AN: Full title: Child Of The Night, Except Not Literally Because Mister Kyle Drako Is An Adult And A Teacher
I like my long titles, okay? *shifty eyes*
Not everyone at Jefferson County Middle School walked in the light.
For example, one Mr Drako, currently padding easily through a darkened hallway, wasn't the sort to even walk out in the sunlight at all if he could help it, to the point of carrying an umbrella with him at all times just in case he needed to go outside during the daytime. The night was where he belonged. Unfortunately, his career as a teacher did not agree.
This hallway was dark, not because it was the middle of the night, but because the school board had decided replacement lighting for rarely-used hallways to be a lesser priority than dealing with the latest disaster that had come as a result of teaching a Murphy.
As it happened, said hallway was not, in fact, rarely-used. Many students found themselves walking the well-trodden path of their peers, out from under the watchful eye of authority.
Mr Drako himself, far from being an ambassador of authority in this lawless place, a beacon of light in the darkness, a Teacher to guide these wayward Students, instead shed a weight from his shoulders in the comforting embrace of shadow. His destination: an old abandoned classroom, still in ruins from an incident with one Milo Murphy the year before.
"Password!" a voice called when he knocked.
Looking straight ahead, at a missing patch of plaster on the wall, he spoke. "If Mrs Murawski loves her desk so much, why doesn't she marry it?"
The door swung open and a shock of dark hair burst through, followed by the rest of the lanky girl attached to it. "Good to see you again, Mr Drako!" she said, grinning ever-so-slightly upwards at him as she gestured him in. "What can I get for you today? The usual?"
"Of course, Absiday," he murmured, before the door slammed shut again.
Also lurking in the hallway were two students, Chad and Mort. "I told you," Chad hissed, slinking closer to the door and pressing his ear against it. "Come on, it's not proof until we both-"
Mort joined him, thumb rubbing over the smooth disc of lapis lazuli he'd slipped in his pocket for protection from vampires, and listened.
"Did you hear that?" Chad hissed as the conversation inside the classroom progressed. "Stakes. He's definitely a vampire." Then his... unusual... logic caught up with him, and he hesitated. "But why would a vampire want a stake?"
"Maybe he's trying to prevent anyone else using them against him," Mort suggested, after some thought.
Chad scoffed, as if the idea was more absurd than it actually was. "Like Abbie's ever going to run out of stock. But believe me, this is the proof we've been waiting for."
Despite the leap in logic, Mort accepted this, just in time for the door to open again.
"Greetings, children," Mr Drako said amiably, a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, full of, apparently, stakes.
The boys in question fled.
What proceeded from there would, in another medium, be a clear song montage, filled with failures and sweet rhymes. Alas, this is prose thus and has neither audio nor visuals, so any song montages exist only in imagination.
Highlights include:
Arranging a full-length mirror to reflect anyone walking down the hall in which Mr Drako was walking, only for Milo Murphy to pass by first, causing a chain reaction of disasters that led to it shattering. "Whoops," Milo said, cheerful as always. "Another seven years bad luck, right?"
Setting a sunlight trap only for one of the goth students to be caught instead, screaming about "the hideous light of the daystar".
A confrontation with one Melissa Chase in which she offered them a lucrative deal: a vampire protection charm each for their still-uneaten lunches. Chad accepted immediately, adding it to his substantial collection, while Mort declined, citing his crystals as protection enough.
While all this played out, Mr Drako continued innocently on his rounds, supervising the students under his care as they ate and talked and played whatever games were popular this century.
By the last few minutes of lunch, the two boys were exhausted, while Mr Drako seemingly hadn't even noticed any of their attempts to discover the truth. Little did they know, he had, he just wasn't acknowledging it, any more than he'd acknowledged any other of the previous decade's beginner investigators.
"More fun this way," he'd say, were he ever to be asked by a fellow teacher, assuming they cared enough. Alas, due to the nature of middle school, his colleagues all barely had the wherewithal to care about their own wellbeing, let alone take an interest in a fellow teacher's life, even on a "small talk" level. That, and the faculty's regrettable tendency to, as it were, "go native" whenever the opportunity presented itself, meant that intelligent companionship was rare.
Overall, he didn't mind.
If he was honest, some of the students were better, and quite frankly more intelligent, company.
So, when students decided to stalk him around the school, skulking around corners in secret, that was merely to be expected. Between the wannabe vampire hunters, and the students only now dealing with their first crush, he'd dealt with a lot in his time. Another day in the life of a middle school teacher.
At last, the lunch bell rang, and he could return to the staff room for his own midday meal, unbothered by the frantic actions of children just starting to figure themselves out.
This was what he'd purchased, in that abandoned classroom along a dark hallway: a raw steak, still bloody.
To say he tore into it would be inaccurate. All else aside, his parents had raised him with manners befitting a gentleman, rather than the table manners more suited to a wild animal. As such, instead of taking the meat in his bare hands the way his fellow teachers would, he retrieved his personal silverware and sat down to eat, delicately slicing off segments and eating them with no mess at all.
His colleagues made no comment, having grown used to this over the years they'd worked together. Besides, it wasn't in them to ask questions, not any more.
And so, nothing changed. Life continued as normal at Jefferson County Middle School, with only Absiday Atkins aware of the school's best-kept secret: that Mr Drako was, in fact, a werewolf.
AN: Crossposted from ao3.
Absiday, and her black market, come from an old origfic of mine that went nowhere and had an obnoxious protag. They were the only bits worth salvaging, honestly.
*cough* just like the middle school shenanigans are the only part of MML worth salvaging to me *cough* well, those and Savannah *cough*