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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 8/24
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
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven



Part Eight

The pain in Michael’s arm should have been abating at least a little bit as time wore on, and yet it was against all odds growing worse. He leaned back against the stretcher as the very first ambulance ride of his adult life raced on and said, “I could have driven myself.”

“And then passed out from blood loss halfway there, taken three other people out with you, and made me come pick your butt up, anyway,” the EMT answered crisply. She had, over the course of the thirty minutes or so that he had known her since she had first started cleaning up his arm as well as could be done at the scene and then checked in on him periodically as he waited for an ambulance to clear for those who were not mortally wounded (and, as she frequently let him know, made sure that he was not making good on his promise to slink off), proven herself to have an impressively low tolerance for bullshit. “And all after the end of my shift, too. You’re not a very nice person.” She leaned in low over his arm so that she could press more gauze to it, shaking her head. It was bleeding even more than the head wounds that he and his sisters had inflicted upon each other playing daredevils as kids, and it was proving slow to stop. Fucking burned, too. Like someone was grinding coals into the lacerations.

Another human being bit you, Michael told himself in faint amazement, not even sure if he could bring himself to believe it. Really fucking bit you. He wondered if this was what Casey had felt, in the seconds before...Before. He wondered if he even wanted to know. His mind was already busily knitting its protective walls, building for him a Before, an After, and the terrible Then. Scar tissue was knitting itself like Saran wrap over the Then and carting the details away before he could examine them too closely; it would not be too much longer before he was able to believe that he had not gone entirely insane.

“What’s your name?” Michael asked, watching the lights in the ambulance pick gold out of the EMT’s ponytail as she leaned over him. Maybe she was right about the blood loss thing; details were jumping out at him that he never would have noticed before, and the entire world felt as if it was moving just a half step too slow.

The EMT lifted her head far enough to present him with a wryly arched eyebrow. “Sara,” she replied, and that was when Michael realized that he had asked her in the lower, sex-tone that was almost predatory. He hadn’t noticed.

“I’m married,” he replied, turning his arm in her grasp slightly so that the ring would glint.

“And I have a girlfriend,” Sara told him calmly as she pressed yet another square of gauze to his arm. It began to turn red immediately. “Oh, no, you definitely could not have driven with this,” Sara muttered before she raised her voice again to benefit the both of them. “You’d be amazed by how few people that actually stops.”

“I wasn’t hitting on you,” Michael told her. Another eyebrow. “I wasn’t.” He hissed when she hit a tender spot on his arm. The blood was hardly even slowing down. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”

“No,” Sara said, sucking her lower lip between her teeth for a moment. “Are you a hemophiliac?”

“No,” Michael said with a touch of impatience, because this was not the first time that she had asked that, as if it was something that could possibly just slip his mind. “And, like I told you, my sisters and I were morons when we were young. If I had a bleeding condition, I would have known about it by the time that I was four.”

That still didn’t seem to soothe Sara. She said something beneath her breath that Michael did not catch--he had learned that she had a way of talking to herself like that--and addressed the driver ahead, “Miguel, how far?”

“Three minutes,” he answered back.

“I don’t think that you’re going to die before that,” Sara told him. “Doctors will get this stitched up and figured out like nobody’s business. How the hell did a dog get into a place like that, anyway? I thought it was pretty swank.”

“Wasn’t a dog,” Michael answered her. “It was a man.”

Sara rocked back onto her heels so that she could look at him. Michael could see his status changing in her eyes as she rethought how much blood he had lost, and he hated it. “Sir, I’ve seen human bites,” she told him. “This is not one of them.”

“And I’ve never actually had another human being attached to me by my arm before, but, you know, it’s really hard to mistake it for an animal when it happens,” Michael snapped back. He was testier than he intended to be as his mood took a sharp spike into the hostile and then back again fast enough to leave him with his head reeling. It had to be stress catching back up with him; he had seen several people die before his very eyes tonight, and doubtless there would be more police at the hospital who wanted him to relive it all over again. He sighed and looked away as the audience pulled to a halt.

“I can walk,” Michael protested as a wheelchair appeared almost immediately.

“Sir,” Sara said. There was a tone in her voice which made it clear that she was really calling him something else entirely. Michael rolled his eyes, but sat. His entire body was jangling with loose adrenaline and, in spite of how his arm continued to burn and ache, he thought that he could be doing laps around the hospital building while he waited for admittance far more efficiently than he could be sitting here.

“Baby!” A blonde figure who had been pacing back and forth anxiously by the entrance to the ER peeled away from the sparse crowd as soon as she noticed that he was there.

