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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 21/24
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
Part Seventeen
Part Eighteen
Part Nineteen
Part Twenty



Part Twenty-One

There were certain inalienable rules to warfare that were not broken, not unless you wanted to end up in a body bag. One, only fools mounted direct assaults when they had lesser numbers than their opponents. When your numbers were fewer, you broke apart and scattered, uses the larger and stronger force’s power against them. Use the home field advantage that you have, because it’s the only chance that you actually have. The defending party is always the stronger party, because they have the opportunity to pause and take advantage of nearby resources in a way that the attacking party, always forced to keep moving, does not have. Neither is it easy to win from a defending position, however, which was why David and his group always seemed to find themselves running in place. The attacking party was the one who got to decide when a fight began, and when it ended.

One of the best ways to win a battle and then eventually a war, it was nearly universally agreed, was to take a defensive position and then find a way to attack with it. Wait for the opposing force to wear themselves down by beating against a position that they could not win, and then attack for everything that you were worth.

David looked up at the stretch of movie theater that Michael’s soft word had indicated for them, dark and silent. He didn’t know who was the attacking party and who was the defending one here, was the problem. He didn’t know that it mattered.

“We ought to split up,” David said, which he figured was a long way from being his first or final mistake of the night. Everyone’s head turned to look at him. “With their senses, a big group will only attract even more attention.”

“Stupid,” Kelly said darkly, and David did not know which aspect of the situation she was actually referring to.

“Be that as it may,” Michael said. He was keeping his voice pitched low, speaking mostly to David alone. When David had a moment to really look at him, he swore that Michael’s skin was more pale than it had ever been before, and that he was breathing so rapidly that it was nearly a pant. “I can hear and smell all of you as if you’re shouting at the tops of your lungs and just got finished running a mile.”

David stared at Michael and wondered if there was any hope, any hope at all, that they were actually going to pull this off, and then wondered if it really mattered. Archuleta was maybe the key to ending the entire war right here and now, and more importantly, he was innocent. That made it their kind of job. The end.

“We need to split up,” he repeated, and saw Syesha and Carly quirk their eyebrows up in eerie unison at the back of the pack. They had been acting strangely ever since they had left the compound, David had noticed but had no opportunity to say; the presence of Kelly’s group was making him self-conscious and defensive about his team’s flaws. Syesha and Carly were keeping a secret between them, but there was no way that David could draw attention to it now. “It’ll be a lot easier to get in if we do it separately. We can meet up again inside to reach the kid.”

“I’ll go with you,” Michael said quickly, as David had expected that he would. He was clinging to David almost...almost as if he expected David to keep the darkness at bay for him after Michael himself no longer could. David did not know what he was supposed to do with that responsibility; he already had so much that it sometimes felt as if he could not breathe. He also knew what to shrug it away now would be unconscionably cruel.

“All right,” David said, nodding. “You’ll have to be the eyes and ears that I can’t be.”

Kelly did another one of those eyebrow arches that she had apparently worked into a whole language, and which David had only had to have seen in action a few times to know that he hated them. Carrie immediately responded, “I’ll go, too.”

David and Michael both paused. David swore that he could see Michael getting ready to have a fit right then and there, and it might have been funny under any other circumstances. Any others at all.

As much as David was prepared to fire back with an instantaneous refusal, he paused and saw things from the others’ point of view as well as Michael’s own. Michael more likely than anything else did not want any other witnesses save for David, with the strange connection that the two of them had managed to forge between each other in spite of the fact that David had spent most of his time thus far pointing a gun at Michael, to be there for the moment when he finally slipped and could not come back. The others, however, looked at David and saw that he was taking advice from a burgeoning vampire, taking that vampire along on a mission more important than any other, and David was even letting that vampire call the shots when it came to deciding how the mission would go.

“No problem,” David said. He could feel Michael staring at him hard as Carrie came over to join them, while Kelly went with Carly, Chikezie, and Jordin, and Syesha with the remainder. He nodded to each of his own people before turning, around to the side of the building where shadows stretched out long fingers. They were all already keeping their voices pitched low, in deference to what they knew must be inside and waiting for them.

“You’re a real charmer, you know,” Michael said in a low voice to Carrie as he crept along with them both to the theater’s back entrance. “I’m amazed that you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Carrie flicked Michael a glance and came closer to smiling than David had personally ever seen her before. He wondered if it hurt. “Careful, there,” she said. “That’s a little heteronormative, and I really doubt that you two are ones to talk.” Another smile, and her face managed not to even crack.

“Huh.” Michael sounded contemplative, and less depressed than David had heard from him in hours. David wondered if this was because he, like David, was now wondering which woman Carrie could possibly be referring to, when it did not seem as if Carrie herself managed to have meaningful interactions with anyone other than...

“Wow,” David whispered as he got it. They were on a mission, they were on a mission; David abruptly threw the thought out of his head so that he could continue on. “You got the scent?” he whispered to Michael in as loud a voice as he dared. Any sound at all made him feel as if his skin was about to crawl right off of his body.

“Yes,” Michael said shortly. He tilted his head to one side and did not elaborate. David asked himself if he really wanted to know what was going through Michael’s mind right now, what dark urges he was holding back, and decided then that it was not a matter of what he actually wanted. It was what he owed Michael, for the help that Michael was giving them--David listened to Michael’s insistence that he was not a hero and called bullshit on it--and the promise that he had made to Michael to see it through to the end.

David held up his hand to stop Carrie before she could enter the theater. “Tell me,” he said to Michael in a low voice.

Michael did not answer for several seconds, making David think that he was ultimately going to refuse on the grounds that there were some things beyond sharing, one’s own death being one of them. Finally, he responded, “I could tell you how many drops of blood there are in this square block, and I think that I could drink them all.” He cast David a sideways look when David flinched back before he was able to stop himself. “Was that what you wanted to know?”

