Chapter Text
There was something that bordered the beautiful macabre when it came to watching the stars at night.
You knew most of them had already dimmed and died more than a millennia ago. Instead, what you are left with are the revenants of stars that once were; it's this that captivates you with such weighted fervency and on your worst nights brings an evil kind of pain that gnaws at the lining in your chest. As if only the stars could possibly empathise with your eternal existence, and trapped in the catacombs of the library beneath Silas University; weak without the blood you need for sustenance, it's the stars at night you miss above all else from the world that continues on above you.
You wake with a startle; gasping and retching for air that your body refuses you. The children murmur above you, toddlers, muttering among themselves about what to do; half hope that you're entirely you and half agony that you might turn on them any minute.
It's enough to make you wince that these wisplings believe they can exert their control over you like a beast to be tamed. You flop back down on the jacket they've folded into a makeshift pillow and wheeze a pained groan.
"You need not worry," You assure them quietly. "I don't devour my friends this close to dinner time; it spoils my appetite." your eyes flutter close once again.
"Carmilla,"
The noise stirs you, "Hmm?" you groan.
"Carmilla, wake up." she whispers again and crouches beside you, knees dug into the stone, hands gently clasping your face with a tenderness that melted the impenetrable ice cavern of your chest. "Please tell me what to do… you haven't drank anything for over a week." she pleads in that violently desperate way and you almost feel guilty; but you are older and wiser and you know better.
You've appraised this for days and counted endless plans, one through a hundred, backwards and forwards appraising them against one another and this one; the one where you starve yourself of the thick venous liquid that sustains your life is the only one where you minimise the risk of devouring Laura whole as if she's a piece of ripened fruit ready to be plucked.
Your eyes open and you peer at her just long enough to see thick tears drip off her cheeks and wet your neck like the first rains of spring. What a strange comfort there is in being held and tended to... having someone love you and cry over your broken crumpled pile. Oh, how the mighty fall, you thought and tempered a little sob that threatened to wrack your body.
"Please, Carmilla, just feed!" she wipes her eyes and demands you, her beastling, to obey her. The cup of thick venous liquid is pushed to your lips once more but you howl a long noise that's beyond a scream; it escapes your chest and makes them all shudder.
Scratched is the skin on your chest, as if you could ever bury deep enough with your nails to claw the lining of your lungs and make that growling noise stop. The smell fills your nose and scalds your palate with a particular kind of violence and all you can do is scurry backwards into the corner and set your knuckles between your teeth to maintain some control. It kills you and all you can think about is downing the whole glass, running your tongue around the rim and gathering every drop of blood and quenching a deep endless thirst that has unequivocally rotted your insides and turned you parasitic; you can feel it, the warmth of your gut as you start to pull and synthesize the iron from the furthest stretches of your body. It's still better than the alternative.
You won't drink from the cup, and you can't, because the smell of the blood is all too familiar. It's filled with the scent of wildflowers and sunlight on skin and innocent wile, and so you know the blood in the cup belongs to your innocent and beautiful companion.
"Why won't you feed." Laura growls angrily and shakes your weak shoulders with a strength that wouldn't normally mess your hair.
It's the thought of the blood lust taking over; the vivid idea of the thirst being so unquenchable that one glass won't be enough, you will lose control and drain her and her merry band of halfwits until they're nothing more than wide-eyed shells littering the ground. It's this nightmare that drives the wailing noise from your chest every time they shove the nectar filled cup beneath your twitching nose.
"You know heroics cause me undue suffering and distress, but I have to abide the ethics you have tutored me in so graciously." you grind your jaw and lie, "I will not risk you… I won't be able to control myself." you shudder and that part is the truth, the idea that fills you to the brim with a sad kind of concession. "I never was one for moderation." you cough and whisper in that poised and tempered dark tone that is so insatiably you to Laura's ears.
"Carm, you're dying." Laura chokes and her hands are cupped around her mouth as if she's shielding you from the words. It makes you smile.
"Oh cupcake, it was always the plan, eventually at least."
