Fic: Claustrophobia (Mavid)
Title: Claustrophobia
Author: is having herself a merry little Christmas
Giftee: circlesanthem
Word Count: ~7,200
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mavid
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Real people. Fake story.
Summary: Sometimes you feel more smothered by yourself than you do with anyone else.
Author Notes:This is for circlesanthem; have a happy holiday, darling, and may it not be half so angsty as the holiday portrayed here.
Contrary to popular belief--by which he means every single time Michael does an interview, gets a question about the bromance, and decides to run his mouth about what a rockstar David’s become, too good to hang out with his old friends--it is still possible for David to travel by public plane. He charms the flight attendants, reads three books, leans back with his eyes closed when that brings latent motion sickness that he had never known he had up to the surface, swears that he has signed autographs for every person on that plane by the time that they touch down again at Perth International Airport. He can count on one hand the number of times that Michael has signed an autograph, or even spoken, for that matter, and not because Michael is sitting in the window seat, either. Michael’s single hit the radio three weeks ago and has even started charting, and David knows that Michael noticed the head after head which turned to watch him as they walked through the airport and then down the plane aisle itself together.
Michael’s shoulders are tight, his gaze distant. He has barely spoken to anyone, David included, since the flight attendant had taken their drink order shortly after the plane had lifted up from the ground. Those Michael has managed to keep coming in liberal doses with nothing more than a crook of his hand every time that he had managed to catch the flight attendant’s eye, but he’s not wobbling on his feet when the seat-belt signs turn off and they are allowed to stand. He was an impressive drinker even while they were on the show and then the tour together, David remembers now, and it’s been months since they were able to really hang out together. He doesn’t know what’s been going on in Michael’s life since then, save for the one big thing, he doesn’t entirely know the man who walks hurriedly ahead of him off of the plane.
“Merry Christmas,” David mutters beneath his breath, and then gives the flight attendant a tight smile as he follows Michael down the aisle and off of the plane. She had been giving Michael sidelong looks for the entire thirteen hours that they had been sitting there; if David had to lay down money on it, he’s willing to bet that she’s an Aerosmith fan. Had Michael not been wearing such a patently unapproachable look upon his face, David was sure that they would have been mobbed before the first hour had even had a chance to go by.
“Is he okay?” the flight attendant asks David, touching him lightly on the arm as the rest of the passengers pull their items together. He’s gotten used to fans touching him since May, and even gets a kick out of it; personal space has always kind of been an optional thing for him. He also bets that she spent a lot of time on YouTube, this summer.
“He’s fine,” David says, smiling wider. “Little airsickness is all.” Just on the off chance that that whatever he says is going to wind up on TMZ.
Michael is waiting for David in the terminal when David finally makes it out of the plane. He has his sunglasses out and already pulled down over his eyes, a hat on his head. He’s not looking at David. He’s doing his damnedest not to look at anybody. David sighs, can already feel the holiday piling up on him. He thought about asking Michael to go back to Missouri with him, they’re practically brothers and it’s not as if anyone in his chaotic family would actually mind, but Michael needs to be here. After everything, he needs to be here, and David needs to be here with him. He makes a note to kick Neal’s ass the next time that Neal tries to take the piss out of him about it, too.
David sighs and puts on his own sunglasses. His bright red KC hat would actually probably get him more noticed than his bare head at this point, but he can already see camera phones coming out. Over the protests of his assistant, his manager, and every ominous-looking or -sounding person that 19E had been able to pull out and yell at the both of them, because Michael hasn’t been going anywhere without David for the past few weeks, they’re here without security. And they were doing that, David had finally snapped at every last one of the pit bulls in suits, because Michael wasn’t going anywhere without David and that should have fucking told them something, maybe, about turning this into any more of a publicity circus than it had to be.
“Let’s go, man,” David says, taking Michael by the elbow and tugging him when Michael seems more inclined to stand still and brood than go to meet his family. “We’re going to get swarmed if we hang out here for much longer.” More Michael than him, probably, in the exact reverse of the way that things are back in Los Angeles. He’s the hometown boy done good.
Not that good. David looks at Michael sideways as they stride towards baggage claim together. Michael’s not a brooder. Michael’s a puncher and a drinker and a joker, and if David is perfectly honest, they both know that David did not throw all of his previous holiday plans up in the air because, what the hell, he didn’t have anything better to do. He did it because he’s worried.
They get their bags, they wave to fans. Michael manages at least that much, though David highly suspects that the sunglasses fixed firmly on his face are the only thing keeping the giggling girls and giggling women alike from seeing how mechanical it all is. “There’s Hailey,” he says when he’s had enough, nudging David in the side and pointing towards a tall, pretty brunette. Her hair is darker than Michael’s and her eyes her blue. She waves when she sees Michael pointing at her. In return, Michael squints. “Or it might be Kate. God, it’s been way too long since I’ve had a break.”
The woman grabs for Michael and holds onto him tight as soon as he’s within grabbing distance. Only when David starts to fidget a little bit does she let go so that she can extend her hand to him. Michael has told David that no one else outside of their little Hollywood group, the show survivors, knows, not even the media (she’s at least managing that much, and David knew that it was coming, he and Carly used to find quiet corners while the tour had been going on and talk about how much it was coming and what kind of cushion they could throw up under their friend for that inevitable moment, but he can’t help but ask why she had to do it fucking now), but there are a few seconds when David swears that she has to be working some kind of sisterly intuition on him. Or maybe David just needs to remember that there were people who knew Michael before he did, and maybe even better, and he does not have a moratorium on Michael’s obvious misery.
“All right, sweetheart,” Kate-or-Hailey says to Michael, putting her arm around his waist and rubbing at his back. “Come on.”
“David, this is my sister, Kate,” Michael says, solving the mystery for David. “Kate, this is David--”
“Cook,” Kate finishes. She smiles at him, but cannot stop glancing at her brother. “Your face is, uh, kind of famous.”
“Thank you.” David looks at Michael, too. He has always had a way of pulling the eye like that, a careless charisma about him; it doesn’t stop even now that he’s clearly falling apart. “I got a good deal on it, no interest for twenty-four months.”
Kate laughs a little at that, and puts a few strays hands of hair behind her ear. It makes her even prettier than she was before, but David catches her glancing towards her brother and knows that it’s a nervous gesture. “Let’s go before we wind up in the tabloids,” she says. Kate gestures, and David and Michael follow her out to the almost oppressively bright parking lot.
“Jesus,” David blurts out as he thinks that his family is surely dealing with snow and ice back in Missouri, but hell, at least that’s actual Christmas weather.
Michael laughs, for perhaps the first time in days. Kate jumps to hear the sound; David thinks that if she’s already getting spooked by her brother, she should try being one of the people determinedly holding him together ever since it all went to hell. “South of the equator, Dave,” he says. “Don’t ever lecture me on my geography again.”
It’s on the tip of David’s tongue to tell Michael that at least he never forgot which state they were all in while on a certain tour, you smug bastard, but Michael shifts his bag to the other hand so that he can lean into David’s personal space and say calmly, “And if you’re very nice, I might even take you to the beach.”
Carly so should have been the one to do this, prior plans with Todd or not. At least her motives would have been pure. David takes a deep breath and follows Michael and his sister out to the car. Michael throws his bag into the backseat and then climbs in after it, effectively leaving him out of having to make eye contact with anyone. David pauses and stares at Kate over the hood of her car before he shrugs and gets into the front passenger seat. All three of them are quiet as Kate takes them to a quiet suburban house.
“Admit it,” Kate finally calls over her shoulder as David leans forward to fiddle with the radio stations, because the silence in the car is growing so thick that David thinks it could bludgeon someone to death. “You thought that I was Hailey at first, didn’t you?”
“I had my sunglasses on,” Michael says from the back seat. David thinks that he might be smiling, but it’s gone by the time that he looks back. “Identical twins, remember?”
“I’m your freaking sister,” Kate argues back, and trades a glance with David. David has no idea what kind of rough therapy she thinks that the two of them are writing here, but if it’s going to get Michael actually talking, then David will drag out the couch himself.
