Work Text:
“So, Mr. Jackson,” you speak over the cassette recorder. “How long have you been dead?”
He laughs.
A beautiful sound, softer than life itself; this delicate thread he walks on with one foot hanging off the ledge and into the darkness. Not really alive, not truly dead. Just trapped in the endless pendulum of both.
“It’s Michael,” he almost whines. Such a soft cadence for a creature capable of such great violence. A contradiction, just like everything else about him. He’s lounged on his couch, spread out, wearing darkness much better than it wears him. He’s biting on one finger with a tilted head, smiling at you so brightly you almost forget about the sharp-fanged canines glistening. “For you, it’s Michael.”
You pause, swallow. “I know, Mr. Jackson.”
Michael Jackson lived just like he died: on the margins, despite having every spotlight on himself. Biggest star of the world—resplendent, untouchable—someone to look at in a museum display with awe instead of knowing. Of learning.
Of loving.
Michael Jackson came into your life still breathing, cheeks full of warmth, alive. So, so alive it hurts to think about. He’d just broken the Grammys in half, forever splitting himself apart from any other artist that’s walked the same halls and earned the same awards.
They weren’t him. No one would or ever could be.
The year was 1984. At the beginning of spring, the time when earth wakes up and stirs people into living again. But it stirs hunger, too. Blood-red and sopping with a never-ending repetition that rarely gives and only takes.
You didn’t know it then and neither did he, but the spring of ‘84 would be the last spring Michael ever saw as mortal. Where he could wake in the morning and tiptoe outside, glimpse at the birds perched on his balcony and watch the sunrise without it being suicidal.
You were nervous back then, still green while the industry was blooming all in technicolor around you, trying to carve a space for yourself in metaphorically unmoving stone.
You’d just gotten out of a hellish job waiting tables near Berkeley Marina. Ready to take the world by storm, carrying your clip-book full of articles everywhere like ID. It was your baby, fully yours, born from three years’ worth of endless nights and cramped fingers and all the sweat going into that.
UC Berkeley’s Mass Communications alumna. Magna Cum Laude, although you had to fight for it because, well… Life gets hard sometimes, right? But you got it in the end, and it felt good as shit.
That waitress job was temporary, you’d swore to yourself it would be. Your dreams were much bigger than a sleazy diner only serving those small enough to fit in it. It got you through school though, so there’s not much to pine about. You lose some, you win some.
And you won big.
Worked your ass off for that win, too. Written a banging thesis on the rise of MTV, built a portfolio of music reviews for The Daily Cal, co-hosted a weekly pop culture slash entertainment show on KALX with some campus friends.
‘90.7 FM every Wednesday, baby!’
You miss it, what can you say? You just can’t help yourself. Life flowed easier back then. Before the inevitability of success, of that gnawing feeling something’s going to go terribly wrong any minute now.
Before Michael.
Everything is categorized as either before or after him. Sometimes you can’t even tell the difference; the feeling of his teeth is like it’s always been there.
A phantom pain you’d feel when changing mixtapes for an article that was due, or those times you’d get goosebumps when tidying up the vinyls—late at the radio station, after a show—and his face would show up.
White suit over a black shirt; piercing eyes, soft face and even softer disposition; gold handwritten cursive reading Thriller.
You’d think, again and again, ‘Fuck, he’s gorgeous.’ The vinyl would sit tucked pretty between The Police’s Synchronicity and Bowie’s Let’s Dance, and that’d be it. Just another record on the shelf, another artist that floated above the common man not because of money or arrogance, or even success.
Simply because he was meant to be there. It was the rest of the world that was just catching up with him.
That’s what you thought then, at least. Before you met him and got to know him. Before falling for him rather than the idol plastered on every entertainment article (written by you, or otherwise). It simultaneously took you by surprise while also not being surprising at all. Everyone falls in love with Michael one way or another, you just didn’t think you would.
At least, more than a fan or an admirer of his art, professionally. Of course you were a fan. Your mom used to blast Jackson 5 records every Saturday morning, and you’d be peeling potatoes or sweeping the living room with Michael’s voice as an underscore.
You grew up with him. And, isn’t that sad? You were a kid, a real kid; crying over boys and homework and skinned knees while he was pumping out show after show and interview after interview. Even at eight, you remember feeling sad for him.
Your mother used to tell you you’re being silly. That the Jacksons loved to perform, and they got handsomely compensated for their artistry. That they wouldn’t have to work a real job a day in their life the way you or your dad were expected to. And, she was right. But the sadness was there, you could feel it.
When he released his first solo album, Got To Be There, you bought it with the weekly allowance you’d been saving up and surprised your mom. That weekend, the only thing echoing through the house was Rockin’ Robin. And when he put out his first proper solo album, Off The Wall, you were first in line at your local records store.
You loved him for a long time before you laid eyes on him, but that childish almost-affection quickly got eclipsed by something far stronger.
The date was February 28th of 1984, the Shrine Auditorium bursting like ripe citrus against a setting sun, palm trees swaying by the sheer size of the crowd. A heavy laminated card dangled from your neck, reading:
26th ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS, National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc., PRESS.
You were with Rolling Stone, or with whatever crumbs of a presence they maintained in the West Coast after moving all their offices to New York years ago. Your editor, Ben, was a washed-up Rock-N-Roll purist who thought anything other than Elvis was ‘a fad,’ including the ever-rising pop scene.
Including Michael.
Which is precisely why he sent you—the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed girl from Berkeley—to cover the Grammys instead of going himself. Thought it was a waste of time, and who were you to disagree with the man?
Ben could live in his past-and-gone glory days all he wanted; it was a new decade halfway on its way out already, with something in the air that felt historic. Primordial. You needed to be in that room, and if playing into Ben’s refusal to get with the times was your way in, fuck would you do it.
Of course, it did end up being historic. Michael had—has—that quality about him.
The backstage press room was pure pandemonium that night. Hot and stifling, reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, packed with aggressive reporters from Time, Newsweek, and television affiliates you couldn’t even begin naming.
You think they saw you just like Ben did. Scratch that: you know they did. A kid without her big-girl pants on, thrust into the deep end for the sharks to feed on and scatter the scraps.
You’d earned your place there, as much as their stares did nothing to help the sweat on your back or the twitching of your lips. Watching from the designated press room, you bit through your lipstick as the nearly 7K-seat theater blew up with each win Michael brought home, growing louder the more the night progressed.
You were not surprised at all. Thriller was a masterpiece, you knew it from the very first listen. And if anybody asked, you’d just point them to Page 30 of your portfolio: your best article. Your magnum opus. October of 1982, a thousand words typed on a clunky typewriter in the basement of Eshleman Hall, coffee stains on the margins. Written by a girl who saved up her waitress tips just to buy the record on release day; the same girl who’d saved up for Got To Be There all those years ago.
When Michael finally entered the press room, it erupted even louder than the theater had.
Much closer in proximity, shoulders and elbows pushing against ribs, a clunky brick-sized cassette recorder clutched so tight in your hand your knuckles shook. Someone kept thrashing against your back to get closer, but all they managed to do was push you right to the front. Right into Michael’s eyesight.
He was surrounded by publicists, security, and Quincy Jones, who was positively glowing. Somewhere to the side stood his date for the night, Brooke Shields, and Michael was holding a literal armful of golden gramophones. He was in a gold-embroidered blue-black military jacket, a single white glove, aviator sunglasses.
He looked otherworldly.
(Michael Jackson is not of this earth, that much was clear long before he died in sanguine ecstasy.)
A sea of camera flashes clicked with inhuman speed, swirling into a dizzying staccato reflecting off of him. And being with Rolling Stone—their dwindling influence in California notwithstanding—still meant you were with Rolling-fucking-Stone. You knew you had one sought-after chance at a question before security whisked him away, and you knew you had to make it count.
Asking anything along the lines of ‘how does it feel to have won’ or ‘broken the record’ were out of the question entirely. His answer would be tight and rehearsed, and you didn’t grind this hard just to waste something so monumental on a local-channel-news question at best.
Your hand shot up so many times you might’ve gotten whiplash, questions flying around the room in tandem with the trickling clock. Your heart dropped and kept dropping as publicists looked you over in favor of the men squeezing you from all sides. Until one publicist—female, older, a mirrored image—made eye contact and your world stuttered in place.
“Alright, alright, quiet down,” she commanded over the clamor. “We have time for just a couple more. Yes, you in the front.”
This was it. Your heart was hammering so deeply you felt it in your stomach, seeping down your legs and numbing them in the process. Your Berkeley instincts kicked in like fight-or-flight, forcing your voice to even out and raise. Holding up the recorder, you smiled through the sweat dripping down your face.
