godricfic
Um. I have written True Blood fic. Major spoilers for “I Will Rise Up”; vagueish ones for “New World in My View.”
Title: Book of hours
Summary: What's left after he goes.
Timeline: Twenty-four hours, from the end of "I Will Rise Up" until not long after the end of "New World in My View," with the understanding that all this will probably be Jossed (Balled?) by the next episode.
Disclaimer: THESE VAHMPAYRES AHH NOT MAYN.
Rating: PG-13 for angst and the occasional naughty word.
Thanks: To my wonderful kita0610, even if I suspect she only enjoys this show ironically.
0. When the cock crew
At the precise moment of dawn, there is a wild blue flash against the sky that few, human or otherwise, will notice. But the thing that calls itself Maryann, which is old enough to feel when old things go, is suddenly aware of a sharp fissure, a hole torn in the world. She opens her throat and laughs like chaos; she dances in the empty space left behind.
I. Falling light
Just before dusk, Eric wakes--if he ever slept--to the gentle whirring of the fax machine in the corner of the room. When he has scrubbed the crusted blood from the corners of his eyes and combed most of it from his hair, he goes downstairs to collect the package waiting for him at the front desk, a wrinkled Hotel Carmilla gift shop bag and a note scrawled hastily on the back of a receipt, the handwriting childish and strained: I'm sorry. He crumples the paper; her emotionalism, as always, annoys him to the point of murderousness, and knowing that she was there at the end when he could not be fills him with choking rage. His infatuation has vanished, for now, like smoke; he could eat her heart.
His phone begins to ring as soon as he turns away from the desk, and he silences it, ignoring what will be the first of Pam's five increasingly frantic and furious voicemails. He forces himself to wait until he's returned to his room before opening the bag. The elevator climbs with excruciating slowness, a thousand years from one floor to the next, but he doesn't want to take the stairs; he feels dizzy and sick, bloodless, his key card blurring before his eyes as he slides it into the lock.
The shirt between his fingers is soft and thin, fragile, like tissue paper; Isabel made Godric go shopping twice a century whether he needed to or not. It still smells like him, but Eric--Viking that he still is, subject to the inevitability of every vampire's wyrd--knows that will fade, soon, far too soon, and one evening in a decade or five or ten he will wake and find he has forgotten his scent, and a hundred years after that the cloth clenched in his shaking hands will have crumbled to dust, and in another hundred he will have forgotten the color of Godric's eyes, and a half millennium after that he will have forgotten the sound of his voice: the last of him fallen away, dissipated, scattered ash.
On that day, Eric thinks, perhaps he will climb a rooftop of his own.
II. Evensong
Isabel returns to what is left of their nest shortly after sundown and crawls over shrapnel and stone to the torn pile of upholstery where Godric once kept court. Many miles west of here, Hugo checks into a hotel just over the border under someone else's name. A few inches above her, a tarry residue that used to be Stan hangs from the chandelier. Other than the crunch of glass, all is silence.
She rests her forehead against the seat, soot staining her face, and huddles there, very small and very still, until nearly dawn.
III. Evening news
The Sheriff (ex-Sheriff) had never appeared to sign the forms. Nan Flanagan goes to bed annoyed and wakes up that way, as she seems to have most nights since the Great Revelation. When her Blackberry announces the news, she wonders, for a shuddering moment, whether she caused this by giving him such a tongue-lashing the night before.
Then she brushes the feeling aside and snaps open her laptop. She never liked the self-satisfied little prick, anyway.
IV. Bedtime
Steve has gone to sleep on the couch, an absurd Bandaid plastered over the bruise on his forehead. Sara is choked with anger, trembling with humiliation--but the bed is too big, too empty without his familiar presence, the sheets beneath her hand too flat and cool.
She remembers lying next to Amber in one of their twin beds, tanned little girl legs pressed side by side, stretching the sheets between their toes and playing with their doll's yellow yarn hair. I wanna be a preacher's wife when I grow up Sara would say and her sister would reply I wanna join the circus and she supposes both of them got her way, because what you become is the price you pay to get what you used to want.
