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It’s a sudden, disorienting jolt.
Nothing, to everything all at once.
One instant, she’s not in existence. No consciousness. No thoughts.
The next she’s reeling and unable to tell up from down.
Her flickering eyes, don’t focus. Bright lights intrude on her corneas, feeling like tiny needles scraping across them. Everything around her sounds like it’s being played through an underwater speaker, everything completely indistinct but deafening. The worst part by far is the smells. They invade her head, making her brain feel suffocated in her skull. There are chemicals and a lot of them. They burn through her nostrils, her bloodstream, across her skin. It reeks but occasionally, she catches something savory, overly sugary and thick like honey. It’s a new smell but she already knows what it would feel like bursting across her taste buds and-
Danny jerks upwards, shoulders moving in erratic bursts as she lunges for the crowd around her. Before she can get her long fingers beneath someone's skin, two stone solid arms latch around her, trapping her in one place. She turns her head enough to snap at the person, attempting to bite into them from the awkward position. After a few moments of straining her neck at the person behind her, she gets too frustrated to continue with that and opens her mouth wide, throat constricting through a screeching wail. Laura and LaF double over, clutching their ears with eyes shut tight.
Then the noise stops as Danny feels a quick rush through her, a chill overtaking her bones and a sweat breaking out across her pale skin as she jerks to her knees, heaving as strangled sounds emit from her. Every muscle across her shakes in an uncontrollable frenzy.
Pulsing ink-like sludge comes spilling out of her like untold secrets.
Hands around the room quickly change over from ears to mouth, LaFontaine quickly running off to a sink and Laura, holding her mouth closed as tears stream from her eyes and down her face. Not wanting to watch but not being able to stop.
Danny’s feet scramble against the smooth floor for a surface to brace against as she continues to heave. She grabs at one of the hands acting as her shackles, looking for something to keep her anchored to the spot because she can't control anything she's doing.
Finally, it seems to cease. Then it gets still among the living, waiting to see if the storm has passed. A disgusting gargle comes from Danny’s throat like she’s trying to force more of the gunk out of herself, but she can't manage it, so the tension seems to dissipate by a fraction.
There this a long stretch of silence where the only sensation Danny has is a sharp ringing in her ears. Her eyelids feel like concrete and the light beyond them is searing.
Eventually, her lips slide apart, showing her tar stained teeth, sharp and glistening in the fluorescent lighting.
"Where am I?" Her voice is not her voice. It echoes through her head, sounding muffled to her own ears.
"The bio lab," LaF supplies, appearing back into the doorway, leaning against it with their elbow to the frame and hand to their mouth.
Danny's fingernails slowly scratch across the linoleum, through the surrounding muck, without reason. Her skin matches the tile, pale and washed out. Lifeless. The only other markings on it being the thick chunky charcoal fluid.
Then, she begins to spread it around, really slow and unregistering. It creates a ghastly abstract finger painting across the once sterile surface.
Danny doesn’t have to open her eyes to know that the two humans in the room shift uncomfortably away from her.
“What’s wrong with me?” her own muted voice inquires.
“You’re gonna be okay, Danny,” the voice behind her says, hands moving to be tighter around her middle and biceps.
Carmilla.
No one misses the sudden use of her first name.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“You’re dead.”
“Obviously not," she responds, trying to keep her cool through the blur of her racing head.
“Not dead dead. Immortal bloodsucker dead.”
It takes a full three minutes of complete inactivity to sink in. Everyone thinks something’s gone wrong, that maybe Danny has gone catatonic or into some weird post-transformation haze but really, she’s just letting it soak that she’s one of the very things she’s wanted to protect people from in months.
Then she starts screaming. Not the inhuman shrieking of before, but painful, raw, shouting. Her balled up fists smack against the puddle covered floor, dirtying her and Carmilla further. She sobs into the air because she has nothing to press her face against, nothing to soak up the tears that won't even fall.
The restricting hold suddenly becomes less for the safety of the warm people around them and more for comfort. Carmilla drops from her squatting position to sit right behind Danny, legs going to either side of her’s. Her arms relax just enough so Danny feels less trapped, but she still knows that Carmilla would no way in hell let her lose around Laura.
She’s a killer now. A predator. Dangerous. She needs to be treated that way.
She gasps and gasps and gasps through her snivels like she needs the air but it does nothing to help or hurt her. Her body has no reliance on oxygen anymore.
This fact makes her bawl harder.
She looks up through her wet lashes at the familiar friends.
LaF looks at her like a stranger. They’ve never been particularly close, or even gotten along all that well, but Danny never expected to see their face look downright repulsed by the sight of her.
Laura looks at her with heartbreak overflowing from her doe eyes. She sniffles and shakes, looking like a lost little kid. Danny can tell she wants to call home. Call her dad. Call her mom. Make everything normal. It’s the look of Laura in mourning.
Danny knows this because she’s seen it before.
She saw it one night after one of their pie dates as she walked the shorter girl home, that was the night she’d told Danny about her mother’s illness and what had happened to her. Of course, the expression was old and worn, almost comfortable after the years of living with it, the years of missing her, like a sweater with too many holes. Danny saw it again after they took out the Dean. After Camilla fell into the pit.
At the time, Danny thought seeing the emotion fresh on Laura’s features was so much more painful than the one that had time to simmer and settle, but now, she knows, that that look is even worse when it’s directed at you.
She wants to yell. Reassure her that she’s right there. Hug her and hold her close and prove that she’s not dead.
But, even as she thinks that her fingers twitch and her stomach rumbles with thoughts of being close to Laura and the sweet smelling blood in the younger girl’s fragile body.
That’s the moment Danny Lawrence realizes she might as well be six feet deep because who she was might be gone for good.
Grief is a strange sentiment when you feel it for yourself.