“Mr. Jackson, congratulations on a historic night. I’m with Rolling Stone. On Billie Jean, you and your team famously spent weeks just mixing the bassline. Tonight, the world is celebrating the commercial success of Thriller. But as an artist, do you feel the industry finally understands the actual technical craftsmanship you put into this record?”
The room got quiet. Not truly silent, but just enough to hear your own heartbeat again, listen at just how loud you were breathing. A man coughed beside your ear, and you fought the urge to flinch.
Michael paused. He wordlessly handed a few gramophones to Quincy by his side, tilted his head just so, lowered the aviator glasses down his nose, and gave you a gentle smile.
Cameras click-click-clicked away.
You’d heard his speaking voice before that night, obviously. But hearing it from five feet apart had nothing on the shitty TV box in your apartment or the screens you’d watched the awards from backstage.
“That’s a beautiful question,” he breathed, and you pushed on your tiptoes to nudge the recorder closer. He sounded like soft velvet, making you shiver. “Yes. Yes, I do. People often just want to talk about the dancing or the charts, you know? But Quincy and I, we lived in that studio, and Bruce sweated over every single frequency. Billie Jean… that bassline is the heartbeat of the song. If the heartbeat isn’t perfect, the body doesn’t move. To have the Academy recognize that tonight… It’s a sign God is good, and that the hard work is understood. That means a lot to me. Thank you.”
That was it. Your one question, your headline, the article you were waiting to write ever since you heard his voice on vinyl that first Saturday morning. But you were never one to be satisfied, were you? No. You always wanted more, pushed harder, chased things quicker than your feet could keep up with.
The publicist was about to call one last question, but Michael hadn’t taken his eyes off you, so you did the one thing you’d been busting your ass three years off for.
You asked another.
Briefly meeting the publicist’s line of sight, you jumped back into Michael’s gaze. “Is that the standard for pop music now? Perfection or nothing?”
He pushed his aviators up again, chuckled something soft, smile so wide and blinding it bordered on catastrophic. He said: “Perfection is a nice goal, but it’s really about the magic. You can’t mix magic, you just have to catch it when it falls from heaven. Thank you, bless you.”
Bedazzled hand over his heart, hell broke loose with all its demons as Michael was led away.
And that was how the new girl from Berkeley managed to snag a spot on the front-page cover of issue #419, right beside the pose of Eddie Murphy.
(You’d written for #417 too, but that issue hit the streets right before the Grammys. You’ll always mourn that cover; the lighting on Michael’s face made him look beautifully melancholic. Having your article plastered next to him might’ve actually killed you, so, yeah. Like you said: you lose some, you win some.)
You wouldn’t see Michael again for a couple of months. In reality, you didn’t think you’d see him again, period. Speaking to him once was already a utopic dream come true. A comet that only flies by once and you remember it forever, because there isn’t a chance you’ll see it again.
But the Rolling Stone higher-ups loved you. Okay, ‘love’ is a strong word. Though, being the only journalist to squeeze out a genuine answer from Michael on arguably the biggest night in pop-culture history? That made people do a double take when your name showed up. That’s all the love you needed.
Ben was weirdly jealous. It didn’t help when you asked him how many Grammys Elvis won in one night. Really dug a hole for yourself when you added, “Or, like, ever?”
He could do nothing when you were chosen to cover the preparations for the Victory Tour; granted exclusive access to Zoetrope Studios to attend the rehearsals. You’re surprised you didn’t pass out when Ben broke the news, with as much enthusiasm in his face as reading his monthly bill charges.
April of 1984. A boulevard packed with the busy fumes only a city as big as Los Angeles could produce, that same cassette recorder tucked inside your bag as you paid the cab driver and stood in the front doors of Zoetrope. The sun was slowly setting in the background when a production assistant came to grab you. Huffing and puffing while breezing through his notes, he hardly even looked back to see if you were following.
When he slipped you inside the auditorium, you chose a seat near the middle, the lights dimmed and the stage alight. You pulled out your notepad and got to work, words flying off the paper with hardly the need to look down at them.
You were mesmerized.
All of them were great, but they weren’t Michael.
When they started practising a Jackson 5 medley and you heard I’ll Be There echoing right in front of you, tears almost fell. You thought of your mom and how insane this was, sniffled, and continued jotting on your notepad.
The rehearsal ended, stage lights dimming until fluorescence zipped to life above the theater seats, and you had to squint against the onslaught. Your notes were a mess and your shirt sported a new ink smudge near the breast pocket, yet Michael recognized you anyway.
He was sweaty and tired, wearing a soaked white shirt, curls stuck on his forehead and cheeks. He had just downed an entire Evian water bottle, and some of it trickled past his lips and down his neck. He looked entirely spent, and all you could think was how much you’d kill to be the one to make him feel better.
Your head shook at that. Jesus, girl.
His demeanor was so different from when he was onstage. It’s like he took another form entirely. But down there he was just a guy, squinting at you through the exhaustion. You exited the seats and when he came close enough, you told him: “Hi, Mr. Jackson. I’m from—”
He cut you off. “Hold on… Don’t I know you?”
His voice was as soft as you’d remembered. It washed over you. From the back, his brothers’ boisterous laughter could be heard, but you clung to the softness. Faltering a little, you looked at your shoes before meeting his eyes again. Your smile was tight but genuine. He remembered you.
“Backstage at the Grammys. I asked you about the Billie Jean bassline…?” you trailed off.
And, his whole face just lit up. You should’ve known right there he’d be the thing to kill you.
Snapping a finger, he laughed: “Yes! The craftsmanship question. I remembered your voice.” His shoulders fell in relaxation, like he was lighter. His hand dropped, that enthusiastically bright smile melting into something softer. Mellower. Looking straight into your soul all the while. “You wrote that beautiful piece for Rolling Stone. You actually… listened to the track.”
You chuckled a bit, feeling your neck flush. This wasn’t the Grammys press room or an official interview studio, with cameras or mics or anything other than his eyes to scrutinize you. This was private. Genuine. You were a kickass professional, but you were also human. He flustered you; way more than pride would have you admit out loud.
He read your article. Called it beautiful. Holy shit.
“I try to make it a habit. You’d be surprised how many people I work with that couldn’t tell you the difference between a chorus and a bridge.”
Cough. Ben. Cough.
That made him laugh. Fuck. Fuck! Leaning a hip against a seat, he crossed his arms and shook a curl off his forehead. His smile was fucking devastating. “Not you, though. Right?”
“I mean, I hope so?” You made a joking grimace, something between cringing and shrugging. “There’s always a margin for improval, though.”
“I think so, too. Staying stagnant is one of my biggest fears.”
“You’re anything but stagnant, trust me,” you laughed, swallowed hard when he levelled you with a look that urged you to continue. “I–I mean, Off The Wall might’ve been your first fully solo album, but you’d already separated yourself from your brothers creatively. Completely. And, Thriller… What can I even say? They’re like day and night. So, yeah. Trust me,” you took a breath for what felt like the first time after a dive, “Journalistic integrity and all.”
He was nodding along, smile brightening the longer you rambled. In truth, you actually wanted to kind of kill yourself, but once you started there was no shutting it off. So, there you were, giving Michael Jackson a review of his own damn life’s work! What even was your life?
“You’ll be covering this,” he looked back halfheartedly, sighing, “uh, tour?”
Your brows furrowed. “The preparations, yeah.” Call it plain curiosity or your journalistic instincts kicking in, but it took you over. “Why’d you say it like that? Are you not… feeling this?”
He levelled you with a smirk. His eyes were hooded; tired, but sly. Oh, he was a problem, alright. “Not now that you’re here.”
He said it all smooth and suave, yet squinted his eyes a second later, softly laughing at himself and making you stutter through a laugh too.
“That’s–uh… Thank you. I appreciate it, Mr. Jackson. More than you know.”
“Michael,” he grinned at you. “For you, off the record, just Michael. We’ll be sharing a space for some time ‘til the tour.”
You nodded like an idiot, completely caught off-guard. Because, yeah, what the fuck. Sure. “Michael,” you repeated. Like an idiot.
A camera flashed from the side, a metaphorical bucket of ice-cold water getting dumped on you. All levity evaporated off of him, spotting the promotional photographer almost instantly and raising a dismissive hand.
“C’mon, man. Go bother Jermaine or somethin’.”
“O–of course, Mr. Jackson. Sorry!”
He left with his tail tucked between his legs, and you looked at Michael with a sniff. “He doesn’t call you Michael.”
“He’s not you, is he?”
