will

They came hurtling down the steps.  

The younger of the pair's knees buckled as he hit the final step and he slid and hit the adjacent wall hard with his shoulder.  The second, an aged man, had already started stumbling well before the bottom of the stairs and was on his shoulder when he hit the last step.  He struck the floor with a hard slap on his side and weakly bounced.  Both, grasped for air forcibly, sitting and laying where they had landed.  

After a moment's pause the younger began to get his feet under him.  His neck appeared to not have the strength to properly lift his head as it drooped to side and front as his head shifted with his movements.  He was dropping sweat on the hard stone floor and his hand left a steam where it braced against the wall.  After he was upright he hurriedly grasped onto his jacket, encompassing the compartment of a pocket in the front of his jacket with his hand, seeking what appeared as a fist-size lump.  As he felt the weight there, relief and despair met on his face.  He released it, but trapped the coat pocket to his side with his arm, whether to hide it or keep it from fleeing, his face did not tell.  

The older man had not moved his body besides the heaving his body undertook in order to breath.  Spittle had found its way to his lips and from there was being thrown to the floor with the passing breath.  His breath lit the room with the sound of rasping pain.  

"We can't go back," the old man finally said between surging breathes.  He did not lift his head, cheek pressed to the stone.  Some of the spittle being flung from his lips had come to rest on his exposed cheek and nose.

"Get up, old man.  We need to get going."

"We're trapped.  We can't go back."  His eyes stared straight away, at nothing.

"Get up!  Don't lose it now.  We need to ..."  The standing man was staring at his partner with growing eyes.

"I just wanted to be free.  This was to get free.  We are not free.  I thought... this isn't what it was supposed to be."  The older man's voice broke at the end of this.  A shudder ran across his body wholly different then his gasps for breath.  

At these last words the standing man took a quick look at the stairs they had just fallen from and turned and bolted through an opposing doorway in the room.