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The Things Our Fathers Teach Us.
True Blood. Pam, Eric, Godric, and all combinations thereof. PG-13. 1500 words.
They fought all the time at first, with screams and shattered windows and harsh words meant to slice flesh from bone, and then knives and fangs that did the same, only with bloodier results. She was a violent newborn, and everything was bright and shiny new for the shattering.
And then his bloody lip and broken bones would heal, her bruises flourished in reverse, and they would go out, two blondes on the town, dressed to the highest fashion, beautiful, haughty, and Eric would offer her his hand with a sardonic twist to his lips and she would step from the carriage, skirts swirling about her as nails would crush perfect half-moons into his wrist. Music lit their life and blood coloured it, through parades of pretentious young poets and starry-eyed politicians, through all the milkmaids and burlesque dancers that kept them fed and flushed.
Pam loved the dancers most of all, would take them to halls and homes and pubs and secret clubs, and spin and twirl them around, with their beautiful pearls, soft skin, slinking hips, arching necks and tragic eyes, and catch glimpses of Eric, sitting alone and patient, watching her with his pale, glittering eyes.
She wondered, sometimes, if she was in love with him, and the thought sent horror shivering down her spine. No, this was not love, not that petty, obsessed, jealous, stultifying emotion that humans would chase their whole lives and lived dying lives once they had found it. That, at least, was something Pam was sure belonged to the realm of living meat and chemicals.
She was nearly trapped in that, nearly a porcelain doll with no mind or air in a picture-perfect townhouse with no avenues of escape. She was very nearly the perfect daughter to a perfectly fine mortal man.
Not for her, not ever, not now, especially not now when she has eternity and them some to live, not for her the need to latch onto another and never let go. When Eric calls, she cannot help but answer, and whether it’s from across a blood-spattered bed or an entire ocean, she will go, she will follow, and there are some things that she just can’t hate, even though she should.
But she doesn’t need him, and that is all the difference she needs to love him. Love and in love are two different things, but semantics are always semantics, and she really doesn’t care for the fine hairs and splitting thereof. There is her, and there is Eric; it is father and daughter, lover with lover, brother to sister and partner in crime, and that is what it is.
-
Somewhere in Paris, sometime when absinthe is still fashionable and children are playing at old wars in the streets while new ones warm up, the Celtic appears, his tattoos visible beneath an open collar, clad in ruffles and a long dark coat, a silver-topped cane under one arm and dark hair spiked with drying blood.
He bows to her, even when Eric is frozen beside her, full with the paralysis of abandonment and love, and takes her to dance while Eric implodes. She spins in his arms, his hands sure on her waist, lips cool on her neck and feels like she’s caught in the eye of a storm, all her stolen blood rushing through her body and she doesn’t know what kind of a monster he is, but she thinks he is wondrous.
He is impeccably polite, takes a drop and gives her one in return, and it is all so small, so exact, so tit-for-tat, and she has never felt more thoroughly helpless in her life.
The next time she spins, she knows before seeing that Eric is gone, and knows before completing her turn that her dance partner has followed. She barely cares, and cares far too much, caught up in bliss, spinning on marble and seeing candles like suns, and she has no lack for partners, she has never suffered from that particular malady, and dances until she could die from the dawn, and stumbles into the home Eric has bought for them, collapsing behind blacked-out windows onto the floorboards, her mind slipping away as the door slams shut.
She wakes, sprawled out across the divan, her ball gown spread out around her in mountains of silk and satin. Someone has arranged her like a doll, her hair flowing behind her over a cushion as she rises to her elbows, her feet crossed daintily. She feels a fierce ball knot in her stomach, feels her mouth snarl as if of its own will, and a voice speaks from somewhere below her.
“Forgive me, Pamela, I simply tried to make you comfortable before you woke. I … did not think.”
She swings her head over the edge of the divan, sees the dark, solemn face staring up at her from the floor, and the anger fades into something more like intrigue.
“You made him.”
“Oh, yes.” He smiles, shifts upward, his face so close to hers she can smell Eric’s blood on his lips.
“Godric.” She says, and it is accusation, jealousy and wonder all wrapped into her voice, and it comes out more broken than she’d meant. To cover, she twists her mouth, smirks, “you’re a little shorter than I expected.”
He laughs, a short, surprised bite of sound. “You are wonderful.” He breathes, falling back to the floor, arms stretching languidly up above his head.
She slides off the divan, eyes narrowed, slinks up the carpet until she’s straddling him, her dress pushed up past her knees. His hands settle on her thighs like it’s the most natural thing in the world, eyes dark and unreadable, face an unbroken series of careful lines.
She kisses him because she has to, because Eric is his and she is Eric’s and what Eric has she has to have too or she might just lose to him.
She thinks Godric might kiss her back, might wrap his arm around her neck and rise with inhuman strength, shifting her up his body as he stands, slamming her against the wall, she thinks that Godric might just do these things for the exact same reason. Or maybe it's sheer perversity that makes this strange, unwholesome boy cater to her whim.
