She nodded, and they kept moving. At least she wasn’t completely panicked. If he remembered properly, she’d been fairly level headed in situations before, but nothing was going to prepare anyone for this. He’d been poorly prepared himself, so he wasn’t going to go too hard on her - not while she could drop him down the stairs.
Those stairs were, simply put, hell. It took all of his scrambled concentration to take steps and make sure he wasn’t crushing Emma, that she wasn’t at risk of falling. So when she stopped, he looked over at her, confused. She met his gaze a moment later. “Fuck.”
Something had to be wrong. No way that people would be that quiet in a situation like this. He should have noticed. He had a concussion, sure, but that wasn’t really an excuse. At least she’d stopped. “Alright. We’re not going down there,” he told her, voice quiet. They needed to get out of the building, but they also needed to not get shot or blown up. The stairs were a dangerous place to be, even if they led to freedom.
He’d been in the blast, not watching it - it was hard to say how much of the building was intact. Structural soundness was a luxury they couldn’t afford at the moment. Trying to find cover could put them out in the open or have them opening a door to nowhere. But standing here, they were sitting ducks for anyone who wanted to go exploring.
“Someone’s making them quiet. Or there’s another bomb that they’re holding still for as it’s defused. Could be either.” They’d been too far away at the beginning of this to hear any shouting from down here. “We need to get out of here. To the second floor, what’s left of it. I need to find out if I can see what’s happening.”
He also needed to make some calls, but his phone was buried under rubble upstairs, so that wouldn’t be happening. Those who needed to probably already knew where he was. This wasn’t anything he knew about - that narrowed things down only slightly.
“If there’s hostiles they’ll pop their heads through here, but the building’s got to be too damaged for them to risk a full sweep. We should move.”
Emma’s head felt foggy, thoughts churning like thick molasses against a small spoon. She nodded but didn’t understand. The words were still processing. The stairs were still quiet.
She hadn’t thought before, hadn’t wanted to think, of how the building suddenly gained a gaping hole in its side. The how didn’t seem important. Instead, she had focused on the fact that she was still alive, that Sebastian was still alive (and damn it all, he was an asshole but she didn’t want to see him dead) and that they could escape.
But now there was talk of people being hushed and bombs and hostiles—
and suddenly, Emma had an overwhelming urge to curl up on the couch with Chester and order take out. It seemed like such a silly, simple thing to want at that moment, but she wanted it with every fiber of her being.
She looked at Sebastian as though she’d never seen his face. He spoke as though he wasn’t surprised or had been expecting this, and she faintly recalled that he once told her he was in the army. Had he known, then?
Had he known that the building would be attacked?
Had he been part of the attack?
No, Emma decided, that was ridiculous. Why would anyone willingly stay in the same building they planned to destroy— unless something had gone wrong, unless it hadn’t been his plan, unless—
Some very, very faint part of Emma realized that she was spiraling. And she was shaking.
“Ok,” she said with a voice that tried so hard to be calm and strong and instead betrayed some deeply buried urge to cry, “Ok.”
She kept nodding. It didn’t feel like she could do anything else. She swallowed hard.
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