Archive of Our Own

They didn’t stop anywhere else.

Neither of them said a word whenever they passed the occasional town or village on the road, and in some unspoken agreement Trevor would steer the wagon away from it. Sypha didn’t know what it was—perhaps it was a sort of guilt that came with watching a town burn even after they had done everything they could to save it, or fear that the same rot of death and the bad deeds of those they’d trusted would follow at their heels like a loyal hound. She didn’t think she would be able to stop at another village; all she would be able to see was the place in flames.

So instead they wandered aimlessly for what felt like weeks but was probably merely days, Trevor’s fingers loose on the reins, his eyes vacant and hollow. The air between them was empty and bitter, chased by the lingering defeat at Lindenfeld. All she could see was the town destroyed, the body of the Judge at the steps of the priory, blood trickling from between his lips, the room full of bloody little shoes and the crushing sense that no matter what she did it would never be enough.

They’d hardly spoken, even when they’d been ambushed by a pack of night creatures on the road about three days away from the husk of the town. It had been quick enough, the attack; there had been only three, and they had taken care of them with almost no effort at all. It had been a good fight, but even Sypha hadn’t been able to bring herself to celebrate it, or even feel good about it. All she could feel was numb.

It had been a slap in the face after defeating Dracula, a bitter and brutal one. She had felt, when they’d left the castle, that the world was theirs, that it was theirs to conquer. Everything felt like a victory, like an adventure. It had been fun, and all they had felt for the first few weeks of their journey was euphoria, that they were unstoppable. But then the world had reminded them that sometimes, you couldn’t save everyone—and that sometimes the true monsters were the people standing at your side all along. They had been reminded that defeat lurked behind every victory, no matter how celebrated.

On the fifth day Sypha realized that they were no longer wandering.

Trevor’s fingers were tighter on the reins, guiding the horses along forks in paths, and there was something almost like purpose in the way his eyes followed the road that stretched ahead of them. She wondered as she gazed at the setting sun mottling the path in spots of gold and blue, how many days he had had a destination in mind. He hadn’t told her anything, had merely decided to go wherever he was leading them silently. She didn’t ask, though she was sure he had realized that she’d noticed.

She didn’t even try to guess; she merely watched the world go by outside, the trill of birdsong and the scamper of woodland creatures across the paths and the way the sun rose and set and rose and set. Merely looked up at the sky, turning from bottle-glass blue to orange and red to purple to navy to black, and then blue again the next day. She didn’t count how many sunsets she had seen, didn’t bother noticing the moon shrinking in the night sky, turning from a semicircle to a mere slice of silver among the scattered stars.

On the seventh day the roads began to grow familiar.

She lifted her head from where she had been dozing idly, feeling her brows furrow as she recognized the trees, the furrows in the earth beneath the wheels, the way the road curved in a long arc and then forked, branching into four separate paths. She sat up straight, blinking herself awake as she gazed at the road, her heartbeat quickening in her chest as it all came together in her mind, a sudden rush. She knew exactly where they were going.

She turned to look at Trevor, and he was looking back at her, an unreadable look on his face. He said nothing, merely smiled a little halfhearted smile that was barely a tug at the corner of his lips. She kept her silence as well, looping an arm through his and putting her head on his shoulder instead. He leaned his head against hers, his warmth seeping into her skin where they pressed up against each other at the movement.

She didn’t think there was a better place to go than where they were going. They needed familiarity, needed someone they knew they could trust. They needed to rest, and they needed to know they were safe. Where better to go than into the arms of a friend? And why not admit it? She had missed him, dearly. She found herself thinking ahead, looking forward to seeing him again, the sight of those small, rare smiles of his and the way her face had fit perfectly to the curve of his shoulder when he had put his arms around her in farewell so many months ago. Her stomach fluttered a little at the thought and she yanked herself away from the memory, feeling her cheeks burn as she decidedly avoided Trevor’s eye.

She was sure he would be happy to see them—she didn’t imagine he’d had much company while they had been gone. For the first time in days she felt something almost like excitement again.

But she had no idea how wrong she was, nor did she realize exactly how different things would turn out to be.

“Sypha.”