Naturally, it doesn’t last. “I haven’t been back in a while,” Michael says in a sulky mutter as Kate takes the car into the driveway and cuts the engine.
You were back three weeks ago, David wants to say, and bites it back just in time. There was someone beside Michael the last time that he was here who is not now; David is very aware that he is but a pale imitation.
A pale, and entirely out of place, imitation. David is not unaware of Kate looking at him sideways, when she thinks that he cannot see it.
Another brunette woman walks out onto the porch at the sound of the engine cutting off. She’s Kate down to the most minute detail, so far as David can see; this must be Michael’s other half-sister, Hailey. She waves at them. Michael waves back. He’s back to putting on his performer’s face, the everything is fine face that he used to wear on the tour when he and Stacey would have a hushed fight over the phone less than fifteen minutes before going onstage. He would channel it into his performance then. David would like to know how Michael manages to perform now.
Really, David decides less than twenty minutes into the introductions, Michael is full of shit when he saws that he would not be a good actor. He deserves an Oscar. Anyone who didn’t know him very well, or anyone who might have known him well once but hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade, would think that he was doing just fine, and that David had come halfway across the globe with him for a family holiday, because, well, they were friends, weren’t they? And that’s what friends did.
That’s what friends do, David tells himself after he puts his hand against the curve between Michael’s shoulder blades for a second as he shakes hands with Michael’s mother, his stepfather. He feels Michael flinch, very minutely, in the way that he has been doing at the touch of any person, even Carly, for the fast few weeks. Almost more importantly, David sees Kate abruptly tilt her head to the side. Michael does not come from a family of stupid people, it would seem, damn it. David jerks his hand away and feels his face burn.
“What were you saying about the beach?” David murmurs to Michael when they get a lull in between meeting Michael’s older brother and his older sister, and before the endless rows of children are trotted out. He’s glad that they came out on the 23rd rather than Christmas Eve itself; he’s glad that they gave themselves a little more breathing room than that.
Michael tilts his head to one side and regards David with a strange half-smile curving his mouth. He’s not from a stupid family and he’s not stupid himself; David has often wondered if Michael knew about the real source of this...of this heat that they can throw, that it’s not merely the source of siblings separated at birth. “Later,” he murmurs back to David. “I’m drinking in some family togetherness here.” And there’s a note in his voice that’s so plaintive that David feels bad for even asking, Michael for a few seconds wearing his wound plainly after he’s been keeping it held tightly close around himself.
”You have to go with him,” Carly had pulled David to the side and hissed at him, less than three days after it had happened and Michael had effectively locked himself into the nice new house that the tour had bought him, paparazzi a living moat around the structure even though they didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what was wrong. Knowing that something was off at all, and that normally joking and playing along Johns had started swearing at them was enough. His single had dropped less than a week prior to that and had started building buzz immediately, barreling Michael abruptly back into the public interest. David was just glad that Michael hadn’t gone on a public, obscenity-spewing bender. He and Carly were helping with that, by aiding him in private, obscenity-spewing benders instead. He was not sure that his liver could take much more.
“Look, we’re close--” David had argued back, and been treated to Carly rolling her eyes before he could even finish his sentence. He and Michael had gone from strangers to practically related in the span of less than a year, was the truth of it. “But I think that barging in on someone’s holiday is a little over the line.”
Another eye roll. Carly’s steamroller qualities were in full force, and more was the pity for anyone who didn’t get on board before she simply rolled them over. “Holidays fuck people up,” she had told him bluntly. “And if Michael’s family is anything like Michael--”
Then they were going to be a group of buoyant extroverts who were going to be more interested in egging him on, however inadvertently, than they were going to be in keeping him together. David sighed. Carly read her victory in the sound, and smiled, even if it was a sad one.
Except that it’s now appearing that Michael’s family is nothing of the sort, and David is really starting to feel like a dumbass, here. He smiles tightly as he receives another curious look, though everyone is being perfectly nice, and as another member of Michael’s family tries to touch him and gets that strange stiffening as a result. They aren’t going to actually ask him if he has family of his own, or even allow themselves to think of it for too long at a stretch, probably, they are altogether too nice a group of people for that, but David can still sense just how much he’s sticking out. Luckily, Michael’s uncharacteristic subdued moroseness is making him stick out, too; even his own mother is giving him measuring looks. David can see the oncoming maternal intervention rushing closer and closer.
“Yeah, Dave and I have been joined at the hip since August,” Michael is telling one of his cousins. David rolls his eyes, because they had gone weeks without seeing each other after the tour had ended and it had sucked beyond the telling of it, but he still settles down to listen to whatever outrageous lie Michael is clearly gearing up to spin. “It’s part of the aesthetic, you know, the whole Cobra Starship secure male thing--”
David winds up and punches Michael in the arm, making him yelp and his cousin squeal before she realizes that Michael is biting his lip to keep from laughing, not because he’s in pain. To be fair, it takes David a few seconds to make that connection, too. That’s twice since getting off of the plane that he’s seen Michael laugh. If nothing else, even if David doesn’t have a single damned thing to do with Michael’s lightened mood, there will be someone to report back to Carly that it existed so that she won’t launch an all-out one-woman rescue mission.
“Violence isn’t cool, David,” Michael chides him as he rubbed at his arm. He looks at David from beneath his lashes, an oddly coy move from the man that David had come to know over the past year and who was more likely to simply run through a door than spend any time or frustration in trying to finesse it open, and a very self-aware one. David catches his breath for a second; Michael knows. It’s not as if David has been doing all that great a job of hiding it, when even Jason sometimes told him that people had started taking bets from the onset about how long that he and Kim were going to last, but still. No one likes to see themselves laid bare like that in another person’s eyes.
“You’re a role model now,” Michael goes on. The moment is gone, like it never existed, as if David can not still feel the way that Michael had looked at him like a hand on his skin. “See, what is Alice thinking right now, that it’s okay to hit people?”
David looks at Alice. “I don’t think that it’s okay to hit people,” she tells him.
David punches Michael in the arm again. “There. My influence clearly doesn’t cross continents.”
Michael makes a face at him and then continues the introductions, one after the other in a blur that David can not hope to keep up with, even though he thinks that he has gotten pretty good at telling the fans who had come to multiple shows over the summer. They all have the same reaction; they all give him quizzical looks, head cocked to one side, clearly only just managing to stop themselves from asking why he is there and why someone tall and blonde and possessing another X chromosome is not. David smiles and offers no explanations; Michael smiles, runs his mouth constantly, and offers even less. David makes careful note of him, not caring that everyone is probably watching him watching Michael as closely as he’s watching Michael, and he still sees how Michael tightened and steps away every time that someone tries to hug him for more than a few seconds.
“Damn,” Michael’s stepfather says quietly to David while Michael is off regaling another set of cousins with tales of how loose and immoral the mighty Los Angeles was. David thinks that he’s only getting away with it because these cousins look to be about thirteen at the outside, are by definition credulous to a fault, and probably have only the vaguest of ideas of what Hollywood immorality actually constitutes in the first place. “I haven’t seen him like this in years.”
David tilts his head, looked without speaking at the man that Michael refers to as his father, even though they don’t share any blood ties. “Come again?” David asks. He already has a feeling that they are about to head into heavy territory, even though David and Carly have been handling that heavy territory by themselves for going on three weeks by now and he will be glad of the support.
John looks at David as if he really ought to know better, and John is frankly disappointed in him for his failure. “In case you haven’t noticed, son,” he says calmly. “Michael does not deal well with being left.”
David looks at Michael again, who is waving his hands about expansively as he continues to entertain the cousins. David catches a snatch of conversation as he walks up behind Michael, “And then Brooke sets off the entire row of firecrackers that we weren’t even supposed to have at once--” Michael glances over his shoulder and notices that David is there. “And that’s why you should never, ever drink, because it doesn’t even taste good and will only get you in trouble.”
