DAVID
Michael must have slept with Star in that bed.
He can't help but think it when he first steps in.
Michael must have slept with Star in that soft, warm-looking queen-sized bed in this well-kept, organized apartment and what did David have? Nothing.
Nothing but a dark, dark, messy, messy, sunken hotel that he couldn't bear to go back to, which couldn't matter less when Michael didn't want to come back to his anything anyway.
There was a bed in the hotel, too. Star's bed, sometimes Laddie's if Laddie was there– they were the only ones who slept horizontally. The only ones still human.
Michael must have slept in that bed with Star, David thought, and his gut turned black as an oil spill. Watch the fire, watch. It will burn him to the ground.
"You're not invited to the rest of the apartment," Star said, and closed the door. She stayed a good distance from him, and David didn't care either way; he didn't feel anything like the ways he felt around Michael. Michael.
Just don't come back. Michael. He'd flown away from Michael, and now he didn't have to be afraid of anything; Michael couldn't hurt him.
And David was hurting anyway.
Michael's voice said Go to Star's or go to hell, and Michael's neck had a hickey on it, and Star had a bed that sometimes had Michael in it. What was the difference? Star's or hell. Hell and stars both burned.
Oil in David's gut, watch the fire.
"Do you have food?" David wasn't hungry, but his gut was twisting. David wasn't hungry, but his mind was endlessly churning on itself. David wasn't hungry, but his chest, oh, his heart, oh. "I'm hungry."
Star is silent for a long moment. The room David stands in is a kitchen-living room-office mesh, and the refrigerator is right there, white and boxy, domestic and human. David never wanted to be human quite the way he wants to now.
"Go ahead." Star allows him to eat, and eat, and eat, until he's only eating to grate on her.
Star's soft voice comes over the table. David hates her soft voice. She sounds like a woman, and he can see Michael falling like quicksand, and David is on solid ground watching, but he is afraid. He cannot take a step or he will sink too, following Michael, following Michael, falling.
"Have you fed?"
Bitter acid, the thrumming chord of mild anger. David holds up his wooden chopsticks. Rice. Tell me, Michael. "Feeding right now."
Star shakes her head. The clock shows nearly midnight, which explains the shadows under her eyes. David gets a guilty, vindictive pleasure in knowing her life isn't all sunshine and Michael; she has nights like the rest of them. Dark and unhappy, she is imperfect like the rest of them, and then the pleasure is gone. Dark and unhappy has seeped into David, too. "You know what I mean."
David's chest gives a pang. "Why does it matter?"
Star is quiet again.
David hates Star's silence. As if David is not worth Star's time or attention. Star has Michael and David does not, and that should be enough to settle them even a dozen times.
Shouldn't it?
Star has Michael. Does she even realize?
Does anyone want David around?
Perhaps not. Perhaps it is obligation and pity that create and maintain the only relationships to the living he still has.
"Michael seems to think you 'love killing.'"
He hates the look in her eyes. He is a predator, an animal that she is trying to read and manipulate, humanity stripped away. Trying not to provoke him. To twist one of his limbs the wrong way or raise his hackles.
"I'm sorry about your Lost Boys."
She doesn't say it like she means it, the way Michael did. Michael, Michael, he cared too much. About getting things right. About Sam. Christ, Sam. She says it as if it is a stepping stone, a bleeding cut of meat that will allow her to step closer until she can fit the collar. She cannot realize that of the two of them, he is not the only one being studied.
"But your grief–" There it is. "–has nothing to do with the people of Santa Carla. You shouldn't kill more than you need to feed on."
"Are you telling me how to feed?" David lets his throat catch on the words roughly, so they come out as a growl. He will sound the predator if he chooses. He chooses.
He will be the predator if he chooses… but Michael does not want him to be. He will hit the breaking point, but he is not there yet, and he does not want to be the one to give in, to stand down and sidestep the catastrophe. But he is not going to lose control. No, he is going to kill someone and drink them– just not right now. He cannot bring himself to when he thinks too hard about Michael, and he is always thinking too hard about Michael.
But he will alleviate the hunger.
