Chapter 04: The Ties That Bind

[A/N:  I wanted to let you know that my own vision of vampire-human bonds and blood swapping is going to be different from both the book and the show.  I have something a little different in mind, and I hope that you will indulge me.  So this is simply my interpretation of what I’ve seen on the show, mixed in with a whole lot of creative license.  I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but as I said at the beginning, this story represents how things would go if I had my way.  I hope you enjoy!]

As Sookie got out of her old, yellow car, she was greeted by both Jesus and Lafayette, who were relaxing on the porch and obviously already a bit tipsy.

“It’s not even 10:30 a.m. yet!” Sookie scolded playfully.  “And you two are already gettin’ lit up!”  She smiled at them as she put her bag down on a chair.  “I was wondering if I could stay the night tonight, and I’ve brought a bribe.”  She pulled out the bottles of liquor she’d brought.

“Of course, baby girl,” Lafayette said.  “We was gonna suggest that you stayed anyway, and now that you have supplied more hooch―and some good shit at that―we’s insist on it!  Here, you’s can start with a glass of this wicked brew that Jesus cooked up,” Lafayette said as Jesus poured her a drink.

Sookie laughed, “Please, Lala, don’t call it a brew.  No offense to you two, but I don’t wanna think about witches’ spells right now.”

Lafayette and Jesus both joined her in a chuckle as Sookie took a glass of something that looked like sangria from Jesus.  She sipped it, and finding it delicious, took a bigger drink.

“Ready to get shit-faced, Doll?” Lafayette asked.

Sookie nodded as she took another long drink.  She sat down to join the two men on the porch, propping up her feet on the railing and leaning back in her seat.

After a few minutes of silence that was spent doing nothing more exciting than enjoying the quiet of the day, Jesus asked Sookie, “How are you today, Sookie?  You get any sleep at all?”

“A little,” she answered, “but my dream woke me up, and I don’t feel that rested, to tell you the truth.”

Lafayette frowned, “Fucking vampire dreams.  I remember those fucked up things a little too vividly.  I know you’s kinda have somethin’ goin’ on with Eric now, but shit, his blood was fuckin’ potent, and I still gets me some fucked up dreams every now and again.  I’m just glad that Big, Blonde and Toothy ain’t in ‘em no more.”

Jesus patted Lafayette comfortingly, “You know what we learned, Laf.  It’ll just take some time, and then you’ll stop having the dreams completely, especially since we decided that the other thing would be too much of a risk for you.”

Sookie’s curiosity was peaked.  “You learned something about vampire dreams or blood?  And what other thing are you talking about?”

Jesus sighed.  “Actually, Lafayette’s dreams are one of the reasons why I went to meet Marnie for the first time.  A little more than a year ago, probably around the time you disappeared, me and Lafayette . . .”  Jesus paused, looking at Sookie and ready to gauge her reaction to what he said next.  “Well, we did some V, and . . .”

Sookie interrupted and looked at Lafayette accusingly, “Lala, you can’t do that.  What if Eric found out?  What. The. Hell?”

Lafayette put up his hands as if in surrender, “I knows, Sook.  But it was shit that I had left over from when Eric was havin’ me sell it!  And he told me to get rid of it.  He said he didn’t care how as long as I didn’t sell it from then on.”

Sookie again interrupted, this time almost spilling her drink.  “He did what!  Fuck!  After he kept you in his fucking dungeon, he had you selling V!  I’m going to stake him myself!  Fucking hypocrite!”

“Listen, Sookie,” Jesus said, trying to calm her down.  “He came here a few days after you had disappeared to make sure we’d gotten rid of it; by then, we’d destroyed the rest of it ourselves.  But I think he came mainly to ask us if we’d seen you.”

Lafayette added, “He seemed a little―um―out of sorts.  He didn’t make no threats or nothin’.”

Jesus continued, “He sat right in that chair you’re sitting in for at least an hour.  He told us that some vampire queen had ordered him to sell the V and that he regretted having to get Laf involved.”

“It was almost a fuckin’ apology, Sook,” Lafayette added.

