Laura's bad habits didn't start off so bad. The first time it happened, the first time she really thought of Carmilla's needs instead of just pretending she preferred to ignore them, it was an act as simple as leaving out food for her roommate – not that she didn't do that already, albeit unintentionally.
It was the middle of an eighteen hour work day, one of those days when Laura didn't have time to leave her textbooks or her computer for a trip to the cafeteria or an impromptu pie date with Danny. It was one of those days Perry said were going to kill her, days filled with polysilicate chemicals from peanut butter and snack cakes as the only fuel to her diligent studies. Her chocolate chip cookie supply had depleted quickly. From LaFontaine sneaking a few the day before, to Laura's own mindless face-stuffing, she was down to the last row of sugary ovals by dinner. She could've eaten them all, could've filled her stomach. But she didn't.
She left one. One lone cookie wasn't going to make a difference to her gurgling belly, and it wasn't going to make a difference to Carmilla's either, but still Laura found herself wiping up the chocolate from her fingertips and urging her greedy hands to surrender that last cookie, leave it unsuspectingly undisturbed in its plastic tray. It was the principle of the thing that mattered. She knew it would be eaten. Just not by her own comparably dull teeth.
And she wasn't disappointed. Laura's dinner was Carmilla's breakfast, and when the slumbering gothic figure beside her woke up, clothes and hair barely tousled, the first thing she did after bidding Laura good morning was snatch up that last sphere of sugar, without permission or hesitation.
Laura didn't hesitate either. With her own meal finished she rose from her chair, walked swiftly to the front of the room, and gathered her Tardis mug and her cocoa powder. She was simply going to quench her thirst, wash down her sugary meal, but she pondered too long, considered another option, and this is where she developed her next bad habit. She grabbed another mug.
Laura was fully aware that Carmilla probably wasn't actually fond of the taste of chocolate or cocoa, but she did seem to be fond of 'borrowing' Laura's things, and those cookies and that cocoa were going to become Carmilla's at some point whether Laura surrendered them to her or not. So Laura skipped a step, bypassed her feigned annoyance, and submitted to Carmilla's whim, played along with her roommate's game. (Game, Laura reminded herself. Carmilla wasn't serious, wasn't really flirting with her. She just liked to ruffle Laura's feathers, rile both of them up until one of them left the room, erring on the edge of either sweaty, delirious, or some combination of the two, not to return to the same worked up state again until the other returned to the room and the cycle repeated itself.) She poured Carmilla a cup of steaming, chocolate-flavored water. It sloshed inside the plain beige mug like an ocean, pulled by the tides of the moon, but Laura didn't want to surrender her control to any celestial bodies (she didn't like the way they made her feel insignificant, not in the way Carmilla did), so she thickened it, poured the thick red slurry of goo from Carmilla's soy milk container into the cup until it brushed against the rim of the mug, staining it red like Carmilla's lipstick so often did, and the waves could no longer climb as high with each of her steps back to her work desk and Carmilla's bed.
Laura intentionally made the cocoa too swiftly, and maybe chunks of powder were still floating clumped and dry among the foamy scum at the top of her mug, but she didn't care that she had done a messy job of mixing her drink, and Carmilla didn't seem to care either. She accepted her mug almost gratefully, with as much gratuity as a heartless vampire who hadn't expected the offering in the first place could convey in one small moment of surprise, that is.
"Thanks."
"Yep."
Laura nodded that awkward nod, pretended her only motive was kindness, but Carmilla's eyes, those dark pupils lost in streaks of even darker eyeliner that somehow hadn't smudged as she slept, looked right through her, right past Laura's embarrassing gestures and failed-to-be-hidden self-consciousness. Laura thought those eyes might swallow her up, suck the soul out of her before the dean could even lay a finger on her. But they didn't. Not right now, anyway.
When Carmilla took a sip from her mug, eyes still on Laura's uncomfortable stance rather than her drink, she hummed or moaned or … did something Laura couldn't quite classify in surprise. She hadn't expected the blood to be there, hadn't seen it kissing the rim of the cup until her own lips were meeting it on the mug, pretending the cool, glassy material that belonged to Laura was warmer, softer… fleshier, yet still as delicious. Greedily, she took another gulp, and she made sure to stare Laura in the eye as she did it.
Laura couldn't discern what the origins of the stare were, didn't know if Carmilla was ogling her in confusion, lust, or bloodlust, but a couple of those options seemed to stand out more than the others, and Laura knew in her gut what that look meant, even if she tried to deny it.
