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You make the first mention of forever when you’re twenty-two, an offhand remark and she take it as anything but, tensing and looking desperately for an exit, an escape, an anything and when you shut your eyes (fuck Laura, fuck), you hear the familiar sound of her poof-ing someplace and (fuck Laura, fuck).
When she doesn’t come back for seven hours, you search the night, desperately calling her name. But you know that if she doesn’t want to be found, she most definitely won’t be, and good god you never meant to send her reeling into the ice alone. She doesn’t really talk about the night she was turned, only fragments in German when she’s very drunk and very sad and this, you realize, is why (it was forced on her, forced and you have to kneel and throw up in a snow bank, because what had you just asked her to do?).
She comes back a day later, looking shattered, and when you approach her on turned-in toes, she smells like snow (pine, woods, chill), like alcohol, like stinging. Her shoulder is twisted strangely, like it broke and was set by someone with trembling hands, her eyes cold and lonely and hundreds of thousands of years old.
“Do you mind if I touch you?” You whisper, and she swallows (she shakes her head and you gather her hollow bird body into your arms.)
“I’m sorry,” you murmur into her, “I’m so, so sorry,” (she is trembling and you feel as if the world is ending around you; she is stinging).
“Please,” she whispers, her voice rough, soft, “you will never ask me that again. Ever.”
And it is not a request, (you lay your hand on the broken wing of her shoulder and nod, breathing apology after apology; your heart stutters in your chest.)
/
But, you realize a week after Carmilla rebreaks her shoulder to set it properly, there are many means to an end.
You wait in a hallway of the Science building for three hours to talk to LaFontaine’s magibiology professor, Dr. Ateba, from last semester, pacing back and forth, planning out exactly what you’re going to say to convince her to help you.
But, of course, as soon as you see her, you blurt out, “I want to become immortal!”
She just looks at you and starts laughing, saying, “Don’t we all, sweetheart,” but you glare at her, and there must be something in your eyes, or your shoulders, or heart, because she stops laughing and looks at you, hard.
Finally, with a sigh, she opens the door of her office. “Better come in.”
Once you’re inside, you decide it’s time for your speech. “Hi! I’m Laur—” but Dr. Ateba cuts you off with a wave of her hand.
“I know exactly who you are, Ms. Hollis. Caused quite a good deal of trouble with the old Dean, and fixed most of it too,” and you feel a bit of burning pride (most people ignore the fact that you managed to save those students from the Dean of Students), “I don’t care about the details of your personal life that have led you to the conclusion that you must become immortal,” and she fixes you with a hard stare, “although I assume it has something to do with that vampire girl. I can’t help you with more than the basics,” and your face falls.
Dr. Ateba starts to laugh again. “Ms. Hollis, if I had all the answers to immortality, do you really think I would be teaching undergrad magibiology in the middle of Austria?”
You have no answer to that.
“But,” and she scribbles something on a piece of paper, “I would start with the Old Ones, if I were you. They have the answer to quite literally everything, and if you prove yourself worthy—” She trails off, but you can feel something like hope fill your lungs (something like Carmilla’s forever).
/
You don’t mention it to Carmilla (because what if it fails? what if you, quite simply, are not worthy?) but one evening, walking back from the student center, you tell Danny and she looks at you like you just told her you’re planning on going swimming in the campus lake.
“Laura, you’re going to summon the Old Ones?”
You’ve never heard of these Old Ones before (their name sounds like a middle school band, or maybe a bad fantasy novel) so you just nod, and Danny looks sick.
“Have you ever heard of… of all those ‘myths,’ maybe that they teach you in school?” She asks, staring at you quite intently.
“Like Zeus and stuff?”
“Exactly like Zeus and stuff. Except, every god you’ve ever imagined. Like ever. I’ve been the high priestess for almost a year now, Laura, and I haven’t even tried to summon them. Not even when the Dean was trying to kill us.”
You file away the information that Danny is a high priestess for later, because fuck you’re going to be summoning gods.
That’s when you decide you better tell Carmilla.
/
She’s asleep when you get back to your room, all curled limbs and child small (it’s like she learned to take up as little space as possible) and you sit, perched on the edge of your bed, waiting for her to wake up.
After an hour and she’s still sleeping, you decide to take your reading for your Irish Lit class out (you sit back next to her; you get none of your reading done) (how do you tell your girlfriend you want forever, and it truly, truly means forever?)
