Chapter Text
Her legs dangled over the edge of the examination table. Her mother walked along the edges of the room, looking at the jars of cotton swabs and studying the diagram of a child split in half; his intestines highlighted and colored with pastel blues, purples and pinks, ominous sounding names of diseases in a cheery font listed next to his sickly body.
Carmilla swung her feet, bored. She looked around, scanning the walls of the doctors office for something to entertain her. Her eyes landed on a poster, depicting someone with bright socks and a blue circle with eyes requesting that anyone with diabetes to please take their shoes and socks off. Carmilla bit her lip, remembering what her mother had told her, years before.
"Hey, Mom?"
Her mom hummed questioningly in response.
"Isn't that what Oma died of?" She pointed to the poster, turning to her mom.
"Hm? Oh, diabetes? No, Oma killed herself." she said casually, turning around again to inspect a 3D model of a brain.
"Wow, look at this, Carmilla! This little thing is your ah-my-gdala. It's what processes our emotions. That's probably where God lives, too, then. Next to love." she said, too cheerily.
Carmilla didn't answer.
And that's how Carmilla found out that her grandma committed suicide.
Imitating her mother, she took a laid-back attitude concerning it. She didn't think about how much her Oma had loved her, and she definitely didn't blame herself for not being for her more. She didn't cry herself to sleep about it even years later, either. As time went by, Carmilla just ignored it. She tucked it away in a corner of her mind, so she would never have to think about it again.
And it would've worked. If everyone else wasn't so damn nosy.
"Carmilla, wow, you look just like your Oma! She was a lovely lady. I heard she passed recently, I'm so sorry! But at least we have you, her spitting image, huh?" And then they would laugh and clap Carmilla on the back, unaware of the stab wounds they'd reopened.
And it's not like Carmilla didn't realize they were right. She knew she was a lot like Oma; that's why they were so close. And that's why it felt like a knife in her stomach every time someone compared them.
Do you even know?
She's in Hell.
You talk about her like she's an angel in heaven, but she's a sinner, she's a sinner.
And I shouldn't love her, and you definitely shouldn't be talking about her like this.
But Carmilla didn't voice these thoughts. She would just give a tight smile, excuse herself, and go to her room to stare at the picture she'd snagged of her grandmother; before the rest of her family burned all the other pictures of her.
She is no longer a part of this family.
She is in Hell.
She disrespected God.
She did this to herself.
Nobody outside of this family is to know.
So the Karnstein family continued to go to church, and always donated when the basket came around their pew. They even looked the other way when the head priest mysteriously disappeared after some scandal with one of the little Karnstein boys. And nobody ever talked about Oma.
At first, Carmilla begged God to forgive Oma. She gave up after a few months, after one of the priests asked what she was praying for during Mass one day. She stuttered and flushed, unable to make up an excuse, quickly trying to empty her mind of the thoughts of Oma, as if the head priest's piercing eyes could see what she was thinking. When she got home, her mother drilled her about what she was actually praying about. And, thinking she would get sympathy, she told her the truth. And she got slapped and sent to her room.
So Carmilla didn't talk, think or pray about Oma anymore. She fought to keep her face straight and her mind empty when someone mentioned her. But, sometimes it wasn't bad that people talked about her grandmother so often when Carmilla was around. Sometimes she learned interesting things about Oma and stored them deep in her subconscious. Sometimes she could unravel some of the mystery behind her suicide. But only one exchange stood out in her mind. One exchange that she couldn't push to the back of her head.
Coincidentally, it was her grandfather: completely shitfaced, spouting and spluttering prophecies of the apocalypse; Jesus completely naked, thrusting and impregnating every single woman in sight, implanting seeds of godliness in the basins of their bodies; disco dancers ecstatically climbing out of the mundane rut of their daily lives, brought to life again by our mighty Lord's power. Sinners cowered and were ran off the edge of the world, and the Chosen Ones were brought onto a UFO with the Fountain of Youth as a centerpiece and dancefloor. Couples, old and young, danced in the Fountain with a long lost sense of freedom, and children chased each other around while their parents waltzed madly and fucked with a primal hurriedness. Fire would rain down on the empty Earth, the few sinners left dying in a blaze of glory. Up above in the heavens, the Chosen Ones drank champagne from glasses of pure diamond until all they could see, hear, taste and smell was the smooth, twangy voices of Johnny Mercer and Blondie and the warm light of the fireballs raging down outside the windows. And we would arrive in the Promised Land, and meet again our lost ones, forever to frolic and fuck in fields of joy and holiness. Lambs with eyes as blue as a forget-me-not would frolic and angels would fill the air with their silvery songs, bathing reunited lovers revelling in their rosy flesh in a glorious golden light. Amen.
