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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 16/24
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
Part Fourteen
Part Fifteen



Part Sixteen

“Are you okay?” Michael was sure that he was asking this question every five minutes, but he could not seem to stop himself, even when Archuleta rolled his eyes at him in such a fundamentally teenaged way that it was all that Michael could do not to put his hand over his mouth in order to hide a smile.

“I’m fine,” Archuleta said with aggravated care, though anyone with eyes could tell that he really wasn’t. Michael guessed that Archuleta was still managing a pretty good holding pattern, though, even as he knew that it was bound to break sooner or later. The better that Archuleta was at keeping it together now, the bigger that crack-up was likely to be when it occurred.

And I dragged him out here and away from the only people who seemed to have his best interests at heart. Telling himself that it was a split-second decision to go with people who only maybe wanted him dead versus people who definitely wanted him dead, and while he had still been hoping that what he was turning into wasn’t going to be a creature of entire evil, didn’t actually help. Michael reached out and put his arm around Archuleta’s shoulders, drawing him protectively close. Archuleta only tolerated the contact for a few seconds before he began to fidget.

“Um, no offense, Michael?” he began. “But you are really hot.” Archuleta seemed to realize what he had said only a few seconds later. A blush ran up his cheeks. “Feverish, like you’re sick.”

“I am sick,” Michael muttered, but obligingly lifted his arm again so that Archuleta could slide out from underneath it. He caught Archuleta watching him from the corner of his eye, looking concerned, and thought that this kid was so fundamentally nice that he probably even managed to sympathize with the bullies at school. “Maybe I’d better take you to a police station or something.”

“I don’t want anyone else getting killed to get to me,” Archuleta said firmly, shaking his head. It was the same response that he had given every time that Michael brought up the prospect of bringing legitimate law and order into this. With so much of his life already out of control, Michael guessed that the kid was entitled to his say in whatever he actually had left. He made a note not to bring it up again.

“Besides, I’m safe with you,” Archuleta said, which Michael thought was a fairly odd statement, considering that Michael had, if not entirely aided in Archuleta’s kidnapping, at the very least not done even a fraction of what he ought to have done to stop it right off the bat. Not to mention how much Archuleta did not appear to realize how very wrong he could turn out to be, even now.

Michael took a deep breath and did not answer, carefully not looking in Archuleta’s direction. He swore that he could smell and hear every drop of blood in Archuleta’s body, in the bodies of every person who was walking through the entire damned city beyond that, and it was making his teeth itch and his body clamor. The sensation of being both hungry and thirsty at the same time, and knowing deep down in his gut that there was only one thing that would actually satisfy that craving, was such that Michael thought that he would have vomited any human food that he actually had in his stomach.

Archuleta was sweet, but he was also apparently a long way from stupid. Reading Michael’s silence, his voice was hesitant as he asked, “Where are we going?”

“Back to my apartment.” Because the last that he had seen of his wife was moments after he had taken his first definitive step into turning into a monster and he had kissed a man since then, and even though it was absurd Michael thought that both of these things were weighing on his mind equally. “We can clean up there, figure out what’s next.” Michael took a sideways glance at Archuleta and saw the young man deep in thought. “You probably would be better off away from me, you know,” he said.

“No,” Archuleta said, the first sign of irritation appearing in a line between his eyes. “I’m not going to leave you alone when you--” He apparently realized that he had said too much and snapped his lips shut around the words, but too late.

“You think that by staying you’re really helping me,” Michael said. He tried but could not quite manage to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

The line deepened and, worse than irritated, Michael realized that Archuleta was actually hurt. “You don’t have to act like it’s the funniest thing in the world,” he muttered.

“It’s not,” Michael said. Archuleta threw him a dark look, clearly thinking that he was being humored, and Michael repeated, “It’s not.”

