Author's Note. And the one-shot saga continues. I sort of regret not putting all these movie fillers in one place, but eh. It's done now. Until the next one hits. Basically, just another little filler from the movie, after Evelyn is captured by Imhotep, but before they go sweeping away in a funnel cloud through the desert.

Disclaimer. The characters of The Mummy are the property of Universal Studios.

Nasty Little Fellows

He was the sort of person she was in the habit of ignoring.

She'd been taught from a young age to avert her eyes and walk with a purpose when she happened to spot the likes of him. Don't make eye contact with them, my dear. At best they'll try to bully you into buying something worthless, and at worst...well. Just don't make eye contact. By the time she was a teenager, Evelyn had figured out that her father was being a tad overcautious, and the chances of suffering any horrible crime were quite slim in the safety of the tourist district. But just the same, she avoided men like him as a rule, and when she saw such people loitering on the curb with their cigarettes, she instinctively walked a little quicker and held her breath as she passed them by.

She'd made a point to avoid him in particular, too, ever since she found out he was leading the Americans to Hamunaptra. He was exactly the sort of person who claimed to know the way to the City of the Dead and other such places of promised wealth. She'd seen men like him before who boasted great discoveries with dubious backstories. Jonathan had been taken in by more than a few of them, and dragged out to rubble piles of no significance whatsoever. She was surprised that this man actually knew the way at all. He was thin and dirty and stank like the streets, and she wouldn't have trusted him to lead her around the block, much less out into the desert.

So in addition to being utterly terrified at her impending death, worried sick over her brother and Rick and Dr. Bey and that...desert man...she supposed she couldn't help an instinctive feeling of apprehension to be shuffling along beside a grimy and dissolute fellow like this. She reminded herself that he'd proven himself treacherous and unscrupulous. But a part of her also knew she never trusted him to begin with. He was too suspicious and unkempt. And while she supposed it wasn't fair to judge people by their appearances - especially when the only reason she wasn't getting proper work as an Egyptologist was because she was a woman - she didn't know how else to survive in the world. It was regrettable Beni looked so shifty, but it was even more regrettable that he was every bit as untrustworthy as he looked.

Anyway, he was a slippery little scoundrel and she didn't like being trapped in his company.

She kept a protective hand on her locket, running it back and forth down its chain. She felt him glance at her with his grim eyes and imagined that he was assessing how much her one little piece of jewelry was worth.

"Are you cold?" he muttered in a voice that didn't sound like it actually cared.

She let out a little scoff and refused to look at him. "No."

"You look cold."

"I'm fine."

He chuckled in his wheezing, sniggering sort of way, and she rolled her eyes.

"You can have my jacket," he told her, too cruel and amused to be serious.

Her teeth clenched, and she crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't want your jacket. God knows what's infesting it."

He sniffed and whined, "I was just trying to be nice."

Evelyn huffed a sigh and glared at him with narrowed eyes. "You were not, and you know it."

Beni stared down at her with fake, wide-eyed innocence. "It isn't my fault you're too good for my jacket."

"Oh, like you were really going to let me borrow it."

He clutched the dirty, oversized thing a little closer to his body. "Well now I am not." His eyes dropped from her face down to her bare shoulders and the low neckline of her black nightgown. She hated his leering smirk. "Now I definitely am not."

"Ooh!" Evelyn breathed, crossing her arms even tighter around herself in a vain effort to cover some cover her body from his eyes.

He snickered. "That actually made it better."

She took one glance at her breasts, pressed tightly together between her arms, and immediately dropped her clenched fists to her sides. She hoped he couldn't see how red her face was in the growing gray of the early morning.

"Oh, come on..."

She ignored him and tried to walk faster, but he kept up. She couldn't go any faster without running into Imhotep, though, so she sighed in defeat, resigned to walking beside Beni. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and just couldn't believe him. Sneaky little fellow or not, how could he do a thing like this? How could he serve Imhotep and lead her to her death without even the vaguest show of regret? She pursed her lips angrily, and turned on him. "You don't have to do this, you know."

He stared back at her with sarcastic, incredulous eyes. "Oh, you're right. Because I owe it to you, Evelyn."

She flinched at the sound of her name. This was the first real conversation she'd ever had with the man, and while she supposed it was obvious he knew her name (she knew his, after all), there was something strange and almost jarring about hearing it come out of his mouth. She swallowed and fought the urge to cross her arms again.

"Well don't you think you owe it to the human race?"

He laughed.

"Or - or..." She let out a disgruntled sigh, looking him over desperately. She strongly doubted he had a wife or children, but... "What about your mother? Don't you think you owe it to her?"

"My mother is dead."

"Or your father, then?"

"My father can go to hell."

Evelyn huffed a sigh, watching him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. "You can't really feel that way."

He scoffed. "Well I do."

"About your own father?"

His lip wrinkled irritably. "Yep."

She shook her head. "Isn't there anyone at all you care about enough not to go through with this?"

"No."

"No?"

Beni stopped in his tracks and turned to her squarely. "No." He cast a grim eye at Imhotep's direction. "There is no way to stop him, anyway."

Evelyn bit back the hopeful surprise in her throat at his disgruntled tone. She took a step closer to him and whispered eagerly, "But there is! There's a golden book, and reading from it will make him mortal again. He can be stopped, you see, and you could help me do it - "

Beni's mouth twisted thoughtfully, and he reached a hand up to rub the stubble on his chin. His gaze wandered away from her, back to Imhotep, and for a moment she genuinely thought he might be taking this into consideration. That perhaps he wasn't just a slimy fellow out to grab whatever he could. That maybe she and everyone else had misjudged and maligned him, and all he really needed was the right opportunity to be a good person, and he'd take it -

"Eh, no," he said at last with a shrug. "He promised me the treasures of Hamunaptra, so...I think I will just take that instead."

