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Sasha stares up at the crack in the ceiling of the cave--tunnel--whatever-they’re-in. As she watches, frozen, it grows.
Two inches. Four. A foot, another, and then it’s past her field of view. What she can see of it is widening, a crack growing to a fissure growing to a hole, and then--
Something creaks. Something else cracks, and then everything around them is rocks and dust and screaming--Hamid screaming, Zolf yelling, Sasha quiet as she ever is.
It goes on for hours, or maybe minutes, the sound of rock against rock so loud that it might as well be silence. Sasha covers her head with her arms and tries not to think about the irony of dying in a catacomb.
Eventually the tunnel goes quiet, echos still ringing that she’s mostly sure are only in her ears.
Sasha takes a moment to catch her breath, before pushing at the rocks she cal feel trapping her leg.
It’s pointless; they don’t move an inch. Panting, she stares at the piles of rubble she can just barely see--or maybe she’s imagining them, eyes playing tricks on her like the afterimages of Upper London’s light right after heading back underground.
“Hamid? Zolf?” She asks the empty air.
The air stands still for a moment, the only sound a trickle of dirt-water-dust from somewhere up and to her right.
Not-so-empty air answers. “I’m--I’m h-here,” Hamid stutter-coughs. He sounds worse off than she is. Probably not used to this kind of thing, living aboveground like he does. Sasha can hear him moving, rocks shifting somewhere maybe a few feet away.
Nothing from Zolf, yet. Sasha braces, about to push again, but--oh. Goin’ at this wrong, she realizes, and twists her way out.
She lies in the mostly-dark mostly-empty air of the tunnel, and breathes the free breaths of someone trapped only by circumstance, instead of literal tons of rock.
“S-Sasha? Zolf? Are you--” Hamid asks.
“Yeah, I’m alright.” She forces her voice steady. “You out, Hamid?”
“I--” Sasha hears a grunt from where Hamid is, followed by more shifting rocks, then quiet that’s still not really quiet, full of trickling water and Hamid’s panting breaths.
Hamid still sounds like he’s panicking; that’s not exactly unusual for him, but this situation is almost worth the panic. Maybe he’ll calm down if she tells him that he’s actually panicking at the right time for once. Fortunately for them both, Hamid interrupts that train of thought.
“I’m--I don’t think I’m hurt, but--Sasha, I--Zolf, he hasn’t s-said anything, and he isn’t--” Hamid sucks in a breath that whistles with nerves. “I think he’s stuck.”
Shit.
Neither of them are exactly strapping young lads, or whatever it is that rich old ladies like to call Bertie. She says as much to Hamid.
“I th-think I can, um, cast something on you that’ll help,” he says. With something to focus on, he sounds less like he’s about to faint. That’s good, ‘cause in Sasha’s experience, nothing good happens if you faint in the dark after a cave-in. “It’s called bull’s strength, I--I was reading about it the other day, and I think...”
Sasha considers it, but not for too long. It’s not like they’re getting out of here without Zolf.
Not that she wants to leave him behind or anything. Not that she doesn’t want to, she would if she had to--she doesn’t want people thinking she actually cares, or anything. Definitely not. It’s--it’s expedient, like Eldarion would say.
Eldarion would probably leave her down here to rot. Maybe she’d say something about how it’s her own fault for going down here in the first place, before she walked away.
Sasha never got anywhere by doing what Eldarion would.
“Can’t hurt, can it? I mean, uh, can it actually hurt? I’m not going to--literally turn into a bull or anything, right?” Her voice gets higher as she goes on, though she’d lie like hells if anyone ever tried to call her on it.
“No!” Hamid sounds scandalized. “No, of course not! It should just--just make you stronger, so you can help Zolf.” His voice drops to a whisper. “At least, I’m pretty sure…”
“Yeah, okay,” she says. “Go ahead. But, uh, maybe you could--” she waves her hands uselessly. “Make some light first?”
“Oh. Right.”
Between the spells and Sasha’s familiarity with how tunnels cave in--though this one’s much older than anywhere Barret ever told her to go in Other London, and some of the places he didn’t know about that she got into anyways--they manage to drag Zolf out from under the rubble he’s been buried under.
He’s still unconscious. Worse than that, though, is Zolf’s leg--the one he still has, though maybe not for long. It looks terrible, all-over blood and dust and dirt.
Well, shit, Sasha thinks, not for the first time today. Like one of those broken watch displays in the Other London stores that only sell thrice-used things, stuck ticking backwards: well, shit. Well, shit. Well, shit.
She doesn’t say it out loud, because Hamid’s face is saying it for her, and only one of them can panic at a time if they want to do anything about getting out of here.
“We’re gonna--we’re gonna be fine, he’s gonna be fine, yeah? We just have to--bandages. And clean it.” Sasha says confidently. Definitely confident, and not at all undermined by the fact that they have nothing to clean Zolf up with, much less bandage him.
People don’t look this bad and come back from it, not in Barret’s London. But she’s never had someone magic with her before, either.
“Y--yes. I can--I--I can--” Hamid sounds the most distraught Sasha’s ever heard him, even more than earlier when they were all stuck under half a ton of caved-in tunnel.
“Do whatever you’re gonna do, then, Hamid,” Sasha says, aiming for encouraging, but she left her encouraging voice behind somewhere around the third wrong left turn. And hope you don’t make things worse.
He sucks in a breath through gritted teeth. It whistles in and out, slower each time, and then the pink ball of light he’d been holding winks out.
But Sasha can still see him.
She can see him, or at least where he is, because he’s fucking glowing, every part of his body limned in that same pink. Not that the light’s actually helpful, no, of course not, magic users never are--but he’s bright enough that she’s pretty sure she’s not imagining it.
Sasha scoots back a bit, out of range of whatever this strange gods-magic is, and lets herself believe. Just a little bit. It can’t hurt.
Hamid places oh-so-careful hands--surprisingly steady ones, for someone walking the tightrope of shock--on Zolf’s leg.
Sasha watches, and waits.
And waits.
And waits.
Right as she’s about to ask if all healing takes this long, she realizes the glow isn’t only around Hamid now. It’s grown to envelop Zolf, too, tinted almost purple where it reaches up along Zolf’s leg. If she were more of a magic-type, Sasha might have more of an idea of whatever the fuck that’s about; as it is, it just strikes her as a little weird.
Then again, maybe all gods-magic is weird and glowy and color-changey. It’s not like Sasha’s ever seen much of it before; clerics of any faith never really bothered with her ilk, not that you could find many in Other London in the first place.
So she’s not the best placed to say, but--maybe it all comes with a hint of--flowers? Whatever that smell is in the air, at least, it sure isn’t dirt.
The glow fades in front of her impatient eyes, slowly at first and then all at once. The smell of flowers lingers, and Hamid sits back with a sigh.
“There, I think--I think we can move him now, Sasha.”
Sasha, still starting at the afterimage of that faint pink glow, starts. “Oh, uh, right. Can you do that--that light thing again?”
“Light? I--yes, I, um, I think it was--light,” he says, something extra in his voice in a way she can’t explain, and then she can see again, a bright pink ball of light brightening the tunnel around them. It illuminates what looks like healthy skin underneath the dried blood on Zolf’s ripped pants. Sasha hopes he wasn’t too fond of those clothes; but then, he’s a practical type like her, so he’ll probably just be happy to be alive. Whenever he wakes up.
But he’s going to wake up. A little worse for wear, maybe, but--he’ll be okay. Thanks to her, but more thanks to Hamid, and that’s a weird thought if she ever had one. It’s a day for weird thoughts, though.
Maybe Zolf’ll laugh about it with her, when he wakes up.