Jesus nodded, “He seemed real torn up about you being gone too―kept asking us if we’d heard from you.  He told Laf to keep all the money he’d made from the V-sales, and then he left, asking us to phone him if we heard anything, even if it was just to tell him that you were alive.”

Lafayette finished quietly, “He did seem real shaken up.”

“I don’t get him,” Sookie said, frustrated.  “One minute he can seem almost kind, and the next he’s got someone I love locked up in his basement, or he’s locking me up in his basement!”

Lafayette raised his eyebrow in question at the last part of her statement.

“Long story,” Sookie said, not wanting to open that can of worms.  “You know what Eric told me the night I came back?  He said that everyone stopped looking for me, gave me up for dead.  But he said that he never did.  How screwed up is that?  I mean―him―of all people!”

Lafayette looked a bit ashamed.  “Listen, Sook.  No one wanted to give up, but we searched and searched for months.  There was searches through the woods, and the police investigated both Eric and Bill.  Then six months after you was gone, the police closed the case even though Jason didn’t want to.”

Jesus added, “Yeah, that’s why he finally made a huge effort to pass his exams and become a cop, I think.  But there was just no trace of you.  Bill was asking questions for the first week or so that you were gone, but he seemed occupied with other things after that.  He told Sam that he could no longer feel your presence and that he thought you were dead.”

Sookie shook her head, “It’s crazy to think how everyone suffered like that when, to me, I was gone for only a few minutes.”

“Where was you?” Lafayette asked.  “I mean, I knows you told everyone that you was workin’ for Bill, but you’s know I ain’t buyin’ that sorry ass story.”

Sookie chuckled and took a deep breath; she knew that she could trust the men in front of her, and she needed them to know the whole story so that they wouldn’t think she’d just made them suffer without a word like that.  “Well, to start off with, I’m part fairy.”

“Huh?” Lafayette asked.

“Fairy―as in the species, but they’re a lot scarier than Tinker Bell, let me tell you!  I found out after Bill almost drained me; it’s why I don’t have a blood type, I guess.  I met this woman named Claudine, who turned out to be kinda like my fairy godmother.  Anyway, after I broke things off with Bill for the last time, I was real upset, and I went with her to the fairy world, which is in a different realm or something.  Anyway, time works a lot different there, and what felt like ten minutes to me was more than a year to you!  They tried to keep me there too, but I managed to escape.”  Sookie’s voice got quiet, “I saw my Grandpa Earl there too.”

“The one that disappeared when you’s and Jason was young?” Lafayette asked, enthralled by Sookie’s story.

“Yeah,” she said.  “He had thought he’d been there only for hours, but it had been decades.  He was like me, you know, with the telepathy thing.  He helped me get away, but he died when we got back to this world because he’d eaten some of this fruit thing they had there.”  Sookie had to work hard to stifle the tears working their way into her eyes.

Lafayette was shaking his head, “Jeez, Hooker.  Every time I think you’s as fucked up as you can get, you goes and adds something else to the heap of shit that is yo’ screwed up life!”  He poured himself and her new glasses of Jesus’s very potent drink.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Sookie sighed.  “So I didn’t even know I was gone that long until I got back and saw Jason dressed in a cop uniform.  Talk about a culture shock!”

The three friends laughed at this and then settled into quiet as Lafayette and Jesus absorbed what Sookie had told them.

“Listen, Sook,” Lafayette said after a few minutes.  “You’s know that I’m not the biggest fan of Eric Northman, but he didn’t seem like his big, bad vampire self at all after you went missin’.   You needs to know that what Eric said was true.  Even after everyone else had pretty much resigned themselves to the idea that you was dead, Eric kept on lookin’.  I’d see him ‘round Merlotte’s a few times a week, and he would call us at least that often to see if we’d heard anything.”

Sookie sighed.  She didn’t really know what to think about this new-found knowledge about Eric and decided to move it to the back of her mind for the moment.  Instead, she elected to go back to their previous topic―vampire blood and dreams.

She took another sip of her drink and then asked Jesus to continue his earlier story about Marnie.

