cryptsleeper | Catch All

Sypha snorts against his neck, secretly delighting in the way his skin jumps. He's so clever about these things, dishing out just enough truth not to be called on the things he still keeps wrapped tightly away. They tend to let him get away with it, when they have the sense to recognize what he's doing; their dhampir needs time and space to process things. His mind is such a complex mechanism, it sometimes takes simple things a day or two to work their way through its twisting paths and chambers. Things like 'I am outside my comfort zone and I don't appreciate it' or 'I enjoyed that thing you did but I'm not sure I'm allowed to ask for more.'

Things related to his father are rarely simple.

Sypha twists, pushing her hip against Alucard's to urge him onto his back. She props herself up on her elbows, hovering just above him. His hand still blankets the claw marks on her skin, palm the same temperature as the midmorning air.

"They don't bother me." she tells him, forthright. "You know that, yes?"

Of course.

[ He leaves, only for a moment, and returns with a blanket from the next room. Aurelius is done with the plate by the time he returns and yips excitedly at the new blanket, getting caught under it despite Trevor’s best attempts to avoid that and then popping his head back out again to return to his comfy place at Alucard’s feet. ]

I’ll go bother Sypha again. If I’m out of her sight any longer she might worry that I’ve raided some village and stolen all the goats.

[ it’s in good humour, at least. He’s well aware that Sypha trusts him by now. Has from the start. He just likes giving her a difficult time. If she kept her hair long enough for pigtails, he’d be tugging them. ]

Alucard's defense mechanisms reach his mouth last. It is easier to read body language for discomfort, as the time delay between an event happening and his articulating an issue can go on for as long as a week. This only ever happens with the big things though - Trevor being an idiot gets an immediate response. Wanting to do a date night like one that just concluded? Absolutely has taken two weeks to get said before.

So for things related to Dracula and the thing that brought them together in the first place? That's more like diving into a cave and bringing out interesting rocks to examine. It takes time, and then after the rocks are removed, they need to be polished before they are considered done and tended to.

Or some other metaphor. Alucard's given that thought too, but he's yet to find one he likes. What he knows he does like is when Sypha gives direction no matter how small. That helps settle his head. Pull thoughts and feelings in the right direction. Just like now.

"I know," he says, golden eyes meeting her blue ones. There's no particular hint of his emotions for now. "You've never indicated otherwise."

Don't antagonize her too much, okay?

[He's removed some of the pillows, ready to go back to sleep. The blankets are a warm and wonderful weight, aware of how good and warm and safe it is under all the blankets.

It is so strange, being in a place that can be considered safe. That no one can get here, and that there's even a little dog that cares about him. The other shoe will drop one day. For now? He can appreciate this place for what it is.]

"Hmm," it's a nonjudgemental noise, acknowledging that he's listened and taken her words at face value. Whatever else is going on in his head, he believes that Sypha is comfortable in her skin. "Good." That's important.

Equally important to her, however, is his comfort level with the both of them. They are all reminders to one another of some things perhaps best left forgotten. Monsters and monster hunters, those who wield flame and those who've lost to it. They can hurt one another so easily.

Sometimes Sypha thinks about that, about how little damage they've actually done to each other, and she can't catch her breath.

"But do they bother you?" She's settled her weight atop him, mostly, fingers laced over his chest. The points of her elbows drive into the mattress on either side of his arms as she looks down at him. "That's a separate thing from my feelings on the matter. They're not mutually exclusive."

"They're a part of you. They can't bother me, not truly."

Scars are scars. Maps of survival. Perhaps moreso on Trevor, whose torso and back is a testament to that fact. Alucard's only scar is a complex thing because of how it was earned and the shape of it, for it misses so many vital parts but just barely. His father as a doctor, and if he had truly meant to kill his son in that awful moment, he would have. The shape is a reminder of the man who he was for twenty odd years, the man who is mourned by a sole survivor.

The shape of the things on Sypha? That is the man who was transformed by grief. The mark is upon her instead of himself, and Alucard can at least think that much is wrong. Unfair. If anyone was to bear those scars, then it should be him.

