profession | first minute.

[ One floor up, he's thinking the same thing.

If I aim just right. Perfect hole through your skull, right through your neck. Snap, like a twig under a boot. Clean exit wound.

Not that this is that kind of call. ]

Hm, [ he hums, and then— a door swings wide open with a crash-bang, three evenly spaced out shots firing (like a beat, a smooth bang-bang-bang), and a ringing silence that always follows. ] Staircase on your left, leading to the fire exit.

[ I'm drawing them to you. Illya lets the pause stretch just shy of awkward, before putting the phone down with a sharp click and moving to the stairs.

You can hear the footsteps following his way along the hall. ]

[ They're unmistakeable. There's a drive to his step that he can pick up in an instant, can match to his own quickly-packed snapping of his shoes on the expensive marble. He's not wasting any time, hanging up like he does and lining up against the door.

He's hung up the line so Solo drops the phone. The directions are simple, straight and to the point. The staircase he's talking about is one of two--the first running up and down, the second peeling off to an eastern wing that stretches down the street. Luxury suites. He waits, holds his breath, counts the steps and anyone else might jump or prematurely leave the room, guns blazing. But he waits, he holds, because they're getting close, they're almost there, they're just about--

Solo swings the door open feeling the way skull careens against it.

Save a bullet there.

The next one he fires from behind the safety of the door, flashing out for a moment to line the shot up within seconds. It's practically a party. How many men did they fit into that clown car of a milk truck? ]

[ Right on cue.

A thug swings round a corner and gets his head slammed straight up against a door. Two flashes of gunpowder - one from behind the door, another from the hall running parallel to the staircase landing. Illya drops, rolls onto his back and fires at a man's knee once, at the falling man's face twice. (Overkill, definitely, but that's the idea.)

Four more men ahead — two coming down from the staircase, the other two on Illya's side of the door. The nearest one is disposed off with a clean snap of the neck, the other gets messy, what with a hidden boot knife and a shiv besides.

It nicks the sleeve of his jacket.

Bad move.

He has his watch under that sleeve.

Illya cracks the man's head against the wall in quiet, furious brutality, before pulling the door the whole way open. ]

[ There's the sound of gristle and bone--the way it splits the wrong way and Napoleon knows that someone's gone and done something awfully naughty to deserve that one. They're coming down the staircase like a stampede now, probably after hearing the shots and subsequent thudding.

Illya swings the door open and he knows instantly that he has less than six seconds to make a shot before someone gets fast and smart.

The man behind him doesn't stand a chance when he points the muzzle of his gun and fires off only once into his chest.

There's that wet, sucking sound after the smell of heated gunmetal that tells you that you didn't miss. The kind that's fit for desperate breathing. The last one that comes down seems to buckle back, maybe try to backtrack up the stairs, but Napoleon rounds quickly, ducking under the arm shoving the door wide and firing one last shot between the shoulder blades. He considers it a mercy. You could be trying to breathe like your friend on the floor with swiftly collapsing lungs. You're the lucky one. ]

Thoughtful of you to bring the party downstairs.

[ I like sharing this part of the mission.

I never used to like sharing.

He wrinkles his nose a bit and kicks an empty shell out of the way with the tapering end of his shoe. ]

Any more? [ He's peering down the hall now slowly. ]

It is likely.

[ Everything is likely from a certain perspective. From the consummate cynic's vantage, everything is a mistake waiting to be made; so it is, too, for an operative of their kind, to assume the same paranoia, though this is given by the knowledge that death comes for them all for the smallest of errors, and that death is not merciful towards such faults.

Illya counts his breathing. One. Two. A pause to let the blood rush settle in his veins, ill-advised as that might be. A faint cold seeps in, and it calms him a little. Calm is always good, after all. Illya was born under the watchful eye of an angry fire; the cold will ease the burn of it on his soul.

(Don't let it pass from a man's lips, that the Russian man has no poesy carved in his bones.) ]

Walk now, Cowboy.

[ There's a siren wailing in the distance, headed towards them. Too quickly for the rounds fired. ]

We are expected.

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