She makes a tiny, soft noise and nuzzles into your hip (you consider for half a second to just kiss her and ignore the heavy headiness of eternity; that would be so incredibly wrong, you quite simply can’t). She sits up, blanket pooling around her hips for a second before she twists a leg over you, sitting in your lap and kissing you, slow and lovely and you have never wanted forever more than you do in this moment.
You push her away gently, placing your book where she had been sleeping and she puts her head on your chest (listening to your heartbeat, you think; she does this a lot).
“Carm?” You whisper, and she hums softly in response. “Carm, look at me. I need to ask you something. Something—something really serious,” and her head snaps up. Her eyes are trapped and her hands curl into fists.
You hold your hands up slowly, look her in the eyes, speak calmly. “Not that, I promised. I promised, remember, Carmilla? I promise, it’s not that,” and slowly she bleeds back into unfurled fists, iron back.
“You can put your head back down, if you want,” and she nods sharply, arranging herself so she can hear your heart (your breathing, maybe), your comb your fingers through her tangled hair (try to come up with how to tell her; how do you tell her?).
So you stumble out with everything (Dr. Ateba, the Old Ones, Danny, forever, forever, forever) and she’s still, so still. You don’t think she’s breathing (you can’t see her face), you don’t think you’re breathing.
“You will watch everyone you love die,” she says to your ribs, solemn.
“Not you,” tracing your fingers along the back of her skull (you do not know what she thinks, her voice is still and soft, muffled by your shirt, by hundreds of years).
“Not me,” she agrees, pressing warm, open-mouthed kisses to your collarbone, “Not me.”
/
Later that night, she fits herself tight against your body, tugging your arm over her waist, “You will slowly lose yourself,” she whispers to the empty room, “and eventually, you will forget what your father looked like.”
Your breath catches in your throat, but you are no longer a child; you must make decisions for yourself and not for memories and safety.
She turns so she’s facing you, her breath like salt (like tears, regret), “It’s lonely, love. It’s so fucking lonely,” and you brush your thumb across her cheekbone, rest your forehead against hers.
“You’ll have me,” you say simply, and as you shut your eyes you try to remember the exact shade of brown of your father’s eyes.
/
Danny is absolutely furious with you for all of sixteen days (everytime she sees you, her eyes widen and she mutters something that sounds like smiting, and turns on her heel), but on the morning of the seventeenth day, you’re woken up at six by an extremely loud pounding on your door, and when you open it, Danny’s standing there. She glares at you, and gives Carmilla a raised eyebrow.
“Morning, Cullen. How’s the shoulder?” Carmilla twists it backwards and gives Danny a thumbs up, before flipping her off.
“Great, um…” You’re not sure exactly why Danny’s here or why it’s so early and you’re still only semi-functioning, so what comes out is, “I thought you didn’t like immortality,” and Danny rolls her eyes at you.
“What I don’t like, Laura, is you telling me you’re planning on summoning the Old Ones with literally no help, no experience, and—” She goes over to your desk where you have Rituals for Dummies, “—and this. Vamp girl, you planning on getting your girlfriend killed?”
Carmilla’s up in a second, grabbing the book from Danny, and fixing you with a glare, “Laura, fucking hell, is this some kind of secret attempt to destroy the dorm? Or the entire campus?”
You offer her a smile. She (just barely) refrains from setting the book on fire.
Danny takes a deep breath, and sits in your desk chair, spinning around in a circle a couple times before opening her mouth.
“Okay,” she starts, “I need you to know that I’m in no way… approving of this. At all. But, I’d rather you not die, Laura, and in order to ensure that, I’m going to unofficially help you. You will breathe no word of this to any of the Summer Society sisters, got it?” You nod. Carmilla rolls her eyes.
“I’ll get you the materials you’ll need, the incantations, everything. All you’ll need to do is perform the summoning. Okay?”
You nod again, and Danny breathes out.
“I’m gonna get in so much trouble,” she mutters, and stomps out the door.
/
You sit on your bed, Carmilla next to you, her fingers tangled in yours (you think she’s asleep, you’re trying to do your Calc homework with your left hand).
“I’m not trying to… trying to discourage you,” she whispers suddenly, and you look over to her (her eyes are big, her lip between her teeth), “I just need you to know what endless is, what you’re going to do.”
You squeeze her hand; she bows her head. “I know, Carm. I know.”
“Are you going to call your dad?”
Silence.
She leans over and kisses your cheek, then the corner of your mouth, “You did number seven wrong,” and she takes the pen from your hand and quickly corrects it, leaving your father gaping between you in the silence.