He doesn't let those thoughts spill forth. Instead there is a soft sigh, and his hand strokes down the marks softly, running perpendicular.

"They're just another part of that legacy. Same as this castle. Same as what I bear in blood and on my skin. Just manifested differently."

A lovely sentiment, even though Sypha knows it to be a lie. She's seen the way his eyebrow twitches when she leaves her robes on the floor for more than a single day. Although, fine, she can acknowledge the difference between a had habit and something inflicted on her by someone Alucard cared for deeply.

"You don't treat them the same as those pieces," she points out, not unkindly. Her fingers wind through his hair, where it fans out over the pillow like skeins of cornsilk. Sypha's known plenty of women who'd commit murder for hair like his. "I just...I worry that we let you hold that legacy too close. Staying here in the castle. Studying his works. The knowledge kept here is invaluable, but I don't want it if it causes you pain."

"It's a different facet."

That isn't a lie. The castle? That's a combination of safety and experimentation. Projecting will into the world. The books and what's within? Intellect. The most important part of Dracula's legacy, beyond his family. The scars though, that's the worst of his father, pressed upon love ones and all stemming from Lisa's murder.

Sypha's hand in his hair is soothing. Alucard knows she must have figured out that petting his hair is one of the quickest ways to calm him, and there's no part of him that can truly protest at the discovery.

That reason is why Alucard tells himself that it's okay to sigh like he does when they're both away. Lonely. That icy well Sypha once described with a few tracks in it.

"If I didn't want to be here, you know I wouldn't be." Bullshit. Alucard is nothing if not devoted to his family's legacy.

"I wish he knew you better. That they both did, instead of this being the only signifier of an encounter."

As Trevor's pointed out more than once, Sypha's poker face is shit. She's never experienced an emotion she didn't immediately broadcast, including gently exasperated disbelief when her other lover claims not to be shackled to his family's legacy. They are, all of them, living legacies, culminations of works terrifyingly larger than themselves.

She doesn't call him on it. Not out loud. Her eyebrows do that for her. Instead, she traces the slight point of his ear and says, "Is that why we stay here, instead of rebuilding the Belmont estate? So that we might know them the way you did?"

The sad thing is, she can follow the logic. Sypha's spent days submerged in Dracula's notes, marveling at his intellect, completely forgetting how close she'd come to death by his hand. Even Trevor leaves off grumbling when he's neck deep in the marvelous self-filling tub in their washroom, with its never ending supply of clean hot water.

Traces of Lisa around the castle aren't so heavyhanded, since most of her personal effects were burned along with the home she kept in Tepes. Sypha catches her now and then like whiffs of faded incense - clever lamps installed in reading nooks for tired eyes, antibacterial silver tools in one of the labs, a brutally practical herb garden off one of the kitchens. It's oddly comforting to know that the castle has accommodated humans before, and can be made to do so again.

She tips her forehead against Alucard's with a sad smile for the people she will never know. "We know them through you, you know. It may not be ideal, but we get to see the kind of person they shaped, when they were at their best. That's not nothing."

[ Four centuries ago, Sara Trantoul was turned by the vampire Walter Bernhard. She wished to choose death other the bloodlust that came with her new form, but her fiance instead struct a deal with the fairies. She would never need to take blood. Instead, as the fairy queen is a sadistic thing, she would only exist in the night hours and her fiance Leon only in the day.

Their lover, Mathias, remained with both of them for a time. But as he grew older and they did not, he grew more and more conscious that things would never be the same again. He married, and the ceremony was held at dusk to allow the both of them to wish him well.

For a time, both the queen of vampires and fairy knight who could never stand at her side watched over his family. But generations passed, and the sons of Mathias Cronqvist did not take well to the interference of their fathers' consorts in their lives. Oaths were sworn, and neither vampire not fairy would interfere with them. Not as they became famed doctors and alchemists. And not as they were hunted down as witches and burned. ]

[ The decision to put the alchemist into the pillory was calculated. Made to seem, on the surface of things, like a relief. Humiliation and scorn and discomfort instead of more pain. Church officials, even the inquisitor and his men, ignored him entirely when not forcing meager amounts of food and water into him. Even the justice enacted by the people was half-hearted, most of them afraid to approach the man. The occasional kick or strike or attempt to knock his legs out from under him to force his neck and arms to bear his weight. Mud and stones and offal and jeers.

