#i'm...so sorry

The library and much of the other areas ruined in the finalbattle—the observatory, the laboratory, the wing of living quarters—are toohaunted for Alucard to bear.  He choosesthe deeper reaches of the castle instead, where the work is simple and directand miserably straight-forward.  He tearsout bloodied carpeting in the entrance hall and pulls down the throne roomalmost entirely, excises the forgemasters’ workshops like a gangrenous limb,dismantles guest quarters and burns a bonfire behind the castle taller than heis, for days on end.  

He destroys the night creatures still caged in the castleand burns their bones, burns the beds used by Dracula’s allies and the tablesused for their war councils, cracks open the Belmont Hold and burns the bodiesthere, burns bloodied carpet and broken wood. Alucard considers burning the books he finds there that are too damagedto be legible, but he sets them aside to evaluate later.  Perhaps he can decipher what is left andtranscribe them.  Perhaps Belmont knowswhat was inside.  Perhaps—

Alucard runs out of things to burn, eventually.   There was little to rebuild in the lowerreaches of the castle in the first place, and now he has reduced what there wasto empty rooms, a labyrinth of gutted dungeons and bare stone.  He scrubs the floor with his own hands andwith telekinesis and with lye so pure it makes him retch until he cannotjustify it anymore.  He retreats to theentrance hall, and then outside of the castle, where the ground is scarred andblack from the bonfire, and sits down with his back to the castle and his kneespulled up to his chest.

It’s dark out—he’s been working night and day without muchregard for what time it is.  He’s notsure how long it’s been since—since, but the air has gone cold and bitterrather than the sweet crisp bite of autumn he remembers from Gresit.  There’s snow on the ground.  He observes these things and forgets to allowthem to affect him, because vampires, even half-human vampires, do not sufferfrom the cold the way a mortal would.  Hesits behind Dracula’s castle—his castle, now, Alucard’s castle—in shirtsleevesand lets frost accumulate in his hair.

Alucard can’t sleep. There’s irony there, he thinks, in his moments where things like ironyand humor are achievable.  He slept for ayear and was more than ready to sleep again, to escape this world that Draculahad made and sleep until he was found, until he was needed, until Gresit felldown and destroyed his vault and everything inside.  Whatever came first.

Now he can’t sleep at all.

Where would he sleep, anyway?  He’s avoided thinking about this questionsince he sat in his father’s study—in Dracula’s study and cried until hecouldn’t anymore, curled up in the sturdy oak chair that he had hiddenunderneath as a child.  He had set someof the room to rights before he broke down, steadied the chair and set hismother’s portrait on the mantle, but he had fled as soon as he could trust hislegs to carry him.  Once, his father’s—Dracula, damn him, Dracula’s study hadbeen a place of warmth and comfort.  Itmeant that his family was together, when there was a fire in the hearth and thesoft sound of a quill tip writing, and Alucard had slept there often when hewas restless as a boy.

He hasn’t been back to the study since he fled the ghoststhat lingered there.  Nor the ruinedlibrary, where he used to creep after his mother put him to bed, so that hecould read late into the night.  Hehasn’t dared the observatory, nor her laboratory.  Dracula’s private library was in nearly aspoor repair as the main one, with the distance mirror shattered on the floor,but even if it had been pristine, it made the scar on Alucard’s chestache.  

His parents’ rooms, he didn’t enter even to check theircondition.  His own—

And he couldn’t feel at ease closing his eyes in the lowerreaches, where the burning taste of forgemaster magic lingered and his mindwhispered dark warnings about the dangers that lurked in the corners.  Now, of course, he’s rendered them more orless unlivable for a vampire until the astringent, insistent reek of the lyeairs out.

So.  Where does hesleep?

Alucard sits on the ground, back pressed to the wall of thecastle behind him, and lets the question chase itself around in his mind untilthe sky lightens.  When he finally stirs,snow drifts from his shoulders and hair.

He holds his hand out, palm up, and watches flakesaccumulate in his palm. They melt more slowly on his skin than on humanskin—than on his mother’s.  She loved thesnow, had taken him out on a balcony the first winter after he was born andcuddled him close, her warm cheek pressed to his and his hand, small andchildish, wrapped around the end of her braid as they watched the snow fall onthe mountains.

