Disclaimer: I own nothing, I only own my OC's, the rest belongs to Universal. Thank you all for reading!
Fallon gasped as she sat straight up in her cot. It was still dark outside and her group's campfire was burning low. Rick and everyone else was actually asleep except for her. She rubbed her eyes and breathed heavily. It was the dream she had been having for a year, except it was more vivid and fast paced. And this time, the man from the boat and the attack was actually there. She could see him, face and all. She felt wide awake and couldn't possibly go back to sleep.
She shifted her leg and felt something fall from on top of her leg onto the sand. Peering over, she could see it was a thick, square shaped piece of leather, but she knew it was more than just that. Slinging her legs over the edge of the cot, she reached down and picked it up. Even with the low light from the dying campfire she realized what it was as soon as she touched the leather and uneven pages poking out. A journal...
Unwinding the leather string that wrapped itself around the journal to keep the pages inside, her heart raced. She hesitated to open it, and she held her breath as she did.
'The Diary of Josephine Mary Sullivan Carnahan' it read on the first page, the top of the page tearing out of its binding from wear. Fallon quickly flipped the page to reveal the first diary entry from 1910, fifteen years ago, five years before she and Fallon's father went missing in pursuit of Hamunaptra. Fallon felt a tear begin to form in her eye as she readied herself to begin reading. But a question deep in the back of her mind interrupted her: Where did this come from?
A soft whiny came from behind a tall broken off column off in the distance. She could barely see it with the light of the moon and the campfire. Clutching the diary to her chest, Fallon stood and tread quietly over the sand towards the column. She looked back towards her camp to make sure no one had awoken while she sneaked away. She knew Kelly would be furious if she found Fallon out of her cot and nowhere to be seen. However, curiosity had gotten the better of Fallon tonight. The column wasn't part of any campsite of any of the diggers or the Americans, who slept closer towards the entrance of the city. They had feared the further they went into the city amongst the broken columns and obelisks and crumbling buildings with heavy stone doors they would get lost. Fallon felt almost certain that it was just an American's horse that had wandered off and took refuge behind the column.
As she inched closer, with the light of her camp's campfire growing dimmer and dimmer, and the light of the moon growing brighter as it rose in the sky, her heart continued to beat wildly in her chest. She touched the stone of the column and quickly stepped out from behind it.
Sure enough, there was a saddled white and gray speckled horse standing there, shaking it's tail innocently. Fallon let out a sigh of relief.
A hand clamped gently over her mouth and arm wrapped around the front of her shoulders. She nearly went blind with panic as it lead her behind the column with the horse. The hand only pressed down harder when she tried to scream in order to muffle them.
"Do not scream, I only wish to talk," her silencer whispered calmly in her ear. The accent gave away that he naturally spoke Arabic, but the voice and tone was deep enough for her to recognize it slightly. When her muffled screams turned into gasping breaths, his hand started to life off of her mouth, and he fully let go of her shoulders when she had calmed down. She stumbled away and spun to face her kidnapper and let out a scream, but she froze when she saw who it was, her readied scream catching in her throat. He touched her arm gently and placed a finger to his lips. Him... The man clad in black whom she saw on the boat, and in her dreams, whose people attacked her campsite only hours earlier.
With a soft grasp on her arm he pulled her in just a little closer, to hide her more behind the column. Fallon continued to clutch the diary close to her breast where she swore her heart was skipping beats.
"It's you..." Fallon said breathlessly. Then realization hit her. "What are you doing here?" She exclaimed a little louder.
"Sshhhh," he hushed. Silence. Fallon began to chew on the inside of her mouth with anxious rigor. She could hardly look him in the eyes. "You know who I am."
Her eyes finally met his. "Well...no-"
"That is not true," he interrupted her.
"Well if it is true, then you know who I am." She bit her lip, it wasn't like her to snap like that. She'd had her fair share of dreams and strange occurrences with and about this man. By the way he acted around her, she thought it was safe to say that he knew her too.
He only regarded her intently. As he stared at her, he seemed like he was trying to read her, or like he was trying to find something to come back with.
"I know you, perhaps. One does not necessarily forget the sight of a woman who disguised herself as a man to join the French Legion, who can speak Ancient Egyptian," he admitted.
Fallon furrowed her eyebrows. "What did you just say?"
"Where have you seen me before?" He continued.
Fallon could barely take in what he had just said. Her brain began to fog. "I...You were on the boat..."
"Where else?" He urged.
Fallon's cheeks flushed a rosy pink. "You shouldn't be here. If anyone sees you here, there's no knowing what will happen." She had to keep reminding herself to lower her voice. She argued with herself in her head about why she was doing this. She could make him leave, all she had to do was scream. But she didn't want him to leave. He had answers. All she had to do was just ask the questions...if she were brave enough to ask.
"I came here because there was something that I needed to know, and I'm sure you have the same questions. But as far as I am concerned, you aren't giving me all of the answers," he explained to her.
"Well how do you know me, huh? You're the one who's doing all of the staring, treating me as if I'm-I'm...Princess of the Nile!" Fallon stuttered. "Why don't you answer that?"
Just as she thought, he refrained from answering immediately. Even in the silvery moonlight, she could tell that the blood was slowly draining from his face.
"You remind me of someone, several people that came here 10 years ago. Diggers that were excavating too close to things that did not concern them. I had to know if it was true," he finally said.
"10 years..." Fallon repeated, she felt the leather diary in her hands. "Did you give me this?"
