InuYasha Fan Fiction / Cowboy Bebop Fan Fiction / Dragon Half Fan Fiction / Pokemon Fan Fiction / Pokemon Fan Fiction / Tenchi Muyo Fan Fiction / Hellsing Fan Fiction / Crossover Fan Fiction / Words Worth Fan Fiction / Battle Angel Alita Fan Fiction ❯ On the Run ❯ Side Story 1: Thicker Than Water ( Chapter 16 )

'…' Thought

Side Story 1: Thicker Than Water

"Thatcher?"

Bored silence.

"Thatcher?" the teacher droned again in his nasal voice.

Again, silence.

"Has anyone seen Ms. Thatcher?" Even when placed in a sentence the roman nosed educator still infused the name with all the too-bored-to-care excitement he had put into it by itself.

"Anyone?" He asked as he peered over the tops of his horn rimmed glasses.

"I haven't seen her in the last couple of weeks," one of the permanently chipper cheerleaders in the class answered.

The gray haired teacher let out a sigh that was equal parts frustration, apathy, and boredom; he passed over the roll for a moment before settling for the next name on his list. "Valenti?"

"Here," Antoni replied offhandedly.

"Good, Mr. Valenti since Ms. Thatcher seems to be unable to make it to class I need you to take her work to her. I'll coordinate with the rest of her professors and get her make up work from them, see me after school to collect it and take it to her."

"Uh sir," Antoni replied while inwardly he groused at his bad luck. This afternoon was his 'work' time. He had people stopping by for their stuff later and if he was busy running errands for the school's resident snot then he wasn't going to be ready. Unfortunately he couldn't actually give the professor the real reason he didn't want to play messenger boy so he made one up. "I don't know where she lives."

"I'll have directions to her house waiting for you," the teacher assured him without bothering to look up from the roll. "Walther?"

Antoni tried to think of something else to use as an excuse but nothing came to mind and his opportunity passed. For the rest of the day he tried to think of a way to get out of this, after all he had orders to fill.

High school was relatively good to Antoni, not because he was especially athletic, smart, or good looking, it was good because he could provide a service few people could. In a world where high technology was still used but knowledge of it was shunned those who knew its inner workings were both extremely useful and rare. Sure most of the people in the school knew how to use a computer, a few of the rich ones even owned one, but as far as actually knowing how one worked? None, Antoni was it.

Which left him in a very lucrative position, a position to offer services and products that no one else in the school could, a position that allowed him to live handsomely for a week off an afternoon's worth of work, an afternoon's worth of work that this little side trip would screw up.

Any idiot with access to a computer, some card stock and a roll of laminate could make a fake I.D., but Antoni was the only one who could get you one that would pass muster with the police. A pen, an eraser, and some patience could change the grade on the piece of paper you handed to your parents at the end of the semester but Antoni could actually change the grade where it mattered, in the computer. A few tenths of a point low on your GPA? For a price Antoni could fix that and get you where you wanted to be. So while the word geek could certainly apply to the hundred and ninety five centimeter bespectacled toe head he avoided much of the hassle that would have normally gone with the word. Most of the clique leaders of the school treated him with at worst indifference and at best false friendship, which in turn bled down to their lackeys and eventually out into the main body of the school. 'Their all a bunch of drones anyways,' Antoni thought, 'but they're drones with money.' College wasn't going to be cheap.

At the end of the school day no solution to his problem had presented itself, he'd thought of a few explanations that might fly but he knew they'd all be shot down. Determined to get this over with as soon as possible so he'd have to listen to as few bitchy preppies as possible he walked back into his first period classroom.

"I'm here for Callista's work," he said as he approached his teacher's desk.

"Oh yes, that," he said as he looked up from a set of papers he was grading. After a bit of shuffling of the mess that covered his desk the older man found what he was looking for and handed Antoni a rubber banded stack of papers. "The directions to her house are on top," he said before turning back to his grading.

