Heavy thuds shook the walls of the tiny dorm room and caused the dishes, organized so meticulously by Laura, to rattle on their shelves. The squid (Carmilla was pretty sure it was a squid) who inhabited the pond between the Dean's quarters and the remainder of the campus was giving the small swarm of vampires a serious roadblock in their approach to the dormitory.
Carmilla took a deep, steadying breath. Loud, pounding booms like these didn't generally bode well for her. The last time she heard thundering like this, sure she was freed, but she was also let loose on the world again. Times like these, she was convinced everybody would have been better off if she had just stayed buried, sealed away in her stone sarcophagus. She wouldn't be repeating this same foolish cycle of love and loss, she wouldn't be free to hurt and kill and feed and care. With another violent slam, she doubted she would ever fully forget the salty smell of gunpowder filling her nostrils, acrid smoke burning her eyes, the screams of men, entirely too young, echoing in her ears all these years later. Indeed, she ought to have stayed in her coffin.
She turned to the cramped occupants of the dorm room, hiding a flinch as she felt a fresh tremor rattle the floorboards beneath her feet. There was another war raging outside the window. This one with soldiers she cared about on both sides - her family and her friends meeting in a clash of claws and teeth and steel (and whatever LaFontaine had in all those beakers hanging from her lab coat.) Before her, wide-eyed and spooked, but gathered before her nevertheless, stood her small, stupid, brave army. Danny, covered in war paint and flanked by several ferocious looking women with spears that may have once been rugby sticks. Perry, her floor don, wearing a plastic yellow hard hat and for some reason wielding a fire extinguisher. Kirsch, chest puffed with bravado alongside a handful of suspiciously muscular brothers. There was even a crowd of slight, pasty-looking folk, who blinked nervously and muttered what sounded like equations, testing the very chemistry of the air in the room. They were all squeezed into the tiny room, filling every surface and watching her pace and cringe.
They looked to her for guidance, she realized. Laura had gathered them, but this was her fight. For someone who put such a heavy reverence on into language and the power of words (they are, after all, the only remnants of her past lives; the words people have spoken to her, the books her favorite philosophers, her friends, had left behind for her) she found that she had none for the scared, scattered company her roommate had assembled. And besides, she didn't have much confidence inspiring speeches. Not when she'd lived as long as she'd had. But that was one of the few benefits of having lived as many lives as she had. Carmilla had been many women. She'd heard and given the best of exhilarating rhetoric.
She shook off the eyes of these strong souls she had grown to call her friends (although, it was admittedly a loose definition) and dug deep within herself. Past the wild woman with all the wanderlust of an entire generation with flowers in their hair; past the studious, clever woman, catching up on decades of history that had passed over her head while she slept; past the love-struck fool that she despised; past the villainous, charismatic accomplice – instrumental in the suffering of so many families. She dug back to the halls of Versailles, to the woman she was after her birth, mad with newfound power; to the Lieutenant, the Countess Karnstein, the ruthless warrior who had toppled nations and made emperors kneel, the woman who changed the course of wars and history, regaled in tales as the Valkyrie who decided the fate of men, to the woman who had not suffered death in her life, not really.
When she came back, she was not Carmilla. Carmilla couldn't lead this attack. Carmilla was weak and cared that not all of these people, these mortals before her, would return. If any returned at all. She was Mircalla. The champion who's presence was a harbinger of bloodshed. Her stance changed. She stood taller, filled the room more with her very existence, her royalty. The company surrounding her felt weak of breath, for she took all the air in the room and held it, commanded it. She radiated authority, supremacy, might.
She spoke then - words of victory, conquest, laurels. Her words were invigorating and timeless, infused with the passion of one who lived for battle, as she once had. Her army nodded silently, emboldened. Even the muttering of the alchemists had stopped. She looked into each pair of eyes that she could meet, convinced them that they could triumph in their crusade. Her voice grew with her animation as she settled into her role as commander. Her words infected the assembly standing shoulder to shoulder in her dorm room. With a final shout of something about valor (really, who believes this stuff?) she raised her fist and let a terrible growl claw itself from the back of her throat, fangs bared and eyes wild. She was then drowned with the deafening roar from her legion of warriors.
