Sypha hides a pleased smile against Alucard's neck. Her industrious, forward thinking vampire, taking a morning off because he recognized she might like the company? That's progress. She sighs her approval and squirms a little closer, fingers opening and closing over the tip of the scar. Everything in balance.
"Thank you," she says, "I hope you weren't too bored."
She is. Cuter when she's squished between himself and Trevor, but even with one of them? Sypha's a peaceful little thing, hiding the terrifying powerhouse that the night world knows her to be and fears. It has never escaped Alucard's notice that he and Trevor get a side of Sypha that isn't just her at her best, it's her at her most caring, because there's only two people that will ever get to see that side of her.
Alucard's fingers go still at the scars on Sypha's arms. By accident, they line up precisely with where his father's claws once gouged, and it is as he lifts his head up that Alucard clocks their position. The realization makes him go still, and all words stop flowing.
"Cute is for kittens. And puppies." Sypha grumbles, puppies on the brain this morning. Cute is for harmless things...and those that choose to set harm aside for a select few. All right, fine, she can get behind that line of reasoning; possibly no one else alive has ever seen the way Alucard catches his tongue between his teeth when he's reading a particularly dense passage.
She's smothering laughter when he freezes up beside her, slow dhampiric heartbeat stuttering against her cheek. Frowning, Sypha peels away and catches him staring pensively at her shoulder.
She has other scars. Worse ones. Hell, Trevor's practically a topographical map of some alien hellscape, his hide's so marked up. These are things they accept about one another. Yet Alucard knows the history of these particular scars, and seeing his fingers splayed over the raised marks is...jarring in a way she hadn't expected.
Alucard, lost in thought as he is, knows that much. He can lie and say he's fine, but Sypha will call him out in an instant. He can say nothing, and she'll prod at him until he speaks. He can be truthful to the degree of admitting he's thinking of his father, but that's a mood killer.
So the honest but vague answer it is. His fingers slide a little bit beyond those marks, curling around the back of her upper arm instead.
"Just tracing lines."
They both do it to Trevor in their idle moments. He rarely seems bothered by it. Alucard has no issue with either of them touching the horrid gash that marks the start of events that brought them together. This shouldn't be different and yet.
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.
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."
"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."
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."
"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.
"Not that I don't have the utmost faith in you, but we really should hire the structural work out to people who know what they're doing." That's a fight she's been putting off, too. the Castle is beyond the understanding of your average artisan, so it gets a pass, but Trevor's not going to like a small army of craftspeople tromping around in the Hold.
Whereas if Alucard ever fully expresses an emotion, the world may flinch off its axis. Sypha presses a kiss to the miniscule wrinkle between his eyebrows that appears when he admits to being 'upset'.
"If it helps, I don't think of him when I see it," she strokes his hair off his forehead, and yes, sure, she's fully reclining on him like he's a divan, now. So what? He's very comfortable. "I think about how you said you weren't alone anymore, and then we proved it."
"I built the entire crypt under Gresit, you know." Because Sypha, you're going to come for his engineering abilities when you broke it in the first place? He thinks not. And he absolutely thinks not that he'll allow any random person into that hold.
The kiss to the Alucard version of a deeply furrowed brow mollifies him only slightly. The wrinkle remains, and he huffs like the child he sometimes is through all the bluster and attempts at maturity.
It's Sypha just using him as furniture that causes the dhampir to let go of that thought. She's warm, and brings so much warmth with her.
"It might help in time." That could be a truth. He doesn't know for sure. "It's one of the few remaining marks of him in this world."
"You're an architect now, too?" Sypha mock-gasps. "So accomplished at nineteen!" In truth, she'd figured Dracula had had some sort of team of builders, but that he'd entombed them all within his grand design, like the Pharaohs of old.
...that's probably exactly the kind of thing Alucard worries she thinks of his father. Damn.
"I won't argue that he left some, um, other scars," she's thinking about the chasm the Castle gouged into the earth when she dragged its dodecahedron sideways through space and time, or the burnt swaths of bloodied ground that were once prospering villages. "But there's you, too. And I think in time we can apply all the things he hoarded here to greater use. That will be one hell of a legacy." If she has anything to say about it.
