Chapter Text
The first thing Michael thought was David.
I have to find David.
Although, logically, it might not have been the best idea. Logically, the first person Michael probably wanted to talk to is Sam—Sam was the one with all the comic book knowledge… and Sam was the one on Michael’s side.
Especially since, apparently, there was a little bit of bad blood between vampires and werewolves in Santa Carla.
Or a lot.
There was a lot of bad blood.
But Michael couldn’t be held accountable for the first thing that came to his mind, and this time, it was David. David was the only living supernatural creature Michael knew (although alive may have been a stretch) but more than that, David was kind of… well, he was the first thing Michael thought about after a lot of things happened.
When Michael would catch sight of the train line, he thought David.
When Michael would look over at beach bonfires, people running with sticks aflame, he thought David.
When Michael would see the comic books Sam read, blood dripping from the mouths of pale, grotesque figures, he thought David.
When Michael slept with Star the first time—and the times after that.
He woke up.
He thought, David.
The first time, he was in the vampire cave. How could he help but wonder if David would mind him fucking a girl in the place where he… lived? Existed? (Michael’s not sure about the terminology—what he does know is that David made Michael feel alive.) The times after that, Michael had no excuse for thinking about David at all. David wasn’t dead; he was out there, somewhere in Santa Carla, flying through the nights and leaving drained bodies behind, but he sure wasn’t any part of Michael’s life anymore… and yet. Yet.
There he was, in Michael’s mind.
And now here he is, in the flesh and bone, perched in what looks like must be a new haunt of his.
From the outside, it looked much like an abandoned treehouse, perhaps a decade old, that some neighborhood dad had put together with thick, mis-matched beams of wood, crooked nails, and leftover pieces of aluminum siding for the roof, complete with a classic rope ladder that looked worn but held steady as Michael climbed up onto the small deck space. From the inside, it looks like a cobbled-together bedroom: an old, scribbled-on desk piled high with little trinkets and leaflets of paper, stacks of folded clothes wedged incongruously into what appears to be a bookshelf, a pile of other clothes uncerimoniously heaped on the floor.
Michael steps into the room wood creaking beneath his feet, closing the door behind him.
David whirls—he must’ve heard or felt Michael climb up—arm out.
A flash of metal. Michael just manages to catch sight of the blade, and then he’s moving without even thinking; it’s as if he’s being carried by a force not his own.
He’s stronger than he’s used to, leaping out of the path of the knife so forcefully, he crashes into the opposite wall.
The knife lands, quivering in the wood of the treehouse door.
“Motherfucker,” Michael says. The first thing he says to David since the antlers and the attack on his house and the death of Max is motherfucker.
Michael knows David has abandoned the cave, at least for now—he checked—and he hasn’t meant to be searching for David, but he always ends up doing it anyway. In stores at night, on the beaches and in the back lots of the boardwalk, even staring up at the sky as if searching for a shooting star. Looking for bleached hair and a dark jacket, looking for pale, broken, bodies by the edge of the water.
Finally, he’s found David—piercing, steady blue eyes, lip curled in disgust as he surveys Michael. It’s the magnetism Michael has found himself dreaming of, night after night: the irrisistable shoreline where beauty meets horror that he cannot help but dance at the edge of, imagining what it might feel like to get pulled under.
“I smelled you coming,” David says, all slow and gravelly. “Could smell that stench from a mile away.”
As thick as his voice is with distaste, David makes no move to retrieve the knife, and instead moves to sit on another old-looking wooden bookshelf, this one with a few sad looking books on it, all fallen on their sides, upside down and of varying sizes. David can’t go anywhere. It’s daytime, and if David leaves this rickety, abandoned treehouse, he’ll burn to a crisp. It’s in the backyard of an equally abandoned house, rotting away on the side of town, not too far from the bluffs, and the landscape around them provides no cover from the flinty winter sun, save for the tree the treehouse sits precariously on.
Michael planned it this way.
He shouldn’t have. It was a mean, frankly dishonorable thing to do, planning to ambush David when he knew David would have no course of exit, but he saw David fly in here just yesterday, and he’d thought I have to talk to him. He’d thought, finally. He’d thought, I’m not letting him get away from me, not this time.
And he’s not.
“It’s flattering that you recognize how I smell.”
Not only that, David must’ve heard him coming up, as well, scrabbling up the rope ladder. Must’ve grabbed a knife, gripped it tight—but also must have missed on purpose. What that means, Michael couldn’t possibly guess, but it does mean David doesn’t want to kill him. Or, in the very least, he doesn’t want to kill him enough to do it.
The Lost Boys are gone and Michael is an integral part of why. Hence the knife and the look David’s giving him and the way David sits unmoving on the bookshelf, every muscle tense as if he’s ready to pounce on Michael, like a predator, in the blink of an eye.
“Werewolf,” David sneers. He spits out the word like it tastes like shit in his mouth. “Michael Emerson. A werewolf. You stink of dog.”
“Wolf.” Michael waves his hand. “Technically.”
