To Die As Lovers May, So That They May Live Together

Happy Ending

Six years later, Carmilla found herself standing in the doorway to her apartment's bedroom. Asleep on the bed was her girlfriend, Laura Hollis. It was very late, but Carmilla herself had been unable to get to sleep. Instead, she paced the apartment listlessly and downed a few bottles of Lafontaine and Perry's Hemo-Soy Blood Substitute. It still didn't taste as good as real blood, but it was the more moral option. (Morals?! Since when had Carmilla ever cared about those?! She might as well change her name to Cullen instead of Karnstein! But at least she didn't sparkle!) As Carmilla finished her latest bottle of Hemo-Soy, she stared pensively at Laura's sleeping figure, but despite her outwardly calm appearance, there was a torrent of thoughts swirling through her mind...

It had been a very long and hard six years. In the first, following Carmilla and Laura's little escape from Silas (dragging two of the three gay gingers along), the two ended up realizing that their little stunt down in the bowels of Silas had instigated an apocalypse of Biblical proportions. The whole rest of that year and into the following summer was spent trying to stop Mother, who was no ordinary vampire as Carmilla had first thought. Instead, she was actually the Sumerian goddess of love and war: Inanna, and all of the work she'd had Carmilla do was all in the name of performing a ritual that she thought might help bring her dead lover back to her.

Carmilla might've sympathized, but Inanna was just too selfish and abusive to forgive. Besides, for that part of the year, Carmilla's own love life had been pretty shaky, to put it lightly!

"Tell her to go cry me an ocean," Carmilla grunted in dry amusement once they all realized what Inanna was really after. "She ain't the only one with a broken heart or romance problems. I mean, look at me! 317 years of being a lovelorn vampire and you don't see me trying to end all of humanity to fix it, do you?" though of course, the more Carmilla thought about it, the more she had to admit that she might've very well done such a thing, were it in her power. Or at least, she would try to get things straight (ha, ha) with Laura. Were they dating or not? Were they a couple or not? The main desk at which they worked while hiding out in Silas' master library certainly would say so... How many impromptu sex sessions had they had on that poor thing? Yet both of them were still skirting the stupid question. Yea or nay?

Or at least, they were. At the end of that summer, though, just like all the others, Laura died.

"Nononononono!" Carmilla wept into Laura's lifeless body. Of course! She should've known! She should've known her curse would be cruel enough to take Laura away from her right when they were about to celebrate their greatest triumph of all! She should've known! But she hadn't. She'd forgotten. In a moment of rapture, Carmilla had forgotten all about the dangers of love and the curse she bore. All she could remember was Laura, and how happy Laura made her. But in that one moment of forgetfulness, that was when the curse decided to strike again. So now, Laura was becoming Carmilla's undoing again, lying uncharacteristically still, quiet and cold as Carmilla cradled her, fruitlessly trying to bring her back.

Inanna tried to intervene, tried to make amends for her actions which she finally understood the severity and wrongness of, but the best she could do was restore Carmilla's mortality so that, if she did have to suffer without her soulmate, it would no longer be eternal. Then perhaps, the two could finally reunite in death, properly. Would there be a point or purpose to keep bringing Susanna back to life if Carmilla, herself, was no longer there? So that was Inanna's best idea: give Carmilla her life back and then let her die naturally, taking the curse to the grave once and for all.

But then Ereshkigal, the goddess of death herself, and the twin sister to Inanna, stepped in. She took pity upon Carmilla and was able to bring Laura back. Never in her un-life, or regular life, had Carmilla been quite so happy! There was no guarantee how long Laura would last this time, but either way, both she and Carmilla were fully human, so they were on equal footing. Maybe the Sumerian gods had undone the curse the Christian God had cast upon Carmilla. Maybe, just maybe, this Laura would be her last and she and Susanna would finally get their happy ending.