cryptsleeper | 20s AU Post

20s AU Post

Current Carmilla plot outline
--Post-fire, Carmilla and Mr. Peanut team up mostly to use each other. Carmilla's spent the past several months (since November, it is now February 1925) networking, and it's clear to her that Alucard's not suited for the position and that the other two are the obvious weakness. Mr Peanut needs something back, so this is perfect on her end. Mr Peanut can only imagine the joys of vampire blood in his work, and he'd like an army of vampires for his own ends.
--Shit stirring from Mr Peanut (all of March?)
--Mr Peanut also begins to sell mis Miracle Serum, which has vampire blood in it.
--Gang is very much trying to murder Mr Peanut during this.
--Start of April, vampire gets a call from one of the blood bank contacts that 3 patients have come in and are displaying some bizarre signs. Investigation yields the fact that they're in process of turning, and they've all taken the same serum.
--Additional investigation reveals O FUCK IT MR PEANUT
--Meanwhile Carmilla's been made aware of a familiar she didn't sire, so she knows something's up. Big fight with Mr. Peanut and thus Mr. Peanut is left depowered
--Gang commits a murder
--Carmilla's well sured up on her contacts now, and it's time for open rebellion (mid-April)
--In a more subtle attempt to let Alucard just step aside, she cuts the breaks on demon car and shows up to gloat/suggest he not pull a dad and go to deal with his grief quietly while she runs the city. The how he wants to do it is up to him (black widow joke goes here.) Treffy and Sypha walk in.
--1 week of straight up rebellion; feedings, no help from allies, need to do damage control instead of fight carmilla, every dracula rule is
--MEANWHILE IN GRAVITY FALLS, triangle shows Vlad what's up to try and psyche him out, somehow this finalyl snaps Vlad out of his depression and he heads home
--Just in time for Alucard and Carmilla to be tearing each other to bits in one of the bayous, it's not going well
--Vlad coming in means the king of vampires is accosted by a belmont with a pair of blessed knitting needles and a speaker with a fucking gun and he's just like what the shit happened to the world while i was gone
--Wards around the fight means that only demon car can break the wards, everyone has to pile in.
--Carmilla gets her ass kicked AND SENT TO THE JUSTICE DIMENSION

THEN THERE WERE FAERIES.
--Prior to all of this the vampire and Sypha have done a shit ton of research on how to get their Belmont back
--Sypha has also been practicing debating with dad, which leaves everyone Very Tired.
--When Trevor is actually snatched up (1 year after marriage, it takes fae effort. Taking Arn's shape fails, so it's a lot more kidnapping by force), Sypha and Alucard go into Faerie
--But they're playing this as politics, not as heroes rescuing their damsel, so that means the faeries are just "wait what now excuse u?"
--There are 3 gates and 3 trials (the particulars we're still bullshitting.) Each is asked to sacrifice 3 things. (Alucard: voice, his titles as bestowed upon by his father and his people, i forget the third; Sypha: her human form (she's a birb), fuck what were the other two)
--They enter the court at the end of the third trial. After LITERALLY ALL THE TITLES Sypha declares she Speaks for Trevor Belmont
--Claim debate over Trevor, turns out that the rules are in Sypha's favor.
--But that means debating to leave Fae without giving up what they've chosen.
--Sypha lawyers it all out, Alucard is a safety deposit and hangs out with Fae!Trevor
--In the end, safe passage out of Faerie consists of Sypha giving up her memory of the necromancer (billed as a great mage she studied under), the vampire gives up his immortality, and Trevor is replaced with Carmilla (dad was aware of this option and OK with it), but Trevor has his ability to swear taken. He now soundslike a rubber ducky when he tries
--Everyone gets home okay, except for the AU of this AU where the gang fails, but Trevor's on their doorstep like a bat out of Hell because time doesn't work right and he's been in Hell for a WHILE.

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Hopefully you can. This is going to get really fucking awkward if we can't use the execution site.

