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American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 9/13
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
Part Seven
Part Eight



Part Nine

Beth did not make mistakes often. She had not thought to have the security guard stop Michael as he entered the building though, still thinking that Michael was one of hers, and to Michael’s mind that was probably the biggest mistake that she had made since meeting him. The guard did nothing more than nod as Michael stormed through the lobby; he had come into work with a murderous expression so often that once more was hardly remarkable.

There was so much blood pounding through Michael’s head that he thought it would be amazing if he even managed to hear his own voice above it. That was fine, that was all right. He intended to yell pretty louder than he had ever yelled before in his life; it would be a victory if he made it out of here without breaking furniture. Michael glanced neither to the right nor to the left as he stormed across the newsroom, ignoring the way that people stared at him as he passed. Michael was making a pretty good news story for them this morning. He intended to make one more before he left the building.

“Don’t you dare try to stop me,” Michael snarled at Beth’s secretary as she rose from her seat in protest.

He threw the door to Beth’s office open so hard that it rebounded against the wall and left an ugly dent in the plaster; the news room behind was shocked into sudden silence. Beth did not rise from her seat.

“How could you?” Michael yelled at her.

Still looking as calm and as polished as always, Beth said, “Michael, you are treading on a very thin line here, and because I like you, I’m going to give you the chance to back up before you cross it.”

“You manipulative, fucking cunt,” Michael snapped back.

Beth’s face went colder than Michael had ever seen it before it his life. Had she been holding anything in her hands, Michael was sure that she would have snapped it. “You’re done here, Michael,” she told him. It was only by listening very hard that he was able to hear her voice shake at all. “You can leave, or you can be thrown out.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Michael demanded of her, unable to stop himself from taking a step closer to her desk. She flinched back minutely before she was able to stop herself, and Michael could not help but reminded that he was bigger than she was and, no matter how much she was wearing the cloak of icy fury right now, he had to be angrier than she was, and it was right that she was afraid of him. He couldn’t bring himself to care about any of the implications of that thought; he had tried to be a better person, and he was so goddamned tired. “Doesn’t it fucking bother you even the slightest to do this to people?”

“Do this to what people?” Beth snapped up at him. She had still not risen from her position at her desk. Frightened or not, he was not going to make her leave that position of power. “I do hope that you’re referring to Mr. Cook, Michael dear, because he is absolutely the only one in this little arrangement who has the right to refer to himself as the injured party.”

“I tried to back out!” Michael yelled at her.

“Bullshit!” Beth answered, and for the first time Michael realized that she was yelling. It might have been the first time she had raised her voice since he had even met her. The silence in the room behind them was awes-struck; if the story had not been breaking right there in there own paper, Michael thought that most of them would have been taking notes. “You know how you could have backed out, Michael. ‘I quit’. That’s how you could have backed out at any point over the last three years. Don’t come crying to me now because your dark night of the soul didn’t turn out as you planned.”

Michael raised his finger at her, prepared to go on a furious tirade again, and felt it lodging in his throat. “You would have run the fucking story, anyway,” he finally managed to whisper.

Beth shrugged, flashed her flesh-eating smile. With the situation under her control again, it was no longer a concession for her to stand and lean forward across her desk at him. “Yes, I would have,” she purred. “And you would not have been half the hypocrite when you got so angry at me about it.”

A hand came down on Michael’s shoulder. He barely glanced at it before he recognized it as security, and he rolled his eyes. Michael had not had any illusions as to his employment after he had decided to walk in here and pick this fight, but he had hoped that he could keep it short enough to get out again and deny Beth her moment of having him thrown out. Michael shook the hand from his shoulder just long enough to say to her, “You’re a goddamned bottom feeder, Beth.”

She took the blow without flinching. “And you’re a bottom feeder with pretensions,” she said coolly back. “Which one of us do you think nature abhors more?”

The hand came back, and this time it was not going to accept no for an answer. Michael allowed himself to be pulled from the office, but he jerked away and walked to the elevator on his own. He had entered this place on his own power, and he was going to leave it the same way, even if their was no one meaningful there to witness it.

Michael was so flushed with fury that he did not realize the cab driver was even speaking to him for several seconds after he had thrown himself back into the backseat. He could barely even remember asking the man to wait for him.

