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

American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 6/13
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
Part Five



Part Six

Beth did not call for his presence the next morning. She did not have to; Michael knew her well enough by now to know what was expected of him. He rolled over in his bed at nearly noon, still feeling like utter shit but now knowing exactly the prescription cocktail that it would take to make him rejoin the human species. By an act of extreme will, he had not used the last of that half-bottle of beer to wash the pills down the day before. It made an excellent brunch when Michael was finally able to lever his body out of the bed at eighteen minutes past twelve. There was another message on his answering machine, the same professionally cheerful and blank woman informing him that his car had been ruled a total loss, and that someone would be by his apartment in the next few days with papers to sign and a big, fat check to compensate him for his loss. Michael listened to it twice with a carefully blank face and then erased it from the tape. He was not hungover; after four years of drinking with an eye towards seeing how essentially fucked the American medical system actually was when it came to his liver transplant, it took more than a little wine to put him down. He instead felt equal parts clear-headed and as if he was swimming under water, and he didn’t think that it could be attributed to the painkillers that the hospital had given him.

Michael called a cab to take him to the office, as he could all but feel Beth’s impatience radiating at him from the other side of town. The building was plain brick from the outside, quiet and unassuming. Michael still could not help but smile every time that he saw it. He paid the cabbie and slipped him a tip on a rare burst of good feeling towards his fellow man before he eased himself out of the car and stepped up the walk. There were security guards, of course, as the work that the people that this building did tended to make them very unpopular around Los Angeles. The celebrities never attacked themselves, though, preferring to ignore the sleazy photographers and journalists swarming around them the way that large dogs would ignore babies pulling on their ears. It was the fans that Michael had learned to watch out for. At least once a month one of them had to swing by to tell them all, in violent language and sometimes even violent deed, what they thought of the paparazzi, like birds flying into windows. Michael nodded to each of the guards in turn and then hit the button on the elevator, just as he had nearly every day for the past three years.

He had not bothered to take his sunglasses off even after entering the building, and the faces before him were slightly blurred as the elevator opened and allowed him to step off. A pause settled down over the room. It only lasted for a second; scarcely had Michael had time to process it before the keys were clacking again and people were shouting to each other across the room. Culture would not go about degrading itself, after all. They were all very ordinary-looking people, no one who would be picked out on the street if they didn’t have their cameras with them. Michael, with his height and his looks, stood out in ways that had made Beth reluctant to hire him, at first.

Speaking of. Michael only hesitated in the elevator long enough to let the room know that, yes, he really had tempted fate and somehow made it out alive before he was striding across the room. He nodded to the few faces that he knew; many of them were strangers to him. There was a high turnover rate, and Michael had spent most of his time prior to the accident out in the field and away from human contact. He could hear whispers behind him as he passed.

Beth’s secretary scarcely bothered to look at him before she buzzed him in. Michael did not know what he ought to make of that, that Beth had been expecting him so thoroughly and that he had let pass an opportunity to jack with her, just a little bit. He settled on flicking the secretary a smile just to watch her flush instead, and opened the door to Beth’s office.

She was on the phone. She looked up at him as he entered, though, and Michael saw her eyes widen slightly before she could stop herself. As the only evidence of the accident that marked his face was a slight swelling in his lower lip (which had scared the shit out of Michael when he had looked at them in the mirror that morning, thinking that he was bearing evidence of David’s kisses on his body), Michael guessed that it must be something in his demeanor, in his expression, marking the change. Beth recovered quickly, and gestured for Michael to take a seat while she finished her phone call.

“That’s irrelevant to me,” Beth said to whoever was on the other end of the line. She was using the tone that made Michael sometimes wonder if he was not going to be a witness to her attempt at world domination before it was all over. “Can she definitely prove loss because of it? No? Then talk to me when she can. Weeping, creeping Jesus, you’re supposed to the expert on libel law, why am I the one telling you this?” She signaled the end of the conversation by pulling off her BlueTooth with more force than was necessary and throwing it down to the desktop. A grin was crossing her face before it had time to bounce.

“You enjoyed that,” Michael said.

“I really did,” Beth admitted. “Little bastard is charging four hundred dollars an hour to lecture me on ethics, not the law. I have better things to do with my time.” She clapped her hands together once and, just like that, signaled that now was the time for the other business at hand. “All right. I know that you would not come in here unless you had something for me, so I take it that he called you?”