"I'm assuming it means something to you," he said.
"My mother's. How did you come to have it? Did you know them? What happened to them?" Fallon was breathing heavily. He wasn't telling her everything. She knew there was something else that he wanted to say on top of what she immediately wanted to know. She felt she knew the answer to both of those things, she just wanted to hear him say it.
"How else do you know me?" He asked again.
"Don't answer a question with another question! You know what happened to my parents, tell me! And-and whatever else it is that you're trying not to say!" She exclaimed. His hand was immediately clamped over her mouth again to quiet her.
"We both want answers, but it seems there are things that we are not ready to answer yet. I hope some of your answers can be found within that book. But until then, we will have to wait another time," he told her. He removed his hand and began to mount his horse.
"Wait, how do we know if we're going to see each other again? You're the one who told us to leave," Fallon said. He looked down at her, clutching the reins of his horse.
"I believe we will meet again," he said, and he lifted up his mask to cover the bottom half of his face and he was off, riding out of the city.
"Are you alright?" She jumped at the voice. Fallon turned her head and saw Burns walking towards her. "I was just walking around; making sure each camp was alright. Just keeping watch. What are you doing all the way over here?"
Fallon looked towards the direction that the man in black had ridden off to, but he was nowhere in sight. She began to wonder if she had imagined the entire thing. Then she remembered the diary in her hands, and noticed the hoof prints in the sand in front of her. "I'm fine…I just wanted a little cool air and some privacy," Fallon said just as quietly.
He walked up to her casually. "It's kind of dangerous to wander off on your own, especially around here, with everything that went on earlier."
"Yeah, it's been some day."
"That man…" Burns began. Fallon was unsure where this was going. She almost didn't want to know. "He helped you up when he pushed you to the ground, he..."
"Yes, I suppose it was rather strange," Fallon said, passively.
"It's just weird, you know. Why would someone like him do that?" Burns asked.
"I can't imagine," Fallon replied, she felt the flush in her cheeks that she had been trying to hide from Burns start to dissolve. She let out a breath and stepped away from the column back towards her camp.
"Yeah, well, people can imagine lots of things. You should look out for yourself. I mean, a beautiful woman like you, you need to be careful in a place like this."
Fallon sighed. "Thank you, Mr. Burns, but I assure you, these desert people have no interest in me. Now, it's rather late and I should get to sleep. You should too. Tomorrow will be a very important day for the both of us, I', sure. Goodnight, Mr. Burns."
Burns hesitated and removed his glasses from his nose to fiddle with them. "Goodnight."
Fallon retreated back to her camp before anything else could be said. When she curled back up on her coat, throwing a blanket over her to protect her from the cold desert air, she clutched the diary of her mother as though she was afraid it would disappear as she slept. As soon as she closed her eyes she tried to calm her crowded mind, but all she could think about was the desert rider clothed in black and tattoos inked on his cheeks. She remembered how his arm was gentle but firm on her back and his hand holding hers was warm earlier that night right after the attack. She remembered feeling his cool dark curls against her face as he helped her stand. As she breathed deeply, she could almost smell the slight scent of musk, leather, steel, gunpowder, and spices. Fallon knew that this was starting to get out of hand. She didn't understand anything anymore because of these dreams, why they were recurring, and why she was dreaming them about this man she had technically never met before in her life.
In the Desert
So it was true, Ardeth thought. She was connected to the couple who had found their way to Hamunaptra ten years ago and had almost ruined everything. Ardeth was still a young man, coming into his role as Chieftain of the Medjai, when it happened. It was a close run in with his greatest nightmares, but he and his men had taken care of it. She had called the diary her mother's, and he could only conclude that in the photo in the back of the leather journal, this woman he had dreamed of so many times, was the little girl sitting upon the older woman's lap. She had the same dark brown curls, that in the picture were pinned back with a big white lacy bow, and the same full lips puckered into a smile. Ardeth lost count of how many times he had looked at that picture, so much so that it began to wear at his touch, along with the pages of the journal which he had read its personal pages over 1000 times. He knew all about this family, especially about the writer's little daughter named Fallon. He would smile over the pages that described the little girl praying to miniature statues of Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, and speaking for them, as if they were real people. He read about Fallon and how when she was 10 she would have dreams that Anubis would tell her to get into mischief, and Isis would tell her to apologize to her brother because of something harmful she had said to him a few days prior.
The woman wrote with such life and love towards her children that it warmed Ardeth's heart. He hoped that some day soon he would have the honor of having children and showing them the love that he read in the diary. He was sad to part with it when he placed it on the woman's cot while she slept. But if his prediction was correct, then it rightfully belonged to her. And it also proved that she was Fallon.
He could hardly bring himself to sleep that night. He kept thinking that he should never have tried to communicate with her. He should have just left her the diary and rode away on his horse and left it at that. But he couldn't. He had to speak with her, and his heart pounded while he did so. It didn't exactly go as well as he had hoped, but then again, he wasn't sure what he was expecting in the first place. Did he expect all of the answers to come out at once and have everything resolve right then and there? He was an idiot. She wanted to know more about the journal and what happened to her parents while they were there. But as soon as she asked that, he froze. He didn't think that far ahead and, he only wanted a confirmation that she was dreaming of him too.
He covered his face with his hands in frustration. Then why couldn't he have just said that? It was a complete and utter failure. However, one thing was for sure, and he meant it when he said it to her. They would see each other again. Her knew it for certain.
AN: Thank you all for reading! Please favorite, follow, and review!