(no subject)
Today, my friends, I am sleep deprived, which will become all too clear to you in a moment. Liz, don't read this.
Look here, people. This is just wrong. Liz asked for Godric/Eric from Pam's pov. HAHAHAHAHA fml
Spoilers after a fashion for Timebomb.
Paris, 1923
Pam's on Ebay shopping for yet more tragic bondage gear-the second worst part of mainstreaming is living down to human expectations-when her phone rings.
YOUR LORD AND MASTER the display reads. She thinks, as per always, of letting it go to voicemail just out of pique at him having the gall to program himself into the directory like that.
“Yes?” she answers on the third ring.
“Is that any way to speak to me?” The ambient noise under the sound of him is lively, a party.
“So I take it that Godric is once again not completely dead to the world?” She navigates away from the page hawking corsets and browses through Eric's bank statements.
“Your compassion is what keeps me coming back year after year.”
“Yes, sometimes it feels like a loveless marriage to me, too. And you rang because?”
“What do you know about Jason Stackhouse?”
Pam laughs. Eric has always been a bit of a magpie, collecting humans and vampires in the moment and then discarding them on weird whims that even Pam can't always grasp, but this is capricious even for him.
“Nothing, of course. That can change.” She doesn't pretend to care. He doesn't expect her to.
“Have you killed anyone while I've been gone?”
Heartstrings are proverbial, but Pam has always thought the turn of phrase is an apt metaphor for what real love does to you, the ache that feels like someone plucking a taut harp.
“Only scores and scores.” She tries to keep the fondness out of her tone, but that is practically impossible. His laughter is pure pleasure anyway, not derisive.
“Lorena hasn't changed.”
The line goes dead. Pam has always hated Lorena, so she's glad she's minding the store and not in Dallas-that town is so desperate anyway. Not that she picked Shreveport for godsake.
**
Everyone was in Paris in those days. Which was a very good reason not to be there. Eric will do what Eric will do, however.
Pam watches the rain form rivulets on the wavy glass, lets her hair down and as she cards her fingers through it thinking of cutting it all off-imagines the ends of a sleek blonde bob against her cheek, feathering caresses from the simple act of walking.
“No.”
She turns to see Eric arrested in mid motion, his head cocked to the side and his own hair in his face.
“No, what?” She still tests him from time to time, to see how close he is to guessing her literal thoughts through her moods.
“You know what.” And he's pressing her against the window, the cool surface stealing room temperature from her skin. His fingers twist in the ends of her hair. “Indulge me.”
She does nothing but.
He's silent, his mood drifting, the same old longing that colors him according to whims Pam doesn't understand. His fingers run through her hair and his body presses against her, but his age fills up the room, its weight would compress her chest and smother her if she had a need for air.
His teeth sink into her neck but he just rests like that, wrapped around her but not drawing blood or feeding, just part of her.
*
The freedom of Paris is intoxicating. The humans are so drunk or high or stupid that they don't have to play at pantomiming normalcy or stick to the shadows. Never being seen in the daylight is not remarkable. Lisette, their neighbor, is from old money and was educated at the best convent schools. She drinks champagne for breakfast at two in the afternoon and keeps cocaine in a platinum locket that she wears at all times.
“But you have to come, it will be scandalous if you don't!” She sits too close to Pam, touches her familiarly. Lisette seems to have no native fear. Her hand circles Pam's wrist and she doesn't flinch at how cool the skin is, at the lack of a pulse. Pam imagines Lisette covered in blood, her eyes staring wide in final comprehension-Pam is so sated, growing so fat off the prosperity of Paris, that this tableau is somehow boring, not as immediately alluring as it should be.
“Darling.”
Pam manages to not laugh. Just barely. She turns to smile at Eric who is lounging in the open half of the doorway to the breakfast room. His eyes pass over Lisette. He's excited about something. Pam pauses to consider whether she regrets losing Lisette already...no.
Eric laughs and Lisette's head cocks, her smile dims slightly, but the moment passes and she returns to her blissful ignorance. “But you must come!' She clutches Pam's arm. Pam wonders suddenly if Lisette's interest is sexual. Humans seem to be losing some of their inhibitions lately, so it's possible that this is more than just friendly enthusiasm.