“Yeah,” Michael admitted. He shifted his weight in his chair, the first anxious move that he could recall making in Beth’s presence since the day that she had hired him. “I was at his house last night.”

Beth straightened in her seat. Without a word needing to be said, Michael knew that she had only been listening to him with half of her attention before, the other half being directed towards expense reports, stories that still needed her editing hand, and photographers who were dragging their feet in giving her the promised pictures, but that now he had everything. “Really,” she said. Michael had never felt filthier in his life. “What do you know about Hyde?”

“Nothing.” As soon as Michael said it, Beth’s right eyebrow began to crawl upwards. The movement was slight and slow, and yet Michael knew that her patience with him was from that point forward being measured out in finite increments. “We didn’t get around to talking about that.”

“I can only imagine what else was occupying your attention.”

Michael rolled his eyes and felt himself starting to get angry for the first time. “Goddamnit, Beth, it’s not like that--” He snapped his mouth shut so abruptly that his teeth made a clicking sound as they came together, but it was too late. Beth had already smelled the blood.

“And what is it like, Michael?” she purred at him. “Come on, enlighten me. Because from where I’m sitting, you are supposed to be doing a job, not making daisy chains and holding hands.” She snorted, turned away halfway so that she was looking at her computer screen rather than at him. Beth was always at her most dangerous when it looked as if she was only giving someone half of her actual attention. Michael leaned forward rather than away; his blood was rising, and he couldn’t fight himself.

“Don’t be a bitch, Beth,” he snapped at her. The way that she struck at her shift key was a warning. “You got enough mileage out of the crash itself to last for months, you don’t need to know whatever was going on in that club.”

“Bullshit.” Beth made one final touch at her file and then closed it. She swiveled her chair back around so that Michael was getting the full force of her dark, burning gaze. “Your little play-acting at being a hero might have taken some of the heat off--” Michael felt blood draining away from his face and had to avert his gaze for a moment, hearing Beth skewer his real contribution to the crash far more accurately than David himself seemed willing to. “But as far as the public is concerned, we caused that crash. That’s our baby. And it’s hurting my bottom line. Do you know that sales are down thirty percent today alone? Do you know how goddamned hard it is to get people to buy papers at all anymore, and then this shit happens? I need to distract them with another cause, and I need to have done it yesterday.”

“That’s the truth,” Michael couldn’t stop himself from blurting out. “We did cause that crash. We did nearly kill three people. Maybe it’s right that we should pay for it.” He couldn’t believe that the words were even his until he heard them out loud.

Beth stared at him. Michael could feel the air being sucked slowly from the room under her gaze. “Are you honestly suggesting that I admit that, Michael?” she asked softly, and Michael could tell by the way that she said it that she was daring him to say yes. “Are you suggesting that I undo everything that I have worked for for longer than a decade because you either can’t or won’t bring your conscience under control?” Beth’s voice rose; outside of her office, Michael could hear a pause in the clacking of keyboards.

“There are lines,” Michael insisted. He didn’t know where this was coming from and, worst of all, knew without Beth needing to say anything that it would not last, that it was just a phantom pain from a limb long gone, and yet he could not stop himself. He remembered the way that David’s mouth had felt on his and the way that David had talked to him all evening, like he was ignoring who and what Michael actually was through force of will, and like Michael was something better than they both knew he actually was.

“No, there aren’t.” Beth snapped off each word crisply, as if she was breaking it. “And you’re playing a stupid, childish game with yourself if you’re pretending that you would even recognize them even if they did exist. I expected better of you.”

“How wonderful for you,” Michael snapped back. His voice rose high enough to cause another one of those lulls from outside. “I used to expect better of myself, too. We both have cause for disappointment.”

A high flush rose in Beth’s cheeks. She opened her desk drawer, rooted about it in for a moment, and then snapped it shut again without actually retrieving anything. Michael stared at her and thought in awe, My God, I’ve actually made her upset--I wonder why? He had no time for the answer before Beth was looking up at him again, her eyes dark and flashing with an anger that Michael had never seen before.

“You were assigned a job,” Beth informed him in a low voice. There was a tremble just beneath the surface of it. Michael wondered how much effort she was actually expending in order to keep it there. “That’s the end of the discussion.”

