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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 10/24
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
Part Nine



Part Ten

David woke with an aching head and the deep sense that his life had just slid sideways on him with no hope of ever bringing it back to rights again. He opened his eyes, stared around the room that he was in and the bed that he was on in confusion for several minutes before his brain was able to piece together everything that had happened for him. After that, David wanted those minutes back.

All three of them were dead. David ran the words through his mind, begged them to make sense, tried again when they refused. “Dead,” he said aloud. Dead because vampires, actual vampires, had gotten it into into their heads that there was something about him that was special and that they needed, and they had used his family as a way to try to get to him.

Syesha had a private bathroom. It was a good thing, because David hardly made it there before he was falling into his knees and being violently sick. He leaned his forehead against the cool porcelain afterwards and tried to cry, but his eyes remained stubbornly dry and unaffected. He had probably done all the crying that he was going to manage in his entire life, earlier.

David rinsed his mouth out in Syesha’s sink when he was sure that he had nothing left to vomit but bile and looked at himself in her mirror. He had been sleeping for hours, it felt like, but there were still dark circles beneath his eyes and a certain waxy hollowness to his cheeks. He looked like someone who had just exited a war zone.

That was funny, David thought as he leaned down to spit out another mouthful of water. He hadn’t made it out yet.

David was about to leave when he noticed that there were two sets of makeup on Syesha’s bathroom counter, and two hairbrushes, too. The two women had been wearing makeup when they had entered the club earlier, though David now thought that they had done that more out of a sense of urban camouflage than anything else. Curious without being able to say why, David picked up first one makeup kit, then the other. The first one had been designed for someone with Syesha’s skin tone, but the second had been designed for someone with much lighter and more golden skin. It could not have been Carly’s any more than it could have been Syesha’s. Neither could the second hairbrush have been hers, for David leaned close and saw several long, straight dark hairs that were still several shades lighter than either of theirs.

God, David thought miserably as he exited the bathroom. There’s more of them around here somewhere. He looked around Syesha’s room with more interest, now that he was not wandering through it in a state of grief-shock. Syesha had a narrow bed shoved against one wall and a chair over which a gunbelt hung, a dresser and a bedside table. There was a book on the table. David drifted closer and realized that Syesha had been reading on tactics of the Vietnam war.

How to fight a guerilla war against an enemy who’s a lot bigger than you are, David thought. Home team advantage and nothing else. He somehow didn’t think that Syesha’s group saw themselves as the United States in the vampire versus human conflict.

Beyond that, there were no personal affects to mark the room at all. Anyone could have lived there, or no one. David shivered, wrapped his arms around himself, and was just about to leave when he heard the sound of several voices raised at once from the common area.

Carly, Syesha, and Cook were all standing with their hands on their hips, save for the one hand that Cook already had on his gun. That gun was pointed unswervingly at a man who was wearing nothing more than drawstring sweatpants and a pair of running shoes, and who had dried blood on his mouth and chin. David had to stare at him very hard before he stopped merely looking familiar and finally clicked for David: the singer of that band back at the club, before everything had gone to hell and then some. David had hardly made this connection before the man stopped staring at Cook like he would maybe like to pull Cook’s arm off and beat him with it and made eye contact with David instead. David could tell that the man recognized him, too, in the way that his eyebrows suddenly drew together.

“Is the kid a hostage, or was he some kind of bait?” the man asked, interrupting the argument that had already been going on. He addressed Cook; while his eyes skipped over Carly and Syesha and certainly did not seem to be overflowing with affection for either of them, David could tell right away that Cook was the one he really hated.

“You don’t even start to know what we’re doing here,” Cook told him in a voice that was just as growling and dangerous as the man’s own, and since Cook was the one holding the gun, David figured that that made him the winner.

“This is completely insane, David,” Carly said, turning the conversation back towards its original path. David drifted closer with wide eyes as he tried to figure out what that path actually was. It did not appear to be making anyone in attendance very happy.