“Lisette,” Eric glides through the room drawing Lisette's attention. “You are very kind but we are otherwise engaged.”
Eric never speaks to Lisette directly, so something is afoot.
“Oh!” Lisette's hand flies to press her locket against her skin. She's startled, like she's never seen Eric before. Eric's glamoring her over Pam's shoulder. Her huge grey eyes grow larger, her rouged mouth falls open in a pretty mew, her cheeks flush scarlet.
“Lisette, you don't know us. You've never heard our names. As far as you know, this house is vacant.” As Eric intones the words, Pam sighs and looks sullenly to the side.
“Yes, yes, of course!” Lisette sways to her feet and shuffles out of the room like the puppet on a string she is.
“You're getting lazy.”
She doesn't turn to look over her shoulder at him. She's not angry, exactly, more annoyed. Sometimes she still falls back on her human ways, silent treatments and withheld affections. For some reason silence is the one thing that bothers him.
“It won't always be like this. They will go back to wariness and you will be casual to the point of danger.” He exudes concern, worry. The days when he's mostly her father are trying. The need for his approval chafes, that's not who she is-is not who she's ever been. Her pride buckles under the weight of his approbation and she wants to hiss in his face.
His laughter, as they say, is a slap in the face and she's halfway to her feet when he snatches her up, taking her with him back down on the settee. “Your anger makes you beautiful.”
In life, Pam thought she'd burned brightly, always on the edge of some great passion-wonder at science, frantic with lust, obsessed with nonconformity. In death, Pam learns anew every day what actually combusting from the inside is like, just one glance from her Maker melts even the memory of her identity.
*
Godric...never fails to disrupt everything.
“I sense you have...misgivings about me?”
Pam hasn't been alone with Godric before. Eric drinks up his time with his Maker like a newly made one on a virgin. It makes Pam uncomfortable, like she's involved in something too intimate to be shared.
“It's not my place to pass judgment on you.” She's not going to come out and tell him to leave, but if he's going to ask her directly, she's going to tell him the truth.
His smile causes her knuckles to whiten. “Do you fear me?”
“Of course.” She answers without thinking and doesn't regret her answer. Who in their right mind wouldn't?
They sit facing each other in matching armchairs with matching postures-both with hands folded in laps and feet crossed at the ankles. He's dressed causally without a tie or jacket, shoes removed. She's in pearls and tweed.
Godric draws in a breath to speak and lets the clicking of his tongue linger in the air for several seconds. He might be thinking, he might be allowing his influence hover in the air as a power play. Finally his eyes lock on hers. “He was...unhappy before you. Now he is not.”
And that is a pronouncement.
Pam lived her human life hemmed in by convention. She was taught that a woman's entire life revolved around pleasing men, your father, your brothers, your suitors, your husband, your sons. She was taught to be decorative and bite her tongue rather than speak a heated word. Not only were her feelings not a consideration, even the fact that she had feelings was deemed coarse. Pam withstood countless slaps to the face, scoldings, imprisonings in her room for demeaning herself and her family with her opinions and inability to be other than she was.
“Isn't that nice.” The words ricochet through the room with the clipped precision of her human diction. The mantle clock chimes half past the hour and Pam keeps her chin up, her eyes on Godric's face. He stares back at her, unmoving.
Finally he shifts in his chair slightly, runs one foot against the other. “I considered being insulted when you were a woman.” The slight smile that accompanies the words is Pam's welcome to the family, the sly kind of subtle body language that women share in a crowd of men. Vampire society is not so different from regular Society, really, slightly more bloodshed and a greater longevity, but the social cues are often enough similar.
“If it makes you feel any better, I'm not a very good one,” she answers.
Godric smiles showing his teeth; he switches to French and asks about her past.
*
Pam wakes up to Eric's familiar weight in the bed next to her. He needs presence more than sex, a kind of intimacy that's not tied to orgasms and declarations but in something deeper, more like home and family than romance and physical need. She shifts under the down blankets, the residual warmth of the bricks lingering on her feet.