He terrifies her.
Later, Godric will play the violin for them, a crease diving down his pale brow,and Eric will his head in her lap, smile up at her like he knows all the secrets of the universe, like a cat with a canary beneath his paw, and lick his lips.
-
They are three for a while, terrorizing Montmartre, with Godric driving famous writers to suicide with his rhetoric just for kicks, and Eric organizing the local crime elements into a hobby syndicate, and Pam snacking on the altar boys and accidentally-on-purpose generating a local cult around her dark antics. She tires of worship swiftly and topples the movement with one fell massacre.
“I much prefer corpses to cultists. Honestly, at least corpses don’t keep nattering on about Satan this and Satan that, and Dark Mistress may I cut off my genitalia for you? Mistress, allow me to lick your toes, ugh. Humans. Oh, Dark Lady of the Night, Simon says the symbols go like this, but I say that, and in your infinite wisdom, oh, and don't get me started on the God, God, God, God. Always with the ‘God’. If I never hear that name again, I might just start believing there is one.”
Eric smiles at her fondly with a bloody maw over the body of her high priest. Godric, perched on a windowsill, tries not to laugh. He loves to laugh, though somewhere along the way, he got caught on the idea that he should save his laughter, bottle it up and use it wisely. Pam tries her best to ruin his resolve, with mixed results.
He is the best laugher among them, and when he does let go, falling around their naked limbs, spreading out across rumpled silk bedclothes like he cannot help himself, cannot control his shuddering chest, with its tattoos dark against the firelight, when laughter quakes out of him like some dark eruption, it is all Eric and Pam can do not to lose themselves in the twisting, hypnotic sound.
-
She leaves first, she breaks the spell. She doesn’t know if it is Godric or Eric who leaves after her, who leaves who, and she’s not sure she wants to.
If they had been human, there might have been tears. They weren’t, so she got gold, furs and hard, angry looks instead.
She never sees Godric again, not after that last night when he comes out to say farewell when Eric doesn’t, sulking and stubbornly hiding inside the house, probably still curled up under the sheets of his ridiculously ornate bed, pretending he doesn’t care. Godric has wrapped himself up in a black cloak and not much else, his hair ruffled in the cool evening wind and with violent love in his eyes.
He kisses her on the forehead, gives her a benediction before he turns away, and he might as well have spat into the stone at her feet for all it feels like a curse and a slap.
She leaves because if she doesn’t, she never will.
-
fin.
True Blood. Pam, Eric, Godric, and all combinations thereof. PG-13. 1500 words.
They fought all the time at first, with screams and shattered windows and harsh words meant to slice flesh from bone, and then knives and fangs that did the same, only with bloodier results. She was a violent newborn, and everything was bright and shiny new for the shattering.
And then his bloody lip and broken bones would heal, her bruises flourished in reverse, and they would go out, two blondes on the town, dressed to the highest fashion, beautiful, haughty, and Eric would offer her his hand with a sardonic twist to his lips and she would step from the carriage, skirts swirling about her as nails would crush perfect half-moons into his wrist. Music lit their life and blood coloured it, through parades of pretentious young poets and starry-eyed politicians, through all the milkmaids and burlesque dancers that kept them fed and flushed.
Pam loved the dancers most of all, would take them to halls and homes and pubs and secret clubs, and spin and twirl them around, with their beautiful pearls, soft skin, slinking hips, arching necks and tragic eyes, and catch glimpses of Eric, sitting alone and patient, watching her with his pale, glittering eyes.
She wondered, sometimes, if she was in love with him, and the thought sent horror shivering down her spine. No, this was not love, not that petty, obsessed, jealous, stultifying emotion that humans would chase their whole lives and lived dying lives once they had found it. That, at least, was something Pam was sure belonged to the realm of living meat and chemicals.
She was nearly trapped in that, nearly a porcelain doll with no mind or air in a picture-perfect townhouse with no avenues of escape. She was very nearly the perfect daughter to a perfectly fine mortal man.
Not for her, not ever, not now, especially not now when she has eternity and them some to live, not for her the need to latch onto another and never let go. When Eric calls, she cannot help but answer, and whether it’s from across a blood-spattered bed or an entire ocean, she will go, she will follow, and there are some things that she just can’t hate, even though she should.
But she doesn’t need him, and that is all the difference she needs to love him. Love and in love are two different things, but semantics are always semantics, and she really doesn’t care for the fine hairs and splitting thereof. There is her, and there is Eric; it is father and daughter, lover with lover, brother to sister and partner in crime, and that is what it is.
-
Somewhere in Paris, sometime when absinthe is still fashionable and children are playing at old wars in the streets while new ones warm up, the Celtic appears, his tattoos visible beneath an open collar, clad in ruffles and a long dark coat, a silver-topped cane under one arm and dark hair spiked with drying blood.