“I couldn’t do it,” Cook answered her. “I wanted to, I know that I should have, but I couldn’t. Not with his wife there.”

“Do what?” David asked, even though the leaden feeling in the center of his stomach told him that maybe this was not going to be a nice answer.

Even though her hands were on her hips just like everyone else’s, Syesha had looked much more stricken than actually angry ever since David had entered the room. She was staring at the singerl like he carried the plague, though David had no idea why. The man looked a little pale and sick to David’s eyes, with tiny beads of sweat standing out as his hairline that were picking up the light, but David guessed that this was mostly just because Cook was holding a gun on him and looking like it wouldn’t bother him a whole lot to use it. David imagined that that would be making him sweat, too. He didn’t understand why everyone didn’t just explain to the man what was going on. He would freak out, like David had freaked out, but he would cope with it. He hadn’t even had anyone die on him that night.

David had to close his eyes suddenly against another terrible wave of that sickness. “Do what?” he asked again as he realized that several moments had gone by and still no one had answered his original question.

Syesha twitched and seemed to realize that David was there for the first time. “Come on, kid,” she said, taking his arm. She would have led him away if David had not dug in his feet hard and refused to go. “This isn’t a conversation that you want to be here for.”

“I’m not a kid,” David protested automatically. It was true. Maybe he had been one at the beginning of the night, numbers on his driver’s license or not, but that had all been purged out by blood hours before. “I want to stay.”

Syesha leaned back, looked at him. David had a feeling that he was being assessed as short, slight, looking even younger than he actually was, and he hated that even as he could not do anything to change it. “All right,” Syesha finally said. “Your fate is tied up in all of this, too.” She didn’t say that like she was doing him any favors. David shifted his weight from one foot to the other and tried to look as he wasn’t considering changing his mind.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here,” Carly told Cook. She gestured towards the singer, as if there was any kind of doubt as to who she was referring to; hel shifted his glower onto her in response. The singer’s face was very pale, underneath the blood, and as well as he was handling it, David still got the feeling that hel was as scared as David himself. Immediately, he felt a bond to the singer.

“What else was I supposed to do?” Cook asked her. He made a helpless gesture that David privately thought was very unwise, given the gun that he had not yet put down and all. “He’s still human. That’s not something that I could decide on my own.”

David now definitely thought that there was a conversation going on over his head here, and he could tell by the way that the singer had gone suddenly still that he felt it, too. They both stared hard at Cook as Cook said, “So we have to decide. As a group.”

“He gets out after turning, he’s going to kill a lot of people,” Carly said softly. She sounded as if she was halfway convinced towards what Cook was very carefully dancing around, only to shake her head. “But if we do it before, it’s murder.”

That was a message that David and the singer could both read loud and clear. David gasped softly and stepped back a step, stopped only by Syesha’s hand on his shoulder. “You wanted to participate,” she reminded him softly.

“Yeah, but I’m a dumb kid,” David answered back, equally as softly, because there was a hush to the air in the room that was almost holy. He didn’t know why Syesha was talking to him at all, when she seemed to talk to the rest of her team only when she had no other choice; there was a bond of shared experience between them, somehow.

These were thoughts best saved, David decided a bare second later, for moments when he was not fairly certain that cold-blooded murder was being discussed in front of him.

The singer had come to the same conclusion that David had, and if anything even quicker. “Wait a minute here,” he said. “I think that I’ve played along nicely enough--”

“I had a gun to your head,” Cook interrupted him.

“In spite of that, not because of it,” the singer snarled, actually legitimately snarled. He seemed taken aback by it less than a second later. “I haven’t done anything to any of you, come on.” There was genuine fear in his voice, too, beneath that low and simmering anger.

“It’s not about what you did to us, sweetheart,” Carly told him, and sounded just as heartbroken when she pronounced the endearment as she did when she called David by it. “It’s what you will do. After you turn.”

“After I turn into what?” The singer sounded as if he was on the verge of screaming. He spun away, ran a savage hand through his hair. The way that Cook jerked the gun up higher only made him scowl. “If you’re going to kill me, anyway, then that’s not much of a threat, is it?” The singer’s voice cracked just slightly, and David thought again; as scared as I am. He held his breath.

