MICHAEL
David's smoke-and-blood taste still lingers on Michael's mouth as he goes to find his mom, but it must be the flush on his cheeks that gives him away.
Or perhaps the fact that he can't stop grinning.
Or maybe, maybe, the bandage still on his neck, and the fact that Lucy doesn't believe Star– who Michael did admit to breaking up with– had her period all over Michael's pillow.
Whatever the case may be, she is not believing him for a moment.
"Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to keep guessing?" She touches the bandage on his neck. "Don't you know anything, Michael? You need to change the bandage sometimes."
"Give me your best guess, Mom." Michael lets himself be led to their bathroom, which has since been cleaned of Paul's blood. He still feels strange going into the bathroom where Paul died to clean up a neck wound of all things. A neck bite. "And let me clean this up on my own. I'll have to learn how sometime, right?"
His mom frowns, getting out anti-itch and anti-bacteria ointments from the cabinet. "Not unless you're planning on getting scraped often. I have my suspicions, Michael. But I would rather you tell me the truth, you know."
His mom can be so guilt-trippy sometimes, and yet not really. It certainly trips him up with guilt, but she isn't doing it on purpose. Most of the time.
"I don't think you could guess it if you tried."
"If I tried?" Lucy rummages through the cabinets, apparently looking for bandages. Michael's not bleeding anymore, but he supposes mother knows best. "I dated a vampire, Michael. I have a wider world than you might think."
Michael tries not to react in any way.
Lucy, of course, notices.
Mothers notice these sort of things, she'd told Michael once, but then she was always saying that sort of thing, always trying to be everything her boys needed. Sometimes, Michael had snapped at her once, what they needed more than anything was to learn how to stand on their own two legs.
Lucy, bandages in hand, looks him up and down, her lips pursed. Michael knows better than to interrupt her thoughts– she's more likely to form a more lenient opinion if given more time. If not, she feels rushed and chooses no, in an effort to be more safe than sorry.
Sons know these things, but Michael and Sam never told her. It's not the sort of thing any smart son would tip their mother off about.
"I'm not surprised," she admits eventually. "I thought about it a few times, you know. What with you coming home so late? Star wouldn't keep you that long, because I know you didn't like her quite like that."
She points at him before Michael can open his mouth. "Don't even try it, young man. I know you. I just thought all the Santa Carla vampires were dead? What, are there more?" She looks at Michael hard. "Or– does the empty grave by the tree have something to do with your neck?"
Michael rips off the bandage and lets her fuss over him. She hasn't yelled his head off yet, although she takes in a sharp breath and gives him a stern look when she catches sight of the two punctures.
"No, no more vampires." Michael bites his lip; cleaning the wound stings. "I didn't think you noticed the grave."
"I'm not blind like your grandfather," Lucy tuts. "But I did originally think it was just raccoons." She dabs him dry and smooths on the ointment. "I hope the bite was fully consensual and safe."
Michael's face burns. "Mom, stop."
"Is he hurting you? The vampire? What was his name…"
"David." Michael's face, though he hadn't thought it possible, gets even hotter. "He's not hurting me. And he won't, I promise. You have to promise you won't hurt him either. Not you or Grandpa."
"Hmm." Lucy presses the gauzy white bandages on next, much better than Michael had managed the first time. "I suppose if you love him."
Michael swallows, feeling the healed over spot on his neck ache just the slightest bit.
The first time, Michael had been rushed and tired, his fingers clumsy with lightheaded lack of blood. He had been just barely realizing he was in love, and now it seems like a given. Of course, he is. And it's only been a few days since then, but the feeling been pumped out from his heart until it fills every inch of him. He loves David. Fuck, so much.
He'd had to figure out where the bandages were, getting blood on the counters and being distantly reminded of Paul, but even then, it was David still on his mind. David's mouth on his neck and his earring brushing against Michael's collarbone as he drank.
He hadn't… minded. No, he really hadn't.
If David had been more aware of himself and more careful, and if Michael hadn't taken a knife to himself, he would have even enjoyed giving David something he needed so badly, and something that David felt so bad about taking. David wouldn't kill Michael, and there would be no reason for guilt then.
