[ He takes Alucard's hand as they walk back to the main hall. Because fuck being watched right now and fuck the fear of things repeating themselves. He's not going to just watch him torment himself like this and do nothing. He only lets go of it once he's found the stairway to the laboratories, and it's not the narrow staircase that forces him to let go (though it doesn't help) but the fact that it's probably better for both of them for him not to be holding on to Alucard while reciting Leon's words. It'd be weird. ]

'I have always known my best loves to be the most wise and kind and brilliant souls that graced the earth. And for all the good that they have done, I have always selfishly considered what they might have achieved without constraint. What hearts would Sara have soothed, could she go to the side of any soul in pain, what suffering could she have averted with her soft voice and her caring heart and with the love of all who look upon her? And Mathias, dearest Mathias, who brought such healing and understanding into the world with her patronage. What could he have done with more? What mysteries could he have shone his light upon, what hurts could he have healed, what plagues could he have bested had he not been constrained by time and resources and the frailty of man?

I looked back upon these thoughts as I came to the laboratories. I found my answers, and I found that I misliked them greatly.

The laboratories had been Walter's own, once. I suspect any creature that lives as long as he must eventually turn itself to the mysteries of the world for want of more to learn, for to know all that one cares to know sounds to my ears like the most terrible sort of living death. They fell into disuse long before our mission began, however. Whether Walter found his own mind insufficient to the task of solving the questions he had laid before himself, whether he found himself caring more for matters of conquest than of science, whether he simply consumed his time with frivolities - none of these things I can say for sure. All information that we had suggested that this place had been walled off and forgotten, and yet when I arrived it hummed and glowed with life.

I knew my love must have been turned when I first entered, because the wonders I found could not have sprung from any other mind and yet the amount of work could not have been done by a single man in the time since his disappearance and my coming to this place. It was as beautiful as it was horrible, his brilliant mind unconstrained by all things but the walls of this terrible place. There were what I suspect to be early versions of those captured stars that light this place, pure white light chained between two rods. Notes on terrible poisons. A device the size of a man's head, half metal and half demonic flesh and all of it laced through with magic, that moved from place to place in an instant when agitated. Corpses made to move by energy pulsing through them.

And at the centre of it all, worn to a thread and in chains, he was there. Even when I broke the chains and stood before him he would not meet my eyes and flinched away from my touch. He only placed a single red stone upon the ground before me, and I knew what it was. The Crimson Stone, completed but for those parts of our foe that we would trap within it. I could do nothing more, and so I vowed to him that I would return for him with Sara at my side and that we would leave this evil place together. He spoke, then, only six words.

"I have done what I must."

And I did not understand.'