TITLE: Us Against Them
RATING: T
PAIRING: Pam/Tara
SYNOPSIS: Set during the events that occurred in episode 6x4. Tara realizes, upon seeing Pam get shot, that she has to make a choice.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own True Blood. It does not belong to me. If it did, I would rename it to the Pam and Tara show.
A/N – Writing is the best medium for processing all the crazy that this show fills my head with after each episode. I took the liberty of extending that scene of Pam getting shot from Tara's perspective. Perhaps, it might shed some light on things, I don't know. All I know is that, in my head, this is what I saw happened. Anyway, enjoy.
Us Against Them
"VAMPIRE!"
The word was spat out like something foul on one's tongue, staining the air like piss on a wall.
Its effect was instantaneous.
Tara turned at the telltale pop of a gun, fear seizing her in a chokehold. But she turned a fraction too late and the anxiousness that marred the dark of her eyes as she managed but one glimpse of her maker hitting the ground in a crumpled heap, blossomed into one of affliction as Pam's pain ripped through her with all the fury of an incendiary storm.
Tara stifled a strangled gasp, biting down so hard on her tongue that her teeth punctured through flesh and the coppery tang of blood exploded into her mouth, sluicing her teeth with crimson. Her fangs protracted, a visceral response to her body's torment and the younger vampire resisted the urge to double over and scream as she took refuge behind a parked truck.
The young vampire's entire sinewy frame quivered as spikes of pain tore through her body, screaming misery down her veins and gnawing at nerves that were rapidly fraying. Her hand twitched in almost violent fashion, barely resisting the urge to press a clammy palm over that spot on her stomach that had recently been a temporary home of that damned UV bullet.
From her vantage point, she noted that Pam's bullet wound almost mirrored her own.
And it hurt.
It hurt just as bad as Tara remembered.
It felt as though she were back in Fangtasia, back lying on top of that bar with that UV bullet punching a hole through her stomach, searing and blistering otherwise flawless ebony flesh, cooking her from the inside out.
But the similar torture she was currently experiencing courtesy of Pam, the sheer, unapologetic agony renting deep grooves down the bond she shared with her maker was nothing, nothing compared to the look graven on her maker's face.
Pain.
In its basic, purest form.
It painted bold lines across the wintry features of Pam's face, set eyes fashioned from sapphire ablaze with suffering and pale brows to scrunch helplessly as the bullet wracked havoc through her body, scorching through nerves and flesh with all the subtly of a freight train.
Pam screamed.
Tara flinched violently in response, her own painfully coiled frame reacting as though it had been kissed with the end of a silver-tipped whip.
Her maker screamed again, anguish oozing from every note, the sound traveling across the night air, an aria born from the throat of a wounded animal.
Tara couldn't take it.
Every instinct, dormant or otherwise compelled her to go to her maker's aid, never mind the squadron of black fatigued bodies surrounding Pam, guns cocked, ready and aimed at her maker's writhing, crumpled form.
Another fresh wave of hurt hissed down the bond, spitting pain into her blood as a heavily booted feet kicked at Pam, directly over the bullet wound.
Her maker's resounding scream flayed flesh from Tara's unbeating heart.
The way Pam curled in on herself, a last attempt to defend her already weakening body ripped apart her soul.
She couldn't take it.
She had to get to Pam.
Tara took an unflinching step out from behind the truck but the second her right boot produced a faint thud against the dusty ground, sheer, unadulterated panic screeched down the bond.
She froze immediately.
Pam heard that faint thud. Even over the barking commands of the governor's SWAT, the uniformed stamp of heavily booted feet, she heard that one determined, stubborn step.
'No,' her mind immediately screamed. 'No, Tara. Don't. Please. Stay hidden.'
It was subliminal, her protests and Pam wasn't exactly sure if she was able to project her desperate plea through the bond to her child, so caught in throes of a pain so great, she was almost delirious.
But Tara felt it. She felt Pam's panic.
Panic for her.
She froze.
Her body instantly rebelled at the lack of motion, every cell shrieking for her to move, to go to her maker's aid.
Standing still had never been more excruciating.
Tara had never felt such compulsion, never knew that ignoring such primal a call would render her entire body into a quaking, aching, rigid mass of agony.
'Pam.'
Tara still did not quite understand the full mechanisms of the bond she shared with her maker, did not quite understand how to fully utilize it.
But, upon her mental utterance of her maker's name, an utterance that came laden with sheer, utter desperation, Pam somehow managed to look up, to find and lock her glaucous blue eyes, currently hazy with pain and iridescent with fear , onto her child's own pained obsidian ones.
'Stay,' those hypnotically blue eyes pleaded with her. 'Please.'
'Pam.'
'Stay.'
Tara wasn't even aware of the crimson tears that were running meandering rivulets down either cheek as she watched the SWAT carelessly silvered her maker, hogtying her hands and ankles with thick chains of the burning metal and procuring from her maker, another agonized shriek.
She wasn't aware of her hands weeping blood through the cracks of her tightly clenched fingers, her nails having dug so unrelentingly into the soft flesh of her palms that they produced crescent wounds that cried scarlet.
Tara wasn't aware of anything beyond the devastation unfolding in front of her eyes.
Eyes that watched, eyes that were etched in torment.
Eyes that refused to move from their owner's maker's body.
Tara watched as the SWAT picked her maker up, watched as they threw her forcefully, uncaringly into the back of a black van that had eased silently out of a corner concealed by shadows, skulking out into the open like an obnoxiously large beast.
She watched them close the van doors, watched as the van drove off and the rest of the SWAT melted expertly back into the shadows, waiting for their next targets.
She watched until the van roared out of sight, driving Pam away from her and into whatever hell the governor had orchestrated in those vampire camps.
"Pam..."
Tara could still feel her maker, could feel her through the rips of pain that still coursed through the bond like liquid, scoring lacerations into her hart.
Pam was alive.
But for how long?
As Tara stood there, she came to the awful realization that her stubbornness, her absolute refusal to adapt, to adjust to the hellish nightmare that was now her reality had probably cost her the one person that had always been there for her.
The one person that could have offered her everything.
She had fucked up. Again.
She would fix it.
Tara's back straightened at this, going ramrod stiff. She wiped angrily at the blood-tears that adorned her cheeks, crimson banners of her failure, of her mistake.
The ebony-hued vampire finally understood that she couldn't ride the border between vampire and human anymore, couldn't cling to her humanity like she had wanted to.
Not anymore.
'Us against them,' Pam had bluntly informed her.
She understood now.
She was vampire. It was time to pick a side.
She would pick the side that would place her next to Pam.
Eyes hardening and grim determination dropping a somber mask over her face, Tara allowed herself a cautionary, cursory sweep of her surroundings before speeding off.
"I'm going to get you back, Pam. Whatever it takes, I'll get you back."
FIN