#cv3

1476.

The world should be burning by now. Cities should be ash. Skies black. Screams on the wind.

He gave them a year.

A year to mourn the only goodness left in the world. The only warmth that ever touched the cold edges of what remained of Mathias Cronqvist, now Vlad Dracula Tepes, king of darkness.

She was gone and his son –their son– wanted to stop him.

Isaac and Hector waited for the signal. His army, restless,but something stirs in the wind. A name.

Belmont.

Suddenly, none of it matters.

He sees the boy before he ever smells the whip. A figure in a cloak, reckless, angry, alone. But it’s the eyes.

That impossible blue.

It knocks the air out of him. Centuries of stillness, of blood and bitterness, and now this– this.

He sees Leon. Not the old man who died at seventy surrounded by bloodlines and children.

No.

He sees the boy of ten, stubborn and bright. The teenager at sixteen, eager and raw. The man at twenty-two, molded by his hand—shaped by affection and discipline, crafted to be perfect.

Crafted to be his.

Leon had loved him once. Before faith, before duty, before betrayal. Before Mathias became something else. He remembers how the boy would look at him like he was the world. That worship. Not fear. Not awe. Devotion. He remembers taking it. Again and again. Nights of whispered words and gasps, flesh and surrender, and now, this Trevor carries that same flame in his blood, but not in his heart. This one despises him. Hunts him.

Dracula does not want Trevor. He wants Leon.

So he goes to the throne room. Alone. Past the bells. Past the blood. Deep beneath the castle’s heart, where the magic is old and cruel.

He calls him.

Through death. Through time. Through pain. He calls the soul that once cried his name in the dark, begged to stay, loved him.

 Leon comes. A body given shape by longing, by grief, by the castle's own will to please its master. Eyes wide with confusion, then horror, then sadness.

“You shouldn't have,” Leon whispers.

“You were mine,” Dracula breathes.

Leon touches his face. For a moment, his hand lingers and it is like centuries fall away. He does not kiss him, but they stand close enough that they could. 

“I loved you,” Leon says, “but I also left you.”

“And now I’ve brought you home,” Dracula replies. “Stay.”

Leon’s eyes shimmer. The soul remembers everything. Even the pain. Even the control. Even the love, in all its twisted, broken truth. He remembers Sara, he focuses on her, her gentle love, her voice. 

“I can't,” he says, but he doesn't leave.

The castle hums around them, draping Leon in a magic that holds his form. He is flesh again. Bounded by want.

Dracula steps closer. “You will.”

The room is quiet. The torches don't flicker. The wind doesn’t breathe.

Leon stands barefoot on cold stone, draped in a simple linen robe gifted by the castle’s will. His hair is tousled, pale against his shoulders. His body unchanged– young, strong, just as it was the day Mathias watched him walk away, but the man standing before him is not Mathias.

Not truly.

Dracula is colossal now. Nearly eight feet of immortal force, cloaked in black and crimson. His hair hangs long and dark like wet silk, and a thick beard carves his angular face into something mythic. Those eyes no longer the deep sorrowful brown of the man Leon once knew, for they glow red with something closer to hunger.

Leon doesn’t flinch.

He should. The weight of Dracula’s presence is suffocating. Every part of the room bends toward him. The air itself trembles, but Leon just looks at him.

“You’ve changed,” he says softly.

“So have you,” Dracula replies, his voice low, “Or rather… you haven’t.”

Leon doesn’t answer because there’s nothing to say. They both feel it: the electric tension pulsing between them. A tether pulled taut across time.

Mathias takes a step closer. The sound of his boots on stone echoes like thunder. He towers over Leon now, monstrous and regal. A king.

Leon lifts his chin.

“You brought me back,” he says. “You tore me out of peace.”

“I brought you home,” Dracula says.

His voice breaks slightly on that last word. That old tenderness buried under centuries of bloodis still in there, glowing like a coal under ash.

Leon swallows hard.

“You miss me.”

Dracula closes the distance in one long, slow stride. Now they’re chest to chest. Leon tilts his head back more, refusing to shrink from the man who once held him like a secret. Like something sacred. Like something his.

“I mourned you,” Dracula whispers. His breath brushes Leon’s lips. “More than Lisa. More than anything.”

Leon’s hand finds his chest right above where Dracula’s heart should be. The fabric of his cloak is cold, but the body beneath it is burning.

“This isn’t love,” Leon says, voice barely above a breath. “This is madness.”

Dracula leans in, his forehead almost touching Leon’s.

“Is there a difference?”

Leon closes his eyes.

He can feel it now, the castle itself pulsing around them, responding to Dracula’s hunger. To his needs. The stone beneath his feet vibrates faintly with the magic trying to keep him here. To remake him. To let him belong again.

He opens his eyes.

“Why me?” he asks. “After all this time. After everyone else. Why not move on?”

Dracula’s voice is thunder and confession.

“Because you knew me. Before all of this. Before I was a monster. You saw the man. You loved him.”

He reaches out and cups Leon’s face, enormous hand cradling him with impossible care.

“And because when you looked at me, I didn’t feel damned.”

Leon’s breath catches. His own hand rises, resting atop Dracula’s.

The ache between them is unbearable.

Years stolen. Love corrupted. Pain that never softened and yet this moment this charge? It feels like the eye of a storm that has been building for four hundred years.

Dracula lowers his head, lips brushing Leon’s ear.

“Let me have you again,” he whispers.

Leon doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t pull away. Leon never pulled away and the castle takes that as permission.

