12months_challenge | January themed challenge.

merikuru posting in

January's theme challenge is:

JanuAUry!

This is the month to write anything that has to do with an alternate universe. Throw characters into a parallel timeline? Drastically change an event that shaped the canon of the world? Someone lives or dies in a reality where the opposite ought to have happened? Let's have it. AUs for all!

If your work has spoilers, please add an [S] tag to the comment title. If it has mature content, please add an [MA] tag.

This theme challenge will end on January 31st, 11:59 PM Central Standard Time.

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From:

taichara

Horemheb gripped the ship's slim gunwale so tightly his knuckles showed white, despite the deep bronze of his sun-scorched skin. All around him scurried his adjunct officers, his personal aides and a small herd of scribes; he ignored them all, just as he ignored the wind tugging at the hem of his linens, the slap of the river against the Falcon's hull and the smaller watercraft tacking left and right to clear the way for his ship. The stop at Iunu had taken too long ...

How much did that mewling old fool cost me?

There was no time to waste. He needed to reach the capital as if he'd grown wings, before the entirety of the Two Lands crumbled around their collective ears. Before His Majesty ...

Damn them. Damn them to namelessless, soullessness. Forever, and eternity.

Damn them ...

He'd thought that he'd -- with effort worthy of the gods themselves -- gotten himself back under control. And he'd managed the trick, marshaling the Divisions to complete their campaign to drive the cursed Hittites back from Amqa despite the frantic messenger come careening to his tent at the very midpoint of the siege.

That message -- sealed doubly, triply over, by the royal seal, Her Majesty's seal, the God's Father's -- lay tucked beneath his tunic, pressed against his flesh by the sash of his kilt, and burned like a brand.

There had been an 'accident' -- Horemheb snorted -- involving chariotry exercises. Tutankhamen had been flung from the thundering vehicle, bones broken, the great bone of one leg shattering. The king was expected to join his ancestors; an expectation that came as no surprise to one accustomed to battlefield injuries.

By the time Horemheb clawed his way back to the Two Lands from Amqa, he no doubt had done so twice over.

May I see you to your house of eternity, at least. Shai, grant me that much at least.

If that fat old fool hasn't delayed me, Dispersing the troops at Parunefer took long enough as it was.

But it gave him the chance to switch to proper, swifter, cleaner means of travel, and for that he was grateful enough. Now the gleaming white walls of Mennefer loomed up before the Falcon and its attendant ships, and Horemheb felt a chill grip his heart.

Mennefer, the capital, where death and politics awaited.

-*-

I'm wasting time bothering with this --

Falcon had barely slipped into Mennefer's quays before a frantically waving cadet in primly pleated kilt and the Set Division's colours charged towards the ship with more urgent requests. Which now meant that, against his wishes, Horemheb was making his way to his Mennefer villa by chariot instead of proceeding to the Great House directly.

Every force in the Two Lands wants to keep me away! What excuse is there for this? I can deliver the reports as readily from the Great House -- more so, at that!

He growled under his breath, which his charioteer discreetly ignored. Ahead on the dusty road loomed the imposing double-bolted gates of his villa's compound.

I should be making actual use of the authority His Majesty --

Someone stood waiting next to the gates. A very notable someone, slowly waving away the heat of the day with a single-plumed fan, ignoring the dust gathering on his long tunic's pleats and his silver-flecked hair. Horemheb blinked, nonplussed.

Nakhtmin? What's he ...

Horemheb signaled a halt, leaping from the chariot the moment it slowed enough to do so -- ignoring the lifted brows on Nakhtmin's square-jawed face -- and sent the beasts and their driver to be tended to by the stables with a barked command. Not once did he break stride as he approached the waiting General, who shook his head and smiled wryly.

"I see my man found you before you could bolt, Great Prince. Good; we have a great deal we need to talk about. We need to put our issues behind us now, you and I --"

"Unless it involves your relieving me of my expedition records, Nakhtmin, I could give a jackal's sympathy for your need to talk."

"Don't be like that. No, in all true honesty --"

Nakhtmin flicked his fan sidewise, the flimsiest of barriers across Horemheb's chest; but it was enough to draw him to a halt, and lower his hand from the gate bolt. Horemheb favoured his fellow general, and occasional obstacle, with a wary, questioning stare, and waited. Nakhtmin glanced around them, rubbed his jaw ... and, as an expression of unfeigned shock slowly crept over his face, finally resumed speaking.

"-- Horemheb, Great Prince, Deputy of the King, Generalissimo ..."

"Enough with the formalities, Nakhtmin, before --"

"Horemheb, did you never receive a second royal messenger? Nothing at all?"

