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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 13/24
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



Part Thirteen

Michael was burning with more fever than David would have guessed any human be able to sustain and still live. He made a soft sound as David massaged the back of his neck with one hand; it was the single hottest thing that David had ever heard in his life. It was also the slap to the head that David realized only a few seconds later that he desperately needed. Like throwing a lifeline out to a drowning man and managing to catch him squarely in the face with it, and David did not realize how very welcoming such a rough rescue could be until he yanked himself backwards from Michael’s mouth hard enough to leave them both gasping. He stared at Michael, who was wide-eyed and looked as if someone had just taken a board solidly to the back of his head. It might even have been funny, if the situation itself had not been so terribly dire and David had not been sure that his own expression was a mirror.

“Sorry,” David said, leaping back up to his feet in one swift motion.

“You’re apologizing to me?” Michael looked dumbfounded, and the part of David that was having so much trouble understanding time and place wanted to laugh again. For the fact that in several hours or a day at most they were going to kill this man, sure, that was completely justified, but the make-out session? That was completely beyond the pale.

Could have been worse, David told himself. You could have extended to necking. He swallowed hard to push back what surely would have been the most absurd and dangerous giggle of his entire adult life.

“For that? Yeah, I am.” David fumbled behind him for the door and slid out quickly, before he and Michael had to make eye contact with each other any further. He slammed it shut and engaged all of the locks so furiously that his fingers began to shake as soon as he was out again, and then leaned his head against the door. Could Michael still hear him standing there, David wondered? Could he listen to David’s heartbeat as it rattled furiously about his ribcage without even coming close to its normal rhythm again, could he smell the way that adrenaline was crackling along David’s veins?

These were not comforting thoughts. David tore himself away from the door and strode quickly across the compound, unable to stop himself from flinging an uncertain look back at the door as he did so. Why could Michael not have saved him the trouble and simply been fully turned when David had gone to deal with him? Seeing the person who was in there, vibrant and alive, was going to make it so much worse to put down the thing animating the corpse once that person died.

He scrubbed his hand across his mouth. Michael had still tasted human. His skin had still been warm. Hot, even, as fever raged through him to mark the virus gaining a little more ground. It had been like kissing a furnace. And it made David desperately want to go back.

“David!” David jumped hard when he heard someone calling his name, spun. He remained poised and wary upon the balls of his feet when he saw that it was Carly. David was convinced, suddenly, that Carly knew exactly what he had been doing in that room and was about to call him the biggest fool that had ever lived. One little nick of fledgling fangs against his lip, and he would have been awaiting the inevitable in that room right along with Michael.

But Carly clearly had much larger things on her mind than whatever dalliances David might have been carrying out in his free time. She paused to throw a single confused and concerned glance over his face, which he was absolutely sure had gone the color of milk, and said softly, “It’s Syesha.”

Most of their crises these days seemed to center around Syesha. It was comforting in its familiarity, and it made David take a deep breath and feel a little bit of the tension flee from his body. “Yeah?” he asked.

“She wants to change her vote.”

Or maybe, because this was going to be one of those days when the universe delighted just that much in kicking David right in the teeth, it was going to be both at once. David took a deep breath, struggling to keep his voice level, and said, “What do you think?” Carly had been the most vocal against killing humans, any humans, even if they knelt down and lapped the blood from the floor after the vampires were done. There were already systems to deal with them, she said. Their job was to judge and execute the ones for whom there was no system. And when the person in question had yet to actually do anything, did not in fact deserve any judgment? There was a word for the kind of person who killed that.

Carly met his eyes without flinching. Her eyes were hard and her lips were pressed together into a thin line. “I think that it’s monstrous,” she said. “But we’re a team, aren’t we? No one is the leader, no one gets to have control over anyone else.” Carly took a deep breath, and that was when David realized that her shoulders were trembling. “We take votes. If we’re going to go to hell, then we do it together.”

It struck one of David’s more unkind impulses that this was a fairly passive-aggressive way of passing the buck, but he did not say so. Not while Carly was still so visibly upset by the decision that they were doing their best to come to without actually admitting it, not when David knew full well how hard she took the body of civilians at her feet. David reached out and rubbed her shoulder to help her trembling.

“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath and nodding. “Okay.” If they were going to hell, as Carly put it, at least they would be doing it together.

Before David could actually put plans for murder into voice--call it what it is, Davey, otherwise you have no business doing it--there was a tremendous crashing of glass from deeper in the compound. Sirens began to wail less than a second later. David and Carly whirled towards the sound as one mind cast within two bodies. David wondered if her pulse was spiking as swiftly within her veins as his one was, knew that it must be. There were only so many different kinds of predators out there, after all, and in the end the instincts were the same across all of them.