The cousins dash off. David raised his eyebrow at Michael. “You’re the one who got us in trouble with the firecrackers in Vegas,” he says. “Brooke lectured you the next morning when you were throwing up on the girls’ bus.”
Michael’s grin is wide and expansive. David does not believe in it for a second. “They don’t need to know that,” he says.
Michael doesn’t quite have the cash on him to buy his mother that new house that he had promised her, at least not yet, and Michael had not been joking when he had warned David before getting on the plane that there were going to be a lot of family members in the house that holiday. David winds up with the choice of crashing on a patch of floor in the living room, surrounded by several of Michael’s cousins who kept giving him looks that made him think that he might be molested in the middle of the night, on the floor in Michael’s old room, or in the half of Michael’s actual bed that he is going to physically shove Michael right out of if it should come to that.
“You know,” David says as Michael sprawls diagonally across the bed, managing to take up a percentage of it that David is pretty sure didn’t actually make mathematical sense, given that Michael is not that big. “My album has a decent chance of going platinum by New Year’s.”
Michael doesn’t answer right away; David thinks that he might have even done one of those abrupt and eerie retreats back into his own head again, and is not listening to David at all. “No one fucking cares out here, rock star,” he says finally. He would have said it in a joking tone, back during the summer, and probably reached out to slap David on the ass at the same time, rather than sounding as if he barely realizes that David is there at all. “You can go scrap it out with Alice, if you want.”
“Alice is way too young for the way that she’s looking at me.” David sighs, looks down at the prone form of his friend, and comforts himself by remembering that it would have been at least as creepy if Carly had been the one to make this trip. She might not share David’s complicated emotional space with regard to their favorite glossy Aussie, but her genitalia would have automatically given her the edge. He leans over the edge of the bed and begins bodily pushing Michael over. Michael has his arm thrown across his eyes; he lowers it just far enough so that he could stare at David like he’s gone mad.
“The fuck are you doing?” Michael asks.
“I’m not sleeping on the floor, jackass, I don’t care how much you feel like flailing around like an emo kid.” The corners of Michael’s mouth pull down, and David thinks for a few seconds that he might have gone too far, but any attempt that he or Carly have made to have an honest talk with Michael about everything that had gone down haven’t been received any better.
“Fucking bastard,” Michael mutters finally, shifting over of his own accord when it becomes clear that David is willing to push him right over the edge and onto the floor if Michael decides to be too much of a prick about it. He kicks off his shoes and shimmies beneath the blankets without bothering to change out of his clothes. David pauses, looking him over and knowing full well that Michael is aware of the attention and is doing his best to ignore it, before he goes into the bathroom to change himself. The Michael that he had known on the show and the tour had been possessed with absolutely zero in the way of modesty; had he breasts, David was pretty sure that there were several producers who would have been flashed for no other reason than the coronary that would have inevitably ensued. He is just as sure that the only thing that kept them from seeing Michael’s cock in a less-than-subtle metaphorical gesture was the fact that undoing both a belt and then jeans would have given them too much time to realize what was about to happen.
They have slept in the same bed before. Whenever they managed to get that rarest of creatures, an actual day off, drinking always seemed to ensue, and David can remember a handful of occasions in which either he or Michael would get confused about which bed belonged to which man and then just decided, fuck it, it was too much trouble to get it all sorted out again. Nothing had ever happened. Michael isn’t stupid, and David knows that he had to have felt the tension that even the media was remarking upon by September, but he had never done anything about it. Michael is too moral, and he loved her too much.
David emerges from the bathroom and slides into the half of the bed that has been left open for him. He stares at Michael’s back in the darkness. It’s begging for someone to touch him and, like an animal in a trap, promising just as passionately that he’ll bite anyone who tries to help him. David isn’t aware of which one of them falls asleep first; he’s certain that they’re both waiting for the other one to break.
David wakes up with sunlight on his face. He shifts and turns, feels Michael watching him before he opens his eyes. Michael has scooted over to the farthest edge of the bed that he can reach without tipping over. He’s giving David such an inscrutable look that David for a few seconds cannot help but wonder if he reached for Michael in the middle of the night or something. He’s a snuggly sleeper, it’s just a thing, and Michael had used to give him unending shit about it when they were both dealing with their hangovers in the mornings after. David’s not sure what this Michael will do.
“Morning,” David says finally, when Michael makes it clear that he’s perfectly okay with staring at David like an attractive, peach-colored gargoyle until the sun has moved too far up in the sky to glide through the window any longer.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Michael answers.
“All right,” David allows slowly, because Michael’s still staring at him, and it’s a little creepy. “Are you trying to tell me that Australians have some weird fucking legend, like a Christmas Eve goblin or something? Mike, you’re kind of--”
“Come on,” Michael says abruptly, slapping at David’s thigh before he slides out of the bed. Very aware that Michael touched him for a second, if that, and that this hardly means that he’s gotten over his weird thing about contact, David can still not stop himself from reaching automatically for Michael’s wrist. He catches it; the skin is warm, and Michael’s arm goes tense immediately. He looks at David until David lets him go. “I promised that I would take you to the beach, didn’t I?”
This might be the strangest Christmas that David has experienced before in his life. He slides out of bed and gets dressed, watching Michael from the corner of his eye with all of the subtlety that he can manage and being very aware that that’s not saying much. Michael changes shirts and then hops agitatedly from one foot to the other, his gaze fixed on the floor. It’s not the first time that David has noticed how much energy Michael actually has--he’s pretty sure that the only way that Michael could actually sit still, for anything, is if he were to be physically sedated first--but this is the first time that he’s seen such an edge of desperation in every gesture.
“You did,” David allows as he pulls a clean shirt over his head, “but, man, it’s okay, we can spend the day with your family--”
Michael sighs. It’s a long, unhappy sound, and it hurts David to hear it. He wonders if he still ought to be texting Carly with the news that, hey, they got lucky and there’s still actually some version of Michael inside of there. The eerie robot that has been wandering around has long since passed the stage where he’s merely worrisome and into the one where he’s downright terrifying.
“I really don’t want to deal with--all of that right now, okay, David?” Michael asks. There’s a pleading note in his voice. David already knows that he’s going to give Michael anything at all that he wants. “So can I just have a few hours fucking break from it?”
“Yeah,” David says. He reaches for his shoes and watches Michael carefully, because Michael looks like he wants to be out of this house so badly that he might just say fuck it and leave without David. “We can do that.”
David doesn’t give Michael enough credit. Michael waits by the door of the room for him, and then lets his arm brush lightly against David’s own as they exit together. It’s more physical contact than David can remember Michael initiating in weeks. He’s definitely going to text Carly with this development as soon as he gets the chance, like a family member ecstatically running to let another know that the coma patient is waking up. Though the sun is high enough to wake David up, it’s still early enough, especially with Christmas Eve counting as its own holiday worth sleeping in, that they’re able to creep through the house unnoticed. What David does notice is that Michael does not try to touch him again. He revises the text in his head; maybe it’s not time to start celebrating victory just yet.
The beach that Michael promised him is nearly deserted. Because sane people are all with their families right now, David thinks, and maybe that means that he’s not a sane person. Or it means that he’s being the best friend that he knows how to someone who’s just barely hanging onto sanity himself, by all accounts. He sighs, follows along in Michael’s footsteps as Michael walks the beach and watches the water. They’re two steps away from the most depressing romance novel that David has ever seen in his life. He wraps his arms around himself, because it’s cloudy and not as hot as it will be later, watches the taut line of Michael’s back. Onstage, Michael has the gift of being able to completely forget that there’s anyone else watching him at all, just throw himself into the music and be. That talent is clearly one that he leaves on the stage.
“Michael--” David starts, and then cuts himself off with an abrupt clicking of his teeth coming together as he realizes that absolutely nothing that he says here is going to be nearly enough. So he lunges forward, before Michael can do one of his amazing twists away, and grabs hard for his friend’s arm. The skin is warm; the body beneath it is taut and so clearly unhappy that David nearly lets go again. He can feel Michael first jump at the unexpected contact and then tense up, prelude to pulling back. David tightens his grip so that he can’t.
