TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve

( The universe spoke to him, in fits and starts. )

And we're done. I can't believe that I wrote 55928 words. That's a novel. On American Idol.

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten

( The rental company, after learning that Michael had scarcely been in possession of their car for five hours before he managed to get a DUI in it, swiftly informed him that under the present circumstances they thought it best to cancel his contract. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine

( Michael had never been arrested before. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight

( Beth did not make mistakes often. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven

( Even though Michael did not drink another drop that night, he still woke up with a pounding headache and a deep and inescapable sense that something had gone wrong without his knowledge. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six

( Michael did not think that he had ever had a reason to scrutinize his apartment as an outsider would see it before. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

( Beth did not call for his presence the next morning. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

( Michael could think of many far less pleasant ways to spend his day other than lying around his apartment and doing his best imitation of a slug. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

( Michael awoke to a ringing sound. )

David Cook's adorable humility and awe in the face of suddenly being a sex god will never stop being, well....adorable. I love that he was right from the beginning a total rock idol onstage (allowing those few weeks before he learned how to work a televised medium and overdid it), and yet is such a friendly, personable word nerd in real life.

( Spoilers love southern rock. )

I am so glad that I have a job that only requires 15-25% of my brain at any given time. It frees up so much time to think about whether or not a "music soothes the savage beast" moment of David singing in the vampire AU would be too over the top (and then realize, shit, I'm contemplating a vampire AU, maybe the time to worry about being over the top is past), that if Michael Johns ever sings "You'll Accompany Me" I will hit the ionosphere, and that "Cherry Pie" is the best Dean/Woman song ever written. And now you know so much more than you ever cared to about my musical tastes (ie, about thirty years in the past).

Have finished paper. Have sent off paper. Have never struggled so hard not to call someone a fucking douchebag in an academic context in my life.

Here's the thing. The 6% vs. 3% stat that proponents of the adaptationist theory of rape are so found of? It's really, really easy to obtain that statistic when you redefine rape to mean whatever you want it to mean. Sure, knock off male/male rape, rape of women either too young or to old to bear children, anal rape, oral rape, rape with instrumentation, rape-murder, rape in which the woman was taking contraceptives, and rape in which the rapist experienced sexual dysfunction. (This is why it's now considered unfair to expect a rape kit to yield semen as proof.) Except that then, much like the animal studies (forced copulation* doesn't yield reproductive success in the animal kingdom; genital structures are too complex, even and especially among the higher primates to yield reproductive success without female cooperation), you're in the world of baldly making shit up.

A word to Harding, Drea, et. al, however: please don't point towards moderate size differences between men and women as compared to our ancestors and call it proof that rape could not be an evolutionary strategy. Humans are soft and easy to make bleed; we scrabbled up this planet by being smart and ruthless. Use the mountains and mountains of legitimate counter-evidence instead.

SHIFTING GEARS. GEARS, WE WILL SHIFT. I have dealt with this one asshole long enough to last me a lifetime as it is. I am going to thoroughly enjoy the shit out of Ironman this Friday, y'all. You have no idea. This is the same response I expect to have to the latest Narnia movie. Oh, look! Now Peter can be slashed with someone who is not related to him! Oh, yes, how shall we contain ourselves?

Further fannishly: y'all see that icon there, right? It's insane, the things that it and the extremely gay apple-picking are doing to me. I have decided that what this fandom needs is an AU. A vampire AU. Furthermore, a vampire AU where David C., Syesha, and Carly are all vampire hunters charged with saving a prophecy child (David A., naturally) from the nefarious vampire forces of Jason, Ramiele, and Brooke. And Michael gets caught in the middle and is bitten by Jason, so the vampire hunters are bickering amongst themselves about whether or not they should try to find a cure or just kill him before he turns, and of course there's the GAY SEX YAYZ, and then also a subplot where Syesha is getting Angelus-esque messages from Ramiele, since Ramiele was a vampire hunter herself before she was turned, and then Syesha will have the badass moment of "You used to be my friend; now you're just wearing her skin" before commencing with the SHOOTING IN THE FACE....I do not understand why none of you have staged an intervention by now.

*Term used to differentiate from rape among humans, because not only does Thornhill engage in the naturalistic fallacy (what occurs in nature is automatically "natural" in the granola-eating sense), he engages in equivocation when it comes to his definitions of rape, too. If I hadn't learned to mock the shit out of him in the margins by Day Three, my head would have exploded.

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

Part One

( The streets of Los Angeles were a wonder at night. )

TITLE: Black Bird Singing
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 eventually
SPOILERS: Uh. This is AU. This is deeply, deeply AU. No one has wings, that’s about as much contact with “canon” as it actually has.
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook.
SUMMARY: Somewhere, Michael’s life went wrong, and he’s not entirely sure where.

