Darkness does not arrive; it persists. A single sound threads it—dull, patient, unavoidable.
Plip.
A drop descends in impossible slow motion, fat with inevitability. It touches a skin of liquid and becomes rings—one, then another, then another—each circle arguing with the last about what center means. The sound arrives late, as if traveling through someone else's memory.
Plip.
Breuk's mouth is open. It does not matter. His lips are split and chalk-dry, the kind of dryness that makes you think of old walls, of forgotten cupboards, of words crumbling before they're spoken. He breathes through grit. Every inhale drags, every exhale scratches a match that won't catch.
My mouth… feels like it's made of dust.
Light blooms without asking permission. It is clean, almost cruel in its cleanness—white the color of denial. Lig stands inside it as if he were built for this kind of brightness. School uniform—collar straight, tie obedient, jacket that never learned to wrinkle. He looks like the photo a parent keeps in a drawer to remember hope by. Around him, glass carafes wait on pedestals like altars. They are full of water so clear it looks like air with ideas.
Lig lifts a vase. Drinks. The water does not cascade. It performs. It slips past his mouth, trails his jaw, beads his throat like a string of cold pearls and falls in strict tempo.
Plip.
Plip.
Plip.
Breuk raises a hand. It feels like lifting a wall. Muscles that used to obey politely consult a committee and send regrets. His fingers don't quite achieve "reach." His voice flinches from his throat and retreats. The gesture is small, the need behind it enormous.
Give me… just a mouthful…
Lig does not look at him. The jars refill themselves the way lies do when you feed them: effortlessly. He drinks again, not greedy—no. Greed has corners. This is smooth. He drinks with the steady assurance of a man in a picture—this is how it is done, it has always been done. The water keeps arriving as if supplied by a contract the world signed and forgot to tell anyone about.
Breuk takes a step. The floor answers by becoming something else—air with weight, oil with ethics. Each move is an argument he is not winning. His knees feel new to him; the hips disagree with their terms of employment. He advances as if the space were a long throat and he were a swallowed, stubborn thing.
He stumbles.
He doesn't fall because of clumsiness. He falls because the ground chooses to fail him. Lines of light break through, clean, sharp, righteous. They spread like cracks in a lie. For a blessed instant the white world fractures into exit wounds—and then darkness takes its job back.
The fall is not violent. It is a patient theft. The body that belongs to him, that learned his gait and his swears and the exact angle he favors when he lights a cigarette, loosens from instruction and yields to the downward. The edges of him drift—shoulder, hip, the stubborn set of the jaw becoming contour, becoming suggestion.
He opens his mouth. He intends a scream; the universe hears a bubble. Spheres of breath, round as coins, leave him in a hurry that looks leisurely. They wander upward as if sightseeing. He watches them with a dishonesty he knows is pointless—go tell them I'm here—and they ignore him in the polite way dreams have perfected.
Light skates his skin in moving bars, the kind you learn under water: fragments of a sun he has never owned. They roll and ripple and reassemble elsewhere because light likes options. The sound of the fall thins to the kind of silence that wears velvet and sits in the front row. Depth decides not to announce itself anymore.
Then—contact.
He hits water without splash. No slap, no cold slap-shock, no intake of breath that is half panic and half joy. He arrives as if placed. The surface accepts his weight and refuses to confess it. It is a bed made by a god who dislikes sheets: smooth, unwrinkled, absolute.
He sinks the way a line sinks into a poem—slowly, meaningfully, without struggle. The surface yields a little at a time, careful. He becomes half and half: chest wet, face dry; one ear underwater, one offered to air. The world is stereo. In one channel, the hum of a city remembered badly; in the other, the deep animal hush of water thinking.
His profile floats in a mirror he is lying on. The curve of the brow, the scar at the jaw that pretends to be a smile when it catches light, the mouth he has used for bargains and reluctance—everything calms. The muscles go off duty. The small, hard place between the ribs where hunger keeps its calendar lets the page fall.
Maybe this is heaven…
It is not a thought he trusts. It is a thought that arrives because he has run out of others. He opens his eyes, and the water under him decides to be honest. It takes him. Not with violence. With policy. A gentle, bureaucratic pull. We regret to inform you. We must insist. He goes under like paperwork.
He reaches. The reach is wrong. There is nothing to catch, and his hands have learned nothing else. Fingers scissor emptiness. Palms close on clarity. The light above him narrows like the end of a hallway you aren't invited to. He is not drowning; he is being edited. The body does not panic because the rules of panic do not apply in rooms without oxygen.
The world is blue that wants to be black. Shadows are rumors of shape. A current he cannot perceive instructs his limbs and they comply without signing. He waits for the old fear—the one that comes with held breath and hot throat and the certainty of a chest bruised from the inside—to climb into him. It doesn't. He is afforded the rare luxury of terror without pain.
Lig appears above him, as if standing on the ceiling of the ocean. He is still in uniform. He has the same tilt of head that makes adults confide in him and enemies underestimate the cost. He drinks, and the water he drinks replenishes itself from the same water Breuk is sinking into. The drops that fall from Lig's chin arrive like meteors, strike the surface with ceremony, and become rings that never reach Breuk. Physics minds its manners.
I asked for a mouthful, Breuk thinks, and the thought has the weight of a stone tossed in a deep well that refuses to echo.
The bed of water does not intend harm. It intends consistency. Gravity agrees. Time, bored of being linear, tries on the idea of a circle. In that slow rotation, a handful of memories— bowl-days at noon and six; his mother frowning at a pot until it promised to forgive them; the first cigarette he ever pretended to enjoy; a boy he didn't know yet named Lig asking him what he wrote and knowing it mattered—turn in a light that feels like weather.
He exhales a breath he didn't know he had been hoarding. Bubbles barter themselves upward. Breuk watches them go, and something like a laugh happens to him without his consent. It makes no sound. It trembles the water and changes nothing.
The light keeps shrinking, polite about it. His body stops insisting on vertical allegiances. Up is an opinion; down is a policy; sideways is a rumor he is willing to entertain. For a second he imagines that if he turns just so, the necklace in his pocket (not here, not now—not now) might float free of fabric and choose where to shine. The thought refuses him. Dreams protect their budget.
Lig lowers the empty vase and finally looks down. The motion is slow, the acknowledgment careful, like a debt being recognized, not paid. Their eyes do not meet. They almost do. It is enough to make the water a degree warmer. Lig raises the jar again. The refill is absolute.
Plip.
Plip.
Plip.
Breuk's lips move. No sound. The bed of water takes his attempt and returns it as a shiver of light along his collarbone. He waits for meaning to arrive attached to sensation. Instead, he gets the precise knowledge that he is sinking and will continue to do so until sinking becomes being. He does not argue.
Maybe this is rest, he thinks, and the thought tastes so close to blasphemy he wants to apologize. To whom, he cannot say.
Something touches his shoulder.
Not a hand, not yet. Pressure. A suggestion of grip. The water makes room for it, grateful to be asked. The darkness folds differently, as if rearranging furniture for a guest it has not decided to like.
Breuk does not turn. He lets the touch exist. Above him the light remembers him in decreasing detail. The world keeps its new promises.
He sinks.
He does not drown.
He learns, briefly and against his will, what it is to be carried by a thing that owes you nothing and chooses you anyway.