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Entry tags:	american idol: fic, flyboys

AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 4/24
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.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three



Part Four

They were fighting. Naturally. If it weren’t for the arguments, Michael was reaching the point where he would hardly even believe that he was in a marriage. He pinched at the bridge of his nose, struggled to keep his rising temper under control. It did not matter that Stacey was well on her way to irrational regardless of whether or not he gave in and joined her and that he knew he would not be long before they were shouting at each other, just as they had done dozens of times before. It still mattered that he try to stay in control for as long as he could. When he stopped even trying, that’s when he would know that they were in trouble.

Unhappy families are all unhappy in their own unique way, Michael thought, not even sure where the quote was coming from. He stopped pinching at the bridge of his nose and stared at his wedding ring instead. The shine had not worn off of it.

“Stace, we are absolutely not doing this right now,” Michael told Stacey. Each of his words was precisely bitten off, as it was all that he could do at the moment not to lose control entirely. He didn’t have a musical instrument in his hands at the moment and, absent that, he was not sure what to do with them. Clenching them into fists seemed far too threatening a gesture.

Stacey folded her arms over her chest. She looked every bit as miserable as she did angry, which cooled Michael’s ire, but not by much. There were only so many times that they could have the same fight over and over again before they both ceased to be sympathetic figures, he guessed.

“Well, then when are we going to do it, Michael?” she asked, and she sounded so hurt that for a second Michael faltered. He married this woman for a reason, he told himself. Even when they were in the middle of their worst fights, he married her for a reason. “Because every time that I actually try to talk to you, you just brush me off--”

“You want me to quit.” Michael didn’t even bother with putting heat into his words. They were running behind, the band was going to be looking for him, and he needed to get himself in the right frame of mind before he strode onto that stage. He had used to jokingly call Stacey his muse, but of late it had been getting harder and harder when she was there.

Stacey bit at her lower lip so hard that for a second Michael was afraid that she was going to draw blood. She looked on the verge of tears. “Don’t say it like that,” she said.

“How the hell should I say it?” Michael asked, rounding on her. He was pushing towards that yell that he had desperately been trying to keep under control. “You want me to give up on my career--”

“No, I don’t!” Stacey cried. “I don’t want you to give it up, I just want you to, to...” She trailed off, clearly trying to find the best way to phrase what she wanted to say. Her lips pressed together in a thin line. “I’ve been reading, and the odds of someone suddenly having their big break at your age are...slim.”

Michael was well aware of the statistics. He turned away from her, in no small part so that he would not have to look at her and see how much it was genuinely hurting her to say these things.

“But I’m paying the full mortgage and everything.” He could feel her cringing from where he stood. “And we’re not managing to save a dime, Michael. I’m ready to have children, I thought that you were, too.”

“I want kids,” Michael said, turning. “I want kids with you. That hasn’t changed.” It was maddening to him, now, how they could have been on the exact same page with one another only a year before and now be standing so far apart.

“Then we need money to support them, Michael, and that means a...” Stacey snapped her mouth shut around the words before she said them. Michael was still able to fill in the blanks.

“A real job.”

Something of steel entered Stacey’s spine, straightening her. “It’s worth considering.”

Too bad for her, Michael could feel it entering him, too. “We are not doing this now,” he repeated.

“Fabulous. I’ll look forward to the day when you finally grow up enough so that we can.” Stacey threw her purse back over her shoulder and turned to go. She wouldn’t stay for the show, Michael knew. She had started claiming months ago that they were all the same, anyway, about the same time that their fights had stopped being lovers’ spats and started becoming about something else. Michael could look forward to a back turned stiffly away from him when he slipped into their bed that night. They would each glare sullenly at their respective walls until Stacey rose a few hours later to go to work, and then Michael would finally manage some sleep.

The bass player, Casey, let out a low whistle as he passed Michael on the way to the stage. The rumble of the crowd was already making its way to them. It was packed; it was a small venue, anyway. “That’s an angry chick, right there.”

Michael lifted his middle finger in Casey’s direction without bothering to look around. “You make a trouble in paradise crack and I swear I’ll beat you to death with your own instrument.”

“What about a crack about beating instruments?” Casey grinned at him unrepentantly when Michael flashed him his middle finger again. “This is why I stick to groupies, man. I don’t ever have to deal with them once they start getting nasty.”

“You’ve never been in love.” Michael winced even as he said it, knowing that he was tripping along the line of sounding like a bad romance novel.

