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AI Fic: A Rush of Blood to the Head 24/24
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
Part Twenty-Three



Part Twenty-Four

Michael did not flee out of treachery. Though someone standing on the outside and looking in might disagree, he did not even flee out of cowardice. That mythical person, standing just outside the window and only able to see what he did and not how it affected him to do so, would get such an infinitesimal fraction of what was going that Michael, barely able to restrain the fangs that were protruding down over his lower lip and with every beat of his heart chanting blood blood blood, was actually experiencing.

It all came down to the blood, after all. It did not matter that David made his infant attempts to soothe Michael and to hold back the growing monster for as long as he could, it did not matter that Michael himself was trying to do the same, to the point that if he were a human hanging off of a ledge he was sure that his knuckles would be the colors of pearls and his arms would be shaking with the effort. It didn’t matter that Archuleta was innocent and if Michael ever wanted to pretend that he was a decent person again, he would turn back. It didn’t matter.

He wasn’t going to be any kind of person at all for much longer, let alone a decent one, so it didn’t matter.

Michael hit the comparatively cool air outside and doubled over with his hands braced upon his knees. There were a thousand different sounds racing through his ears, but none of them were his own heartbeat, and Michael didn’t know how terribly that lack of sound was until he experienced it. It didn’t help, as much as he needed it, getting distance didn’t help. He could still hear everything, smell everything, better than he would have been able to as a human even if he had been standing right next to the chaos. And above it all, so desperately that it was making his mouth dry and his hands shake, there was blood. It was all that he could think about and all that he could ever imagine himself thinking about, and it was making it hard to even move.

The very worst part of it, Michael decided as he stared at the pavement with aching eyes and knew that the city lights would burn him if he dared look up, wasn’t the senses that he could not hope to keep under his control. It wasn’t even the bloodlust. It was that he was still him, underneath it all, his conscience refusing to be turned off even as it was growing weaker and weaker against what he needed it to hold back. He wondered if the other vampires had gone through this, and maybe that was why they were so vicious. Because you had to be a full monster when the other option was to only go halfway and with it be rendered completely mad.

Someone within the theater yelled, a sound that a human standing on the sidewalk outside would not have possibly been able to hear. Michael’s skin prickled as he told himself that he was removing himself from the situation before he wound up contributing to it, whether he liked it or not. The sun would be up very soon. Michael, if he couldn’t stop this, could at least end it before he killed someone.

Another yell.

“You’re killing someone now,” Michael whispered to himself. It was one of few occasions when he hated to be right. He wondered what David was surely thinking of him now. That he had planned this. That he had brought the group here solely so that Jason’s own could kill them, and hadn’t let merely because he had felt himself starting to slip in that final way that he would not have been able to pull back from.

Michael spun, punched a parking meter. He felt only the slightest of pains in his knuckles before he was staring in horror and awe at the way that the metal bent beneath the assault. The cuts on his hand were closed over again almost before the dark black blood had time to trickle out.

Michael stared, feeling his tongue touch out lightly at his lower lip. He leaned down, brushed the tip against one dark and clotting bead. It tasted wrong, it tasted so wrong, nothing like David’s blood when he had fed Michael, or even Michael’s own when he had still been human and had stuck a finger into his mouth after cutting it. He turned his head quickly to the side so that he could spit it out and let out a mirthless laugh as he shook all over like a dog.

“I don’t think that you’re going to make it until dawn, kid,” Michael whispered to himself. “So you might as well make this one count.” He nodded once, decision made to himself, and whirled.

If he thought about it, he would stop, so he didn’t. Michael dashed back into the theater and, that gate, that barrier within himself that he had been holding onto so fiercely, he let it go. Let it go, let all of the rage and the bloodlust and the horror wash over him, and felt those infant fangs slide down over his lower lip until twin streams of blood run down his chin. Someone within the theater would stop him when it was over. Pray God for them all if they couldn’t.

Michael counted on the vampires within knowing that he was coming and made up for that with pure, adrenaline-fueled speed as he struck the appropriate doors. He knew where he was going by the heartbeats like glowing markers.

