Chapter Text
The hospital is real. White walls and antiseptic smell, that astringent bleach that seems to cut into your nostrils and your brain. The lights that go off on schedule, and the lights on the machines that never go off at all. Those are unsettlingly real.
Silas’ sirens, though, and the mermaids in the lake the alchemy club and the cloud that ate October, the claims about the dean, and your belief that you were immune to moving traffic that one time… apparently those aren’t.
It takes until your fourth therapy session for all of this to come out. Because before that, well. You’d talked about them in passing, but really your focus was on this new place, and trying to raise your eyelids while they played with your dosages. And then there were plenty of other things to focus on: anorexic Devi, who swears he can stop, just as soon as he’s skinny enough that his boyfriend will take him back; Skylar who insists a squirrel lives inside her head; Victoria who can’t remember that people care about her unless they’re right in front of her. Beside all of that, your stories about Silas don’t seem exceptional to you.
But when you tell them in group, you see the way the others respond - the raised eyebrows, their skepticism - and for the first time you feel like you are one of them.
Apparently stories have always been told about Silas. But to everyone else, that’s all they were - stories. It’s only you that actually believes they’ve seen the mermaid’s teeth, the Dean’s blood deliveries, or the light that heralds the anglerfish moving and causes the localised earth tremors. Silas, explains Dr Brand, hasn’t had an earth movement since 1948, and that appeared to be the result of unexploded ordinance from the war.
You soak all of this in alongside the row of medication you now swallow every morning and night. The pills line up in a way that the facts don’t yet, and you stare down that queue like it’s going to explain something if only you look long enough. But the pills don’t talk, and you’re left wondering.
If the fish isn’t real, and neither are the sirens; if the Dean lives off food and not the tears of failing students; if the alchemy club doesn’t generate rain - if you only ask, will you learn that a girl on the other side of the wall, a girl that no-one but you had spoken to - a girl you’ve never laid eyes on, in a room that everyone believed was empty - if you find the will to ask, will you learn that she too is something you’ve invented?
You stare down your pills and you let the doctors play with the dosage and you talk to anyone who asks about anything they want, anything in the world except Carmilla.
(You have been wrong about so many things, so many friends and stories and seasons and patterns. You cannot bear to give up this last.)
They won't let you leave alone. And they're sending you home, but you beg and you plead and eventually your father gives way this far: If you will come home for the summer, and then the year, while they sort out your medication and get you ‘stable’, you can have one last night in your old room to pack your things and say your goodbyes. And you agree, you swear compliance, you freely accept his terms in exchange for this one thing, because you need, you need, to know.
But someone needs to pick you up first, and once you stop and think, really think, the choice is obvious. And so Lola Perry collects you in a pale blue sedan that looks both twenty years old and as though it rolled off the line yesterday, the model ancient but the paint job immaculate. When you open the trunk, it’s lined with a picnic blanket, and you wonder if she wraps one over the car at night too. By comparison, you are beyond shabby in your borrowed scrubs, and you narrowly prevent yourself from dragging a corner of the blanket over your backpack. It contains nothing but your prescriptions and the clothes you came in wearing, and it looks sad in the corner of her car.
"Yes, of course," Lola is saying to Dr Brand. "The cafeteria is closed but I'll make her dinner myself."
"And check she takes her pills," Dr Brand advises. She gives you a sideways look, one you know well, and adds, "I know you haven’t been skipping, Laura, but it's easy to forget once you change your environment. I've forwarded your father your treatment plan; he'll be able to support you once you get home."
Sure. Because being discharged will be enough to let you forget all your hard won progress, the recognition that unmedicated your brain can’t keep a grip on what is and isn’t real. You don’t think you’ll forget that bitterest of pills, not soon.
Still you dredge up a smile and the doctor nods, apparently satisfied. Perry goes to the car, gesturing you to get in, and when you're inside and seat belted Dr Brand taps the roof with her hand and smiles her professional smile again.
"Drive safe!" She says, and you grip the edge of the seat lest she change her mind.
