Work Text:
When Laura woke up it was to the librarian tapping her shoulder with an irritation that suggested this was not her first attempt at waking Laura up. "It's past 9pm, Ms Sheridan, we are closed."
She scrambled to her feet, apologizing profusely to the librarian and swearing it wouldn't happen again. This was a lie, they both knew, but one that common decency required. Laura had been falling asleep in the library her whole first semester at Saint Perpetua's College because she studied relentlessly after class. And she studied relentlessly after class because of her.
Carmilla was DeLafontaine’s protege, her star pupil, and a mythic bitch. Sure, her poetry was fantastic, and her style was incredible, and her hair looked perfectly soft at all times. But she was mean-spirited, fiercely possessive, and rude to anyone other than DeLafontaine. Laura wanted to knock her down a peg, and she couldn’t do that without studying, which is what brings us back to this moment.
As she moved to gather the book she had been using as a pillow, she saw a slip of typewriter paper tucked into the pages.
Meet me in the library after dark. - C
Ha! As if she would fall for such an obvious trap! Laura was a freshman, yes, from an isolated town where she was the preacher’s daughter, but she had seen such ploys in her amatory books. She wasn’t stupid. And even if she were inclined to listen, the librarian clucking nearby was evidence that the library closed after dark and would be locked tight until morning.
Once she got back to her dormitory room across the quad from the library she flopped on her bed, staring out the window. It was late, she hadn’t eaten, and she still had more studying to do. Yet her mind kept wandering to what Carmilla could possibly want from her. She made a peanut butter sandwich and settled into her desk, curtains open to watch the drizzly rain over the gothic architecture between pages of her mathematics text.
A few hours passed this way. Eventually, Laura finished her assignments and glanced at her watch. It was just about midnight, much later than she had intended to stay up, but it was due to her accidental nap that she’d been delayed so the sleep budget felt balanced. She snapped her notebook closed then cursed under her breath as the small gust blew a paper off her desk onto the windowsill. It was the note, and now that it was on the sill she noticed that across the lawn one of the library windows was faintly lit, as though by a flashlight.
She knew it was complete foolishness to venture out at midnight to meet her rival in the closed library, in the rain nonetheless. And yet as she watched the dim light move from window to window away from the fire escape on the south wall she couldn’t help but feel like a moth.
Groaning, Laura stood and grabbed her coat and slipped on her oxfords. If it was a meeting in the library that Carmilla wanted, it was a meeting in the library she would get, good sense be damned.
Her last thought as she locked her door was that at least this time she wouldn’t be asleep when Carmilla saw her between the sheets.