Disclaimer: All of the following is thoughtfully rearranged from the original works of Charlaine Harris. So I cannot scream MINE.
Born out of a conversation I had with Thyra10 about how "but he's a vampire he has to"(...kill/hurt people/fuck everything on two legs/is a predator and is right to do these things) is misdirection by Bill that sucked in a lot of readers. I don't hate Bill, but I'm not going to blindly accept that he tells the truth – he's the king of misdirection, misinformation and omission. In CH's words: Bill hasn't always told Sookie the truth.
Thanks to CassandraMello who helped me solidify some of my thoughts via PM when we chatted about DITF. Read her fics – they're brilliant. If I had to choose one (which is difficult as I like all of them), I'd go with homeless crazy Eric who eats only red things:
http:/www . fanfiction . net/s/5842011/1/A_Fate_Worse_Than_Death - take out the spaces next to the dots to parse the url.
Important point of note from the books: Sookie seems to effectively deflect any kind of personalised hurt during the trunk incident, the Mickey attack and the Jake Purifoy attack with talking about how blood and sex are linked – but that's her trying to not make the attacks personal. Don't take her at face value – she's trying to dissociate, not giving genuine information. Sookie doesn't say that sort of thing all the time (I can't remember her saying anything like that except for those incidents), and the books show the opposite is true.
So I'm in an undefined relationship with Eric, and intend to spend a lot of time around vampires. Obviously, a telepathic asset is never going to get away, and I was tied to Eric Northman in a way I might never be free. I had yet to decide if I wanted to get free from him. But Eric didn't live alone as the only vampire in the world, and with him came all of his compatriots, good and bad. We were not just bonded, but pledged. Maybe no matter what, I would never be truly free of him and he wasn't of a mood to let me go.
Vampires didn't employ me - unless asked nicely and when they decided it was advantageous - they had acquired me. Like the Mob, once they had you, they had you, and there was no getting free. Claudine had once said that if I went to the conference in Rhodes that there was no turning back. Huh. Anyone would think that Sophie Ann gave me a choice to not go - she wouldn't let me out of going to the conference that night at Hadley's flat. I didn't have a choice, not from the minute Hadley opened her mouth.
I needed to think about what it was that I was dealing with, to think about the nature of those who commanded my talent.
One of the natural thoughts about vampires was how blood dictated their actions. Obviously, they needed blood and it brought out fundamental reactions in them. But I'd noticed that there were discrepancies in some of the ways that different vampires had in blood.
I thought about all the times I'd seen blood around vampires, and how they reacted. Of course, there was the obligatory feeding during sex – I'd experienced that many times. While I thought that sex and blood were linked, I wondered if that were a hard and fast rule. In truth, the only times I'd ever accepted that question without thought is when I was being attacked. After all, I'd seen different behaviour from different vamps.
A couple of nights after I met Bill, he'd had my blood and I'd had his. He'd licked it off my face, and the most he did was cuddle me onto his lap. Bill wouldn't have had time to both kill the Rattrays and have sex with them too - so I don't think it was likely that he did. Of course, it would have looked mighty suspicious if tornado victims had signs of recent sexual activity with a third party if the third party hadn't been caught in the tornado. So the odds on that were nil. That wasn't the only time a vampire had my blood, which seemed particularly tasty, and didn't feel the need to have sex with me or anyone else during. Chow and Pam had had my blood the night I came in with the damage from the Maenad. That all seemed to go well – I didn't wake up in an orgy, or to anything other than embarrassing smirks. Vamps obviously didn't need to have sex every time they took blood – otherwise supe bars like Fangtasia and Club Dead wouldn't have to put up "no biting" signs, but rather rely on the fact that it's generally unacceptable to have sex in public places.
Andre had had my blood, and even though it was only a drop, he certainly didn't even warm to me slightly. He was as cold as ice, and completely unaffected. Russell Edgington had licked my shoulder, and had restrained himself just fine. Russell had lingered, but he didn't need to excuse himself with his boyfriend immediately afterwards, and held a conversation just fine. Eric had drunk my blood when Mickey hit him in the head with a rock, and nothing happened then. He'd told me that he'd enjoyed myself, but he didn't become animalistic and out of control. The blood and sex connection didn't always exist.
