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Entry tags:	ai, american idol, american idol: fic

American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 4/13
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



Part Four

Michael awoke to a ringing sound. He made an irritable noise from the back of his throat, but that did nothing to halt the ringing, and after a few seconds he realized that it was not a cruel dream, after all. His head was throbbing, and his stomach was flipping itself in and out of knots even though he could not remember the last time that he had eaten anything. Fine, so he had a hangover. He had had enough of them since things had started to go off of the rails; that was hardly new. If the rest of his body hadn’t also decided to join in the rebellion, anyway. Michael started to sit up and then decided immediately that this was easily the worst idea that he had had all year, and possibly even since he had been born. He groaned and tried to throw his arm across his face, only to yelp in pain.

Right. He had been in a car crash the night before. That car crash had come about as a result of being a witness to another car crash, which he shared responsibility for (no matter what the law said) as a result of who he was and what he did for a living. Michael was damned lucky that no one had died the night before, or else the pain of a few broken ribs and one full-body bruise would have been nothing in comparison to what he would have done to himself.

And then the person who really ought to have punched him right in the face and walked away before a nurse could come over and see what was wrong had asked for his phone number. Michael tried to laugh and then had to put his hand against his abdomen. It would not have been a pleasant laugh, anyway, so maybe it was for the best. Los Angeles had proven itself to be a weird town time and again in the seven years since he had migrated here, but this was easily the topper.

There was a click and then a whir from the living room as his answering machine took over for the phone. Michael let out a sigh of relief, as the bottle of painkillers that he had been prescribed the night before was too far away to be reached easily and the noise had been killing his head. Maybe now he could sleep until the sun set, call Beth and tell her that someone else was going to have to chase the coke-snorting B-listers around town, and then sleep until the sun set again.

The answering machine clicked off. There was about thirty seconds of perfect silence, and then the phone began to ring again.

“FUCK!” Michael grabbed for the nearest pillow and threw it. He was able to get it all of three feet before he remembered that stretching had not been the wisest of moves the night before, either. He swore, yelped, swore again. By listening hard, he swore that he could tell that the voice cycling through the answering machine was female.

There were only two women who called him, these days, and his mother didn’t know that he had been hurt. Michael thought of all of the cameras that had been flashing around him the previous night and groaned. She was either going to be pissed that he hadn’t somehow staggered in with prints, even if that meant that he would have been trailing an IV from his arm, or she was going to be putting her acting skills to the test and pretending that she actually gave a shit. Michael would prefer it if she was pissed, actually.

When the phone began ringing again immediately after the answering machine had shut off, Michael surrendered. He braced his hands to either side of him against the sheets and slowly, painfully slowly, worked himself into a sitting position. Every single muscle that he had felt worse than a hangover and a hard day of tennis combined, and his abdomen when he pulled up his shirt and looked at it was one solid mess of purple and green bruises. Drawing a deep breath hurt. That was probably for the best; gulps had not served him well the night before.

“Okay,” Michael muttered to himself after he had gotten himself sitting up and without any body parts falling off. “Atta boy.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, hissed, and stood.

Goddamnit, he hurt. It was enough to make him considering crawling back into the bed and just putting a pillow over his head until Beth became distracted by another crisis at the office. Some celebutante was bound to overdose, come up with a brand new baby mama, something.

The phone started again. Or maybe David Cook was going to continue to be the biggest story in Los Angeles for the next several days, and Beth was going to gnaw at him until there wasn’t anything left.

“For fuck’s sake, I’m on my way!” Michael yelled when he had reached his bedroom doorway. His neighbor downstairs pounded against the ceiling, irritably. Since he had personally witnessed her vomiting in the foyer more than once, Michael thought that he was justified in slamming his foot against the floor right back at her. It was all that he could do not to double over immediately afterwards.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the universe was telling me to be a better person. Michael nearly laughed.