She closes her eyes and thinks of the boy in the basement, so polite and kind, so sweet and fragile and small, harder than steel, older than dirt. And she does not know which is worse, the certainty that he was evil, or the terrible suspicion that he may not have been, just as in some of her nightmares Amber is a pile of bones beneath a bridge and in some of them she stands at the window, blue eyes glittering in the moonlight, fingernails tapping the glass: Sara. Sister. Invite me in.
She doesn't know anything anymore, but tonight she pulls the sheets over her head and whispers a prayer for them both.
V. Closing time
Pam had slept restlessly the previous day, half-knowing in her dream-stupor that something was very wrong with her maker, and had called him three times upon waking (for Christ's sake, quit it with this taciturn Nordic bullshit and call me back) before finding out what had happened. Around nine the AVL calls to inform her of that morning's events and ask if she'd like to release a statement. She states flatly that Nan Flanagan is a tacky, brainless cunt with no fashion sense before ending the call. She misses the days when phones were heavy and had cords and could be slammed emphatically onto receivers.
She'd never met Godric; he and Eric had stopped seeing each other regularly not long before she was made, probably, Pam suspects, because Eric was disgusted by his maker's refusal to kill people anymore. He'd kept Godric close, like a secret, and had spoken of him to her precisely twice in a century: once thirty years back, when a bout of Hep D had him rambling about the past like a geriatric hippie reminiscing about Woodstock (you should have seen him, Pam, he was so tiny, and with all these tattoos, it was incredible), and once the night she was turned, when she lay against him back to belly in the grave and he whispered stories in her ear all night long. Stories she can only half remember, but are as much a part of her as blood.
She thinks it best not to open the bar that night, even if most of their idiot customers don't know enough to be in mourning. Chow disagrees, calling the idea sentimental and foolish, and continues to disagree until Pam pierces his temple with her stiletto and locks him in the dungeon. She paces across the floor until Ginger starts asking questions, so Pam throws her in the dungeon, too. The screams are oddly... satisfying.
VI. The Witching Hour
Lorena is in Las Vegas by the time she finds out. She flips her phone closed and begins to laugh slowly, a dark, bitter, gutteral sound, like clotting blood.
VII. Rush hour
En route from New Orleans, Bill's cell phone starts making indignant noises at him. He pokes at it furiously for several minutes before realizing that Lorena, during their recent hostage crisis, had locked the keypad. It takes longer than he'd like to admit to retrieve his messages: every vampire he knows (he knows surprisingly few) has called to ask whether he'd heard what had happened to his Sheriff's maker. He experiences a moment of sick glee imagining Eric's grief--serves the bastard right--and then, after thoroughly castigating himself, he pulls over and stares sightlessly at the dusty road as the weight of what has happened settles over him.
He never saw his own elderly father again after he went to war; after that last, horrible time, he never saw his wife and children again. There was no real leavetaking, only that sense of sickening shame as he pulled away into the darkness, and he envies the sense of finality Eric must have experienced, a sorrow clean and real and uncomplicated. Envies Eric's love for his maker, when Bill feels only revulsion and hate for his.
He realizes, suddenly and terribly, who was at Godric's side at the end. This he envies above all; she'll be long dead before Bill finally goes.
VIII. Last call
"I heard them Dallas vampires is mean as fuck."
Lafayette pours another shot, and Jason gratefully accepts it. It feels good to relax, even if his other hand is still clamped around the chainsaw. In the corner of the room, beneath the light of flickering candles and the warm glow of a glittering Virgin Mary, Lettie Mae presses a damp cloth to her unconscious daughter's forehead. Sookie stares out at the gradually lightening sky, forehead pressed against the glass, waiting for Bill.
The tequila spreads warmth over his tired muscles. "It wasn't the vamps that was bad, man, it was those goddamn Bible-thumpers. This one guy--Godric--they were gonna set him on fire and shit! It was fucked up as hell."
Lafayette blinks once, deliberately, at the name. "Godric? I heard he's one scary-ass motherfucker."