“What?” Michael finally asked sullenly, when the buzzing refused to go away. He scrubbed his hands over his face and wished that there some way that he could just go back. Past David, past Beth and the job, back into a time when he had still thought, I can do this.

“I said, where you do want to go now?” the cab driver repeated, with no small amount of impatience. He had probably asked the question several times before Michael had finally started to pay attention.

“Back to my place,” Michael said, even though that was the absolute last place that he wanted to be at the moment. There was nowhere else to go.

Michael paid the driver after he had arrive and then walked slowly through the foyer and towards the elevator that would take him to his floor. He vaguely recognized a few of the faces that he passed; he had not been the most inclusive of neighbors since moving in here, and he was not in the mood to begin now. They stared at him as if they were not sure whether they should offer help or move away.

There was a blinking light on the answering machine when Michael let himself in and, even knowing better, he could not stop himself from stepping a little bit faster as he crossed the room to hear the message. He didn’t bother to turn on any of the lights first, so the machine’s little red eye was the brightest thing in the room.

“Mr. Johns.” That chill professionalism again. “I just wanted to check in with you after your accident and make sure that you’re still doing all right. We’ve almost finished evaluating your vehicle’s worth and will be contacting you within the next twenty-four hours with an offer--”

Michael didn’t care to hear the rest. He erased the message, then thought better and picked up the phone and dialed a number. After a short hold, he was put through to an agent who was more than happy to confirm that, yes, he had paid for rental coverage as a part of his policy.

“I want a car,” Michael said firmly. Being unable to drive himself from one point to the next might have been the smallest of ways that things had spun out of his control since this had started, but it was the one way that he was capable of getting that control back, and he intended to take it.

He paid the company for discretion and swift response, and a sleek coupe arrive within the hour. It was not the Chevelle, but then, as the young man who dropped the keys into his hand explained, he was going to be hard-pressed to replace that thing. Social responsibility was all the rage these days. Big monsters like his baby flew in the face of all that.

“Yeah,” Michael agreed as he slipped the young man’s tip into his hand and registered his moment of shock when he realized how large it was. Michael was hardly in the mood to play prudent, today. “I tend to go in the opposite direction. It works out for me.”

After giving Michael a final, startled look, the young man left. Michael thought that he was probably glad to go, as Michael was certainly glad to see the last of him. He was finished with trying to exercise whatever lingering social skills he might have left.

Michael slid behind the wheel of the car and inserted the key into the ignition. The purr that it made as it started up was too soft, too sedate, nothing like the aggressive growl of the Chevelle, but it would do all right. It would get him out of here, for one thing, and that was all that Michael was willing to ask for at the time. He peeled out of the parking space hard enough to leave rubber behind on the pavement and was saluted by several honked horns and not a few raised fingers as he muscled his way into traffic.

It was barely two in the afternoon, but that meant nothing. This was Michael’s town, he was the keeper and the cataloguer of all of its vices, and he knew exactly where the stars went when they wanted to forget their better natures. With no camera on him and no reason for anyone to recognize his face yet (Beth had made a paltry attempt to shield is likeness in the original story; Michael doubted that he would be granted that dubious kindness in the follow up), there were even a few who would let him in. It to one of these that Michael eventually found his way.

“Scotch, neat,” he said to the bartender without preamble after he had seated himself. The man was swift in bringing it. Michael was equally swift in throwing it back and demanding another. No one so much as gave him a second glance, here; he was hardly the first person who had walked in during the middle of the day determined to forget whatever it was that had made him do so.

Halfway into his third drink, Michael happened to notice the television set above the bar for the first time. Rather than the usual barroom fare, it was turned, improbably, to one of the midday entertainment news shows that Michael privately thought were as sure a signal of the end times as anyone was likely to get. A glossy blonde and her equally glossy companion were talking excitedly to one another, the volume on the set too low for Michael to actually pick out what they were saying. David’s picture appeared on the prompter screen behind them, and suddenly he had his answer. He made a low sound of disgust from the back of his throat.

The bartender misinterpreted the cause for the sound. “You want me to turn it up?” he asked, picking up a remote from the counter and gesturing towards the set.

“No!” Michael realized in the bartender’s face that he might have spoken just a shade louder and more emphatically than the situation actually warranted and backpedaled. “No, I don’t want to watch it. Why...why do you?”

The bartender shrugged and seemed genuinely surprised to hear the question. “Something to do, I guess,” he said.

“But these are people’s lives.”