“Come on,” he says. “Let me talk to you for a minute.”
Michael makes a face and finally lets David pull him a few steps closer over the sand, though David still gets the feeling that he’s coaxing forward a reluctant animal that’s still deciding whether to bite him or just run away. When Michael is standing so close that the space between them is measured in millimeters, the sun struggles to come out for a few seconds before dipping back beneath the clouds. David shivers in spite of the promise of heat.
“What?” Michael says in a short tone as soon as David has run out of forward space through which to pull him. Michael Johns choosing not to run his mouth; as if anyone who knew him at all has not already been able to tell that there is something so very wrong with him, and has been for several weeks. David takes a breath, choosing his next words, until Michael lets out an irritable sigh. “Look, you and Carly have been doing a great job of babysitting me, no, really--” David’s face change, because Michael sighs again. “Yeah, I’ve noticed. You two are lucky that you can sing, because Hollywood definitely doesn’t want you for your acting skills.”
“It sucks that Stacey left you,” David says bluntly, the thing that everyone has been skirting around saying out loud even though they all know what happened. Like she’s dead, instead of just gone. Michael jerks, and then glares at him. David shrugs. “You want me to write you a sonnet? It sucks, and I’m sorry.”
“You probably shouldn’t be so proud of your songwriting skills if that’s the best that you can come up with,” Michael mutters, and turns part of the way to the side so that he can avoid making eye contact. He runs his hand through his hair; his entire body is still drawn like a guitar string on the verge of snapping.
“I’m sorry,” David says again. He reaches out, puts his hand upon Michael’s arm once more, makes a face as he realizes how very Touched By An Angel all of this shit is. Doesn’t stop him from tightening his grip upon Michael when Michael tries to lean back. As far as he knows, he’s the only thing keeping Michael tied down to the earth at all.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Michael snaps. David almost laughs; that Michael also realizes how ridiculous this all is actually makes him feel better.
“I’m sorry that she left you, it sucks, that’s true, but you’re freaking people out here,” David says. He doesn’t drop his hand from Michael’s arm until Michael stops trying to pull away from him.
“Jesus Christ, I thought that being voted off of that show meant that people were going to stop staring at me all the goddamned time,” Michael says, and then puts his hands over his face so that his next words are lost around his fingers.
“Too bad, you’ve entered superstardom, so you’re just going to have to put on the big boy pants and--” David stops as he abruptly realizes that he was able to hear at least half of what Michael actually said, and that it bears repeating. “What?”
“Stacey was the only one who touched me for five years,” Michael repeats, enunciating slowly, as if David has suddenly gone stupid. That’s fine, because he’s looking at David in a way that David sure as hell understands, twenty-six years old and a long way from celibate, but what David does not understand is what he’s supposed to be doing about it. “Do you know what that’s like?”
David shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He hasn’t had a relationship that lasted for longer than six months, let alone one that came anywhere near to marriage. Maybe there’s something to this that he’s not understanding. “I don’t--”
“After a while, you don’t know how to respond to anyone else,” Michael finishes. He rolls his eyes, shakes his head, seems to regret allowing bringing David out here in the first place. “Besides, you got it wrong.” A quicksilver flash of teeth; it hardly looks like a smile. “You and Carly aren’t anywhere near the detectives that you think that you are, anyway.”
David really thinks that by now he ought to have left Michael to tell outrageous lies about Brooke White to little girls who are too young to know any better. “Okay,” he says slowly.
“I left her.”
And right there, Michael’s right, because Carly and David putting both of their heads together sure as hell never saw that one coming. “Then why the hell have you been being such a brat for the last three weeks?” David blurts before he can stop himself.
Michael jumps, stares at him. “Way to be the supportive friend, asshole,” he says. David feels bad, but only for a few seconds, because when Michael’s surprised he forgets to be that pale shade of himself that’s been wandering about ever since he and Stacey split, no matter who left the other one first. Michael waves his hands around. “It doesn’t make it any less fucking weird, all right, she’s the only person that I’ve slept with since I was 25--”
That is the stupidest goddamned thing that David has ever heard, he has never had trouble jumping into another woman (he’s so glad that he managed to bite his tongue and not say that out loud) after an ugly breakup. So he thinks that it’s a lucky break that he manages not to fall straight down to the grass after Michael goes on, “And leaving your wife for a bloke doesn’t exactly make it easier, you know.”
David’s mouth falls open, which is all in all a pretty good thing. It keeps David from biting off the tip of his own tongue. “What?” he says, finally. After a full thirty seconds has gone by, it’s not exactly what one could consider stealth.
Michael rolls his eyes. For the first time in weeks, he steps closer to David of his own volition, reaches for him. “I haven’t been subtle, Dave,” he says calmly. “I’m amazed that you haven’t realized it before now, but I’ve been going through something here.” Something that involves sleeping in the same bed with David like he’s sharing blankets with a rabid opossum, there is so much that makes sense now. And so much more that just doesn’t.
No, David thinks. All summer you were just being you. Michael jumps all over people. Michael is wild and enthusiastic and makes even more of a mockery out of personal space than David himself does. David can’t seem to find speech, even when Michael is looking at him like he might consider just digging a hole and burying himself in it if David doesn’t give him the right answer now.
That much, at least, is easy. David grabs for Michael, Michael’s weird touch aversion be damned, and kisses him. It’s not nearly the kiss that David wants to give him, it’s the barest brushing of skin on skin that can still be called touch at all, but David still feels Michael tremble when it’s done. “You could have told me before now,” he says. He thinks of the kiss that he wants to, that he will, give Michael as soon as he gets the chance.
“You’re the word nerd,” Michael says back. Inch by inch, he’s melting into David, and David would kind of like to go kick John for completely misdiagnosing the situation, except that he probably would not have dragged Michael out here if not for that fact. Maybe he should have brought Michael’s parents a better gift. “I do more with actions.”
“Yeah, some actions,” David says. “Going on autopilot for longer than a month, scaring the shit out of your friends--”
“So you decided to horn in on my family’s Christmas?” Michael is not quite laughing, but he’s close, and letting each line of tension be stroked out of his body by David’s hand on his arm, on the small of his back. Fine, when Michael puts it that way, it sounds kind of creepy and weird.
“We were worried,” David repeats. Michael is still tense, like he’s not sure how this is going to go even after David’s just kissed him in the gentlest way that he knows how, and maybe he’ll need to kiss him again to make sure that he gets it. That doesn’t sound like a bad plan, but Michael’s still holding himself rigid, so David adds instead, “You know that I’m never going to leave, right? Even if you try to kick me away, I’ll come to your house and hang onto your screen door like a limpet.”
“Another fucking five dollar word,” Michael mutters, and rolls his eyes before he goes on, still under his breath, “Remind me to kick my dad in the ass.”
“Okay. Later.” He knows without needing to ask that it’s not John that Michael is referring to here. David does kiss Michael again, lightly on the mouth, and pulls away before either one of them can deepen it. “For someone who plays at being such a goofball, you’re pretty fucked up, do you know that?”
“So you’re the Superman out of the two of us. I always thought that Batman was cooler, anyway.” Michael takes David by the hand, pulls him back towards the car. “I still can’t believe that came with me to my fucking family Christmas because you thought that I was having a bad breakup.”
“Worried,” David repeats, because Michael doesn’t seem to be getting that part. He wonders if Carly had been keeping a hidden video camera on Michael during those those weeks, just so that they can prove to him how much he was starting to scare them all.
“Am I complaining? It’s sweet.” David doesn’t get a chance to point out that if it’s not complaining, then it’s still something that manages to sound a hell of a lot like it, before Michael goes on, “By the way, I’ve been telling my family that you’re my boyfriend whenever you weren’t within earshot, every time they asked me why you came.” It’s a little too glib for someone who just confessed to having an extended crisis about his sexual orientation, but David is willing to let it slide. He pinches the inside of Michael’s arm, though, just because he can. “It was that or admit that you’re the least subtle stalker in the world and I like you too much to call the police.” And Michael finally, totally, relaxes against David’s side.
