This may have been a mistake.
Marc would sooner cut out his own heart and present it to Taweret in a pickle jar than say that out loud, but he was thinking it. And he felt no such compunction about laying out all the reasons why to Layla and Steven. Or, well, the many facets of the one big reason why this had been such a bad idea.
It had hit Marc with the same abruptness as that time he and Layla had been going through a crate of solid basalt scarab amulets the size of his fist, and he found a lone amulet the size of two fists, depicting a scarab pushing a ball of... something. He couldn’t place what the ball was for a moment, but when he did, it had struck him like a wriggling fish to the face that no matter how they were worshipped and how fancy their name was, a ‘scarab’ in any other country would simply be called a dung beetle. This mystic and majestic symbol of the ancients was an overgrown bug whose life cycle revolved around shit. It was born in shit, lived off of shit, and after it died, something else probably ate it so it returned to shit. On some level, he’d always had that knowledge. But that was the first time he became aware of it.
And now this. Watching a walking corpse wander around under the bright lights of a fancy hotel room was a very different experience than trying to get a halfway decent look at her as she shuffled in and out of the glare of a car’s headlights. The former made it clear in a way the latter couldn’t that they could not, in fact, simply overlook the massive hygiene problem they had on their hands. And it had seemed plenty clear in the latter circumstance already!
"We stuck our hand down Alexander the Great’s mummified throat last year and that was fine," Steven argued. For the fifth or so time.
"I watched you do that, buddy, and I wouldn’t call it fine by any definition of the word."
"Alright, alright, it was doable. It was unpleasant, but we got on with it without wanting to set our hands on fire afterwards. So why can’t we do the same now?"
"I know, Steven, it doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t have to make sense, because it’s fucking disgusting," Marc replied for at least the third time.
"We were all in imminent mortal danger at the time," Layla pointed out. "The fate of the world was at stake and the clock ticking. It was survival instinct helpfully blinding you to the full reality of what you were doing. Same with that heka priest who grabbed me by the fucking face. I only screamed for a fraction of the time I really wanted to."
"Yes!" Marc cried (softly, so their guest wouldn’t hear and be distracted from her pawing at – and leaving mummy cooties all over – everything and anything she could put her shriveled hands on). He pointed a triumphant finger at his wife. "Exactly! Ammit’s ushabti was right there. Plus, Steven and I died and took a bath and got resurrected like five minutes later, so for us it didn’t matter anymore either way then."
(The tiniest, wounded little noise escaped Layla. Marc’s first instinct was to cringe but ignore it and let her have her dignity, but Steven grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze that worked as apology and comfort and everything in between. And then he silently nudged Marc not to feel bad about it too, the homegrown Gary Stue.)
"Human bodies are miniature ecosystems on legs," Layla went on gravely. "We are all, at all times, home to hosts of both beneficial, symbiotic microorganisms, and potentially harmful, parasitic ones. Did Prince Dickface’s curse resurrect them too? What are they going to do now that their host is stuck like this? Worse yet, was Mum-I carrying any traces of long-extinct diseases from thousands of years ago that could ravage modern populations due to our lack of antibodies? You know, like those nightmares I kept having after the Blip, about the non-Blipped world with the pandemic that carried over to humans from some kind of animal, and everybody kept trying to say it was just a flu, except people were dying by the millions and when I got it, even though I thought I was doing okay at first, it left me with chronic fatigue and shortness of breath for probably the rest of my life?"
"Not a connection I wanted to make just now, baby."
"We’re married, we suffer together."
"At least she’s not shedding anymore," Steven said, sounding queasy. "And surely, if we thought of it, Taweret did too?"
"Just because she’s a conceptually entangled, extra-dimensional super hippo, doesn’t mean... much of anything except reality-altering levels of power, really," Layla said wryly. "She forgot to give me the universal translator."
"Khonshu ‘forgot’ on purpose," Marc muttered. After all this time, he could still find novel new ways of feeling betrayed and fucked over by that pretentious wannabe-toucan.