Another shrug. “They put themselves out there. You want to make that kind of money, you got to pay your dues somewhere.” The bartender noticed that Michael was empty and asked, “You want another?”

“Yes,” Michael answered quickly, even though the answer to the more proper question, did he need another one, would have been a most emphatic ‘no’. He had not eaten that day, and he could already feel the alcohol coiling through his blood and doing its dance. There were beads of sweat pricking along his spine; all of the colors in the bar suddenly seemed brighter than before. One of those colors was robin’s egg blue, attached to a dress that was cut to make style applaud and decency weep. That dress was in itself attached to the a woman, and that woman was looking at Michael like she wouldn’t mind spending a little time attached to Michael. They made eye contact and held it. It was only a few seconds later that the woman was picking up her drink and coming over to meet him at the bar.

“I hate drinking in the middle of the day,” she confessed by way of introduction. “It always makes me feel pathetic.” A soft smile, as if she was still not quite sure if she was going to be rebuffed, even though in Michael’s experience women who could wear their clothing like this one was doing were rarely rebuffed in anything that they happened to do or want.

“So why do it, then?” Michael knew as soon as he had said it that it was wrong, that he wasn’t playing the rules of the game right. It had been far too long since he had flirted with anyone else purely for the sake of flirting.

Though she seemed rattled by his bluntness, the woman didn’t leave. He was still good-looking enough to get a little leeway there. She shrugged. “Bad day, I guess.” She offered him another nearly shy smile. If he bought what she was so clearly psyching herself up to offer, Michael decided, it was going to be on the basis of that smile. The rest of her was pure Hollywood, but her smile was one week removed from a Midwestern girl, if that. “Needed a little time on the chemical therapy couch.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Michael raised his glass and clinked it gently against the woman’s own. She was drinking white wine. Of course she was; Michael was willing to bet that she was still new at this. It would be at least a year, maybe more, before she found herself first flat on her back amongst the cushions of the casting couch and then drinking as hard as he did. “Why’s the day going do badly, if I might ask?” See, he could still interact among human beings when he put his mind to it. He wasn’t so far gone that the only option was crawling around a bell tower just yet.

The woman lifted her shoulder into a graceful shrug. “I had an audition earlier today. I thought that it was going really well. It...apparently really wasn’t.”

“You’re industry?” Michael asked, pretending to be surprised even though he really wasn’t. He had had her pegged, actress or model or dancer, from the very first moment that he laid eyes on her.

“Trying to be.” She cut her eyes at him sideways. If he had been in a better mood, her seemingly genuine shyness probably would have been inescapably charming. “Why, does that bother you?”

“Nope.” Michael raised his glass to her before he finished it off. The bartender appeared immediately with another one. He was good at this game. “Believe it or not, I used to be industry, too.” Michael had no idea if he was referring to the music or the pictures. Did it matter, in the end, when it turned out that he had the stomach for neither?

The woman leaned back in her seat and made a show of looking him up and down, her gaze warm and slow. The brazenness jarred against her moments of shyness in a way that Michael did not want to stop. “I believe it.”

Michael took a sip of his fresh drink, looked at her, and considered. His considering led him to lean forward without saying anything further, press his lips to hers, and feel her mouth open up beneath his at even that slight request. She tasted like wine; she moved against him as he deepened the kiss. She also had Stacey’s blonde hair and David’s hazel eyes, and it didn’t matter that neither of these things were her fault. Michael knew, he knew, that he would wind up making her pay for them before it was over. He would make her pay so hard and so fast that she would not even realize that she did not want it until it was all over. And, oh, Michael wanted so badly right now to make someone pay. His sigh into her mouth was soft.

“I don’t know if I ever used to be good,” Michael whispered to her as he pulled away. “But I know that I used to be better than this.” He rose from his stool and avoided the woman’s surprised, hurt stare as he quickly drained the last of his drink and threw a series of bills down on the bar. “For the lady’s next few drinks.” He left quickly, before he could change his mind. It was all that Michael could do to hang onto his last scrap of decency for even the amount of time that it took to get him out the door.

The sun was bright enough to hurt as Michael hit the street outside; he was surprised by how early it still was. Michael fumbled for both his sunglasses and his cellular phone as he slid behind the wheel of the rental car. His movements were just a shade slow, just a touch uncoordinated, but that was fine. That was nowhere that Michael had not been before and managed to walk away from without so much as a bruise.