“Goddamned fucking hell, we’re being invaded,” David blurted out, which was all that needed to be said. He spun towards the gun belt that he had, stupid, stupid, stupid, taken off before going in to see Michael. David was buckling it rapidly about his waist again as Carly sprinted off in the direction of the broken glass. The sirens were wailing without pause all across their space, without giving any hint any longer as to their point of origin.

David’s fingers had gone fat and clumsy on him. He cursed at them even as he was buckling the last strap upon the belt; he drew his gun on instinct and adrenaline when he heard a faint sound behind him. David’s finger drew back against the trigger, the muzzle roared and flashed, and the body of a vampire went sailing back from him as the bullet took it directly in the chest. Heart shot, David knew even before he had to see the results. The body slid down to the floor and did not move again, not even with the series of faint post-mortem twitches that David would have expected from a human. This body was already dead and had been for quite some time.

David rose from his ready crouch and stared at the corpse, breathing and thinking hard at the same time. This vampire had clearly been inside for awhile, to be able to creep inside that deeply and get behind him. There had been no siren to mark its entrance. There had been no--

“They know how to get in,” David whispered to himself, horrified. And if they knew how to get in without making a sound, then the glass and the sirens were only a ruse. “Carly, Syesha!” David raised his voice into a yell without stopping to care that he was probably giving every other leech in the place an exact fix upon his location. “It’s a trap, fall back!”

David drew his breath to yell again and then had it driven out of him by the force of a body slamming into him hard from the shadows at his side, hurling him down to the floor. He remembered the lessons of the club this time and did not dare let his gun hand get pinned down to the floor. David wrenched the weapon up in the miniscule space that was still allowed to him between his chest and the slavering body of the living corpse on top of him, shoved the muzzle into the hollow of a smooth throat, pulled the trigger. A pretty blonde stopped being so pretty; David turned his head to the side on reflex so that none of her blood could get into his mouth and pushed the body off of him so that he could roll away. All vampires oozed thick black blood that was almost like tar. It had a heavy, wild smell that always reminded David of the predator cages at the zoo.

He hardly paused to draw a full breath and make sure that he had not been injured in any way that adrenaline was simply making it possible to blow past at the moment before he hurled himself towards a spare weapons cache. David threw himself down in front of one of many trunks that they had scattered around the place for situations just such as this, hard enough to make the concrete bite into his knees, and began grabbing silver stakes by the fistful. They were dangerous, last-ditch weapons; David was finding it very difficult to remind himself of why he should care.

They’re in our home, he thought to himself. It was a kind of frenzy, the rage that was filling him. Fuckers came into our home.

His body bristling with new weaponry, David rose from his crouch and whirled towards the heart of the building where the girls and the kid had to be. It had all been less than fifteen seconds since the alarms had first begun to scream. Time didn’t know whether it wanted to run fast or slow, stretch out like taffy or whip by so quickly that David did not see how he could possibly be of any help to his friends, even if he was able to increase his speed to double-time.

The kid came pelting out from some far corner where he had been hiding himself to grieve and maybe even try to sleep, so quickly that he was lucky he didn’t wind up with a bullet between his eyes for his trouble. David checked himself and lowered the weapon by a notch just in time. “Come on,” he panted. David grabbed for Archuleta’s wrist and yanked him close against him before Archuleta had any time to argue, if that was how he was feeling so inclined. Kid himself didn’t look as if he was thinking that resistance under the current circumstances was a wise idea at all, and he came willingly. One less thing to worry about. “Stay close to me,” David ordered Archuleta in a tone that did not say that arguing was going to be a wise idea.

The kid paused, gave David a sideways look. David was reminded all over again how hard the kid had freaked out after the decision concerning what to do with Michael had been made. And I don’t care, either. He had enough to deal with when it came to managing his own conscience; Archuleta would have to manage the outrages of his own on personal time.

David fought back the urge to race by a slim margin and instead crept through shadows that he knew intimately enough to wear as skin, hearing Archuleta following close behind. David could hear him breathing. If it was that obvious to him, then the vampires must know where they were as easily as if they had spotlights trained upon them. But still, David had to try.

