Hello everyone! I'd like to thank those five who reviewed the first chapter of The Great Day That Dawns, it means more to me than you think! That being said, I would very much appreciate anyone's-if not everyone's reviews! Good or bad, constructive or commentary...I want them all! There's nothing I enjoy more than everyone's reception to my writing, it encourages me to continue doing so!
In response to those who commented, your main concerns seemed to concern Georgina being the "shadow" of Sookie, or something of that nature, and I can see exactly where you're coming from. In fact, that was a concern of mine that I faced while planning this story! One of my main goals is to build Georgina as her own person, but that doesn't mean she won't falter and face the challenges in becoming so. As you may have noticed in Chapter One and you will definitely notice in this chapter, Georgina is going to face the challenge of becoming her own person or becoming someone's shadow-and not just Sookie's shadow, anyone's! Georgina is a dynamic character, which means she is going to change. An important aspect of creating realistic characters is giving them real-life weakness, and I know for sure that people have trouble with not being able to establish themselves as their own person-me being one of those people!
Sorry to go on such a terribly long tangent, but I want respond to everyone's questions and concerns! So far, I've been incredibly pleased with the feedback and quantity of so for this story, so keep it coming! Enjoy!
Tara looked at me with dark eyes like the soil and lips fluttering like the tremulous branches of trees in a thunderstorm. She must have known, if not she'd been curled up in my arms by now.
My stomach swirled like boiling soup and I wanted to escape the looming scent of gunfire more than anything I'd ever wanted. No one seemed to smell it liked I did, but for some reason the particles of gun powder had caught in my nostrils and no one else's.
As Arlene gushed about her pride in the local police force to Andy Bellefleur, I tore my waist apron off and jogged outside.
"Georgina!" I heard Sam yell from behind me. I knotted my fingernails in the humid, peachy frizz of my hair and looked behind me. I saw the heart, beating in his dark hands. I ran.
In high school I ran track, and I was still proud of the pace my legs could carry me at. The air cleared of the stagnant sound of Andy's gunshot the further I ran away from Merlotte's, so I kept on running until the street in front of me turned in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps I could recognize my place in Bon Temps if my head was somewhere else, but at that moment it was locked in one place—one image. emEggs carried the dripping heart of Daphne in his hand as it pumped a final spurt of blood; his eyes looked like the excess pool of black ink fountain pens coughed up when shaken. He was smiling.
I ran faster, letting instinct drive. Eventually I wound up home, and with hacking, sticky breaths I threw myself up the stairs of the front porch and through the open screen door.
"Sook!" I shouted, hearing my panting voice sound throughout the house to no response.
My own body seemed to control my ascension up the stairs to the bathroom and into the shower. I went in with neat mascara-done eyes and came out with charcoal smears down my freckled cheeks. My phone began to sing its robotic marimba tone; I ignored it until it began ringing again and I couldn't ignore the urgency in its xylophonic hiccups.
"Hello?"
"It's me, Gee. He's gone," Sookie's voice pled unusually over the speaker.
"Huh?"
"Bill and I were out to dinner and he proposed and I went to the bathroom to gather my stupid head and then when I returned I couldn't find 'im."
I forced a sigh down my throat at the sound of his proposal. Some antediluvian voice I kept bundled in layers far from my mouth told me he was nothing but bad news for her. It warned me of the inescapable possession he had on her heart and it told me to be bugged Bill's unpreventable consumption of her soul. She was silly when she was with him—foolish. Her head ran away from her and her heart made the big decisions.
"You think he got cold feet?" I asked and she scoffed.
As if it's so unimaginable that a man get cold feet on her.
I knew they loved each other, but there was something off. It wasn't always this way, it all started when I'd first had dinner with them a long time ago—or at least it felt as so. Well, Sookie had dinner. Bill just sat there and smiled and called me "Miss Stackhouse", and occasionally the blue seas of his eyes swam with hungry and uncanny creatures. I cleaned the dishes with him and his arm was pushed against mine in some bubbly, soaking, awkward wash of a dish and I'd seen some redheaded lady with two excessively-protruding fangs and finger curls. She handed a file to me in the reflection—to Bill, but his eyes were still trained on the sloshing water in the sink beneath him. In front of me, on the paper, I saw a family tree—circled at the bottom was the labeled box of Sookie Stackhouse.
