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American Idol Fic: Black Bird Singing 13/13
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
Part Twelve



Part Thirteen

The universe spoke to him, in fits and starts. It was never easy, not the way that it had been when he had been young and his world had been more pure. When he finally did get into the studio, more often than not Michael left with beads of sweat standing along his hairline and his hands clenching themselves with the effort that it took him not to put them into the wall. Even that took weeks, even that was a step earned in between humbling fights with McCartney and visits to the court. Even first time offenders who were willing to admit guilt were not dealt with lightly; Michael could resign himself to taking cabs or the bus everywhere that he needed to go for several more months yet. Several of the arguments with McCartney, the most humiliating ones at that, were over the subject of the vocal coach that McCartney had hired in anticipation before Michael had ever set foot into the studio. Three years of hard living and no singing had ruined his breath control; his lack of wind as he had exited the stage after one simple song ought to have told him that. Michael didn’t guess that he was ready to stop being stubborn quite yet.

Somehow, in the haze of feeling out what it meant to be a person again, two months went by. Michael tried one final time, a hail Mary pass, to contact David and was stiffly informed by a lawyer that that any further incursions into Mr. Cook’s private space would be handled through the courts. That led to the first relapse. It was a bottle of good whiskey; Michael considered it a victory that he had the good sense to do it at home this time. Then he realized that he had been slapped in the head by too many people trying to tell him that he had a problem at this point for any taste of booze in his mouth to ever be considered a victory. He always had his epiphanies just one moment too late; he was leaning over his toilet with the hangover the next morning by that point. Michael chewed breath mints for the next six hours and prayed that McCartney would not notice. The second relapse had no cause that Michael could see at all. That led to him sitting outside of a church where a certain meeting was going on at nine o’ clock on a Thursday night, his hands clenched tight around the steering wheel of a borrowed red Matrix that didn’t tempt him to drive fast at all and that technically he should not have been in at all, what with having three more months of suspension on his license. There were sweat marks on the steering wheel when he finally unclenched his hands so that he could flex the stiffness out of his fingers and drive away. He was going to have to go in sooner or later. He knew that. But not that night.

Today, Michael leaned over a sound board and watched as the same dreadlocked young man that McCartney had snapped at Michael for distracting him from at the bar strummed a guitar in the sound booth. As it turned out, he knew David, too; Michael was never going to get over the deep ironies of his universe. He was already determined that Jason should never knew that Michael himself knew David. As far as he was concerned, they could stay coworkers on their respective second and fourth chances within this business and leave everything else to the imagination. Michael drummed his fingers against his thigh and made an irritable noise. It was probably lucky, he reflected, that no one had told him beforehand how difficult and painful rebirth actually was. The past three years had knocked the fight out of him quite ably, and he was sure that he would have continued to lie there, several different people willing to scream at him to get up or not, if he had realized what an uphill battle it was actually going to be.

“He’s good,” McCartney said from his space beside Michael. Michael was also not used to a studio being so small, so quiet. There was usually an assistant running around until McCartney frightened them off, and occasionally McCartney’s own wife, but the amount of time when it was just him and the artist he was working with that day was staggering. Michael was also not used to anyone who focused so totally on the music independent of the corporate trappings.

“Yeah, he really is,” Michael said finally. Jason had a sweet, clear voice that lacked a great deal of range but made up for it with the connection that he could make with the notes. Whatever connection to the universal force that Michael was still having to relearn, it was clear that Jason had never lost it. Michael envied him far more often than he cared to admit.

“It’s okay to talk, Johns,” McCartney said mildly. “You’re here to make sounds, you know, you don’t have to save them all up.”

Michael cracked a smile and discovered that it did not hurt his face. “I don’t have a whole lot to say, I guess,” he said. “But hey, if you want me to explain, in detail, every trashy headline from the last six months, I’m your dude.”

