"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."