Author: is having herself a merry little Christmas
Giftee: circlesanthem
Word Count: ~7,200
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Mavid
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Real people. Fake story.
Summary: Sometimes you feel more smothered by yourself than you do with anyone else.
Author Notes:This is for circlesanthem; have a happy holiday, darling, and may it not be half so angsty as the holiday portrayed here.
Contrary to popular belief--by which he means every single time Michael does an interview, gets a question about the bromance, and decides to run his mouth about what a rockstar David’s become, too good to hang out with his old friends--it is still possible for David to travel by public plane. He charms the flight attendants, reads three books, leans back with his eyes closed when that brings latent motion sickness that he had never known he had up to the surface, swears that he has signed autographs for every person on that plane by the time that they touch down again at Perth International Airport. He can count on one hand the number of times that Michael has signed an autograph, or even spoken, for that matter, and not because Michael is sitting in the window seat, either. Michael’s single hit the radio three weeks ago and has even started charting, and David knows that Michael noticed the head after head which turned to watch him as they walked through the airport and then down the plane aisle itself together.
Michael’s shoulders are tight, his gaze distant. He has barely spoken to anyone, David included, since the flight attendant had taken their drink order shortly after the plane had lifted up from the ground. Those Michael has managed to keep coming in liberal doses with nothing more than a crook of his hand every time that he had managed to catch the flight attendant’s eye, but he’s not wobbling on his feet when the seat-belt signs turn off and they are allowed to stand. He was an impressive drinker even while they were on the show and then the tour together, David remembers now, and it’s been months since they were able to really hang out together. He doesn’t know what’s been going on in Michael’s life since then, save for the one big thing, he doesn’t entirely know the man who walks hurriedly ahead of him off of the plane.
“Merry Christmas,” David mutters beneath his breath, and then gives the flight attendant a tight smile as he follows Michael down the aisle and off of the plane. She had been giving Michael sidelong looks for the entire thirteen hours that they had been sitting there; if David had to lay down money on it, he’s willing to bet that she’s an Aerosmith fan. Had Michael not been wearing such a patently unapproachable look upon his face, David was sure that they would have been mobbed before the first hour had even had a chance to go by.
“Is he okay?” the flight attendant asks David, touching him lightly on the arm as the rest of the passengers pull their items together. He’s gotten used to fans touching him since May, and even gets a kick out of it; personal space has always kind of been an optional thing for him. He also bets that she spent a lot of time on YouTube, this summer.
“He’s fine,” David says, smiling wider. “Little airsickness is all.” Just on the off chance that that whatever he says is going to wind up on TMZ.
Michael is waiting for David in the terminal when David finally makes it out of the plane. He has his sunglasses out and already pulled down over his eyes, a hat on his head. He’s not looking at David. He’s doing his damnedest not to look at anybody. David sighs, can already feel the holiday piling up on him. He thought about asking Michael to go back to Missouri with him, they’re practically brothers and it’s not as if anyone in his chaotic family would actually mind, but Michael needs to be here. After everything, he needs to be here, and David needs to be here with him. He makes a note to kick Neal’s ass the next time that Neal tries to take the piss out of him about it, too.
David sighs and puts on his own sunglasses. His bright red KC hat would actually probably get him more noticed than his bare head at this point, but he can already see camera phones coming out. Over the protests of his assistant, his manager, and every ominous-looking or -sounding person that 19E had been able to pull out and yell at the both of them, because Michael hasn’t been going anywhere without David for the past few weeks, they’re here without security. And they were doing that, David had finally snapped at every last one of the pit bulls in suits, because Michael wasn’t going anywhere without David and that should have fucking told them something, maybe, about turning this into any more of a publicity circus than it had to be.
“Let’s go, man,” David says, taking Michael by the elbow and tugging him when Michael seems more inclined to stand still and brood than go to meet his family. “We’re going to get swarmed if we hang out here for much longer.” More Michael than him, probably, in the exact reverse of the way that things are back in Los Angeles. He’s the hometown boy done good.
Not that good. David looks at Michael sideways as they stride towards baggage claim together. Michael’s not a brooder. Michael’s a puncher and a drinker and a joker, and if David is perfectly honest, they both know that David did not throw all of his previous holiday plans up in the air because, what the hell, he didn’t have anything better to do. He did it because he’s worried.
They get their bags, they wave to fans. Michael manages at least that much, though David highly suspects that the sunglasses fixed firmly on his face are the only thing keeping the giggling girls and giggling women alike from seeing how mechanical it all is. “There’s Hailey,” he says when he’s had enough, nudging David in the side and pointing towards a tall, pretty brunette. Her hair is darker than Michael’s and her eyes her blue. She waves when she sees Michael pointing at her. In return, Michael squints. “Or it might be Kate. God, it’s been way too long since I’ve had a break.”
The woman grabs for Michael and holds onto him tight as soon as he’s within grabbing distance. Only when David starts to fidget a little bit does she let go so that she can extend her hand to him. Michael has told David that no one else outside of their little Hollywood group, the show survivors, knows, not even the media (she’s at least managing that much, and David knew that it was coming, he and Carly used to find quiet corners while the tour had been going on and talk about how much it was coming and what kind of cushion they could throw up under their friend for that inevitable moment, but he can’t help but ask why she had to do it fucking now), but there are a few seconds when David swears that she has to be working some kind of sisterly intuition on him. Or maybe David just needs to remember that there were people who knew Michael before he did, and maybe even better, and he does not have a moratorium on Michael’s obvious misery.
“All right, sweetheart,” Kate-or-Hailey says to Michael, putting her arm around his waist and rubbing at his back. “Come on.”
“David, this is my sister, Kate,” Michael says, solving the mystery for David. “Kate, this is David--”
“Cook,” Kate finishes. She smiles at him, but cannot stop glancing at her brother. “Your face is, uh, kind of famous.”
“Thank you.” David looks at Michael, too. He has always had a way of pulling the eye like that, a careless charisma about him; it doesn’t stop even now that he’s clearly falling apart. “I got a good deal on it, no interest for twenty-four months.”
Kate laughs a little at that, and puts a few strays hands of hair behind her ear. It makes her even prettier than she was before, but David catches her glancing towards her brother and knows that it’s a nervous gesture. “Let’s go before we wind up in the tabloids,” she says. Kate gestures, and David and Michael follow her out to the almost oppressively bright parking lot.
“Jesus,” David blurts out as he thinks that his family is surely dealing with snow and ice back in Missouri, but hell, at least that’s actual Christmas weather.
Michael laughs, for perhaps the first time in days. Kate jumps to hear the sound; David thinks that if she’s already getting spooked by her brother, she should try being one of the people determinedly holding him together ever since it all went to hell. “South of the equator, Dave,” he says. “Don’t ever lecture me on my geography again.”
It’s on the tip of David’s tongue to tell Michael that at least he never forgot which state they were all in while on a certain tour, you smug bastard, but Michael shifts his bag to the other hand so that he can lean into David’s personal space and say calmly, “And if you’re very nice, I might even take you to the beach.”
Carly so should have been the one to do this, prior plans with Todd or not. At least her motives would have been pure. David takes a deep breath and follows Michael and his sister out to the car. Michael throws his bag into the backseat and then climbs in after it, effectively leaving him out of having to make eye contact with anyone. David pauses and stares at Kate over the hood of her car before he shrugs and gets into the front passenger seat. All three of them are quiet as Kate takes them to a quiet suburban house.
“Admit it,” Kate finally calls over her shoulder as David leans forward to fiddle with the radio stations, because the silence in the car is growing so thick that David thinks it could bludgeon someone to death. “You thought that I was Hailey at first, didn’t you?”
“I had my sunglasses on,” Michael says from the back seat. David thinks that he might be smiling, but it’s gone by the time that he looks back. “Identical twins, remember?”
“I’m your freaking sister,” Kate argues back, and trades a glance with David. David has no idea what kind of rough therapy she thinks that the two of them are writing here, but if it’s going to get Michael actually talking, then David will drag out the couch himself.