Someone will stop me, Michael thought as he felt himself pass the moment in which he could have stopped himself. His attention was drawn first to Archuleta, because Archuleta was scared, pissed off, and bleeding, a combination that made him all but pulse. Archuleta was bent back over a broken theater chair with that terrifying blonde leaning over him, her overly wide mouth stretched open wide to reveal far too many teeth. Archuleta struggled against her, bending his neck back at an angle that had to be painful to him, all of the tendons in his neck standing out. Michael watched him scrabble behind him for a shard of plastic from the shattered chair and drive it hard into the blonde’s chest. It made a sucking sound that Michael could hear from where he stood as he dragged it back out again; Brooke laughed. She leaned down again, Michael thought to bite Archuleta, which would have been even less dangerous than being bitten by a neighborhood dog to what Michael had seen that kid capable of doing, until she put her hands on either side of Archuleta’s neck in preparation for that ultimate bloodless snap.

Michael was not even aware that he had started moving until he was across the room and throwing the full weight of his much larger bulk against Brooke. They went end over end together; though Michael could hear the sounds of chaos erupting behind him, all that he could see around him where flashes of yellow hair and hear Brooke’s furious hissing. They came to a halt and she untangled her limbs from his, striking him hard enough in the jaw to knock his head back. Michael shook it off and noticed for the first time that there were others in the room, than Brooke, Archuleta, and himself. David was there--Michael had heard his heartbeat, knew his scent, but still found room to be shocked by this development--and at Michael’s entrance, he had taken advantage of a moment of distraction on Jason’s part as an opportunity to take him on. Syesha and Carly were only a few yards off, Syesha on her back and kicking up viciously at a vampire that was doing its best to disembowel her. Syesha snapped the vampire’s head back, and Carly finished it off with a shot to the head.

Michael met eyes with David for only a second before the both of them were pulled away by their respective battles again. Michael was not sure what he saw in that gaze. He wasn’t sure that David understood that Michael hadn’t left in the first place because he had wanted to, and that he was back now. Why that mattered. It was going to be the last thing that Michael ever did which mattered, and he wanted it to count.

“Aren’t you the little Benedict,” Brooke murmured, drawing Michael’s attention back to her. Her voice was a low and satiny hiss as she leapt at him.

It was liking fighting a cat. Michael was taller and heavier and ought to have had the upper hand in this contest, but Brooke had been a vampire for much longer than he had and had thrown herself into it utterly. She knew the limits of her enhanced physiology and could move in ways that Michael could not bring himself to believe didn’t break the rules of physics in some way. She knocked him back, against the theater seats and against Archuleta. God. The kid’s blood. Michael jerked himself up and away before temptation could become more than he knew how to fight.

“Get away from me, kid,” Michael whispered to Archuleta as he disentangled himself and leapt away. “Get as far as you can.”

“I’m not a kid,” Archuleta answered back automatically, “And no way.” His face, though completely drained of blood--that’s all running out of his arm and just being wasted, don’t think of that, don’t think of that--was more resolved than Michael had ever seen it.

Brooke followed Michael with a speed that blurred the eye and made him wonder if she had not actually managed to to disjoint her arms and legs as she landed on his chest, scrabbling furiously to grab his neck and, he knew, break it as easily as a carrot. He highly doubted that he would be able to throw that off as easily as a few cuts across his knuckles. Michael ducked and hurled her off, forgetting for a second that the kid was there. Brooke landed on him like a spider; Michael saw her eyes go wide and her nostrils flare. Archuleta tried to scrabble back over the chairs and out of the way, but if even Michael was having trouble holding his own against Brooke with all of the changes that had been wrought in him, then one barely-grown human who had never seen a vampire until two days before did not have a chance. Brooke seized his arm and, dragging him forward with such force that Michael was sure his arm was about to pop right out of its socket like a cork from the mouth of a champagne bottle, settled her mouth onto the bleeding wound. Her hungry groan was audible across the entirety of the theater; Michael saw her eyes and realized that she did not want to be drinking of him, that the thirst had overwhelmed her.