The walls hum louder now. The floor beneath his bare feet softens, warming to his skin. The magic, old and sentient, twists around his body like a serpent coiling around prey. It wanted to keep him. 

Dracula’s hand drifts from his cheek to the back of his neck. Gentle. Reverent. Possessive.

“You’re mine,” he murmurs. “Always were.”

Leon exhales sharply. “This isn’t right.”

“No,” Dracula disagrees, his voice low, thick with want. “It’s perfect.”

His other hand slides down Leon’s spine, and the robe falls loose, weightless to the floor. Leon flinches from the sudden rawness. The powerlessness.

The man who once made him feel worshiped now makes him feel like prey.

Dracula lowers his face. “You feel the castle. You feel me in it. It wants what I want.”

The magic cradles Leon like a lover. Keeps his legs steady. Keeps his voice small and through it all, Dracula watches him with fevered eyes: crimson, wild, lost in a hunger centuries old.

Leon tries to speak, but no words come. The air is too thick. His body is too heavy.

“You left me,” Dracula breathes against his neck. “And I forgave you.”

He kisses Leon’s shoulder. Soft. Tender. Wrong.

“You died,” he says, lips brushing the skin. “And I mourned you.”

Another kiss, lower.

“You forgot me,” he growls, voice shaking, “but I never forgot you.”

Leon forces out, “Mathias– ”

“I’m not him anymore!” Dracula snaps suddenly, towering above him, fangs flashing. “You made me this. You left me to rot while you built your family, your legacy, your Belmont name.”

Leon’s chest heaves. He looks up, but Dracula is already pulling him in again, gentler now, but more terrifying in his calm.

“I am all that’s left,” he says. “The world is ash without you. Let me have this. Let me have you.”

The castle agrees.

Invisible tendrils wrap around Leon’s wrists, binding them above his head, not cruelly, but intimately. Like a lover’s embrace. His legs won’t move. The floor pulses, anchoring him.

Magic sings through his nerves. His body begins to respond because the castle won’t let him refuse.

Dracula steps back, just a little, to look at him.

The soft light makes Leon look ethereal. Beautiful. Eternal. Just the way Dracula remembers him.The way he wants him.

“I will make you love me again,” he promises. He leans in, their mouths a breath apart. “I will rebuild what we lost, Leon. I will fill this castle with your voice. Your warmth. Your devotion.”

Leon’s eyes well with tears, but they do not fall, not yet, but close because he knows, finally, fully: there is no escape.

Not from Dracula.

Not from this place.

Not from the kind of love that would burn down Heaven just to hold him again.

Leon no longer feels the ground beneath him. The magic has made him light, floating just above the stone. A marionette in the castle's invisible strings. His body is flushed, heart pounding.

It shouldn’t feel like this.

Dracula stands before him, towering, powerful, divine in his ruin. His long hair brushes against Leon’s skin as he leans close again. His voice is soft, a phantom slipping into Leon’s mind.

“You remember what it was like,” he says, lips brushing against Leon’s cheek. “Before God took you from me. Before duty made you turn away.”

Leon’s chest rises, then falls. His breath is shallow. “I didn’t turn away,” he whispers. 

“You abandoned me,” Dracula breathes, his voice breaking. “You promised.”

The weight of that word lands like a hammer in Leon’s gut.

He had promised. When he was young. When they still whispered to each other in secret. When love was something forbidden and desperate…and now Dracula’s hands are on him again, no longer tentative. They know him. Still remember every line of his body and the way he shudders. The way he aches–

Leon trembles, but he is not cold, he is more. He is hot. Burning. He trembles from the memories, the familiarity of how right this feels, how he longed for it, and how he had hoped with Elisabetha’s death Mathias would love him more: Shameful, terrible thoughts of a young man. He knew better, now, but the body remembers. The heart yearns– it wants him even as he denies, because of guilt, of hate, of something he can’t quite place. He thinks of Sara, his darling, his beloved. Her face is blurred, but not her love, her warmth. He feels it still. 

He shouldn’t want this. He knows he shouldn’t. This isn’t the man he once loved. This is a monster, but his body remembers what it felt like to desire this completely. To be seen like this. Every breath, every nerve, every silent plea answered before it’s spoken.

When Dracula kisses him, it’s not soft. It is hungry. Possessive. A man kissing the grave of something he thought lost forever and Leon, God help him, kisses back.

His bound hands tremble as he surrenders to it, lets it in. The warmth. The pressure. The way Dracula touches him like he’s a relic, precious and powerful and his.

The castle moans around them. Magic thickens the air. Even the stone leans in.

Leon gasps as the magic pulls tighter. His head falls back. Dracula buries his face in Leon’s throat and breathes him in, like incense, like sacrament.

“You are mine,” Dracula murmurs. “Say it.”

Leon’s lips part, but for a moment, he’s silent.

Then, barely a whisper:

“I was always yours.”

Dracula closes his eyes and takes him in a dark, consuming intimacy that leaves no part of Leon untouched. He is unmade and rebuilt all in the same moment, held so tightly it feels like drowning, yet he doesn’t fight.

Because something inside him still remembers the way it felt to be wanted like this.

When it ends, there’s silence.

Leon lies beneath him, marked by the castle’s will, remade in its image. He breathes slowly, eyes half-lidded, still glowing faintly with the magic that keeps him here.

Dracula touches his cheek, almost reverently.

“I’ll never let you go again.”

Leon doesn’t answer.

He closes his eyes.