Just a few quick words here: This story includes scenes of sex between two males, yada yada, if you don't like it you can leave, etc.
This is my first story, so any advice or comments are welcome unless they're just flames, which are dull-witted and boring, so keep those. You can drop me a line at Killersincrocker@aol.com
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Chapter One
Springing upright so quickly it hurt, Nathan quickly glanced about the room looking for the source of the insidious beeping that had snatched him from his peaceful slumber. Letting out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, he calmed down to allow his wits to slowly return and he reached onto the nightstand next to him and shut off the noisy alarm clock. As he shuffled into the adjoining bathroom, he thought to himself as he did every morning, how insane one had to be to willingly wake up so early in the morning. And then he reminded himself of the fact that all of his ilk would likewise be waking as he himself had. Four hours was usually as much as they needed to function regularly, but still, Nathan couldn't deny the fact that it did feel good to sleep late.
Turning on his shower, Nathan quickly disrobed and picked up the bristled brush he'd bought just for this purpose. Slowly he began to brush it across his skin, beginning at his legs and working his way up. While his reasons for doing this were primarily biological, he had to admit that the bristles did feel pleasant against his skin as he did so. Stepping into the shower, he resisted the urge to cringe as the now freezing water pelted against his skin. Slowly the water began to feel more comfortable as he lathered the soap and washed himself clean.He didn't bother to wrap himself as he stepped out of the shower and moved quickly to his closet to prepare for the day ahead of him. Today felt like a different kind of day than usual, so he settled on a pair of dark jeans, a white button up, and a red and white striped tee with a black tie. Nathan took a quick second to examine himself in the mirror. His morning examinations were the only time in the day he ever bothered to look himself over, preferring to insure everything was in its proper place. Never particularly vain regarding his looks, he couldn't help but to smile a bit. He was short, he knew, but he had to admit he much preferred it to being so tall. Easier to slip through the crowds and lose pursuers if necessary. The person who looked back at him had deep forest green eyes, and skin the color of soft caramel. Angular facial features, almond shaped eyes, and a well-curled Mohawk completed the look. Taking a moment to move the bangs out of his eyes, he reached into the top drawer of the bureau and sifted through his collection of collars, deciding on a red cat collar. He quickly walked over to the nightstand once again, picking up his keys and a black flash drive, which he clipped unceremoniously onto the collar and rushed out the door. The run across campus to his first class of the day was a short one, made shorter by the fact that as he moved, Nathan's body moved in perfect synchronicity- a feat which had taken him almost a year to perfect, but which had served him well in the years which had followed. And turned a few eyes as well. Though there weren't many, he did nod occasionally as people called his name. Five minutes later, Nathan found himself standing in front of the large general education building. Resigning himself to the fact that he would be bored out of his mind for the next hour and a half, Nathan climbed the large stone steps two at a time with a near feline grace, and quickly moved through the halls and into the large lecture hall which would be his trigonometry classroom for the next half a semester. Fun.As usual, the hall was still empty, most students only now leaving the dining halls for classes. Straightening himself and facing forward unblinking, Nathan allowed his vision to blur and the world around him began to disappear. As everything went dark, he once again found himself in the warm floating comfort of the infinite darkness behind his eyelids. He took a deep breath and reveled for a moment in the feeling of that empty plexus at the base of his torso as it sputtered to life. A small smile graced his face momentarily as he took another, and another, the plexus now pumping warmth upward through his body, causing it to buzz with energy. Nathan continued in this way for a short while, his awareness centered only on his body, and the nervous energy building inside. Finally, what felt like an eternity later, Nathan felt his awareness expand to the hall around him. The feeling of his mind virtually filling the air around him always caught him off guard, but the shock of it when he wasn't doing so intentionally always bothered him, and had he not known what the disturbance was which triggered the response, he likely would have panicked more. As it was, he allowed his breathing to normalize before he opened his eyes, still trained straight ahead, while the seat next to him was quickly filled."You're here early." Nathan said, as he slowly clenched and released his hands."Yeah, roomie's being a douche again this morning." The larger man next to him said, reaching into the green backpack on the ground next to him and producing a notebook, pen, and a thermos full of what Nathan assumed to be coffee.
Slowly the room around them began to fill with students as eager as he was to be there. The man next to him began to open the thermos, offering him the top as a makeshift cup. Nathan raised his eyebrow questioningly at his friend. "Drew?"
