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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 11/24
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



Part Eleven

Theirs was not a place that had been made for prisoners. Now they had two. Syesha leaned up against the short wall that encircled the roof and pondered this, thinking that more had changed among them in the span of six hours than in the entire three months since Ramiele had been dead. It wasn’t just in the pure nuts and bolts of what they were doing. They had weapons, they were fortified, they knew how to hold people who did not particularly want to be held. If it came down to pure, practical possibility, then Johns could consider himself well and truly fucked: they were not going to be letting him go until they were good and ready to do so, and that meant that he was not going to be leaving this place until he was in a body bag.

No, Syesha realized with a jolt. It was not the bloody-minded possibility of it that she was busily getting herself turned and re-turned into knots over. It was the morality of the thing. Deep within her heart of hearts, Syesha found that she could not quite be convinced that they were doing the right thing.

“This is stupid,” she said aloud without caring that only crazy people ever spoke to themselves on rooftops with a pair of guns strapped to their hips. “You’re being stupid.” Michael was a person for now, but those days were numbered--numbered in the single digits, if Syesha wanted to be perfectly frank with herself about it. When that was yanked away from him, he would be nothing more than one of them One of them meant, on good days when Syesha was willing to fool herself, or try to, that he would a rabid dog, running wild and ripping out throats without particularly caring who they belonged to or what kind of carnage he was actually leaving in his wake. On her bad days, she understood the truth: he would be a creature of pure evil who chose his victims in such a way as to maximize the amount of hurt that he would produce. He would be the stalking antithesis of everything that was good.

Syesha knew all of these things. She still could not bring herself to give the vote that would change things in David’s favor and just end this goddamned game already. If that made her a coward, then fine. She had been worse things in her life. Standing in the place where David came up every time that he wanted to brood was not going to help her any. Syesha made a disgusted sound and spun away, back towards the door.

Carly met her halfway up the stairs. She was not quite meeting Syesha’s eyes; Syesha thought that this was because Syesha had recently stopped hiding her impending crack-up and instead had begun to wear it on her sleeve where anyone who cared to look could see. At least Carly had, over the course of the past few hours that Syesha had in which to really judge, stopped her endless quest to save.

“The kid?” Syesha asked Carly shortly.

Carly lifted her shoulders into a shrug. “Sleeping,” she said. “Which is still better than flying the coop.”

Syesha shook her head and tugged at one of her curls in frustration. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Vampires don’t target individuals. They don’t care.”

Another shrug from Carly. “I gave up on trying to figure out why they want any of the things that they want years ago,” she said, and Syesha remembered that when she had first met Carly the woman’s finger had still been white with the place where a wedding band had once been. Syesha had never asked about this husband that she had never met and that Carly didn’t speak of, and Carly had never volunteered. It was shocking to realize that she might not be the only one who understood all of the intimate pathways of grief.

“What about David?” Syesha asked. He had been avoiding her for hours, ever since he had brought their prisoner back. Syesha thought that it had something to do with being the deciding vote. Maybe he could face Carly because she was doing the most idealistically right thing and standing by it, and not Syesha because she was only one or two nudges away from being in the exact same place that David was now, and that mirror was never a fun one to look into.

“David’s hiding,” Carly answered easily. Syesha was startled to hear such a blunt admission, until she remembered that David and Carly were practically related, with the affection that they shared for one another. Maybe when you were blood you stopped having to pay attention to such polite lies. “He’s taking this very hard.”

Syesha did not see how, when they were deliberately stopping and waiting for Michael to become truly dangerous to them all before they finished him off. If they were making any mistakes here, then surely they were making them too far in the direction of compassion. Maybe he remembered Ramiele, too. Maybe he remembered how hard it was to tell where the lines began and ended, sometimes. She twitched and walked past Carly, back down the stairs.

