MICHAEL

Star feels different.

What does different feel like?

Michael's whole body feels loose and lazy with relief, any sense of urgency that had swept him up in the past week fading away like dew on the grass in the morning sun after a cold night. It feels like the sun has risen and it's summer again– sweet and simple and bright.

And under his skin, the laziness of their life itches at him– their gentle, slow nights and how easily Lucy and Sam and Grandpa fall back into their life before the Lost Boys in the span of a few days.

It feels like he's holding his breath for something that's never going to come.

"What do you mean?"

Star looks up at him, eyes sharp and searching.

Even with her great set up– a job and an apartment and everything– Star never lets her guard down. She's the only one who hasn't fallen complacent. It's why Michael kept coming back to her.

...Isn't it?

"It's just… a feeling. Don't you feel different?" Star looks out at the sunset, and then back at him.

Michael slips his hands down to her hips. Kisses her until she gives in and stops looking at him like something might be wrong.

When he pulls back, she doesn't look at him intently anymore, her breath soft and catching against his jaw, and he's relieved. Even though he has nothing to hide.

He takes her in, then: her bright red lips, the steel in her eyes, her curls spilling over her shoulder, swaying in the seaside breeze. Her silhouette against the warm colors of the sunset over the ocean as they stand on the bluffs together. The utter perfection of her hits Michael with a gentle jolt, the slow stop of a Ferris wheel. She looks like a dream– the kind of girl every boy would fall over themselves to earn a smile from. He had, before.

But she's not the one in his dreams anymore.

"Yeah," he whispers, "I feel different."

It is a feeling.

He remembers, faded like the distorted way an echo can remind someone, the way he felt when he first spotted her on the boardwalk what felt like a lifetime ago. This thrumming. This wild, irrational desire to get to know her, the thrilling rush of anticipation at the top of a rollercoaster, ecstatic at her first words and utterly enchanted by her smile.

Now, kissing her neck, a new desire rises in him, darker, hazier. He doesn't know what it is that he wants, but he wants. He remembers her in the hotel and he wants, he remembers her on the back of David's bike and he wants, he remembers her leading him to David and the boys and he wants… he wants…

"But you're the only one who knew them," he murmurs. He doesn't look at her.

The sun is down. Star's hands find his. "I can tell you about them."

"No." Michael doesn't know why he refuses.

It's too much to talk about them. It's not enough. It's too direct. It's not the real thing; not direct enough. It's better, he thinks, to pull her into bed and tie himself to the Lost Boys that way than to face what he wants in the daylight.

He fumbles for her, but she catches his hands.

"Just be my friend Michael. Michael." She looks sad for him.

He hates it. He hates it. He's not upset. He doesn't need anything. He just wants her. That's all he wants that's all he wants that's all–

"Friends, Michael." She kisses him. "Friends."

"Star– just–"

Star pulls away. "I need to put Laddie to bed," she whispers.

She's got an apartment at the top of a nice, respectable seaside hotel where she cares for Laddie and brings Michael, sometimes. At night, when Laddie is asleep. At night, when Michael can't stop thinking about the Lost Boys– though Star doesn't know it. Though Michael doesn't like to think of it.

Michael swallows and watches her go. He looks the other direction– towards the Lost Boys' hotel– and remembers her standing in the shadows, and Paul laughing, and Marko with food, and Dwayne watching, and David's white-blonde glinting in the firelight, and David with a low voice, and David with the bottle, and David and David and David.

He turns away, and he goes home.

He stops on the hard dirt road near the gate, dust swirling in his footsteps. He always does.

David's grave.

He's buried under a tree, a scraggly, bare tree that looks sharp and ominous in the night, its leaves thinning in the end of summer.

Flat dirt, a wooden stake with David scrawled on it stuck upright in the fresh dirt they threw over his body. It feels wrong– it is wrong to mark his grave with a wooden stake, of all things, but they didn't spare David too much time afterward. Everyone wanted to return to normal. Every night, after Star, Michael stops by the grave and looks at the wooden stake and feels wrong inside, at the pit of his stomach.

Tonight, it's not there.

Tonight, the dirt is messy, sunken and scattered, and there's a deep, human-body sized hole where the make-shift grave was. Or vampire-sized, as it were.

Fingers claw at Michael's heart, stopping it cold in his chest. He's weak in the knees. He's dreaming. Isn't he dreaming?

