There were only so many hours Marc could lie awake, tracing Layla’s features in the moonlight and listening to Steven snoring down a forest in his mind’s ear, before he had to admit defeat and get up. You’d think skipping an entire night’s sleep to find and retrieve a mummy and then staying up all day giving her a crash course to the modern world would provide enough exhaustion to doze off from, even if the sleep didn’t last, but apparently not. But hey, what else was new.
Sighing tiredly, he swung his legs out of bed. The locked bedroom door surprised him for a moment. The three of them had decided to keep their guard up for the time being, just in case, but Mum-I had proved well-behaved enough throughout the day that it had apparently slipped his mind as soon as they’d done it. (But, again, what else was new.) He left the door open a crack behind him – Layla wasn’t who they’d locked it to protect – and shuffled into the bathroom.
Only when he re-emerged, refreshed and relieved, did he notice Mum-I’s short, skeletal figure silhouetted against the window. Layla’s borrowed pyjamas dwarfed her. She looked at him over her shoulder and gave him a little wave. Waving back, he crossed the suite to join her. Nothing better to do, anyway.
"Can’t sleep?"
She shook her head.
"Yeah, me neither."
He leaned his shoulder against the window frame and studied Steven’s sleeping face in his reflection for a moment, slumped against the same frame but with the pillow and duvet from the bed still cocooning him, before his gaze shifted to Mum-I’s. It was weird. The reason he couldn’t sleep was a familiar jittery energy and restless, unpredictable bubbles of guilt and taint and wrongness. It was exactly how he used to feel after jobs as big as this one – for Khonshu. When that still meant ‘ended up cutting a woman open from gut to gullet because she objected to having her drug empire running on underage mules shut down’. The contrast between a typical ‘job well done’ for Khonshu and how today had gone was so stark it wasn’t even funny. So why? Had something triggered some kind of Pavlovian conditioning? Was this some sick, subconscious manifestation of frustration that he couldn’t fly back in time and personally deliver Khonshu’s justice on Prince Dickface for what he’d done to Mum-I and her people?
If he knew himself at all, he might just have been staring the reason in the face all night long (bathed in moonlight, as beautiful as the day he met her, dearer still than the night she married him) without realizing it. Or, even more likely, not wanting to realize it. But if Marc and Steven’s collective personality was any good at telling the difference, none of them would be here right now, so wondering about it was by definition an exercise in futility. Yep. Absolutely. Case closed.
"I wonder if you don’t need to sleep anymore as a mummy or if you’re just too keyed up from all the excitement of the day, like me," he told Mum-I. "What do you think?"
She shrugged and spread her hands in a ‘dunno’.
"Well, we’ll find out eventually, I guess. Either you start getting tired or you don’t."
She tapped the window and, making a questioning noise, followed a passing car with her finger. Their hotel was located in the thriving center of one of the country’s largest cities, so that was hardly the only sign of life. There was a whimsically alienating effect to watching the rest of humanity pass you by like this at the best of times. Marc wondered if Mum-I’s thoughts of ‘look at those strange bugs down there’ leaned more toward whimsical or alienating at a conflicted, overwhelming time like hers must be right now.
"Those people?" he said. "I’m sure most of them would be asleep if they wanted to. But the better we’ve gotten at making our own light, the less we seem to want to sleep."
She hummed and lapsed into silence. Marc watched the city and its people with her. He didn’t know for how long; time didn’t play by its usual rules on sleepless nights like these.
"Can I ask you something?" he said eventually.
Mum-I made a noise of agreement.
"Did your people have anything like divorces? Could you end a marriage for reasons other than death?"
She hummed and nodded.
With a lot of guesswork, back-and-forth, and creativity, she managed to convey through nothing but improvised gestures and yes/no answers that, like most other such things, a separation of spouses was accomplished with a simple public declaration to the village. The practicalities of separating the household were then overseen (or, when necessary, mediated) by the village elders and anyone else the ‘divorcees’ invited to chime in, and neither spouse could take a new spouse until four season celebrations – roughly a year, give or take the distance to the last celebration – after all desired agreements were declared binding. That year was meant to ensure the divorcees didn’t change their minds, to give everybody affected by the split time to settle into new habits and living arrangements they were comfortable with before having to be confronted with their ex’s happy new relationship or household, and to prevent ambiguity about the parentage of any children that might be born after the split.
