Chapter 1
Thanks to Meridian for inspiring this little tidbit. The End
It has been ten years, ten very long yet very short years, for Eric Northman.
Those years have been very kind to him even if the end of what brought it on broke his heart into a million pieces.
The end was the beginning of the rest of his unlife. Even though he had cherished her, Sookie Stackhouse had been too naïve, too immature, too besotted with someone else to see his actions for what they truly were.
She may have treated vampires as just another person but she looked at the world through rose coloured glasses. Glasses which someone should have ripped off her face and stomped beneath their feet.
Sookie saw that the world had flaws, she knew it with every fibre of her being yet because of her disability, her damned telepathy, she never learned how to read between the lines, how to give the benefit of the doubt or even how to do something as simple as read body language.
Eric had tried, truly tried, to let her know him and teach her how the Supernatural world worked but she was bound and determined to live for her precious Bill. The one vampire who hurt her many times over. The one vampire she forgave all his wrong doings time and time again yet the ones who truly did try to do right by her, tried to teach her, she would barely give the time of day to.
Finally, one year to the day after the show down with the Yakuza she came to him. SHE came to HIM.
She may have come to him and apologized for her actions, or inactions as it were, but the hurt was still there.
“I’m so sorry Eric,” she had said.
“For what,” he had asked with a raised eyebrow and scepticism evident in his tone.
“For treating you the way I did. For not believing in you. For not giving you a chance.”
“What would you have done differently Sookie,” he had asked without a hint of the old lust.
She had looked at him with her own scepticism and sighed, “I don’t know Eric. I just don’t know what I could have done differently.”
That one sentence showed him just what he needed to do in order to gather the pieces of his heart and go forward with the rest of his existence. The words and their true meaning saddened him greatly but he had always known she would be the end of him. Whether it was the end of the man he was or his True Death he hadn’t known before that moment but now he knew.
He sighed deeply as he gathered his thoughts and put them into words, “If there is nothing you would have done differently then there is no future for us.
Your apology is accepted but it would be best if you got on with your life as Mrs. Merlotte or Mrs. Herveaux or even Miss Stackhouse but it will never be as I once hoped, it will never be as Mrs. Northman.” He then got up from the table at the restaurant they met in, paid the bill and left her sitting there, staring after him with tears streaming down her cheeks.
He had felt guilty for exactly three tenths of a second then decided that while he did love her, he wasn’t IN love with her.
In that short time frame he felt the pieces of his heart come back to him and they had slowly mended themselves back together as he went about his nightly business of taking care of Nu Blood, teaching his youngest progeny and fending off Pam’s errant remarks about a certain former flame. He may no longer be in love with her but that was no reason to speak deprecatingly about her or pretend she had never been a part of his life.
The End