Indeed, I'd seen lots of vampires fall into battle, and they'd been able to control themselves, no matter how much blood was around. Bleeding people and blood had surrounded all of the vamps at the Queen's Party Barn, and yet they didn't break down into pure sexual lust. Admittedly, I didn't see the end of that battle (what with the running away) but I did see the end of the war with the witches, and it was decidedly lacking in orgies.
I'd seen willing donors at Rhodes, as the buffet table, yet the conference rooms didn't spontaneously break out in a case of orgy. Indeed, I hadn't seen that my roommate at Rhodes, the girlfriend of Gervaise, had sex in public. Nor did the whore that I saw at Rhodes. Indeed, the vampire dancers danced with each other and the male, Sean, bit Layla and seemed to be able to keep it in his pants.
Of course, I'd observed that different vampires had different amounts of control. The night Longshadow bled all over me, and bit me, there were three vamps there. Pam was the most rational. She gazed at Belinda, but had the control to not attack me. Eric seemed mesmerised but at least partially logical – he didn't leap on me, despite the fact that he could have taken out both of the other vamps (and all the humans) in the room. Bill – well, I had to pull his hair when he started licking me – he couldn't seem to get himself under control as easily as the other two did. I don't think it was just the idea that I wasn't their personal human that controlled Eric and Pam.
Not even under extreme duress did blood and sex automatically go hand in hand. Sure, Bill had been tortured for a week, and Jake Purifoy was a newborn and perhaps the need for blood and sex needed to be satiated. Farrell had been held for a long time in the basement of the Fellowship, but he was still rational enough not to drain Hugo dry in a heartbeat - and to understand when I yelled that Stan had sent us - he had a tiny amount of restraint, no matter how starved. Even Godfrey, starved by his own will, had control to lick my shoulder, but (thank goodness) didn't do anything to violate anyone. By that same token, Sophie Ann had told me herself that immediately upon rising, she did not feed from or have sex with the first human – a priest – that she came across. Different vampires had different thresholds of control, and age had nothing to do with it.
Indeed, in my sexual encounters with vampires, both of them sought a tacit acceptance that they could bite me. Bill put his fangs against my neck, and only when I told him yes that first time did he take it for granted that I allowed him to bite me. Eric too, looked up the length of my body before he bit me. It wasn't an automatic connection the other way around either - when I told Bill that I was anaemic, and had to recover from the blood he took, he managed to hold off biting me. Eric too, didn't always bite me - last time we were together before the Fairy War, I bit him once, without him needing to bite me as well.
I'd been bitten quite a few times without being sexually aroused, and it didn't seem to worry the vampires - it only hurt me more. If anything, being aroused was consideration for me - not for the vampire. Of course, the vampires who bit me couldn't glamour my pain away and make me forget. It was in their interests to make it as painless as possible, hide that pain in the ecstasy of my orgasm - so that they could do it again.
So blood and sex weren't fused together as part of the same package, although they did have strong ties, blood didn't necessarily mean that the vampire had to have sex or vice versa.
.*° o O 0 * 0 O o °*.
Another part of the vampire nature that Bill tried to impress on me as universal was the urge to hunt. In his own words he likened himself to leopards and wolves, and said that it was in his nature to hunt. I'm not sure that that's a universal truth either. Indeed, it was another vampire who first suggested that the logic was questionable.
I talked with Eric in front of my fire about how he was a predator, and therefore killing was of a nature to him. Granted, he had no memory of that time, but he didn't buy the predator argument. Eric told me that it was a comforting theory. He was referring to the holes in that theory, and how it really fit with ideas about vampires generally, but not in the strictest sense. It was a way to feel as if there were predefined lines, with no blurring. Eric pointed out that the predator idea just didn't stand in the face of the contradictions.
The more I thought about that statement, the more it made sense. Eric made it clear that it wasn't as simple as just explaining it as a predator-prey type relationship, merely because vampires interacted with humans. They were made to blend in and hide within society. Seeing as they'd only come out of the coffin a few years ago, they'd done well with that.
