Chapter Text
“That I don’t what, Mircalla?”
She says your given name and it shocks you to the core. Your throat goes dry, and although you are very certain that it should not be a bother to you, it feels like your undead heart is twisting and turning in that ribcage of yours.
You are terrified.
And you are a vampire.
This alone is truly bothersome.
“How…?”
“LaF found a picture of you holding me as a baby. I could fill in the other blanks myself. Plus I did find the blood. And you signed your letter with M.K.”, she belts out and you seriously are considering running out on this conversation by disappearing into a plume of black smoke, but you refrain.
You close your eyes and groan quietly. How do you get yourself untangled from this mess?
“Were you even gonna tell me? About you? About our history? About the fact that you probably have been following me around?”, this is too much to handle.
She is seriously thinking that you have been following her, although she is the one that found you. The one, who caught your eye. The first, the second and this time. She is the one that has been bursting into your life every single time. She is the one that is responsible for all of this, and she doesn’t even know, because she isn’t aware of those first two times.
“I have not been following you around. Laura that’s not-”
“No. Just no. Even if you weren’t, you lied to me. Yesterday in the train, when I recognized you, you lied to me.”, her voice breaks and it strikes you as odd that she is more hurt than terrified.
“I did not lie.”
“You told me your name was Carmilla.”
“That’s the name I go by now.”
“The name you go by now.”, she scoffs, there is a sad smile on her face and you can’t place it.
“Laura…”
“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”, she looks up and her expression breaks your heart.
“Because the truth is so much more complicated for me, than just forgetting you ever existed.”
Her brows furrow and she shrugs her shoulders, “So why offering me a tour through Paris then? If you were so keen on forgetting me? Whatever that even means.”
“I thought I- I didn’t know what I thought okay? I just…”
“You just left.”
“I know.”
“You were my mom’s best friend and then you just left. She was so sad for a long time.” You cannot believe that that’s what you two are talking about now.
“I had to. I can’t have people knowing about me… I- Can I tell you everything? Can we talk about this? With you sitting down? And listening to me without interruptions, because there is so much I would like you to know.”
She considers it for a moment, but then her shoulders sag and she nods. You are grateful for that.
“You were the one that got me out of that car?”, she has been crying for a while now.
You had started at the very beginning, telling her about the first time you met, because for obvious reasons she does not remember and then you told her how you watched her grow older and how you absolutely adored her as a child, which in hindsight is a little odd, but she does not question you.
She hasn’t questioned anything. Laura isn’t even that horrified to know that you are a vampire. What bothers her is the fact that you kept it a secret and you don’t know if you want to kiss her for it or scold her for it, because no one out of their right mind should think like her.
“You were unconscious and Karen urged me to help you first so I did and then-”
“Why were you there?”
“I told you… I was back in the States and wanted to see your mother, but I couldn’t…”
“No. Why did you follow us?”
“Because I wanted to make sure you got home safe.”
“Clearly you did a bang up job.”, you want to rip out your own heart for that statement.
“There has not been a day I didn’t feel guilty for that.”, or all the other things you did after turning into a monster.
“I’m sorry, that was-”
“Don’t be.”, you stop her, “I’m a monster. I’m a monster, who has abilities out of this world and still I managed to take her away from you. If I had been faster or-”, you deflate, because you don’t know what you can say to make it amends. You simply can’t imagine the pain she must have been in. But then again, you have had your own heartbreaking moments to. This current one counting to one of them.
“I don’t think you are a monster.”, her voice is so low, but your super hearing get’s it all.
“And there we have your biggest weakness, Laura. You trust too easily.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”, she is getting angry. Good, you think.
“I’m telling you that I’m a vampire and you are being upset about something so irrelevant!”
It seems to take her by surprise, “First of all you didn’t tell me. And secondly… For me it’s not. This is relevant for me, because the things you just told me about my mom… Growing up not many families did interact with us. When my mom died, I didn’t have people coming over and telling me stories I didn’t know about. I mean, I wouldn’t have appreciated it back then anyway, but now- It’s relevant for me to know her from your point of view. As an outsider. You knew her for some time. For the time I couldn’t really acknowledge her for what she was.”
“I did. She loved you very much.”, your heart feels heavy in your chest. Vampires aren’t supposed to feel, but you do. You feel so much.