He let the phone keep ringing long enough to detour into the kitchen, pop open the bottle of pills that the hospital pharmacy had prescribed for him the night before, and take two with a long swallow of a beer that he had left open in the fridge. It was flat and tasted like ass, but what the hell. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had actually had orange juice in his refrigerator, and he had learned months before that milk was just asking for trouble.

“What,” Michael said without preamble when he had finally made it back into the living room in order to snatch up the phone. He eased himself down onto his couch amidst a lot of swearing and what he hoped were some suitably pathetic-sounding groans.

“Pobrecito.” Beth managed to make even that sound like she was secretly smiling. “This is the seventh time that I’ve called you. Where were you during the other six?”

“Trying not to vomit up my spleen.”

“That’s what drinking will do to you.” Michael could hear Beth’s nails clacking over her keyboard as she spoke. She must be talking to him on her BlueTooth, then; Michael was strangely comforted to realize that he was not the sole object of her attention. “I take it that you haven’t seen the trades?”

Michael glanced at his clock and realized that it was nearly eleven in the morning. Beth must have thought that he was dying, to have waited for this long. “You woke me up.”

“Ah. Well, I hope that you have some good pictures that you’re conveniently not sharing with me, to explain why I’m having to read about the exploits of one of my employees.” Beth sounded more amused than Michael thought that his situation warranted, but that tended to be the way between them.

Michael rolled his eyes and sank down lower on the couch. Now that he had gotten here, he thought that it would be several hours before he had the power to move himself again. “Beth, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“According to every news source in LA, you’re quite the hero.”

Michael sat up. It was too quick, and he swore explosively. “That’s...no, Beth, no,” he said. He didn’t think that he had made so sincere an appeal to her since he had gotten his job in the first place, and he could feel her shock radiating out to him across the line. “That’s not what happened at all. I was just there.”

“Humility. I’m stunned.” And a little worried, too, it sounded like. Luckily for them both, Beth was not the kind of woman who allowed herself to be hampered by emotion for any extended length of time. “However, that’s hardly the issue here, is it?”

The pain pills must be starting to work, because following Beth’s train of thought was completely beyond him at this moment. Michael rubbed his hand over his face. “Beth, I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re clearly medicated. I’ll let that one slide.” Just like that, the kinder, gentler side of his boss was gone. Michael straightened. “I don’t like to read about my employees in the trades. It sets a bad precedent. You should have called. Someone could have picked up your camera for you.”

Michael winced. “My camera is with Justin Levine right now, actually.”

Beth swore. Michael did not think that he had ever heard her do that before. He was too shocked to respond, and after a few seconds she stopped waiting. “Justin Levine? TMZ’s Justin Levine? Employee of my direct competition Justin Levine? He’s the one who has your camera right now?”

When she put it that way, it sounded downright stupid. “There’s honor among parasites, Beth,” Michael told her.

“I’ve been one of those parasites for more than a decade, sweetheart,” Beth informed him crisply. “And, no, there’s not. Tell me everything that happened last night. Leave nothing out.”

Michael hesitated for a beat and considered lying. The previous night have revealed both his worst instincts and the last fluttering remains of his betters ones to him, and he was not ready to deal with either of those things yet.

“Michael,” Beth reminded him. She was using her “listen up, motherfucker” voice. “I’m waiting.”

Michael sighed. He went over everything that had happened after he had arrived at Hyde, only editing out how much he had actually had to drink before the car chase had ensued. Beth made a soft hmming noise from the back of her throat which suggested that she already knew, anyway. He told her about his moment of sheer panic after staggering out of his own vehicle, convinced that they had finally done it, that they had finally killed someone, and knew from her silence at the other end of the line that this was not a moment which she could empathize with at all. He even let her know how close he had come to being arrested. It was only at the end that Michael found himself hesitating.

“Really,” Beth paused for a long moment. Michael could hear her fingers continuing to move over her keyboard and wondered if she had been taking notes the entire time. “What aren’t you telling me, Michael?”

Maybe they had only been the last flutterings, after all. “Cook asked me for his phone number.”

