Title: "The Witching Hour"

Author: Mala

E-mail: malisita@yahoo.com

Fandom: "Alias"

Rating/Classification: 'R', Sark/Lauren.

Disclaimer: Bad Robot!

Summary: Just some nefarious time on the job for two Covenant operatives.

Her bare legs swing, a tantalizing pendulum, as she surveys his work from her perch atop the bathroom counter. Blood swirls, efficiently, down the drain of the porcelain tub as he rolls the corpse to the side. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Her legs crossed and her toenails painted pink. She watches him scrub his hands, digging the all-ready congealing red bits from the lines on his palms.

"You're enjoying this," she murmurs, in that prim and proper voice. A whole collection of family silver down her throat. Preparation, foreplay, for thicker things.

"And you aren't?" He is faintly bemused. He dries off with a terrycloth towel, watching her eyes in the mirror. Tick. Tock.

Oh, yes.

They're enjoying this.

He grabs her knees, stops motion. The play of her pale hair against her paler skin under the harsh lights is the stroke of midnight. Her gasps echo off the walls and count off the seconds. She laughs when she lands in the sink, trying to crawl out of it, up him, inside him. She's a filthy little girl and he tells her so. If there wasn't a body in the tub he would scrub the hollow at the base of her spine clean with his tongue.

"If there weren't a body in the bath, I might *allow* you," she counters, imperiously as her legs lock round his hips and stroke of midnight becomes one, then two, then three in the morning.

Their unfortunate companion's unseeing eyes are turned towards the tile wall, spared the rhythm of his killers' victory dance and the indignation of being referred to, blandly, as "a body." But his name truly is incidental. As was his death. Preparation, foreplay, for thicker things.

Later, when they have tidily disposed of all evidence and abandoned the laundry cart in the bowels of the hotel, Sark watches the sway of her hips as she strips off her gloves and goes to fetch the car. She has a delightful sway. Such conviction. Such boarding school poise. From here, it's on to Los Angeles...where she'll don an apron and make her darling husband a perfectly caramelized creme brulee.

"I'm quite handy with a torch," he points out, leaning against the door.

"You're quite handy in general," she laughs, huskily. And there are bruises to prove it. Marks that she'll effortlessly explain away as an altercation with a particularly nasty ottoman.

"Don't you mean a nasty Russian?"

Tick. Tock. "Next week. Vienna," she says, as the window slides up.

He barely steps back before she peels out of the garage, leaving him chuckling and inhaling the bitter-sharp exhaust fumes.

Next week. Vienna.

Indeed.

--end--

February 18, 2004.