So much that it eats you alive most of the time.
There is a heavy silence filling the room, until she decides to speak up again.
“Do you… I mean… Do you want to tell me about yourself?”, most of her tears have dried and she looks a little better now.
You laugh at her bitterly, “What would you want to know about me?”
“Everything.”
The way she says it tugs on your undead heart. The way she reaches out her hand. It is like the very first time she did that, to capture yours. You let yourself revel in that memory.
You don’t dare to touch her though. You sit there. Still and by yourself. Guarded. You sigh and give her what she wants.
“I was born Mircalla, daughter of the Count Karnstein in Styria, a duchy of Austria in 1680-”
“Styria? As in the state in Austria? LaF goes to Silas!”, she interjects and you frown at her, “Right sorry, go on!”
“My family was wealthy, I had four siblings. We lived a happy life. There was a rich, baron wanting to marry me, when I was eighteen, but my dear father declined, because he had learnt that the baron was after my family’s land. Baron Vordenberg though was very angered and wanted to avenge my father’s doings. If he couldn’t have me, he thought, then no one should. So he killed me- Or at least he thought he did. Maman was there, she found my body on the street, where he discarded me like garbage. I must have had something, something she had sought for a while, so she resurrected me. Made me into this. I told you humans with special capabilities were given the key to immortality. My curse was my beauty.”, you don’t mean to be so conceited, but it is what she told you.
My darling girl, it simply would have been of utter idiocy to waste such a pretty, pretty face.
“Oh my god… Murdered...?”
“All too tragic, huh?”, you give her a small smile.
You force yourself to it. You still can feel his dagger in your lower abdomen. That scar is still there. It is the thing that killed you.
“Carmilla…”, her expression is pained.
“What? Don’t you have a million questions right now?”, you try to lighten the situation. It is funny really, because you are trying to brighten your own mood.
She smiles sheepishly, “Actually I do…”
You nod and raise an eyebrow at her, to indicate her that she should go on.
“How does that work? The transformation?”
“I don’t know the exact procedure. It’s something only the head of the clan can perform. I just know that I found myself in a room, locked up and begging them to kill me, after I had learned what they did to me. Back then vampires were a common thing. Most people knew of their- Our existence.”
“How is it? I mean- Do you know the difference to being a human? Do you remember how it was like for you to be uhm- Alive?”
“Of course.”, you look at her, calculating, before sitting next to her and capturing one of her hands, placing it delicately on your chest, “See? No heartbeat.”
She has her eyes closed and her brows crease, as if she is trying to prove to you that there is one.
“Then what you saw earlier… I heal very quickly. Vampiric constitution and all that.”, her eyes open again and she holds your gaze.
“What about mirrors?”
You chuckle, “I have a reflection. Would be messy, if I didn’t.”, you point at your eyebrows and she beams, really beams.
How can she be smiling like that, when you’ve just revealed the most dismaying thing about yourself?
She isn’t retracting her hand. She has it planted on your chest, not letting go of you. She isn’t scared.
However you somehow want her to be terrified, because that would mean you don’t have to be frightened for yourself.
“Hey, so technically you are a countess, right?”
You have no idea whatsoever why she wants to know that, but you nod hesitantly. It makes her smile. It is odd, but you don’t question it.
“I am as a matter of fact, yes. But the identity I knew before my demise is something I had to separate myself from.”
It pains you to think about them now. Every once in a while you do, but never like this.
Laura makes you vulnerable. The first impression you had of her in that train was right.
She is capable of breaking your undead heart, without doing much.
“I’m sorry.”, the smile she is gifting you tears on your heartstrings.
“Yeah. You should be. No one should be risen from the death. And no one should be around someone like me.”, you give her a pointed look.
It takes her off guard. Her forehead creases. Ever the good-hearted soul.
“Do you really dislike it that much?”
You can only scoff, “I don’t dislike it. I resent it. I hate myself, Laura. I loathe my whole entire species.”
“But you- I mean… You are not a bad person. You saved me yesterday.”
“Hardly. You would have been alright without me.”
You don’t know that, but she has to stop depicting you as a hero, when all you are is corrupted. Something broken.
Something dead.
And yet you feel so alive when she tells you that she still thinks you are a one of the most interesting and good-natured people she has met.