Only when the dust of death falls all the way off of her does she realize it's not just Eric in the bed. She's passed some unspoken test then. A small part of her triumphs-not everyone has such a Maker as Eric, let alone pass the approval of their Maker's Maker--that's almost unheard of. Vampires are jealous creatures by their nature.
Pam strokes her toes over the brick closest to her and practically vibrates with joy. Eric's hair brushes her face but it's Godric who laughs, a dark, rustling sound that makes her want to run her hands over his skin, pluck at his hair with her nails, wish that he could possibly be interested in such games.
*
Vampires are no less ridiculous than humans for the most part. One of lessons that Eric has taught Pam is that vampires suffer from hubris and pride just as much as humans do. They believe just because they are vampires that they're better, cleverer, more deserving of life than humans. The percentage of idiot vampires is probably about the same as that of idiot humans.
Debauchery? That stereotype is accurate, however.
Pam watches Luc and Henri smearing themselves with blood while humping themselves against the girl they're draining. She doesn't openly sneer, but just barely. She doesn't have anything against a good blood-letting; it's the setting. Why do so many vampires degrade themselves by making public spectacles of feeding and fucking? She doesn't approve.
Eric looks around at the brocade and mahogany gaming tables, the whirling roulette wheel and the humans shackled with silver chains. “Boring,” he intones.
“Quite,” Pam replies.
They aren't there to frolic, though. Just to be seen. Eric has a reputation-one he deserves-and people who completely retire lose whatever prestige they've accumulated. Pam prefers human cafes and theater, the boisterousness of living that overwhelms Paris at the moment. She would prefer to dance in a frenzy and drink champagne under the gaslights. Instead she's wasting her diamonds on fools who wouldn't know Taittinger from tap water.
Eric smiles at her, his mood shifting from aggressive annoyance to pleasure. “I don't regret you.”
“That's good to hear since I enjoy not dying.”
“Your perfume is new.” He tucks her hand into the fold of his elbow. “Violets. Nice.”
It's silly to care about such clearly orchestrated compliments, but Pam knows it's even more foolhardy to deny simple truths-she loves him recklessly and absolutely. “If you keep flattering me like that you'll make me fall in love with you.”
They both laugh, cutting through the room, every head turns. Power feels effortless sometimes.
*
“Godric is leaving.”
Pam can't actually fly, but if she could she would have. Fifteen minutes beforehand, standing in a millinery contemplating feathers or brocade, Pam had felt Eric plummet. One second she was barely aware of him, just a distant thrum like the shore a long way off, and the next instant he was laced through her like burning barbed wire.
He lifts his head and turns his gaze on her. In that moment she would gladly die to lift his mood. Anything to stop his pain. She rushes to him, drops to her knees and presses her face into his lap. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.” His hand falls onto the back of her head, dead weight.
She could rip Godric apart by inches, each piece of flesh burnt in front of his very eyes until that one last finger or ear tipped him over into exploding into ashes.
“Murder is a good look on you,” Eric sounds genuinely amused, but his mood doesn't abate.
“She would kill me for your sake, my child?” Godric's voice brings Pam to her feet. His expression is mild, the same face he ever wears. “Yes, you would.” Unlike humans, Pam can see Godric move. Perhaps not see so much as sense it. She's unsurprised when he appears a foot from her baring his chest. “Would you end my existence?”
Pam says nothing, her mind rioting against her sense of self-preservation. She doesn't give a bit of ground for all her silence, though.
Godric lowers his shirt with a small smile. He looks so deceptively young when he smiles, innocent almost. “Perhaps when I finally become too weary with this world I will submit myself to you, for revenge for your Maker's sake, the misery I cause.”
“No!”
Eric's shout sends Pam to her knees again, this time shielding her face with her unbound hair, her forehead pressed to the carpet. The fright she feels eclipses all thought. She is like a woodland creature caught in the corona of an illuminating torch. She stays like that, listening with her non-human ears to the creak of the furniture, the rustle of clothing, the brush of skin on skin.
