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Consciousness comes back to him slowly.
It is dark, he is tired, it must be the early hours of the morning.
His back aches, his shoulders ache, his legs ache, he has been leaning uncomfortably against a chair for however many hours it has been. He still has not changed out of his clothes from the night before.
Right.
The night before.
He thinks of Mizi, and recalls how they tried to make him sing.
Then he stops, because he is tired, and does not want to think anymore.
Slowly he shakes the sleep off of him, regaining more awareness. As he does, he registers another presence in the otherwise empty room.
He looks over and sees Ivan sat beside him, staring up into space, awake but not paying attention to him at all. How long has he been here?
“The hell are you doing here?” Till grumbles, snapping Ivan out of his trance.
Ivan looks over to him.
“You’re awake,” Ivan says.
“Yeah, I am, why are you?”
Ivan stares at him for a moment, his expression inscrutable.
“I was worried,” he says.
Till groans and turns back away from him.
“Stop worrying then," Till says, "I can take care of myself just fine.”
Ivan doesn’t say anything.
They sit in silence, giving Till a few more moments to reflect on things. On last night. On everything.
“Mizi is missing,” Till eventually says.
“I know.”
“Probably dead.”
“She might not be.”
Till sighs.
Ivan speaks again, trying to reassure him, “I don’t know much,” he says, “But I heard-”
“Doesn’t matter,” Till cuts him off.
“She might have escaped.”
“Yeah? To where?”
Ivan pauses for a moment, his eyes going distant.
Till has asked him this before, and Ivan didn’t have a good answer then, either.
Till had still believed him, though. He doesn't anymore.
“Didn’t you want to get her out?" Ivan asks, "Didn’t you want to be with her?”
“Shut up,” Till says, not wanting to think, “It’s too late. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“We could…” Ivan trails off before he says it, but Till is pretty sure he knows what Ivan was going to suggest anyway.
“How?” Till asks, narrowing his eyes, “When? In the next week? Because after that we can’t do anything.”
Ivan’s expression goes sad.
“I know,” Ivan says, “I know.”
He pauses.
“One of us could try, though,” Ivan adds, desperately clinging onto hope, “One of us could-”
“It’s not going to happen," Till cuts him off before he can start.
Till has had time to think about this, about the dreams he had of escaping, once. He can see through them now, especially now with Mizi missing. Even if they did leave, there would be nowhere to go, nowhere better.
And Till is tired.
He speaks again.
“You’d better win next week,” he tells Ivan, and Ivan opens his mouth to protest but Till keeps going, “And I’m not just going to give up, so you had better give it your fucking all, okay?”
He looks back over at Ivan, who is staring back at him like he wants to say something.
“You aren’t allowed to give up,” Till tells him, “Not until you beat me. After that I don’t care. Let Luka beat you or go off and find Mizi and cry, but not until you win.”
There is no other way out.
He stares at Ivan, who has that inscrutable expression on his face again. Till dares him to challenge it, because he knows that Ivan will.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Ivan admits.
“You can,” Till tells him, “You can do better than me,” and he’s starting to realize that maybe Ivan's not talking about his ability, and Till is starting to feel a little desperate, “You have to.”
Ivan nods, and Till turns away from him again.
“I’m not going to give up,” Till says, "But I'm done, I'm just done with this, okay?"
“Okay,” Ivan says, quiet, “I understand.”
-
Till doesn’t get another chance to speak with him before the show.
Five minutes before they go onstage he sees Ivan, stuck inside his own little pod. Ivan is looking back at him. Ivan opens his mouth and says something, but Till can't make out the words. He looks like he has a question, something important to say, but there is no time for that, no space for that anymore.
-
The music starts.
He loses himself a little bit, as he begins to sing. Everything he’s feeling, he channels into the lyrics, cutting it out of himself raw and presenting it to the world so that he doesn't have to feel anymore.
When he stops, however, and when Ivan starts singing, pouring as much of his heart into it as Till did, Till begins to notice his own breathing, his own heartbeat.
There is so little time left.
Panic begins to rise in his chest, crawling through his throat and cutting off his airways.
No matter how much he does not want to be here, there is still some part of him that is afraid to die.
And then, too soon, his part comes in again. Ivan and Till are singing together now, they are running out of time and Till doesn’t have any more space to process it. He doesn’t notice when Ivan stops, doesn’t notice until he is right there and-
Ivan kisses him.
Till is quick to shove him off, but Ivan comes back again, trying to force it, trying to alleviate his own stupid fucking regrets while ruining the song for both of them. Mizi and Sua didn’t do this in their round, although maybe they wanted to, or maybe they had done it before.
Maybe they had expected to live.
Ivan grabs him again. Till is already pushing him back, so it takes a moment for him to recognize that it is not another kiss. Ivan’s hands are around his neck and Till realizes that he can’t breathe.
Till stops struggling.
He thinks he understands now, thinks that maybe this is what Ivan had wanted to ask. Neither of them are getting out of here now, not that they would have, even if they’d won.
Till looks at Ivan, and sees something like relief cross his face. Till relaxes too, as the sound fades from his ears and the feeling fades from his fingertips. His vision blurs, and he lets himself go.
-
Consciousness comes back to him slowly.
He blinks, and sees strange faces above him, gradually coming into focus. Something is poking him, prodding him, checking that he is still alive.
He is breathing.
His throat hurts and he struggles with each breath, but he is breathing.
Feeling has returned to his fingers now. He pushes himself up and staggers to his own two feet before anyone else can grab him. Distantly, he can hear the crowd roar.
Till ignores that, ignores everything else, instead looking down, still trying to comprehend.
"Oh," he says blankly.
It comes out as a rasp.
There is blood on his shoes, it is on his face, in his hands, in his hair.
There is blood, still pooling out below him on the stage because Ivan is there.
Ivan lost, Till realizes.
Ivan lost, and Till is still breathing.