Chapter Text
In that first frozen instant, Londo thought he was too late. Having rammed open the door of G'Kar's cell with his shoulder, he stopped dead at the prone figure covered in rubble.
But when he laid a hand on G'Kar's back, he felt movement in response. G'Kar stirred, clutching at him, struggling up with Londo's help. Londo dragged him out of the cell seconds before the cell collapsed.
The corridors beneath the palace were a shadowy nightmare world. Power flickered on and off; rocks fell from the ceiling in a lethal rain. Repeated explosions shuddered underfoot. Londo had to stagger against the walls to keep his -- their -- footing.
They were not even halfway to the stairs before the ceiling ruptured and gave way in front of them, tons of rock cascading to block the steps leading up and out. Londo stumbled back, choking on dust, his mind a washed-out blank -- before he remembered there were other ways out. He knew this place, knew it almost as well as he knew the old Mollari estate where he had grown up. As a boy, he had learned many of its secret ways, and it was to one of these that he now half-carried, half-dragged G'Kar's semi-conscious and terribly heavy bulk.
A side corridor. An old door. The power went out completely, leaving them in blackness. Londo stumbled and fell painfully to his knees on stone. At least this part of the ceiling hadn't collapsed on them yet. The air was nothing but dust, too thick to breathe. He heard another avalanche of rock from somewhere nearby, a distant scream from a prisoner or a guard -- but he couldn't think about that; he could do nothing to help that wouldn't get both him and G'Kar killed.
Blind, choking, moving by feel, he got both of them to their feet. As they stumbled on, he had no sense of direction, no sense of anything except that the way had to stay open in front of them -- which it did, by some miracle of the gods in which he only half believed. Londo felt his way along, holding up G'Kar, fingers scraped raw on the wall.
Another great roar behind them as more of the ceiling fell in, flooding them with further waves of choking dust. Londo couldn't stop coughing. He knew his companion was still alive because G'Kar was coughing now and then too, and moving sporadically under his own power, though it felt like most of his body weight was resting on Londo.
Londo tripped twice more before he went down for good, a bruising sprawl for both of them; G'Kar made a pained noise. This time Londo decided to stay down for a few minutes. The air was a little better near the floor, though it was still musty and thick. There was a good deal more rock between them and the surface here, in the old catacombs under the palace, and it seemed to him that the floor did not shudder quite as badly. Nothing had fallen on them in the last few minutes. He tried not to think about the fact that there was also more rock to fall on them if these old tunnels did give way. It wasn't as if it mattered; one shipweight or two thousand was equally lethal to a fragile mortal body.
The darkness seemed to have a weight of its own, pressing down on him as his ragged coughing slowly eased.
G'Kar stirred a little. "Can you see?" he asked in a faint rasp.
"Of course I can't see," Londo wheezed back. "It's pitch dark." He hesitated. "Can Narns see in the dark?" It had never occurred to him to wonder.
"Only Narns with an artificial eye that has an infrared mode." G'Kar's voice was still a croak, but he sounded a little more like himself, less weak and faint, with a slight sardonic edge. Londo started to retort, then yelped in pain as G'Kar's weight came down on his spine in the form of a Narn hand that seemed to be grinding down into his kidneys.
"Off!"
G'Kar muttered an apology and tried to use some part of the floor not covered in Londo to give himself leverage to sit up. As his weight withdrew, Londo had a completely irrational moment of panic when he couldn't feel him, and grasped for something, anything to ground himself on. He felt foolish as soon as his hand landed on the gritty, trailing edge of G'Kar's coat. Of course he was not really alone down here. It was only that it was so very dark.
Abruptly the darkness was washed out in blue-white light. Londo squeezed his eyes shut, suddenly aware that he'd gotten some of the grit in them, too.
When he was able to blink his eyes open, he saw that they were in a narrow, rough-cut tunnel with some fragmentary ends of pipe dangling from the ceiling on rusted-out brackets. G'Kar was sitting next to him with his back against the wall, looking even worse than Londo had realized in those few brief glimpses before the light went out: plastered with dust and blood, shoulders hunched. But he was smiling a little. One glove was off, and he was holding something pinched in two bare fingers that was shedding light like a captive star. G'Kar did something to it, and it dimmed a bit.
"Where did you have that?" Londo asked suspiciously.
"Inside my glove. One of a few small, useful items I carry on my person." He passed it to Londo. It was slightly smaller than an Earth marble, and faintly warm. "You'd better have it, since I can see adequately enough without. Twist the two halves to dim the light or turn it off."
