fic: darkcity, it's a throw-away life

It's a throw-away life

It's a Friday. Sam is grading papers, making clicking sounds every time a student makes a mistake. Sometimes he'll read out the more notable mistakes: "Hey, this kid spelled chlamydia with a k! I should give him points for the reference. I hope it was a reference." Mostly, though, he's quiet, even if Sam does 'quiet' differently than everybody else. Occasionally, his chair squeaks across the tile whenever he shifts. Sam is never comfortable when he's grading.

Dark sits on the other side of the table, and he isn't drawing, although he's holding a pencil. The paper in front of him is 11.7 by 16.5 inches of blank space.

Allie has her cosmetics in front of her; she has to leave for work soon. With the right kind of make-up, she can pass for human. Maybe it's her clothes, too: people don't think killers come in bright pink. She has her compact open, a single finger on a curved lip of plastic, but she's still.

Dark knows what she's listening to, because he is as well: The beat of Sam's heart. It's steady, steady, steady, and if he moves his hand, pushes it across the table, he could press his fingers against Sam's neck, wrist, heart, and feel that heartbeat under his skin--

There's the snap of the compact. Allie ties her hair back; she's barely remembering to throw in lots of extra movement, so that the action looks natural and clumsily human. She smacks her lips together, exaggerated. "Okay, I'm going," she says.

Sam looks up, focuses his expression on her. Dark grips his pencil; it bends.

"Don't do anything stupid," he says, and then, absurdly: "Stay safe."

Allie smiles at him. She leans forward. This is all vampire--smooth, graceful motion, her torso tilted at an angle no human could hope to suspend without extensive training. She presses her lip against Sam's cheek. It's a split-second touch, because Dark is present, and leaves a smear of pink.

"Sure," Allie says. She straightens, and suddenly she's a teenage girl, off to stand all night in the ordering booth of a 24-hour fast-food restaurant.

Dark waits until they're alone. Then he puts down the pencil and gives Sam a long, measured look, but the man is back to his papers, and his students. "You should be more careful around her," he says.

Sam rolls his eyes. "Train isn't spelled T-R-A-N-E, is it?" he says, and red ink flashes across the page. With his other hand, he reaches into his jacket. He pulls put a knife--the knife, the one Dark gifted him with. It lies between them, fenced in by blank sketching paper and student essays.

"I'm always careful," Sam says, and then: "Shit, you know what, I'm just going to take fifty points off these dumb unnamed papers."

Dark says, "I see." He picks his pencil up again, and begins to sketch.

Labels: _fiction, c: allison fencer, c: dark, c: samuel gray, verse: darkcity