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Avdol doesn’t have time to think as he pushes Polnareff out of the way – there’s no consciousness to his hypocrisy, just an instinctual need to keep him safe.
He has time to think after.
The cold hits him first, and it is biting. There is a wind, without much force but rhythmic, only warm enough to be just above freezing. Avdol does not scream. He wants to, desperately, but some primal fear stops him. Whatever this place is, it doesn’t feel dead enough for him to make noise. He can see nothing around him, the world around him is so dark that it could continue forever, or only a few feet. The same part of him that feels the threat of life around him, the hunted dog at the back of his mind, knows without exploration that it is infinite.
He knows, logically, that he’s inside Vanilla Ice’s stand – what that means he cannot quite be certain, but it must be true. But there is something so wrong, so unlike the warmth and strength of Stands, that part of him considers that he may be in Jahannam, that he is dead.
He thinks of Polnareff and cannot quite bring himself to regret it.
Avdol tries to look around the blackness and realises through the motion that he is not resting in nothingness, that there is some form of force all around him, restricting his movements. It is difficult, not impossible, to turn his head, meeting a resistance like pressing one’s hand into a sofa cushion. It is as he muses on the invisible physicality of the abyss around him that Avdol makes a realisation. The gusts of air are rhythmic, and if he tries, they easily align with his own breaths. The material surrounding him both yielding and firm is not reminiscent of upholstery, but muscle. He is not trapped in a void, but a throat. It is then that Avdol screams.
He screams until it starts to hurt, though he knows eventually he will start screaming again just for the relief of feeling that pain. The void keeps him on the edge of true sensation, and he knows it will be maddening. It is just warm enough that the cold does not hurt, and as he sits suspended in the spectral muscles swallowing him, he feels his limbs growing numb. He can move, but with no purpose – in his heart he knows there is nothing he can do from inside the void. The most he could do is pray to be digested.
The dull anticipation of what future could be expected from within the constraints of the throat hits Avdol. He cannot hope the be rescued – even if – not if, when- Polnareff defeats Vanilla Ice, some radiating hopelessness tells him he will not be let out. For the first time in his life, Avdol is beginning to comprehend the shape of eternity.
He wonders when he will go mad, if it will be a slow progression or sudden, whether he will have bouts of lucidity. He hopes he will go mad. He cannot imagine enduring sanity for an eternity. Most painfully, he wonders if he will start to resent Polnareff. He cannot imagine a more perfect torture than the corruption and pollution of the love that drove him into this place. He prays that he will have the strength to hold onto devotion. He knows he won’t.
While it still brings him comfort, he thinks about Polnareff. He thinks about last night, when they shared a bed not for the first time, but in a new, truer way. He remembers holding Polnareff, being finally free to feel him and smell him without shame or guilt. He thinks about every time he got to kiss him. With a dull ache he realises it will never feel like enough, that he will only ever feel cheated out of a love that felt like forever.
In a desperate bid for distraction, he begins counting the breaths that surround him. He gives up when his count hits two thousand. He lets his mind wander, having given up on any strategy to ignore the infinite stretching out before him.
Time passes. Maybe an hour, maybe weeks. But eventually Avdol’s half lucid musings are suddenly interrupted, and he finds himself blinded by sensation. First, all he can register is the screaming yellow brightness of the sun, and he closes his eyes in pursuit of escape. The effect is lessened, but even through his eyelids the sun is searing. No longer overwhelmed by brightness, it is the pain that attacks him next, as he realises the only thing he can feel is a heavy, punishing agony where his forearms should be. It hurts less than the sunlight did.
The only relief he feels is hearing Polnareff rattle off desperate pleas in French, begging him to talk, to open his eyes, to say something. It is the first sound Avdol has heard in a long time.
Much later, Polnareff tells him that in reality, he was only in the void for less than half an hour. Avdol knows it was longer. Whatever darkness lay within Vanilla Ice was the line where reality ceased, and something else took over.