His hand strayed, unconsciously, to the bundle of papyrus concealed at his belt. Horemheb felt the chill wash over him again, chased by a growing wave of fire down his spine. What Nakhtmin was suggesting, however obliquely, was ...

"No. Only the one; he arrived during the siege. I carry the missive on my person. Why?"

The dark eyes winced. Nakhtmin flinched away, face gone ashen, leaving Horemheb torn between scratching his scalp with its overgrown locks in irritable confusion and just throttling the man.

"Nakhtmin, spit it out or by the gods, I'll drag it out of you --"

"You should have had another. If not before you passed the Walls of Horus than certainly afterwards. Father dispatched the messenger himself ... he's wondered why there was no further response from you.

"This is ... revealing. And makes it even more vital that I came here directly."

Squeezing Horemheb's shoulder, Nakhtmin stared him down. Every line of him screamed warnings; Horemheb wished his weapons were at hand. He suspected he needed them.

"I requested you come here so that I could remind you to make yourself presentable, and discuss -- recent events -- in more detail before you presented yourself at the Great House, and I think, now, that I'm going to have to dedicate double the thanks-offerings to the gods that I made that decision.

"Great Prince, go. Go now. Allow me to deal with the reports and any requisitions the Divisions may need. Don't even take the time to change into finer linens. Go just as you are -- and watch who reacts, and how, and why.

"Trust me, Horemheb, just this once. Maya should be waiting for you there; you know he'll explain anything you ask. Just go."

-*-

He'd wanted to argue with Nakhtmin. Oh, how much he'd wanted to argue -- the man had sounded mad, out of his mind with some unspoken fervour, and long hard experience drove home to Horemheb that fervour was a trap and a step away from zealotry.

He'd wanted to argue, or drag some kind of explanation from the man's throat, and then one nagging, itching detail that hovered around his awareness since Falcon had moored crystallized in his mind:

Mennefer was not in mourning.

There were no pennants waving from the temple pylons; the city thronged with people -- servants, farmers, artisans, the litters and chariots of their betters, scribes herding their students, military-men -- as if nothing was wrong. As if there were no threat to the Two Lands' very stability.

That fact, and Nakhtmin's comments about messengers and alliances, prompted two paths of thought in his mind even as Horemheb's chariot thundered towards the Great House.

Either His Majesty has been sent to his house of eternity with ... great dispatch, and someone else has taken the throne; or something rotten as jackal leavings is happening here.

Nakhtmin -- or his father -- could've managed a claim in my absence, but I can't imagine him holding back if his father is now king. Neither would a new Horus be standing at my front gate.

Mennefer's crowded streets gave way to soaring temple pylons and the Great House in the middle distance, gleaming with whitewash and brightly painted columns --

So why did he refuse to explain himself? Unless ... he wants my response to be as unprepared as possible. Why?

Watch the court, he said ...

-*-

"Horemheb, there you are!"

Nakhtmin had said that Maya would be waiting for him. He didn't say that he'd be seized and dragged off to a side office the moment he stepped past the Followers of the King. His sandal had barely touched the paint of the floor!

And now Maya had his back to the room's -- the cubby, really -- door, rumpling the fine fall of his tunic's broad sleeves, as if they were two conspirators. Horemheb eyed the normally serene Treasurer with as much patience as he could muster; which, all things being equal, was not much at all.

"If I don't have an explanation soon, I am going to ..."

The impish glint in Maya's eyes clashed with the tension of his posture.

"Erupt into one of your legendary rages? May I ask you to save it for a few scant moments more? And let me also say, from the depths of my heart, Horemheb, that I am mortally gladdened to see you returned from the barbarians alive and in good health.

"But enough of my prattling. Let me assure you, at the very least, that your heart is about to be lifted in joy -- and you'll have more than enough to keep you busy for a very long time. You may need to give up your field commission to Nakhtmin, more's the pity -- I know how you love to get yourself covered in blood and dust and just let yourself go --"

-- and here Maya took in Horemheb's simple tunic and kilt, his untrimmed hair left wild, and his obvious need for a shave --

"-- but I think we'll manage. Because you and I, my dear Deputy of the King, have a great deal of work ahead of us. Come on now, Tutu's otherwise occupied and thinks that I've gone to fetch a requisitions document from my harried underlings."

With a smile both serene and downright wicked, Maya whisked the door back open and turned to make his way to the audience hall. Bemused, Horemheb tempered his still-seething aggravation and matched him stride for stride (hiding a touch of amusement at Maya's deft handling of his long, pleated hems) as the Treasurer strode briskly and arrow-straight down the broad columned hall of the first court. The four Followers of the King that guarded the gilded doors to the audience hall noted their approach, touched breast and forehead in salute, and pulled the heavy leaves open; Horemheb nodded in acknowledgement and stalked into the court.