Londo tested it out, fiddling with it, making it dimmer until it no longer hurt his eyes. "You had this in the cell?"
G'Kar tried to shrug, hissed in pain. "I have learned to be resourceful in such instances. I have a knife as well."
"Where do you -- no, no, don't show me. Please. I suppose I should be glad our guards are dismal at searching their prisoners."
He held up the light to view the tunnel around them. It revealed little. Ahead, a slight downward slope. Behind, a short run of rough-hewn stone hall that diverged in a fork. Londo's stomach sank in a pit of chill as he realized they'd come out of one of those two branches -- but he wasn't sure which one. Dust still hung in the air, reflecting the light of G'Kar's little orb.
"How long will its batteries last?" Londo asked.
"A couple of weeks, at the minimum." G'Kar coughed into his fist before pulling his glove back on. "Longer than we will without water or food, I expect."
"Thank you for the optimism." At least they didn't have to worry about conserving light. Londo tried to figure out a way to hold the thing comfortably or maybe wedge it into the jeweled brooch on his dust-covered coat.
"It's magnetic," G'Kar said. "If there's anything metal on you, stick it to that."
Most of the metals of his various decorations were non-ferrous, but Londo discovered that there was something in the clasp holding his coat shut at his neck that it could adhere to. With the light thus clipped, he turned to look at G'Kar, who had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.
"How badly are you hurt?"
"Not so badly as I would have been," G'Kar said. His voice was a cracked undertone. He opened his eyes, squinting at Londo as if his head hurt. "Thanks to you."
It was an uncomfortable reminder that G'Kar had been in that situation in the first place because of Londo. "Let us save the accolades until we get the rest of the way out, hmm?"
G'Kar smiled slightly. "Which way now?"
"Great Maker knows," Londo said between his teeth. He looked ahead, then behind; there was no help there. The ground shuddered again, and he reflexively looked up, only to wrench his eyes down at the sight of the low, rocky ceiling. He told himself that it had stood for hundreds of years against weather, seismic disturbances, and other threats. Of course, it had never been bombed from orbit before, either.
"You don't know?" G'Kar sounded a little more alert. Also, irritated.
"It was dark!" Londo shot back. "Would you rather be buried under a massive pile of rock in your cell?"
"No, but I'm also not fond of wandering until we die of exposure and thirst."
"We are not going to die of any of those things." Londo tugged his coat closer around himself. It was chilly down here, he was only now noticing.
"Or bad air, or --"
"Why don't you add a horde of hungry ghosts while you're at it?"
"Centauri ghosts? I don't consider them much of a threat."
Londo sneered at him, but gradually lost the ability to hold the expression. G'Kar, for all his bravado and attempts to put a joking face on it, looked terrible. He was still hunched in pain, shivering a little too, his face caked with dust and blood matted together into a sticky slurry. One of his hands rested on his leg above his knee, fingers digging in a little.
"We're in the old part of the tunnels," Londo said. "Mining tunnels that predate the modern palace. Maybe even the city. No one has mapped them all. No one really knows how deep they go."
"If you're trying to comfort me, you're doing a poor job."
The ground shook under them again. Londo wished he had a drink of water; his tongue felt caked with dust. He got to his feet, the light on his coat causing the shadows to dance crazily around them, and held out a hand.
"Come on, let us see if we can find our way back and stop your people from bombing us to rubble."
Urgency beat at the back of his mind. He had to get back, he had to stop the Centauri fleet before it returned and the war blew up beyond all hope of reconciliation.
G'Kar looked up at him, squinting against the light. Then he took Londo's hand in his dust-covered glove. In his first attempt to get up, he nearly pulled Londo down on top of him. Londo had to crouch, got an arm around him -- this produced a huff of pain, and Londo told himself he hadn't just felt something crunching around in there -- and hauled him to his feet.
"You should go ahead," G'Kar suggested, stumbling along beside him as Londo headed back to the fork in the tunnel and made his best guess at which one they had come from. "It makes more sense to let me sit for a while and catch my breath, while you find the way out, and you can send help back for me. I am slowing you down."
"You certainly are," Londo grumbled. "And you're heavy. So why don't you let me save my breath for walking instead of arguing."
He knew, as G'Kar must also know, that he was not very likely to find his way back to him in the labyrinth. Especially not once he became embroiled in whatever was happening on the surface.
