Back In Time

Chapter 18: In Which I Have My Cake and Eat It Too

Three nights. I'd been forced to wait three nights to see her. I am many things. Patient is not near the top of the list. However, I had made it through and was moments away from an audience with the Ancient Pythoness. I sat in an antechamber at the palace she was kept in, thinking.

I had resolved many times over the course of the last three nights to fly back to Louisiana and kill Sookie's brother on principal, only to talk myself out of it each time. I knew when I got her back she would be pissed if he was dead and as endearing as I found her to be when she was pissed, I had to admit that murdering her brother might tip her over the edge. Deserving though he may be.

Thinking of Sookie being angry brought to mind the instance she had most pissed, and coincidentally hilarious. Though, admittedly, I didn't find it funny in the least at the time. It was just after I'd turned her. When she'd woken, she'd been disbelieving and upset. When I tried to explain myself, I experienced a very rare moment of emotional overload myself. That episode had ended satisfactorily, with very passionate lovemaking. One of the things that I would never tire of with Sookie would be her capacity for passion. She constantly surprised me sexually, never behaving the way I expected her to. It was tantalizing, to say the least.

However, shortly afterward, she quite quickly became irate again. An unfortunate side effect of the newly made vampire. To explain what happened next, I can only assume she was experiencing too many emotions to process at once. Or she'd gone temporarily bat-shit crazy. One is as plausible as the other, though Pam's money was on bat-shit.

She'd insisted on going directly to her home, so I followed her. I took an ear-beating the likes of which I hadn't suffered since my human days the entire way there, but I let her rant. I'd known she would be angry and rightly so. We had discussed the possibility of turning her while she'd been human and it was something neither of us wanted. When I told her I'd acted on reflex, I wasn't lying. The thought of her not being with me was offensive and when I saw her fading away from me, I acted by instinct. So, I was prepared for her raving.

I wasn't prepared for her to start eating food, though, which is exactly what she did. Apparently somewhere in her brain, she was clinging to the hope that if she didn't acknowledge the fact that she was now vampire, then she wouldn't actually be vampire. Like I said, emotional overload or bat-shit crazy. I was nearly in a panic at the time between the eventual sickness she was causing herself and the worry that she'd been too far gone when I'd acted. The only thing worse than losing Sookie forever would be a having created a Bubba-like Sookie; a cruel parody of the woman I'd loved so fiercely. I recalled the incident in perfect detail, as I did all of my many memories.

"I really wish you wouldn't do that!" I shouted at her from across the table in her small dining room. She grabbed two more handfuls of cake and shoved them into her mouth, which was already nearly too full to close. She chewed grossly, making a face at me from across the room. I threw my hands up, exasperated. "You're going to be spectacularly sick! Oh, you are going to be sorry for that!"

I was pacing, running my hands roughly through my hair, and she was chewing to beat hell. She swallowed a huge mouthful of half masticated cake and nearly gagged on it. It had to taste horrible, worse than horrible. I could practically see it scraping down her throat, sticking in her gullet. She kept it together, though, and managed to get it down. I was about to speak, try to reason with her when she looked at me in triumph and then crammed another handful of cake in.

'Stop! All right!" I roared, bringing my fists down on the tabletop. I was very close to full blown panic at that point, certain by then that she wasn't right, that something was off. She chewed wildly for a few seconds before swallowing that mouthful as well.

"Say you're a liar," she said in a level voice, staring me down.

"I will not and you know better than this," I said, motioning to the platter of cake roughly with one arm. She hesitated for a moment and then shot her hand out toward the cake. "Wait!" I shouted. She froze, staring me down out of the corner of her eye. "I'm not lying, and I won't say that I am. Before you eat any more of that godforsaken cake, I want you to listen to me seriously," I held one hand out in from of me, palm down, like I was dealing with a crazy person. Honestly, I could have been, judging by the way she was acting. Before I could try to reason with her, she blanched and doubled over.

I flitted to her side instantly. "Here it comes," I told her, not looking forward to this process at all.

"Here comes what?" she groaned, sinking to her knees. I bent with her just as she started to heave. I kept my hand strong on her back, hoping it would provide some comfort.

"You cannot tolerate food anymore. I told you that literally seven times before you started gorging yourself with cake, and several times during. You aren't familiar with the effect human food has on our bodies because you've never witnessed us eat it," I said quietly. Because we're not idiots, I added silently in my mind. "Now we wait until it comes back up." Even in her incapacitated state, I was confident she'd pick up on the sarcasm.

"How long will that be?" she asked miserably, heaving dryly again and curling into herself.

"At least two hours," I said thoughtfully. "Likely three, with the amount that you ingested. It was hard to get down because your muscles no longer function like humans. You swallowed all of that from forced memory, not actual movement. Your stomach is trying to get rid of it now, but again, the muscles don't work that way anymore and unfortunately you can't get it up with muscle memory. So, you have to wait until your body riots it up on its own," I pulled her onto my lap and her small body curled into my wearily. As pissed as I was at her thoughtless act, it tore at me to know that she was in pain.

I had underestimated, as it turned out. It was just over four hours before she came back to her senses. The cake was no worse for the wear, looking basically the same as it had when it went down; partially chewed and still spongy. This was because, as I explained to her, she no longer had any acids in her stomach to deteriorate food. Which is why she could no longer eat it. Well, obviously she could eat it, but it would come back up and after that vivid proof, she accepted her fate. She'd still been pissed and had managed to discover new methods of being a pain in my ass over it, which was saying something considering I'd been fairly certain Pam had run that well dry decades before. But she'd come to terms and we'd been enjoying a fairly normal relationship until she'd gone missing.

Thinking back on the incident, it was quite entertaining. When I'd recounted it to Pam, much to Sookie's dismay, she had gotten incomparable joy from imagining the scene and even re-enacting what she thought it must have looked like. Even Sookie had to admit the hilarity of it at that point and even joined in with Pam's playacting. Just then my cell phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled myself from the memory reluctantly. I checked the screen to see it was a text message from Pam.

Don't forget to call me after your meeting with the AP.

I nearly rolled my eyes before responding back.

Name one instance during the time you've known me that I've forgotten anything.

I knew she was really fishing to see if I'd been admitted yet and that she was only anxious. She'd wanted to come to me but I'd been afraid I would take my frustrations out on her and she didn't deserve it. Admittedly, I would have preferred her closer to me, her presence had always been a comfort. But I knew I'd be prone to lash out at her and I didn't want that. As thick as her skin seemed to be, I could feel her true emotions and with Sookie gone, the last thing I needed was to hurt Pam as well.

The first three years of the 1980's you 'forgot' that bellbottoms were out of style.

I actually snorted at that one and typed my response with a faint smile on my face.

Clearly, you're forgetting that I'm a trendsetter. Whatever I wear is 'in style'. I will call you as soon as I speak with her.

Her response was immediate.

Thank God thigh high boots are in season because the shit is getting deep. My phone is in my hand.

I smirked and slid my phone into an inner pocket of my suit jacket, smoothing the material down the front as I readjusted myself in my seat. Just then the massive doors in front of me opened, revealing an exceedingly attractive Asian vampire. I stood immediately, towering above her diminutive height.

"She will see you now," she informedme blandly, turning back into the hall. I made a note to tell Pam the phrasingthat had just been used, not doubting for a moment that she would get a kickout of it knowing that the Pythoness was blind, and then followed her down thehall.