Chapter 21 – Trust

 

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Part II: Have I Ever Truly Been Here

 

“For fuck’s sake, Godric!” The dishes in Tara’s hand fell to the hard tile floor shattering the porcelain to pieces. Wet hands dripped as she desperately tried to sidestep the damage while she glared at the vampire that had suddenly appeared in front of her window. “You can’t sneak up on people that way.”

 

“I apologise, Tara, I should have called,” he offered shyly through the glass of the window before she motioned him towards the front door a few feet away in the small studio apartment.

 

“Come in, Godric,” she sighed reluctantly when he appeared to be hovering near the threshold for no discernible reason.

 

“You have a very nice home,” the ancient vampire noted as his eyes travelled over the room.

 

“You’re a very good liar,” Tara grinned. “Let’s be real here, it’s a piece of shit. What brings you by, Godric?”

 

“It felt like you could use someone….” he trailed off before the hard and defensive look settled on Tara and their bond. “I could use someone.”

 

“My days of comforting others with my body to forget our collective misery are over, Lil’ Ric,” she returned dismissively before coming to understood he meant nothing of the sort when his face fell with her insinuation. The surprising part to her was that a man, or vampire in this case, came knocking at her door in the late night not seeking sex. “Can I offer you a drink?” Tara quickly asked in hope to glance over the social awkwardness that had inadvertently emerged. His eyes glimpsed up from their sullen stand and when mistaking it for interest in an arterial vein that only thrummed harder with scrutiny she supplemented, “A bottled one?”

 

“No,” he sighed deeply for which she exhaled one of her own for she had nothing like that in her home. She wasn’t quite the Supernatural hostess like Sookie.

 

“Shit, do I need to call 1-800-donors?” she asked with genuine worry as his mood refused to lift as he always at least tried in her presence. Tara couldn’t find herself to care much for nocturnal creatures, but she couldn’t stand to see him this miserable either.

 

“No,” he answered with a small chuckle causing her to soften with the sight of a smile on his face.

 

“So?” she demanded with her hands crossed firmly over her chest, a raised brow questioning his sudden appearance at her door. Neither one willing to acknowledge her text message that had her reaching out to him.

 

“How do you do it?” he finally asked after spending and extraordinary amount of time staring at his feet while cataloguing her every single emotion and supposed motivation behind them through their shared blood.

 

“Do what?”

 

“Just continue on as if nothing happened,” he whispered, marvelling at how put together she was despite what she had been through, functioning as if it were all a minor incident. “How do you ignore the emptiness?”

 

“It’s just there,” she shrugged while casually sweeping up the damage to her crockery with his unexpected appearance before meeting his downcast eyes. “It’s always been there. Isn’t it the same for you?”

 

“No.”

 

“Oh,” she startled, wondering what was worse, having it and losing it or never knowing it at all. Seeing the fidgeting ancient vampire in the flickering fluorescent light of her kitchen made her pause her sweeping movements. For the first time in her life she considered herself fortunate and forgot her pragmatic preoccupation. Leaving the broom to fall to the floor with a clang she uncharacteristically stepped up and hugged him, choosing to pick up the vampire who appeared to be laying in pieces on her floor instead of the physical shards of porcelain. “Well, I’m not as empty as I thought,” she whispered into his ears baring her troubles to him in a moment of insecurity.

 

“How do you mean?” he questioned as Tara’s inner confusion only added to his with her cryptic statement.

 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she answered defensively while moving out of his grasp, regretful of the slip of her tongue. Shame washed over her with the knowledge that she had hijacked his misery with her own once more, one which she had been so careful to hide from everyone.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I already know your opinion on the matter,” she bit back with venom, falling back on the familiarity of anger. A solitary emotion that had always offered her refuge from a cruel world that had never given her much mind. “It’s not one I’m willing to hear right now.”

 

“I could surprise you,” Godric offered, unwilling to relent while he followed her around the small space that was her apartment, which left her no place to hide. All she was capable of was turning her back on him, but even that did not stop his persistence on hearing what was troubling her so greatly. His hand tentatively sought to reach for her hers only to be met with a tear-stricken and resentful face in her trapped position when turned around.

 

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered before her knees gave way, her back slipping down the roughened wall of her living room, crumpling her to the floor with wetness blinding her eyes. “I can’t keep it. I just can’t.”

 

---

 

“Talbot?” Russell whispered with the public mention of his Childe by the uncloaked figure. Despite their supernaturally heightened vision, neither he nor Pam had recognised her and failed to place the brunette in front of them. She simply nodded to the unspoken question of whether his beloved was still alive.

 

Pam stood tall, mimicking the stance of her Maker without the benefit of his height to express her authority where Russell appeared to give way in trade for any nugget of information for the possibility that the vampiress in front of them spoke any truth. “Why are you here?” Pam growled out with acerbic suspicion to the sudden intruder.

 

“Officially I am here to retrieve Bill Compton,” she said with a gleam to her deeply dark brown eyes, which ran over Logan’s form appreciatively in the process of answering. Pam hated her instantly. “Officiously I am here to protect my blood.”