One look at the address and the directions he was being given make Antoni grimace, her house was a good forty five minute walk from the school, it would take him nearly two hours to get there and get back to his house.

Apparently his displeasure didn't go unnoticed as his teacher immediately told him, "I realize this is a ways to go, I've already talked to the other teachers that you and Ms. Thatcher have in common and they've all agreed to give you extra credit for this."

While the credit would be nice it wasn't what was bothering Antoni. Still he'd take what he could get and he set off.

Sluton was a big city, not only was it the provincial capital but it was also the biggest deepwater port on the north coast of the Orange league. The high school Antoni attended was on the outskirts of the city, in one of the more upscale residential areas but the neighborhood that Callista lived in put Antoni's to shame. Every house sat on a half dozen acres or more and not one of the looked to be less then seven hundred square meters and a couple of stories.

In a way it was exactly what he expected for a pureblood. Callista was one of only three purebloods in the entire school, a school that had over two thousand students. Unlike the other two Callista didn't make it her hobby to constantly try to insist that she was better then everyone else like the other two did. No, when you were around her you just knew it, her belief that she was better then everyone else ran so deep that she didn't feel the need to tell everyone about it, she just knew it, and if you spent more then thirty seconds around her you knew she knew it. 'The only line of sight that girl has is right down her nose,' Antoni mused as he walked by what could only be described as a miniature castle. The fact that he was running this errand for a complete snob didn't help his attitude, why her parents just didn't send one of their lackeys to fetch her stuff didn't make any sense, it's not like they were hurting for flunkeys.

Callista's father was a member of the city council, a political big wig who'd taken the two centuries old practice of running on your heredity to new heights. Why people seemed to think that being a pureblood made you more fit to lead was a concept just beyond Antoni's grasp, especially since more then ninety nine percent of the population had as many pokegirls in their family tree as normal humans. Still, people were elected every day that had absolutely no qualifications to run so much as a lemonade stand but were put in office anyways just because you couldn't find a pokegirl in their family tree. Antoni had a deep rooted belief that most "purebloods" were lying anyways, proving your ancestry back more then a half dozen generations was damn near impossible, trying to prove it all the way back through the Great War to the time before seemed an impossible task, ten to fifteen generations were literally thousands of people, 'And not one of them lied or might have been a bastard?' Antoni scoffed. Regardless Callista's father was running for mayor on the "no pokegirl genes" ticket and everyone expected him to win, but that was still months off.

When he finally reached the end of his journey the Thatcher's house was everything that he had expected. A three story monstrosity sitting on a small hill surrounded with trees on what had to be ten acres of the highest priced land in the area. A three meter high stone wall kept out the casual prying eyes and Antoni was only able to see it at all through the wrought iron gate of their drive way. A shove on the gate revealed that it was locked but the guard shack on the other side was unoccupied and there was no call box to be seen to ask to be let in. "Give me a break," Antoni complained to himself. He waited for ten minutes, hoping that the guard was taking a break but no one showed up. "Damn it," he snarled as he looked at his watch, "the first of them is going to be showing up just when I get back." Having no desire to be any later then he already was and not wanting to have to make this trek tomorrow he spotted a tree sixty meters down the way and climbed it as quickly as possible and used it to hop the fence. More annoyed then ever to be running "little miss perfect's" errands, Antoni stormed up the long crushed stone drive way to the home.

The front door of the house was a massive wooden affair that Antoni guessed was made out of blackwood or some equally valuable and rare material, 'Nothing common for a pureblood,' he mused as he waited for his knock to be answered. He had to wait for a while.

He was in the middle of pounding on the door for the third time when a blond haired middle aged woman jerked the door open just far enough to see out and she demanded, "How did you get here!?"

"I'm just here to..." Antoni started to answer.

"Never mind, get off the property, NOW!" she yelled and slammed the door hard enough to cause its heavy frame to creak.

