As it hisses on the horizon Sookie hurls herself from the house, down the road and across the field, into the graveyard. Bill wakes and throws the doors open; the Compton house takes a breath of night as he runs onto the porch. He can feel her coming, or it is a wish. She is coming to him across the graveyard. He closes his eyes, straining for her, and finally smiles: There she is. He meets her on the field, under the moon, and they kiss hungrily. Less alone. He's known death, a hundred years of death and the loneliness that follows. He alone knows just how hungry her skin must be. He brings her silence, and forgiveness, and like Adele, no judgment whatsoever. Only love.

For one night we are all Jason Stackhouse: climbing into each other's skin the best way we know how, to shove a burning brand into the face of death and say, "not today," and "not ever" and "I am not alone." Looking for those sparks across his skin. Tara screams wordlessly and falls back on the bed, muttering profanities as Sam chuckles above her. He looks down into her eyes; the couple next door comes to an annoying reconciliation. The woman tells the man she loves him, so much; he says he had to come back. She's all he has, now. "I need you," says the woman, who is Randi Sue. "I need you so fucking much. You're all I've got." Tara stares and thinks about need, about orphans. Jason, Sookie, Sam. All the people she loves are orphans. And she's not; she has deserted her mother, who is all alone and in over her head. She shrugs Sam off, and he's confused. "Tara, what just happened? Did I do something?" She puts on her funeral dress and shakes his head, tossing him pants. "It's not about you. I'm sorry. I'll see you at work, okay?"

Next door, Randi Sue rides Jason's v-juiced dick, facing away from him, sending words and moans out into space, screaming how much she loves him. All words are advertisements. He lies below her, finally alone, and grieves: for himself, for Tara, for Sookie and Adele, for Hadley and Bartlett, for the drugs and his complete powerlessness, for himself as an orphan, as an abuser, for Maudette Pickens, for Dawn, for the exquisite loneliness she rides. Nobody sees it. He grieves most purely of us all.

Bill lays Sookie down by the fireside, in her white dress, on a pillow and a blanket of velvet red. He kisses her, reaching behind to open up her dress. Cat Power kills all boners but those of the undead, it is a fact. She pulls him down to her, and he kisses her softly in the firelight. He's never looked so human, or so strong. He kisses her neck, takes her thumb in his mouth; she rakes a hand down his back. That's what does it; he's embarrassed, as ever, by his body's responses to desire. His fangs pop out and he hangs his head upon her breast. She asks what's wrong, and he shows her. She considers him; his shame, and his beauty. He looks for the fear, but it melts away, from her face. There's nobody watching, now. She's not afraid, anymore: just curious. She guides his head down, kissing him softly. There's just the two of them, pressing desperately, skin against skin. Trying desperately to be whole: