#Bain knew so he didn’t punch the guy to death :( | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

belphegor1982 · 5 years ago

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This is not an easy chapter. ngl, it was A Lot to write.

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: Two years after the events of Ahm Shere, the O’Connells are “required” by the British Government to bring the Diamond taken there from Egypt to England. In Cairo, while Evelyn deals with the negotiations and Rick waits for doom to strike again, Jonathan bumps into an old friend of his from university, Tom Ferguson. Things start to go awry when the Diamond is stolen from the Museum and old loyalties are tested… (story on AO3; on FFnet)

(Chapters on Tumblr: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19)

Chapter 20: Aftermaths (on AO3 here; on FFnet here)

What struck Rick was the hush. It wasn’t exactly silence; more like cotton in his ears, muffling out the incoming sounds.

He had known, the second he had seen Jonathan slide down the wall, the second Alex had screamed, what was going to happen. He was too intimately familiar with the signs of encroaching death to ignore them: the sinister pallor, the laboured breathing, the inevitability of it all… and the helplessness of the living. When a distraught Evelyn had turned to him, calling for help, finding none, there had been no comfort he could give her. Life had slipped out of Jonathan too fast for anyone to do anything.

Against him, Alex made a keening noise and started to sob, quietly at first, then violently, his small frame racked with shudders. Rick cradled him in his arms and gently rocked him back and forth. Evelyn stared at her brother’s body, her eyes almost as empty as Jonathan’s had been before Rick had closed them.

Izzy ran out of the cabin just as Atifa scrambled up the ladder. Both jaws dropped open at the same time.

Nobody said anything. The thick silence seemed to swallow the words before they made their way out. Rick was almost grateful.

Apart from Alex weeping in his arms, the only movement he could feel and the only sound that reached his ears was the breeze, slowly growing warmer as the sun rose over Egypt. The moment seemed to stretch out, like a rubber band. And like a rubber band, Rick knew, you could only stretch that kind of moment for so long before it snapped.

A small part of him wanted to fall back, retreat to the nearest secure spot, and lick his wounds – all kinds of wounds – in peace. A big part of him, the part that was pure frazzled exhaustion, wanted the world to stop so he could sleep for a week. But the heart of him, the very core, looked at his unresponsive wife and the sobbing child in his arms, and said, They need you right now, and they need you strong.

He never actually wanted to take charge. Somehow, though, that’s where he usually seemed to end up in the worst kinds of circumstances.

You just got promoted…

Rick let out a shuddering sigh, and freed an arm from Alex to put it around Evy.

“Evelyn. Honey.”

She let him turn her ever so slightly, her eyes still drawn to the body as though to a magnet.

“I’ll take care of him. Okay? I’ll stay with him.” He stroked her back, very gently, dropping his voice down to a murmur. “But I need you to take Alex. He can’t stay here.”

Their son’s name rekindled something in Evy’s eyes. She reached out, and Rick, once he had gently detached Alex’s hands, tight around his neck, poured the boy into her arms.

It was an achingly familiar move, perfected when Alex had been a toddler and prone to falling asleep on his parents’ lap after swearing up and down he wasn’t sleepy. He had done that a lot for about a year and a half. They had come home once, after a conference in London, to see Jonathan fast asleep on the sofa with a two-year-old Alex sprawled over him like a starfish. Both babysitter and child had been equally hard to wake up.

The memory made Rick’s chest ache. He bit down on the pain and shoved it aside, to be dealt with later.

And he knew there would be a later. No matter how numb he currently was.

He caught Izzy’s eyes over Evy’s shoulder. The pilot understood instantly.

“C’mon, Evelyn,” he said, gentler than Rick had ever heard him. He took Evy’s arm to support her as she rose, still holding Alex, and slowly escorted her inside the cabin. When they were gone, Rick tried, in vain, to swallow the lump in his throat. He turned back to Atifa, who stood by the rail, so still and silent it was easy to forget she was there.

“Do you have a, uh…” Damn, but that sentence was difficult. “Something we could use as a kinda shroud?”

Atifa nodded.

��Wait here,” she said in a low voice.

His eyes followed her down the ladder and into the ruined camp. He liked Atifa. She was stern, only a little less intense than Ardeth was on a bad day, but she was a strong, no-nonsense woman, and a good ally.

She came back with what looked like white linen sheets. Rick rose to his feet slowly, feeling every single muscle, tendon, and bone, and took it off her hands as she climbed over the rail.

“Thank you. Where –?”

“The white men’s tents and bedding. We have taken care of our dead since the sun rose.”

Rick hadn’t missed the battle damage as he ran out of the pyramid. It had only taken a second to recognise the signs. But he’d been so focused on getting out that he hadn’t let it sink in.

“I’m sorry about your men,” he said through whatever still obstructed his throat. “How many?”

Atifa looked just as hollow and worn as he felt.

“Thirty-two. Nine men, eight women, and fifteen Westerners who chose to fight the Army of Anubis with us. They all gave their lives so we could live.” She looked down at Jonathan, then back at him. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“He’s family, actually.”

Too late, Rick caught the present tense.

They were a family of three, now. Four, with Ardeth. He would have to get used to it.

God, he hated it already.

Atifa’s eyes softened slightly. Without another word, she spread the sheet on the deck, smoothing out the wrinkles, and moved to Jonathan’s side.

For just a half-second, Jonathan appeared to be sleeping. Rick had seen him sleep that way, back in that basement they had been locked up in, sitting against a wall with his chin resting on his chest. The illusion was gone in an instant. No matter how the cliché went, a dead man’s body could not be mistaken for a live one. The difference was tiny, but staggering.

Rick picked up his brother-in-law’s corpse, cradling his head as gently as he had cradled Alex’s, and deposited him on the makeshift shroud. Before Atifa could close it, however, he stayed her hand.

When people died, the living often asked questions. It was part of what being alive meant. ‘Why’ and ‘how’ were generally the most frequent ones.

In this particular case, ‘why’ was moot – Jonathan hadn’t given his life, like the Medjai who had died weapons in hand, defending each other. It had been taken from him as they ran to safety, to family, to freedom. No, asking ‘why’ would be pointless. Rick was more interested in ‘how’. And, incidentally, in ‘who’.

He slowly turned the body on its side.

The blood stain wasn’t that large, he noted with a strange detachment. Most of the bleeding had been internal. The origin was a small round hole between the shoulder blades, a little off to the right of the spine. The bullet hadn’t gone through. Maybe it would only have done minor damage if the effort of running hadn’t made it move around and nick an artery. Or maybe the wound would have been fatal anyway and he would have bled out, only slowly. There was no way to tell.

Rick gingerly laid the body back down on the sheet. That was the ‘how’ taken care of. Now for the ‘who’.

Fury gradually eroded the numbness, as slow and inexorable as the wind moving the sand dunes.

“The men who were behind us,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “Where are they?”

Atifa looked into his eyes, and understood perfectly.

“They are our prisoners,” she said firmly, “and they will not be touched.”

“I won’t need to touch him.” Whether Baine had fired the gun that had killed Jonathan or not, he was damn well responsible. And even though Rick would like nothing more than to pound him to a paste right now, a bullet to the head – or in the back – had a certain poetic irony to it. He’d been itching to deck the guy for days; now he just wanted to kill him.

But Atifa shook her head.

“The battle is over. They lost and they accepted their defeat. The honourable thing—”

“Honourable!?” he almost shouted. “The damn pyramid was falling apart around us, and instead of thinking of his own men that guy chose to shoot us as we ran. Where’s the honour in that?”

“O’Connell!” she snapped.

Through the haze of anger came a pinprick of annoyance. Why did everybody seem to call each other by their first names except him?

“You’re not thinking clearly.”