The room where Michael was being kept for the duration until the inevitable happened was not fortified or guarded with lasers or anything like that, though that might have been a wise decision. They did not often do this kind of thing. It was just a room, used for storage and hastily cleared out in the span of time between one of Michael’s bursts of resistance and while he was drawing his strength for another. There were no windows. Syesha had insisted upon that, and ignored the curious looks that David and Carly both had given her. Beyond that, the only thing keeping Michael inside was the sturdy metal padlock on the sturdy metal door. Syesha had a mind that this place had been used for holding something valuable, weapons or computers, and that was the reason behind so many of the doors being metal rather than wood. It was more than strong enough to hold a fledgling vampire. Michael was not going to get any farther than fledgling.

Even though she knew it was stupid, Syesha could not stop herself from gathering a few supplies and then going to Michael’s temporary holding place. The padlock creaked as she juggled her supplies with one hand and unlocked it with the other; she wondered if Michael inside listened and heard. If his hearing was that good yet.

“You’re an idiot,” Syesha said to herself, and wondered if Michael was able to hear that, too. She was being treated to a play-by-play view of what Ramiele must have gone through as she turned and, rather than thinking like a warrior and just ending the goddamned thing, probably saving a lot of suffering on both sides, she could not make herself look away.

Michael was standing on the far side of the room when Syesha entered. She made a note of this; if he was too far along into the change, then he would have been clamoring at the door and for her throat as soon as he realized that there was someone there. He would not have been able to help himself.

The good sign still came with a promissory note attached to it, however. Michael did not look as if he was too far evolved into his new species yet, but he was evolving. It only took Syesha a second’s glance across his body to see it. He was pale and sweating; it caught the light every time that he moved. The same light that he could no longer fully face, as if they burned his eyes. They ought to. They were UV bulbs, installed in every room in this place as soon as the group moved in. Never say that they did not operate with paranoia in mind.

“Do you want me to dim them?” Syesha asked when Michael had realized that she was even there. And never say that she would lose her capacity to go from the machine that she was so proud of into an unabashed fool with scarcely a moment’s notice, either. She made note of the fact that it had taken Michael more than a handful of seconds to realize that she was there. The thirst must be starting to pull at him, too, to divide his attention like that.

Michael gave her an ugly look with his chin slightly lowered, looking more like a dog than he probably cared to realize. “No,” he said finally. “No, they’re not bothering me.”

He knows exactly what’s happening to him, and it scares the hell out of him, Syesha thought. What ought to have been a comfort to her, that at least they didn’t have a sociopath locked up in here, wasn’t. It was worse when it was a decent person.

“Here.” Syesha set down her supplies in the center of the room, trusting in her hand upon her gun to keep Michael back against the far wall, and then stepped back. She had brought with her a bowl of water, the water tepid so that he could not scald her by throwing it and the bowl plastic so that it could not be broken and used as a weapon, along with clean cloths and a tee shirt that had once been David’s before Syesha had stolen it, she could not now remember why. There was still blood streaking Michael’s lower face and, sweat or not, he was also shivering. She hated to have her body on display when she was feeling like hell, too.

Michael proved her right by going after David’s shirt first and pulling it quickly over his head. He paused midway through, long enough to wonder if his sense of smell had not also begun to sharpen so that he could scent David on it. He dipped one of the cloths into the water next and quickly cleaned the blood away from his chin and neck. The wound that had put that blood there was already gone. Syesha wondered if he realized that, too.

“What’s going on here?” Michael demanded as soon as he was done. Syesha was so busy studying him that it took her a second to realize that he had even spoken. She needed to see this so that she would know what Ramiele, who had simply disappeared on a hunt one night and then popped up again one week later as someone else entirely, had gone through. She needed to know so that she could finally end it.

Like you’re ever going to end it.

Syesha swallowed hard and realized that Micahel was staring at her, and that he was having less and less success with every second that went by when it came to hiding the predator in that stare. She put her hand back upon her gun to remind him that they weren’t fooling around here. He obliged by taking a step back.

