Chapter Text
“Sure you left it here?” Marc asks again as Steven stops baffled at the mountains upon mountains of books he left scattered all over the apartment floor. “God, look at this place. It’s a mess.”
“Occasional disorganization, not a mess, love. This was an unintended disorganization that occurred in a fit of extreme pandemonium. Also I know where I put my books, and to be fair, you two got me occupied with translating that ancient spell book that had never been discovered by anybody in less than a week!” Steven huffs, tossing their backpack to the couch before he awkwardly navigates his way around the maze of books, careful not to tumble any. “What do you always say, Marc? Gimme a break?”
“All right, all right, I hear ya.”
“But you did so, so well, cariño. You’re like our knight in three-piece marshmallow suit,” Jake croons, winking at him from his reflection on the fish tank and moving to the mirror by the bed. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
Steven pauses, fiddling with the sleeves of Jake’s jacket he’s wearing and thinks, that appreciation goes both ways.
“Well… we each have our own responsibilities. For this body, for Khonshu, at times for the world? And the three of us are terribly hopeless without one another, so. I felt brave because you two were there with me, I wasn’t alone,” shying a little from the absolute warmth he feels radiating from his two alters. Considering he’s never been at the receiving end of anyone’s affections before, he thinks he may need some time to get used to this delightful feeling. “I wouldn’t know what I would do if I lost either of you.”
There’s a moment of silence between the three of them, never suffocating but simply a moment to digest what has been said. An outright heartfelt confession like this is surprisingly rare but equally precious, appreciating the bond they share is something Steven so desperately wants to keep safe and forever.
“You’ll never find out, babe,” he sees Marc’s soft smile reflecting from the mirror propped on the desk, a definite assurance. “I can promise you that.”
“Remind us to pinky-swear you later?”
Steven giggles, nodding his head.
“And you wanna know something?” Jake continues. “It amazes me how quickly we change the subject.”
Marc grunts, “You’re ruining the moment, Jake.”
“Don’t get me wrong, mi rey, I love that we get to share this sweet moment together and I’m hoping way too much for some sexy times later,” Jake crosses his fingers, waggling his eyebrows. “But we’re on a tight schedule, cariño.”
“Oh, right! The book! It’s right here,” he tumbles through the books on the bottom of the shelf housing Gus the Second, Gussy and Guzman, pausing. “Somewhere.”
“I should really hire us a fucking librarian,” Jake sighs as Marc directs Steven to search the other bookshelf, it shouldn’t be that hard to find.
“No, no. No librarian. Not even a maid! No one is allowed to touch my haven, we’ve discussed this,” Steven grouses, and brightens when he finds the red leather book they’ve traveled countries over for. “Aha!”
Jake cheers. “Yay!”
Three months ago, Marc and Frenchie nabbed a tome from an auctioneer consisting of an unknown chronicler’s curious adventures through Roman Egypt that caught the interest of so many legal and illegal organizations, surprisingly including Khonshu. Jake gambled (over fronting for the next two months) for the possibility that the tome’s chronicler was a tomb robber, documenting their list of steals, places they raided and what they did with their found treasures. And once Steven painstakingly learned Old Latin for the sake of deciphering and translating the texts themselves and avoiding unwanted risks, he was quick to confirm that Jake had been right – much to the assassin’s delight.
Though it eats away precious time to interpret the dead language and locate the treasures stolen and misplaced, the tome immediately becomes Steven’s Rosetta stone and has been both their map and primary source of information since then.
But with Steven being Steven, he accidentally left the damn thing behind during the rush of their latest mission from Khonshu.
“I’ll remind you boys again, my Latin is still a bit rusty,” he sits on his desk, donning his glasses before thumbing through the written entries to the page he’s stopped last. “What are we looking for again?”
“Gemstones, babe. Spell work, most likely. Magic or some sort of weird phenomenon,” Marc lists out.
Turning a few pages back, Steven starts again. “Right, right. It should be around here, I remember reading something similar. But it was somewhat vague though.”
“Could be it.”
