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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 1/24
TITLE: A Rush of Blood to the Head
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: R
PAIRING(S): Michael/David
DISCLAIMER: This is a wild-ass AU. Nothing that happens in it is true.
SUMMARY: There’s someone in Los Angeles who could change the dynamic of vampires versus humans forever. Naturally, both sides want him dead.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Due to subject matter, most of the details of David Archuleta’s family have been changed.




Los Angeles was a city built on the sun, and completely infested with vampires. David wished that he could be a bigger appreciator of the irony in that. He squinted against the dying sunlight and watched as the last rays descended down behind the skyline. A faint pink glow remained behind. David watched it and felt a faint smirk turning up the edges of his lips. Yeah, and that was going to be enough to hold back everything that walked through the city at night, sure. And maybe now he could understand why they were stretched so goddamned thin all the time.

“Some people wear sunglasses when they do that,” a voice from behind him said. David turned and saw Carly leaning against the open door to the roof entrance. Her arms were folded over her chest, her expression was neutral. David still noticed that she could not stop herself from glancing towards the sun, though. They all had an unbreakable habit of watching it now. In the glowing sunset, her skin was still very pale, the ink on her shoulder still very bright. Syesha was not with her. Syesha tended not to be with either of them as much as she could possibly manage it, these days.

David could not help but remember that there were only three of them, now. They did not choose a definite leader, that was not their way, but he acutely felt every moment in which one of their own was not with them. Syesha was hurting. That meant that he and Carly were hurting, too.

“Some people get too much sun as it is,” David answered her evenly. “We don’t get nearly enough.”

Carly made a face at him, her go-to reaction every time that she knew that she was right. She pushed herself away from her position at the door and then held it open so that he could go back inside ahead of her. It was Carly’s way of saying that it was not a request. David felt his face break into a smile as he looked her over and wondered what would happen if they did break their promise to one another, started actively recruiting new members and then choosing a leader. She might surprise everyone.

“You need to get some sleep,” Carly remarked to him in a voice that sounded neutral on the surface as David reentered their temporary home ahead of her.

“So do you.” Carly had deep circles beneath her eyes that makeup would not have hidden, even if she had bothered to wear it. David knew that he did, too. They were stretched too thin. That was just the bare fact of it.

It was a hard old world. David shook it off, made sure that he flashed Carly a smile over his shoulder. “But you’re still pretty.”

“Ha, ha.” Carly reached out and gave David’s shoulder a playful shove. He caught her wrist and tugged until he nearly unbalanced her, and did not let go until he heard her squawk in surprise. She shoved at his shoulder again once she had managed to catch herself. “You fucker.”

“I got to keep you on your toes somehow.” And when Carly had finished swearing at him and the two of them had fallen back into a companionable silence as they pounded down the stairs together, David continued in a low voice, “Has she broken her routine any today?”

“She eats, she sleeps, she goes at anyone who goes near her like a feral cat,” Carly answered him. Her voice was muffled; David paused and looked back to see that she was chewing at one of her cuticles. “Business as usual.”

“Hmmm.” It was all that David could do not to give in to a nervous gesture of his own. “If I didn’t know better, I would say that suicide by vampire was not going to be far off.” Carly fixed him with a look. His entire body suddenly feeling as if it had been dipped into ice, David insisted, “No. She wouldn’t--”

“They had their own world,” Carly insisted. “Everyone else on the team was just visiting. What would you do if one half of that world was suddenly gone?”

“Still--” The very thought of it was boggling to him.

“What if I was--killed?” Carly asked him. “What would you do?”

“Hunt down every fucking leech that I could find and make them pay.” The answer fell past his lips before he even had time to consider the wisdom of it. Carly’s lips curved upwards as if she had scored a victory. “That’s still a long ways from contemplating suicide, Carls.”

“I’m not saying that she wants to die,” Carly said as she pushed ahead of him and grabbed for the door. “I’m saying she’s not in a place where she’s really thinking far beyond how good it will feel to stab something.”

That was a logic that David could not argue with. He frowned instead and grabbed at the door before it could rebound and leave a dent in the plaster, not that they usually wasted their time giving a shit about what kind of state they left their buildings in after they had departed. He was more concerned with how hard Carly had thrown the door open at all; she was more tense than she was willing to admit to his face. He sighed.