“A vampire,” Cook said simply, without embellishment. Even hours after learning and accepting that there were whole worlds and worlds of things that he did not understand about how the universe really worked, David still gasped. The singer went paler still, when he was already the color of milk, and looked around at all of them in turn.

“You’re all insane,” he said. “Every last goddamned one of you.” But his voice faltered halfway through, and David thought, He already knows all of this, on some level. He peeked at the faces surrounding him and realized that they had all reached the same conclusion. It was not comforting, to know that he was thinking on the same level as people who were actually contemplating murder.

“Someone bit you in that club, didn’t they?” Carly could work miracles with her voice, David was already figuring out, could pull down order out of chaos and make people who had been holding knives to one another’s throats put their weapons away and go wash their hands for dinner. It was because she was one of the very sanest out of a bunch of certified lunatics, probably, but even her charms could not diffuse this situation. The singerl calmed down about halfway, from a Level Ten to make a 6.5 if they were all lucky, and looked at her sideways. He did not speak. Carly waited for him to have his chance, and then went on, “And no one believes you, but you know that it happened.”

“They all kept telling me that it was a dog,” the singer said, and let out a short and mirthless laugh. “Like a dog has fucking dreadlocks.” He still looked terrified. He also looked as if he needed Carly to keep speaking, physically needed it, to confirm what he already knew. David took a closer look at the pallor that marked the singer’s cheeks. Under the light and with ample time to study it, he no longer thought that it was simple and understandable human fear. He thought that it was something else. And he thought that maybe the singer already knew it, too.

“You’re going to turn into a vampire, Michael,” Carly went on in that same terribly compassionate tone, the same one that could talk potential suicides down from their ledges. “You’re going to turn into a monster that lives on blood and kills people for fun. I’m sorry. That’s what happens when a vampire bites you, and doesn’t kill you outright. There’s nothing that any of us can do to stop it.”

Nothing at all. David’s internal temperature dropped and kept dropping without any sign that it was going to stop soon, while he fought back hard at the urge to rub his shoulder where a fresh set of puncture wounds were hidden beneath his new, borrowed clothes. Every time that he thought that this was it, he had been pushed absolutely as far as he could possibly be expected to without going crazy, there was a new place. But I don’t feel bad, David thought, and followed it up immediately with, You were bitten after him, too. He stayed silent and continued to watch everything that was going on around him with wide eyes.

Michael shook his head. “You’re all crazy,” he insisted again. “I just...okay, a man bit me, but big fucking deal. That’s worth some stitches and a round of antibiotics. This is just...” Michael shook his head, shifted around so that the flickering lights above were not hitting his eyes quite so fiercely. “This is the beginning of an infection, that’s all.”

All three of the potentially crazy people who were holding David hostage, too, lest he forget, looked at Michael without speaking for several long moments. Carly was the only one who looked even close to compassionate. Cook looked as if he just wanted to end this as soon as possible, and Syesha looked as if she was holding onto her very sanity with a white-knuckled grip.

“Vote,” Cook said. “Right now. If we’re going to do this, then...” He shook his head. “I’m not going to make this decision by myself, but I’m voting yes.”

“No,” Carly answered instantly. Cook looked at her in something very akin to betrayal. She shrugged her shoulders and lifted her chin. “There are lines. There have to be. If we start killing people before they actually turn, then that’s running right over a great big one.”

“Holy fucking shit.” Michael took a big step backwards and gave the gun that Cook pointed at him an incredulous look, as if he could not even believe that Cook was still trying this nonsense and pretending that it was going to work.

“Fine,” Cook responded, his voice tight. David didn’t think, he knew, that if it was not for the presence of Michael and himself, the whole group would be devolving into a full argument right then and there.