"Yes, actually." Alucard's response is as serious as anything. "We worked on that together. It was...awkward, once I matured. Architecture and engineering helped us bond as adults."
When he was a child, attention and a lesson in one of the labs was more than enough to mollify him. Growing older, growing faster had been hard. Both he and his father struggled with it, but building? That had been the key.
There's a nod of acknowledgement with other scars, but it doesn't change where his mind sits now.
"I'm not so concerned with that external legacy as within this....configuration of ours." Family. He means to say family. "And I think that at the end of the day, they may mean something different when I look at them."
Oof, she may have overstepped there. She hasn't yet fully worked through the nuances of Alucard's...situation. He isn't just a nineteen (twenty?) year old who can pass as older, he's matured at a completely different rate from humans. How much of that was physical versus mental? Vice versa? Or does a human baseline even stand as a point of comparison?
"I'm glad you found something for the both of you," she says, by way of apology.
It isn't until his touch returns to her scars, rasping over them like the edge of an autumn leaf, that Sypha realizes this particular insecurity is smaller, quieter, more close to home and all the more vulnerable for it. Concern tugs at the corners of her mouth.
"We love you, Alucard." Best make that as plain as can be. "And yes, your father did try to kill us, but you are your own person. You've proved that with your own pain. Don't...don't cause yourself any more, please."
There's little more than a hum of acknowledgement for the apology. Sypha didn't know. Couldn't have known, because how would anyone bond with their half-vampire son? It was an open book of a thing, and there's no need to dwell on it.
"I love you both as well." It's a response that is automatic these days because it is a simple truth. He loves them both and they only get a single lifetime together. To hesitate to say the words is stupid. Selfish in it's way, for all he can think of is how many more years he'll go without saying them to Trevor's and Sypha's faces.
"And you know as well as I that that's easier said than done."
He doesn't quite laugh or smile, but there's an approximation of it. That and some real warmth from within, because she cares and Alucard knows she knows it's a challenge. "But I will continue to try."
Sypha heaves a dramatic sigh and lets her face drop against his neck with an emphatic "Ugh." If Alucard's attempted 'no, I'll stay behind and haunt my father's castle unto eternity' stunt had shown her anything, it was how quickly he'd throw himself at an opportunity to be tragic and self sacrificing. "Yes. Yes, I know. We'll work on it."
Then, because she's a firm believer in positive reinforcement, and this has been a morning of prolonged cuddling and relatively straightforward emotional speech, she gives a full-body wiggle and nibbles at the slope of his shoulder. "Know that I appreciate all your efforts immensely."
Being a dramatic fuck is an inherited trait. Just look at Dracula!
He knows what that ugh really means. Alucard knows he should apologize just a little for it, but he can't quite manage it. It is easier said than done. The castle really can't be left alone, and it does need work. Excuses and true statements can coexist.
Sypha pushes. She always has, and it's in betterment of himself, of Trevor, and all three of them. What Alucard takes more issue with is the pace, because this is a little too much too fast.
Sypha also wiggles, and Alucard sighs. Nearly swoons if the nibble to his shoulder is any indication.
"I'm always aware. Just as I know you want me to be at peace with so many things."
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"Thank you," she says, "I hope you weren't too bored."
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She is. Cuter when she's squished between himself and Trevor, but even with one of them? Sypha's a peaceful little thing, hiding the terrifying powerhouse that the night world knows her to be and fears. It has never escaped Alucard's notice that he and Trevor get a side of Sypha that isn't just her at her best, it's her at her most caring, because there's only two people that will ever get to see that side of her.
Alucard's fingers go still at the scars on Sypha's arms. By accident, they line up precisely with where his father's claws once gouged, and it is as he lifts his head up that Alucard clocks their position. The realization makes him go still, and all words stop flowing.
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She's smothering laughter when he freezes up beside her, slow dhampiric heartbeat stuttering against her cheek. Frowning, Sypha peels away and catches him staring pensively at her shoulder.
She has other scars. Worse ones. Hell, Trevor's practically a topographical map of some alien hellscape, his hide's so marked up. These are things they accept about one another. Yet Alucard knows the history of these particular scars, and seeing his fingers splayed over the raised marks is...jarring in a way she hadn't expected.