“Guess not.” You glanced at your watch, eyes widening. “Oh! I have to go. I’ll see you next time. Um,” you giggled awkwardly and shook your head. Maybe it could be seen as endearing. At least, you hoped. “Goodnight, Michael.”
“Do you live close? Want me to get someone to call a cab?”
“I’m good,” you nodded softly at the thoughtfulness. It made you feel warm. “See you.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, hips jutting off of the seat he was leaning against, hands closing around the towel hanging from his neck. “I’ll see you.”
That night, you closed your apartment door and screamed so loud the old lady next door had to check on you. You were so over the moon that you slapped a kiss on each of her cheeks and gave her a bunch of leftover cookies you’d made the day before.
You weren’t scheduled to attend another rehearsal until next week. What you weren’t expecting to find at work two days later was a courier at your desk, a nondescript white package shoved into your arms as he urged you to sign. Your heart began pitter-pattering like a hailstorm as you carefully opened it with a pair of scissors, and not even Ben’s curious gaze was enough to stop you.
It was from him.
A rare, early white-label promotional vinyl pressing of Thriller, ‘NOT FOR SALE’ plastered front and center. Your heart genuinely dropped to your ass, head swimming as you turned it around your grip with a hung jaw.
You think Ben might’ve made some sarcastic comment about the feral look in your eyes, but you didn’t even register his presence. He was such a small blotch of importance in your mind, he might as well have not existed at all.
Your head was in upheaval, little-you’s running around with everything on fire, because… This wasn’t happening, right? What the hell?
There was a handwritten note attached, on what looked like to be Michael’s personal stationary: a gold-trimmed and thick cream paper sporting his handwriting. Your heart galloped harder, like it wanted to burst free with every line you read.
It was a wonderful surprise to see you at rehearsals. It’s rare to find someone who understands the magic we try to capture in the studio. I would love to talk more about music with you… Without all the flashing cameras next time.
If you have some time this weekend, please call Bill (my security) at this number (213)XXX-XXXX. He will arrange for us to have some quiet time to talk.
Keep writing beautifully.
—Blessings, Michael
You were gone, in every sense of the word. Completely and utterly wiped out.
You called the number right there in the office, nervously fidgeted with the cord as you spoke with a sweet-voiced man on the other line who identified himself as the aforementioned Bill, chewed halfway through your lip when you gave him your address and arranged for him to pick you up on 8PM that Saturday.
Arrangements for Encino, the Jackson residence. To somehow—in some inconceivably mind-numbing way—meet up with Michael Jackson and… talk about music? You. And him. Alone in a house larger than your apartment complex and probably your old house combined.
You and him, alone, with his beautifully doe-like eyes and that soft voice that hasn’t left your mind ever since you heard him in the flesh. Fuck.
When you got home that day, you dropped everything by the door and flew to your mom’s old record player she insisted you take during the move. Punching the white-label in, you spent nearly the entire time between coming home and sleeping just listening to Thriller on repeat.
It sounded so… crisp. Clearer than the record back at Berkeley’s radio station, or the one currently sitting on your stack near the wilting spider-plant. If absolutely nothing else, it was a collector’s wet dream, and the most thoughtful thing anyone had done for you in a long time. Worst of all? He didn’t have to.
The thought had you smiling like an idiot inside your small apartment, with the smoke-stained walls smelling of cheap perfume, forgotten takeout, and that certain kind of loneliness only the dust gathering could spread.
God, you were so easy. But he was who he was, so you figured you’d cut yourself some slack.
That’s exactly the thing, though… He owed you nothing. Anybody else in his place would’ve probably forgotten about you the moment they stepped out the press room, let alone remembering you worked for Rolling Stone and waiting for the article to hit the streets? Are you kidding?
You never asked him why. That week came and went like water in a forest creek, swifter than a breath. Before you knew it, it was Saturday and 8PM loomed dangerously. Your room was in a state of disarray, which meant your bathroom too, which might as well have meant the entire apartment looked like site zero of nuclear testing.
Bill arrived at 8PM on the dot, bent his hat for hello as you descended the stairs, and drove you to Encino like he’s driven you a million times before. Like he would a million times again.
Michael greeted you by the fountain. Your heart did the thing that makes you think you’re having a heart attack, but no. He’d just smiled at you. Cheeks full of warmth, eyes bright, asking with a soft voice if you liked his gift. He said he didn’t want to come off as pretentious, but the way you spoke about Thriller made him think you’d appreciate it.
You don’t even remember what you said; the most you remember about that night is everything you’d lose—
“You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?” Michael’s voice cuts through the low hum of the cassette recorder, dragging you out of the spring of ‘84 and dropping you right back into the suffocating luxury of 1988.
You blink, focusing on him again. That sweet face full of promise gives way to what he is now: undead and frozen, disastrously beautiful, the best and worst thing to ever happen to you.
What he also is, is inside your mind. Literally.
The tape reels of the Sony TC-D5M turn between you, small plastic wheels trapping secrets that could burn the music industry to ash if they ever left this room. When they leave this room.
“I’m the one doing the interviewing. Get out of my head,” you quip, arms and legs crossed, every ghost of his gaze making your hair stand in attention. Clearing your throat, you adjust your position as if a straight back could shield you against him. “Who’s he?”
“Yeah, yeah you are. C’mon, girl,” he tsks, waving you off. “You know exactly who he is. I don’t have to read your mind to know where you go when you look at me like that.”
“And where is that?” You level him with shaky blinks, almost afraid to take the risk of not seeing him for that fraction of a second it takes for your lids to open again. He’d never hurt you, you know that.
At least, more than you want. More than you crave to be hurt by him.
“Hayvenhurst, Zoetrope, the studio in Encino, that hole-in-the-wall record store…” he counts off on one hand, long curls falling over his eyes from the half-up/half-down updo he’d tucked them in. “Before. Stuck on something that’d never last to begin with. I’m right here, baby. Can’t you see that?”
He looks so good it makes you want to cry. Why did you agree to this?
Because he’s Michael. Because you love him. You loved him in 1984, and ‘85, ‘86 and ‘87, and you love him now too. No matter the blood. No matter his nature. He’s still the Michael you met in that crowded press room, no matter how much he insists he isn’t.
“So. The him in question is you, Mr. Jackson. You, before you turned?” Journalistic, professional, curt. That’s what he asked for, isn’t it? One final interview by his favorite journalist, revealing what he is to the world.
His eyes drift down to the recorder. It whirs and whirs and keeps on whirring. The almost 13K square feet take the silence and project it all throughout, until the house is louder because of it.
“Yeah. It’s me.” He breaks into a blinding smile. His fangs glint. “I’m thirty years old. I was turned the summer of ‘84, so I’ve been dead for about four years.”
“By all accounts then, still a child.” He doesn’t like that. Clenches his jaw, but says nothing. “Who turned you? How? I imagine those reading are most curious about that.” And then, almost too quiet for the cassette to pick up on, “I know I was.”
“You know what I think about?” He ignores your prompt completely, elbows resting on his spread thighs, eyeing you with that look he gets only where you’re involved. “Remember Dodger Stadium?”
Of course you do.
(December 9th, 1984. A sea of fifty-five thousand people thrashing and screaming, all there for the final night of the Jackson 5 Victory Tour you’d been vigorously covering since April of the same year.
Somewhere along the way, it became something else. Michael had kissed you under the dim lights of his personal studio in Encino, and you’d kissed him back. One hand on his nape, the other clawing at the curve of his waist. His arms curled around you like they belonged there, and his tongue tasted as good as he sounded.
He asked you to be his girl two weeks later. You protested halfheartedly—thinking of your career and the ethics—but in the end didn’t give half a shit. He was yours, you were his, and you continued being a kickass entertainment journalist in the meantime. Your sources just became a tad more direct.
And then, he died.
It was early August, their next concerts being scheduled for NYC. He flew you out, ready to show you off to his brothers like they didn’t already know, and you were over the moon.
Ever since the tour started and long distance became an inevitability, the landline by your bedside got hot every night before bed. He’d call, and you’d fall asleep with his sleepy voice as a lullaby. It left you aching in the best of ways.
You missed him like you knew him all your life. You were so happy to see him again, but… He was different.
He looked… sick. Lips dry, eyes unfocused, limbs uncoordinated like it was the first time he wore his skin. He refused to leave the hotel while the sun was out, and looked at your neck like it was calling to him.
Well… His nature became clear when you found him draining a busboy behind the hotel. The guy looked deliriously elated to be dying: smile wide as blood-spurts flew like a fountain, bathing Michael in red as he gulped it all down.
He was onto you before you could even take a breath deep enough to scream.