"That too. They’re no better than us, really."
"They’re the worst."
"Taweret is not the worst."
"Khonshu is the worst. Taweret’s fine. Weird, but fine. Hathor is okay, I guess, bad taste in men aside. The rest of the Ennead genuinely thought Harrow was an upstanding dude. My opinion of them and their collective intelligence is low."
"We need to disinfect the kitchen tonight," Steven butted in, a muscle beneath his eye twitching as he watched Mum-I shuffle in that direction. "With fire."
"No," Marc and Layla chorused.
"I have no idea how he ended up with the pyromaniacal tendencies, I really don’t," Marc whispered. "And buddy, I thought you were just arguing that we were overreacting."
"So were you about Layla and I at first, bruv. And then Layla was saying it to us. I gave up trying to keep track of who’s arguing what against who five minutes in."
"We’re all arguing with ourselves," Layla offered. "Because – because..." She faltered and covered her mouth with a hand, while her other arm wrapped around her stomach. "Because our ‘pleasing a friend’ instincts blinded us to the full reality of what we were promising."
Mum-I had opened one of the cabinets in the kitchenette and taken out a glass. She held it close to her eyes, inspecting the suite through the rippled bottom. It was impossible to hate a mummy who laughed with such innocent delight. The ‘ew ew ew’ they kept feeling wasn’t something any of them were proud of or particularly happy about.
"Alexander did have, er, a bit more clothes on?" Steven winced at himself. "His embalmers didn’t skimp on the wrappings the way poor Mooms’ did. Maybe that’s why it feels so different."
Good point. He’d had to tear away a thick and tidy layer of careful packaging before he got to Alexander’s grisly bits. And his grisly bits had still been significantly less grisly than Mum-I’s, because even though mummification could happen spontaneously whenever and wherever the right atmospheric conditions were met, that didn’t mean you could just half-ass a deliberate mummification, the way Dickface and co had clearly done Mum-I’s, and expect everything to work out alright. The obvious, deliberate malpractice that had gone into preserving her was heartbreaking and incensing, but unfortunately, first and foremost gruesome to look at.
Mum-I’s desiccated flesh was, in many places, plainly visible through a sparse, haphazard layering of poorly preserved linen; another layer down, bone was visible in more than one place too. Her visible skin was a mottled patchwork of starkly contrasting tans, browns, and literal blacks, shriveled in some places and pulled too tightly over her bones in others. And the reason Mum-I’s remaining wrappings were no longer disintegrating seemed to be that many of them were so thoroughly fused to the flesh beneath that Taweret’s healing power simply couldn’t tell them apart from her body. It was a nightmare they couldn’t tear their eyes away from. Thank god her nose and eye sockets, at least, were covered.
...and her privates, now that Marc thought about it. Oh man, bad thoughts, bad thoughts.
"There’s also the simple fact that Alexander was exactly as dead as he was supposed to be, while she’s alive," Layla said. "It matters, it just does. Nothing that looks like that should be moving! Even Alexander’s heka priest wasn’t so – god, I can’t believe I’m talking like this about someone I agreed to take into our home..."
That too. Despite all the supernatural nonsense in their lives and the seemingly inevitable mummy uprisings that came with it, the three of them still defaulted to ‘properly dead and dried’ as the rightful state of any mummy. Having them come alive, and in such glaringly biologically inexplicable ways, unbearably muddled the distinction between ‘mummy’ (which was like a neat, hard, dried-out little dog turd you could scoop into a baggy like a twig without ever having to think twice) and ‘unusually intrusive corpse’ (in this analogy, a fresh, steaming pie of cow dreck. that might try to hug your face at any moment). It wasn’t the mummy’s fault. And in this case, it would be unfair and cruel to make it the mummy’s problem. But to Marc, Steven, and Layla, it still presented a problem.
Marc pinched the bridge of his nose. "I just keep remembering that scene from The Mummy where Imhotep kisses Rachel Weisz and he starts decomposing straight into her mouth."
