The usual disclaimer applies, I own nothing and nobody involved, etc. Revised because I was never really happy with the original, I felt like it fell short of my intentions and just dragged on without getting the proper feeling across in the end... thought I was trimming things down but somehow I wound up making the story slightly longer (for better or worse), anyway this is closer to what I intended.
I think this is the wrong way. Another wave of dizziness rolled over her, worse than the first. Closing her eyes did nothing to stave off the sensation and instead made her feel like she was falling, spinning out of control. Elena snapped them open again only to trade nausea for a splitting headache.
Nate was sure they were headed in the right direction- they had chosen this tunnel over the other based on his instincts- but down here in the dark everything looked the same to her, to the point that it threatened to strip away all sense of distance and spatial awareness. Beyond the flashlight beam the path was hardly more than a black hole cut into the surrounding stone. It could have gone on forever or dropped suddenly off the side of an underground cliff for all she could tell. So far they had been marking their progress with the extinguished end of the torch to indicate paths already explored and while the lack of soot stains told them they were not retracing any steps, this way still felt wrong somehow.
She tried to express her doubt and found the words would not come, almost as if her tongue had become too heavy to move. That was odd, and odder still when the black hole dwindled and shrank to a pinprick just before a perfect circular glow swallowed it from within, blazing bright as an oncoming train. Wait, that's not… we're in a tomb, not a train tunnel. Oh, that's just the flashlight. She could not find the strength to swat the thing out of her face. Nate was calling her name, or at least she thought he was, his voice a million miles away and fading fast. That doesn't make any sense, he's right here next to me was all she had time to think before the world tumbled out of reach.
Next thing she knew his face was swirling into focus above hers. Her head felt foggy and pitch black surrounded them on all sides, the only source of light a faint backsplash coming from somewhere she could not see. Above was a craggy stone ceiling bridging rough walls carved from the same. Elena blinked up at her husband in confusion.
"Oh, Christ, thank you!" he blurted, his words echoing off into hollow silence, you you you you you, and she wondered why until the fog lifted and she remembered where they were. Morocco, lost somewhere under the city. It's Tuesday… Nate kissed her between a few more breathless thank yous, arms trembling around her.
"Wha..?" She couldn't quite manage the t or the happened and her voice sounded weak and strange in her own ears, twanging around inside her skull like reverb from a plucked guitar string. That struck her as funny for some reason but laughing seemed to take way more effort than it was worth. She felt like she was tripping on something.
"Shh, don't talk— just breathe. Just focus on that, okay? Deep breaths. There must be a gas pocket in that direction, carbon dioxide or-"
"Monoxide," Elena corrected feebly. His suggestion was easier said than done; the subterranean air was stale and chilly here in this place that never saw the sun. Every inhale felt sharp as the shock from an ice-cold shower, and worse, it tasted of dust and dead things. This far down even the spiders had been dead for years.
"Whatever. You passed out." He was very pale against the mouth of the tunnel looming over one shoulder, disapproval rounding out the fear in his eyes. He must have carried her all the way back to the T-junction where the path split off of the main corridor, meaning the air here was safe to breathe. While she was contemplating that he flashed the light to check her pupils and held her hand at bay with an unrelenting grip when she tried to fend him off. For an instant she was so startled she could only sit and glare. He had never once used physical strength to his advantage. "I thought you were gone," he said hoarsely. "I can't lose you, Elena, not like that and not today of all days-"
More memories swam upstream. Through her fading hypoxia haze she heard hints of the old argument, the same one that had almost destroyed them. Their absolute worst fights were over his need to be protective overpowering all other reason, as though she were some frail, fragile porcelain doll and not a grown adult woman fully capable of making her own decisions when it came to her own life. Not that she was unappreciative by any means- most of the time his concern over her safety walked a fine line between endearing and annoying- however the instant it took priority over their relationship she hated it with a passion she had never known before knowing him.
