Author's note: I thought chapter 17 would be met with crickets, but it turns out that people are still interested in this fic :') THANK YOU SO MUCH to those who left an unsigned review (and whom I can't reply to directly). In the midst of general awfulness (2020 is… not really starting out to be a good year, to say the least) I hope this fic brings a smile. Even if our heroes are not in a good place right now…

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" is a Harlen and Koehler song, and my favourite versions are Ella Fitzgerald and George Harrison. It's not just a great song, the title describes our heroes' predicament pretty accurately :P

Disclaimer: Stephen Sommers owns and developed The Mummy and The Mummy Returns; the characters, places, some situations are his creation. Some things and characters I did make up, but every character here is fictitious, and has nothing to do with any person, living, dead, or in-between. Who knows.

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Chapter 18: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Alex had been in trouble before, or at least thought he had been in trouble before. This, he decided as he watched the Medjai and Hamilton's men wait for battle behind their flimsy rampart of fire, was so much worse.

He had promised his mum that he wouldn't set foot outside the dirigible. It had been a solemn promise, almost a vow. He didn't make a lot of those. But the look on his mother's face and the way her voice had almost shaken compelled him to take it as seriously as he could.

Besides, judging from people's faces, he wouldn't be much safer on the ground anyway.

It looked as though everyone had forgotten him. Mum and Izzy had been down into the pyramid for some time now, and the Medjai had been so busy preparing for the unexpected horror coming their way that nobody had even noticed the boy on the dirigible. To be honest, Alex didn't particularly want to be noticed.

But, he thought with rising terror as the Army of Anubis charged the meagre forces behind the fire with a roar straight from somebody's nightmare, he probably would be at some point.

Alex had been terrified when Imhotep had taken off his mask and shown him his true face. He still dreamed about it, sometimes – that, and a few other things. It had been easier, later, when the mummy had looked human and Lock-Nah had been under strict orders not to kill him, to try to be brave like Mum, tough like Dad, and make jokes like Uncle Jon. Imhotep had been clever, smug, confident – all very human traits. The monsters that now crashed against the fires and the swords and threatened to destroy the human beings fighting desperately were not clever. They were not smug. They were not driven by ambition, a quest for power, or love. They were just mindless killing machines.

And if they managed to break through the Medjai's defences, they would reach him in a matter of seconds.

From the ground came a shriek over the noise of battle. The sound shook Alex out of his fear-induced daze. He ran to the command booth and stared at the controls, trying hard to remember everything Izzy had told him about Dee.

His mind drew a complete blank. He groaned and pressed the palms of his fists against his eyes.

"Okay," he whispered out loud. "Okay. To get Dee off the ground, I need to… I need…"

He was alarmingly close to tears when the word hit him like lightning.

"Buoyancy! I need positive buoyancy!"

Right. Positive buoyancy meant being lighter than air. To achieve that… They had talked about it in school last year…

Alex snapped his eyes open and stared at the control panel, finally knowing what to look for.

What he needed to do was heat up the air in the balloon. For that, he had to start up the engine first, then throttle it at just the right time and adjust the elevators – the angle had to be steep enough to get the dirigible into the wind, but not so much that it just shot up in the sky or tipped over.

Right. Easy enough.

"How do you start up this thing!?" he cried in exasperation and mounting panic. Izzy had made it look so easy…

Wait. What was the one thing Izzy hadn't wanted him to touch?

Alex's eyes darted to a little knob protruding near the helm's axle. He turned it in one swift wrist movement like he'd seen his dad start up the car time and time again.

A shudder ran through the whole dirigible and a low sound, like a purr, resonated through the balloon and inside the cabin. The boiler had flared up. Even from the wheelhouse, Alex could see the glow of the flame.

Izzy had said it took five to ten minutes to fill up the whole balloon with hot air. Alex used that time to carefully study all the knobs, levers and pedals he could see, wracking his brain to remember what each of them did.

When he could finally feel the dirigible move upwards, he grabbed the axe Izzy had shown to his mum in case of fire or other emergencies and ran to the mooring lines.

The front lines had to go first so Dee would tip up rather than down. Alex brought the axe on the thick ropes with all the strength of a desperate ten-year-old. He hacked and hacked at the hemp, nicking the deck under it. Whether cursing with every blow helped or not, he didn't know, but he kept going just in case it did.

It blocked the sounds coming from the camp, at least.

By the time he tackled the last line, the dirigible was almost fully in the air, straining against the rope. Alex's arms ached fiercely, as did his back and shoulders; sweat dripped into his eyes and made his shirt stick to him like glue. The axe seemed to get heavier with every chop.

"Come on," he muttered, "come on, break, you rotten goddang bleeding –"

Miraculously, the rope split with one last hack. The untethered dirigible, finally breaking free, rose above the ground so suddenly Alex lost his footing and tumbled to the deck. He scrambled back up, quite breathless, axe forgotten on the floor, and ran to the rail.

The ground was falling back beneath Dee, the dilapidated tents and forgotten vehicles growing smaller and smaller. In the light of the fire wall, now staved in at several spots, he could see the Warriors of Anubis storming the camp, cutting, slashing, hacking at the people there like he'd cut and slashed and hacked at the ropes. A few tried to jump up and reach the dirigible, but by now he was high enough in the air to be safe. The humans were just as outnumbered and outgunned (outsworded, maybe, Alex thought) as they had been at the start of battle, but they put up a good fight, defending one another fiercely.