“Well,” Jesus said, picking up where he had left off, “we had done some V, and the side-effects of it were really hard on Laf.  He started to sort of hallucinate even when he wasn’t on it, and we figured out it was because the V had opened up some of his latent magical power.  I figured that this was at least in part because he also had Eric’s blood in him, and that blood was continuing to make him have dreams, which were increasingly scary for Laf since they also contained dead humans at that point.  Well, I finally did a bit of research and found out about Marnie’s circle.”

Sookie nodded and took a big gulp of her drink, waiting for Jesus to go on.

“Well, I met Marnie, and I sensed some magic in her right away.  She was also so open to helping people then.”  Jesus looked forlorn at this memory, and Lafayette reached out to squeeze his boyfriend’s shoulder.

Jesus continued, “I explained the problem, and Marnie and I began to look through some of her spell books, hoping to find something that could get rid of or at least lessen the effects of the vampire blood.

We found out that the drug V doesn’t create any kind of connection between a vampire and a human because the blood has to be given freely by the vampire to create what they call a tie, which is basically a kind of magical connection.  They literally use their blood to infiltrate the body of the human―to tie the human to them in some way.”

Sookie stiffened a bit as Jesus continued, “There can also be different kinds of ties, depending on the vampires’ motives for creating them.  But most vampires create a tie to at least partially control the human they give their blood to.

“A magical blood tie, created purposefully by a vampire, is powerful.   This is how Eric tied Laf to himself when he healed Lafayette’s leg with his blood.  A tie allows the vampire to always locate the human and sense the human’s emotions.  It also seems to allow the vampire to influence the human’s feelings and behavior to a certain extent, especially through the use of dreams but also subtly through a kind of glamour within the blood itself.  And obviously it causes sexual attraction for that vampire, though this attraction will be tinged with the human’s true feelings about the vampire.  So since Laf was frightened of Eric, the dreams were both disturbing and―uh―arousing for him, at least at first.”

Lafayette blushed a little and shifted uncomfortably.

Jesus continued, “Us doing the V seems to have just been a catalyst for the dreams to start up again.”

“We’s not even sure it was Eric’s blood that was causin’ all the dreams after that, to tell you the truth,” Lafayette said.  “The last one that I had that he was in was over a year ago, but I still dreams me some bat-shit crazy stuff sometimes!”

“Are your dreams anything like Lafayette’s?” Jesus asked Sookie.

She shook her head, trying to absorb what Jesus and Lafayette had told her.  After a few moments, she gave a more complete answer, “After taking Bill’s blood for the first time, my dreams were a little scary, but mostly very―uh―erotic, and my dreams about Eric were always . . .” Sookie paused, not knowing exactly how to phrase what she wanted to say.

She took another drink and then set her once-again empty glass down.  A bit floored that she had drunk so much so quickly, she promised that her very next piece of business after hearing the rest of Jesus’s story had to be getting some food.  She sighed as the two men looked at her expectantly, seeing if she would continue.

Finally, she did, “My dreams about Eric were always more―oh, I don’t know―romantic maybe?  Tender?  I mean, we did it, but . . .”  Sookie paused, blushing.  “We did it, but we also talked a lot and joked sometimes.  Other times, he’d just be there talking to me, trying to warn me about Bill or something.  In the last one, he was just kinda sad because I was with Bill.”  She had finished almost in a whisper.

Jesus and Lafayette both looked at her a bit surprised at this revelation.  “Well,” Jesus finally continued, “it’s a cliché, but when it comes to this kind of blood magic, dreams are the windows to the soul, and they reflect but also amplify your feelings.”

“Can a vampire control the dreams?” Sookie asked anxiously.

“To some extent,” Jesus continued.  “According to the book I read, the content of the dreams comes from the human’s subconscious, but that can be pushed along by the vampire’s motives regarding the human.  In other words, vampires cannot completely create brand new feelings from the human, but they can take what the human does feel and make it about a hundred times stronger.  Vampires can also influence the human to have the dreams in the first place by essentially sending them.”

