PSL; [every moment's a day]

[royalboar]

[He can’t fucking see.

His eye flares bright with pain. It feels as if someone’s hammered a nail into it, blinding him, and the heel of his hand presses hard against the flow of blood that ekes past the wound, smelling of copper and warm like fire. He forces his other open, willing it wide, and light floods his vision. He sees shapes, and those shapes shake and stutter and finally fuse into the violent scene now engulfing him — them — like a storm.

He had fallen to his knees, the bones in his legs having become useless in those few treacherous moments when pain seared itself into his eye. He can feel the hard, tiled floor bruising them, shards of glass strewn around his feet (the once-drink in his hand), gunshots filling his ears. Somehow, instinct had overtaken his body as he fell, and the table they once sat at now lays upturned in front of him, his only form of cover. It might as well be made of paper, judging by the sound of the gunfire staccato-crackling through the air. Automatic, high-caliber. A bullet punches through the wood just inches away from his head, spraying splinters, and he grits his teeth as his ears ring.

Movement all around him. The rest of his retinue are scrambling for cover, and the men opposite them must be doing the same. That, or they’re already dead, bleeding out with bodies full of holes, and this thought has him reaching for his gun — when he realizes it had been resting on the table, now skidded across the floor. In the line of fire and out of reach.

Shit.]

Ashe—! [It’s the man closest to him, their crack shot gunman, who hunches behind their shared cover. Dimitri yells over the din, adrenaline and pain twisting his face.] I want you to put a bullet through the skulls of every last one of them!

[Them. Unknown, masked, wordless men who had interrupted a by-the-books, boring business exchange by barging in and lighting up the whole room. Just a handful at best, but a handful of assault rifles is all it takes to turn a good day into a bad one.]

Comments

[chivalread]

[ Later, Ashe will have gone over the moment when the bullets started flying dozens, hundreds of times in his head. Ways he could have been faster. Ways he could have been better prepared.

Assuming he makes it to later. As it is, there's a single table between him and the enemy, and his cover is looking more and more like Swiss cheese by the second. Dimitri is next to him, and the sound of his barked orders over the din of the gunfire draw Ashe's gaze.

Oh. Oh hell. There's a stripe of bright red painted down Dimitri's face, sliding out from beneath the palm pressed to his face. There's enough rage in the one bright blue eye Ashe can see to easily make up for the absence of the other. It's a startling sight, but to take even a second to gawk could mean death for the both of them, and if nothing else, Dimitri needs to make it out of here alive.

All he does is nod, not bothering to shout over the report of automatic gunfire. His pistol is in his hands already, has been since the moment everything went to hell. There's a small dip in the noise, a split second of quiet that cuts through the din as their assailants dip back behind cover to regroup or reload. It doesn't matter which.

Ashe takes the chance and pokes his head around the ragged edge of the table, and the instant a masked visage peeks over the side of another overturned piece of furniture, Ashe fires. The man's(?) head snaps back, rifle clattering to the floor from limp fingers.

That starts it all over again, the spray of bullets against their waning cover. At least one shot gets too close for comfort, carving an angry red line across one of Ashe's freckled cheeks, and he's forced to shift his position, slinking past Dimitri to pick off a couple more from the opposite end of the table. A stream of bullets slam into the ceiling as one gunman dies, finger still on the trigger. Waste of ammo, Ashe thinks grimly.

It goes very quiet after that. Either the enemy was not very many at all, or he's thinned their numbers enough to have them second guessing themselves. Green eyes flick back toward Dimitri, questioning. ]