"OH GOD, FUCK YOU, MARC, I DID NOT NEED TO BE REMINDED OF THAT!" Layla and Steven yelled in perfect synch, flinching away from each other.
(If Marc were the kind of person to admit such things to himself, he would have found it hilarious, heartwarming, but also absolutely heartbreaking how Steven had, in only the few scant months of ‘real’ life he’d gotten in the past decade, developed into such a perfect blend of Marc’s childhood favorite character, Marc’s wife, and The Perfect Husband For Marc’s Wife According To Marc, Certified Terrible Husband.)
"We’re married, we suffer together," he said. But he did give Layla an apologetic look.
Steven huffed indignantly. "We’re not. I’d smack you upside the head right about now, but everything I can do to you is just me cutting off my nose to spite my own face."
"Really? That’s stopping you?"
"Yes, Marc, the fact that punching myself in the nose to get at you would hurt me too is stopping me. Because some of us are not the kind of unhinged, self-loathing masochists who would toss ourselves down a mine shaft as punishment for –"
"Boys," Layla hissed. Then she plastered on a brilliant smile. "Mum-I! So, what do you think? Nothing like the old days, is it?"
Marc turned around to where he’d last seen Mum-I and all but jumped back when he found her right behind him.
Moaning at length, Mum-I spread her arms and turned in a circle. It’s a marvel, Marc could picture her saying.
"Yeah, it’s fancy, alright," he said with a small smile.
Mum-I held up the glass to them and gestured and gurgled about it, clearly still enamored with it.
"Were your people already making glass?" Layla asked.
Holding up one hand and gesturing with it, Mum-I made a short, questioning noise, and answered herself with a nod. Then she held up the glass, pointed at it, and vigorously shook her head. Glass? Yes. Glass like this? No way!
Layla laughed in delight. "Yeah, people have been working on refining it to this quality for a long time."
Mum-I gestured for her to follow her to the nearest window, which she caressed reverently, and Layla obliged, her smile now entirely genuine.
"Alright, we can do this," Steven murmured, to himself as much as to Marc.
Marc tried to sound convinced. "Yeah, as long as she doesn’t ask for too much physical contact, we’ll be fine."
"I don’t know about that. I meant communicating and bonding."
"Oh. Right."
Mum-I was pressed flat up against the window now, and Layla was pointing out things to see in the streets below. They should teach her a sign language. If it really was a universal translator, Marc reasoned, it should be able to pick up on non-vocalized language systems too, right? No way all other intelligent life everywhere in the universe communicated solely through sound.
"We probably shouldn’t let Layla do all the work in that regard though," Steven was saying, clearly unaware of where Marc’s mind had been going. "Wouldn’t want to be that kind of guy."
"What?" Marc tried to rewind to the last thing they’d been talking about out loud. "I’ll get over the germophobia in a minute, gimme a break."
"No, I mean how women are always expected to do all the social work in relationships and men just coast on their coattails. It’s one of those sexist background noise things pervading our society. Or so I’ve read."
...uh. Okay? Fine, Mister Perfect. (Sure, just add feminist theory to the pile of French poetry and reading hieroglyphs and all the other in-depth Egyptology and everything else Marc thought Layla enjoyed being the admired and indispensable expert about, but turned out to like sharing with Steven a lot more. Yeesh.)
"Uh-huh. You’re right, buddy." Marc concentrated as hard as he could on giving Steven a mental slap on the shoulder, and was pleased to be rewarded with a twitch of their body. "Good thing you’re a paragon of sociability. Have at it."
"Oy! Freeloader!" Steven laughed.
"Seriously, it’s up to you. If this part was my job, we’d be in deep shit."
"Still selling yourself short, I see."
"You still don’t know me that well, I see."
By this point, Mum-I was mimicking little horns on her head, and Layla was running the thick nylon strap of her cross-body bag through her fingers.
