HERE IS A RECENTLY COMPLETED PAID COMMISSION. {Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade} Check the pinned post on my profile {especially the bottom of it} for commission information! Thank you to @mysteriousmisadventures for commissioning me.
! 3,420 words long + it took exactly a week to complete.
None of them could ever fully hope to wash the dusty red clay from their skin. Indiana’s hands were once soft and untested. That had been a
None of them could ever fully hope to wash the dusty red clay from their skin. Indiana’s hands were once soft and untested. That had been a long time ago. Now, every scratch and minute scar told stories without him ever opening his mouth. Stories of daring escapes and courageous misadventures.
The scent of sunbaked earth and of metal clung to him truer than any old friend, a reminder of who he was and all of the places that he had been - tombs, deserts, beaten paths, unformed paths, lakes and rivers and countries and cities. Indiana couldn't ever truly scrub off remnants of all of the places that he'd been to - the mysterious and previously undisturbed mummy-ridden tombs of Egypt, crumbling monasteries overlooking slowly-eroding cliffs, places he was told he shouldn't have been in and states of mind that lesser men carefully avoided exploring. His sense of culture and courage had been earned through countless rope-burns, weathering winds, and steps across foreign lands that left callouses on both his feet and his mind.
The soles of his well-worn boots carried the dust and the grime of a hundred locations or more, a grit he wore as proudly as his chosen name. Sweat and dirt and grit were his lucky charms and invisible medals placed around his neck after every extremely close call, every conquered beast, every brush with death, and by now he could make every half-dead, trampled shrub growing underfoot as he traveled various trails seem like four-leaf clovers. Faint traces of petrichor on clay could make him pause just long enough to remember hidden passages where the Reaper had nearly brought his scythe down on Indiana’s neck. Heroes like him didn't need mail armor.
Heroes like him were protected by honed reflexes, wit, and gumption that were sharpened as well as any blade after enough years on the road. He didn't have any armor, but he sure as hell had been in some situations where he would've welcomed such an advantage. Armor to catch arrows and bullets in case he couldn't catch himself, armor to keep blades from finding the meat between his ribs, armor to shield him from falling rocks - every brush with danger remained implanted in his mind like hieroglyphics. And yet, no matter how many times he'd come close to meeting his Maker, Indiana Jones always came back for more. Even though the era of feudal lords and crusades was long past, their ghosts seemed to linger in the carved halls of the temple, whispering unheard secrets half-forgotten by the living and kept safe by the dead. These secrets lay lurking in dusty history tomes and only picked up by brainy academics and unfortunate schoolchildren, Indiana traced the steps of long-dead knights as if he could vividly imagine the creaking of armor or the weight of responsibility.
Though he was not a feudal knight, Indiana found himself paying fealty to his sire regardless, keeping silent vows to unspoken ideals, saving his father and succumbing to the allure of the Grail. Even now, in the deafening silence of the temple that the Grail was hidden inside of, he could practically feel the pull of the holy relic like a tether to a minecart. The world outside of this desolate tomb raved about battles to come and unsettled political matters, the never-ending rumbling of trains and factories and public figures, the papers all full of a world hanging in the balance, but it was easy to forget about the outside world while Death and Danger took turns holding him hostage at the business end of Misfortune's bayonet. He rolled the dice and gambled something more precious than the Grail with each and every step whether he realized it or not. Each shadow was a potential executioner and every breath was measured by the breadth of his hope and courage.
Elsa, on the other hand, either wasn't aware of the figurative gun to her head or her lack of armor to protect her from certain doom. She was too arrogant to believe that she too was not exempt from facing fate. Perhaps she'd been in too many rooms with too many weak men, men who made their own rules and defined what it meant to be authoritative but crumbled under what Elsa considered to be the truth, men that declared absolution, men that spoke of overcoming humanity.
