InsaneJournal

Current mood:	bouncy
Entry tags:	american idol: fic, flyboys

AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 22/24
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



Part Twenty-Two

In the absence of all else, David prayed. He didn’t do it loudly, not wanting to draw the attention of the scary people even more firmly down onto his head, but he prayed. Please, God, look this way, just for a moment.

David was aware that his lips were moving, but he was certain that he was being quiet enough, sure that he was not making any sound at all that could pull attention down onto him except for, you know, the attention that he wanted to be on him until the tiny woman called Ramiele crouched down in front of him. David was sitting in a moldy theater chair that was riddled with cigarette burns and the hard, tacky remains of candy at least a decade old. The only lights were the flickering red gleam of the EXIT signs and the gold beams that snaked along the aisles, marking the way out. David’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness a long time ago; he could see nearly every detail of Ramiele’s face. The worst part of it, he thought, was that she was still pretty, in a terrible and cold way that belonged more in a museum than it did upon a living girl.

David realized that it was so much harder to pray when he was also thinking about what it would be like to kill someone, something, but he could not seem to make himself stop. He shivered in his seat and stared hard at Ramiele. She and Brooke had not done anything...anything too terrible yet, even though the way that they laid their hands against his neck and shoulders made him feel like he would be showing a psychiatrist where on the doll they had touched him, if by some miracle he should get out of this.

“Our Father, who art in heaven,” Ramiele said to him as she remained in her crouching position just in front of him. She had a little girl’s voice, but it was made even worse when she was deliberately sing-songing at him. “Hallowed be Thy name.” She smiled at him. “How am I doing?”

David found his voice after several long moments of searching for it and said softly, “You have to actually mean it. Just saying the words isn’t enough.”

“Damn.” Ramiele tilted her head to the side. “I don’t guess that I have piety in me any longer.”

Brooke draped herself over the seat behind him and thus over David, as well, her cool cheek nuzzling against him and her long pianist’s fingers playing with the front of his shirt. She had been doing that so often since he had been taken back that David hardly even jumped any further, though he felt as if he was being caressed by snake’s skin each time. “I still think that we could probably boil it,” she said, and ignored the way that Ramiele rolled her eyes. “And if it’s only his blood that’s dangerous--”

“Gosh” did not even begin to cover it. David lunged up and to his feet with a fervor that he would not have thought that he even had in him, even knowing that his life might very well be on the line here. “Stay away from me!” he all but screamed at Brooke, feeling his voice crack. “You--” Were you there? his brain could not stop asking. Did you help spray the blood?

Our Father, who art in Heaven.

Hatred and prayer did not go together; you could not think about grace and about denying someone the final chance at theirs at the same time. It didn’t stop David. He didn’t think that it could stop him, and if he was going to be forced to choose then he thought that hatred was at that moment going to win. It was a pulsing fury behind his eyes that David had never felt before and, in that moment, had no possible way of controlling. All that he could think of was the way that Alexandra’s nightgown had been so high up on her thighs and how, even though Carly had insisted to him that in all likelihood Alexandra had been killed and killed only.

“What, little Davey?” Brooke rose up and cooed at him. “What are you going to do, sweet little boy?” She extended her hand out to caress at his hair.

David flinched back hard. “I’ll--” He paused, froze. What would he do? Rip her head right off of her shoulders? It crossed David’s mind, had he the strength. He felt something sour rising in the back of his throat.

His parents would not be proud of him if he succumbed and became a murderer, no. Even if David did not know anything else in the entire world, including what he could actually do, he knew that much. He spun and ran instead.

David had less than one second in which he thought that maybe a miracle really was going to happen, and he was going to make it. He didn’t think that he had ever run in his life as fast as he was running right now. The exit lights glowed.

Nor had he ever been hurled backwards as hard as he had when he felt a heavy hand come down on the back of his neck and wrench him off of his feet as if he was nothing else than a disobedient kitten. David registered that he was flying backwards for only a second before his spine hit the back of one of the seats hard, sending agony that David did not think he had ever felt before racing all the way through his spine and into the tips of his fingers and toes.