Archuleta said flatly, “I’ve been physically picked up and carried from one place to another for more than twenty-four hours now, and only about half of that was by vampires. I couldn’t--” He paused, clearly struggling to bring himself under control again, and Michael held his breath as he thought that he could finally see that epic moment of coming unglued rolling down the tracks towards them. Archuleta probably did not even realize how much better he would be once he had it. “I couldn’t stop my family from being killed. I know about how intimidating I actually am.”

“The vampires are pretty hot to take you out,” Michael said to him. “Whatever scares scary things, as the saying goes, that’s powerful.”

Archuleta cast Michael a look. “That’s not anything that I did,” he said. “That’s something that’s just in me. Being a freak does not make me strong.”

“You’re strong,” Michael told him. The dried blood on Archuleta’s back was so sweet that Michael had to close his eyes for a few seconds before he could continue; he hoped that Archuleta would not take it the wrong way. “I wasn’t surprised by you protecting me, I promise. I was surprised that you would want to.”

Archuleta shrugged and suddenly looked embarrassed. “After you’re through turning, you’re going to be...” He trailed off, but that was fine, Michael could still fill in the blank. He was going to be something terrible. “I wouldn’t want to be alone for that if it was me.”

It was sweet. It was fundamentally misguided, but it was sweet. Michael started to put his arm around Archuleta’s shoulders again, remembered that he had a fever raging through him as the virus did its work that made him uncomfortable to touch, and dropped his arm. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. You can still put your arm around me.”

“We’re almost there,” Michael said as if Archuleta had not spoken, because at the moment he did not think that he could stand another person’s attempts to comfort him. They stood together on the sidewalk across the street from Michael’s building without saying anything. Archuleta was fidgety, obviously thinking of all of the things that could be waiting in the shadows beyond the streetlights’ meager glow. He must not realize that to Michael it might as well have been noon on a sunny day.

Michael took a deep, shaky breath. You manage to cut out the bloodlust and casual murder, and this gig might not be half-bad, he thought to himself. There weren’t any of the cops that he had been worried about, so Michael gestured for Archuleta to follow him across the street. He did not want to explain his disappearance to police officers under normal circumstances right now, let alone while he looked as if he had not seen the sun in at least a year and a half and was splattered with blood but no visible wounds. It was going to be difficult enough to keep his wife from calling them.

It was either very late or very early, depending upon how a soul wanted to look at it, and the lobby was deserted. Michael thanked the universe for granting him at least a few small favors as he and David crept up to Michael’s floor, whereupon Michael immediately took back his thanks as he realized that he didn’t have a key on him. When David had forced him out of the apartment, Michael had been so consumed with making sure that the apparent madman did not hurt Stacey and that Michael himself did not wind up being ordered out of the apartment naked that everything else had paled in comparison.

“Brace yourself,” Michael muttered to Archuleta before he raised his fist and pounded on his apartment door. It only took a few seconds for Stacey to answer; she must not have been sleeping.

Her eyes widened as she saw him, and her mouth opened in the unmistakeable beginnings of a scream. Michael put his hand over her mouth and quickly forced his way into the apartment while Archuleta trailed in after him. Archuleta made sure to shut the door after himself as he did so, and Michael’s faith in the young man’s ability to engage in criminal enterprise and remain beneath the radar soared.

“It’s okay, Stace, it’s okay, it’s me,” Michael whispered urgently as Stacey continued to make abortive attempts to scream behind his hand. That black buzzing, that terrible hostility, began to rise up within him again as she refused to heed him. Horrified, Michael released her immediately and stepped back, hands raised. If she wanted to shriek until she was making a sound that only dogs could hear and brought a full SWAT team down on his head, Michael decided, that was fine, but he was absolutely not going to hurt her again. Knowing where that rage was coming from by this point didn’t actually make it any better.

Stacey stopped trying to scream as soon as Michael released her and instead remained wedged back against one of end tables to the side of their couch, staring at Michael with wide eyes. He belatedly realized that every light in the apartment was on, as if she had been sitting up and waiting for news, and so she could see how very different he was now from when he had left.

