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Eric's POV

(50 years after Sookie's death)

As night falls completely I come out of my dream. Where once there would have been weak and pathetic tears upon waking to realize that it was just another dream, now there is only anger.

Anger at her for being so selfish, so childish that she willingly chose to remain human, to put me through the hell of losing her. She claimed to love me, but how can you truly love a person if you would so easily abandon them to the hell I have lived in for the last 50 years.

And Intense almost unbearable anger at myself for allowing her the choice. I am a VAMPIRE! I have never given anyone the choice of life or death. And yet I let a silly, stupid girl have such power over me. Such control that I let her choose to leave me. I should have turned Sookie that night in Jackson. I loved her, that was enough. Her wishes should never have come into it. If I had done it then, she would be here with me now, not rotted to dust in the ground.

But I didn't. I convinced myself that to truly love her was to let her freely choose. I was a fool, and now after 5 decades of grief I hate her every bit as much as I still love her. And love her I do. I know now that I will never be free of her. I will never have peace from the ache deep within me to see her again, to kiss her again, to love her body again, to talk to her, to laugh with her. No, instead I will go on and on walking each night on an endless path with no destination; always looking behind me wishing that I might see her there in the distance trying to catch up to me.

There are nights when I do not even know why I continue to exist. It would have been so much easier to simply meet the sun, certainly it is what they all expected of me after I completely lost my mind the night of her death. But I could not take my own life for one simple reason: Pam. The fact of the matter is that I love my child to much to ever do to her what Sookie has done to me. I cannot choose to leave her when I have the means to remain. Nor could I reward the loyalty and love my child showed me in the aftermath of Sookie's death by killing myself. She worked so hard to keep my alive, sometimes at great personal risk to herself, I could not turn my back on her. I am shamed when I remember that most of the danger to her came from me. The one being who she should never have to fear.

I did not attend Sookie's funeral. I could not watch her go into the ground never to come out. Instead I honored her in the best way I knew how, by extracting a long and agonizing death from the man that seperated us.

When I arrived at the warehouse Thalia was wating for me at the front entrance. "Master," She said and bowed low.

"How long has he been here?" I ask, not really caring, except that I hope she hasn't damaged him to much already. If she has then there will be less for me to play with.

"I found him earlier in the evening. In his apartment. He was purchasing something with Sookie's credit card when I knocked on the door." I feel the rage in me well up. I try to tamp it down for only a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes of coherancy and then I can give myself over to it.

"You may go." I tell her. Thalia nods and takes off into the night. A slow, dark smile creeps over my features as I begin to imagine some of the more creative things I will do to him. I enter the warehouse and find that Thalia has tied the man's hands above his head securing him to an over head beam. His feet are off the floor and so he swings slowly in the slight draft that wafts through the warehouse. Otherwise he is unharmed. He is gagged as well but makes no attempt to escape or to try to speak. Clearly Thalia procured his cooperation through glamour rather than force, and has left him that way. Excellent!

I walk up to him and examine him, and I feel the rage welling within me again. This time I let it out. He is nothing, nobody. The man, the putrid sack of blood that stole my beloved from me is nothing more than a common criminal, and a fairly stupid one at that.

Somehow this is even worse. If Sookie's murder had been the plot of some evil supernatural: a fairy with a grudge, a were pack, a plotting vampire, I think I could have handled it better. If it had been deliberate and purposeful I could have stood it, but this, this was unbearable. My love's death was nothing more than bad timing and unluckiness. If the waitress she was waiting for had arrived on time, if there had been a parking spot in front of the club, she would still be here with me.

Instead she parked in the badly lit lot accross the street from the back of the bar and became the random victim of a mugger with a knife. She never saw her death or knew that it was coming. If I know Sookie she had her shields up and never heard his mind. She was simply alive one moment and not the next, all so he could have the few dollars in her wallet and her credit card. No price can ever be attached to what this man has stollen from me. So now I will take from him the only thing he has of value to offer me: his life. But he will not be as lucky as Sookie, to live one moment and not the next, no he will see his death, know it intimately, he will beg it of me before we are done, and we will not be done for quite some time.

I come up infront of him so that we are face to face and I look deep into his eyes. I allow myself access to his mind and lift the glamour Thalia has placed on him. When he realizes what his new situation is I see terror in his eyes. He begins to beg and plead for his life around the gag in his mouth.

"Do you know what I am?" I ask him quietly. He stops begging and really looks at me for the first time. I smile at him with all the hatred in my dead heart and allow him to see my fangs. His only response is a frightened nod of his head.

"The woman you murdered three nights ago was my wife."

Those are the last words I speak to him. He was stronger than he looked. He lasted four nights. I couldn't believe my luck in that regard. After all once I started to play with him I got a little carried away. Truly excellet torture requires the torturer to remain at least somewhat objective. You have to know when to back off and when to lay in. You need to understand and remember the difference between that which is merely painful and that which can cause vital damage. My rage and my sorrow took me over and truly I don't even remember half of the things I did to him. But his mindless screaming told me that I was doing it right.

When it was finally over and he hung there as dead as my beloved, I looked around me and wondered what was next. I had my vengence but now there was nothing. Nothing but time, endless time without her stretching in front of me. The anger, and the pain welled up in me again but this time they had no outlet.

My last act was to set him on fire and the warehouse with him. I had used this place for interrogations since I became Sherriff 70 years ago, but now I knew that I could never come back here. Could never look at these walls again.

After making sure that the place would burn to the ground without interference from the local human authoritites I made my way to the only place that I would ever want to be again. The Bon Temps cemetary, where my love layed in what I hoped was peace.

The evening was fine and I made good time, landing in the cemetary only 20 minutes later. Picking up a shovel that had been layed against one of the trees by the cemetary workers, I made my way through the headstones knowing exactly the location of my destination. The year that Sookie and I had had together in peace and in love we had shared a great deal of our pasts with eachother, our sorrows, our joys. And we began to include eachother in our every day routines. When we stayed here in Bon Temps we would often clip roses from her Grandmother's garden and walk down through the cemetary to lay them over the graves of her Grandmother and her parents. She wanted me to know them she said. At the time it had warmed my heart that she was including me in every part of her life.

I arrived there now and looked at the freshly turned ground between the headstones of her Grandmother and her father, knowing without needing to be told that this was where she layed. I suppose a sane person wanting to be close to her would have walked past the cemetary to her little farmhouse and stayed there amongst her things and her sweet scent. I certainly could have. The light proof bedroom that we had shared many many nights was right there and her scent would be more strong there on the sheets and pillows than anywhere else. I had not stayed here in about a week but with my vampire senses I would have had no problem picking up my scent in the bed as well. If I were sane I would have gone there, layed in our bed and revelled in our combined scent for days until mine began to supercede hers. But I was not sane at that point, not even close. Why would I go to an empty home and lie in an empty bed when I could travel just a few more steps and lie with her?

I slid the shovel down into the earth and began to dig. With my heightened speed it didn't take more than four or five minutes to unearth her coffin. I wanted to be with her, but I did not want to get her dirty so I chose to lay on top of it instead of opening it. Dawn was still two hours away but there was no place I would rather have been so I quickly reburried us and lay down on top of her. What I felt was not happiness, I knew that I would never feel that again. But there was a kind of peace to be had there in the ground laying just above the woman who had made me love her with her beauty, her kindness, her fierceness, her sweet facinating mind, and her beautiful soul. As I waited for dawn to take me I felt the wood of her coffin beneath me and I whispered to her over and over again that I was here, that as I promised I would never leave her, and that I loved her even now. I would always love her no matter what happened.