Archive of Our Own ^beta

He doesn’t have as much hesitation in adding Nathaniel’s form to his arsenal as he thought he might.

It's simple enough since he’d spent long enough with the boy, shared a body with him, for crying out loud.

Besides, he’d done more with less before. 

Speaking of which, Kitty’s guise came to be another top contender. The charm and the memory of the owner aside, there was something provocative about a weary millennia-old spirit embodying a spunky teenaged girl that he thinks would’ve continued to make her smile. 

*

John Mandrake and Kathleen Jones were remembered long after their time.

There were sculptures and names and portraits in books and they became household names in line with magical history and the London Revolution.

Though summonings now came with more parameters and safeguards, it didn’t make the masters any less insufferable. They liked to rebrand themselves, thinking that using terms such as employees and contractors would erase their sordid history.

Magicians from well after Nat and Kitty’s era occasionally accused him of making a mockery of respected historical figures when he borrowed their guises.

He never bothered to correct them.

His memories of and affection for them remain his and his alone.

As enough time went on, Nathaniel and Kitty’s young faces faded out of collective memory and became among the guises he came to rely on routinely.

He realized that the passage of time was a truly terrifying thing when he’d catch himself remembering his early years with their jagged young selves fondly.

*

It’s the first rainfall after an arid summer.

He spots the grey of the sidewalk darkening in splotches from inside the window of a stuffy neoclassical government building he’s stationed at to eavesdrop on classified intelligence, this time as a common housefly, unobtrusive and efficient.

It’s a little after the meeting ends and he buzzes out towards the portico that the rain starts to pick up.

There’s a sense of déjà vu, the echo of a winter in Alexandria, the vantage point of a lapwing perched on the shoulder of a boy.

This close, it had been easy to see the crinkle at the corner of his eye when the boy had smiled, to commit the melodic laughter to memory as he had let himself soak up the storm.

Even as he has found himself becoming more protective, opting to keep it mostly for himself in these days when names and faces take up far too much attention and too little meaning, it remains the form that comes easiest, feels closest to home.

Slowly, he carries Ptolemy’s guise into the downpour.

Spirits care for neither rain nor shine.

Still, he cannot help but smile, eyes crinkling at the corners.