“We wait until after he turns,” Carly continued. “Maybe it’s just a fine line, but goddamnit, it’s one that matters.” She looked towards Syesha, who still looked as if someone had just kicked her in the face and she had not quite recovered yet. “Sy? Your vote?”

Syesha jerked. stared at Michael. Michael seemed to realize that she was his last chance, for he stared at her in mute appeal. “We can’t,” Syesha said. David thought that she was issuing a simple declarative--murder was wrong, they would not do it, the end--until she cleared her throat and shook her head. “We can’t just kill him before we’re sure. We have to be absolutely sure.” David was one more time made aware of history that no one had bothered to fill him in on as Cook and Carly exchanged a look between themselves. Syesha caught the tail end of it, too, for her expression hardened. “If we’re going to kill him, we have to wait until he’s fully turned. Until there’s no mistaking what he is.”

Cook nodded and relaxed. He was the only one in the room who seemd more comfortable now that a decision had been made. Michael looked as if he had been struck by electricity, while David was furiously thinking that he should have stayed at his house and waited for the cops. His whole family was dead, and he was in the company of people who were, from where he was standing, no better than the ones who had murdered them. The world began to tilt from one side to the other.

“When you’re sure--you’re talking about murdering me!” Michael exclaimed. He was still wearing no shirt, he was still so terribly pale, and he still had dried blood flaking on his chin and the skin around his mouth. David could nearly believe that he was a monster, in that moment. But still. But still. To borrow Carly’s phrase, there were lines, and from where David was standing this group had crossed them all so very long ago.

“It won’t be murder,” Cook corrected him, staring at Michael with eyes that were made worse by the fact that they were so very calm. “You’re going to die of natural causes long before that. We’re just going to deal with your body when the time comes.”

Something seemed to break in Michael then, something that David was frankly amazed had even lasted that long. “You’re all fucking insane,” he said again, and spun towards the exit, wherever that might be. Cook lunged for him; Michael put his fist hard into Cook’s mouth, or tried to. Cook saw the blow coming and twisted so that Michael’s knuckles only skimmed along the edge of his jaw. It still looked to be a close fight, though, until Syesha leapt in herself. Michael seemed hesitant to hit a woman, even when his life might very well be on the line. Syesha did not have that hesitancy.

Seeing the one person in his whole place that he thought he might actually be able to trust descend into such an act of violence was suddenly more than David could handle. He spun and bolted, not even caring where he was going so long as it was away. He bolted up the first series of stairs that presented itself, only dimly aware of the footsteps that were following him, and did not stop until he reached the roof. Dead end. Well, he might have known, what with the going up and all. David still doubled over and put his hands against his knees as he struggled to get his breath back. His lungs were made of solid lead within his chest, stubborn tears would not stop trickling out from the corners of his eyes no matter how tightly he crushed them shut, and it was all. Just. Too much. David did not even bother turning his head to acknowledge the person who had come up onto the roof with him.

“You’re the second person that I’ve followed up here over the last few days,” Carly said. She leaned her weight back against the doorframe, very carefully giving him his space. Not too much, though. David thought with a wry cynicism that shocked him and that he would not even have believed himself capable of hours before. She was making sure to stay between him and the door at all times, for one thing. His father had used to have a saying: just enough rope to hang yourself with. It burned in David’s mind and brought up fresh tears to burn in the back of his throat now.

“I want to go,” David said to her, not caring that he sounded young and scared and absolutely nothing like the man that he kept insisting to everyone that he was ready to be. “Please, I just want to leave.”

Carly looked as heartbroken as he did, was the hell of it. “I know,” she said. “I know that you do. But we can’t let you leave until we figure out why the vampires think that you’re so special.”

“I’m not special,” David insisted, and had to fight back what undoubtedly would have been a very childish urge to stomp his foot. “I don’t want to be, I’m no one.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Carly told him. “No one ever wants to be special. That usually doesn’t go far towards saving them.”

David stood there and stared at her, feeling his bitten shoulder burn through his jacket without being able to dare reach his hand out to rub at it, and knew that she was right.

End Part Ten

Continue to Part Eleven