Just before they headed home, Jake met up with Crawley for any updates on the streets’ daily gossips and the performer told him about a loudmouth rat selling an Egyptian malachite on the black market at a staggering price. A regular occurrence but what caught their interest was when Crawley added the gemstone was rumored to be a powerful item belonging to the Ptolemaic dynasty, similar to the stones that erased half of the planet’s population, desperately and effectively luring deniers and thrill-seekers to attempt purchasing it.
Steven lightly runs his finger on the inked passage, mumbling a little and testing the words on his tongue. “Wait, I don’t remember reading this bit. This entry says nothing about gemstones but a strange item found in a middle of nowhere in Egypt, made completely out of bronze and gold. This chronicler found it in a mastaba before it was destroyed by an unknown force, there was only one but they believed there could be more.”
“Curious. Did they say what it was?” Jake asks.
“Just an assumption that it could be a weapon of some sort, or a part of a weapon. And they also mentioned a summoning ritual taking place at the mastaba while they were there,” he frowns, pausing at the paragraph. “Fiery… air? Sky? They wrote collapse here but... that doesn’t make any sense. Were they inside the mastaba when it collapsed? Was it the… sky that collapsed? And there’s also a word for burn. Embers. Flashes. Quakes. Lightning clashes of something unseen.”
“Word vomit. Pendejo’s drunk.”
“No, more like they were watching an apocalypse happening,” Marc offers, looking pensive, recalling the incident with Harrow and Ammit, and Steven helping Khonshu changing the night sky. “What else did they write?”
“Umm, they wrote about a disappearance of something after the summoning,” Steven starts again, clicking his tongue at the scratched out section of the paragraph that bars him from understanding the text, but he continues on. “Right here, this one said about a cold wrecking the earth. Hellish fire turning people into dusts, ashes and sands. And the item they took shot up to the sky and vanished.”
“Uh-huh, pendejo’s definitely drunk,” Jake comments again.
“Possibly, but this is something, innit?” Steven skims through the next few entries, cataloguing the chronicler’s narration of this unknown apocalypse before he leans back on his chair, confused. He tries to piece together the story and the malachite, an awkward fit and somewhat random. It feels like their lacking something important. “Feel free to argue though, I just don’t see how this connects to that malachite,” he turns to Marc in the desk mirror. “If we continue on, it may take us weeks, or months, to read through this tome just to find a hint of something. Or nothing.”
“You’re right, this one’s pretty much a dead end,” Marc sighs and takes the reins of their body when his burner phone chimes in their backpack. He walks over to the couch, rummaging for the phone, expecting a text from Frenchie about their black market contact and what he reads is something much better. “Frenchie has the malachite.”
“Ay, ese hijo de puta. He fucking did it,” Jake groans, throwing his arms up.
“Does that mean you owe him half a million dollars, Jake?”
“It wasn’t me who made that bet, cariño,” he narrows his eyes at Marc.
“You should’ve known he would’ve done it,” Marc grins, setting up Jake’s laptop to look through the email attachment Frenchie has sent them. “But don’t think we should table whatever this apocalypse is though, or that golden weapon. I have a feeling they’ll come up again sooner or later.”
“Okay,” Steven says.
Jake pipes up then. “What do you think the ancient Egyptians used the gemstones for?”
“Jewelries, mostly. Some statuettes and sarcophagi. The nemes, the pschent—“
“Dumb it down for me, jellybean.”
“A pharaoh’s headdress and their double crown,” Steven mends back with a fond smile at the pet name, giddy. Marc and Jake adore all the moments when Steven gets all smart on them. “The Egyptians held spiritual significance to their gemstones, correlating them with magic for protection, fortune and healing. For a malachite gemstone, it meant fertility for mothers and harvests. It could also mean wisdom or prophetic visions, or protection from misfortunes as it was also the color for the Eye of Horus.”
Jake hums, his reflection showing him reclining on their bed, hands behind his head. “I’m calling it, prophetic visions. The gemstone isn’t cursed like what the rumors say but just a fallen piece of dead cabrón’s jewelry.”
