Somebody Loves Me

Somebody Loves Me

I was watching a band of Z’s looking for a way into our compound when she came in.  We had been here for several days now and she was still not reconciled to the reality that I was here.   She came and went by turns, sometimes talking to me as she had in the past, sometimes she would burst into tears or laughter than underscored her instability as nothing as else could have.

I was starving.  I still had True Blood and there were canned goods for Sookie, thanks to Pam.  It almost didn’t hurt now when I thought of my beautiful progeny.  Almost.  “If we find ourselves in an apocalypse I will be bringing something better than True Blood into this bunker.  They will need supplies.”  She had held her ground and I was so thankful that she had.  Sookie was malnourished, in addition to the psychological damage she had sustained.  I was grateful to be able to feed her.

My fangs dropped as she moved to stand beside me and take a look at what I was seeing.  Just then one of them looked up into the hidden camera, as though they knew it was there and I got a full on look at the horrible visage of the new vampire.

Their eyes were red.  Fangs had become a mouth full of needle like teeth, good for tearing flesh.  Their arms were longer, the easier to reach their prey.  They were long and rangy creatures who moved at speed, but thankfully not vampire speed.  They has lost their hyper speed in the tradeoff for more fangs and ability to consume flesh.

The creature before us opened his mouth, revealing a second set of teeth recessed behind the first.  Just then one of the others bumped against him and in a rage at being denied entrance to my compound he turned and bit the other Z.

He came away with a mouth of flesh, cannibalizing his own kind in his endless hunger.  Sookie laughed beside me as though she had just seen something that amused her.  She shouldn’t be watching this, I thought and turned toward her.

“Maybe they will eat themselves up!” she said, clapping her hands and swaying side to side lost in the joy of her musings.  “Oh, that would be great!”  She turned then, pirouetting in the small surveillance room, humming as she turned again and again then suddenly stopping, a frown on her face.  “I wish you were really here, Eric!  If you were here I could tell you what was happening.”

She did this sometimes, talked to me as though I were not really there and still a figment of her imagination.  This was a good night.  The bad nights she balled up in the corner and cried, screaming as she relived horrible visions that were on loop in her brain.  Sometimes I wished I could read her mind, but then seeing her memories would not heal them.  I was at a loss. Sighing I decided to go along with her and see where that might take us.

“Tell me, Sookie.  Pretend that I am here and tell me all the things you long to say!”  My passionate plea broke through her madness and she smiled a little again, turning to look at me.

“I miss you.” I knew how she felt.  I missed her, too.  Every day I fought to get back to her I missed her.  The hell of it was that standing here in the room with her I missed her still.

“What else, Sookie.  Tell me anything, everything.”

“I wish I had been braver when we met.” I raised an eyebrow.  Again, I knew how she felt.  I wish that I had been braver when we met, too.

“Braver, how?”

“I wanted to talk to you that night.  Just take your hand and lead you off into some quiet corner and tell you all the secrets of my heart.”  She took my hand then, rubbing it gently between hers.

“W-What would you have told me, Sookie?”

“I was always alone.  My family shunned me, the other kids they shunned me, called me Crazy Sookie.  Did you ever know that, Eric?”

“How would I?”  She shrugged still looking at my large hand in hers.

“You moved in mysterious ways, who could say what you knew? Perhaps you looked into me that night and saw everything that there was to know.”  Oh, if only that had been true.  If I had been thinking of something other than my dick in my stupid complacency…if I had been gifted to read her mind what treasure might have found in the girl who stood before me in the white dress?

What would I have done if I had known she would remain with Godric on the roof in Dallas as he left me and this world behind?  What would I have done if I could see her facing down Russell to save that useless excuse for a vampire Compton? What might I have done if I had known then in that moment that we were hurtling toward a place and time when I would offer to be one with the fabulous effervescent creature that she would become?

“What could I have said that night to encourage you to be brave and do these things, my Sookie?”  She smiled sadly.

“Telephony,” she whispered softly as tears started to slip down her cheeks again.  I was losing her.  She was slipping away and would start screaming again any minute now.  Denying that I was here.  She was so sure when she slipped away into her own dark world that sometimes I almost believed her and wondered if I were a ghost here to haunt her.  Then I would feel my own pain and remorse and remember that this nightmare was as real for me as it was for her.

I was wrong though, she didn’t start screaming, she just stood there a moment and then walked closer to me and pressed her body to mine, turning her head to rest on my cool chest.  “When I was little I had no one to play with most of the time.  So, I made my stuffed animals my friends.  When I was six my Gran gave me a unicorn.  He was beautiful!”  Her arms slipped around me now and I stood as still as I could afraid to break the spell of her memory.

“He was white, with large blue eyes and a long golden mane.  I took him everywhere with me.  I told him all my secrets and loved him with my whole heart.  He was my best friend until…” she stopped here hiding her face in my chest and I knew that my six year old Sookie had somehow lost her best and beautiful friend.  Seeking to distract her from yet another unpleasant memory I asked the first thing that came to my mind.

“What did you name him Telephony?”

“Aunt Linda worked for the phone company.  She was over visiting Gran one Sunday and talking about her work.  She said the word ‘telephony’ it had something to do with her work and I remember I piped up and said, ‘If I had a unicorn I would name him Telephony!’  They had all laughed but that Christmas my gran gave me a unicorn.  She remembered.  She always remembered…”  She was sniffling now still with her face buried in my chest.