Blood-stained hand against your mouth, wet against your skin, hot as it accidentally slithered past your lips. Your pupils shrunk into pinpricks, the bricks cold on your back as Michael caged you between him and the wall.
You couldn’t breathe. You screamed against his hand so loud your throat burned, but it didn’t matter. Nothing came out. Only the hot, sizzling tears that mixed with the blood.
“Shh, shhh, baby, calm down,” he whispered. He was so close, inches away, the fresh blood metallic in your nostrils. You saw his fangs and screamed again, thrashing against his hold. “Please, I love you. I love you, baby, be quiet—”
You sobbed against his hand, head shaking as you desperately tried to get away. He kept shushing you with soft and loving praise, calling you beautiful, caging you harder. Your eyes fell on the busboy still dying, milky white skin drained of color as his blood stopped flying, and you knew he was dead.
“It’s over,” Michael whispered, kissing your forehead, lips lingering as he spoke against you: “It’s over, see? Stop cryin’ baby, you’re breaking my heart.”
“You killed him,” you wailed against his hand that was slowly retreating. You couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t think. You couldn’t move. “You killed him, Mike, he’s de–dead—”
Your sobs were the only coherent thing that could come out of your mouth; the same mouth that now had the taste of that guy’s blood. You were going to be sick.
“Somethin’ happened in New Jersey… I changed. I changed, baby, and,” he pointed to the dead guy, “I asked his consent. He let me,” Michael laughed in disbelief. “I swear to you. Let’s just go back to the room, yeah?” He searched for your eyes.
You couldn’t look. You were petrified of what you’d find. Some monster, or the same sweet eyes he hid behind his hands when he shyly asked you to be his girl? You still don’t know what would’ve been worse.
“W–what…” you coughed, spit clogging your throat, tongue paralyzed because if you moved it too much you could taste the blood. “What are you?”
“I’m me, but different. I’m better.” That same soft voice, his characteristic lilt right in your ears.
“I want,” you heaved, “I–I want to go… I think. Michael, I just… Let me go.” You ducked your head down, one of your trembling hands ghosting over your jaw and the blood caked there. “Let me go, plea—”
“Can I kiss you?”
“What?” you cried, eyes finally meeting his. There the monster stood, with the same eyes you loved.
He slowly leaned on you, laying his delicious weight and grounding you despite being the reason for your turmoil. He closed his eyes, those soft curls tickling your cheeks, his hips completely flush against yours and making you gasp as he breathed you in. You were hot, boiling everywhere: neck, chest, hips, deep down your belly and spreading into every inch of your limbs.
He was everywhere. And, in spite of everything, you clutched him tight. One hand on his bicep, the other brushing on the curve of his waist, leg unconsciously lifting to curl around his. You exhaled into his open and waiting mouth, swallowing his lips when they crashed against you. You tasted the fresh blood in his mouth, and shivered as you accidentally licked his fangs.
All you could think was that you’d go to Hell. Not in some lighthearted, cursing-in-the-heat-of-the-moment way. The literal way. The biblical way. Damned for eternity, boiled alive and skinned with fire type of Hell.
You moaned into him; half a whine, half a sob. He ate it all. He grinded his hips into you, hand buried in the meat of your thigh and bringing you even closer, closer to where he was hot too—
You were going to be sick.
And you did. Breaking the kiss for air, all that connected your mouths was a thin line of hot-red saliva mixed with blood.
And… Yep. There was your dinner: twisting in your stomach and up your esophagus, hitting you so viscerally you only had time to push Michael aside and hurl on the dirty concrete of some NYC back alley, trapped between a dead body and an undead one.
Fuck ‘a rock and a hard place’ and whoever made that shit up. Fuck them and their momma, too.
“What the fuck are you?” you rasped with a sore throat, wiping your red-crusted lips with the back of your hand. Half-kneeled over, you were gripping your knee with one palm so hard it hurt.
He smiled at you wide, fangs getting buried in his bottom lip. They glistened with your spit and that thick metallic tang you could still taste. His voice was still soft. Still his.
“Isn’t it obvious, girl? I’m a vampire.”
You just laughed.
Sudden, sharp, gut-deep. You don’t think you’ve ever laughed that hard in all your twenty-six years on this mortal coil. Twenty-two, then. You laughed and laughed until all you could do was inhale lungfuls of air that punched their way out of you seconds later.
You clapped two hands together and looked at Michael with a crazed beam, your mouth open and teeth showing, still laughing. He looked at you and started laughing too, that deep rumble you found so attractive. He returned the crazed look, hands moving to wrap around each of your shoulders as you ran out of breath.
When your laughter died out, you fainted into his arms, and that’s the last thing you remember about that night in the alley.
It’d been four months since August. Four long months of guilt and disbelief clouding your head every time you woke up, of haunting your nightmares in the form of that unnamed busboy each night you fell asleep.
Anyone normal would’ve turned Michael in to the cops. Would’ve called him psychotic over the vampire bullshit, and ran away to some corner of the world so obscure not even the CIA could’ve found them in.
You did none of that. You weren’t just anyone.
He showed you. That very same morning, with the hotel room blinds shut, he proved everything. Read your mind right back to you, extended and retracted his fangs on will, moved around the room in a dizzying rush of movement a million times faster than any normal human could run. He told you everything.
Your head hurt so much you couldn’t get out of bed for two days, thus ending up losing your flight back to LAX. He paid for another ticket without question.
It was a tough-as-shit pill to swallow, but swallow it you fucking did. Michael Jackson was a vampire. Because, yeah, sure! Vampires are real! That’s a totally normal thing to be aware of in the world.
Michael was a vampire, you loved him, he loved you. He called you his girl, you kissed him and ached for him the same way you did before. You just needed time.
Ben was hounding you about your pending article/review of Prince’s newly released Purple Rain, the ceiling in your bathroom began leaking while you were away and had to get fixed, and you just… needed time to get your head straight.
The four months flew by quicker than you could’ve anticipated. Even as Michael and his brothers touched down on LAX at 2AM on the penultimate Friday of November—just a week before their final six shows in LA—you had a hard time believing what really went down that night in August.
He called you during. Every night, just like before, the landline by your bed rang and you’d talk for so long that you’d wake up in the morning with the phone dangling off the side of your bed. Pretending everything was normal. Ignoring the elephant in the room probably big enough to get into the Guinness record.
He’d call, and all you could think about would be those late nights in his studio, laughing over nothing as you questioned what you were even doing. Of how insane it was to share such an intimate space with him. Of knowing him beyond that invisible wall between you and a person of such tremendous success.
Of how much more he was than anything a TV host or swooning fan could squeeze out of him.
You flew into his arms near the mini-bus that was scheduled to drive them home from the airport, chuckled over his shoulder when Bill made eye-contact with a smirk. Bill also knew. You and him were the only ones.
Well, if you exclude Michael’s maker. But you don’t like thinking about that, so you don’t.
“What does it taste like?” you asked him after the show on the 7th; the second to last.
You were in his room in Encino, the lamps casting a warm glow over his endearing childhood clutter. Perched on top of his bed, naked and sweaty and spent, you rested your head on your wrist, arm bent at the elbow. Your other palm played with the dips of his chest, curling in indecipherable patterns.
He huffed a soft laugh. “You’ve already had a taste, baby.”
“Yeah, and I threw up,” you counter. “No, I mean, like… What’s it like to drink blood? Does it feel like drinking life itself?”
He chuckled, gave you a wet peck and pulled on your lip with his fangs. You sighed a moan. “Warm,” he whispered. “Thick, it’s… Well, it’s not the answer to life’s mystery, angel. It’s food. I need it.”
“And me? Right now?”
His pupils dilated. You saw it in real time, as he bit his lip and his gaze fell on your neck. Your heartbeat picked up, and he would’ve felt it anyway, vampire or not.
“I won’t lie to you. I sense it. Feel it,” he brushed a sharp nail softly against the skin on your carotid, “as it slides along your veins. I think about it, when we—”
He looked cute. Flushing at his own words, his own thoughts. Your thigh was draped over his naked lap, and he slid a hand across your skin to grip you tighter.
You didn’t think much when you said: “Take a sip, then.”
His head snapped at you, all of the flush gone and replaced by something of a different nature entirely. There you were, a lamb that’s survived the wolf and begging for it anyway.
Th-thump, th-thump, th-th-thump, th-thump. You knew he felt it. Your skin was sizzling, and you wanted him to taste you.
“No,” he shook his head.
You raised a wrist near his face, waved it like a child, naked breasts brushing against him. Stupid fucking lamb. “Why not?” you asked, and you actually sounded hurt.