Naturally, it doesn’t last. “I haven’t been back in a while,” Michael says in a sulky mutter as Kate takes the car into the driveway and cuts the engine.
You were back three weeks ago, David wants to say, and bites it back just in time. There was someone beside Michael the last time that he was here who is not now; David is very aware that he is but a pale imitation.
A pale, and entirely out of place, imitation. David is not unaware of Kate looking at him sideways, when she thinks that he cannot see it.
Another brunette woman walks out onto the porch at the sound of the engine cutting off. She’s Kate down to the most minute detail, so far as David can see; this must be Michael’s other half-sister, Hailey. She waves at them. Michael waves back. He’s back to putting on his performer’s face, the everything is fine face that he used to wear on the tour when he and Stacey would have a hushed fight over the phone less than fifteen minutes before going onstage. He would channel it into his performance then. David would like to know how Michael manages to perform now.
Really, David decides less than twenty minutes into the introductions, Michael is full of shit when he saws that he would not be a good actor. He deserves an Oscar. Anyone who didn’t know him very well, or anyone who might have known him well once but hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade, would think that he was doing just fine, and that David had come halfway across the globe with him for a family holiday, because, well, they were friends, weren’t they? And that’s what friends did.
That’s what friends do, David tells himself after he puts his hand against the curve between Michael’s shoulder blades for a second as he shakes hands with Michael’s mother, his stepfather. He feels Michael flinch, very minutely, in the way that he has been doing at the touch of any person, even Carly, for the fast few weeks. Almost more importantly, David sees Kate abruptly tilt her head to the side. Michael does not come from a family of stupid people, it would seem, damn it. David jerks his hand away and feels his face burn.
“What were you saying about the beach?” David murmurs to Michael when they get a lull in between meeting Michael’s older brother and his older sister, and before the endless rows of children are trotted out. He’s glad that they came out on the 23rd rather than Christmas Eve itself; he’s glad that they gave themselves a little more breathing room than that.
Michael tilts his head to one side and regards David with a strange half-smile curving his mouth. He’s not from a stupid family and he’s not stupid himself; David has often wondered if Michael knew about the real source of this...of this heat that they can throw, that it’s not merely the source of siblings separated at birth. “Later,” he murmurs back to David. “I’m drinking in some family togetherness here.” And there’s a note in his voice that’s so plaintive that David feels bad for even asking, Michael for a few seconds wearing his wound plainly after he’s been keeping it held tightly close around himself.
”You have to go with him,” Carly had pulled David to the side and hissed at him, less than three days after it had happened and Michael had effectively locked himself into the nice new house that the tour had bought him, paparazzi a living moat around the structure even though they didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what was wrong. Knowing that something was off at all, and that normally joking and playing along Johns had started swearing at them was enough. His single had dropped less than a week prior to that and had started building buzz immediately, barreling Michael abruptly back into the public interest. David was just glad that Michael hadn’t gone on a public, obscenity-spewing bender. He and Carly were helping with that, by aiding him in private, obscenity-spewing benders instead. He was not sure that his liver could take much more.
“Look, we’re close--” David had argued back, and been treated to Carly rolling her eyes before he could even finish his sentence. He and Michael had gone from strangers to practically related in the span of less than a year, was the truth of it. “But I think that barging in on someone’s holiday is a little over the line.”
Another eye roll. Carly’s steamroller qualities were in full force, and more was the pity for anyone who didn’t get on board before she simply rolled them over. “Holidays fuck people up,” she had told him bluntly. “And if Michael’s family is anything like Michael--”
Then they were going to be a group of buoyant extroverts who were going to be more interested in egging him on, however inadvertently, than they were going to be in keeping him together. David sighed. Carly read her victory in the sound, and smiled, even if it was a sad one.
Except that it’s now appearing that Michael’s family is nothing of the sort, and David is really starting to feel like a dumbass, here. He smiles tightly as he receives another curious look, though everyone is being perfectly nice, and as another member of Michael’s family tries to touch him and gets that strange stiffening as a result. They aren’t going to actually ask him if he has family of his own, or even allow themselves to think of it for too long at a stretch, probably, they are altogether too nice a group of people for that, but David can still sense just how much he’s sticking out. Luckily, Michael’s uncharacteristic subdued moroseness is making him stick out, too; even his own mother is giving him measuring looks. David can see the oncoming maternal intervention rushing closer and closer.
“Yeah, Dave and I have been joined at the hip since August,” Michael is telling one of his cousins. David rolls his eyes, because they had gone weeks without seeing each other after the tour had ended and it had sucked beyond the telling of it, but he still settles down to listen to whatever outrageous lie Michael is clearly gearing up to spin. “It’s part of the aesthetic, you know, the whole Cobra Starship secure male thing--”
David winds up and punches Michael in the arm, making him yelp and his cousin squeal before she realizes that Michael is biting his lip to keep from laughing, not because he’s in pain. To be fair, it takes David a few seconds to make that connection, too. That’s twice since getting off of the plane that he’s seen Michael laugh. If nothing else, even if David doesn’t have a single damned thing to do with Michael’s lightened mood, there will be someone to report back to Carly that it existed so that she won’t launch an all-out one-woman rescue mission.
“Violence isn’t cool, David,” Michael chides him as he rubbed at his arm. He looks at David from beneath his lashes, an oddly coy move from the man that David had come to know over the past year and who was more likely to simply run through a door than spend any time or frustration in trying to finesse it open, and a very self-aware one. David catches his breath for a second; Michael knows. It’s not as if David has been doing all that great a job of hiding it, when even Jason sometimes told him that people had started taking bets from the onset about how long that he and Kim were going to last, but still. No one likes to see themselves laid bare like that in another person’s eyes.
“You’re a role model now,” Michael goes on. The moment is gone, like it never existed, as if David can not still feel the way that Michael had looked at him like a hand on his skin. “See, what is Alice thinking right now, that it’s okay to hit people?”
David looks at Alice. “I don’t think that it’s okay to hit people,” she tells him.
David punches Michael in the arm again. “There. My influence clearly doesn’t cross continents.”
Michael makes a face at him and then continues the introductions, one after the other in a blur that David can not hope to keep up with, even though he thinks that he has gotten pretty good at telling the fans who had come to multiple shows over the summer. They all have the same reaction; they all give him quizzical looks, head cocked to one side, clearly only just managing to stop themselves from asking why he is there and why someone tall and blonde and possessing another X chromosome is not. David smiles and offers no explanations; Michael smiles, runs his mouth constantly, and offers even less. David makes careful note of him, not caring that everyone is probably watching him watching Michael as closely as he’s watching Michael, and he still sees how Michael tightened and steps away every time that someone tries to hug him for more than a few seconds.
“Damn,” Michael’s stepfather says quietly to David while Michael is off regaling another set of cousins with tales of how loose and immoral the mighty Los Angeles was. David thinks that he’s only getting away with it because these cousins look to be about thirteen at the outside, are by definition credulous to a fault, and probably have only the vaguest of ideas of what Hollywood immorality actually constitutes in the first place. “I haven’t seen him like this in years.”
David tilts his head, looked without speaking at the man that Michael refers to as his father, even though they don’t share any blood ties. “Come again?” David asks. He already has a feeling that they are about to head into heavy territory, even though David and Carly have been handling that heavy territory by themselves for going on three weeks by now and he will be glad of the support.
John looks at David as if he really ought to know better, and John is frankly disappointed in him for his failure. “In case you haven’t noticed, son,” he says calmly. “Michael does not deal well with being left.”
David looks at Michael again, who is waving his hands about expansively as he continues to entertain the cousins. David catches a snatch of conversation as he walks up behind Michael, “And then Brooke sets off the entire row of firecrackers that we weren’t even supposed to have at once--” Michael glances over his shoulder and notices that David is there. “And that’s why you should never, ever drink, because it doesn’t even taste good and will only get you in trouble.”
The cousins dash off. David raised his eyebrow at Michael. “You’re the one who got us in trouble with the firecrackers in Vegas,” he says. “Brooke lectured you the next morning when you were throwing up on the girls’ bus.”