The numbers were still stacked against them, though, ridiculously high.

Alex had never started up such a complex piece of machinery by himself. A tiny part of him, the part that was justifiably proud, wanted to whoop and holler, but it was completely overwhelmed by exhaustion and terror.

Mum… Dad… Uncle Jon… I really, really hope you're okay down there.

For all that he had lived virtually his whole life in Egypt, Izzy had never actually been inside a pyramid. His domain was the sky, not the bowels of the earth or those glorified corpse depositories where rich people piled up their belongings in the hopes that they'd follow them after death. Izzy knew better than to believe that was true. At least he hoped it wasn't, as he had sold away a few dubiously-acquired items in his time, and he didn't like the idea of their dead owners coming after him for that. Finders keepers, mate. Let the living enjoy what the dead can't.

When he had followed Mrs O'Connell into the pyramid, he had not known what to expect. Darkness, surely, and dusty stone walls, maybe a few rats, scorpions, or spiders. As it turned out, he'd been completely off the mark. There actually was a weak greenish light coming from who knew where, just enough to see by and – hopefully – spot the booby traps. The dusty walls he had anticipated appeared to be made of different shades of gold, copper and amber, half-hidden behind the kind of lush jungle that would put the greenest oases to shame. And while he could certainly hear skittering and chirping between the fronds, so far he had not encountered any kind of wildlife.

Maybe this last point shouldn't be the one that worried him the most, but it really did.

Mrs O'Connell walked in front, a gun in one hand and a sword in the other, and he covered their backs with a pistol and a few magazines in an old leather bandolier. The realisation that they had been too late to stop the bad guys before they summoned the army from hell had turned her pale, quiet, and even more resolute. There was no sense in stopping now, she'd said, and Izzy had followed. They faced certain death on the surface and only probable death below, after all.

Every now and then, the ridiculousness of the situation slapped him in the face like a dead fish. What the hell am I doing here? I'm a pilot, for God's sake, not an adventurer. Why did I sign up for this again?

The answer was, as always, O'Connell. Both of them, actually. Or two and a half, if you counted the kid.

Mrs O'Connell turned to him, her eyes bright in the gloom.

"You're very quiet," she whispered, something like approval in her voice. Izzy shrugged.

"Force of habit. One time O'Connell and I had to sneak out from the casbah in Beni Mellal. Not alerting two hundred Moroccan soldiers is pretty good incentive to be stealthy."

Oh, he'd got her attention now. Her eyes gleamed.

"What happened?"

"Well, O'Connell didn't do stealth at the time. We ended up getting chased by two hundred Moroccan soldiers and had to leg it to Casablanca in disguise – on donkeys – because they'd shot my plane down the day before."

And didn't that little memory still smart. Two days on a rocky, bumpy road, spent getting beaten down by the sun and biting a lot of sand. He was pretty sure his ass had never quite recovered, and that was before it caught a bullet. His donkey, on the other hand, had seemed completely fine.

Maybe it was the mental picture of O'Connell on a donkey, or maybe it conjured a completely different memory, but Mrs O'Connell gave a small smile.

"He's improved since."

"Well, I hope so. That was a long time ago."

One of the things Izzy had dreaded, when the woman and the boy had blasted his door down and demanded he dropped everything and took them to the arse-end of nowhere, was to have to dredge up fun anecdotes of O'Connell from two decades ago. Not that he had forgotten, but most of the more… palatable ones had been used up during the return trip to Cairo two years ago. There was a kid present who drank in his every word whenever his father's past was concerned, which meant that any story involving anything more than mildly criminal activity – or worse, O'Connell chasing tail and making a fool of himself – was off. Which didn't leave room for a lot of stories.

But then the whole family had been reunited at the time. The atmosphere couldn't have been more different from the little bit of sightseeing they'd had to get there. And it was certainly different from these past few days, with Evelyn O'Connell's husband and brother in dire straits, a worried kid, and a tense desert warrior onboard. Maybe that was why the kid and his mother had kept their prying to a minimum.

Bloody hell, the kid. He'd better find both boy and dirigible in one piece when he got back.

They were walking again, quietly. Every now and then Mrs O'Connell stopped to hack at branches and leaves to uncover hieroglyphs on the walls; she muttered to herself as she deciphered them, finger moving slowly on the pictures, then went on confidently.

Izzy still couldn't tell whether the sword was serving its intended purpose or not. Considering how steady it was in her hand, that was doubtful.

The noises – as though muffled by the undergrowth around them – almost caught him by surprise.

As they approached an antechamber of some sort, he could hear yelping, panicked yelling, and gunshots, all coming closer and closer very quickly. Then he could feel a gust of wind on his face, carrying a rotten stench that turned his stomach and the sound of high-pitched, hissing laughter.

In front of him, Mrs O'Connell stopped dead.

"Oh my God," she said in a toneless voice which for some reason sent chills down Izzy's spine.

Then she ran forwards without looking back.

Izzy, cursing and shaking his head, ran after her.

The scene he came across made him wish he could just drop everything and run back in the other direction. A dozen white guys in dark suits were fleeing, some silent, some screaming their heads off, shooting at and being pursued by – Izzy squinted into the darkness – nasty-looking creatures about twelve inches high armed with spears, knives, and blowpipes. One man at the back tripped and fell; the critters swarmed him and stabbed him with shocking glee.