“I’m sorry, what?” Syesha asked. She had to clear her throat first in order to do it and even had a second to wonder what the hell had gone so horribly wrong with this plan that she was not being polite to monsters with their training wheels still on.

“I said, what the hell is going on here?” Michael repeated. A growl had entered his voice; Syesha titled her head to one side and made note of it. “You just grab people off of the streets and throw them in here to fit your fantasies? And then, what, you’re just going to let me go when it turns out to be horseshit?” Michael’s laugh was bitter. Syesha wondered if it was meant to mock the very idea that they were going to let him go, or the idea that Carly, David, and herself were the ones engaging in flights of fancy right now at all.

“The lights are hurting your eyes a lot more than you want me to know,” Syesha told him rather than answering directly. “Maybe they were just itching when you first came in here, so you thought that it might just be dust, but they outright fucking ache now. It’s starting to bother your skin, too. You’re sweating and you know that you’re running a fever, but you still couldn’t get that shirt on fast enough. Because it meant that there was less of your skin for the light to touch.”

Michael ran a hand through his hair. Damp with sweat, it stood up on end. “I don’t know if I’m hot or cold,” he said. “I can’t tell.”

“I’m sorry,” Syesha said, and meant it. I shouldn’t have come in here, she thought to herself. If she had thought that watching him change would help her gather herself to finally end it the next time that she saw Ramiele, then clearly she had been horribly wrong. “I wish that this wasn’t happening.”

“I’m not a monster,” Michael told her. “That’s impossible.”

“You’re not one yet,” Syesha answered him. I am a machine. Even though it was foolish, she slid down with her back against the door until she was in a sitting position, her gun out of its holster and balanced on her lap instead. Michael stayed on the far side of the room, panting and wild-eyed, before he mirrored her and settled into a sitting position against the far wall himself. He was completely exhausted, Syesha realized as she looked at the dark circles that had formed beneath his eyes in the span of just a few hours. Syesha could not look away.

“We’ve been running together for about three years,” Syesha told Michael. He looked at her for a few seconds before he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, and Syesha realized that he was inviting her to take his mind off of things for the time being with a story. Almost begging for it, in fact, and as much as Syesha swore that she was here for her own sake and not for his, she could not help but feel a pang at that. “There used to be more of us.” Fully double the number, actually, but Michael did not need to know that. Even if he was going to get no farther than this room, a vampire did not need to know how vulnerable they were. “It’s hard to remember how we all came together, now. It just kind of happened. David and Carly were already here when I joined, along with this guy named Justin. He had been doing it a lot longer than David and Carly, so he taught them the ropes, and he taught me.” Quietly sat her down while her roommate’s blood had still been drying on the walls of their apartment--one night stand gone wrong, was the official police report, and Syesha would never get over the irony of that--explained, what was really going on, and asked her if she wanted to do anything about it. As if Syesha could possibly give any other answer but the affirmative.

“Taught you how to do what?” Syesha thought that Michael only asked because Syesha had paused, and that was simply the way that conversations were carried out. He didn’t know that she had paused because she was thinking of how Ramiele herself had joined less than three days after Syesha herself had, both of them the victims of a really nasty outbreak in Tampa, and that they had clung to one another immediately as the newest kids and the ones whose grief was still the freshest.

“Hunt you,” Syesha said simply. Michael opened his eyes again. “Hunt all vampires, and kill as many of them as possible before they can kill anyone else.”

“Do you think that you’re being soothing here?” Michael’s face was even paler now than it had been when Syesha had first entered the room, and a shudder ran across his whole body as she watched. She still could not bring herself to look away, convinced as she was that two sets of dead and dying, both Michael and Ramiele, deserved someone to document what the transition was like. Even if she would in the end not even be able to speak to the others about what she was doing here and it would remain in her memory alone. Syesha attributed the shudder to horror at what was happening to him and went on.