Syesha was doing her stretching exercises in the center of the exercise floor when David and Carly came back in from the roof. She barely glanced at either of them before she made a faint snorting noise and went back to her nearly horizontal split; it was the most eloquent sound of disgust that David had ever heard. “Decided on an intervention strategy yet?” Syesha asked as she resolutely continued to stare at the east wall. Neither Carly nor David answered. “Good, that should mean that I have a couple more days to prepare myself, at least.”

“Syesha--” Carly started, sounding pained.

“I’m fine.” Syesha bit off each word like it was a bullet that she planned upon firing at them. “I don’t need my hand held.”

What she needed was to be pulled out of the field altogether up she got her head straightened out, but that wasn’t David’s call to make, not with the roundtable way that they did things. And there were so painfully few of the good guys these days, and so many of the bad ones. He stayed silent with his arms folded across his chest.

Syesha finished her stretched and leapt up with an easy athlete’s grace. She balanced her weight forward and onto the balls of her feet immediately; David immediately imagined that she was looking for something to hit. “We got a plan for tonight?”

“Clubs,” David answered. “Bars. Anywhere where people are crowded, sweaty, and stupid.”

“The usual.” Syesha nodded and sucked her lip between her lower tip. David could see that she was thinking that that was not nearly big enough. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.” She started to turn away.

Without thinking, David reached forward and grabbed for her elbow. Syesha paused and looked back at him with a quirked elbow. David realized how little he and Syesha had ever actually talked in spite of working together for years. She and Ramiele had had their own little world, Carly had said, and Syesha was a difficult person to get to know to anyone who had not received that express invitation.

“Are you sure that you’re going to be okay?” David asked her. When she deliberately dropped her gaze down to the place where his hand met her arm, he dropped it and held his hands up in a non-threatening gesture, even though his intent had never been to subdue her in the first place. “It’s all right to be rattled--”

“That’s a load and you know it,” Syesha interrupted him in a voice that would have been pleasant to anyone who was not listening too deeply. “Rattled gets you killed.”

David leaned back, unable to come up with an answer when he knew that Syesha was right. Rattled got them killed; they always seemed to be picked off, one by one. There was almost a schedule to it. “We don’t have to hunt tonight,” he said, knowing that she would not reach for the out but determined to offer it to her all the same.

Syesha flicked an annoyed glance over him. “Now you’re just being stupid,” she said. “We don’t hunt, someone for sure at one of those crowded, sweaty, stupid places is going to get killed. Last time I checked, we were in the business of preventing that.” She pushed her headband further up, ostensibly to capture a stray lock that had been threatening to fall into her eye but mostly, David thought, to give her an excuse not to make eye contact for a few seconds. She hesitated, and then reached out to touch her fingers to his forearm before turning away. Syesha generally did not like to touch or be touched; David recognized a peace offering when he saw it.

“She’s not fine,” Carly stated flatly from behind him as they watched Syesha disappeared in the direction of her quarters to weapon up.

“She’s about three pushes away from blowing up all over the place,” David agreed. “All that we can do is hope that she’s pointed in the direction of the leeches when she does it.” He and Carly met eyes, sighed, and then left to get his own weaponry. They had a job to do. That there was steadily less of them to carry it out was irrelevant.

In David’s own quarters, he didn’t even bother to turn on the lights before he began gathering everything that he would need. A gun went on each hip, twin sets of knives were strapped to each thigh and bicep beyond that. As a last resort, he snugged a long silver stake against the small of his back, though everyone that he had ever known who had tried to rely on that weapon had not come out on the other side of the fight. Stakes were proximity weapons even more than the knives were; with knives, David could slash at the leeches, force them to keep their distance until blood loss weakened them enough to allow for the final beheading blow. Using a stake meant that he had to grab his opponent and drag them up close before he could even hope that he would be able to drive the stake between the ribs and into the heart.

David had watched Luke, desperate, try just such a move, and Kristy, too. They weren’t with them any longer.

He sighed and shivered hard to throw off the goosebumps that wanted to overtake him, left the room after making sure that he had enough ammunition to deal with everything that they might run into that night. Maybe Syesha had a point, much as it outright hurt to watch her. Maybe grieving at this point would open up floodgates so wide that they would never be closed again.

Funny, David thought as he shut his door behind him and went to where Syesha and Carly were waiting. They were wearing weaponry identical to his own, and Carly had pulled her dark hair back from her face into a ponytail. He was sure that his expression was a mirror of theirs: taut, intent, seeking to fight. It was only by becoming the leeches that they had any hope at all of fighting them.

End Part One

Continue to Part Two