“Stace!” Michael ignored his nurse’s disapproving look and rose to his feet so that he could return Stacey’s hug as she rushed towards him. He had called her immediately after the police had arrived and told her which hospital he was going to, but it had gone to voicemail and they had been so pissed at each other when she had left that he had not known how long it would be before she checked her messages. Michael ignored the pain in his arm and gripped her tight so that he could inhale the scent of her. “I’m getting blood all over you,” he whispered a second later.

Stacey let out a laugh that sounded as if she really wanted to cry. “Michael, do you think I give a monkey’s shit about what you’re getting on me right now?” she asked.

And Michael laughed in spite of himself, his sounding much more real than Stacey’s had. “That’s crude, babe.”

Stacey answered by hugging him back hard enough to make his ribs creak until the nurse cleared her throat softly behind them. “Okay, okay.” She released him so that he could sit back down, but took up his good hand in her own immediately as the nurse wheeled him inside. “I got your message, and all that I could think, over and over again, that the last thing that we had done when we saw each other was have a fight.”

Michael squeezed back at Stacey’s hand, aware that her fingers were trembling. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here now, and we’re okay.”

Stacey made the nurse stop the wheelchair so that she could lean down and kiss him squarely on the mouth. Her hair tickled the sides of his face and, in this heightened state where he seemed capable of noticing half again as much detail as was normally possible, Michael wanted nothing more than to twist his fingers through her hair and deepen it. Maybe even take them both down to the neat tile floor while he was at it. He leaned back, a little shocked that his libido could still go there at a time like this, and caught the tail end of Stacey’s hurt expression.

“You’re angry at me,” she said.

“No, I’m not,” Michael said, though her face said that she did not believe it. What he was was shocked, and even a little scared. Where the hell did that come from?

Stacey sat beside him and held his hand while they waited in the ER for Michael to be admitted, and while he talked to the endless rounds of police officers who wanted to interview one of the small handfuls of witnesses who were neither hysterical nor seriously wounded. “No, it was not a dog,” Michael said so many times that he felt like beating his head against one of the room’s plastic chairs in frustration. “How the fuck do you think anyone would not have noticed a wild dog running through the crowd? It was a man. One of the people who...” And here Michael’s anger always failed him, as he had to stop and recall how Casey had fallen, and how his yell had sounded wet with blood rising into the back of his throat. Stacey rubbed at his shoulder. “One of the ones who killed everybody, he was the one who bit me.” If the glances being traded back and forth were anything to go by, Michael was only a few steps away from landing himself in a 72-hour psych evaluation, so he went on, getting his anger back, “Why do you keep asking me, if you don’t want the answers?”

“Because we need answers that make actual sense so that we can catch these monsters,” the officer interviewing him snapped back, his own frustration finally getting the better of him. That made Michael feel better, actually, more as if they were on a level playing field with one another.

Monsters. That was an excellent word for it. “Good luck doing that with whatever you want to hear.” Michael was finally, blessedly, called forth to get his arm stitched up while the officer went to talk to the other witnesses who had been brought to the same ER. He looked as if the prospect absolutely thrilled him.

The bleeding had finally slowed and then halted altogether while Michael had been sitting waiting to be admitted and trying to convince Los Angeles law enforcement that he had not lost his mind altogether. The edges were still raw and red, though, and had a slight puffiness to them as if they were already growing infected even after only a few hours. Michael thought that he was imagining things until he heard the doctor also make a displeased noise as he caught sight of them.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that this was a human bite, too,” he said. He looked up at Michael. “Humans have some of the filthiest mouths in the animal kingdom, you know. Makes me think that we’re related to Komodo dragons somewhere down the line.”

“It was a human.” Having used up all of his anger on the officer in the waiting room, Michael was sure that he only sounded frustrated and worn out at this point. Stacey, standing behind him, rubbed at his back. The doctor continued drawing the catgut thread in and out of Michael’s skin and said nothing. A painkiller had been administered first, and Michael felt the needle moving in and out of his skin as nothing more than a strange tug and release sensation, something that was just slightly disjointed from the rest of his experiences. It had made the ache fade away, at least, and for that Michael would be eternally grateful. No one said anything further until the wound was closed and then wrapped in gauze. The doctor placed an order of antibiotics and painkillers down to the hospital’s pharmacy, and Stacey volunteered to go wait for it almost before the words were out of his mouth. Michael thought that she was probably feeling guilty for the way that they had left things at the club. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do about that, outside of let it ride. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened. Michael was still trying to tell himself that there was nothing he could have done, either, even as images of Casey falling still filled his brain.

