April: Part One

Tear off the mask, your face is glorious – Rumi

The fourth time Eric arrived on the front steps of Sorcha's sprawling house he was looking forward to their conversation.

It had been good to talk through everything that happened between him and Sookie; he felt lighter and easier with his decision to draw a line under that chapter of his existence.

Sorcha had been right to suggest these meetings. After their last talk, his growing connection with her couldn't be ignored and he didn't plan to resist his impulse to trust her any longer. She made an interesting ally. He was contemplating bringing her into his full confidence that very evening, getting her input on his strategies and plans within the vampire hierarchy. He was missing Karin's ear. Pam was not quite impartial enough yet and, being older, Sorcha had a deeper understanding of supernatural politics than his surviving child.

For the first time Sorcha didn't appear immediately. He rang the brass bell that hung from a bracket by the door and waited. A few moments later the heavy door swung open.

Sorcha's eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her face was paler than ever and her hair was uncombed. She wore soft grey sweat pants, a baggy charcoal sweater and her feet were bare.

Eric took a quick step forwards, then stopped himself, gruffly demanding, "What has happened?"

Sorcha smiled faintly to herself and said softly, "Come in, Eric," stepping back so he could enter.

Eric waited while she shut and bolted the door, only frowning once her back was turned to lead him into the house. Something was definitely wrong.

In the dark hothouse the candles were lit already, their warm yellow light pooling over the couches comfortingly. Refreshments waited on the low table, but not quite as before. Next to the usual carafe of dark blood, a crystal decanter of amber liquid glinted in the light. When Eric took in the half-finished glass and placed the distinctive smell of brandy, he stopped, his frown deepening.

Sorcha took a seat in her usual spot and gestured for him to sit next to her. He did, kicking off his shoes first. He took the other end of the couch and turned towards her, sitting sideways with one leg drawn up. His eyes glittered in the candlelight as he scanned her serious face.

She reached her hands out wordlessly, palm up between them. He hesitated, and then answered her unspoken request, resting his large hands gently on hers, palm down. She curled her fingers around them, and he reciprocated, gripping her hands loosely.

She began to run her thumbs over his cool knuckles, her clear green eyes never leaving his.

"What is wrong?" he asked quietly.

"I came to a decision today. Tonight, if you wish to hear it, I will tell you my history with the fae, that part that is the root of the bad blood between me and my mother's race." She paused, but didn't stop the slow rhythmic sweep of her thumbs. "I have never told another the whole of it. Not a lover, not a friend. Not even my father."

Eric was still, a cold and beautiful statue. He well remembered the exchange she proposed the first time he asked about her relationship with the fae. He felt the warmth of her hands and drowned in the living green of her eyes, giving himself long seconds to think.

He squeezed her hands gently and began to move his thumbs too, returning her gesture of comfort.

"Then tonight I will tell you my history with my Maker." He paused. "I have never spoken the whole of it to another. Not to Karin or Pam ... not to Sookie."

"Very well." She accepted his offer, glancing towards the table. "A drink first? A little Dutch courage."

"I have never found the Dutch lacking in that area." He squeezed her hands briefly before he let go to pick up the carafe of blood. He poured a full goblet and raised it to his nose as she topped up her brandy.

"Shapeshifter?" he asked.

"Bear. I thought you might appreciate something a little stronger."

He nodded, and they drank in silence. She bared her teeth as the brandy warmed her throat. He closed his eyes, savouring the extra kick of the were blood.

Once their drinks were finished, Sorcha curled into a comfortable position on the couch and prepared herself. Eric turned to sit sideways again so he could face her.

His face clear and his voice firm he said, "I am elder. I will go first." She opened her mouth, and he silenced her with a finger on her lips. "It is my turn. You spoke first last we met."

After a second, she acquiesced with a nod, taking his hand from her face. Keeping it clasped in hers, she brought it to rest on her lap.

He began with a drunken walk on a moonlit night, and a stranger lying injured by the side of the road.