He had even enjoyed it the first time, though of course, it had hurt quite a lot.
But if they were careful about it…
He would do it again. He would do it again every night.
Michael resists the urge to ask why their Grandpa has full-on medical bandages in stock in the first place. Santa Carla is a wild place, and he couldn't be more glad they came here.
Fuck, he's thinking about David again. David's odd love for this boardwalk, and all the memories he's tied to it. David has been here for longer than Michael has been alive, and today, when David spoke of it, his words alone made Michael ache.
David is anchored in this place, rooted in this world, and sometimes Michael feels as if he is walking carefully through the chambers of David's heart: the good, the bad, and the bloody. The painful and the bittersweet, and, Michael hopes, the just sweet.
The beach where David would make his wild kills with the boys and the store full of comic books that David hates, the hotel way down under that David loves and isn't ready to go back to yet and the apartment at the top of the Seaside Cove that David has declared with a slightly peeved expression he has no desire to be in, the boardwalk where the Lost Boys would traipse about in glorious carelessness and the video store that's dark now and David likes to graffiti dicks on the window of late into the night when everyone is asleep, all of it, all of it.
Santa Carla, Murder Captial of the World.
Even without his royal court, Santa Clara is David's kingdom.
"Mom," Michael says carefully. "Do you think… do you think there are any good colleges in Santa Carla?"
Lucy's face fills with understanding, and her eyes go wide and watery. "Michael. My Michael. Do you really feel that way?"
Certain. About David. Certain enough to make a decision like that, to stay in this wide-awake town where people get lost and are never found again. Is Michael sure? Does he want that?
He remembers wanting to fall– and perhaps by then he had already fallen. He remembers David daring him to pinpoint just when, exactly, he fell in love and finds he can't do it; David was right.
Michael is both lost and found in David, and he doesn't want to find his way out.
"Yeah," he clears his throat. It doesn't hurt too bad. "I do."
Lucy brushes her eyes briskly and kisses his forehead. "Oh, honey. You can go to college wherever you like. No matter what college you choose, you get what you give."
"Mom." Michael's eyes sting. "You're such a fucking hippie."
Star is radiant when Michael visits her. Laddie isn't there.
"I'm glad, Michael. I'm so glad you and David have each other." She's blushing and beaming, though, and Michael finally gets it out of her that she found the missing ad for Laddie and got him home to his family. Laddie's brother, it turns out, is quite something.
"Bring him around sometime," Michael makes her promise to. "Then David will learn to keep his hands off. My mother sent me to invite you and David both. I'm not so sure about it."
Star shakes her head, smiling. "I will."
Neither of them talks about how she's got a man in the blink of an eye, and Michael's disastrous love story took a month and a handful of days, a near-death blood deprivation drunkenness, several arguments, and a fire to settle into something steady. Still, she's smiling at him with half of her mouth, and he knows she's thinking about it.
She leans against the doorway as he leaves. "Does he have a place to stay?"
Michael thinks of Sam, staying behind to make friends with David, even though Michael could tell from the way Sam's shoulders pulled in that it might've been one of the hardest things Sam had ever done. Sam hated David for Turning Michael without telling him, maybe even more than Michael himself. That's what brothers are for, after all.
And Michael thinks of his mother, taking it all in stride even though they never tell her what's going on, willing, somehow, to believe in Michael, if not David yet.
Michael. Way back what feels like forever ago, and is little over a week, if he counts. Stay with me, then. Stay at our place.
David. Honest without his careful filter, tired and bloodless. I don't want to be anywhere else.
"I think he does," he says. "But I'll ask."
"Michael," she says before he leaves. "He doesn't want me. You know that, don't you?"
Maybe Michael knows more of David than Star does now, but they know different parts of him, so he gives in. "I'm one person Star. Is that enough?"
Star smiles. "For David? You're the world to him. I think he nearly killed me in jealousy when he came here." She ruffles Michael's hair, and Michael has to set it to rights.
"You're such a mom."
