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In the end, they stagger into the first hotel they can find that isn’t slap-bang in the middle of the most tourist-y bit of central Cairo.
It’s the middle of the night. The kid behind the desk looks about sixteen, spotty, lanky and chugging an energy drink with his eyes glued to his phone as he checks them in - Layla catches the tinny chatter of a news report, footage of the night’s events - of them.
Layla has spent the entire journey here too aware that if they are spotted it will be her face that gives them away - she’s going to have to enquire with Taweret about some sort of hood in future. Fortunately even if the kid were to glance up from his phone, he’s unlikely to recognise the two bedraggled travellers in the lobby as having anything to do with the two shining heroes on his phone, blinking under cold neon light, paying for a room with a handful of crumpled bills.
There's only one room available, with one double bed in it, and Layla can’t bring herself to care, because literally nothing matters more to her right now than getting into the shower she can see gleaming through the open bathroom door the minute they step into the room. She kicks off her shoes, drops her rucksack and coat on the floor and makes a beeline toward it without glancing back at Marc -
“I’m going to take a shower. If you interrupt me before I’m done it had better be because some other God has risen from the sands of the Western Desert and is about to step on this building.”
“Duly noted.” Marc sounds grimly affectionate - and then there’s a little inhalation of breath and she hears a now-familiar British accent - “I’ll pick us up some food, then, yeah?”
“Don’t wander off, Steven!”
“Scout’s honour!”
The hot water hitting her skin feels so good Layla almost starts crying. She could start crying for any other number of reasons, to be fair, but if she does, she’s going to blame the shower and not - you know - all the trauma.
She turns the temperature up as high as she can stand it, stands under steaming hot water letting it beat down on her skin until she feels scalded clean, watching rivulets of sludge-y grey and brown run off her feet and gurgle down the plug hole. She’s filthy - coated in a fine layer of dust, sand in her hair and under her nails, blood on her knuckles and in her throat; she stinks of sweat and death, and she aches like she’s just… well, survived a fight with an actual god. If it weren’t for sheer stubbornness she’s not sure she’d still be upright.
But she’s standing, and she will be clean before she gets into bed.
There’s only a wafer-thin square of complimentary soap and a thimble-full of acerbic-smelling shampoo, at least some of which she should probably leave for Marc, but she does her best to scrub the debris of the night’s misadventures off her body. It takes a long time, under the roaring stillness of the shower, all the noise of the world blotted out by rushing water, blurred by rising steam, pushed out as she crushes her eyes closed, until she starts to feel as if she’s standing on solid ground again. The glass of the shower cubical slowly begins to feel fully real against her palms - as if she won’t step out of it and immediately find herself in an enchanted tomb or face to face with a monstrous immortal.
By the time she turns the water off, wraps herself up in a towel and stares herself down in the fogged up mirror over the sink (no hippo ears as of yet), it’s been forty five minutes and it occurs to her abruptly that she should at least check that Steven truly hasn’t wandered away.
The fresh underwear and clean t-shirt she wants to change into are stowed in the bottom of the rucksack she left out there anyway - alongside a comb, her toothbrush and a purse full of tampons - so she cracks open the bathroom door to peak out into the room, half-expecting to find it empty.
Instead she can see Marc’s - or Steven’s? - head bobbing - as if he’s on all fours on the floor around the other side of the bed.Someone has picked up her coat and hung it by the door, neatly lined her shoes up underneath it and propped her rucksack against the bedside table.
She clears her throat.
“Oh!” It’s definitely Steven - Mark has never sounded that unguarded in his life - he sits up, looking toward the bathroom, and then hastily averts his gaze when he catches sight of her, “you all finished?”
“Can you pass me my bag?” She points toward it. “I have a change of clothes.”
“Lucky you,” Steven grabs it and hands it over, careful to keep his eyes on the ceiling the whole time, “I’m gonna have to sit in my skivies in a laundrette tomorrow, aren’t I?”
