A/N OK, so this is kind of short, but I liked where it ended (you may not agree) and I thought it gives you some of what happens next. Now I just need the Great Network Pixies in the Sky to let me post it. They're temperamental little sods.
Disclaimer: Not mine, but most of what I own is a huge pile of unfolded washing that I'm avoiding looking at, so I like this better.
SPOV
While Eric was out I'd finished scrubbing the blinds down and left them on the front lawn to dry. They looked pretty good, even if I said so myself, but I was in two minds about hanging them back up. On the one hand the big picture window looked so much better without anything blocking the view, on the other hand it remained to be seen how hot it ended up getting in that living room when the late afternoon sun hit that window full force. It could be very stifling.
So we'd do a test and we'd see I thought. And I went in search of someone to tell all my exciting plans to. Only Felicia wasn't interested.
"Uh-huh. Cool, Mum" she said, without really lifting her eyes from her phone. I left her sitting at the table in the kitchen and went in search of other people to talk to.
Sam and Tray were in the living room with the PlayStation. They weren't keen on looking at me either. "I thought Dad said that didn't work" I said to them.
"Works. S'bit crappy though. Graphics are kind of shit" Tray said. He wouldn't look at me either.
Sam glanced at me briefly. "Tray fixed it" he announced, like he expected me to tell Tray off or something.
"You did?" I asked.
"Yeah, just needed…" Tray stopped talking and concentrated on something he was shooting on the screen. "There was a loose wire. I fixed it."
"How?" I asked, and then I waited a bit to see if he'd answer, or if he'd just keep on playing. Eventually he said. "In the garage…there was one of those things for soldering stuff…" He stopped talking again, and kind of leaned to one side with his tongue between his teeth as he tried to get whatever he was watching on screen to do what he wanted it to. "Watch out!" Sam hissed at him.
"So, you were out there, with a soldering iron?" I asked Tray. After about thirty seconds I got a "Yeah. Just a little one, though" out of him, and I gave up. I supposed I should be glad that the chair was still the only thing around here that had been burned.
At a loss for what to do next I went back to the laundry and took the stuff out of the dryer and folded it. I wondered how Eric was getting on with all his appointments. It was a shitty thing to have to do. I remembered when my parents had died, I'd been lucky and Gran had still been around, but even so, I'd felt like I should be doing it myself. Jason was a bit lost really and couldn't face it, so it had just been me.
Well, me and Bill. Back in the days when he was my boyfriend and I was so grateful to have him around. That felt like another lifetime.
Pam came home, full of tales about how great life was next door and the amazing wardrobe Miriam's Barbies possessed. "Tomorrow I'm taking my Barbie over and we're going to make her a dress. I need some fabric though. Have we got any fabric?"
"Um…I'll see if there's something we can cut up for it" I said. I figured there had to be something hidden in one of these wardrobes.
"Really?" Pam asked. "Like, just old stuff?"
"Vintage Pam, it'll be vintage fabric." Or possibly a stained towel, who could tell around here? Pam looked a bit unsure but didn't press further.
At a loss for what else to do while I waited I looked into the room the boys were in, the one that used to be Eric's. It was a mess. Not only had they dragged their own stuff out of their suitcases, but they'd pulled almost everything out of the wardrobe and just left it, lying there.
Well, that'd give me something to do.
So I packed the treasures that had formerly been Eric's away as best as I could. It was weird looking at the board games and comics and guns and Transformers and thinking he'd played with all of this and then just left it behind. Like a clean sweep. After all, he'd arrived with just a suitcase and he hadn't brought all that much back when he'd sold his place in Shreveport. I guess he'd just walked out of here and never come back and didn't bother keeping boxes of old toys for the children he might one day have. Weird.
Well, weird if you were me and you spent a long time storing boxes of doll's clothes that might one day be used again. Maybe not weird if you were Eric.
Although he had brought a lot of bloody t-shirts with him. And he wouldn't get rid of those. There were still some t-shirts lurking in the recesses of that wardrobe. I pulled one out thinking I could use it for Pam's Barbie fashion line, but it was really old and manky.
It would make an awesome duster though. I put that to one side and went back to stacking up board games. I wondered who Eric had played these with if he didn't have siblings. I had Jason to do all that kind of stuff with. Sure, we annoyed each other but at the end of the day if there was nothing better to do you knew you always had that other person to play Monopoly or Battleship or Cluedo with. Eric just had…Eric. I wondered if there'd been any kids living next door when he was a kid? I must ask him I thought.
