Chapter Text
You follow mummy’s orders to the line, packing your bag full of clothes you assume are still in fashion and boarding the train at sunset. Silas is forever away and you have to be there before dawn.
You barely make it, the sun creeping around the edges of your vision and harrying at your skin until you’re itching, nails freshly painted from the train ride, scratching deep into your skin and then again after it heals. You ignore the stares of passers-by, just another crazy girl with blood under her nails and shadows under her eyes, your bag slung over your shoulder as you trudge toward the ugly towers that mark your new would-be home.
You don’t keep homes anymore. You haven’t in over two hundred years. You can barely stand a train ride, much less the idea of creating someplace with solid walls in which you actually reside. The thought makes you shiver, makes you want to vomit. You scratch harder and scale the staircase as fast as you can, the light nipping at your heels as it races you to the top floor.
The door of your dorm room gives way easily enough when you snick the key in, hand carelessly wrenching and then shoving the door till it bangs against the wall. You wince- you’re sensitive, of course, all of your kind is- but school your face in case your roommate is here.
Maman warned you that you would have a roommate. You assume the roommate will be fodder, which is fine, but you still don’t want her to see you pouting at the damned door. You have a reputation to uphold, even if it’s only for a little while.
And anyway, she is here. The roommate. She’s seated at her desk until the door goes wham and then she’s up like a rocket, hand clenching at her heart.
“Jesus.”
“Not quite.”
She gulps down a breath- humans, so adorable- and moves forward on shaky, slow feet, as though afraid you might bite. Wise girl. A hand goes out, less shaky. Not so wise. You stare it down.
“Laura. You must be Carmilla.”
Your heart stutters to a stop- or at least it would have, if it still beat. As it is, you actually trip over your own feet and nearly plow into the frame of one of the beds, your bag flying forward out of your hands. Laura clumsily ducks the bag and it smashes into what can only be her bed, as covered in cheerful colours and smelling so freshly of sleeping human as it is. You curse.
“Fucking- what?”
“What?”
You glare at her because you need her to repeat her name, not your fucking question.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Laura,” she says, eyeing you like maybe you’re crazy. And maybe you are, because you could swear that the name that’s slashed across the middle of your sternum starts to burn. “And you’re Carmilla.”
You might be. You must be. You’re never sure what Maman is going to name you next, but Carmilla will do. Carmilla, which is an ugly-ass name if you’ve ever heard one, doesn’t seem to bother Laura in the slightest. She doesn’t seem nearly as perturbed by the name as she does by you, and you gulp down the air that you don’t actually need to breathe before responding.
“Whatever. Sure thing.”
She stares at you as you unpack your meager belongings, not saying a word. You’re satisfied with that.
(You resist the urge to go to the bathroom to find a mirror so you can watch yourself trace the name that once seemed foreign, seemed fake, seemed hopeful, because three hundred years ago you’d never heard of such a name and you thought surely, you could never mistake her for someone else. This exquisitely named girl, this precious piece of you.
How wrong you were. How young. How human. How stupid.)
Laura, as it turns out, is kind of a dolt.
She spends the first two weeks of your residency kind of hovering around your edges, face perpetually pinched as she tries to contain herself. She’s not very good at it and it takes her all of four hours on your first full day to wake you up with a question.
“So, where are you from?”
“Somewhere where people sleep in fucking peace,” you snap, and flip over so that you can yank the covers over your head. Laura huffs and you can hear her stomp over to her computer like the petulant child that she is, her fingers taking up a fierce staccato a few seconds after. Good. Let her write a novel or a blog rant or whatever the hell. You don’t care.
You just want to sleep.
She leaves you alone after a few more failed attempts, more or less. She still bugs you with inane questions from time to time- How was class? as though that’s where you’ve been- but mostly she lapses into silence unless her friends are there. They’re a load of precious work too, a seemingly endless stream of bumbling redheads in varying stages of infatuation, two of them with each other’s names scrawled across their wrists. The big one doesn’t have a visible name and you wonder briefly if she too has Laura ripped in somewhere.
The thought makes you sick. You hate that bitch from the moment the thought occurs to you.
She stops coming around as frequently after you finally bite into her in a fit of rage. You don’t actually bite her, of course, but she’s mooning over Laura who’s giggling like trees posing as humans are actually funny or whatever and you just lose your cool. You fling insult after insult at the irksome giant and a choice one or two at Laura, who sits dumbfounded as the big stupid ugly stands up and sputters about how she doesn’t deserve this shit.
So she gets the message and stops coming around so much. Or maybe it’s that Laura spends less time in the room, choosing instead to be around people who aren’t a constant pain in her ass. Whatever.
