With matercula

[cryptsleeper]

Continued from here!

[The way back to the castle brought no surprises. No mobs. Nothing. There was only the road and there was only silence. For most of, Alucard slept, stirring only when there was a change in terrain or something felt off. His sleep wasn't deep. It was just enough to take the reins from his mother if he absolutely had to.

That never came to pass, and in the foothills of the Carpathians, familiar spires rose above the treeline. For any other travelers, the word to describe the spires would be loom. Alucard considered them welcoming. They were home, the horrors far, far behind them and any church hounds were equally distant.

Alucard sleeps for a solid week, having not bothered to eat before collapsing on his bed and only taking a cursory five minutes to try and remove all the blood from his person. (The tattered remains of his shirt and trousers were exchanged for sleep clothes, at least.) It's longer than he expected, the expanse of energy hadn't felt that intense at the time. But it was, and his body decided that those same abilities that had propelled Alucard ever forward needed that much time to reset.

When he wakes, there's an uncertainty that everything before wasn't a dream. It's only when he walks over to the mirror to look at himself, enough blood still there (his hair's a matted mess, it's not a good look) to remind him: yes. Everything transpired as you remember it.

The next part is routine. Cleaning all the blood off. Finding clean clothes. Changing the sheets on his bed not because of the few spots of dried blood, but because the stink of it is alarming at best. It helps keep his mind away from the next wave of emotion that he knows has to hit sooner or later. The emotional one, the one that's going to take more time to get through. Guilt, grief, anger, relief, all of it, a churning mess that will interact with two others and make those same feelings flare like wildfires. He ought to eat first.

But he doesn't. Alucard walks the halls of the castle instead. His parents should know he's awake.]

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[matercula]

[They had made light, on the way home, of the inevitable storms set to rock the house when Vlad Dracula Ţepeş eventually caught wind of what had transpired while he traveled, but the reality proves to be no joking matter.

Lisa has never liked fighting with her husband, despite knowing that she is perhaps the one being on the entirety of the earth — including their own son — who can raise her voice against him with impunity. Even in his most furious moments, Vlad never directs his ire toward her, only the circumstances that surround their disagreement. Their wedding rings never leave their fingers, no matter how terrible the clash. And even when they separate to calm down and process through the verbal blows exchanged, sooner or later they always gravitate back to each other again.

That is, after all, what love is. Not the absence of disagreement, but the ability to work through such conflicts together.

Still, this does prove to be perhaps the worst fight they have in her recent memory, if not the worst they've had in the whole of their time together. Vlad rages with fire and fury from his outrage, but also from his guilt and his pain at having failed to protect her from what had transpired. The people of Târgoviște make for an easy outlet for his anger, and if he is able to vent his rage upon them, then he doesn't have to turn it inward toward himself. It is, after all, far easier to condemn someone for the mote in their eye than to deal with the branch in one's own.

He rails upon her when she defends their right to live, accusing her of protecting the guilty. He finds it incomprehensible that she would stand up for a people who had come so close to executing her out of baseless hatred and superstitious fear, and it only reminds her that any affection Vlad may hold for humanity is a mere refraction of his singular love for her. He is not altruistic by nature. He has no compassion for compassion's sake. What progress he's made toward tolerating humanity endures solely because she lives, and she shudders to think how that all might come undone if she really were to die.

It's been a week, now, of ongoing marathon fighting, interspersed in the middle with surreal little pauses of tenderness and gentle concern. They fight for hours, separate, and then quietly come back together again to curl up together near the fire for a short spell before bed. Come the morning, they fight over breakfast, storm away, and before mid-afternoon Vlad is back with some book he's unearthed for her that will better than replace one she'd lost. They fight and they rage and before long they're drawn back to each other again, both too stubborn to allow Târgoviște to remain as a wedge between their happiness for long, and sometimes when she weeps he holds her and doesn't suggest making the town's rivers run with the blood of its inhabitants, because he's preoccupied with reminding her that she's safe in the cradle of his arms.

It's still not decided, the fate of Târgoviște. The battle continues on, in bits and pieces. But it's one of the quiet lulls now, and she and Vlad are in his parlor, her head on his shoulder as she reads and his pencil scratching against a yellowed page as he sketches a replacement portrait for her from memory.

They both hear the footsteps in the hall, and know who it must be. Lucky, perhaps, that she's got most of her weight propped against her husband at this point, because it removes the possibility that he might get up and go confront his son alone, while she rests here.]

We're in the parlor, Adrian.

[It's significant, that she uses the word we. It'll warn him, perhaps, that he'll be faced with the both of them when he enters. But it'll also let him know in advance that his parents are still defining themselves as a unit, still together, no matter the arguments that had unfolded while he'd slept.]

[cryptsleeper]

[Prague has been good. Two years in, and there are routines. A sense of normalcy. (In so much as a city that thinks some politics can be solved with tossing someone out a window is normal.) The castle hasn't moved in two years save for the odd week-long get away. The three of them are only ever there on the weekends otherwise, unless there is an emergency demand for medical supplies.

(No one has looked twice at the success rate of the clinic. It is only known that the woman there is skilled and she only demands payment from those who can afford it, so that those who can't can receive treatment. Alucard smiled thinly the first time he heard someone in a crowd speak of the concept and call it Christian charity.)

Alucard's place, place as Adrian and not Alucard, is either as a large wolf watching his mother work or else with the printers He proof reads drafts before anything gets type set, he double checks pages for errors and makes corrections, he comes home with ink smudged on his hands and on his face and he grumbles only when his mother tries to rub away all of it with her thumb. He talks of work generally, and of the more alarming things when he must. There is a renewed interest in witches starting to bloom, and safety is all he and his father think about most days.

It's a castle weekend again. The only time that either one of them really let Lisa alone, because she is safe within the walls there. Both of them are paranoid, will be until the natural end of her life. (No one has started to think about what will happen after that.) It's night, night and he and his father have been out and considering where the castle might go next when the weigh station they have been at for the past two years must finally be left behind. Quiet and with a full moon overhead and--

--and then Alucard is bursting through the front doors of the castle, shifting from wolf form to human as he yells for his mother.]

We need to go to the castle's engine room! Now!