“It looks like so much fun from where I’m standing, too. I don’t do that masochism crap.” Casey grabbed at Michael’s finger when Michael started to flip him another bird and instead tugged him towards the stage. “Move it or lose it, sound check’s over.”

And he had been having a spat with his best beloved rather than helping them, too. Michael sighed, already knowing that he was going to catch hell for that later. It was shaping up to be a fun night all around. Another sigh. It was the last one that he had time for before he was stepping onto the stage and listening to the crowd packed into the tight space as they erupted into raucous and only slightly drunken cheers. Michael laughed in spite of himself, already feeling the energy of being here, in front of people and knowing that he was going to give them, if not the time of their lives, at the very least one that they would remember. He could have them in the palm of his hand within moments and knew it; it was like a drug.

Stacey had fallen for him in part because he could be a rock star in private with her, too. Michael barely allowed the thought to enter his mind before he shoved it out again. Not here, not now. Tonight was for something else.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he leaned forward and yelled into his microphone. The crowd obliged him by screaming back, and Michael updated his “slightly” assessment. “Are you ready to have a good time?” Another scream. At the door, Michael caught sight of a trio of young people entering, two boys and a girl. The girl was looking around animatedly and on the verge of blowing her group’s cover--because if any of them were actually old enough to drink, then Michael would buy them their first round--while the other two were about to finish the job for her by looking utterly terrified. Michael had never seen a trio more obviously entering a club based upon fake IDs in his life. He wondered how good the work must have been to make the bouncer overlook it.

Focus now, crowd-watching later. Michael shifted his attention back to the body of people already swaying and stomping in general and grinned at them all, that slow-sex smile that he wore on the stage alone. “That’s what I like to hear. Now, tell me that this first number doesn’t get you revved up and ready to go.” There was a warm insinuation in his tone that made more than a few women in the audience shriek preemptively, and their boyfriends roll their eyes and signal to the waitstaff for another beer. Michael grinned and then launched into the band’s first song. It was harder rock than he was happiest doing these days, but it still got the crowd pounding their feet against the floorboards and shaking their heads from side to side in time to the beat, and wasn’t that the entire point?

Yeah, Michael decided halfway through the first chorus. Yeah, you could bet his ass that it was, and he was having the time of his life up here. If he could ever make Stacey understand this, then all of their marital problems would be solved overnight. Once she understood what he got from his experience, then she would never be able to ask that he give it up.

The crowd erupted as Michael and the band wound down from the first song. Michael looked up and over them and saw that the trio of clearly underage kids from earlier were now at the bar and doing their level best to order drinks. The bartender looked as if she did not know whether to laugh in their faces or go along with it and see just how much trouble they could actually get themselves into. Michael smiled at the girl, who grinned back and waved at him.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys,” Michael said into the microphone. He picked at the back of his shirt, where the lights were already coaxing out a line of sweat. “But that got my blood up.” Another cheer. Michael loved crowds like this. He glanced towards the door and saw a second group of three slipping in. These guys didn’t look as if they had gotten in there on fake IDs and amazing luck; these guys, when Michael looked them over a second time, did not look as if they were entirely safe walking the streets with civilians. Two women and one man this time around, as different from the children as day was from night. Both women were dark-haired. One was African-American and had dark curls that she was holding back from her face with a headband the color of clotted blood, while the other was white and had a tattoo covering her entire right bicep. Michael hoped that she remembered to wear sleeves when she committed the mayhem he was willing to lay down money that these guys got up to in their off hours, or else her career as a criminal was likely to be a short one. The man stood slightly behind them and gave the impression, without even moving a muscle, that he was somehow watching over them like a brother would. It was uncanny. So was the man. He was tall, nearly as tall as Michael himself, with dark hair and clear hazel eyes that sparked to Michael even from across the room.

Michael jumped as Casey coughed, and realized that he had been so caught up in staring that he had nearly forgotten about the rest of their set. “All right, then,” Michael said. The puzzled rumblings of the crowd began to quiet down slightly. “Now that I’ve gotten you all revved up, how about something to cool you down.” The next piece was slower, more introspective, and allowed Michael to slide a little bit of a bluesy rasp into his tone. He could have performed it in his sleep and still kept an eye out for the mystery man who had entered the club, but that was not the way to good music. He had to throw himself into it so thoroughly that he could feel it in his blood. Michael closed his eyes, let the notes race along his skin, and just rode on it. It was scarcely ten seconds before he had forgotten about the new man, forgotten about his fight with Stacey, forgotten about virtually everything except for the music itself.