“Or we could just get you some new clothes.”
“Ah - yes - genius.”
She changes quickly - she travels pretty light, but she always carries fresh socks, a change of underwear and something clean to sleep in. Long, hard experience has taught her that it’s always well worth the space they take up - and these days she can also roll all those things up into a ball inside the extra socks.
When she steps out into the room again, still towelling off her hair, Steven is still on all fours - and it takes her a moment to realise what he’s done.
There is, inexplicably, a table cloth on the floor, which he must have gone down stairs and taken from the hotel lobby, because there absolutely was not a table cloth in here before. And on the table cloth is a tray, with a tea kettle, two mugs, a selection of small, styrofoam and cardboard containers, and a bag of marshmallows.
Food. Steven has laid out a picnic on their hotel room floor.
It’s not until the smell hits her - the painfully familiar promise of cumin, coriander, taamaya, some sort of meat - lamb? - that the full force of her hunger hits Layla. She’d been aware that she was hungry, sure, in the same hollow, distant sort of way that she’s been aware that she’s tired and sore and grumpy. But now she’s so hungry she could eat half of Cairo - she hasn’t eaten since breakfast nearly twenty four hours ago, and she’s so grateful to Steven she could kiss him (...again).
“Thought if I was getting peckish, you’ve gotta be starving,” Steven says, proffering one of the boxes. “I got you - uh - hawawshi - some pita and taamaya, here - this is just hummus - and there’s some kofta kebab-y things - you’d better finish those before Marc does - and your favourite, kushari -”
“ I got you the kushari,” Mark suddenly interrupts, his voice arresting Steven’s mid-sentence in a shift so abrupt it seems to take his whole body by surprise - he rocks back on his heels, spine straightening, trying not to look petulant, “if it were up to Steven we’d all be subsisting on fava beans.”
Layla sits down on the edge of the tablecloth and takes the little plastic bowl piled up with lentils, pasta, rice and spicy tomato sauce - because what she wants right now is carbs on carbs on carbs and the taste of her childhood, safe and comforting and exactly the same as it was when her father used to make it for her. And then she wants to eat that entire bag of marshmallows.
“Nothing wrong with a fava bean!” Steven protests, “key component of Egypt’s national dish, the humble fava bean!”
The kushari tastes so good Layla thinks she really might start crying again. So she leans across the table cloth and takes hold of her husband’s collar instead.
“Thank you, Marc,” she kisses him on one cheek, “and thank you, Steven.” She kisses him on the other.
One or other of them is definitely blushing. It’s probably Steven. But it shuts them both up for a minute, and they lapse into companionable silence.
“So, there’s another one, right?” Layla begins,eventually. There’s a lot she could say - should say - a lot of painful, complicated things they need to talk about. That the possibility of a third person existing in her husband’s body - one who seems to be decidedly homicidal - is the least painful or complicated of these really says something about the turn her marriage has taken, doesn’t it?
“Another - ?” Steven almost looks totally innocent - almost. Unfortunately for Marc, Steven’s nowhere near as good at hiding the guilty-labrador look they both get behind the eyes when they lie.
“Another - “ Layla gestures vaguely at him with her fork - chews, swallows. “ - personality? Alter? What do you call yourselves?”
“Steven,” Steven chirps, “with a V.”
“What I saw tonight wasn’t you, Steven. And it wasn’t Marc, either.”
For a moment, his eyes flicker - and then Marc’s back. “No. No, it wasn’t me, or Steven.”
“So there is another.”
She thinks he’s going to disappear again, retreat behind Steven - she sees the tremor that suggests the change (now that she can tell when it’s happening she’s amazed she’s been missing it all this time) but then Marc tenses up, resists it. “Yeah. Yes. I think.”
“You think?”
“I haven’t - exactly - had a conversation with him yet.”