Michael’s grin is wide and expansive. David does not believe in it for a second. “They don’t need to know that,” he says.
Michael doesn’t quite have the cash on him to buy his mother that new house that he had promised her, at least not yet, and Michael had not been joking when he had warned David before getting on the plane that there were going to be a lot of family members in the house that holiday. David winds up with the choice of crashing on a patch of floor in the living room, surrounded by several of Michael’s cousins who kept giving him looks that made him think that he might be molested in the middle of the night, on the floor in Michael’s old room, or in the half of Michael’s actual bed that he is going to physically shove Michael right out of if it should come to that.
“You know,” David says as Michael sprawls diagonally across the bed, managing to take up a percentage of it that David is pretty sure didn’t actually make mathematical sense, given that Michael is not that big. “My album has a decent chance of going platinum by New Year’s.”
Michael doesn’t answer right away; David thinks that he might have even done one of those abrupt and eerie retreats back into his own head again, and is not listening to David at all. “No one fucking cares out here, rock star,” he says finally. He would have said it in a joking tone, back during the summer, and probably reached out to slap David on the ass at the same time, rather than sounding as if he barely realizes that David is there at all. “You can go scrap it out with Alice, if you want.”
“Alice is way too young for the way that she’s looking at me.” David sighs, looks down at the prone form of his friend, and comforts himself by remembering that it would have been at least as creepy if Carly had been the one to make this trip. She might not share David’s complicated emotional space with regard to their favorite glossy Aussie, but her genitalia would have automatically given her the edge. He leans over the edge of the bed and begins bodily pushing Michael over. Michael has his arm thrown across his eyes; he lowers it just far enough so that he could stare at David like he’s gone mad.
“The fuck are you doing?” Michael asks.
“I’m not sleeping on the floor, jackass, I don’t care how much you feel like flailing around like an emo kid.” The corners of Michael’s mouth pull down, and David thinks for a few seconds that he might have gone too far, but any attempt that he or Carly have made to have an honest talk with Michael about everything that had gone down haven’t been received any better.
“Fucking bastard,” Michael mutters finally, shifting over of his own accord when it becomes clear that David is willing to push him right over the edge and onto the floor if Michael decides to be too much of a prick about it. He kicks off his shoes and shimmies beneath the blankets without bothering to change out of his clothes. David pauses, looking him over and knowing full well that Michael is aware of the attention and is doing his best to ignore it, before he goes into the bathroom to change himself. The Michael that he had known on the show and the tour had been possessed with absolutely zero in the way of modesty; had he breasts, David was pretty sure that there were several producers who would have been flashed for no other reason than the coronary that would have inevitably ensued. He is just as sure that the only thing that kept them from seeing Michael’s cock in a less-than-subtle metaphorical gesture was the fact that undoing both a belt and then jeans would have given them too much time to realize what was about to happen.
They have slept in the same bed before. Whenever they managed to get that rarest of creatures, an actual day off, drinking always seemed to ensue, and David can remember a handful of occasions in which either he or Michael would get confused about which bed belonged to which man and then just decided, fuck it, it was too much trouble to get it all sorted out again. Nothing had ever happened. Michael isn’t stupid, and David knows that he had to have felt the tension that even the media was remarking upon by September, but he had never done anything about it. Michael is too moral, and he loved her too much.
David emerges from the bathroom and slides into the half of the bed that has been left open for him. He stares at Michael’s back in the darkness. It’s begging for someone to touch him and, like an animal in a trap, promising just as passionately that he’ll bite anyone who tries to help him. David isn’t aware of which one of them falls asleep first; he’s certain that they’re both waiting for the other one to break.
David wakes up with sunlight on his face. He shifts and turns, feels Michael watching him before he opens his eyes. Michael has scooted over to the farthest edge of the bed that he can reach without tipping over. He’s giving David such an inscrutable look that David for a few seconds cannot help but wonder if he reached for Michael in the middle of the night or something. He’s a snuggly sleeper, it’s just a thing, and Michael had used to give him unending shit about it when they were both dealing with their hangovers in the mornings after. David’s not sure what this Michael will do.
“Morning,” David says finally, when Michael makes it clear that he’s perfectly okay with staring at David like an attractive, peach-colored gargoyle until the sun has moved too far up in the sky to glide through the window any longer.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Michael answers.
“All right,” David allows slowly, because Michael’s still staring at him, and it’s a little creepy. “Are you trying to tell me that Australians have some weird fucking legend, like a Christmas Eve goblin or something? Mike, you’re kind of--”
“Come on,” Michael says abruptly, slapping at David’s thigh before he slides out of the bed. Very aware that Michael touched him for a second, if that, and that this hardly means that he’s gotten over his weird thing about contact, David can still not stop himself from reaching automatically for Michael’s wrist. He catches it; the skin is warm, and Michael’s arm goes tense immediately. He looks at David until David lets him go. “I promised that I would take you to the beach, didn’t I?”
This might be the strangest Christmas that David has experienced before in his life. He slides out of bed and gets dressed, watching Michael from the corner of his eye with all of the subtlety that he can manage and being very aware that that’s not saying much. Michael changes shirts and then hops agitatedly from one foot to the other, his gaze fixed on the floor. It’s not the first time that David has noticed how much energy Michael actually has--he’s pretty sure that the only way that Michael could actually sit still, for anything, is if he were to be physically sedated first--but this is the first time that he’s seen such an edge of desperation in every gesture.
“You did,” David allows as he pulls a clean shirt over his head, “but, man, it’s okay, we can spend the day with your family--”
Michael sighs. It’s a long, unhappy sound, and it hurts David to hear it. He wonders if he still ought to be texting Carly with the news that, hey, they got lucky and there’s still actually some version of Michael inside of there. The eerie robot that has been wandering around has long since passed the stage where he’s merely worrisome and into the one where he’s downright terrifying.
“I really don’t want to deal with--all of that right now, okay, David?” Michael asks. There’s a pleading note in his voice. David already knows that he’s going to give Michael anything at all that he wants. “So can I just have a few hours fucking break from it?”
“Yeah,” David says. He reaches for his shoes and watches Michael carefully, because Michael looks like he wants to be out of this house so badly that he might just say fuck it and leave without David. “We can do that.”
David doesn’t give Michael enough credit. Michael waits by the door of the room for him, and then lets his arm brush lightly against David’s own as they exit together. It’s more physical contact than David can remember Michael initiating in weeks. He’s definitely going to text Carly with this development as soon as he gets the chance, like a family member ecstatically running to let another know that the coma patient is waking up. Though the sun is high enough to wake David up, it’s still early enough, especially with Christmas Eve counting as its own holiday worth sleeping in, that they’re able to creep through the house unnoticed. What David does notice is that Michael does not try to touch him again. He revises the text in his head; maybe it’s not time to start celebrating victory just yet.
The beach that Michael promised him is nearly deserted. Because sane people are all with their families right now, David thinks, and maybe that means that he’s not a sane person. Or it means that he’s being the best friend that he knows how to someone who’s just barely hanging onto sanity himself, by all accounts. He sighs, follows along in Michael’s footsteps as Michael walks the beach and watches the water. They’re two steps away from the most depressing romance novel that David has ever seen in his life. He wraps his arms around himself, because it’s cloudy and not as hot as it will be later, watches the taut line of Michael’s back. Onstage, Michael has the gift of being able to completely forget that there’s anyone else watching him at all, just throw himself into the music and be. That talent is clearly one that he leaves on the stage.
“Michael--” David starts, and then cuts himself off with an abrupt clicking of his teeth coming together as he realizes that absolutely nothing that he says here is going to be nearly enough. So he lunges forward, before Michael can do one of his amazing twists away, and grabs hard for his friend’s arm. The skin is warm; the body beneath it is taut and so clearly unhappy that David nearly lets go again. He can feel Michael first jump at the unexpected contact and then tense up, prelude to pulling back. David tightens his grip so that he can’t.