He kissed you, poured all his love into it. Palm cradling your head softly and shooing away your wrist from the danger-zone that was his mouth, he said: “Because,” a peck against your lips, “once I start,” on your cheeks, “I won’t stop.”
Deep down, even then, you know you wanted it—)
“That’s not what I asked,” you tell him now, eyes tight. The whirring recorder fills the silence.
His head drops for a moment with a quiet laugh, and when he speaks up, he looks at the recorder pointedly. As if to say, ‘Happy now?’
“It’s my story, isn’t it? My reckoning?”
You huff. “A story needs foundation. So far, all we’ve established is that Michael Jackson knocked his head sideways so hard while filming Thriller, he’s having delusions. You asked for this interview, didn’t you?”
“I did,” he smiles. He loves this. Of course he does.
“Then let me do my job. Now… When, how, and by whom were you turned?”
He sucks in a sharp breath, elbows on his knees, playing with his fingers. “I was turned in New Jersey, July 31st. My maker… is a patron of the arts. That’s what he told me, anyway. Why he did what he did. He said I should stay like this forever.”
You feel your heart bleeding. You know he can hear it, too. “And you will.”
“And I will.”
Michael should be alive right now. This shouldn’t be happening. He shouldn’t have so much blood on his hands, even though it’s so, so fucking hypocritical of you to think this way. The moment Michael died, he became something else. Something outside of human morality and comprehension.
He’s not human, but that image of his doe-eyes that first Saturday in Encino is engraved down to your bones. You just can’t let go.
You cough, clearing your throat, begging a higher power to stop the tears from pooling. You don’t fucking need this right now. “So, it wasn’t consensual?”
His smile changes, for just a fraction of a second. “No. It wasn’t. But I don’t think you’ll find many vampires to tell you it was.”
You look to your lap, at the notepad that’s still empty and the nervous tapping of your pen. “How does one turn? Please, walk us through the process.”
There it is, that smirk. Even when he gets like this, his smile is beautiful.
“Remember Dodger Stadium?” he repeats, a deeper timbre in his voice that lands right where you don’t need to be thinking right now. He doesn’t normally sound like this, to protect his voice.
Fuck.
The answer is yes, and he knows it is. He just wants you to say it. Wants to remind you, as if it could ever be erased.
December 9th, Dodger Stadium. Last night of the Victory Tour. The night Michael finally gave his piece-of-shit father a taste of his own goddamn medicine. The night Michael tasted you for the first time. The point of no return.
You were backstage, waiting for him and his brothers to be done, eardrums nearly bursting by the sheer excitement of the crowd. It should’ve overwhelmed you—and it nearly had—but he made it all okay. Had Bill standing by your side for the entirety of the concert, ensuring Michael would be the first person to see you after they got done. For good this time.
Joseph was there too, and you were fuming, but not as much as he’d be. The thought comforted you.
Michael looked high when he stormed towards you, sweat-soaked and iridescent, the throat-burning screams of an insatiable crowd echoing behind him like the croaks of vultures. He smiled at you, letting his fangs show as he took you by the hand, Joseph hot on his trail. Bill stopped him, and Michael didn’t look back once.
He crowded your every sense in some obscure corner of the stadium, nearly pitch-black. He kissed you like he hadn’t found your lips in days, like a thirsty man trekking the desert.
You welcomed it. You craved it. Arms thrown over his shoulders, one playing with the curls of his nape and the other burying itself in their thickness, you squeezed him like you wanted to be fused. Needed to.
“You did it,” you sighed with a big smile against his lips, moaning a soft exhale as his kisses trailed down and all over. “I’m so fucking proud of you, Mike, you did it—”
The first bite was soft. Just a nip, a barely-there graze of his fangs on your exposed neck. A slip-up, making him freeze in place as your heart echoed, pounding deeper and deeper against its boney cage.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. All color drained from his face. You panicked, clutched him tighter against you. He quivered: “Baby, no, I’m so sorr—”
“No,” you breathed. Th-thump, th-thump, th-th-thump, th-thump. You watched his eyes clouding, pupils blown as he zeroed in on your pulsing jugular. You felt the vein shifting your skin with its intensity. He damn-near drooled. “I want you to. I want you to have me, like this… I want you to taste me.” You licked into his open lips messily, tongue slipping on his fangs. “I trust you.”
He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“W–what?” he stuttered in that sweet voice, just like the boy he used to be. His pretty eyes drifted between your neck and eyes, lost and confused, like he hadn’t heard you right.
You smiled at him. With one finger, you traced his cheekbone, down his nose, across his lips. One of your legs was wrapped around his waist, and you tightened it. His hand instinctively buried itself in the meat of your thigh, thumb softly rubbing.
“I want you,” your hand pushed down your shirt collar, “to taste me, Michael. You deserve it.”
He morphed into something else; darkened eyes, something swirling inside them that surpassed lust by an absurd degree. You couldn’t understand it fully; you could only just revel in it.
He inhaled sharply, lips on your vein, voice blistering. He sounded breathless, air completely punched out of him. “I do, don’t I? You smell… so sweet, baby.” A kiss, sharp fangs prickling you, warning you of what’s to come. “My sweet thing, all mine… Are you sure?”
“Yes,” you begged, “yes, yes, ye–ah—!”
It was… euphoric.
To this day, there isn’t a more apt word for it. That first tasting felt better than any drug, any naturally produced hormone. And it was exactly that feeling of intimate carnage you’d been chasing ever since.
The truth is, Michael ruined you. You’ve come to terms with it.
How can you even put it into words? He’s in your head again, you can tell; reliving it from your perspective, letting the pain and pleasure of memory wash over him as he exhales. You exhale, too. You cross your legs, he adjusts his crotch, and neither of you says a thing.
The recorder whirs, tapes wasted over the silence.
Your brain shifts through the memories without your say. That hot prickling of his teeth into your neck—for just a second—to gently pierce the flesh and not cause too much damage. The way he licked over it as you moaned, something in his tongue that made the pain give way to ecstasy.
You still haven’t figured that part out, but you doubt there’ll be any scientific studies done on the Dark Gift anytime soon. So, mystery it is.
The way he drank: lazily, his slender and strong arms wrapped around you like a vice, feeling him everywhere as your eyes swam. You turned boneless in his embrace, like putty. Completely at his mercy, and he drank every last drop you offered.
You were pulsing hot for him, and you are now too. Both times, he’s been able to feel it. That first time, though, he held back. Blood-drunk and greedy for more, he drew back with a sharp breath, two slim fingers finding the puncture wounds and pressing tight to stop the bleeding. Heaving as his tongue lapped over what was left still on his lips, completely gone.
You remember feeling hammered. Like you’d just downed a whole bottle of Hennessy and done three lines of coke. Fuck, that’s not something one can go through and just be normal afterwards, right? Well-adjusted and going on about their day?
Humans are vampire food, and that something in their saliva surely is to make your last moments on this earth somewhat enjoyable. That busboy looked so happy with his entire neck slashed in two. You’d been in ecstasy too, and just lived to tell about it.
He’s doing this on fucking purpose. Your thighs clench, eyes narrowing.
“I remember,” you hiss curtly. “But you knew that. You’re in my head right now, aren’t you?”
“What would I see?” he asks, breathless, leaning back on the cushions, hand on his crotch. Don’t look, don’t look. “If I was.”
Two can play that game. You force yourself to think of something insanely unsexy. Like that time you accidentally walked by Tito skinny-dipping in the pool in Hayvenhurst, one night you’d stayed over and wanted a glass of water in the middle of the night. You got an unforgettable view of his naked ass, and that’s exactly the image you project.
It takes merely a second for Michael to lose it. And, fuck. Fuck him and that stupidly deep laugh of his. Fuck him, and fuck you for finding it so disarming.
“You think my laugh’s disarming, sweet thing?”
Sweet thing. Just like he called you that night, drooling over the smell of your veins. It shouldn’t be as hot as it is.
“Mr. Jackson—”
“—Michael—”
“Michael—!” you give in and cut yourself off, his name a frustrated whisper. You clench your eyes tight, defeated. Then, because you’re you, you bite back. “Remember the AMAs? Or Rolling Stone’s 20th, remember that? Huh, Michael?”
(The American Music Awards of 1986. What can you even say about that shitshow of an awards night? The last time you’d been inside the Shrine Auditorium was as a young journalist, still unsure but certain to leave your mark.
And you clearly had, because the second time you stepped through those doors was while holding onto Michael’s arm. His date. His girl. Seated in the front row, wearing a pretty black dress to match his military jacket.
You don’t remember much about the ceremony or the afterparty, except for how much you wanted to strangle Diana Ross in that shiny red dress of hers. That old bitch.