“Oh,” he growled, “I really am –”

“No you’re not,” she countered hotly, in Arabic this time. “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be thinking of darkening your soul with pointless vengeance while your brother’s corpse is still warm and your family is weeping just behind that door.”

As usual, she was just as intense, but less formal when she spoke Arabic. The language switch gave her words a weight and an impact they would have lacked in English. But maybe that was because his Arabic – a language he had spoken daily from thirteen to twenty years old – was just a little rusty.

He didn’t bother to correct her about the difference between brother and brother-in-law. After all this time, and everything they had been through together, Jonathan might as well have been blood.

This time he did remember to use the past tense.

“We set up camp a couple of hours’ ride to the south-east,” Atifa continued in the same language, more quietly. “Your wife and the pilot know the way. That’s where we’ve been sending the prisoners and the fallen. They deserve their families around them, and their families need to say goodbye. You and yours will be welcome there.”

Rick was still seething; his hands tightened into fists almost of their own accord, still itching to punch Baine into the ground. But he nodded wordlessly.

They worked in silence after that. When they were done, the body was neatly wrapped in white linen and easier to look at, somehow.

Rather looks like something you’d find in a sarcophagus, doesn’t it, old boy? a familiar voice piped up in Rick’s head. Beneath the layers of grief and anger he felt a small spark of laughter. Jonathan probably would make that joke if he could.

Rick bid Atifa goodbye and found Izzy at the helm, unusually sombre.

“O’Connell.”

“Hey, Izzy. Thanks for coming to the rescue.”

The pilot snorted. “Like I had any choice. Your kid picked the lock on my door and then your wife just blasted it with a shotgun. Hell of a family you got.”

“Yeah. Well, it just got smaller.”

Izzy opened his mouth and closed it wordlessly. Rick ran a hand over his face, too tired for sarcasm.

“…So, where to?” Izzy asked eventually in a would-be casual voice, making a show of fiddling with buttons and firing up the boiler.

“Apparently you know the way to the Medjai camp?”

“Yep. A whole load of tents pitched near a little oasis and lots and lots of scary people in black. Kids, too, if you can believe it.”

“’That far?”

“Nah, about twenty minutes as Dee flies. Even with the damage your boy did to my dirigible we should be there in half an hour.”

Rick blinked. “Dee?”

“I gave my lady a name, O’Connell – got a problem with that?”

In other circumstances, Rick would have enjoyed ribbing Izzy. They had the kind of back-and-forth that could last for hours, back in the day; pretty entertaining, as pastimes went. Right now, though… Right now he had rarely wanted his wife and son in his arms more badly. If only to make sure they were still alive.

He replied with a vague gesture and made for the sleeping quarters, where Izzy had put up Evy and Alex.

Izzy had a big mouth and a tendency to put his foot in it, but he was smarter than people often gave him credit for. He threw a look at Rick over his shoulder and muttered, “Hey, O’Connell? Sorry about Carnahan.”

Rick tapped his shoulder in thanks and walked away.

The night had been hell. He had a feeling the day would be worse.

.⅋.

The night had been long. Ardeth had a feeling the day would be longer still.

He barely had time to see to his wounds once they came back to the camp. As High Commander, he had to oversee the aftermath of the battle just as he had the preparations. This meant making sure tents were pitched up for the wounded, seeing that families received their dead in private, and directing the flow of information about who lived, who needed treatment and what kind, and who would never come back. Fortunately, after a while he was able to delegate and let things run their course. After giving a few last orders, he left to look for his family.

He found Imeni in their tent, in the Eleventh Tribe section. To his absolute relief, she appeared unhurt. Sabni was asleep on her lap, and she sang softly as she braided Maira’s long dark hair, her hands almost the same colour in the dim light.

When Ardeth entered the tent, he only just had time to get down on one knee before his daughter, braiding forgotten, ploughed into him. Despite his injuries, and despite the exhaustion of almost an entire night of fighting, he took her into his arms and held her close.