Back on campus Perry walks you all the way back to your apartment block, and then up the four flights of stairs to your room. You tried to dissuade her when she’d pulled up and parked the car instead of going, but she’d resisted your suggestion politely and then with a look you are coming to know well (one that says she is under directions other than your own wishes) and you stopped resisting. It’s easier that way, and you think maybe it’s even worth it when the worried lines smooth out of Perry’s face, although you still won’t answer when she asks if you met ‘anyone nice’. There’s cooperating and then there’s collaborating, and there are things you can’t yet bring yourself to do.
Still, credit where due. She leaves you at your door with a promise of bringing you by dinner, but then hovers at the end of the corridor.
“Lafontaine and I are both on campus for the night,” she blurts abruptly. “In case - you change your mind. You can reach us, just - just call or come by or, just, whenever you like. Alright? You’ll be fine, I know, but - just in case.”
She flounces away before you can come up with an adequate response. “Um, okay,” you say to her retreating back, and then you turn to your door. From the corner of your eye you see Carmilla’s, but you aren’t ready for that and turn your face away.
From habit you try to fumble in your pockets for your key, but the scrubs have no pockets and anyway you don’t know what has happened to half your things. You sigh, wishing Perry had stayed until you’d worked out a way inside, and bang your head against the door. It swings open at the touch.
Disbelieving, you push it further open, half expecting to find the room trashed and half your things gone. But you don’t, the room is cleaner and tidier than you’ve ever seen it, the window half open and the ever present scent of half decayed garbage entirely disappeared, and your clothing piled neatly into suitcases placed by your desk. And you’d assume it was Perry, but there’s one more new thing, and you stumble inside and close the door before you manage a word to the pale girl sitting crosslegged on the end of your bed.
“Carmilla,” you say.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she says eventually.
Outside the drawn curtains of your window you can hear birds. Further away there are cars and trains, the distinctive whine of the brakes of the university bus doing one last round of leaving students. You’ve never been able to hear it so clearly, so used to the sounds of all your fellow students breathing and moving and orbiting through the pattern of their days around you.
Without the wall between you, Carmilla’s voice is lower and smokier than you had ever expected. She is soft when she lets words slide from her mouth, lining them up before you like an offering, hopeful and afraid.
“You were - panicking. Screaming, too, but that wasn’t - that didn’t scare me so much. It was your breathing, and that even when I tried talking, tried - calling out to you - you didn’t hear me.” She pauses, stopping to swallow, and you turn your back to the window. “I said I was sorry, Laura, but I didn’t know, I didn’t understand what was going on and why you were panicking. I thought it was me, at first, but then that didn’t make any sense. And then I thought you were hurt, and I, I, I tried to come to you. But I couldn’t, and you were hurting yourself, and I didn’t know who to call, so,” she shrugs. “I called Perry.”
“RA Perry to the rescue,” you say, and you want to be joking because it hurts to hear her hurt, but the ceiling is spinning and you are drifting.
Your meds often make you distant, dozy; the seroquel lets you sleep eight hours at night in what is apparently a normal way, but it leaves you hostile in the mornings and sleepy during the day.
Dr Brand swear it will get better, you’ll acclimatise, but you think that she likes this slower version of you, this slovenly thing weighed down by her own body so that you have to think ahead how to move and stand and catch yourself. It stops you running through the road because it stops you racing ahead in your thoughts, and you wonder how you are ever meant to complete school work again. How you are meant to write an essay or give a speech or drive a car when your reflexes are on another plane from your fingertips.
No wonder you are here when all the other students are gone; you cannot imagine how it would be possible to graduate when you feel this way. Dr Brand says it is normal, that you will come to recognise patterns and adjust, and you are so tired of Dr Brand you could choke.
You choose to look instead at Carmilla. She’s so very pretty, so much prettier in person than any of those photographs you ever saw on the internet, and you wonder how that can be true when she is as pale as a cloud and looks to have eaten nothing but her own fingernails for weeks.
