In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, here’s a quote from book 5, where Eric and Sookie are talking about the pirate vampire, Charles Twining. It also happens to be one of my very favorite E/S passages. Eric is essentially telling Sookie that he cares about her deeply, and Sookie (as usual) misses the point entirely. *grins*

Of course, we’ll never see anything like this in season 5, since Bill killed Long Shadow in Alan Ball Land. Hmph.

“When Hot Rain was dissatisfied with Long Shadow’s death, he sent Charles to exact payment for the debt he felt was owed.”

“Why would killing me cancel the debt?”

“Because he decided after listening to gossip and much reconnoitering that you were important to me, and that your death would wound me the way Long Shadow’s had him.”

“Ah.” I could not think of one thing to say. Not one thing. At last I asked, “So Hot Rain and Long Shadow were doing the deed, once upon a time?”

Eric said, “Yes, but it wasn’t the sexual connection, it was the… the affection. That was the valuable part of the bond.”

Every now and then, I like to look back at Eric passages from books two and three. I fell in love with the Viking in book two, and there are so many wonderful Eric moments. So here’s some quotage, just because. If only True Blood had retained this affection, trust, and humor between them… *sad sigh*

“Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me.”

I began crying. I looked so awful; it just broke what was left of my spirit.

To his credit, Eric didn’t laugh, though he may have wanted to. “Sookie, a bath and clean clothes and you will be put to rights,” he said as if he were talking to a child. To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel much older at the moment.

“The werewolf thought you were cute,” I said, and sobbed some more. We stepped out of the elevator.

“The werewolf? Sookie, you have had adventures tonight.” He gathered me up like an armful of clothes and held me to him. I got his lovely suit jacket wet and snotty, and his pristine white shirt was spotless no more.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I held back and looked at his ensemble. I swabbed it with the scarf.

“Don’t cry again,” he said hastily. “Just don’t start crying again, and I won’t mind taking this to the cleaners. I won’t even mind getting a whole new suit.”

I thought it was pretty amusing that Eric, the dread master vampire, was afraid of weeping women.

There was a small desk by one wall. Eric moved it over to the right side of my chair, lifted my arm, and laid it over the top of the desk. He switched on the lamp. After swabbing off my arm with a wet washcloth, Eric began removing the lumps. They were tiny pieces of glass from Luna’s Outback’s window. “If you were an ordinary girl, I could glamour you and you wouldn’t feel this,” he commented. “Be brave.”

“Do you think from now on, you could just let me stay at home, and leave me and Bill alone?” I asked.

“No. You are too useful,” he said. “Besides, I’m hoping that the more you see me, the more I’ll grow on you.”

“Like a fungus?”

He laughed, but his eyes were fixed on me in a way that meant business. Oh, hell.

Instinctively, I shut my eyes while the blasting lasted. Glass shattered, vampires roared, humans screamed. The noise battered at me, just as the tidal wave of scores of brains at high gear washed over me. When it began to taper off, I looked up into Eric’s eyes. Incredibly, he was excited. He smiled at me. “I knew I’d get on top of you somehow,” he said.

“Are you trying to make me mad so I’ll forget how scared I am?”

“No, I’m just opportunistic.”

I wiggled, trying to get out from under him, and he said, “Oh, do that again. It felt great.”

“This room reeks of blood,” he whispered.

“Well, there,” I said, and looked up. “That was the grossest—”

“Your lips are bloody.” He seized my face in both hands and kissed me.
It’s hard not to respond when a master of the art of kissing is laying one on you. And I might have let myself enjoy it – well, enjoy it more – if I hadn’t been so worried about Bill; because let’s face it, brushes with death have that effect. You want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive. Though vampires actually aren’t, it seems they are no more immune to that syndrome than humans, and Eric’s libido was up because of the blood in the room.

But I was worried about Bill, and I was shocked by the violence, so after a long hot moment of forgetting the horror around me, I pulled away. Eric’s lips were bloody now. He licked them slowly. “Go look for Bill,” he said in a thick voice.

I glanced at his shoulder again, to see the hole had begun to close. I picked up the bullet off the carpet, tacky as it was with blood, and wrapped it in a scrap from Eric’s shirt. It seemed like a good memento, at the time. I really don’t know what I was thinking.

“I am here,” Eric said.

“And I am here.” I was a little amused at Eric’s phone answering technique.

“Sookie, my little bullet-sucker,” he said, sounding fond and warm.

“Eric, my big bullshitter.”

“You want something, my darling?”

“So you want me to go to a human orgy, where I will not be welcome, and you want us to leave before I get to enjoy myself?”

“Yes,” I said, almost squeaking in my anxiety. In for a penny, in for a pound. “And… do you think you could pretend to be gay?”

There was a long silence. “What time do I need to be there?” Eric asked softly.

Normally, Eric was a blue-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of guy. Tonight, he wore a pink tank top and Lycra leggings. I don’t know
where he got them; I didn’t know any company made Lycra leggings in Men’s X-tra Large Tall. They were pink and aqua, like the swirls down the sides of Jason’s truck.

“Wow,” I said, since it was all I could think of to say. “Wow. That’s some outfit.”

I couldn’t find anything more informally sexy than shorts and a tee shirt. However, the shorts were some I had left over from my junior high days, and they encased me “like a caterpillar embraces a butterfly,” Eric said poetically.

“Hey, our hair’s the same color,” I said, eyeing us side by side in the mirror.

“Sure is, girlfriend.” Eric grinned at me. “But are you blond all the way down?”

“Don’t you wish you knew?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“Well, you’ll just have to wonder.”

“I am,” he said. “Blond everywhere.”

“Don’t let anything happen to me, okay?” I said to Eric directly. [...]

“You trust me?” Eric sounded surprised.

“Yes.”

“That’s… crazy, Sookie.”

“I don’t think so.” Where that surety had come from, I didn’t know, but it was there.

“You are happy,” Eric said.

“Yes. I am.”

“You will be safe.”

“Thanks. I know I will.”

“Sookie,” Eric said in my ear, so low that I don’t think another person in the room could’ve heard him. “Sookie, relax. I have you.”

Then, bless Eric, we were out the door and he laid me out on the hood of the Corvette… “Sookie,” Eric said. I didn’t think he’d heard a word. “Yield to me.”