New Beginnings

18. Laura

"No, they won't."

The words were said with such confidence that Laura almost believed them herself. They were accompanied by a swaggering stride out the door and for a moment those two things were enough, Carmilla was going to be her hero like so many times before. It didn't matter what was behind those doors, Carmilla wouldn't fail her, wouldn't leave her, wouldn't die.

The sound of her blood dripping from her arm onto the ground served to snap her back to reality. The loss of the blood she kinda needed inside of her body and not on the expensive floor, reminding her not of her own mortality but Carmilla's. Carmilla was not fragile, she knew no one fiercer and Laura would bet on her in any fight, but they were in the same boat now. The same bullet that had gone through her arm would have done the exact same damage to Carmilla and now she was about to get a whole lot more coming her way. No amount of brave words and confident swagger was going to change that.

She needed help and Laura wasn't going to sit here like some damsel waiting patiently for the hero to vanquish the danger. If Carmilla couldn't beat those goons alone, then Laura would make sure she wasn't going to fight them alone.

Perhaps that was the true lesson of her time at Silas. Not that those stories of good triumphing over evil weren't real and one should just give up and surrender to cynicism. But that if good wasn't fated to win like it always did in the stories she grew up with, then it was up to people like her to fight as hard as they could until it did.

Sometimes that meant being brave and standing up to scary people, sometimes that meant widening your worldview to understand the world wasn't as black and white as you thought, sometimes that meant opening your heart to people so different to you, you could never imagine falling in love with them.

And sometimes that meant getting your ass off the floor of an art room in the Uffizi Gallery, to help your girlfriend fight armed goons trying to kill her. The lesson was admittedly a pretty vague one, yet valuable all the same.

But when she tried to get to her feet, she felt heavy pressure on both her shoulders pushing her back down.

"Please don't do that, I haven't stopped the bleeding yet and I am absolutely certain that she will kill me if you die."

Okoye was right in front of her, doing something with her injured arm. She had been so worried about Carmilla she hadn't even noticed. To be truthful she'd mostly forgotten Okoye's existence when Carmilla had walked through the door.

Her hands were wrapping something around her arm. It took her a moment register that it was the now very crumpled suit jacket Laura had come to associate Okoye with. Okoye seemed smaller without it. wispy, frail even, like the shedding of a hard shell revealing a fragile animal beneath. Some of Laura's blood had gotten on the white shirt she'd had underneath the jacket.

She could hear shouting outside the door, something in Italian. Probably nothing good but shouting sounded better than gunfire.

Okoye tightened the jacket around her arm and she gasped in pain. Okoye nodded to her awkwardly.

"I think that stemmed the bleeding for now. Only for now, you'll need to get to a hospital sooner rather than later. You're...we're lucky the bullet went clean through."

The shouting stopped, a window smashed and the muffled gunshots started up again, this time in earnest.

She shot back up to her feet faster than Okoye could stop her. Okoye dashed passed her and planted herself in front of the door. Laura glared at her.

"Get out of the way." The pain in her arm and her anxiety turned the words into a growl, a tone she wasn't sure she'd ever heard out of her own mouth before.