Now, it was not the first time Carmilla heard this story. He told it every time he got drunk, slurring it worse and worse with each telling. But after this time, he wiped away a tear and said,
"Now if only Romilde hadn't been a coward bitch, she could've enjoyed the Promised Land, and seen Winfield again," and then he burst out laughing and spluttered, coughed and took another swig of beer.
Carmilla sat there, her mouth hanging open. That, she had definitely never heard before. Curiosity overwhelming her fear of being beat, Carmilla seeked out the drunkest person at the gathering, looking to prod for information. It turned out to be one of her too-touchy great uncles.
"Henrik, who was Winfield?" she asked quickly, putting on the most innocent face an eleven year old could manage. Immediately, Henrik pulled her close, whiskey on his breath.
"Well, mein Schatzi, Winfield was one of your uncles! Great lad. Youngest of the bunch. He drowned. Right in front of your Oma, too!" He laughed. "No wonder everyone hates her, huh, Maus?" he laughed again, the alcohol on his breath making her want to vomit. Carmilla forced a laugh and wriggled out of his entirely too-tight embrace, running over to her cousins, numbing herself by scurrying madly around the house, drunk off of rebellion. That night, once everyone passed out and her room was full of sweaty little children sleeping noisily, Carmilla sneaked out of her window, climbing on to the roof. She looked at the stars, and realizing that her Oma wasn't amongst them, she started to cry.
But that was years ago. After that night, Carmilla never heard another word about her grandmother, mostly because her mom stopped going to those family gatherings and started working more. Started working a lot, actually. Most of the time, she was home alone. Well, she had a nanny. But she spent all day watching TV. So Carmilla grew up, restless and alone, entire summers spent exploring the lake and the woods behind her house. She named herself the guardian of their lake and the woods surrounding it: the Stormdrawn Wilds. She painted tribal tattoos along her arms and legs, symbols for courage and peace and faith. She sharpened a rock and fashioned a spear; she even used an old dinghy to cross the lake, giving a good-bye speech to the painted rocks and small woodland animals that were her followers. She stored food, water and empty glass jars in a small backpack and took off, imagining herself the mighty captain of the grand ship Arrownax, sailing off to discover worlds unknown. She ran through the new woods, whooping and yelling. She jumped over fallen trees and climbed rocks; she thrashed through underbrush gleefully and collected sand, flowers, beetles, branches, fireflies. She climbed the tiny cliff next the the cove and when she reached the top, she gave a triumphant yell, her cheers echoing to the edges of her world as she jumped into the deep waters below. When she returned home that evening, the heat of the now-set sun still kissing her back, her hair still wet, she was merry with adventure and adrenaline coursing through her veins. She slept soundly for the first time in a long time after that.
But soon, she grew older, old enough to tell herself that she was above such childish things.
(She would not admit that she actually stopped because once, her mother came home early and saw the dirt on her face and slapped it clean off.)
Instead, during those hazy summers, she climbed the rooftops at night and drew and studied maps during the day. She would journal the growth of the hen harrier chicks in the nest next to one of the chimneys. She drew diagrams of birds' wings, and daydreamed of going back to the Stormdrawn Wilds, flying over the lake and reclaiming the lost youth of her expeditions, flapping her wooden wings and soaring through the sky.
But at night, when the chicks were asleep and their mother softly preened, used to Carmilla's presence, she would try to talk to God.
At first, she would ask questions.
What was Heaven like? Were there dogs in Heaven? What's worse, murder, or the homosexuals?
She received no answer.