"But - "

"I don't care," he told her bluntly, cutting her off. They had reached the edge of the city, and Imhotep stopped, planting his feet in the desert sand. Beni strolled up to stand beside him, and Evelyn's eyes narrowed at his thin, stooped back.

"You would really let him sacrifice me just so that you can be rich?" she called.

She watched his shoulders shake with malicious chuckles, and he glanced back to sneer at her instead of answering.

Evelyn huffed. "You can be a better person than this!"

He stopped chuckling, and turned around to look at her with grim, serious eyes. She stared back at him in confusion, unsure whether she could take comfort in his contemplative gaze, or if she could even be sure he was contemplating anything at all. His mouth was set in its usual unpleasant sneer, and his lips twitched while he watched her.

"I am not a bad person," he said defensively. Desperately.

Evelyn's eyes widened, and she stared back at him, shocked.

"You're joking. That's a joke, isn't it?"

He reached a trembling hand instinctively for something under his shirt (perhaps a necklace?), and his hand held fast around it.

"I am not a bad person," he said again. "There are worse people than me."

Evelyn's eyes narrowed, and she scoffed. "Well, forgive me if none come to mind just now."

Beni crossed his arms over his chest petulantly. "I am just doing what I can to survive."

"Ha."

His mouth twisted with a scowl, and he pointed an accusatory finger at her. "You're the one who woke him up. You brought all of this on yourself, and everybody else."

Evelyn blinked, her lips moving with the want of words, but none rising to the occasion just then. She stared at him, and he stared back, a slow smirk working itself into his face. His eyes had a hollow, superior glint in them and she hated the smug way he was looking her over.

"You are a worse person than I am," he told her cruelly. "You took the book from Dr. Chamberlain. It was his discovery, but you just could not bear it. So you took it and you read it because you did not care that it was cursed - "

"Stop it."

" - and now the Americans are dead, and Imhotep is all-powerful, and O'Connell and your brother are probably dead, too - "

"I said stop it!"

" - all because of you."

Evelyn stalked over to him, and before she could stop herself, she raised her hand and slapped him hard across his mean, smirking little face. She knocked a stream of curses right out of his mouth, and he spat them in the sand before turning to glare at her in angry shock.

"What the hell, Evelyn?" he demanded, rubbing his face tenderly. He flexed his mouth and winced, his brow furrowing up in a scowl. "Do you know what? I am doing the world a favor, letting Imhotep sacrifice you. It is justice."

"Oh, shut up," she retorted. "You don't care a thing about justice."

"Well neither do you. You think I should risk my life and help you even though you are the reason any of us are in this mess at all."

Evelyn squared her shoulders and stared up at him steadily. "I think you should help me because it's the right thing to do."

His eyes narrowed back at her, but he said nothing.

She took a breath, "Now, I made a very big mistake, but I'm doing everything I can to correct it. All you're doing is capitalizing off of it."

Beni scoffed. She shook her head, and her hands curled into tight, desperate fists.

"So don't you dare try to tell me I'm a worse person than you are."

That's what she said, just before the sand rose up all around them on Imhotep's whim, and they were suddenly, violently caught up in a torrent of wind. The ground was ripped out from under them and they screamed, their voices lost in the howl of the cyclone.

That's what she said to him, and he probably forgot every word in the seconds after she said them, as they were barreled up and away. He probably forgot them, but she didn't. She didn't forget them, if only because her voice had been so defensive and desperate, and her stomach had been turning with cold guilt, and she couldn't shrug off the pinpricking feeling his words had left on her skin.

He was the bad person. He was.

She'd known that the moment she'd caught sight of him on the barge, sneaking around like a thief. He was bad and he'd always been bad. O'Connell said he'd left him to die in the ruins of Hamunaptra. He didn't have an honorable bone in his body, and now, even though she'd offered him the opportunity to help her destroy Imhotep, he'd refused. He was a horrid, selfish little man and he was living on borrowed time. Bad things always caught up with bad people.

And, well...yes, maybe she was responsible for Imhotep. Alright, she definitely was responsible for Imhotep. But that didn't make her a bad person. This was all a mistake of harmless curiosity, and...well, even if the Book of the Dead was Dr. Chamberlain's discovery, he'd only gotten it because he'd shoved Evelyn off of the dig site in the first place.

It wasn't like she was actually going to steal it...

Was she?

Evelyn's mind was a haze, and the events leading up to Imhotep's resurrection were fuzzy and surreal. Now that there was an undead ancient priest terrorizing Cairo, it was hard to remember what she'd been thinking before she believed in such notions. I just wanted to get a look at the book, she told herself firmly. God knew Dr. Chamberlain never would have dreamed of letting her touch it (though he might have extended such a professional courtesy to a man in the field). She just wanted to look at it, was all, and see if the key really fit with the lock. She never would have read from the book if she'd known it was going to put the Americans' lives in danger.

She wasn't a bad person.

She wasn't a bad person and she didn't deserve this. No one deserved to be a human sacrifice. She'd made a mistake. Just a mistake. She wasn't being malicious or cruel or selfish when she slipped the book out of Dr. Chamberlain's grasp...

Well, perhaps a little selfish.

But not like Beni. He was the one who led Imhotep to the Americans so he could kill them. He was the one who was helping Imhotep get her back to Hamunaptra. He didn't care what happened to anyone, as long as he was benefiting. He was the bad person here. He was.

And bad things always caught up with...

Bad people.

end.