miraclewhip | (for cryptsleeper)

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(for cryptsleeper)

[ He remembers- maybe about half of what happened last night. A little more, perhaps. He remembers the comments that initiated the fight. Vaguely remembers being dragged back to the inn. Remembers throwing cold water on his face to wake himself up to do the terrible fucking job of stitching himself back up that he found himself with this morning (if there was ever a chance to keep that fucking cut from scarring, well, he's gone and botched it).

And he remembers telling the fucking vampire things that he probably should not have told the fucking vampire. He doesn't remember the specifics but he knows that he said too much. More than he's told anyone in a decade maybe. All for the sake of a petty victory that he doesn't even remember if he achieved.

He's uncharacteristically quiet today, even for being as hungover as he is. He forces the almost-solid porridge down his throat when it's pushed in front of him. He drinks half the water that he was using to wash himself last night and pours the other half over his head to wake himself up after maybe an hour of sleep. He only interrupts Sypha's long, long 'discussion' when she stares at him for an indication that he's still awake. It's after that that he's dismissed to the back of the wagon, either because Sypha can't stand his presence right now or because she doesn't trust him not to fall off and end up tangled under its wheels.

(Can't blame her, being tangled up under the wheels of a wagon sounds better than being in his own head right now, even without the throbbing pain.)

He doesn't sleep, mostly because he's been told not to and he is, even more uncharacteristically, on his best behavior right now. The day is mostly uneventful until sometime in the afternoon, when a particularly foolish highwayman sees a wagon driven by a single speaker woman and tries to take advantage of the situation. He's driven off within moments, of course, harmlessly to both them and himself, and the worst that happens is that the horses are startled by Sypha's display and the wagon lurches to one side, knocking Trevor onto his side against the wooden floor. It's only after everything has been confirmed okay, once the horses are calm and they're moving again, that he places a hand to his lower chest. ]

Fuck.

[ It's warm. And damp. He's gone and opened his shitty stitches, hasn't he? ]

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[ And then he's elbowed. Which is normally not something noteworthy, but in this context the meaning is clear. His turn. ]

Last I checked, you were an adult. You don't need protection.

[ Which isn't the same as denying it, because denying it would be a lie, and he has to tell the truth. The elbow said so. ]

Ask away.

Trevor.

[That's the bullshit detected voice. Alucard's tone sobers up, but he decides to focus his attention on the viewing mirror instead. The forest in it is all too serene.]

Your sister named my father as Mathais. Not Vlad. Not Dracula. Mathais. [His elbows rest on both arms of the chair.]

This factors into what you've already told me, and I've seen the name in the record since. [The boat. That horrible fucking dream.] What...?

[What did you spare me the first time?]

[ Well, shit. ]

Mathias Cronqvist. Count Mathias Cronqvist, though he never used the title. It was your father's name, before he was turned.

[ Which answers almost nothing, and Alucard is almost certainly going to ask for more answers than just that. ]

The older records use that name instead of the new one he took - Leon, and his sons, and their sons. Some of the family used the names interchangeably, especially if they spent a lot of time in the old archives.

I surmised most of that.

[But thank you for confirming.]

What was the personal connection?

Doctor to the Trantoul family, first. Closest friend of Leon's fiancee. When he left on the crusades, she asked Mathias to go with him as medic. He proved himself a great tactician and when they returned he and Leon had come to realize that there was more evil within France than outside of it. He stayed with Leon's company and they fought together, hunting down the vampire known as- Walter I think?

[ He pauses there for now. That's what Alucard asked for. The connection. Not how it fell apart. If he was feeling particularly obstinate he would have only told him that Mathias was doctor to Sara's family, but half-truths are only dragging this out. ]

[Doctor. Oh now that's rich, and there's actually a little snort at that detail. The rest is listened to in silence, because this? This is only part one.

But how it ends is tragedy, Trevor's revealed that much. The middle though, the how the...if he's to be honest the question of what did my father do? is the heart.]

The hunt took a bad turn. How?

The short version is that two out of three of them ended up turned, and nobody was happy about it.