Laura breaks into violent sobs that are fueled by a vicious kind of hatred that comes hand in hand with loving a monolith. You've seen it before in Elle. It's a pain they all come to know well and tonight it erodes the lining of her lungs until she's forced to breathe a deep breath that stretches out and shakes her ribs; she glances over her shoulder in embarrassment and waits for LaFontaine or JP to notice but they look away, ashamed and repulsed as they are at their own failings.
"C'mere," You tiredly lift one of your arms and appraise your little human.
"No," She says with anger dripping from her mouth. "How can you be so cruel?" her lips pull into a snarl, "I killed a man, Carmilla. I stood there, and I ended his life to save you... I did that!"
A peculiar bile rises into the chasm of your throat as you watch your tiny human; shuddering, sobbing venomously, clutching her mouth as if it would somehow keep a breath in her chest. "Come here," you say a little firmer and pat your shoulder.
She does as she's told; tucking her head into the crook of your pale neck, breathing in a soft and favourite smell that always lingers there like an old friend, or so she always tells you. Your arm snakes across the expanse of her waist; thumb dancing over the tiny bit of skin on her hip that you love ardently.
"Dearest, this too will pass," you hush and wipe your lover's tears, "Can we pretend that when you get out of here, you'll go back to your father and stay away from anglerfish gods and vampire hunters?"
"Carm—"
"Just pretend with me, for tonight, please?"
"Okay," Laura's voice wobbles and relief washes over you.
"I know you must be angry with me."
"Oh you have no idea," Laura shakes with disbelief and wipes her eyes, "Livid comes to mind."
"Laura, can I ask you something?" you say sincerely with the inside of your lip between your teeth; chewing and nervous. You hate yourself already, because this is weakness and you should know better; you should be better, you are three-hundred years old and one day you will watch the stars burn out one by one and you should be above humanity by now… but you're not.
"Mmm," she makes a little noise.
"Do you love me?" you ask with a simmering need and take her hand, holding it with a fond pressure that you renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing at her with soft languid eyes that saw her deepest truth.
"More than I ever thought possible." Laura kisses you so gently you feel like you might evaporate into a gaseous state.
Her tongue brushes against yours; forehead to forehead, hand cupping the edges of your jawline. You deepen the kiss the way you always do, but all you can taste is Laura's pulse beating feebly against your tongue and it takes every bit of restraint not to devour her whole. Instead you gently push her away and bite your mouth with an unwavering ardor that also serves to keep your gnashing teeth occupied.
"Carm if you don't feed, I'll make you!" Laura shoves the center of your chest, "I will. I'll force you to feed!" she growls; chest heaving, desperate and untempered in all the ways that excite you the most.
But with it, you smile sadly, "I don't doubt that you could, dearest." you whisper.
It's JP who interrupts you both first; blithering and nervous with hands in his pockets that he wasn't quite sure what to do with. "Miss Carmilla, I assume you have a plan?" he encourages you.
"The storage closet," you nod off towards it, "Lock me in there, barricade it, and don't open it again until the noises stop."
"I could help?" LaFontaine offers as a last resort; they blink away the woozy feeling from where JP fed a short time ago and you know this person would be willing to bleed their self dry; possibly for the moot ethics that they along with your innocent companion take great pleasure in trying to force upon an arbitrary universe. But part of your wonders whether you've earned your place among this band of underdogs with your own merits. Ultimately, it's of no use though, LaFontaine can barely keep JP fed like a scraggly wolf that's never quite full, always precariously between tame and wild.
"It's okay, really." you assure LaFontaine softly with scalding tears in the corners of your eyes. "All things must come to an end."
Two days pass before JP carries your limp shaking frame inside the emptied out cupboard; draped over his arms like a bit of cloth, barely breathing with dark eyes that are more beast than they are girl. You can hear Laura howling, you turn just in time to watch LaFontaine hold her back like breakers that kept the morning tide at bay and for that you're grateful.