"Not bad," Carmilla spoke, lips wrapping around the bloody opening of the mug as they formed her words. Her vocal chords were never affected by sleep, her voice never altered or groggy or rough like Laura's was when she woke up in the morning. Sometimes Carmilla's seeming perfection made her feel inadequate, though mostly she just appreciated the creature before her, watched on in fascination as Carmilla persisted as the worst and most interesting person in her life simultaneously. "You'd make a good house wife," Carmilla joked, and Laura dropped to her chair as her heart rose, clogging her throat. She used the muscular blockage as an excuse not to respond.
She watched Carmilla dip her own cookie into her own cocoa, soften the crunchy biscuit, saturate it in blood, and bring the sweet to her lips, chomping down on the bloody treat with hungry, extended fangs that Laura couldn't help but imagine sinking into her, too.
Laura's next bad habit was one that was particularly injurious, mostly because it wasn't just the addition of a negative behavior to her routine, but the subtraction of a positive one as well.
When Laura first found out about Carmilla's… condition, she took every precaution she could, tying garlic cloves around her bed post, placing that makeshift cross Danny gave her under her pillow, and wearing turtle necks even when they were only a few weeks into the fall semester and it definitely wasn't winter or even quite fall yet. Carmilla knew what she was doing, but Laura didn't care. She was protecting herself. She was safe. And that was what she had wanted to be. Had, anyway.
Now she wasn't sure, didn't quite know what safe was or if it was something she even desired. Her dad had preached safety to her, taken her to CPR lessons, taught her the Heimlich maneuver, packed her suitcases full of bear spray and mace, but Laura had never actually used any of that stuff at any point in her life, and she wasn't sure if the safety methods she was implementing now were just as useless. Maybe she wanted to invade a bear sanctuary, consume her food without chewing properly, stay underwater a few seconds too long. Maybe she wanted to get bitten.
That last revelation wasn't a revelation at all, she told herself. She hadn't come to any conclusions. She didn't say she absolutely 100% for sure knew she wanted to experience what it was like to have her vampire roommate stalk her in the middle of the night, sink her pointed fangs into her neck when she wasn't paying attention, and drink from her like the blood supply in her veins wasn't finite. She didn't say that, and she didn't know that she wanted it.
She wasn't quite opposed to it, though, either, and she found a happy medium, a way to express her interest in both sides of the subject without committing to either. She did not flat out ask Carmilla to feed from her, fill her stomach with Laura's blood like she did with the rest of Laura's food, but she didn't prevent Carmilla from having the opportunity either.
First she took away most of the garlic, used it to cook the first real meals she'd eaten since she'd traveled to Austria and to Silas. Then she removed that cross from underneath her pillow. It was uncomfortable to sleep on anyway (though she didn't know if that was because of its bulky shape or the fact that it reminded her of Danny when she was having dreams of Carmilla atop it every night). Finally the turtle necks were replaced with flannels and t-shirts, oversized ones, of course, with the collars stretched and sagging halfway down her chest, leaving both her neck and her collar bone exposed from Carmilla to pierce into, fracture. She thought maybe it would entice her roommate, seduce Carmilla the way Carmilla tried (and failed, Laura reminded herself, 100% absolutely failed every single time no matter how convincing or racy or sweet Carmilla's flirting tactics were) to do to her. Or maybe it would do nothing. Laura might be okay with that option, too. Or at least her rationale might be.
It didn't do nothing, though. It worked. Sort of. It worked in that way that half of her was pleased, a quarter of her was terrified, and the last quarter of her was disappointed. In worked in that middle ground Laura was trying to achieve even though neither side of her conflicting feelings were satisfied by the compromise. It lured Carmilla in, but she never took the bait. She got close, perched on the edge of Laura's bed, observing her offering, scrutinizing its authenticity, but Carmilla saw the string above the worm, recognized it as another trap, and Carmilla didn't want to get caught in another one of Laura's snares, even if she might get away with it this time, dupe Laura and her gang of redheaded toddlers. But the risk wasn't worth it. She resisted.
"You better be careful, buttercup" she whispered instead, to a Laura she thought was still asleep. "You don't know what you're getting yourself into."
But Laura did know. To some extent anyway. And she knew she wouldn't be as careful as Carmilla recommended, as her dad and Danny and Perry and even Lafontaine wanted her to be. She'd do something stupid again, and she knew it. It wouldn't be long before she developed another, even worse habit.