[ He's going to ask for the longer version. Trevor knows he is. ]

The long version- Walter couldn't die. Not for long. He'd been killed before, but he came back. Mathias had a solution - a thing made with alchemy called a Crimson Stone. It- let me remember. It's a kind of medicine, except it's a rock. It pulls all the bad shit out of a body and holds it. And it could do that with the vampirism, too. And it would be a dangerous relic, once that happened, but then they could just hide it somewhere- at the bottom of a big fucking hole in Wallachia, for example.

Very short. And I know my father, he did something incredibly foolish that you've excluded from the narrative.

[He's not stupid. Dracula's reputation is known.]

Medical alchemy, from the sounds of it. And take it out east where no one's going to be looking for it in Wallachia's mountains. I do follow the logic.

Walter caught wind of the plan, and either it scared him or he wanted the stone for his own. Your father had an apprentice, and that man had a daughter - Justine. Walter took Justine, turned her, and demanded Mathias and Leon use the stone to cure her and then give it to him.

[ And he sighs. Because here is the part where everyone starts doing the absolute wrong thing for the absolute best reasons. ]

They refused. They couldn't risk making him more powerful. And so he released Justine into the Trantoul estate one night, once her hunger became unbearable. It was a massacre. She was only a little less powerful than the vampire who had turned her, and even were she not none of them could bear to turn their blade on a child. The apprentice's entire family were the first victims. Several members of Leon and Mathias' company. Sara- Leon wrote that Sara tried to calm her, and she was gravely wounded in the process. Mathias tried to help her but- she was in one of those sleeps. The ones that aren't being dead, but that people don't wake from.

[As said. Stupider and stupider.

Alucard sighs, and begins to massage the bridge of his nose slowly. This is all good to know, in spite of the pain. He'd have learned it eventually. Sypha had been discussing getting past those silver journal covers.]

And then he did something worse, didn't he?

He took Sara and the stone one night. Took them to Walter. Offered the stone and his services as alchemist and asked him to turn Sara in return, to save her.

[ So yes. He pauses for as long as he thinks is appropriate for Alucard to react to that, and then continues as soon as he thinks that reaction is going to turn from horror to something more damaging. ]

With him gone, the apprentice - Rinaldo - he used Mathias' research to make the Morning Star in the same way that your father made that stone. To draw out Walter's power, but to use it to make a weapon to kill him with instead of a trinket to be hidden away. He tracked down his daughter and used it to kill her, first. Then he passed it on to Leon. Asked him to use it to kill Walter and rescue Mathias and Sara both.

...Dramatics are truly his forte.

[That's about all he can manage at the moment. Because the rest is far too exhausting to deal with. It is a tragedy on every level, and worse than that, the personal hatred of Trevor's family for his own is far more justified than he ever expected.]

A rescue that failed. Because we know how the story ends.

The rest- the rest you can guess. Walter turned the both of them, not just Sara, because Mathias was useful. Leon arrived to find Walter dead and the stone completed, and it became the source of your father's power. Sara couldn't stand the hunger, and chose to die to complete the whip.

Your father never forgave Leon for being the one to kill Sara. Leon never forgave him for being the one to make Sara choose death. They both turned to the task of protecting Europe from others like Walter in their own ways - the Belmonts by day, and Dracula by night. They both fled France out of respect for Sara, so her family name wouldn't be darkened further by their actions. They came to Wallachia, and Leon built his home where they had meant to bury Walter.

Pair of fucked-up families.

[Strangely enough, silence is not Alucard's response at the end of this tale. It is, instead, a very put upon sigh that is trying to buy him time for a proper reaction. There are quite a few, but the one Alucard settles on first is perhaps the easiest:]

You were right to keep this from me at the time. Thank you.

[Because in that moment, after that dream, on that horrible goddamn boat, he would have simply fell into another awful silence. One coupled with too much guilt.

As it stands, Alucard takes a moment more to gather his thoughts, then closes his eyes for a moment.]

The rest explains itself. And we sit here with this story because of all those choices.

