Note: Sorry, it's been a while again this time, but y'all know how it is. Hope you enjoy this one and I'm looking very forward to hopefully many reviews!
Chapter Nine: The Awakening
The world vanished into white. For the second time in the past days, I must have lost all sense of space and time and I felt dizzy and disoriented when finally, after what might have been hours or seconds of feeling like floating in sheer, white nothingness, I felt hard ground under my legs and the weight of the unconscious Bill in my lap again. I opened my eyes and sucked in air in surprise, looking around me puzzled and shocked when what I saw turned out to be the sun flooded, comfy familiarity of my living room. It took me some seconds to wrap my head around that. Here I was sitting on the carpet of my own living room, when only moments ago (or were it moments ago?), I had knelt in the middle of the Iraqi desert having just witnessed the gods of a dead civilization bringing my dead boyfriend back to life. Geez. This En priest might have looked creepy and skinny, but he sure knew how to work some serious magic. After having realized that I had in fact been transported home by some kind of powerful but rather handy magic, all my attention focused again on Bill and my heart skipped a few beats, when I realized that he was still breathing, his still pale but now not superhumanly pale cheeks flushed with a hint of pink. After what we had been through, after what I had seen and felt these past days, all this felt strangely unreal.
Since Bill didn't give any sign that he would be waking up any time soon, I lay his head down carefully on the floor and slowly got up. My muscles were aching from the recent exertions and I staggered more than walked into the kitchen, pouring myself a large glass of cool water from a bottle out of the fridge and downed it in one go. I still wasn't feeling particularly hungry, though the tiring, exhausting effect of being without food for some time was getting more and more noticeable. I went back into the living room, watching my unconscious ex-vampire for a few moments then I grabbed the phone and punched in Sams number. He picked up after only a few rings.
"Sam, it's Sookie,,," he interrupted me before I could voice my request.
"Sookie, thank god. Where have you been all week? I was starting to get worried."
He sounded genuinely so, and though I had told him that I would have to spent some time away from work because of urgent vampire business, I had not told him where, why and for how long I was going away, so I understood his concern.
"It's kind of a long story. Would you come over to, uh, give me a hand with something? I'll tell you everything then." I knew it wasn't the nicest thing to do to call Sam of all men, but I really needed someone to help me get Bill upstairs and into bed. After all, I had no idea for how long he would be knocked out until he would come around eventually and I was in no physical state to heave him upstairs to one of the bedrooms alone. Besides, I was still groggy and shaky from the past experiences and I felt like I was not really able to handle the situation right. Was I supposed to call the ambulance or would Bill be fine on his own?
"I'll be right over."
Sam hung up and I relaxed a little. There was another reason why I had called Sam to come over, that I didn't quite want to admit to myself. Somehow I needed someone, someone real and living and familiar, someone who hadn't been part of this whole creepy, ancient ritual to confirm that this was the reality. That I was really, actually back in Bon Temps and that Bill, a living, breathing yet still unconscious version of him, was here with me, lying on the carpet of my living room with a heart beating steadily in his chest. Otherwise I was afraid I would wake every moment finding myself back in the desert, leaning against a rock, the dead body of Bill next to me in the dust with all hope and all happiness lost to me forever. I needed someone to confirm I wasn't dreaming.
While I waited for Sam, I drank another glass of water then sat on the floor next to Bill, stroking his soft, dark hair lightly. Hell, even if this was just a dream, I was going to enjoy the sound of his breath and the beating of his heart as long as I was able to. Soon enough, I heard the sound of his car in the driveway then sound of a door being closed and opened again and before I had even gotten up to open the door for him, he was already halfway in, catching me in tight embrace before inspecting me closely.
"You look…. Tired." He said politely.
I laughed. "Come on, you can say it. I look like crap. You would too if you'd spent the last few days in the gleaming sun of the Iraqi desert, had crawled into a huge pile of old clay, had taken part in some kind of ritual, had cried your eyes out and then dragged your dead boyfriend through the desert for a whole day." I laughed hysterically, realizing that I had actually experienced every little thing of what I had just listed. Sam looked at me like I was crazy and I could have sworn I saw his hand twitch a few inches into the direction of my head to check if I had a fever, but he stopped dead in his movements suddenly and stared into the room behind me. His mouth fell open.
"Is that…. Bill?"
So he did see him! That was a start.
"But it's in the middle of the afternoon!" he seemed completely confused but stepped past me and entered the living room slowly, staring at Bill on the floor as though he might burst into flames every second. "Won't he…?"
