Uhhhhhh, sooooooo, this might just be my longest ever hiatus! I have been very busy lately with this and that, you know, nothing terribly exciting or life-changing, just... stuff, idk. It's no excuse, really. XD

Anyway, this is Hakuku's birthday present but it's late, hahaha, and it's going to be in parts anyway, maybe like three mini-chapters that I'll do hopefully this week/next week; but I suppose it's fitting that this ended up being posted on 23/04, which is, according to most fanon, England's birthday because it's also St George's Day.

So we have Haku, England and also (not to forget) William Shakespeare, who was born and alledgedly died on this day; and Shakey deserves his mention because the title of this fic is a line of his from Antony and Cleopatra. Oh so fitting? I think it is! :3

So anyway, this is a little multi-chapter fic, pretty light-hearted and with a touch of influence from The Mummy (SORT OF), which I know Miss Haku likes very much. It's also similar, I must confess, to an earlier fic I wrote in the Death Note section called Stolen Away, though that's (literally) a whole other story...

In The East My Pleasure Lies

Gentlemens' fashion and the dead, dry heat of Egypt was not a happy marriage.

Dr Arthur Kirkland, on a short fellowship at the University of Cairo, had been suffering for the four months he'd been here, all day every day, and this afternoon was no different. He understood perfectly, of course, why the locals wore loose linen robes (and not much else, it seemed) but he wasn't about to lower himself to such things: his beloved and very proper tweed was worth the sweat and the stares in the market place.

All the same, it was always a relief to hear the bell sing sweetly over the doorway as he stepped into the cool, dark interior of the club. Here he could take off his jacket and sit in just his shirt-sleeves and braces without feeling he was half-naked; the hookah smoke did plenty to disguise this and that, after all.

He weaved his way through the mismatched wooden tables towards the bar. The place was half-empty at three in the afternoon, with only a few retired locals huddled in the corner with their long smoke-holders. The barkeeper, therefore, was somewhat unoccupied, amusing himself with a sport of trying to flip coins into an empty tumbler.

"Oh, stop that," Arthur sighed, putting his hand firmly on top of his. "The devil makes work, as they say."

"Oh?" Alfred Jones grinned handsomely at him. "Speak of him and he will rise, haha. What would you busy my hands with instead?"

"Beer." Arthur loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. "It had better be cold."

"Hey, do you know how hard it is to keep stuff cold here?" Alfred grumbled; but he set to work with a glass and some half-melted ice scooped from a bucket beneath the bar. "Here you go, Doc."

Arthur shot him an idle smile as he took the glass.

"And don't you forget it."

"What, don't forget the stunt you pulled on me in Paris?" Alfred made a face at him. "Don't worry, I won't." He lowered his voice. "What did you do with the damned thing, anyway? Sell it?"

"Nothing as crude as that," Arthur replied delicately, sipping at his beer. "Although I do not care to discuss it."

Alfred's eyebrows lifted.

"I bet," he said dryly, "you little snake."

"Oh, then aren't we evenly matched?" Arthur looked pointedly at him. "Morocco, 1935; not to mention Berlin in 1934-."

Alfred grinned.

"You're still mad about that?" He gestured around. "Besides, I used the money from selling that dumb Moroccan statue to buy this place. Well. You know. Some of the money."

"Indeed, I shan't ask how much you foxed me out of, you sly beast." Arthur waved his hand. "Anyway, we'll let bygones by bygones, shall we?" He, too, lowered his voice, leaning across the bar. "I, ah, have a little proposal for you."

Alfred smiled broadly at him.

"Sure," he drawled, "but not here."

"No, of course not." Arthur gave a curt nod. "Why don't you come to my apartment tonight and I'll give you the details in privacy."

"Sounds good." Alfred gave him a knowing look, which Arthur chose to ignore.

Instead he looked Alfred up and down - at his askew glasses and tousled gold hair and khaki shirt, sleeves rolled up and top three buttons undone so that you could see actual skin, tanned and gleaming over the dip of his collarbone, how very indecent; he gestured disgustedly at him.

"And don't you dare turn up looking like that," he went on.