 

“She’s yours?” Pam questioned incredulously with an upturned brow to Russell who answered with a shrug that communicated ‘don’t look at me, I know as much as you do’.

 

“Is that any way to speak to your aunt?” she smiled while approaching the set of matching thrones. Pam was in front of her before she even managed to reach the first step of the dais, staring her down intently.

 

“My Maker is an only child,” Pam hissed but before she managed to tackle the brunette vampiress down to the floor she was swatted away as if a mere insect.

 

“That is what our Maker led him to believe,” she grinned while petting her blonde locks condescendingly. Her fangs distended into her wrist to give proof of their shared familiar line as she offered the scent of it to Pam’s discerning nose. “He has already withheld information of another, or has your Maker kept that from you too?” She batted her long brown lashes coyly as if she were genuinely apologetic of the fact, only causing Pam to growl out in threat once more.

 

“You are aware of my long lost sister Cecily then?” she smiled subduing the cackle that went along with it, a more genuine kindness began to resonate from the petite woman when she noticed the very real threat Russell began to pose. She offered her hand to Pam without hostility to help her up and it was warily accepted. “Don’t take it too harshly, Godric never wanted to turn me. His lack of acknowledgement that I am his served me well in the end.”

“The Authority is known for favouring orphans,” Pam noted as her finger tapped on the shiny insignia that previously hid behind her robe. “Why would he keep it from Eric?”

 

“I blackmailed him,” she shrugged displaying the tell-tale scars from her human existence that barely survived the epidemic of the black plague. “Gave him no choice but to turn me or watch me die from the deadly disease I contracted.”

 

“You were lovers?” Pam discerned.

 

“No,” she said with a giggle. Pam and Russell regarded her with scrutiny before sharing a questioning glance for the seemingly unnatural noise coming from a vampire. “He was to my natural brother though, we buried his body first and I refused to be the next. There were only so many sacrifices I was willing to make for nursing my brother into his mortal death.”

“Ms. -” Russell questioned, becoming rather bored with this story of origins when she could be offering him more information on his precious Talbot.

 

“Gainsborough,” she supplied. “But my friends call me Nora.”

 

“Are we friends?” Russell asked with no uncertainty to the evident threat his three-thousand years afforded him in moments like these. “Nora?”

 

“Are you friends with Pamela here?” she countered, showing little fear and pertly sat on Pam’s vacated throne.

 

“Are we, Poppet? Friends?”

 

Pam eyed them warily wondering if this was some sort of trap or if she could genuinely trust them both. She sat herself in Russell’s lap, now the more familial of the two, despite the scent of shared blood, arms hanging of his neck before catching his gaze as she huskily replied, “Oh darling, I think we’re more than just friends.” Before he could cackle hysterically with her display of seduction, she took him by surprise and kissed him fully on the mouth.

 

He spluttered with protest at the feel of her soft, yearning, feminine lips before exhaling a noise that could only be interpreted as utter disgust once freed from her grasp of shock. “I think you are mistaking me for the wolf,” he sneered while he wiped his tongue profusely on his sleeve displaying his abhorrent disgust of female attention.

 

“Friends then?” she grinned with an offered hand to shake, masking the surprise of her apparently poorly hidden liaison with Logan. It shouldn’t have surprised her though, Russell seemed to know everything without discernible reason.

 

“Friends,” he smiled in return, kissing the ring finger of the presented hand before setting them both on their feet again. “Now let’s show your auntie here to our favoured guest in the dungeon.”

 

“With pleasure,” Pam returned with a long extinct curtsey before leading the way to the basement level.

 

“Pamela, what did you do?” Russell scolded as if she were an infant when he took in the sight of the Civil War veteran who had clearly passed out from the pain she had inflicted on him.

 

“You told me to get a hobby,” she shrugged innocently. “I got a hobby.”

 

“Not quite what I had in mind,” he grinned apologetically to Nora while taking in the intricate Arcadian scene embroidered into Bill’s chest with silver thread. “Though you are very skilled. You’ll have to excuse the wallpaper on Mr Compton’s chest, Ms Gainsborough; Pammy here got a little excited.”

 

“I think they’ll ask for a workshop when they see this back at HQ,” Nora grinned while giving orders to her handlers to prepare him for transport. She kissed Pam twice on the cheeks before giving a courteous nod to Russell. “We’ll be speaking soon, after all, we’re all friends now.”

 

“Of course, Auntie Dear,” Pam intoned with an exaggerated saccharine that jarred with her persona.

 

“Adieu, Madam Chancellor,” Russell waved when they reached the transport van.

 

“Your Grace,” she greeted with a curtsey not dissimilar to Pam’s

 

“A pleasure to meet you, my friend,” he smiled falsely before watching her saunter off. “Oh, and Nora, send my regards to Niccoló.”

 

---

 

“Better?” Eric questioned carefully as he regarded Sookie with extreme scrutiny. She nodded fiercely while another unidentified glob of warm food travelled down her throat.

