AN: I really don't think people know how much thought I've put into Vamp!Laura AU, because here's the thing: if you're going to switch Laura and Carmilla, you need to switch everything about them. Not just their places, but their entire situations, because so much of who a person is is based on their experiences and the people who were in their lives.
Disclaimer: I do not own Carmilla: The Series. U by Kotex does.
Instead of the Dean being the vampire, Mr. Hollis would be. He would be the four thousand year old vampire who serves the Light. Who, every twenty years, sacrifices five human beings to the Light to keep the world from falling.
But the thing is, Mr. Hollis is the kind of man who would continuously believe, no matter what horrors he saw, in the goodness of humanity. Knowing that the only requirement for the Light's sacrifices is that they are alive and human, instead of five random innocents, he would sacrifice five criminals. Five humans who had committed horrible crimes against their own people-five humans who barely deserve that title; they would be fed to the Light, so that a little bit more evil was gone.
And one day, while traveling around the world in the late sixteen hundreds, he finds himself in a small little town. Perhaps his carriage broke a wheel, perhaps he's just tired and needs to rest for the day. Either way, he finds himself in this little town, barely a collection of mud huts, and he has to stay.
Half way through his stay, while he's walking around while his carriage is being repaired and he's seeing if this little group of hovels has anything to offer, he hears a baby crying. And crying.
And crying.
He searches for the source of this sound and finds that one of the huts is an orphanage- a dozen children are stuffed into this one room hut, an old woman their only guardian. An illness had passed through the village, killing a handful of families; these children are the ones who lost both parents and aren't old enough to fend for themselves.
The last death was three days ago, when a young unmarried woman, heavily pregnant, died after giving birth to her daughter. The daughter that is now screaming, screaming and being ignored by everyone there.
Mr. Hollis, being who he is, goes to comfort the child and finds that she hasn't been fed for two days; there is no wet nurse, none that will willingly feed her, at least, because her mother might have survived the illness had she not been with child, and so this little girl has been abandoned. Left in this hole to die without a name.
This is unacceptable. Mr. Hollis takes the girl with him and finds a woman who can nurse her and is willing to sell her milk to this 'cursed' infant. He pays her well, and the moment his carriage is fixed, he leaves with the little girl he's named Laura.
Once he's traveled far enough away that no one from Laura's past could ever find her, he finds another village (again, a small set of huts that barely keep out the cold in winter) and hires a wet nurse to permanently care for Laura as well as her own son. He hires the woman's husband as his personal manservant, and the two leave to get what they need.
Through Mr. Hollis's very deep pockets, the two come back a few months later with hundreds of people, all of whom get to work on building the mansion Mr. Hollis has decided to live and raise his newest 'minion' in (because why else would he come back? He could set the family up with enough money to take care of little Laura and just go, never looking back. But having someone who would follow him to the end of the world and never look at him scared, someone who loved him despite the monster he was? That was worth returning).
Within six months the mansion is built, the forest has been cleared and turned into grasslands for the sheep and cattle Mr. Hollis bought as an investment, and the entire village has been razed to the ground and rebuilt with stone and wood and proper roads.
Because Mr. Hollis held Laura in his arms and watched her as she smiled up at him and tried to grab his chin, and she slipped from being a minion to his daughter, the little girl he would do anything for.
So he builds a perfect world for her. A house full of beauty and comforts for her to grow up in (he quickly relocated the wet nurse, her husband, and their children the moment the mansion was done), hundreds of servant, animals, and care takers who love her (they're paid more than well for their services, and will do anything to take care of the daughter of the man who single-handedly pulled them from poverty), and a village near by that's just as beautiful as their home (there is no poverty, no hunger or illness; the city has the finest doctors and the greatest artisans, and even those who sweep the shit from the streets are richer on their own than some of the villages nearby combined).
He creates a perfect world for his little Laura to grow up in, so she'll never have to experience the pain he knows is out there.
And grow up little Laura does. When she gets older, she spends her days running through the halls with the little boy (let's call him Timmy) she nursed with. Laura and Timmy bother the cooks for cookies, beg the caretakers to let them ride on the backs of the cows when they're moving between the pastures, and constantly go into town with Timmy's Mother/Laura's Wet Nurse to watch the glass blowers or the gold shapers or the candle makers practice their crafts (they both often leave with some little nick knack, like a glass flower or golden ring or candle shaped like a man's smiling face).