“Do the cops need to talk to me about anything else?” Michael asked the doctor in a low voice as the man packed up his supplies and rose.

The man paused and for a second seemed genuinely startled by the question. “I don’t suppose so,” he said. “You’ve already talked to them, haven’t you?”

“Endlessly.”

“I’m sure that they’re talking to other witnesses and victims,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell a nurse that you’re ready to be released. Since you don’t have any evidence of a head injury, I’m not going to recommend that you stay overnight, but don’t drive. Those meds that you’re going to be on tonight are no joke.”

“My wife’s here,” Michael said, leaning around the corner of the curtain and staring down the hallway as if he could see her when she was gone. “She’ll drive.”

“There you go.” The doctor left. Michael thought that he was probably secretly glad to have gotten one of the mild cases, rather than one of the people who had been ripped open. He lay back on the bed instead and stared up at the ceiling, the pattern of tiles there. A witness, a victim, the doctor had called him, and Michael guessed that was true. He had tried to fight, tried a lot harder than the average person could reasonably be expected to do. He had one everything that he could. He was not responsible.

That had been a lot easier to believe when he had not still been riding high on adrenaline.

“Hey, baby.” Stacey announced her reappearance with her voice and her hand upon Michael’s knee. He jumped before he could stop himself, and Stacey rubbed a circle into his skin, through the jeans. “You look like you need to go home.”

“God, yes.” Michael rose to his feet and then winced as the world tilted a little bit before it settled back into its proper place. Maybe Antonella the EMT had not been kidding around when she had said that he was losing a lot of blood. “More than anything else in the world.” He threw his good arm around Stacey’s shoulders and pulled her close, put his face into her hair. Stacey answered by embracing him back and touching her lips lightly, chastely, to the hollow of his throat.

“Here,” she said, pulling a bottle from her pocket and shaking out two pills. “Pharmacy tech said not to give you these until we were home, but I think that you’ve earned them and then some.”

“This is why you’re a goddess.” Stacey’s lips turned up slightly at the compliment, but she still looked strained. They hadn’t fixed anything, Michael was forced to admit, with this coming together that they were doing in a time of crisis. But maybe, if they were lucky, they had put it off long enough for both of them to decide if they really wanted to dig in and do the real work that would fix things.

Stacey drove them home while Michael leaned his head against the passenger window and stared at Los Angeles whipping by. Even now, a few hours before dawn, the city was still busy, the lights so bright that they pricked at his eyes. Michael did not know if it was the blood loss, the pain medication, or both, but he was feeling slightly dizzy and disjointed from his own body, like this mind was moving at one speed and the flesh at a lesser one that Michael already knew that he did not like at all. He took a deep breath and turned away from the window finally, rubbing at his mouth. He had just been through something that put polite phrases like “traumatic experience” to shame, it made sense that he would be rattled. Michael could feel Stacey watching him from the corner of her eye as she drove, but he did not turn his head to look at her.

“I’m not going in to work today,” Stacey said as she opened the door to their apartment and allowed them both entrance. Among familiar things, Michael could already feel his body relaxing and settling into itself again, leaving the shadow person from the car out there where he belonged. He touched at one of the pictures on the wall as Stacey continued, “I think that clients will understand under the circumstances.”

Michael turned, smiled at her. “Thank you.” Stacey smiled back. She did a good job; it was only a little awkward and crooked around the edges. We were doing so well, Michael thought in frustration. During those first few hours at the hospital, they had forgotten everything else, all of the bullshit, and actually been them again. Damn it, Michael wanted that back.

He went to Stacey instead, wrapped his arms around her and felt her doing the same to him in return. She tightened her grip when he first pressed his lips to her hair, then raised her chin so that he could kiss her. Stacey did not pull away until Michael deepened the kiss and then moved one of his hands further down on her back.

“Michael,” Stacey said. She was using the voice that she used on him whenever he was being ridiculous, but ridiculous in a way that she secretly liked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to get my wife turned on, if she doesn’t mind.” It was the lingering stain of everything else that had happened that night, it had to be, because Michael’s rational mind swore that Stacey did not smell or feel any differently than she always did, but there was something deeper and more primal inside of Michael which insisted that his brain was wrong. She was so small in his arms, and so warm, and there was no mistaking the fluttering beneath the skin whenever Michael lowered his lips to her neck. He nipped at the place where it ran closest to the surface and felt her jump.

