InsaneJournal

AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 12/24
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



Part Twelve

Michael’s chest felt as if someone had just hit him one truly excellent blow with a sledge hammer. He slumped against the far wall that Syesha had nearly managed to kick him into, panted harshly, and fought with everything that he had to bring his racing thoughts back under his control again, creeping closer to panic with every second in which they refused to obey him. All that he could think of was blood, all that he could think of was her blood, now that it had been so close and yet so far at the same time. There had been only centimeters of skin separating him from taking it. Centimeters, and a tiny little thing called murder.

Michael drew his knees up to his chest and buried his head in his hands as he made a gasping noise that he hardly recognized as himself. He had wanted to hurt her more than he had ever wanted anything else in his entire life as he had held her pinned against the door. He had wanted to take her apart one piece at a time and lick every drop of blood from her body. And worse, even after she was gone, there was still nothing else that he could think of.

Michael could smell the spilled water on the floor as it flowed closer to his feet. It was not even close to what he wanted.

His breath coming so fast in his chest that he was on the verge of hyperventilating, Michael leapt up to his feet again so that he could pace around the small space that had been afforded to him. She had been right, he was not sure how much longer he could stand the lights. They had been like a bad allergy attack when he had first entered, but now he could not even raise his eyes to look at them. The longer that they struck at his exposed skin, the more that they were coming to feel like tattoo needles.

“This isn’t happening,” Michael told himself. He tried to ignore how much his voice was shaking. It’s all true, and you’re turning into a vampire.

“No, I’m not!” Michael yelled, and then had no other choice but to let out the laugh of the just this side of hinged as he realized what he had done. Every single possible emotion that a person ought to be capable of running through at a time like this, Michael was getting them all at once, and he was left with no room to think about even the simplest of tasks. Like escape. Like what would happen if--drop the ‘if’, my boy, we’re a little late for that--if</i> his captors were right, once he escaped.

Michael leaned back against his wall and pulled furiously at the clean white gauze that still encircled his arm, which had not stopped burning for one single second since this whole ordeal had started. His mouth was already healed from where that lunatic had struck him. Michael kept telling himself that he did not have to believe it for as long as he was denied a mirror in which to take a good, long look at himself, but he still ran his tongue along his bottom lip and knew. Fine. So let him evaluate the wound that he could see without the benefit of a mirror, and he would take his answer from that.

Michael tore the last of the bandages off, threw them to the side, and stared down at an arm that had had teeth embedded in it only a few hours before. The wound looked as if it was a few weeks old, at least; the stitches were surrounded by taut, angry-looking flesh that clearly did not need them any longer and wanted nothing more than their removal. But it still hurt. God, it still hurt, like there were bees beneath his skin. Michael could not keep himself from drawing his lips back and away from his teeth.

All of the air in his lungs flew out on a whistling gasp. Michael could not stop himself from whirling around and kicking out at the metal door with every ounce of strength that he had available to him. A tremendous gonging sound and a dent left behind in the door’s surface told him that that answer was not what it had once been, either.

Before the noise had even had time to fade away, Michael could hear someone opening the lock on the other side. He had been able to hear it when Syesha had been opening it, too, and maybe that ought to have been his first clue. Michael backed up as he listened to the sound of the breathing on the other side. Not Syesha, this time around. She had left in too much of a state to possibly be that calm now.

David slid through the doorway, and Michael changed his mind. Maybe David’s breathing was only so level and flat as a result of the extreme force of will that he was exercising in order to keep it that way, because those were some of the flattest and coldest eyes that Michael had ever seen.

“What did you say to her?” David asked without preamble. There was no need for him to specify which “her” he was referring to.

The absolute last thing that Michael needed when it felt as if he was hanging onto his sanity with a white-knuckled grip that might slip at any moment was for one of the people who had locked him in this room in the first place to have the audacity to demand answers out of him. Michael did not care what he was turning into; if any questions were to be asked here, it was still going to be the other way around. He surged forward with his lips pulled back from his teeth and only barely stopped when David raised his gun. He would not give Michael that second to throw the shot wild, Michael knew. And if he was really going to be what they said he was--there was a part of him that, even with Syesha’s blood so close in his nostrils, could not believe it--maybe that was for the best.

“What did I do to her,” Michael repeated, half to himself, as he raised his hands in surrender and fell back against the wall. “Like she’s the victim.” He raised his voice. “Kill the lights.” It was easier for him to sound demanding and vicious now than it had ever been before, no matter what he was being put through that made him justified in doing it.

David’s eyes flickered. “No.”

“I can’t look at them, they’re burning me.”

“They’re also keeping you weak, until...” He could kill someone, but he couldn’t talk about it. Under any other circumstances, Michael might have laughed, but instead all that he could bring himself to do was make a disgusted sound from low in his throat.

