Midnight

[kiyakotari]

Written in response to the Week #19 challenge/prompt on Resinality's ABJD Writing usergroup. Prompt was "smells/tastes/sounds like midnight." The connection this time is more explicit than last week's, no? Also, much shorter than my usual. A mere snippet of a scene, with bare hints of what's going on.

Midnight

Kartchner’s body topples from the fire escape and hits concrete with a meaty thud. The barrel of Jian’s Glock is still smoking lightly, the faintly visible wisps a darker smudge in the heavy fog, hanging in the air like a muted exclamation point. The trail seems to narrate his movements as he turns, gun ready, looking for more enemies.

The acrid tang of burnt sulfur is heavy in his nose, tickles the back of his throat. He’ll never forget it, never fail to remember the way the taste of used gunpowder clings to a place in the early hours of the morning. It takes him back to the hills of Xizang, to midnight raids in the sparse forest, to long hikes over beaten game trails.

To shared nights in the caves, Wren’s body arching beneath his, skin on skin, tearing what heat they could from the cold rock around them.

No, he’ll never forget the taste of midnight.

Comments

[greenjudy.livejournal.com]

Call me nuts, but I'm getting a subtext here. Jian reads freaked out. His stress is mapped onto the poetic beauty of your lines in interesting ways.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

It's interesting you should pick up on that - on Jian's attitude, the "freaked out" aspect of things. As I was writing this, I was getting a very stong feeling that All Is Not Okay in his little part of the world. For one, he's very obviously having trouble focusing, and in a situation where lack of focus might not be a good idea. I'm getting a..."something has happened to Wren" read off it this. Not death, necessarily, but close enough to it that Jian is shaken. Remember, one of his character flaws is his arrogance, not only as regards his own abilities, but also as regards Wren's. He's so very, very sure that they are The Best, and when things happen that challenge that, or smack him in the face with Fallibility...