Sorcha held his hand while he spoke, riding his emotions with him as he gave free reign to them. He knew she was using her empathy to absorb them at the most difficult parts, cushioning him, but he allowed it. Quite frankly he was grateful, doubting his ability to get through the tale alone. As it was, he was relieved each time he had to pause for her questions or for her to regain her composure.

She was grim while he talked of those first few nights: the awful hunger, the desperation to get away, the terrible realisation that he lost everything and had become other, draugar. Walker after death. He spoke unemotionally of his Maker's expectations. Obedience. Subservience. Sex. Of how he fought to get away at first and Ocella let him think he could, merely overwhelming him with his superior strength time and again until Eric realised he couldn't win and submitted.

Eric outline those early years in general terms. Sorcha had expected the constant travelling, the hiding in the shadows. It was not so dissimilar to her experience as a supernatural in the mundane human world. Never revealing what she was, moving on to escape discovery if she couldn't dazzle humans to forget their suspicions with her fae glamour.

Then Eric paused, struggling for how to begin, and she knew he was coming to the heart of it, the bloody toxic heart.

He chose to tell her what he knew of Ocella's origins first. To delay the pain, to rationalise his Maker's actions or to give her some warning, she wasn't sure which.

The Empire was a harsh mistress, but Ocella was a soldier of Rome, a favoured citizen. That privileged position gave Ocella power over those who weren't citizens. Their lives were cheap. He had kept slaves, used them as he wished, as Romans did. Eric explained that his Maker's background combined with his transformation into a being so much faster and more powerful than a mere human had given Ocella tremendous sense of superiority and deep contempt for lesser beings.

Then he began.

She had heard enough of the Roman to anticipate brutality, but some of the terrible things he compelled Eric to do in those early years exceeded her expectations. She was revolted by the depravity of his commands as he tried to remould Eric in his image, to beat Eric into accepting that he was vampire, a predator at the top of the food chain able to do whatever he wanted to the human scum at the bottom ...

She listened with growing fury as Eric described a string of horrors, horrors that went against his very nature: killing for sport, rape, treachery. His face betrayed only a ripple of his feelings, but she felt them clear and true, the echoes of his remembered shame and desperation, loathing and longing to escape.

After a particularly gruesome bloodbath involving a whole family, from aged grandfather to new born babe, she shook with suppressed rage and Eric had to stop while she cursed Ocella's name in as many languages as she knew.

It took a while.

Having got the worst over, Eric turned to lighter memories of those early years, describing how he had revelled in his speed and strength, and relished his ability to fly and fight without tiring. She was relieved to feel his joy and pride. He spoke fondly of learning to defend himself under Ocella's instruction, how it prepared him for striking out on his own.

Sorcha stopped him again then, astonished by what he felt and asking hotly why he held any affection for the vampire who'd taken him away from his family, his people.

Eric's eyes were far away. "Ocella was far from stupid. He did not wish me broken and destroyed; only bent to his will sufficiently to make me loyal. He liked," here he smiled wryly, "spirited companions. For that, he had to allow me some encouragement, something I could gain satisfaction from. He knew my people's philosophy, my love of battle, and he used those to his advantage, playing on my strong desire to survive. He taught me to use my nature, my speed, any weapon to hand to win a fight. And I am grateful: those lessons saved my ass many times.

"Of course," he added slowly, "you have to also understand that my feelings for Ocella were … confused by his blood in me. When I was freshly turned and we exchanged blood often, I found myself feeling affection towards him and did not question it. Some of our time together was … pleasant. I was drawn to him." He pause before he add in a harder voice, "He kept me in ignorance of the connection between us for twenty years, telling me only a little of what it could do."

Rory stiffened and her hand tightened on his.

Eric spoke evenly. "I see you understand."

"Oh yes." Her eyes flashed angrily. "I understand being deceived, having your feelings twisted against you for someone else's benefit only too well."

Eric filed that way and continued. "Once Ocella allowed me to interact with others of our kind, I eventually pieced together why I felt affection and lust around him. I could not distinguish where my feelings ended and his began, nor could I resist them."

"That is why it distresses you – that you may have influenced Sookie with your blood."

"Yes. It is … not good to be influenced like that."

"No, it's not," she agreed.