Brooke barely drank his blood for a second before she released him and Archuleta jerked away. Her lips were stained red like a Mata Hari as she gasped and heaved, trying in vain to spit all of the drops from her mouth. The unholy pallor that had marked her face ever since Michael had first laid eyes upon her was replaced with deep red as she grabbed for her throat with both hands. She gasped for breath like an animal in pain and fell down to her knees, only able to stop herself from falling all the way to the floor by putting her hand out quickly. Archuleta recovered himself and stood before her, his hands clenched at his sides. He needed to stop doing that. It was making the blood flow all the faster. Michael remained in a semi-crouch behind her, not trusting himself to go closer.

“Archuleta!” Leader or not, David could still make his voice crack like a whip. He threw a silver stake to Archuleta; Archuleta caught it from the air with an ease of purpose that Michael did not think even the kid himself could fully believe. He bent over Brooke’s bowed back and raised the stake high over his head. Michael saw Archuleta pause for only a second; he doubted that a human would have been able to see it at all. The silver stake made a whistling noise as it came down.

Archuleta stepped away from Brooke’s body as soon as it hit the floor, looking drawn and sick. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

Michael didn’t want to lave Archuleta alone, but neither could he be close to him any longer. He turned and in one leap was on the short platform in front of the movie screen itself, where Jason was proving to David, Carly, and Syesha all that numbers meant very little when the biological deck was so thoroughly stacked in your favor. Carly took a knee to her belly that made her double over and fall down to the stage before she could halt herself.

Well, maybe four could do the job where three could not. Michael twined his fingers through Jason’s hair and yanked his head back hard, putting his knee up and against Jason’s spine. He didn’t have the weapons at his disposal to kill the fucker. He could, however, paralyze him and then see how long it took a vampire to knit a spine back together.

Jason reached back behind him, seized Michael beneath his arms with both hands, and hurled him over his head as easily as if Michael weighed nothing at all. Michael struck the floor on his hip and skidded a short distance before he rolled back into a ready crouch. He spat his own blood out of his mouth without caring that probably looked like an animal at this point.

Jason smiled at him, those eerily beautiful eyes of his flashing. “Don’t kid yourself,” he told Michael. “All that you’re doing is delaying the inevitable.”

“Get a new speech, boy,” Michael gritted. He rose back to his feet and lunged. Everything that he had, every ounce of energy in his body, was directed towards making Jason pay. Michael remembered how the fangs had felt sliding into his arm when Jason had started all of this, had cost Michael his wife, had cost him the life that he had been enjoying, would cost him his soul before it was over. All of this was at Jason’s feet, and even though Michael would not see the sunrise, goddamnit, if it took the last breath of air that he had in his body he was going to be certain that Jason did not see it, either.

What Michael did not yet have in skill he knew that he was making up for in terms of sheer ferocity. He collided with Jason hard enough to bowl them both backwards, over the short edge of the stage, and down to the floor. Michael had been able to shake off punching a new shape into a metal parking meter within seconds; he barely registered hitting the floor at all. He and Jason devolved into a biting, snarling whirl around each other. Michael was dimly aware that the fighting was still going on in his peripheral vision as the remaining vampires renewed their fight against the humans, but he had no time to pause and think about that. It was only barely that he had any inclination. There was so much blood, hot and pulsing and rich, buzzing in Michael’s head and driving him mad. He hoped that David had his finger well-snugged against his trigger. It had become time, and maybe Michael was not going to be able to die by his own hand, after all.

But Jason first.

It was only by blocking out the last, lingering traces of his concern for David’s people or for Archuleta that Michael was able to hold his own at all. Much as had taken place with Brooke, Jason was smaller and lighter than Michael, but he was settled into his vampiric senses and abilities in ways that Michael could scarcely conceive of. He wiggled like mercury out of Michael’s grasp every time that Michael thought he had him, more often than not delivering a ringing blow to Michael’s face, head, or abdomen as a parting gift. Michael shook each one off, pleased that at least vampiric healing was working in his favor, but the effect was cumulative. He could feel himself weakening by degrees.