"Georgina?" Bill asked, and I heard it in the farthest plane of my hearing, but it wasn't enough to tear me from what I saw before me.
"Georgina?" He asked again. I looked down at the papers the sharpened-fingernail hand held in front of me through the dusty window and running water of the faucet, but the papers stayed perfectly intact and unimpaired.
The red river of a fine-point pen wrapped around Sookie's pink box. Jason's blue box was next to hers and her parents above, but there weren't any more circles. And upon looking closer, "G. Stackhouse" was written beneath Jason and Sookie's boxes with a messy question mark next to it.
"Are you okay, Georgina?"
I blinked like my eyes had never known water and the queenly vampire before me dissolved into the air like cotton candy on my tongue.
"Oh," I stuttered, shaking my head. "Darn, Bill, I sure am sorry. I get caught up in my own head a whole lot, you've got to forgive me. I ain't been gettin' a lot of sleep lately with work and I just don't got lots of time to think nowadays… so I just fall out of it like that for a little sometimes. I'm real sorry if I scared you there," I laughed girlishly, forcing a cheeky country blush into my paled cheeks.
Bill laughed heartily, but there was an unusual silver layer of doubt beneath it, as thin as gossamer and as undetectable as a spider web in a forest. "Well it's okay Georgina, we all get like that sometimes," he said. "Oh, sorry, is 'Georgina' okay?"
"Of course, sugar!" I laughed, perhaps pushing it too far.
"Maybe you should ask for new hours?" Bill suggested.
"I would but Sam's got so much stress lately, I wouldn't want'a cause too much trouble. But, I'm doin' fine. I appreciate your concern," I smiled, looking back to the dishes and feeling my heart high in my throat.
Too suspicious. To this day, I hadn't learned any more of the redheaded vampire.
"Want me to come meet you? Where are you?" I asked.
The first thing Sookie did after she flung her quivering arms around me was force her way back into my car and insist we go to Fangtasia. She swore Bill's disappearance was by Eric's design and that she was "gonna roast him in the sun 'til he begged for mercy".
Sookie's inexorable contempt for Eric got on my nerves more often than not. Eric's ego was as big as a hot air balloon and he was as sneakily manipulative as a snake, but she didn't seem to look at these characteristics objectively. Eric was over a millennium old; he'd lived through everything we learned about in history class like it was nothing and he had to keep all those expired years to himself. Of course he was haughty—what was our finite knowledge to his imponderable wisdom? And yet Sookie treated his arrogance like that of a high school quarterback who was too good-looking for his own good. I never tried to breach Eric's sagacity like Sookie, I merely shared with him the small quantity of life experience I discovered myself or that which had been handed down to me from Gran or gained from observation of others' mistakes.
And she had the audacity to critique his insensitivity? Eric spent hundreds of years alone, watching human lives fade and bloom again around him like annual flowers. He was the perennial sage of the universal gardens. She compared Bill's "goodness" to Eric's, as though they were comparable. Bill was still raking his losses into organized crop lines after a hundred years—trying to make himself feel okay again, but Eric's fields were arid after so many years of his trying. Little did Eric know I had a glut of sympathy for him, whereas Sookie was too busy comparing Bill's façade to Eric's raw and unconcealed person to see the tragic beauty of Eric.
Still Eric was fascinated by Sookie's mystical abilities; while little did he know, whenever his cold skin brushed against mine the North Sea sang its pitiful anthem in my ears and filled my nose with its primordial salt. He was so cold and yet I felt fire in me that hailed from the wan abysm of the sea whenever he neared.
Sookie drove. Her chattering waxed beside me about the situation until her eyes began to tear and she clamped shut her mouth, insisting the topic was too sensitive to dwell on and that she preferred silence to her own woeful blathering.
I read one of Gran's old books on the art of Botticelli as we drove to Shreveport. I could feel her pruned fingers on the scratchy pages and the warm heat of interest rising in her chest.