Mr. Hollis spends his time watching his little Laura grow up; a blessing and a curse, for he knows, one day, she will get old and die, for how can he turn her into a monster like he is? How could he spend every day for the rest of eternity looking at this child and knowing he killed her, just so he wouldn't be alone?
When Laura is fourteen Mr. Hollis starts discussing the prospect of marriage; there are many young men who have come to him, asking for an arrangement to be made. All of whom he's turned down, of course, for he refuses to force Laura into anything she doesn't want. But it is something that needs to be considered, so one day, when he's in his study and she's reading by the fire, he brings up the idea to her.
Laura, all her life, has told her father everything. Her thoughts and her dreams, her hopes and her fears, everything. So, when Laura becomes very uncomfortable with the idea of marriage, Mr. Hollis becomes concerned. Why would she keep something, anything from him? It takes some prodding, but, eventually, he gets it out of her.
It's not the idea of marriage that distresses Laura. It's the idea of marriage to a man, and everything that would come with it.
Mr. Hollis just smiles; at four thousand years old, he has seen everything there is to see. So, he promises Laura that, when it is time to for her to marry, he'll find someone like her- a man who is interested in other men, someone who would be her friend and husband in name, but nothing more. If they wanted children, they could adopt. When, eventually, she found a woman she would fall in love with, no one would bat an eye if she took this woman to be her personal servant, since everyone would assume she was only a servant and Laura spent her nights with her husband.
He describes this entire ruse, memorizing every detail for when he would need to enact it in a few years, and decided that every word was worth it as Laura, his little Laura, smiles at him the way she does that makes him grateful that wheel broke in that little village all those years ago.
Laura continues to grow, happily encased in the world her father has built for her; she hears about the terrors and horrors of the world outside their city and estates, and while she's curious and wishes to see the world, her father's promise that they will see everything she wishes when she's older appeases her. For now, at least.
She's not entirely safe from pain, though. She has her fair share of bumps and bruises, colds and a horrible bout with the flu that almost steals her life. But over all of these she prevails.
Over all physical pain she's prevailed, but then she's fourteen and convinced she's in love with the glass maker's daughter, convinced that the daughter is in love with her, only to find out the same day that she is going to ask the girl to become her 'personal maid' that the girl is in love with someone else. A young man, one of the pie maker's sons, and they are to be married in a month.
Her heart is broken, to the point that she's sobbing into Mr. Hollis's chest and he has to restrain himself from murdering the foolish children who did this to his little girl. For days she mourns, spending her time sobbing, refusing to eat, almost making herself sick with grief from this rejection of the first person she loved.
But again, just like the physical pain, she eventually heals. She spends time with Timmy (who, when she finally comes out of her room, is found asleep before the door; he's been sleeping there this entire time, just waiting for his friend to come back to him), visits the animals in the field (one of the men presents her with a puppy, a tiny little fluff ball who never leaves Laura's side), and into town (but never to the glass maker's or the pie baker's).
Laura grows up. She's a few months away from being eighteen, and between the 'surprise' birthday party Mr. Hollis has decided to throw and the sacrifice to the Light coming up soon, he is a very busy man.
Again, he refuses to sacrifice the innocent to the Light, so instead he takes a few day's leave and travels between some of the surrounding towns, finding five criminals that he buys from the prisons and brings to his home, where he locks them in their own private room in a special wing that he specifically had built for these five. For while he is a monster he is not cruel, and he will make sure the last month of these people's lives are wonderful.
He tends to their every need himself, and forbids that anyone else ever go near that wing.
Laura doesn't listen. She's stupid and curious and believes the worse danger is getting your heart broken, and so when Mr. Hollis finishes tending to the people, she sneaks in and tries to talk to them.
The first won't speak to her. Refuses to say a single word no matter how much she needles him. Keeps quiet the entire time, because he killed every single one of those people for the sin he knew they carried, and he didn't want to again. Didn't want to find out what sin this sweet child held, the reason he would have to slit her throat the moment he got out, so he kept quiet.
The next woman cursed her out and ran her off. She too wanted nothing to do with Laura; she had long since accepted her fate, and just wanted to get on with it. Mr. Hollis had promised that there would be no pain, which was more than could be said of the gallows. All she wanted was no pain.