Silence falls over your again and you want to run. You want to go and hide, away from this creature that cannot possibly be human. Because she is sitting there, as if you didn’t just shatter her world anew. The whole entire mankind despises your species -at least the part that knows of your existence. They don’t try to understand. Never have.
But her. She is there, looking at you, her eyes trying to grasp the pain you have been through. And it is so, so precious. You don’t ever want to lose that feeling again, and simultaneously hate her for making you feel this way.
You can’t feel. You don’t allow it. It is distasteful of you. And yet…
“I don’t remember much… But I remember the Sunday afternoons in summer. When we would do barbecues. You’d always come over or my mom would take me to your place. And I would play with the squirrels in the garden. I’d try to catch them.”, she giggles, wallowing in memories. You go the lane with her.
“You’d eat all the candy I had at my house.”, you remember with a fond smile.
Your impeccable memory. Of course you remember everything about her. You have always loved her around.
She frowns for a second, before looking you directly in the eye, “But you are a vampire. You don’t even eat candy.”
“I always bought it for you.”
The look she gives you makes your eyes water. She is so, so beautiful with her human values. You were wrong about her being spoilt. She is nothing but pure. Her beliefs still are pure, even though she had terrible things happening to her. Even though everything was taken away from her. There is so much love radiating from her.
Suddenly she is sitting up on the heels of her feet, reaching forwards again, and taking your hand in hers. Her fingertips dance lightly along your palm, just where she cut you. She turns your hand to look at the ring decorating your middle finger. It is the only thing that survived throughout the years. It is your birth father’s ring.
“It makes sense. And it suits you.”, she says a little absentmindedly, “Your Serene Highness.”, she mocks with a deep voice and you shake your head, drawing back your hand. She seems a little sad about the loss of contact.
“Gräfin Von Karnstein suffices completely.”, you say with an eye roll and she looks at your lips in confusion.
“Say what now?”
“That’s the original title in German. As you may know… Austrians do speak German.”
“So you speak German too?”
“It’s my mother tongue, yes. It would be tragic, if I didn’t, don’t you agree?”, you laugh and the look she gives you means she is awaiting for you to continue.
It makes your heart swell up. And you both forget to eat.
“So now that you actually practically told me about your whole life… Can you tell me, what we are doing about the dead body?”
“We?”, you raise an eyebrow at her from your position by the desk.
“Or weren’t you gonna do anything about it?”
“No I was…”, you have to, “But I was more worried about you saying that you were tagging along, cupcake.”
“Uh, duh! Of course I am helping you with finding and dealing with the bad guy -uh girl or person, I guess.”
“Really? You wanna find the vampire that’s responsible for that mess and help me rip out the heart of that imbecilic idiot?”
Her eyes grow wide and she stands up from her position on the chaise lounge by your bookshelf.
“This isn’t really what you’re gonna do, is it?”
“Well of course I am. I’m a vampire.”
She swallows thickly, but not because she is terrified of you. Why isn’t she scared of you? Frightened to death?
“Oh come on. You can’t still be deluding yourself that I’m some bastion of nobility, just because I took you to my apartment yesterday.”
“Well, I think it is noble to wanna help out a girl you barely know. Cause that’s what I was, even though you did know me forever ago. I am just a girl, fresh out of high school you actually don’t know at all.”
You give her all your attention, because she has no idea. And you tell her.
“You are so much more.”, there is a faint smile splaying on her lips and she looks down, blushing, “I have thought about you often, you know? You, your parents… Your mother was the personification of good. She was very dear to me. I thought about how you all were, how you turned out. She did love you very much, I hope you are aware of that. And she raised you so well.”
“It’s so weird hearing things like that from you, when just some hours ago I thought you were inter-”, she refrains from going further, but you want to know what she wanted to say, so you urge her.
“When you thought…? What did you think?”
“Nothing… Just that what you just said sounds like something my aunt would say to me. Not something someone in my age would say to me. Well you are clearly not my age, but you get what I mean, don’t you?”
You sort of know, what she wants to imply, and you wish she would have said it out loud before. You thank her though at the same time that she didn’t.
I thought you were…
Interested in me.
Interesting to me.
You wonder which one it would have been. Or which answer would have made you more happy.
“Can’t we do anything else though?”, she asks.
You don’t follow, “What?”
“About the vampire thing?”