“So I’ll spare you the speech, per your request,” Jason growled. He kicked Michael hard in the gut, flipped him over Jason’s head, and then landed easily on top of him. His hands found Michael’s throat. “But you’re a goddamned fool.”

“Seems to be the way of it,” Michael grunted. He got one of his feet up enough to kick Jason as hard as he could in the navel, aiming for much lower than that if Jason had not squirmed away at the last second, and followed that up by kicking Jason a second time, in the mouth. Blood began to flow immediately; Michael could only hope that he had broken some of the bastard’s teeth. He had done enough damage with them.

Jason reared back amongst a flurry of curses that were slurred as his lip began to swell up immediately. Michael was sure that he would have loved to hear what Jason was calling him, but a shot rang out before he could ask for a translation. Blood and brain splattered everywhere, obliging Michael to duck; he looked up to see David staring at him with an impassive face. The tremble in his hand was the only sign whatsoever that he was under any strain as he and Michael stared at each other.

Do it, Michael urged him as the roaring in his ears rose up to fill his entire world. Do it, do it, can’t you see that I’m not going to make it here? The vampires had lost, the last of them were being eradicated in the far corners of the room as they struggled to flee from the humans who now outnumbered them. Archuleta was safe. It was time for the monster to die, that was how all good movies ended.

“Come on,” Michael whispered aloud. David’s hand was outright shaking.

“Michael, are you okay?”

Michael knew that voice immediately, did not need to turn even though his body mandated it outside of any will that he might have had. Get back, kid, get back, please, God, if you know what’s good for you-- He was still turning, even though he was ordering himself to stay still, it smelled so sweet--

So sweet and so red, flowing down his arm and dripping down to the floor, and Archuleta’s face was nothing sweet and innocent like it had probably been once upon a time, but he still hadn’t reached the level of scary that David and the rest of his people lived in on a day to day basis. Didn’t matter; Michael was long past the point where he could stop himself. He lunged.

Shots fired from behind him. Michael listened to the echoing boom in that split-second of reflection that he had and even hoped that one of them would hit him, but they whistled by without so much as making an impact.

He didn’t tackle Archuleta as he had done Jason. He fell to his knees instead, grabbed for the boy’s arm, and wrenched it towards his mouth. Archuleta yelped and attempted to draw his arm back, but he couldn’t have fought against Michael even while Michael was still human, not as desperate as he was feeling right now. Michael kept his lips tucked over the fangs that desperately wanted to sink into Archuleta’s skin and drew a long line with his tongue through the blood that was running down Archuleta’s forearm, across his wrist, down his knuckles. The kid had gone so still that if it was not for his hammering heart it would be difficult to believe that he was even alive.

And the blood. Dear God, the blood. Michael made a high keening noise that he did not even realize was actually coming from him at first and was so incredibly reminiscent of the sounds which arose from good sex that Michael likely would have been humiliated if he had even had room to care. It was sweet and warm and the sex analogy was probably more apt than Michael ever cared to admit, because he would have given up getting laid ever again for the rest of his life if he could get more of it. The keen turned into a soft, urgent moaning noise.

Michael wished that he pulled back because Archuleta was struggling so hard that he was about to pull his own arm right out of socket in order to get away and because fear-sweat was overwhelming even that sweet scent of food, but it wasn’t. He might have kept on drinking forever if a burning had not started all along the interior of his mouth and then down his throat, if his stomach had not been struck by sudden cramps so powerful that they nearly drove him into a fetal position. Michael jerked backwards, let Archuleta go, and then felt several different pairs of hands grabbing at him as he doubled over and gagged. He could smell David; as his vision first doubled and then tripled, he could not tell where he was.

Michael went willingly with the hands that pulled him back, only to abruptly collapse down to the floor as the urge to retch became overwhelming. He expelled all of the blood that had barely had a chance to settle into his stomach on one sudden, violent rush. It didn’t stop the burning, and Michael became glad of unconsciousness as it slammed over him with the force of a hammer-blow only a few seconds later, because it stopped him from screaming.