The next two lied to her. Promised they were innocent, that it was all a misunderstanding. That Laura had to let them out, had to be a good girl and get the key from her father to keep him from making a horrible mistake.
She was smart enough not to believe them, and avoided those doors after.
The fifth, though, he was clever. When Laura came to his door, he didn't deny who he was-he had killed, and so was being punished for it. But he showed an interest in Laura, asked about her day and her friends and her pet, about her hopes for the future and the plans she had had in the past and everything that made Laura herself. He spoke sweetly, much like Mr. Hollis himself, and, slowly, Laura began to trust him.
When she finally asked for detail about what he had done, he told her the truth (at least, a version of it). Yes, he had killed a woman, but accidentally, out of self-defense. He had walked into the wrong home after a few drinks with some friends, she had immediately come at him with a knife without giving him the chance to leave, and he had pushed her away. She fell, hit her head, and the sheriff arrived a few minutes later to make the arrest.
(There had been a knife, yes, that was true. A knife she had grabbed after he finally finished with her. He had expected her to curl up on that pile of straw and start thinking of names for the child he had undoubtedly planted in her belly, but instead she had grabbed a knife and tried to kill him. He had pushed her away so she fell, that again had been true. But after she hit her head she hit it again and again and again, until her skull gave in and he had to be torn off of her by the returning husband and sons.
One of his happier memories, feeling his fingers stick together from the red and peeling them apart.)
Laura, who had never known the world and what it could hold, accepted this telling of the tale as true, and began to believe that, perhaps, Father had made a mistake in claiming this man a criminal. He was sweet and kind and gentle of word; could he truly be blamed for a mistake?
Mr. Hollis, like always, finished caring for his prisoners before heading on out. There were still a lot of things that needed to be ready for his little Laura's birthday, and there was no time to waste.
So focused on his task was he that Mr. Hollis didn't notice when the key to the rooms went missing, along with his daughter.
It wasn't until a little while later, when he was searching for Laura to get her opinion on colors (it was a surprise party, yes, but that didn't mean she couldn't have a say in the colors of her tablecloths) that he realized Timmy was in the house and no one else had seen Laura for hours.
Mr. Hollis knows his daughter; knows that she's curious and sheltered and knows nothing about the world outside of the little town she grew up in. Knows that she could easily be pulled in by the man behind that door and the sweet lies he told her.
The dog is dead by the time Mr. Hollis gets to the room, its teeth barred in a bloody snarl and its neck snapped, broken by bloody hands that are attacking his daughter. One around her neck, Laura's face turning blue as she weakly tries to remove the grip keeping her pinned against the wall, while the other is under her dress, its owner whispering in her ear everything he was going to do to her before he let her die.
He doesn't, can't, think- in less than a moment both Laura and Mr. Hollis are covered in blood, drenched from the limbs he tore and the corpse he destroyed. A waste of a death, for he refuses to drink from this creature after he's done, instead just throws the remains across the room and waits.
Because in less than a second, Mr. Hollis revealed himself to be the monster he truly is by saving Laura from the one she believed didn't exist. Showed who he truly is to the one person he had sworn would never know.
But Laura doesn't care. The man covered in blood standing before her, with bits of skin and pieces of flesh between his teeth and under his nails, is still her father, still the man who's cared for and loved her for her entire life; who has only done everything he could to protect her and keep her safe.
She hugs him as close as she can, ignoring the remains that covers the room, and continues to hold him until they both stop crying.
When they're finally able to form complete sentences, Mr. Hollis summons Laura's former Wet Nurse, her husband, and Timmy to them. The Wet Nurse takes Laura to get a bath and have the dressed burned (as beautiful as it is, the blood will never come out. And even if it did, she would never be able to bring herself to wear it again). The husband, Mr. Hollis' personal manservant, who has known for years what his master is, starts making preparations to have the body buried and the room cleaned and redone, all evidence of the man erased from sight. Timmy, who is just learning who his family serves, helps (only because Mr. Hollis told his manservant what happened the moment Laura was out of the room, and Timmy realizes he almost lost his very best friend. Once he knows this, he's more than happy to help).
