Chapter Text
As with all things in the desert, it started under the sun. A beginning, scarred by the blistering, unending assault of Ra himself. A gift and a curse. A rising and a setting, to inevitably lead to another rising and setting all the same as sure as the dawn wakes to meet us each day until our last. Seth was younger than he’d like to have been and older than what was for the best just the same on the day he was swept up into the happenings behind the palace walls.
The whys of how he wound up there were foggy at best, but they hardly seemed to make any difference at the time. Seth was far too busy committing other things to memory to have room for such trivialities. Reading, first and foremost, and once he’d earned mastery of that it was innumerable incantations, medicinal rites, and preparations in the holy temples.
The only experience that stuck fast was the day he was tasked with serving the young prince.
Seth had two years and a head of height on the would-be pharaoh, and at the time he’d suspected he might have a growth spurt and beat him some day. Of course, that never came to pass… Their first meeting hadn’t come as planned, of course. Seth hadn’t known enough of the pharaoh’s mischievous charms at the time to understand but he was certain now the prince wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The elder priests had every intention of making their introduction in the throne room. A formal capacity, no exchange of words or meeting of eyes, nothing more than a rivalrous companion to encourage their derelict royal student in his oft-forgotten studies. That was not how it came to be.
Seth was wandering the halls, stack of scrolls in hand, late to something or other following his eavesdropping on a meeting in the east halls and skittering past a collection of priceless, irreplaceable vases when his knees were capped out from under him, sending lids and scrolls alike sputtering in a clatter over the floor. One of the jars gave a light feminine chuckle from inside and the one closest to him snapped a lid back on in a fit, nearly missing the mark and revealing tiny bronze fingers clad in gold before ducking back inside the vase.
Seth stormed over to the pot, fighting the bony fingers for command of the lid before popping it off and revealing the wild haired boy blushing furiously inside. Seth opened his mouth to scream, prince or not, but Atem beat him to it.
“C-Come play with me in the garden,” Tiny hands shoved a small board of hounds and jackals into his chest. “Mahaad’s no fun, he always loses…”
Atem’s face was beet red, and Seth heard another stray giggle, obviously Mana, from another pot across the hall. He’d meant to give the game back, but the prince hopped out of the pot and beyond his wingspan in a single fluid spring, skating to a stop behind the pillars of the colonnade.
“Wait--!” He yelled, holding up the game.
“It’s yours,” Atem hissed. “Finders keepers, right?”
The prince and his side-kick scattered off to another hall of the palace, and Seth was left to collect the scrolls and hide the damaged pot lids.
Seth waited in the shadows of the courtyard, raking his feet over the loose gravel where the grasses were thin with wear and ground the dust to powder between his palms to stave off the sweat. His hands were shaking, which didn’t make any sense as this was hardly their first time meeting like this, under the cover of night.
When they sparred during the day, Seth was forced to go easy on him, pulling punches where it counted to spare the prince injury and humiliation in front of a crowd. But Atem…
Atem insisted on being prepared for the worst. At least, that’s what he claimed. Seth was beginning to suspect his enduring penchant for drama and misbehavior rendered these evening tristes exciting in his mind. For Seth, they were… nerve wracking. First, for fear of getting caught but now…
Atem’s gleaming ruby eyes caught the starlight from around the side of a hedge and his lips pulled back to reveal pearly fangs when he noticed Seth looking back.
“You already know how this is going to end,” Seth spat, watching his approach with hawk-like attention. “Why even bother wasting my time?”
“Perhaps I enjoy hearing the same stories more than once.” Atem halted, barely beyond an arm’s reach, stripping himself out of his royal robes to avoid drawing suspicion with their inevitable tears and dirtying. His bare chest, liberated of cotton and gold, still caught in the light of the moon as he moved. Atem gave the wooden practice sword an arrogant flourish. Seth took the bait and opened the game.
He caught Atem in the soft spot behind the knee, upending him with a howl that sent him careening to the earth with a hot lick to the shin, red leaking out from where the sharpest pebbles lodged in the flesh.
“Must you make your depredations of everything that’s sacred?” Atem picked the bloody rocks free, hissing and flicking them back into the dirt.
“You asked for this,” Seth turned away. He was never so uncomfortable with blood, except when it was Atem’s. “Quit yowling you stupid cat, you’re going to get us caught.”
The prince sprung up from his spot on the ground, trying to catch Seth off guard only to be met with a skilled parry and disarmament, getting an arm pinned and twisted up out of sorts between his back and Seth’s towering frame. Atem’s bare-skinned back burned against his chest even through the fabric. He twisted the wrist just to watch the prince cry out and water his eyes.
“I’ll get you for that...” Atem swore under his breath, snaking an ankle around their legs and searching to be his undoing in kind.
“If you wish to see me weep,” Seth taunted low right into his ear. “You yourself must first know grief.”
Set cemented his victory with a blade to the throat and eliciting a sharp gasp of desperation from the prince that made his stomach stir. He faltered, almost imperceptibly, at the feel of Atem’s sweat slicked fingers slipping between his own. Not subtly enough for the prince capitalized on his blunder and sent them both spinning in the dirt with swords forgotten and nothing more than raw clawing and gnashing of teeth. Set’s nails found purchase in the tender flesh under Atem’s shoulder blades and in turn the prince’s stocky weight found him pinned between his chest and the red sands, flushed, panting faces only a breath’s distance apart.
