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Reflection
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Tucker passed in front of a mirror and stopped, did a double take. He'd been doing that a lot, lately, ever since what he and his friends referred to as the 'Egypt incident.' He raised one hand and traced a line under his eye, his lower eyelashes ruffling.
"You checking your eyeliner, Fol-ey?" asked Dash, bumping into him, rudely.
Tucker avoided stabbing himself in the eye and caught himself on the sink. He frowned at the reflection of the jocks in the mirror and scanned the locker room for Danny. Alas, his best friend must still be running punishment laps in the gym.
"Looking for Wimp-ton to save you? That's pretty pathetic," said Dash, jabbing Tucker again.
Tucker spun to face them and started to back away. He wondered if it would be okay to fight back under these circumstances, or if he would get in trouble. Because Tucker could fight. Maybe not as well as Sam and Danny, he was more the tech guy of their group, but all of them could throw a punch. Heck, Tucker could pull back a bow and put an arrow into the center of a target a hundred feet away. That took arm strength.
If he fought Dash, he'd probably win.
But fighting was generally frowned upon at school and with the other jocks as witnesses... Yeah, that wouldn't pan out well. His parents would take his side, but he didn't want to get a bad reputation with the teachers. One of the trio had to stay on their good side. Obviously it couldn't be Danny, and Sam was too argumentative, so it fell to him.
He sighed. Well, he could take a punch, too, if it came to that. He took off his glasses and put them on the back of the sink.
"What're you doing that for?" asked Dash.
"Good glasses are expensive, Dash," said Tucker, flatly, glaring up at the taller boy. "They're also made of glass. I don't want to be wearing them if you decide to hit me in the face."
Dash stared down at him, as though seeing him for the first time. He humphed. "You take all the fun out of it," he complained. "Come on, guys," he said to the other jocks, leading a parade out of the locker room. Tucker sighed and looked back at the mirror.
Eyeliner, huh? Dash probably would have been surprised to find out that Tucker had thought that he'd seen eye makeup on his face. Kohl. No. Not kohl. That was a recent word, and not completely accurate. Mesdemet for the black. Udju for the green. He blinked, unsure where the words had come from.
No, he knew where the words had come from. He just didn't want to think about it.
Danny stumbled into the room, banging the door behind him. "Hi," he said, waving at Tucker. He paused. "Are you okay? You look kind of..." Danny trailed off and shrugged.
"I'm fine," said Tucker. "Just talked my way out of getting beaten up by Dash."
"What, really?" asked Danny, his eyes flickering over Tucker. "Are you sure you're fine? He didn't hit you?"
"Nope. I'm really fine."
He hoped.
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The archery club met right after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, regularly, contrasting with the computer club, which met 'whenever' and 'online.' Usually, meetings coincided with Danny getting detention and Sam's activist stuff. Tucker thought of these afternoons as their 'alone time.' Otherwise, they were, well, not quite joined at the hip, but...
It was a near thing.
Tucker wouldn't have minded if Sam and Danny did join the archery club (or the computer club, for that matter), but it could be nice to have some time away, so that he could sort through certain thoughts. Thoughts such as: What was happening to him?
Because he really had thought that he had thrown off the influence of Duulaman's ghost, or that weird staff, or Hotep-Ra, or whatever had been going on that week, and yet, here he was, over a week later, hallucinating himself wearing Egyptian makeup, of all things.
He squared himself on the edge of the archer range and checked that it was clear. The other members of the club were working with the closer targets. Tucker thought that he would challenge himself today. He pulled back.
The thing was, at the end, when Hotep-Ra was gone, and Tucker was back to himself, he had been able to use that staff, the Scarab Scepter, to return everything to normal. He wasn't sure he should have been. He had no idea how that staff worked. Yet, in that moment he had.
And he did look an awful lot like Duulaman.
"You're doing great today, Foley!" called the club advisor from across the range. "Are you sure you don't want to shoot competitively?"
Tucker rolled his eyes. "I'm sure!" Then he caught sight of his arrows. They were all clustered neatly in the bullseye.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Tucker was good. He wasn't, quite, that good. Not at this range. But, in the moment, as he was shooting, he hadn't registered anything as being unusual. He remembered looking at them as he was aiming, so he wasn't just spacing out.
Archery was practiced in Ancient Egypt, wasn't it? He remembered seeing murals. He remembered the sun shining down on his shoulders as his entourage...
... What?
Tucker frowned. This wasn't going to go away, was it?
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The computer screen cast Tucker's dark bedroom in a blue light. The only sound was him typing away at the keyboard.
Tucker didn't want to worry Danny and Sam. Mostly Danny. He had enough to deal with without worrying that his best friends was going to go crazy and try to kill him. Again.