“I thought it was Danny,” you confess, and then the words you’ve fumbled for run through you like water. “I was so afraid, Carm. I thought you were angry, that you heard me and then you’d never speak to me again, and then - ” you shudder.
Your fear seems to have stolen your volume when you go on. You say, “They told me a lot of things weren’t real. In the hospital. And I didn’t believe that, because I knew about you, how you speak, how you sleep, how you sound when you sleep, you – I thought that for sure I knew you.
“But I had - nothing of yours, nothing you’d given me, only a thousand stupid photos and stories on a computer screen. And I realised they didn’t mean anything, because a million people could have those photos… And I was afraid, so afraid, that you weren’t real either, that you were one more thing I’d made up…”
You don’t know that you’re crying until you see that she is. Light from the window glances across the wet streaks on her cheeks, illuminating her lovely face and its wreckage, the long hair that she has drawn her fingers through until it curled and tangled, her crumpled black shirt advertising a band you know she’s never seen. Her hands knot in her lap, and then she’s standing up so very slowly.
She doesn’t approach you, only opens her hands, and you choke back a sob.
“Laura,” she says, full of regret and longing and ache, and you stumble to her on disjointed feet and clumsy legs, your awkward body of chemical imbalance and slow reaction, and it doesn’t matter because she is here, she is finally here and she is perfect.
Her shoulder is wet beneath your cheek when you curl against her, your back to the wall in your narrow bed. It seems smaller this way, but then so does your room – you have spent so long unwillingly walking the corridors of the institute that you’ve become accustomed to its expanse, and your room is revealed for the tiny box that it has always been. You mind less about the bed, the way Carmilla’s presence is expressed as a weight and a pressure instead of the insistent belief that you were together.
“I met Elle through my philosophy course,” Carmilla says. Her arm is around you, a twig that folds across your shoulders, and you bury your nose against her neck and nod to encourage her. “This was… a couple years ago, I forget exactly. I was taking online courses to get my degree, at first just to have something to do, but then… I don’t know. I liked it. I was good at it, and my second semester I took more classes than before, and more philosophy especially.”
She shrugs, awkward under your weight, and you can hear how rarely she tells this story.
“Elle was in two of my classes. She was pretty – she actually used her photo as her ID, although most people didn’t – and that made her easy to remember. She stood out, even though she wasn’t always that good at the classes; she would argue with me all of the time. And at first it was annoying, because she would argue even when it was so blatantly obvious to me that she was wrong, but then – I don’t know, it was like I came to count on it. I started leaving posts that deliberately contradicted her, or held logical gaps, just to watch her react, and then I got used to expecting that no matter when or what I posted she would end up responding. And after a month or so she worked it out, and messaged me directly to give me grief about it. And so we started talking.”
She shifts again, her collarbone pressing against your forehead, and you lift yourself away for a moment because again the room is spinning, and you can’t tell if that’s the pills or the way you can feel her bones against your body, breathe smoke from within her clothes.
But when you look she is frowning, and you lower back against her, letting her scent and her story define your orbit.
“I didn’t go out then, either, but I wasn’t as bad in some ways as I am now. I couldn’t go new places, but I wasn’t as afraid of new people. And after we talked for months, and she said one day that she knew who I was but she’d never cared – she asked to meet me. And I said yes.
“Nothing happened, that first time. I don’t think we even touched, we just had coffee and argued about a book and insulted the guy running our course. And she made me laugh, and it had been so long, so damn long, since someone made me laugh. So of course I wanted to see her again, and she kept coming back. Weekly at first, and then maybe a couple times a week, and all the time she moved closer and then one day she kissed me. I panicked, because it had been years, but she said it was okay, we didn’t have to do that, and she didn’t mind if I was ace. That this was perfect.