We do. All the wrong things, for all the right reasons, and it led here.

[ And then- and then something slips onto place. And Trevor's face, calm while reciting all of this, goes pale and wild-eyed. ]

...fuck.

[ Dracula did not have that fucking stone when they encountered him. Nothing of it has appeared in all their time in the castle. And Carmilla had taken that ring and just waited for Alucard, knowing that he could overpower her. That had seemed strange, but if she'd thought that that plain wedding ring was the stone- ]

To three.

[Again, it seems.

But then Trevor's expression shifts into something so much worse. Alucard's not sure what wild realization has been had, but that? He's never seen Trevor do that before.]

What is it?

[ He doesn't answer. Instead, he's gripping the sides of the mirror, tightly enough that it would be in danger of cracking if it were something normal. ]

Walter Bernhard. Walter Bernhard Fucking show me him.

[ Nothing shows, else what does show is so blurred as to be useless. A face is easier to work with than a name, let alone a name 400 years old. ]

[Alucard reaches over, hand on Trevor's shoulder. It's to try and focus the mirror, as Trevor's eye has made it harder to see.

No changes. Alucard's eyes narrow.]

Leon's journals, would they have a depiction of the man? Drawing that's not a stick figure?

Perhaps. I can look through them. But-

[ He buries a hand in his hair and tugs at it in thought, trying to calm himself enough to think. ]

-we have better. He turned your father. You have his blood in you, some small part of it.

We can go through this one into the hold and--

[Oh fuck him.]

Doesn't mean I have an inkling of what the man looks like. And these things don't respond to blood.

Shit, that's not enough?

[ Fuck. The one shitty vampire thing that gives no shits about blood. ]

Right now, he ought to look like a tiny red fucking rock. But- the hold. Unless you know where your father would have hidden the most important rock in Europe.

[The Hold shows in the mirror. Alucard rises to his feet.

And then he reaches over to touch the top of Trevor's head for just a moment. Dismiss this. There. Now they can enter this action properly.]

Unless you somehow understand these things more than I do, no. Faces are going to be our best bet, and I can't open the journals because of the silver.

[He's all steel and purpose now, the Alucard that first popped out of the vault in Gresit.] Open the journals, I'll go through them and refocus the mirror down there. If we're lucky, we'll find nothing.

If not, we'll need to go to France. Leon had an estate there as well, yes? Any remains shall be our new headquarters. You two will go ahead through the mirror once we have supplies and have secured the castle, then I shall follow.

[ The touch is light, but important. He went and forgot the rules of his own game, didn't he. Box off the past, box off the horror of realization, leave only the purpose. ]

The stone was- not common knowledge, but it wasn't a secret that Dracula carried a relic containing the powers of the vampire who came before him. That's- that must have been why Carmilla took the ring, and why she fought you instead of fleeing. She knew we were on our way, and she thought that it was the stone - that it would make her more powerful.

[ He's in the hold now, snatching a ring of keys from the lectern and testing them one by one on the great set of locked cabinets that hold Leon's writings. He pulls out a silver book, opening it to reveal its many blank pages, then pricks his thumb on a spike set into the cover and drags it across the first page. The blood moves, slowly, into place to form letters and images. ]

[Alucard follows through the mirror right after Trevor. It says everything about the intensity of the moment that he doesn't even comment about your ancestor used fucking blood magic on his journals. Alucard just stands over Trevor's shoulder, watching the pages spring to life.]

She did look more surprised than she ought to have been when I threw her out the door.

[That had been a deeply satisfying moment.]

But at this point I have been in every room in this castle and then some. Never saw anything like it, and if the powers are as your family's recorded them, then that explains why certain acts were easier. [Patricide, he means.]

...Oh.

[Alucard suddenly goes all too still.]

You're going to have to go to Lupu.

You didn't even look for him-

[ But he doesn't need to, does he? Because there was that other thing Trevor mentioned. Where would Dracula put the most important, precious, irreplaceable thing in Europe? They both know the answer to that. Alucard has known it all his life. ]

-are you sure?

(for cryptsleeper)

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