“Michael?” Stacey whispered. She raised her hand as if she meant to touch him and then dropped it abruptly back to her side. “What happened to you?”

Michael let out a short laugh. “You’d have to make up a killer pot of coffee before we could even begin to get into everything that’s happened to me.”

Stacey glanced past Michael, to Archuleta standing behind him, and her eyes widened further. “You’re that kid from the news!” she exclaimed.

Michael took one look over his shoulder and saw that Archuleta had gone so pale that he looked to be on the verge of fainting. He grabbed Stacey’s arm so that he could tug her a few yards deeper into the living room. “Stace, don’t.”

Stacey was shaking all over, Michael could feel it through his hand on her arm even though he was taking great pains not to grip her, not to do anything that could be taken as threatening, and Michael thought that only a small fraction of that had to do with Archuleta’s presence. She kept taking peeks at his face as if she could not believe what she saw there. “Michael, that boy is a suspect in his family’s murders,” she told him in a tone which suggested that she thought he could still be brought around to sanity if she tried enough.

Living with the inmates now, Stace, Michael thought with a sort of grim amusement. Living with the inmates, will soon be their king.

“He didn’t do it,” Michael said automatically, and shook his head. “It’s not important right now.”

“I think that whether or not I have a murder suspect in my home is pretty fucking important.” Stacey’s voice rose. Michael could not help but glance over his shoulder and see that Archuleta had gone rigid, his face stricken, and he cursed under his breath. Stacey had a way of doing that. “God, Michael, what the fuck is going on?” It was pretty obvious that Stacey had spent most of the day crying, and her voice cracked as she tried to speak.

“I can’t explain most it right now,” Michael said helplessly. Even breaking ground on the tip of that iceberg would mean staying here for several more hours, and everything in the apartment was making Michael twitch with the need to be away. He had a dim idea that the longer he and Archuleta stayed in one place, the more they were asking for danger to find them, but more than anything else he thought that he needed to be away from Stacey. Her blood smelled familiar to him, and even sweeter than all that he had scented rushing on the street outside; all that Michael could think about was how he had hurt her when he had only just begun to turn, and how much easier than even that it would be to hurt her now. He took a step back.

Her expression immeasurably hurt, scared, and worse, bearing the stubborn look that she sometimes got which could make a seasoned general weep at his chances of actually forcing her to do something that she did not wanted, Stacey followed after him as easily as if they were dancing. Michael’s breath caught in his throat as her pulse rose; he jerked his arm away when she tried to reach for him. Stacey stopped in her tracks with her hands balled at her sides. “Then what can you explain?” she demanded. “God, Michael, the police are looking for you as a kidnap victim, you show up here looking like you’ve been doing drugs--what happened to the guy that took you?’

“When I saw him last, he was fighting for his life,” Michael said shortly.

Stacey only considered this new information for a second before she nodded. “Good.”

“No, not good.” Michael shook his head and pinched at the bridge of his nose. To Archuleta over his shoulder, he said, “Go to my dresser, grab any shirt that you want. It’ll be too big, but it’s better than nothing.” To Stacey, he added, “I’m sorry, babe, but we have to go.” It had been a bad idea to come here, Michael realized. He had thought that he needed to see her again, and that had been true, but there was so much more than love and guilt wound up in that decision, and now he realized that it was like a heroin addict visiting a poppy field. Every careless, familiar gesture that she made caused more of that blood-smell to waft towards him, undid a little more of the self-control that he had been scarcely hanging onto even before he had come here.

“The hell you do.” Stacey grabbed for his arm when he would have turned away from her. He was distracted by the rising buzz in his head and didn’t jerk free from her as he had before; it was a solid contact of skin on skin. And she felt so cool against his fever--the way that David’s lips had felt when you were cheating on her--and that was good, but better still was her blood, her blood which Michael already knew would be different from every time that he had ever accidentally cut his finger and sucked on it as a kid by actually tasting sweet as it slid down his throat. He wanted it so badly that he could feel his entire body beginning to shake. “Michael--”

“Let go of me!” Michael cracked and did not yell so much as roared as he jerked himself free from her. He meant to lean back, into a safe distance for the both of them, he swore that he did, but somehow the signals got crossed and he found himself lunging forward into her personal space until it could not be mistaken for anything other than an attack. This was the second time in under a day that he had made his wife fear for her life, he knew, and he knew that there were words for men like that.