"She won't be able to control herself much longer." you hear them tell her, "Your blood won't be enough, she won't stop until her blood lust is satiated." their voices grow harder to hear as JP does as you've told him and locks the door with you crumpled and withering away on the cold stone.
The hunger is insatiable; it's a dark and venomous thing that poisons you from the inside out and you don't dare to think of how long you will suffer like this before the parts of you that are consciously Carmilla rot away and die. 'Sip slowly, dear girl.' your mother had grinned down at you and laughed before they sealed your tomb, and sip slowly you did.
It was the winter of 1929 when you licked away the last sliver of dried blood that had seeped into the oak. You know it was the winter of 1929 because you carved three-thousand six-hundred and forty-seven strikes into the lid of your tomb to mark each passing day, not that you ever counted, but you have it on good authority from the assistant curator of the museum where the remnants of your tomb is stored.
You don't remember anything past the first month of your decade stretch if truth be told, there reached a point where you rotted away and died, giving life to the ghoul that lives inside of you, you woke up on the battlefield of the last great war with a satiated hunger as if no time had passed.
They called that day the Boy Massacre of Graz — a hundred Hitlerjugend; teenage boys drafted into the youth programme for the future of the glorious Aryan brotherhood, found dead in the snow on their way to Vienna. It's blurry and you don't remember it well, but you know the eight-hundred fatalities that day belonged to you.
Four more days pass before the wailing sounds of hunger start to ring around the walls, it was another day after that before you realise you were even the cause of the noise, bloodlust takes you as its lover; and when the heavy thuds of your bloodied fists banging at the door punch holes in the silence; when the soft sound of you begging and pleading to be free claw at the door; that's when you hear Laura cry broken pitiful sobs into the silence of night, as your hunger worsens, your senses peak like a predator honing in on it's prey.
"—What about the basement underneath the hospital, could we get there in time?" You hear her ask desperately one evening after LaFontaine and JP turn up empty handed from their latest attempt at acquiring enough blood to gorge you with. "She's going to die, isn't she?" she nearly explodes and you are entirely too hungry to care anymore.
"I've researched everything I could find but there really isn't much information on how long a vampire can last sans haemoglobin." LaFontaine says and you kick the door with an almighty thud that costs you what's left of your energy reserves, you know it made them all flinch, but none more than Laura who felt it in the core of herself; winded and despondent, you can hear her pulse slow to the speed of a dripping faucet.
"I'm not leaving her." Laura sniffs and swallows the gnawing pain in her throat, "She saved us so many times, never asked for much in return… just me... I was all she wanted." she muses out loud and you can practically hear her shrug her shoulders into mountains, "I won't leave her now." you hear her promise her friends before you drift asleep once more.
It's a late hour of the night when you stir; Laura is there and you know it because her feeble pulse sounds like a war drum in your ears and you can smell her blood through her paper-thin skin from behind the oak door. It infuriates you and you let your anger known. Though she doesn't flinch or scuttle backwards, true to her temperament you decide. Instead she tentatively inches closer until she's curled up beside the oak wood with her head leaning against the frame and you know that because you can see the imprint of her heat signature.
"Carmilla," she whispers.
You kick the door, then another kick, and another, and another; they grow in their intensity until you are a heaving exhausted pile and the timber frame starts to splinter. You're satisfied she'll run away and stay a safe distance from the danger you pose, and yet she fortifies herself and refuses to move.
"Get away from me." you growl with malice and violence from beyond your side of the door but true to her temperament, she disregards the demands of you, her beautiful revenant, and so instead pushes and turns the key inside the lock, opening the door.
You've hunched yourself up in the corner of the room; more beast than human, angular face, black eyes, mouth snarled into a precarious growl with dagger like incisors and you can see it in her eyes that you've thoroughly terrified her.
"Run." you beg, shaking; you're going to kill her, you decide, nose inhaling deep breaths and legs wound up like a predator ready to snatch it's prey right out of the air. Laura is going to die and you hate yourself for it.