“It’s funny,” Michael said as he rose to his feet. “I’m the one who’s going to be fucked, and yet you’re the one who’s going to get the biggest paycheck for it.”

Beth let out a soft and mirthless laugh. “Welcome to a woman’s world,” she informed him. “Get your head in the game, Michael, and find me what I need to protect my paper. If you can’t, I’m sure that I can find some way to work around you.”

Michael turned with his hand on the doorknob and flashed Beth a smile that, he was certain, did nothing flattering for his face. “I preferred it when you were offering me vast sums of money.” It was a lie, but Beth did not need to know that.

“I preferred it that way, too.” The hell of it was that Michael did not think in his heart of hearts that Beth was telling the same lie. “Take a break for yourself when this is over, Michael. But not until then.”

Michael gave Beth another version of that same thin smile before letting himself out of her office without another word. The entire workroom came to a halt when they saw him; he and Beth must have been louder than even he had anticipated. Michael glared until every pair found some other place to occupy themselves. It was hard to remember that he had spent a decent portion of the previous twelve hours in an actual good mood.

Michael was halfway to the door when his cellular phone rang. He fumbled for it, opened it up without looking at the number, and growled, “What the hell do you want?”

“Great way to say hell to your sister, asshole.”

Michael rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling, half in exasperation and half in a fondness so great that it nearly buckled his knees. “Kate,” he all but whispered. “What the hell are you doing calling me at--” He checked his watch. “Jesus, do you know how late it is over there?”

“Early is more like it. Mum called me, told me that you had been in a wreck.”

Michael groaned. He couldn’t even remember calling their mother, on the drugs that he had been fed before he had been allowed to leave that hospital. There was no telling what he had actually said. “It wasn’t that bad. Couple of broken ribs, busted my lip.”

“Damn.” Michael was expecting her to bring up that one time that she had tried to ride her bike off of a ramp and had wound up with two broken fingers, a broken wrist, and a knot on her forehead that had made her look like a beluga whale, just to prove that she still had a story that could beat any of his, but she didn’t. “How do you feel?”

Like hammered shit, Michael thought of saying, even though the prescriptions were doing quite well. “I’ll be okay,” he said. He cold all but feel Kate’s silence on the other end of the line; it had been a long time since they had been able to speak without it devolving into a fight by now.

“Are you sure?” Kate asked. She sounded hesitant. Michael didn’t guess that he had done too well with the last few overtures of kindness that had been made his way, if this was how she was reacting to him now.

“Yeah,” Michael said after a long pause. “I’ll get through.”

“That’s funny.” Kate made a clucking sound. “You know, as much as you were cussing, there were a few seconds when I thought that you sounded happy there.”

Michael let out a short laugh and abruptly became aware that he had the entire newsroom at his back hanging onto his every word. He wasn’t even important, but God help any of them if they should try to turn away from a potentially interesting story. “Maybe for a few seconds I was.”

Kate made a clucking sound. “You don’t wear emo well, kiddo.”

“Sure I do. It would break your heart, to see how well I wear it.”

“Whatever, I have to go, the house is waking up. Are you sure that you’re going to be all right? Really sure?”

“As sure as I could possibly be,” Michael said. He was lying all over the place today, he who had less than a week previously worn his foul temper like a badge of honor to keep people back. Luckily for him, he and Kate spoke to one another so rarely that she as not likely to tell.

“Call Mum,” Kate ordered him. Michael let out a soft sigh of relief, realizing that his lie had done its work. “You scared her half to death, calling her and mumbling about car crashes. She thought that you were drunk.”

“Stoned, this time. Just for a change of pace.” Michael heard a beeping sound; he was so unused to one person calling him, let alone two, that he hardly realized what it was at first. “Listen, Kate, I have to go, too. Someone’s beeping in. I love you.”

“Love you, too. Don’t go four months without talking to me again, asshole.” And she was gone. It took Michael nearly thirty seconds to realize that her voice had cracked on the last syllable, as if she had been working her way up to tears.

Michael swallowed back the sudden and surprising tightness that had risen in his throat and took the next call. “Hello?”

“Am I interrupting something?” Maybe Michael should not be congratulating himself on being such a good actor quite yet, if he was broadcasting that clearly. David sounded worried.

“No, you’re fine.” Michael broke off as a thought struck him, and actually pulled the phone away from his ear so that he could stare at it. “I know that I did not give you my cellular number.”