“No,” Eric says more softly, pleading-and Pam quakes again, but now because she feels such despair for him, that his Maker comes and goes, inconsistent and unreliable. The torment of that must be unbearable. She pities Eric, but she's not going to stay on the floor all night while Godric and Eric once again consummate their ageless, tormented love. She sits up and draws breath to clear her throat and make a joke but never manages to vocalize anything, not even a cough.
The sight of Eric on his knees never fails to strike a discordant chime inside her head. Godric naked strikes her doubly silent. Pam has only idly contemplated Godric's life; the door to inquiries about his human life was resolutely slammed by Eric very early on. Godric's thighs are heavily muscled and his arms broad and strong. The ink etched under his skin gives him a fearsomeness that is unique in Pam's experience. She watches unashamed, because that was ever her nature, as Eric feeds from the artery in Godric's thigh-Eric's feeding habits universal even with Godric then.
Pam sits on her knees with her hands clasped trembling at the scent of Godric's blood. When she raises her hand to push her hair behind her ear her hand visibly shakes. Eric lifts his head at her movement, his tongue flies out to lick a small trickle of blood that has escaped and Pam sways forward. Eric and Godric each catch her, one hand on either arm. They're now all on their knees. Godric's smile stirs fuzzy childhood memories of creaking floorboards and wind in the trees.
Eric leans his face to hers and she takes the motion as an invitation to lick the blood off his face, which she does in greedy bursts. Her moans echo through the room, wanton, lewd-and she laughs. Pam loves this life, the sensuality of Godric pressed naked to her back and her own utter abandon when he bites into her neck. She lets her head fall back onto his shoulder and wishes she were naked, too. Eric offers her his own throat and she accepts. Pam accepts everything, at least once, for the sake the girl she once was who knew when to say yes when freedom snatched her off a dark street she'd been warned never to walk down.
*
“What about America?” Pam's tired of Eric's mood. If she could leash Godric like a poodle, she would if for no other reason than that Eric is ruining Pam's shopping.
“I hate that one,” Eric grumbles at the hat in her hand. He hates everything these days.
“As if I care,” she puts the hat on and adjusts it as she looks in the mirror.
“Your willful nature will be your demise,” he sniffs, but he's not even really putting in the effort to sound annoyed.
“It already was.” She doesn't like the color of this hat after all. She sighs as Eric laughs. At least he's laughing again.
He touches the back of her neck, affectionate. “Maybe I won't trade you in just yet.”
The shop girl blushes when she walks up to see Eric bent towards her, his entire posture too familiar for public, or at least on this street, in this neighborhood.
“Madame...” the girl stutters and looks at the ground.
Pam laughs, loud, hard, unembarrassed and unapologetic. She pinches Eric's behind.
**
Pam's in the middle of freezing a human male with the power of her gaze when Eric calls back. “His credit is in the sewer. He had an STD last year, shocking, I know. Nothing new besides the crazy fundies. It looks from his bank statements that he's stopped selling V.”
“Huh.” Eric sounds semi-interested.
“Please don't, he's dumber than a sack of frogs!” She looks down at her nails; she's got a damned chip in one.
“Godric is well, thank you for asking.”
Across the bar a patron slaps Ginger's ass and she gets him in a headlock. “Passive aggression is so last season, sweetheart.”
“Regular aggression is more your style, I know.” Eric laughs and Pam knows this is how things will always be, the flutter of pleasure at his good humor. She chafes at it still, unimpressed with being tied like this to a man, but all in all this is her reality. She could have done far worse.
“Give Godric my love,” she says with as much false annoyance as she can muster.
"Oh I will," Eric purrs and they both laugh.
Hello, Pamela Godric whispers suddenly, his version of excitable chatter.
“Hello,” she whispers back, the awe transparent in her voice still after all these years.
Pam looks around Fangtasia when the line goes dead. She wonders again how long this particular farce will go on. She misses parasols and promenades.
What she really misses is a good kill, but that's another story entirely.
*
The bookends, obviously, are something like a half hour apart, during Timebomb.