At least that means you haven’t broken your back, David thought in a dizzy voice as he collapsed back to the ground and attempted instinctively to curl around himself. It was the closest possible thing that he could find to optimism under the circumstances, and at that moment David really wished that he could just tell his brain to shut up. Especially when a tiny foot--how could he tell it was tiny, it was possible that he had been smacked around so much over the past several hours that his brain had just given up and decided to call it quits on him altogether--impacted his side less than a second later, throwing him over onto his back and driving every ounce of air out of his lungs on a wheeze. That was the sound of bones breaking, he was sure of it.

Ramiele put the same foot that she had used to viciously kick him upon his throat and pressed down slowly, driving out all of the oxygen that he was struggling to pull back into his lungs. David coughed and pushed at her calf as black spots began to dance around the edges of his vision, but he might as well have been trying to enforce his will upon an angry statue.

“I’m sick of waiting,” Ramiele hissed at him. David’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness a long time before; even without that, he thought that he would have been able to see the way that her eyes glittered and flashed. She was like a cat. She was like a miniaturized archangel, terrifying in her indifference. “I never followed orders before, I don’t see why I should start now.”

“Do it,” Brooke whispered, her voice trembling with a need that was almost sexual. David turned his head as far as he was able and saw that she was kneeling on the floor, nearly eye-level with him. That wide mouth was pulled back; she had so many teeth. “We’ll worry about the body later, do it, I want to see.” The last word emerged as a whine that sent a shiver down David’s spine and made him forget entirely how much that hurt.

This was how a rabbit felt when the shadow of the hawk fell overhead. This taste of iron in the back of his throat that was pure fear, this way that every single detail leapt out as time slowed down to accommodate him. David sucked in a whistling breath and told himself that he was not a rabbit, even if he was not wiling to become a killer, and he didn’t have to lie there and passively accept his fate. He braced both of his hands against Ramiele’s instep and hurled her up as hard as he could. He was fueled by adrenaline, and she flipped over backwards with a startled yelping sound. David scrambled up for another try as Brooke snarled, actually snarled, a sound that reminded David of a sick dog. She knocked him into one of the seats hard enough to make something crack. David was not even sure that it was the plastic and not simply his arm until he felt a sharp lance of pain and then something warm trickling down his forearm.

Panting, David looked down and realized that the ancient plastic that made up the arm of the seat had actually broken and driven a long splinter into his arm. Trembling, he pulled it out and watched warm blood flow out. In the shadows, it was nearly black. Brooke and Ramiele both sucked in their breaths hard.

“One little sip, I dare you.” Jason’s voice cracked like a whip. Ramiele seemed to hear and jerked backwards; Brooke continued to stare with a raptured expression. David crouched against the seat and looked around to...his heart fell down into the floor, burrowed through the earth, and waved at the people on the other side. Cook and a blonde woman that David didn’t recognize were shoved into the theater by a gaggle of vampires standing directly behind Jason, their faces blank of animation or mercy while Cook and the blond seethed with a rage that was only barely being held in check by the bounds of their skins. “And you’ll only get to regret it for a few minutes.”

David shivered. I didn’t want to be special, he thought one final time, however little good that was actually going to do him now that he was in the thick of it. He looked up and made eye contact with Cook for only a second as Carly and several other people that David did not recognize were forced in through another entrance. One of them was a brunette who, letting out a sound of pure rage, twisted around and cracked a vampire’s arm over her knee with a noise that David was able to hear from all the way across the room, no matter how she paid for it with a hard punch to the mouth immediately afterwards. Blood trickled down her chin, and the entire room shivered as with an electric current.

“Sorry, kid,” Cook said to him. He was a nice guy. David had no doubt that he meant it.

Ramiele looked around with an inquisitive expression and, before anyone could speak to her, quietly slid away.

End Part Twenty-Two

Continue to Part Twenty-Three