Fanfiction- Vampires on Camera
Title: Vampires on Camera
Fandom: Carmilla
Characters/Pairings: Carmilla/Laura
Summary: Carmilla always turned out wrong on camera. The reason why was too frightful to think about.
Challenge: 30 Day Dark Fandom Challenge
Prompt: Inspired by modern horror
The camera was a present, back when Laura had decided she was going to be the next Sofia Coppola. To her credit, she hadn’t let it go to waste; it captured vacations, birthday parties, and beautiful sunsets, but those witty and intimate romances she’d hoped to create fell by the wayside with her lack of actors. It was a side effect of her lack of a social life at all, a home-schooled girl high up in the mountains in her father’s mansion.
She wasn’t lonely, exactly, but it did seem a pity she couldn’t learn to direct.
But now that she had a friend at the house with her- a friend more beautiful than any sunset, who knew Shakespeare monologues and romanticist poetry by heart- now, at last, Laura could make her films. At first, Carmilla hadn’t wanted to do it, but with a little coaxing she’d become an utter ham before the camera, and Laura loved every moment of it.
No one spoke the words of William Blake like she did. No one did Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene up and down the staircases of the mansion, naked save for her long hair, with the same intensity as dear Carmilla. That role worked out well in the final cut, though her Juliet didn’t work quite as well. Laura had heard of the camera adding ten pounds, but she was a little surprised that it also added ten years.
Carmilla was stunning in person, but her grace and elegance never turned out quite right on film. Not only did she seem older, but her movements seemed jerky, and her expression appeared cruel no matter what emotion she was trying to display. Looking at the final results, Carmilla would sniff and say she didn’t photograph well. It reminded Laura of that old photograph her father had found, of the woman called Mircalla, a flapper in a fur coat with a silver flask of something she was toasting the camera with. There was an attractive person somewhere in the picture, but it had to be unearthed beneath the haughty expression and the sneering lips.
But still, Laura filmed her friend. The camera was running when Carmilla recited a poem by Lord Byron as if speaking to an off-camera lover, and it was forgotten and left running when she started directing her words at Laura herself, pulling her into the frame for a tender kiss. Laura was so surprised (and yet not- their relationship had been leading there since they’d first met) that she didn’t bother to turn off the camera, and as a reasult there ended up being a bit of amature pornography on the would-be director’s reel. (Laura deleted it afterwards, but with a smile on her face.)
She wasn’t sure, though, what made her decide to film herself sleeping- or what made her decide to conceal the camera. It had something to do with the nightmares, of that much she was sure. Maybe she thought that if she could capture the fact that nothing was happeining, she could sleep easier. Or maybe there was something else she suspected, something she could not bear to speak aloud, or even think of clearly to herself. But whatever the case, the camera remained there.
It showed her climbing beneath the covers, turning the light out, and then curling up into a ball. It showed her tossing and turning later in the night, and Laura started to speed up the footage while watching it out of sheer boredom. Then she slowed down and reversed it, unsure if she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen.
It was hard to see in the dark, but close viewing revealed something else in the room. A shape, vaguely feline in form, crept towards her own sleeping form. Why she didn’t scream and turn off the footage at this instant, Laura wasn’t sure, but she watched nonetheless, with both fear and a strange sadness in her heart. There was nothing to be reassured of; all she had dreamed of was true, and she could think of nothing that could be done about it.
And then the feline figure turned its head, and for just a single frame, Laura knew why Carmilla’s face appeared wrong on camera- because it was the face of a nightmare.
Laura stopped watching at that point in the footage. And without another thought, she deleted it all.