Of course, Pam had told me that prior to Vlad Tepes becoming a vampire, vampires had dressed in rags and lived in holes, until his royal self came along and decreed the change of the way of doing things. Eric idolised him, as I saw on Dracula Night, so I have no doubt that at least part of that was getting back his creature comforts and a semblance of humanity, thanks to the Prince. Even after a couple of centuries living like an animal fugitive, vampires like Eric were overeager to grasp back some human life - they didn't refuse and go on the way that they had been, refusing to be part of the mundane nature of human trappings.
When speaking of vampires, they were and wanted to be within our society. Leopards did not interact with the antelope – they didn't attempt to engage them in commerce, or conversation. Leopards could blend with the scenery, but they didn't interact with their prey. It wasn't as simple as just calling them predators.
Vampires were strong enough, and had advantages of mind control. If they really wished, they could be the overlords of human society, or separate and apart from it. Instead, they had chosen to come out, to be as equals, and expose themselves to vulnerability. Whatever they wanted, it wasn't a predator relationship. They had been skulking in the grassland of the savannah, camouflaged, and chose to come out and point to themselves with a big sign.
As Eric also astutely pointed out, vampires used to be human. They didn't spring up unbidden as vampires, with no knowledge of what it was like to be human. No, they were deliberately taken to be vampire. No doubt with some deliberation on the part of the ex-human-now-vampire on choosing someone they wanted to have around for a while. The vampire world was centred around watching humans carefully enough to choose a good vampire or a good meal. Eric knew the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner enough to get my reference "Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink" when we were at Russell's, so I don't think even very old vampires were so completely out of touch with human concerns.
They didn't somehow forget what it was like to be human, or what humans felt – that was where the long time assimilation in the human society came out. They had hidden among us for centuries, without being noticed – they were believed to be myths, and indeed, had influenced our myths in order to blend in better. We had false information planted in our minds, about garlic, crosses and reflections in mirrors. We had information that vampires couldn't cross running water (and if they were in America, that clearly nixed that argument). That meant that not only did they understand humans, but also that they chatted to them long enough to plant those myths in the first place. How else would one explain the raging success of Fangtasia if Eric didn't understand exactly what humans thought? I doubt there's a lion in the world that thinks about the marketing for gazelles, down to the custom napkins with little fangs on them.
.*° o O 0 * 0 O o °*.
As a telepath who can't be glamoured, and the fact that I've been at a lot of vampire shindigs (and let me tell you, those things almost always end in blood) I have an unparalleled view of not just one vampire, but of many. None of them can hide what they've done from me, and unlike most other humans in the world, I can recall every detail.
If they were all made of the same cloth, then I wouldn't have observed different responses from them. They aren't all identical in their natures. When the massacre happened in Dallas, Eric stayed behind, while Bill and Joseph ran off to pursue our attackers. But Eric wasn't the only vampire in the room who stayed. He may have stayed to manipulate me, but there were other vampires who stayed to tend to the wounded. They didn't try anything fresh with me, and didn't acknowledge me at all. They wandered through helping others, or looking through the fallen.
Eric's consistent behaviour wasn't to run off and pursue attackers – many times he'd stayed behind to pick up the pieces, and he wasn't the only one that night who didn't hunt them. When Mickey came to my temporary home and attacked me, Eric didn't pursue him in a fit of rage, although he did consider it, if his dark comments afterwards were any indication.
Bill seemed to feel so strongly about hunting that the one thought I had gotten from him was a vision of hunting prey, pursuing them and thrilling in the chase and the blood. He explained his behaviour of hunting those humans, and it seemed he'd been prone to hunting humans just for fun. In view of the fact that he'd shared a friendship with the likes of Malcolm, Liam and Diane, I can see that that would have been a popular bonding activity. I'd never met a bunch of vampires since who were so contemptuous of humans and so open about it. I can only imagine what Bill was like while he shared their company.
It also occurred to me that Bill didn't present me with the whole picture of himself when I first met him. He was there for a mission after all, and he did what he needed to gain my confidence, much to my dismay. Since then, he'd endeavoured to win me back. Some things that he'd told me about the nature of vampires could not be universal, or absolute truth. One thing I learnt about Bill was that if he could hide something he thought detrimental to our relationship, he surely would. Even if that included misdirection, omission or flat out lying. Bill put great effort into trying to stop me finding out of the Queen's plan, and his role in it. He had shown a tenacity in holding onto that false foundation, and probably thought that if he could keep it from me, then all would be well between us in time.