[ He stands. ]

Room where he keeps all the records, on a hook inside the cabinet. There must be something like seven fucking hundred spells keeping my grubby Belmont hands off them.

[Alucard's moving a few more steps ahead before he realizes Sypha isn't in step with him anymore. He turns around, head tilted just a little.]

What is it?

[He's not refusing, but he'd like to know.]

[Alucard dismisses the viewing mirror first. It now reflects his face back at him, scared and pale and so very unhappy. He hisses at the sight, then stands as well.]

I'll meet you back here when I have them.

[He needs a few moments alone anyway. Just to breath out. Processing this will not happen until the deed is done, because to do it before would be to wear his heart on his sleeve in public. In here, this office, it can see his face when forced to deal with the worst choices.

Alucard departs, leaving Trevor to wait.

And wait.

And wait ten minutes more.

When Alucard does return, his expression is mostly annoyed. In his hand are the keys, and his hand itself looks a bit red. There was some kind of fight with the protections around the keys, and it is only just healing.]

Have I mentioned lately that I loathe my father?

[Whether he meant it or not, that's permission enough for her — or at least, that's what she hears it as. So, quietly, she closes the few steps of distance left between them and carefully wraps her arms around his middle, angling her embrace so that it's mostly pressed against his side instead of his chest, to avoid putting any undue pressure on his wound and his stitches.

It doesn't last long — just a few seconds, without even a hint of squeezing. But for a few seconds, she has her arms around him, and he is dirty and rumpled and still an absolute mess, and the fact that those things don't matter to her is just as important as the hug itself.]

[There's a lot to unpack here.

Alucard's deadly still as Sypha's arms go around his middle. The first is for a practical reason - he doesn't want to aggravate the wound slashed across his chest. The second is every last hug he has received lately has been because of what's happened. This feels slightly different, but not different enough.

Third, and worst of it, the last one to touch him period was his father. The results of that are clear.

So he's afraid at first, which is the stupidest reaction he could ever have to something like this. He doesn't relax much more after those fears pass, he seems more at peace. Then Sypha isn't there at all, and it feels strange. She burns much warmer than most humans.]

I'm going to suggest we just keep those in the desk drawer from now on.

[ He winces in sympathy just a little at the injured hand, even if it is healing quickly. But he doesn't touch Alucard. He doesn't offer comfort by putting a hand on his shoulder. It'll heal. Alucard would have mentioned if it wouldn't. And so it won't affect anything. And so right now, it can't matter. ]

I'll explain the enchantments on the place in the car. At least from reading about them, they sound pretty fucking impressive.

...I have never seen anyone look so sad as you did when you came to our camp yesterday. Not even my grandfather, when he lost his only daughter.

[She backs up a little when she's done, giving him his space. But curiously, she's done with averting her eyes, now. She's looking at him directly, chin raised just a touch, gaze steady. Whatever hesitation had been in her before, it's not present for this.]

So I meant it, when I wished you to be safe and be well. And what I did not say was that it was going to be all right, because it was not something I could promise. But I am glad you were not left to do this alone. I hope that it brought you some comfort, this past night, that you weren't.

I'll let you take care of their security.

[Trevor's better than Alucard is at certain things, and that's one of them. Alucard's other hand has his car keys.]

Let's go then. I'm whatever the opposite of enthused about learning the nature of these enchantments.

[Sad? Well, that's...accurate. To say the least. Alucard cannot say how he must have looked to others, but he can believe Sypha's observation. Everything around him is in shambles. Pieces of glass too finely broken to be glued back together. So..yes. Sad is right.

But it goes beyond that. The little bit of loss she shares, it's sobering. The way she's able to speak of it too that...it's not hope. It isn't reassuring. But it is a sign that it is possible to weather this horrible hurricane.]

You are...prudent in your word choices. [She's a Speaker. Of course she is.] Your hope held through.

[As almost an afterthought, he murmurs:] Your will burns very brightly.

Oh.