When we pulled up in front of Fangtasia, there was a long and dark-colored line streaming out of the bar's front doors. Sookie and I both received several irate, passing confrontations from those who waited in the line while we ran passed it—with Sookie dressed in a feminine lavender dress and myself still in my Merlotte's uniform, which I'd put back on after showering for a reason unknown to me. When we reached the front door of quilted leather and with vermillion lights shining through the opening, we ran into Pam. She wore her hair braided back tightly and an intricate dress composed of small metal rings and midnight blue satin. Hovering at least three inches above my own rather tall height, she looked like a Gothic Amazonian dominatrix, and she was still beautiful as always.
"Never seen blue-collar on you, Georgina. I like," she smiled, the plump curve of her bottom lip lighting up against the light. I looked down at the small pair of shorts Sam had me wear and the skin-tight white top I had—through which one could see the lace trim of my bra. I didn't approve of the uniform, but it wasn't my place to say anything.
"Where's Bill?" Sookie asked loudly, bringing Pam's attention to her.
"No idea," Pam answered monotonously.
"Then where's Eric?" Sookie continued.
"He's a bit indisposed at the moment," Pam smiled esoterically, knowing something naughty that we did not.
"Indisposed doing what?" Sookie asked, pushing through the bar's lithe bodyguard. Pam merely sighed and rolled her eyes, following behind slowly. I nervously scanned the flowing crowds of mavericks. Their frenetic energies merged together into one tempestuous storm that swallowed me up with a big gulp. I suddenly felt vulnerable; the thousands of things to sense that surrounded me gave me nothing to focus on. The only thing I could feel was the heat of various colored lights against my skin and the thumping floor beneath my feet. Pam took us to a small metal door in the wall and opened it like a hotel staff leading us to our designated rooms. I peered over Sookie's shoulder and saw an unwelcoming staircase that faded into obsidian depths—those of which were only softly brought to life by cautious fluorescent lighting.
"Don't worry Gee, this isn't my first time descending into Eric's dungeon," she sighed and began making her way down the stairs with myself and Pam closely behind.
I heard grunting and the warbling shaking of shackles as I proceeded further down the stairs, and I saw the sounds' source when I made it to the landing where the staircase turned to the left and emptied into the basement's floor. Immediately, as the pathetic and virginal girl I was, I waited until Pam passed me by and pressed myself against the darkness of the wall so Eric would hopefully not see me. Despite my previous mentions of a physical draw to Eric, that didn't dismiss the overarching nervousness that vibrated within my every breath while in the presence of a man my eyes enjoyed.
"Sookie, stop. No. Come back," Pam called after Sookie pathetically, clearly not putting a lot of effort into reigning her in.
"Holy S," Sookie breathed, watching Eric disappear into a cloud of movement against a sighing, sweaty woman whose limbs were spread and stretched through the use of chains.
Eric immediately stopped at the sound of her comment. "Why hello," he didn't turn around but the lopsided smirk on his face was all too present. "See anything you like?"
"I do," Pam answered dutifully, her voice as long and soft and heavy as silk.
"I take it Sookie couldn't be stopped?" Eric asked, turning around and revealing himself to all three of us. I averted my eyes and focused on the broad expanse of gloomy cement walls that drove far back to corners that couldn't be seen in the darkness. "Georgina is a little more polite, I don't imagine she'd force her way into rooms she didn't have permission to access."
"What can I say? Sookie overpowered me," Pam said, sighing.
"Off you go, Pam," Eric ordered casually, as a father does his daughter.
"This," Sookie began. "Is between Eric and I," she said, giving a side-eyed glance towards me.
I scoffed. She was too much sometimes; according to Sookie, I was at her beck and call. Shamefully, however, and without a fight, I turned towards the exit of the basement with the assistance of Pam's manicured claw beneath my collar that dragged me up the stairs.
"Feeling excluded?" Pam feigned a sympathetic frown after she slammed shut the door behind me.
I shrugged as if it didn't matter to me and looked at the dirty floor, feeling my eyes trying to focus on something besides the smug look on Pam's face.