Stacey had had every light in the apartment turned on, waiting for news. There was no way that she could miss his mouth as he opened it and flashed teeth that could hardly even be called such any longer at her. Stacey grabbed hard for the side of the couch so that she could keep herself from falling. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, and then clamped her hand hard across her mouth. So that she wouldn’t scream, Michael realized, and felt sick to his stomach. The magic moment of coming to his senses wasn’t happening, he was still leaning forward and thinking that she was so much smaller and more fragile than he and it would be just so goddamned easy.

Michael’s breath wheezed like a teakettle in his lungs as he ripped himself away from her and stormed down the hallway towards the bedroom that he shared with her. I’m never going to see her again, he realized. There was only one way that this was going to end, and it was becoming more and more clear to him that it was not an ending that she could be a part of. Not if he wanted to keep from killing her before it came to its grim and inevitable conclusion.

“I got you a shirt, too,” Archuleta said as he met Michael at the door to the bedroom. Michael doubted that he could have missed much of what had happened in the living room in his absence, the apartment was not that large, but he was keeping his face neutral and his thoughts to himself.

Michael took the clothing that Archuleta offered and shucked off the sad remains of the shirt that smelled like David before pulling the new one over his head. “We have to leave,” he said.

“Where?” Archuleta asked.

It was an imminently reasonable question, and Michael knew that the kid had a point when he dug in his heels and said that everyone had been jerking him back and forth without actually letting him have any say in his own fate since this whole mess had started, but in that perfect moment it was like flicking a match into a haystack. Michael spun. “Do have to fucking know everything?”

Archuleta took a step back, and Michael thought that he was going to quail and drop it. He had clearly underestimated the kid. “Since it’s my life here, I think that it would be helpful if I knew something,” he came back. “Since you’re turning into one of them.” He made a face which looked like maybe he was regretting saying that less than a second later.

Didn’t matter. Didn’t mean that he was actually wrong. Michael took a breath. He was turning into a monster. There was no way to stop it, only to control how it ended. “You think that the vampires want you because of your difference?” he asked Archuleta, gesturing to his shoulder. “How you won’t turn?” There was a mutation that he would give pretty much anything in his life to have right about now.

“It’s the only thing that makes any sense,” Archuleta said.

“Then they have to figure that you can hurt them very badly, somehow, if they’re investing this much in seeing you dead,” Michael said, half to himself, and nodded. “You have to go back.”

Archuleta surprised him by putting both of his hands over his mouth and letting peal a laugh that sounded maybe just a little bit crazed. One crack-up, speeding right down that track, and maybe Michael was fooling himself if he thought that it applied only to Archuleta. He could feel the corners of his mouth starting to twitch. “Didn’t you just help them take me from there?” Archuleta asked.

The twitching turned into a full-fledged smile, Michael couldn’t help it. “I’m thinking more clearly now.” He was. The future, and the course that he had to take if he wanted to avoid doing things that he would never be forgiven for, was spreading out before him in one clear, inevitable path.

Something in his voice warned Archuleta, who sucked in his breath and looked at Michael with sober eyes. He didn’t try to talk Michael down or tell him that there was another way, however, and for that Michael knew that he liked the kid for a reason. “We’d better leave now,” Archuleta said softly. “Before your wife freaks out even harder.” This time, as they walked towards the door, he stood close to Michael, almost as if he was inviting Michael to put his arm around his shoulders again, and Michael did not think that Archuleta was thinking of his own comfort when he did it.