“The next time she went home I went into my room and realised I was missing a picture of Will from my dresser. I wanted to be wrong, but…” she shrugs again, and it should make her loose but you can feel every tendon in her shoulder. “I got online and I googled her, and then her and my name. I’d googled her originally, of course, but all it told me was she wasn’t a journalist or a photographer, and I thought I was safe so I didn’t do it again. But now when I searched, I found she had a blog, and she had followers, and all she talked about was me and my family and our things. She had photos, too. Mostly the house, but some of me. A few of us. She said she was my girlfriend. And then the next week, because of the photos, someone believed her and they put her in their magazine, and suddenly it was everywhere.” She scoffs. “We only ever kissed once. And the next time she came over I threw her out of the house. Told her to consider us broken up.”
You turn in the circle of her arm, and look up at her. Curling into her has given you have the intimacy of your bodies without that of your eyes; you have heard her pain vibrate through her without putting a face to it. Letting her feel without the burden of your gaze or judgment, because the last month has taught you the weight of those.
But now that forbearance has become a barrier, and you twist against her, crawl higher on the bed, and she looks at you where you kneel over her.
“I didn’t lie to you, Laura. I’ve never done that,” she says. Pauses. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
You close your eyes, and you think about how our stories define us. How the words people say about us become who we are.
“I know that now.”
“Do you?”
Her presence is a balm, vindication and glory, but her pain cuts through you. Echoes through your veins in counterpoint to the heaviness of your heartbeat.
“I only ever wanted to protect you,” you say. “– I lied. Not to you but about you – so many times. And not like Elle, but to everyone else – I told them that you weren’t there, that I didn’t know you, that nothing was going on. That I didn’t know you. That you weren’t – mine.” You shake your head, letting your eyes open and reach past her to that still open window. It’s night still, although you think maybe there is the beginning of light on the horizon. You don’t have a lot of time. “I think maybe that’s why it was so easy to believe them. That you were one more thing in my head, a voice through the wall that was so exactly what I wanted – how could you possibly be real?”
She softens against you, and you want it to be enough. To finally know where you both are, where you stand, why you’ve told the stories that you have. But you lied, and you were wrong, and she deserves to hear it.
“I was always afraid of that, I think. And so when my father asked…” you shake your head again, helpless. “I was already reeling. Down the bottom of an internet black hole that fed every fear I had; everything from you not caring to all the horrors inflicted by the modern media. And so I said… that I wasn’t seeing someone.” You swallow. “I lied.”
You are too afraid to look at her. Too afraid that this at last is the thing that should have been untouched, the one thing left unsaid.
But then her hands are on your face, gentle and insistent as the tide, and you cannot resist meeting her eyes any more than you can resist gravity.
“You’re seeing me now,” she says, and you are, you are, you are, until you’re blinded again by tears.
She seems too fragile to kiss, too delicate to touch. But she cannot seem to take her hands from you, and she is too beautiful to deny, and so you trace her with heavy fingers and a lightened heart. She smells different than you ever imagined, sweetness edged by a hint of paper and cigarette smoke, and her bones seem to have been sung to the surface, pressing at the skin over her hips and cheekbones.
You let your hand sit there, on the curve of her waist, and you wonder if you’d felt this warmth - even once – if you would have believed so soon that your world was coming apart as you lost your grip on her. Because she stabilises you, holds your hips against hers when you shift in the narrow confines of the bed and balances the line of your shoulders with the weight of her arm around you.
“I’m not supposed to stay up all night,” you say, then reconsider. “I’m not supposed to stay up at all.”
Carmilla laughs, a little. “So your days of erratic sleeping are over? I didn’t know how you managed, cutie.”
It’s impossible to say if resentment or embarrassment is the greater reason when you scowl into the point of her shoulder. “Well. It turns out when everyone else said… that they stayed up all night writing papers, or studying... They were exaggerating.”
Her neck creases when she lowers her head to look at you. “You didn’t know?” she asks, and you shrug.
“Apparently routine is key to keeping me… stable. Not getting depressed, or manic. I need patterns, and then I won’t go… off-kilter.”
She raises her eyebrows, evaluating what you’re implying, but then she lets it go.