If the company that he kept before he met me was any indication, Bill was on the more savage end of the spectrum, but he liked me to think that he wasn't. When he first met me, Bill talked of wanting to remember what it was like to be human, of not wanting to lose that inner core of goodness in himself. Over time, as I accepted him, he rather tried to convince me that he was not human, that he had needs or urges to do things that repulsed me. I think that the predator-prey theory comforted him too and provided a way for him to feel less guilt about his actions.
When he didn't like what was happening, Bill tended to hurt people, including me. He twisted my wrists when I tried to pull him off Sam for kissing me, and he'd squeezed me hard when I mentioned the Bellefleurs soon after we met. He had killed Uncle Bartlett because he didn't like what had happened to me, and he'd killed those members of the Fellowship of the Sun, as well as the Rattrays. When Quinn turned up at my house, Bill's first urge was to attack, rather than chat. Regardless of what sorts of people they were, Bill's first choice seemed to be to hurt people.
Bill channelled all of his anger into violence, and when that was diverted, into passion. But for my quick thinking the night in the graveyard, he surely would have killed me when he heard that the Monroe vampires were burned to death. I diverted him into a passion, and it was the way that I survived that night. In that, Bill's anger wasn't particularly directed, as I had had no role in the fires at all, but was merely the messenger.
In contrast, I had seen Eric infuriated, and he always defaulted to cutting remarks, and I'd never had to divert him with passion at all. While Bill lashed out physically, with Eric he lashed out verbally or emotionally. Even his anger was largely calculated, rather than let out at all those nearby alike. Surely, Bill's anger was easier to deal with in some ways, because I could walk away. With Eric, the hurt followed me long after.
.*° o O 0 * 0 O o °*.
The vampire attitude to humans varied as well. But there was an undercurrent of somewhat contempt for all humans, as a universal vampire trait. How far that went depended on the human and the vampire in question.
Certainly, Hugo in the Dallas nest wasn't taken seriously. He was used, as a matter of course, and underestimated. Hugo had turned to the Fellowship of the Sun for his vengeance, and as he pointed out, he was reduced to fetching dry cleaning and running errands. Hugo cited that he didn't like the way that Isabelle had treated him. Vampires didn't have much regard for humans.
Indeed, when Eric thought that there was money stolen from Fangtasia, he assumed that it was a human who did so. As I observed that night that Longshadow was no smarter than humans. Eric himself had pointed out that we were edible like cows, but cute too. Humans were greatly underestimated and often treated like idiots. Ultimately, that would lead to their own detriment. It did in Rhodes. Vampires disregarded humans completely - even the Fellowship knew that. Those suitcases were brought into every room in that plan, and vampires ignored it. That plan had hinged on vampires assuming that any luggage that belonged to one of their party meant that it was safe.
I'd been subject to treated as lesser than in the eyes of vampires, as an amusing diversion, and Andre had little regard for my thoughts. Only those vampires like Pam, Bill and Eric who knew me well, had regard for my thoughts on things. But Pam, Bill and Eric had a bad opinion of humans in general, even if they occasionally made an exception for me. Even in his memory-less state, Eric told me that he had a bad opinion of humans in general. The only reason any of them thought that I was the exception to the rule is because they'd bothered to get to know me. They didn't bother with many, but they still judged humans as a whole.
Felicia of course, wondered how I thought, so that she could dodge my attempts to kill her. Clancy hadn't cared very much what I had thought, other than to admire his clothing at Eric's Dracula Party, and had shown great contempt for me. If they didn't have a use for me, or a fear of me, they really weren't interested in what I thought, as long as I kept my mouth shut about secret vampire business.
Stan, Sophie Ann and Andre had to have my worth and intelligence proven to them. So did the Ancient Pythoness. Other than what I could give them or their own advantage there wasn't any mutual regard going on. For the most part, vampires I didn't know well didn't regard my opinion on anything. Neither Felipe de Castro nor Victor Madden rung me to ask if I'd like a free holiday in Vegas – no, it was commandeer me all the way. I'd routinely been ignored in the same room.