Stacey was standing in the center of the living room with the phone in her hand when they reentered it. However much crying she had been doing over the course of the day, it had not been so much that she couldn’t start again. “I’m trying to talk myself into calling the police,” she told Michael. “But somehow I don’t think that this is something that the police can handle, is it?”

Michael went to her, cupped her jaw and the side of her face with his hand. Stacey flinched until she recognized the touch as belonging to the man that she had married, and not the hostile stranger who had made two visits in his place thus far. She would never, Michael swore to himself, know hard he was fighting in that moment to keep it that way. He kissed her as softly and as gently as he had kissed her on their first date. He ran his fingers through her hair and across the planes and curves of her face, seeking to memorize it all. He licked his lips to capture her taste and inhaled deeply of the way that she smelled, for the first time glad of the enhanced senses that were becoming his own. The effort not to bite her made his hands shake.

Stacey was smart enough to know when she was being memorized. She started crying harder, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and pulled him back down into a kiss to be proud of. They definitely had not had one of those on their first date. Michael did not participate nearly as much as he wanted to, afraid of how far he could go before the last vestiges of his control slipped away altogether, and sensed Stacey’s disappointment. He touched lightly at her face as he turned away. Neither of them said good-bye to the other.

“I’m sorry,” Archuleta said as they crossed through the lobby and to the night outside together.

“It’s not your fault.” Michael had still not managed to get his shaking under control again.

“I know that. But I’m still sorry.” As long as Archuleta was staying close and offering that comfort that Michael could take by putting his arm around the kid’s shoulders again, Michael was tempted, but he was not sure that he would be able to keep himself together enough to avoid doing that final unforgivable thing. He stayed at a distance.

They had hardly made it to the corner before Michael felt something grab him, whirl him around. Michael reacted before his conscious mind even had time to think; it was the growing, terror-inducing subconscious part of himself which decided what his response would be. He roared, a sound that he hardly recognized, and threw out a punch harder than any that he had ever made in his entire life. It connected with Jason’s jaw, snapped his head to the side. Jason hardly seemed to even feel it. His eyes flashed, Michael realized that Jason was wearing gloves and that there was a glint of metal in one of his hands, and then there was once again that terrible and unforgettable feeling of his own flesh parting way. He was being stabbed with something much larger than a set of fangs this time, though, and it burned. Michael gasped back a scream and sank to his knees on the sidewalk, looking at his shoulder where the silver stake protruded. Archuleta yelped as Jason grabbed him when he tried to escape and hit him hard..

Jason hit him again, and shook him like a disobedient puppy, before he looked down at Michael. “Did you think that I couldn’t track you by your scent?” he asked before shaking his head. “You have a lot to learn. Better pull that stake out before it poisons you, first. And second...” Jason leaned down close, until they were eye to eye with one another. “I like you, for some reason. So I’m telling you now that you had better feed, or else you’re going to die. And I don’t peg your for the tragic, Byronic type.” He managed to disappear faster than Michael in his distracted state could follow, though he did hear the squealing of a car’s tires seconds later.

Michael stared down at the stake in his shoulder for a few seconds longer before he could actually bring himself to touch it, and even then he only did it because it felt like it had been plunged into acid and was actually making his head spin. This was the kind of wound that you went to a hospital for. This was the kind of wound that led to transfusions, antibiotics, and possibly surgery.

If he had still been human.

Michael set himself by remembering all of the dumb shit things that he and his sisters had done to each other as kids before he grabbed the stake and pulled it out in one long jerk. It was impossible to hold back his yell this time; the stake made a clanking sound along the sidewalk as he threw it away from himself, and he swore that his palms were tingling afterwards from even that brief contact. Michael doubled over for several seconds with his hand pressed against the wound, feeling blood that flowed thicker than it should have as it ran across his fingers. Every pulse in a three-block radius jumped out at him that much more sharply. Michael took deep breaths through his nose and thought at the missing specter of Jason, No, you’re right. I never was the Byronic type.

He preferred to get things done.

End Part Sixteen

Continue to Part Seventeen