*
Michael didn’t know where he was; he didn’t even know who he was. Sometimes he could smell every single person who was in the room with him and hear the activities of people who he swore were blocks away, sometimes it felt as if his entire head had been swaddled in cotton. Michael didn’t know what this latter experience meant. After only two days, he had already lost his basis for comparison. He shivered with chills that ran down into his bones and then was drenched in sweat seconds later, what felt like, as time became strange and elastic on him. So many hands were on him during so many different occasions that he would have sworn, had he not known better, that he was in a hospital; it occurred to Michael more than once in his delirium that this was exactly what had happened, and he had somehow hallucinated the previous two days of hell. He swore that he could smell David.

He was neither in heaven nor hell, Michael realized some indeterminate period of time later, as he drew in a ragged breath that hurt and opened his eyes. He was somewhere in between, right there with everyone else.

“What the hell?” Michael asked, and winced. His throat felt as if he had been forced to swallow charcoal. He was lying on a narrow bed, a scratchy blanket beneath him. There was a pillow beneath his head; his shoes had been removed, but other than that he was still clothed.

“Welcome back, miracle baby.” Michael rolled his head to the side and saw Carly sitting in a chair beside the bed. She had a copy of Anna Karenina in her lap; she might even have been reading it. There was a guitar sitting forgotten beside the chair.

Michael stared at it hard before he asked, “How am I not dead?” He winced and then put his hand against his throat.

Carly reached out and snagged a bottle of water from the bedside table. She cracked the seal and handed it to him, and Michael decided that he was going to love her for the rest of his life. He took a deep gulp as Carly said, “Oh, good, all of us are on the same page. We don’t have any idea, either.” She reached out and put her hand against his forehead. “If that’s not ninety-eight point six, then it’s close enough for government work.”

As much as Michael would like to indulge his inner pessimist, he was so overwhelmed at that moment that all he could do was lay back against his pillow, close his eyes, and resist mightily an urge to cry tears of pure relief. The implications were too large, too stunning for him to process them all at once. He set his bottle of water to the side and pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw colors instead.

“How much can you hear?” Carly asked him.

“You. Some traffic outside, when I focus.” The room that he had been placed in must be against an outer wall. Michael opened his eyes and looked at Carly again. “Yeah. I get it.”

“Well, I was sure hoping that you weren’t about to cry because you still thought you were looking forward to eternity as a bloodsucking monster.” Carly exhaled a long sigh and stood from her seat. “You were so close to being fully turned,” she said softly, not looking at him. “So close. I saw you in that theater and was sure that you were about to rip that kid’s throat out. Guess that one percent was what saved you.”

“It’s almost enough to make me take up religion,” Michael said before he closed his eyes again, because his entire body felt as if he was in the middle of recovering from a long and brutal flu. He didn’t open them again until he felt Carly gently gripping his shoulder.

“He sang to you,” she said. “While you were out. Do you remember?”

“No,” Michael was forced to answer.

Carly smiled. “I can’t remember the last time that he did that,” she said before she left the room, closing the door behind her so that he could rest.

*
Michael felt less like he had been hit by a truck by the time that he woke again, and more like collision with an angry newspaper boy on his bicycle. He stretched and muttered curses to himself as his body decided that he was now going to pay for every single bruise that he had incurred as a vampire in the most human way possible. And, he decided as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, he was going to kiss each of them that he could actually twist around and reach.

The sound of raised voices pulled Michael out of the room and to where David was standing practically nose to nose with a brunette who looked as if she had removed any hope of someone defying her from her inner landscape years before. Archuleta was standing slightly behind David and looking like he didn’t know whether to be scared or pissed and was settling for some mixture that was merely young and upset instead. There were dark shadows under his eyes.

“There is no fucking way,” David said in a low voice that Michael had never heard from him before, even when he had thought that David was actual, literal seconds away from killing him, and which made Michael wonder if Daivd was not about to draw his gun.