Only right now, it is not so unbearable. That is all.
"Should I take it to the ones my real quarrel is with, then? I know where the Frog family lives."
David has tried to swallow his wild hatred for them, but only with a small amount of success; it still simmers in him, always.
At least Michael told him what he wanted David to do instead of putting a lead around his throat. David imagines Michael putting a lead around his throat and swallows and stops imagining it and regrets drinking someone tonight. It gives him enough blood to flush.
Better than that, Michael's world is painted in right and wrongs, grayed shades of morality. His pencil-sketch of David may be lighter than David deserves, but at least he believes David has light.
Star has paled. "Leave those boys alone. They're just children." She adds pointedly, "Michael cares for them."
David tries not to be, but he is bitter, and it eats away like acid at his flesh and bones, sweeping through his veins of borrowed blood. He is suddenly sure that Star does not realize. She has Michael. How lucky she is, how fortunate. How much David would give.
"I don't." David shoves the food away. He is far too full for someone who did not even start hungry, and the Chinese cartons remind him too much of Michael. "Not Marko and Dwayne and Paul. I owe them vengeance at least."
He is terrible for the gladness he feels in her horror, but everybody knows he is terrible anyway. It is alright.
"You haven't even tried to kill them."
"Yet." He won't later, either. He wouldn't be able to without thinking of… but he doesn't not ever go where they live, because if he ever saw them, he would kill them on the spot. But Star doesn't need to know that, and she might be able to tell he cares for Michael but she doesn't need to know how much.
"David that's–" Star stops. She doesn't seem to understand.
"I haven't been killing more than I need."
Star makes a surprised noise.
David draws idle and invisible drawings on the table with the wooden chopstick. "If that helps you leave it alone."
It doesn't. Star never listens. To anyone, to anyone. David wonders if she listens to Michael. He wonders if Michael listens to her.
She looks as if she doesn't believe him. David wouldn't believe himself, either, if they had switched places. He remembers her witnessing him and his boys on one of their killing sprees. Fire and blood spraying, though perhaps not as showy as the performance they'd put on for Michael.
David doesn't think telling her that killing isn't fun without the boys will earn him very much sympathy, but it's true. David doesn't think telling her Michael makes him ache when he asks if he's killed every night will go well for him, considering what the two of them have.
"So why does Michael–"
"Michael," David cuts her off sharply. His name on someone else's lips slices like a blade. "Has already made up his mind about me."
Star notices.
Of course she notices. "I don't think he has," she says gently. Still an experiment, poking at him, watching his reactions. Still, he can't help but react.
He snaps the chopsticks without thinking.
They are thin and weak. They are dry and pale, wooden.
Black oil in David's gut, David will burn. Churning heat, fluttering stomach. Eighteen again, but David isn't going back to that tree, because Michael told him not to and David will not burn.
Because he will not see Michael again and there is nothing to be afraid of.
"Going to sleep," he mutters to Star.
The clock chimes midnight but he doesn't care for staying awake.
He should have stayed awake. He should have made sure his and Star's sleep schedules were the exact flips of each other's.
He is grateful she has let him into her bedroom, where the dark curtains allow him to be about the room during the day. But he cannot stand sharing waking hours with her.
She is incessant.
"What exactly is happening with you and Michael?"
Nothing, nothing. Nothing, and I wish, I wish… "Nothing you're interested in."
"I care about Michael." Fiercely. Earnestly, angrily. Easily. "I'm worried about him."
David cannot even imagine the words I care about Michael on his tongue. They will burn him. He laughs. "You're worried about him." Star hates it when he repeats things with no commentary but a mocking tone. So does Michael. Oh, what the two of them have in common.
David shouldn't even have come if he was going to be like this.
Just don't come back.
"Yes. Are you hurting him?" Star stands right in front of him and makes David look at her. He doesn't understand it; he can lie right to her face without a blink. He can with most.
But he says, "No." And he says, "I wouldn't."
Star scoffs. David wants to rip her throat out. It is only a simmering hurt and it is not her fault. But it is a brand of hurt nonetheless, and he wants to. "You wouldn't," she repeats, in his way.