( Michael hated his job. )

I've downloaded David Cook's studio version of "Little Sparrow". I think that I love it even more than I did live. (And a big part of my love is that he doesn't do a "Me and Mr. Jones"-style revamp and sings it as a female singer would, for reasons both noble and porny.) Oh, lord, guys, this is getting bad. This is getting Season Five levels of intense for me, and I think that we all know how that one turned out. Come to me, Silly Smutty Nonsense Fandom, come to me!

So, in the interest of ensuring once more that I will not see heaven, a rec: Song Choice. This is a work in progress, and I will probably rec it again once it's finished, but more now it's one chapter of hand-clappingly fun Michael/Jason. First line, "People have told David that he can be a bit of a stalker." And it only gets better from there, filled with cameos for all of the other contestants on this season and a hysterical, charming David voice.

Also, from my first fandom: Empty rooms, shuttered and dark. Holy hot Spike/Riley/Angel, Batman. I don't think that I can spoiler anyone to plot details, because there's not a lot to plot to be had, but just pure, hot, fantastic smut.

( Very, very brief, because I require sleep. )

Okay, so I'm reading The Ruins right now in preparation for the movie coming out, and ZOMG. I don't squick or scare easily, ordinarily, and yet I have more than once been reading this book with my mouth hanging open. Scott Smith has a very blunt style with a lot of random details thrown in there that makes the atmosphere so much creepier; I want to be in his head for ten minutes. I think that I would need a valium afterwards, but I want to do it. At about halfway through, it's pretty good on gender issues, though I of course won't be able to lay down a final verdict until I finish it, and the big thing that looks cranky-making about race in the movie previews? If it's handled in the movie the way that it is in the book, then it will flip around and automatically make the movie better than a good 80% of the other films in the horror genre.

At least once a year, I guarantee that I will not see heaven.

TITLE: Buckley Meets Morrison
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Michael Johns/Jason Castro
DISCLAIMER: Not my sandbox.
SUMMARY: Oh, my darlings, if you’re looking for a plot this is perhaps not the best place to go. There’s pot. And sex. That’s about it.

( The smoke tickles as it slides down Michael's throat. )

Oh, God, so I've downloaded Michael Johns' full version of "A Day in the Life" from iTunes. And I am stupid kinds of in love with it. In a recording studio, doing the full version rather than ninety chopped-up seconds, he is amazing.

I have been down this road before. Yeah, the charming guy who has a stubborn idea of who he is as an artist and can knock the shit out of a studio recording even as he's underwhelming onstage? (I'm just waiting for Michael to start doing the bad week/brilliant week/bad week trade-off.) And he's married already and thus makes shameless porn intensely problematic?

Guys. It's like Ace and Chris in one body. What do I even do with that?

Firstly: it's probably the battery on Kermit, Apple.com tells me, and they run about sixty bucks. That is...so not happening right now, is what I'm thinking, so it'll be listening to music off of the computer only for me at the moment. I mostly listen to my iPod during my early-morning writing brainstorming and during my post-episode pacings (and with Moonlight settled for the time being, the only show that's really making me pace about and get thinky at the moment is SCC until Lost comes back-and we all know that when I get thinky at Lost, I also tend to get ragey, so maybe it's for the best), as I think best both when I'm moving and when I have a beat. This is going to suck, y'all, because work isn't offering overtime again until back to school season, when I will already have long quit and be off to wherever for grad school.

I didn't follow Idol very quickly last year on account of being eaten up with work and school at once, and any way, much as I loved Blake and Jordin, I was convinced that my head over heels thing for one Mr. Young was a deeply bewildering and occasionally disturbing one time thing. Only (mostly) having work this season, though, I'm tuning in. I watched San Francisco last night, snerked at the fact that my two favorites were the non-Americans, and watched South Carolina tonight. ( To the show's credit, )

Is there the beginnings of an SCC fandom anywhere? Other than on the TWOP boards (which I'm actually enjoying, because hey: smart time travel discussion meets smart philosophy of mind discussion, interspersed with everyone being in complete agreement on Summer Glau's abrupt about-face from Joss Whedon's Weird Waif Obsession into utter hottie)? This show, guys, it's taken me all of three episodes to go head over heels. And for everyone, too, which is a rarity for me. (John still does irritating teenaged bullshit, but he intersperses the ITBS with flashes of the hero that he's going to be, so all right. That I should love Cameron and Sarah falls into the realm of "Hi, have you actually met me?") Completely shallow perving one second, completely appropriate citing of the Chinese room example the next, there is no bad there.