He had to get back up there as quickly as possible. Duty pulled him agonizingly in two directions.
But he had made his choice already, in the crux of the instant when the bombs began to fall, when he could have gone any of a number of places, and he ran down: to the dungeons, to G'Kar. He could still remember with searing clarity that moment when he had seen G'Kar, dust-covered and still, and thought he had been too late.
He regretted a lot of things he had done, maybe almost everything. But it was hard to regret G'Kar beside him, living and breathing and complaining and holding on to him.
***
It soon became clear that either he had not chosen the correct direction, or they had missed some other turn. Before too long they were going down again, more steeply this time, and the air was getting clearer, the pall of dust thinning out.
Getting out of the dust was a relief, and also a bad sign. The farther they got from the palace, the more turned around they were, the more wrong turns between them and the way back ...
Londo had heard about people, mostly children, but sometimes adults too -- adventurers, explorers, young rakes making a point to a lover -- who went missing in the tunnels and were never found. He had never been sure if those were true stories or just rumors, like the stories of wild leati spotted in the city that brought out eager would-be trophy hunters. But as they went deeper, as they tried different routes, as the tunnels lay increasingly untouched beneath layers of dust that could have been accumulating for centuries, he couldn't help suspecting the rumors were true.
They passed signs of long abandoned infrastructure, walled-up transit tunnels, mining equipment rusted into immobility. Londo tried doubling back, tried finding their tracks in the dust only to discover that he was a miserably ineffective tracker. The bare rock left little trace.
They were hopelessly, desperately lost.
Thirst tormented his dust-caked throat; his legs ached; his brain chased itself in circles, what-ifs and self-flagellation, doubting his decisions going all the way back to taking the position on Babylon 5.
Not helping his dark, circular recrimination spiral was G'Kar's increasing weight on his shoulder, the shallow hitches in his breathing, the way his legs sometimes wobbled as if they were about to go out from under him. Londo could feel him shivering. By the time G'Kar started to slide off his shoulder, pulling him down in a heap, Londo was beyond desperately worried into near panic: about G'Kar, about the war, about everything. It had to be daylight by now up top; they had been down here for hours and hours. Anything could be happening, and probably was.
Worry flared into anger. "What's the matter with you?" he snapped, trying to untangle the two of them. "How badly are you hurt? No lying now -- G'Kar --" When Londo touched his face, he was shocked to find G'kar's skin ice cold and relatively bloodless, as much as could be determined beneath the spots and the orange pigment, the dust and the blood. "G'Kar? What is wrong, are you in shock?" Curse it, he had been letting G'Kar set the pace, however slow it was, trusting G'Kar's willingness to call for a rest if he needed it, which of course he wouldn't; trusting G'Kar's honesty about how badly he was hurt, which of course he would downplay, given half a chance.
G'Kar was shaking his head, his words so slurred Londo could barely make them out, then realized he couldn't understand him because G'Kar was speaking Narn, just as G'Kar switched to a language he understood. "Not shock. T-torpor."
"I don't understand. What are you talking about?"
"Torpor, it is ... just a moment ..." Even sitting on the floor, he swayed, and Londo tilted him against the wall. "A natural condition of my people," he managed after a moment. "When we are injured."
"Really? This is normal for you?"
"It ..." G'Kar hesitated as if he was struggling to think. "It happens ... sometimes, when we are hurt, after the danger passes. It is a -- a natural way for the body, for the body to conserve energy and heal by passing into a -- a deep state of ... coma, until help will come."
"Yes, well, help's not coming for us, is it?" Londo grasped G'Kar's collar, trying to force G'Kar to look at him, but his head flopped back limply against the wall. "What happens if help doesn't come, what then?"
G'Kar's words were soft and slurred. "I will likely sink deeper until I die."
"Oh no," Londo said between his teeth, "no, I did not drag you out of a cell so you could die on me here. You idiot," he spat. "How is this helpful?"
"Narn ... is a warm world. Was," G'Kar mumbled. He slumped forward, now half leaning against Londo, who let him in dismayed horror. "Before your people came ... anyway ... in the sun, it is not such a dangerous thing. Here ..."
"Yes, yes, I get it," Londo gritted, "so tell me, how does one stop it. Exercise?" Not that G'Kar seemed capable of that right now.
"Warmth," G'Kar murmured. His cheek was resting against Londo's neck now, ice cold to the touch. "Food .... water. Stimulants," he added as a sort of afterthought. "The body needs to ..." But he didn't finish the thought.