And when I'd done what I could with the wardrobe, and tidied the suitcases I drifted around looking at the stuff on the walls. The fairly prominent poster of Pamela Anderson was worrying. Eric always said that he hadn't named Pam after her, but I wasn't so sure. Maybe it wasn't a family name at all.
Still, at least I hadn't found any porn in the wardrobe. I wondered if I should check under the bed though. I looked a bit closer at the wall above the desk and realised there were some photos there. They were interesting. Especially the ones with the teenaged Eric with the long hair in them. I hoped Sam didn't look too closely; I didn't need him having a perfectly good excuse to avoid getting his hair cut. He wasn't keen on that concept at the best of times.
And then I noticed there were some certificates pinned up as well, the kind they give out at school to show you've done well. Might be interesting to see what Eric was good at, I thought.
Maths seemed to be the answer to that one. And some weird things they didn't teach at my high school in New Zealand. And then I noticed the names on the certificate. They were Eric's, well, I assumed they were. They all said Eric. They all said Eric Davis.
But he wasn't Eric Davis. He was Eric Northman. I'd seen his passport after all. That was the name on all the documents he'd ever signed; the Civil Union papers, the adoption papers, the applications for birth certificates. Of course he was Eric Northman.
Wasn't he?
And so my plan to tell Eric when he got back that we needed to put a lock on the garage door because I didn't care how small the soldering iron was, it could still do damage was eclipsed by my questions about the name.
Not that it mattered, of course.
But it might have been nice to know.
I went back into the kitchen and Eric arrived home with the groceries I'd asked him to get. He was usually pretty good about stuff I asked him to do.
I wondered how much he was going to like being questioned about his name though.
"Why do all your certificates have a different surname on them?" I asked, when he was half-in and half-out of the refrigerator. I tried to keep my voice as neutral as possible. I hoped I succeeded. Eric was always a bit funny about his past and I learned a while back that asking things directly sometimes didn't get you anywhere. But I was curious.
And maybe a little, tiny bit hurt.
"Um…" Eric said, shutting the fridge door. "Certificates?"
Yeah, that was a tactic the boys liked to use when they were trying to avoid questioning. Just play dumb at all costs.
"In your old bedroom. On the wall. The ones from school which have the name Eric Davis all over them." I figured that was nice and specific and it would be hard to play dumb.
It wasn't, however, that hard to give me the annoyed look with the narrowed eyes which suggested he really didn't want to answer. Tough. I'd had to 'fess up about the courgettes; he could face up to this.
I mean, it couldn't be that bad, could it?
Well, it was hardly like he'd killed someone and gone on the run. If he had, we wouldn't be back here staring at things with his old name on them.
So what could it be?
Eric gave up staring at me, and sighed. "Used to be my name" he said, shrugging, and he plonked himself down on one of the chairs at the table. Right. So we were on to limited information now. Say as little as possible and hope I'd give up.
Was it weird that I knew all his tricks and not that he'd once had a different name?
"So you changed it?" I asked, and then Sam came in and looked from Eric to me and back again. "I, uh…what can I eat?" he asked.
I shoved a bag of biscuits that Eric had bought into his hand and said "Take those." Sam looked at the bag and grinned and then ran off before I changed my mind. So he and Tray would be full of sugar and God knows what else, but I needed to talk to Eric.
Eric however thought that the conversation was over and looked up at me. "What?" he asked.
"You changed your name" I said again.
"Oh. Yeah. When I left home. It's not really a big deal. I mean, it's all legal…so, uh, you know. Well, it was ten years before I met you. Wasn't an issue by that time."
"Mmm" I said, considering. That answered a couple of questions, but not all of them. "So you just didn't like your old name?" I asked.
Eric stared at the wall. "I didn't like…I don't know" he said quietly. "I think I didn't like what it meant…" he stopped talking but was still staring at the wall. If I'd thought it was hard talking to Sam and Tray when there was a PlayStation in the room, then that was nothing compared to this.
Luckily I was nothing if not persistent when I had to be. "Because of your dad?" I asked, sitting down at the table with him so that maybe I'd be harder to ignore. I put my hand on his.
"No" he said, vehemently. Then he paused. "Yeah…I guess. I don't know. Shit. It was a long time ago, Sookie. Twenty years ago."
