InsaneJournal

Current mood:	amused
Current music:	David Cook-"The Music of the Night"
Entry tags:	ai, american idol, american idol: fic

American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 3/13
TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two



Part Three

They reached the hospital in what seemed to be both less than ten minutes and an eternity, and then Michael’s stretcher was being unloaded without his being permitted to exit it and it was an endless round of tests, tests, tests. Michael made a note to call home and ask Mum if there was any history of cancer in the family that he did not know about, and that she should probably start making her plans if there was. It felt as if he had been barraged with X-rays for hours.

“Four broken ribs,” came the final verdict, after it had been ruled that Michael was not likely to start coughing up his own liver and after he was seated on a bed with a curtain that could be pulled around it for privacy. He was not in a room yet; he was refusing to be admitted for the night.

“There was blood,” Michael pointed out to the ER doctor. Why, he didn’t know, when he was all but grabbing onto the walls to avoid being actually admitted for observation overnight, but it seemed like something that should be said. It was one of the few bodily fluids that had never, under any circumstances, been intended to be seen outside of said body.

The doctor glanced up from his chart long enough to smile at Michael. The smile looked distracted; compared to the rest of the carnage that could be ripping through the emergency room, Michael guessed that his injuries were pretty mundane. “There’s some bruising,” the doctor told him. He was one step away from patting Michael on the knee. “But you’re not bleeding internally. We’d still like to keep you overnight to be sure--”

“No.”

The ER doctor’s smile was thin. “Objection noted. Under those circumstances, the most that I can do is prescribe you a painkiller and advise you that your ribs will take anywhere from one to two months to heal. Unfortunately, as we can’t put them in a cast, there’s not a great deal that we can do beyond that. Since you’re refusing to stay overnight, you should know that broken ribs always carry with them the risk of a punctured lung if they splinter. Your X-rays turned up clear, but you’ll need to steer away from any vigorous activity until you’re healed. That means no sports, no hitting the gym, no sex--”

“No problem,” Michael muttered in a dark tone. Stacey had had it with him and his increasingly foul moods almost a year before, and the hook-ups since then had been few and far between. He might still be good looking, even if he was now officially in his thirties, but he wasn’t quite the charmer that he had once been.

The doctor paused from perusing his clipboard long enough to look Michael in the face. Michael could all but see the words spinning around the inside of his head before he diplomatically elected to bite them back. “Well, then,” he said. “That’s that. You’ll understand if I order the nurses to drag their feet in getting your discharge papers ready, and that you are leaving against medical advice.” Michael threw him an ugly look and said nothing. “Come back immediately if you have trouble breathing or begin to cough up blood again-that goes beyond bruising and into something much more serious. I cannot stress enough that you really do need to be staying here overnight.” Michael answered with another look. At the rate that all of the doctors and nurses kept pushing at him, they were lucky that he hadn’t started answering with creative fingers.

The doctor sighed and muttered something beneath his breath. Michael had the feeling that he was being sworn at, and it made him feel more kindly inclined towards the doctor than anything else that he had done yet. “Promise me that you won’t drive, at the very least,” he said. “You’re going to be on some fairly intense painkillers for the first few days. Don’t want any more accidents.” The corners of his mouth turned up.

“No problem,” Michael said. “No car.” No ride home, either, unless he called a cab. Michael was in nowhere near the frame of mind to deal with Beth right now, and Levine was surely developing his pictures by now, getting them ready for the highest bidder. They were friends, of a sort, but there was only so far that that could be pushed before it got in the way of business.

The ER doctor smiled his thin and insincere smile. “Right,” he said, and left. Michael wondered if maybe he had unsettled him.

He leaned back against the narrow bed that was being provided for him while he remained in an administrative limbo and closed his eyes. A shot had been provided for him after the hospital had finally realized that he didn’t have a head injury, and there was the promise of pills once he had made it home, but his ribs still refused to be coaxed down from a dull ache. The doctor need not have warned him about vigorous activity at all; Michael thought that Angelina Jolie herself could have been standing in front of him with nothing on but her smile and he still would have turned her down.

“Mr. Johns?”

Michael startled and swore when that turned out to be a bad move, a bad, bad move. He opened his eyes. And just like that, a bad night became even worse. Naturally, the man at the end of the bed was a cop. And naturally, he was looking at Michael like Michael was something that he had seen a million times before and that was not all that impressive to start with.