Suitably roused, her small, foolish, brave band turned and thundered down the hall and out to the courtyard where glorious battle awaited them. The charge was led by that tall red-headed woman in war paint, brandishing a spear and commanding troops with a skill that Mircalla would have admired. Perhaps these were warriors, after all. Perhaps victory was possible.
But as the brothers of Zeta Omega Mu parted and the room emptied, Mircalla was struck by the one pair of eyes she had not met; a familiar, tiny girl who was frozen in place. Laura stared at her with horror and appreciation -horror because they didn't quite recognize one another and appreciation because they both knew that those who had gathered had needed the push that Mircalla had provided. But those eyes, that palpable fear, the scratching memory of something very important, brought Carmilla back to herself. She deflated, ashamed, as awareness finally dawned that she had just sent her classmates, her friends, to war. And then she was Carmilla once more; the girl who was scared of her mother and of caring too much for too many people.
She had to fight, that she knew; it wasn't her eloquent orations that decided battles (though they helped a great deal for some reason) it was her powerful, ancient presence. She knew she could strike fear in the hearts of her enemies, giving her companions a sliver of a chance- and she could leave a trail of carnage behind her with the veteran skill of the conqueror she had once been.
But suddenly she couldn't move. She was paralyzed with fear for herself (didn't they know what her mother would do to them?) but mostly for the tiny girl before her who had convinced her to rebel against her mother-in-all-but-birth in the first place. Laura. Laura who could defend herself reasonably well against in her pajamas against her mother's right-hand. Laura who had gathered a squad of shivering, frightened students and convinced them to listen. Laura, who was absolutely too curious and entirely too good. Her Laura.
Her Laura seemed to recover from the shock of Carmilla's transformation as yet another boom rattled the books on their shelves.
"We should… go help." Laura stuttered, remembering herself. She threw her thumb over her shoulder, gesturing to the hallway that led to the door that led to the war that was raging outside their dormitory. As if it had been forgotten.
Go help? How innocent could she be? Didn't she understand war? The horror of memory gripped Carmilla and she felt powerless and inadequate. She knew she wouldn't be able to fight for glory, not now that the bloodlust had faded from her eyes. She approached Laura slowly, hands raised, convincing her to see (oblivious though she could be) that she was herself once more.
And she did. Laura saw the hesitation and unease that seeped from Carmilla. She took Carmilla's hands in her own, preparing her own poignant speech, "We can win this. You said it yourself. Valor-"
Carmilla interrupted, "I don't need valor, I need strength."
Laura blinked.
"Oh! Right. Of course."
She turned to the side and shifted the hair from her neck, offering her veins to the vampire.
"No. Strength." Carmilla whispered and lifted her hand to Laura's cheek, turning her face so their gazes met. She leaned forward with more bravery than she had ever mustered (who knew if she would ever get another chance) and pressed her lips to Laura's.
They were soft, softer than she ever could have imagined; and warm, so warm the heated the core of her and melted the doubt, the despair, the foreboding sensation that gnawed at her stomach. And when Laura kissed her back, suddenly she had something for which she could fight and someone for whom she could die.
She pulled back and took in Laura's serene, though still stunned, face. She let it sear itself into her memory and she knew she had to fight, had to face far worse than bombs and tanks, far worse than her even her nightmares had allowed her to imagine, in order to keep this naïve, brave girl with more heart and passion than she'd ever experienced, to keep her safe.
Carmilla stepped forward once more for a final, unbearably soft kiss, the scent of her permanently erasing the fleeting memories of gunpowder and blood, the pounding of her heart the only sound that would ever truly echo in her ears again. She whispered to the lips of her roommate, her mark, her complex infatuation, "Stay safe, my Laura."
And then she was out the door, in the hall, approaching the courtyard and her nightmares, perhaps with fear but also with satisfaction and eagerness. She would fight for what she cared about. Perhaps there was something to be said for inspirational speeches.
A/N: Continue? Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Good jokes?