Sorry about that coding issue. I haven't done that in years.
Look here, people. This is just wrong. Liz asked for Godric/Eric from Pam's pov. HAHAHAHAHA fml
Spoilers after a fashion for Timebomb.
Paris, 1923
Pam's on Ebay shopping for yet more tragic bondage gear-the second worst part of mainstreaming is living down to human expectations-when her phone rings.
YOUR LORD AND MASTER the display reads. She thinks, as per always, of letting it go to voicemail just out of pique at him having the gall to program himself into the directory like that.
“Yes?” she answers on the third ring.
“Is that any way to speak to me?” The ambient noise under the sound of him is lively, a party.
“So I take it that Godric is once again not completely dead to the world?” She navigates away from the page hawking corsets and browses through Eric's bank statements.
“Your compassion is what keeps me coming back year after year.”
“Yes, sometimes it feels like a loveless marriage to me, too. And you rang because?”
“What do you know about Jason Stackhouse?”
Pam laughs. Eric has always been a bit of a magpie, collecting humans and vampires in the moment and then discarding them on weird whims that even Pam can't always grasp, but this is capricious even for him.
“Nothing, of course. That can change.” She doesn't pretend to care. He doesn't expect her to.
“Have you killed anyone while I've been gone?”
Heartstrings are proverbial, but Pam has always thought the turn of phrase is an apt metaphor for what real love does to you, the ache that feels like someone plucking a taut harp.
“Only scores and scores.” She tries to keep the fondness out of her tone, but that is practically impossible. His laughter is pure pleasure anyway, not derisive.
“Lorena hasn't changed.”
The line goes dead. Pam has always hated Lorena, so she's glad she's minding the store and not in Dallas-that town is so desperate anyway. Not that she picked Shreveport for godsake.
**
Everyone was in Paris in those days. Which was a very good reason not to be there. Eric will do what Eric will do, however.
Pam watches the rain form rivulets on the wavy glass, lets her hair down and as she cards her fingers through it thinking of cutting it all off-imagines the ends of a sleek blonde bob against her cheek, feathering caresses from the simple act of walking.
“No.”
She turns to see Eric arrested in mid motion, his head cocked to the side and his own hair in his face.
“No, what?” She still tests him from time to time, to see how close he is to guessing her literal thoughts through her moods.
“You know what.” And he's pressing her against the window, the cool surface stealing room temperature from her skin. His fingers twist in the ends of her hair. “Indulge me.”
She does nothing but.
He's silent, his mood drifting, the same old longing that colors him according to whims Pam doesn't understand. His fingers run through her hair and his body presses against her, but his age fills up the room, its weight would compress her chest and smother her if she had a need for air.
His teeth sink into her neck but he just rests like that, wrapped around her but not drawing blood or feeding, just part of her.
*
The freedom of Paris is intoxicating. The humans are so drunk or high or stupid that they don't have to play at pantomiming normalcy or stick to the shadows. Never being seen in the daylight is not remarkable. Lisette, their neighbor, is from old money and was educated at the best convent schools. She drinks champagne for breakfast at two in the afternoon and keeps cocaine in a platinum locket that she wears at all times.
“But you have to come, it will be scandalous if you don't!” She sits too close to Pam, touches her familiarly. Lisette seems to have no native fear. Her hand circles Pam's wrist and she doesn't flinch at how cool the skin is, at the lack of a pulse. Pam imagines Lisette covered in blood, her eyes staring wide in final comprehension-Pam is so sated, growing so fat off the prosperity of Paris, that this tableau is somehow boring, not as immediately alluring as it should be.
“Darling.”
Pam manages to not laugh. Just barely. She turns to smile at Eric who is lounging in the open half of the doorway to the breakfast room. His eyes pass over Lisette. He's excited about something. Pam pauses to consider whether she regrets losing Lisette already...no.
Eric laughs and Lisette's head cocks, her smile dims slightly, but the moment passes and she returns to her blissful ignorance. “But you must come!' She clutches Pam's arm. Pam wonders suddenly if Lisette's interest is sexual. Humans seem to be losing some of their inhibitions lately, so it's possible that this is more than just friendly enthusiasm.