Antoni stood there in stupefied silence for a moment, he'd heard of purebloods being unpleasant, but that was worse then he'd ever dared imagine. It was only as he was running the scene through in his mind again that he realized who the woman was, he'd seen her on TV. 'What the hell is Mrs. Thatcher doing answering her own door?' he wondered, anyone who could afford to have a guard for their front gate could afford a little domestic help to answer the door, but then again nobody was at the front gate.

He was tempted to just ditch the sheaf of papers and be done with the whole thing but it was supposed to rain this evening and if for some reason she didn't get it when he said he'd gotten it to her it would be his ass. He looked over the entry way hoping for a mailbox or slot, something he could put the papers in and reasonably claim he'd done what had been asked of him but there was nothing. 'Probably gets delivered to a PO box or something.'

A quick check revealed that there was no way to slide the papers under the door, it had some sort of seal on it and the door itself was locked. With no options left to him and time ticking away Antoni made a snap decision. 'I just need to find a door or window that's open, I'll toss this crap inside and I'm gone.'

Moving as quickly and quietly as he could Antoni started to make his way around the left side of the house. The windows of the domicile were large and airy but all of them were tightly shut and curtained off. After forcing his way through the thick prickly hedge that ran around the bottom of the house like a collar for the third time only to find the window locked Antoni gave up and focused on looking for a door. His watched beeped at him letting him know that another hour was passed. 'It's going to take me an hour to get home and that jock should be there in half an hour.' He picked up his pace.

He found what he was looking for at the back of the house. A large screened in porch with a balcony above it ran the length of the back side of the house. Antoni tried the first door that he came too and was able to slip inside. All the doors into the house from the porch were locked so Antoni decided that the wooden table on the porch would have to do. He quickly dumped the stack of homework on the table and he was about to leave when he heard on of the previously locked doors open.

For a half a heart beat as he turned Antoni thought about running, the problem was that he'd already left the stack of assignments on the table and a quick check with the school would let them know he'd been here, and taken off running like a criminal. He was in the middle of considering his other options when a small soft voice behind him hesitantly asked, "Antoni...Valenti?"

The girl who'd discovered him was significantly shorter then he was, maybe one sixty centimeters if she wore a pair of thick soled shoes. Her hair was a shiny ebon black that hung raggedly around her face, it didn't look like she didn't take care of it so much as if her stylist had simply grabbed bunches of hair and cut if off at different lengths. Some of it hung down past her shoulders while the rest of it choppily layered around her head with some of it sticking out slightly of its own accord. Her skin was a pale eggshell color that made him wonder if she'd ever gotten out in the sun a day in her life. Her lips were full and eminantly kissable but they were as black as her hair and the eye shadow that adorned the area around her pale ice green eyes. She was skinny but not unhealthily so, just long and lean; she had a gymnast's body. The most surprising thing about her was that she was wearing old worn clothes, a faded t-shirt that was too large for her small frame and a pair of shorts that looked like they'd been worn out years before she'd ever seen them. While he was sure he'd never seen her before in his life she still somehow knew his name. For a moment they stood there considering each other, Antoni looking right through her and trying to figure out how she knew him while she stood there shakily looking him up and down.

He was still trying to figure out how she knew him and why she was so poorly dressed when she took one hesitant step towards him, looked him straight in the eye, and hurled herself towards him.

While she came at him in a rush the impact of their bodies was less then cataclysmic, she didn't weigh enough to even rock a string bean like Antoni back on his heels. With shocking force the little girl drug Antoni's head down to hers and crushed her lips to his. The girl was remarkably insistent and even though Antoni tried to resist her she was able to work her tongue into his mouth in a matter of seconds. He was in the middle of transitioning from resisting to participating when a familiar unpleasant voice screamed, "You little WHORE!"

As fast as she'd latched onto Antoni the midnight haired girl detached herself from him only to be slapped in the face hard enough to be knocked down when she turned to confront her accuser. Antoni automatically moved to help the girl as Ms. Thatcher bellowed, "What are you still doing here you bastard!"

