you land badly, but you crash standing [open]
She's gone and trashed her hotel room.
Ros would be ashamed of herself, if she could pull herself together long enough to concentrate on it; on anything, other than the need to be very very still in the middle of the wreckage and breathe and concentrate on not screaming. Security will probably be along any minute, which is precisely what she deserves for giving into emotion like that, and then there will be arguments and recriminations and she'll probably wind up on the street; she woke up in Moscow this morning, and she watched a man she'd -- a man she'd known -- turn to smoke this afternoon, and she'll probably end up going back to Thames House and sleeping in a chair tonight. If she can sleep at all.
She's so damned tired. She's so damned tired, and it's not very comfortable on the floor --
-- and the air begins to shimmer, green and pink and gold, and the floor gives way underneath her, and there's a moment of sheer terror as she's falling --
-- and landing, hard, with a shooting pain in her palms and knees.
When she climbs to her feet, she's on a gravel path -- which accounts for the pain -- in the middle of a green park. The sun's directly overhead, and she doesn't recognize a single damned landmark, and whatever happened between the hotel room and now -- because something must have -- is completely gone from her memory. Ros doesn't panic often, but it's been a hellish day, and she shudders hard before forcing herself to lock it down.
She can fall apart again later. Right now her priority is to get herself to safety.
Assess the situation, she can hear Jack Colville hiss.
She's in a park. She's in a park, in midafternoon, with an entirely unfamiliar skyline stretching out around her. Two equally unappetizing possibilities suggest themselves: either she's suffered some form of stress-induced psychotic break, or she's been drugged and kidnapped. Again. This couldn't look less like Russia, thank God, but she knows as well as anyone that there are plenty of hostile powers out there.
If she's lost her mind, there's nothing she can do about it. Until further notice, she's going to assume Option B. Which means someone's watching her, right now, waiting to see how she reacts.
Assess your weapons.
She'd wanted to pick up a gun before leaving Thames House. Harry hadn't been keen on the idea of letting her out into the world armed. Harry, for all his virtues, can be a bit of an old woman sometimes, and she's going to tell him that the minute she sees him again. Of course the kidnappers wouldn't have let her bring it with her, but if she'd been able to get to it she could have done something about them before they became, technically, kidnappers.
There's an empty beer bottle just off the path to her left. (American beer, a helpful little voice from her subconscious points out.)
That'll work.
It's not heavy enough to make a decent blunt instrument, but there's a trick to smashing off the end of one of those without giving yourself a fistful of glass, and luckily for Ros it's a trick she happens to be good at. And the back of an unoccupied park bench makes a perfectly acceptable breaking surface, all things considered.
[Come one, come all, and poke the twitchy spook! It might be a good idea to ping before tagging; see here for contact info.]
Ros would be ashamed of herself, if she could pull herself together long enough to concentrate on it; on anything, other than the need to be very very still in the middle of the wreckage and breathe and concentrate on not screaming. Security will probably be along any minute, which is precisely what she deserves for giving into emotion like that, and then there will be arguments and recriminations and she'll probably wind up on the street; she woke up in Moscow this morning, and she watched a man she'd -- a man she'd known -- turn to smoke this afternoon, and she'll probably end up going back to Thames House and sleeping in a chair tonight. If she can sleep at all.
She's so damned tired. She's so damned tired, and it's not very comfortable on the floor --
-- and the air begins to shimmer, green and pink and gold, and the floor gives way underneath her, and there's a moment of sheer terror as she's falling --
-- and landing, hard, with a shooting pain in her palms and knees.
When she climbs to her feet, she's on a gravel path -- which accounts for the pain -- in the middle of a green park. The sun's directly overhead, and she doesn't recognize a single damned landmark, and whatever happened between the hotel room and now -- because something must have -- is completely gone from her memory. Ros doesn't panic often, but it's been a hellish day, and she shudders hard before forcing herself to lock it down.
She can fall apart again later. Right now her priority is to get herself to safety.
Assess the situation, she can hear Jack Colville hiss.
She's in a park. She's in a park, in midafternoon, with an entirely unfamiliar skyline stretching out around her. Two equally unappetizing possibilities suggest themselves: either she's suffered some form of stress-induced psychotic break, or she's been drugged and kidnapped. Again. This couldn't look less like Russia, thank God, but she knows as well as anyone that there are plenty of hostile powers out there.
If she's lost her mind, there's nothing she can do about it. Until further notice, she's going to assume Option B. Which means someone's watching her, right now, waiting to see how she reacts.
Assess your weapons.
She'd wanted to pick up a gun before leaving Thames House. Harry hadn't been keen on the idea of letting her out into the world armed. Harry, for all his virtues, can be a bit of an old woman sometimes, and she's going to tell him that the minute she sees him again. Of course the kidnappers wouldn't have let her bring it with her, but if she'd been able to get to it she could have done something about them before they became, technically, kidnappers.
There's an empty beer bottle just off the path to her left. (American beer, a helpful little voice from her subconscious points out.)
That'll work.
It's not heavy enough to make a decent blunt instrument, but there's a trick to smashing off the end of one of those without giving yourself a fistful of glass, and luckily for Ros it's a trick she happens to be good at. And the back of an unoccupied park bench makes a perfectly acceptable breaking surface, all things considered.
[Come one, come all, and poke the twitchy spook! It might be a good idea to ping before tagging; see here for contact info.]