“I’m not trying to be soothing,” Syesha said. “I would only do that if there was a way out of this, but there’s not. Your ass is going to have to remain smokeless, sorry.” Michael looked at her with bleak eyes, and Syesha felt a pang of guilt. “Look at it as terminal cancer. All that you can try to do is make peace with it before you go.”

Michael made a snarling sound that barely resembled a human noise at all and lunged to his feet. Alarmed, Syesha jumped up, too, thinking, He’s gotten so fast. This was a mistake, this was a huge mistake, and she made sure that her finger was on the trigger and the safety was disengaged as she reached behind her for the door handle.

“Is that why you’re telling yourself that you’re here?” Michael yelled at her. It was a small space, and the noise boomed and echoed in ways that it would not have on the main floor outside. With Michael’s face twisted in anger, Syesha saw the monster that he was going to be. She hoped that he saw it, too, so that he could finally realize what she and hers were trying to prevent. “So that I can come to terms with it?” He stalked closer. The raised gun did not do a single thing to deter him, and Syesha thought again, Mistake, mistake, mistake. She fired a shot as Michael finally snapped and lunged at her. He was fast, though, and the space was small, and Syesha knew as soon as her finger jerked backwards that it was going to go wild. She slammed back hard against the door with Michael on top of her. Michael’s mouth was inches from her own, his lips pulled back from his teeth in rage. They were still blunt enough to be called teeth rather than fangs, but Syesha did not know enough about the virus that caused vampirism to be sure when it would go live. It was possible that Michael could turn her with a careless nip even now.

What had once been fear finally became outright terror. Syesha made a short, strangled sound that had wanted to be a scream before she had swallowed it back as Michael whispered to her, “No, I think that you’re here just for you,” and slammed her wrist back hard against the door in an effort to make her drop the gun. She would not turn, she would not allow it, she would not become a monster inside of her own skin. Syesha let the scream that wanted vent to rise out of her chest only when she was sure that it was going to be a sound of rage rather than of fear. She bucked against Michael’s hands, but, God, sick or not he was already so strong. Syesha screamed again to keep the panic at bay and then, when Michael was still blinking a little bit in befuddlement over how vocal she had suddenly become (and Syesha would not allow herself to think of how innocent a gesture it was when he did that, how much of a hint towards the nice man that he had surely been), and then drove her forehead forward as hard and as fast as she could. Not into his forehead, that was for television shows and only ended with both parties having aching skulls, but up from a position down below, aiming to do as much damage to his mouth and nose as she possibly could. Syesha felt teeth graze at her scalp, and for a few seconds her heart stopped, but she still hit him hard enough to startle him into letting her go. Syesha used those few seconds of distance to strike him in the jaw with the most punishing roundhouse that she had, and then follow that up with a kick to the solar plexus that would have knocked every ounce of air that he had straight out of his chest if he had still been fully human. She did not know how much his oxygen needs had come to resemble a vampire’s, and how much they were still like a human’s. Neither did she care.

Michael fell back and to the floor. The bowl of water flipped over and went everywhere as Syesha whirled for the door. She had shimmied out of it and slammed it shut behind her before Michael even had time to rise to his feet. The lock made a loud clanging sound as she shut it; there was already tears standing out in Syesha’s eyes.

Mistake, mistake, mistake, she could not stop chanting to herself, whenever she was not, desperately, saying over and over again, I am a machine.

Syesha fled towards her room and, her vision blurring, only just managed to dart to the side before she would have slammed directly into David’s chest. She sensed him reaching out to grab for her arm and calling her name, but all of the powers of heaven could not have stopped her.

She still barely made it to her doorway before she heard someone say, “Syesha?” Whirling, she found Carly standing there, staring at her with an open mouth. Syesha was barely able to get herself under control enough to say, “I want to change my vote.”

End Part Eleven

Continue to Part Twelve