Chapter Text
Carmilla opened her eyes, and found herself in a room that had become all too familiar: the coffin room in the dungeons of her estate. She knew she would be bound to the chair she was seated in, but tugged ineffectually all the same. Panic rose in her chest; how could this be happening again, she had freed herself from this, why – something stirred in the corner, and the panic turned to sheer dread. It was impossible, and yet Carmilla watched helplessly as Lilita Morgan swept into view, dressed in the same bloodstained gown she’d been wearing when Carmilla staked her to death.
And she wasn’t alone.
Behind Morgan came William, Carmilla’s traitorous brother. Carmilla stared in bewilderment; William was imprisoned, sentenced to a decades-long sentence for his part in Morgan’s plot, and yet here he was, free, while she was the one tied up. He was walking oddly, a shuffle, and it took a moment for Carmilla to realize that he was dragging something behind him. As soon as the realization hit the sickeningly familiar smell of blood filled the air, and Carmilla instinctively flinched, the metallic odor triggering only pain and fear for her.
Her mother smiled at her, the expression as unnerving as anything else that had happened thus far, and came closer. “Hello, dear.”
Carmilla simply looked at her for several seconds, shocked and scared into silence, before finding her voice with effort; when she spoke, it was tinged with audible hysteria. “Mother. You-you’re dead…I killed you!”
Her mother’s smile simply widened, and she gestured to William, who moved the shape he’d been dragging into view, tossing it carelessly at Carmilla’s feet.
Laura Hollis’ broken body lay unmoving before Carmilla, her throat slashed and her eyes staring unseeingly at the vampire.
Carmilla stared uncomprehendingly, perplexed. It didn’t make any sense; she had freed herself from this, things were supposed to be better now – long moments passed before she realized that the screaming she’d been hearing was her own.
Her mother stepped up to her, seemingly uncaring of the noise, and brushed her hand down Carmilla’s face. “Sweet girl, do you really think that my absence will change anything? That you can change anything?”
Carmilla sat up with a sharp gasp, her heart pounding with terror. There was a muffled snort, followed by a not-so-muffled snort, and she looked around confusedly to see that she was sitting in a…diner booth? The muffled snickering she’d vaguely registered turned to outright laughter, and she looked across the table to see LaFontaine, the House Hollis scientist, and Kirsch, that buffoonish Hollis hunter, bent over in laughter; next to them, Perry, the hostage they’d rescued, watched them disapprovingly.
She felt a hand on her arm and turned to see Laura looking at her, a smile playing on her mouth. “Hey, Carm, sorry for the rude awakening. You kinda just knocked out in the middle of eating.”
"It was freaking amazing," Kirsch interjected, finally having gotten his laughter under control. "We were just watchin' and hoping you'd faceplant into your burger."
Carmilla just smiled at him, and if her canines were a bit more pronounced than usual no one felt the need to point it out. "Nope, but now that you mention it, I am feeling pretty hungry..."
Kirsch's smile dropped and he hastily backpedaled, holding up his hands in protest. "Hey, hey, you promised to drop the vamp jokes!"
"I promised to drop the jokes. I never said anything about the threats."
Kirsch, speechless, looked to Laura beseechingly, only to see that the brunette was watching the exchange with great amusement, a smirk playing on her lips. "Sorry, Kirsch, you walked into that one."
He looked between the two of them, before finally sighing and slumping back against the booth in defeat. Satisfied, Carmilla looked to LaFontaine, the other guilty party. "And you?"
The scientist looked back, ever unflappable. "Hey, I've never seen a vampire sleep before. It was an incredibly funn- er, valuable research observation."
"Anything for science," Carmilla said dryly.
"You said it."
"But hey, Carm, are you okay?" Laura interjected, eager to forestall the inevitable banter. "I've never seen you fall asleep out of the blue like that."
"Well, it is two in the afternoon. I'd be asleep right now if you hadn't begged me to meet up with the dimwit squad," Carmilla replied testily.
"Hey!"
She tipped her head in acknowledgment. "Sorry, I meant you, and the dimwit squad."
Laura just looked at her, unmoved by the vampire's typical defensive tactics. "Carm..."
Carmilla sighed, as susceptible to Laura as ever. "And the negotiations. The constant meetings and debates have really been getting to me."
Perry, who had been watching the proceedings with varying amounts of disapproval and hidden amusement, spoke up for the first time. "Have you been getting enough sleep? I can recommend some excellent herbal teas, if you'd like?"
