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They had expected the alarms. But, somehow, expecting them didn't make them any less terrifying. Till and Audrey turned to each other, both trying to hide the fear in their eyes, but failing.
"This is it," Till said.
They both knew it, of course. Till didn't need to say it. But Till found the tense silence between them unbearable, and she was desperately filling it.
Audrey didn't reply; there wasn't anything to say.
But after a moment of intense, anxious eye contact, Audrey held out her hand. Till immediately took it, gripping hard. Audrey squeezed it back.
The atmosphere in the car was almost suffocating. Even though no one else knew the plan, the rebels seemed to instinctively know that the alarms were simultaneously something to fear, and a cause for hope. The nervous chattering bouncing off the walls exacerbated Till and Audrey's discomfort. Till didn't want to add to echoes.
As the agonising seconds ticked by, neither of them spoke the terrifying rhetorical questions on their minds.
"What if they get caught?" "What if something goes wrong?" "What if this is the end?"
Neither of them needed to voice their concerns to know that the other was thinking the same.
Their entwined hands clutched tighter.
After another minute or so of holding hands and anxiously looking around the car, Till grew too restless to stay quiet.
"I should've gone with them," she muttered, "We should've had a backup plan-"
"Kiss me," Audrey interrupted, punctuating her words by pulling on Till's hand, so that they were facing each other again.
"What!?" Till's surprise temporarily broke her out of her anxious state.
"It's too late to help them now, Bess," Audrey reasoned. "And if this is the end-"
Audrey's justification was cut off by Till's lips landing on hers.
Within a second, their mutual desperation to feel something like love in their potential last moments alive became clear. The kiss was undeniably adrenaline-fuelled and fearful. But it was also tender. Their clasped hands let go and they held onto each other with firm grips, on waists, backs and faces.
Audrey was right; there was nothing they could do, now, to help with the plan. Their lives - the lives of everyone on the train - were in the hands of Layton and the engineers. Till and Audrey both tried to allow the kiss to distract them from their helplessness. They were only aware of how well it had worked when the train suddenly jolted, breaking them apart.
As the unsteady passengers all found their feet again, the alarms stopped. After a tense beat of silence, the sound was replaced by relieved sighs, and then laughter.
Audrey pulled Till into a tight hug. They both leaned into it heavily, collapsing against each other with relief as they caught their breaths and joined in the chorus of laughter.
"Are you okay?" Audrey asked, withdrawing from the embrace and holding onto Till's shoulders to look her in the eye.
"Yeah," Till gasped out. She immediately recognised how unconvincing she sounded. So, she tried again. "Yeah. Are you?"
"Mhm," Audrey answered, as she wrapped her arms around Till again.
They clung to each other for a while longer, letting the embrace drain away some of the adrenaline that had been racing through them. When they finally parted again, Audrey swiftly rearranged her jacket. Then, softly, she began to chuckle.
"That lipstick really isn't your shade," she said, jokingly alerting Till to the makeup that had made its way onto her mouth.
Till blushed as she joined in with Audrey's gentle, coy laughter and began to rub her thumb across her lips to remove the second-hand lipstick. Mostly, she only succeeded in making the smears worse.
"Let me," Audrey said, beckoning Till towards her.
Till agreed, dropping her hand and leaning closer so that Audrey could finish wiping lipstick marks from her face. They soon both ended up giggling again, from a mixture of residual relief and mild embarrassment at their situation.
"Sorry, I didn't realise how transferable this shade is," Audrey lightly apologised as she ran her finger over the edge of Till's lip.
"You had bigger things to think about today," Till easily brushed off the apology.
Her words were slightly distorted by Audrey's hand, wiping away the remaining lipstick smudges. It made them both laugh again.
"Yes," Audrey agreed, when she finished laughing, "I did."
Audrey's tone was so complex that Till couldn't begin to decipher it. Still, it made her wonder what else had been on Audrey's mind as they had all faced the potential end. She wanted to ask. But before she could string together a question, Audrey spoke again.
"Thank you," she said, removing her fingers from Till's lips and cupping her cheek for a moment, to once again intensely look her in the eye.
"For what?"
Audrey paused for a moment, then let out a small, vulnerable sigh.
"It had been a long time since I'd last done that," she quietly admitted.
Till didn't manage to hide her surprise.
"Oh," Till stuttered out, flustered, "Uh, I mean, yeah, sure. No problem."
Audrey broke into another chuckle as she watched Till awkwardly struggle to accept her thanks. Meanwhile, Till seemed to grow aware of her own cumbersome rambling. She let out a short laugh at herself, then spoke again.
"Any time," she said, using humour to detract from her initial, awkward response.
"I'll take you up on that the next time Melanie tries to derail us," Audrey bantered back, her tone sarcastic rather than flirtatious.
"It's a date," Till replied, mirroring Audrey's energy without missing a beat.
The somewhat dark joke seemed to be what they both needed to shake off the final remnants of the tension that had gripped them for the past few perilous minutes. Without anything to do but wait, they wandered over to a quiet area and leaned up against a container. An hour or more passed before Melanie and Layton's victory announcement played out. The whole time they waited, Till and Audrey chatted. First, they discussed the apparently-successful plan to cut off the jackboots. Then, their conversation moved on to the revolution more generally, before finally turning to the topic of the brighter future that they were finally starting to believe might be real.
But despite the time spent together, and the long, intimate conversation discussing their hopes for the new society, neither Till nor Audrey dared to acknowledge to the other how the kiss had made her feel.