You get a lot of reading done. You wait for Maman’s orders. You seethe.
The orders come a month into your forced residency. Surprisingly enough, you don’t need to feed Laura to anyone: your chest feels like it’s caving in when she tells you as much. The burning starts up again, a wildfire between your breasts.
“What, that human? Honestly, Mircalla, I thought you were clever.”
You are, but you don’t bother correcting her. She tells you something about a local chapter of shape shifters that you need to help her intimidate for a while longer, adds in that maybe you can sacrifice one once a few more of them back off the territory line. You shrug and nod and hum at the appropriate parts, eyes and mind unfocused.
You’ll be here for a few more months, Maman explains. Try not to fuck it up.
“I never do,” you say as you stand to leave. You both know it’s a lie. Her eyebrow quirks up and suddenly you can smell the dirt outside, sharp and terrifying, and you bite back the urge to vomit on the very expensive-looking rug Maman has deemed fit to grace the hardwood flooring of her office. “Let me know when you need me.”
She calls you here and there, but the work is far easier than most things she’s had you attend to over the span of your lifetime. You read more books, you punch some shifters in the face, you stew over your stupid roommate. Life is fairly normal.
Except- sometimes when you’re sleeping or pretending to be asleep (you draw the covers over your head so your roommate can’t see that you can read in the dark, book propped narrowly against your forearm and mattress), you can hear Laura making sounds. Whimpering sounds, sometimes, and heavy breathing others. The first time it happened, you thought maybe she was relieving stress. You were almost proud.
“Really got all that anger out last night, didn’t you, roomie? Or- maybe it wasn’t anger. Figured out your feelings for the Jolly Red Giantess?”
She blinks at you for a moment before her eyes go hard in a way you’ve never seen. It’d be intimidating if she wasn’t, you know, a human.
“Oh, really nice, Carmilla,” she snaps, ponytail whipping around as she glares at you. “Really cute, making fun of somebody in pain.”
Now you’re the one blinking, staring after her as she marches out of the door without her books for her next class. Pain?
She returns thirty seconds later, ears burning red and heart beating angrily enough that you can hear it. Your mouth waters against your will as you watch her collect her psychology text.
“Seriously, you’re such a- bitch.”
She leaves again and you’re more confused as ever. You swallow and rub your hand against your chest. Her name- no, not her name, somebody else’s name that just happens to be spelled the same, somebody else who’s probably been dead for two hundred fifty years or more- flinches deeper into your skin.
You don’t talk about it for two days. You sleep as much as you can when she’s there and read Vonnegut when she’s not. He’s new, young too in a way you can’t help but grimace at, but he gets you in a way that sometimes the classics don’t.
So it goes.
“What did you mean, you’re in pain? Do you- do you need to see a doctor, or something?”
Laura nearly drops her idiotic mug at the sound of your voice. Or at the question, maybe, and you can’t blame her. You’ve never actually asked her a question before that didn’t involve teasing her or berating her friends.
She gingerly sets the mug down before answering like she’s afraid she’ll drop the damn thing.
“I just- this is stupid, LaF swears it’s not supposed to happen and they want me to see a doctor, but I really think it’s just because I’m taking forever-”
LaF is the science-y one, you think. You shift and pick lint off your shorts. “So see a doctor. About whatever’s wrong.”
“My name burns,” she blurts, and your head snaps up so you can meet her eyes. You don’t mean to react at all, but you do. “I mean, not my name. My other’s name.”
“Soulmate,” you supply on autopilot. Laura blinks.
“That’s oddly sentimental. Y’know, for you.”
You shrug and refuse to look away, refuse to back down. “Mine is dead.”
Slowly, as though walking through water, she covers the distance of the room and sits down next to you, uninvited. You tense as she reaches out and then thinks better of it, her hand settling next to yours on the blanket that covers your mattress.
“I’m so sorry, Carmilla.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you meet him?”
A breath rips in and out of your dead lungs, half a wheeze, half a laugh. You don’t bother to correct her. “Not to my knowledge.”
“God,” she whispers, and the hand not holding her weight so close to you rubs the top of her own thigh, fingers digging into the cloth of her jeans. “This is so fucked up.”
That gets an actual laugh from you and you meet her eyes for a second- she’s so close, you can see a flake of mascara on the round of her cheek, the pits and craters in the iris of her eye. “You said it, cupcake. You definitely said it.” And, after a pause, because it seems right- “Sorry yours hurts, too.”
Laura is definitely a dolt because it takes her a whole day to realize what you said.
“Yours burns too?” She asks, voice quivering. She leaves immediately after you bob your head in a slow nod.
Your chest aches all night. You don’t sleep at all.