"Nate, cut it out. I can't stop you killing yourself playing pirate; can't stop me coming with. No 'better off without me' bullshit. No more. Okay?" There was more she could say on the subject, but she had said it all before and just getting out those few stilted sentences had her wheezing like a chain smoker before she was done. Her coughing barked back at them in echo and she hoped it didn't hurt her argument too much.
And there it is. Every time with that smug-ass stubborn look on his face. At least he wore it well, so comfortable in his excess of gallantry he might have had on a favorite sweater rather than a scowl. Elena was only slightly disappointed in herself for thinking how handsome he looked just now with that unwavering gaze and the determined jut of his jaw… at least until he ruined it with, "Well, pardon me for not wanting to watch you suffocate to death- purple's not exactly your color, you know!"
"And you?" Every breath came a little easier than the one before. The loopy, lightheaded feeling was all but gone, too, although her headache had returned with a vengeance. She wondered how much of that was to blame on her husband as opposed to the recent lack of oxygen. "I'm supposed to be fine with you dying somewhere on the other side of the world while I worry myself sick, afraid to answer the phone because I don't know if it's really you calling or some official saying I need to go identify whatever's left of you?"
"You knew who I was when you said 'yes.'"
She wanted to slap the handsome off of his stupid hypocrite face. "And you knew who I was when you asked!" Elena snarled, struggling with the combined effort to both shove him away and use him for leverage to get back to her feet. "You knew what you were getting into, that I wasn't some princess to wait in a tower for her hero to visit whenever it's convenient-"
"Yeah, well, I hope you're happy, 'cause this is what you married for some reason, this is what I have to offer you. I hope it's everything you've ever dreamed of." He swung the light around to brighten their immediate surroundings: walls and rock and dust, and not much else. "Right now it's a choice of asphyxiating or freezing to death or hell, with our track record we'll awaken some crazy killer mummy and-"
"Where's the flashlight?" It was his cell phone flailing around, not the Mini Maglite she remembered.
Nate looked annoyed at having his dramatics interrupted. "Hell if I know, I lost the damn thing."
Well, so much for that. It must have happened sometime between her loss of consciousness and here but she could not think of a way to say as much without setting off his guilt response again. They could not risk going back for it and the torch was an absolute last resort for more or less the same reason, put out once they realized the possibility of burning up all the breathable air, so that meant they had no other choice. While she missed having a portable heat source Elena had much preferred the directional capabilities of the MiniMag. Flickering flame made for poor illumination in such close quarters, just as likely to blind as it was to show them a way out.
She enjoyed the warmth of Nate's hand around her own as they moved on again, his grumpiness much easier to bear now that he was directing it at his phone rather than her. He tried holding the device this way and that, fiddling with the settings and lifting it higher to try and cast the beam as far as possible, unhappy with the result no matter what. "Wow, really? So this sucks, it's only good for a couple of feet and I gotta keep hitting the button just to make the screen stay on. Hey, lemme see yours. 'Cause you've got an actual flashlight app and I'm stuck with this freaking flip phone from way back when they still made flip phones, that's why."
She set it up for him since he sometimes had trouble with slide to unlock, let alone trying to locate and launch the appropriate function. Considering his luck with phones they had both agreed it was best for him to have the most affordable service plan available, which usually came with the cheapest phone for ease of replacement. "Oh, it's not that old. You've got GPS and Facebook and everything on there." Not that they had a signal down here to utilize any of those things.
"Everything but a flashlight." He squinted at the white light blooming in her hand like a new star in the sky… except that this sky was stone, with dusty galaxies and spiderweb nebulas. The corridor seemed to go on forever, dizzying if she looked too long. "Oh, yeah, that's way better. Give it here?" He aimed it forward, back the way they had come and forward again, enjoying himself. "Holy crap, that's almost better than the real thing! How much did we pay for this again?"
Elena imagined a month's worth of gas and groceries obliterated beneath a half-dozen pursuing Jeeps, the fate of his last phone. The previous one was at the bottom of a waterfall, the one before that bent beyond repair from having been sat on one too many times. It wasn't always at the cost of adventure. "Too much," she admitted, glad he had let things go for the time being. He would drag them back into it again as usual but until then the respite was more than welcome, especially considering they might really be trapped here. If this place was airtight and the oxygen in finite supply as they feared then she didn't want to spend her last moments rehashing the same old stupid argument.
