Laura isn't pretty.
She's too quiet. Her nose is kind of funny. Her smug face is annoying. She has a nasty habit of humming the Doctor Who theme song when she writes, too, and yelling at Carmilla for stealing her pillow. She's bossy and demanding and stubborn, outspoken and brave, despite the fact that she's scared shitless of what's happening at Silas. She's eloquent and kind and caring and really short in a super cute way-but not pretty, she reminds herself hastily. Never pretty.
"Pretty" was too dull of a word. "Pretty" is something you say when your friend shows you a really bad re-creation of the Mona Lisa, or when your aunt buys you a really ugly sweater for Christmas and you don't want to hurt her feelings by saying it's the colour of cat puke. Laura was neither a bad piece of art, nor an itchy, just-too-small-to-be-comfortable Christmas sweater. She was something completely her own.
Laura made the entire world stop. Carmilla could close her eyes and she wouldn't picture blood or her mother or Earth falling through space. She would think about how heavy flower petals are or how she's only alive because the stupid blonde with the funny nose fought battles way bigger than herself. And something like that was worth so much more than the word pretty.
Whenever she's around her, Carmilla's blood vessels feel like flint and steel, waiting to spark and consume her. Laura Hollis is literally human sunlight, and sunlight isn't pretty. Sunlight is brilliant and hot; a blazing inferno that travels billions of light years just to warm up a tiny ladybug.
(And Carmilla knows that Laura would travel billions of light years to warm up a tiny ladybug. That's just how she is.)
Carmilla hates that Laura isn't just pretty. Maybe if she was a plain as the adjective she wouldn't have caught the brooding vampire's attention in the first place. Brooding vampires did... well, brooding vampire things. Like reading 16th century literature and sleeping until 7 PM. They didn't muse about how someone embodied sunlight. At least not until now.
But she couldn't tell Laura these things. She was far to naive and oblivious to how her shining glared through Carmilla's darkness, proving that maybe she did, in fact, have a heart, and that Elle didn't take it with her to the grave. She would shrug it off as Carmilla trying to "seduce her with her dark vampire ways" and that would be the end of the conversation. Then Laura would continue to chatter at her webcam, Carmilla would steal her pillow, and everything would be normal.
And for now, Carmilla liked it that way. Maybe Laura didn't need to know how sunshiney she could be. She could continue to talk about her dad's bear spray obsession and hum sci-fi theme songs, and Carmilla would watch in bliss.
She didn't need Laura to run away just yet.