Mrs O'Connell sheathed her sword, aimed, and shot at the creatures one by one.

Once his brain reconnected with his body, Izzy did the same, muttering darkly what even he wasn't sure were curses or prayers.

When the smoke cleared and relative peace settled once more, four of the guys were dead, and so were half a dozen of the creatures, their remains scattered across the room. The rest had fled.

One of the suits stared at their unlikely saviours.

"Th—thank you," he stammered. "What were – did you just – who are you?"

"I'm a librarian," Mrs O'Connell answered with curt dignity. "Dr Evelyn O'Connell, British Museum. Now, I'm looking for Charles Hamilton, or failing that, the two men you and your… associates have brought inside this pyramid against their will. Where are they?"

The guy just gaped. Fortunately, another one, more alert, took over and said, "Would you be the Dr O'Connell who discovered Hamunaptra, by any chance?"

Mrs O'Connell made an impatient gesture. "Yes, yes, that's me – now, where are my husband and my brother? And your superior?"

The suit shared an uneasy look with his mates. Then he turned sheepish eyes at Mrs O'Connell.

"Hamilton's down there, but I think he messed with something a little too… Well. He stepped on a seal, and then there was this weird light, and he hovered in the air… Let's just say I don't think he's there now, so to speak."

"You mean the wheel's turning but the bloody hamster is dead," muttered another suit in a slight Scottish accent.

"You mean the bastard responsible for all this mess isn't even going to answer for it?" Izzy shook his head in disgust. "Typical." Then the guy's exact words registered. "Wait, he hovered? What the hell is going on down there?"

The grumpy Scot looked at him and Mrs O'Connell with hollow eyes. "There was a little light show, and now Hamilton's possessed or something. He must have given orders to Baine, because –"

Mrs O'Connell interrupted him, frowning. "Baine?"

"Agent Baine, he's the head of the hit squad. Hamilton picked him for a second-in-command, God knows why. Anyway, Baine ordered us to kill them. But," he quickly added as Mrs O'Connell's eyes glittered dangerously, "they ran off with Ferguson, and, er… some of us took the opportunity to run. We'd had enough of this nonsense."

"Yeah, I thought our job was to protect treasures, not kill our own colleagues," a young man piped up in the back.

Mrs O'Connell's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, 'kill your own colleagues'? And why did Rick and Jonathan run off with Tom Ferguson? He was responsible for their kidnapping in the first place."

The Scottish suit shrugged. "Ferguson tried to reason with… well, us. Said cold-blooded murder wasn't our job. Baine wouldn't have it, though."

"Then the American grabbed him and took his gun," said another man. "That's when Baine said he wouldn't let one agent 'compromise the mission'. I think he would've shot Ferguson if O'Connell hadn't grabbed him and bolted."

"And that's the last we saw of them."

"The three of them, you mean?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Mrs O'Connell fell silent, looking at the corridor leading away from the chamber, her face pinched. It wasn't difficult for Izzy to guess why. O'Connell and Carnahan were both somewhere in that maze, surrounded by evil creatures and with a kill order on their heads. For all he – and she – knew, they were irretrievably lost, even if they somehow managed to evade both threats.

The thought must have occurred to at least one agent or two, because Izzy saw a few avoid her eyes and look uncomfortable.

"The exit is that way," she finally said, pointing towards the way they had come from. "I hacked at the vegetation for directions, just follow the cut branches to the surface. But I'm warning you, you may not like what you find up there. Your superior did 'mess with' dark forces beyond his understanding. He released the Army of Anubis. If you are scholars as well as treasure-seekers and kidnappers, you will know why stopping Hamilton is paramount."

Her tone was biting, her accent even posher than usual. Her voice sliced through the room, razor-like, even sharper than that sword of hers.

The suits looked at each other, then slunk out of the room in a single file, guns still drawn, glancing everywhere uneasily. The Scot was last to leave the room, and threw the pilot and the librarian an almost apologetic glance.

"I've heard about Anubis' Army. I'll take my chance with them. Down here there's just death."

Izzy watched them leave, shoulder to shoulder with Mrs O'Connell, who looked dismayed.

"But they – oh, what utter rot – what about taking responsibility and stopping Hamilton while we still have a chance?"

Izzy shrugged. "Don't ask me. I think taking on this pyramid of death with the murder midgets and possessed maniacs is just as suicidal as goin' up to face that army. The company's a smidge better down here, that's all." Some of the tension left Mrs O'Connell's face, and he took that as a victory. "So – the British Museum? You really are a librarian, huh?"

"Yes, I am," she said with a small smile, "and proud to be. I love my job."

"I can see that." He nodded to her sword and the pistol she still held. She didn't miss the tongue-in-cheek undertone in his voice. Her lips twitched.

"By the way," Izzy asked as they started again towards the heart of the pyramid, "should I actually be calling you Dr O'Connell instead of Mrs?"

The smile got warmer. "Evelyn will do."

"Right. So, uh –"

There was a tremor, somewhere deep in the pyramid, followed by a muffled roar. It was close enough to hear, and feel, but far enough that the floor didn't shake. Izzy grabbed Evelyn's arm and asked in a low voice, as though speaking up would make things worse, "Did you feel that?"

