first minute.

[profession]

MAKE IT QUICK.

prompts, text, action.
anything goes.

tick tock tick.

Comments

[dons]

[ 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. ]

[profession]

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.