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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Shit.

[ The house is furnished now, at least. He can lay Alucard down on a couch in the entrance hall. It's hard to say what's happening, from the inside. It could be Dracula playing with his spells, it could be Dracula having trapped the three of them here. ]

Are you burned? Let me see.

[ If it's the former, they can only wait. If it's the latter, they have time. Either way, Sypha can take priority. ]

It just stings. I can still move it.

[She turns her hand over, palm-up to show the reddening line across it, and the identical one up near her knuckles. She'd pulled it away fast enough that not much damage was done, but the kiss of a spell or a ward is still there nevertheless.]

Could whatever he's doing in — in the other one, could that be affecting the one we're in here?

This one shouldn't be impossible to leave. This one's meant to be a fake, the one that people end up in if they break in.

[ ...the pretend house for interlopers. He's shunted the three of them into the pretend house for interlopers. That's almost certainly deliberate. He sighs, looking over the burn. It's not bad, at least. And if she's capable of ice right now, he probably doesn't need to tell her to use it. ]

I don't know. That's- the good option, I suppose. That we're just all caught in the crossfire.

Or he's holding us here until he's finished with Carmilla, to deal with us next.

[Good thing she still has HER GUN.]

I wonder if you can open it. It's something about Belmonts, isn't it, that affects the things he can do?

Or holding us here forever-

[ He considers and nods. ]

Well shit, good job I kept my blood inside me. It's worth a try.

We can't stay in here, that much is for certain. He needs help — more than we can give.

[That's sort of a truth and sort of not. What she means is that he needs to be home, and this needs to stop. It needs to be over with, so that they all can breathe again.]

And if you cannot get it open, then...we have to think of something else.

[ The cut from before, on the fleshy part of his left hand, has just about stopped bleeding, but he doesn't need a lot. Once he's finished writing the spell, he squeezes at it enough to get a little more from it and then smears it on the door. Good enough.

It would have been enough to break the castle, this should be nothing in comparison.

And it works. The door opens into the near-dawn, the the empty street and the car. ]

Would you please go back inside, where he will be safe? [ A voice rumbles, frustrated, as if they were supposed to somehow divine good intentions from being locked in a murder house. ] I can hardly keep him under my protection by daylight, after sunrise.

Edited 2019-02-25 01:48 (UTC)

[Oh, it's Dracula. So that's Dracula, locking them into the murder house on the premise of keeping his son safe. That's nice. That's really kind of him, actually, and so charming.

Ugh.]

And so what, then. He stays here, locked in this house until the next nightfall?

[If Sypha sounds irritated, it's only because she is. Reminiscing about the day she met Alucard in the basement just reminded her of why she'd met Alucard to begin with. The pallor in his face back then is so akin to the one that sits beneath his skin now. The stitches are the same. The blood is the same.

The fact that this is all Dracula's fault, fundamentally, is the damn same.]

He's hurt, and badly — he needs a doctor, not a musty old couch in the middle of some grotesque house!

[ Trevor, for his part, is content to just force the matter. He lifts Alucard again, setting about getting ready to carry him outside. It's only when he starts to turn to demand Sypha stay close behind him that Dracula reveals himself at his side, simply lifting his son out of Trevor's arms as if the weight were nothing. Trevor scrambles to put himself between Sypha and Dracula. ]

I am a doctor, Speaker. Of any subject that you could name. I possess the wisdom of a thousand years, and you dare to suggest that I trust the son of Lisa Tepes with anything less?

And how did the wisdom of a thousand years serve him when you clawed him open?

[She should know better than to provoke Dracula when Trevor's moved to put himself between them. She should know better than to start conflict when someone else will take the first hit from it.

And yet the sight of Alucard draped in his father's arms makes her see red in a way that feels like fire blazing inside her, because he doesn't belong there, doesn't belong to him, not anymore.]

You abandoned him. You have no right to speak of who or what he should be entrusted to!

Sypha.

[ This is a bad idea. This is a bad time, place, and general situation to be having an argument like this. Trevor's tempted to just accept Dracula's terms. But Sypha needs food and water. More to the point, she's already very much not accepted Dracula's terms. And so-

-shit, her aim isn't going to be steady, is it? He crouches, bringing his shoulders down to a good height. ]

Brace your arm on my shoulder. Aim for the body. Don't hit Adrian.

[So this is a thing we're really doing, then, aren't we. What a story we're going to have to tell Adrian, when all this is over.

But she reaches into her robes, and from them comes the heavy, severe weight of Trevor's gun, and don't hit Adrian is a mantra as she steadies her arm and her aim on Trevor's shoulder and brings her finger to the trigger.]