“No, you have plenty to say,” McCartney countered. It had been a difficult day, the music wasn’t talking to Michael right now, and he suspected that Jason had been moved ahead of schedule mostly because McCartney was giving him an out to get his head back together. “Just have to find that muse again.” Michael didn’t want to tell McCartney that he had reached for that magic again at the bar where they had met because it was either that or die, perhaps literally before it was all over, and so he kept his mouth shut until the silence became slightly uncomfortable. “Or figure out what the hell is keeping you from reaching it, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

And suddenly they were more than just slightly uncomfortable. “McCartney--” Michael began. He was on eighteen days, nine hours, and about seventeen minutes without a drop. That had to count for something.

“Shut up, son.” McCartney pulled out a brochure that had once been glossy but now looked as if McCartney had been carrying around in his jacket pocket for days and worrying it with his fingers at every opportunity besides. He laid it down on the soundboard between them. “You’re looking worse every day, not better.”

Michael traced at the glossy pictures with the tip of his finger and thought that he wasn’t going to get the choice to sit out in the car and stare at the building, next time. “I thought you said that you weren’t going to be my friend,” he said.

“I have plenty of friends,” McCartney grunted. “But it takes a pretty sorry human being to stand around and watch another person drown, so consider that your lifeline. Hell, consider it your reward, if you want. When I first met you, I thought that it wasn’t going to be more than a week before you had your first falling-back. Took you nearly a month.”

Michael’s finger stilled. “And here I thought that my ass was going to be out of here if I screwed up once.”

“That was before I heard you sing.” McCartney turned back to the sound booth and to Jason, leaving Michael to study the brochure in silence. Michael still wasn’t used to working for someone who didn’t throw in a healthy threat or two every time that they spoke, or who made Michael think of the best that he maybe could be instead of the very worst that he would have become if he had not somehow found the reins again. It was unsettling nearly as often as it was comforting.

His cellular phone beeped in his pocket with a text message, and Michael excused himself so that he could duck away and see who it was. His eyes widened; he could feel McCartney watching him. “I, uh, have to go do something,” Michael said shortly. He wasn’t asking permission; his hands were shaking the way that they did on bad days and he could hear that his voice was tight.

McCartney waved a distracted hand at him and then took a second look when he saw how quickly Michael had managed to go from zero to coming out of his skin. “All right,” he said cautiously. Michael wondered how hard McCartney was thinking about that brochure, and whether Michael was off to fall headlong into relapse number three as they spoke.

“I need a ride,” Michael said. The idea of waiting for a cab and drawing out even further the amount to time before he could get his over with suddenly made him sick to his stomach.

McCartney’s face cleared; if Michael was going to hurl himself off of a cliff, then he could surely find shadier company to do it in than the two of them. McCartney was too likely to start throwing bar glasses at him, and they both now that if Jason had a vice, then it wasn’t drink. He leaned over and pressed the button that allowed him to communicate with Jason in the booth. “Your lower register is still rough, so let’s take a break. You mind running an errand?”

“Oh...kay.” Jason sounded confused. That was his usual demeanor, and Michael was already having to watch himself in defense of it, realizing that there was a lot more going on beneath the surface of Jason Casto than most people would ever be able to see.

Michael left the building in Jason’s company, slid into the passenger seat of Jason’s car, and was glad that he was not the one who had to drive. He was not sure that he would have been capable of it. He had, after David’s lawyer had told him in no uncertain terms how things were going to be from there on out, done his very best to avoid anything and everything that reminded him of what he had been doing with his life before an epiphany had flown into the side of his head so hard that his ears were still ringing with it. Remembering what he had done, what he had been well on his way to being, was not a pleasant experience.

“You have to go inside sooner or later,” Michael muttered to himself as they pulled away from the curb.

“Are you going to be okay?” Jason asked, glancing over as he wove through traffic.

Michael let out a short laugh that probably was not the one that Jason wanted to hear. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll let you know.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth and wanted a drink more than he had in days. It was probably a good thing that he had been forced to ask for a ride; Michael did not like to think of the detours that he probably would have made if he had been left to his own devices.

Jason cast him another curious look, but did not ask. If they ever became friends instead of merely coworkers, Michael told himself, it was going to be because Jason was the one person Michael knew who understood how to simply let a silence be.

