[He'd been so afraid for her, that night. All things considered, she's been bearing up...almost unsettlingly well, with only a few scattered moments of vulnerability, and she half-wonders if that isn't a sign that she's not processing things all that well in her own right, whatever opinions she might have on the subject on an objective level.

In some ways, it never quite seems real unless she sees the magnitude of it reflected in her son's expression. It happened; she was taken and tried and insulted and beaten, but it's as though there's a chasm between the horror of it and the place where she's sitting now, bridged only when she's able to see how it had affected the ones she loves around her. They were going to kill her, but with no real frame of reference for what that means on an individual level, it's a set of emotions only accessed through the grief reflected back in others. She could have died, and didn't, and someday she suspects a dam is going to burst and drown her in weeping and screaming from it, but as yet it simply...hasn't come.

But it's not the same, when it's her boy. Her boy, who was so afraid; her boy, who had to listen to creatures beneath him degrading and deriding his mother. Her boy, grown and yet in some things still such a child, a man whose hands have taken life yet still guide his mother's fingers to rest against his cheek.]

We've gone from "go back and put the whole town on spikes" to "go back and burn the whole church to ashes". It's not much of an improvement.

[And yet it is an improvement. Particularly when all things considered, there's really no way anyone could stop Dracula from doing whatever he pleases, except that he still cares to listen to her opinion.]

What do you want to do? Truthfully. What you want, however petty or noble or anything in between.