It wouldn't be the first time he'd dreamed about David.

"Michael."

Michael whirls.

It's–

It's…

It's David.

But it's not the David Michael has ever seen before.

David stands covered in dirt, blood down his neck, his black leather coat gone. His hair, messy and dirty, barely glints in the strong moonlight.

"Michael." His soft, low, mocking voice has been warped– it's scratchy, raw, ragged.

Michael's nails bite into his palms. He isn't dreaming.

David's eyes fix, unreadable, on Michael.

David watches him, watches him, watches him. He's unnaturally still, but then, it's David. It's David. Without a single movement, without a single word, he still looks as if he means something.

Or maybe it's just Michael. Maybe Michael just wants him to mean something.

He swallows around a dry throat. "David."

Michael is still standing in front of David's grave, hovering like a ghost tied to the place of their passing, except that it's David who died, and David… didn't die. He stumbles quickly out into the road, away from the base of the tree where David is– was– buried.

David's mouth twitches. "I'm not going back into my grave, Michael."

Michael has spent the past few days thinking about David– the good, the bad, the inconsequential. David isn't good by anyone's standards. Not, at least, the David that Michael was allowed to meet.

And yet despite himself, he feels something whisper down his spine and pool in his stomach when David says his name like that. A caress, his lips and tongue around the sounds, careful and gentle, airy and entrancing.

"You're alive," he says dumbly. He can't come up with anything else at the moment.

David's eyebrow twitches up. "Undead. You sound unreasonably happy to see me."

His voice is as flat as Michael remembers it. Somehow, that only adds to his relief.

"I'm not a killer if you're alive." Michael rushes to justify himself. But that's not why his chest feels warm, why his heart is kicking up, pulling itself from cold terror to… something else.

"I wasn't alive before. Are you sure killing me would have made you a killer, Michael?" David tilts his head, truly mocking him now.

He asks like it amuses him to imagine Michael puzzling through this question. He evidently already has an opinion and is waiting to laugh at Michael, but Michael doesn't know what that is. Somehow, he thinks that David would consider killing a vampire as murder, and yet would like nothing more than to be counted as a separate case, something different and darker and not shoved into the same category as human life. Maybe he's wrong.

But he's not going to give David the answer David wants– he's done trying to please David. He could never do it, anyway.

Maybe that's the real reason he's given up.

"Of course," he answers. It's his real answer. "You had a life. I took it. That's killing."

David laughs at him. Of course he does. "I had a life." He sounds immeasurably amused. "I had," he says again, as if feeling the words in his mouth, weighing them, "A life."

He turns away from Michael, looking up towards the tree over his grave, almost dismissive, but not quite. Michael knows he's still in David's periphery. Still being watched.

Michael doesn't know what to do; what to say. David isn't exactly trying to keep the conversation rolling, but it feels blackly wrong to just leave David here. And Michael wants to keep talking to David. He doesn't want to stop.

David is watching him, watching him. To see if he will leave. To see if he will stay. Will David ever stop testing him? Will Michael ever stop trying to pass David's tests?

He feels as if this moment is the moment before he plummeted off that cliff on his bike, egged on by David. Whether he keeps going where nothing good could come of it. Whether he stops while he still can.

He doesn't even know what he would say.

"David."

It seems like that's all David needs. His body twitches, and he turns the tiniest bit. Almost as if David is just as affected by his name in Michael's mouth as the other way around.

"Now, Michael. Don't tell me you feel bad for me after you tried to kill me." There's something in his voice. Something.

"I didn't have a choice," Michael shoots back. "You were trying to kill me."

David whips around. His blue eyes burn. "I was trying to get you to join me," he hisses. As if of all the terrible things he does, of all the people he's killed, somehow attempting to kill Michael is inconceivable– insulting to even consider.

Michael doesn't know how to respond to the bite of David's voice. It's bitter and terrible. It sounds almost like hurt.

He nods at the blood trailing down David's neck, and remembers the first time he saw David feed– David had been the cleanest of all the Lost Boys, blood nowhere but on his lips. Michael remembers, shamefully, wanting to lick them clean. And only partially because he needed blood.

"Killing anyone tonight?"

David looks as if he's been slapped, but when he speaks, he's returned to his low, knowing voice. "It's not so bad of a thing. You get used to it, Michael. You would get used to it, if you joined me."