"Eventually, once Ocella stopped giving me blood so often, my emotions were my own again. To survive, I learnt to disguise and hide my deepest feelings as they began to resurface. I thought I had accepted my situation, his power over me, but as soon as I realised it wasn't quite complete I resisted any way I could, however slight." He sighed. "Our relationship and my feelings for him were complex. It is only since his final death that I can really be sure of them."

She frowned. "But weren't you free of him once you were apart? You said he encouraged you to strike out on your own, to become independent of him."

"Yes, he did. But I soon learnt that didn't mean Ocella would leave me alone."

Eric went on to relate various occasions when his Maker turned up out of the blue to intrude on his so-called independence.

They were together for nearly a century after Eric's turning. Then Ocella took a lover he planned to turn and sent Eric away. Eric had been chaffing under Ocella's yoke by then and could hardly believe his luck, but barely a year later Ocella strolled into the house Eric had set himself up in, casually ordering Eric to kill the woman he was with. Sorcha felt Eric's shock and hopelessness at the memory, and his fear when he found out that Ocella had casually snuffed out his new child for some minor disobedience.

That pattern was repeated for the next sixty years, Ocella giving him longer on his own each time. Eric realised he was being tested, and that any time he got too complacent – that was the word he used, but Sorcha mentally corrected it to too happy and called Ocella a son of a bitch and worse in her head – that was when his Maker turned up.

Then Eric got a good thirty years to himself, but Ocella called him back because he was injured. Eric stayed with him in Italy for a decade and by the time Nadia showed up there, he was desperate to taste freedom again. Ocella had suggested that if Eric couldn't hold his own against older vampires he needed to stay under his Maker's protection, and Ocella's suggestions had a way of becoming reality. That was why Eric had been determined to defeat Nadia in combat, giving her the thorough trouncing that began her vendetta against him.

Sorcha shook her head at fate's cruel twists. If Ocella hadn't egged Eric on, perhaps he wouldn't have made an enemy of the sadistic Nadia, who had borne her grudge through the centuries until, as Queen of Alabama, she found a way to take revenge on Eric and his Maker through Freyda.

In his third century, Eric established himself under a local queen in Greece and that gave him some protection even though Ocella was never far away. He felt confident enough to turn Karin, which was a story he didn't go into beyond saying he was thankful he was living in a nest and she had good control of herself when Ocella turned up to 'inspect' her twenty years after her turning.

Ocella hung around in Greece and met Tariq, Nadia's maker, who had befriended Eric. Ocella killing Tariq in a fit of jealous was a nasty reminder of his hold over Eric, but there were repercussions and Ocella was forced to leave the area. Not long after that Eric moved on too, settling in France. Ocella left him alone for another century, turning up just in time to mess up Eric's position with the king by causing an incident that risked exposure.

A couple more examples like that, and Sorcha was fuming, spitting out a tirade of curses worthy of the foulest mouthed sailor. Eric smiled slightly as she finally wound down.

"..., that bastard. How can you be so calm about it? He turned up every time you got settled and deliberately took away whatever made you content. Why the fuck didn't you have him killed?"

"Ah. That." He sat back and grimaced. "Partly because there were heavy punishments for a child that turned on their maker in the Old World, partly because it would have been difficult and dangerous because of his age, and … I was hesitant, always finding some reason to forgive him, to stay my hand."

"What? Why –" He began running his thumb over her knuckles and she stopped her outburst, feeling his uncertainty and a hint of defeat, helplessness. She guessed at what it meant. "A maker's command?"

"No. He had commanded me never to kill him when I first rose, but commands are specific and I could have got round that. After Ocella was ended …" He stopped and started over. "When he arrived in Bon Temps, Sookie surprised him. He expected an ordinary human. That convinced me he knew little of her or our true relationship before he arrived, that he'd only heard rumours that I'd secured an asset, a human telepath, with a pledge. So I believed that when he took Freyda's money and signed the contract he was acting in what he thought, however misguidedly, were my best interests. I was offended, hurt that he didn't respect the position I'd built for myself and that he treated me like a vassal with no say in my own life. But that was all; I did not see the contract as part of a pattern."