“My mother will decide what to do with the perpetrator. She has special rules for that.”
“Is that who you wrote the letter to? Your mother?”
Smart kid. You always knew.
“Yes. Maman is the head of the clan. There are certain regulations for every vampire to follow, regardless of their family. So if one acts out, we have to eliminate them, or at least hold them captive until whatever problem there is, is solved. I suppose though that my mother will give me the order to annihilate the threat this time. Apparently the attacks have happened before. I overheard the policeman talking about a recurring animal bite.”
“Do you always follow her orders?”
“She resurrected me. She made sure that I had a place to stay, a family to support me in my travels through time. Even though we don’t agree on certain things, I owe many things to her.”
“But you don’t even like being a vampire.”
“I hate it with all my guts.”, you both lock eyes and there is something in her look, “But if she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have gotten to experience many things.”
“So… What you are saying is totally contradicting.”, she bunches up her face and it is so adorable. You should get yourself locked up in a mental health institution.
You are turning into a mess around her.
“There isn’t always black and white Laura. Every thing has its perks, as well as its disbenefits.”
“But then you should be able to understand why I’m doing this.”
Laura approaches you and she never averts her gaze from yours.
“Doing what?”, you ask hoarsely, because there is something. Something you can’t determine.
“Being here. Not running, even though you are displaying yourself as pure evil. I know you. Even though you think I don’t. I’ve known you all my life, if you think about it that way. You were there. You played games with me, when I was little. You…”
She is pulling out the necklace you gave her fifteen years ago out of under her shirt, “You cared. You aren’t as callous and indifferent, as you think you are. You cared. You cared for simple human beings, such as us.”
And you have left your heart there, when you fled to Croatia. You know that you cared. You don’t need her to tell you.
“I don’t know, if you remember this, but I never got rid of it-”, she says, clutching on the anchor necklace.
“Of course I remember, Laura. That thing is the reason I recognised you in the first place.”
Her facial expression changes into the one of contentment. You still don’t understand her. Why is she still here, talking to you?
“Why wouldn’t you just tell me?”, she asks you again.
Again those eyes. They could kill you. There you thought you had penetrating eyes. She does it so well. And she is human.
“Because just a day ago I didn’t even know, what you knew… Also when you told me about your father, I thought you’d hate me, if you knew, what I was.”
“It’s ridiculous. If I were condemning you for something someone else did, wouldn’t that make me some sort of speciesist?”
“I wouldn’t blame you, if you did.”
She shakes her head and there is a noise of displeasure exiting her mouth.
“Wait, was that guy a vampire too? The one that came by this morning?”
“Yes he was.”
“Oh.”, she frowns, “That kinda makes sense now… He was super creepy.”
“Am I creepy to you too?”
Her eyes widen and she looks at you fully, “No of course not, but that’s because you’re a girl- Woman- Whatever.”
“I assure you, you’d find my mother creepy.”
You really do hope that this only stays an assumption. You never want those two to ever meet in real life.
Only over your undead body will you ever let that happen.
“Wait so, you said you had a brother. How does this work?”
You tell her exactly how that works, how he was turned as a young soldier fighting for the Allies back in 1942. Your mother saw something in him. Just like she rescued you from death -at least that’s how she always put it- she saved him from dying of young age. He’d only been twenty, when three bullets had hit him in his chest. He always had been very grateful to mother for his second chance. He has always been such a momma’s boy. William never leaves her side, he is her right hand, except when it comes to things that need a little bit more decency.
She does get hungry at some point again. You decide to get something from delivery service. (Cooking didn’t go that well.) This time your fridge will be filled with real takeout from the Chinese across some streets. You have ordered almost the entire menu, because she couldn’t decide, what she wanted.
When the food is in front of you, all set on the dining table, you look at her expectantly.
“Aren’t you gonna eat too?”, she asks you.
“I don’t really benefit from…”, you trail off and hope she gets the message.
Laura smacks her forehead, “Sorry, I forget. You can have some, you know?”, she licks her lips and it distracts you. For a while anyway, “I won’t get grossed out or anything… Um, if you drink blood in front of me, I mean.”
So you sit across from her, sipping on the A+, while she is munching on a dumpling. She observes you, the way you set your lips on the glass, the way the red liquid flows down your throat. It’s as if she is contemplating on saying something and you make it easier for her.