Carly let out a scream of pure rage and rolled through the doorway that David had been just about to step through himself; she was not alone. A short male vampire that David did not recognize was rolling along with her, his limbs so intertwined with her own that it took David a few seconds to pick where one ended and the other began. He was just drawing his own gun to help her out when Carly whipped out of her knives from the sheath strapped to her arm and drove it hard into the vampire’s throat. He made a gagging sound, spraying black blood that she had to turn her head in order to avoid, and that was when Carly drew the knife across the vampire’s throat so fiercely that she nearly decapitated it. It was not until she was able to shove the body off of herself that she managed to finish the job.

David watched without comment as the vampire died, but Archuleta behind him made a gagging sound. “It’s all right,” David said without looking around.

“No, it’s not,” he heard Archuleta respond in low tones that he probably did not intend for David to hear at all.

“What happened?” David asked Carly without bothering to look around and check on the kid.

“They got in,” Carly answered in a dazed tone. She shook her head and spat a glob of bright red blood to the side. “I don’t know, somehow they got past the security measures...” She trailed off and shook her head again.

“Ramiele,” David answered softly. They had been waiting for this, the moment when she finally took all of the information that she had been privy to as a human and struck back with it. And we had a chance to end her last night, too. It was sour knowledge in the back of his throat.

“They’re here for me,” Archuleta said. He reached back and rubbed at his shoulder as he said it. David had no idea why, except that Carly had told him that Archuleta had basically been thrown headfirst into a mirror back at his house. He was lucky that the shrapnel falling down from it had not sliced his head and shoulders to pieces.

“Yeah,” David said shortly. He paused and gave Archuleta what was, he was pretty sure, the very first smile that he had directed towards him since they had met one another, trying to be reassuring. “And that means fuck-all. They’re not getting you.” It was a ballsy, overblown statement that David had absolutely no idea if he was going to be able to back up, but he still saw color coming back into Archuleta’s face.

Carly reached for Archuleta’s arm, pulled him close to her. She and David ventured back into the main part of the compound with Archuleta wedged protectively between them. David’s hand never left his gun. He was ready for anything, he told himself. So hopped up on fury that these bastards had dared come into the place where he and his own actually slept, he thought that he could take on a whole vampire army.

The universe waits for you to say shit like that, you know. David felt something grab him by the back of his neck, he swore to God dropping down right from the ceiling in order to do it, and yanked him away from Archuleta and Carly as if he weighed absolutely nothing at all. David scarcely waited for his feet to leave the ground before he was rolling with the blow, allowing it to take him off of the floor without allowing it to shake his sense of balance. He struck the cement on his shoulder and was back up again before he even had time to draw a full breath. One hand grabbed his gun, the other pulled a knife from the sheath at his arm. David pulled his lips back from his teeth without being entirely aware of the gesture. Separated from him by distance and a vampire, Carly did the same. David realized that he had no idea, none at all, where Syesha was.

He also realized that it was the blonde from the club who had thrown him, and who was now between him and his best friend. She stayed in her half-crouch for several long moments in spite of the fact that there were two guns pointed at her before a span of heartbeats had even had time to go by, that too-wide mouth smiling at him in such a way that made her look a bit like a snake. Like she might unhinge her jaw and swallow them all whole at any moment. David fired, but found the reason for her smile as she whirled away faster than his eye could even follow, a whirl of golden hair like the sun. The UV lights were burning her skin, anyone who looked at her could see that, and yet she had the composure of a queen.

“Do you really think that we’re stupid enough to come in lightly?” she asked David as she deftly plucked a bullet from her shoulder and dropped it to the cement. Her blood smoked wherever it touched the silver.

“Lady, I don’t think that there’s any misunderstanding the kind of crazy that you fucks are capable of,” David said without hesitation. She grinned, and shadows fell down from the ceiling and walls all around them. Clever little leeches, they were wearing ski masks and long sleeves in order to protect their skin, though David still saw them blinking rapidly and turning their faces downwards in order to protect their eyes as much as possible. David hardly had time to register that much, and that Syesha was still nowhere to seen and that David swore to God that he was going to rip those fucking alarms right out of the walls himself just as soon as they survived this, before he was getting punched in the kidneys so hard that every ounce of breath was driven out of his lungs and he had no other choice but to double over, retching. He felt someone--some thing’s fingers wrap around his bicep and raised his gun, fired without thinking or looking. A shriek of pain told him everything that he needed to know. Maybe he hadn’t managed a kill shot, but, by God, he had still managed a shot that fucking hurt, and he would take whatever he could get.

