orange_crushed | Ficlet: Bright. (True Blood, Sookie & Eric, after 2x09)

Bright. Tiny tiny True Blood ficlet for

the_grynne, because she has such ridiculously good taste in poetry. Sookie/Eric, kind of, or Sookie&Eric. Set sometime after 2x09, "I Will Rise Up," with spoilers for that episode.

"Only a beauty, only a power,
Sad in the fruit, bright in the flower."
-John Masefield

Sookie rises in the morning while the sun is still low, a round and heavy gold, crawling above the eaves. She puts on her grandmother's knit slippers and her ratty blue robe and goes down the stairs. There is silence in the house, the real silence of the woods, nothing but the soft feathery sound of the curtains pressing themselves against the screens and then fluttering away like a teenage flirtation. Sookie pours herself a glass of leftover tea and the condensation soaks her hands.

She unlatches the screen door and pads out onto the porch, hugging her robe around her. It isn't hot, not yet. It will be. For the moment everything is damp and cool and milky blue, like skin over a vein. The light crosses the bottom of her lawn politely, shyly, tipping the fringe of weeds in yellow and white, skimming the clover. Sookie stands on her porch and watches it come.

And when it is almost close enough to touch, she does- she leaves the slippers on the steps and walks into the shaggy grass, letting the sun soak her toes first, climb her ankles, circle her knees and hips and belly. She can't help but think of Godric, of the warm pink light that haloed him in the seconds before he burned. The sun is on her throat. She closes her eyes and the glare soaks into the skin of her eyelids, bronzing the nothingness until she can see fireworks in the black, comet trails, headlights and candles and stars. If this is what he saw, then that's not so bad. Not really.

Sookie stands in her yard and breathes in the smell of grass, of gravel, of the woods beyond and her own faint sweat. The weeds curl into the joints of her toes and her arms tingle warmly with the memory of old tans, older burns.

And elsewhere, somewhere, Eric dreams of dawn.