nakasomethingkun:

A messy thing I wrote in like an hour because I saw this post by @acerenee and then I realized I could use this with the prompt ‘on the commute home’ on the Andreil card from @aftgbingo so like. Yeah

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Neil needs to get to work, and this line hasn’t moved for the past fifteen minutes.

It’s not often that he has to go to campus, because most of his classes are taught online.

Today, however, is special; he needs to physically be on campus for a faculty meeting. But he’s going to be fucking late because somebody is holding up the ticketing queue. He should’ve just gone for the ticket machines, in retrospect.

“Hey!” a man behind him yells. “What the hell is taking so long?”

A few other people shout their dissatisfaction and demand to know the same.

A slew of frantic sentences fly down the line. There is a buzz of murmured confusion among the people, and Neil sighs.

He pushes his way through the crowd to the front of the line. A tall, frustrated man is hunched over the ticket window, throwing a “Patience, please!” to the line of angry people behind him.

The problem is – he is speaking in Russian, and nobody can understand a lick of what he is saying. Nobody but Neil, anyway.

“Excuse me,” he says in Russian. “May I help you?”

The man stops rambling to the station agent behind the window and turns to Neil, eyes widening in surprise. Then his face breaks into relief and delight as he begins to explain that he needs to get to the museum but he wants a three-day pass that covers zones A to C, with a 1-day pass that covers only zone D.

Neil relays this information in English to an unruffled Minyard, who performs the transaction with brisk efficiency. It’s quite contradictory to his claims of I do not care about this job.

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