“If you had said ‘Telephony’ that night I would have known because that was all I could think as I stood there and looked at you on your throne.  Your pale white skin, beautiful blue eyes, and long blond hair.  For just a moment I thought I had found my best friend again.”

She sighed then, dropping her head.  “But I lost you before I could tell you that, before I could be sure…but there were moments when you lost your memory and I saw you, the heart of you…in those moments I would whisper your name to myself and I would think of my beautiful unicorn.”

“I am right here, Sookie.  Look at me, please!”  She kept her head down and shook it from side to side in denial.

“If I look you will be gone.”  Her quiet voice was barely a whisper but it conveyed her breaking heart with an accuracy that was devastating.

“Then close your eyes and feel me.”  It was all I could think to say.  To my surprise she did, her arms coming back around me again.

“If you were here you would be hungry,” she said softly turning her face up to mine keeping her eyes tightly shut.  “I know you aren’t real because you haven’t asked me to bed or to let you feed.” I chuckled.

“To bed?”  She smiled now.

“From the moment I met you, you were trying to get in my pants, Eric Northman!  I know that no matter what else has changed that surely hasn’t!”

“Well, that was saucy!” I said, replaying what I had told her when she returned to me from Fae.

“But not wrong. You wanted my legs to magically open for you.  You just never figured out that the way to make that happen was to win my heart.”  I kissed the top of her head softly and turned my cheek to rest against it.

“Oh, I knew it, my Sookie.  I knew it the moment I saw you.  I was just…afraid.”

“Pfft! You weren’t afraid of anything.  Ever!”

“I was scared of you and the way you made me feel.”  She held me tight to her then.

“I was scared, too.”  My undead heart clenched.

“You faced down things that would have sent most people over the edge.  What scared you about me?”

“That I would stand beside you, love you and find out that I was made for you, to be with you…to be like you.”

“And that would be bad?”  She hesitated, struggling to find her words.

“It would have been different.  You wanted me to be everything I could be.  Everyone else just wanted me to be what they wanted me to be.”

“Yes, because I loved you, I wanted you to be everything you could be.”

“But what…what if I was…a…m-m-monster?”

“Is that what you thought of me?” She shook her head and then rubbed her face on my chest.

“You told the world what you expected from it.  I was from a place where the world told me what it wanted from me.  The distance between the two is immeasurable.”  She burrowed closer to me then and her voice dropped so low that I would not have heard her if it wasn’t for my vampire hearing. “I watched them kill everyone I knew, Eric, but they wouldn’t take me.”

I stiffened in her grasp.  I had wondered how she had survived until I found her the other night.

“What does it mean if I am so bad that even the monsters don’t want me?”  My mind started to race.  As a vampire Sookie was almost irresistible with her hybrid Fae nature.  She called to us like a siren song, but if what she was saying was true the Z’s did not want her and for some reason could not even stand to touch her.  Was this another thing they had lost in their evolution to better killing machines?

Before I could figure out how to turn this to our advantage she started to shake in my arms.  She needed an answer from me.  She needed to hear something other than cold logical reason that was running rampant defense in my mind.

“It means, my Sookie, that there is a higher power looking out for me.  I know that now because of everything I have and could still yet lose, you are safe.  It means that somebody up there loves me.”

“I loved you, Eric.  I should have told you before it was too late and I lost my chance.  You just…always think that there is time, that this is not the right time, and that you have more time.  But it ran out when I was looking somewhere else and I lost you like I lost Telephony.  I am so sorry I never told you when I had the chance.  Of all my regrets…”

“No, no more regrets.  You feel me here with you now.  Say that you do!”  She stood there quiet and not speaking.  “Say it, Sookie!”

“When my eyes are closed I do feel you, but I have always felt you, or for you, or with you.  I would have cut you out of me if I could!  When there were none but me left, I could still feel you.  It seemed the cruelest trick of all that I could feel someone I had lost forever.”  Unable to take another horrible word from her precious lips I pressed mine to hers to make the words stop.

She moaned and opened her lips to me, rubbing her warm body against mine, still seeking I knew to prove that I was not there with her in this moment.  My fangs were still down demanding so many things not the least of which was sustenance and when she pushed her tongue over one whimpering from the pain I moaned and sucked her blood into my mouth.

Her hands locked behind my neck and she leaped up wrapping her legs around me.  “If you are here, then drink.  If you are here you need it, and if you are here I want it.  I want to feel you, please.  Don’t go away.  Please be here, Eric!”  Her pleas and my hunger overrode my reason and I let my face come to rest in her neck, breathing in the scent of her.

I was overwhelmed with memory and with need and when my fangs slid into her flesh she writhed in my arms while holding her head still.  “Yes!” she whispered into the room as she held me close to her and drank as though I had never tasted blood before.  It was only hearing her heart slow that called me back to this place and time and the realization that she was close to dying in my arms.  I pulled back and licked her neck clean placing a soft kiss on her skin.  “Thank you,” I whispered to her as I held her closer.  She purred and burrowed closer to me, drifting away from the blood loss and the emotional exhaustion she was feeling from everything that she had survived and the things she had shared with me tonight.

Feeling her coursing through my veins renewed not only strength but my conviction that we would find some way to get through this.  If the Z’s truly reviled her, then perhaps there was something in that revelation that could turn this around for us.

Gently I carried her to bed and placing her down gently crawled in beside her to let my mind do what it did best while I let my body do what it wanted to do, protect the sleeping woman next to me.