Carmilla smiled dryly. "Unless your teas can make incredibly boring meetings suddenly even vaguely interesting, I think I'll pass."
Perry frowned. "Well, my goodness, how boring can they be?"
Laura held back a sigh, feeling Carmilla's irritation. A more apt question would probably be, how much more tedious would they have to be before their attendants actually started expiring from sheer boredom. In the few meetings she'd sat in on, she'd counted five separate attendees dozing behind their binders; granted, they were among the older delegates, but she was sure they were only doing what everyone else wished they could do. It was, she reflected, rather ironic that such a momentous and history-making event could be so dull.
It was a striking change from the chaotic chain of events that had occurred six months prior, in which Laura and Carmilla had uncovered the conspiracy surrounding the death of Laura's mother and in the process, stopped Carmilla's mother, Lilita Morgan, from carrying out a plot that would have wiped out the leadership of the vampire clans and granted Morgan immense power, enabling her to act on her hatred of the human hunter houses and crush them once and for all. Stopping her had been a near thing; Carmilla had been found out and imprisoned, and Laura nearly died. The final encounter was only survived thanks to the aid of the group of hunters Carmilla had so ignominiously dubbed the dimwit squad (Laura assured them it was a term of affection; they weren't so sure).
After the dust had settled and the clans and houses' initial shock and outrage (and, in the case of Laura's father, rage and terror at Laura's near death, coupled with simmering suspicion of Carmilla, who was much too close to his daughter for his liking) had died down, attention inevitably shifted to accountability. Lilita Morgan was dead, and could not be brought to justice for her would-be crimes; her closest crony and sycophant, Carmilla's "brother" William, had been unceremoniously dumped into a dank dungeon cell and more or less told to get used to it, as he would be there for a very long time. And so all eyes had turned to Carmilla, the newly minted leader of Clan Karnstein. Her own torture and imprisonment at the hands of her mother cleared her of any culpability, and yet mistrust and anger towards the clan, who had so nearly destroyed everything, remained; she was now its leader, and so, fair or not, she was responsible for steering its fate.
Carmilla had seriously considered running, leaving the endless intrigue and politics of the clans behind for someone else to handle. It was only the fear of some incompetent taking her place and running the clan en masse straight to the staking grounds that had stayed her restless feet. That, and Laura. If she had been told a year ago that the heir to the local hunter house would help topple her mother, save her life, and capture her attentions and heart so fully in the process, she would have flatly informed them of the obviously dire gaps in their mental faculties, and instructed them to seek immediate help.
Life, it seemed, continued to contain surprises, even four centuries on.
So she stayed. After assuring the clans that Clan Karnstein had no more doomsday plots up its sleeve, involving mass sacrifices or otherwise, she moved onto the unenviable task of proving her worth as clan leader. Her ascension to the role was highly unorthodox, to say the least; these were, after all, clans made up of essentially immortal beings, and of the eight clans five had had the same leader since well before the signing of the Treaty eighty years ago. The other two changed leadership when the old leaders simply tired of the role and wished to do other things, and even then, there was always a carefully selected and groomed subordinate ready to take up the spot.
Clan Karnstein had no such mechanism in place. Morgan had had no plans to give up the role and the power that came with it; indeed, it seemed that instead she’d been actively working to not only permanently cement her power, but also to keep the members of her clan as ill-prepared as possible should something happen to her – a parting gift that, Carmilla thought sardonically, rather summed up her mother as a whole.
So Carmilla had her work cut out for her, proving her credibility to the clans. The threat of dismantling the clan or removing her from power was very real, and Carmilla had had to talk fast to keep them from moving in and doing just that in the immediate aftermath. It was only when she made several promises – several large promises – that they reconsidered.
In short, Carmilla had pledged to serve as chief negotiator with the hunter houses, who were understandably enraged at the plot that had been unfolding under their noses, one that not only seemed to clearly violate the Treaty but would have ultimately resulted in their annihilation. They demanded restitution, or else. And the clans took the threats seriously.
Much had changed for them in the past eighty years, and though they were certainly still vicious, predatory creatures that could put up a fight, they had grown complacent and lazy over the decades. As the need to rule with an iron fist – sowing fear and shedding blood when necessary to maintain that rule – diminished, turning instead to the equally potent, more modern rule of political and financial power, they had shed much of their warlike ways.
