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Nastya leaves a trail of silver droplets on the entrance ramp to the Aurora, but she makes it onto the ship in one piece. Before Aurora can even finish greeting her, Nastya sprints to the gun turrets and takes down half of the creatures tailing them in a matter of seconds, which gives Jonny, Ivy, and the Doctor enough time to stagger up the ramp and into the ship’s corridors. Aurora lifts herself into the air as soon as the ramp swings shut. “Are they alright?” Nastya demands, already turning back toward the entrance.
All three appear to have lost blood. Carmilla more than the others.
Cursing under her breath, Nastya returns to her crewmates to find Jonny leaning bodily on Ivy, while Carmilla slumps onto the floor and struggles to catch her breath. “Medbay,” she commands, more to Aurora than anyone else. “Jonny, can you walk?”
“I’m fine,” he grits out. It’s a lie, but he’s still able to move on his own.
Nastya glances over Ivy, who looks a bit more intact, before turning to Carmilla. She really doesn’t want to touch her, especially with the racing panic of adrenaline prickling under her skin. “Can Aurora help you to the medbay?” she asks, knowing that it’s a miracle that Carmilla made it back to the ship at all.
Her face is distorted, halfway between pain and hazy numbness, but she nods. Dozens of cables swing down from the ceiling, scooping her off the ground; it’s something Aurora does for Nastya all the time, though usually more out of affection than necessity. Jealousy swells into a hot lump in Nastya’s throat. It’s only for a few minutes, she reminds herself. Aurora has already shifted the corridors around them so that the medbay is just down the hall, and the ship carries her mother-doctor-captain with a swift efficiency that she never uses on Nastya.
Once she’s settled on a medbay cot, it’s clear that Carmilla isn’t just in pain.
The blood soaking into the sheets under her is thick and oily-black, shimmering in a way that blood definitely shouldn’t, as she struggles to draw in every shaky breath. This isn’t the first time that Nastya has seen her weak and hurt—it’s barely the thousandth time, for that matter—but she’s far more pale than Nastya has ever seen her, and her eye can’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds at a time. All of a sudden, Nastya realizes that they haven’t landed on a planet with other humans for… years, at least. “When was the last time you ate?” she asks, sitting down on the cot next to Carmilla with a few carefully-measured inches between them.
Carmilla doesn’t answer. Whether it’s because she’s too stubborn or she’s just not present, Nastya can’t tell.
It has been at least three years Terran since our last encounter with mortal human life.
From the far side of the medbay, Jonny curses. “She’s—has she been fucking starving this whole time, and she wouldn’t tell us?”
At last, Carmilla stirs, looking first at Nastya and then over at Jonny and Ivy, who cross the room to crowd around the bed even though their faces make it clear that they’d like to be anywhere but here. “I’m not starving,” she rasps. “It takes much more than a few years to do me in.”
“Based on your physical condition and overall awareness over the past several weeks, there’s a ninety-six percent chance that you’re lying,” Ivy responds.
For a long moment, Carmilla just closes her eye and breathes. “What am I supposed to do about it? It’s not like I could feed on—whatever those things outside were. We haven’t seen humans. I ran out of blood… months ago.”
The other three stare back and forth between each other, having a conversation that mostly consists of eyebrow waggling and subtle lip movements, not that Carmilla is conscious enough to notice even if they did talk to each other. They’ve all long since grown to fear their creator, flinching away from her casual touches and hiding in the depths of the Aurora whenever she decides to carry out ‘routine maintenance’ on their mechanisms, but they need her, too. As loath as they are to admit it, her ‘routine maintenance’ is often necessary, and she’s protected them from thousands of dangers that mortal minds can barely begin to understand. Nastya can’t speak for the others, but there have been so many moments, in the timeless space between stars, where she’s sat next to Carmilla on the bridge, listening to her cryptic old stories of Terra and Loreli and experiments gone wrong, and thought that she loved this outrageous vampire more than she ever could’ve loved her own family.
That doesn’t say much, but that’s beside the point.
“You, um. You could… feed on… one of us,” Jonny suggests, just as Nastya realizes that she’s zoning out. “It’s not like it would kill us. We’ve got plenty of blood to go around. Uh, no offense, Nas.”
Carmilla’s eye sharpens as she looks up at Jonny. “No. I can’t—I can’t risk turning you. You don’t understand—”
“Of course he understands,” Nastya cuts her off. “We’ve all heard your stories, we all know what’s at stake. But we need our captain in one piece.” She grimaces at her own sentimentality, but doesn’t take it back.
