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Your hand is steady on the Secretary’s neck, pushing down down down as his limbs thrash in the air. The pads of your fingers have grown wrinkled with moisture, the dead skin around your nails white and brittle. But there is no hesitation in the force of your hand.
You do not let up before you must, intimately familiar with the line to walk, to toe, to stretch before its breaking point, a little game you play for no other reason but your own satisfaction.
The seconds tick away in your mind—thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine. You don’t need the cautionary measure. You are, perhaps, the leading authority on exactly this.
Alexander is long past grappling at your wrist, at the water that slips right through his fingers, at the basin where his head is submerged. You are forced to lift him from his own grave to prolong your time together.
You do, begrudgingly, marvel at the way water leaks past Alexander's lips. The way his chest heaves with every desperate breath is an equally captivating display.
The thought comes unbidden, if you would have looked the same were you given the chance after each relentless deluge. A moot point; you did not have this privilege.
There was no air, no breath, no moment of rest. There was only an endless flooding of your lungs without even the respite of death.
You would grant Alexander the curse that flows through your veins, if only to inflict the same degree of suffering. He deserves no less than the most excruciating torment you've discovered a man can endure.
The Chair sits only two feet away. It is, some would argue, a more fitting sentence.
But you are not personally acquainted with the agony that it wreaks. You are not, as much as it pains your very soul, the leading authority on The Chair; though you would choose it a million times over to spare the man who is.
If you’ve learned anything, it’s that there is no such thing as going back. You cannot change the past, that of your own or the man you love. But you can do this.
You allow a handful of seconds—a fraction of the time you had been meticulously keeping track of—and down your hand goes, heavy as it's ever been.
The living weight beneath your grip is ever weakening, but it spasms all the same with the little strength that it has.
You start the count all over again from zero.