[Prudent in her word choices, he says, and then goes and says something like that. He's the prince of vampires, he surely must know enough of magic to know the implications of what he's just told her. To say such a thing, to a Speaker and a magician —

Because she's never going to forget that, is she. The way he looked, the way his voice sounded, the way his mouth shaped the words. Your will burns very brightly, and that's a part of her now, a story for two, safeguarded by one.]

...Thank you.

[Perhaps he'll remember it, too, for his own reasons: a Speaker, speechless, from his own prudent word choices.]

[Alucard's simply a skilled observer, it has nothing to do with being prince of anything. This feels like the right point to keep walking, one foot steadily after the other. Sypha's made no comment of the fact he has been using her bloodied cloak as a cape around his own body, trying to hide the bandages from the eyes of the world. He's glad for it.]

How long have you been practicing that art?

[Anything to make this less awkward. Talking about magic? That's pretty normal in his books. Rendering a speaker incapable of words is...he's not of the right mind to realize that for the accomplishment it is.]

As long as you're fine with me needing to use the fire tongs to put them there.

[ He keeps an eye on the hand, watching it heal. Once they're in the car, setting off, he starts to talk. ]

The trick to the place is that it seems like there are two houses, depending on how you get in. If you break the door in, go in through the windows- anything like that, you get into an old fucking mansion that, by all accounts, is in a pretty shitty state of repair. If you use that key to go through the front door, or you follow someone who has, you get into the-

[ -how to put this? Execution hall? Execution hall and also torture rooms (thankfully unused, there only as a threat). ]

-the other place.

[ nailed it. ]

Whatever you need.

[The hand is healed by the time Alucard is in the car. He has driving gloves on because he is a proper gentleman about some things, but it also helps to cover the still too pink flesh. With them backed out of the garage and out of the gates to the house, Alucard listens.

The air carries coldness with it, even if late autumn in the south is still not truly cold. It's the time of year were things are dead, waiting.

It feels right.]

That makes sense. The first way in means that there's protection for tourists that break in, ensuring that drunk revelers and would be ghost chasers are given exactly what they expect upon entering. A clever safety measure.

[He sounds nearly fond.]

Sypha would call it misdirection, after a fact.

I practice several arts.

[Yes, good, there we go. The topic has shifted back to something safe and familiar, something she could talk about at length in her sleep. (Little does she know she actually does talk in her sleep. It's not as though she's ever been awake to hear it.)

But off they go again, trotting along at Alucard's pace, drawing ever closer to their destination as they make their way down the secluded path toward town.]

Speakers dress their girls to look like boys, to protect them as they travel. I learned from this practice and do something similar with my magic. People see what they wish to see, and what they expect to. So I practice magic, and I also practice tricks. When people see you as a stage magician first, they assume that the real magic they witness is...just a trick too clever to be explained. I've been doing both since I was young.

[She pauses.]

Since...I was old enough to understand the importance of pulling my own weight. There are always people who will pay money to be told stories they wish to be told. I am very good at giving them what they want. And so, I help.

So your magic is practiced in layers, with nods to the concepts used by those who rely on more traditional ways of fooling the senses.

[He's impressed. It shows in his tone, in the way he considers everything Sypha has explained before drawing his conclusions. Her acts are no small feats, they're carefully woven...narratives. Because to think of Speakers is to think of stories, and it is the easiest way to interpret everything that Sypha has said so far.]

It's finely honed. I'm certain that honing will become refinement approaching perfection before too terribly long.

[They're approaching where they have to part ways. So Alucard returns to business, lists every part of the city that will see Speakers as no more than other visitors to the city and give no side-eye to their needs. (Don't practice your arts where you intend to purchase he advises.) And so at the outskirts, Alucard inclines his head west.]

This is where our paths must fork again, Miss Belnades. I'll find you when I can.

It was a necessity, at the time. Not the largest incident here, I don't think, but one of the first nasty ones. There was a man staying at the house - claimed to be the brother of a prince, but there's no way of knowing for sure. He'd apparently been on bad terms with a vampire from his homeland.