Michael had not been back to the office since the day that he had so violently told Beth what her real place was in the universe and stormed out; he could no longer wander up to the elevator as he pleased. Michael gave the guards his most sarcastic smile instead and waited with his arms folded over his chest as they called upstairs and confirmed that, yes, he really had been invited here and, no, he was not simply making that up so that he could try to creep up to a certain office with a bomb hidden beneath his shirt. He was even a little surprised that Beth did not demand that they frisk him, just so that she could try to prove one more time who was in control here. Jason, however, wasn’t cleared. He gave the guard a beatific smile that made Michael wonder, not for the first time, how much of a smartass Jason might really be hiding beneath the laid back stoner exterior that he wore so snugly. He never seemed to stop finding amusement in the universe.

“You going to be all right out here?” Michael asked him, suddenly feeling guilty. This was his mess, after all. He didn’t have a right to start dragging over people into it and into contact with security guards who looked like Jason was a bad acid flashback that they would like to pound on for a while.

Jason waved a lazy hand at him. “I’m fine, bro,” he said. “Go do whatever it is that you have to do.” Under ordinary circumstances he would have bought Jason a beer afterwards for being so easy-going about this. Since that was not a wise option for him any longer, and since he didn’t want to run the risk of being arrested in getting Jason the other thing that he would have enjoyed, Michael supposed that he would have to think of something.

You walked away, Michael told himself as he was finally cleared to approach the elevators. That puts you in control. He kept telling himself this and was even reaching the point where he could believe it, no matter how much he still had days when he wanted to go back. Rage could still rise up in him like a live thing, buzzing and powerful, and take hours to fall back down again. You have to go inside sometime, Michael repeated to himself.

The newsroom fell silent one final time as Michael entered; he met everyone’s eyes, one at a time, before he strode resolutely towards Beth’s office. For once, he didn’t have to wait for Beth’s secretary to buzz him in. Beth herself met him at her door, holding it open wordlessly as an indicator that he should enter ahead of her. Her face was blank of expression. Michael paused for a moment to wonder if Beth was not the one that the guards should be worried about, when she was wearing enough affect to make a robotic look animated, as he settled himself down into one of her chairs without being asked. Beth quirked an eyebrow at him and said nothing.

“What do you want?” Michael asked without preamble.

“It’s comforting to note that you haven’t improved your social skills any,” Beth answered as she took a seat on the edge of her desk. It put her in a position to look down at him, Michael noted, and wondered when Beth had become so insecure that she needed such an overt display.

Michael twitched the corners of his mouth upwards. “Makes it easier to flip off the photographers that you had stalking me,” he said.

Beth shrugged and for a few seconds looked fifteen years younger. “I’ve always been a fan of irony,” she chirped at him. “Speaking of irony, this you and me, banter thing? Loving it. Really missed these chats that we had.”

“I’m not the one who asked to come here,” Michael said. He started to rise from his seat. “So if my presence is bothering you--”

“If I wanted you to leave, I would have had you bodily escorted out,” Beth interrupted him. She sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Believe me, if I could legally get out of giving you this, I would.”

Curiosity sank Michael back down into his seat. “Give me what?” he asked.

Beth had to give up her position of superiority in order to cross to her desk and rummage about in one of the drawers. She produced a rectangle of heavy manila paper and handed it to him; Michael realized a second later that it was a check. More to the point, it was a big check.

“What the hell?” he asked, looking up at her. “I didn’t have anything in queue when I quit.”

“When I fired you,” Beth corrected. “And, no, you didn’t. Unfortunately, when Lohan’s little oops finally made it out into the public, your pictures of that night were the only one’s I had, so.” Her lips thinned. “Call it your severance package.”

“I never gave you my pictures from that night.” Michael was barely speaking over a whisper, talking to himself as much as he was Beth. He turned the check over and over in his hands. It made his skin crawl just to touch it at the same time that he had to fight in order to put it back down on Beth’s desk.

“No.” Beth made a faint huffing noise and looked away. “But your friend Levine dropped it off a few days later. I suppose that there’s some honor among parasites after all.”