Sorcha frowned in disbelief.

"Yes, that is … astonishing, isn't it? After everything my Maker had done over the centuries." He gestured with his free hand. "But Ocella had never secured a political position for me before, and he had certainly never been enthusiastic about seeing me with a woman as attractive as Freyda. That made the more benevolent motives I imagined plausible. It wasn't until a few months after I went to Oklahoma that things came into focus."

Sorcha felt a pulse of unease and couldn't be sure whether it came from Eric or herself.

"One night I began to think over my long history with Ocella. He liked to toy with his children, manipulate them. Even once he no longer wanted me for himself, he did not like to see me with anyone else. He was a jealous maker. I knew all that. That's why I wasn't as suspicious of his motives with Freyda as I should have been when he darkened my doorstep. His behaviour convinced me he genuinely expected me to welcome the marriage. And that wasn't unreasonable; I enjoy leadership, have sought it out many times. Consort is a higher position than sheriff, and he always pushed me to be more ambitious.

"Naturally, while he was in Shreveport I kept him away from Sookie and assumed I had succeeded in deflecting his attention from her. I did not know Ocella already knew from Freyda and her spy Felicia how … erratically I was behaving over Sookie long before he came to Shreveport. I failed to connect the obvious dots: the contract was primarily meant to tear us apart, teach me a lesson for daring to ... care about a human that way. It wasn't about elevating my position at all, it was petty jealousy and vampire pride.

"When the penny finally dropped, that night in Oklahoma, I was furious with him and with myself for not seeing that. I spent several nights going over similar incidents when he'd shown up and inserted himself into my existence, only to leave a trail of havoc and destruction, but I had never questioned why. That night I did. I re-evaluated everything.

"I saw the truth. He played me. He had, for centuries, sabotaged my efforts to establish myself in the hierarchy over and over even while he berated me for not having enough ambition. He knew carving out a place for myself was important to me, and he interfered simply because he could. I had found something with Sookie that mattered to me just as much and he meant to ruin that too."

Eric spoke bitterly. "Even though I had earned a place at his side centuries earlier, earned enough of his respect to call him Ocella, even though he called me kin, he only paid lip service to that. He treated me as his property, his slave, whenever it suited him. I asked myself why I had respected him so much and … I didn't have an answer. True, he turned me, taught me to survive, gave me this life, but he did not…" He grappled for the right words.

"Care about you as family should," Sorcha provided shrewdly, driving the nail home true.

"No. He did not," Eric said bleakly.

Despite her fury at his psychopathic maker, Sorcha appreciated that Eric had lost a father figure. His disappointment in Ocella ran deep, she could feel it.

Hoping to give him comfort she said gently, "I do not think such true caring was in his nature. Perhaps it never was. Or perhaps he had the capability once and the centuries sucked him dry of it.

He sighed. "We do not change so much when we are turned. Ocella had much cruelty in him as a Maker. The seeds of it must have been there when he was human."

"He cared only for himself, his own twisted desires. You are very different." Sorcha tilted her head. "Why did it take his death for you to see him for what he was?"

Eric shifted on the couch. "It is a guess, but I do not think it a coincidence that I did not question our relationship with a clear head until some months after his death."

"His blood?" Sorcha didn't fully understand the maker-child relationship, but blood was definitely at the heart of it.

"More than blood." She felt a swell of pain and self-doubt from him with his next words. "I think it quite likely that Ocella glamoured me."

"Glamoured you? But vampires can't be–," Sorcha halted and processed the implications. "You mean … before he turned you."

Eric nodded. "The practise is frowned on, because the results are unpredictable. If it was his habit to attempt it, it might explain his failure to turn a child before me."

"And the glamour would last until he died?"

"Yes. If the turning process is successful it fixes the imprint."

A thousand years of manipulation. Sorcha failed to keep the disgust out of her voice. "So what do you think he… programmed you with?"

"Something subtle, something I wouldn't notice. An inclination towards him, a predisposition to respect him, not to question his motives too deeply maybe. Nothing as gauche as undying loyalty and affection, otherwise he'd have missed out on enjoying my … resistance."