'For some reason,' that's nice. I married you because I love you, dumbass. It was on the tip of her tongue… no, getting in the last word like that would only overshadow the point and make things worse. Eloquence eluded her in these situations. It was something she was trying to work on, starting with her tendency to spout the first pissed-off thought that entered her mind. Not that he ever gives me credit for- shit, I'm doing it again!
She hated how helpless he could make her feel when she took pride in being anything but. Were he any other man she would have left him in her dust long ago and never looked back but she needed Nate more than anyone, needed him to understand what it was to love someone so stubborn, although to hear the others tell it that was the one area where they were evenly matched.
Patterned footfalls and soft breathing were the only sounds for some time as they left behind featureless stone for more of the same. Back at the T-junction they had used the blackened end of the torch to mark one path ventured and the other unsafe, as in previous passages where smaller antechambers and corridors had crisscrossed with the main tunnel. Here the only distinguishing thing was an ever-so-slight grade and half the time Elena could not tell if they were going uphill or down. The corridor was wide enough that they were able to walk abreast without crowding one another, but so thoroughly enclosed that she could not stare straight ahead for very long without feeling out of touch with her senses.
Eventually she found it helpful to shift focus every so often and give her depth perception something to do, alternating between the mismatched rhythm of their feet and Nate's belt buckle where it pooched up his shirt when her phone chimed suddenly. She recognized the sound of inadvertently bumping the volume button an instant before the impact of plastic-on-stone plunged them into darkness, shattering the silence like a cannon blast.
The next few seconds were as close to being blind as Elena ever cared to get. Nate dropped after the phone but with her sight stripped away she felt like she was about to float helplessly off into empty space, her hand on her husband the only solid connection to reality. In a panic she squeezed hard for fear of losing him to the void and wound up going down with him. Over the pounding of her heart was a confusion of shuffling, cursing, the crunchy sound of sand and grit sliding beneath shoe leather. Something stomped on the back of her free hand as she pawed around for her phone, which led to her snarl of protest and a clumsy apology from somewhere off to her left, only to happen again not two seconds later. More cursing, more shuffling, the leather squeak of his shoulder holster. Everything seemed so much louder in the dark.
"Yeah, yeah, I know, 'there he goes overreacting again, it's not like it bit him or anything'," she heard him grumble just as her fingers found what they were seeking. The case had come apart and she could not find the rear cover but when she popped the battery back in the glow of the startup screen made her feel better than a roaring fire on a winter night.
Nate was not appeased. He paced restlessly within the confines of the light, rubbing his arm where she'd squeezed him. "Great, that's just perfect. Lost the flashlight, now I'm breaking the only thing we've got left-"
"It just needs to boot up, give it a minute."
"And when the battery runs out, what then? The torch will only burn for so long and that's if it doesn't kill us in the process!"
His concern was not entirely unwarranted however it seemed a bit premature to be so anxious considering she still had plenty of battery life remaining. She tried to show him, but he wasn't even looking and Elena realized the phone was only the catalyst. Before she could attempt to forestall the inevitable he ranted, "Damnit, Elena- it's our anniversary, we shouldn't even be here-"
She knew perfectly well what day it was. It rained on the way to the courthouse. Chloe drove my truck and made ball-and-chain jokes while I slathered my finger with lotion so the ring would slide on easily, and afterwards Sully treated the four of us to a late lunch. It was a happy memory, one she held dear even through the pain of separation just a few months later. Because of his guilt game they had spent most of that first year apart, and she was sick of playing.
Nate was still going on. And he complains that I don't let anything go… "-your husband for crying out loud, I'm supposed to protect you and provide for you, keep you safe from shit like this and instead I've failed, again, and led us into certain death, again, and even if we escape we'll probably just get arrested for trespassing or some crap and have to spend the rest of our lives in separate cells- we should be out at dinner or in some hotel watching dirty movies, not stumbling around in the dark-"
"You are aware this stuff was right up my alley long before we even met, right? I got paid for it and everything, my name wasn't exactly in lights but I was kind of known for going places most girls don't." Until her return from Nepal minus a colleague and all their equipment. She still remembered the look on her executive producer's face as he happily assured her he was glad she had survived the ordeal and fired her in the very same breath over the fact that her footage had not.
