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

American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 11/13
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
Part Ten



Part Eleven

The rental company, after learning that Michael had scarcely been in possession of their car for five hours before he managed to get a DUI in it, swiftly informed him that under the present circumstances they thought it best to cancel his contract. Michael, still feeling heavy and slow from the scotches that he had downed after leaving Levine behind, did not protest. It was not as if he had many places to be, anyway.

The first time that Michael stepped outside of his building and was immediately greeted by the flashing of photographers bulbs, he called Beth foul names that he had never even conceived of before, though he wished now that he had. That way she could throw him out of her office twice. She had run pictures in retaliation for his little stunt at the newsroom. Of course she had. If there was one thing that he could count on her for, and always with its odd source of comfort, it was that she would find the lowest common denominator and waste no time in dive-bombing directly into it. Michael threw them his middle finger and pushed on to the cab that took him to his insurance office, where he was both written a check covering the costs of his old vehicle and told that, given that he had received a DUI less than three days after destroying it, they would not be covering whichever new one he picked out. Michael handled that with good grace, too. He didn’t flip anyone off this time. The bottle of scotch waiting for him back at his apartment kept him on good behavior, though there was a bitterness to it that even the burn could no longer quite cover. I’m not a functioning alcoholic on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s pretty obvious that you don’t have it under control any longer. David was the only one who hadn’t said anything about how much Michael drank in his presence. Looking back as days became weeks, Michael thought that maybe this was fate, too. It was clear that David had not known him at all.

Not having a car, or insurance to cover a car even if one was available, didn’t prove to be the hindrance that Michael would have imagined it to be before. Michael didn’t want to leave his apartment, anyway, unless he was absolutely forced to. The throngs of cameras stayed in place long after the story should have gone stale, making Michael wonder if Beth was not secretly feeding them new tidbits for no other reason than to piss him off. It sounded like something that she would do. At any rate, he knew that he could be out taking freelance photographs to show to a new magazine, but that would require energy, and in the meantime he was just so fucking tired. All thoughts of leaving the industry had been burned out of him, but so had any thoughts of doing anything else.

Michael knew within a week that he was using the paparazzi outside his place as an excuse, but acknowledging that fact didn’t stop him from doing it. He was exhausted, body and soul, and no matter what Levine, David, and, hell, even Beth had said to him about lying down and accepting his fate, Michael thought that the part of him willing to stand up and fight it had been burned away a long time before. They were all too stupid to see it, but that was not Michael’s problem.

I don’t know if I was ever good, but I used to be better than this.

It was a hell of a come-on line, now that Michael thought of it. He wished that he had used it before.

Michael went three weeks and did not once try to contact David again. He was surprised when David did not make the first move and contact him instead, via a lawyer. Truth was always a defense to libel, after all, Michael told himself with a viciousness that surprised him. Neither did he talk to Levine, after the embarrassment of Levine’s attempt to save him and Michael’s momentary temptation to take it, deleting all of Levine’s messages from his machine without bothering to listen to them. Michael did put out a few feelers towards other tabloids, at first, only to stop after being told that he had become a story himself, and that made him too visible for their purposes, sorry. He couldn’t believe now that he had deleted all of his old photographs from his hard drive on that burst of stupid, ill-fated idealism that David had inspired in him; there was enough there that, released from Beth’s contract as he was, he could have used to pay his rent for the next six months. For all that the magazines attempted politeness, however, the way that they worded their refusals made Michael wonder more than once if Beth, all of her mutterings about competition be damned, had not been telling them all what a loose cannon Michael had become.

A loose, drunken cannon. Michael laid out on his couch, drank enough each day to make the world go blurry, and only fired up his computer in the other room long enough each day to watch his bank account grow steadily smaller. He had thought himself fairly well off, before he had crashed into David in more ways than one and begun their orbits around each other. He hadn’t been committing himself to his own self-destruction with a vengeance then, though.

Michael was flicking through the television channels on one of these nights nearly a month in, pausing every so often on one of the trashy infotainment channels that showcased all of Hollywood’s failings. It was like poking a sore tooth; he could not seem to stop himself. He had noticed that David never seemed to find himself on these shows, or Carly, either. After issuing a brief statement to the effect that he would fuck whomever he wanted (Michael would have loved to have watched a PR manager try to clean up the original), David had closed ranks around himself and refused to say anything further about the situation at all.

Michael’s phone rang. He glanced over. It had been nearly three days since he had had a drink. He did that sometimes, tried to see how long he could go, and even thought once or twice that he could actually do it before he remembered that standing up and fighting against his baser nature wasn’t really his thing anymore. His vision was sharp and clear as he read Levine’s number on the caller ID. He still watched quietly without bothering to pick up as the machine took over and Levine’s voice filled the living room.