“Water is the only material in the world that naturallyoccurs as a solid, a liquid, and a gas, Adrian,” she had whispered, like shewas sharing a secret.  “Here, lupul mic, like this,” she said, andtipped her head back, sticking her tongue out. Alucard had done the same, turning his face up toward the grey cloudsoverhead, and had laughed, stretching his hands up toward the sky as the coldflakes landed on his tongue.  His motherhad laughed too, spinning the two of them around on the balcony until she wasdizzy and he was clinging to her jacket, and then…

And then his father had come to find them, had found themsitting on the balcony with Alucard in his mother’s lap, both of them rumpledand flushed and grinning.  He hadlaughed, had crouched down to ask what they were doing, and his mother hadcaught the fearsome master vampire Vlad Dracula Tepes by the collar and draggedhim down by main force to kiss him with her cold lips.  They had gone inside, finally, when hismother’s ears and fingertips were so cold she swore they had gone numb, and shehad put a cup of warm spiced milk in Alucard’s hands to match her own and theyhad sipped at it while his father read to them beside the fire, and it had beenso good—

Something hot strikes Alucard’s skin, shocking, almostscalding.  He may not feel the cold likea mortal would, but his skin has grown chill, almost deathly so, and the waterburns.  He raises his fingers to his face,presses his hand over his eyes as if to force the tears back, and a high, thinsound escapes through his teeth, like the whine of a wolf wounded by an arrow.  He feels a little like it, like there’ssomething barbed and terrible lodged in his chest that he’s been trying tooutpace, and sitting here has finally let it dig through his bones to tear opena lung.  That’s what Alucard imaginesthis feels like—gasping airlessly while tears fall down his face, as if he’sdrowning in his own lungs, grief filling the empty spaces like blood.

This is the third time Alucard has cried for his family.  

The first was when he returned to his mother’s home in apanic—he missed her by a matter of hours, because Alucard is too human toteleport any respectable distance and had to run home on foot when he heardrumors of a witch from Lupu.  He had pacedthrough the ruins of his mother’s home, marking the rooms and doors in his mindto prove to himself that it had really been hers.  Here, his mother’s kitchen; here, his parents’bedroom; here, his own room; here, her laboratory.  He had dashed the tears away without athought and run, flat out, toward Targoviste, and arrived just in time to seehis mother die.

Then he hadn’t allowed himself to shed another tear untilDracula was dead.

Now, crying hurts,makes his ribs ache, makes his head spin. Alucard closes a fist into his shirt, over the sharpest point of pain inhis chest, where a child is calling hopelessly for his parents to come back tohim, and lets his hair fall forward to hide his face.

Eventually, Alucard runs out of tears.  No one can cry forever.

Alucard wipes his eyes. Alucard stands up.

There are still repairs to be done.

The hold is less damaged than the castle—Belmont killed mostof the invaders in the first chamber, kept them from reaching the holdproper.  But the damage to the entrance shaftis extensive, the stairs smashed to kindling in places and ripped whole fromtheir moorings in others.

Alucard solves the first and most obvious problem by thesimple expedient of affixing a strong pulley to the top of the open column.  He can get himself in and out without trouble,but he’s not interested in testing the exact limits of his telekinesis in sucha high-stakes manner as lowering heavy construction materials down a hundredfoot shaft with him at the bottom.  

Then Alucard tries his hand at carpentry.

All things being equal, he’s not bad at it.  He dares the ghosts in the castle to findbooks in his mother’s study, her endless curiosity teaching him new things evennow as he repairs the shattered staircase. The stairs aren’t as fine as their predecessors, but they’re smooth andclean and sturdy, and he figures that the Belmonts would probably be all rightwith it.  Even if they wouldn’t—well, it’shis hold now, isn’t it?  If he decidesthat it needs pretty stairs, he’ll redo them.

The thought is equal parts encouraging and deeplyterrifying.  Encouraging, because in themoments where Alucard is still, trying to close his eyes for a moment, hedreads finishing the restoration of the Belmont Hold.  When he finishes here, there will be nothing leftbut his family’s own wing of the castle, no excuse not to repair the libraryand the laboratory, nothing keeping him away from his parents’ chambers and thelittle room where he grew up and killed—

Terrifying, because for the first time in his life, Alucardlooks forward at eternity and sees a long and lonely blank.  There is no one here.  Even if his mother hadlived a human life and died of old age—unlikely, in Alucard’s opinion, Draculawould never have allowed it—he would have had company.  Family. His father, who lovedhim.  Now he has an empty, hauntedcastle, and the last legacy of a family wiped out of history.  If Alucard rebuilds the stairs of the BelmontHold twenty times, at least it will be something to do to fill that endlesstime.

Alucard tries not to think about it too much.

