Disclaimer: Dino Crisis 2 is the property of Shinji Mikami and Capcom. Not KoochiZibble and her wonderful collection of teddy bears. Well, damn.

Title Untitled
Rating
PG-13
Word Count
826
Summary/Notes
Possibly can be taken as a sequel to Deja Vu, but I think it can go on its own, too.

By all rights, Regina should be asleep right now; she certainly wanted to be – you forgot pain when you slept, but had gotten used to the fact that sleep wasn't an easy thing for her.

It wasn't even like she was on guard tonight – Dylan was, and as Dylan seemed to be the human version of the Energiser Bunny, always on the go, she didn't feel very guilty for letting him stay up all night.

Still—

From somewhere off to her left, there was sudden gunfire, jolting Regina wide awake. David, who had been dozing near the fire, shot upright and grabbed the first thing that came to hand (a stick – in any other circumstances, Regina would have laughed), glaring around blearily.

This is just what I need – staying up all night pointing a gun at nothing – and that was exactly what Regina was doing, aiming at an innocent leaf while the echo of the blasts rang in her ears. Dylan had left some time ago, having heard something – he must have found the culprit.

It was only a few moments before there was a rustle in the bushes and a tiny dinosaur, compsognathus, skipped into the clearing. Regina and David stared at it, and it was quite happy to stare back.

"That's it? I just got woke up 'cause of that?" David gestured with the stick, then seemed to realise what he was holding and threw it into the bushes with a grunt of disgust.

Out of pure spite, Regina simply shot the thing – hitting the chest where she'd aimed for the head, but whatever. There was barely a squeak from the animal as it flew back into the bushes in a spray of red.

"Great, now a whole pack of them'll come after us. Didn't you see Jurassic Park?" With that, David lay down by the fire - Regina didn't bother telling him that even seeing the DVD cover for that movie made her feel vaguely ill.

By the time Dylan marched back into the area, what looked like a bite mark oozing blood down his face, growling something under his breath and kicking at twigs, David seemed to be dozing again and Regina was drinking out of her hip flask – at this point, she'd have preferred it to be something stronger than water. Dylan sat down on the fallen tree trunk Regina was on and stared at the crackling fire sullenly, wiping at his cheek.

"What happened?" Regina asked, after finally growing sick of the silence.

"One of those little things – compies, I think they called them – tried to steal my body armour. Didn't have any luck, so the bastard bit me," came the curt answer.

It's shiny, what did you expect? Well, it had been shiny at some point. Compies obviously had low standards.

"I'm sick and tired of this damned island."

If he'd wanted to tell Regina something she didn't know, he had pretty much failed.

"I'm sick of dinosaur bites, mosquito bites, dead people everywhere I look – and I'm definitely sick and tired of the smell. Blood everywhere.

"Damn it, I'm sick and tired of always being sick and tired."

Regina was tempted to tell him, I'm sick and tired of you always being sick and tired, but that made her feel almost guilty, and that made her uncomfortable, so she got up and, after grabbing one of the small first aid kits, knelt beside Dylan.

"Sit still," she murmured, picking up random things she thought she would need (Alcohol wipes, always good – are those butterfly bandages? Well, they are now.) and using what little medical skills she had - which were usually limited to 'that's a Band Aid. It covers small cuts'- to work out what she should be doing with them.

"Leave it, Regina, it doesn't hurt." Dylan tried to bat her away, but she dodged his hand and gently manoeuvred them both so she could see the wound by the light of the fire.

"I want to," and then, because she couldn't resist, "Because if anything smells you bleeding, we're all screwed. Now, hold still."

This time, he listened to her – and didn't move (but occasionally hissed through his teeth while she cleaned the wound) as she clumsily went about stopping the bleeding, biting her lip as hard as she could to keep her concentration going. Her pulse pounded against her teeth.