The kids were what Marc found himself most curious about (in a morbid, not-gonna-acknowledge-his-own-baggage kind of way), but child-rearing was a much more communal affair among Mum-I’s people than almost any current-day society, from the sound of it. And apparently, the only thing a splitting couple wasn’t allowed to do was bar their new households to children from their previous one, or force a child to stay with a parent against its will. Children could even (Marc’s chest twinged painfully in his chest) petition the council of elders to let them ‘divorce’ one or both of their parents themselves, if the state of affairs in their household made them feel miserable or scared. As communally as their society operated, there was always at least one household happy to take them in for however long they needed it. Mum-I’s own family had done it once, when she was little.
None of that could be any more immune to malicious intent than modern legal intervention in bad family situations – Mum-I’s supposed-to-be-binding rejection of her suitor hadn’t been either, after all – but Marc had to say he was impressed. There were a lot of modern societies that could still learn a thing or two from this forgotten Stone Age tribe, he thought.
Silence fell while Marc tried to stuff a bunch of emotions back into his Not Doing That Today box, and Mum-I took the time to study him. After a while, she cocked her head and crooked her fingers in a rough approximation of a question mark; the symbol they’d come to use for ‘I want to know...’ in all its forms until they figured out the best way to teach her a complete sign language. In this case, he figured it could only mean Why do you ask?
"Oh, just got thinking about the curse and what might have happened if we had married and simply tried to get a divorce. Would Dickface have thought that far ahead, and all. He obviously didn’t think at all about a bunch of other things, but if you guys could get divorced too..."
Crossing her arms over her chest, Mum-I shook her head. She didn’t believe him. Why? she asked again.
Marc let out an almost amused huff. Of course. You have a lifetime of (largely successful) practice at how to be as readable as a brick wall, and then you spend a few months making extremely slow and taxing attempts at communicating more, and suddenly mummy women born on the other side of the planet and millennia in the past can pick up on every unspoken word that crosses your mind. Just his luck. He decided to humor her, if only because it felt like a dick move to be so obviously evasive and dishonest to her at this stage. Save that for when they weren’t her only lifeline in a world so fundamentally changed it might as well be a planet of slug people.
"Fine. I was thinking it’s a good thing you didn’t really have to marry me, because I’m a pretty lousy excuse for a husband. And then my thoughts drifted to what a divorce might have done to the curse."
She jerked her head and spread her hands in a clear what the hell? She pointed towards the bedroom where Layla was sleeping, gestured between him and the bedroom a couple of times, and then hugged herself and started making kissy noises. Either her people had really disliked public displays of affection (haha, Marc wished), or he and Layla had made a really lovey-dovey impression on her (haha... ha... ha...). Mum-I had had reason to overreact to any sign of couple-y-ness from them, but still. He tried to shush her and only got more crooked fingers in return.
"She forgives me for the ways I fall short and the things I’ve done wrong, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a massive fuck-up. If Steven wasn’t there to pick up the slack nowadays, she would probably have divorced me months ago," he said lowly, eyes on the open crack of the bedroom door. It would be just his luck if Layla came out right this second and heard him.
He tried not to dwell on it too often, because he at least knew himself well enough to know he just started saying hurtful things and pushing her away again when he did, the slumbering conviction that he could never earn the love he’d so long swindled out of her by legit means stirring without fail. But sometimes – like when women rose from the literal dead in their desperation to marry him – it just happened, with or without him. And then he’d lie awake all night trying to convince himself he was actually going through murder withdrawal or some shit like that, because unlike lying to Layla for so long, there had at least been mitigating circumstances for the murdering.
Mum-I somehow managed to look like a kicked puppy. She put her hands on his arms (thank god for sleeves, he was still only halfway used to their new roommate’s state of decay) and gave him a long, impassioned, very earnest speech, punctuated by little squeezes. Their version of the Allspeak being the Pale Imitation Due To Mortal Brain Limitations version, it all just sounded like the wordless moaning of a woman whose tongue got cut out by a spurned Stone Age incel.
Marc smiled sadly. "I know you know that I didn’t understand a word of that."
She punched his arm.
"But okay, okay, I can guess what you were going for."
It was... weirdly touching? He wasn’t even thinking about whether he’d have believed her if he had understood. It was just an oddly effective combination of nice gesture and ‘my life is absurd’.
With a pleased noise, she patted his arm one last time, turned him around, and pushed him towards the bedroom. He thanked her awkwardly, bid her goodnight, and went. But when he looked back as he made to close the door, he found her collapsed into the oversized armchair by the window with such defeated and dejected body language, his heart broke for her all over again.
"Are you okay?" he asked quietly.
Caught, she jolted and quickly straightened as she wafted his concern away. She mimed yawning into her hand and all kinds of chaos around her head; tired, but too worked up for rest, that’s all, promise! Uh-huh. And she was just accusing him of his act being transparent. He turned back and knelt down beside her.