(You cannot remember the exact color of his eyes; you kiss Carmilla and taste centuries in her mouth.)
/
It only takes Danny four days to get the materials to you (they come to you through Laf, who takes one look at the things you’re unpacking and gets the fuck out of there as fast as they possibly can).
Carmilla holds the golden bowl in her hands like it’s something precious and carefully places it on the shelf behind your bed.
“We don’t touch that until you’re ready, okay?”
And you think you’re ready, but (you don’t know how forever will feel sitting on your skin, your lungs, your heart; you’ve lived for twenty years as Laura, with blood running through your veins) (will ichor beat differently?)
/
Usually at night, you hold Carmilla, but tonight (you need something to hold you to this room, remind you of the why), tonight her arm is looped around your waist, her anchor necklace pressed up against the knobs of your spine, lips soft against your shoulder.
“Can we do it tomorrow?”
Her hair curls against your shoulder blades; your skin muffles her voice, “Are you quite positive?”
You bite your lip, listen to your heart thumping in your chest.
“Yeah.”
You can’t see her smile, but you can feel it (and it feels like hundreds of years of loneliness, of sunrises, of nectar and honey).
/
The morning dawns gray, and Carmilla pushes all the furniture into the corners, draws a huge gold circle on the ground. Her eyes are old, and her hands shake as she tries to pour whatever liquid Danny had sent over with Laf into the golden bowl.
(“Are you sure?” She whispers again, “There’s no—no undoing this,” and you remember her stinging, her broken wing shoulder and you know that this is something as inevitable as the stars).
You sit on your bed and she sits across from you, painting the mixture out of the golden bowl onto your cheekbones, your forehead, your breastbone.
“I feel like Willow and Tara,” you say shakily, giving her a half smile and she smears the liquid across your chin, before kissing you softly.
“You need redder hair,” she whispers, “Plus, they got it totally wrong. Magic is way more sexual,” and okay you’re totally going to need to talk about that later.
But now, she takes your hand and helps you off the bed, leading you like you’re a lady at a dance to the center of the gleaming circle. She hands you a piece of paper, covered in Danny’s neat handwriting, a careful pronunciation guide to some ancient language and on the back, a long note addressed to you, explaining exactly why you shouldn’t do this (and then a postscript to Carmilla, telling her what to do after) (Danny knew all along you were going to do it, there was nothing she could say or do to stop you).
You sit in the dead center of the circle, and Carmilla kneels in front of you, her hair falling in front of her face, her eyes serious and sad.
“You can back out now,” she murmurs, and the drying mixture pulls on your neck and cheeks as you shake your head.
She ducks her head to kiss you once more, soft and sweet, (thank you it gleams, I love you, you kiss back, I love you, I love you, I love you).
“I’m going to start now,” and she stands, backs up out of the circle and gathers herself onto your bed that’s shoved against the window. Her smile is soft, hesitant, and you could live with that smile forever (you will live with that smile forever, you will you will you will).
/
The words come slowly at first, and it seems so strange, so silly (you’re sitting in a circle of paint, something is drying quickly on your face and neck, you’re chanting some nonsense and dear god maybe this won’t work).
But slowly, the words being to flow into each other, they become more and more difficult to remember, to read and you’re quite suddenly not reading Danny’s print anymore, you’re humming the words like they’re imprinted on your mind, like you were born to simply say them over and over and over and over and over and over and – they burn.
The words sizzle out of your throat and you’re crying because your lips are burning, you want to stop, you want to stop but you can still see Carmilla on the bed and—and you sob through the white hot pain of speaking because Carmilla, Carmilla, Carmilla, Carmilla.
You mumble the words through burned lips, burned tongue, burned throat (you think of the suffocating darkness of a coffin and try to speak louder).
They brand themselves into your lungs, your heart, force their way out of yourself (you remember images from a museum, from a childhood, of gods wreathed in light and you wonder if your skin is breaking to let the burning glory of the words free) you keep speaking, you keep speaking, you keep speaking (your tear burn tracks down your cheeks).
You think your hands are running into light.
/
It’s bright.
It’s bright behind your squeezed shut eyes. Something like a hand cradles your head, traces your burned lips with light (with a hand) and you struggle to open your eyes.
Keep them shut, something echoes in your head, child, keep them shut.
They pour something sweet, something soft, something smooth through your wrecked mouth and comb your hair away from your forehead.