[ He's been doing his reading since he first arrived here with absolutely no clue what was going on. ]

Your father claimed the house afterward. The enchantment was to throw off the police investigation, but the house ended up being a symbol of just how furious he'd been. Good kind of place for inspiring fear.

[ It's also pale pink, but that doesn't make it any less scary to the vampire population. ]

They were from the Ottoman Empire, correct? [There's a flinch there, remembering the disgusting glee his father had at the fall of the Sick Old Man of Europe finally dying.] My father's biases exist, and several of them are laid at the feet of the Ottomans.

[Another reason to claim the house, at the very least. The world goes by the car windows, bringing them ever closer to the city itself.]

But I see why he used the place.

[He hates it, but Alucard can see the logic. He speeds up the car, and settles into silence until they reach the agreed upon point for dropping Trevor off. Half an hour's walk from the place. When Trevor is out of the car, Alucard is off again, careful to park the car a few blocks away.

When he approaches the house, he feels the key in the pocket of his coat start to grow warm. Carefully, once at the gate, Alucard takes out the key, and uses the first to open it. When he closes the gate behind him, he doesn't throw the bolt. It'll be unlocked for Trevor.

At the front door, he hesitates. Swears softly, then enters.]

Mm. Then I wish you again, Adrian: be well, and be safe.

[And off she goes, in the opposite direction as his own path, to find a well-trafficked street corner with just a little bit of shade and something pleasant-smelling nearby — usually either a flower-seller or a restaurant, so long as the aroma is palatable to the senses. People relax more easily in such an environment; they give more away, and they feel more comfortable with their generosity — especially if they happen to be leaving said restaurant with change still in their hand, and can be caught by the whimsy of spending it on a quick fortune.

She has a fair run of luck with it, too. The usual types pass through — girls looking for the faces of their future husbands, gamblers looking for a turn of their luck, wealthy men preoccupied with this business deal or that proposition. It's never difficult to convince them to try her, and one by one she plies them with a smile and a story, giving them what they want to hear and sending them away satisfied.

When she's earned enough for the morning, she takes a short break and darts into the restaurant to buy herself a small portion of jambalaya, and once she has it she packs up her things and walks the streets eating while she ferrets out her afternoon's location — this one designed to catch workers on their way home from a day's trade, where in the morning she was seeking to hook shoppers and idle vagabonds.]

[Alucard returns home to an empty castle. It is at that point where he eats and drinks what he must, then collapses in his bed. Damn if his father's still home and could destroy him in his sleep. If Alucard dies, he makes this house harder for his father to live in.

He sleeps for three very long days. When he rises, the castle is still empty. Wherever it is his father has fled so that he might mourn, it is not home. Alucard cannot blame him. This place now is as much a tomb as his mother's actual final resting place. Quiet. Still. All life robbed of it, because the central force that kept it so full of life is now gone for eternity.

The thought hits him like a truck. Renders him into tears, until the pain from sobbing is literally painful. A reminder to check his bandages, which Alucard does. Undoing the wrappings take time and effort, and for it he's rewarded with skin that is only slightly healed. He hisses at it, then forces himself to enter his mother's lab to take supplies.

(It still smells of her. All a careful mix of her perfume, medical supplies, and faintest hint of soap.)

Bandaging it all takes time. Time in an empty and horrible house, and Alucard wants out of it. He...he's not sure what that means, but he owes Miss Belnades a new robe. So to the fabric store first, and then to one of the parts of town where there's some new fortune teller that's come in.

When Alucard approaches Sypha's set up, it is carrying several bags. A man who's doing the shopping for someone, perhaps, for he looks like no one's son anymore. He's too old and weary for that mistake now.]

[ It's not a pleasant place.