"Are you sure you're all right?"
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Alucard, lost in thought as he is, knows that much. He can lie and say he's fine, but Sypha will call him out in an instant. He can say nothing, and she'll prod at him until he speaks. He can be truthful to the degree of admitting he's thinking of his father, but that's a mood killer.
So the honest but vague answer it is. His fingers slide a little bit beyond those marks, curling around the back of her upper arm instead.
"Just tracing lines."
They both do it to Trevor in their idle moments. He rarely seems bothered by it. Alucard has no issue with either of them touching the horrid gash that marks the start of events that brought them together. This shouldn't be different and yet.
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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?"
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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."
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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."
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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."
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"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."
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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."
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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."
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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."
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Whereas if Alucard ever fully expresses an emotion, the world may flinch off its axis. Sypha presses a kiss to the miniscule wrinkle between his eyebrows that appears when he admits to being 'upset'.
"If it helps, I don't think of him when I see it," she strokes his hair off his forehead, and yes, sure, she's fully reclining on him like he's a divan, now. So what? He's very comfortable. "I think about how you said you weren't alone anymore, and then we proved it."
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The kiss to the Alucard version of a deeply furrowed brow mollifies him only slightly. The wrinkle remains, and he huffs like the child he sometimes is through all the bluster and attempts at maturity.
It's Sypha just using him as furniture that causes the dhampir to let go of that thought. She's warm, and brings so much warmth with her.
"It might help in time." That could be a truth. He doesn't know for sure. "It's one of the few remaining marks of him in this world."
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...that's probably exactly the kind of thing Alucard worries she thinks of his father. Damn.
"I won't argue that he left some, um, other scars," she's thinking about the chasm the Castle gouged into the earth when she dragged its dodecahedron sideways through space and time, or the burnt swaths of bloodied ground that were once prospering villages. "But there's you, too. And I think in time we can apply all the things he hoarded here to greater use. That will be one hell of a legacy." If she has anything to say about it.
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When he was a child, attention and a lesson in one of the labs was more than enough to mollify him. Growing older, growing faster had been hard. Both he and his father struggled with it, but building? That had been the key.
There's a nod of acknowledgement with other scars, but it doesn't change where his mind sits now.
"I'm not so concerned with that external legacy as within this....configuration of ours." Family. He means to say family. "And I think that at the end of the day, they may mean something different when I look at them."
A Rorschach test of daddy issues.
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"I'm glad you found something for the both of you," she says, by way of apology.
It isn't until his touch returns to her scars, rasping over them like the edge of an autumn leaf, that Sypha realizes this particular insecurity is smaller, quieter, more close to home and all the more vulnerable for it. Concern tugs at the corners of her mouth.
"We love you, Alucard." Best make that as plain as can be. "And yes, your father did try to kill us, but you are your own person. You've proved that with your own pain. Don't...don't cause yourself any more, please."
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"I love you both as well." It's a response that is automatic these days because it is a simple truth. He loves them both and they only get a single lifetime together. To hesitate to say the words is stupid. Selfish in it's way, for all he can think of is how many more years he'll go without saying them to Trevor's and Sypha's faces.
"And you know as well as I that that's easier said than done."
He doesn't quite laugh or smile, but there's an approximation of it. That and some real warmth from within, because she cares and Alucard knows she knows it's a challenge. "But I will continue to try."
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Then, because she's a firm believer in positive reinforcement, and this has been a morning of prolonged cuddling and relatively straightforward emotional speech, she gives a full-body wiggle and nibbles at the slope of his shoulder. "Know that I appreciate all your efforts immensely."
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He knows what that ugh really means. Alucard knows he should apologize just a little for it, but he can't quite manage it. It is easier said than done. The castle really can't be left alone, and it does need work. Excuses and true statements can coexist.
Sypha pushes. She always has, and it's in betterment of himself, of Trevor, and all three of them. What Alucard takes more issue with is the pace, because this is a little too much too fast.
Sypha also wiggles, and Alucard sighs. Nearly swoons if the nibble to his shoulder is any indication.
"I'm always aware. Just as I know you want me to be at peace with so many things."