Helga was lost.
Everything around her was gold. Glittering, shining gold dunes, rising and shifting beneath her feet, the hot sand offering her scorched limbs no purchase. She tumbled to her knees again and again, rising to continue doggedly onward. The sky above was burned pale yellow by the sun, which was nothing but a white glare and so hot Helga was sure it had pulled the Earth closer in its orbit. Her throat was parched, her skin rubbed raw from the sand-filled winds.
She fell once more, and found that she could not get up. Lying on her side, she felt her skin baking hard and brittle. She was letting go, giving in…
Arnold. Where was Arnold?
She tried to call his name out, but her throat was too dry, and all that emerged was a hoarse croak. Using what little moisture she had left, she wetted her lips and tried again.
"Arnold…" she breathed. It was getting harder to take in air, as her lungs withered and died.
A pair of gold eyes fixed on her. She tried to hide, to shrink away, but she couldn't even move.
"Arnold…"
Something dark reached for her…Helga felt a tug on her soul.
"Arnold!"
Helga's eyes snapped open. She was lying in the cool darkness of her tent, staring up at the canvas roof. Arnold's concerned face hove into her field of vision.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "You were having a bad dream."
Helga shivered as the effects of her cold sweat set in. "Arnold…it was awful…" she rasped, starting to break down. She felt feverish, remembering the heat of her dream.
His eyes went soft with pity, and he pulled her into his arms. "Shh…it's okay…I'm here…" he murmured, rocking her gently. He kissed her forehead, holding her close. "It's okay, sweetie."
Helga let him hold her, relishing the comforting hand that she had never had as a child. Yes, she was reconciled with her parents now—thanks to Arnold—but that couldn't give her everything she had missed in childhood. Including someone to comfort her after she woke from a nightmare.
It was silent outside. Apparently Curly and Raoul and the others hadn't been woken by her panic—which was good. Helga was only just learning how to open up to Arnold, the man she had loved since she was a pigtailed preschooler—letting her other friends in on her various vulnerabilities was not something she was willing to do, at least not right now.
Besides, they needed their sleep. Slogging across the desert day after day, searching for lost Egyptian treasures, following Arnold's map to the fabled Lotus of Nefertiti, certainly took its toll on all of them. Usually Helga slept so deeply she didn't dream at all, much less suffer through vivid nightmares.
Arnold sensed she was calmer, and pulled back so as to be able to look at her. "Do you want to tell me what it was about?" he asked gently.
Helga looked away. She remembered everything vividly—the hot, barren desert, the dark shape reaching for her, the piercing gold eyes seeing straight into her soul—and yet she couldn't express why it had infused such abject terror into her, why it had petrified her so. So she lied.
"I…don't remember," she told him, meeting his eyes. He looked levelly at her, and she wasn't sure, in the darkness, if he could tell she was lying or not.
"Okay," he said after a long minute. "Can you go to sleep now?"
She nodded. They lay down, Arnold turning to face away from her. She wanted to reach out to him, to bring back their usual closeness, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She felt low, dirty, unworthy.
Helga wasn't sure what was wrong with her. She hadn't lied to Arnold in…well, months. Since she had confessed that she loved him. Maybe she had lied to herself, but not to him. But something told her to keep this to herself, to leave him innocent of what was disturbing her for at least a very little while longer. She curled up into the fetal position, letting a few hot tears slip from beneath her lashes, feeling more distant from Arnold than she had since the six years they had been separated.
A long arm snaked out and pulled her close. She smiled through her tears, burying her face gratefully into Arnold's shoulder.
She did not deserve him.