“Easy, stud.” Stacey put her hand against his chest and pushed him back slightly. She was still amused, but now Michael could see concern coming into her eyes, too. He bit back his frustration as he knew that there was a talk coming. Why did they have to do that as soon as things were good again? They were both adults and knew that another fight would be coming down the pike sooner or later, so why couldn’t they just enjoy the moment while they had it? Why did Stacey always have to--

The surge of hostility that rose up inside of him from some place that he could not possibly name startled and frightened him. Something must have changed in his face, too, for Stacey’s expression immediately became one of pure worry. “Michael, baby, you’ve been through hell tonight, don’t you think you ought to get some sleep?” she asked him.

“Half of my band is dead,” Michael told her. “If I sleep, I’m just going to dream of them.”

Stacey’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open slightly. She knew the guys from the band where Michael’s mates, even when they were having their very ugliest fights there was an unspoken agreement between them that to speak disparagingly of them would be like insulting either of their families. “Oh, Michael,” Stacey said in a voice that bordered on heartbroken and made Michael wonder if he had not revealed more than he had actually intended to in his own. She held her arms out to him and kissed him back when he flowed into her, rubbing her hand along the place where his hair started on the back of his neck. It seemed to Michael that every possible physical sensation was coming back to him threefold, making him arch and gasp just slightly against Stacey’s mouth. He shook his head when she parted and gave him a quizzical look.

They made it to the bedroom, undressed quickly, and slid beneath the covers. Michael noticed that Stacey seemed terribly torn between wanting to take Michael’s injured arm between her hands and examine every inch of the bandages until she had them memorized, and between pretending that they were not there at all. He could have died there, in that club. It was a pure stroke of luck that he hadn’t. Neither one of them quite knew how to face that head-on.

Michael decided that he would face it by making love to the woman that he had married, the most blatant demonstration of life that he could think of, and daring the specter of death to find a way to rear its head here. He traveled down all of the well-known paths of her body and felt her shiver and cry out beneath him as he reached each landmark, her own hands making his skin feel like it was burning everywhere she touched. They had never been like this before, Michael decided, they could not have been like this before, because he had never noticed so much of his surroundings like neon signs before. The blood loss, the meds, Michael didn’t care, because it was one of the most intoxicating things that he had ever felt before in his life. He entered Stacey, finally, when they were both aching for it, and thought that he had never noticed before how very much smaller she was than he, how fragile.

Michael didn’t even realize what had happened until Stacey cried out. Even that sounded close enough to ecstasy that he did not stop until she began hitting his shoulders. “Michael, goddamnit, stop!”

“What?” Michael asked as he stopped his movements and leaned back on his elbows, still within her. He was close, he had been so goddamned close. That surge of...of rage was what it was, or near enough to make no practical difference, came up within him again. It was cold and fierce and out of control enough to start killing his erection immediately.

And if that was not enough to get him there, then surely the way that Stacey was clutching at her shoulder and looking at him with wide, horrified eyes was enough to do the rest of the work. “Christ, Michael,” she said. Her voice was shaking, and after a second Michael realized that she was close to tears.

“What is it?” Michael started to reach for her hand, to pull it away and see, only to stop when she flinched just slightly before he could reach her. He waited for her to move her hand out of the way instead. His stomach dropped.

There was a ring of indented flesh set into Stacey’s shoulder, in the clear and unmistakeable outline of a bite. It was already turning red enough to be black by the time the sun rose, Michael could tell, and knew that he was lucky that he had not broken the skin. “Fuck.” He reached out with fingers that were shaking slightly to trace the outline. Stacey tensed before she could control herself. He had made her afraid of him. Never, in all of the time that they had known each other, did Michael think that he would ever see the day when Stacey was afraid of him.

“I’ll get you some ice,” Michael said as he slid his legs over the side of the bed. He was already starting to settle into a raging case of blue balls, but finishing the sex was the very farthest thing from his mind. “Stace, I am so sorry, I had no idea what I was doing.”

Stacey nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line. “It’s okay,” she said, even though Michael could tell from where he was standing that it wasn’t. She touched at the mark with her fingers; she was as shocked to see it there as Michael was.

Where in the hell did that come from? Michael asked himself as he left the bedroom. The very kinkiest thing that he and Stacey had ever gotten into in the bedroom was a bit of light bondage, never...never anything that really hurt each other. Michael thought of the angry black buzzing that had risen in him twice now, and something inside of him turned cold.

Something inside of him turned colder still when, barely two steps outside of his bedroom door, he realized that he was walking straight into a gun.

End Part Eight

Continue to Part Nine