When he finishes the stairs, Alucard turns to the rest ofthe hold.  He sets the painting of theBelmont ancestor back on the wall.  Hepulls rubble out of the places where the walls are damaged.  He returns the books they pulled down intheir frantic research back to their shelves, and begins trying to transcribethe ones that have been damaged.  Helearns the index inside out, expands it. He grins a little, for the first time in…a while, at the memory ofBelmont’s affront over his criticism of it.

It’s been—months, probably, since Belmont and Sypha left.  Alucard isn’t sure.  It’s even harder to track time in the holdthan in the depths of the castle.  Hedoes know that he hasn’t talked to anyone in almost as long, except for a fewpassing exchanges with the merchants who sold him the stores of wood and stone thathe needed.  He doesn’t talk much now,except for the occasional flood of cursing when something goes wrong in therepairs.  He doesn’t even murmur his own nameanymore.  Alucard comes easily now.

His mother would be so disappointed.

Alucard is restoring the Belmont Hold, and he is notthinking about his mother, or his father, or his eternity.  

He is not.

The hold is beautiful, and deep, and quiet, and kind—even toAlucard, who is trespassing on the legacy of those who might have hunted him,given the chance.  He sleeps a littlemore, here, an hour or two of restless dozing at a time snatched while he’slying on the floor or the top of a shelf or on a table, filled with uneasydreams.  He thinks he could be at peacehere, if the world left him alone.

He understands, a little bit, the world Dracula craved.  The silence. There is nothing that Alucard wants more than to close his eyes andsleep forever, and the hold, sometimes, seems like it would let him.

Alucard comes to the end of the restorations in the hold.  It takes longer than he’d first expected—he’sbeen doing makework, he can admit it, restitching old pages back into bindingand moving books that have been misplaced back to their proper shelves just todraw it out—but not as long as he’d hoped.

The last step is the granite slab.  It’s the same size and weight as the previousone, as best as Alucard can estimate, and smooth on top, ready to be engravedwith the Enochian seal.  Alucard hasseveral diagrams of the seal, drawn from his memory and checked against whatbooks he could find on the subject, and in theory, he should be able to engraveit and be done.

Alucard doesn’t engrave the seal.  He’s still not a magician, he tellshimself.  If there’s another step hedoesn’t know of, something left out of the books or lost over time, he couldcarve the seal and render the stone useless. He’ll look into it later.

Besides, no one comes near the castle.  The hold is as protected as it’s likely toget.

Some part of Alucard wonders if he can find a way to contactSypha.  She would know how to seal thehold.  Belmont might be with her—would heapprove of Alucard’s repairs?  He’s thelast of his line, it’s only right that he know what’s happened to his family’shold.  Maybe the two of them—

Alucard breaks off the thought as crisply as snapping a neck,and leaves the granite slab over the entrance.

It is spring.  Heknows this because the weeds taking over the ruin of Belmont Manor are greenand lively, putting out flowers.  Thesunlight is bright and cheerful, the air sweet with the promise of rain, warmenough that Alucard’s plain dress of shirt and breeches wouldn’t mark him asstrange.  It’s…beautiful.

Alucard stands in front of the castle, hands spread and facetipped up to the sun, eyes closed to against the brilliance, for a long time.  He has always loved sunlight, even though it’soften too bright for his eyes, he remembers, and the memory is strange and alittle foreign, as if remembering a story told to him by someone else a longtime ago.  But it’s his, his own story,his own memory, and as he stands there in the sunlight, feeling the warmth sinkinto his bones like so little sinks into a vampire’s bones, it clicks back intoplace, a stone pressed back into a wall he’d thought was mostly torn down.

He is—so glad to be half human, Alucard thinks abruptly, asa breeze whips around him and vanishes into the ruins.  He would hate to have never felt sunlight onhis face.  

The sun begins to set, and Alucard goes back into thecastle.

It’s time to face the upper rooms.

Over the last uncertain number of months, Alucard has done morework than a team of humans could have achieved in years, but when he steps intothe ruins of Dracula’s private library, the enormity of the work he has aheadof him hits him like a tidal wave.  Itleaves him breathless—there’s so much to do here, even just in this room, whichis less damaged than some.  He had thoughtthat starting here might be easier, the way it was easier to tear apart the lowerreaches, where there was more evidence of the monster Dracula than there was ofAlucard’s father.