Elsa Schneider’s Bimini wasn't an oasis flanked by lush greenery, but rather, it was a tangible artifact that she flew towards readily on wax wings reinforced with Nazi artillery. She was a master of self-preservation, existing in a world where nothing was built to last anymore. Her cunning became her sword, her shield, and her mail armor. Perhaps she could not be loyal to Henry or to Indiana or to God, but she could be loyal to herself. She longed to live a life where she only had to answer only to her all-seeing eyes when passing a mirror. She would have forever to learn benevolence - ten thousand hours each for each of her desires and ten thousand more to rewrite the ten tenets that threatened to condemn her to bathe in Hellfire for eternity. However brief life was supposed to be, she had seized every opportunity she could thus far to write her own destiny and sculpt eternity like clay.
She would become eternity and countless little worlds built on the backs of lesser people would be explored and corrected if she willed it. Elsa would be the Empress of Consequence, destined to orchestrate the fates of others who could not match her brilliance. After all, most people seemed far too content to hardly notice their own existences these days - what a waste that was.
Longing tasted like a mint julep swallowed to erase the taste of men, of blood swallowed from a bitten tongue, of the acrid taste of adrenaline, but this victory would taste like ascension and would resonate in her eardrums louder than an axe to binding chains. This was her promise to herself, a silent prayer directed not at God but at the only one she believed to be capable of changing her life for the better - herself, of course.
Elsa had worked hard to get to this point. She had manipulated and studied and predicted outcomes more accurately than a career gambler. Every move had to be entirely deliberate. Elsa had villainized herself in the eyes of villains, cloaked in the deceit that had long since become a second skin.
She had traded loyalties between sides like fool's gold; promising on the outside, phony on the inside, but perhaps just convincing enough to someone that was particularly desperate. According to her calculations, desperation was the kinesis that could make fate succumb to her own pull of gravity.
Donovan’s death was a display of her most vain fears. The finality of it was frightening. Although she did not feel remorseful, she did feel uncomfortable when she was faced with his withering form - the folly of every risk she'd taken personified.
Her fears were very human. Age, senility, worthlessness, failure - and yet she had him face this fate with little more than a certain look in her eyes when she glanced at Indiana, as if to tell him: “See? Do you see how far I’m willing to go?” Her expression could have frozen hell twice over.
Donovan would've kept the Grail for himself. But Indiana’s goodness was the very quality she could choose to exploit to ultimately get what she wanted. Morality acted as both a leash and a lever. Elsa had learned long ago how to both push and pull.
It was easy to mistake Elsa’s humanity as evidence of inherent good. People saw what they wanted to see, especially when they subconsciously wanted to see fickle things such as love and approval. Her distress when all the books were burned wasn't at the evils being committed itself - just unalignment with the Nazi party. Elsa mourned not the cruelty but the inconvenience. It was easier for her to mourn knowledge than to mourn the people that spent their lives spreading it.
Indiana knew, grimly, that the only reason she wasn't truly invested in the cause was because she was too self-serving. Morality and moral actions were either a hindrance or a personal investment to Elsa.
Elsa had a way of making him feel as if he were supposed to accept responsibility for the fate of Walter Donovan with a single glance. He wondered what sort of delusional state would lead a person to hang on her every word, and then remembered that at one point he had. Indiana had once believed in her brilliance. He wanted to believe that beneath her self-interest and ambition were qualities such as heroism and virtue. He wanted to believe that he and Elsa were more similar than they truly were.
“For as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”
The echoing words were a grave warning.
Men always felt so safe with guns in their hands even when the true threat to their lives lay within them - the mind, the heart, their instincts. Donovan wanted to believe that he had his hands on the Grail. He clung to the prospect of immortality like a drowning man would cling to driftwood.
He relied on Elsa’s credibility when she chose the cup because he wanted to believe that he had every tool to win the gift of eternal life in his grasp.
The disbelief and horror almost allowed him to die without fully comprehending his own death. And those words were all that Donovan's life would amount to now, a footnote, a cautionary tale, one poor choice. This was the true sum of his life.
That sentence would replace the image of his face in Indiana’s mind no matter what he did.