“Is it revolting for you now?”
Laura shakes her head immediately, “No, I just was wondering where you get that from.”
“I have friends that get the supplies at the local blood bank.”
“Does it taste the same? I mean as fresh blood from a human? I guess you didn’t really have blood banks back in 16-something?”
“It’s very different. Sodium citrate is being added to the blood, so it doesn’t get clumpy. And it’s not whole-blood either. What I am drinking now is red cell concentrate. Also it is cold. Drinking warm blood off a human is much more pleasuring. It’s like comparing a five star meal to a cheeseburger you can get at those hideous fast food places.”
She is squinting her eyes, “Do you…?”
“Do I what?”
“Feed off a human sometimes?”
This is a question you rather not answer, “Sometimes. Of course only from volunteers.”
“Oh… So there are people that know?”
“Yes.”
“And they do that willingly? Doesn’t it hurt?”
Another question you don’t like to answer. Especially with her you don’t want to discuss these things. You don’t know why.
“It’s a very enticing experience. There are some perks of being a somewhat supernatural being. I as a predator have certain abilities to make it feel…”, you have her full attention, “Good.”
“Oh.”, she blushes a little and you can’t really determine why.
“Tell you what.”, she has recovered very quickly and is now on full-on-blabbering-mode and it is alarming how much you enjoy her company. You could listen to her all day. “Now that we kinda did all that bonding over my mom and stuff.”, the way she says it aches a little, because she is trying to be nonchalant about it, but you know her fairly well for the short amount of time you’ve been with her now, “I wanna help you. I wanna help you find that vampire that killed that poor man.”
“Why?”, it is a simple question. You don’t understand why she wants to get in the midst of all of this.
“Because you are going to help me interrogate him.”
“What?”, you can’t believe what she wants from you.
“I wanna know Carmilla. I wanna know what motives someone has to be so cruel. Maybe I can understand the death of my father better after that. I mean, there has to be something, right? There has to be a reason behind all of this callousness right?”
You groan loudly, “I told you Laura. We are monsters. We don’t have motives. We just kill. For pleasure.”, she flinches.
“Do you do it too?”, for the first time you sense fear on her and this is the first time you don’t want her to be scared of you.
“No. I don’t. I have though. I wasn’t always like this. In my first few decades I was a cruel killer. I was so enraged all the time. I felt alone and helpless. The Mad Master was nothing compared to me. I learned to control myself fully throughout my years on this world and through help from maman. Also back in the days the knowledge of the existence of vampires wasn’t really an uncommon thing. There were several gruesome killings performed by humans to exterminate our species, so we had to be more careful. In the mid seventeen-hundreds Gerard van Swieten was persuaded by Maman -we were residing in Bohemia by that time- that there were no such things as vampires. The archduchess Maria Theresia of Austria then spread the word about us being a myth. Of course there were several others that stated the same, so after that I gradually had to learn to live with myself and with that came all the guilt and then I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“See? You did learn from it. Maybe if we held the person responsible for this mess captive, and did talk some sense to them-”
“Laura no! I told you that I had to follow my mother’s orders and if she orders me to kill this guy then I will do it.”
“Wait a second, you know it was a guy?”
“The bite marks were very afar from each other. It is very unlikely a vampire of female form. Although I could be mistaken, but women aren’t usually messy eaters.”
“Okay… But my other request still stays. I want to talk to him. I want you to find him with me and then I want to talk to him.”
You can’t really believe yourself when you grumble a ‘Fine.’ to her and chug away the rest of your blood. She smiles at you with her tongue caught in-between her teeth and you roll your eyes at her. You can feel the smile on your face, you can’t believe, how she has you tied around her little finger.
You would do anything for her.
The thought scares you and you hope that it is worth it.
“As long as you stay here with me and I can keep an eye out for you.”
“I’ll do what you want. I just… Before I go back to Austria, I want to do that. I could totally hack into the police-”
“Hold on sweetheart. My mother has her lackeys strewn around all over Paris. I reported to her and I believe she will contact me shortly and tell me where exactly to find our little problem child. We just have to wait it out a little. Word spreads fast. There has to be someone, who has met him.”
“It’s settled then. We’ll collaborate. We’ll find out who the killer is… And you’ll let me interrogate him.”
What have you gotten yourself into?