"Hey, just because you seem to get a kick out of sweating like a pig in all your finery doesn't mean the rest of us are that stupid," Alfred huffed. "Seriously, who are you trying to impress?"

"No-one," Arthur said stiffly. "I simply like to dress properly."

"Yeah, well, you ain't in the right place for goddamn sock-garters and waistcoats, dummy."

"I've managed this long," Arthur sighed, massaging his temples. "Just two more months in this wretched heat and I can go back to England."

"And good riddance, too," Alfred replied cheerily, sticking his tongue out at him.

"Oh, you are tiresome," Arthur sighed. "Bugger off, won't you, and let me drink my beer in peace." He swilled it around the glass thoughtfully. "...It's warm, by the way."

Alfred shot him a sweet smile over his broad shoulder as he started away.

"Fuck you very much too, Doctor," he chirped. "It's not like you have any intention of paying for it anyway."

xxx

The night was cool and pleasant; lively, of course, with the marketplaces still in full swing, bursting with music and the smell of street food. Arthur's university-property apartment, a modern square thing with white walls and a tiled floor, was two flights up and had a balcony which overlooked these nightly revelries; and here he found Alfred, leaning over to watch a group of musicians on his return from the drinks cabinet.

"Come inside, won't you?" he said testily, clinking the glasses. "I'd rather discuss this behind closed doors."

"Sensible," Alfred agreed nonchalantly, breezing back inside; he slid the panel across behind him with his bare foot. He was only marginally better dressed than this afternoon, his cream shirt properly buttoned and his braces not swinging at his knees.

He flopped onto the sofa, drawing his feet up beneath him, as Arthur sat opposite and pushed a glass of rum over the gloss of the coffee table at him. The noise outside was muted, washed over by the low sweet crackling of the old gramophone playing Stravinsky from the corner. Arthur, his sleeves rolled up beneath his grey sweater-vest, observed Alfred for a long moment, bringing his drink to his lips.

"It's the usual order, if you must know," he said calmly, his breath clouding on his ice. "I only ever want you for one thing."

Alfred grinned, hitching up his glasses.

"And we agree to split the profit this time?" he asked smoothly, his deep voice a little dangerous. "Not like last August?"

"Hmmph." Arthur looked at him haughtily. "You started this, Alfred - back in '34. You know I wanted that book for myself. You stole it from me out of spite."

"A little, perhaps," Alfred said, grinning. "But mostly I needed the money." He rested his chin on his hands. "But I thought we agreed to let bygones by bygones?"

"We did," Arthur agreed, disconcerted. "Very well, Alfred; tell me, how quickly do you think you'd be able to make a copy of this?"

He took from the coffee table, folded beneath the inside cover of a handsome leather volume, a glossy sheet of paper in quarters, which he passed to Alfred. Alfred opened it up, finding himself looking at a poster in Arabic of a handsome breastplate in the fashion of the Ancient Egyptian tradition. It was hand-illustrated in full colour, the artist painstakingly recreating the gleam of every last jewel studding its surface of fine-beaten gold.

"It's called The Heart of Ra," Arthur said. "It's believed to be part of a ceremonial outfit for a Lower Kingdom pharoah, likely 320BC, somewhere around that mark. Currently it belongs to a private collector, a Turkish noble by the name of Sadiq Adnan. However, a colleague of mine at the University of Cairo, Dr Gupta Hussan, has been in contact with Sadiq and has persuaded him to loan the artefact to the university for a study period of three weeks. Members of the public will be allowed to view it at that time."

"And you want to steal it?" Alfred drawled, looking at him over the poster.

"Naturally." Arthur met his gaze pointedly. "Don't you?"

Alfred laughed, looking at the poster again.

"Can't think what I'd do with it," he said.

"What you'd do with half of it," Arthur corrected him crisply. "Or I could buy you out, if you'd prefer. I suspect that would be for the best."

"Huh." Alfred dropped the poster to the table, finally lifting his drink. "You and I need to shack up together, that's what - it'd solve these sorts of problems."

"Oh, please," Arthur scoffed with a roll of his eyes. "You know I can't stand you."