"Aw, naw, man, he was cool. He was like--"
Jason pauses, takes another shot, screws up his nose in concentration. This always happens, the way feelings well up in his chest so hot and real and sudden, but then they work their way up and just get... strangled in his throat, or maybe lost whirling around somewhere in his brain, emerging from his lips stupid and weak. He wants to explain how helping save Godric made him feel strong and good for the first time since Amy, how ashamed he was and how good forgiveness felt, how he said please know you have friends in this area whenever you visit and it felt like a promise, like a declaration of love, not like a formality. How those words made him feel he belonged more than Jesus or Bon Temps ever had--
"--I don't know, he was just a really cool guy."
IX. First light
She couldn't speak of it after. Not to Bill when they roused him from his daytime sleep long enough to roll him, stooped and groggy, into the Anubis coffin. Not to Jason, who fidgeted beside her the whole flight, rubbing at the ash and vampire guts staining his good jeans, worrying the spots until his fingertips blistered. She had planned to tell them that evening, but then they returned to Bon Temps to find all hell broken loose.
Bill surely knows by now, and Jason will know soon enough, but now she knows she will never speak of it; this lie of omission will stretch into the next night and the next, too big and jagged and horrible to ever pass her lips: the eldritch pattern of bloodstains on Eric's face, the blue glow of their bloodless flesh in the growing light, how beautiful it was when fire gleamed against Godric's marked skin. How empty the place he had been was when he had gone: how terrifyingly, achingly bare, like a grave gaping beneath her feet, like Gran's eyes when they stared up at her, speckled with blood. She has seen death so many times now, and yet this is something worse than death: the absence of a body, more fundamentally, unthinkably wrong than the presence of one could ever be.
She finds she cannot look at it directly, this terrible thing, and so she will put it away, until slowly, slowly, it will begin to wear away at the edges, becoming small and polished enough to hide away in her pocket and perhaps she will take it out again someday, run her fingertips over it when it is no longer too much to bear, admire its shifting colors. She will remember how he shone in the sunlight and her mind will not draw away in horror.
In a corner of the sky, dawn is coming fast.
Title: Book of hours
Summary: What's left after he goes.
Timeline: Twenty-four hours, from the end of "I Will Rise Up" until not long after the end of "New World in My View," with the understanding that all this will probably be Jossed (Balled?) by the next episode.
Disclaimer: THESE VAHMPAYRES AHH NOT MAYN.
Rating: PG-13 for angst and the occasional naughty word.
Thanks: To my wonderful kita0610, even if I suspect she only enjoys this show ironically.
0. When the cock crew
At the precise moment of dawn, there is a wild blue flash against the sky that few, human or otherwise, will notice. But the thing that calls itself Maryann, which is old enough to feel when old things go, is suddenly aware of a sharp fissure, a hole torn in the world. She opens her throat and laughs like chaos; she dances in the empty space left behind.
I. Falling light
Just before dusk, Eric wakes--if he ever slept--to the gentle whirring of the fax machine in the corner of the room. When he has scrubbed the crusted blood from the corners of his eyes and combed most of it from his hair, he goes downstairs to collect the package waiting for him at the front desk, a wrinkled Hotel Carmilla gift shop bag and a note scrawled hastily on the back of a receipt, the handwriting childish and strained: I'm sorry. He crumples the paper; her emotionalism, as always, annoys him to the point of murderousness, and knowing that she was there at the end when he could not be fills him with choking rage. His infatuation has vanished, for now, like smoke; he could eat her heart.
His phone begins to ring as soon as he turns away from the desk, and he silences it, ignoring what will be the first of Pam's five increasingly frantic and furious voicemails. He forces himself to wait until he's returned to his room before opening the bag. The elevator climbs with excruciating slowness, a thousand years from one floor to the next, but he doesn't want to take the stairs; he feels dizzy and sick, bloodless, his key card blurring before his eyes as he slides it into the lock.
