AN: I'm really sorry this turned out so short. I tried to make it longer, but it just didn't want to expand. So, a quick little drabble for today's Creampuff Week entry. I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own Carmilla. U by Kotex does.
Sometimes, if she looked out of the corner of her eye, she knew.
The world would begin to waver and shift whenever she did- where once there had been a bench was now a tree, or a squirrel that had been sitting on the branch would be replaced with a bird, quietly preening its feathers as it waited to fly. People who they had passed would disappear into thin air, and if she ever mentioned them to her companions, her friends would just give her that blank look that said they had no clue what she meant. Then they would laugh and ask if she was okay, if her head had been in the clouds for too long before mentioning that it was time she landed back on hard ground.
It became a habit of hers to look out of the corner of her eyes sometimes, just to see if things would look different when she did. When it did she knew, but when it didn't…
Well, she hoped it wasn't, and continued on with her day.
Other times she knew because of just how plain normal things were. It was sad, when she thought about it, that nothing trying to kill her and her friends was actually cause for alarm, but at a place like Silas, where she had spent her last three years trying to stay alive and save the world, normal was weird and something to be avoided.
So when she found herself and her friends at a park, for once just enjoying the sun and the grass, without swords and stakes and other monster killing objects within reach, she was suspicious. She had to be, if she wanted to keep all of the events straight, because often reality was too weird to be real and what wasn't truly real seemed like it should be, and if she wasn't careful she could get the two mixed up one day and get herself killed.
But it was always the hardest to tell when Carmilla was there, holding out her hand for her to take or lounging on the couch, reading, because these were so like the real Carmilla she was in love with it was hard to tell whether or not she was dreaming this version or if she was awake and just letting her mind drift.
And the worse was that, often, she didn't want to know the difference. In the dreams where Carmilla wasn't there, she was desperate to wake up, to get back to reality. But the ones where she was, where they were lying in bed curled around each other or researching the newest evil with nothing dangerous in sight, she didn't. She didn't want to wake up, didn't want to leave the dream she was half sure she was in, because why leave the little piece of peace she had?
But then she would wake from the dream with that overwhelming sense of being back in reality she had every time she woke, and Carmilla would be there, lying next to her or sitting somewhere in the room in some stolen clothing, and Laura would be glad that she had woken up and left the dream behind.
Because dreams, as nice as they were, were no match for the reality of the situation, even if the reality was a nightmare sometimes.