He cringed. He did not have the best track record when it came to that particular thing. Then again, neither did anyone else close to Danny.
Hence not wanting to worry Danny.
Maybe he should talk to Sam, though. Out of everyone he knew, she was the only one who'd been mind controlled in a similar way. She hadn't said anything about having hallucinations post-Undergrowth, but, then, she wouldn't, would she? Sam had the same reasons Tucker did for keeping quiet.
Tucker made a face at himself. It was probably a sign that their relationship wasn't as healthy as it looked, keeping secrets from each other like this. But... he knew Danny kept secrets. They all did, and they were fine with it. So, Tucker or Sam keeping secrets was fine, too.
As long as it didn't turn into murder attempts. That was not fine.
Tucker slipped his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes and returned his attention to the screen. He was researching Duulaman, and had dived deep into the academic side of the internet. He'd come up against a dozen paywalls and dismissed them all with a few keystrokes.
Duulaman. Pharaoh of Kemet. A descendant of Hatshepsut and an ancestor of Tutankhamen. He had been a fairly progressive member of his family, restoring several of Hatshepsut's monuments after other of his ancestors had done their best to destroy them, making laws concerning the treatment of slaves and foreigners, and forging peace with neighboring countries. He had been well-liked, his popularity having been attested to even years after his death by inscriptions in other graves, praying that their inhabitants would find themselves under Duulaman's rule in the afterlife. He'd been famed for his athletic and magical abilities.
Sadly, academic publications were as skeptical about magic as they were about ghosts.
Tucker rubbed his eyes again.
Duulaman had been murdered. According to his brother, the pharaoh who had succeeded him, the deed had been done by an advisor whose name and image had been systematically removed from everything.
Probably Hotep-Ra. That fit with the ghost's whole thing, and the fact that Tucker couldn't find any information on him.
After another relatively fruitless hour, Tucker pried himself from the chair and went to bed.
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He turned the fine silver mirror over in his hands, contemplating its polished surface. It had been a 'gift' from a Mitanni noble, and had carried a brutal curse into the heart of Kemet, but the curse was loose, now, wound around his very soul, and the mirror itself was merely a harmless, empty vessel.
One that Duulaman could learn from. He ran his fingers along the strange symbols scored on the outer edge of the mirror.
If his advisors would stop arguing for just a moment.
"We must attack at once!" said Hotep-Ra. "This insult against the person of god cannot be borne!"
"But it is harvest season," objected another. "We cannot afford to take the men from the fields. There would be famine!"
"Hotep-Ra," said Duulaman, softly, "brother of my heart, it was not even their king that sent this. Would you raze their whole kingdom and force a tragedy on their own for the sake of one man?"
"One who attacked you and our kingdom through dread magics?" asked Hotep-Ra. "Yes, my pharaoh."
"Then perhaps it is good that I am pharaoh. I know that you love me, but I have no desire for war. Even so," he said, raising his voice, "I have sent certain persons to correct the problem, and my brother has borne a letter to the Mitanni king, explaining the situation. It is true that this assault on our kingdom cannot be suffered quietly."
The advisors took that in. Duulaman turned to the Priestess of Mut and tried not to squint. She was just far enough away that he had trouble seeing her. Sadly, none of his magic had yet succeeded in giving him the eyes of a hawk, but he yet had hope.
"What say you about the curse?" he asked.
Duulaman was a powerful priest in his own right, favored by the gods and his ancestors, but he valued other opinions. Being the focus of the curse might have blinded him to certain aspects of its function.
The priestess bowed. "It is as we first feared," she said. "It binds your great soul, so that you may not pass into the green fields of the Duat when it is your time to do so. Instead, it decrees that, when you die, you must suffer to be born into a common line, far from your rightfully exalted place."
"And for Kemet? For my line?"
The priestess, an experienced woman who had served Duulaman's father, actually trembled. "That, whence your second life reaches the age of reason, you shall understand, and you shall see the last of the Pharaohs come to ruin, all our temples abandoned save for nonbelievers, your descendants crushed or cast into obscurity, your name stricken from history, and your tomb robbed by foreigners. She dooms you to watch the slow decay."
This was about what Duulaman had expected. He closed his eyes, pained. If only he had been more careful opening the box... but he had assumed it to be from Hotep-Ra, or his brother, or one of his sisters, for it had been among other, like gifts.
"I see. Fear not. I will take care of it. Kemet shall not fall within our lifetimes."
The relief in the room was palpable. They had faith in Duulaman's power.
Alas, that it might come to naught.
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Tucker woke with a jolt, hand on his heart. He looked around wildly, relaxing when he saw the acid green numbers on his bedside clock. He was here. He was now. He was Tucker.
And it wasn't even time to wake up for school.
Wait. It was Saturday. He wouldn't have to wake up for school anyway.