"Why is that so hard to believe?" But he knows why it's so hard to believe. Who he is. What he is. What he's done, and to Michael in particular. So he says, "You're the one biting him."
He shouldn't have said it.
Star is far too clever.
And she is incessant.
"I am going," David says in the afternoon, "to sleep."
"You did in the morning."
"You've driven me to exhaustion."
Star is silent. David still cannot bring himself to sleep in her bed, but she has promised Laddie will join her and David can take Laddie's bed. If she had not, he would've hung in the closet. He wonders if Star's bed smells faintly of Michael, the way Michael's jacket does.
"What if Michael comes here?"
David can't help the flinch this time; it is automatic. The idea of Star and Michael together, here, has swelled like an ocean, salty and drowning him, draining him slowly. He thinks of it every moment he is here. And it has thrown him against the rocks.
"Michael told me to come here. You can't throw me out, or you'll upset him."
This isn't true. Michael didn't care where David went.
Star is in the doorway of Laddie's room. She is the single most pitying thing David has ever seen, and more than anything, it is this that makes him determined not to crumble. "I'm not taking sides. I want you to know that if he comes, I won't turn him away. If you're avoiding him…" Her implication is get out. He hears it loud and clear, the toll of a bell.
"He's not coming." The bedspread is white, the corners are untucked. David tucks them. "He's not particularly interested in seeing me."
Star whispers something under her breath, but David doesn't hear it. And he doesn't care enough to ask.
He sleeps through to past midnight.
And in the morning, Star is incessant.
"Did you hurt him?"
"I wouldn't hurt him." David stabs the egg she fried up. Hunger yawns in his stomach. It is not hunger for food, but he eats the food. He eats, and he eats more. Star watches him and doesn't comment, but he knows she is thinking. "But I've told you that already."
Star. "So what happened to him?"
Star is convinced he would have come. Star is used to Michael always coming. Always, always. She is not David, who rushes to the tree every night just to catch ten minutes. She is not David who carefully cradles every moment because Michael might not talk to him again.
Won't.
Won't talk to him again.
No, she is not David at all.
"Please." David leans forward and ignores the growl of his stomach, the painful clench. Her pulse beats and beats, and black oil in his gut will burn him, so he does not know why he is playing with fire. But he asks anyway: "Explain to me, what is it that makes you think he'll come back to you? Is what you have just that special?"
Her eyes flash knowingly. He gave the game up last night, when he mentioned the hickey. He does not know why he is still playing. Perhaps talking about Michael is becoming a placeholder for talking with Michael.
Maybe Star is tired of him, or maybe she pities him too much to talk about it, but she doesn't respond.
They exist quietly into the midafternoon before she goes to work. Neither of them mentions it, but she'll talk to Michael. It isn't hard to read her.
He wonders what she will say to Michael, and what Michael will say back. His stomach twists. He wonders if they will kiss, and he tries to sleep, but his stomach is still twisting.
He eats more of Star's food. He's growing to hate Chinese.
He eats it anyway.
And his stomach still twists.
Star is warm, David can sense it when she comes back in. It could be the Santa Carla summer sun. It could be something she did with Michael. It could be the hungry cry in David's veins.
It could be. It could.
He thinks he has gotten off fine until she brings out dinner. It is not Chinese. That is good.
She says to him, "Why do you try to make Michael believe that you're a monster?"
And time skids to a stop, screeching like Dwayne turning his bike. That first time, with Michael offering Star a date. If that hadn't happened, David wouldn't feel like this right now. This is the cliff he nearly sent Michael off of.
"I don't want Michael to think I'm a monster," he murmurs. It's strangely difficult to push the words out. Because they are true. It is so hard to say true things that matter.
Star waits. And then. "That's not what I asked."
"I don't know what you're looking for." David pushes the pizza slices around, and takes just cheese. The cheese has rich marinara underneath. It's red. "But that's my answer."
"I don't remember you ever taking 'perverse enjoyment' out of feeding." Star bites her lip, and then amends, "Not afterward, anyway. Only in the moment."