Your and Michael’s relationship was kept mostly private from the public, but not from either of your circles. A badly-kept secret, so to speak. Of course Diana knew as she called him up the stage and held his arm, kissed him sloppily on both cheeks, danced tightly against him as all the artists involved sang We Are The World.
You fought with him about it afterward, really bad. Said some nasty shit you wish you could’ve phrased differently, because he just couldn’t see your point. He even defended her, right in your face! You remember saying something like: “She met you as a child, Michael! A grown woman! Called you sexy on national TV! What the fuck are you not seeing, exactly?”
He replied like: “Baby, it ain’t like that. Never was, never will. You’re overreacting. Please. Why are you bein’ like this?”
Bill drove you home ten minutes later, and you didn’t speak to Michael for over a week.
Your apartment got promptly filled with an apologetically handwritten card, some of your favorite pastries from Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown, and a brand new record of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love.
It was a week too fucking soon.
Yeah. Well, ‘86 and ‘87 were a couple of bad years for the both of you. You don’t know if you can confidently say you actually broke up, because how do two people break up when one’s tasted your blood? When you’ve let them? Can that connection ever be severed, even momentarily?
You sure as hell acted like it had.
You’d barely spoken to him in months—close to a year, almost—and the cards didn’t once stop appearing every week, like clockwork.
He called you once, too. Late into the night, your apartment quiet as you twisted and turned. You picked up on the third ring, breath catching in your throat when you heard his soft whiny breaths.
Michael. Heavy and hot, almost scratching the receiver. You recalled his scent, the way his perfume would linger on the pillows even hours later. The way you’d bury your face in those pillows as he wrecked you.
The soppy-wet sounds of his hand working over himself travelled the distance, landing right between your legs as you rubbed them together in shock.
“Mike?” you whined, bit back a moan as he exhaled.
“Talk to me, baby, jus’ keep talking… A–ah, please, plea… I need to hear your voice…”
It was so loud under the silence. Your heart pounding, the heat between your legs slipping past the point of tolerance, the way his soft moans slithered on your skin and made you shudder. Your hand buried in your panties, mouth huffing and drooling over the headset, shuddering with each of Michael’s groans and whines, each wet echo of his hand as he got off to your voice alone.
He came with a shuddering breath that was enough to send you over the edge too, fingers cramping as you chased the feeling with your hips, your moans only prolonging his own high.
The quiet stretched over you both like a blanket, just the faint scratches of the connection breaking it, your breaths mingling even miles apart. You imagined what he’d look like right then: fucked out, needy, spent, curls a wet mess against his forehead and cheeks. The way he’d clench his eyes in pleasure and the way his thighs would quiver from it. The way you’d kiss every inch of him, lips sliding over his sweaty skin as he flushed; because, despite everything, he still got shy.
Panting, you punched the landline shut, like it’d burned you. And that was it.
While that period of time felt like ages to you, it must’ve been meaningless for an immortal who’s got nothing but time in his hands. You think he would’ve waited years had you not pulled the stunt you had.
The scene was this: November of 1987 inside the Hollywood Palladium, dimly lit table areas punctuated by blinding white follow-spots cutting through a thick layer of haze, the stage dominated by a giant ‘Rolling Stone: 20 Years’ neon sign. The air was heavy with the scent of expensive French perfume worn by every A-lister, spilled champagne, hairspray, and an omnipresent cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke.
You wore that black dress Michael bought for you to match him in the AMAs, because you knew he would attend. He’d said as much in his most recent card that he’d sprayed with his perfume. You weren’t proud of it, but you’d clutched it tight against your nose, inhaled a deep gulp of his sweet and honeyed musk, sighed as frustration and pettiness sprouted inside you like weeds.
You wore his dress, to match with another man. Like the selfish bitch you were, apparently.
His name was David; a sweet post-graduate from USC who’d clung to you like a duckling since his first day in the office. It didn’t take long for him to ask you to be his date for the anniversary party, and you could see in his eyes he hoped it’d lead to something more. A sloppy makeout with champagne-soaked lips, maybe some second-base action in the back of his red BMW in the parking lot. A textbook office romance that’d end up being nothing but a short-lived disappointment, because after Michael that’s what every relationship was doomed to burn down into.
It’d never happen, of course. The plan wasn’t to get under somebody else, it was to get under Michael’s skin. That’s just about how far you’d thought it through. Hindsight’s a nasty bitch, though, because you really should’ve second-guessed yourself a bit harder. You wouldn’t have David’s blood on your hands had you done that.
But, you’re getting ahead of yourself.
David looked like the American Dream personified. Tall and muscular, pretty blue eyes and long brunette hair. He was the kind of man destined to marry his high school sweetheart and live in a nice two-story house in the suburbs, driving that same BMW until either he or the car gave out. You have no idea what happened and he somehow ended up as an entertainment-journalism intern in the heart of LA, but everyone’s got a story, you suppose.
Michael’s arrival signalled mayhem. He’d just released Bad three months ago and embarked on his very first solo world tour since September: first stop in Japan, then back to the states for the near-month gap until the Australian leg of the tour. Bad was another masterpiece, but you’d known that already.
You were with him for almost the entire time he was making it. You’d sat curled on his couch in the studio as he re-recorded his ‘83 demo for Liberian Girl, shuddering at his beautiful harmonies, kissing him in-between breaks.
Outside, the sidewalk was a warzone of the paparazzi’s flashing Xenon flashbulbs. Inside, the instrumental intro of Dirty Diana began blasting as everyone became aware of Michael’s arrival, and you had to fight the urge to glower.
He’d told you it was fictional, a gritty pop-rock anthem about groupies. You knew he was telling the truth. It still pissed you the fuck off.
David was pulling at your hand, wanting to introduce you to Jann Wenner, who he’d just met himself. You know you should’ve been enthusiastically jumping at the chance to get acquainted with Rolling Stone’s co-founder, but all you could think about was Michael.
His look. The longer hair you’d been threading your fingers through, now slick with gel and held up in a half-bun, falling to his shoulders. The metallic buckles, the heavy black leather, the studs. He looked like sex, even from fifty feet apart. Even in the dark. Maybe especially in the dark; right at home.
His eyes found yours in the crowd, irises glinting unnaturally when you made eye-contact. You’d missed those eyes so much. He smiled at that, reading your thoughts from the distance.
Amidst the clamor of his arrival and the party which was in full drunken swing, he made every sound but his projected voice fade away; as if your ears got stuffed with cotton. It disoriented you, and for a second before his voice rang in your head, you thought you’d been drugged.
‘Hi, baby,’ he echoed around your skull.
Fuck—
A chuckle, in unnatural surround sound. ‘I missed you too.’
But then David drew closer, still chatting with Jann Wenner, laughing over something you hadn’t bothered to pay attention to. Not that you could. Michael was watching. And when David’s palm inched down to your waist, gripping your skin with the confidence of a much different man than who you’d become accustomed with… You knew. You could taste it in the air.
David was already dead.
Does it really matter what exactly happened next? How Michael cut a line through the crowd and laughed at David’s jokes, looked at you only when he invited him somewhere quieter to talk, acted fascinated with his infant career? How you did nothing to stop the growling predator from catching up with sweet David into one of the countless unmarked backrooms of Hollywood Palladium?
“Stop!” you cried as Michael had him by the throat, red-hot and thick rivulets of crimson painting the floor in heaps. David’s neck was bent for Michael’s teeth to latch onto, dark leather glistening with blood, his pretty eyes sizzling with an anger so deep it bordered on divine. “Mike, he’s no one, h–he’s nothing! He’s a fucking nobody! Just let him go!”
“A nobody?” he echoed, voice slick as he swallowed around the words. “Touching you? A nobody you wore this dress for? Our dress? Are you serious, girl?”
David was gargling on his own spit and blood, completely out of it, limbs spread like a plush-toy on the discount aisle. Your hands were shaking, gooseflesh prickling every exposed inch of skin.
“We can just t–take him to a hospital. Please, Mike,” you wheezed out, a sudden sob breaking through your voice. “It’s my fault… It’s my fault, I didn’t thi—”
“Think what? That I’d do this?”
You shook your head, eyes clenched, arms crossed over your torso unsurely. “Just, let’s ju—”
“We can’t take him anywhere, sweet thing. Or let him live.” He rose, slowly, the predator approaching the deer because it loves it despite everything. He came to you and cradled you by the nape, searched for your eyes as your breathing steadied. You gripped him by the waist as he brought you closer, going to kiss your forehead and stopping short because of the blood still dripping. “What happens when he wakes up and tells the police Michael Jackson tried to kill him?”