"And yet you keep coming back to me," Alfred replied airily, picking out an ice-cube and popping it into his mouth like a gobstopper.

"For your hands," Arthur sighed. "I can't deny that you're a bloody genius when it suits you." He leaned over to tap at the poster's image. "And so, to bring us back to the matter at hand... how long?"

"Coupla days, I guess." Alfred shrugged, crunching his ice. "I'd need to see it first, though. You know... the real one."

Arthur nodded.

"I suspected as much. There's to be a welcoming luncheon, of sorts, for The Heart of Ra and for Mr Adnan this coming Thursday." He shot Alfred a sly look. "I suppose you might pop along then for a quick look."

Alfred swallowed his ice and leaned forward across the coffee table, clinking his glass determinedly against Arthur's.

"Thursday," he drawled with a lazy smile. "It's a date, Art."

Alfred seemed to have hit it off rather well with Sadiq Adnan, who was a boisterous and eccentric type, excitable with hands that talked, handsome and well-dressed in linen and silk. The Turkish collector seemed to have little interest in or time for academics, only briefly shaking with Arthur and Gupta, the head of the History Department, and telling them to make sure his artefact was put on a windowsill or something with plenty of sunlight so people could be dazzled by it properly.

Alfred had wormed his way in under the guise of a journalist, which caused Sadiq to warm to him, intrigued by his led-on life of stalking Hollywood celebrities between hotels and other lies; Alfred even had a bulky Kodak hanging around his neck the entire time, which Arthur thought was overdoing it just a little, but whatever got results, he supposed. He knew better than to question Alfred's often-questionable methods by now.

The Heart of Ra, magnificent in the afternoon sun streaming through its glass prison, stood in the centre of the lecture theatre, blinking brilliantly every time a shadow swept over its smooth curves. It was remarkably well-preserved for its age, better than other recent findings, and had been unearthed from a royal tomb in 1933. From there it had found its way onto the black market of such collectibles and ended up in the private hoarde of Sadiq, who reportedly had a penchant for all things Egyptian.

Personally, Arthur didn't think it being Egyptian or not made a blind bit of difference considering that it was made from solid gold in the fashion of a vulture with wings outstretched, coiled either side by elaborate cobras, and each of these details encrusted with over three hundred jewels and precious stones. It was called The Heart of Ra, translated from the original heiroglyphics, because to wear it was to wear the sun over your heart, for it held the light of the day as of in the hand of a god.

He stood jealously close to it for most of the afternoon, drinking in its every detail. It would be a piece of work for Alfred to reproduce, he knew, but he had faith that he'd be able to pull it off. Once they'd replaced the real one - which had already been thoroughly examined and passed as genuine - with the fake, it would stay behind glass and no-one would ever look closely enough at it again to know the difference. He was certain, in fact, that Sadiq couldn't tell the difference between diamonds and rhinestones. Collectors tended not to be experts, just rich little show-offs with nothing better to spend their money on than historical treasures to cram into trinket cabinets. As an esteemed historian, having completed his PhD at King's College London, the thought of such wretched fates made Arthur feel positively ill.

Therefore he was glad to relieve the likes of Sadiq Adnan of undeserved treasures and replace them with a meaningless decoy which, by all accounts, looked the part.

Sadly, Alfred had been more of a hindrance than a help on more than one occasion, making off with the original and selling it, but it was collateral damage, Arthur supposed. The artefact simply went back into the black market be stolen again somewhere down the line. It wasn't the end of the world, annoying as it was - and he couldn't deny that he had undercut Alfred more often than Alfred had undercut him.

Speaking of, Arthur looked towards Alfred, who was standing at the buffet showing Sadiq how his camera worked; and Alfred looked up at that exact moment, met his gaze and winked at him. Taken aback, scowling, Arthur looked away, back to The Heart of Ra.

"It is strange," Gupta said, appearing at his side. He was a soft-spoken man, serious and thoughtful. "I do not recall inviting a journalist."

Arthur shrugged uneasily, inwardly bristling at Alfred's idiotic cover.

"You know what they're like," he replied. "Snakes, specifically. They slither in where they're not wanted."

