hint of false hopefulness in my tone. I knew full well the boy would do no such thing, and the withering look he gave me proved as such.

“Ugh, just…” He paused, then pointed to a bookcase on the other side of his fairly large office. “I charge you to go read a book from that shelf over there.”

“Doesn’t work if I’m not in a pentacle,” I said smartly, but he merely rolled his eyes and went back to his work.

I sighed again, deciding to it not worth the effort of my waning essence to harass him anymore[1]. Instead, I walked to the other side of the room and looked at the decently-sized bookshelf, wondering what sort of texts a young member of the British government read in his nonexistent free time.

I pulled one out at random; the title read “Unexplained Phenomenon of the Americas” and had a grainy black and white picture of a forest with some unidentifiable, luminescent creature on the front cover. I opened it to a random page, curious to see what sort of things were in here that could easily be explained by magic. My eyes widened as they scanned the page.

“Unbelievable,” I murmured, reading the heading and date of the event. Instantly, my mind drifted back a few decades, remembering a time I’d been working with an all-too-familiar djinni…

***

“So… where exactly are we meant to be dropping this stuff off?” I asked, one beady vulture’s eye trained on my companion.

“We weren’t given a specific place; it’s up to us to make sure that whatever we do with this, it’s ‘untraceable.’” The other, slightly bulkier vulture[2] said, metaphorically rolling his black eyes. “Weren’t you listening to the instructions?”

“Eh… not really.” I attempted a shrug, a difficult gesture to do with wings, let alone ones that were currently being used to fly. “I was more interested in trying to figure out what in the world this stuff is…”

“It’s none of our concern, is it?” My cohort let out annoyed sigh. “Let’s just find a place to dump this and get back; the sooner we can be rid of this charge, the better. My essence is starting to ache.”

I hummed in affirmation and focused forward, scouring the ground for a perfect spot to release our mysterious packages.

As most would surely have guessed, we only appeared as vultures on the first plane. The packages we were carrying were a bit too bulky to conceal with magic without some complex maneuvers that, frankly, neither of us had the strength for.

Faquarl and I had been summoned together a few months ago, an unexpected surprise[3]. The magician was some shady man living in rural America during the 1870’s. He seemed a bit mad, honestly, but to our dismay had at least enough wits about him to perform a summons with all the correct seals to keep us from escaping our bonds. Thus, we were once again forced into servitude by the will of a human.

He had some sort of nasty hobby that I tried not to speculate about, but I never actually got to learn what it was[4]. Our main assignment was to constantly transfer mysterious packages to and from the man’s farmhouse in rural Kentucky. I hadn’t spent much time in the Americas and was curious to explore, but the constant travel was exhausting… not to mention the company I was forced to keep.

Faquarl and I had never gotten along at the best of times, but being the only two spirits around for miles and connected by the same magician forced us to spend much more time together than either of us would like.

“Can’t we just drop this and be done with it?” I asked, debating whether to just go ahead and let the mysterious package fall to the ground. I didn’t need Faquarl’s permission to do anything, of course, but our mutual charge meant it was best to be on at least somewhat of the same page[5].

“Just wait, Bartimaeus,” Faquarl snapped, and I could hear the snarl in his voice. I glared at him as best I could.

“I’m trying to suggest an easy solution, but you just don’t care what I think, do you?”

“No, not really.”

I gasped dramatically, affronted. “Well! Excuse me for trying to make our lives a little less difficult. You’ve always been so stubborn.”

“I’m stubborn?!” Faquarl barked a laugh. “Remember that time in Indonesia when you had to-”

“Hey, hey, we agreed never to bring that up again!”

“You agreed with yourself; I made no such promise.” The vulture’s face remained passive as stone, but I caught a glimpse of Faquarl’s snide grin on the 7th plane[6]. I grumbled something under my breath, and then a brilliant idea occurred to me. If Faquarl wouldn’t go along with my plan willingly, maybe there was a way to make him follow along unintentionally.

Still keeping partial focus on my wings to assure I stayed in flight, I skillfully reached into the sack hanging from my claws with a talon, took out a chunk of undistinguishable meat, and hurled it directly at the djinni beside me. It missed him by a mile[7], but the gesture had certainly been noticed.

“Oh, really? Now you’re going to throw a fit?” Again, Faquarl rolled his eyes on a higher plane. “How childish.”

“I’m not ‘throwing a fit,’” I retorted. “I’m trying to add some entertainment to this incredibly dull task.” I quickly grabbed another piece of meat and threw it, this time hitting Faquarl in the side. He squawked indignantly as I let out a gleeful laugh.

“Alright, two can play at this game!” he responded, and I managed to dodge as Faquarl lobbed a chunk of meat at me. It broke into two pieces as it fell to earth, and I jerked my beak towards them in a huff.

“No fair!” I exclaimed. “You can’t throw two at once!”

“I don’t recall there being any rules to this challenge.” I could hear the grin in his voice and suddenly a soft, wet sensation hit my right wing. I nearly lost my balance in the sky but managed to right myself just in time.

“Alright, that’s it!” I yelled, and thus the battle commenced.