Fuck. You’re so fucking stupid. Idiot. Idiot, idiot, id—)
“Of course I remember,” Michael tells you. “If you’d told me to stop, I would’ve. But you didn’t. Why?”
You drop the pen, ink smudging the unmarked notepad before you throw it to the side completely. “You never actually wanted this interview, did you?” He smiles. “What is this? Some sort of sick trip down memory lane? Why the hell did you have me agree to this, Mike?”
“It’s Mike, again? Good, good…” he breathes, smile elated. “I didn’t have you agree to anything, baby. You agreed… because you wanted to. Just like you wanted me to drain David dry.” You look away. “Admit it,” he urges, wild.
(—iot, idiot, idiot.
“Scratch me,” he told you, breath hot and metallic. You almost leaned forward. “Push me. Bite me. Do anything, and I’ll stop. I’ll let him go.” He unravelled his arms from you, took a step back, eyes locked onto yours like anchors the entire time. He moved backwards, one painstakingly slow step at a time. “Anything. Move a muscle, and I stop.” Another step. Two, three. “Anything, baby.” He leaned down, grabbed David by his blooming neck, oozing in-between his fingers. He shook his head: “No?”
You didn’t move an inch. Not a twitch, or a tremor, or a step. Nothing. Because he was right. If David woke up, Michael’s life would be over. Yours too. You’re not ashamed to admit it; you love Michael too much to care about a life snuffed out before its time. Hell, you might’ve killed David yourself.
So, you did… nothing. You stood there idle, breathless as the soppy slaps of Michael’s lips and tongue drained David dry. And when he swiftly came in front of you—spat the remaining blood on the ground next to your heels and fixed you with his hunger—you kissed him.
Open-mouthed, hot, eating him from the inside out. David’s blood smearing on your skin, you moaned against Michael’s sizzling lips, your waist and neck bending as he leaned into you harder. He whined something soft, voice electrifying, just like he sounded all those times before. Even under the leather and the death, he was still your Michael.)
“Why did you call me here, Mike?”
“You know why. You’ve known from the start.”
You shake your head, petulant. “No, n—”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you do.” He searches your eyes, an endless brown sea of stars, all trapped inside his irises. His brows furrow, and his voice suddenly loses its punch. “I need you with me. I… I can’t do this, not anymore.”
Your heart stutters. “What? What’re you talking about?”
He chuckles to himself a bit, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. It’s something broken. “Eternity is lonely, and I love you s–so much…” He sucks in a sharp breath. “I don’t want to be alone anymore. I can’t.”
Oh… “Michael,” you breathe. Every human instinct in you screams to run, but every uneven beat of your heart screams the opposite. He can feel it. The way the blood surges through your veins, the way your breath catches somewhere in your throat, your eyes that trail down his figure you’ve memorized by heart.
Fuck. Fuck, f—
“What is it, baby?” he whispers. He might as well have yelled it. The way he’s looking at you makes the hairs on your nape stand tall, a shiver going through your shoulders you have no time to suppress.
You gulp. Eyes trailing down his arms, caressing his veins, falling into the trap of his slender hands. He’s beautiful everywhere. His pretty face and even prettier eyes, the long curls he’s grown out, his soft-spoken mouth with two fangs sharp enough to kill.
God. You love him so much. You need him. Not just for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Not to wilt away while he stays behind, watching you go with every sunset. No. You need to be… with him. Through all of it. You fucking need him.
“How… would you do it?” you whisper.
You don’t need to specify what ‘it’ is. His eyes are proof enough he understands exactly what you mean; holding you captive, like snares. You watch the way they darken, how his whole face shifts. It makes need pool deep down your belly. You twitch on the sofa, and he knows.
But you know, too. You can see the way he’s rubbing a hand on his thigh, adjusting in place, breathing a little heavier.
“I’d have to drain you first,” he punches out. One of his fingers traces his own throat in demonstration, sharp nail catching skin and leaving a trail. “I’d bite… here,” he stops at the carotid. “And,” his finger continues the trail, “here.” The jugular.
“Yeah?” You feel the vessels he’s pointing to galloping, pulsing harshly under your skin, like they’re getting ready for him. It’s like you can’t breathe properly anymore; the air gets stuck somewhere down your throat, your chest rising and falling in compensation. “And then?”
“Then…” He shifts, standing up, stalking towards you. “I’d stop, just before you die…”
Your neck needs to bend upwards to look him in the eye, eyebrows raising in performance. You’re eye-to-eye with his crotch, and you push down the urge to rub your cheek against it. You breathe: “Oh?”
“Mhm,” he hums, looming above you, all dark and handsome and yours. Fuck, you’d missed him. His palm comes up to cup your jaw, thumb softly tracing your bottom lip. “I’d slit my wrist… Right over this pretty mouth…” His thumb pushes in, and you take him gladly; tongue swirling around the digit as you huff a moan. It threatens to undo him. “I–I’d… Hm. I’d let you drink from me, as much as my baby needs… Yeah?” he asks, voice breaking into a high-pitched breath at the end.
“You will?” you ask when you release his spit-soaked thumb, giving the digit a kiss.
“Yes,” he exhales so hard his whole chest shudders. “I will, girl. I’ll give you every last drop.”
You don’t know who lunged first. All you know is that one second he’s looking down at you—mouth gaping as he pants, the heat between your legs spreading like tendrils over your nerves—and the next, you’re kissing.
Kissing is a kind term. You’re breathing each other in; licking and scraping teeth together like animals, whining against each other’s open mouths. His hold is bruising on your skin, his body an anchor as he turns you around in his hold.
Back against his lean chest, hips flush, his arm around you as his mouth comes down to your neck with a moan. He doesn’t bite, or even nip; he’s breathing you in. It makes you hotter, temperature rising dangerously.
“Sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted,” he sighs, words muffled on your skin. “My girl… All mine…”
“Do it,” you heave, bound in his arms. He freezes. “Make me. Right now. Do it, Mike—”
“Baby—”
His hold lightened, and you used it to turn around again, just as flush as before. You grab him by both cheeks, cradling him in equal parts softly and fiercely. You smile, and it widens when you realise how much the sight undoes him.
“You were right. I’ve wanted this… for a long time.” You lay a peck on his lips, moving back before he has a chance to return it. You remove your blouse with both hands, chest falling and rising deeper with each second more his gaze trails over you. Taking his palm in your hold, you bring it to your pulsing neck, letting his nails softly graze against it. “I trust you.”
Just like you’d told him in Dodger Stadium. The words cleave him in two, lids hooding over his eyes as he nods, leaning down to catch your lips in a wet kiss full of promise.
He lays you down on the big couch, your naked skin meeting the back cushions. He undresses, looming over you like a statue, something from another era entirely. Lean and catastrophically beautiful. The white shirt he wore lands somewhere near the still-whirring cassette recorder, and he’s on you in seconds. Careful hands cradling the back of your neck, kissing you all over as your breathing quickens.
He’s nervous. “I’ve never done this before.”
You giggle nervously. “Me neither.”
It lands just like you wanted it to; makes him chuckle. He meets your eyes, and you suddenly realise his eyes will be the last thing you see. What better a way to die? He breathes: “I love you. I love you so much.” You smile. “Say it back,” he begs.
With a shake of your head, you whisper: “After.”
What comes next can best be described as a… euphoric daydream. A split-screen montage of ache and pleasure, a film reel of your life the way people say it flashes in your eyes just before you step into the light. You never believed it when they said that. How can so many years fit into so few seconds? How can an entire life of mornings and afternoons and nights all fly by so quickly? How did you get here?
As Michael pierces your flesh—carotid and jugular throbbing together in thick, hot rivulets you faintly register bathing your skin—you feel no pain. The ceiling oozes and bends out of shape, your limbs grow numb, and your eyes swim. You moan, but it doesn’t sound right in your ears. Like you’re somewhere else, hearing it from a distance. And Michael keeps on drinking; gulping you down, your heart racing to make up for the loss, lips siphoning all of your nearly one-and-a-half gallon of blood out.
You’re not in Michael’s house anymore. You’re six, and your dad’s bought a brand new record player as a gift for your mom’s birthday; the one that’d later end up in your apartment. You jump excitedly as she punches in Abbey Road, and the three of you spend the entire morning dancing to Here Comes The Sun.
You’re fifteen, and a boy’s broken your heart for the first time. He’d asked you to the prom as a joke, making you come by his house only to find Donna Taylor dolled up and smushed against him, his parents snapping polaroids of their son and his real date. You were mortified, hardly got out of bed for a week.