“Yeah, we only started having our little chats quite recently,” Steven interrupts - he has three taamaya balls, hummus and pita bread in his left hand; Marc has shawarma in his right. Steven, Marc has told her, is apparently both vegan and left handed. “Bit of a shock for me, as you can imagine. But I’ve only been chatting with Marc. Haven’t - uh - encountered the other one.”
“And you’re not gonna,” Marc snaps, almost out of the other side of his mouth. “He’s not a nice guy, Steven.”
His eyes flicker and roll again - his jaw tenses - some kind of internal conversation with Steven that Marc is trying not to have outloud. Which is sweet, but fully pointless at this stage.
“ - told you,” he eventually stutters out loud, “I haven’t spoken to him, and I’m not gonna, and neither are you. He’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous than getting shot dead in an ancient Egyptian tomb?” Layla asks, pointedly. “I think the time for caution may be over, Marc.”
“Sensible lady, your wife,” Steven snaps back to the fore, his expression bright as he eyes Layla over their food, “I can see why you like her. You saw him, though, right? Mr Dangerous? Number three?”
“I saw him,” Layla nods, slowly, “wasn’t pretty.” The one look he’d thrown her way as she was wrestling free of that van had been blank, cold, shark-like - the gaze of a ceaseless hunter - a face she absolutely didn’t recognise, so starkly different to either of the men she knew.
“Did he try to hurt you?” Marc sits up, “did he touch you?”
“If he had, reckon we’d know about it,” Steven interrupts, “reckon she’d have broken both our arms, don’t you think?”
“Sensible man, your Steven,” Layla pats his leg, “I can see why you like him.”
“Okay, you two can stop being cute,” Marc appears out of Steven’s delighted smile with a dour glare, “none of us know what that guy is really capable of, but so far he’s only shown up to do serious violence, which doesn’t endear me to him.”
“Oh no, an alter who takes control of my body without warning, seems to be ultra-violent and is probably wrapped up in shady business on the side, wonder what that could be like?” Steven drawls, “no experience of that at all, have I?”
“I’m serious, Steven.”
“So am I, mate! Look, however scary this guy is, if he’s anything like I was he’s got no idea what’s going on - what if he’s confused? Scared? What if he just needs one of us to just sit him down and have a Q&A?”
“Oh, ‘cuz you were so open to that when you first started seeing me?”
Watching Marc and Steven converse is… strange. Though Layla has to suppose it’s healthier than whatever they were doing before - perpetually wrestling for control.
“So how is it you can be aware of each other but not of the other one?” she asks, putting her empty bowl down and reaching for the bag of marshmallows.
“I mean we weren’t, till a few weeks ago,” Steven shrugs, “at first all I knew was I seemed to be sleep walking, you know? And then I was getting these weird gaps in my memory - and I thought that was because I was sleep deprived. But it was just Marc, pulling double shifts on the body. Doing Konshu’s business.”
“I’d managed to keep our lives completely separate,” Marc adds, after a moment, slowly, and it strikes Layla that he looks so much sadder than Steven, and that makes her ache, somewhere, deep down, “I kept me away from Steven. I made sure he was safe. I made sure he could have just - a nice, normal life. But then I…” and he stops, and closes his mouth tightly, and Layla can see him having another silent conversation. “I lost control. I started losing my grip on missions, in places Steven shouldn’t be, times Steven shouldn’t be around - “
“I kept popping back up! In the middle of bloody - nowhere - in fights, on Konshu’s missions - you were there for some of that,” Steven manages to look only a little sheepish at the memory, “with the motorbike and - anyway. Our lives were sort of - running into each other? Somewhere in there, that’s when I started to be able to hear Marc - see him sometimes, in my reflection? But I’ve never had any contact with this other bloke.”
“Maybe you just haven’t needed to,” Layla considers, peeling open the bag of marshmallows, taking one before she offers them to Steven, “it sounds like you and Marc had to start working together because you needed each other. You were keeping each other alive.”