The clacking noises abruptly ceased. Michael could imagine Beth abruptly straightening in her chair. “You’re cuter than I thought.” Michael made an irritable sound. “Well, yes, but I’ve known you for three years. Your personality has had a chance to catch up with the rest of you by now.”

“Don’t involve me in your gay sex scandal, Beth,” Michael warned her, abruptly afraid that this was exactly what she was going to do.

Beth laughed, both musical and terrifying. “I don’t care where you put your cock, Michael,” she told him. “Or who puts their cock into you.”

“You’re so classy,” Michael told her. “I’m amazed that you haven’t made the leap to legitimate journalism already.”

She ignored him. “Do you know why the police were at Hyde last night?”

“It didn’t come up.”

Beth made another of her hmming noises. “No one else can find out, either.” Michael let his eyes fall halfway shut as Beth said nothing else. God love prescription painkillers, because he was thinking that he could fall asleep again right there on his couch. “Find out for me, will you?”

“What?” For a few seconds, Michael was certain that really had fallen asleep again and dreamed Beth’s last words.

“Find. Out. For me,” Beth repeated, enunciating very slowly. “If your boy ran from the scene, chances are that he and his lady had something to do with it. And if no one else is willing to talk about it, then it’s either very small or very big.” Beth’s tone grew smug. “And we both know that where celebrities are concerned, there’s no such thing as a story too small.”

“Beth, I don’t think that this is a good idea.” It was the second time in a single conversation that he had actually sounded earnest. If he kept this up, Beth was going to come over here and make sure that he really was okay. “I’m a photographer, not a reporter--”

“We all know that you deal much better with pictures than with actual people, trust me,” Beth told him. “You’ll just have to stretch yourself.” Michael was silent. Beth went on, “Darling. Do you have any idea the kind of bonus that you could get from this kind of story?”

It might have been better if she had threatened him. Michael closed his eyes. “He might not call.”

“He’ll call. Get some sleep, Michael. You sound like you need it.” Beth hung up without another word. Goodbyes were inefficient.

Michael put the phone back into its cradle and sat for second moments without moving. The previous night, he had thought that maybe there a part of himself coming back to life after years of suppression, something that was, if not noble, at the very least decent. He wished that he could say it was a shock when it turned out that it had only been adrenaline after all.

He muttered a curse under his breath and reached out to swat at the answering machine. The collected messages began to play.

“Hello, Mr. Johns, my name is Beverly Kimball,” a bland and professional voice filled his apartment. “I’m calling in regards to your accident last night.”

Michael tilted his head to one side and gave the answering machine a look. He did not remember that he had called his insurance company and filed a report the night before. That meant one of two things: that Levine had done it for him, which meant that he was going to have to start being nicer to him, because Levine clearly had superpowers. Or two: Michael had done it while he was under the influence of some very nice painkillers, which meant that who knew what he had actually told whoever it was who had answered the phone. Since he was having trouble keeping his thoughts to himself even relatively sober, he could only imagine how much of his soul he had bared to an electronic voice.

Michael cringed with something that had nothing to do with his growing physical discomfort and quickly pushed the Skip button. He would deal with his poor, dead car and the death of his low premium later. The rest of the messages were Beth. She started out sweet, got strident, and towards the end, once she had figured out his game, didn’t say anything at all before she simply hung up and called again.

“Love you, too,” Michael whispered before he was finally done and could lean back against the couch in peace. It was short-lived; his apartment was too quiet. It was large, and well-furnished, as Michael had been adamant that if he was going to sell his soul he was at least going to enjoy some ripe material rewards from the experience. There was very little in the way of personal effects to mark that he lived there at all. Frankly, Michael thought as his lips curled back from his teeth, all that he needed was a drink in his hand to complete the cliche altogether. And his liquor cabinet was too far away, while he had worked too hard to get...well, not to get comfortable, but at least not to feel like his ribs were about to splinter across his lungs as it was.

The phone rang again. The shrill noise startled him into nearly jumping, as he had not realized how deeply he was slipping into his own thoughts. Michael swatted at it without looking at the caller ID and snarled into the receiver, “Beth, for fuck’s sake, do you think that I forgot in the span of fifteen minutes?”