The shirt between his fingers is soft and thin, fragile, like tissue paper; Isabel made Godric go shopping twice a century whether he needed to or not. It still smells like him, but Eric--Viking that he still is, subject to the inevitability of every vampire's wyrd--knows that will fade, soon, far too soon, and one evening in a decade or five or ten he will wake and find he has forgotten his scent, and a hundred years after that the cloth clenched in his shaking hands will have crumbled to dust, and in another hundred he will have forgotten the color of Godric's eyes, and a half millennium after that he will have forgotten the sound of his voice: the last of him fallen away, dissipated, scattered ash.
On that day, Eric thinks, perhaps he will climb a rooftop of his own.
II. Evensong
Isabel returns to what is left of their nest shortly after sundown and crawls over shrapnel and stone to the torn pile of upholstery where Godric once kept court. Many miles west of here, Hugo checks into a hotel just over the border under someone else's name. A few inches above her, a tarry residue that used to be Stan hangs from the chandelier. Other than the crunch of glass, all is silence.
She rests her forehead against the seat, soot staining her face, and huddles there, very small and very still, until nearly dawn.
III. Evening news
The Sheriff (ex-Sheriff) had never appeared to sign the forms. Nan Flanagan goes to bed annoyed and wakes up that way, as she seems to have most nights since the Great Revelation. When her Blackberry announces the news, she wonders, for a shuddering moment, whether she caused this by giving him such a tongue-lashing the night before.
Then she brushes the feeling aside and snaps open her laptop. She never liked the self-satisfied little prick, anyway.
IV. Bedtime
Steve has gone to sleep on the couch, an absurd Bandaid plastered over the bruise on his forehead. Sara is choked with anger, trembling with humiliation--but the bed is too big, too empty without his familiar presence, the sheets beneath her hand too flat and cool.
She remembers lying next to Amber in one of their twin beds, tanned little girl legs pressed side by side, stretching the sheets between their toes and playing with their doll's yellow yarn hair. I wanna be a preacher's wife when I grow up Sara would say and her sister would reply I wanna join the circus and she supposes both of them got her way, because what you become is the price you pay to get what you used to want.
She closes her eyes and thinks of the boy in the basement, so polite and kind, so sweet and fragile and small, harder than steel, older than dirt. And she does not know which is worse, the certainty that he was evil, or the terrible suspicion that he may not have been, just as in some of her nightmares Amber is a pile of bones beneath a bridge and in some of them she stands at the window, blue eyes glittering in the moonlight, fingernails tapping the glass: Sara. Sister. Invite me in.
She doesn't know anything anymore, but tonight she pulls the sheets over her head and whispers a prayer for them both.
V. Closing time
Pam had slept restlessly the previous day, half-knowing in her dream-stupor that something was very wrong with her maker, and had called him three times upon waking (for Christ's sake, quit it with this taciturn Nordic bullshit and call me back) before finding out what had happened. Around nine the AVL calls to inform her of that morning's events and ask if she'd like to release a statement. She states flatly that Nan Flanagan is a tacky, brainless cunt with no fashion sense before ending the call. She misses the days when phones were heavy and had cords and could be slammed emphatically onto receivers.
She'd never met Godric; he and Eric had stopped seeing each other regularly not long before she was made, probably, Pam suspects, because Eric was disgusted by his maker's refusal to kill people anymore. He'd kept Godric close, like a secret, and had spoken of him to her precisely twice in a century: once thirty years back, when a bout of Hep D had him rambling about the past like a geriatric hippie reminiscing about Woodstock (you should have seen him, Pam, he was so tiny, and with all these tattoos, it was incredible), and once the night she was turned, when she lay against him back to belly in the grave and he whispered stories in her ear all night long. Stories she can only half remember, but are as much a part of her as blood.
She thinks it best not to open the bar that night, even if most of their idiot customers don't know enough to be in mourning. Chow disagrees, calling the idea sentimental and foolish, and continues to disagree until Pam pierces his temple with her stiletto and locks him in the dungeon. She paces across the floor until Ginger starts asking questions, so Pam throws her in the dungeon, too. The screams are oddly... satisfying.