Entering the house, it's close to what the fake probably looks like. Better maintained. The walls are soft pastel colours, the floor is carpeted. The lights turn on as Alucard enters. And there need to be lights, despite the daylight outside, because there are no windows. The door is the only way out, and if it's not opened with the key-

-best not to think about where it leads if it's not opened with the key.

The ground floor is dedicated to holding cells. There's a lot of silver, for something created by vampires, with all of the moving parts controlled by machines so there is no need to touch them.

The floor below is a great hall, a stage at one end and a large empty space in front of it with a few seats at the sides of the room. It hasn't been cleaned - in fact, the opposite is true. The bloodstains haven't discolored even after months, still bright red.

And the upper floors, the upper floors are unpleasant places full of unpleasant instruments.

Trevor enters a little over half an hour later, closing the door behind him quietly. ]

Alucard?

[Alucard kept his driving gloves on, for no particular reason at the time. Walking through the house alone made it feel like the right decision, as he wanted no actual contact with any part of the house. Having a barrier made it easier to walk past the holding cells. (There was so much silver.) He dreaded to think of how it was all put in place.

The upper floor had been next, and he wanted to be sick. Then he had descended below, and at that point he had simply walked out, no words left in him, and waited for Trevor at the front door.

His father's European reputation was always well earned. Alucard had seen it in fits and starts over his lifetime, but until his father attacked him, it was all hidden away. Part of his father's past, something he didn't want to show to his wife or his son. This was...

...No. This is a part of his legacy, and he hates every horrible inch of it.

Alucard's only a few feet from the door when Trevor enters.]

I'm here.

[She sees him coming, of course, because she watches everyone who passes by when she's out like this; she's got a few seconds before he's close enough to be called out to, and she spends them on examining how his appearance has changed in the few days that have passed since she's last seen him. He's cleaned himself up; there's a little more color to his skin, and he's walking better. It's smart of him to come laden down with bags; regardless of how heavy they are, no one will question a man walking slower than usual if he's also one with a full load of bags to carry with him.

When he draws close enough to be within earshot — a man's earshot, not a vampire's, because she knows the latter all too well but she doubts he wants to be seen as that in the daylight — she calls out cheerily: ]

Bonjour, monsieur! Fortune for a penny?

[Plenty of people smile and move on, from her solicitations. He won't seem any different if he does the same. But now, at least, he knows she's here, and the invitation has been extended just the same.]

Do you accept trades instead?

[Because there is a bag that is specifically hers and he indicates that one first. It is on his right, and there is a little bit of blue fabric poking out of it.

This is her work, so he must respect that. The intent is to only let her know that all is healing and to do as she asked as far as repayment went. Nothing else.]

That depends on the trade, doesn't it? I couldn't say no to a string of pearls — well, unless they're your wife's!

[It's all just idle chatter, meaningless prattle — or so it seems. He's getting the same treatment that anyone else would if they drew near, and it's always good to test the men with a reference to the missus. See if they smile or frown, if they look nervous or disgusted or delighted. A man who looks worried might well have a mistress. A man who looks especially worried might have a husband, instead.

She picks up her cards, idly playing with them and shuffling them as she lets him see the way she glances at the bag. That's a shade of blue she'd recognize anywhere; she wonders what lengths he must've gone to, trying to match it precisely.]

[All of the bags get set down. There's food in there, replaced medical supplies, but the fabric is for Sypha and Sypha alone. He's yet to destroy the robes, but at the moment, he doesn't need to. He's the only one home, and now there is no danger of his blood being a problem for anyone else in the house.

(In later years, Sypha will find it folded at the bottom of a trunk alongside other precious things. Some of his mother's favorite clothes. The first pair of shoes Sypha wore through from dancing too hard at one of the parties. Important ephemeral things with too much meaning.)

There is a blank look at the comment though, because he knows he's patter, but all the same. Timing. He sits in front of her set up all the same, because for this to be a supply drop, a covert one, there must be some acting on his part.]

I'll leave it to your good senses to evaluate what's fair.

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Page 18 of 141

20s AU Post

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