Michael grits his teeth. It's hard, so hard, to even wrap his mind around David. Completely uncaring of human life. Matter-of-fact, even amused, enjoying it.

"And that's why I'll never join you."

He turns to the house.

It's late, and the moon is out, and Lucy will be wondering–

He's thrown back, shoved against the tree over David's grave. The impact knocks the breath out of him, and the tree shivers above him and leaves flutter down.

David is furious, and it is terrifying. His features haven't changed, but his eyes have gone yellow and his fangs have popped. Michael's too shocked to even struggle against David, who's pinning him against the tree with a fist in his collar.

"You think you're so much better than us," he spits. "So good. Up there on your moral fucking high ground." His words are angry, but his voice shakes. "You and those bastards came after us first. You killed Marko. And then you killed the rest of us. You" –his voice pitches– "You were going to kill me. You're going to lecture me, Michael? You?"

David's breath is cold against Michael's cheek. If Michael turned his head and leaned forward one inch, they'd be kissing.

He's not going to do that.

His heart thuds in his chest, and he swallows his protest, or David might tear him apart right here.

He reaches up to where David's hand clutches at him and gently wraps his hand around it. He's never touched David gently like this. He remembers David wearing leather gloves, black, black. He's so pale now, without his gloves, without his jacket. So cold. "David," he whispers softly, and nothing else.

David's eyes flash when he realizes Michael isn't going to do anything. His eyelashes are so light blond, in the moonlight they might as well be white.

When he breathes, Michael can feel it against his chest.

He says, "David."

And then his eyes turn blue again, and his fangs draw in. Michael watches them, and he knows David is watching him watch.

Still carefully, he pulls David's hand off of him. David hasn't provoked him– he's provoked David. He feels strangely triumphant.

He meets David's eyes, still holding his cold hand, until David stumbles back, muttering "Fuck," so softly Michael isn't sure he was meant to hear it.

"David." Michael's hand feels empty. Too warm. He misses, somehow, the chill of David's.

"Stop," David says– he sounds ragged, and Michael can't see his face. "Stop fucking saying my name."

He turns away fully this time.

Michael dismissed.

The next night, Michael and Star fall into bed. Laddie sleeps in the second bedroom and Star makes sure they're both quiet. If Michael seems both desperate and distracted, Star doesn't say anything.

"I'm going to find a man one of these days, Michael," she says instead. "You'll have to let me."

"Do whatever you want," Michael mutters. "Let's keep doing this until you do."

"Okay." Star's body gleams in the moonlight. She's warm. She's gentle. She's never killed anyone. "Only if you want to."

Michael grabs his jacket. "I do."

Star just looks at him. "Do you?"

Michael puts on his jacket and doesn't answer. The seaside breeze will be cold tonight. "Do vampires get cold?"

"They're not so different than us."

Michael decides that's a yes.

It's cold outside, save for the circles of warmth bonfires provide. David's coat was gone the last night Michael saw him. It's cold outside.

Michael follows the path home.

And against all rational thought, he finds his way back to David's grave.

He doesn't know what he expected– David wouldn't get back in his grave. But David is there, sitting on the lowest branch of the tree and curled up with his arms around his knees, staring out at the Emerson house. He looks seventeen. A lost boy.

"David."

David starts, and Michael wonders what he was thinking about deeply enough that he didn't hear Michael approach, even with his vampire hearing.

David lets his legs drop down and regards Michael from up in the tree. He doesn't say anything, and Michael realizes with a strange twist in his gut that he was hoping David would say Michael's name in return.

Michael shrugs off his jacket. "Cold?" He doesn't know what he's doing, only that he doesn't want to walk away. David isn't sending him off this time, he decides. He doesn't even think David wanted to send him off last time, not really.

David sneers. "I'm a vampire."

"Do vampires not get cold?" Michael internally curses Star, and then takes it back. Star is the one perfect thing in his life– even if he finds he's not searching for perfect after all.

There's a scrape of bark, and then David lands soundlessly on the ground beside Michael. "Offering your jacket, Michael, is not what someone usually does when they've almost killed someone."

"Don't want it?"

There's a pause. David studiously looks away. His black T-shirt is ripped, and his arms are as pale as the moon. He looks… fragile, and Michael wants– unreasonably– to pull David into the circle of his arms and cradle him. David would eat him alive if he knew Michael was thinking it.