When they're both cleaned up and the servants have gotten started on tearing apart the room so it can be rebuilt clean and new, Mr. Hollis sits down with Laura and tells her his own secret- he's a vampire, a monster, and he would understand if she hated him. He starts blabbering on about how he has a handful of marriage proposals, all young men much like herself, who would make good friends and good pretend husbands. He talks about how he understands if she wants nothing to do with him, for who would? Who would ever want to be near someone like him, a monster that preys upon the innocent in the dead of night, forced to take life from others.
He explains about the Light, how it demands the lives of five every twenty years, and how the process to prepare them for the sacrifice changes them. How, by the time he's done, they're willing to walk into the Light and die.
He explains his past, who he is and how he came to be, and just keeps on talking until there are no more words, until the night's long since passed and morning has been present for hours. He keeps talking, trying to put off the inevitable rejection Laura would give, until his voice finally falls silent and he can't anymore.
Laura, after remaining quiet this entire time, asks him to turn her.
She asks him to turn her because Laura realizes she's weak. She's weak, reliant on others to take care of her, and had her father walked in a few moments later, she would be dead. She's been a fool to believe that nothing bad could ever happen because Father and the world seemed to love her, and it's time that she's come to her senses.
Besides, even with everything he's told her, how could spending eternity with him be a bad thing?
At first he refuses; Mr. Hollis doesn't want this life for his child, even though she herself points out that he doesn't kill often, that he's perfected the ability to drink without killing and he could teach her. They didn't have to be monsters, and could spend their time protecting others.
He still refuses, but only until after she turns eighteen.
A few days later, Mr. Hollis and Laura leave for another village to find a sacrifice to replace the one Mr. Hollis killed. Laura tags along to finally see what the real world is like, so she can look another piece of evil in the eyes and understand that they are human, and are soon to die. Mr. Hollis needs her to understand what the world is like if she is going to spend eternity in it, and he wants her to fully understand the decision she's going to make.
Laura, even after she meets the replacement, after she sees the constant starvation and poverty most of the world lived in, even after witnessing the sacrifice herself a month later (tied to a pole so she didn't follow the dancing sacrifices over the edge of the pit), she still chooses to be turned.
Because the Light devoured the evil, her Father only drank from those who had committed crimes or, if an innocent became involved, never let them die, and being turned would give her the chance she needed to be strong and make a difference in her world.
So, life continues on as normal. Laura spends her time with Timmy, discussing her choice and how things were going to change because of what she had decided to do. How he would one day die while she stayed forever eighteen, and how she would never have to feel fear again. How, once she was turned, things would never be the same again.
Mr. Hollis threw himself into planning Laura's birthday party. It was the last his little girl was ever going to have, so it had to be one she would remember throughout all the ages she would exist.
It truly was magnificent. A feast that fed hundreds of people, every single person who worked on the estate or lived in the village. Presents piled higher then she was tall, that took half of the night for her to open and thank those who had given the item to her. Dancing and laughter, even a version of the Waltz that she did with Timmy, much to many people's scandal. For the entire day, she lived the human life she would soon be leaving behind.
The next night Laura fell ill, and a few days later, as far as everyone knew, she passed.
Mr. Hollis stayed for two more weeks, a weary, exhausted figure to any who saw him. Many feared he would go the same way as his daughter, to an early grave brought on a by a broken heart. He had lost his daughter, the only person in the world he truly cared for.
How could he continue on, when she was all he had lived for?
For two weeks he held on, just long enough to find a justice of the peace to oversee his will. Mr. Hollis turns over all of his estates and its yearly income to his manservant, Timmy's father, and makes sure that Timmy is his heir, to inherit everything that was once his when his father dies. For two weeks he stays, packing only just what he absolutely needed- a few pairs of clothing, some nick knacks he might need in the future, and a number of dresses that were once Laura's (for the poor man still believed she was alive).
For two weeks he remained before climbing into the carriage that had brought him here all those years ago and, without a single word, left.
Left, as most people believed, to find someplace far away to die in peace.
Little did they know that, a few hours after he left, Mr. Hollis pulled over, opened the door, and found Laura-a new, strong, alive Laura who was thrumming with the blood of the animals she had been hunting for the last two weeks to sate the new born blood lust-waiting for him.
Waiting for him so they could continue the life they had left behind anew.