Sookie said contemplatively, “I hadn’t had any since I got home until I . . . ”  She paused for a few long moments.  “Until Bill healed me after I was shot.  Then, they started up again.”  She finished quietly, “But I’d also had Eric’s blood earlier that night too, so that might have started them back up as well.”

Lafayette and Jesus shared a significant look, and then Jesus continued, “The dreams are also much more vivid than normal dreams, as I’m sure you know.  The vampire can make the magic tie last longer by giving the human more blood, and that blood can act as a catalyst for stronger dreams.  However, if blood isn’t given again, the overall effect of the blood and the dreams will diminish and eventually disappear.”

“Oh,” Sookie answered, feeling a little nervous about her most recent ingestion from both the vampires in her life.  “What else did you find out?”

“Well,” Jesus answered, leaning forward a bit.  “Here’s where the magic books get a bit vague; vampires are very secretive about their blood magic and the ties that they can create―for obvious reasons.  But the books suggest that there can be different kinds of ties created, as I indicated before.  Lafayette’s experience is indicative of the kind that the books know most about.  This is when the human drinks the vampire’s blood, and the vampire retains all control over the tie.  This kind of tie can be made even stronger if the vampire also drinks the human’s blood.

But there seems to be another kind of tie, one where the vampire gives blood in order to protect the human and, therefore, seems to forfeit his or her control.  And then, there’s another kind where the human and the vampire exchange blood; this one is called a bond.”

“Both Bill and Eric have had my blood too,” Sookie said musingly.  “Does that mean I have this bond thing with them both?”

“That’s not enough to make this different kind of magic,” Jesus said shaking his head.  The exchange has to be a true exchange―with the blood swap happening within a few moments.  And the vampire blood must be given with the intent of the vampire to create a stronger bond with the human.  This way, humans cannot force such a bond.”

Sookie nodded, remembering when Eric and she had exchanged blood in his cubby.  It had been different from anything she’d done with Bill, and the surreal experience they had following the exchange seemed to indicate that something major had happened to them.  After all, they’d both basically experienced the same kind of high.

She’d asked her Eric about it after they’d both essentially sobered up, but since he had lost his memories, he didn’t know if it was common for vampires to experience a ‘high’ like that every time.  She made a mental note to ask him again the next time they talked now that he was the old Eric again.

“How is a bond different than a tie?  I mean, are there different effects?” she asked.

Jesus answered, “This is where the book got really sketchy.  There was no concrete information on that.  It just said that the human seems to have some kind of influence over the vampire too if there’s a bond like this, but again, vampires are very secretive about anything that their blood can do.

Sookie nodded and exhaled.  “Did you find out anything to help Lafayette?  Something that could get rid of the magic―the tie to Eric?”

Jesus nodded slowly, looking at Lafayette through the corner of his eye.

Just then, Sookie heard a car come up Lafayette’s drive.  It was Jason’s cruiser.  She glanced at her watch, which said only 12:22 p.m.

“Hey,” she said to Jason as he got out of his car, “I thought you said you’d be here after 6.”

“Well,” Jason said, “Andy is all gung-ho today, and he sent me home early when I told him that I hadn’t gotten any sleep last night, so here I am.  He also gave me tomorrow off.  I don’t know what’s up with him, but I’m so tired, I took him up on his offer before he could change his mind!”

“Then you’s can get toasty with us,” Lafayette laughed.

“And . . .” Jason added, reaching into the back seat of his car, “I brought some chicken.”

He grabbed a couple of buckets from the back seat.

“Thank gosh!” Sookie exclaimed suddenly feeling very hungry and knowing that she needed to add something to her stomach before she got too drunk on Jesus’s fantastic ‘brew’, especially if she’d be doing some marathon drinking later that day.  She giggled a bit to herself as Jason joined them on the porch.

She greedily grabbed a drumstick from one of the buckets as Jesus and Lafayette began picking through the other one.

“What all’s been goin’ on?” Jason asked as he too grabbed a piece of chicken and fell into a chair.  He took off his gun belt and laid it on the table.