Seth felt his grip grow subconsciously tighter, slowly releasing his breath in an effort to appear unfazed. Atem's lips sported an insidious grin.
"Again?"
“You kept me waiting,” Seth hissed, but the frustration was hollowed out once Atem sneaked into the room, pulling the door shut behind him with the brightest smile he’d donned all evening.
“If the day was really about me, I’d be allowed to spend it with only my favorite people,” He made quick work of the distance between them, carefully avoiding passing in view of the window despite the late hour and the low light.
“That implies more than one,” Seth snipped, crossing him arms over his chest.
“Someone should have taught you to share when you were a child,” Atem chuckled, untying the knot in his arms and slipping himself between them. “You were never any good at that. I spoil you too much.”
“Empty words, coming from you,” Seth, of course, crumbled his defenses and let his arms re-cross on the other side of the pharaoh’s back. He tried to burrow his face in his long-day matted hair but the crown was in the way and he settled for his neck instead, taking a deep breath where the perfumes and incense faded leaving nothing but sweat in their wake. “It’s too hot. You should have been born in winter.”
“Sons of Ra are always born under the sun,” Atem kicked off his shoes, wiggling his tired toes and rocking on the sore arches of his feet.
“I can’t believe you made it to twenty. I thought cats only had nine lives,” Seth noticed the squirming and gestured to the seat at the edge of the bed before fetching the fresh jug of water from the table.
“I still have one left,” Atem flopped down on his back, kicking his dangling heels against the frame. “That’s plenty for any man, I think.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that.”
Seth knelt down on the floor, wrapping a hand around one bony ankle and dragged him forward across the sheets until one gilded foot dangled over the bowl. He poured the cool water over Atem’s foot in exhausted silence, massaging the sand and dust off the skin until it returned to soft, polished bronze.
“I find you both useful and pleasing. That delights me.” Atem sighed. “If I died, you would miss me.”
The taunting smirk didn’t need to be seen, Seth could hear it just fine.
“I wouldn’t have to, you’d haunt me,” He placed the first foot back on the bed despite it being too short to reach the floor and started on the second.
“Is that so?” The end of it faded out in a fit of giggles, Atem almost kneeing him in the chin when Seth drew a slow finger up the thin skin of his sole.
“I don’t think you could ever completely die,” Seth’s thumb found the sore point on the instep and Atem groaned when he pressed the issue until the tension wore out. “Some mischievous part of you would evade the grave.”
“What makes you think you’re so special that I’d waste my eternity with you?” Atem sat up, smiling down at him from above, and for the briefest moment he suspected he understood the terror Isis knew gazing through the necklace. His grip tightened despite being through with washing.
“Don’t leave me…” Seth counted and recounted all five unscathed toes in his hand.
“Your misfortunes never suited you…” Atem drew his foot back from his touch, taking his hand and pulling him up to eye level. “I won’t add to them.”
He watched the smile drain from his face, only to be replaced with something akin to hurt.
“Seth…” Atem pushed his long hair back from his face. “You know that I—"
“Some words if we let them escape cannot be recaptured.” Seth would rather press their foreheads together than look him in the eyes a moment longer. He toyed with their fingers, still locked and laced.
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say them,” Atem whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Then show me.”
“You can choose to live in your fantasies but I’m a realist!” Seth was broiled with anger at the foot of the throne, baiting Atem into another defiant screaming match. Even the palace guards did not dare to intervene.
“I will not stoop to sacrificing the subjects we aim to save!” Atem bellowed back, deep voice echoing through the halls and sounding too close now to his father’s. “When did you lose sight of that?”
“We can spare a few for the sake of the many,” Seth cried. “If you’re not strong enough to do it, I am!”
“Seth—”
“You would sooner see us all devoured than play the beast yourself, but a lack of claws doesn’t make you righteous,” It was an odd twist of events, for Seth to be looking up at Atem, the petite man with two heads of height on him from atop the dais.
“I’d be a king in a castle of sand if I abandon all we stand for!”
“Then your lack of direction will be the end of us all!”
“And your ambitions will be the end of us,” Atem’s eyes narrowed to slits beneath his crown. Seth was the only one in the room to catch the double meaning.
“I don’t serve the kingdom,” Seth growled out between barred teeth. “I serve you.”
“I am the kingdom,” Atem said. “And if you cannot see that you are lost.”
“Life in the palace has made you weak!” Seth threw his arms out in wild abandon, fighting the urge to tear at his own hair in exasperation. “I cannot serve a god that wants nothing more than to be praised.”
“I never wanted yo-your praise!” Atem spat the word like it left a bitter taste in the back of his throat. “I’m not upset that you defy me… I am upset to have lost your faith, and for that I am truly sorry.”
“Save you apologies, pharaoh. Your empty words don’t have the power to save us,” Seth heaved a breath of finality. “You never deserved the throne you sit on and that’s why you’ll lose it.”