"Then listen to me like one," Star says. She's incessant. She is making sure he understands. "He'll make friends, but loves you like no one else. You're enough."
Michael kisses her cheek.
And he leaves to visit the place of the people David loved before.
The hotel is full of things that must be memories, but they aren't Michael's memories. It's nostalgic to be down here, thinking of eating Chinses and drinking from a jewel-encrusted wine-bottle that isn't wine at all, but it is not stifling or unbearable.
This doesn't mean it is not heartbreaking.
The walls have all sorts of pin-ups on them: old photographs, ticket stubs and posters, bumper stickers and thin silver chains. There is no closure here, no sign that the Lost Boys ever though they might not come back, only a faint layer of dust and silty, sandy dirt that has scattered in strong winds.
There is the fountain that Paul danced on and the chair that David stretched himself across like a cat on a throne, the place strewn with trinkets.
There is the bed that Michael joined Star in and later carried Laddie out of, and there is a curtain around it that he doesn't push back.
Some ways down, there is a tunneling path that leads to where the boys would sleep, upside down like bats and side by side like brothers.
Michael doesn't go in there.
There are memories here, his memories, and they do not even touch the tip of the iceberg; they are only the aerial view.
Someday, he hopes, David will bring him here and he will tell him about it, but Michael will wait for that day, because David will need time.
For now, he doesn't know what certain objects mean to David, so he only takes what he knows.
David's gloves bring back a dozen memories.
And David's coat smells just like him.
David is on the edge of the cliff he had been sitting under a few hours ago when Michael gets back, the sun having set and leaving the sky a pure black, full of twinkling stars. No moon tonight, but David still shines, somehow, as if outlined by his own light: the light blond hair, his twinking earring, the pale lines of his throat as he tips his head up to look at the stars.
Michael doesn't even want to talk to him just yet.
He wants to stare and drink David in like art. If only he could draw, he would draw this: David, just David, alone with his feet hanging off of the edge of the cliff carelessly, looking both young and timeless at once, fearless of the drop and yet weightless, in the middle of the frame. If Michael could do art, he would find his own style, one that matched David and only David, a color palette of the deepest night and the brightest star, the blue of David's eyes and of the sea.
Sam is there, too. He looks like a very normal person who Michael loves very much, but he is not magic.
Sam spots Michael first.
"David," he whispers conspiratorially. "Don't look now, but Michael's looking at you like he wants to marry you."
It sweeps through Michael in a rush. God, Sam should shut his mouth and Michael should slow down– he promises himself he won't even think about it for at least another year– but Sam isn't wrong.
"I think I will look now," David's soft voice says, and David turns to watch Michael come up. Watching Michael, watching Michael, watching.
His eyes are less the blue of ice and more like the running water of a stream, ancient as the water cycle and young with the snowmelt.
Michael holds out his full arms when he gets there and sets them on the ground. "Your fucking clothes aren't in the hotel anymore," he says.
He means here, have this. He means I've been thinking of you. He means I hope we can regain the balance of your life together, bit by bit. He says, "Your coat smells like you." David doesn't blush– perhaps he hasn't fed recently enough– but Michael can tell he's flustered and pleased all the same.
Sam wrinkles his nose. "Gross, Mikey. Stop fantasizing about my friend."
Michael raises his eyebrows and looks between them.
David shrugs. "I like your brother, Michael."
"That is so unfair," he grumbles. "Did you bring him offerings every night, like you were worshipping a goddamn Greek god? No."
Sam laughs, smiling wide. "I'm going to tell mom you'll be late for dinner." He wanders back down to the boardwalk.
Michael looks out at the lights on the ripples of the sea. It's the same water they looked at when he first kissed David, and when David first confessed his love and when Michael confessed it back.
There isn't the bright spot of the moon, now. It's the stars. The bright stars are all over, lighting up more than a single spotlight.
"Give me your jacket," David murmurs, "And you can wear mine."
"You have my jacket." Michael turns away from the water and fingers David's collar. David is beautiful. David has always been so beautiful.
