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belphegor1982 · 4 years

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I'm just imagining a cross-over of two of your interests - Bertie Wooster hanging out with Jonathan Carnahan. I think they would get along well!

(BERTIE AND THE CARNAHAN SIBS WOULD BE BUDS. More on that later.)

I’d heard of Jeeves and Wooster a bit but never really got into it until last summer, when I basically fell in love with Bertie Wooster, and since The Mummy is one of those few fandoms that’s always in the back of my mind just waiting for an excuse for me to fall back in, I realised at some point that the characters of both fandoms are pretty close in age, or at least the same generation. (And then TM/TMR took over my brain and I put Wodehouse aside for a while.) Evelyn must be about 25 in the first film; there’s 8 years between Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, and she’s two years younger than Brendan Fraser, so in my head the characters’ ages in the first film go thus: Evy, 25; Rick, 27; Jon, 31 (because a 5/6 years’ difference is more fun to play with than 8 years). Which would make Bertie exactly Rick’s age and (again, in my head), Jeeves 6 years older than Bertie.

I was just throwing ideas together and summing up what might come out as vignettes one day in different characters’ points of view, but it got long, so I’m putting it under a cut ^^’ It’s mostly headcanon stuff, anyway.

So. The Carnahans are a moderately respectable family, even if a lot of the upper crust turned their backs on John Carnahan once he married Salwa al-Masri, and Jonathan and Evelyn (respectively 13 and 7) are deemed suitable playmates for 9 year old Bertie Wooster. Bertie is a little baffled by the tiny force of nature that is Evelyn Carnahan, who despite being a tiny slip of a girl with lots of curly hair walks with purpose and self-confidence. (And she can read almost better than he does.) They have themselves a little adventure, and the sibs conclude that Bertie Wooster is a good fellow. As for Bertie, he’s also looking forward to further lessons in picking locks, climbing down drainpipes, and other exciting endeavours Jonathan seems to know a lot about.

At some point he hears Aunt Agatha make… derogatory comments about the siblings and especially their mother, who is a very nice lady, and resolves to keep being friends, because aunts can in fact be wrong, no matter how scary they are.

When Bertie’s parents die, the siblings find a muted sunshine beam that doesn’t look like their Bertie. Jonathan sets out to cheer him up with Shenanigans, and before they know it all three have taken a tumble into the duck pond of Brinkley Court. It’s a warm summer, so they lie on the grass and wait for their clothes to dry, and Evy talks about Duat and the Weighing of Souls while the boys listen. It sounds beautiful and terrible and probably shouldn’t make Bertie feel better, but it does, a bit. Aunt Dahlia is a little horrified at the state of their clothes, though.

Bertie attends Eton, with Jonathan a few years above him, so they don’t actually see much of each other at school. When the war rolls in, Jonathan doesn’t enlist right away (he tries to finish his degree first - and fails) and so spends almost two years (early 1917 to late 1918) on the Western Front. Bertie, as expected of a young man of his class and education, joins up as soon as he turns 18, but just before he’s deployed he’s hit by the Spanish Flu and spends the last months of the war recuperating and stationed in the South of England. He and the Carnahans write to each other as regularly as they can.

When Evy’s and Jonathan’s parents die in a plane crash, they receive a long letter from Bertie. A lot of words are crossed out and corrected, and it’s meandering and sometimes a little nonsensical, but unlike most letters of condolences they received so far it was plainly written by someone who is 1) kind to the very core of his being, and 2) intimately familiar with that kind of grief.

At some point, Aunt Dahlia reasons that since Bertie and the Carnahan girl get along so well, she might make a fine match, and she tries to push them together. Bertie is awkward and low-key terrified, Evy is nerdy and nervous and absolutely unwilling to seriously consider marrying anyone. She ends up swearing solemnly that she’ll never marry Bertie, which he is considerably relieved about, and they part as friends before she and Jonathan leave for Egypt.

But where is Jeeves, you may ask? Well, he enters the picture just after the above paragraph. Which means that one day, a few months after the events of TM, Bertie tells Jeeves about this childhood friend of his who just got married to an American fellow and will be coming for tea to introduce him to Bertie, along with her brother, simply spiffing people, really, can’t wait for you to meet them, old thing.

…Jeeves is not impressed. Mrs O’Connell seems agreeable enough, prim and proper and quite an authority in her field, but her husband’s tie is a little too loose and it’s clear he has no idea how to wear a suit properly. As for her brother, he’s a foppish cad who makes Jeeves itch to count the silver spoons the second he walks out the door.

Evy, recognising a fellow scholar from unlikely background, had a splendid time talking with him and Bertie, but Rick and Jonathan think Jeeves is stuffy and snobbish.

I think they’re all going to have a little adventure together, possibly with a slight supernatural twist, which will make everyone reconsider bad first impressions:

• From Jeeves’ perspective, Mr O’Connell clearly has more common sense than most of Mr Wooster’s friends and family, which is a refreshing change. As for his deplorable fashion sense (or lack thereof), allowances may be made considering the man’s history. (Though Jeeves privately thinks Mr O’Connell might benefit from having a proper gentleman’s gentleman to guide him down the path of sartorial competence.)

• Jeeves also mellows a little with regard to the Carnahan siblings, especially Jonathan (because he and Evelyn actually got on well enough). It’s transparent that both of them are genuinely fond of Mr Wooster, just as much as he is of them, and - unlike a number of his acquaintances - are just as quick to defend him and come to his rescue as they are to put him into what he calls “the soup” in the first place.

• It’s also what endears Jeeves to Evy and Jonathan, actually: the lengths this frightfully intelligent man is willing to go to protect the young master and make his life pleasant. They’re both familiar with the concept of service in a way Rick isn’t, and they recognise how Jeeves excels at his job.

• Plus (personal headcanon here) Jonathan, not being adverse to putting the occasional toe - or foot - or his entire person - out of what is legal for two chaps to do together, didn’t miss the way Bertie’s eyes shine when Jeeves is in sight like he’s never seen them shine, how enthusiastic his descriptions of Jeeves’ brilliance, how he’s splendid and grand and a paragon and such a perfect gentleman’s gentleman. Whether Jeeves returns the sentiment, Jonathan has no idea, but he hopes so. Call him sentimental.

• (Rick also noticed, and he’s fairly sure Jeeves does return the sentiment. Not because he knows Bertie, or Jeeves for that matter, but because he saw enough of the world to know what love looks like. He doesn’t say anything, though, because it’s none of his damn business.)

So that’s it for the mo’! I wrote about 800 words of the first vignette, from Bertie’s PoV, before my mind focused on TM and its characters almost exclusively and I lost what little of Wodehouse style I had. Here’s the first paragraph, for anyone still reading this :o)

I don’t know what it is about getting on in years, but I find as they pass that one tends to look back on one’s childhood days with a somewhat fonder eye than one experienced while actually living them. St Whatsit’s summer, halcyon days, as the Bard wrote. Not that I have reached the point my nieces, if ever they should set foot in old Blighty again, might start calling me “aged relative”, as I am sometimes wont to greet my dear old aunt Dahlia with, but some of the misadventures of my mildly misspent youth do seem a lot funnier now than they did at the time. I suppose it’s the same for any and all misadventures, really, since faithful readers might recall that some of the more recent situations this Wooster found himself in are far more ridiculous than letting oneself be trussed up and mock-mummified.

Promising, what? :D Hope I can make something of it.

Thank you for giving me an excuse to be ridiculously wordy ♥

#the mummy #the mummy films #jeeves and wooster #ask reply #Mummy headcanons #sammysdewysensitiveeyes

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