“Lisette,” Eric glides through the room drawing Lisette's attention. “You are very kind but we are otherwise engaged.”
Eric never speaks to Lisette directly, so something is afoot.
“Oh!” Lisette's hand flies to press her locket against her skin. She's startled, like she's never seen Eric before. Eric's glamoring her over Pam's shoulder. Her huge grey eyes grow larger, her rouged mouth falls open in a pretty mew, her cheeks flush scarlet.
“Lisette, you don't know us. You've never heard our names. As far as you know, this house is vacant.” As Eric intones the words, Pam sighs and looks sullenly to the side.
“Yes, yes, of course!” Lisette sways to her feet and shuffles out of the room like the puppet on a string she is.
“You're getting lazy.”
She doesn't turn to look over her shoulder at him. She's not angry, exactly, more annoyed. Sometimes she still falls back on her human ways, silent treatments and withheld affections. For some reason silence is the one thing that bothers him.
“It won't always be like this. They will go back to wariness and you will be casual to the point of danger.” He exudes concern, worry. The days when he's mostly her father are trying. The need for his approval chafes, that's not who she is-is not who she's ever been. Her pride buckles under the weight of his approbation and she wants to hiss in his face.
His laughter, as they say, is a slap in the face and she's halfway to her feet when he snatches her up, taking her with him back down on the settee. “Your anger makes you beautiful.”
In life, Pam thought she'd burned brightly, always on the edge of some great passion-wonder at science, frantic with lust, obsessed with nonconformity. In death, Pam learns anew every day what actually combusting from the inside is like, just one glance from her Maker melts even the memory of her identity.
*
Godric...never fails to disrupt everything.
“I sense you have...misgivings about me?”
Pam hasn't been alone with Godric before. Eric drinks up his time with his Maker like a newly made one on a virgin. It makes Pam uncomfortable, like she's involved in something too intimate to be shared.
“It's not my place to pass judgment on you.” She's not going to come out and tell him to leave, but if he's going to ask her directly, she's going to tell him the truth.
His smile causes her knuckles to whiten. “Do you fear me?”
“Of course.” She answers without thinking and doesn't regret her answer. Who in their right mind wouldn't?
They sit facing each other in matching armchairs with matching postures-both with hands folded in laps and feet crossed at the ankles. He's dressed causally without a tie or jacket, shoes removed. She's in pearls and tweed.
Godric draws in a breath to speak and lets the clicking of his tongue linger in the air for several seconds. He might be thinking, he might be allowing his influence hover in the air as a power play. Finally his eyes lock on hers. “He was...unhappy before you. Now he is not.”
And that is a pronouncement.
Pam lived her human life hemmed in by convention. She was taught that a woman's entire life revolved around pleasing men, your father, your brothers, your suitors, your husband, your sons. She was taught to be decorative and bite her tongue rather than speak a heated word. Not only were her feelings not a consideration, even the fact that she had feelings was deemed coarse. Pam withstood countless slaps to the face, scoldings, imprisonings in her room for demeaning herself and her family with her opinions and inability to be other than she was.
“Isn't that nice.” The words ricochet through the room with the clipped precision of her human diction. The mantle clock chimes half past the hour and Pam keeps her chin up, her eyes on Godric's face. He stares back at her, unmoving.
Finally he shifts in his chair slightly, runs one foot against the other. “I considered being insulted when you were a woman.” The slight smile that accompanies the words is Pam's welcome to the family, the sly kind of subtle body language that women share in a crowd of men. Vampire society is not so different from regular Society, really, slightly more bloodshed and a greater longevity, but the social cues are often enough similar.
“If it makes you feel any better, I'm not a very good one,” she answers.
Godric smiles showing his teeth; he switches to French and asks about her past.
*
Pam wakes up to Eric's familiar weight in the bed next to her. He needs presence more than sex, a kind of intimacy that's not tied to orgasms and declarations but in something deeper, more like home and family than romance and physical need. She shifts under the down blankets, the residual warmth of the bricks lingering on her feet.