"Indeed." Gupta looked at him. "Dr Kirkland, I hope you will not mind me saying so... but it would seem that you and the journalist know one another, at least in passing. He keeps looking at you most intently."

"Oh, yes, that," Arthur said, calmly meeting Gupta's gaze. "He once conducted an interview with me for a magazine in the United States; about one of my papers. It was, ah, of particular interest to him, you see. Perhaps you recall the piece I published in 1933 about the American War of Independence?"

Gupta nodded, saying nothing.

"Well," Arthur went on, "in any case, Mr Adnan seems quite taken with him."

Another nod from Gupta, whose face never gave anything away.

"Most strange," he said again, "when I overheard him not moments ago telling Mr Adnan just how easy it would be for someone to steal The Heart of Ra."

"Did he now." Arthur bit this out, glaring across the room at Alfred, who was oblivious. "Perhaps, Dr Hassan, we ought to have him thrown out for harassing our guest."

Gupta shrugged.

"Adnan didn't seem too upset," he said easily. "He seemed to think the notion amusing."

"Even so..." As Arthur watched, Sadiq said something to Alfred before walking away, seeming to motion that he'd be back. "I, ah, think I'll tell him that he's out of order, as it were. Whilst Mr Adnan is out of earshot."

"As you please," Gupta said calmly; although Arthur was already marching away towards Alfred (who backed up like a cornered rat against the buffet table on his approach).

"What on this earth do you think you're playing at?!" Arthur demanded in a low hiss. "Dr Hassan has just informed me that he overheard you insinuating that The Heart of Ra would be an easy steal."

"Hi, Arty," Alfred drawled obnoxiously. "Nice party, huh?"

"Alfred!"

"Look, will you just let me do this my way?" Alfred breathed, leaning close. "I know what I'm doing."

"Oh, the way that you knew what you were doing in Switzerland last year?"

Alfred rolled his eyes.

"That Detective Zwingli is a nutjob," he muttered. "And yeah, okay, I admit I didn't gauge him right; but this Sadiq guy, trust me, I can read him like an open book." He flapped his hand at Arthur. "Now why don't you run along and talk about dead white guys or something and let me get on with my job?"

Arthur shot him a disgusted look.

"Alfred, I swear to god," he bit out, "if you fuck this up-"

"Jeez, Arty, take a load off!" Alfred interrupted cheerily, smacking him on the back. "One of these days you're gonna keel over dead from being so uptight all the time."

"Shut up." Arthur pointed towards the door. "You, Mr Jones, have outstayed your welcome. Get out."

Alfred raised his eyebrows.

"That seems a little harsh," he said. "All I said was-"

"Out, now, before I have you escorted out for falsely impersonating a journalist."

Alfred gave a good-natured shrug.

"Okay, okay, you win." He reached out, grabbed a handful of bread rolls and shoved them into the pockets of his suit jacket. "But I'm taking these rolls."

"Will you just go, please," Arthur snapped, massaging at his forehead.

Alfred blew him a sarcastic kiss as he passed, apparently with some sort of intent to leave the lecture hall; but he did not get that far, Sadiq swaggering back with a call to him:

"Hey, Yankee!" He stepped brusquely past Arthur and caught Alfred on the shoulder. "Where are you going? You said I could use your camera to take pictures of the pyramids."

"Professional duty bids him to be elsewhere," Arthur cut in before Alfred could speak. "Does it not?" This he added with a meaningful glare in Alfred's direction.

"O-h, I uh, yeah...!" Alfred held up his camera and shot Sadiq his most apologetic, charming smile. "I forgot I was supposed to interview, uh... um, what's his name-"

"Clark Gable, wasn't it?" Arthur growled helpfully. "The very important, very famous Hollywood actor who wouldn't like to be kept waiting?"

"Yes!" Alfred clapped Arthur on the shoulder, beaming. "Yes, Clark Gable, that's who it is. He's doing a movie here and I completely forgot I was supposed to interview him and, I mean, the pyramids have been here for hundreds of years, they're not gonna be going anywhere any time soon-"

"Thousands," Arthur sighed at him. "Don't you think you ought to be getting along, Mr Reporter?"