Casey stuttered on a note behind him, that was the first way that Michael knew something was wrong. Even then, it only pulled him away from the lyrics long enough to throw an irritated glance over his shoulder; the crowd did the rest. Learning how to read them and adjust a performance accordingly was an art, hard-learned. Michael heard them begin to whisper and realized that he no longer had their attention at all. He looked out across the crowd and took several more seconds to understand what was going on.

A blonde woman stood at the door with her arms folded over her chest. She was shockingly pale, and thin, too; Michael looked at her and wondered how she could possibly be healthy. A closer examination of her eyes let him know that health had nothing to do with it. She hardly looked as if she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, yet Michael knew without a shadow of a doubt that the sensation of ice curling down his spine was one of fear, the rabbit freezing as it realized that the shadow flying above its head was really that of the hawk.

“Guys, guys,” he said into the microphone without thinking, as he did not even know for certain that there was a threat yet, let alone what shape it was taking. His instincts knew what his brain could not yet pin down. “Let’s just stay calm here--”

“Michael!” Casey barked out a warning from behind him.

Michael whirled, and brought the mike stand up with him defensively on instinct. Later, once he had finished shaking, he would realize that the movement had saved his life. A woman so small that it took Michael a beat to realize that she was not still a girl rushed at him from the side of the stage. God, she was so fast. Michael was amazed that Casey had been able to detect the movement at all, let alone shout out his warning. Michael held out the mike stand horizontally across his chest, and the woman rebounded off of it and back down to the stage with a heavy thump. If the blonde at the door looked as if she would not clear one hundred and twenty pounds on a fat jeans day, then this woman must surely be thirty pounds less than even that. Michael’s fingers still shook with the impact of the collision, and he staggered back.

How does someone so small get so strong? Michael’s mind, already half-hysterical, screamed at him while the rest of his body continued to work on the same instinctual autopilot that had made him look up in the first place. He had been in Los Angeles for years now and in the music business for longer than that, he knew all about creative uses of chemicals, but he had never experienced anything that could make a person act like that. Even famed PCP could not come close to it.

And PCP sure as fuck could not do to the woman’s mouth what Michael was seeing right now. He watched and knew that his jaw was falling open as she rolled across the floor where he had knocked her, recovered into a half-crouch that was nearly jointless in its grace, and bared her teeth at him. They were wrong, they were so wrong, gleaming-sharp and too many.

“She looks like a shark!” Michael heard Casey blurt from behind him. Poor bastard, Michael wanted to yell at him, don’t speak and attract her attention. Too late; the woman swiveled her head and lunged in another of those furious, physics-defying rushes. Michael raised the mic stand over his head and hardly even spared a thought towards the fact that he was about to hit a woman before he swung. It was heavy steel, lightweight but strong, and as hard as Michael was swinging it at someone as small as this woman was, it should have knocked her to the stage if it had not knocked her out entirely. Instead Michael watched in horror as the heavy metal rebounded off of her back without so much as slowing her down; it was Michael who actually had to back off as the shock waves reverberated all the way up into his shoulders and nearly made him drop his weapon. The woman glanced back over her shoulder, it seemed, as she darted across those few steps. Even though there was no time for it, Michael still swore that she was issuing a promise to him.

Casey yelled in alarm once it became clear that the woman was heading for him and him alone, and made a belated effort to raise his bass guitar as a weapon. He had about as much luck as Michael himself did. Michael had a full half-second with which to watch in horror as the expensive instrument actually broke across the woman’s back, and did not even manage to buckle her.

And then.

Michael was sure that he was seeing things, sure that he had to be seeing things, as the woman bowled his friend and band member over with the sheer speed of her assault until they both fell to the wooden stage. Her teeth...there was definitely something wrong with her teeth, something that no amount of PCP could have caused, and something even more wrong as she leaned down in that fluid, jointless way of hers and sank them deeply into Casey’s neck. Casey opened his mouth into a scream, but it had a wet sound.

Michael took a step backwards in horror, and then another, hardly even realizing when he was coming closer to the edge of the stage. He glanced back and caught himself just in time to save himself from a hard fall. What she was doing...what the hell was she doing? Even as he was staring at it with his own eyes, Michael could not seem to make his brain compute it, only knew that he had to do whatever was required of him to bring it to a halt. He stooped quickly to pick up the warped mic stand again.

