“Do not do this to me.”
UNTIL THE END OF TIME
Nikolai Zuyev & Lidochka Mikhaylov
prompt: calling you home
With all his strength, all his might, he had fought against the pull, fought to push himself up, to reach the surface and take that single precious gulp of air, all he needed to keep fighting, but it was too late. The crushing agony in his throat and lungs had chased him into the dark, the weight too much to bear, the horrible pressure threatening to tear him apart from within. Overwhelmed and too weak to fight his way upward he had slipped away, the blackness flooding in from all sides to fill him. The small orb of light at the surface had faded away, dimming to nothing, the last thing he saw as his eyes closed.
The blackness stretched for an eternity, void of light and warmth, cold and endless and smothering. It stretched in all directions, a barren and black wasteland, a vast ocean of emptiness. It felt like he was falling, always falling with no way to catch himself, no relief in sight, and he had only one thought before even that was taken from him: So this is it. What had he expected? What had he thought to see in the end? It had never crossed his mind, he had never thought of the end before, only ever thinking ahead to the next action, his next task. Obeying and pleasing her. Lidochka.
As her name passed through the empty expanse, a fading echo, the smallest, dimmest light pulsed in the distance, there and then gone. So brief, so small. He almost missed it. Time passed, he kept falling, colder and colder as he went, the weight of loneliness and defeat pressing down on him, pushing and pushing, and then he saw it again. A pulse. Light. Brighter this time.
“Do not do this to me.”
That voice. Firm, authoritative. A subtle warmth only he could hear.
Lidochka.
Another pulse. Another. Another. Harder, brighter, sweeping across the blanket of black and swallowing it piece by piece.
“Fight. Come on. Fight.”
Fight. Yes. That was what he had to do. It was so simple. Why had it seemed so difficult before? All he had to do was fight. What was so hard about continuing to do that which he had been trained to do all his life? Fight, struggle, make his way back to her. His place was at her side.
“Fight this, Kolya. Fight it.”
Kicking, thrashing, throwing everything he had into the struggle, that was exactly what he did. Fought. With every fibre of his being, with every scrap of strength in his possession, he fought the hands pulling him down, fought the press from above, fought everything but the powerful and fierce desire to get back to her. To Lidochka.
“Come back to me. You come back to me right now.”
Lidochka.
The world exploded in a blinding flash of light, burning, searing, making his eyes stream as oxygen flooded down his airway into his lungs, his chest rising in a rush as he fought to breathe. He choked, trying to take too much too fast, water bubbling up his throat and out of his mouth. Strong but gentle hands rocked him so the water spattered concrete, and the coughs made his throat raw, he thought he tasted blood, his back rose raggedly as he struggled to breathe, but the air was so wonderful, so crisp on the way down that he almost didn’t feel the pain, the weight on his chest that had threatened to crush him what felt like an eternity ago.
Fingers raked through his sopping hair, smoothing it back from his eyes as he trembled, familiar arms winding around his chest to pull him to her, hold him to her. One shaking hand found her wrist and took hold, his face burying in the crook of her elbow as her voice murmured in his ear. He heard what she said, he always heard what she said to him, but the actual words would have meant nothing to anyone else, little reminders of times from their youth, the day when he had been there to dive through the ice after her and pull her, half-frozen and near-death, from the water.
That had been so long ago. So many years, in a place far away, hundreds of thousands of miles, on the other side of the world. A different life. Everything had changed. Nikolai barely recognised their lives now, the world around them, the home they had made for themselves, but as he clutched her wrist and felt her arms hold him tightly to her, supporting his weight so easily, he knew the one thing that truly mattered would never change.