Maira was eight; Sabni was three. Unlike her brother, his eldest had clear and vivid recollections of the last time the Medjai had gone out in force to fight Anubis’ Army.

He met Imeni’s eyes over the small dark head. They were shining.

“Allah be praised,” he breathed, softly in order to not wake his son. “I feared –”

“I know. So did I. The fighting was so fierce.” She gave him a smile, her teeth very white in her dark face. “But I heard that the Commander was on his feet, and I had a feeling you would eventually come here.”

“There’s no Commander in this tent. Only a husband and a father.” Ardeth carefully sat down, Maira still clutched to him, and kissed the crown of his wife’s head. “Are you hurt?”

“A nick to the back of the calf, on the right leg. I already treated it. I’ll just avoid walking today and limp a little for the next few weeks.” Her long, almond-shaped eyes meandered over what she could see of his body. “What about you?”

Ardeth shook his head. “A few scratches here and there. A small price to pay to keep the Army of Anubis at bay. Especially when we lost so many warriors. Even Maher’s men were attacked, right at the foot of the Pyramid.”

Imeni’s eyes widened.

“Really?”

“Yes. His message said he lost about a dozen people. Plus some of the Westerners who surrendered when they took the camp. Maher insisted the survivors be treated better than those who were still coming out from the Pyramid.”

“What happened to the Pyramid of Ahm Shere, Dad?” came Maira’s voice from against his chest, somewhat muffled by his robes. Ardeth gently ran a hand into her hair, now almost completely loose. It was dark and quiet inside the tent; the soft weight of his daughter against him and the warm shoulder of his wife against his own felt comfortable and familiar. For the umpteenth time since sunrise, he sent a prayer to Allah in gratitude.

“Bad people went inside to release the Army of Anubis, good people went inside to stop them. I’m guessing they must have been successful.” Maira absently played with the hem of his shirt, and he was glad he had taken the time to put on clothes that were not bloody and tattered. “When the Army disappeared, the Pyramid started collapsing, but some of the people had time to come out before it was destroyed.”

“What about Alex and his mother?” she asked. “And his dad and uncle? Did they come out?”

“I hope so, sweetheart. I haven’t heard from them yet.” Ardeth met his wife’s eyes again, and saw his own vague worry reflected there.

He was debating what to say and not say when Nuya, a young man who often worked as his aide, lifted the flap at the entrance of the tent and called softly, “Commander? Westerners are coming.”

“What kind of Westerners?” Ardeth asked cautiously. Nuya smiled.

“Ours. The balloon is landing between the Eighth and Ninth Tribe sections.”

Ardeth couldn’t help a grin, relieved. The world just would not be the same without Evelyn’s passion for knowledge, Rick’s calm strength, Jonathan’s wry humour, or Alex’s childlike enthusiasm. It might be quieter, and – as some people muttered sometimes – safer, but it would be colder, and definitely not as entertaining.

Imeni kissed his head near his ear. “Go, and give them my love,” she said, smiling. “And tell them that tea would be nice if they have the time.”

Ardeth gently pried Maira’s hands from around his torso and kissed her forehead, promising he would be back soon. Then he followed Nuya into the blinding mid-morning sun, forcing his face back into a serious expression.

When he saw the dirigible, though, and spotted the O’Connells walking down the gangway, the grin sneaked back on his face despite himself.

“My friends,” he began in English, delighted, “you—”

His voice trailed off.

Something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

Alex was clinging to his mother, hiccuping from time to time, his face blotchy. A few stray tears rolled on his cheeks he didn’t bother to wipe. Evelyn looked like brittle steel, pale and hollow-eyed. O’Connell walked behind her, shoulders slumped. His face, usually so expressive, was set in stone, with deep, hard lines.

Ardeth searched in vain for the fourth member of the little family until denial made way for a leaden resignation that would shortly, he knew, turn into sorrow.

“What happened?” he asked in a low voice when he reached them.