"Absolutely." Alfred seized Sadiq's hand and shook it vigorously. "Mr Adnan, it's been a pleasure. I hope you don't mind my ditching you, I'm so sorry, you know, I just forgot-"

"Goodbye, Mr Jones," Arthur said curtly, prying Alfred from a confused-looking Sadiq; though it was worth noting that Sadiq looked confused for about all of two seconds.

"I'll join you!" Again he was quite dismissive of Arthur, pushing him out of the way. "I've seen Mr Gable's films and I'm sure he wouldn't mind."

"I'm sure he would mind," Arthur said crossly, glancing at Alfred, who looked cornered. "You can't just bring Turkish nobles to interviews with you, how very improper!"

Sadiq shot him a bored look.

"I can do whatever the hell I want," he said blithely. He beckoned to Alfred. "Let's go, Yankee."

Arthur looked at Alfred in a furtive, desperate manner.

"Uh, I... I don't think my editor would be too pleased with that," Alfred said weakly, catching his eye.

Sadiq heaved a dramatic sigh.

"Fine," he said. He looked at Arthur, clearly annoyed. "I suppose I'll just stand around here, then." He examined his nails, well-kept and clean. "I thought, after my travelling all the way here, you would see to it that I was entertained."

"The university has cameras at its disposal," Arthur said irritably, "if you must insist on seeing the pyramids today. Perhaps Dr Hassan could accompany you - he is a leading expert in the history and customs of the Ancient Egyptians."

"No thanks." Sadiq looked at him uniterestedly. "I can't stand academics. I had a run-in with a Greek one a few years back - I outbid him on some Ancient Greek spear he wanted to write a thesis on - and I've never liked any of you since. In my experience, none of you ever want to do anything interesting."

"I see," Arthur said, his voice crackling with frost by now.

"Still, thanks for the little party... thing you have going on here," Sadiq went on airily. "I can see that you tried - though it's certainly not my idea of a party. " He grinned and nudged Alfred in the ribs. "Universities have their uses, I suppose - all because you want to take notes on my latest buy." He gave a yawn. "Well, if nothing else is going on, I'm going to go and take a nap. I'll want to be refreshed for tonight - I'm sure I can find somewhere to have some fun." He pointed at Arthur. "You and your friend Dr Hassan make sure nothing happens to my Heart of Raj!"

"It's The Heart of Ra, actually," Arthur corrected him icily.

Sadiq shrugged.

"Who cares?" he said breezily. "It looks great on my mantlepiece!" He swanned off, cutting through the crowds of esteemed academics and writers, his rich linen robes fluttering after him.

"Goodness," Arthur said quietly, "he almost makes you seem tolerable."

Alfred shrugged.

"I don't know, he seemed friendly enough when he was talking to me earlier." He grinned. "Must just be you."

"Huh." Arthur let his green eyes slide towards The Heart of Ra, gleaming like its namesake in the centre of the lecture theatre. "Do you know, Alfred, that from time to time I do actually have something of a conscience?"

"You? Really?"

"Indeed. I confess, sometimes I do honestly feel a little bit of guilt when we steal the things we do - only a little bit, you understand, but occasionally I can't help but feel sorry for whichever poor bugger we've duped. Some of them have been such nice people, if somewhat simple-minded."

"And let me guess," Alfred said, taking out one of his bread rolls and nonchlantly tearing a chunk out of it with his teeth. "You feel bad for old Sadiq - because he clearly doesn't know the first thing about Ancient Egypt or its artefacts and will probably never figure out that we stole the real Heart of Ra?"

Arthur laughed, looking at him incredulously.

"You're joking, aren't you?" he replied, arching his eyesbrows. "No, no, I was going to say that this time I don't feel a scrap of remorse at all."

Ah, well, it's something a little different (for me), I suppose? Haku, I hope you like it so far!

Boys, boys, I think you might have a little case of UST going on there... XD

Second part soon (...she says with confidence)!

xXx

BTW FFNET KEEPS EATING MY FIRST LINE BREAK AFTER THE BAR SCENE IDK WHYYYYYYYYYYY