"Got...," the girl began nervously as Antoni kneeled beside her.

"Shut UP!" Ms. Thatcher screamed. "We didn't raise you to speak like an animal!"

"Whoa lady, calm down," Antoni said as he backed up slightly only to find his back to the low brick wall of the porch.

"What's going on out here!?" A well kept man in a polo shirt and khaki slacks that Antoni immediately recognized as Mr. Thatcher demanded as he came through the same door that both the girl and Ms. Thatcher had used.

"I don't know, I'm just trying to drop off the school work Callista missed and then I met this girl and then this lady comes out screaming and hits her, I don't have a fucking clue what's going on," Antoni babbled as Mr. Thatcher tried to calm his wife.

The girl still lying on the ground next to Antoni snaked one arm up over his thigh as he kneeled next to her and whispered pleadingly, "Antoniiii?"

When she saw the girl's hand grabbing hold of Antoni Ms. Thatcher drew back her hand and started towards her prone form but her husband stopped her and she screamed in rage. "Let me go damn it!" the incensed woman howled. "That little bitch is going to ruin everything! This is all your fault!"

"How the hell is this my fault, she's your daughter!" Mr. Thatcher snapped back.

'Daughter?' Antoni wondered while his hand automatically drifted over to grasp the girl's, as far as he knew Callista was an only child. He knew this because the fact that Callista's parents had only a single child was a bit of a scandal as far as the school's other two purebloods were concerned. Most pureblood couples bred like rabbits in some kind of vain attempt to "purify the human race from the influence of those monsters," or that's how he'd heard it before. A pureblood couple with just one child was very bizarre.

The yelling was increasing in volume every round, something that was making the young girl very nervous. In a pitiful request for whatever protection he could offer the pale skinned girl pulled herself in tight to Antoni and latched onto him with both arms, something that drew Mrs. Thatcher's attention away from her husband.

Where as previously the woman had simply been angrier then Antoni had ever seen a female get and he'd been raised with a fire type pokegirl in the house now elder woman looked like she could explode at any moment. "Is this what you want you little CUNT!? To be some HALF BREED'S FUCK TOY for the rest of your pathetic life!?"

"Hey!" Antoni yelled, being called a half breed was one thing, he was so it didn't bother him that much but how this woman could be so callous to her own daughter was too much. "Back off!"

"Mark, call the police, I want this little sonofabitch arrested!"

At the mention of his being arrested the little girl squeezed her arms around Antoni's waist hard enough to be painful. "Gaaawwth," she complained.

"Callista you little slut, STOP ACTING LIKE SOME KIND OF ANIMAL!"

When Mrs. Thatcher called the girl by Callista's name Antoni's mind blanked out. Whether he believed purebloods lied about their ancestry or was on thing but like everyone else he'd been brought up with one thing constantly pounded into him, purebloods don't threshold, ever. But apparently Callista had, and then everything made sense, the lack of any staff on the property, where Callista had been for the last two weeks, and even why the Thatchers were so angry, if it was found out that their daughter had thresholded then everything would fall apart. Mr. Thatcher's election campaign was founded on the fact that he was a pureblood, and everything else in their lives was a result of the fact that they were purebloods, the elite, the royalty of the world. Without their heritage they were just like everyone else.

Mr. Thatcher's eyes had never left his cowering daughter and the young man kneeling beside her since his wife had demanded he call the police. His politician's mind had almost immediately supplied him with a way to not only make the best of this situation but also to come out ahead because of it.

"Well, are you just going to stand there?!" Mrs. Thatcher demanded.

"No, but I have a better idea then calling the police," and with that he disappeared into the house.