"I know you can take care of yourself. That doesn't change what happened," Nate insisted. To his credit he seemed to be making an active effort to remain rational in his argument for once instead of going off the deep end. "If I hadn't carried you out of that tunnel you'd be-"
"If you hadn't carried me out," she repeated, shivering as the cold seeped into her bones from the stone below. "And who would have carried you?"
He stopped pacing and squinted back at her with his face half in shadow, looking for a trap. He knew her well enough not to bring up any of their friends in answer to that question. By now she had proved herself just as capable, more than willing, and unflappable in her refusal to believe that he would readily risk their lives any more than her own therefore any hypothetical situation minus her was minus them as well. Gradually his suspicious scowl became the familiar stubborn one as he insisted that he wouldn't have passed out, or even taken that particular path had he been here on his own. 'Confident' was not a word she would have used to describe the manner in which he said either.
"Oh, okay. Deadly substances don't affect you like everyone else? Also, it was your bright idea to go that way in the first place, you said something about instinct..?"
Nate slumped, the fight draining out of him. "I would have turned back once I started to feel the effects."
"Believe me when I say by then it's already too late." It had hit her like a train, and with less warning. First priority when they got back home was a carbon monoxide detector for the apartment. "Look, Nate, we're here together and we are getting out of this together, and any other mess we wind up in. This-" she splayed her fingers and wagged her wedding band at him, "—means you're stuck with me for good. I go where you go, so if you really want to be my knight in shining armor then help me up because my ass is freezing down here. And watch your big feet, don't go stepping on the rest of my phone like you stepped on me."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't ever let me listen to my instinct again." He avoided looking her in the eye as he gave her a hand up, dismissing her logic so abruptly she knew the point had been made. He did not like to acknowledge defeat. She kissed him in acquiescence and when he murmured an apology she conceded with her own despite the certainty that she had nothing to be sorry for. Without a cover in place to secure it the battery fell out of the back of her phone and the LCD winked out of existence again but this time she was safe and warm in his arms with his taste on her tongue. She hardly noticed the darkness even when the weird floating feeling came and went, the following stillness almost euphoric. Now she really felt like she was tripping.
"What's so funny?"
"It's nothing, just my mind playing tricks on me. Like what if we turn the light back on and there's some terrible creature standing right there, could you imagine? Watching us, getting off on it..." This time he laughed when she did. It felt good to remind him she could take her licks and crack a joke in the face of death just as well as anyone.
Still, they would not get out of here like this. With her phone intact and the flashlight feature activated yet again to reveal the only thing waiting for them was the path ahead stretching off into the unknown, all felt right with the world as far as Elena was concerned. Hopefully that was the last she would ever have to hear of the old argument. Wonder if we can get some seafood with that dirty movie he mentioned. Wait, I meant wine- where the hell did 'seafood' come from? She wasn't even hungry. "Nate, you smell that?"
"Sorry. My stomach's been on fire since breakfast, we can outrun it if we walk a little faster-"
"No, not- gross— that's not what I meant, there's a…" A lungful through her nose failed to recreate the experience. For hours the air had been utterly still, with not even the slightest hint of a draft to indicate outside access but this time there was something beyond the stink of the tomb, something she could not place. "I could swear I just got a whiff of something… salty, kinda… like the back room at Sully's after oyster night. Dunno how else to describe it." Realization dawned in his eyes, mirroring her own. "The ocean?"
Nate grinned. "Bet we're somewhere near the harbor! If we're lucky we might even catch the sunset." He looked inordinately pleased with himself, as was his habit whenever things turned out in their favor. God, she loved him. Elena wondered what normal people did to celebrate a wedding anniversary and felt a rush of relief and selfish pleasure, eager to never find out.