Your first day at UC Berkeley. Your fresh start. Your passion. The new friends who didn’t give a shit about how you grew up or what you used to be. The endless caffeinated nights slaving away in Eshleman Hall. That small diner close to Sherry’s house you’d all spend your free nights at, gossiping and laughing and talking about the future with greasy fingers. Those Wednesday afternoons spent at the radio station hosting your show with Aisha and Susan, giggling over Michael Jackson’s vocals on the second verse of The Lady In My Life.
Michael. The Grammys of ‘84. His room in Hayvenhurst. The tiny mom-and-pop record store close to your apartment you’d both go incognito in and browse for records, even though the teenage girl behind the counter recognized him and swore to keep his secret with her life (as long as he promised to come back). Before he had the courage to kiss you. Before you had the courage to admit you wanted him to.
The memories are brighter now, images swirling and bleeding into one another, to the point where you don’t know where one ends and another begins. You see Michael’s younger face, before he turned, and he’s standing beside you as you were on your first day in Berkeley. You look good together.
You feel featherlight. Eyes drooping and—
Something warm drips on your lips. You didn’t realise before, but a breath was stuck in your throat, lethargic and slow. It punches you straight in the chest on its way out.
It’s so sweet. Hot and thick, better than anything you’ve ever tasted. Like a charged live-wire, you jump up. Things get less blurry, sanguine haze slipping into rhapsodic focus.
It’s Michael’s arm, his oozing wrist, his blood you’re gulping down. You’re so, so hungry. Starving. Like you haven’t eaten in years. Your hands wrap around his wrist like an animal, pushing it into your mouth, guzzling down his saccharine blood as it drips past your jaw and down your breasts. You hear him moan, deeply, erotic and charged. You gulp harder and harder—
He swipes his hand away, and you’re left whining.
“No,” you cry, whimpering, words slurred like you’re drunk. “Iwantmore, Michael, I need more—”
“I’ll give it to you, baby, I will,” he comforts. His hands cradle your face softly, wrist still bleeding, fingers trailing over your forehead and cheeks and lips in awe. “You’re here…”
“I love you,” you heave out. His blood is still thick on your tongue. With newfound strength, you overpower him, pushing him back down onto the couch and straddling his lap. He moans as you kiss him, making him taste himself, tongues swiping against each other. You want to eat him up. “Ineedit, M–mike…”
He’s hard against you, bulge pushing up against his pants, sensitive as your hips start rubbing against him. You feel drunk on it. You lick your own lips, chasing the last sweet remnants of his blood, gulping it down with his spit. It’s like every single sensation has been dialed up to a million.
He looks like a dream. Breathing heavily, his non-bleeding palm tight on your thigh as you move against him, head hanging back with an open mouth. He brings his wrist up lazily, blood seeping down his forearm, fangs biting his lip with a dangerous smirk.
“You want it?” he whispers, sharp. You nod feverishly. He hisses: “Take it then. Take what you want, girl—”
He moans so prettily when you take his wrist in your mouth again. A little calmer now, not like you’re starving but rather like you’re savouring. Every hot drop. You’re wet and aching, rubbing against his hardness, gulping him down as it all swirls into a fucked out bliss you never want to get out of.
You could listen to his sounds forever. You want to. He’s so breathy and soft, nothing like the men you’ve been with before who only grunt like brutes. You suck his wrist a little harder, drop your clothed center a bit firmer, his eyes rolling back as he lets out the most mouth-watering mewl.
He exhales an embarrassed breath a second later, feeling as you smile against his wrist, still drinking. He pulls his hand back, your lips smacking in its absence.
“How d’you feel?” he slurs, cupping your cheek.
Forgoing an answer, you drop a hand between your bodies, grinning when he shudders. You rub him over the cloth just like this, need growing stronger the more he falls into you.
You lean down and kiss him, blood and breaths mingling, gasping a small ‘oh!’ in his mouth when you feel those slender fingers sneaking past the hem of your skirt.
You’re shaking as his fingers make contact with your slick; so cold contrasted with the heat bubbling, exhaling into each other’s face as you rest your forehead against his. Your hand undoes his zipper, bypasses his underwear and closes around him.
Fuck. Fuck. You missed him so much.
You work him just the way he loves: fingers brushing over the tip, smearing the wetness, squeezing him just so as your grip glides up and down. In return, he works you too: thumb on your clit, rubbing tight circles without missing a single beat, not even when he slips two fingers inside and you falter, moaning in his mouth.
“It feels so good, Mike…” you hiccup.
“I know,” he whines, “I know, sweet thing… You’re so good f’me… Here,” he brings his wrist up, “drink. Dri–a–ah, mhh—”
He tastes so fucking good. Is all blood like this? Is it just Michael? You don’t know nor do you care, you just need to keep drinking. You hold his lean arm tight against your torso, veined forearm lodged right in-between your breasts, wrist bent as he continues working you to a climax.
He stops his ministrations on you and closes around the hand that’s sloppily working him, slips his hardness out, single-handedly ripping your underwear in two. Fuck. Fu—
You shudder when he slaps the tip against your sensitive clit. “Mike,” you cry through a full mouth, nearly choking on a gulp. You shove your wrist in his face, brows furrowed, begging: “Fuck me.”
The sounds he makes slides over you like hot molasses. And when he slips in, it feels right at home.
His fangs break the skin on your wrist, mirroring your greedy gulps and you move against each other, skin slapping against skin. He’s everywhere. Everything. Him feeding on you feels as euphoric as it had that very first time, when you were still alive and mortal, fragile in front of the beast. The sensations travel from the puncture wounds and up your arm, tingling and erotic. They mix with the feeling of his dick driving in and out of you until you can’t tell where one sensation ends and the other begins.
You make for a sinful sight. Damned. Fucking on his couch, blood dripping down the leather, drinking each other up as you’re steadily shoved towards your peak. You feel it coming suddenly, his arm still held tight between your tits, his wrist limp as you detach your lips from the wound because you’re—
“M–mike—” you sob, voice wrecked, “I’m, I–I’m—”
“Yeah?” he breathes. He kisses you, hand slipping to your clit, and you come harder—fiercer—than you’ve had in your entire life.
The feeling threatens to drown you all over again. It travels from your bud and up your belly, spreading like tendrils and meeting with the tingling of his mouth that’s latched to your wrist again. Not drinking now, just kissing. Tiny wet pecks as the skin tries to heal itself, veins throbbing.
It takes a few more desperate bumps of his hips and your fangs—fangs!—teasing his ear for him to cum inside you. He shudders whole, his moans the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard, his head falling back and chest rising arrhythmically.
He doesn’t pull out, and you don’t want him to. You’re content to lie like this, chest to chest, connected and aching in the best of ways. Still breathing hard, you kiss him on the cheek, and he smiles at you so brightly, tears gather on your lashes. Happy tears.
“My baby,” he whispers, pretty doe-eyes drifting across your features. He kisses you, just for a second longer than you had. “My girl…”
“Look!” you giggle, brushing the pad of one finger against a fang, mouth hanging open like an idiot. He laughs. “I’ave’angs now!”
“I love you so much,” he murmurs, “but you need to rest. You’re not gonna wake up so happy, trust me.” You hum, smirking, squeezing your walls around his sensitive and softening dick. His hand comes down your ass in a sharp slap, making you smirk wider. “C’mon now, girl,” he smiles, pecking your nose. “Don’t start.”
“Okay,” you smile against him.
You spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, resting just like he told you, listening to him explain how most things work now. It makes your head ring—and you have a million and one things you need to figure out and come to terms with—but none of it mattered for that small window of time you spent cuddled in his bed, all your problems and concerns unable to reach you past the warmth bubbling in your chest.
You died. Michael died. You were both on equal ground now, undead and damned, as you always suspected it was meant to be. Ever since you locked eyes beneath a sea of camera bulbs flashing.
(The night after your turn, you burned the forgotten Sony TC-D5M and the reels inside it. The interview was never going to see the light of day, anyway. He just needed to remind you of something you’d wanted from the start. He had to make you remember. He couldn’t stand your absence any longer. That you-shaped emptiness that threatened to stretch out for years while you’d force yourself to move on, leaving a void behind you that could’ve never been filled.
You loved him just as he loved you, and that was rare. Even before he died, he’d never felt it quite like he did with you. Every relationship of his scrutinized or twisted out of context, unable to exist with someone without offering explanations. He didn’t have that with you.
You’re a journalist, you know the ins and outs of the industry, and what you didn’t know you learned. Because you were good. With you, he was free to just exist.
So, yeah.
That’s the story of how Michael Jackson killed you, and that’s the end of it. There’s nothing else.)