“So no more midnight recitals of The Compass?” she asks, and you blush clear to the middle of your chest before you sober, looking up at her.
“No. At least, not here.”
She hums deep in her throat, and reaches out to smooth your hair back from your face where it’d swung forward when you raised yourself up. Her fingers are cool on your cheek, her look tender, and it makes your heart hurt that you have to make her understand.
“But Carm - it’s not just that. Not just sleep and food, that stuff. There’s - well - pills. Medication, I mean, and I have to go to two different types of therapy, and just - stability needs to be a thing for me. Like getting out of the hospital was one thing but now I need to work on things for myself, and no one thinks I can do that here, not when I’m studying. And my Dad - God, my Dad. My crazy overprotective father has just learned his only daughter has bipolar disorder and needs support to get through it and you can just imagine - I have to go home. He wants to take care of me for a while, and I’m pretty sure that means I won’t be coming back. Not next year, anyway.”
You look down, because you don’t have it in you to watch her face when you tell her. Too full of shame and regret, too full of pain. You are a girl who couldn’t tell what was real, and now you are a girl who needs a world of therapy and medication. Periodic reality checks and your father’s supervision. You can’t look at her and the irony of it is painful. Because for so long you couldn’t see her because of the wall, and then because you didn’t believe in her, and now when you can finally see her lovely face you are the one who is driving you, holding you apart. The distance between you no longer physical but somehow more necessary. You pick at the coverlet by your knee on the bed.
But her fingers are still on your cheek, warming against your skin, and she uses them to raise your eyes once more. Hers are dark and cool, and you bite your lip to hold back your tears.
“My college experience isn’t quite what I’d expected,” she says. “Not quite what anyone planned. My psychiatrist really thought I’d get out more if I was surrounded by my peers, somewhere that not everyone knew the story… that hasn’t really panned out.”
Her fingers are gentle when she slides them from your cheek to beneath your ear, her thumb caressing skin as her fingers sink into your hair. It’s lovely, loving, and somehow still not as gentle as her voice. It’s the softest you have ever heard from her, cautiously building words like a bridge between you. Offering you forgiveness for all the things you haven’t done and can’t do, and when you blink this time your tears spill down your cheek.
“I’m sorry,” you say, and she shakes her head.
“No, Laura, you don’t understand. I’m sorry, so sorry that I didn’t understand and help you sooner - but for me, this has been - sort of, well, the closest I could get to what a college experience is meant to be like. I didn’t - I’ve barely spoken to anyone who wasn’t my course coordinators or a delivery boy, I haven’t gone out. Except to call Perry. And then here, for you.”
She pauses, and you freeze. Letting her feel her way again, the best that you can. Finding a way forward.
“What I’m saying… the only times I did what I was meant to do here was when it involved you,” she says. “So for me… I guess it doesn’t really matter where I am, not when I don’t, don’t go out anyway.”
She looks at you again, and you look back. You’re not getting it, and she blows a hasty breath upwards to send her hair fluttering up from her face, and tries again.
“What I’m trying to say is that I can pursue my education anywhere. Including. Um, back home.”
She peers at you then, anxious through the weight of her eyelashes. Chewing at her lip, fingers stilling in your hair. And your mouth falls open when you finally understand what she is trying to say. This one important message surpassing all barriers.
“I could… I could come and see you there,” you offer. Trying to reach out as gently as she has to you. “If you wanted.”
She bites her lip, still looking at you through her lashes. Then she raises her head, and nods.
“I do. I want that, Laura.” She pauses, and the hand still in your hair begins to move again, stroking you so very, very softly. “Do you not know I love you?”
“I do,” you say, and tears run down your cheeks without restriction now. Because no matter the distance and the doubts and the fear, this you did know. You do. That this was what you were always afraid of losing, to the world or to lies or to the manipulations of your own brain. But she says it, and the too loud world stops its violent spinning for a moment.
You lean in, touching her forehead, her nose, her lips with yours. Wet and salt streaked and dry and damaged and somehow perfect in this single moment.
“I love you too.”