He shudders, but then I feel his ribs expand under my hand. His breathing evens, just a little. He coughs, then turns his face to mine. His skin in pale, and his eyes are wide.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
I nod, because I don’t have air for words. We lay there, side by side, my arm across his chest, the fog boiling over our backs but leaving a tiny seam of nothing at ground level.
Ashton keeps staring at me. There’s a flicker of the old charm in his eyes, but it’s cracked at the edges, scared. “I thought you were trying to kill me,” he jokes, but his voice breaks.
I just look at him, and the look must say everything, because he lets out a choked laugh, then leans over and kisses me, quick and soft, right on the corner of my mouth.
“You’re amazing,” he says. “You know that?”
I shake my head, more dizzy than embarrassed.
He runs a hand over his face and looks at me again. “You are. No one’s ever saved my life before.”
I want to make a joke, something about fairy tale roles reversed, but the exhaustion hits me in a wave. I roll to my side, curl up, and rest my head on his arm. We lay together in the mud, listening to the hiss of the fog above us, waiting for the air above us to be safe again.
He starts humming, soft at first, then louder as his lungs recover. I recognize the tune. It’s the one he hummed the night before, after the wedding, when the world was just a tangle of lights and noise. I close my eyes and let it wash over me, pretend for a second that we’re somewhere warm, somewhere safe.
He says, after a long silence, “My mom used to sing to me when I was a kid. She said it was a good luck charm.”
“It’s pretty.”
His expression gets soft and sweet. “She would’ve liked you.”
I smile. “I wish I could’ve met her.”
The fog hasn’t lifted, but it’s not getting thicker. If anything, it’s just… waiting. I reach for Ashton’s hand, and he happily takes it. “It’s not dispersing? Should we try to get out of here?”
He glances at the fog, then back at me. “It doesn’t seem like we have another choice.”
I brush hair out of my face. “Crawling it is.”
“Like in the tunnel,” he says, with a grin.
“Yes,” I say, confused by his smile.
“I must like you on your hands and knees…”
I stare at him. “I don’t get it.”
Something wicked flashes in his eyes. “I swear you will, one day.”
A shiver rolls down my spine at the heat in his eyes, but I look away from it. We have other things to focus on than whatever image is rolling through his mind.
We start crawling. At first it’s hard. My joints hate me, my palms sink in every patch of mud, but after a while the rhythm becomes almost soothing. The fog boils a centimeter above my head, but as long as I keep my nose close to the moss, I can breathe.
I glance over at Ashton. He’s doing the same, eyes fixed on the ground, jaw clenched.
After a while, his gaze catches mine, and he says, “This is the most undignified thing I’ve done in a century.”
“Is that why you’re making so much noise?” I say, and he snorts, then coughs.
At some point, the mud turns to pebbles, then to hard dirt, then to stone. The shift is subtle at first. There’s less suction at my hands and knees, less drag with every movement, but I feel it.
And then… something else changes.
The air begins to thin, but just a little bit. Each breath comes a fraction easier, like something has eased its grip on my lungs. The gray around us begins to thin in strands, unraveling instead of vanishing, pulling back in slow, reluctant threads.