The butterfly bandages turned out to be fiddly things, and took longer simply because she kept fumbling about with them, but for someone who knew more about taking lives than saving them, Regina thought she'd done a pretty good job on that. Finished, she stood up and backed off, stretching her now aching legs.

Before she could say a word, there was a loud reptilian screech somewhere out of sight. Dylan swore loudly and disappeared in the general direction, leaving Regina to stand and think that next time, she'd just let him bleed to death.


Title Easy Pickings
Rating R
Word Count
754
NotesAnd one more from the 'Zarrah defies canon for a 'good' cause' files. This is from the point of view of one of the nameless young men who often accompanied Paula. He's also a crazy bastard in this, so feel free to kill me. (At least, I'm of the opinion that they were men; please show me a screenshot of their breasts of something and prove me wrong. XD)
Also my first foray into second-person-present-tense. Forgive the crappiness.

Your every instinct is telling you right now that killing the two people less than ten feet in front of you is the good, right thing to do. You're actually itching to rush in there and kill them both before they can turn around – shoot them and shoot them till their blood lines the walls and even the scavengers won't get a good meal out of their remains – and you can't find much wrong with doing it; but for now, you stand and you watch, strangely fascinated.

The intruding group of soldiers, originally around a thousand, but now only three, is missing a member for some reason – this is a good thing, really, as the missing member packed some heat and you could probably only take all three with the others' help – but you haven't seen your sister since the female inside locked her away, and you split up with your brother not long after. You're alone. Not that that bothers you.

And these two – woman in particular, who seems more like eye candy than anything else - are the easy pickings, you're sure; neither have the gumption to fight back against you, and even if they did, they don't have the necessary firepower to back it up. So far, everything they have done has seemed to be on a 'let's go this way and see what happens' basis. If they had achieved anything at all, it was coincidental.

Even now, neither of them would be in this building – where you know the key they need to reach the residential area and the coastline beyond is stashed – if it wasn't for the pteranodon pack circling outside, cawing raucously. The creatures won't touch you – so you're perfectly content to sneak round the back of the building, still harbouring a secret desire to rip both people's heads off but for now willing to suspend it – finally, you end up peeking at them through a smashed window, being careful not to get the reddened shards of glass on your fingers.

They're both searching the room – they seem to have reached an unspoken agreement to leave searching the dead body in the corner until last, and you smile smugly as you remember from your last visit that the key they're most likely looking for is actually stashed in the man's clothing. You'll be here for a while, you think, and as you watch them, you realise with an almost electric jolt that if you were to lift your gun and shoot both right now, they'd be dead too quickly to even retaliate. You smile at the thought, and for a while, drift in and out of your own fantasies.

"Hey, Regina?" the man suddenly says, making you jump.

"Yeah?" The woman, you notice with a thrill of glee, is standing right in front of the window, side on to you and too pre-occupied in reading something on a sheet of paper to even notice that you're all but leaning in the window.

"You've seen all this before, haven't you?"

You have very little understanding of what the two are saying to each other, and you have little or no sense of empathy, but even you can feel the woman's – Regina's – shock in the following silence.

"Uhhh, what?" She puts the sheaf of paper down – still not noticing you. You're loving this, and once again you ignore the conversation (which is probably just as useless as they are, anyway) in favour of watching imaginary gore spatter, of the woman lying broken in a pool of blood as red as her hair, pleading for her life. Your hand inches off the windowsill and downwards.

"… I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you…"

Forget the joking way in which the woman says this, the words intrigue you ('kill' is one of the only words you have yet remembered) and you determine to pay more attention, at least for a little while. You lean further forward…

And your forearm slides over the glass, creating a grating crunch – not that loud, but loud enough; the woman pivots on one heel and has a gun aimed at your face before you can even draw breath (and you'll spend quite a while afterwards wondering where that gun came from), and the man has a rather larger gun pointed at you almost as quickly.

Your heart leaps into your throat, and you run for it before one of them can forget that they're supposed to be the easy pickings and kills you.