The loss of feeling in his limbs is strange.
Cold encompasses his entire self, but along with that cold comes the feeling of nothing. No, not nothing as in there's nothing to feel, but he feels nothing at all. Not that there is all that much to feel while descending into the endless abyss that is the blue eye of Siberia. Just crystal clear water and bubbles shaped like tiny diamonds.
Movement is something out of his reach now, along with that bright sun far above the surface the great lake. He can still see it, he wants it, but he can't reach out for the warmth. He can't. The light that can save him is growing smaller and smaller by the second. It feels like he'll never hit the bottom of the beautiful Baikal. For some reason he's able to remember that it's the deepest lake in the world. You'd think you would think about something else while you're drowning silently like a stone. Something more meaningful.
Bubbles stream past his eyes as he gasps again. His body knows it's meaningless to take that next breath, but part of him doesn't want to believe he's going under. That he is under. Beads of water tread across his eyes and mouth as he attempts to move again. Another meaningless gesture.
His lungs ache.
All he really knows is the cold, the endless cold; it runs its fingers up his back in an almost loving manner. It spreads out and rests its palms all over his body until it actually burns him. It's a pattern. Spread, sizzle, then the nothingness. Numbness sets in and the hands move somewhere else, carrying out their miserable deed with deadly precision and accuracy.
He's ready to give up because the water is so very, very cold. And he's so very, very tired. A little fish drifts past him in a lazy manner, almost mocking, free as he would be if he was on land. It has stripes running up and down its scales and small, beady pitch-black eyes. Kai can see himself in the reflection of the eye that faces him. He's pale. He looks dead.
He just about is.
The fish drifts up to the surface, that place Kai can no longer reach, but he tries just one more time. He forces his fingers to move…and they do. They move about three centimeters. It exhausts him.
But then he sees him.
Kinomiya.
It's not the usual, "Take my hand, Kai!" dream he has, where he's finally able to move when he sees the other boy and grabs his hand. He's silent, white-lipped, and regards Kai with a look that tells him that he barely recognizes him.
Those deadly hands grab at Kai's heart and begin to squeeze it, which sends a pulse of pain up the back of his neck and down his spine. Kinomiya looks peaceful, unlike Kai, who looks like he was choked and tossed into a freezer. Possibly beaten with a shovel, too.
And, Kai slowly realizes, Kinomiya is headed to the surface. He's not moving his arms or anything like the normal stupid Kinomiya would be. Neither of them are (not that Kai could if he wanted to). But this Kinomiya simply rises with a simple sort of grace while Kai plummets down like there's a stone on his chest.
But they never leave the other's view.
Kai wants to reach out again, but he can't. He really wants to this time. But the cold has finally claimed his mind and the numb has spread everywhere. It's too late. He looks at Kinomiya's face one last time.
He wakes up.
He's in his bed, in his tiny apartment, shaking slightly and gripping his pillow like it's going to leave him if he doesn't. His breathing is labored and a few beads of sweat roll down the back of his neck. It's a cold sweat. Cold like the crystal waters of the great Baikal.
He sits up and presses the palm of his hand against his forehead. He doesn't have a fever from what he can tell. So that dream didn't come to him purely because of delusion or illness. His tank-top (the only thing he's wearing besides his boxers) clings to his torso because of his perspiration, and he sees that he kicked his comforter off his bed and onto the floor. He's only wrapped in his sheets now.
Normally his dreams don't end that way. He looks out the window and eyes the empty streets, but he's not really looking at them. His mind is back in Baikal with Kinomiya.
Kinomiya.
Why was he drifting in the lake as well? Why wasn't he being stupid and heroic, like he always is? Kai rubs his eyes with the back of his hand before falling back onto his poor abused pillow.
Kinomiya had been rising while he had been falling.
Did that mean something?
Kai sighs and flops over, taking a second to turn his alarm clock away from his face. The light from the illuminated numbers annoys him.
2:30. What a time to wake up at night.
He closes his eyes and doesn't give it any more thought. It doesn't really matter, does it?
A dream is a dream. Not reality.