While he was gone Antoni helped Callista to her feet though the pokegirl's grip on him never loosened at all. Mrs. Thatcher said nothing at this; she just glowered at them making it obvious that if looks could kill they already would have. While they waited for Callista's father to return Antoni took stock of the changes that had taken place in her, while a careful examination revealed that while her face had remained nearly unchanged everything else about her had. Callista had been a tall girl before, nearly as tall as Antoni, now she was short enough that he could put his arm around her neck without raising it at all, which he was doing. Before she'd been a blond haired blue eyed Nordic ice princess, now she looked much like one of the school's skater punk girls. Her well developed tan was gone as well.

After several minutes in the house Mr. Thatcher returned with Callista's school bag, he collected the sheaf of papers that Antoni had left on the table and stuffed them into it before shoving it into Antoni's hands. "Both of you get out of here; she's your problem now. There's thirty five thousand credits in cash in the bag along with a few of her things. Never come back her and never tell anyone what's happened, if you do I will see to it that you, your family, and everyone you've ever meet is ruined, nobody's going to believe a half breed and his pokegirl."

Alan and Callista both stood there numbly, Alan was having trouble processing everything being thrown at him and Callista trying to grasp the fact that her parents were getting rid of her through the near feral haze clouding her mind.

Mr. Thatcher pointed off towards the back of the property, "Leave through the south end, there's a gate back there, it will be unlocked when you get to it, keep walking south and you'll eventually come to a road, follow it east and it'll get you back to the main road," he told them.

When neither of them moved but instead just stood there and stared Ms. Thatcher snapped, "Get OUT!"

Callista jumped at her mother's exclamation and both her and her new owner walked through the door out of the porch and into the yard in the direction they'd been told to go. For every step of the journey across the expansive unkempt lawn towards the line of tall proud trees a hundred meters away both of them could feel the Thatcher's eyes boring into their backs.

Once they were among the trees the ground started to slope downhill. When Callista glanced back after several minutes of walking she could no longer see the house she'd been raised in. The realization that she'd most likely never see it again dawned on her as Antoni led her through the narrow south gate and into the messy natural forest beyond. It was only after they'd walked a few dozen meters into the forest that she was finally able to process everything that had happened in the last ten minutes and in the previous two weeks. When it finally hit she started to cry.

Antoni missed Callista's first soft quiet sobs, he was every bit as busy trying to process what had just happened as she had been a few minutes earlier. A girl thresholding wasn't anything to get excited about, it was almost more normal then to see a girl make it through puberty untouched. Antoni's class had started ninth grade with almost seven hundred people in it, about three hundred and eighty of whom were girls, and now it looked like there would be less then four hundred and fifty people graduating. During the worst of it in tenth grade it wasn't uncommon for four or five girls to stop coming to school in a week. It had slowed considerably but a girl still dropped out every other week or so.

It wasn't even the fact that they'd given their daughter to a complete stranger that made him uneasy. Most families started planning for the possibility of their daughters thresholding very early on, usually a friend of the family, a male friend of the girls, or even a distant relative was found who would agree to take them in if the likely event occurred. One of Antoni's classmates had even taken his own sister as his pokegirl which had raised a few eyebrows but not much more. A few even used one of the matching services out there to find a suitable owner for their daughter but some refused to think that it could happen to their daughters or just didn't bother to plan for it and when the inevitable happened they had to sell them to a ranch or just give them to the next decent looking candidate to come along so that the girl didn't go feral.

No, it was the rage he had seen in Callista's mother and the lack of any compassion from her father that ate at him. He had two older sisters who had been lucky enough to avoid thresholding but if they had he couldn't imagine his father or mother or their pokegirls treating them like Callista's parents had. The amount of hate that had been directed at her over something she had no control over stunned him. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn't notice Callista's distress until she fell to her knees and started sniffling.