The knight said nothing about false people robbing themselves of their own lives but perhaps that proverb was supposed to be common sense. Common sense was often ignored in favor of the prospect of power. People stayed steadfast in their sense of hope until double became nothing and until their joy turned to ashes in their mouths. Common sense stopped being common when people like Elsa got it in their heads that they could defy order. Elsa had the audacity to believe not only in her own abilities but that whatever outcome she was chasing was inevitable. But why shouldn't she believe herself capable of doing that? Weren't attempts at survival itself in the face of the unnatural and the dangerous testaments to ingenuity? Years of being treated more like a piece of jewelry rather than as a scientist in her own right didn't rob her of any confidence; She polished her invisible weapons and armor until they began to shine brilliantly. It was firmly implanted in her mind that she could do things better. She could succeed. And if she could manipulate laws and order to change sides over and over and to find this temple, why couldn't she arrange the rest of her fate exactly to her liking?
Perhaps, if she'd lived, she'd claim that no one convinced her otherwise, but there were plenty of people who had tried. Indiana’s guilt, though perhaps misplaced, wasn't just because he couldn't save Elsa Schneider - it wasn't just because he couldn't get a good grip on her hand - but rather, that he'd failed to convince her that her life was more valuable than the Grail. Her blood might as well have been his. He left a piece of himself behind in the temple like flowers on a grave when Elsa fell to her death. Bought and paid for, rotting and forgotten by most.
The knight had warned them. None of them could claim ignorance. Ignorance was only an issue when it was willful. Perhaps the urge to take things out of their natural environment for study, as trophies, and for use no matter the disturbance doing so caused was the same one that drove humans to create trade routes - people placed desire above consequence and curiosity above caution. They loved to place the novelty of the unknown over the safety of familiarity and expectation.
"We have got it, come on! It's ours - yours and mine.”
Indiana felt hope and dread all at once, a mixture more intoxicating than moonshine.The temple shook with the force of something far older than all of them combined, splitting in two. Fine dust rained down upon them, as vengeful as if Indiana were witnessing a scene from the bible. He was coated before he could blink enough of it away to be able to see. The walls groaned and the ground shook. Sweat perspired on Elsa’s forehead, tacking a stray blonde curl to it. Her eyes, terrified and yet alight with ambition, were more tempestuous than ever.
The carpenter's cup - the Grail - fell with nary a sound to be heard over the commotion. It appeared to hover for an impossibly long moment, suspended by perception and perhaps fate itself.
Quick as anything, Indiana reached for Elsa as the cup brushed her fingertips and then fell just out of reach on a lower ledge. The ledge was slick and jagged.
The mist below was intimidating, a shroud that threatened to swallow both the light and the dark. The good and the evil would be judged equally by the looming threat of the crater and the mist. Although Indiana could not see through it, he knew that nothing but certain and imminent death awaited within it. Everything was loud - too loud for Indiana to hear his own shouts or that of his father's. Every footstep, every crash, and every exhale of breath seemed amplified. For a moment, it felt almost as if his skull would splinter open right along with the ground.
Just when he thought that he caught her by the hand, pleading for her to take his hand, he was left holding a glove instead. He reached out once more. His arm strained and his fingers trembled.
"I can reach it. I can reach it." A mantra. Perhaps a verbalization of what Elsa had told herself for months and years up to this point, rehearsed in her mind each and every moment leading up to this - her final moment, her last shred of will before falling to her death.
Perhaps Indiana was under its spell too, because he found his hand reaching out for the Grail by a fraction of an inch, his heart pounding.
Henry’s voice cut through the chaos, the eye of the storm. Henry had long since realized the danger of obsession and the allure of temptation throughout this journey. He had neared the edge of danger too many times, and he knew the stakes in a way Indiana could not yet fully comprehend.
Revitalized by the Grail’s water, aged by time and circumstances, he managed to snap his son out of his trance-like state, pulling Indiana to safety just in time for them to both witness Elsa’s fall.