“They’re torturing me,” he snapped back. “Is that the point, really? Knock off the bullshit about how I’m still human, stop pretending that this is about mercy.”

David’s eyes flickered again. His face was chill and blank; Michael was sure that he was about to get that bullet that Syesha had denied him. And maybe, maybe...his head was buzzing, his head was burning, his entire body felt as if someone had run a truck over him repeatedly for sport. He hung his head, watched a bead of sweat run down from his hair and drop to the floor, and tried to draw in a whistling breath through lungs that seemed to have other things in mind.

Michael did not even realize that David had opened the door and was leaving until he heard the sound of his boots scuffing across the floor. He raised his head and stared in faint wonder at the door that had been left open a few inches after David’s exit, thinking that this could not really be happening. His body ached so hard that he was starting to think that going after Syesha like that had been a fluke, but surely if his life was on the line, as Michael was not for one second foolish enough to believe that it was not...

The lights went out, leaving the room’s only illumination as a single and blessedly normal bulb hanging down from the center of the ceiling. It swung back and forth and threw shadows into the corners. It also threw patterns across David, who reentered and shut the door behind him so quickly that the switch must have surely been located just outside the door itself.

“Better?” David asked, watching Michael with an unreadable expression.

“Yes,” Michael said. He sat down against the wall again, avoiding the puddle, and immediately felt more like a person. That person, unfortunately, was still one who was in the middle of turning into a vampire--and admitting it to yourself doesn’t make you feel any less like spinning right out of your mind, does it, old champ--and having himself a nice little sit-down chat with the man who was probably going to murder him, if it could indeed be called murder at that point. It was alarming to Michael, how quickly he was coming to emulate these people’s thought patterns, and he made a note to himself to read up on Stockholm Syndrome if he ever happened to get out of here. None of this was exactly a comfort.

Michael leaned his head further back against the wall and closed his eyes, because even if the standard bulb didn’t burn him, neither was it exactly a comfort. “Have you ever done this before?”

“Done what?” Michael opened his eyes and saw David staring at him as if he honestly did not know which answer he was supposed to give. Michael made a choked sound from the back of his throat, maybe a laugh if he viewed it very optimistically.

“Locked someone in a room until you deemed it morally acceptable to murder them, what do you think?” Michael snapped. He noticed that his hands were trembling. He didn’t think that it was fear. Though that was a low, ever-present buzzing in the back of his mind that he could not quite dislodge, it did not have nearly the grip on him that Michael imagined it should, in a situation like this. Whenever he really allowed himself to focus on it, he realized that he was more angry than he was anything else, and angry in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the imminently rational way that he ought to be angry. This was something darker. This was something buzzing. This was something....

This was something hungry, Michael realized, and closed his eyes again as a way of nausea so fierce that he doubted he even would have been able to keep down that precious blood washed over him. David’s gaze was a weight.

“No,” he finally answered Michael softly. The way that he was watching Michael was more unsettling than Michael cared to admit, even when he was looking the likely instrument of his own death directly in the face. “No, we’ve never done anything like this before. Usually we hunt them after they’ve already turned, or if we catch them halfway through turning we...” David pressed his lips together around the words as if he thought holding them back would change the reality behind them.

“Usually you deal with them in the field,” Michael finished for him. He did not know why he was offering out the kind euphemism to someone who surely did not deserve it. It seemed like the human thing to do, and thus worth clinging onto for as long as possible.

“Yes.” David tilted his head to one side as he continued to watch Michael, a brain clearly working behind those liquid-hazel eyes. Michael was so thrilled to know that he was serving as the basis of future research.

“Have you dealt with a lot of them?”

“Have I killed a lot of people, are you asking me?” David replied. Michael did not know why David’s refusal to accept that euphemism, and the diluted responsibility along with it, made him stand up higher in Michael’s estimation when nothing short of single-handedly saving an entire orphanage from a fire should have been able to do the trick, but he found himself straightening against the wall a little bit as he nodded. “Less than you imagine. Usually we don’t get there as fast as we were able to track down you. Usually they’re either right at the verge of fully turning, so they’re more vampire than they are anything else, or they’ve already turned. So the bodies of their families are all around them.”

Michael felt his entire body go cold. He had bitten Stacey so savagely-- “I wouldn’t,” he blurted out. “There’s no way. There’s no way.” When all David did was look at him, Michael made a disgusted noise and looked away. “Why are you here, anyway?” he asked. “You can’t tell me that you’re really going to sit here and chat up a dangerous animal because I hurt your friend’s feelings.” And were giving serious consideration to ripping her throat out and drinking everything that sprayed out, but, shhh, don’t think about that, if you don’t think about that then maybe it won’t be happening so fast.