 

“Sorry,” she whispered apologetically for probably the sixth time that night. An amused smile graced his face as he gently caressed her thigh while he patiently waited for her to finish her food. “I’m really cranky when I’m hungry.”

 

It had been alarming and strange to the thousand-year-old vampire to be woken by a hard slap to the face before the sun had set by a fierce little fairy hybrid. The fact that he wore that same amused smile then had done little to plea for his case while she ranted off on all the things that were so obviously wrong between them. In his half-daze of consciousness, he had barely been able to make out the words that were spewed out at an intensily fast rate. However, the insinuation that he didn’t care for her, something evident by the complete lack of sustenance in the safe house, had woken him with greater urgency than any emergency ever had in the past.

 

After diligently explaining and discrediting everything his meddling semi-corporeal sister, Cecily, had planted in her food-starved head, it did not go unnoticed by him that he had been rather lax in her general care. The hunger for proper nourishment had been fed with snacks and meals on the go, and somewhere he felt slightly guilty for having that go unnoticed by him. Her rant had ended moments after sundown and rather than fuck away the unleashed anger, like he wanted, Eric had instead scooped her up and taken her to New Orleans’ finest dining establishment.

 

“This is all very strange,” Sookie whispered in the very formal dining room where their presence had not gone unobserved by the rest of the discerning clientele. For one, Eric’s place setting had gone untouched. The glass of True Blood sat intact demonstratively as he watched her eat in his oversized shirt, a pair of shorts, and tube socks while he wore a track suit with flip flops that stood in clear defiance of the formal dress code.

 

Eric merely shrugged with the observation and gave a particularly hard glare to another table that looked on with disgust. “Who gives a FUCK as long as you are happy and fed?” he spoke to onlookers and Sookie simultaneously.

 

Sookie rolled her eyes half-heartedly. “Way to make the human feel like cattle,” she grumbled, her annoyance, however, was quickly silenced by a well-aimed spoonful of sinfully delicious food. “Not really disproving your case,” she giggled when the spoon finally left her mouth once Eric was assured it was sucked clean. He looked on with raised brows daring her to continue the earlier insinuation. “Don’t you find this strange?” she asked, gesturing about in demonstration of their seemingly odd fit into the decor.

 

“It’s been quite some time that I sat in a restaurant like this,” he confessed. “I tried to avoid it all costs when we were still hiding and after the Great Reveal there was little need for it.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she whispered against his lips when the last of her dessert had truly filled her to the brim. “I really needed something substantial inside me.”

 

“Well, I can always help you out with that,” he leered with a gesture to his cock, earning him a slap to the chest. She shook her head while trying desperately to contain her own amusement in her display of reprimand.

 

“You’re incorrigible,” she hissed when he refused to let go of the attacking hand.

 

“Yours,” he grinned before bluntly nipping at her fingers.

 

“Is that how you really see it?” she whispered softly, catching the glimmer in his eye as the intimation of Cecily came back to her with her presumption that monogamy was a foreign concept to a creature like the devoted man who sat in front of her. “Only yours?”

 

“Sookie,” he sighed before kissing the tips of her fingers and letting her retract her hand while he carefully tucked away a lock of hair she attempted to hide behind. “A relationship may be somewhat foreign to me, but I know loyalty. Betrayal is not a quality I tolerate or admire.”

 

“But Cecily-”

 

“Is getting a swift kick in the ass if she ever becomes corporal again,” he growled out, softening instantly when he sensed the anger he felt could be mistaken as directed at her. “When I say you’re mine or that I am yours, it is not for my sake, or for the benefit of a room of gawkers to claim you as a possession.” He grinned menacingly, displaying every bit of his power derived from age, while his eyes raked the quickly averting gazes back to their tables. “It is simply to acknowledge you are a part of me, like Pam or Godric are. I would no sooner discard you than I would my own limb.”

 

“On account of the blood,” she ascertained while fumbling with the heavy cloth napkin draped in her lap, her eyes following the movements her hand made instead of meeting his.

 

“No,” Eric spoke with certain clarity as his hand gestured her chin up to meet his gaze. “Blood or not, this is how I feel. It’s confusing and pisses me off most of the time, but I’m not sorry for it.”

 

“Why?” Sookie requested softly.

 

He gave a tiny shrug as his hand loosened from his hold on her chin to find hers. “Because it brought me you.”

 

“It’s just that simple for you?”

 

“It is.”

 

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A/N: I’m back in the New Year and I hope you all will enjoy the secondary arc to this tale. I need to do some housekeeping banner wise, hopefully that will be resolved with the next update. So the E/S blowup wasn’t as bad as assumed by your last comments but I will say their relationship has gone by pretty unscathed through it all so there is little necessary to upset that balance, it can’t be roses and sunshine all the time… No one guessed Nora as the cloaked figure and I’m not committing in any way to where her loyalties lie you’ll just have to wait and see how that conduit will function in the weeks to come while Russell and Pam are pretty much Russell and Pam… What can I say about Godric and Tara… it’ll be trying times…

 

Many thanks to the wonderful msbuffy for her super editing skills on this 🙂 

 

Happy New Year to you all and your thoughts are welcome as always!

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