“Yes?” Michael asked. He sat up, carefully, before putting his hand against his abdomen and wincing. While he was hardly going to turn down any sympathy that his injuries might have coming his way, the expression was not feigned.

The cop looked him over carefully before saying, “You were the driver of the second vehicle?”

“Which wreck?” Michael asked. When the cop raised his eyes from his notes, he added, “Yeah, there was more than one.”

“The one in which the limo was not involved,” the cop said finally.

“That was me.” Michael waved his hand. “Look, I shouldn’t have been going so fast, I take full responsibility, all of that jazz. I have insurance--”

“Witnesses say that you were drinking fairly heavily before the crash.”

And just like that, this shit stopped being funny. Michael snapped his mouth closed and stared at the police officer, trying to decide where the next move was coming from. “Wouldn’t call it heavily,” he said, and tried his best smile. “I’m sure that you hear this every day, officer, but I swear that I only had a few.” It had been hours since the crash, and Michael was confident that he could pass any sobriety test that this joker wanted to throw at him, but there was still a look in his eyes that Michael did not like at all.

“Hmm.” The cop nodded. “And if I ask the hospital to draw some blood? You sure that your BAC will come back under legal?”

“Sure.” Michael said. He wasn’t sure of that at all, but if anything was going to get him out of this situation, it was confidence. He stared the officer down with the most innocent expression that he was capable of.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that I was interrupting anything.”

Michael jerked again, and this time could not stop himself from swearing. He looked past the cop and to the pop star-to David-who had appeared from nowhere and was looking around the edge of the curtain at them both. If David’s expression was anything to go by, he knew damned well that he was interrupting something, but he was also the most welcome person that Michael could imagine seeing in the world at that point.

“It’ll be just a moment, sir,” the police officer said without looking around.

“Hey, no problem, I don’t want to intrude,” David said. Michael noticed that his face was still pale, and that his right wrist was encased in a heavy black brace. “I just wanted to thank the hero.”

The cop’s face twitched. Michael wondered if he looked even half as displeased from behind, too. “What?” he asked.

“The hero.” David shrugged as if he was relaying information that he was certain the cop already knew. “Couldn’t have gotten out of that car without him. Is there something else wrong?”

Man, Beth would love to hear this, Michael was already thinking. The photographer who saved the day, only to turn out to be battling his own demons at the same time. Less than half of it would even be true, but they didn’t worry about percentages unless they had to. Michael stared into the cop’s eyes and wondered what his next move would be, and also wondered how fast whiskey was metabolized if it should come to that.

“If you’re thinking that he had a part in the crash, he didn’t,” David added. He was looking past the cop’s shoulder, directly into Michael’s eyes, and Michael could not shake the feeling that he was being offered a gift here. Why, he could not hope to say. He would have thought that the paparazzi would be the very last people on the planet that David Cook would be interested in doing any favors right about now. “I looked back just before we hit. He was at least two blocks back.”

The cop stared long and hard at Michael. Michael could see him weighing the pros and cons, wondering if a conviction would even stick, wondering if there was enough alcohol in his bloodstream to qualify as a DUI, and what his lawyer would be able to do with all the painkillers that he had been given after being admitted. “Drinking and driving is a serious offense, sir,” the cop said to him finally, and that was when Michael knew that he had won. It was all that he could do to keep his face neutral. He glanced over his shoulder, at Cook, whose face was every bit as impassive as Michael’s own. “You could kill someone.”

“That’s why I never partake,” Michael said mildly. The look that he was given made him think that he had finally pushed it too far, before the cop made an angry huffing sound and left.

“Nice,” David said when they were alone again. “I would have thought that you would get a reckless driving charge, at the very least. You would have had it coming.”

Oh. That. Michael straightened on the bed. “How’s your driver doing?” he asked.

David shrugged again. Michael was not sure what kind of musician he was, but he was a shitty actor. “He’ll be okay. A broken leg, a broken arm. There was some internal bleeding, but it was stopped.”

Michael closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. When he opened them again, David was looking at him with a quizzical expression.