Only when the dust of death falls all the way off of her does she realize it's not just Eric in the bed. She's passed some unspoken test then. A small part of her triumphs-not everyone has such a Maker as Eric, let alone pass the approval of their Maker's Maker--that's almost unheard of. Vampires are jealous creatures by their nature.
Pam strokes her toes over the brick closest to her and practically vibrates with joy. Eric's hair brushes her face but it's Godric who laughs, a dark, rustling sound that makes her want to run her hands over his skin, pluck at his hair with her nails, wish that he could possibly be interested in such games.
*
Vampires are no less ridiculous than humans for the most part. One of lessons that Eric has taught Pam is that vampires suffer from hubris and pride just as much as humans do. They believe just because they are vampires that they're better, cleverer, more deserving of life than humans. The percentage of idiot vampires is probably about the same as that of idiot humans.
Debauchery? That stereotype is accurate, however.
Pam watches Luc and Henri smearing themselves with blood while humping themselves against the girl they're draining. She doesn't openly sneer, but just barely. She doesn't have anything against a good blood-letting; it's the setting. Why do so many vampires degrade themselves by making public spectacles of feeding and fucking? She doesn't approve.
Eric looks around at the brocade and mahogany gaming tables, the whirling roulette wheel and the humans shackled with silver chains. “Boring,” he intones.
“Quite,” Pam replies.
They aren't there to frolic, though. Just to be seen. Eric has a reputation-one he deserves-and people who completely retire lose whatever prestige they've accumulated. Pam prefers human cafes and theater, the boisterousness of living that overwhelms Paris at the moment. She would prefer to dance in a frenzy and drink champagne under the gaslights. Instead she's wasting her diamonds on fools who wouldn't know Taittinger from tap water.
Eric smiles at her, his mood shifting from aggressive annoyance to pleasure. “I don't regret you.”
“That's good to hear since I enjoy not dying.”
“Your perfume is new.” He tucks her hand into the fold of his elbow. “Violets. Nice.”
It's silly to care about such clearly orchestrated compliments, but Pam knows it's even more foolhardy to deny simple truths-she loves him recklessly and absolutely. “If you keep flattering me like that you'll make me fall in love with you.”
They both laugh, cutting through the room, every head turns. Power feels effortless sometimes.
*
“Godric is leaving.”
Pam can't actually fly, but if she could she would have. Fifteen minutes beforehand, standing in a millinery contemplating feathers or brocade, Pam had felt Eric plummet. One second she was barely aware of him, just a distant thrum like the shore a long way off, and the next instant he was laced through her like burning barbed wire.
He lifts his head and turns his gaze on her. In that moment she would gladly die to lift his mood. Anything to stop his pain. She rushes to him, drops to her knees and presses her face into his lap. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.” His hand falls onto the back of her head, dead weight.
She could rip Godric apart by inches, each piece of flesh burnt in front of his very eyes until that one last finger or ear tipped him over into exploding into ashes.
“Murder is a good look on you,” Eric sounds genuinely amused, but his mood doesn't abate.
“She would kill me for your sake, my child?” Godric's voice brings Pam to her feet. His expression is mild, the same face he ever wears. “Yes, you would.” Unlike humans, Pam can see Godric move. Perhaps not see so much as sense it. She's unsurprised when he appears a foot from her baring his chest. “Would you end my existence?”
Pam says nothing, her mind rioting against her sense of self-preservation. She doesn't give a bit of ground for all her silence, though.
Godric lowers his shirt with a small smile. He looks so deceptively young when he smiles, innocent almost. “Perhaps when I finally become too weary with this world I will submit myself to you, for revenge for your Maker's sake, the misery I cause.”
“No!”
Eric's shout sends Pam to her knees again, this time shielding her face with her unbound hair, her forehead pressed to the carpet. The fright she feels eclipses all thought. She is like a woodland creature caught in the corona of an illuminating torch. She stays like that, listening with her non-human ears to the creak of the furniture, the rustle of clothing, the brush of skin on skin.