“He was keeping me alive,” Steven takes a marshmallow, “dunno what good I was doing in any of those situations. Ballsing things up nicely, me.”
“I don’t know,” Layla shrugs, “if Marc was blacking out in the middle of fights it sounds like he needed you, too. To look after him.”
Steven looks genuinely taken aback at that thought, smiling hesitantly but shaking his head, his ears going pink. Layla resists the urge to reach across and pinch his cheek like her jida with a little kid - he’s too cute. It’s a fucking problem.
But also, she’s so tired, and now she’s full of food and the full weight of the last day or so is threatening to crash down on her, her eyelids suddenly heavy, her limbs ledden.
“I need to…” she waves a hand at the bed behind them, trailing off into a wide yawn.
“Yeah - yeah, of course - I’ll clean up here, yeah, you get into bed - me and Marc’ll just wash up - “
The air conditioner in the room is an old, rattling, choking thing, so Layla switches it off and levers open a window instead, sinking into the blessed quiet of the room, and Cairo beyond it, sounding shockingly like itself for what it’s just been through. She switches off the light and crawls onto the bed, kicking off extra blankets and collapsing onto the clean, soft sheats.
Steven and Marc are in the bathroom - she can hear the shower running, and the occasional rumble of chatter as they talk to each other. It’s good - nice. One way or another, they are safe, for now, and she is safe and whole, clean and fed, and everything else she needs to think about can wait until tomorrow.
She must fall asleep before her husband exits the bathroom, because the next thing she’s aware of is the weight of his body on the mattress and the reflexive, distant urge to curl toward him. But she slips deeper into unconsciousness again almost immediately, a mercifully dreamless void -
Which she snaps out of some unknown number of hours later to a cold absence next to her and the sound of Steven muttering in the dark.
For one horrible, disorientated moment Layla wonders if she’s still in the tomb of Alexander The Great, or being buried alive under the great pyramid of Giza - and then the world blinks into focus.
Steven is a grey outline in the dark of the room, his body jerking erratically from one corner to another. The movement immediately puts Layla on edge - there’s something unhealthy about it, as if he’s not fully in control of himself.
“ - we will not - we will not - no, no, no - “ Steven’s voice is rising, a note of panic making Layla sit up, scrambling for the bedside light. “We won’t leave Layla here, she’ll be so hurt - no, not again - we’re not - stop that! Stop that! We’re not going anywhere!”
“Steven?” Layla finally finds the switch on the lamp, flicks it on with a faint ‘click’, and the room fills with honey-coloured light, “what’s happening?”
Steven’s eyes are wide with alarm as he swings back toward her - and she can see his body - Marc’s body - is taught and trembling, a piece of elastic pulled too tight between opposing forces, like it’s about to snap in half.
“He wants - out.”
“Who? Marc?”
“Nu - no. No. The other one.”
“The other - “ She’s still half asleep or she wouldn’t still be processing what she’s seeing. “You mean - “
“Mr Dangerous. Number three.”
“Oh. Oh.” Layla slides off the bed, “can you stop him?”
“Trying. He’s - strong. And rude . And Marc’s not here -”
Well that’s goddam alarming. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know - I don’t know - but he’s not helping - I’m on my own - I’m on my own and I don’t know if I can stop him -”
God, he looks so genuinely scared.
She’ll have to worry about Marc later - at the moment she can only help the man in front other. Layla reaches out for his hands instinctively - they’re clammy with sweat. “You’re not on your own, Steven. I’m here.”
And thank fuck, that genuinely seems to help, and he nods, his darting gaze coming to rest intently on her face. “You’re here.”
“Yes.” She squeezes his hands, feels them stop trembling. “And you’re going to take three deep breaths, and come back to bed, okay?”
“Three,” he nods - his hair is sticking to his forehead with sweat but he looks determined, “three, I can do three.”
“One,” she counts, inhaling with him, slow and deep, and then exhaling, “two -”
He breathes with her, and she watches something in him unknot, just a little - something loses its grip, retreats - slinks back into the depths of a psyche not truly his own.
