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Eternity.
What is eternity?
Eternity is time stretching forward and backward, an infinite line that doubles back and copies itself.
Eternity is seeing patterns everywhere.
Eternity is being a scientist, is recognizing what the world is and what it is made of. The ways time flows and overlaps. The way you can live the same life 10 times over on different planets and in different times.
Eternity is patterns. Eternity is loops. Eternity is following in your own footsteps so many times that deja vu is reality.
Eternity is eternal, and she belongs to eternity.
But her eternity had been a lonesome one.
In the beginning, it hadn’t been. In the beginning, she and Loreli had walked into Eternity together. Arm in arm. Hand in hand.
But in that long long long long ago moment that still haunts her waking wandering dreams, the eternity that was the two of them became only hers, and she walks it alone.
The occasional companion, sure. Lab partner, clone, test subject, girlfriend, or even pet, but never in her eternity, until now, had she been a Mother.
And now in her eternity, that new title was coming to an end.
Or at the very least, it would soon.
Carmilla was crouched over a body, hands shaking and eyes wild. Because this was not supposed to happen like this, Jonny was not supposed to die like this.
Her son was dying, dying, dying and soon he would be dead.
Death is not an option in eternity, endings are, things so close to death they can almost but not quite be called death be are, but death, but rest, but falling gently into the night is not an option when an eternity of time stretches forward in front of you.
For only a few moments, in this current life, she’d almost viewed time as she had so so so so so long ago. Because this mortal, this violent and hurting teenager had burrowed his way into her heart like termites to wood like acid to paper. He’d clawed her open and made his home in her chest.
And through him time was visible. As he grew inches taller as stubble slowly appeared on his cheeks as his hair grew slowly as time passed and he aged and grew.
He is not timeless.
And for once, for once in her eternity she had felt time pass.
So she had dared to think that maybe, only maybe, that the carving empty hollow loneliness could fade. She had hoped and felt the ghosts of her long-ago prayers that maybe, perhaps if only for a minute she might not grieve millions of millions of long-faded souls and live in the present, no ghosts behind her no eyes on her back.
She had dared to dream to hope that maybe the cycle leading deep and through the infinite abyss of time could be fulfilled yet again, but that this time it may not ache so deeply. Getting attached to a flicker of light in the dark; a stuck match in the night only to have to tear herself away and run before the inevitable crash of death and loss.
Her Jonny, her little boy, her golden-hearted little warrior, her brilliant son, her lovely little cowboy.
Her Jonny.
Her Jonny wasn't supposed to die so soon.
His heart gave out, and she should have realized, she should have known. He’d mentioned a cousin dying of a heart attack, she should have checked. It was only after he collapsed in her arms, on a planet far too primitive to save him, that she’d realized that she perhaps should have brought the kid from a planet with medicine from the sp1860s to a proper full-body physical.
And she did not have the medicine or anything to fix a heart attack. To save him. To stop him from fading into the oh-so-tempting dark and leaving her to the wolves to the empty to the eternity alone with only an empty hole in her chest where he’d burrowed in and made himself a home.
So he was dying, he was in her arms, and she was weeping.
Weeping like she did as she pressed a wooden stake into her now and soon to be ex-wife’s back stabbing in stabbing through and starting an end and a beginning as she passed into her lonesome and slow infinity.
He’d looked so scared as he turned to her, as he’d stumbled over to her, complaining of his chest hurting, of pain.
She’d concluded he was having a heart attack before he’d even gotten to the shortness of breath, and he was dying.
He’d passed out, not long after. He’d not told her until he got dizzy, until he’d been too far for her to even try to save.
He was dying, and soon he would be dead. Soon this portion of infinity where time passed slowly would come to an end and she would throw herself back into the roiling boiling waves of ruthless infinite time.
As she held him, all she wanted to do was tear into his neck and drink him to life. To drag him into immortality, into true undeath so he would live however shallow and false that life may be.
But long ago she’d promised herself to never do such a thing, never again, no more vampires.
Jonny’s taking his dying breaths, and Carmilla tries to think of anything she could possibly ever do to save him.
Long ago, once upon a long decayed planet that sits in the heart of a black hole, she had participated in an experiment. An experiment that she had intended to hopefully kill her. It had failed, of course. The entity they had contacted looked past her. Didn’t meet her eyes, and instead into the gaze of her lab partner.
And once upon a time, she’d done an experiment with that same entity’s powers.
One upon a time, she’d taken to calling that entity’s plane of existence The Void.
She’d dissected a frog, and replaced parts of it with void-drenched replacements.
Nothing happened the first few times she’d done this experiment, but when she did it to a dying but not-quite-dead frog?
It had woken up, shriveled from the inside out in a twist of writhing rainbows, and had refused to die.
In the end, months later, it had settled some, in a sort of stasis between dead and alive, capable of eating and walking but not nearly what a frog should be.
That frog had been dead and dying, but it had lived.
Carmilla thinks back to long passed experiments, thinks to the shriveled half-alive thing in the terrarium in the back of her ship, and she knows, she knows what she must do.
She is certain she can do this.
She believes she can.
Jonny is her son.
He will not die.
Jonny is her baby.
She will not let him die.
He will not be a vampire. He will be something else. Something new. She will replace his heart, she will make him a new one, and she will bind him to eternity with her.
Her son will not die.
He will live.
He will live, like that frog.
He will live, and she will save him.
A heart of gold, she decides. Things like this, things that she still and always will refuse to call magic often work like this, on metaphors and implied meaning.
She will give her son a heart of gold. She will drag him into her eternity. She will save him.
He is her son.
He will not die.
She will not let him die.
She slowly lays him down, and begins her work.
Her Jonny will not die.
She will save him.
She has to.