"What? It's decaf! Give me a little credit.." Nathan smirked as he took the cup and let his friend fill it with the dark liquid. "Can't do that. You'd never let me live it down."The blonde, burly teen had to steady the thermos as he laughed to keep from spilling. "You're damn right I wouldn't."The professor, a short and rather rotund man with balding dark hair entered the room, and all talking ceased. For the next hour at least, this was his domain, and professor Cotton was not known for being a particularly tolerant or pleasurable man early in the morning.Quickly the board was filled with numbers and formulas as the man explained the intricacies of trigonometry. So busy was Nathan with taking his notes that he hadn't heard the professor calling his name."What?" he practically yelled at Drew, annoyed at having to break his concentration to stare at the teen who'd been busily jostling him as he'd been attempting to take his notes. His furor died down a bit as he realized all eyes in the room were on him, including his professor's. " How kind of you to join us, Mr. Croix." Realizing that his comment had done nothing to ruffle his student's composure, the man quickly approached Nathan, picking up a page of paper from the small pile that had been steadily accumulating in front of him. The man glanced surreptitiously between the paper and the youth before him, eyes narrowing in suspicion before he placed the paper back atop the stack and walked back up to the dry erase board where he messily scrawled a complex equation on what little space the board had available. "Now, if you'd be so kind as to show us how well you've grasped the material, Mr. Croix, I would be so grateful."The class, who had been quietly observing the interaction for fear of being the target of his ire, had visibly calmed down as the tension became something of speculative curiosity. He was used to the fact that his classmates regarded him as a bit of a mystery. In fact, he wanted it that way. It was the same with all of his people. Nathan got up from his desk and moved confidently up to the board, taking the marker from the man before him, not bothering to look at him. He stared at the board, glaring at the numbers as if willing them to reveal the answers to him. "We're waiting, Mr. Croix.." As if waking from a trance, Nathan took a deep breath, picked up the dry erase marker and quickly wiped away a third of the writing on the board. Moving back to the equation, he quickly and neatly began to scrawl a long line of numbers and formulas beneath the equation until he arrived at what he knew to be the answer. He turned away from the board and walked back to his seat, stopping only momentarily to place the marker back in the hand of his now pale and stuttering professor. He quickly picked up his pencil and stared once again fixedly at the board as if waiting for new data to suddenly come spilling out of it automatically. In words barely above a whisper, but loud enough in the quiet to be heard by the entire room, he said stoically, "If you don't mind terribly, I prefer to be called Nate or Nathan."The pudgy man's round face became a deep shade of scarlet as he walked up to the board and began erasing everything. He stiltedly turned to face the class and grumbled. "You may go now. Class is over."
"Damn, Nate. That was pretty brutal." Drew stated as the two of them began to pack their things."I didn't do anything." Nathan said as he ignored the now curious eyes of his peers while they passed the two of them on the way out of the room."Dude, seriously. He wouldn't even have said word one to you if it wasn't for that creepy eye thing you keep doing in class."The two of them stopped moving as Nathan turned to face his friend. "Creepy eye thing?"
"Yeah, you know. Where you stare at the board and your hand keeps writing down everything while you're not even looking at the paper. And you don't even blink. It's creepy. Seriously. It looks like you're sleepwalking or something.. Sleepwriting, I mean."Nathan quirked his eyebrow as the two of them resumed moving with the rest of the students. He had to admit, that was the first time he'd heard the Flow reduced to the word creepy. Drew cleared his throat as he spoke up again. "So, the Factory tonight?"
"Of course. When have we ever missed a Friday?"
"Watch it, Grinder." A tall and somewhat lanky dark haired man sneered as he passed between the two, nearly knocking Nathan off balance."You should be the one watching it, don't you think, dog boy?" the dark haired man stopped walking and turned around, his face a mask of menace as he approached Drew. Nathan knew Drew could handle himself, being just as tall and almost twice as wide as the other man, but he took a deep breath to center just in case. He knew doing anything too flashy in the middle of the student commons would raise some questions, but there were ways around that problem that would still leave the bigger man in a quivering mess on the ground if necessary. "Who're you calling Dog, tin man? Might wanna be careful or somebody might accidentally spill something cold and wet on you, don't you think?" Nathan could tell Drew had begun to grind his teeth, which meant he was one comment away from ripping the other man to pieces right where he stood. Nathan cocked his head slightly to the side, his face devoid of expression. "Drew, aren't you late for your next class? You should be going, don't you think?"
"Class can wait." Drew responded, not even bothering to take his eyes off the man in front of him. Quickly stepping in between the two of them, his back on the stranger, Nate grabbed his friend by the arm. "Just go to class, Drew. If he could've hurt me, he would've by now, yeah?"Grudgingly, his friend nodded, hiking his bag further up on his shoulder and turning to leave. "You callin' me weak, grinder?" Nathan didn't even bother to turn around and face the man as he too began to walk away. He knew how big an insult it was to turn one's back on an Inuki in the midst of a challenge. "Sniveling corpse thief." Nathan, who was now a few feet away, stopped walking and turned to face the man, whose sadistically smiling face reminded him very much of a hyena in the wild about to pounce on a piece of carrion. He allowed just the slightest edge of his agitation to peek through as he stared directly into the man's eyes."You want to leave this area now." Nate didn't think it possible, but the man's smile grew wider as he began to approach him. "Or what, corpse thief?"Not one to lose his cool, Nate instead poured his agitation into the nervous energy he'd been storing since the altercation had first started. When he opened his mouth to speak this time, the voice that came out of him was dripping with an alien malice, his eyes rigid with focus. "Shut up, you mangy little dog." The man flinched, unable to break his eye contact as Nathan slowly approached him, heat pouring off him like a furnace. "If you so much as even glance in either my direction or any of my friends', I will end you. Do you understand me, dog?" By this time Nathan was so close to the man, he could see the whites of his eyes. Though his being so much shorter than the other man should have been somewhat intimidating, the heat induced chills running through the other man's body was more than enough to tell him, this was not something to play with. " Now. Leave."As if released from some unseen bindings, the bigger man backed away and ran, stopping only to grab the bag he'd dropped earlier on. Cocking his head to both sides in an attempt to stretch his neck, Nathan hiked his own bag up a little further on his shoulder and began to move back towards his own room. He had a job to do, and he needed to grab his tools and supplies before he left campus.
Chapter One
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