"Ah, you guys used goat hair – goat hide? I think this is probably made of... dinosaur?"
Steven burst out laughing.
"What?" Layla said, looking over. "It’s true. Ish."
"You pop science heathen," he said, wiping his eyes.
"She has thousands of years of new discoveries and knowledge to catch up on. A little pop science to ease her into isn’t going to hurt anybody."
Mum-I reached for the strap in Layla’s hands, so Layla handed her the bag. Marc was almost sure only he (and maybe Steven, by now) could see the cracks in her pleasant-faced mask. Mum-I hung the bag across her chest and caressed every. single. inch of it. with her unnatural zombie hands.
Then she discovered the auditory joys of pulling a nylon strap taut very hard and very fast, and crowed with delight, and all three of them felt like monsters for being grossed out again.
Layla excused herself and muttered in passing, "I can’t take this anymore, I’m going to ask Taweret."
The bathroom door slammed and locked behind her just a tad too wildly to pass for casual. Luckily, Mum-I was entirely engrossed in her modern toy. Meanwhile, Marc bit his tongue and developed a shiny new way of communicating with himself on the spot; his own reflection in the TV screen and Steven’s reflection in one of the windows, feverishly theorizing once again about what the hell it even meant, biologically, hygienically, to be an ever-healing dead body that would never resurrect.
Damn arbitrary conceptual power limits.
Eventually Layla re-emerged, rubbing some last traces of tap water from her hands, an odd, tensely restrained look on her face. Marc shot her an alarmed glance, but she shook her head.
"Taweret says not to worry," she whispered as she came up beside him. She watched Mum-I go through the contents of her bag, which she had upended on the carpet and was now ‘oooh’ing and ‘aaaah’ing and ‘uuuh?’ing over. Furtively, while she wasn’t looking, Layla tugged Marc’s arm around her waist.
"Then what’s wrong?" he hissed, right before Steven butted in to ask, "Well, that’s great, isn’t it?"
"The exact thing she said was, and I quote:" Layla said, now with a tremor in her voice to match her expression. "‘Don’t worry, that’s standard procedure; one catastrophic plague as a result of a sickly avatar was enough to hammer that lesson home for eternity.’"
Marc and Steven’s mouth fell open.
"Good gods," Steven whispered.
"She also said..."
Layla couldn’t finish.
"What?" Steven prompted.
Layla’s mouth trembled. "...not to be embarrassed to ask her a million questions. To think of Mum-I as our first child and ourselves as new parents. ‘It’s only natural to want the advice of an expert. It happens to all first-time mothers and fathers.’"
Marc could only reel back and swear internally.
"Good goddess," Steven said externally. "That’s some devious reverse psychology."
Layla couldn’t hold back anymore; she let out a hysterical-sounding little laugh. "And the worst part is, I don’t think she even meant it that way."
Mum-I had discovered a tin of vaseline, managed to open it, and dragged a finger through the contents; having sniffed her fill, she now stuck her finger in her mouth in an attempt to taste it, and appeared to find that harder than anticipated with no tongue to dab against.
"Taweret also said to just wash our hands more often if it really bothered us," Layla said in such a smothered voice, Marc couldn’t tell if it was laughter or tears she was fighting.
Steven dragged a hand down his face. "Great. That’s just great, Tav."
"And to ask her to bathe and see what happens."
"And see what happens?!" Marc burst out, aghast.
While Mum-I delightedly rubbed the inside of her withered cheeks with vaseline, Layla buried her face in Marc’s and let her shoulders shake. No laughter, no tears, just shaking with an emotion that transcended both of those and probably most others too.
"Yeah, okay," Marc sighed eventually, his arm around her. "Story of our lives."
"At least one thing’s for sure," Layla murmured into his collar. "Whether she cleans up or disintegrates, she’s gonna love this suite’s bathtub. It has massage jets. We need to fuck in it at least once before we leave."
Preferably before a mummy disintegrated in it. But Marc figured they could probably manage that much.