Wh— you struggle
Ambrosia. Amrita. Nectar. They answer. The food of the gods, child. You were very stupid trying to speak to us. Very clever.
You’re slowly getting feeling in your hands (you feel something like flesh on you body, faintly hear someone screaming a name, a wordless plea). I thought I had to prove myself worthy.
They make a noise, which terrifies you (fills you with overwhelming awe) for a moment until you realize it’s laughter. Child, you burnt yourself up for love, just for the chance to speak to us. We see you as worthy. Now, I shall release you back to the mortal world. Do not try to speak to us again.
As the feeling of their shining light hands around your head fades, you slam back into Laura, her flesh tight and wrong, her lungs struggling to breathe, her heart so faint so soft so weak. You take a shuddering breath (you are Laura, you remember slowly, you are) and Carmilla is screaming, screaming your name, an endless sound.
You open your eyes and you are slumped over on your side (you lick your lips; they are ash but whole, somehow whole). Gasping, you fill your lungs with air (you can taste nectar on your tongue and); your head spins as you sit up and Carmilla looks at you in awe, a scream still shadowed on her lips.
She shakes on tiptoes, stops before the painted golden line, reaches out one trembling hand; you fall forward onto your knees and grab her hand (flesh still feels like flesh; Carmilla still feels cool against your warmth).
/
Ichor, you discover, flows like blood (warm and thrumming and your heart still beats just as strong as before).
/
You skin your knee biking home from class one night and you can see the golden reddish ichor staining your skin (Danny rushes you away from the Health Office and hisses at you that ichor is “very precious” and “people may do—stupid things to get their hands on it.”)
You press your finger against your knee and stick it in your mouth.
It tastes, disappointingly, like blood.
/
Three days after, Carmilla takes you out to see the stars. She hasn’t really mentioned the immortality thing, not since you scrubbed the golden circle off of your bedroom floor, not since she kissed you, licked the last of the (ambrosia, amrita, nectar) out of your mouth and washed the remains of the markings off your face, neck, collarbone.
But you sit back against the side of the English building and she sits next to you, almost on your lap, and you can feel her smile (everything is crisp cold; her hand is warm in yours and you breathe in forever, forever, forever).
“That’s Ursa Major,” she whispers, “It looked the same a hundred years ago, and it’ll look the same a hundred years from now,” and you curl your fingers around hers (she looked the same a hundred years ago; you’ll look the same a hundred years from now).
“I love you,” and it’s quite possibly the truest thing you could say.
“I love you too, of course,” she laughs and her eyes are like the stars (so infinite; sparkling, a reminder that there is something more).
You sit there in silence, her hand in yours and you know she’s smiling (the soft, small smile that she pretends she can’t do anymore; maybe she thought it was smothered out of her, but you know it glimmers in the dark sometimes; reflected in the stars).
“I don’t know what to say,” she says after what feels like hours (could be minutes), “I don’t know what to say,” and there are centuries of loneliness in her voice (her lungs are splitting with the sheer weight of missing, of emptiness).
“Is it okay if I kiss you?” you ask, and she leans over and pulls the air from your mouth into hers (something like life; something like eternity).
Your skin is forever twenty-two, hers forever eighteen. You have a forever to kiss the stinging from Carmilla’s palms, to love her, to love her, to love her.
/
It sort of hits you, that night in bed: you will never die. (And you chose this, of course you choose this, you would choose this a hundred, a thousand times over but)
You will never die, and when you were nine years old your mother died (when you were nine years old you were asleep in a hospital for three days; when you were nine years old you woke back up; when you were nine years old your mother didn’t).
In the back of your mind, you always hoped that a someday you would see her again (you never believed in an anything after you prayed to your father’s God to bring her back, but some part of you hoped that you would somehow be held by your own mother again).
Carmilla’s sitting at her desk, reading some book in something that looks like Russian but she snaps around when she hears your soft sobs (because what if you regret this taste of divinity that glitters in your veins?)
You shake your head before she can even ask; she wraps her arms around you and lets you cry (it’s lonely, she warned, you have her, you have her, you have her).
/
(time moves like liquid as you get older)
Carmilla still screams and gets lost in the woods sometimes; you learn how to talk to her, you read and you read and you read, you learn and panic and flashbacks and everything continue to be just a little bit less.
(loss feels like a gap under your ribs sometimes, you gasp with the wholeness of it)
But you kiss Carmilla and (and the sun rises like nectar and blood) you feel the eternity and she is yours (you are hers) and that is the inevitable truth.