I’d like to say it was a brilliant affair, full of wild tricks and subterfuge, but it was hard to do much when your only weapon was various chunks of mystery meat[8]. The fight lasted only a few minutes, stopping when we both realized that our sacks were empty. We glanced at the ground far below to see it littered with pinkish-grey dots. Some pieces had landed on and around a little house, outside of which a woman was currently standing with her husband and looking quite frazzled.

“Oh, now look what you’ve done…,” Faquarl groaned, surveying the damage. “Now we have to go clean all this up!”

“Do we?” I asked, and he trained a questioning beady eye upon me. “I mean, our charge was to dispose of the contents in the sacks, correct?”

“In an untraceable way, yes.”

“We’re miles away from our master; I doubt the humans would be able to trace this back to him. Besides-” Faquarl looked about to speak again, but I continued. “Have you been able to tell what this stuff actually is?”

“Well… no,” the djinni admitted reluctantly. I knew he always hated when I was right[9].

“Then do you really think mere humans will be able to distinguish it?”

“…Probably not.”

“Exactly!” I did a summersault in the air, one of the only flashy gestures I could make in my avian form. “So, technically, our charge has been complete.”

Faquarl remained silent for a few moments, desperately trying to think of how to prove me wrong. I did realize that my logic regarding the situation wasn’t rock-solid; I knew a particularly clever human could probably figure out the type of meat, and maybe enough investigation would eventually trace it back to the magician. Faquarl could easily bring these things up, but I knew he was just as tired as I was and presumably wanted go back to the Other Place equally as bad.

“…Fine,” he relented with a sigh. “We’ll go back and tell our master that our charge is complete. But if this comes back to bite us, you’re taking all the blame.”

I made an astonished noise as we simultaneously turned around and began flying back towards the magician’s house. “Now, now, you were a big part of that fight; you can’t go blaming me! I thought we were in an equal partnership here!”

“Only in your dreams are you in any way equivalent to me, Bartimaeus.” I heard the sneer in Faquarl’s voice and wished I’d saved one last piece of mystery meat for a surprise attack. As it was, I merely grumbled back something that I shall not be repeating here, then quickly sped up as my fellow djinni let out a screech of rage and dashed towards me.

A few days after we returned to our master’s house, we were dismissed. I bid Faquarl a not-so-friendly farewell and blissfully returned to the Other Place, not knowing when I’d see my unwilling compatriot again.

***

“What in the world are you smirking at over there?!” Nathaniel’s shrill voice cut violently into my reminiscing. I glanced at the boy to see him staring at me with a pinched expression on his face.

“Oh, just remembering the old days,” I said, sighing wistfully. “The days when I had masters who knew how to buy clothes that fit properly, and to wash their hair more than twice a year—you really ought to take a shower, though, Nat—and who—”

“Be silent, demon!” the boy hissed at me, and I placed a hand to my heart in mock horror.

“Goodness, someone’s in a bad mood today!”

“I’m trying to work and you’re over in the corner giggling and grinning like a maniac. If you can’t be silent, I’ll send you out on your rounds earlier than usual tonight.”

“Alright, alright,” I grumbled, not in the mood to go out into the dreary streets of London any sooner than was necessary. “For the next few hours, you won’t even know I’m here.”

“See to it that I don’t.”

I rolled my eyes as Nathaniel focused back on his papers. I closed the book in my hands, lingering over the cover for a few seconds before slipping it neatly back into its place on the shelf. Then, I flopped down on the rather uncomfortable couch and waited for night to fall, casting my mind back to my most recent encounter with Faquarl a few years prior and wondering what, if anything, the djinni was up to now.

***

[1] At the current moment, that is. I’d be back at it again by suppertime.[Return to text]

[2] Though he would never admit it, I knew the slightly more formidable appearance was an unnecessary but very deliberate attempt to ruffle my feathers. It didn’t work, of course.[Return to text]

[3] Yet surprisingly not unwelcome. Though we considered each other nemeses by this point in time, it had been so long since I’d seen a familiar face during a summons that it was a welcome relief to be around someone I knew, even if we did hate each other’s guts.[Return to text]

[4] I was quite happy about this, mind you; most humans are weird, but some are just plain depraved. I had a feeling this man fell squarely into the latter category.[Return to text]

[5] I don’t need permission from anyone to do as I please, but the threat of a magician’s crippling fire can be quite convincing at times.[Return to text]

[6] Though it was hard to tell exactly what expression his true form was wearing, what with all the writhing tentacles and other assorted bits.[Return to text]

[7] What can I say, I was out of practice. I hadn’t tried to physically fight Faquarl for decades, since the last time nearly ended with my ear being sliced off by a wayward kitchen knife.[Return to text]

[8] Although I did perform some particularly stellar acrobatics in midair in my attempts to dodge.[Return to text]

[9] I, however, rather enjoyed watching Faquarl fume when he was proven wrong.[Return to text]

Notes: The Kentucky meat shower was a real event that happened in on March 3, 1876. For a few minutes between the hours of 11 and 12 in the morning, what appeared to be chunks of red meat fell from the sky in a 100x50 yard (91x46 m) area near the settlement of Rankin in Bath County, Kentucky. There are several explanations as to how this occurred and what the "meat" was, the most popular being the vulture theory, in which a group of vultures regurgitated their meals; and the pieces fell to earth from a reasonable height. The exact type of meat was never identified, although various reports suggested it was beef, lamb, deer, bear, horse, or even human.