His stomach contracts. Feeding. He eats his cheese pizza. It's hot, and the tomato sauce is red. It's nearly the same thing. He chews and he swallows. It is not the same thing at all.
She is quiet.
She already knows how he feels.
And she has Michael.
But David feels a bit weak and tired. He doesn't feel like arguing, or pushing it, or beginning a quiet contest, who can wait out the other the longest.
He stares at the tomato sauce on his fingers. He didn't sleep very well, and his eyes are fluttering, and so in the blurry half-vision he gets of his fingertips, it looks like blood.
But it isn't.
"Maybe," he says quietly, "I just like having less to lose."
He's never thought it.
He's certainly never said it.
He just did it. Just let Michael believe it. Michael would wind up thinking David the monster in the comic book anyway; at least David would have the say over when. At least it would be for good reason.
And Star doesn't say anything.
Star and her endless, unbearable silences, pressing him only until he says something that will press him without her help.
It's well done, he has to admit. He feels empty and purposeless without Michael. Without his Lost Boys. Without even Star to take his mind off of his solitude.
He is alone in Laddie's room, tired. His stomach will not stop turning, and his head feels a little dizzy, and perhaps it is only his lack of energy that causes him to give in, but by the middle of the night he is standing in Star's bedroom doorway. He cannot sleep around his stomach, but he does not want to go out.
He will not. It is not so incredibly bad just yet.
"Star," he says.
She is a light sleeper and she wakes noiselessly, slipping out of bed as quietly as a cat. She closes the door behind.
"What–" He swallows. "What does Michael think of me?"
He has caved first.
And Star smiles.
She tells him things. She tells him that she does not think Michael has decided David is a monster yet, even though David hasn't made it easy to believe in him.
Michael, he thinks. Foolish Michael who trusted David, who believed David was good– and still does, at least a little. Still does.
Warmth, the kind of warmth he hasn't felt since nights by the tree, rushes through him. Michael, he thinks, and pulls Michael's jacket tighter around him.
She tells him that Michael has been worried about him.
Me? David asks, only he doesn't ask it. Yes, me.
She says that he is always asking: whether vampires get cold, where the nearest Chinese place is, whether David would mind if Michael went down to the hotel and retrieved things for him.
Cold, yes, but vampires never mind it. Never until they've learned to crave warmth, the way David has on Michael's fingertips, in the curl of Michael's hand around his own the very first night David emerged from his grave feeling remade. It's a surprise, an oversight, but not an unwelcome one, to think Michael asked where to find Chinese.
That Michael asked.
Michael.
Somehow it has never occurred to David that Michael's visits were thought about, premeditated. David thinks about Michael thinking about David and feels as if he might burn and burn, the thrumming in his chest threatening to sweep him up and end him.
Oh, Chinese.
David would mind if Michael went to the hotel. He is glad Michael did not. He is even more glad that Michael cares whether David would mind and even more glad than that that Michael is thinking about David missing his things, and David. Can't.
David is so glad.
"He cares about you," Star says, as if it isn't clear.
He cares about you.
Michael cares about you.
Hell.
"I want to talk to him," David says. David says it out loud. "I'll go talk to him.
Star yawns wide; it's a few hours past midnight, but David can't bring himself to be sorry for waking her.
Yawns are contagious. David yawns.
Star's eyes flutter and then narrow, and she scrubs her hands across her eyes. "When was the last time you slept?"
"A couple of hours ago," he assures her, but his throat is gritty. It isn't a lie; he slept but barely. For a few minutes at the most. His stomach hurts. "I'm going to go."
Star's apartment has a window that's easy to shove open, only David feels weak just now.
"David?" Star's sleepy eyes are sharp now, her voice quicker and nervous. She is so quick to change. She should stay the same; it is easier. "When was the last time you fed?"
He has eaten plenty. When was the last time he fed?
He doesn't want to feed. He doesn't want to.
David shrugs. The morning wind is cold, blowing through the apartment and making Star shiver. "When?"
He feels weak, but he is not so bad.
"David?" Her voice shivers around in the wind as he climbs onto the window sill. "Why aren't you feeding?"
But David is already flying.
