#soniacard

"Does he look like his father?"

Sonia bounced the baby higher on her hip. "No. He looks like you, doesn't he?"

Marie Belmont frowned deeply, before sighing. "That's good. Less questions if he looks like his mother's side."

"There won't be any questions at all, if people know what's good for them."

The baby was bubbly, and round, and entirely human. He didn't shy away from sunlight. Shortly after his birth, Sonia had dribbled blood from a cut on her finger into his mouth, and he drilled and coughed. He had none of his father's otherworldly abilities. If he had hers, on the other hand, it remained to be seen. She hadn't started seeing spirits until her adolescence. The baby had a while yet to be normal.

"Let me see him." Sonia handed the baby over to her mother. Marie held him under the arms, with the long experience of being the midwife's sister. "Goodness, he's getting big, isn't he?"

"He's nearly a year." Sonia shrugged. "He's walking, you know."

Marie clicked her tongue. "Missed my grandson's first steps. You've been gone so long, Sonia."

"I've been… busy, since grandfather died." The baby's first steps had been in some no name tavern at the foot of the Carpathians. He'd babbled nonsense and waddled to Sonia, who sat across the room, bandaging the cut on her arm. The scar was barely healed.

Busy was a simplification of things. Since she'd killed Dracula and his castle had fallen, it seemed that every monster in Transylvania was making a power grab. She'd put a dozen vampires under the whip before she'd even realized she was pregnant, and since the baby's birth, she was working her way up to an even fifty. Half a hundred vampires. Lord knew how they even managed to sustain themselves without draining every man, woman, and child in the country dry.

"Is the father alive?" Marie asked. She sounded more casual than she looked.

Sonia was tempted to give her the truth: not technically, though his heart beats, but decided against it.

"He lives." Buried in some forsaken crypt somewhere. Sonia understood suffering, probably more keenly than most people, and she understood that Alucard's agonies wouldn't be healed by a wife and a baby, but that didn't soothe her rage upon discovering the other side of the bed to be empty.

"But not with you."

"Not with me."

"Have you named the baby after him?"

"I haven't named the baby at all." Sonia took the baby back from her mother and jogged him on her hip.

"After your father?"

"I'm not naming him Ralph." Sonia scoffed. She brushed back the baby's hair and wiped the drool from his mouth.

Her mother was quiet for a moment. "Your grandfather, then."

"It's… a legacy, to live up to." Hers was too. All that weight, on something so small. She'd heard whispers, and the nervous way her mother had watched the priest in the marketplace all but confirmed it: she was going to be excommunicated. A child out of wedlock was one thing, but a child out of wedlock with the son of a vampire was another. She'd kept it quiet, but there was always gossip about the strange young man with whom she spoke after dark, before Dracula's hordes came along and destroyed her life.

"You should disown me." She told Marie casually.

"I would never!"

"You have a home here. I don't. I can move, easily, and you can't. At least keep yourself safe, if you can't keep me safe."

Marie watched her, an indescribable sadness etched into the wrinkles on her face. "Don't name him Trevor. Let the boy live a normal life; let him be a shepherd, or a cobbler. Don't drag him into his mother's legacy."