“No, you didn’t.” David’s voice was downright cheerful, for someone who had just alluded to being one step away from rummaging through Michael’s underwear drawer. “But I have money. You’d be amazed what you can get with enough of that, especially when it comes to someone who has pissed off as many people as you have.”

It was Michael’s first real laugh of the day. It hurt his ribs, but it felt good, too. He wondered what David would do if he were to learn that he was the keeper of so many of Michael’s better moments. “Stalker.”

“I’m an artist. It’s called being eccentric.” Michael could hear David making some kind of rustling noise in the background and imagined David shifting nervously through his crossword puzzles as he tried to think of something to say. “Not to sound too much like a nervous prom queen or anything, but I had fun last night.”

“I had a good time, too.” It was all that Michael could do not to think of the way that the inside of the car had smelled and the streetlamps had glowed down through the windows as David touched him, and be horny all day long as a result of it. “Better than I’ve had in a pretty long while.”

“Yeah, I, uh...I kind of got that feeling.” David cleared his throat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I kind of think that I’m the one doing most of the pushing here--”

“You are,” Michael said. He could not hear the sounds of work from behind him any longer, though he refused to give any of them the satisfaction turning around and glaring. If they were eavesdropping, he swore to God that he was going to break some heads.

“Oh.” There was a sudden tight note to David’s voice. “As long as you’re being upfront about it.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” He should leave it here, Michael knew, make a clean break and be done with it. But David’s skin had been warm, and it had been so long since he had touched and been touched in return, and Michael was slowly coming to realize that he was a selfish man and always would be. “You’re right, you’re the one expending all of the effort here. That’s not right.” Michael dug down deep, found the lazy, sexy tone that used to come to him so effortlessly. “Come by my place at about eight tonight, all right? This time, you can just lay back. I’ll do all the work.”

“I am so glad that I wasn’t drinking anything,” David said solemnly, and then laughed. Michael could picture the smile that was accompanying that laugh by now. He would have loved to find the doctor who had laid the no sex rule on him and kick him. Hard. “I’ll see you then.”

“Looking forward to it.” Michael snapped the phone shut. “Looking forward to it,” he repeated to himself, very softly.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Michael jumped, then cursed and put his hand quickly against his side. He whirled to see Beth standing behind him with her arms folded over her chest. No wonder the entire room had gone silent behind him. Michael threw his old promise out the window and swore then that he was still going to find a way to rip all of their heads off, one by one. He glared at them all over Beth’s head and watched as everyone suddenly found something else to do.

Beth watched Michael’s expression change and ordered in a soft voice, “I wasn’t joking when I said that I would have you thrown out of here if you even thought of calling me a cunt again.”

“You would deserve it.”

“This world would be a pretty nasty place if everyone in it actually got what they deserved. Yourself included.” Beth leaned forward, into Michael’s personal space, and put her hand on his arm. He was so startled by the gesture that he could not even shake her off. “Cauterize it, Michael. You’ll be happier when you do, trust me.”

Michael did jerk his arm away from her, then. “Get your own life together before you start giving me advice on mine, Beth.”

Her teeth glittered at him. “And I’m not the functioning alcoholic on the verge of a nervous breakdown, now, am I? I’ll give you tonight. Have something for me by tomorrow morning, or we’re going to have a problem.” Beth turned back towards her office. A single raised eyebrow got the entire newsroom back to working.

Michael stormed out of the building and barely made it to the sidewalk outside before he was whirling around and putting his fist into the building’s brick face as hard as he was able. Pain radiated from his knuckles into his shoulder and down the entire right side of his body; Michael nearly screamed. He made a choked sound and leaned against the sun-warmed brick without giving a shit about the passers-by who were giving him curious looks. There was blood running down his knuckles and dripping onto the sidewalk. He was lucky that he had not broken anything.

It was all so easy, Michael thought. It was all so easy to end this right now, if that was what he really wanted to do. All that it would take was a single phone call. That phone call would probably be the last time that he ever spoke to David Cook, but that did not mean that the right thing was not still available to him. One phone call.

Michael stayed for several long moments with his face pressed against the rough brick wall, all the while thinking that he had not undergone nearly as many changes since he had dicked over his band as he liked to pretend. When the day finally came that they all got what it deserved, it was going to be a bloodbath that even Beth upstairs would not be able to anticipate.

End Part Six

Go to Part Seven