Levine had never told him that. Doing the math, it might well have fallen immediately after Michael had dealt so very badly with Levine’s attempt to save him. Michael could well imagine why Levine had not wanted to approach him in the aftermath of that tete a tete. Michael reached out and touched lightly at the edges of the check before he dragged his hand back again. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“We weren’t exactly on friendly terms by that point,” Beth said dryly. She crossed behind Michael’s chair, her heels marking her progress. He tensed up to hear her there, and then tensed again when the only thing that she did was drag her fingers, so lightly and so gently that he hardly believed that it was her, through his hair. “I’ve heard that you’re doing well for yourself.”

Well, he wasn’t raking in the cash, but he guessed that anything short of becoming a crack whore had to be better than where he had been. “Still a functioning alcoholic,” Michael answered Beth. He leaned his head back so that he could look at her and wondered if what he was seeing in her face was actual sincerity. “No longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I call that progress.”

Beth smiled, and that looked real, too. Michael did not know what he was supposed to do with all of this genuine emotion coming from her. He had no previous parameters for it. “The first time you came into my office with some actual usable photographs,” Beth told him softly. She continued to pull her fingers through his hair, soft, hypnotic. “I told myself, ‘There is no way that this kid is going to last.’ No one likes looking into mirrors. They’re never as flattering as we want.”

“I was thirty,” Michael told her. “That doesn’t really make me a kid.”

“Shush. Respect your elder when she’s speaking.” Beth nonetheless paused for a long moment before she continued. “But then you did. And I won’t lie to you, Michael, I had a few drinks over it over those three years. I’m glad that you didn’t have what it takes, in the end. I really am.”

“I can’t accept that check, Beth,” Michael said softly.

Beth untangled her fingers from his hair, stepped back. “Do you expect me to cry over that?” she asked him. “No, really, keep helping my bottom line, it breaks my heart.”

He couldn’t keep his mouth from quirking, just a little bit. “I’ll see you around, Beth.” Michael rose from his seat.

“I hope so,” Beth answered him. “If you’re on my radar, that means you’ve made it.” She waved a hand at him to indicate that he was dismissed and took a seat behind her computer, firing it up and sliding her bluetooth into her ear.

Michael left the office hurriedly and without bothering to make note of how many people were pausing to watch him go. “Let’s go,” he said to Jason, and left the lobby without making note of whether Jason was actually following. He didn’t care that Jason was the one who actually held the car keys; Michael thought that he would have happily hotwired the car if that was what it took to get out of there.

Jason left the building a few seconds after Michael, finally, and moving at a much more leisurely pace than Michael liked to see. He guessed that Jason had wanted to wrap up his staring match with the guard first, how nice for him. “Come on,” Michael said to him. His voice was low, nearly growling. “I have to get out here.”

“No kidding.” Jason unlocked the car so that they could both get inside. “It’s like a haunted house with people in it.”

That was the best analogy to the whole business that Michael had heard yet. He laughed and then put his hands over his face. “You have no idea.”

Michael could feel Jason continuing to give him sidelong glances as he drove and wondered if Jason had ever been a big reader of trashy journalism. He could have fallen out of the car a few seconds later when Jason asked, in a voice so perfectly nonchalant that Michael knew right away that it was fake, “Man, I am not looking forward to McCartney handing my ass to me some more back at the ranch. You want to, uh, grab something to eat first, delay the inevitable?”

Holy God, I think that I’m being flirted with. Michael tried to keep his mouth from hanging open too far as he considered the offer. Jason was good-looking and didn’t suck to be around, and he had just done Michael an incredible solid by going to the magazine with so little complaint. It could work.

Maybe. Maybe it would have worked if they were just two normal people who had met on the sidewalk, but Michael had no illusions as to being all better. He didn’t have the right to invite anyone else into his head until he had gotten it straightened out first.

“Sorry,” Michael said, twisting so that he could look out the passenger’s window. “‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is a huge fucking cliche, but I’m...I’m really not fit for human consumption right now.”