David raises his eyebrows, mouth twisting into something unhappy. He looks like shit. He’s always looked artfully un-put together, with his hair a little bit of a mess and the smell of cigarettes always lingering on him as if he would rather that than any kind of cologne. Always looked sleepless, pasty, not quite unshaven enough to be scruffy, but almost there. Now he looks un-artfully like shit: his hair has grown longer, falling into his eyes; he hasn’t greased it back or spiked it up; his stubble has grown longer, too, into some sort of a beard, and his eyebags are even more pronounced.
He doesn’t respond to Michael. He gives Michael a long, cat-like blink, as if to express his absolute intolerance of Michael. There are curtains drawn over all the windows, tight and new-looking—David must’ve put them in—and the light David has going is a kerosene lamp that he must’ve taken off the beach, making his expression look even more haunted than it otherwise would.
Michael stands there. David’s gaze makes his skin crawl, but in an absolutely exquisite way. It makes his nerve endings light at the small of his back, as if David’s touching him there, even though he isn’t.
This is the feeling he had when he saw David first coming in and knew, whatever level of morally wrong it would be to use sunlight to trap David, he was going to do it.
Need.
Urgency.
It’s what he might think a vampire thrall would do, but he knows David isn’t doing it. David’s looking at him like something the cat brutalized and then dragged in—with horror, with unmasked disgust.
And then David gets up.
The wood hardly creaks under his footsteps. David, when he wants to, can be so, so light on his feet, so quiet and slippery. Unnatural. Supernatural. Michael, if the past two weeks have told him anything, has gotten heavier from his new werewolf status. Thicker, stronger. Louder footsteps.
David pulls open a drawer behind him with a long, drawn-out scraping sound, his eyes never leaving Michael. He reaches in, closes his pale, thin fingers around something. He’s hefting another knife.
“What are you here for, Michael?” he asks. His voice is low and mocking, but it doesn’t sound like he’s only mocking Michael. It sounds like he’s mocking himself. Like he’s mocking both of them at the same time.
Michael is silent. He doesn’t know.
He had to.
He had to see David. He got bitten and he had to see David.
“Did your pack send you here to kill me? Michael. I’m not sure if you’ve realized—” David drags one hand through the air, as if it takes an exhaustive effort to do so. There’s the sad, weak bookshelf, the creaky, cracked boards of the treehouse walls, a space that looks like it was meant for a little boy with a scattering of items: shoes, a jacket, some beaded bracelets and thin chain necklaces in a pile on a little table with a short leg. “I’m not the leader of some vampire enclave anymore.” He grins. It’s empty and jarring. His canines are long and stick out over his bottom lip. “What’s one little vampire going to do?”
“I’m not here to kill you,” Michael says. He says it low in his throat, a rumble. He’s always spoken low—Sam used to make fun of him, saying he was trying to be tough, but it was actually his natural voice—but it’s gotten even lower since he got bitten. It’s like an honest to god growl, now, originating in his chest and coming out strong and heavy. “And I don't have a pack.”
When he speaks, he can see a flicker of recognition in David’s eyes, not all pleasant. His gaze seems to sharpen, as if saying oh, there’s the werewolf in you.
David’s tongue clicks in his mouth. “A werewolf without a pack.” Michael tightens his hands in his pockets. “Look at you. Did you come here because you thought we would be friends?”
No.
“Or that I would hook you up with someone? Find you a pack?” David laughs coldly, dropping the knife back into the drawer with a clatter, as if Michael is too pathetic on his own to warrant a defense. Michael’s hands tighten further. “I can’t believe they got you and they’re not even trying to keep you.”
There’s something funny about that sentence, something that tickles something at the back of Michael’s brain. The way the guys in the crowd brushed up against him, circled him ever-so-slightly, shoved him into an alley. They ripped his collar and set their teeth in hard enough to cover Michael’s shoulder in blood. It all felt mechanical, rehearsed. There wasn’t a spark of impulsivity in there, not anywhere.
“What do you mean?” he demands, stepping closer to David. There’s only so much space in the treehouse, which is only one room and much smaller than the size of Michael’s bedroom. Maybe smaller than half.
David’s mouth turns up, and he breathes out a soft, incredulous laugh. “You don’t think the fact that I tried to turn you and they tried to turn you—and succeeded, so it seems—is a coincidence?”
Michael narrows his eyes. Steps even closer. David’s still standing in front of the bookshelf; there’s no where for him to back up.
“Santa Carla is a vacation town, Michael. But you’re here to stay. And you’re a big hunk of muscle both of us wanted to get our hands on pretty damn badly.”
It starts to form in Michael’s mind. “Who’s we?”
“The werewolves and the vampires,” David says, as if it’s meant to be obvious. “You were a prime prospect, but now they know the truth—no wonder they didn’t stick around to invite you with them after they bit you—you’ve got vampire blood in your veins and I bet you anything they can taste it.”
They can taste it.
So now Michael’s a werewolf and he doesn’t even have a pack, because he was almost a vampire but he’s not a vampire. So he doesn’t fit with humans—he was never going to fit with vampires. But he also doesn't fit with werewolves, of which he is one.
Alright, fine. He’s not sure what werewolves need packs for, anyway.