“We’s decompressing from all that witch shit,” Lafayette answered.  “Speaking of which, you’s both need a full glass of some decompressing liquid.”  He reached for the pitcher and refilled Sookie’s glass as Jesus got up to bring a new glass from the kitchen for Jason.

After they all had settled in again and had eaten a few pieces of chicken in relative silence, Sookie turned to Jason.  “Jesus was telling me about some things he learned about vampire blood.  Apparently, when you drank Jessica’s blood, a kind of magical tie was created between you two.  From what Jesus has been saying, your dreams about Jessica―since she gave you her blood―are pretty normal, and since you were both attracted to her and also felt guilty about that attraction because of Hoyt, that kinda explains why you’re dreaming what you are.”  Sookie patted Jason’s hand.

She continued, “And Jesus was about to tell me what he learned about making the blood magic go away or at least not seem so strong, right?” Both Sookie and Jason turned to Jesus, very interested in what he was going to say.

“Yeah,” Jesus said, “it’s not so simple.  There’s a way to do it, but we thought it might be worse than just waiting it out.”

“Why’s that?” Sookie and Jason asked at the same time.

“Well, first, it’s real painful for the person getting it done.  The spell isn’t that hard to do, but the magic literally burns the blood out of the human, and this has actually been known to kill the human at times.  And then there is the fact that the vampire will be able to feel the magic tie dissolve too, and we didn’t want to risk Eric becoming angry at Laf, and Laf and I didn’t wanna have to run or go into hiding.”  Jesus paused, “After a while, we didn’t think Eric would get angry, but since the dreams no longer contained him much at all, the risk just seemed too great.”

Lafayette nodded, “And after Eric came over once you went missin’, truth be told, I wasn’t really that scared of him anymore.”

Jesus continued, “And then the dreams became less and less frequent.  We didn’t think it would be worth any danger then.”

Sookie nodded and took a long drink of her alcohol.

“I wanna do it!” Jason yelled out abruptly.

Jesus and Lafayette both looked at him surprised.  Lafayette asked, “Do what?”

“Well,” Jason said, “I wanna do that break the magic vampire tie thing.  If I am only into Jess because of that, I need to get rid of it.  Hoyt is too important to me, and if it’s her blood makin’ all this happen, then maybe he’ll see that it’s not my fault that I―well―had sex with her.”

“But Jason,” Jesus said with concern, “it’s dangerous.”

“Me too,” piped in Sookie.  “I want it too!”

Now all three men turned their attention to her.  Lafayette said, “Hell no, girl!  It’s too dangerous.  You could die.  That ain’t worth it!”

Sookie looked at each of the men sitting with her in turn, finally landing her eyes on Jesus.  “Listen―I understand the risks here.  But since I have been involved with vampires, I have been beaten up more than once, nearly drained―again―more than once, and nearly killed lots of times.  I have two vampires that want me to be theirs in a kind of property way that I don’t even understand, and worst of all, I think I love both of them, but I cannot be sure if I really love them or if I just feel all this because of some kind of chemical thing about their blood.  I know that their blood cannot exactly make me have feelings, but it sure as hell took everything I felt for them and knocked it out of whack.  If I’m just attracted to them―if the love I feel isn’t real―I have to know before I really do get killed.”

She continued, almost ranting by this time even as tears began to gather in the corners of her eyes, “I was attacked only one day after I met Bill by the Rattrays . . .”

“What?” Jason interrupted.

“Let me finish!” Sookie said, tears now rolling freely down her face.  “I was attacked because Bill wanted to feed me his blood.  He had been ordered by the vampire queen of Louisiana at that time to find out if I really was a telepath, and then he was eventually supposed to get me under control and bring me to her.”

“I’m gonna kill that bastard,” Jason said interrupting again and jumping from his seat.

“Sit down!” Sookie exclaimed.  “I said to let me finish!”

Jason grunted and retook his seat.

Sookie wiped her eyes and kept going, “Bill says that he fell in love with me after that and that he was tryin’ to find a way to keep me safe, and I think I believe him, but I don’t know if that’s just his blood making me think that or if that’s what I really think.  I do know that both he and Eric have tried to glamour me in the past, and when they couldn’t do that, they both found ways to trick me into drinking their blood. I just don’t know what’s real, and I really need to know so that I can either move on with my life away from them, or figure out which one of them I really love because I’m not the kind of person who is in love with two men at once or who dreams about threesomes!”