“Come on,” he says. “Let me talk to you for a minute.”
Michael makes a face and finally lets David pull him a few steps closer over the sand, though David still gets the feeling that he’s coaxing forward a reluctant animal that’s still deciding whether to bite him or just run away. When Michael is standing so close that the space between them is measured in millimeters, the sun struggles to come out for a few seconds before dipping back beneath the clouds. David shivers in spite of the promise of heat.
“What?” Michael says in a short tone as soon as David has run out of forward space through which to pull him. Michael Johns choosing not to run his mouth; as if anyone who knew him at all has not already been able to tell that there is something so very wrong with him, and has been for several weeks. David takes a breath, choosing his next words, until Michael lets out an irritable sigh. “Look, you and Carly have been doing a great job of babysitting me, no, really--” David’s face change, because Michael sighs again. “Yeah, I’ve noticed. You two are lucky that you can sing, because Hollywood definitely doesn’t want you for your acting skills.”
“It sucks that Stacey left you,” David says bluntly, the thing that everyone has been skirting around saying out loud even though they all know what happened. Like she’s dead, instead of just gone. Michael jerks, and then glares at him. David shrugs. “You want me to write you a sonnet? It sucks, and I’m sorry.”
“You probably shouldn’t be so proud of your songwriting skills if that’s the best that you can come up with,” Michael mutters, and turns part of the way to the side so that he can avoid making eye contact. He runs his hand through his hair; his entire body is still drawn like a guitar string on the verge of snapping.
“I’m sorry,” David says again. He reaches out, puts his hand upon Michael’s arm once more, makes a face as he realizes how very Touched By An Angel all of this shit is. Doesn’t stop him from tightening his grip upon Michael when Michael tries to lean back. As far as he knows, he’s the only thing keeping Michael tied down to the earth at all.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Michael snaps. David almost laughs; that Michael also realizes how ridiculous this all is actually makes him feel better.
“I’m sorry that she left you, it sucks, that’s true, but you’re freaking people out here,” David says. He doesn’t drop his hand from Michael’s arm until Michael stops trying to pull away from him.
“Jesus Christ, I thought that being voted off of that show meant that people were going to stop staring at me all the goddamned time,” Michael says, and then puts his hands over his face so that his next words are lost around his fingers.
“Too bad, you’ve entered superstardom, so you’re just going to have to put on the big boy pants and--” David stops as he abruptly realizes that he was able to hear at least half of what Michael actually said, and that it bears repeating. “What?”
“Stacey was the only one who touched me for five years,” Michael repeats, enunciating slowly, as if David has suddenly gone stupid. That’s fine, because he’s looking at David in a way that David sure as hell understands, twenty-six years old and a long way from celibate, but what David does not understand is what he’s supposed to be doing about it. “Do you know what that’s like?”
David shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He hasn’t had a relationship that lasted for longer than six months, let alone one that came anywhere near to marriage. Maybe there’s something to this that he’s not understanding. “I don’t--”
“After a while, you don’t know how to respond to anyone else,” Michael finishes. He rolls his eyes, shakes his head, seems to regret allowing bringing David out here in the first place. “Besides, you got it wrong.” A quicksilver flash of teeth; it hardly looks like a smile. “You and Carly aren’t anywhere near the detectives that you think that you are, anyway.”
David really thinks that by now he ought to have left Michael to tell outrageous lies about Brooke White to little girls who are too young to know any better. “Okay,” he says slowly.
“I left her.”
And right there, Michael’s right, because Carly and David putting both of their heads together sure as hell never saw that one coming. “Then why the hell have you been being such a brat for the last three weeks?” David blurts before he can stop himself.
Michael jumps, stares at him. “Way to be the supportive friend, asshole,” he says. David feels bad, but only for a few seconds, because when Michael’s surprised he forgets to be that pale shade of himself that’s been wandering about ever since he and Stacey split, no matter who left the other one first. Michael waves his hands around. “It doesn’t make it any less fucking weird, all right, she’s the only person that I’ve slept with since I was 25--”
That is the stupidest goddamned thing that David has ever heard, he has never had trouble jumping into another woman (he’s so glad that he managed to bite his tongue and not say that out loud) after an ugly breakup. So he thinks that it’s a lucky break that he manages not to fall straight down to the grass after Michael goes on, “And leaving your wife for a bloke doesn’t exactly make it easier, you know.”
David’s mouth falls open, which is all in all a pretty good thing. It keeps David from biting off the tip of his own tongue. “What?” he says, finally. After a full thirty seconds has gone by, it’s not exactly what one could consider stealth.
Michael rolls his eyes. For the first time in weeks, he steps closer to David of his own volition, reaches for him. “I haven’t been subtle, Dave,” he says calmly. “I’m amazed that you haven’t realized it before now, but I’ve been going through something here.” Something that involves sleeping in the same bed with David like he’s sharing blankets with a rabid opossum, there is so much that makes sense now. And so much more that just doesn’t.
No, David thinks. All summer you were just being you. Michael jumps all over people. Michael is wild and enthusiastic and makes even more of a mockery out of personal space than David himself does. David can’t seem to find speech, even when Michael is looking at him like he might consider just digging a hole and burying himself in it if David doesn’t give him the right answer now.
That much, at least, is easy. David grabs for Michael, Michael’s weird touch aversion be damned, and kisses him. It’s not nearly the kiss that David wants to give him, it’s the barest brushing of skin on skin that can still be called touch at all, but David still feels Michael tremble when it’s done. “You could have told me before now,” he says. He thinks of the kiss that he wants to, that he will, give Michael as soon as he gets the chance.
“You’re the word nerd,” Michael says back. Inch by inch, he’s melting into David, and David would kind of like to go kick John for completely misdiagnosing the situation, except that he probably would not have dragged Michael out here if not for that fact. Maybe he should have brought Michael’s parents a better gift. “I do more with actions.”
“Yeah, some actions,” David says. “Going on autopilot for longer than a month, scaring the shit out of your friends--”
“So you decided to horn in on my family’s Christmas?” Michael is not quite laughing, but he’s close, and letting each line of tension be stroked out of his body by David’s hand on his arm, on the small of his back. Fine, when Michael puts it that way, it sounds kind of creepy and weird.
“We were worried,” David repeats. Michael is still tense, like he’s not sure how this is going to go even after David’s just kissed him in the gentlest way that he knows how, and maybe he’ll need to kiss him again to make sure that he gets it. That doesn’t sound like a bad plan, but Michael’s still holding himself rigid, so David adds instead, “You know that I’m never going to leave, right? Even if you try to kick me away, I’ll come to your house and hang onto your screen door like a limpet.”
“Another fucking five dollar word,” Michael mutters, and rolls his eyes before he goes on, still under his breath, “Remind me to kick my dad in the ass.”
“Okay. Later.” He knows without needing to ask that it’s not John that Michael is referring to here. David does kiss Michael again, lightly on the mouth, and pulls away before either one of them can deepen it. “For someone who plays at being such a goofball, you’re pretty fucked up, do you know that?”
“So you’re the Superman out of the two of us. I always thought that Batman was cooler, anyway.” Michael takes David by the hand, pulls him back towards the car. “I still can’t believe that came with me to my fucking family Christmas because you thought that I was having a bad breakup.”
“Worried,” David repeats, because Michael doesn’t seem to be getting that part. He wonders if Carly had been keeping a hidden video camera on Michael during those those weeks, just so that they can prove to him how much he was starting to scare them all.
“Am I complaining? It’s sweet.” David doesn’t get a chance to point out that if it’s not complaining, then it’s still something that manages to sound a hell of a lot like it, before Michael goes on, “By the way, I’ve been telling my family that you’re my boyfriend whenever you weren’t within earshot, every time they asked me why you came.” It’s a little too glib for someone who just confessed to having an extended crisis about his sexual orientation, but David is willing to let it slide. He pinches the inside of Michael’s arm, though, just because he can. “It was that or admit that you’re the least subtle stalker in the world and I like you too much to call the police.” And Michael finally, totally, relaxes against David’s side.