Cowboy Like Me || The Mummy/Night At The Museum [COMPLETED]

3 ||

Suddenly you feel a clod of dust inhaled into your lungs. You cough horrendously against the cloth in your mouth before you realise you're alive, then sit up and bang your head on the lid of the coffin.

You're alive! How could this be? The last thing you remember was you and Rick O'Connell being stuffed into the sarcophagus of Ahkmenrah, and then dying from lack of oxygen - and you're still in the coffin.

Wait - is Rick as well?

As if on cue, a deep male voice coughs loudly on the other side of the mummy. "What the hell?" O'Connell asks indistinctly, and you wriggle the cloth down with your lips and whisper to him.
"Rick? Rick, we should be dead; how are we alive in the sarcophagus?"
"I don't know, Y/N," he muffles in an equally afraid tone. Until he gasps, and then coughs from dust again. Rolling your eyes at his idiocy, you tug a hand out of your tied rope and reach over to take off his gag.

"Y/N," he begins, his tone anticipatory, "what if... What if we're alive from Ahkmenrah's immortality thing?"

Your struggling stops as quick as your heartbeat. The immortality trinket! "But what could it be?"
"I have no idea," replies Rick in the dark.

"Mmmfmmm! Mmffffhmm!"

Both you and Rick are shocked into silence. Who on earth said that?
The muffled noises carry on, until you realise that it's coming from... gulp... the mummy between the two of you!

"Quickly, unwrap him!" you command, and Rick scrabbles for the end of the bandages on his head and tugs. You help him to unwind, and as soon as the face is uncovered, you place a hand on the pharaoh's cheek.
Wow! You are the first person to touch the pharaoh Ahkmenrah since his death! Wait, shouldn't it be a skeleton by now?

"EWWW, I TOUCHED BONES!" you shriek and back away, and bang your head against the coffin lid again.
"Y/N!" O'Connell shouts, concerned for your safety - and another voice says, "Can you keep it down, please?"

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" you both scream and hit your heads, and a third body's silhouette appears.
"Please, do not shout in my ears; this is my resting place, after all."

You stare at the mummy between the two of you, as it raises its head as much as possible, coughs, and says very politely, "Lovely to meet the both of you, even in these circumstances. My name is Ahkmenrah, Fourth King of the Fourth Kings, ruler of the land of my father's."

You and Rick suck in your breath slowly and carefully, causing another bout of coughing. What you were on this expedition for... you'd found it. Wealth in knowledge and secrets of Ancient Egypt from the man himself, the pharaoh! It's a miracle! It's... magic.

"Where's the immortality thing?" you ask the pharaoh, and he hums in thought.
"It is somewhere outside of my abode, I know that," he says, "but I have not been outside in so long, I cannot remember."
"They must've taken it, though; how else would we all be alive?" Rick reasons, and you feel more than see Ahkmenrah's head turn.

"Who is they?" he asks, and you shift in your tight space.
"Uhhh... We may have accidentally lead a bunch of expeditions from museums to your family's hidden gravesite."
"What?!" he explodes, his own head banging against the lid. He grumbles lightly, then shakes his head.
"So, these people have my mother and father, and my brother? Where are we going?"

Well, that was one thing you and Rick were both stumped by. The only thing you knew is that there were Englishmen and Americans. From what Evelyn told you about the legends of Ahkmenrah, his parents loved him so much that they showered him with riches, gave him the lands before his older brother could inherit it, and gave him a gift of immortality so that their love could stretch over the ages. Everybody who has ever heard of that last story wants to find and take the gift for themselves, and his parents must've known that. So they must've made the trinket inconspicuous, something nobody would think twice about, something they would just throw in with whatever else they could get, aka your sarcophagus.

And who would be so polite as to take whatever they could get after the others got their turn? Why, English men in the 1930s, after all! You must be going to one of the museums in England - but which?

"I don't know," you admit, scared of what was to come. "Pharaoh?"
"Yes?" the teenager asks, and you sigh in the dark.
"How long have you been coming to life?"

His turn to sigh. "I have been coming to life every time the sun goes down, since my body was placed in this sarcophagus. I'm sorry, Sir, Madam, but you will stay in this locked casket for as long as I. And if we are not separated with the tablet, I am afraid that this will be the case for years to come. Our only hope is that some day, someone will prise open the lid of our coffin and free us."

You feel something touch your hand, and you start, thinking it Ahkmenrah, but Rick O'Connell whispers, "It's me, Y/N," and you calm down.

You settle back down into the sarcophagus, Rick's hand in yours stretching across a mummy, and a tear escapes your eye as you lie there waiting for eternity to end.