[The reasoning Alucard puts on display as he lays out his recitation proves to be a double-edged sword, both serving his cause and leaving his father to bristle at it. It helps in the clarity it lends, building a framework of narrative that the details then color in; it also helps, to some degree, by preempting targeted questions about the choices he'd made by showing in advance what he'd considered when he made them.
But the relative coldness of his reasoning lacks the fire of rage that clearly burns behind Dracula's eyes, and on some level it might truly have been better for him if he'd been able to admit to flying into a fury and succumbing to reckless anger, if only because it's a response that would have resonated better with his father's emotions.
As it is, it creates a terrible duality between them — one only made worse by the memory of the name Alucard. People call him the opposite of his father. In a moment like this, opposition breeds and warrants a certain level of contempt. There is, after all, a very slender difference between what his mother would want and what someone who loves her with such abandon might believe she deserves.
(For her sake, there should be peace. For her sake, there should be war.)
I find myself wondering, his father says in a slow and chilling way, whether my son could possibly be afraid of a town full of pitiful men and their pitiful arts. Do you think you lack power enough to challenge them?
(For little more than an insult, Dracula alone once slaughtered and impaled forty merchants. The near execution of a wife and mother — the magnitude of such a transgression is so much greater than a mere insult.)
Is my son so weak that fools and peasants pose such a difficulty to him?
Dracula's hand comes to rest on the back of the chair set to hold him, long nails curling in toward the wood of the frame supports in an unholy grip.
You are my son, Dracula says, with harsh emphasis on the last two words. Is it beyond you to preserve that which is yours and answer insult in kind, such that you are merely left to choose one or the other?]
no subject
But the relative coldness of his reasoning lacks the fire of rage that clearly burns behind Dracula's eyes, and on some level it might truly have been better for him if he'd been able to admit to flying into a fury and succumbing to reckless anger, if only because it's a response that would have resonated better with his father's emotions.
As it is, it creates a terrible duality between them — one only made worse by the memory of the name Alucard. People call him the opposite of his father. In a moment like this, opposition breeds and warrants a certain level of contempt. There is, after all, a very slender difference between what his mother would want and what someone who loves her with such abandon might believe she deserves.
(For her sake, there should be peace. For her sake, there should be war.)
I find myself wondering, his father says in a slow and chilling way, whether my son could possibly be afraid of a town full of pitiful men and their pitiful arts. Do you think you lack power enough to challenge them?
(For little more than an insult, Dracula alone once slaughtered and impaled forty merchants. The near execution of a wife and mother — the magnitude of such a transgression is so much greater than a mere insult.)
Is my son so weak that fools and peasants pose such a difficulty to him?
Dracula's hand comes to rest on the back of the chair set to hold him, long nails curling in toward the wood of the frame supports in an unholy grip.
You are my son, Dracula says, with harsh emphasis on the last two words. Is it beyond you to preserve that which is yours and answer insult in kind, such that you are merely left to choose one or the other?]