Screw Mozart-watching fathers. I need to write that fic. Now.
Two stupid mistakes, although he wasn't complaining now.
Mistake number one: misinterpretation.
The rule had seemed pretty simple. Once the head vampire was dead, all half-vampires would return to human. Half-vampires couldn't become full vampires until they killed. So all Michael had to do was not kill anyone until after he killed the head vampire, and everything would be okay.
If he'd put that sentence into writing, he probably would have noticed the problem with that plan.
See, he'd always assumed that vampires were dead. So killing a vampire wasn't really killing. It was just... getting rid of something bad. Like exterminating cockroaches. No one considered an exterminator a mass murderer. Same thing with vampire slayers. They weren't killers, they were just vampire slayers. That was a good thing. Not something that would damn their souls.
But he'd been a half-vampire, and his heart had still been beating. He'd still been breathing. He'd even felt David's breath on his face during that last, painful, beautiful fight, and David was a full vampire. It hadn't been death that had turned him. He hadn't spent a night in a coffin. David hadn't killed him. He hadn't even bitten him. The only thing David had done to him was give him his blood. Blood sweet as wine and sharp, so sharp, like metal, biting into him, through him, peeling away the dull, everyday layers and bringing the core of his being to the surface, reaching deep into parts of himself he never knew existed, never wanted to know existed, but once they were out there it seemed so right, so incredibly, horribly right...
He hadn't been dead. He'd felt more alive than he ever had before.
And that had scared the hell out of him.
It was terrifying, so incredibly indiscribably terrifying, to imagine that he could exist that way. That he could go through the world taking what he wanted and living on the very edge of life for all eternity with every single sensation so incredibly sharp and intense and amazingly wonderfully beautiful--
An entirely unfamiliar world had been handed to him in that bottle. And he'd panicked. He'd thought of Sam's comics and horror movies and used it as an excuse, a reason to flee back into that familiar human existence, away from David's eyes and blood and fangs and cruel laughter curling up his lips, oh, god, his lips...
It had been too much. Vampires weren't dead, they were alive, so alive that it hurt.
Destroying Max would make it all go away. All these new sensations, all these new urges, making his pulse pound and his mind fill with a red haze until he didn't know what he wanted... It would all be okay. All he had to do was destroy Max.
But Max was alive. A vampire, not a human. But alive.
"You're not a full vampire until you've made your first kill." Star's words, barely heard in his rage, but Sam remembered them, and they'd become so incredibly important, one last thing for him to cling to, a way out...
Your first kill.
She'd never said anything about killing humans.
And now Max was dead.
And Star and Laddie were free.
And the red haze was finally gone. Because it wasn't a haze anymore. It was a pure liquid energy flowing through his veins, through every fiber of his being, and everything was suddenly, incredibly clear.
Dazed confusion, at first. A vague, empty feeling of betrayal. He'd beaten the villain, saved the princess--she was in his arms--so now the curse was supposed to be lifted.
He was supposed to be human.
A few moments to adjust, that was all it had taken. Sudden realization that no one else could tell, no one else could see that something had gone wrong.
Forced himself to worry about it later. "Everybody okay?"
Star and Laddie, Sam and his mother... they were all safe. He'd tried to force a smile, almost succeeded. Too dazed to really care. Too dazed to feel more than dulled surprise at his grandfather's comment. Too dazed to feel anything other than an increasingly urgent need to get away, as far away as possible, far enough away that he wouldn't have to look at his family, look at these people he loved and see slabs of meat.
...Well, that's most of the first part, anyway. Queer as Folk's on in half an hour, so I think I'll stop there. Isn't that exactly how Michael looked at the end of the movie? Dazed? Confused? Like, 'hey, wait a minute... why aren't I human?' And then when he sees Star and Laddie are safe, and Sam's okay, he's like, 'okay, I'll just be glad they're all safe and try not to let them realize that I'm a freakin' vampire, I'll deal with that later...' He was so still a vampire at the end of that movie. It's canon. I'm sure of it. And ain't no one can convince me differently.
Now, just wait until I get to the second stupid mistake, that's when the fun really starts.