This room is ruined, but in the way of a room willfullywrecked by someone in a rage, or a haze of grief, rather than the collateraldestruction the main library or the observatory faced.  The smashed distance mirror is far from theonly thing scattered in pieces—books and quills, glass beakers and vials, evena writing desk, have all faced Dracula and failed to withstand his wrath.  The icosahedron that used to govern thecastle’s movement is as shattered as the engine, planes melted together at oddangles and lying on the floor.  Alucardhasn’t even bothered to try and repair the engine yet, hasn’t even reallydecided if it’s worth repairing.  There’snowhere he wants to go, after all.

Alucard lights the lamps and looks around the room,breathing slow and careful, as if inhaling too sharply might send his fragile controlof himself spinning.  The shelves aremostly intact, at least, and he can probably repair the damaged ones easilyenough.  The desk is a lost cause, he’llhave to build up a bonfire again.  Mostof the books are more or less intact, and—

And there’s a spray of blood, smeared across the wall besidethe door as if someone had tried to scrub it away while it was drying but hadn’tcleaned it properly.  It smells old, morethan a year, and it has a distinct signature to it.  Unique, even. Neither the sweet promise of human blood nor the electric crackle ofvampire blood—somewhere in between.

Alucard retches, and it’s probably for the best that he hasn’teaten anything more substantial than donated blood in a while.  There’s nothing to bring up.  

He locks Dracula’s library behind him.

It’s a bad start and sets a bad precedent for hisprogress.  These rooms are haunted, true,by the memory of better times, but Alucard drifts from one chamber to anotherlike he’s the only ghost in this castle. He remembers this feeling from that first day, a sort of perfect numbhelplessness as he rights chairs and straightens pictures, lingering over them,but doesn’t move a finger to take steps toward real repairs.  He trails his fingers over his mother’s books,over Dracula’s telescope, over the door to his parents’ room.  He still hasn’t dared to go inside.  

Alucard passes through the halls of the castle with lessimpact than a strong breeze and—and he’s tired,a sort of soul-deep exhaustion that drives him on instinct to the door he leastwants to see.

At the end of all this, of Dracula’s war on the world, ofhistory’s longest and most disastrous suicide, Alucard is a little boy alone ina vast castle, and all he wants is to sleep, and so here he is, sitting on hischildhood bed without much memory of having walked there.

The room has suffered for the winter with a shattered window,but not as much as Alucard might have expected. The eave, and the fact that the broken window is one of those set intothe wall, have conspired to protect it from most of the elements.  The wallpaper is peeling, and many of thedrawings tacked to the desk and wall have been shredded or suffered waterdamage, but the portrait of the three of them is unharmed, and other than theblack and ashy stain on the carpet and the broken bedpost, there’s little else disturbed.

The ceiling is still painted with constellations—it’s full darkoutside, probably even getting on toward morning a bit, but Alucard can stillsee them when he leans back to lie down on the bed.  He’s too tall for it now, lying at an anglewith his legs bent at the knee and his feet on the floor.  His father had painted the stars for him, asa surprise for his first naming day, a mishmash of constellations that Alucardliked best arranged without concern for the reality of the night sky.

“If it’s the stars you wish to see,” Alucard says to theceiling, remembering what his father said, “look out your window.”  Art isfor us, Dracula had murmured, and Alucard had rested his head against hisfather’s shoulder, so that he could better hear the rumble of the deep voice inhis chest, like distant thunder.

It’s been some time since Alucard slept here regularly—firsthe stayed in Lupu, then he traveled, and then, of course, he fled to Gresit.  Still, though, the bed is made up with softsheets and a warm blanket, the pillow placed as if he might come back to it atany moment, and it smells familiar and soothing, the smell that meant love andcomfort for most of his life.

He is so tired, Alucard thinks as he stares up at theceiling.  The painted stars swim beforehis eyes, the periphery feathered with grey, and focusing his vision makes asharp, subtle pain lance through his temples. He hasn’t slept well in so long. Today was probably his least productive day in months, idled away in thesunlight and the night spent wandering the dark halls of the castle, but theexhaustion is hitting him hard and fast, like he’s been in free fall all thistime repairing the castle and hold and now he’s finally reaching the bottom.

The thought comes to him like it’s being whispered bysomeone else—maybe he can sleep here. Maybe, if he closes his eyes here, he can sleep until he wakes up better, without the ache in his chestand the weight in his bones.  Maybe he cansleep until he wakes up to his mother’s face, his father’s affection.

Maybe he can sleep until he wakes up in a world wherevampires don’t exist.

It’s a hopeless wish, but Alucard shuts his eyes anyway.