“I don’t think you could turn us even if you tried,” Ivy pipes up.
Still, Carmilla shakes her head and draws her knees up to her chest defensively. “I’m not sure that I can control myself, after this long. I don’t want to hurt any of you.”
Jonny lets out a derisive laugh. “Is that a fucking joke? You don’t want to hurt us? I doubt a little bite would be the tenth worst thing you’ve done to me this week. If you want to keep acting like a goddamn martyr, that’s fine, but I refuse to believe that you care that much about hurting us.” He draws his gun and inspects the barrel with practiced apathy. “If you can’t keep yourself under control, we can just shoot you. It’s not that hard.”
Pain flashes in Carmilla’s eye, but she knows he’s right, and her hunger is clearly too deep to ignore, given the way her pupil dilates as she studies the wounds scattered across Jonny’s body. “Well, I can trust you to do that much, at least,” she murmurs.
Already, Jonny is starting to peel back the layers of shirts and jackets and, inexplicably, belts near his neck, but Ivy stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve lost a lot more blood than me,” she explains, “and my brain won’t be as affected if I lose any more. Let me.”
Nastya’s hands curl into fists as her protective instincts rage. She hasn’t been as good at protecting Ivy as Jonny was at protecting her, but still, Ivy’s so young and naive and sweet compared to them. “You don’t have to—”
“What, are you volunteering?” Ivy interrupts her with a pointed glare.
That shuts Nastya up effectively. Instead of arguing, she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Jonny as Ivy sits down on the cot, leaning back into Carmilla’s lap. The doctor helps her shift her shirt collar aside with hands so gentle they can’t stop trembling. When she licks her lips and then bares her fangs, Nastya can’t suppress a wince.
Then she bites, and Ivy slumps back against her with a choked-off whimper.
Carmilla’s entire demeanor changes within seconds. As Ivy writhes and gasps in her arms, cheeks flushing red and eyes rolling back in her head, Carmilla grips her shoulders with renewed strength and hunches over Ivy’s smaller form to lap at the wound. The other two watch in silence, hands on their guns, until Ivy’s voice starts to dwindle and it’s clear that she’s barely holding herself upright.
“Carmilla,” Jonny growls, drawing his gun. “That’s enough.”
The vampire looks up at him, eye void of recognition, and barely leans back enough to snarl.
Jonny cocks the gun and presses it to her temple. “I wasn’t kidding. Let go of Ivy.”
Apparently, the weight of cold steel against her forehead is enough to draw some lucidity out of her, because Carmilla pulls away from Ivy and licks the blood from her teeth. As soon as she lets go of Ivy’s shoulders, the archivist slumps forward, unconscious. Jonny drops his gun in favor of catching Ivy in his arms. “There we go, it’s okay,” he soothes, pressing one hand over the bite mark gushing on her neck. “It’s okay. It’s over.”
Nastya hasn’t seen him so dedicated to someone else’s comfort in a very long time.
“Take her—take her back to her room,” Nastya directs him, picking up his gun and shoving it back in its holster. “Just get her out of here, okay? We’ll talk later.”
He complies, for once, and by the time he’s half-dragged Ivy out of the medbay, Nastya can’t find another excuse to ignore her creator any longer.
“I told you,” Carmilla says, voice breaking. “I fucking told you, Nastya. I couldn’t do it.”
Nastya opens her mouth to reassure her, but for once, she can’t force herself to lie. It’s not alright, for any of them, but right now she’s the one without tempting human blood, and she can see on Carmilla’s face that she’s halfway to a flashback and struggling to breathe. Not that she needs to breathe, but that’s beside the point. “Focus on me, okay?” she responds, reaching out hesitantly to pick up one of Carmilla’s hands. “We stopped you, like we said we would. Ivy will be alright.”
“I went too far,” she gasps. “I hurt her.”
“And she’ll recover.” Nastya sits down next to Carmilla and, schooling her face into a neutral mask, wraps an arm around her shoulders. There’s plenty of quicksilver staining her shirt already; a bit of Ivy’s blood will hardly make a difference. “You’re still with us. Hopefully you’ll feel better now, too.”
Given the way Carmilla’s face crumples with a mixture of guilt and relief, Nastya can tell that she does.