"I want this one." David tugs on the one Michael's wearing. "This one doesn't smell like you anymore."
"I'll wear yours," Michael agrees. "Even though it's nothing like mine."
David smiles and slips off his jacket. Michael's jacket. If they keep switching them around like this, it will be their jacket soon.
"How did Sam win you over so easily?"
David ducks his head down a little, into the collar of Michael's jacket. He is still again, and his fingers tap against each other. "He was telling me about his comic books," he murmurs as Michael takes his hands.
David's hands are cool to the touch and spindly. David smirks a little, and Michael knows David has noticed Michael likes his hands.
"There's actually a comic book in the series where the vampire does something and weans himself off of blood. He becomes human. It's just a story, but…" David shrugs. He's still not hitting casual. Michael thinks they should just give up. "Sam's looking into it."
Michael feels as if the world has stopped on its axis– but time goes on. Santa Carla roars and shouts, bonfires pop and crackle.
It is Michael and David who are frozen in amber for this one moment.
"David do you–" Michael's voice cracks. He is fire and midnight and the water on the shores, he is everything that David has ever been a part of, falling in to fill every part of David that needs to be filled. "Do you want that?"
David looks Michael in the eye. He looks afraid. He looks brave. "To grow with you? I want nothing more."
His face is young. Michael could believe he is human already– and if the comic book turns out to just be a story, he's not sure he would mind so much. Perhaps it is enough to know that David would.
"David," he says. His voice is shaking. His hands are shaking. All of him is shaking. "David."
He kisses David.
Blood and sugar-sweet and smoke, David's cold hands on him and his lean body tangled in Michael's, his open mouth and his earring against Michael's cheek.
A rushing, open sea of feeling in Michael, a roaring, fearless fire in Michael, both surviving at once, magical and impossible.
Love is everything at once.
This is love.
David pulls him close enough for Michael to feel the slow, slow beat of David's vampire heart against the pounding in his own chest.
"My Mom knows about you," he murmurs into David's mouth, unwilling to stop kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him. "She says I can go to college here in Santa Carla."
"You want that." It's too breathless to be a question or a statement; it is an echo of the sentiment. "Here, with everything?"
"With you," Michael tells him. "Santa Carla has… my family. Sam, my mom, and grandpa. It has Star, and her boyfriend, who you can kill if he's mean to Star. And it's your place, you know."
"Santa Carla, Murder Capital of the World," David repeats. "This town."
"Yes, this town." Michael puts his arm around David's waist and turns them away from the sea, pointing. David leans into him. "The boardwalk, your land. The beach, your beach. The hotel, yours and your boys'. Paul and Marko and Dwayne are here, and you belong with them. And Star's, and our place, right here."
"Our place, the rocky undercliff?" David sounds amused, but so happy. Michael is so happy. He is so happy, he would not change a single thing.
"I thought of it as a cove."
"Romantic."
"This whole place." Michael waves his hand, sweeping Santa Carla. "It's yours. And I–"
"Don't say it."
"I'm yours."
David hits him, but Michael doesn't mind. He can't be bothered to mind over everything that is right. David's eyes are bright and blue, and he is smiling a helpless smile, all of eighteen years old, teenage lovers by the sea.
Michael laughs, and David is kissing him again, his cold hands slipping up Michael's neck, Michael's hands sliding beneath David's jacket and shirt. The lean shape of him and the two little circles on his chest, just a little smoother, the soft stubble against his cheeks and the soft hair at the waist of David's leather pants. "I was thinking you could stay with me, in my room," he says, rushed and out of breath.
David's hands go low. "Well, I'll bet my bike I know why it suddenly became relevant."
"Hey–"
David kisses his protest away. "I'll stay with you if you say something else sickeningly sweet." He's smiling against Michael, his eyes tender when he pulls back and looks at him.
"I'm yours for as long as you want." Michael cups his face. "I mean it."
"Your whole fucking life, Michael."
God, the way David says his name.
Your whole fucking life.
Michael can't help his smile.
"Come on, then," he says. "Dinnertime. I think we're having Chinese."