"My fucking clothes are in the hotel."

Michael realizes that David isn't going to take the jacket, or say that he wants it. His avoidance of rejecting it is answer enough.

He puts the leather jacket around David's shoulders and straightens it. "Better?"

"Nothing like mine," David grumbles, but he doesn't make any move to shrug it off. His eyes are so blue, almost gray-blue. His lips don't have a speck of blood on them.

Michael stops looking at David's lips. His eyes… there's something in them. Something like feeling.

"David."

Something flickers in David's eyes, and David looks away almost hurriedly. His throat bobs.

Michael pushes onward. "I'm sorry about the boys."

David's head shoots up, and he stares at Michael with a look of pure disbelief for a moment before his even expression returns. Michael feels rather accomplished.

"We hurt Marko before you hurt us. That was… wrong, and I'm sorry." He wants to say it hurt you, and I'm sorry for that too, but he can't get the words out. Perhaps it's only self-preservation; if he spoke the words out loud, he doubts the response would be positive.

David blows out a breath. He's still as a statue. "Who would've thought." He smiles, cruel and cold, and catches Michael's eye. "If you're expecting a heartfelt apology from me in return, you can keep waiting."

Really? What the hell, David? Michael's gut flips, coils, black and angry. "Killing anyone tonight?"

David tips his head back and laughs. The line of his throat draws Michael's eyes. And Michael's not a vampire anymore. "No. But if I was hungry, I would. Maybe one of your Frogs." He grins, angry, feral.

"Right. Bye David."

"Don't come back," David calls after him, gripping Michael's jacket in spite of his words.

"Not planning to," Michael replies.

But he goes back.

Of course he goes back.

Star is clearly concerned. "The closest Chinese? Why, I don't know, there's one a few blocks from here. Why?"

Michael rubs his eyes and looks out the window, trying to see if he can spot the place from up in the apartment, looking out at the cold. He'll have to get a new jacket, too. "No reason," he says. And then, "Do they take orders this late?"

They do.

Tell me Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?

"Hungry?" Michael finds David still lurking out around the bottom of his tree.

Why David stays around here, Michael can't fathom, but he's relieved that David hasn't disappeared. Irrationally relieved, relieved of something he shouldn't even have been afraid of, and still something he spent most of his day fearing. That something would happen to David.

"Hungry?" David eyes him and the plastic bags he's carrying. "For human food?"

Michael shrugs. "Yeah. You don't just live off of blood, do you?"

The plastic bites against Michael's hand, and he sets the bag down. David watches him, watches him. Closes his eyes, opens them again, and smiles as if to himself. Amused and a little of something else.

"No, that's impossible." David reaches out to accept Michael's offered box. "But I can take care of myself, Michael." He peeks. "Is this a tribute?"

Michael shrugs again. He doesn't want David to take care of himself. He wants, he realizes with a trickle of shame, for David to need him. Or else what would keep David coming back?

They eat their Chinese.

"Are your parents really hippies, or did you just say that to talk to a girl?"

Michael almost spills the noodles all over his lap. David is talking to him, and it takes him a moment for him to even gather his mind enough to realize what David said. "Did she tell you about that?" He hopes the moonlight isn't strong enough to catch the flush of his cheeks; he can feel them warming.

If he notices, David doesn't seem affected. "No, Michael." His expression suggests Michael has said something humorous, but his voice is as flat as ever. "I watched you for much longer than you knew."

Sweet, syrupy warmth floods through Michael like hot melted chocolate out of an upset pot– it will leave a stain, but it is so good. Watching him. David was watching him. For Max, but still. David. His eyes on Michael, watching, watching, watching.

"My mom is a bit of a hippie, but my dad not so much," Michael admits now, poking at his noodles, unable to meet David's eyes.

David's gaze always feels as if it could pierce right through him and read the inside of his heart as if the words were carved out on his face, and Michael doesn't think David would want to read what he has right now.

"He was when they met, but I think he got too interested in the corporate side of things." Michael looks sideways at David, and then away, because David is looking right back. When their eyes catch, something flutters in Michael's stomach. "It depends on your definition of a hippie, I guess." He shakes his head. "Hippies."

He means it as a rueful failure to connect with the generation, and then he realizes that for all he knows, David could be their generation too, or older.