When Andre had tried to force me to drink his blood, Sophie Ann didn't take too kindly to being yelled at by a human. I was little more than a piece of functional furniture to most vamps. There were of course, vamps who thought worse of humans. Mickey and Franklin Mott had no problems treating Tara like a piece of garbage, passing her around as if she had no say in what happened to her.
Similar too was the vampire staked at the trial in Rhodes, Michael sans Fang. He had no regard for the women he abducted, raped and abused, and his sole argument was that she publicly disrespected him – emphasis on the human. The judges (which included Bill) didn't take kindly to his explanation, and allowed Jodi to stake him, despite his protestations that they had no pride. Some vampires were morally vacant, and chose morally vacant children to sire. I'd seen my fair share of them, and kept well out of their company. That didn't mean that they were all like that, or that it was universal. They were all different, and I had no doubt that vampires like Michael had had the same sort of superior, uncaring attitude when he was human. He just transferred it and tried to justify it by being a vampire.
.*° o O 0 * 0 O o °*.
While both Eric and Bill had told me that they didn't want to kill humans soon after they awoke as vampires (but did anyway due to hunger) that seemed to go away quickly, and the expendable nature of humans seemed to impress upon them. They became a little more careless with them.
Bill had told me soon after I saved him from the drainers that vampires didn't have human values. But I'd found that that wasn't always so true. Pam had offered me something close to friendship, and Bill had claimed to love me. They may be careless about some humans, and doubtless they didn't make exceptions for them, but the mere fact that they refrained from killing wholesale without necessity said something about the sorts of human values they still retained.
After all, the population of the Earth was enough that they could glut themselves one day a week, and kill one human, and still have plenty to go around. Vampires had come out to human society, interacting with us, rather staying to their own separate camp where they only had to deal with vampires. They pursued money and power, and different human interests, such as Bill's love for travelling and cataloguing things. There was that vampire Cindy Lou at Rhodes who was clearly alive trailer trash, but was now dead trailer trash. Her nature didn't change, and she wanted a child, so she took a sick cancer patient as her vampiric child, in both senses and had to share visitation with his birth parents.
Christian Baruch too, changed over to run vampire hotels, and didn't think about changing his mind after he was turned. He'd gotten ambitious and tried to frighten Sophie Ann into marrying him, but that was just because he didn't know vampires that well yet. Henrik Feith didn't become brave and forthright even though he had gained immortality. He was still a scared man, but now he lived as a dead man among those who scared him. Jake Purifoy retained his hatred of vampires, even though he was one, as the vampires avoided him as a former were. If all that mattered was that he was vampire, then surely the vampires shouldn't care, now that he was officially one of them.
The changeover itself didn't change much more than their biology, and give them some new and exciting urges. It changed their bodies, but any difference in their attitudes came from the fact that they became more callous, due to the stretch of time. They didn't lose that inner core, although they learnt to suppress it. Maybe because they were forced into their roles as vampires, they wanted to separate themselves as much as possible from their former state, and convince themselves that they were right to prey on humans.
They seemed to wish to interact with humans, and like humans, wanted only to get the good parts out of their interactions. I'd been inside enough heads to know that humans usually wanted what served them best. They weren't interested in having to deal with bad consequences, or faults in others – most of the time their thoughts ran towards the selfish end.
Vampires happened to be the same. It's just what served them best was someone else in their power, and they had the means to make that happen when it came to humans. Like humans, they used each other and us for resources. They just happened to be stronger than us, and humans have a long history of the strong bullying the weak, just as vampires do.
At heart, all vampires were previously human, and had started their lives as humans, with human wants and desires. They may not be human anymore, but there was no lack of new vampires. They seemed to find them just fine among humans, rather than having to make new little vampires the way we humans did. For all the talk about how different they were from humans, some of them weren't very different at all, barring the limitations of their state - like living only at night and on blood.
Maybe that's what Eric meant when he spoke of it being a comforting theory. It comforted me to think there was some sort of natural order that could explain the role of vampires, just like it comforted Bill to think he was made to be violent because he was a vampire. In bad situations, it comforted me to think that it wasn't a human hurting me, it was the beast that lived inside them, the uncontrollable urge, part of their nature.