VI. The Witching Hour
Lorena is in Las Vegas by the time she finds out. She flips her phone closed and begins to laugh slowly, a dark, bitter, gutteral sound, like clotting blood.
VII. Rush hour
En route from New Orleans, Bill's cell phone starts making indignant noises at him. He pokes at it furiously for several minutes before realizing that Lorena, during their recent hostage crisis, had locked the keypad. It takes longer than he'd like to admit to retrieve his messages: every vampire he knows (he knows surprisingly few) has called to ask whether he'd heard what had happened to his Sheriff's maker. He experiences a moment of sick glee imagining Eric's grief--serves the bastard right--and then, after thoroughly castigating himself, he pulls over and stares sightlessly at the dusty road as the weight of what has happened settles over him.
He never saw his own elderly father again after he went to war; after that last, horrible time, he never saw his wife and children again. There was no real leavetaking, only that sense of sickening shame as he pulled away into the darkness, and he envies the sense of finality Eric must have experienced, a sorrow clean and real and uncomplicated. Envies Eric's love for his maker, when Bill feels only revulsion and hate for his.
He realizes, suddenly and terribly, who was at Godric's side at the end. This he envies above all; she'll be long dead before Bill finally goes.
VIII. Last call
"I heard them Dallas vampires is mean as fuck."
Lafayette pours another shot, and Jason gratefully accepts it. It feels good to relax, even if his other hand is still clamped around the chainsaw. In the corner of the room, beneath the light of flickering candles and the warm glow of a glittering Virgin Mary, Lettie Mae presses a damp cloth to her unconscious daughter's forehead. Sookie stares out at the gradually lightening sky, forehead pressed against the glass, waiting for Bill.
The tequila spreads warmth over his tired muscles. "It wasn't the vamps that was bad, man, it was those goddamn Bible-thumpers. This one guy--Godric--they were gonna set him on fire and shit! It was fucked up as hell."
Lafayette blinks once, deliberately, at the name. "Godric? I heard he's one scary-ass motherfucker."
"Aw, naw, man, he was cool. He was like--"
Jason pauses, takes another shot, screws up his nose in concentration. This always happens, the way feelings well up in his chest so hot and real and sudden, but then they work their way up and just get... strangled in his throat, or maybe lost whirling around somewhere in his brain, emerging from his lips stupid and weak. He wants to explain how helping save Godric made him feel strong and good for the first time since Amy, how ashamed he was and how good forgiveness felt, how he said please know you have friends in this area whenever you visit and it felt like a promise, like a declaration of love, not like a formality. How those words made him feel he belonged more than Jesus or Bon Temps ever had--
"--I don't know, he was just a really cool guy."
IX. First light
She couldn't speak of it after. Not to Bill when they roused him from his daytime sleep long enough to roll him, stooped and groggy, into the Anubis coffin. Not to Jason, who fidgeted beside her the whole flight, rubbing at the ash and vampire guts staining his good jeans, worrying the spots until his fingertips blistered. She had planned to tell them that evening, but then they returned to Bon Temps to find all hell broken loose.
Bill surely knows by now, and Jason will know soon enough, but now she knows she will never speak of it; this lie of omission will stretch into the next night and the next, too big and jagged and horrible to ever pass her lips: the eldritch pattern of bloodstains on Eric's face, the blue glow of their bloodless flesh in the growing light, how beautiful it was when fire gleamed against Godric's marked skin. How empty the place he had been was when he had gone: how terrifyingly, achingly bare, like a grave gaping beneath her feet, like Gran's eyes when they stared up at her, speckled with blood. She has seen death so many times now, and yet this is something worse than death: the absence of a body, more fundamentally, unthinkably wrong than the presence of one could ever be.
She finds she cannot look at it directly, this terrible thing, and so she will put it away, until slowly, slowly, it will begin to wear away at the edges, becoming small and polished enough to hide away in her pocket and perhaps she will take it out again someday, run her fingertips over it when it is no longer too much to bear, admire its shifting colors. She will remember how he shone in the sunlight and her mind will not draw away in horror.
In a corner of the sky, dawn is coming fast.