“Goddamnit, Michael, I’m not joking, you have to knock this shit off,” Levine said. “Get angry, have a tantrum--”

“Really don’t have a problem with either of those things, mate,” Michael said to the empty air. He still made no attempt to pick up the phone.

“But either way, you got to stop wallowing before you wind up killing yourself.” Levine’s voice lowered; he had done something that he should not have, and right away Michael knew it. “Look, I’ve wondered why you’ve been so pissed off all the time since I met you--”

Michael felt his entire body go rigid and cold. He straightened and stared at the phone. Laser beams from the eyes, that’s all that he needed.

“And I was able to track down a copy to listen to--”

Michael was never going to be friends with a trashy investigative journalist again. In fact, he was going to make it a policy to punch every single one of them that he met right in the face from that point forward.

“It’s good, man. It’s really good. Maybe you should think about taking another stab at this. It couldn’t hurt--”

Michael grabbed the phone from its receiver without listening to another word and hurled it with all of his strength against the nearest wall. It impacted with enough force to put a dent into the plaster and no doubt make his neighbors, already pissed off with him over the amount of attention that he had been pulling onto the complex with his very presence, call up the landlord to let him know that Johns was once again being more trouble than he was worth. The phone fell back down to the floor in pieces. That made two, and he hadn’t replaced the other one, either. He was now entirely cut off.

The thought, rather than serving to sober Michael, only made the rage pulse through him that much more brightly. He stormed down the hallway to his bedroom, threw himself down onto his knees, and dragged the guitar case out from under the bed. The dust was slightly lighter where he had pulled it out the last time; beyond that, it was clear that no one had laid hands on this instrument in a long time. It was a good night to start breaking bad habits, Michael thought, to stop keeping around pointless mementos. He undid the clasps on the case and threw it open so hard that it was a wonder he didn’t break the hinges.

The guitar inside was still gleaming, still looked like it had the day that he had put it into this case last. Just looking at it made Michael’s fury ebb for a second, made him wonder if it could possibly still sound as good as it looked after so long without attention. His fingers were shaking as he reached out to touch it.

You came to put the past behind you, Michael reminded himself firmly. He controlled his shaking and, rather than merely stroking at the wood as he had intended to, grabbed the instrument firmly about its neck and pulled it from the case. He had forgotten the weight that it had to it. He had forgotten how much his hands loved to caress the sleek wood even when he wasn’t playing a single note. It was like living as an amputee for years and then suddenly having that limb given back.

He had been contemplating the garbage disposal in his kitchen as he was storming down the hall, or the living room window that opened out over the street. Michael collapsed into a sitting position against his bedroom wall, the guitar pulling into his lap of its own accord, and banged his head softly against the plaster behind him. Levine was a fucking moron; this was the drug that he could not tear himself free from, and he would be so much the better for it if he could only finally find a way.

I don’t think that I have ever met a person so singularly full of shit as you are. The cynical photographer thing, the poor little victim who couldn’t hack it, so he decided to sell his soul instead. It’s pathetic. I’m here because I actually fought for what I goddamned wanted. You have that option, too.

It was so fucking easy for David to say that on the other side of the divide, Michael thought. So fucking easy, when he hadn’t hit thirty without a single definite success and faced record companies and then suddenly his own agent quietly asking him what he was doing still playing at this game. David didn’t, couldn’t, know. Michael’s fingers still moved over the strings of their own accord, plucking out a few notes. His fingers were clumsy and the guitar was out of tune, but it sounded better than Michael had thought it would. The body didn’t forget.

Michael closed his eyes as he felt them starting to burn. “I can’t do this any more,” he whispered to the air. “You’re wrong, I can’t do this.” It had been too long, and he was too old, and too...too fucked-up, besides. Michael had read once that music came from purity of soul that was able to touch the universe and then report back what it had to say. He had laughed, then, and swiftly pointed out that a hell of a lot of musicians managed to carry on pretty good chats with the universe while they were so sick with drugs and excess that they had to be staring their own deaths in the face at that point. He understood now, though. He understood far more than he cared to. There were lines that Michael had crossed that could not know be uncrossed, even if he was at a point where he wished that they could.

Michael’s hands answered him by playing a few more notes, clumsy in the stillness of the room, but still sweet all the same. He felt tears struggling to force their way out from beneath his tightly closed lids. It had been easier when he could be angry all the time, too. It had been exhausting, but it had been...God, it had been so much better than this. Michael was shuddering with the force of this half-born new person. It would be better if he had any way of knowing that he wasn’t going to be every bit as much of a bastard as the last persona that Michael had tried on had been.