Mentally, emotionally, and physically Callista had gone as far as she could. Mentally she'd been stripped of everything she'd ever had and everything she'd ever wanted. Everything she'd had planned for her life was gone and she could never get it back, and to top it off now she was the very thing she'd always been taught to despise. Emotionally she was wiped out, her parents had not only rejected her but they hated her, none of her friends would even acknowledge her existence, not that she could go to them anyways. Finally her body and her mind was going feral but she wasn't far enough gone yet not to realize it, which meant she either had to become, as her mother put it, somebody's fuck toy or she would go insane, and she knew that prospect terrified her enough that not even her considerable pride would be able to stop her from jumping somebody. She'd already tried with Antoni. Most people thought of threshold as a rapid overnight sort of thing. The girl would be sick for a day or two and then overnight she'd wake up a pokegirl. In a way this was true, most of the physical changes occurred in a day or two but the mental and emotional changes could take a week or more and the need to be tamed was the last change to occur. Most people saw this as a bit of a blessing since it gave the parents of the girl a week or more to find her a home even if she turned into a Wildcat. In Callista's case her transformation had taken a bit longer then normal and her body was only now making its new most basic need known.

Under the weight of all this her body simply shut down and she dropped to the ground and began sobbing. 'I should have just killed myself,' she thought. She'd come close, she'd been holding a bottle of pills in her hand and she was getting ready to take the top off when she realized she couldn't do it. She'd stared into the sink for a long time, trying to convince herself that she wasn't thresholding that she was just sick and she'd get better but when she'd looked up into the mirror over the porcelain bowl the green eyes that stared back exposed her reasoning for the lie it was.

She was on the verge of deciding to just let herself go feral and be done with it when she felt Antoni's hand on her shoulder and his voice asking what was wrong. A month ago she would have been hard pressed to remember his name or that she even had any classes with him but now she latched onto the small bit of human comfort that his hand provided like a drowning person would grab a life preserver. He hadn't recoiled in horror from her like her father had when he'd seen her, he hadn't screamed at her and cursed her like her mother had, and he'd even tried to protect her, sort of. A month ago the thought of a half breed like him even touching her would have been revolting but now a set of instincts that she hadn't been born with craved more of his touch, much more.

'You have no right to call him a half-breed anymore bitch, he's more human than you'll ever be again,' a mocking voice in her head told her.

Antoni was still trying to figure out what, out of a hundred different things, was wrong with Callista when she looked up at him through blood shot tear filled eyes and quietly begged him, "Please...please tame me."

The relief that she felt at saying those words and just how right it had felt not only to say them, but to beg Antoni for it scared Callista more then the prospect of what was to come.

'Of course she needs to be tamed,' Antoni realized, 'she wasn't muttering at her house, she's a Goth, she's probably damn near feral too.' He had to admit to himself that the proposition of taming the biggest snob in school was a tempting one, she was at his mercy like this, he could do just about anything he wanted to. A girl who'd thought she was superior to everyone else was now his to do with as he pleased, after he tamed her he could order her to parade around his house, hell all of town, naked. He could spend the next twenty years constantly humiliating her and mocking her, reminding her every minute of every day that she wasn't any better than anyone else and now she was on the bottom of the social ladder.

But he couldn't do it, one look at her, how pitiful she looked, how she was shamelessly begging him to help her, and every thought of trying to humble her left his mind. After everything she'd been through he realized that if he wasn't as caring with her as he could be it could break her, ruin her completely. Just how he was going to do that he didn't know, people were illogical, he was much happier dealing with computers but he was willing to try. The pleading look on her face just triggered every ingrained male protective impulse he had, and he hadn't even tamed her yet.

"When we get back to my house, first thing, I promise," he told her.

Callista's pleading tone took on a more urgent note, "No. Please, I need it."

Antoni's unease ratcheted up another notch as Callista started to pull herself up his leg while her green eyes bored into his. He'd hoped delay the inevitable until he got home giving him time to get mentally prepared, no matter what she looked like she was still Callista Thatcher in the more irrational part of his mind. He needed time to bring that side into line with the rational realization that regardless of whom she had been before she was a pokegirl now, specifically his pokegirl. 'Well mine once I get my pet owner's license and I register her.' His contemplation was interrupted when a small hand glided up one of his pant's legs and across his groin revealing that at least one of his heads knew exactly what it wanted.