And then night. And silence. And the true nature of it all. Long hours of late October frost and the alchemist alone there with his hair and clothes damp with rain and mud and the 'mistakes' the guards had made when giving him water. Left to freeze. Left to know that whatever devil he served wouldn't be coming to save him. For the first night, the inquisitor leaves him be. On the second, he pays a drunk to douse him with ice water in the small hours of the morning. It's all calculated. The first night awful but bearable. The second worse. All to being the sense of dread to a height on the eve of the third.

On the third, the guards free him from the pillory and bring him to a new cell. Nicer than the first one. Dry and free of vermin, with straw for a bed. A small table in one corner with two stools. The inquisitor sits on one. In front of him is a plate of hot food and a mug of wine, and the confession papers. ]

I think that perhaps you have suffered enough, my son.

[ His voice is soft. Pain, and then kindness, and then pain again. The Inquisitor has never failed to get a confession like this, where his peers who use pain alone struggle the second a witch turns stubborn.

The charges on the paper range from the wilful spread of disease to consorting and laying with devils to treason against one's fellow man. The first, the man has already confessed to verbally. Offering healthy people what he called a weakened form of the plague that has done such evil to nearby towns. A vaccine, he called it. ]

Sign, and then we can eat.

[It was going to always end like this. Alucard had known that for some time, because it was how his family usually died. Oh, a few generations could squeak by under the radar, but the desire to do good and educate the world always won out. Then the world kicked the shit out of them, because it still was not ready for the Tepes family's way of understanding.

Witches, heretics, whatever. Alucard grew up learning medicine and science and how to keep himself safe. A doctor shouldn't need to wield a sword, but his father had him learn all the same. It had saved Alucard's life so many times, but it did precious little when his parents burned. They told him to stay away from Targoviste, and Alucard had.

He traveled. An alchemist and doctor with no home, bartering services for food and shelter. Researching when h could.

It was now with the Ottomans on the horizon that he had made a decision: to go to Istanbul. To see if he could make it there, where the Arabic texts were so advanced, and maybe he could survive. Convert to a religion if needed. Whatever it took.

But the church had captured him, stopped en route because of a village about to face the plague. So it had gone. An endurance test. His immune system weakening from the water, the meager rations, and the cold, cold nighhts.

He's a mess when he's brought into the cell. But Alucard doesn't move beyond where he has been put. Only reaches for the papers, reads them, then places them where they were.]

It is a sin to lie. I will do no such thing.

[He did not grow up with faith, but Alucard understands the church all the same.]

You're going to kill me. Confessions are only a formality.

[ The inquisitor's face doesn't turn as Alucard puts the papers back down. Some of them are like this. It's a shame, how they do this to themselves. ]

We are going to save you. Scourge you of whatever devil is whispering these ideas into your ears. The process need not be so difficult. [ He reaches forward, stroking lumps of mud from Alucard's hair. ] It need not be fatal. Whatever poison has taken hold of you, you can purge it with the stroke of a pen. This will all be over.

[We are going to save you. Alucard wants to laugh, but his throat is far too dry and his situation without anything that could prompt humor from him. There's nothing to save.

He doesn't flinch when the inquistor's hand reaches out. The only expression on his face is that of exhausted resignation, of knowing where this means to end. There's only one way it could end, and the only mercy available to him is speeding this along to that inevitable conclusion.]

I know the arcs of my family members. It is always fatal.

[If a church grabs a Tepes, it only ever ends this way.]

Consign me to the flames and expedite the work, or else exile me from Wallachia. Either way places me among devils.

"No. The Hold just requires a lot of staircase work and labor of a different sort, and I'm not ready to tackle that yet."

He's only barely made an impact on all the blood stains, and to repair that grand staircase is a nightmare of logistics and material. Not touching the Hold was in fact a poor choice for Trevor's and Sypha's work, for so much of what lay ahead for them was based in that collection below the earth. He needed to get to it, he really did, but the castle? He had a strong bias towards it.