He bows to her, even when Eric is frozen beside her, full with the paralysis of abandonment and love, and takes her to dance while Eric implodes. She spins in his arms, his hands sure on her waist, lips cool on her neck and feels like she’s caught in the eye of a storm, all her stolen blood rushing through her body and she doesn’t know what kind of a monster he is, but she thinks he is wondrous.
He is impeccably polite, takes a drop and gives her one in return, and it is all so small, so exact, so tit-for-tat, and she has never felt more thoroughly helpless in her life.
The next time she spins, she knows before seeing that Eric is gone, and knows before completing her turn that her dance partner has followed. She barely cares, and cares far too much, caught up in bliss, spinning on marble and seeing candles like suns, and she has no lack for partners, she has never suffered from that particular malady, and dances until she could die from the dawn, and stumbles into the home Eric has bought for them, collapsing behind blacked-out windows onto the floorboards, her mind slipping away as the door slams shut.
She wakes, sprawled out across the divan, her ball gown spread out around her in mountains of silk and satin. Someone has arranged her like a doll, her hair flowing behind her over a cushion as she rises to her elbows, her feet crossed daintily. She feels a fierce ball knot in her stomach, feels her mouth snarl as if of its own will, and a voice speaks from somewhere below her.
“Forgive me, Pamela, I simply tried to make you comfortable before you woke. I … did not think.”
She swings her head over the edge of the divan, sees the dark, solemn face staring up at her from the floor, and the anger fades into something more like intrigue.
“You made him.”
“Oh, yes.” He smiles, shifts upward, his face so close to hers she can smell Eric’s blood on his lips.
“Godric.” She says, and it is accusation, jealousy and wonder all wrapped into her voice, and it comes out more broken than she’d meant. To cover, she twists her mouth, smirks, “you’re a little shorter than I expected.”
He laughs, a short, surprised bite of sound. “You are wonderful.” He breathes, falling back to the floor, arms stretching languidly up above his head.
She slides off the divan, eyes narrowed, slinks up the carpet until she’s straddling him, her dress pushed up past her knees. His hands settle on her thighs like it’s the most natural thing in the world, eyes dark and unreadable, face an unbroken series of careful lines.
She kisses him because she has to, because Eric is his and she is Eric’s and what Eric has she has to have too or she might just lose to him.
She thinks Godric might kiss her back, might wrap his arm around her neck and rise with inhuman strength, shifting her up his body as he stands, slamming her against the wall, she thinks that Godric might just do these things for the exact same reason. Or maybe it's sheer perversity that makes this strange, unwholesome boy cater to her whim.
He terrifies her.
Later, Godric will play the violin for them, a crease diving down his pale brow,and Eric will his head in her lap, smile up at her like he knows all the secrets of the universe, like a cat with a canary beneath his paw, and lick his lips.
-
They are three for a while, terrorizing Montmartre, with Godric driving famous writers to suicide with his rhetoric just for kicks, and Eric organizing the local crime elements into a hobby syndicate, and Pam snacking on the altar boys and accidentally-on-purpose generating a local cult around her dark antics. She tires of worship swiftly and topples the movement with one fell massacre.
“I much prefer corpses to cultists. Honestly, at least corpses don’t keep nattering on about Satan this and Satan that, and Dark Mistress may I cut off my genitalia for you? Mistress, allow me to lick your toes, ugh. Humans. Oh, Dark Lady of the Night, Simon says the symbols go like this, but I say that, and in your infinite wisdom, oh, and don't get me started on the God, God, God, God. Always with the ‘God’. If I never hear that name again, I might just start believing there is one.”
Eric smiles at her fondly with a bloody maw over the body of her high priest. Godric, perched on a windowsill, tries not to laugh. He loves to laugh, though somewhere along the way, he got caught on the idea that he should save his laughter, bottle it up and use it wisely. Pam tries her best to ruin his resolve, with mixed results.
He is the best laugher among them, and when he does let go, falling around their naked limbs, spreading out across rumpled silk bedclothes like he cannot help himself, cannot control his shuddering chest, with its tattoos dark against the firelight, when laughter quakes out of him like some dark eruption, it is all Eric and Pam can do not to lose themselves in the twisting, hypnotic sound.
-
She leaves first, she breaks the spell. She doesn’t know if it is Godric or Eric who leaves after her, who leaves who, and she’s not sure she wants to.
If they had been human, there might have been tears. They weren’t, so she got gold, furs and hard, angry looks instead.
She never sees Godric again, not after that last night when he comes out to say farewell when Eric doesn’t, sulking and stubbornly hiding inside the house, probably still curled up under the sheets of his ridiculously ornate bed, pretending he doesn’t care. Godric has wrapped himself up in a black cloak and not much else, his hair ruffled in the cool evening wind and with violent love in his eyes.
He kisses her on the forehead, gives her a benediction before he turns away, and he might as well have spat into the stone at her feet for all it feels like a curse and a slap.
She leaves because if she doesn’t, she never will.
-
fin.
4 in play | deploy