Evelyn nodded, her face set. She strode on, down the corridor and into the half-darkness.

Still Izzy followed, gun in hand, questioning his life choices.

Rick felt rather than heard the explosion. It reverberated under his feet and into the walls, shaking fine dust from the ceiling, and made him stop dead in his tracks.

For a heart-stopping moment he expected the whole pyramid to crumble on top of him; the night was already one of the lousiest he'd ever had in his life – which was saying something – and getting away with a fall like the one he'd just had relatively unscathed made him wonder if he hadn't reached his miracle quota for the week. But the rumbling and the tremors quickly died down, leaving him puzzled and vaguely apprehensive.

He shoved both sensations to the back of his mind to better focus on the tasks at hand, namely surviving, finding Jonathan and Ferguson, and stopping Hamilton somehow. The rest he would worry about later.

The room he had fallen into earlier had felt somewhat familiar, and the stairs he'd taken did lead to an upper level, but making his way back up was taking longer than he had thought. He walked at a leisurely pace, breathing deeply, gun in hand but finger off the trigger just in case. The collection of bruises he'd acquired during his fall made him wince every now and then as muscles and bones protested vigorously. But he would deal with that later, too.

The corridor ended on a larger room with a short stairway at the end, the steps covered in sand. Finally something that did more than ring a bell. They had passed this way earlier, following the gurgle which told them that, logic be damned, somewhere in this pyramid was a small stream.

The murmur of water was soon joined by other sounds – scuffing, scraping, and someone grunting in effort, interspersed with shouts.

Rick tucked his sidearm into his belt with a relieved sigh. He had found his brother-in-law.

Alarm immediately flared up again, quashing the relief, when he realised Jonathan was screaming.

"TOMMY! Hold on, I'm – oh, for Heaven's sake –"

There was a lot in his voice. Anguish, for one, and desperation, plus the flat-out refusal to look something too terrible for words in the face. Rick's heart took a nosedive in his chest. Whatever had happened, it did not sound good.

The impression was confirmed when he reached the end of the corridor. The explosion had obviously come from there: the chamber had lost half its space and was now partitioned by a mound of broken stone and gold blocks, the smallest ten inches large. At the foot of the newly-created wall stood Jonathan, dishevelled and covered in dust, pulling with all his might at a chunk of rock to dislodge it.

There was a motionless body in a dark suit on the other side of the room. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be one of the agents.

Rick's blood turned to ice in his veins. The corpse had a spear planted deep into his skull, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling.

"Jonathan?" he asked, picking up the dead agent's gun and scanning the room for slaughter-happy critters. "What happened?"

Jonathan didn't answer, still busy trying to get through the cave-in by any means necessary. He only seemed to register his brother-in-law's presence when Rick grabbed him by the arms and pivoted him to face him. His normally slanted eyes were very wide, very blue, and mildly crazed as they kept darting back to the wall.

"Rick!" he exclaimed breathlessly, his voice a full octave higher than usual. "Just the man I wanted to see. Can you give me a hand here? I'm trying to –"

"Jonathan, hey – c'mon, Jon, stop. Breathe." There was no sign of the pygmy mummies at all, no sound, no movement, which meant they could afford to linger for a minute. Rick forced his voice down to an appropriate pitch and volume and asked, more slowly, "What happened here?"

Jonathan was still breathing much too quickly and shallowly for comfort, but he was quiet for a few seconds as the question sank in. Then he swallowed hard. When Rick let go of his arms he seemed to fold in on himself and had to grab the wall to stay on his feet.

"Three agents came our way," he finally said, pitch mostly back to normal but his voice rough, like he'd swallowed a mouthful of sand. "They said they were looking for a way out. We made them give us a gun each, T—Tom and I. They had spares, and dynamite as well."

Rick nodded, starting to understand.

"I heard the explosion."

"One of them got scared. Reacted badly. They got trapped behind the… that. They…" Jonathan breathed deeply, a shudder in both inhale and exhale. "Remember the pygmy mummies? Little buggers attacked with no warning. Killed, er, poor Norton over there. We thought they'd gone after the blast, but…"

His voice trailed off, and he stared at the wall again.

"I heard them," he finished, so low Rick had to strain his ears to hear. "I heard them, until… I didn't."

Damn. No wonder he'd been screaming.

Rick heaved a sigh and rubbed his face. For a second the weight of everything – Hamilton, Anubis' Army, Baine and his orders, all the running and falling and the whole damn night – fell on him like a ton of bricks, making his shoulders slump. Sometimes it got tempting to just wish for a break.

From the looks of it, Jonathan was feeling it, too. That and a whole bunch of other things. He stared into the near distance as though afraid of what might happen if he blinked, his eyes red and puffy.

"He's dead, isn't he."

His voice cracked. Something inside Rick's ribcage gave an unpleasant twinge.

"Maybe, maybe not. If he made it, he'll try to find a way out of this place."

Actually, Ferguson was most likely dead behind that wall of gold and rocks, but Rick would be damned if he said it so bluntly. Bad-mannered he could be on occasion, he knew, and not subtle, but never cruel.

Jonathan blinked; the dam broke.

Rick put his hand on Jonathan's right shoulder, looking away to give him some privacy, and allowed them one more minute.

Jonathan's breathing evened out gradually, but there was something hollow and lifeless in his eyes, like an echo of the expression Rick remembered noticing even in the haze of his own grief and rage when Evy had been killed.