“Not now,” O’Connell replied, sounding – and looking – nothing short of exhausted. He still corrected himself. “I mean – I’m glad you’re okay, Ardeth, I really am. Just… Oh, man.” He ran a hand across his grimy face. His whole body was battered and dusty, and he appeared to be feeling every single bruise. “Do you have a tent or something, somewhere private? Evy doesn’t – she needs to stay with her brother a while, y’know? And Alex needs to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe, where he can rest.”

There was something heartbreaking about his subdued, halting voice. It also drove the point home, though the words themselves were never spoken.

Ardeth nodded, suddenly unspeakably weary. “If it’s all right with you and Evelyn, I think Imeni would be glad to look after him. She always says he’s very well-behaved.”

There was a flash of something on O’Connell’s face that might have been a smile in other circumstances.

“Your wife is a very kind woman.” He turned to Evelyn and Alex; after a few seconds’ quiet conversation, he said, “Yeah, that’d be good. Thank you.”

Thus Ardeth left Evelyn and O’Connell standing by the dirigible with the promise that he would be back shortly, and Alex followed him to his family’s tent.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly after a while, “about your uncle.”

Alex hiccuped and ran his sleeve across his eyes. Fresh tears immediately replaced the ones he’d wiped.

“He shouldn’t be d—dead,” he said in a strangled voice, eyes riveted to the ground. “It’s not… it’s not f—fair.”

“I know.”

“He got out. He and Dad g—got out, and he was fine, and then he… There was blood on the… He shouldn’t b—be dead.”

Ardeth tightened his hand around the boy’s, and wished there was something he could say.

Alex had fallen silent except for snuffles and hiccups by the time they reached the tent. Sabni was awake, and played with wooden cups while his mother braided Maira’s hair. Imeni looked up from her work when they entered, first in curiosity, then in alarm.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as Ardeth made Alex sit on the cushions next to her. The boy barely reacted.

He sighed. “Jonathan’s dead.”

“Tal-lāh1,” she breathed. She’d been fond of the Englishman. He had made her laugh. He had made Ardeth laugh, too, come to think of it – and he had also saved his life. Not many people could attest to both.

Of all the friends he would have to bury tomorrow, Jonathan Carnahan had to be the most unlikely. He was rarely serious, sometimes a little ridiculous, and much too fond of earthly riches; but he was also the kind of man who loved his family so much he repeatedly followed them into the worst situations no matter how scared he was.

“What happened?” Imeni asked in Arabic, reaching to Alex, tentatively at first, then cradling him like she had cradled Sabni. Alex clung to her, eyes closed, gulping.

“I don’t know yet.” His eyes went over to Maira, standing protectively near her little brother, who was staring at Alex with wide eyes. “Do you mind looking after him for a little while? His parents and I need to take care of the body.”

“Of course.” Imeni’s dark eyes were bright, but this time sadness, not joy, made them gleam. She looked down at Alex in her arms. “Yā ḥabībī2,” she murmured. “Don’t be ashamed to cry, bunayy3, let it all go. Tears are the grief leaving your soul…”

Her soft words, half Arabic and half English, accompanied Ardeth until he left the soothing darkness of the tent and walked back into the harsh light of day.

.⅋.

Evy seemed to be clinging to her stiff upper lip like a lifeline. She stood silent and unmoving on the sidelines as Rick and Ardeth picked up Jonathan’s body and carried it into an unoccupied tent not too far from the dirigible.

She still hadn’t cried. It was starting to worry Rick a little.

While they walked, he explained to Ardeth, in a few terse words, what had happened: Hamilton and the seal, Baine and his orders to kill, getting separated, losing Ferguson, and stopping Hamilton by making the giant gong fall on him – then running and ducking bullets, reaching safety, and finding out that they had run out of miracles after all. It had only taken one bullet. One. They had dodged all the rest.