He cannot believe he hasn't thought of it before. David, immortal and ever-young, knowing and watching and living in the very underbelly of life. He can imagine David knowing everything. He can imagine David a century old or more; it almost feels right, because then David would be inevitable. Either David was never supposed to happen at all, or he was inevitable. Or perhaps once David happened even though he wasn't supposed to, he was inevitable.

"Yes, Michael?" David's grey eyes dance, and the corner of his mouth looks like it might smirk. "Admiring my use of chopsticks?"

Michael wonders if it would be a worthy mission to try coaxing out one of those grins he'd flash Michael, back when the Lost Boys were alive and laughing with him. Yes, Michael decides, warmth blooming in his chest, it would.

Chopsticks…?

Oh. Michael flushes. He'd been staring. David's eyes laugh at him, but there's almost a warmth to it– or is it Michael's wishes only? "I was wondering," he confesses, "How long you've been around."

David's expression falters for a split second, and it looks like genuine surprise– even gratification. But all he says is, "Einstein did say time is relative."

Stop being an enigma and let me know you, Michael begs him, only of course he doesn't say it. Instead, he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Give me a hint, come on. Older or younger than Einstein?" It's the first name that comes to mind.

"Younger." David looks disgusted at the suggestion. "Einstein was born in the eighteen hundreds, Michael." He seems to love saying Michael's name.

Michael lets out a laugh of pure shock. It's so human, that expression of disgust. For a moment he feels as if he's having a conversation with someone who trusts him. "What about my mom?"

As soon as he asks it, he's not sure if he wants to hear the answer– it's almost gross if you think about it too hard like that– although what's gross? Michael thinks– whatever Michael thinks and wants are certainly not relevant.

Still, it's a relief when David smiles, the sly sort of glee Michael hasn't seen since Before. "I'm young, Michael. Young enough."

He says it significantly, but Michael doesn't know what it means. All he knows is that David's a magnet.

David hands him back the empty box. Michael wants to laugh out loud. David kills people with obvious enjoyment, but he will not litter? Or maybe he just wants to make Michael do something for him, like a subordinate. Like one of his boys.

Michael thinks the second is the most likely, but he takes it anyway.

"I should've made you see maggots again." David nods to the carton that held rice, snickering.

Michael feels anger like the spill of blood, just a drop. "Killing anyone tonight?"

A ghost of a smile plays on David's lips. "I'll drink 'em dry," he whispers into the night air. The breeze seems to play with his words, floating them around Michael.

Michael feels sick. The magic and the magnetism disappear in a flash, a magician's trick finished. He must go pale– he can feel the shiver down his spine and the blood and heat drain from his face. Again, again, again. Another life, and another, and another. David watches him, watches him, watches him.

And then David looks away. "You should be surprised every time," he mutters. "It's getting old."

"I'm never," Michael says again, remembering David's fist in his collar, the cold skin of his hand as Michael slowly freed himself, "going to get used to it."

"Go on, then," David croons, waving down the road. "Off to your perfect family of perfect angels with perfect morals. Shoo."

Michael, too tired for a fight and all the cardboard cartons packed up in the plastic bag, goes.

The days seem to slip by like the slow, sweet drizzle of honey– the laughing kids on the beach, Lucy at her new job, Sam with his comics and the Frog brothers, ice-cream sundaes with Star at midday.

It comes to a sharp, slicing stop when night falls, and he makes his way to the tree.

Suddenly, time no longer flows.

Instead, Michael is seizing it, trying to make it stop, trying to drag it out, to make the most of the isolated moments he spends with David until it passes joltingly.

One moment lasts minutes as he drinks David in, one blink and they've already had a whole conversation and the entire interaction is gone and passed.

Over and over again. David and his low, lilting voice, the curl of his mouth around Michael's name, the flicker of his smile that Michael works so hard to coax out. They talk only about the things David wants to talk about: mostly Michael, but occasionally David. Flashes of David– one thing he did one time. Never any of the other Lost Boys.

The tiniest glimpse of feeling David shows. Now– gone again– back again– gone. An emotion Michael can never pin before David has wiped his expression clean.

Michael finds that chasing it is the only thing he wants to do. The slow, sweet flow of honeyed days, the rushing, crashing river and night pulling him over the edge of the waterfall. He wants to fall.

Lucy thinks it's Star, and Sam thinks it's Star, and Star doesn't know what to think, she says, what's gotten into him?

He feels, he says to Star, different.