“I wasn’t lying when I said that you didn’t cause the crash.” David smiled, for the first time since Michael had known him. He decided then and there that David should do it more often. “I might have been exaggerating about the hero thing, but trust me, I’m not a fan of vulture photographers. If you had caused the crash, my lawyer would already be nailing you to the wall so hard that your ass would still be hanging there six months from now.”

Michael was silent, not entirely sure of what he was supposed to say. Meaningful social interaction was not really his thing, these days, and David’s offered absolution meant little in the face of the panic that he could still taste in the back of his throat. We caused this, he had thought on endless loop, when he had thought that there really might be dead bodies inside of the car. A few words on David’s part did nothing to chase that away.

After several moments of silence from Michael, David seemed to grow embarrassed. He turned away partway, ran his good hand over his hair, and even had a faint flush crawling up his face when he turned back. “Are you staying here tonight?” he asked. “Man, I tried to crawl away once or twice, but they’re all but sedating me against my will to keep me here for ‘observation’.” David’s quotation marks lost nothing by virtue of the fact that he could only make them with one hand. “Can’t imagine what the media must be doing by now.” He seemed to realize what he had said too late, and cast Michael a sideways glance.

Michael surprised himself by actually laughing, even though he had to put his hand against his side immediately afterwards. “For once, that sin is not mine.” The corners of David’s mouth turned up. “No, I’m going home as soon as they get the paperwork processed. Can’t stand the smell of antiseptic.”

That flickering smile was gone within a second. “I hate hospitals,” David muttered as he gave the activity going on around them an angry look. He rubbed his hand over his hair again. “Nothing good ever happens in these places.” With a physical shudder, David turned back to him. “Look, when I said that I was exaggerating about the hero thing, I wasn’t exaggerating all that much. Thanks for helping out.”

Michael almost shrugged and reminded himself of what a bad plan that would be just in time. “Wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “Anyone would have done it.”

“Funny thing,” David said. “I remember there being at least twenty other people there, and not a one of them so much as lifted a finger. Makes me wonder what the hell you’re doing in that job, anyway.” Michael wondered the same thing, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, but that wasn’t something that he even admitted to his family, let alone a stranger.

Michael’s continued silence was clearly making David uncomfortable. “Jesus, I suck at this whole seduction thing,” he muttered, and Michael nearly fell off of the bed. “Do you have a phone number?”

“Yes,” Michael said slowly. The odds that the nurse had done her math wrong and given him too much in the way of pain meds were becoming better by the moment.

“Well, you want to give it to me?” David had begun to openly grin; Michael wondered what kind of blush must be moving up his face by now.

“Sure.” David’s eyes were a peculiar, arresting shade of hazel. When he smiled, they danced. Michael flagged down a passing nurse so that he could borrow her pen, and then barely controlled his laugh again. “Sorry for the cliche,” he murmured to David as he took David’s uninjured arm in his hand and turned it over to expose his palm.

David had been forced to lean over the bed so that Michael could reach for him at all. His breath was a tickle against Michael’s face as he said, “I’ll allow it, just this once.” He waited as Michael scrawled his phone number quickly across his palm and then moved his lips, as if he were committing it to memory, before he drew back. Looking suddenly nervous, he said, “This should go without saying, but: off the record?”

Michael smiled and meant it for the first time since he could remember as he slowly made a crossing gesture across his own heart. “Done.”

“All right, then.” David glanced down at his hand again. “I’ve got to go check on Carly before my handlers realize that I’ve slipped loose, but I’ll give you a call.”

I’ll be looking forward to it, Michael almost said, and closed his lips around the words just in time. He waved instead as David made a soft, amused sound from the back of his throat. A nurse strode up, pushing a wheelchair, and nearly rolled her eyes when she saw the two of them. “Your discharge is ready, Mr. Johns,” she said.

“Thanks,” Michael said softly. He couldn’t seem to stop starting at David, who made another soft sound that came very close to being a laugh before he lifted his hand in farewell and turned to go.

“You’re about the happiest crash victim that I’ve ever seen,” the nurse commented as she helped Michael into the wheelchair.

Michael realized that he was still smiling; he nearly had to touch his face to even be sure that it was real. “The drugs,” he said. “I’m flying right now.” The nurse made a disapproving noise, but she didn’t speak again, and her presence pushing the chair prevented Michael from having to twist around in the chair so that he could watch David go.

End Part Three

Go to Part Four