To an extent, Marc agrees, as he extracts the attached folder from his email and proceeds to scroll down to assess the images of where the malachite was kept in, the loudmouth rat and the very gemstone itself strapped in a casing Marc recognizes as Frenchie’s. “I second that. Didn’t you say those curses were there to scare off grave robbers, Steven?”
“I did, but it can’t hurt to be a bit more cautious,” Steven says, pouting a little. “Oh! Can you zoom in on that symbol, love? What is that?”
Where the stone is as large like a thumb and oval-shaped, there is a lone, delicate engraving faded over time. Marc does as asked, frowning at the screen, trying to figure out the symbol. “A bird?”
“Yes… is that a sparrow? Or a swallow, do you think? I can’t really tell by its tail.”
“What’s the difference?” Jake asks.
“Generally, sparrows were used to indicate small misfortunes. Swallows, on the other hand, were used to signify the idea of greatness or the stars,” Steven muses, scratching his chin. “But if we combine the swallow and the significance of the malachite together…”
Marc raises an eyebrow, and guesses. “A protection charm?”
“Possibly? That’s the best we have at the moment, it can mean anything.”
“I still think it’s some kind of prophecy, a warning,” Jake supplies just as the burner phone pings again, and Marc lifts to read the text message. “Or again, a dead cabrón’s jewelry. This may be just a waste of our time.”
“But if the seller sold this at a ridiculous price, he could’ve taken or found it someplace important or dangerous. Or he stole it from someone, or a scam,” Steven suggests, turning to Jake’s reflection. “Is it too late to ask him a few questions now?”
“So we can corner him? Good cop, bad cop style?” Jake’s grin spreads wide. “Why, cariño, we taught you well!”
“He’s dead,” Marc tells them, frowning at the phone screen. Steven chokes out, shocked at the sudden news.
“Well, that sucks.”
Steven asks. “Did Frenchie say what happened?”
“Suspected murder, shot in the head. Two hours after he swiped the gemstone.”
Curious. Khonshu appears in a blink, lounging on the windowsill like he’s been there the entire time, staring out the starry night sky.
“Khonshu?”
The god is strangely silent, oozing an air of nostalgia before facing to them.
I have my suspicions but let us hope I am wrong.
“You’re saying you’ve seen the malachite before?” Steven bounces back in, inching close to where Khonshu is.
It is familiar but let me repeat myself again, let us hope I am wrong, Khonshu answers him cryptically, standing to his full height, his white-grey wrappings flutter. The excerpt you’ve read gave me an unfortunate insight.
Steven frowns, realizing how uncharacteristically troubled Khonshu looks.
I’ve only known one of the six locations the Ennead hid their greatest weapons. We leave now, ensure this is simply just a coincidence.
Khonshu vanishes.
“Dramatic dodo,” Jake grunts.
“Hasn’t he always been a dramatic diva?” Steven agrees, snapping his glasses closed and turns to Marc on the desk mirror. “So I guess we’re flying again.”
“Yeah,” Marc says. “Better give Layla a call, see if she’s up for another mission.”
“Is it all right if we take the window seat this time?” he asks while he packs up Jake’s laptop, remembering to bring along the tome this time. Jake slips in, slinging their backpack over his shoulder and heads for the corner of the apartment where he hides his stash, behind a cupboard shelf. “Would you like a first class seat, cariño? A late present for a job well done?”
Steven smiles shyly, contented. “Okay, thank you.”
“You never give me anything,” Marc chips in.
“I just lost half a million dollars because of your bet, mi rey. Suffer the consequences,” Jake winks at Marc’s reflection on the shelf’s glass door, hearing Steven giggle at them again when he spots that upturn lift on the corner of Marc’s lips.
He rifles through his stash, grabbing a few stacks of money and their fake passports, shoving them inside their backpack. Marc reminds him Frenchie should still have their clothes and gears on his plane before allowing Steven to take over to dial Layla’s number.
“Layla, hiya,” Steven greets when she picks up, shuffling for the door, cringing when he accidentally topples a pile of books aside. “Listen, I know this is sudden but we’ve got another adventure coming up our way. Are you interested?”