Sypha's expression isn't an impossible thing to interpret. Her hands are warm against cold ears, and the questions give him so much pause after his immediate and nearly flippant response. His actions always said more, and leave it to a Speaker to interpret them appropriately.

In all that honest consideration, Sypha pulls Alucard out of his own thoughts.

"No. But..." he trails off. He always does, when competing thoughts battle for articulation. "It upsets me all the same."

An understatement, because of course it's an understatement. Alucard deals almost exclusively in those.

"Never should have been scars."

The flames.

[ He raises an eyebrow, then shakes his head. The type who breaks too easily, then. The type that make his job difficult. The kind who think they've resigned themselves to the worst.

Slowly, methodically, he takes the candle from the table and stands, nodding to one of the guards. ]

His arm, hold it out. The left.

[ He still needs to be able to write, after all. The guard he motioned to grabs Alucard's wrist and pulls his arm outward in front of him, pulling the damp, stained sleeve of his coat back as far as the elbow. ]

[Alucard doesn't fight back. His left arm is limp like a doll's, and he doesn't react to being manhandled either.

They'll burn the arm until he signs, because of course. The document is the only thing that matters.]

It isn't a lie to say I refused the opportunity to confess and that I refused to sign the papers.

[A quiet observation. Nothing more.]

True. But irrelevant. None of this is a punishment.

[ He pats the back of Alucard's hand almost sympathetically, and then moves the candle underneath it. Lets the flame of it lick at the pads of his fingers. ]

This is a lesson. I would have you understand what you are asking for.

[ He likes people to be afraid of the flames, thank you very much. ]

The same death as my parents. Death by smoke inhalation, with the flames meant to inflict pain and act as a precursor to hellfire.

[For all the exhausted resignation in Alucard's tone, his hand still reacts. Fingers curl, trying to escape the flame. He hisses at the burns as they start to form. There's finally something new on his face, all brought about by a living flame.]

[ Better. Perhaps another night without sleep would have produced a more satisfying response, but the third night is always a tricky one. Some people wear down further. Some adapt, get it into their heads that their masters might have given them the means to survive this. ]

Cleansing, not death. Cleansing of the devil's influence.

[ He moves the candle to the top of the palm and leaves it there at the fleshy part where the fingers begin. ]

You understand, yes? That this is the least of that.

Whatever you wish to name it.

[It hurts. Of course it hurts. Alucard can feel the flesh scald and blister and burst, and the sharp hiss does become a yelp. Finally.

But it changes nothing.]

Why does it matter?

[To you, he means.]

[ There's a flash of satisfaction in his eyes, at that. He likes reactions. Reactions are rewarding. ]

Because I do not consign innocent men to the flames. [ He pushes Alucard's hand downward. ]

Sign. If the flames are what you want, sign.

[....That's a trap.

That's a trap and Alucard knows it. He's in pain, he wants to just die already, he should ignore the statement.

But no. That statement means so much. That the priest has been fucking with him for three days and why?

Alucard's arm finally begins to twist and try and pull away. There's the real threat of something catching now.

There's no survival instinct that's kicked in. There's only paralysis.]

[ There. A reaction. ]

Enough.

[ He pulls the candle away. Not out of any sort of kindness, but because his job comes with a certain understanding of the human body. Too much damage, and it stops feeling. Too much pain at once and the mind decouples from it. His peers make mistakes like that, and so those under their care endure.

Periods of rest are needed, even if only short ones. Witches need space to dread. ]

The flames burn out. They end. This? This does not.

[Alucard's fingers flex out of instinct, but the rest of him flinches wildly. This is not good. Or it could be, if infection sets in and the church decides to keep him alive for a little while. Oh, it'll be a nasty way to go, but no worse than the other options available to him.

But still, the implications of that trap ring in Alucard's mind. He needs time to parse them out. Time and less burnt flesh smell in the room.

He's not meeting the man's eyes. He hasn't been.]

You want something besides a confession.

[It's a guess. A good one.]

Catch All

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JUST THROW EVERY AU INTO A BLENDER I feel bad for anyone who's trying to read this without context

believe it or not trevor has no icons appropriate for when I play characters who are not trevor

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