"Burn? No. I don't think so. Please, Sam, go over to him and check if he has breath and a heartbeat?" Again Sam looked at he as though he thought I might have gone completely nuts but he did as I asked him. His eyes widened in shock.
"Sookie, what is going on here?"
About an hour later Bill was lying in the bed in my sunlit room upstairs. Sam had helped me move him there and put him to bed once I had briefly informed him of the events of the past days. He had asked me to tell him the story again and the second time I had spared him none of the details, neither the horrible nor the wonderful ones. I had asked him to pinch me please, and it had hurt like hell. I was not dreaming. This was actually happening.
Later it had taken some convincing on my part to get Sam to leave Bill and me alone for the rest of the day, because he seemed to have his mind set on the fact that I needed someone to look after me. The truth was that. how base the fact that I had taken advantage of Sam when I had needed him earlier had been, I desperately wanted to be alone with my beautiful, living Bill now that I knew this was all real. So I ushered Sam out of the house as soon as he had examined Bill closer and told me he thought he should be fine without a doctor and went to the bathroom, taking a quick shower all the while listening alertly if maybe I heard him waking up. I brought up some water and two glasses and nibbled on a cookie half heartedly, before I dressed in casual clothes (making sure they were not altogether baggy and unalluring – I didn't want the first thing he saw in his new human life to be a huge turn off) and slipped under the covers with him, pressing my ear to his chest, listening to the steady beat and the low breath and enjoying the unfamiliar warmth radiating off his body. The smell of his body, though essentially unchanged, was earthier, warmer and livelier now and soon I feel asleep, still not completely able to grasp the extent of happiness that filled my heart with overflowing joy and relief. Just before I dozed off, the thought came to me that, even if there would be trouble with the mind reading or anything else Bill had feared, there was nothing in the world that I wasn't willing to work out now that I finally had him for all the days and nights to come.
I slept safely and soundly for the rest of the day and all night in Bills arms, until I woke, gently and slowly just as the dawn was appearing over the horizon as a barley visible shimmer of silver light. For a moment I thought about getting up and making breakfast because after the rest I was really starting to feel my empty stomach and surely Bill would have to eat at some point too, but just as I was getting out of bed it happened.
With a sharp intake of breath, Bill sat up in the bed very suddenly, clutching his chest and staring around in confused terror. I shrieked in surprise, when a violent cough shook his body and I was by his side, holding his head and whispering to him in the fracture of a second.
"Sookie!" he exclaimed, as soon as the coughing had subsided. His voice sounded strained and thin.
"Bill, it's alright. Just calm down. It's alright. We made it. You made it!" I couldn't think of anything else to say and I didn't need to as soon as realization dawned on Bills face. It twisted into an expression of pure, unbelieving joy as he pulled me into a close hug and buried his face in my neck. And it was just this moment, right then, when I felt hot tears on the bare skin of my neck that I realized how hard and frightening this whole thing must have been for him. What I had experienced must have been nothing compared to what he must have been trough. We would talk about it later, and he would tell me everything, but for now there was something more important I wished him to see.
"Bill." I said, and gently slipped out of his embrace, smiling happily as I watched him touch the clear, salty human tears on his cheeks and laugh out loud with a relieve I had never known in him. "Come on, I need you to see this."
I took his hand and pulled him from the bed, noticing how he moved a little stiffly, probably on account of the total lack of superhuman speed or strength. I pulled him until he followed me downstairs and out on the lawn in front of the house, where we stopped. Bill was breathing heavily.
"This…this is strange." He said. "I thought breathing would be difficult after so many years, but it's not. Just …unfamiliar." He pressed his hand to his chest and stared at me with joyous wonder in his bright eyes still as blue as the night we'd met.
"I had forgotten how fragile a human body is, though."
I laughed. "You will have to get used to it." The ways his face glowed with pleasure when I took his hand said "You're so warm." was the first time that the idea of reading his thoughts even came to my mind. I tried listening in on him and found… something strange. It wasn't the silent nothingness I had sensed before, but I found that I wasn't actually able to read his thoughts either. There was a warm, happy darkness in there, too thick for me to penetrate mentally and all I could pick up was the faint feeling that he was thinking about something that made him really happy.
As the sun rose over the treetops, I forgot about it. We just stood there in the golden morning light and I watched Bill, as his eyes followed the golden glimmer stretching over the sky and the earth with silent awe until he closed them and took in the feeling of the warmth on his skin. I felt him clutching my hand and we stood there for a long time, until the sun had fully risen in the sky and was shining down from a cloudless, clear summer sky, down on the man who hadn't seen the sun for a hundred and fifty years.