“Sure.” Jason sounded disappointed, but that was all. Michael let out a sigh of relief. “I can get that.” Michael glanced back long enough to see that Jason was flashing him a sly smile from a mouth full enough to make Michael think for a few seconds that he had just made a monumentally stupid decision. “I’ll try again in a few months.”

Michael startled himself by laughing. “Do that,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have a different answer by th--” He cut himself off, shutting his mouth so fast that he nearly took off the tip of his tongue, as he saw the new car that was parked in front of McCartney’s building.

A Lexus ISF. Shiny red paint that looked like a cherry, or the glowing end of a cigarette.

Michael sat and stared for several long moments after Jason had cut the engine, his hands shaking too badly to even reach for the door handle. He reached into his jacket pocket, touched at the brochure that had once been glossy before McCartney had worried it so thoroughly, and told himself one final time, You have to go inside sooner or later. He considered it a victory that his legs would hold him at all.

McCartney didn’t fuss about with formalities, Michael had learned within a week of working with him. There was hardly any lobby to his studio at all, just a little cubby hole where his kids worked as the receptionists sometimes, or otherwise went unworked at all. Didn’t matter; hardly anyone ever came in who didn’t know where they were going. And David so clearly did not know where he was going.

He was pacing back and forth across the lobby as Michael stood in the doorway and stared at him. David was clenching and unclenching his hands; from where Michael was standing, it was all that David could do to keep himself within the bounds of the building at all. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Michael cleared his throat, looked curiously to Jason just behind him. Michael saw his eyes widen slightly, but Jason was smarter than people gave him credit for. He sensed the weight of the room and barely dipped his head in a nod before he pushed past and headed back towards the studio. Michael felt a glance being flicked his way as Jason went. He thought that now Jason understood why Michael had turned down his offer.

“Hi,” Michael said softly. He had to push the word out around a throat so tightly clenched that it was a wonder he could speak at all. Michael stared at David, drinking in every detail, so conscious of the fact that he might never get to see him this close again. He wished that he could say that David had been suffering in Michael’s absence, but he looked fit and healthy and he looked...God, he looked so beautiful. Only the memory of the last time that he and David had been this close kept Michael keeping his distance.

“Hey,” David answered. His voice was just as low, just as cautious. He cut a look towards the door, but Michael was occupying it. There was nowhere else to go.

Michael cleared his throat into his hand and stepped to the side, giving David that out if he wanted it. When David’s eyes followed him instead, looked at him like he was hungry, Michael felt heat pooling in his belly, and below. “What...what are you doing here?”

David let out a short laugh. “Carly,” he said. “She’s a gossip hound like you wouldn’t believe. Heard about you through a friend of a friend, thought that I should see. For...for closure.” David made a face as if he was thinking that closure was the stupidest fucking idea that he had ever heard of. So did Michael, but it wasn’t his place to say that. He waited, and after a few seconds David went on, “So, you look like you’re doing well.”

“I’m doing better,” Michael answered, because that was a lot closer to the truth. He edged further away from the door, giving David that out if he wanted it, and thought that he wasn’t going to be able to breathe for much longer when David still didn’t take it. If he was going to pass out, there was one thing that he needed to say first. “I’m so sorry, David.”

David’s head jerked up. He scrutinized Michael through those eyes that saw way too much for long enough to make Michael twitch before he said, “Do you still have your old cell phone number?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. He was hardly able to push the word out past a tightly closed throat. “I have...I have this thing that I’m going to have to do tonight--” You have to go inside sooner or later. “But I still have it.”

A tilt of the head, another long look. Michael fucking hated it when David measured him like this. He was always sure that he would be wanting at the end, even if David could not see it.

But David blew out the air in his lungs on a long sigh. He walked towards the door; his knuckles brushed against Michael’s for the briefest of seconds. David turned that into an opportunity to twine their fingers around each other, pressing his thumb into the center of Michael’s palm, before he said, “Wait by the phone.”

End



And we're done. I can't believe that I wrote 55928 words. That's a novel. On American Idol.