For some reason, the other day I was thinking about the Guinness advert from a few years ago with the surfer and horses in the waves (it's a really cool advert for those who haven't seen it) and the bit about waiting really stuck in my head and then this idea came along and so I was forced to write it. My muse really can't let an idea go.
It's really different to anything I've ever written, the length for one, at one page, it's easily the shortest thing I've ever written.
Waiting
She waits.
Time slowly passes by. The hands of the clock crawl on their slow march around the face. The ever-progressing time taunting her, advertising every second that she's safe and he isn't.
Six hours, that's three hundred and sixty minutes or twenty one thousand and six hundred seconds since she had been forced to leave him behind. That's wrong, she corrects herself, since she left him behind, there was no force involved.
She broke his first rule; nobody gets left behind. She deserted him, she left him to who knows what.
And she can't go back to fix it, she's not allowed to go back and fix it. It's one thing that she can't sort out with science but she needs to sort this out. She can't let this go down as being one of her failures, as being a tragic misfortune, she just needs the opportunity to put it right but that is being denied.
'Impossible' and 'suicide mission' were words that had been bandied around like they would dissuade them, dissuade her.
Nothing could dissuade her, not this time. No rules, no ranks, she doesn't care. She's already broken the most important rule so a few more don't matter to her.
She can't stop thinking. Thinking of what she did and what she can do to make it better. The plan takes her another half an hour, another thirty minutes, another one thousand and eight hundred seconds of safety for her and not for him.
And then she arrives, offering platitudes, sensitive advice and the observations that can only come from a best friend. She doesn't understand and she can't begin to, she accepts it when she's fobbed off and she leaves her alone.
Alone to contemplate what's happened and what she's about to do, what's she's about to throw away. The calm, friendly talk has only served to make her more determined in her course of action.
She's ready to go, alone if necessary but she knows that there are two people who she can recruit for this mission. The two people who understand what happened, who understand why he can't be left behind. Two people who, like her, have and will risk their lives to save his because he has risked his for them before.
She's about to find them, tell them of her plan, when he flies into the lab at break-neck speed, followed by the third of the group at a more sedate pace. They have a plan of their own, she knew they won't leave him behind either. After five long minutes they know what they are about to do, the three hundred seconds that pass allow them to plan what will happen in detail. The inevitable consequences aren't discussed, they don't care.
And so she finally stops waiting.
So, very different to my normal stuff and so I'm more eager than normal to know what you think.