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A fly crawling down your throat saved your life. It thought you were dead, and you were a hair's breadth away from having your soul ripped free of your body, but someone, the priest helping you heal, must have been praying. A violent cough ejected your tiny lifeguard, and threw your body into a seated position before your mind had even stuttered back to awareness. That came when your back and skull slammed back down onto the mud and dirt, expelling mud and water and fluid and blood from your lips. Viktor must have been far down the cliff side, looking for somewhere suitable, because your coughing fit was long and agonising.
Even after you threw up everything and more, that was in your stomach, it still hurt, hurt all over but especially to breathe, especially to move. A brutal rape, that's how reporters and law enforcement describe such incidents, but never how the victim describes them. Usually the victim is dead, physically or mentally. What Viktor did left jagged red bolts of lightning arcing through your nerves every few seconds, but that was not as bad as it had been when they tried to assassinate him, when they tried to murder you, when mind-rending agony accompanied every single one of your heartbeats. But still, you couldn't get up, could barely move a finger or open your eyes. The Reaper still had his icy hands on you. You concentrated on not descending into another coughing fit, which felt as if it would detach your lungs from where they hung and force them up through your throat, but you had to get away, because if your killer returned, and saw that you were just barely alive, you knew with every fibre of your being that he would not reverse course. No, he meant to cover up his first and second crime with a third and a fourth, and you knew you could not stop him, by words or by force.
It's then that your stuttering senses determined on the identity of your location, from the bushes and pine trees, but especially from the smell of an immense body of freshwater nearby. From the sound of its waves, from the dome of the sky, and from the thin strip of blue and the opposite cliffs which you could just glimpse from where you lay. Baikal. Instantly, you divined his plan. He meant to inflict an everlasting search on his and your family and friends, as a cover and one last screw you. If I can't have you, no one will. That old crazy cliche. Instantly, you began attempting to focus enough to disapparate. Began attempting to gather strength. Your mind floated around, unable to grasp images for more than an instant, and what it did grasp were fuzzy. Your will was barely present, no energy for anything when the burn in your chest and the stabbing pain in your guts conspired to drag you down. The barest shape of your fiancee's face floated through the dark, followed by a very specific spot of her living room, a corner of her sofa, the one you two snuggled up on often. But your mind didn't latch onto the seats of the thing, but instead one clawed foot, oak and old. For some reason it always grabbed your attention, probably because it was scuffed. You meant to do something about that, but never had, assuming, foolishly, that you would have time after you were married. Assuming, idiotically, that your best friend would not turn out to be just like all the rest of them.
You were still attempting to generate the enormous mental energy needed to transport yourself four thousand miles in a single go, when vibrations hit your ear, pressed to the dirt, followed by the sound of footsteps. Heavy footsteps, sullen and dangerous. You could see his face without seeing it, so well did you know him. There was no expression that you had not catalogued, and the glower he wore then was white with black fury. Rage at himself, for failing, for betraying his name. Rage at you, for denying, for dying. For proving to be so weak in the end. All those years, you'd been the strong one, the immovable, unconquerable rock, protecting him from other people and their untamed passions, a diamond behind which he stood and through which he gazed at the world he feared and hated. But in the last two years you'd fractured, cutting him as you fell apart in his hands. Even when he finally had what he wanted, he didn't, discovering that plundering a body is not the same as owning a spirit. And then, to add insult to injury, you couldn't handle a few minutes of being forced face down in liquid earth, leaving him for good.
The earth shook in your ear, timed to a two-step beat, Viktor's ragged breathing corrupting the peaceful spring soundscape of birds and bees. The majestic predator was approaching, a giant bird of prey, his awkwardness on the ground doing nothing whatsoever to allay his threat. He would notice that you were not lying as you had been. Instead of lying on your back, you were cast on your side. He would rush over, and as soon as he got his hands on you, with their frightful eagle grip, long, strong fingers hooked into talons, you would die for real. Never ever have you felt terror like that, not even when they stuck a gun to your head, and his. Those men could still be manipulated, still be tricked, but Viktor was beyond all that.
But the terror, a thing that can only be seen in hindsight, like a wraith in the rear lights, came borne on fear for him. You leaving him would result in his death. Sometimes he would say so when drunk, the arms around you turning into a vice grip, only to act like he couldn't remember the next morning.
‘If you ever leave me, Yura, if you abandon me…I'll kill myself.’ He'd say, bleary black eyes reacquiring all their dreadful sharpness. He never missed anything. He saw too much. Felt too deeply. Your father had given you to him, had told Viktor that was what he was doing, and they both held to that for as long as you knew them. It was only you, the gift, who sometimes chafed against your status of being a means to someone else's end. Who sometimes felt guilty for being unable to give yourself away to the extent desired.
‘You’re not a thing.’ Parvati said, as one of the first words she spoke to you when you reconnected after so many years apart. You promptly fell in love with her.
The footsteps paused and breath drew into lungs that were pristine, and still your mind was a dead black, showing nothing, like an unprocessed photo. And then a wordless cry shattered the quiet, a piercing shriek sawing your nerves, the ground leaping up at you rapidly. Still you couldn't think, but the prayers that had generated a miracle for you, did not do half a job, and when his shadow fell upon you, an image of that stupid, annoying sofa foot appeared in your mind, so fully formed and strong that they could have opened up your skull and found it nestled between the grey coils of your brain. And with it was infused the will and the power.
A roar of despair followed you into the rushing nothing as a hook behind your navel yanked back. A disembodied roar of despair, the last sound you'd ever hear from your oldest and greatest friend. You are sure he hit the dirt hard where your body had been, scraping his precious hands and arms, jangling his highly insured bones and muscles, maybe chipping a tooth, too slow to catch something for the first and last time in his life.
Poor Parvati and her family, they knew they were getting into something dark when they accepted you into their fold, but they could never have predicted the kind of drama you would put them through. One does not move slowly through space, one spins rapidly as one is flung through the skin of the world, and when you reappeared in your fiancee's London lounge (with an embarrassing crack) you crashed into the left side of the sofa, into the leg, slamming it with its passengers against the prettily papered wall before your body bounced off at speed to crash backwards onto the fancy coffee table, smashing it to pieces. And there you lay, cradled in an embrace of glass, mud, and blood, every breath a struggle, your mind fading, eyesight narrowing. A lull remained for an instant, and then screams and shouts in familiar voices, rushing feet and kind hands told you that you'd made it to safety, having stolen life from the clutches of death.