"Come on, sweetums," she sighed, taking me by the elbow and leading me into the office at the back of her and Eric's bar. On the sides of the room were daunting stacks of liquors and blood—Tito's Vodka side-by-side with True Blood. There was a desk in the center of the room with a swirling office chair behind it; Pam sat in it and looked at me with hard eyes, she gestured with a lackadaisical finger that I sit down in the chair across from her on the other side of the desk.
"Now, I'm just at a complete loss," she hummed. "Why is everyone so smitten with Sookie when you're standing right beside her?"
"Huh?"
She inhaled longingly through her straight nose, her eyes fluttering shut. When they opened, the swirling pools of her stinging eyes dotted with the lights of fireflies. "And you smell just as good."
"Isn't Sookie special?" I asked, feigning diffidence—or perhaps merely enhancing it to an excessive level.
Pam groaned—the lights in her eyes going out. "Apparently. But if you ask me, she's just a snobby little scourge who can't keep her mystical snatch out of the sights of men for more than a minute. And really—congratulations, she can read minds, but we only know that because she doesn't shut her trap about it. I mean, who knows what everyone else has up their sleeves?" She rambled angrily until her teeth bit down hards on the final consonants of her last sentence. "Like…you."
"Me?" I blinked, hard. One of my hands accidentally slipped to the base of the chair so my hand was pressed against the clammy leather.
"Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men; preserve me from violent men, who plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually. They make their tongue sharp as a serpent's—" my ears begin to ring with an unfamiliar voice. The voice of someone else who was not here in the room but was once.
"That doesn't work here," Pam said plainly, but the mouth of the Pam before me did not move; it echoes in a dimension I could not see.
"And under their lips is the venom of asps. Guard me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from violent men," the unknown voice still carried.
"Come on Pam, there's nothing more amusing than the last-minute bind humankind makes to their silly God out of sheer and unworthy desperation. Watch," Eric's voice commanded lightheartedly, and yet he was not in the room.
"Georgina?" Pam asked, her mouth moving this time. This existed in the now.
"—who have planned to trip up my feet. The arrogant have hidden a trap for me—"
"Yes?" My voice was weak and my eyes were shallow, as if they'd rather see into another dimension than the one I sat on.
"and with cords they have spread a net; beside the way they have set snares for me. Amen."
"What's going on?" Pam asked, standing.
I sat in silence, waiting to see if the voices would leave my head as I pulled my hand from the sticky cushion of the chair. I breathed and waited. Nothing.
"Sorry, I just felt sick there for a moment," I smiled, letting the tan freckles of my crinkle on the thin bridge of my nose and the crookedness of my bottom teeth show.
She walked steadily, her face contorting with an interest I so rarely saw in her—especially those of which dealing with humankind. The click and clunk of her heels against the ground were like the last few seconds of a timer sounding. Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed.
"I really am fine, Pam," I reassured, and her steps slowed.
"Come here," she immediately followed the end of my statement, turning on her shoes and dragging me up from the chair with a harsh tug of my wrist.
Her hand pushed open the soft insides of a woman's thighs—perhaps the woman from downstairs, with whom Eric was so busy. I clenched shut my eyes with expected naiveté as Pam's glittering mouth kissed up the skin and met the pink blossom between the two splitting tree branches.
Pam pointed to what she wanted to show me and the lovers' rendezvous disappeared before my eyes.
"These flowers, the ones you gave Eric, he kept them," she said, bringing both of our attentions to the small, glass vase in which a bundle of lily of the valley slept. The immaculacy of their whiteness was tainted by age as the drooped into an eggshell yellow.
"And?" I asked, looking back up to her.
"I've never seen Eric value something so…temporary," she tried to explain, but her voice cluttered and bruised like it was falling down flights of stairs. She couldn't explain it; for once, she couldn't understand.
I kept a smile concealed and let it beam its sunshine onto my tongue and throat. There was something precious about seeing a hundred year-old woman have trouble comprehending something a twenty-two year-old had introduced without thought.
"Maybe he thought they were pretty," I suggested carelessly, knowing that was not the true reason for Eric's affections for the flower. I wasn't sure of them, in fact, but I could imagine it had something to do with the miraculous appreciation I accidentally enlightened him with.