Michael’s mind raced on. His hands continued to pluck at the guitar of their own accord, the sound gradually becoming sweeter and more confident as his body remembered what it was doing even as the rest of him refused to acknowledge it. It took Michael several minutes to realize that he had begun to weep; he made no sound as he cried. He would have thought that the explosion of years would be more dramatic. Even after his vision became too blurred to see what he was doing, Michael continued to play, because his hands, at least, still remembered what they were doing. His neighbor downstairs rapped on the ceiling, once, and then stopped, as if she was entranced by the sound.

The weeping turned to sobbing at long last, without any warning signs beforehand to let Michael know that it was coming. He set the guitar to the side quickly so that he would not damage it, never mind that he had been intending to hurl it at a motorist only a short while before, and put his hands over his face. It hurt; it felt like his chest was not large enough to contain everything that he suddenly so desperately needed to release. He had lost David, whatever he and David might have been, and he had lost his career, and he had lost, most painful of all, his every conception of the person that he had been before. He had lost the music, too; he was nowhere near wildly optimistic enough to convince himself that he could get it back. There was a rhythm to the universe, a beat, that Michael had been able to touch once upon a time, and being able to plink out a few notes on a guitar meant absolutely nothing to when it came to touching that magic again. Michael wanted to reach for it and was at the same time so terrified that it would not be there for him again after such a long period of neglect. It would be nothing less than what he already had coming.

I don’t think that I’ve ever met a person so singularly full of shit. When David’s voice had become the voice of his conscience, Michael could not say.

“I’m not arguing,” Michael whispered. He tilted his head back towards the ceiling and wiped at the tear tracks on his face. There were many in the city who would not have believed that he was even capable of tears unless they saw it for themselves; they would not have believed that he was even still that human. Michael was not sure that he believed it himself.

He had to still be human, though. When he had been wandering through the gray expanses, it hadn’t hurt so fucking much.

Still seated against the wall, Michael let out a shuddering sigh. If birth was hard, then rebirth was doubly so. He wanted a drink. He wanted David to be there. He wanted to turn back the last half-decade or so of his entire miserable life and examine it for that one fatal moment.

Barring all of that, he knew what he needed to do, even if it was one of the very last things that he wanted to do. It had been so long since he had reached out to touch the pulse of the universe, but he would not be able to finally rest, in one direction or the other, until he tried.

Michael pushed himself up to his feet by bracing one hand against the wall and the other against ribs that, nearly healed, only gave the faintest of twinges now and again to warn him when he was taking it too far. He slipped the guitar back into its case with all the care with which he would handle a child and hefted the case in his hand. Michael walked quickly towards the door before he could catch up with himself. The cameras had finally lost interest in him a few weeks before; he greeted an eerily empty street inside. Success or failure would take place without documentation.

As he was working sans car these days, it was another cab ride to take him to his destination. Michael was starting to recognize their faces. He avoided the eyes of this one, and requested only that he take him to a small club/bar so far removed from the driving pulse of the Hollywood elite that it might as well have belonged to a different world. Michael would not have known about it at all, save for a period immediately after joining Beth’s stable when he had not been able to quite convince himself that this was all temporary, and that he was going to go roaring back into the music industry at any point. They had Open Mic nights twice a week. One of them was this night.

“Don’t bother to wait, I’ll be awhile,” Michael said to the driver as he slipped both payment and tip across the divider. He took a breath out on the sidewalk and then stepped into the bar with his guitar case at his side. He was in there for scarcely a second before he wanted to turn right around and walk right back out again.

If there was anything that Michael needed to convince himself that he was not a dime a dozen failed bar rocker, then it was probably not to see at least twenty other men who could have doubled as him as soon as he hit the door. Jesus Christ, Michael thought that they were all even wearing the same jacket. He took a step backwards before he was able to stop himself.

This is ridiculous Michael told himself. You’re being ridiculous. If he didn’t have the stomach for paparazzo work any longer, then what he ought to be doing was finding some other kind of employment among the rank and file, not playing at a dream that should have been allowed to quietly die years ago. It was keeping the guitar that had done it. Without that, he would have been able to make a clean break.

That was the story that Michael was willing to tell himself, anyway. You’re better than this. Michael wished that he could exorcise David’s voice from his head. He knew without a trace of doubt that it was not healthy. Any yet, it was the only part that he had left, and Michael was so terribly loathe to let it go.

He took a deep breath and muscled his way through the crowd, realizing that if he lingered in the doorway for too much longer his nerves were going to take him straight out of it again. There was a table set up where it would be out of the way of dancers and drinkers, for the would-be stars to sign up. The world tilted from one side to the other as Michael approached it, and the young woman seated behind it dropped her bored expression long enough to stare at him in alarm as he drew close. He was certain that there was not a drop of blood in his face.