In her final moments, she was not a historian.
She was stripped bare of titles and ambitions, reduced to the raw, truth of her humanity. She wasn't a Nazi. Her allegiances ceased to matter the second her body began to descend.
She was nothing but an Icarus, a scared little girl, a cautionary tale. Indiana didn't know whether her last thoughts were of home in Austria or of the Grail, but that wasn't a hard bet to make. He didn't know whether or not the mist was merciful.
Perhaps it swallowed most of her screams, sparing Indiana from hearing more of them than he had been forced to. He never saw her hit whatever was at the bottom of the temple and he never heard it either.
The silence that followed was deafening. The Grail was gone, a symbol of temptation forever lost with the woman who was almost smart enough to obtain it. Holy places were not so easily defiled. Those who dared to take shortcuts would very quickly be humbled.
Along with his father, Sallah, and Marcus, Indiana escaped the temple before it completely sealed itself.
His last glance behind his shoulder was at the knight. The knight remained stoic and resolute, the true epitome of sacrifice. Indiana had read about knights like him as a child.
He did not look frightened. He welcomed death and destruction like old friends and he ended his vigil with all the bravery of a Crusader Knight riding into battle. This battle could not be won and the knight was too frail to put up a fight.
Indiana wondered if he'd ever welcome death so calmly and so fondly. Would he one day face the end with such poise, or would he clutch at life with the desperation of someone unready to release it? If he'd have long since hung up his hat and sold off his horse because his body had made the decision for him?
He had resisted the pull of temptation, but barely Had his father had not been there to call his name and pull him upright, he might have been foolish enough to believe that he could take hold of the Grail. He might have joined Elsa in her rocky grave, swallowed up by the earth, only to be remembered for folly rather than fruition. The temple would have claimed yet another before its imminent collapse. He felt micro-specs of debris tangle into the fine hairs on the back of his neck during his escape.
The blood thrumming in his head and the crashing of the temple were too loud for him to form cohesive thoughts. Perhaps clarity would be unwelcome at this moment. Perhaps if he had thoughts, he would remember.
He'd learned his lesson and he had the rest of his life to revise it over and over again in his memories. Perhaps the truest of the treasures promised to him on this journey was that of the life he'd almost forsaken. The time he could have lost— time belonging to him from the very beginning of his life, taken for granted and gifted back to him when he took the hand that set his fate back in order. It was a treasure more lasting than any artifact, a treasure worthless to perhaps anyone else but priceless to Indiana.
They all rode off into the sunset and he'd never seen anything so pretty. Perhaps it was an insult to that knight to feel as if he'd been down in that vast temple for hundreds and hundreds of years.
No, he was still young and spry and sharp enough to go on. The ache in his muscles was a reminder that he was alive. It was enough for now to simply know that he was still alive. Perhaps his forehead had a new crease forming in it and perhaps his lungs were full of dust, but he would go on. He would live to roam and seek and toil another day. He could not say the same for those who had fallen to time and temptation in the temple.
The temple collapsed, leaving the solitary knight and Donovan and Elsa there. His corpse was set to guard the ruins either for or the rest of eternity or until an archaeologist dug him up. But Indiana wouldn't see any of them again except in his memories, where their voices would echo, their faces flash like lightning across the darkened corridors of thought, where they'd exist as true-to-life as he could picture until they faded into dots on a timeline and flashes of faces.
Long after he forgot Elsa Schneider’s voice, Indiana Jones was sure that he'd remember her death as a failure, a cautionary tale. He'd hear her scream whenever there was an earthquake.
He'd see Donovan's face in the faces of old, withering men. Every wrinkle was a story and every second could be anyone's last.
He would remember what some people were willing to risk every time he drank plain water out of a plain cup. He would remember, and he would survive, and perhaps that had to be enough. “To eternal life.” He muttered dryly, toasting to no one when he took a drink the night after it all happened—finally safe, but forever haunted by what he'd seen, what he had lost, and what he had only recently realized was worth keeping.