Rick's heart sank even lower. Pygmy mummies inside; jackal soldiers of death outside. Nowhere was safe. And Evy – and Ardeth, possibly even Alex – had to be right in the thick of it.

Some things were too awful to contemplate. Especially when you already had to face them once.

"Come on," he said eventually, giving Jonathan's shoulder one last squeeze. "They're probably getting killed up there too, but at least we can do something about that. I think."

The prospect of having something to actually do revived Jonathan a little. He rubbed his eyes and fell into step beside Rick like a sleepwalker, pointedly not looking back at the cave-in. Then a similar thought seemed to occur to him and he abruptly lost what little colour he had left.

"I say, Rick," he breathed, "you don't suppose Evy's—? I mean, surely she's somewhere safe, isn't she?"

Rick kept walking, straining his eyes in the near-darkness, his hand on the dead agent's gun. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

"We're here," he finally said once he was sure his voice would be even. "So are the bad guys and the army from hell. Where do you think she'd rather be?"

"Oh dear God."

"Yeah."

They walked in silence for a little while, eyes flicking here and there, both dreading the same sounds, the same silence, and the same thoughts.

Then Jonathan whispered, "I wonder how Ardeth's doing. Good God, I hope he's all right."

"He's not. But he's alive."

"How do you know that?"

Rick had to think about his answer. Once more, he had no idea how he knew Ardeth was, indeed, alive, but it felt obvious.

Another thing to deal with later. At least this one was somewhat comforting.

"Call it a gut feeling."

Jonathan looked at him curiously.

"And that 'gut feeling' also tells you he's not all right, does it?"

Rick shook his head. "Nah, that's just deduction. He lost a lot of men on the field of battle last time. Can't imagine this time will be different. No officer worth his salt would be 'all right' after that, and he's a good one."

Their post-battle visit to the Medjai camp two years ago remained one of the more unsettling memories he had. Rick O'Connell was no stranger to war, defeat and victory, and the terrible moments as the dust settled when the astonished joy of finding yourself still alive met the mounting horror of counting the dead and the wounded. Amazing how bitter victory could taste. But at least the opponents he had faced in war had been human beings, people who breathed, dreamed, and bled just like he did. The Medjai – men and women, young and old – had battled otherworldly nightmares, beings of sand and magic, who had disappeared after their defeat, leaving behind only death and the terror they inspired.

There had been a kid – a boy that could have been Alex in a decade – the memory of whose eyes still unnerved Rick after a couple of years, even after everything he'd seen. His wound had been ugly, and he faced a drawn-out, painful death, but you could see that wasn't why he was screaming. He'd been reliving the battle in his feverish brain, forced to face the Army of Anubis again, out of his mind with terror.

Jonathan's voice – pretty low, whether because of their need for stealth or because he was still processing what had happened – pulled him out of the memory.

"Knowing Ardeth, he must be more than worth his salt. Proper frontline general, I'd wager. Ever served under that kind of rare bird?"

"A couple." Considering his first officer hadn't lost a single man in four months of fighting and his last had left his battalion to die at the hands and rifles of the Tuareg and bailed, Rick's yardstick for rating officers had been pretty damn long.

Then he stopped in his tracks as a thought tapped him on the shoulder and wouldn't leave.

"Did you?"

"A few."

The reply was automatic, the voice flat. That was probably all he would get this time, and then only because Jonathan had been too frazzled to evade the question.

The longest Rick had heard his brother-in-law talk about the war had been on the first Armistice Day they'd spent in England, a couple of years after his and Evy's wedding. Jonathan was always a little bit quiet on November 11th, but Rick had put it down to general atmosphere, usually more sombre than usual for the British no matter where they were. Rick himself had been a kid of fifteen in 1914, still in that Cairo orphanage, and by the time the Armistice had rolled in, he'd been raising merry hell with Izzy all over North Africa. His own taste of war had come three years later, when he had joined the Legion.

Jonathan was usually a pretty cheerful drunk until he keeled over, so finding him quiet and subdued while absolutely loaded that night had been a surprise, to say the least.

"Yeah, you're not driving home tonight," Rick had said, and hailed a taxi. Evy had insisted Jonathan slept at their house that night, and he was beginning to see why.

Jonathan nodded solemnly. He was about as coordinated as a loose-jointed puppet, long-limbed and awkward, but hardly even slurred his words.

"I should say not. Believe it or not, I actually want to live to see tomorrow morning."

"You'll be dead to the world tomorrow morning, Jonathan."

He gave Rick a broad smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Do you know, I rather hope so."

Rick couldn't help giving him a funny look.

Once the both of them were ensconced in a taxi, Rick said conversationally, "Y'know, the last time I saw you get that shit-faced was at Hamunaptra, after the Medjai attack. What's today to you?"

Jonathan blinked owlishly, and said, much too loud, "Why, it's – it's the end of the end of the world! You see," he added more quietly, squinting as though trying to focus on one O'Connell instead of several, "we all went home to. Er. To celebrate not having wiped each other out, presumably. They gave medals to the dead, and they even gave me a medal for not being dead." He blinked again, and the lost, haunted expression in his eyes was suddenly very familiar to Rick. "Fat lot of good that did the dead."

Well, that certainly explained some things. Rick had rarely found himself so wrong-footed before. Of all the things to have in common with Jonathan Carnahan, their being both combat veterans would not have made the shortlist.