He had been Northman for over half his lifetime then. Like my mother who'd been a Stackhouse for longer than she was ever a Brigant, or Gran who'd had the Stackhouse name much longer than Hale. It was weird how that used to be the norm for women, grow up using one name, and then give it away as soon as you married.
But it wasn't the norm for me. I'd liked Stackhouse and I'd stuck with it, pleased of the connection it held to my family and the people I'd loved and lost. I even quite liked the fact it marked me out as Jason's sister. As annoying as he might be, he was still my family and I loved him.
I loved Eric too. I just didn't get this reinvention of himself. After all, hadn't he repeatedly said he was always him?
But then your name was only a part of that. Probably not a very important one at that. I'd thought that when the woman at immigration had been quizzing me over child support payments. I'd thought that the different names we travelled under didn't tell her anything about our situation. So what did Eric's name really matter?
"I just…it's just news, I guess" I said to Eric, still holding his hand while he still looked away from me.
"You're mad with me" Eric said, accusingly, in exactly the tone of voice I'd been trying to avoid.
"No, I'm just trying to understand…why it happened, and why, I guess, it was something I didn't know yet. Like you didn't know about the courgettes." That made him at least smile, even if that smile was directed to the wall. "So you just thought it would be better if you weren't a Davis?"
"I just…" Eric stopped, checked himself, took a deep breath and carried on. "They all knew" he said, and I realised this was maybe the story I was missing. "How could they not know my Dad? He was out there drinking with them all the fucking time. All that time and they just…I mean, there wasn't much they could do, I get that now. Where would I have gone? And how much worse would it have been? But they all knew. And I fucking hated it that they knew. And just…the pity. That was awful." He stopped and I didn't say anything, scared that if I just bombarded him with questions he'd clam up again.
"Dad loved that fucking car" he said in the end. "I was never allowed fucking near it. But I took it out, once. I was sixteen and I didn't have a licence yet, but it wasn't that hard to figure out how to drive. So Dad was out and I just got the keys and I took it. And it was the best fucking feeling ever, like I could go anywhere and no one would know. Until a cop pulled me over. The one who knew Dad. And you know what he said?" Eric gave a brief laugh, but there wasn't a lot of laughter in his voice. "He said that it was better it was me driving the Corvette because he'd seen Dad earlier in the evening and he was already fucking drunk. And he just sent me home and told me not to be so fucking stupid again. Fuck, I'd been shitting myself. But that was it. I got let off. Because of my Dad." Eric turned to look at me for the first time, and he looked upset. It was pretty clear he really hated this part of his past. "Sookie, I can't even get arrested in this town. And trust me, I've fucking tried."
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, I really didn't. It was all so…bizarre. That you'd let an unlicensed driver go just because his dad was a drunk. Did cops really do that?
"Well…don't test that theory at home" I said to Eric. "I don't think Andy works on that principle."
Eric laughed at that, although I got the feeling he was doing it to humour me a bit. "So why Northman?" I asked. "Why that name?"
"I just liked it. And when I didn't want to be…I don't know, defined by my dad and his choices anymore, what it did matter? Any name was as good as any other really" Eric said. "I just didn't want to be that guy anymore, Sookie. The one who…fuck. The one who kept pushing his luck to see how far he had to go before someone actually fucking noticed him."
"I can't believe they didn't notice you" I said. "You do kind of stand out."
Eric gave me a sad smile. "Not around here, Sookie. Around here I'm just fucking surplus to requirements." And then he stood up and that was the end of that conversation. "What's for dinner?" Eric asked.
"Um…well. You got the minced lamb I wanted?" I asked, and Eric nodded. "So I'm going to do this thing with lamb meatballs in a lemon and butter herb sauce, with some crunchy potatoes. There are an awful lot of potatoes around here."
"That sounds good" Eric said, nodding to himself.
"Yeah, I watched MasterChef while you were away and got all inspired" I said, as I started looking through the grocery bags for what I needed.
"I should go away more often then!" Eric said brightly, and then he kissed my head.
"No" I said, seriously. "You shouldn't." I turned to look at Eric. "This doesn't change anything" I said. "I wish you'd told me, and I'm a little hurt that I had to find out by chance, but it doesn't change anything. You're still you."
"I'm always me" Eric agreed, and then he left the kitchen.
I was pretty sure that in Eric's mind, it did change things. The set of his shoulders and the forced jollity told me that. And whether he thought it was for the better, or the worse, I had no way of knowing.
Thanks for reading!
