A/N - OK, all you soap fans, here's the latest episode of As Sookie Turns, starring Bill Compton. Thanks for all your wonderful feedback on this series. You are the best audience in the world!

As always, the characters belong to Ms Harris, and she is my hero for sharing them with us!

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I walk out of my front door, cross the sagging porch and navigate the front steps that are now crumbling with age. 'Old Jessie Compton did a piss-poor job of keeping this place up,' I think glumly. The repairs I started when I moved to Bon Temps over eight years ago still go mostly unfinished. I have no immediate desire to continue with them. I have had no desire to do much of anything for the past six years.

I pause when I reach the soft grass of the yard and look up at the indigo-colored night sky. The moon is new and the canopy of stars seems brighter with its absence. The night is warm and humid; I have almost forgotten how the air could feel so thick, so heavy...

It isn't just the air that is heavy tonight. A great sense of loss and longing envelops me since waking from my daytime slumber. Lately this is an every-evening occurrence. For a hundred and forty years I had been blissfully devoid of human emotions. But since returning to Bon Temps...no, that is incorrect...since the first night I sat foot in Sam Merlotte's bar, the emotions are back with a vengeance, as if they are trying to make up for lost time. And the passage of time has only managed to strengthen them.

I walk aimlessly, listening to the sounds of the night: crickets chirping, tree toads singing, an owl softly hooting in a distant tree. On any other night these sounds would comfort me. Tonight their sound is sorrowful, mournful; nature's keepers of my conscience, the ever-present reminders of past deeds done wrong.

My wandering leads me through the cemetery, the one separating my house from hers. The house that once was hers. The house that is now home to that cursed witch and her little coven from New Orleans. It should be her living there, not them.

I pass the headstones that mark the final resting places of Renard Parish's dearly departed, including a few of the Loudermilks and even old Mr. Jessie Compton himself.

I eventually reach the other side of the cemetery and emerge onto her yard. Yes, dammit, her yard. Nothing will ever make me think of it as anything but hers. Her yard...her house...her window...her window to her bedroom...

...where she so willingly gave herself to me; where on that sacred night, even in my vampire mind seems so long ago, I lay with her and relished in that which no man had savored before me. Her purity, her innocence, her sweetness – all of these she had surrendered freely. I had been the luckiest bastard on earth, and I fucked it all up.

'It's not entirely all my fault,' I tell myself. I had tried many times to make amends, but she always refused to hear me out. I hadn't asked for any of this -- not to come home to Bon Temps, not to align myself with a human, and most definitely not her. I would not be here at all if it weren't for Sophie-Anne's greed – the greed that had told her adding a telepath to her retinue would elevate her already-exalted status as Queen of Louisiana. By sheer accident of birth I had been chosen to do Sophie-Anne's dirty deed, and look where it had gotten me.

I remember the first night I went to Merlotte's to seek her out. I almost hadn't even gone. I had seriously thought about defying Sophie-Anne's orders and just disappearing. I had no desire to entangle myself with a human, much less a female human. They were all fang-banging whores, as far as I was concerned. Little did I know...

I close my eyes and think of when I first saw her, looking so fetching in her clingy white T-shirt and curve-hugging black shorts. I recall her sweet, intoxicating scent, so prevalent over the foul odors of beer and grease that permeated the bar. That was the moment I knew there was something different about her, something beyond human. It was then I knew I would be unable to carry out Sophie-Anne's orders.

Had I just been able to keep her to myself, things might have worked out differently for us. My undead heart lurches at that thought. Vampire politics is an intricate web of power and deceit, woven by creatures whose chief objective is self-preservation. It had not been my wish to see her become entangled, but she had been like a fly heading directly toward the waiting spiders and I had been powerless to stop her.

I remember the night she asked me to accompany her to Fangtasia so she could inquire after the girls who had been murdered in Bon Temps. I knew then it was a bad idea, exposing her to Eric. He may have been the area Sheriff and I may owe him fealty, but I knew him for the arrogant bastard he is and always has been. I should have known her uniqueness would not go unnoticed by him.

I mentally kick myself for the millionth time for having taken her there in the first place.

"She would have gone without me," I say aloud to myself. My words, though they are the truth, are no comfort.

For the first time, I am finally forced to admit to myself that I have known all along that Eric would stop at nothing to have her. I relive my initial disgust at him asking me if I was quite attached to her. I should have realized then, that was a not-so-subtle declaration of war on his part.

Eric's actions, from following us to Dallas where he coerced her to suck a bullet out of his shoulder, to bonding with her in Rhodes, have all been to slowly bend her to his will. He is nothing else if not patient, like a lion stalking its prey, waiting for the exact moment to strike. Him forcing me to reveal to her my original purpose for returning to Bon Temps only drove the wedge further between us. With every mistake I make, he always seems to be there, pointing them out to her.

I mentally scan the checklist of things I could have handled differently: not confessing to her why I came home to Bon Temps in the first place, not explaining why I had to go to Lorena when she called me to her from Jackson, flaunting Selah Pumphrey in front of her while she worked at the bar. Each mistake is like a stake in my heart, piercing my undead soul and bringing agonizing death to me a thousand times over...

My musing abruptly ceases and I realize my face is soaked with my bloody tears. They drip from my face to the ground, joining the countless millions of others that have gone before them. I roughly scrub my face with my hands, wiping away the physical evidence of my anguish in a vain attempt to somehow right all of the wrong I have done to her.

But Eric Northman is not the only one with patience. He may hold her captive for now with his shrewdness and cunning, but it is only a matter of time before his true nature is finally revealed to her. When that time comes, she will return home to Bon Temps, and I will be here to help her pick up the pieces of her life that I am certain he will shatter.

He does not love her the way I love her – no one ever could.

I take a deep, unnecessary breath and reach out to her. The amount of my blood she has taken in the past is enough for me to still feel her, and the slow humming of her life force. The distance between us makes the signal faint, but I am able to pick it up, in spite of her blood bond with Eric. This secret I guard as closely as the location of my place of daytime rest.

'WAITA MINUTE!' my brain screams at me. Something is wrong – terribly wrong. The signal is weakening, becoming more faint and erratic, then suddenly...nothing.

I feel panic and fear, words that should not even be in my vocabulary as a vampire, much less emotions ripping through my mind and soul. The idea that she has met her mortal end is one I cannot grasp. I survive night to night only by knowing she still exists, knowing some day I may have the chance to redeem myself in her eyes and heart.

As I fight back waves of what I remember from my human life as nausea, I feel...something. I have never before experienced this sensation and I am unable to define it or determine its etiology. It is growing stronger, buzzing in my head like a swarm of angry bees. I stand frozen, and then the realization sinks in.

"NOOOOOO!" my voice roars into the night with enough force to rattle the windows of her house. "FUCKING BASTARD!" I now know what is happening, what he is doing to her. The one thing she has always feared...has never wanted...is being done and I am powerless to stop it.

My rage engulfs me and I rip the closest tree out of the ground and hurl it through the darkness. I hear the crackled splintering of wood as it collides with other trees in its path before it comes to rest on the ground just beyond the cemetery fence.

I consider locating a broken tree branch and impaling myself on its jagged point and ending my pain and misery. But that is a coward's way and I am no coward. I have not waited for her all this time just to forfeit my patience now.

I steady myself and let my rage turn to something else, something more constructive. 'Patience is a virtue,' I remind myself. I will exact my pound of flesh for what he has done to my beloved.

I will rip his undead heart from his chest and feed it to him with a fucking spoon...

FIN