Give him back to us.

[IS THIS A DEESCALATION OF HOSTILITIES OR]

If you truly want him to be safe then give him back, to the people he trusts with his life.

I gave him to you and you brought him into danger. You sundered the armour that I gave to him, and you think yourselves worthy of his life? No.

[ Dracula is approaching now, step by agonisingly slow step. Trevor can't move back, not without throwing off Sypha's aim, but he tenses. ]

Sypha, now.

[ But before Sypha can shoot, Dracula's put Alucard down, apparently on thin air (guess who does have a 'carry the vampire' spell). He coils a hand instead into Trevor's hair, lifting him from the ground by it. ]

Explain, Speaker, why I ought to suffer the two of you to live.

[She stumbles back a step or two, deprived of the security of Trevor's shoulder to aim with, deprived of her shield of Belmont reliability and expertise, but she remembers how to aim and how to fire and even as weak as she is, she's got the gun raised up in both hands, never moving it from where it's trained on Dracula's chest.]

I won't let you set him back to the way he was. I won't let you leave him lonely and miserable. And I will not let you put him through the sadness of losing someone who loves him again.

[She's starting to tremble. The gun is too heavy, her arms are too weak. But before that can overwhelm her, she pulls the muzzle of the gun to the side and yanks on the trigger, snapping off a round into the shoulder of the arm that's holding Trevor up by the hair.

Trevor can get through the door, with his Belmont blood. Trevor can snatch Alucard up and carry him with him. And they promised, they promised, that getting Alucard out came first, before anything else.

This isn't how the plan was supposed to go. But it might still work out to the outcome it's supposed to, anyway.

Maybe she'll even be around to see it.]

[ It hurts. He can feel the skin of his scalp start to tear away from his head at that long cut from yesterday. Dracula's speaking an inch from his throat, now. He's going to die. He's going to die and leave the two of them alone to deal with Alucard's insane fucking father without him.

And then there's a bang from the Saint-Etienne and Dracula recoils. Consecrated silver bullets are consecrated silver bullets, even to him. His grip loosens enough that Trevor's hair can slip through his fingers and he topples to the ground, pressing a hand tightly to the dressing on his head.

Dracula's nails extend into long claws as he draws himself back to his full height, and Trevor stumbles to his feet to put himself back between those claws and Sypha, but he only uses them to pluck the bullet out of his shoulder. He extends his hand, holding the bullet between his claws at arm's length as if it were something extremely smelly until Trevor finally gets the message and takes it from him, pocketing it. ]

Very well.

[ He is unimpressed. But the appeal to the effect of Lisa's death upon their son, at least, seems to have saved them both from death. ]

You both live until he has the chance to make his own case for your survival. But I do not leave his side, and so he does not go by daylight.

[Her hands are shaking, but she doesn't drop the gun. She couldn't get another shot off if she tried, not without having it go wild and probably just lodge into a wall somewhere, but she keeps it aloft anyway, fueled by will alone.]

Then let us stop wasting time and go, before the dawn comes. The hour is late for vampires, and he needs to go home.

[It's, perhaps, the makings of a very shaky truce. A truce as shaky as her arms are, at this point — but at least they are no longer something just to be brushed aside and ordered about. Their claim to Alucard is, at the very least, recognized, if not acknowledged.]

We have- fuck. [ Yeah, that cut's reopened with a vengeance. Literally everyone here is fucking bleeding. ] -a cover, in the car, to keep the back of it dark. I'll set it up.

[ Look at him resisting the temptation to point out that they're prepared to deal with just about any vampire need, because someone left their boyfriend responsible for all of them. He just stumbles out, going to the back of the car and pulling out a thick cloth to block the back of the car from the light from the front window and a pair of screens to cover its own windows.

They're going to have to figure out seating arrangements. Dracula needs to be in the back. Alucard needs to be in the back with him, more than likely. Either he or Sypha need to be in the driver's seat, even if the car ends up doing most of the work.

...which means either leaving Alucard alone with his father, or one of them has to be in the dark with Dracula. ]

[What was that Trevor was saying about good job keeping his blood inside him? Regardless, things have come to an uneasy standstill in a situation literally no one likes, and so maybe their combined agreement that no one is happy right now will at least be enough to get them to cooperate toward getting back to the castle.

She knows Dracula won't let her get near Alucard, not right now, but she sneaks a glimpse in his direction, anyway. He looks...still peaceful, at least. Maybe the Belmont incense is still working.