“Are you filled up for the night?” Michael asked her without preamble.

“We’re pretty packed,” the young woman said, looking down at her sheet. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and made a clicking sound; Michael caught her looking up at him from beneath her lashes when she thought that he wouldn’t see. “But I think that I can squeeze you in in about three hours, if you want. Were you planning a long set?”

“Just one song,” Michael managed. His voice was so hoarse that it was a wonder he was able to speak, let alone to sing.

“Oh. Okay, cool. Can I ask what it is?”

“It’ll come to me.”

The young woman was clearly wishing that she had been able to talk one of the waitresses into sharing duty with her. “All...right, then. Just wait for us to call your name. We won’t be able to help you with a sound system on this short a notice, though.” Her expression became briefly hopeful; she was clearing rooting for this to be an insurmountable obstacle that would get the crazy man out of her bar as soon as possible.

“Not a problem. I’ll be going acoustic.” Michael turned to leave. His entire body was still swimming with the first stirrings of panic, fight or flight, fight or flight, that he didn’t even know how to properly acknowledge, let alone deal with. He couldn’t remember an instance of stage fright since he had first begun to perform well over a decade ago. He was a different man now, and that man was not even remotely prepared for what Michael expected him to do.

Swimming through his own dark thoughts and trying to find the surface again, Michael was not watching where he was going and collided shoulders hard with someone heading in the opposite direction. A drink sloshed across the floor; the smell of alcohol burned the inside of Michael’s nose. He wanted a drink more than he wanted air at that moment.

“Sorry,” Michael muttered, putting his hand out to steady the person that he had run into. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking.” If it was one of his clones, then he was going to say ‘fuck it’ and hit the door running. It would probably make the girl at the table happier than she had been all night. “I’ll buy you another drink.”

The man that he had run into had been turned away while Michael spoke, examining the side of his pants to make sure that the spilled drink had not damaged them. He turned back; he was black, and around twenty years older than Michael himself, wearing a well-tailored suit jacket and slacks over a shirt without a tie. He looked Michael up and down and seemed to recognize just how close Michael was to outright disappearing, for he said, “Relax. This isn’t some trendy uptown house. I don’t have to take a mortgage out on my house to buy another one.”

“Still,” Michael insisted. He was stumbling over the words, unsure of how to even form sentences when he was not being inexplicably hostile. Had it been that long since he had tried to function as an actual member of the human species? It was a horrifying thought to contemplate.

The man in the jacket had already waved a waitress over and bent to speak in her ear, finishing with, “Just put it on my tab for the end of the night.” The woman nodded and glided away back through the crowd again. “I told you, relax. It’s already taken care of. I would say that you could use one yourself, but...” The man didn’t actually lean closer, but Michael still got the impression that he was suddenly being scrutinized, and with his nerves barely keeping him in one place as it was, it was like being flayed alive. “Hmmm.” Michael watched at the man walked away back towards the booth where his companions were waiting for him. One was a young lady and one was an older man dressed similarly to Michael’s collision victim himself. All three of them dipped their heads together and began speaking in hushed tones almost immediately; the collision victim had a way of speaking with his hands, gesturing fluidly this way and that. Watching them made Michael think of a conductor directing notes.

He turned away and pushed his way back through the crowd quickly, cursing himself for an idiot. He wanted a drink at the same time that this was the exact last thing that he needed, and it horrified him to think that he had allowed that weakness to stand so nakedly on display for a stranger to find. The bar was filling up; uptown it might not be, but it apparently was not lacking for its share of fans, and Michael had to fight in order to find a corner where he would not be jostled too much. He took a seat and stared down at his guitar case. There were still places along the clasps where dust had not been entirely cleared away. Michael had officially lost his mind.

Maybe, but he had to know. He had to know which one of them was right, David or himself, when one claimed that there was still decency in him and the other responded that he had burned all of that away by a force of supreme will years before. And if Michael turned out to be the one who was right, then he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do next.

He didn’t realize that he was having thoughts deep enough to become lost in for a span of hours, but before Michael realized that time was passing he heard his name being called, and then the hush of the crowd as they waited for him. By sheer bad luck, he had chosen a corner located on the exact opposite end of the bar as the exit, so that if he was going to bolt now he was going to be certain that everyone knew exactly what he was doing. How strange that the final spur getting him to do this would be his own pride. Michael took a deep breath, made his way slowly through the crowd, and put his first foot upon the stairs leading up to the stage.

End Part Eleven

Continue to Part Twelve