The hunter houses, to say the least, had not. While both the clans and houses and embraced the modern world and the changes it brought, the legacy of fear and violence that had sparked the creation of the houses remained, passed down from generation to generation; it was this fear that kept Laura patrolling the walls of the Hollis compound at dawn, that kept the training rooms and firing ranges of the houses fully booked. The hunters were as ready to fight now as they had ever been; in fact, with the furious investment in research into even more potent weapons against their vampire foes, they were perhaps even more deadly than ever before.
The clans knew all this, and, for the first time, were not so sure of their chances. Oh, they thought that they would eventually win when it came down to it, but there would heavy – unacceptably so – losses in the process. Better to turn to the negotiation table, at least at first.
That was where Carmilla came in. In return for acceptance of her leadership, she would parley with the houses and come to a mutually agreeable update to the Treaty, revised for the new age and reflective of the near-disaster that had just occurred. The clans, none of them too eager to spend such extensive periods of time with their foes, agreed, their only concession sending a representative each (all of them, Carmilla noted irritably, generally ancient and useless) to aid in the diplomacy.
This arrangement was communicated to the hunter houses, and after some internal debate, the answer came back: they were, to Carmilla’s pleasant surprise, agreed. Of course, the curveball quickly followed: the chief negotiator on the houses’ side would be none other William Hollis, the taciturn head of House Hollis and far from Carmilla’s biggest fan. Carmilla thought bitterly that he had probably volunteered for the role, all the better to stretch negotiations endlessly, both to punish her for her role in his daughter’s injury and to keep her away from Laura and in his sight for as long as possible.
And so Carmilla had spent the last six months in dreary monotony, heading each morning (yes, morning; the houses had stood firm on this point, pointedly eager to seize any advantage they could over their nemeses) to the mutually agreed upon neutral site in town to debate the latest piece of minutia presented by the houses. Every detail, no matter how small or ultimately pointless, was the source of a pitched debate, and Carmilla, never one for lengthy speeches, quickly tired of the discussion. Not helping matters was the constant stream of glares directed at her by William Hollis, who had early on cottoned on the fact that Carmilla and his daughter were much closer than any vampire and hunter ought to be.
Laura and Carmilla didn’t think that he knew just how close they were – Laura was pretty sure she’d have been packed off to the most distant hunter house in Austria by now if he did – but they weren’t eager to give him any more ammunition, especially not when the fate of the Treaty and the increasingly tense ceasefire depended on his goodwill. So, though they didn’t like it, they agreed to stay as discrete and off-the-radar as possible, at least until the passage of the revised Treaty. After that…well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it.
Just when Carmilla thought that the hunters would succeed at something her mother had never been able to do – drive her truly insane –her negotiation hell finally, miraculously, seemed to develop an end date. Somehow, the day-in, day-out battles of the past months had finally resulted in some actual progress and agreements – the houses had new powers and protections against the excesses of the clans, while the clans had pledged to adopt more comprehensive accountability for when things did go south – and now, unbelievably, they had reached the final barrier to ratification: a historic, first-of-its-kind conference held by all eight of the clans and all six of the hunter houses, where after some final debate and negotiation the Treaty would be ratified.
The conference was to be convened in several days’ time; Carmilla would be more at ease, or at least, better well-rested, if it wasn’t for the recurring nightmares she’d been having whenever she did get the chance to get some rest. She didn’t know if it was repressed trauma from all that had happened coming to the fore, or just the stress and constant pressure of the negotiations, but either way, it was robbing her of some desperately needed recuperation. Unfortunately, she really didn’t have the time or energy to confront any repressed shock – she needed all her wits about her every day, lest Hollis try to sneak in yet another unacceptable provision into the Treaty. She just had to hold on for a bit longer, and then she could deal with whatever was stirring up her subconscious.
Carmilla jumped as a hand brushed her arm, and she looked beside her to see Laura staring at her worriedly. “Hey…where’d you go? You were totally zoned out.”
Carmilla looked across the table; Perry, LaFontaine, and Kirsch were chatting amongst themselves, oblivious to her momentary check-out. She looked back to Laura and forced a smile. “Like I said, all these negotiations are wearing me out. I’ll be okay.”
Laura examined her for a second before brightening. “I know the last couple of months have been exhausting, but we’re almost done! After the new treaty is ratified, everything will be different. For the clans, the houses…” She smiled a bit shyly. “For us.”
The sickening image of Laura’s sightless eyes and slashed throat flashed into Carmilla’s mind, and she had to abruptly choke down the bile in her throat before smiling weakly.
Do you really think that my absence will change anything? That you can change anything?
“Yeah. It’ll all be different.”