"You're not stupid, Georgina. Don't act like you are."
"Well, what do you want me to tell you?"
Pam's disposition shifted from bewilderment to ferocity. She moved at exquisite speed as she trapped me against the desk, pushing my torso backwards and the lids of my eyes wide open. Her face was so close I could notice the fact that her mouth didn't open and close slightly like that of a living, breathing human. So suddenly—at the snap of a finger—Pam was as dead as a doornail.
One of her slender hands trapped my neck and the other clenched the angular underside of my jaw so hard I could feel myself bruising.
"What did you say to him?" She forced, her voice sounding slightly ragged.
"Nothing!" I coughed. "Is this really all over a damned flower?!"
Her grip loosened but the white knives hiding in her gums descended with a devastating click. "You know I like you more than I like Sookie, but that doesn't mean I like you more than I like Eric," she took her hand from my neck and looked down at me. "And I know that flowers may seem like nothing to you, but this is weakness. And in time's like these, we can't have a powerful man like Eric stepping over flowers for pretty girls he wants to fuck," she said through her teeth, ripping the flowers out of the vase on Eric's desk. She held them between our faces and with a horrendous grip, forcing the remaining water in the flowers' stems to seek solace through the cut-up ends of the stems.
The return of happiness dies.
I suddenly felt vulnerable—as helpless as the flowers that slowly slipped away from any chance of life. The least they deserved was a peaceful death; Eric deserved happiness, but if anyone prevented him from achieving it, the dream should at least slip away slowly and peacefully. I didn't want to watch the flowers die before me, I wanted them to live on forever as Eric deserved eternal happiness. I gave the flowers to him to grant him happiness once again, and yet it slipped out my grasp and into Pam's.
The bulbous ends of the dainty flowers began to swell and ripen once again; they turned to pellets of snow at the ends of verdant vines of crocodile green. Pam's perched and perfected eyebrows lowered in mysticism; her eyes trained on the flowers as life flowed back into them. Her grip loosened and her mouth unlatched, slipping ajar. I opened my palms to the flowers as they slipped from her hand and I let them lay in mine.
The door opened loudly and Eric entered, wearing pants and a striped button-up shirt that he found somewhere between the basement and his office. He looked at us both, his eyes flying from Pam to me, and his eyebrows furrowed at the bright flowers in my hands and the confounded look on Pam's face.
"Hello again," he said. Sookie sneaked in behind him in her silly purple dress and looked at me expectantly, as if I were to give her something and I was already late on it.
Pam shook her head, shaking away the loss of explanation, and she looked at me hard. I didn't know what to say or do, all I knew was that a bundle of flowers meant for Eric were planted in my hands and they needed to be returned to their vase. I scurried away from Pam and slid the flowers back into their rightful place.
"Georgina," Eric said. "What are you doing with the flowers? Did you bring me more?" He asked, seeing the revived flowers as a new batch rather than what they really were.
"Oh, yes, I did," I said quietly. "Well, Sookie and I have to go now."
"Would you not care for a drink? Hand me back some of the ten grand I owe you?" Eric asked, looking at me. I looked to Sookie for an answer, as I always do, and she huffed.
"We're going. Eric, do what you said you would. Find him," Sookie urged.
As I made my way out of the room, I touched my fingertips to Pam's hand that pressed against the table—gripped it as though it were her final semblance of sanity.
There were tens of hundreds tied up against tree trunks, crucifixes, tall erections of splintered wood. Their skin glittered against the light of the afternoon like a pearl beneath the light, but the constant wailing suggested such a thing was not as beautiful as it looked. Opalescent water streamed from their lurid, sea-colored eyes and their bright hair of red and gold and penny brown faded into the grays of garments washed too many times. From the blood and tears streaming from their bodies that was not bucketed sprang flowers of mournful marigold to wistful wisteria. They were the fountain of youth.
I do not know from where I uncovered this vision nor how I translated it to the mind of Pam, but as Sookie dragged me away from Eric's office, Pam looked as though she would never again speak of what she saw.