David had wanted Michael to tell him that against all odds a miracle was taking place and that he was feeling fine; he guessed that he would make do with the truth if given absolutely no other options. “I made a promise,” he said, and then, when Michael started to turn away after Carrie, “Hey.”

“When I say that I’m in control, there’s a countdown attached to it,” Michael started. David decided to give him a very good reason to shut his mouth for a few moments, namely by David pressing his own to it.

It was chaste. It had to be; David could feel the way that Michael was trembling beneath the hand that David put on his shoulder and the way that he sucked in his breath hard at the first touch of David’s mouth to his own. David pulled away as soon as Michael made a first attempt to deepen it, laying his hand against the side of Michael’s face. The skin was growing cool. David would never have thought it possible that he would miss that fever.

“Best if we stop it there,” David said in a low voice as Michael made a pained noise from the back of his throat.

Michael coughed and seemed to have to struggle hard for several seconds before his eyes began to focus again. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably. I really wanted to bite you, when you did that.” The strangled noise that he made wanted to be a laugh and could not quite make it. “Hell of an end to a first date, that would be.”

“Technically, I think this would be our third.” But David touched his hand lightly to Michael’s arm in reassurance before he went ahead to join Carrie. She looked disapproving rather than surprised to have seen the embrace. David thought back to her comment to the effect that he and Michael were not being precisely subtle with one another and decided that he did not altogether care.

“If he had bitten you, I would have dropped you where you stood,” Carrie said in a conversational tone.

“Atta girl.” David tried the back door, and every nerve in his body began firing out warning signals at once as he discovered that it was unlocked. That was either very, very good, a sign of arrogance on Jason’s part in reflection of their inability to trace him back to his home thus far, or David needed to get everyone out of there just as fast as he was able. He looked back over his shoulder at Michael, but Michael’s face was blank and uncomprehending.

Have to work on those trust issues sooner or later, David told himself, and forced the door the rest of the way open so that he could step inside. He heard the soft pad of Carrie’s footfalls behind him, while Michael made no sound at all. Jason had gotten some semblance of power running to the place again, for there were soft lights glowing over each of the theater entrances. It smelled of mold and stale popcorn. David listened hard for any sound and could find nothing except for those made by Carrie and himself. Even those sounded too loud, and he wondered how loud they had to be to Michael, who trailed behind like a ghost.

“Come on,” David said over his shoulder to them both before he began walking as quietly as he was able down the dimly light hallway. He heard nothing. He saw nothing. He still retained his hand on his gun and his finger against the trigger. David tasted something sour in the back of his throat.

“You reek of adrenaline,” Michael said from behind them. His voice had a ragged quality that David had never heard before, as if two entirely separate people were fighting for control of the same body. It wasn’t like the flirtations with violence that Michael had made before, and David knew immediately that this time he would not be able to solve it with a Prince Charming kiss. He spun back towards Michael with more of that sour taste filling up his mouth as Michael said, “David, I can’t--”

A dark shape filled the hallway directly behind Michael. David did not wait to see if its intention was to aid Michael or to harm him, or even if it was human or vampire, before he fired. The bullet went over Michael’s shoulder and took the creature directly between the eyes, which flashed like a cat’s before the thing went down. David was briefly gratified to learn that he had not killed a human. He was also, however, not sure with all of the stress flooding through his system that he would have been moved to care if he had.

Carrie screeched out one of the filthiest combinations of profanities that David had ever heard coming from the mouth of a woman as she leapt to the side, with her small frame giving her a speed and agility that David would not have thought possible until he saw her in action. She fired several times, the muzzle flashes lighting up the hallway like stars before they disappeared again, and then screamed as she was taken down hard by another of those shadows. David turned to aid her, but there were so many more rising out of the darkness, their faces made visible by virtue of the fact that they were so very pale against the hallway’s lingering shadows. Someone punched David in the face hard enough to make his back teeth rattle in their sockets and him to briefly question the very nature of reality around him. He fell down to one knee, recovered his balance enough to sweep someone’s legs out from under them and then fire a point-blank shot into their face, and yelled, “Michael!” His mouth stinging and his breath coming fast in his chest, his voice was distorted and strange.

Michael was standing--kneeling, really--beneath one of the dimly glowing exit signs of the theater. The red bulb cast his face into a harsh, demonic light and ruined any reluctance or compassion that his eyes might have still been capable of. They were dark hollows, and his voice was warped with the fangs which were protruding over his lower lip as he repeated, “David, I can’t stop it.” He made a low and pained growling sound.

David was distracted by care, and he did not even have time to brace his abdominal muscles before a booted kick caught him hard in the ribs and knocked every single trace of air out of his lungs amidst a starburst of agony. Wheezing hard to get it back, David rolled back over to see Jason smiling down at him. Jason had his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow; he looked as if he was ready to get dirty. What the dress hinted at, the smile confirmed.

“We should have known,” Carrie said. Though his line of sight was blocked by Jason, it sounded as if someone slapped her. She spat and swore before repeating, “We should have known.”

“I told him,” Jason said as he knelt down to meet David’s eyes. “So I guess that it’s only fair that I tell you, too. No one fights the thirst. They just play for a little while.”

David looked up at Michael, but Michael was neither coming to his aid nor giving him any explanation as to his actions. He was backing away into the cover of the nearest theater instead, where the shadows were so thick that he could have worn them as a cloak, and his face as David watched him go bore the last traces of humanity sliding away. Jason yanked David up to his feet and twisted his arms behind his back so hard that David swore that the bones were going to break, but David could not stop looking at Michael as Michael slid away and just...just left them there.

“We should have known,” Carrie repeated again, softly.

End Part Twenty-One

Continue to Part Twenty-Two