#aluri

Death is not dignified.

Death is not kind.

Death does not care if you face it with strength, or if it comes to you as you shake and sob and beg for anything, anything but this.

Death does not care if you are old or if you are young when it comes for you.

And whatever Death is, it is not any longer that skeletal thing that haunts the halls of the castle.

Perhaps that is a form of Death, in it's own way, made manifest by whatever power that binds the castle, that warps and twists and latches on to it's inhabitants until they are no longer recognizable. Until they are no longer a loving husband, a doting father, until they are cruel and mindless as the castle wills it.

Or that's what he has to think, to make sense of this all.

That's what he has to think of the castle, and of Death, when he is alone. When he sees the humans laid low by their frailties. That he will never become his father, because what his father became was made by the castle. That Death is a mindless thing that takes all.

Because he watches sickness turn Richter into a shivering, sobbing thing victim to his nightmares and delusions. He wipes Richter's brow with cold water and he tries to make him eat, when he is awake long enough. He watches the food come back up in desperate heaves and he holds Richter's hair back, combs his fingers through it when Richter sleeps. He loves Richter, in his own quiet way, he hums songs that his mother used to sing in a language few still speak. Songs about love. He promises, to Richter as he shakes and as his mouth forms words he cannot speak, he promises that when Richter is well he will take him away. Show him the world. They will no longer be beholden to their duties or to the wars of their fathers.

As the nights wear on he makes promises he is not sure he can keep.

But he stays. He made that promise long ago, and that promise he can keep. He stays, even when it hurts, when it takes everything that he is to return to Richter's bedside when he knows nothing has changed. He stays, and he doesn't sleep, and it begins to show through. His hand trembles when he brings the blankets up again over Richter's shoulders. He forces himself to smile, when Richter opens his eyes, though those moments are becoming more and more rare, his smiles more and more strained.

He stays, because no man deserves to face Death alone.

And the thing that comes, as the sun is setting, is not the skeletal thing of the castle. It is silent and invisible as the wind.

And alone, he buries the last of his love in an unmarked grave so the monsters cannot find it, cannot use the powers inherent to the Belmont blood, and he knows that as time passes, he will forget, too, where this grave is.

Death does not come for him.

It took the dhampir more than a year after Richter said it to admit that he was in love. Love was difficult for him, and Richter tried his best to understand that. To remember the stories that Alucard, no, Adrian, he told him the name he had been born to, that Adrian had told him. About the all encompassing love he had been granted as a child, about the love that had driven his father to madness in his grief. He tried to remember that Adrian had known love, real love, the kind of love that would destroy worlds. And that love, in all it's forms, frightened him.

He tried not to say those words too often. He didn't want Adrian to fear what they had become.

But Richter feared it. He feared it when he saw the villagers whisper to themselves about the tall, pale, elegant and striking thing that Richter had taken in. He feared it when the church asked him how long his companion was going to stay. He tried to pass it off as just someone he had taken in, a friend, someone who would stay a while. But the questions came, and he hardly knew how to answer. After all, how do you explain to a frightened village that this man came from the castle, that he was good, that he had saved them all? No one would believe him, not after they found out who he was. Where he had come from. The sad stories he would tell about his father, about the mother that this village had burned. Richter knew the humans that they had both tried so hard to save would turn on them in an instant if they found out the love that was shared.

But it was all worth it. It was worth it when Adrian finally, in the middle of the night when nothing was going right, said those words to him. Told him he was in love, and all that meant. All the fear that it came with, and all the hope. How scared he was that this love would turn into something not unlike what he had seen of his father. It would turn to grief and madness and horror.

But for the time being it was love. They had love. They could face this world, the day and the night and the places that would accept neither of them, together. Perhaps they didn't belong. Perhaps Adrian was too human, Richter too monstrous, after what the castle had done to them. But, together, they could face it.