InsaneJournal

Current location:	home
Current mood:	satisfied
Current music:	"Repeal of the Liscencing Laws" - The Pogues
Entry tags:	snip, twwd

Snip, snippy, snippet!
TWWD again.


A man stood behind the dark wood of the reception desk. He was dark-haired, and wore a grey shirt, but the rest of his looks seemed suddenly inconsequential, because he was carrying a shotgun, the end of which was trained on her. Oh Lord - it's him; it's got to be him that killed Johhny. Sorelia felt her breath wibble out of her, along with any bits of last-stand courage, and she sagged into a crouch, bottle bouncing on the linoleum floor.

"Don't shoot!" she called, one hand cradling her head.

A breathless silence ensued. The seconds dragged out, coming one by slow one, and Sorelia's heartbeat thundered in her ears. If he tossed Johnny across the room like that, he won't think twice about pulling the trigger on me. Then, as her thoughts boiled in her head, she heard a rustle of cloth and the heavy sound of footsteps coming slowly closer. Her fingers twitched on the neck of the bottle, and she cracked open one eye, cautiously peering up through her hair at the man. Closer now, and towering over her, he had let the shotgun sink - it was pointing slightly to her left, at the floor beside her.

"... Get up," he said, and the words were edged and a little awkward - he spoke with an accent she couldn't put name to. "I will not shoot you - get up."

Fear still shaking her in her boots, she rose, her grip on the bottle tense. He glanced at the rum and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Sorelia swallowed hard and tried to stop her hands from shaking, but failed rather miserably. When she had finished her slow and rather uncertain ascent, he gestured with the shotgun - he kept both hands on it, she saw - towards the emptiness around them.

"Where is everyone?" he asked, his accent skipping over the words, sharpening them and rolling the r's a bit. "This is a... police station, yes?"

"I - I don't know," she said, clearing her tightened throat. His hands... there's blood all over them. "They're... all gone."

The man sighed through nose and said something in a language she didn't recognise - she recognised the tone, though; he was cursing. Since he hadn't shot her - in fact, he kept the shotgun pointing at the floor - her courage came back to her, just a little bit. The shaking in her limbs abated, until it was just a faint tremble.

" - prokljatie!" the man finished his muttered stream of curses, and hissed between his teeth. "A yard filled with dead men, and no one here."

"Dead men?" Her voice pitched the words far higher than usual, and she saw him wince. Oh shit, he killed Johnny, and then came here? The question came before she could stop it. "Did you - ?"

"What?" He stared at her blankly for a moment, and then followed her gaze down to his blood-soiled hands. Then he shrugged awkwardly, letting go of the shotgun with one hand to wipe it on the leg of his black jeans. "No. They were dead when I found them."

Really? Sorelia stared at the sticky-glittering smear left by his hand and swallowed hard, but didn't bother to argue. Lies or no lies, don't argue with the gunman.





Yes, that is Ivan cursing in Russian. To be specific, it means "damn". Russian is a very long-winded language.




This takes place slightly after the previous snip - after their little get-together has been disturbed by someone/something crashing in through the doors of the police station and chasing them into the elevator.


"This is the worst Saturday night ever," Sorelia sighed as the elevator slowly pulled itself up.

She sat slumped in the corner, back against the cold steel wall and arms propped up on her knees. The bottle of rum lay in her lap, wedged between her stomach and her knees, and the slow upwards motion made the rum slosh about with a glug-glug-glug sound. The man with the shotgun made a noise as to disagree with her - as if dead people, bone-chilling howls and being chased down dark hallways wasn't the worst way he had ever spent a Saturday night - and propped the shotgun up against his shoulder, staring fixedly at the door.

The distance between floors seemed endless. On any other day, when Sorelia had ridden this elevator, it had taken her only a handful of moments, but tonight the time dragged on, and she counted the pulse beats rapid in her throat. It is slower than usual. Lord, I hope the power doesn't go out between floors. She rested her chin in her hands and flicked her gaze from the ceiling to the strange man. You couldn't pay me to be stuck in here with him.

"Did you get a good look at.... whatever that was?" she asked, cautious. He looked over at her and then back to the doors, shrugging.

"No," he said, and she sighed. Not much of a talker, eh? But then he spoke again, startling her. "But... whatever it is, it is not human. Four legs."

"It's an animal?" she said, disbelief bleeding in her voice. "There ain't no animals around here large enough to do something like that."

"... I did not say 'animal'," he said, and he kept his eyes on the door as he spoke.

That shut her up, and she closed her mouth with a snap.




Ivan is the close-mouthed sort, but at least a part of his tacit behaviour is due to the fact that he isn't entirely confident about his English skills. Therefore (and I hope this shows up later, when I post Ivan-POV snips) he spends a lot more time thinking than he does talking. No rambling internal monologues, but still.

Sorelia is a Southern girl, and I'm trying to get that through in her speech patterns without falling entirely into caricature. I usually write her dialogue and italicised thoughts with a tab open on Wiki's article on Southern dialects, trying to keep in mind grammatical quirks and words typical of the dialect. Since she's from Somewhere-Imaginary, Georgia, I can't exactly settle on a specific regional dialect, but I'm doing my best.