So she just started talking. She talked about things she did when she was free to explore the Stormdrawn Wilds. She talked about how she wished she could go back out, just once more, to map the woods out. She then talked herself into and out of sneaking out of the house one day to do so, many times. She talked about how she missed her cousins. She asked why her mother worked so much, but she got no answer for that either. She did not talk about her grandmother, and she could feel God's approval in the sunlight and the breeze as the thoughts of Oma drifted away, until she never thought of her at all. Carmilla made sure to not think about those kinds of things.
But still, she longed for the riotous days spent swimming in the lake and romping ecstatically through the unruly Wilds. In an attempt to appease her own wanderlust and earn God's approval, Carmilla decided to walk a mile to the nearest bookstore and buy an adventure book. She thought it was a nice compromise: Carmilla stayed inside, close to God, but she didn't feel the feral calls of the wild beckoning her out. So she picked out the first adventure book she saw: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She giddily skipped home, and got a third of the way into it before her mother came home. When she saw the book, she yanked it from Carmilla's grasp and threw it into the fire, before grabbing Carmilla roughly and slapping her, demanding where she got it from and telling her that God didn't let stinking, unruly barbarians into Heaven. Carmilla cried herself to sleep for a week after that, begging for God's forgiveness and pressing blades to her skin when he didn't answer, opening her veins as an offering to His Majesty, as an apology for her rambunctious, impulsive forays into the forest. The book incident pushed her mother to start formal catechesis, and from then on Carmilla spent all of her day under the watchful eye of priests and nuns. She had sermons all day, priests describing in gory detail the inhuman acts of sodomy that the homosexuals revered and the satanic spawns of the whores who fell for the Devil's trap of premarital sex. Crack addicts raped their mothers and aborted the innocent babies; gamblers bet on who's soul would be taken by the Devil first. They spoke of barbarian, filthy beggars living in the dirt of forests, rolling in animal feces and having sex with bears.
But Carmilla couldn't help it: she was a teenage girl who lived in the middle of nowhere, with a drunkard nanny passed out on the couch and her mother working every day, in and out. She was lonely, and the TV didn't satisfy the primal urges inside of her. She felt restless, itching to take a dip in the lake. She zoned out during catechesis. She dreamed. She dreamed of another universe, where she could take off in a hot-air balloon and discover the world. She dreamed of the wild. She dreamed of the unknown. But teenage Catholic girls from small towns weren't mean to dream like that. So Carmilla went to Confession every week, subtly trying to get advice without letting the truth slip out.
One day, arriving home from catechesis, Carmilla's mother sat on the pristine white leather couch, next to the head priest of their church. Her face was flat, but Carmilla could see the anger and disgust in her eyes. Her stomach dropped. She shrugged off her backpack and kicked off her shoes as the priest stood up, forcing a smile.
"Carmilla, good to see you. How is catechesis going?" His head tilted slightly, like he was talking to a dog, his eyes challenging.
"Excellent, Father. I'm lucky to belong to such a great church." Carmilla lowered her eyes, not making eye contact.
The priest smiled, the challenge in his eyes softening to pleasure.
"Good girl." he rubbed her shoulder, inviting her to sit down. Her mother had not yet spoken, but her eyes were still shooting daggers at Carmilla. The priest sat down next to her mother again, looking at Carmilla.
"Mrs. Karnstein, would you like to say anything, or should I break the news?" he asked, smiling thinly. Mrs. Karnstein shook her head.
"Right, then," he clapped. "Carmilla, my priests have told me that you're exhibiting symptoms of doubt in our Lord, and as someone who's seen you in church since you were little, it worried me. And I was sure it would worry your mother, as well." he gestured to her mother.
"So I came by today and told her, and she told me some things about your behavior at home that I find even more troubling. You're such a good girl, we wouldn't want to see you be defiled." his eyes darkened, and he smiled a little.
Carmilla's stomach dropped lower, her face paling.
Please, she begged.
Please, don't make me move in with him like Johnny did
"So your mother and I have decided that it would be best for you to go to an all-girls, Catholic boarding school," he said happily, clapping again. Carmilla's mother wouldn't make eye contact with her. Carmilla hadn't expected this. She saw the priests elated face again, and her mother's plastered on smile.
Shit, she thought.
motherfucking shit.