Londo peeled him off his neck and pushed him back against the wall. "I see. We have one of those things, I suppose." They needed a rest anyway. He began to unbutton G'Kar's coat.
Worryingly, G'Kar put up no resistance as Londo struggled with the unfamiliar fastenings. G'Kar's head lolled against the wall, and then Londo tilted him forward against his own shoulder as he got first one arm out of a sleeve, then the other.
Sharing a bedroom and then a cell, they had gradually stopped caring about physical privacy around each other. Londo had grown used to throwing off his nightclothes and dressing for court while casually talking to G'Kar around a privacy screen in his bedroom, aware that G'Kar was doing something similar on the other side. He had seen G'Kar nearly naked, stripped to the waist with all the scars of his torture unselfconsciously displayed on his rippling, muscular back, his sides so strangely empty that it was hard for Londo not to stare. In the cell, of course, they had not even had privacy for bodily functions. It was what it was.
But they had never done anything like this. He was acutely aware of the limp, cool weight of G'Kar against his shoulder as Londo removed first his coat, then began to struggle with the pieces of armor secured around his torso. These buckles were impossible; how did he do this every day? First one came off, baring a long stripe of his chest; then another, making clear the shape of his body beneath the loose shirt that was all he wore underneath.
G'Kar's sleeves were each a separate piece, armor all on their own, and Londo realized to get those off, he needed to remove the gauntlets. These he stripped off one by one, leaving G'Kar's hands strangely bare, fingers curled loosely and tipped in blunt black claws. There was a vulnerability to his bare hands that created a soft ache in some inner corner of Londo's chest. He took G'Kar's hands in his own, found them ice-cold and unresponsive like the rest of him.
The clock was ticking, for them as on the surface. Londo squeezed G'Kar's cold hands, got no response, and laid his hands down gently before spreading the thick leather coat on the floor for him to lie on.
G'Kar finally roused a little when Londo tried to lay him down on the coat. This woke him up enough to start struggling weakly.
"G'Kar! Stop that." G'Kar relaxed after Londo said his name a few times, and finally seemed willing to lie still without being held down. Londo unbuttoned his own coat, admitting a sharp chill. The air had not grown appreciably colder in the time they had been walking, but it was still cool, another source of discomfort to go with the rest.
G'Kar had gone still and quiet again. Londo refused to entertain the possibility that he was wasting yet more time, and would soon find himself clutching a corpse. He found it impossible to believe. G'Kar would not simply lie down and die. He had proven that in Cartagia's torture chamber.
Londo stripped out of his coat and layers of waistcoats, leaving him in his loose, silken undershirt. He lay beside G'Kar on the leather coat. G'Kar's hands were too cold to simply leave them lying out, so Londo tried tucking them between their two bodies, then gave up on decorum and put G'Kar's hands beneath his shirt, flinching as they lay like blocks of ice against his warm, bare skin. Trying not to move enough that G'Kar's hands would stray into truly sensitive territory, he began working as well as he could to wrap both of them in their combined coats and other discarded clothing items.
"What are you doing?" G'Kar asked blurrily.
"What does it look like? You need warmth, you said? Well, I am warm."
Holding G'Kar like this was like clutching an iceberg. With their coats around them, G'Kar's icy hands cold against his bare skin, and G'Kar's chilled face against Londo's neck, it seemed possible that they might warm up eventually. Either that, or G'Kar would drag them both down into hypothermia, but Londo tended to run warm in general. Those of his wives who had shared a bed with him used to complain about it.
G'Kar's shallow, rapid breathing seemed to be slowing and evening out a bit. Londo hoped that was a good thing.
He had pressed G'Kar against the wall, trying to create a small pocket of warm with the coats around them; however, he was unprepared for how exposed he felt with his back to the open tunnel. At least they were not completely in the dark, though he hadn't thought to unfasten the light from his coat, so it was pointed off at an angle, lighting the opposite wall. Out of the corner of the eye, the shadows seemed to develop half-recognizable shapes. Londo decided to close his eyes to stop looking at them.
Lying here with G'Kar tucked against him, there was nothing to do except worry: about his people, about the attack, about the unknown extent of G'Kar's injuries.
They were both covered with dust, and after days in the cell, they both could use a bath. Still, there was a faint spicy scent associated with G'Kar that Londo found he did not mind at all. It was completely alien, and totally familiar; it was nothing that should have made him think of home, but it did.
He didn't expect to fall asleep.