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Desmond had a two-hour break between his biology lecture and his biology lab. It wasn’t worth it to go back to the dorm, because that was all the way across campus, so he’d explored the science building until he found the study room, a long room full of long tables, and students with long, haggard faces. It smelled of desperation and tears.
It was a great place to get some studying done.
However, everyone who frequented the building thought so, and as such, it was hard to find an empty table, and while Desmond was pretty good at talking to people, sitting down at a table full of someone’s immunology study group was just…uncomfortable.
He did spot one familiar face, and dared to wander closer. It was his lab instructor for biology, a graduate student named Maria. She looked to be grading papers (oh god, please let his not be in that stack; that would be really weird) with two guys who didn’t seem to be getting much work done.
“Hey, is it alright if I sit here?” he asked softly, indicating a chair at the far end of the table.
Maria looked up and blinked. “No problem, Um. Wait. Don’t tell me. Derek, right?”
“Desmond,” he corrected her with a grin, pulling the chair out to sit down.
“I was close,” she said. “There are so many of you.”
“One of your students?” One of the guys asked, as the other one looked over at Desmond, smirked, and said, “Maria’s teaching for the first time. She still finds you kids intimidating.”
“Yes, and oh my god Altair, I do not find my students intimidating, you need to stop.”
Desmond watched the exchange with a blank face, his backpack halfway unzipped to pull out his algebra homework.
Maria looked over at him and smiled pleasantly. “These two are my roommates, Altair and Malik, a decision I regret on a near-daily basis.”
“And the days you don’t regret it?” said the one who had addressed Desmond earlier (he was guessing this was Altair).
“Those are the days you don’t come home.”
“You wound me, Maria,” Altair said dramatically, and the other man (Malik) snorted as if to say that he, too, was about 200% done with Altair’s shit.
Judging himself to be safely forgotten, Desmond finished fishing out his college algebra work and rifled through it to the correct page, glumly looking through the problem set that he would have to do before tomorrow morning.
The glum staring went on for a few minutes before he realized that the more of it he got done now, the more time he could spend doing nothing later tonight, and that was an idea that he liked. He began to copy down the first problem, when he heard a sigh from the other end of the table.
“Altair, do you still have my calculator?”
“Hm? Yeah, hold on, I’ve got it in here somewhere.” Desmond glanced over to find Altair digging through his backpack, which seemed to be mostly full of small objects. “Let’s see—micro-pipette, mini-centrifuge, scalpel, scissors, vial of Salmonella typhimurium, couple of Petri plates, bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid, bottle of ethidium bromide…Here it is!” He brandished the calculator at Malik, who wore a bemused expression.
“Do you really think that I want to touch it, now, after hearing everything that you have in that bag of yours? Go disinfect it, first!”
Altair actually pouted a little, and muttered, “Fine; I have a bottle of ethanol in here somewhere, too.”
He continued digging, silently pulling out an unmarked glass vial and a few more lab instruments before finding the desired bottle, marked “ethyl alcohol, 70%.”
But both Malik and Maria were focused on the unmarked glass vial, twin looks of horror on their faces.
“Altair, tell me that isn’t—” Maria began.
“I would, but I don’t want to lie to you?”
Malik glanced around and said in a lowered voice, “You have a container of live influenza virus in the study room?!”
“Yes.”
“You idiot! Are you a graduate student or a freshman?”
Desmond realized that, by this point, he was watching the conversation pretty openly. About the same instant, so did the three grad students.
“Desmond,” Maria said shakily, “I will give you extra credit not to mention this.”
He blinked. “No problem?” His eyes fell to the little glass bottle. “So…that could give people the flu?”
Altair smirked. “Want to find out?”
“I’m good,” Desmond responded hastily.
With a glare that could make men who fancied themselves really tough quail in terror, Malik wiped the grin off Altair’s face. “With that virus titer? That’s a lethal dose, several times over. Which is yet another reason that it should say in the lab and not be in the study room.”
Altair seemed only mildly repentant. “It’s true. This is deadly. I could actually kill you right now, if I wanted to.”
His sigh this time was less long-suffering and more disgusted, and Malik gave Altair a firm whack on the back of the head.
“Stop threatening the freshman and take everything back to your lab.”
“Alright,” he said after rubbing the spot where he has been hit, beginning to load all the objects back into his bag.
“Ahem,” Malik said.
“What else, your majesty?” Altair asked.
“You still haven’t disinfected my calculator, freshman.”
Altair rolled his eyes. “Come with me to the lab. We can put it on the UV table. Also, I think your brother’s there right now, and he’s been nagging me to see you.”
“That seems fair.” And then they were packing up to leave (oh god, Malik had one arm, how had he not noticed that?!), and Desmond was thinking that he could actually get some work done.
Maria looked over at him, looking down at his book. “They’re actually really good guys, I swear,” she said.
“I…didn’t doubt it?”
She laughed a little. “I’m surprised, then. Malik’s perpetually grumpy and Altair threatened to kill you just now.”
“I’ve met worse,” Desmond said with a shrug, thinking of his dad.
She grinned. “Well, thanks for not mentioning the influenza thing.”
“Trust me, I am already trying to forget that it happened.”
He did manage to get at least some of his algebra done before it was time to go to lab, and, if his lab quiz grade that week was inexplicably 10 points higher than it should have been, neither he nor Maria mentioned it.