And froze in his tracks.

!!!

By Horus' -- how --

To the left, to the right, the usual throng of nobles, scribes diligently taking notes, more nobles, and the closest advisors to the king. Horemheb spotted Huy, looking a little peaked under a bronzing even darker than his own; Pentu and Usermontu both stood like stone statues, and he spared neither vizier more than a moment's attention. None of them merited a second glance right that moment.

Not now. Not after Horemheb took in the occupants of the brightly painted dais, and the details that not even the brilliant canopy could conceal. On the right of the Horus Throne sat Ankhesenamen, Great Royal Wife, hands folded in her lap -- but he saw how tightly those hands were clenched until his eyes met hers -- and to the left stood the ancient Aya, God's Father, his axe-like face more severe than ever, close-cropped silver mane paler still.

The Throne itself was occupied by a rail-thin young man whose dark eyes, shadowed still, burned with repressed pain and a barely-contained anger that made his own agonies look like the touch of a feather. Not even the brightly dyed and embroidered garments, the glitter of the royal regalia, could hide the ravages displayed in thin-fleshed cheeks and the pained awkwardness of his rigid posture.

But he lived. Nebkheperure Tutankhamen-heqaiunshemay, life, prosperity and health to him, lived.

Horemheb caught Aya's eye as he sank to the floor in expected obeisance, Maya alongside him, and was rewarded with a flicker of the old man's hand. There was going to be a long meeting later, oh yes. Then Tutankhamen's voice cut through the murmurs of the assembled court, and Horemheb's attention was only for his king.

"Generalissimo and Great Prince, Horemheb, my deputy, rise."

Horemheb climbed smoothly to his feet, gaze fixed on the king. But his ears he kept open for dissenting whispers; he could feel the tension in the air, thick enough to cut.

"You have not come to my presence prepared, Horemheb?"

"No, Your Majesty, may you live forever."

He placed just the slightest of emphasis on the traditional response, and was promptly rewarded by Aya's glint of amusement and the hint of a repressed smile on the king's face.

"No, Your Majesty. I was given to understand that, at best, I would arrive to see you become a god. I received no other word. I came prepared for the mourning."

Aya darkened with anger; Ankhesenamen's hands twitched. The king sat silent for a heartbeat, then two; then his gaze slowly raked the assembled nobles, before setting once again on Horemheb.

"Though not of my blood, you are the Great Prince until and unless I declare otherwise. No other may change this. You are my right hand, Great Prince, now more than ever.

"I will not playact for the benefit of this court. You were informed of my -- injury -- and, being wise in warfare, knew what to expect. I expect you know what to expect now."

Indeed he did. Horemheb held back an intake of breath; the king may well be crippled. Though he'd survived the shattered limb, there was plague in the land still. Too many variables, far too many ...

Tutankhamen's eyes glittered, implacable as the vulture and cobra adorning his diadem.

"I may live for years; I may join my ancestors tomorrow. I will not leave behind the chaos that my predecessors did.

"There is rot in the Two Lands, Horemheb. I task yourself and the Overseer of the Treasury; you will answer to no other than my Majesty, the Great Royal Wife, and the God's Father. Do as you feel you must."

Ankhesenamen unobtrusively reached to take her husband's hand in her own; only then, with that tiny hint, did Horemheb notice the king's almost imperceptible tremors. Tutankhamen stiffened, looked rebellious; then the thin face softened.

"We will all speak more of this later.

"May the gods be praised for returning you to the Two Lands safely, General. Go in peace."

From:

merikuru

This is...oh my gosh. I read it this morning, and I've been spending the entire day trying to find the words to tell you how amazing it is, and I still can't bloody find them so oh what the hell. This is amazing. Your writing awes me, it genuinely does. ~~I am fangirling all over you ack I'm sorry I promise I will clean up after myself.~~

I think I must show this to my mother, she loves Egyptian history and she loves a good fic and I think she'll very much like this.

From:

taichara

Thank ye very very kindly! :3;;

This one wanted and wants to get away from me, so I decided to just do this bit and see what percolates into something bigger, lol ~ ~~make some use of my groaning bookshelves~~

I have great affection for some dead folks? X3;;

From:

merikuru

*belated as heck*

I showed her! She loved it and wants more. Your affection for dead folks = good thing, methinks. :D

From:

taichara

Yay ~! :3 <3

I just need to decide what direction I would want to shove an actual plot, hee ~ ~~and then actually write it, which is always the stumbling block~~

I am instructed to pass along this from my scribbled notes:

"Aya is an axe-faced ornery ol bastard
"Maya is adorkable
"Horemheb just really needs a beer"

*snrrrk*