Alright. So he might have, thousands of years ago, been Duulaman. Fine. He laid back down, breathing through his nose. He dealt with ghosts on a daily basis. He could deal with reincarnation. This was cool. This was fine.
He was definitely having a crisis.
Crap.
He fumbled for his phone, and hit the speed dial for Danny. Danny never slept anyway, it was fine. Besides, stuff like this was why Sam had bought him a phone (a Nokia brick, because ghost fights) in the first place. Dead people were Danny's specialty.
"What's wrong?" asked Danny, far too alert for the small hours of the morning.
"I think I might be Duulaman," said Tucker.
There was a beat of silence. "Yeah?" said Danny, confused.
"Like, I'm a reincarnation of him or something."
"Yeah?" repeated Danny. "I thought that was the whole reason you could use that staff and stuff?"
"Wait," said Tucker. "You mean, you knew all along, and you didn't say anything?"
"I thought you knew and didn't want to talk about it," said Danny. "I'm sorry. Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm just having weird Kem- Egypt flashbacks. I'm fine."
"Do you want me to fly over?"
"No," said Tucker. "I just- Am I still me?"
"I mean, you're you to begin with. You are yourself. That's like, definitional."
"Yeah, but..." Tucker gestured at his ceiling with his hand, even though Danny couldn't see it.
Danny chuckled. "You're still you, Tucker. I know Sam and I aren't always super sensitive, but... We do pay attention, you know? We'd know if you were being taken over. Maybe not right away, but..."
"Thanks," said Tucker, with only a little bit of sarcasm.
"Hey, I like to think we've all come a long way since the thing with Poindexter."
"True," said Tucker. "Hey, thanks, man. I'm sorry about waking you up."
"Don't worry," said Danny. "You didn't. I'd just caught Boxy when you called."
"Oh. That's good. Get some sleep, Danny."
"You, too. Tell me what Egypt was like tomorrow, okay?"
"Kemet," corrected Tucker. "And, yeah. Bye."
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"What are you doing?" demanded Hotep-Ra.
Duulaman turned away from his ritual tools and fixed an un-amused eye on Hotep-Ra. "I may have made it your place to question me," said Duulaman, "but I thought I had made my decision on this matter clear. The method your faction proposed is too uncertain, too risky."
"I have made a mirror," said Hotep-Ra, "one that will recognize your soul in whatever body it should take. With it, we could search all of Kemet for you when you are reborn and then lay you properly to rest, as you deserve, before the curse comes to fruition."
"And if I should be born in lands beyond?"
"Then we should look there, too!"
"Starting all sorts of wars on the way, no doubt. Tell me, brother of my heart, what is the difference between the young man who falls in war, whose body is left for the crows, and the old man who is buried peacefully, and who will find joy in the Duat?"
"The devotion of his family!" responded Hotep-Ra instantly.
Duulaman shook his head sadly and looked back to his tools, touching them softly. He had already completed the ritual that would force the curse to carry his soul thousands of years into the future. By the time his next life reached the age of reason, there would be no pharaohs for the curse to affect. And if there were? Well, it would have been a good long time, and the curse would have weakened significantly. Perhaps even to the point of unraveling.
"No, Hotep-Ra. The difference between a tragedy and a happy ending is time. All kingdoms fall. All civilizations fade."
"Not this one."
"Even this one. The only questions are when and how."
"No," said Hotep-Ra. "No. Never!"
Duulaman felt, rather than heard, the scrape of metal against oiled leather and reached for his staff, which lay across from him, on the other side of his ritual. He was too late. He had trusted Hotep-Ra too much, let him get too close, and he felt the bronze knife slide between his ribs. His eyelids fluttered as his hands groped up his chest.
He was dying.
"I will see you, in the next life," he whispered, blood bubbling in his throat.
And then he was gone.
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It was bright when Tucker woke again.
He felt... oddly calm. It was nice to know that he had succeeded in out-waiting the fall of Pharaonic Egypt, even though the fact that it was gone made his heart shiver.
Well. He pulled his phone over, and texted Danny. I know what it feels like to die, now, he said. Maybe they'd be able to bond over it. Or Danny would give him some coping pointers, since Tucker was pretty sure he'd have at least one breakdown over this. Either one would be good.
He stood up and walked to the bathroom. His reflection stared back, completely normal. No weird eye shadow, no Egyptian clothes, just Tucker and his pajamas.
Behind it stretched miles and miles of sand.
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The Egyptian words are for real Egyptian words. Kemet is what Egypt was called in ancient times. Mitanni was a real country in the middle east that Egypt had some wars with during the 18th dynasty. Duulaman is (as you probably already know) fake and I randomly popped him into the 18th dynasty because that's the one King Tut was in.