When the taxi had dropped them off at the house, Rick had hauled Jonathan's arm over his shoulder and asked, "So what did you do, during the war?"

"This and that. I was a sniper with the Royal Fusiliers." Jonathan shrugged, or attempted to."Tried not to die, mostly. But that's not a conversation I care to have while I'm sober."

Rick's jaw dropped open. Then he couldn't help a wry smile.

"Well, you're not exactly sober now, are you?"

Jonathan stared at him earnestly, almost gravely.

"I'll never be drunk enough for that conversation, old boy."

And he had passed out, leaving Rick with a lot to think about and a limp brother-in-law to drag up the stairs.

He had brought it up with Evelyn, after. They had ended up talking all night, he about his Chicago childhood, then Cairo and the Legion, she about her small family and growing up between England and Egypt. By the time dawn peeked through the windows, he and his wife were in each other's arms, drowsy and all talked out, and he realised he'd do it all over again if it still meant meeting Evy in that dingy prison.

So maybe the talking did help. Shame talking to anyone other than Evy was harder than pulling a tooth. That was another thing he had in common with Jonathan.

Rick let a few dozen seconds pass in silence, then said, looking straight ahead into the gloom to make up for the sincerity in his voice, "I'm, uh. I'm sorry about Ferguson."

Jonathan didn't say anything. When Rick ventured a glance his way, he caught a look of mild surprise in the midst of everything else on badly-hidden display on Jonathan's face. Followed by a slight nod, and more silence.

Rick quashed the urge to shake his head. The one time he actually tried to get Jonathan to talk instead of shut up was the time he chose to clam up. He must be really bad at this. Come to think of it, they probably both were.

He was pondering whether to make another attempt when he spotted the hieroglyphs on the wall.

'This way to the Scorpion King'.

Which meant they were close.

Rick gestured to the wall and brought a finger to his lips, then jerked his head toward the corridor on the right. Jonathan nodded, his eyes bright in the dark. The gun he had said came from the ill-fated agents which Rick had spotted in his belt was back in his hand.

Clearly they had not run through their stock of miracles yet, because they didn't encounter a single one of Baine's cronies until they were on the threshold of the room Hamilton's body had drifted into earlier.

Once he was certain nobody had spotted the two of them, Rick allowed himself a small, sharp exhale as he peered once more into the one chamber he wanted to be the farthest away from.

Charles Hamilton – or the husk that bore his name – was still hovering a foot in the air in front of the wall opposite behind a small crowd of his agents. The light shining out of his eyes and mouth was the only clear indication of his presence. Above him, ridiculously large and high, was a gong, heavily-decorated with bas-reliefs picturing both jackals and scorpions. Rick did not like to think who, or what, was supposed to bang it. Nothing human-sized could ever reach the thing.

Around their boss, glancing uneasily at him and the jungle around them, stood a tight-knit group of agents, weapons drawn. The only one who didn't look nervous was Baine, who scrutinised the chamber with narrowed eyes. His back was to his boss, and his entire body seemed watchful, like a predator's on the prowl.

He had nothing of the prey about him. The pygmy mummies must be keeping clear of the room.

Beside Rick, Jonathan also squinted at the room, his face pale.

"Wish I still had that bloody sceptre now," he muttered.

"Wouldn't have made much difference anyway. We'd still need a clear shot." Rick studied the group massed at the foot of the wall, trying to get a sense of where Hamilton was between all the shifting bodies. "And we're not likely to get it if they don't move. At least the Scorpion King didn't have flunkies."

Jonathan looked thoughtful.

"You don't think a diversion –?"

"Nah. They'd just get even closer to protect him. See the way Baine keeps looking back? He's checking they're staying in place. It'd probably take the whole pyramid coming down on them to get them to move."

"Wouldn't want that to happen," mumbled Jonathan. Then he grabbed Rick's arm. "But what if something else came down?"

He gestured toward the wall with his other hand. Rick followed his eyes to the big gong.

It was hanging from four clasps, two above and two below, fastened into the wall with chains that looked way too slight to be holding so much weight. Rick scrutinised the gong, Hamilton, and the volumes of everything.

"It could work," he finally said, slowly. "That thing sure could do a lot of damage. Wouldn't necessarily kill him, though."

"Tom…" Jonathan swallowed. "Tom did say the connection to Anubis needed both body and mind to work. Maybe we'd just need him unconscious."

"That's one 'maybe' too many."

"Perhaps, but we don't have much else, now, do we?"

Rick silently conceded the point, and took both his guns to determine which was likely to be more efficient. "If this goes right," he said in a low voice as Jonathan examined his own gun, "things might get a little crazy. Like 'oasis getting sucked into the pyramid' crazy."

"I expect no less from this little adventure of ours," said Jonathan grimly. "It's already looking to be that sort of day anyway."

"Yeah, well. If things go wrong, you just run like hell, okay? Don't look back. Just run straight to the top of that damn pyramid and get to safety."

Jonathan's eyes bugged out. "You're telling me to run!? Do you really think I need any sort of encouragement for that?"

"I do, actually." Rick fixed him with a level gaze. "Sure, you tend to freak out, and you yell a lot, and you get startled, and your first instinct is to run away. Big deal. You know what I've noticed since I met you and Evy? Every time she ran into danger, you were never far behind. Same goes for Alex, and even me. So I'm telling you, if for some reason we get separated, don't worry about me and just go."

