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“Wait.”
Marc sidestepped an old woman bent low over her jewelry stall and slipped into a small souvenir shop bearing Sobek’s name on a wide banner overhead.
“Bastard,” Khonshu muttered from his perch on the roof atop the entrance. Marc ignored him, wondering disinterestedly which one Sobek was again and what it was he might have done to piss off the other gods. Steven would probably know. “What are you doing?”
Marc shrugged, thumbing through a thin stack of postcards. They had been here a while, judging by the bent corners and lack of Just Printed Glossy Shine™.
“Not again,” Khonshu grumbled, thumping his staff in irritation.
“He’s always wanted to go.” Marc glanced over his shoulder, lowering his voice out of habit so the nearby group of tourists wouldn’t think he was talking to himself. His mouth twisted.
“We don’t have time for this, you have a train to catch—”
Marc stopped at a shot of Elephantine Island and glanced between it and the picture of St. Simeon. “He should get to see it, too,” he said stubbornly. Defensive, Khonshu frequently told him. But fuck it, for an ancient god and his avatar they weren’t actually in Egypt all that often, and Aswan was on Steven’s list. Most people wanted to see the pyramids, or the sphinx. Not Steven. Well – yes, Steven, but he wanted to see all this shit, too. The tiny villages and the – Philadelphia Temple. Marc was pretty sure it wasn’t actually called that, but he went ahead and gave himself some points for remembering that much.
He didn’t have any idea how he was going to explain their – Steven’s – mom being this far outside London, but that was a problem for Future Marc. He held up the pair of cards.
“Which one do you think he’d want?”
Khonshu practically growled. “It does not matter to me what the worm likes.”
Marc felt his hackles rise, but he knew there wasn’t any point in telling Khonshu to shut his face. He would do what he wanted.
He always did.
“No, seriously, one or two, A or B—”
“Pick. One,” Khonshu boomed. “Or send them both, I do not care!”
Marc eyed the pictures again, nodding in approval. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, good idea. Thanks….”
“I used to be worshipped among these mortals,” Marc heard Khonshu lament quietly to himself as he turned to drop some coins into the shopkeeper’s hand. “Feared.”
Marc tucked the cards securely into his jacket pocket as he stepped out into the blazing sun and picked back up into a jog, Khonshu following closely across the rooftops.
“We have less than an hour,” Khonshu reprimanded. Marc could hear the displeasure in his voice.
A cruel prickle of resentment and preemptive self-disgust reminded Marc exactly where he was and what he was going to do. He was tempted very slightly, as always, to sink back into their body, let Steven take over….
Let Steven eat a pastry in a café in a country he wanted to visit instead of shoving a knife into the next somebody’s eye socket.
Marc set his jaw and shook himself, picking up his pace. He gave himself one more second to glance around at the market, imagining what Steven would think of it all if he were here. Some of the warmth of the sun came back to him, and he patted the postcards in his pocket.
“Next time, buddy,” he promised the air. “Maybe next time.”