There was a shocked silence from the other end of the line, and then a male voice said, “I didn’t think that your night was actually going to get worse after you left the hospital, but maybe I was wrong.”

“David?” Michael straightened. He had David had spoken for so brief a time, and an even shorter time on top of that during which David had not acted like he held Michael directly responsible for all of the failings of the western world, that he had nearly convinced himself that it was all an elaborate hallucination. The voice on the other end of the line, husky with drugs and lack of sleep, roughly ruined that.

“Do you have a lot of men calling your house?” David had to be on some heavy-duty drugs, Michael decided then, because the way that he framed the words was sex itself.

“Calling me names, maybe. Calling my apartment, no.” Michael ran his hand over his face and pulled the phone away from his ear so that he could check the caller ID and make sure that he was not actually hallucinating. Why he could hallucinate a voice but not a number on his phone’s face would be a question for another day. “I didn’t think that you would actually use this number.”

“Why not?” And, God love him, David was able to sound like he honestly did not know the answer to that question.

Michael lifted up the hem of his shirt far enough so that he could poke at the lowest edge of his bruising. That David was not even in the same room with him and thus the nervous gesture was completely unnecessary was lost to him. “It would make a better fucking picture if your friend bled to death?”

David went silent for a long moment. “I don’t regret saying that,” he said finally. “But Carly’s going to be okay, so I’ll let it go.”

“Magnanimous of you.”

“I like to think so.” The grin that David had been missing came back into his voice. “Look, you stayed and helped. That means something. You’re also really goddamned good-looking, in case you couldn’t tell, and that means something, too.”

Michael startled himself by laughing. “Fuck, don’t make me do that,” he said, putting his hand against his ribs.

“Sorry.” David didn’t sound it. “Here’s the thing. I don’t date often, and I don’t date well. I might even regret doing this once the meds wear off, but I thought that there was something there, and maybe you think that there is something there, too.”

Michael thought of Beth. He wondered if she was not sitting up at her desk and suddenly smiling for no reason that she could name. “I felt it,” he said, and cringed. He had always been told that he was witty, but out of nowhere his ability to ad-lib seemed to have disappeared altogether. His tongue was thick and fat in his mouth.

“That sounds dirty,” David said after a long pause in which Michael could almost hear his mind turning. “Not a terribly enthusiastic endorsement, I have to say.”

“No,” Michael answered, and this time he was surprised by the amount of enthusiasm that he did feel. “There was definitely something there. I just don’t think that it makes a lot of sense, but..it’s there.” And he realized that he was not lying at the same time that he fully realized what it was that Beth had committed him to doing. It was probably a good thing that vomiting was hazardous to his health at the moment.

David laughed. For the first time, Michael heard the edge of nervousness behind the sound. It was nice to know that Michael was not the only one who was swimming through a completely uncharted stream here. “They just let me out,” he said. “I gotta sleep. But, uh, can I have someone come pick you up at around nine?”

“I’d like that,” Michael said, thinking both of hazel eyes and the ink on the enormous check that he would be getting if he pulled this off. There was still enough of a smile in his voice to fool his own mother as he said, “Call it a date.”

“You said it first.” David waited until Michael had given his address before he said, “I’ll see you then.”

“See you.” Michael put the phone back into its cradle and stared at it for a full thirty seconds before he realized that he had made an actual romantic date with a man. Worrying about one’s sexual orientation became a bit of a joke after seeing all of the real trouble that someone could get into in Los Angeles. Especially since he was going into this date with such an unsavory agenda on his mind.

When you think about it, it makes you no better than a prostitute. If his conscience was determined to arise as nothing more than a fitful flutter from here on out, then Michael wished that it had the very least would not be such an irritating flutter.

That’s sort of what a conscience is, mate. Otherwise, everyone would be able to ignore them.

Michael groaned and put his hands over his eyes, listening to the silence of his apartment echo back at him.

End Part Four

Continue to Part Five