She toes towards you tentatively and your ears twitch with each beat of her feeble pulse. She has these wide eyes that you always think make you look kinder when you see yourself in their reflection, but tonight you're not kind, tonight you're the master of her pain and suffering; and it's beautifully macabre how this thread has been added to the fiddle of the many ways you know Laura Hollis.
"Run!" you order with gnashing teeth and beg her one last time, though it's pointless and from the slowed thrumming of her pulse you both know it.
She didn't come in here with some naive and complex plan to save you, you realise entirely too late. She came in here entirely knowing she won't walk out alive and it's for you. It's always been for you. You're going to kill her and in true Laura Hollis fashion she is willing and ready so long as it's her idea instead of yours.
"I can't do that, I think," she licks her lips and watches you entirely entranced and frightened by the way you crouch in the shadows, "I think it's my turn to save your life." she decides firmly.
"Laura!" you roar desperately and weep and set your hands into fists. "Run!" you heave and stumble towards her.
"It's okay," she promises and closes the space between you both; hands to your jawline, mouth to your mouth one last time, and somehow you hold back your bite just long enough to tolerate that scalding kiss. "It's going to be okay." she promises and wraps her arms around you; dipping her nose along the expanse of skin between your neck and collar that smells familiar and safe, or so she always told you.
Your body stays wound up and stiff like a coiled spring; shuddering and growling. It's painful in the most primitive way possible. It's an animalistic pain and you won't let yourself forget this time, you won't, because you are the master of your own pain and misery too and falling in love with a girl so full to the brim with innocent wile and illusions of grandeur; foolishly believing she can temper and tame the most primitive parts of your true nature… this is by far in three-hundred years of life your most elaborate form of self-harm.
Your head reluctantly gives in and you dip down and nuzzle the crook of her neck; she closes her eyes and you know she's imagining you laying a path of kisses over her skin. For a moment you tempt the idea, but the bite comes quick and sharp because your humanity is a thin veil, an illusion, a thing you use to fool yourself and those around you into ignoring the dark and disgusting parts of yourself.
She gasps and stifles her whimper, brave to the end, and you gorge yourself hungrily at her open skin; licking and sucking fervently. You can taste her life. She's full of happiness and untempered love that pours like a river down the back of your throat.
You're going to kill her, and you know you won't survive this.
Your strong arms guide her to the stone floor as if you're two lovers caught in the moment of ardour; mouth at her neck, growling possessively and drinking like a leopard at your section of the stream. It's an intimate art and Laura plays her part well; wrapping her slender arms around your neck as she lies pinned to the stone beneath you like a wild rabbit bested by the fox.
"It's okay," Laura whispers in that assured way as the dizziness comes for her. "I want you to know that, okay? I want you to know that I love you and it's okay." she promises with a hazy slurred voice.
You lurk beneath the surface of yourself watching these things like a caged prisoner; subdued to your blood lust, you drink endlessly and take more than Laura can give you; she tastes like a cool rain in a permanent state of summer, like sunlight on skin, like the smell of the wet ground on the cusp of autumn, like the first gulp of good wine you ever took and the revenant within you that you owe a blood debt to is drunk on it all.
"None of this is your fault," Laura mutters lazily, gasping for breath as rogue droplets of blood escape your ravenous mouth and ran the length of her neck. "I think," she gasps, "I think loving you was always enough." she stumbles over herself with big wet eyes.
A gentle palm presses to the side of your cheek and her thumb works the length of space behind your ear and you can't stop; you don't stop; sobbing and heaving as she worked that small bit of skin.
Her pulse grows weaker like the flutter of a tired hummingbird but the revenant within you doesn't relent; gut swelling and sloshing with the sweet wine brewed in the vineyards of her veins.
She grows silent; arms slackening until they quickly slid right off your shoulders. They fall and land in an unnatural position where they stay and you feel the hot breath that scolds your collarbone grow tepid; you feel her weakening pulse wane from hummingbird wings into the thrumming of a dripping faucet that is running out of things to complain about.