“No,” Eric says more softly, pleading-and Pam quakes again, but now because she feels such despair for him, that his Maker comes and goes, inconsistent and unreliable. The torment of that must be unbearable. She pities Eric, but she's not going to stay on the floor all night while Godric and Eric once again consummate their ageless, tormented love. She sits up and draws breath to clear her throat and make a joke but never manages to vocalize anything, not even a cough.
The sight of Eric on his knees never fails to strike a discordant chime inside her head. Godric naked strikes her doubly silent. Pam has only idly contemplated Godric's life; the door to inquiries about his human life was resolutely slammed by Eric very early on. Godric's thighs are heavily muscled and his arms broad and strong. The ink etched under his skin gives him a fearsomeness that is unique in Pam's experience. She watches unashamed, because that was ever her nature, as Eric feeds from the artery in Godric's thigh-Eric's feeding habits universal even with Godric then.
Pam sits on her knees with her hands clasped trembling at the scent of Godric's blood. When she raises her hand to push her hair behind her ear her hand visibly shakes. Eric lifts his head at her movement, his tongue flies out to lick a small trickle of blood that has escaped and Pam sways forward. Eric and Godric each catch her, one hand on either arm. They're now all on their knees. Godric's smile stirs fuzzy childhood memories of creaking floorboards and wind in the trees.
Eric leans his face to hers and she takes the motion as an invitation to lick the blood off his face, which she does in greedy bursts. Her moans echo through the room, wanton, lewd-and she laughs. Pam loves this life, the sensuality of Godric pressed naked to her back and her own utter abandon when he bites into her neck. She lets her head fall back onto his shoulder and wishes she were naked, too. Eric offers her his own throat and she accepts. Pam accepts everything, at least once, for the sake the girl she once was who knew when to say yes when freedom snatched her off a dark street she'd been warned never to walk down.
*
“What about America?” Pam's tired of Eric's mood. If she could leash Godric like a poodle, she would if for no other reason than that Eric is ruining Pam's shopping.
“I hate that one,” Eric grumbles at the hat in her hand. He hates everything these days.
“As if I care,” she puts the hat on and adjusts it as she looks in the mirror.
“Your willful nature will be your demise,” he sniffs, but he's not even really putting in the effort to sound annoyed.
“It already was.” She doesn't like the color of this hat after all. She sighs as Eric laughs. At least he's laughing again.
He touches the back of her neck, affectionate. “Maybe I won't trade you in just yet.”
The shop girl blushes when she walks up to see Eric bent towards her, his entire posture too familiar for public, or at least on this street, in this neighborhood.
“Madame...” the girl stutters and looks at the ground.
Pam laughs, loud, hard, unembarrassed and unapologetic. She pinches Eric's behind.
**
Pam's in the middle of freezing a human male with the power of her gaze when Eric calls back. “His credit is in the sewer. He had an STD last year, shocking, I know. Nothing new besides the crazy fundies. It looks from his bank statements that he's stopped selling V.”
“Huh.” Eric sounds semi-interested.
“Please don't, he's dumber than a sack of frogs!” She looks down at her nails; she's got a damned chip in one.
“Godric is well, thank you for asking.”
Across the bar a patron slaps Ginger's ass and she gets him in a headlock. “Passive aggression is so last season, sweetheart.”
“Regular aggression is more your style, I know.” Eric laughs and Pam knows this is how things will always be, the flutter of pleasure at his good humor. She chafes at it still, unimpressed with being tied like this to a man, but all in all this is her reality. She could have done far worse.
“Give Godric my love,” she says with as much false annoyance as she can muster.
"Oh I will," Eric purrs and they both laugh.
Hello, Pamela Godric whispers suddenly, his version of excitable chatter.
“Hello,” she whispers back, the awe transparent in her voice still after all these years.
Pam looks around Fangtasia when the line goes dead. She wonders again how long this particular farce will go on. She misses parasols and promenades.
What she really misses is a good kill, but that's another story entirely.
*
The bookends, obviously, are something like a half hour apart, during Timebomb.
Sorry about that coding issue. I haven't done that in years.