Michael’s fingers flew over a number as he pulled away from the curb, barely bothering to make note of the traffic before he pulled out into it. As before, the phone rang and rang until the answering machine picked up. Michael took a deep breath, knowing that he had to speak quickly. “David, please, pick up the phone, I have to explain--”

“Michael.” Michael’s relief at hearing David’s actual voice, and not the mechanical one that dominated his machine, was so great that he actually swerved a bit on the road. Someone behind him honked in agitation. “Stop calling here.” A woman’s voice, muffled, asked something in the background, and David answered her, “No, I can handle it.”

“David, please.” Michael had never begged for anything before in his life. There was only one other time in which he had even considered it, but he could not stop the words from tumbling past his lips now. “I’ve quit the paper, I swear to you, I didn’t know that they were going to do that. Please. You have to believe that, please.”

David sighed on the other end of the line, and the worst part of it was how hurt and tired he sounded. “I’ve never been good at this whole celebrity thing,” he whispered. His voice was pitched so low that Michael wondered if he was even intended to hear it at all before David continued, louder, “I did believe you, Michael, and that’s why I’m a headline now. Don’t call here again.” The line went dead in Michael’s ear.

“Fuck!” The obscenity exploded from Michael’s mouth before he quite knew what he was doing, nearly a sob. He threw his phone to the other side of the car and heard the satisfying sound of plastic cracking. It still was not enough to expel Michael’s rage; he pounded the heel of his hand against the steering wheel several times and heard his breathing change. It took him some seconds beyond that to realize that he was on the verge of tears.

There were few things that could happen at that moment to make the situation even worse. Red and blue lights suddenly flashing in his rearview mirror was one of them. Michael glanced back, swore again, and for a few seconds even entertained the idea of slamming his foot down to the floor and gunning it out of there rather than pulling over. It wasn’t as if karma was not going to take him to the lowest of all possibilities sooner or later, anyway.

But he still had stuff in Los Angeles that he wanted to keep and, when push came to shove, Michael had no room left to doubt that he was at heart a coward. He hit his brakes and pulled slowly over to the shoulder. The cop arrived at his window just as Michael was finishing rolling it down. It was not the same officer from the hospital. Thank God for small mercies.

“License and registration, sir,” the officer said. One look at his face, and Michael knew that he was not going to be charmed by how exceptionally pretty Michael was in the same way that everyone else seemed to be.

“It’s a rental,” Michael explained as he dug out his license and the car’s papers and handed them over.

“Something wrong with your car, sir?” the officer inquired as he looked them both over.

“In the shop,” Michael answered in a clipped voice. He was not about to tell this asshole that it was there because he had been in a wreck scarcely three days before, not if he was dragged across hot coals first.

“Hmmm.” Somehow, Michael thought that the man already knew, anyway. “Have you been drinking this afternoon, sir?”

Fuck. “I had a drink earlier,” Michael answered cautiously. He wondered if the officer could smell it on him.

“You were doing quite a lot of weaving in traffic for someone who only had one drink,” the officer replied. His face was still blank and calm, even though Michael could see only one way that this situation was going to end by now, and it was not a pleasant one.

“I’m sorry, I was on a phone call,” Michael answered, even though that was only slightly better than admitting that he was driving with the influence of much more than one drink in him. “It didn’t end well.”

The officer made another one of those skeptical humming sounds. “Could you step out of the vehicle, sir?” he asked.

Michael heard a door slamming shut. He sighed and exited. It all felt as if it was happening underwater and to someone else; everything else had already happened that day, why not one more?

“I’m going to need you to breathe into this device for me,” the officer said, producing something that that looked like a snake with a blender attached. Michael did as he was told, and the officer barely looked at what the machine had to say to him for a second before Michael knew that it was not in his favor. The police officer’s demeanor changed, his shoulders squaring and his expression becoming even blanker and more professional. “Sir, you are over the legal blood alcohol limit for operating a vehicle, and as such I’m going to have to arrest you on suspicion of DUI. Please turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Michael protested, though he still did as he was told. “I’m fine; this is nothing.” The police officer snorted from behind him; for the first time, Michael heard the contempt coming through. The officer began to read his rights as the cold bite of the handcuffs closed around first one wrist, and then the other.

End Part Nine

Continue to Part Ten