Time passes. The leaves change like you’ve seen them do a thousand times and before you know it, they’ve fallen to the ground. Another blink and a dusting of snow covers them, a wet grave that masks the smell of rot from your sensitive nose. Laura watches the progress every now and then one Friday evening, looking up from her homework. You look up from your book whenever she does so. It’s a routine you’re strangely comfortable with, one you allow yourself without punishment.
“Do you think she’s dead?”
You shake your head a little to break the stare that was tracing the curve of Laura's shoulder, hidden under the wool of her jumper. She's still looking out the window at the spiraling flakes of snow.
“Who?”
“My other,” Laura says, so softly that you’re not sure you’d catch it if you were human. “My soulmate.”
You breathe in deep, and then chastise yourself. Stupid. Unnecessary. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What about the burning?” Laura flips her hair over her shoulder to look at you and you run your tongue over the point of your teeth, feeling the prick of your canines like a lover’s spine. “Isn’t that how you knew that he…?”
“That’s not how I knew, cutie.” You bite those canines down on your tongue and lift up your book- Wollstonecraft this time, because why the hell not- to signal the end of the conversation. For once, Laura takes the hint and shuts up.
You get in a particularly bad scrap at the end of January, just before classes begin.
You don’t know what gets you worse; the bite from a shifted tiger, or the wallop Maman packs when she’s mad that you’ve lost her another twenty feet in territory. You try not to think about either as you hobble back, the occasional fleck of clotted blood falling onto the snow as you make your way across the campus.
Fucking shifters.
Fucking mothers.
Fucking fuck.
Laura is gone with the ginger Ent, or at least she’s supposed to be, so you bang your way into your room without a care and nearly kill Laura when she screams.
“Don’t-” you hiss, somewhat less effectively than when you’re at full strength and not bleeding onto the Christmas-themed welcome mat that Laura insisted you put in the room- “yell like that.”
It’s not your most acidic comeback to Laura’s idiocy, but then, you’re losing what precious food you managed to contain all over the damn place and you’ve had a pretty bad night. Laura looks ready to rip you a new one when she notices the pool of blood that’s handily gathering around your feet.
“I- holy shit, Carm, what the hell happened? Come here, let me-”
She’s ushering you (with plenty of protests from you, thanks very much) over to her chair and into a seated position, the movement jarring the ribs you’re pretty sure the tiger splintered. Your coat is off in a second, your hat following, and she’s pawing at your shirt like some uncoordinated teenager when you realize what she’s doing.
“No.”
“Carmilla, I need to see-”
“I said fuck off, Hollis. Fuck off!”
You’ve never really yelled at her before- she’s the yeller in this relationship, and you prefer a low, deadly tone for conveying your hatred anyway- but now you’re screaming, your hands flailing in an attempt to keep her away from the puncture wounds in your side and the much more worrisome scar that’ll be revealed if your shirt comes off. It’s low enough that even a vee neck won’t reveal what is apparently your greatest secret, but one look at you in a bra (or less) and you’re finished.
“Easy, Carmilla, easy. I’m backing off.”
She’s holding up her hands and actually backing away like some sort of loser, footsteps slow and eyes on the trickle of blood that’s coming from beneath the shirt. You know it looks bad and you’re feeling pretty woozy, but a few swigs from your soy carton and you’ll be right as rain. You just can’t bear the thought of her seeing your chest.
“Get me the carton.” She gives you a blank stare. Typical. “In the fridge, dimwit.”
She has the audacity to roll her eyes at you- what part of this isn’t screaming emergency?- but goes and fetches the carton anyway. You can hear the blood sloshing around inside and you grasp at it like a starving man, your nostrils flaring once she removes the cap and the smell hits you.
You drink the whole thing in one go and only wrench your lips away from the source once the carton is empty. You pant, your eyes closing for a moment as you feel your stomach churn and your skin ripple to life. You can feel the blood flow slow, then staunch entirely, and Laura’s eyes are on you the whole time.
“What?” You laze, suddenly sleepy, your eyelids peeling back so you can meet her gaze. She’s staring at your mouth.
Which- must be red right now. With blood. Which you clearly just drank by the half gallon, and is helping you stitch your skin back together without any actual stitches. Right.
“So I’m a-”
“LaF was right,” she says simply, shaking her head with a small smile as though you’re some kind of wonder instead of a monster from hell. “Well, that answers a lot of questions.”
You bark a laugh at that and groan when it pulls at your ribs. Laura jerks forward at the sound, one hand extending back toward your side, but your glare stops her short.
“Easy does it, sunshine. Let me heal.”
She backs up again, settling on her bed and crossing her legs underneath her. She takes a deep breath.
"So... what exactly can mess up a freakin' badass vampire this badly?"