Callista had given up on trying to control her urges, she'd been resisting them for the last four days and she was tired of it. She wanted to give in more than anything but held back because her brain kept screaming that it was the final straw, the final admission that this was her life now however her new traitorous body kept up a subtle siren's song of promised pleasure and fulfillment. After four days of trying to resist it the last mental barrier had been shattered, her parents had thrown her out, given her to somebody, she was property now. There was no longer any denying what she was, all that was left were her instincts, her instincts that were demanding that something fill her, that something lick, and suck, and fuck her till she no longer cared what happened to her, but most of all her instincts were crying out for something...human.

The feeling of a pair of full firm lips pressing up against his and of a small soft hand worming it's way down into his underwear kicked his brain and all it's indecision out of the driver's seat.

Their first coupling wasn't particularly long, romantic, or even that fulfilling, in later years they would bemoan the way that they lost their innocence to each other but at the moment it satisfied a need. Their second time, while still by no means spectacular, was much better, facing each other this time with the tree Callista had formerly used to lean on now holding her up as Antoni pressed her against it.

The road that butted up against the forest at the back of Callista's former house was a simple dirt affair with trees on both sides, and completely devoid of traffic which gave Callista plenty of time to think about the fact that the first time Antoni had tamed her had been necessary, the second time had been...because... 'Because you wanted to get it right,' rose unbidden in her mind.

Callista hadn't said a word to Antoni since she'd begged him to tame her, well she'd screamed "Goth" more then a few times but he didn't think that counted. It was starting to make him nervous; she was walking right beside him but in a way that made it worse. If she'd been a dozen meters up the road it would have been one thing but she was walking right beside him, and the way she kept brushing up against him was distracting. One the plus side she was looking noticeably less pale, more so then could be explained by the sunlight, she was still as close to white as he'd ever seen someone but she didn't seem to be almost translucent as before. Her lips were just as black as before but now they had what he assumed to be a healthy shine to them instead of the dull faded look before. He supposed that the changes were from her just getting tamed, she also wasn't as emotional or distracted anymore, Antoni didn't really know what to make of it.

The main road was finally coming into sight when Antoni couldn't stand it any more. "Callista?"

It didn't even look like she'd heard him.

"Callista," he asked more insistently.

"Mmm, what mas...Antoni, Antoni," Callista stuttered as she realized what she'd almost called him.

"You alright?"

"I'm fine."

"You sure, you haven't watched where you were going in a while."

A soft, "Mmmmm," was the closest thing he got to an answer.

"Callista!"

"Don't call me that."

"Huh?"

"I said don't call me that," she replied testily.

"I heard that, why?"

"Callista's dead," she replied flatly.

Antoni frowned, he knew Goths could be morose but this seemed a little extreme. "You look alright to me."

"I'm fine, she's dead."

"And you are?"

"I don't know yet."

For several minutes they walked in silence, making it to the main road and finally getting back on track to make it home. Finally Antoni blurted out, "I've always like the name Alexa."

Callista considered this for a few moments before replying, "That sounds nice."

"Alright then, when we get home I'm going to need you to help me with my work, we'll worry about registering you tomorrow and ever....."

************************

Antoni had a stupid just-fucked grin on his face as he watched Alexa poke around his room naked. Her pale skin reflected the moon light that fell on her giving her an ethereal glow. It was hard for him to make out much in the moonlight but Alexa seemed to have no trouble navigating at all. She poked and prodded at everything, occasionally muttering things about his slovenly habits or how much of a geek he was for having so many electronic devices. As she glided by his desk something caught her eye and she stopped to pick it up.

"What's this?" she asked as she shuffled through the stack of papers she had grabbed.

Antoni squinted trying to make out what they were until the familiar shape of a well worn cover letter presented itself to him. "Oh that, I'm applying to Trella University in the fall."

"Computer science?"

"Yeah, so?"

"You're such a dork."