The balance that Michael had been able to recover was yanked out from under him by a hand seizing him hard by the back of his shirt collar and pulling him down hard over the edge of the stage. Michael yelled as he was in mid-air without warning; the sound halted when all of the oxygen was driven from his lungs by his landing. He caught the floor flat on his back and had every single coherent thought driven from his brain by the back of his head striking hard wood. Michael heard his yell turn into a wheeze as the world went hazy-soft all around him.

A man leaned over Michael and grinned down at him in a way that immediately made every single one of Michael’s fight or flight bells begin to ring at once. He was blue eyes that glittered and absorbed the light, and long dreadlocks that, in Michael’s half-conscious state, looked like a halo falling around his face. He was not facing an angel, he knew immediately. All devils began with wings.

“Your mouth,” Michael muttered sluggishly as the devil smiled down at him. There were sharp points protruding over the man’s lower lip.

“Shh, brother, shh,” the man whispered down to him. He had a soothing, low tone in his voice that Michael would have wanted to listen to for hours if he had not already been treated to such a blatant display of what the man could really do. “You only have to worry about that for a minute.” He lunged down at Michael’s throat with the same snake-quick speed displayed by the woman on the stage.

Michael’s body was still able to function even when his mind was not. He threw up his arm desperately to save his throat and felt first the fabric of his jacket tearing under the impact of teeth that were not really teeth at all but fucking fangs, and then they were in his arm. Michael finally found air enough to yell again. It was excruciating, like being worried by the world’s most sentient dog, and worse: Michael swore that he could feel a burning racing up and down his arm. He gasped and struggled to jerk his arm from the man’s mouth. Blood ran down from both sides as he refused to let go.

“What the fuck?” Michael gasped, and swore that the devil grinned at him from his position drinking Michael’s own blood. Michael raised one of his booted feet and planted it into the man’s abdomen as hard as he was able, never mind that he had watched Casey break a very expensive guitar over a girl’s back without even managing to slow her down.

The devil made a soft oofing sound when Michael kicked him. He did slide his fangs free from Michael’s forearm with a wet popping sound that made Michael’s stomach flip and rocked back onto his heels, the corners of his mouth turning up. Michael swore that the man was on the verge of laughing as Michael got partway to his feet and leaned against the side of the stage, swearing. The burning in his arm was only growing worse with every second that passed as Michael tried to put pressure against the wounds and keep any more of his blood from rushing out.

“What the fuck are you?” he exploded at the man.

The devil himself threw back his head and finally gave voice to that laugh, with eyes so cold that Michael now wondered how he ever could have mistaken him for an angel at all. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he told Michael in a voice that was, against all odds, actually attempting to be reassuring. “It’s not going to be an issue for you.” He lunged forward; Michael’s attempt to shield himself with his injured arm was every bit as effective as a small child arguing against a bulldozer. Michael’s arm was grabbed so hard that he felt the bones grind against one another, drawing a cry from his mouth, and he was jerked forward. Breath that smelled of death and was still so cold, still too damned cold to have come from any living creature, ghosted over his face. Michael stared into the devil’s eyes and looked at his teeth as he tried to find any way at all that this situation was not going to end with his death, and he was not able to come up with any.

A gunshot rang out; maybe that would be the thing that did it. Michael gasped and jerked his head to the side as he swore that he felt something hot kiss the side of his neck in passing. No fucking way. But the devil that was holding him up yelped as the bullet slammed into his shoulder and threw out a rain of blood across them both. His grip slackened just enough for Michael to drive a booted foot into his thigh as hard as she could before he threw himself backwards and out of easy reach. Michael leaned back against the stage and held his burning arm against his chest as he stared out at the club rendered into chaos. The same people who had been cheering him on only a few moments before were sprawled out across the floor of the club, broken, bleeding. Those who were not dead yet would be soon. Michael had never even witnessed a relative die before and did not know how he could explain this knowledge just as surely as he knew that he was right, down deep, in his gut where it hurt.

The devil spun around, crouched low, and snarled. Michael followed his line of sight until he found the same man who had caught his attention upon entering the club earlier. The object of Michael’s momentary diversion was holding a handgun like he meant it and an expression of the deepest, purest hate that Michael had ever seen in his life. His hand was trembling, but so slightly that Michael did not see how that could possibly affect his aim as he pointed the gun at the devil.

Who smiled. “Missed the heart shot,” he said.

“Won’t do that again.” The hand stopped shaking altogether, the finger drew back against the trigger.

Behind them all, against the bar, the boy screamed. Michael jerked his head up and realized that the lithesome blonde from the door was leaning over him with her own teeth extended long and deadly-bright. And all around, people continued to die.

End Part Four

Continue to Part Five