You're going to kill her and this time, quite suddenly, you're aware of your crime and the sweet wine in your mouth tastes of spoiled fruit and the thick hotness that clings to inside of your mouth makes you retch and the fullness of your satiated stomach threatens to burst.
You throw yourself off of your sweet and innocent lover and blink your into focus.
"L… Laura," you appraise your work with a broken sob; clutching your hand to your mouth, you scoop your little human into your arms with a rejuvenated strength. "Come on, wake up!" you plea and lose fingers stroking hair that's paler than wheat. "Wake up, Creampuff." you encourage her gently as if this is all pretend, but it isn't, and with the familiar rasp to your voice; shuddering and filled with a self-loathing that threatens to consume you whole, you hold her to your chest and pray that the slow waning drum of her pulse that rings in your ears will stabilise into a beautiful melody of sorts.
"What the holy hell happened!" LaFontaine shrieks at the door and JP appears over their shoulder and in this moment; you wish it had been them, you wish you had killed them both for the grand crime of not walking in on you two when it was the singular occasion you needed it the most.
"Help her!" you resentfully beg as your lover sags into your arms and hangs there like a draped bit of cloth. "I told her to run!" you try to explain with a gnawing burn in your throat.
…
The chaos cleares like a storm that passes over whilst she sleeps, her mouth was dry, you were aware of that much and took the liberty of dabbing it with a wet cloth like her friends had instructed you to. She coughs at first, it's a small attempt to clear her throat and with it she winces from the throbbing on the side of her neck.
"Dearest," you weep with relief and you know it's the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes; you sobbing like a toddler and still violently disregarding your very nature.
"You're alive." she grins and exudes a contentedness that near on kills you. "How long have I been out?" she groans and tries to sit up; disregarding her predicament like a rabbit that licks its wounds and bounces back off into mischief with a little twitch of its nose.
You quickly halt her, gently laying her back down and tucking your leather jacket over her like a blanket. "A day." you say quietly and tuck a piece of hair out of her face; those two syllables are all you can manage so you reinforce the timber of yourself and try once more. "You were out for a day." you clear your aching throat.
"I know you must be angry with me."
"Furious," you shake with that brilliant twinkle of anger in your eyes and refuse to temper yourself. You almost lost Laura. Laura could have died. It would have been your fault. It's these thoughts that have plagued you every second of every hour that she has slept, "Livid even." you bite your mouth. "You don't get to run around doing the saving, Laura. That's my job. I do the saving." you heave, "I would have died a thousand times if you—" the words got tangled in your throat and so you bite and set your knuckles between your teeth. "I would have died a thousand times." you softly weep.
She disregards you once again and shoots up from the bed; wrapping her arms around your raven hair, it grows too hard to breathe and sit there just ideally waiting for her to be done and so instead you take her in your arms and swear a silent oath that this pure innocent thing is yours and you will keep her out of harm's way at all and any cost.
"I absolutely trusted you not to kill me." she promises you.
You shudder and simultaneously hate her and yourself at the same time, "I nearly killed you." you bite and pinch the bridge of your nose.
"Totally worth it." she whispered in that soft voice you can't resist and traces her nose against the expanse of skin between your jaw and collarbone that feel like home to her.
"It's going to be like this forever isn't it, you flying by the seat of your underwear into danger?"
"You're a great crash helmet." she lies back down and tugs you with her against the rough thread of the makeshift sheets, "Carm?"
"Mmm?" you close your eyes and make a little noise from the crook of her shoulder that is officially home; and you decide you'll put down foundations here and make it a state of permanency.
"You love me, right?"
You kiss her and it's possessive and overpowering; your arm wrapping around her waist, your nose travelling the length of your wispling's nose. "I love you," you whisper, almost in sobs. "You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever."
"I think that would make me very happy." she promised and presses a kiss to you, her gentle and loyal beastling's, lips. "Immeasurably even." she adds and all you can taste is the sweetness of her mouth like an afterthought as pulls away with those big eyes and the soft curved smile that she saved for the moments when you inched closer towards a finishing line that represented the humanity she tutors you so graciously in.