“We’re not the bad guys,” David told him. For once, his voice did not have the edge of combat riding behind it, as if he was just begging for someone, anyone, to give him a reason to fight. He sounded nearly desperate instead.

I have a little too much going on right now to hold the hand of my murderer, Michael thought cruelly, but still could not seem to stop himself. “I know,” he whispered.

David startled, studied Michael in one of those alarming, piercing moments that he had. Michael lowered his eyes, rubbed at his temples. Everything was just so bright, so bright and so harsh, even with only one light left. Michael just wanted to curl up in a quiet corner and wait for it to die.

“Is it really bad?” David startled him by asking. He was the most solicitous murderer than Michael had ever met.

And Michael startled himself, too, by answering honestly. “Yeah,” he said, and had to pause so clear his throat. “Yeah, it really is.”

He heard David exhale softly, and then the sound of a person moving closer. When Michael opened his eyes, David was scarcely three feet away from him. His eyes were even more intense at this proximity. “I’ve never seen anyone turn up close before,” he told Michael. “None of us are really sure how to deal with it.”

Michael’s laugh burned his throat. “I can guarantee you that you have more experience in it than I do.”

David shrugged; it looked more uneasy than anything that Michael had seen him do yet. “Just so you know that this doesn’t change anything,” he told Michael.

Michael’s brow wrinkled. What doesn’t change anything He had no time to speak, however, before David flashed him a crooked smile that made Michael, absurdly, wish to see him smile again. He said, “Music soothes the savage beast, right?”

“Not really in the mood for singing,” Michael answered him.

“I didn’t mean you.” David cleared his hand into his throat and began to sing.

“Has our conscience shown? Has the sweet breeze blown? Has all the kindness gone?”

He started out too low, Michael noted immediately; it did not sound as if David had sung in some time, and then he decided that David must be a cold-hearted son of a bitch for being able to sing those particular lyrics without stuttering. His second thought was that this was an absolute shame, for David was good. The roughness eased out of his voice almost immediately and left behind a smooth baritone that Michael knew could throb to all corners of the room if David wanted it to, though for now he was taking pains to keep his voice pitched low and soothing.

“I drink myself of newfound pity, sitting alone in New York City, and I don’t know why.”

And the ultimate hell of it, Michael decided as he first stared slack-jawed at David for believing that a nice lullaby was going to be a salve to the fact that Michael was first going to turn into a monster and then be killed for it, was that it was soothing. Music had power, Michael had believed this from the time that he was very small, long before he had begun to entertain thoughts of borrowing that power for himself in the short bursts that he managed when he was lucky on the stage. It could start a life-long romance, it could mourn the ending of one, it could start a civil rights movement and catalogue the horrors of a war. Why should it be so surprising that it could put off for a little while the terror of what was happening to him, too?

“So I walk up on high and I step to the edge to see my world below, and I laugh at myself as the tears roll down. ‘Cause it’s the world I know, oh, it’s the world I know.”

Michael closed his eyes and lowered his chin towards his chest, forcing his breathing to even out. His lungs still ached. So did his mouth, and Michael did not even want to think about what changes were being wrought there. He laid all that to the side. For the music, because of the music, for a few seconds he was able to order himself not to think of it and actually get somewhere.

“Thank you,” Michael started to say when David had wound down to an embarrassed silence. He felt more human than he had in hours. That was the transformative power of it; looking at David’s face, Michael knew immediately that David was a good friend of that ride, that electricity, too and wondered what had happened to bring him to this place instead.

But David was looking at him like he was a person in real distress and not something that David simply had to brace himself to do, for the first time since they had met each other, and David’s skin was warm when Michael reached out to brush his fingers lightly along his arm. He jumped hard but did not knock Michael away, not even when Michael curved his fingers around David’s wrist and felt the way that David’s pulse was rushing just millimeters beneath the surface. Michael ordered himself not to think of blood and came halfway to even being able to do it.

He came further when he tilted his face towards David’s in that universal, nearly unconscious invitation, when David answered him by leaning forward the rest of the way. Their mouths met; David’s skin was cool and inviting when Michael knew that he was burning up with fever. He parted his lips to Michael and then went further, grabbing at Michael’s hair and hauling him even further into David’s mouth so that he could take control of the kiss for himself. And it was good, God, Michael heard himself making a soft sound and still could not bring himself to care. He was for the first time in hours not thinking of all of the blood rushing through the veins around him, or the way that his body was increasingly coming to feel as if it was not his at all. He was thinking about the way that David’s mouth tasted and the way that the man smelled, and it was human, and it was good.

End Part Twelve

Part Thirteen