Jonathan stared at him for a while, slanted eyes almost round. Then his face relaxed.

"You know, Rick, years ago when I first met you, I thought you were a stupid cowboy with all the emotional capacity of a brick."

Rick wondered why the phrasing sounded so familiar for all of two seconds, and snorted when it came back to him. Turnabout is fair play, I guess. "Okay. Figures. So that means you changed your mind since then, huh?"

Jonathan's small crooked smile became a full-blown, genuine grin. His eyes twinkled.

"Oh, rather."

Rick shook his head with a chuckle as he checked the clip of his gun. Not for the first time, it struck him that he really could have done worse for a brother-in-law.

He looked up again and cocked his gun. The sound was a stark reminder of both their situation and the stakes. The two men exchanged looks.

"You take the one on the top left," said Rick, "I'll take the one on the top right."

Jonathan nodded soberly, and aimed. So did Rick.

"On the count of three. And I mean on three, not after three."

Rick took a deep breath.

"One."

The chains looked flimsy, but the distance was consequent. If they didn't succeed in taking down the gong on the first try, their cover would be blown and they would probably get shot up all to hell.

"Two."

Rick chased every intruding thought from his mind and focused on the small target. On his left, he heard Jonathan let out a long, steady breath.

"Three."

Both guns fired, so close it was almost one gunshot. Both top chains shattered at once; gravity did the rest. The big gong – silently, slowly, but picking up speed as it fell – tipped over in an almost graceful ninety-degree tilt, directly on top of Hamilton and his cronies.

The agents had all of one or two seconds to react to the gunshots before they spotted the danger from above. There was screaming, scrambling, people pushing and trampling and helping other people up – utter chaos. Finally, the gong came down with a mighty crash and a warped toll that was almost funereal, like a bell out of tune.

It did not lie flat on the floor. Rick searched Hamilton amidst the men still standing and didn't find him.

For an awful moment, he thought this was it. That they hadn't made any difference, that Anubis' Army was still up there, slaughtering their way through the desert, set to take over the Earth like a flood of death. In the silence, Baine's voice cut through the shock like a knife through paper, yelling, "They're here! Find them and kill them! And get this thing off him!"

Rick was wondering what to do when the world flickered. A wave of dark nausea washed through him for a second, as though something had emptied his guts and filled them with lead, and he saw only darkness. His vision came back with a jolt, driving out the unpleasant sensation, and hope flared up in his heart as he recognised what had happened.

The Army of Anubis had gone back to its metaphorical box, as quickly as it had been summoned.

Then there was another crash, followed by a low rumbling.

A fine rain of dust and ground gold fell from above on Jonathan and him. In the centre of the chamber, the agents, less lucky, had to dodge the occasional block or stalactite the quake was dislodging from the ceiling. Some stood trembling, struck dumb and still with terror; some turned tail and fled; some had their guns out and shouted around, mostly at Baine, for orders.

"Time to go," said Rick sharply.

He never knew exactly how it happened. Maybe falling debris caught Baine's attention; maybe he had somehow managed to identify where the gunshots came from; maybe it was just bad luck that he happened to look that way at that precise moment. As Rick turned to run, his eyes met Baine's, whose entire face contorted into an expression of pure rage.

"THERE!"

A dozen guns were trained on him and Jonathan in the blink of an eye.

Both men fired indiscriminately into the group of agents for cover. Then they bolted into the passageway they had come from, bullets whizzing past their ears and smashing into the walls around them.

Exhaustion weighed down Ardeth's arms as he lifted his sword yet again and sliced through sinew, bone and sand. The Warriors kept on coming, and coming, as endless as the dunes they had sprung up from. There was no false joy this time, no test of their strength; they had unleashed what looked like the full might of their forces, and the Medjai, outnumbered two to one, were only trying to stay alive.

His mouth dry, lead in his chest, bleeding from a handful of shallow cuts on his torso and shoulders, Ardeth was, nonetheless, still standing. The same could not be said for a number of men and women. It was impossible, in the rage of battle, to distinguish between the wounded and the dead. The jackals, honourless, remorseless, ruthlessly stabbed at corpses and living wounded alike.

Ardeth had lost his scimitar what felt like hours ago and had picked up a corpse's. He briefly froze as his back bumped into something, and relaxed – oh so slightly – as he realised the something was Aziz, still dour-faced and still fighting. He was bleeding from a forehead wound along the hairline, but his grip on his sword was strong, and his back was warm against Ardeth's.

"If this keeps up," he heard Aziz shout over the din of battle, "they'll wipe us out to the last man!"

Ardeth didn't say anything. There was nothing to say to that.

Faith was something you had or had not, and it could get tested. His faith in his friends and allies had never been broken before, though it had wavered sometimes. It was wavering now, a little, but he kept resisting. That faith whispered Rick O'Connell was still alive, and Ardeth knew, from over a decade of knowing the man, that while he breathed, he fought. Anyway, if he and his family failed, if they died trying to stop the apocalypse, then all Ardeth could do was keep fighting. It might not be enough, but then again it just might.

Just as he shoved the darkness from his heart for the hundredth time that night, he found a Warrior of Anubis towering over him and Aziz, sword in hand, looking for all the world like it would enjoy its bloody victory.