Sorcha curled her lip in disgust. "A quick death was too kind."

"Perhaps. But he made me what I am. I am grateful for that, and the things he taught me."

"I am glad that the fucker is ash and you are free of him."

Eric sighed heavily. "I would say the same."

They sat in silence for a while as Sorcha stroked his knuckles with her thumb.

Then Eric chuckled quietly. "Sookie wanted to end him as soon as she met him too."

"She did? She'd have had to stake him in his day-death to have a chance of survival."

"If I hadn't asked her not to, she might have staked him that night at her house." He shook his head. "And he knew it. She hadn't held back her … disapproval of him the night they met. But that was partly my fault."

"You told her about him before then?"

"Not in any detail. We spoke of Aude once. I mentioned Ocella and that I never wanted her to be in a situation she couldn't escape. I was thinking of de Castro's plans for her at the time."

"So why did she want Ocella dead?" Sorcha's eyes widened. "Did he threaten her?"

"No, no it wasn't that. Ocella's arrival caught me off guard. His and Alexei's proximity affected Sookie through the bond and I was very worried about her. As I said, I have little experience with bonds and I … made a mistake."

Sorcha rubbed his knuckles, encouraging him on.

"As usual, I hid my feelings from Ocella. I don't know how it happened, but instead of containing, damping my emotions–"

Sorcha broke in. "Is that what you do around me?"

His mouth twitched, amused and annoyed by her interruption. "Yes, that. Does it work?"

"Yes, mostly. I suppose that's a positive. Dealing with your bastard of a maker taught you to be proficient in controlling your emotions."

"Quite. And that is what I did as soon as he appeared. Instead of working the way it normally did, my emotions spilled over the blood bond and flooded into Sookie. I didn't have the control to stop that and hide my reactions from Ocella. I didn't even realise it was happening at first, but that was why she reacted so negatively to him, putting herself in danger. She didn't hide it at all, and she is quite skilled at that because of her telepathy."

Sorcha sighed. "I don't suppose you ever talked about that?

"Only a little. Mostly about Alexei –Sookie was frustrated that I couldn't, or in her eyes wouldn't, intervene on his behalf. His youthful appearance and obvious mental fragility tugged on her sympathy. I was … relieved Ocella had a companion, and no doubt she felt that."

"Oh dear." Sorcha could relate to Eric's relief, but she wondered if Sookie had been in a position to understand it or how thoroughly Eric's hands were tied. He had no power to influence Ocella. Humans these days, especially Americans, took their freedoms for granted. They had no frame of reference for the complicated obligations and restrictions that most ancient beings had been navigating for centuries, as automatically as breathing – or in this case, perhaps dropping fang would be a better analogy.

"Indeed. She wasn't pleased when I told her I'd have to warm Ocella's bed if he asked, either."

Sorcha inhaled sharply, about to launch into another attack on his Maker judging by the scowl forming on her face. Eric interrupted before she could. "No, he did not ask that of me before he was ended. But he would have done if Alexei hadn't needed his attention."

"Knowing full well how difficult that would be for you and for Sookie to bear. Bastard." Sorcha shook her head. "And I thought my parent's situation was complicated."

Eric raised an eyebrow.

She grimaced. "It is not easy to love someone who has … prior obligations. Even when such things are part of your culture."

Eric said slowly, "Obligations... You said Memnon had business in the demon realm."

"Yes. That would be his wife. Tarok and Erdal's mother."

"Ah."

"Aideen knew he was married when they met. Demon marriage contracts are almost impossible to break and he was bound for another sixty years or so. He risked the wrath of his wife and her family to be with my mother. You know, even once he was free they never married. They didn't need it. Marriage meant very little beyond obligation to them both, but love was everything to them. They were very alike that way. Aideen accepted his marriage and that he had to spend time with his wife. But that is not really my story to tell."

Eric glanced at the sky. The night was half over. "It is time for your tale now, I think."

"You have spilt enough of Ocella's poison?"

"Yes." Eric squeezed her hand gently. "Your turn, if you are up to it."

"Let me wash my face first. And have another drink."