A/N: Thank you to those who took the time to read and leave me your thoughts. Much appreciated. This seems to be its natural conclusion. I'm going to bed now. :)
SOOKIE
He showed up at my back door four days after after I'd decided that it was for his own good if he never saw me again. (95 hours, twelve minutes, and three seconds.)
I had watched enough Disney movies, and read enough romance novels to have fantasized about a moment like this a time or two. I always pictured it as the most romantic moment of my life – tender, revealing, perfection – but I'd lived through enough over the past couple of years to realize that life went on after the credits rolled, after the last page was flipped.
Real people had to deal with what would happen after the music swelled and the lead male swept you into his arms.
Real people had real problems.
Granted, most of my 'real' problems involved characters that you would find in story books, but that was besides the point.
The point was, that while I'd toyed with a fantasy or two, I hadn't actually expected to see Eric, all six foot five Viking Vampire of him on my back porch in the middle of the night.
I was afraid that if I said anything, that he'd disappear as surely as cotton candy in the rain. I wasn't entirely sure that I wasn't daydreaming, or hadn't fallen asleep at the wheel on my way back from work and hadn't actually made it home as I had thought.
So I stepped aside mutely and let him in.
His shoulders slumped in relief, and it was then that I noticed that he wasn't all there. There were huge chunks missing from his right arm, and his left leg.
His long, golden hair was so stained with blood it was a shade of orange you couldn't find in nature. The damage hadn't spared any inch of his body that I could see, and the deep crimson splotches marring his jeans-and-tee said the same for the inches I couldn't.
"Oh Eric.... What happened?" My first thought had been that I'd somehow been responsible. I probably was, when it boiled down to it. "Come here, come here. Let me look at you."
He sat at the same chair that he had when I'd cleaned his feet after I'd found him running half naked from the witch's curse. I filled the same pan I had then with warm water now, and set it on my kitchen table. He moved to pull his T-shirt off himself, but flinched when his arms rose to lift over his head. I kind of shimmied it up his back and then tugged it over his head without him having to take his arms out of it, so it was awkward, but it worked.
When I had him clothing free from the waist up, I began dabbing a damp cloth against what looked like an animal bite halfway down his torso. Though I knew he would heal without my nursing, I dabbed until the wounds were free of whatever dirt my human eyes could pick up.
It went on like that, me carefully cleaning the jagged tears in his flesh, him watching me wordlessly.
At some point, what with him half bitten and fully torn up, my grand idea of saving him from Sookie shaped trouble by walking away began to look pretty ridiculous.
I probably could have declared my love for him and demanded that he fight every shifter in Bon Temps, all the pot bellied men of The Fellowship, and the King of Nevada and he would have come out looking better than he did now.
"Oh, Eric, tell me you didn't!" I squeaked, because it dawned on me then. No, he hadn't fought all three. But he had fought.
And I was betting it was Felipe.
He wouldn't have been this damaged if he'd taken on The Fellowship. At this time of night, he would have slaughtered them in their sleep.
And he hadn't any immediate need to talk to the two-natured, let along with his fists. He wouldn't have broken a sweat if he had.
I had the sinking feeling you get when your hat flies off your head in a canoe and you're too far away to catch it in time – all you can do is watch it drown.I wasn't sure how he'd come out of it alive, or what he had to have done to do it, but I was sure that he had done it.
He didn't answer me. I'm not sure he could; he was as pale as I'd ever seen him, and his jaw hung awkwardly. But he did hold out his hand to me, palm up.
We didn't have a dramatic drag down, neither of us threw a vase.
He'd gone up against Felipe de Castro – alone – and I should be rip roaring mad at him for doing it.
But I wasn't.
He'd nearly gotten himself killed. For me.
We didn't weep, clinging to each other as we both declared our undying love for each other; we didn't even speak.
He'd gone after Felipe, he looked a million times worse for the wear, but he was alive, and that had to mean he'd won, and he was holding out his hand to me, a question in the gesture.
He could have gone gallivanting through my doorway, proclaiming that he'd slain the beast for me and I was now his, free and clear. I would have expected as much from Eric not that long ago.
But he wasn't claiming. He was asking. His hand between us, shaking from exhaustion from the battle he'd waged to protect me, and he was asking for my involvement with him.
He knew me well enough to know that I would resent being told what to do, resent being claimed without my permission. Resent having my independence taken from me.
And even though he could read my emotions as if they were his own, and would have known why I'd walked away from him when I had – that 'we' was rife with danger and heavy with the possibility of both our deaths – when he'd eliminated that danger, done away with that threat, he was still asking.
He knew me, he understood me; it's what had attracted me to him in the first place.
It's why I'd fallen ass over tea kettle.
It's why I loved him.
I loved him, and I'd thought the price of that love was plucking him from my life, so that it wouldn't cost us both ours.
But what if I didn't love him? What if I had succeeded in pulling him from me by his roots?
What would the cost of that be?
Everything.
I knew without having to having to work myself up to it over months and months and months, everything.
So I stepped closer to him, settled myself in his lap, and nudged my hair off my neck.
As his fangs drew my blood, entwining his life with mine, I threaded our fingers, linking my life to his.
We'd figure out everything else.
Because with him, there would be everything.
FIN