Ardeth raised his scimitar with the very last of his strength and prayed.

The second the swords touched, the jackal soldier's khopesh burst into dark sand. The Warrior only had a second to look shocked before it, too, shattered.

"Alhamdulillah," he heard Aziz breathe beside him.

Around them, the battlefield was chaos stilled. In the faint blue-grey light of dawn, the men and women of the Medjai stared, astonished, as the Army of Anubis stopped fighting and fell apart where it stood. The dark sand mingled with the blood on the cool, light sand beneath their feet. Ancient weapons disappeared, fierce opponents vanished, leaving behind death and grief, but also new hope and a dawning wonder at having survived after all, against such odds.

A cry of joy rose through the ranks, and Ardeth bowed his head, murmuring a prayer of gratitude while hands and scimitars were raised in jubilation. He lifted his eyes again to look at his people, immeasurably proud of these men and women who had taken up the sword to defend humanity. They were not all of them warriors in the strictest sense of the word, and yet they had fought, they had lived and died, and they had won.

Today would be a day for mourning the dead and making sure the wounded didn't join them. But in the minutes until sunrise, Ardeth Bay closed his eyes and let the painful, exhausted, wonderful sensations of life wash over him.

Alex had rarely been as elated and terrified at the same time as he was now, standing on a box on tip-toes to reach the handle that let cold air into the balloon. Cold air was heavier, he had reminded himself, so when he let go of the handle the valves closed and the air got warmer, pulling the dirigible higher. He had been turning the dirigible into an elevator for hours with that particular handle.

The sky was growing lighter, from a deep cobalt to a lighter blue-grey with a faint pink line in the east. There wasn't enough light to see by properly yet, so trying to peek at the ground below was pretty much useless, but the sounds of the fight – the loudest shrieks, the mightiest roars – still reached him.

How he wished his dad were here. Or his mum. Or his uncle – sometimes Uncle Jon didn't make a very good grownup, Alex knew, but at least he tried. Or Ardeth, or Izzy. Any darn adult would be smashing to have around. They could take charge and he could let go of the fricking controls. Maybe even get a hug. Declaring himself too old for mushy stuff like that was all well and good when he was safe in his house, in school, or at least back in England, but the worry accumulated in his heart over the past few days had got ten times worse during the night, and he was more than ready to throw all dignity to the wind and run into the arms of the first family member he could find.

It was cold, high up in the air like that, and Alex shivered, goosebumps all over his arms. His shirt which had been drenched in sweat had mostly dried up by now and felt stiff and not nearly warm enough.

Alex was getting ready to let go of the handle once more when he heard new noises.

"What the heck?" he murmured when he registered what they were.

It wasn't screams, it wasn't roars, it was an explosion of joy. People were shouting, laughing, ululating. The unexpected sounds went straight to Alex's heart and made it skip a beat, then start it up again, the beating ten times louder.

The awful night was over, the soldiers of death were gone, people were still alive, and he was safe.

He pulled on the handle with renewed enthusiasm and grinned as the dirigible accelerated its descent slightly.

Now, he thought, he could afford to be proud.

As Dee floated down with only a few bumps, he became aware that the people on the ground had stopped celebrating so loudly. The cheers stopped, the voices died down. Puzzled, and not just a little concerned, he jammed the handle and ran to bend over the rail.

He could make out people, either wearing the dark robes of the Medjai or the dark suits of the bad guys Mum had said were secret agents – not that he could tell from above – converging towards the top of the pyramid, from which other people were emerging at a run. They joined the people on the ground and Alex lost track of them immediately, but they weren't his main concern. What was his main concern was the pyramid itself and the low but powerful rumble he could hear even high up in the air.

Desperately, he scanned the ground for his mum, or his dad's brown suit, or his uncle's cream-coloured jacket. Neither were in sight.

"C'mon," he kept mumbling, still peering hard at the ground, "Mum, Dad, Uncle Jon, c'mon, get out –"

Another minute, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He ran back to the controls to take off the jammer and pull on the handle with all his might.

Izzy had seemed to appear out of the blue to save them when the pyramid collapsed.

Alex would just have to make damn sure he would, too.

Notes/Translations:

A casbah in North Africa is a fortress, sometimes a garrison. Which would make Evy's lines in TM ("You stole [the box] from a drunk at the local casbah!?") something of a puzzle, because you'd think the best place to pick unsuspecting sloshed Americans' pockets would be a bar, not a fort… (Personally, I like to go with the novelization and think 'the Sultan's Casbah' is a bar.)

Do you have headcanons that sneak into your brain through the back door, settle comfortably, and then turn into The Thing That Wouldn't Leave? I had never even entertained the idea that Jonathan (like almost all Englishmen of his generation) had had to go through the giant meat grinder of World War One at some point, until a couple of years ago I happened on a Tumblr post where someone commented "Jonathan, like Phryne Fisher, clearly hasn't taken anything seriously since 1918." And it felt like a shovel in the face. I'd wanted to go back to this story and revise it for ages, particularly rewrite Hamilton's exposition in chapter 9, but in hindsight this headcanon was pivotal in the sudden resurrection of this fic. Hopefully the characterisation is better for it instead of ruined. I'll let you be the judge.

Alhamdulillah (اَلْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ ): Literally "praise be to God", "Thank God".

See you next Friday for the next part!