Hopefully Dracula hasn't noticed that, either.]

...What about Carmilla?

[Because there's a little time yet while Trevor gets the car set up, and it occurs to her that, well, in all the heat and fuss, nobody's actually asked that yet.]

[ Dracula plucks his son out of the air, looking over the half-healed wounds left from the battle. His tone had seemed dark a moment ago, when he had asked Sypha to justify his allowing the two of them to live. Now, now it is suffocating. Compelling. The kind of voice that could order someone's heart to stop and be obeyed. ]

She has been granted a kingdom of her own. May her reign be long, bloody and glorious.

[ And Sypha finds herself suddenly overcome with a need to respond to that in a particular way. Whether she has the will to resist it or not, she can hear the words in her head, in her own voice.

Long reign the Lady of the House of Justice, with her Crown of Silver and her Throne of Olibanum. ]

[And that? Sypha had been rattled before, but that's the moment when rattled turns to terrified.

There's compulsion, and then there's this. Compulsion she understands; compulsion is something she's used, even, usually with care but sometimes not. But this? This is greater, more oppressive, more encompassing than just an order or a whim imposed on her. This is the weight of a magic she couldn't begin to hope to stand against, played out in an arena where she is supposed to be a master in her own right.

He puts words in her mouth, in her mind. He dictates the story, drops it fully-formed into her mind and forces it out through her puppeteered tongue, and she speaks the reply like a call and response at Trevor's church whether she wants to do it or not.

It's a block of ice dropped into the pit of her stomach. It's every warning her culture ever spoke of, all brought into practice in an instant.

It's the sudden, and very real, understanding of why her grandfather had tried to turn Alucard away, to avoid the chance of bringing this down upon them from Dracula's notice.

Her lips feel dry, when she finishes the response he compels from her. Her skin must be white as a sheet, and not just from the bloodloss. And she's left speechless, for one of the rare times in her life when words simply fail her, but this time it's not because she's distracted or teased or happy; it's as though they've simply been ripped right out of her altogether.]

[ Dracula says no more, carrying Alucard into the car the moment that the protections against the daylight are set up there. Trevor doesn't even get a chance to place himself between him and Sypha this time, he just climbs in.

Trevor runs back into the house, looking Sypha over (she looks so much worse than she did only a moment ago). But she seems unhurt, at least. Everything else can - has to - wait. ]

One of us needs to be in the driver's seat.

[ Even if the car is driving itself, appearances are important. And the other needs to stay with Alucard, so as to not leave him alone with his father. ]

Do you want to-? No. Whatever Dracula just did, he doesn't get to do it again. You do that. The car's probably shaken, it'll prefer to have you there. Just let it handle the driving. I'll stay with Adrian.

...The Belmonts fought things like him...?

[That's all she can manage to say, for a few seconds, still caught up in the paralysis that horror forced upon her before Trevor's presence shakes her out of it enough that she can at least regroup. But it's a visible thing, the way that she has to pull herself together, drawing her focus around her like a blanket and compressing it down into a solid, tight little thing that she can use.]

I — all right. I'll...I'll drive. Are you going to be all right, with him?

Yeah. We- historically, it's never really gone well. We're doing fucking brilliantly right now, what with neither of us being dead and all.

[ He's retreating into gallows humour, the way he does when faced with awful things. He reaches up, stroking her hair. ]

I'll make sure he uses a seatbelt and everything. Just ask the nice demon to get us home, okay?

...Yes. At least none of us is dead.

[Not even Carmilla, apparently, which is the most unnerving part. And it would be nice to take more time to properly enjoy the comfort Trevor offers, but unfortunately the sun doesn't stop rising even for the sake of a stolen moment of tenderness, and they really need to go.]

Don't worry about the car. We'll get home all right, I'll make sure of that.

[He looks a mess. That head wound is bleeding again, and wounds to the head always bleed so much. Not the best position to be in, when he's about to end up in a dark backseat with a pair of vampires.]

...Here.

[She can't easily tear her robes, and the bandages are still...somewhere below, probably, so she just shucks them off entirely and presses the mass of still-warm cloth against his chest.]

To clean your face.

[ He looks down dumbly at the robe (it's precious, he knows that, all caught up in the story of leaves in hair and jumping off non-metaphorical trains), just staring at it before he nods and smiles. It's genuine, so far as he can manage right now. ]

If this is just a ploy to guilt me into doing the laundry, it's working.

[ And he wipes the worst of the blood away, holding the robe against his head. ]

Drive safe, okay?

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willpowerful - 2019-02-26 17:08 (UTC) - Expand

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