The brunette gave one of the most eloquent flicks of an eyebrow that Michael had ever seen. “Do you really think that he can just stay with you, with your resources?” she asked.

“This is where I want to--” Archuleta started.

The brunette rolled right over him without even looking around in his direction. “This kid has never happened before and may never happen again,” she said. “He could be a way of stopping the entire vampire species right in its tracks. He needs to be with people who best know how to cultivate that.”

Oh. Oh. “I don’t think that’s quite the word you’re looking for,” Michael said as he stepped out from his previously unnoticed place on the sidelines. “Not ‘cultivate’, no. ‘Exploit’, maybe. Yeah, that one has a nice little ring to it.”

The brunette flushed, Archuleta looked exceedingly happy to see him up and about, David just looked at him. “You really have not been on the right side of this war long enough to know what you’re talking about,” the brunette informed him stiffly.

“I was among the bad buys long enough to know that they take and use and don’t really give a shit about who they’re hurting,” Michael said. “If the good guys do that, too, then we have a problem.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Archuleta backed him up softly. “And I want to stay here. I’m not asking for permission.”

David looked at him, looked at Michael again with those opaque eyes, and then turned back to the brunette. “There we go,” he said. “That doesn’t leave a whole lot up for discussion, does it?”

The brunette huffed out an angry noise and said, “More than you know.” But she turned around and stalked back over to her people. There was an invisible line drawn between them and David’s own group, which no one seemed quite willing to cross. Michael could feel eyes on him and shifted his shoulders uncomfortably.

And then did it again when David walked over to him. “Hey, I guess I should--” David reached up and laid his hand against Michael’s forehead. “Or ignoring personal space altogether, that’s okay, too.”

David had a soft smile playing on the edges of his mouth, though, and it made Michael forget for the second that there was still a life that he was never going to be able to go back to. “One hundred percent Grade-A normal,” David said softly, as if he could not quite believe it, and then took Michael’s arm within his hands. Turning it over, he exposed what had been when Michael looked at it last an inflamed and angry-looking wound. It was still unhappy to look upon, but the barely-closed bite marks had been replaced with raw, young scar tissue. “Goddamn.”

“Thanks for not shooting me,” Michael said.

“Spare some of that thanks for me.” Michael turned, saw Syesha. She hesitated, then put her hand over his arm. “I had a clear bead.” She hesitated, then said, “I’m glad that you were able to come back.” Michael swore that her eyes were moist as she walked away, but she turned her back upon him too quickly to be sure.

David watched her go and then squeezed at the scars on Michael’s arm. With the fever gone, Michael could now appreciate how warm his skin was. “What are you going to do now?”

Michael shrugged. “I nearly raped my wife because I was turning into a vampire and then walked out on her because I thought that I was saving her from my turning into a vampire. That, uh, isn’t really something that I think you get to take back.”

“When you care about someone, you’d be amazed what you can take back.”

That was teasing with an area that was far too intense for two people who had known each other three days--maybe, Michael was not quite sure how long he had been out as he had been trying to return to the human race--and they both seemed to realize it at the same moment. Michael cleared his throat and went on, “Besides, I’ve seen what’s out there. I don’t...I don’t think that I can turn my back on that and still call myself decent.”

David inhaled as he realized all that Michael was trying to commit himself to. “It’s really funny, how you keep doing these things and insisting that you’re only being decent,” he said. He stroked at Michael’s scar in a way that was intensely distracting and only reminded Michael that there were opportunities to pull away and here he was very much not taking them before David went on, “It’s not a job that most people can do for very long.”

“I’ll seduce you out of your retirement fund when the time comes,” Michael said, partly just to fuck with David and partly to test some waters, but David’s eyes lit up at precisely the part of the sentence that Michael still had conflicted feelings about.

Somehow, David’s hand travelled from Michael’s forearm down to his hand, where it felt incredibly right as it squeezed at his fingers. “You already jumped off the cliff,” David said finally. “What kind of person would I be if I didn’t teach you how to swim?”

End