Ardeth listened, attentive, grave. He looked almost exactly like he had when Rick had seen him after that battle two years ago, sombre and weary, but there was a crease between his eyebrows and a grim downturn to his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

When they were finished, having draped a blanket on the body for good measure, they stood outside the tent for a moment, watching the camp. People passed by, cried, laughed, held each other, or just walked in silence. The camp was hardly quiet around them, but still Rick felt like all the sounds weren’t reaching his brain correctly. There was no getting rid of that damn hush.

Ardeth looked at him sideways.

“I am glad you’re alive, too, O’Connell,” he said quietly. Rick gave a nod of acknowledgement, then something halfway between a sigh and a snort.

“After all this time,” he said in the same tone, “you can call me ‘Rick’, you know. There’s only two people who –” Damn. He had slipped up again. He cleared his throat, and finished, just a little roughly, “I mean, the only other person who does is Evy.”

Ardeth’s eyes softened just a little.

“Then I will.”

“Thank you.”

And Ardeth left to attend to his duties, leaving Rick to his own.

The tent wasn’t large, but it was high enough to stand in. Inside, the brutal light was dimmed, the shadows softened, but Evy’s face was hard when she sat down on the frayed carpet, a couple of yards from the unmoving form under the blanket.

Rick sat beside his wife, wrapped his arms around her, and waited.

After a while, she said, in a clipped, almost foreign voice, “We could never recover our parents’ bodies, did you know that? After the crash.”

Rick held her closer and kissed her temple. “No, I didn’t.”

“They found parts of the plane floating in the Mediterranean sea, of course, and enough evidence that nobody had survived before sending us the letter. I went to absolute pieces when we got it. Jonathan had to make tea and sit on the floor with me until I could breathe properly. I don’t think he remembers now, though, he looked like a sleepwalker at the time.”

It was warm inside the tent, hot, even. Yet he could feel Evy on the brink of trembling. Shivers were moving up and down her back like ripples on a lake in a light breeze.

“My parents never got a proper grave but at least they had each other. Now, he… We’re going to have to bury him here, far from home, and he’s going to be so lonely…”

The rest of her sentence was lost as she finally yielded to her grief and let the tears fall. She curled into Rick’s chest and sobbed and sobbed while Rick held her tightly, wanting so badly to shelter her from everything and keenly aware that he couldn’t.

Rick spent some of the longest hours of his life in this tent, alternating between a silent vigil and quiet, broken conversations that gradually got less fractured as the sun rose and fell outside. Sleep got very tempting around two in the afternoon, but he rubbed his eyes and stayed stubbornly awake. There was no way in hell he would leave Evy alone with her ghosts and the corpse of her brother.

Toward the end of the afternoon, as Evy drifted in and out of sleep, Rick heard footsteps in the sand on the other side of the canvas. A hand drew the flap, and Ardeth poked his head inside, a very odd look on his face.

“What’s up?” Rick asked, suspicious. Evy stirred against him and turned to Ardeth with the same unspoken question, tousled-haired and puffy-eyed.

Ardeth seemed to hesitate. Then he spoke.

“You told me Tom Ferguson was dead.”

Rick rubbed his eyes and tried to gather his memories. The poor bastard had almost vanished from his mind the moment they had come running out of the pyramid.

“I said he must be. He and Jonathan got trapped on either side of a wall and he got jumped by pygmy mummies. Jonathan was pretty damn sure he was dead. Why?”

“Because…” Ardeth frowned, and continued, his voice as steady as it always was, “Because we finally gathered all the surviving agents. Among them, we found Hamilton; he’s alive, but completely unresponsive. I don’t think he can even hear us.”

Rick’s eyebrow shot up. “How’d he get out of the pyramid, then?”

“Ferguson carried him out.”

“What?”

.⅋.

1(تالله): “By God”

2(‏يَا حَبِيبِي‎‎): “Oh my darling”

3(بُنَيّ): “little son” (endearment)

��trust me?

#Fairy Tales and Hokum #fanfiction #my stuff #the mummy films

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