“GET OUT!” Atem’s booming voice echoed through the hall back between them a second time, and then a third before slowly warping into a hollow, distorted whisper. For once, Seth obeyed an order without question and stormed out of the throne room without glancing back. Atem collapsed in his chair, hands still shaking through his tight grip over the arms.
“The god Set takes the form of the cruelest of animals…” Mahaad said in a soft voice, still seated at the pharaoh’s left. “Shall I see to his execution?”
“No,” Atem breathed a sigh of defeat. “Let him go…”
“ATEM!!”
“Seth...”
“What do you mean ‘Seth’!” He collapsed at the pharaoh’s side on the temple floor, coughing and blinking through the smoldering ash. “Get up! Pick a god and pray I don’t kick your royal ass when we’re finished here!”
“Seth, please--” One of Atem’s sticky hands found his, missing the first grasp and finding purchase on the second.
“Save it!” He spat, ducking an arm under his shoulders to hoist him to sitting, only for Atem to cry out in anguish. He made the mistake of looking down. Atem reached up a hand to draw his eyes back to his, placing a thumb in the path of the tears.
“I can fix this,” Seth choked out, putting a hand over his. I can fix anything. “I need time, I--”
“We are nothing more than dust and shadows...” Atem’s other hand was slung over his stomach, holding the puzzle, robes dyed too wet and dark now to judge where or how to stem the tide.
“Not all of us,” Seth scrambled to lift him off the floor, shielding him from the raging fires with his back to the licking flames. “If a man could look at you and not feel the power of the gods then I doubt he could feel anything at all.”
Atem pushed the puzzle into his chest.
“I don’t want to play this stupid game, it’s yours,” Seth struggled to push it back but the gold was slicked with blood and the pharaoh’s weakening grip was letting it slip from his fingers.
“Finders keepers,” He smiled.
“Shut up, stop it,” Seth ran the tips of his fingers over his lips to brush aside the stream of red leaking down the corner of his mouth, Atem’s shallow breaths nothing more than than a wraith ghosting across his knuckles.
“Alright.”
Atem never agreed to anything so painlessly, and Seth was wracked with panic in the absence of their unending road of tireless banter, wishing he hadn’t told him to be quiet. Atem made a hoarse sound that could almost be mistaken for a hiccup if he closed his eyes, but Seth kept them open, propping his head up between the crook of his arm and a hand under his chin.
Atem’s eyes were softer, a ruby warped to garnet one shade too close to night that didn’t catch anymore in the firelight from beneath hooded eyes. Seth leaned his face up to thread their lips together, caught between a kiss and an irrational ploy to breath life back into the ephemeral. He didn’t stop until he could taste only iron and nothing more.
“I love you...”
He hoped Atem could hear.
In the wake of the destruction and the loss, spring came again to the willing and unwilling alike with wheat and houses sprouting each from the ashes.
Seventy seven days. The embalmers finished the task they’d set out to do.
Seth never looked.
The funerary rights were complicated by processions of fawning courtiers who’d never cared much for such things while the pharaoh—his pharaoh—was alive and the sniveling sycophants made a show of their prayers and offerings if for nothing more than to earn a place in the new regime. Seth was pleading for a moment’s solitude to make his own earnest gestures before the sarcophagus, unwilling to risk tears where someone might catch wind of the vulnerability. Before he could snap his thin composure, a gentle hand found his shoulder.
“I’ll… take care of them, Priest,” She whispered, and Seth didn’t correct her on the title.
They filed out in a ruckus of shuffling feet and callous murmurs and Seth paused until their squabbling echos faded down the passages. Seth reached into his robes for an old token, unwilling to part with it, but certain it might server a holier purpose across the river in the west.
“Maybe now this game will finally give you as much grief as it gave me…” Seth placed a small game of hounds and jackals in the tomb, missing most of its pieces and with a chip taken out of the side from a long ago fit of frustration.
“Mahaad used to say…” Mana was the only one who remained now, lingering at a distance beside the blues and violets of a far too resplendent depiction of her old master. “That grief is natural. It’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“So is death.” Seth said. “I never asked for either.”
“You know, I’ve always enjoyed sneaking into the plays,” Mana settled on the dusty floor of the tomb, pulling her knees to her chest and gazing up from where Mahaad’s shadow might be if the sun ever reached such a place so deep in the earth. “When I was little, I used to think that was what my life would be like—a play. I guess I outgrew them, after a while, but I don’t find it such a silly thing to think anymore...”
“Then ours is a tragedy, wouldn’t you say?” Seth ran a hand over the carvings of the tablet, tracing the curve of Atem’s face.
“Hmm it’s still too early to say...” She paused, looking the other way and giving him a small semblance of privacy but this was her time to mourn as well. “But for them, I think it was a good one. It’s not the length that matters, really, but the excellence of the acting.”
“We should have died too,” Seth kept his voice low to mask the cracks in his throat.
“I think that sometimes, that I would have been happier that way… That’s why I’m sure it’s the coward’s way out,” Mana traced hieroglyphs in the dust and Seth did her the courtesy of not reading them. “Maybe living takes courage, too.”