“Three.”
One more breath - in, slow, steady - out.
Steven’s eyes flutter for a moment - he still smells like Marc, which she wishes she wasn’t so aware of right now - and then his shoulders slump, and he manages a small, shaky smile.
“Okay,” he nods, as if testing the motion to make sure it won’t be painful, “okay. That’s put him down a bit. Thank you.”
She’s honestly not sure what to say to that - what do you say when you’ve just talked one of your husband’s alters through an internal aggressor? So she drops one of his hands and leads him back to the bed by the other.
“You know, back home, I used to cuff myself to the bed so I couldn’t get up in the night,” Steven says, sounding deeply weary, as he sits down on the mattress, rubbing his eyes, “got to the point where I’d put the key in water in the freezer, figured by the time I could get the key out of a block of ice I might have woken up, you know? ‘Course, didn’t reckon on it being Marc, and Marc being able to pick locks.”
Layla laughs, softly. “Yeah, I taught him how to do that.”
“‘Course you did,” his smile is rueful - though perhaps just a little admiring. “Probably best I stay awake now, though. At least until Marc comes back.”
“Can you do that?” Layla squints at him, doubtfully.
“Oh yeah - I can go days without sleep, me. Used to do it all the time to try to keep Marc away. I can do it to keep number three out for a bit longer.”
Layla considers for a moment, then crawls closer, across the bed, giving his shoulder a nudge. “Lay down, Steven.”
“You sure?” But he doesn’t resist her.
“Well, what if you sleep here, and I sleep like this,” Layla hesitates for only a moment, before she manoeuvres his arm out of the way, and lays her head down on his chest, over his heart - feels him still immediately, “if you get up again, you’ll wake me, too, right?”
He swallows, audibly - places a careful hand on her shoulder. “Right. Yes. Genius.”
“Steven?”
“Yeah?”
“Relax.”
There’s a moment of silence before she hears him laugh, shortly, nervously.
“Easier said than done when you’re all cuddled up with another man’s wife, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I wouldn’t know. Never been with another man’s wife.”
He laughs again, a little easier. The hand on her shoulder gives an experimental little pat and she reaches back for it, keeping it there, against her skin - after a moment, his fingers curl around hers.
She decides not to broach the fact that yesterday he didn’t have any particular qualms about kissing her - another in the long list of difficult conversations they (all) need to have. For a moment, it’s okay to be close like this - with whatever part of Marc that Steven represents, feeling as safe as she used to in Marc’s arms.
“Do you know if Marc’s okay?” Layla asks, unable to stop herself. She’s rubbing the spot on one of her fingers which hasn’t had a wedding band on it in three months.
Steven is quiet for a second or so - then he gives her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t worry. He can’t have gone far, can he?”
She manages a small smile. “Haha.”
“To be fair to him, there used to be quite long periods where Marc wasn’t here - we did exist completely separately from each other until very recently,” Steven goes on, gently, “and we’re both still getting the hang of the whole… co-piloting thing we’re trying now. It makes sense when we’re stressed that maybe one or other of us will fall back, the way we used to. I think he’ll pop back when he’s ready.”
She’s not sure if he’s saying that to reassure her or himself.
“How’s that song go? Layla, you got me on my knees, Layla, I’m begging darling please - “
Layla glances up, smooths the the hair off his forehead, “ - darling, won’t you ease my worried mind?”
“Yeah,” Steven deflates for a moment, “bet every man and his dog has tried that on you, sorry.”
“Not so many, really,” Layla shrugs, “and you’re the nicest, so…”
He lights up again - like a kid, like she’s made of birthday cake - “ Layla… ”
His voice is sweeter than Marc’s, which absolutely should not be possible. She can feel it rumbling through his chest as she lays her ear over his heart.
“Goodnight, Steven.”
“Goodnight, Layla.”