David reeled back, fired again with one hand, slashed wildly with the other. An anonymous fist struck him in the mouth so hard that he swore his back teeth rattled in their sockets. He didn’t allow more than a grunt to pass by his lips before he whirled into a roundhouse kick powerful enough to snap a knee in its socket. A shrieking, flipping ball of feminine rage passed into David’s line of sight from the left, and David realized that against all odds Syesha had managed to survive. She didn’t even look as if she was bleeding from serious wounds. They straightened and for a moment could not help but share crazed grins with one another before they whirled back into the fight. There’s a life on the line here, David ordered himself to keep the pure love of the fight that could crawl in in moments like this from getting too strong. If he really wanted to face it, there were several lives at risk. The vampires would not come in here unless they meant to leave bodies in their wake.

One of the vampires broke away, to David like they were iron filings and a magnet, and David knew immediately exactly which vampire this was. Even before he pulled off his ski mask and threw back his hoodie so that David could see the long brown dreadlocks and icy-cold blue eyes. “Knew I’d get close to your bedroom sooner or later,” Jason said to him, flashing that rumpled-sheets grin at him.

“Go fuck yourself,” David snapped. Lacking in imagination, maybe, but fury was driving all eloquence from David’s mind. He fired without looking around at a vampire that was coming too close and watched it fall to the floor. His next bullet was for Jason, he swore to God that it was.

And Jason might not even care. There was something of mania in his eyes as he lunged towards David, David did not know where Carly or Archuleta either one of them was, he had the feeling that they had lost the thread of what this whole defense was supposed to be about, and exactly how they were supposed to get it back. He spun with one leg skimming across the floor to bring Jason’s own out from under him as he swore that Jason was not going to get the chance to pin him again.

“I’m not that limber,” Jason whispered to him as he still managed to catch himself before tripping, leaping over David’s arm as lightly and limberly as if they were a couple of kids skipping rope. It took David a few seconds to realize that Jason was not referring to the way that David had tried to trip him up at all. The moment of horror stumbled him for a second; Jason hardly needed even that much of an opening. His fist clubbed David hard on the back of the neck, a second one drove into his midsection with such force as to make David think that all of his organs were being shunted to the side. He staggered down to one knee and barely came up in time to see Ramiele, little Ramiele, striding out of the shadows with Michael following behind her. That lock had been strong enough to keep a fledgling vampire in place. David guessed that this was some sign that Ramiele had officially moved past fledgling weakness. She hardly made eye contact with him at all, which was fine with David. He stared at Michael instead.

Michael was so pale that had hardly seemed more than a corpse with the gift of animation. He stared hard at David, secrets written into his eyes, and then turned his head to murmur down into Ramiele’s ear. She smiled up at him. And everything found a way to go even more to hell.

Her skin now so red that, if she were human, she would have no choice but to go to hospital, the blonde vampire raced up to Carly, darted around all of Carly’s attempts at defense as if Carly herself was standing still, and put her fist into Carly’s face hard enough to snap her head back and turn her eyes into frightening orbs of pure white as they rolled back. All that so that she could wrench Archuleta from Carly’s grasp and glide back over to Michael and Ramiele with a grace that was nearly boneless. Archuleta’s lips moved as he mouthed what David was willing to bet was the boy’s first profanity of his entire life, and he began to struggle hard against the blonde even though she dangled him from her grasp with no more attention than she would give a disobedient kitten. Good kid. Archuleta finally stopped with earnest disobedience after he realized that it was going to get him nowhere and aimed a defiant kick at the blonde’s shin for, so far as David could tell, no other reason than to vent his own frustration. David changed his mind: excellent boy. He changed his mind when the blonde wrinkled her lips back from her teeth and shook Archuleta, hard, enough force in even a careless gesture to snap Archuleta’s head back so hard that David feared for the boy’s neck for a few seconds, and ripped the boy’s shirt halfway down his back. There were marks of shrapnel from the mirror that Carly had described shattering over him. There was also another mark high up on his shoulder blade, completely impossible to mistake. David’s heart stopped beating within his chest, and he wondered if this was what it was like to be one of them.

Making David wonder just how far gone the man was, how far the virus had spread, the man that David had been making out with while leeches invaded his compound paused in his steps. They met eyes. Michael hesitated for only for a second longer before he followed after the women and their captive boy; his gaze still burned where it met with David’s own.

Jason grinned and pinched at David’s cheek before David could wrench away. “Maybe you’ll live,” he said. “Maybe we can do this again. God, I hope so.”

David had no room to tell Jason that he had no time for Jason’s kind of foreplay before Jason was disappearing again, and all that David could do was keep firing and hope that there would be a pause at some point so that he could really think over how badly they had just failed.

End Part Thirteen

Continue to Part Fourteen