After this big finish, all three men were looking, mouths open, at Sookie, who was now weeping.  She continued speaking between sobs, “And I’m even more screwed up than that.  The fucking ‘extra libido part’. . .”  Sookie made air quotes around the words that she remembered Bill saying, “ . . . has made me think I’m attracted to Alcide too, but who knows if that’s even real!  Three men?  I didn’t even have one until I met Bill!  And I’m tired of walking around horny all the damned time!”

At this, Jason rose again, this time because he was so uncomfortable.

Lafayette started to laugh, “Jeez, hooker, you is in a spot, ain’t ya!  Hell, if I was you’s, I’d take some time to really hit all of those fine male specimens for a while.  Maybe even more than one at a time.  Then you’s can make your informed decision.”

Sookie looked up through her tears and then started to laugh hysterically along with her friend.

Jason’s voice was serious as he interrupted their laughter, “Hey, don’t be talkin’ about my sister like that.  And Sook, don’t be talkin’ about no three-way things around me!”

At this, Jesus joined Lafayette and Sookie, who had again broken into belly-aching laughter.

Jason stalked inside, causing the three to laugh even louder.

Finally, after a few minutes, they settled down again, Sookie’s face returning to a serious expression.  Jason rejoined them once the noise had stopped.

“I mean it, guys,” Sookie said.  “I want to―no I need to do this.  I have to know.”

“Me too,” Jason said as both siblings looked at the couple in front of them.

“Could you two perform the spell?” Sookie asked, looking back and forth between Lafayette and Jesus.

“Yeah,” Jesus nodded, suddenly looking a few years older.  “But like I said, it is real dangerous.”  He looked directly at Sookie, “It would be especially difficult for you since you seem to have had a lot of their blood.  And you have had it from more than one vampire.”

“I know, but I have to do this,” Sookie said, her voice pleading with him.

Jesus and Lafayette looked at each other, and then Jesus spoke, “Listen, Sook.  I can see why you want this.”  He looked at Jason then, “I can see why you both want this, but Sookie, you are already a bit drunk, and I want you both to take some time thinking this over.”

Lafayette nodded, “Listen bitches.  I understand why you’d want to get yo’selves free of vamp blood―believe me, I gets it!  But you’s needs to think about this.  According to the book that Jesus read the spell from, people have died before from this spell!”

Sookie looked at them with resolve in her brown eyes.  “I understand that, but I need this.”

Jesus relented a bit, “Listen, if you still feel this way tomorrow, we’ll do it, but I’ll need the book from the Moon Goddess Emporium if we’re going to attempt this.”

Sookie took Jesus’s hand, “Thank you.  Let’s go get the book now, and then you can have it overnight to study if you need.”

“And then tomorrow, we can get rid of some vamp blood!” Jason exclaimed.

“Fine,” Jesus said.

“All right, bitches,” Lafayette said.  “If we’s goin’ to go to Shreveport, we needs to get before we drink more of this shit and while one of us can still drive.”  He looked at Jason significantly as Sookie hiccupped.  “I say we go get this motha fuckin’ book and then get back here and do some proper drinkin’ with this fine ass Don Julio tequila little miss thang brought.”

“Is that a good kind?” Sookie asked.

“Fifty bucks a shot at the bars in Shreveport!” Lafayette exclaimed.

“Shit,” Sookie laughed.  “Stupid high-handed vampire,” she muttered.

“What?” Jason asked her.

“Nothing,” Sookie said.  “It’s just Eric being Eric.”

Lafayette laughed, “We’ll pick up limes on the way home.  This shit be too good for Margaritas.”

“Well, let’s get hoppin’,” Jason said.  “We’ll go by my house too so I can grab some clothes.  If I’m gonna get shit-faced and then get a spell done on me, I should probably be out of uniform.”

Everyone laughed as they piled into Jason’s police cruiser.