"That was a stupid question, of course you’re not fine. How could you be?"
She deflated as quickly as she’d started trying to put on her facade.
"Hey, listen." He put his hand on her knee (thank god for Layla’s spare pyjamas). "I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling. But you don’t have to pretend to us that you feel fine. We’ve promised Taweret to help you. That means we’ll protect you from harm, we’ll teach you how to navigate the modern world, we’ll arrange legal documents and everything else you need. For however much it’s worth, there’s nothing for you to be scared of or worried about, because we’ll take care of everything.
But we’re willing to be your friends, too. If you’re having a hard time purely for emotional reasons, you can come to us for that too. Any way we can help, we want to help. And..." He faltered, his words spent. But his uncharacteristic speech still felt like it needed a closing argument. "And... and we’d like it if you’d let us. Help. With stuff like this. You know what I’m saying?"
She smiled, and nodded, and reached out to lingeringly run a hand down his face. Marc stayed stock-still. With a sigh, she let him go, patted her heart – thank you – and stood. Marc followed suit. Mum-I stretched and yawned demonstratively, waved goodbye, and retreated to the suite’s second bedroom.
Mum-I was catching on to the nuances of their body language a lot faster than they were to hers, but she seemed sincere. Marc chose to take it as a win.
See, told you you were selling yourself short, said... either Steven himself, half-awake for two laser-guided minutes and then straight back to dreamland, or a remnant of Marc’s inner voice that thought and sounded just like him but hadn’t split off into a literal mind of its own.
He snuck into the bathroom real quick to scrub his face and hands and put on a different shirt (he would get over it eventually, he was sure, but not today at ass o’clock in the fucking morning) before returning to his own bed.
"Hey," Layla croaked as he slid under the covers beside her.
"Hey. Sorry, did I wake you?"
"I guess. ’s Mum-I okay?"
"As much as can be expected."
"Good, ’cause I’m not," she groaned, rolling towards and against him. "How dare you leave for so long. I’ve gotten cold."
Nothing could have stopped the smile that stole across his face. "Bullshit. Hotels like this always crank up the thermostat way too high. You’re sweltering under this duvet."
"How dare you call me on my bullshit." She stretched into his space and resettled in a more comfortable position, even further into his space. "A husband ’s supposed to back up his wife about everything always."
"Sorry, I failed the marriage exam five times." The words were out of his mouth before he even thought about it. And then they snapped back in his face like a rubber band and he was left wondering where the hell that levity had come from, startled and inexplicably hurt. He froze, and the only words his brain would unblock for were: "I make you happy, though. Right? At least most of the time?"
Layla clearly wasn’t as sleep-drunk and loopy as she’d been making herself sound, because she caught on to the less than casual turn of his mood immediately. She pushed herself up to look at him, her eyes thick and heavy but clear and intent in the moonlight.
"Yes," she said. "Of course. I’d tell you if you weren’t. Do you want me to listen to something?"
Not ‘do you want to talk?’. Sometimes, even something as innocuous as that phrasing, the reminder of too many unmet pleas and demands in the past, was enough to make the shutters come slamming back down when he was finally braced but ready to let her look inside for once. One time – just one time – she’d asked ‘can we talk?’, and he’d said ‘no, but I do have something I you hope you’ll listen to’, and somehow, she’d picked up on the distinction before he did. Somehow, miraculously, he could even live with himself for needing it.
Other than ‘but do I still make you happy?’, though, he couldn’t wring anything coherent out of his brain anymore now that he was back in the overpriced warmth and softness of their hotel bed after their forty-eight hour workday, with his overclocking self-deception mechanisms finally shut down and the miserable thoughts that had been powering them at a matching ebb. So what he said this time – groaned, really – was: "God, no. What I want is to be asleep five hours ago."
He pulled her back down to him and rearranged them until he was wrapped all the way around her. He pushed his nose into her hair and drank deeply of her scent, even as he felt her relax with her face smushed to the inside of his forearm.
"This is enough," he murmured into her curls. "I promise."
"Okay," she breathed, tickling his skin even before she pressed her lips to it. She reached behind her to run the backs of her fingers along his cheek. Or the part of his face nearest to it she could find from that angle, anyway. He adjusted her hand with a smile.
"Better sleep then." She rubbed his cheekbone one last time before retreating and letting her arm fall somewhere more comfortable. "The brain weasels get vicious when you’re sleep-deprived."
"I know, baby. I don’t deserve you."
"See? There’s one. Good thing you never needed to. You and me are like a winning lottery ticket: randomly selected and non-returnable."
"Oh, that’s a good one."
"My lines are always good. Sleep tight, baby."
"Yeah. You too."