Trevor’s voice was sharper than he’d intended, but surprise and shock and something akin to panic was clawing its way up his spine, his fingers tightening around the reins till his knuckles blanched. She hummed a little, raising her head and blinking up at him, sleepy-eyed and rosy-cheeked. She’d been nodding off a little against the wall of the wagon, as she had been for the better part of the last few days. She hardly slept the whole night.

“What? Are we there?” she asked, stretching, apparently oblivious to the sight of the doors in front of them, frowning at him.

“Sypha, look.” He turned towards the castle and she followed his gaze, still frowning. The moment she caught sight of the doors her eyes widened, her hands flying up to cover her mouth as she gasped. They both stared at the doors, the steps leading from them to the ground, where, flanking them as if to guard the castle stood two bodies driven onto pikes and speared into the bloodied ground, the flimsy nightgowns they were clad in blowing up around their thighs in the wind. The stench of death and decay and days of exposure to the elements was so strong it reached the wagon several yards away, and it made him gag, his lips twisting with disgust.

“Oh, my God,” Sypha whispered. “Trevor, what…”

“I don’t know.” Ideas and theories were racing through his mind so quickly they all seemed to blur together, each one more terrible than the last. “We have to go inside. Come on.” He swung himself out of the wagon, his aching knees screaming their protest as he stretched his legs for the first time in what felt like about five hundred years. He ignored the pain and discomfort, moving almost blindly towards the doors, everything else receding into the background, blurry and indistinct. Something might have happened to Alucard, something terrible—

The bodies rose up in front of them as they approached, half-eaten away and decayed, rotting on the stakes they had been forced onto. They seemed to be about a week old, and as his legs came to an abrupt halt in front of them he realized their throats were slit, ragged flaps of dead skin hanging off their necks along a neat line. They appeared to be—or have been—a man and woman, dark-haired and brown-skinned. From somewhere far away from Wallachia, he thought, judging by their segmented brows and angled eyes. He wondered where they had come from, and what had happened to lead to them here in front of Alucard’s door as if in warning.

Come any closer and this is what will happen to you, it seemed to say. Stay away.

Their blood had dried to a brown so dark it was almost black, dried in dripping lines down the stakes and along their fingers and legs, even on the ground beneath their feet. Their bodies had been impaled onto the sticks with something almost like precision, from between their thighs and up through their throats, the sharp ends jutting out of their mouths, open forever in silent screams. Their eyes were open, half pecked away by crows and sparrows, the gaping sockets oozing and festering.

Here the scent of blood and death, rot and decay, was almost overwhelming, and he felt nausea twist his stomach. Crows and insects had gotten to them over the days, but what little remained of their faces was enough to tell him that they had been young when they had died. Too young—maybe as old as Trevor and Sypha were.

“Do you think… do you think something’s happened to him?” Sypha asked, her voice small. “To—to Alucard?”

He started, suddenly and abruptly pulled out of his shock and panic at the sound of his name from Sypha’s mouth. God, how long had it been since either of them had said it aloud? A month? More?

“I don’t know,” he said, turning towards the doors, his fingers finding the hilt of his knife. “But we’re going to find out.” He strode away from the bodies and up the steps, looking up at the castle above him, rising so far that he couldn’t even see the top from where he was standing. Sypha followed more slowly, looking around carefully.

He banged on the front door with the pommel of his knife.

He drew it from his belt and flipped it over in his palm, slamming it against the doors once, twice, then thrice, the clanging sound of it echoing so loudly that he felt it in his bones. Sypha had wrapped her arms around herself as if to keep herself warm, gazing up at the doors stretching above them, their tops lost in shadow. He couldn’t read the expression on her face, but her eyes were wide with fear and sadness.

To his surprise the doors actually began to open mere seconds after he had hit them, groaning and clanking as they did, slowly. They didn’t part all the way, instead opening only a crack—which was still admittedly a large gap of about six feet—with a low creak. Beyond, all he could see was dull gray light. Cold wind rushed out from between them, carrying with it the scent of dust and decay, neglect and staleness.

Sypha walked forward first, moving between the doors purposefully without a backwards glance. Trevor scrambled after her, the hilt of his knife still pressing into his palm. She was looking around, her face set in tight, unhappy lines. He followed her glance and suddenly it was as if he had stepped back in time; he felt his eyebrows knit together when he saw that the entrance hall that they had stormed so many weeks ago looked exactly the same as it had the day they had left the castle.

The place was a mess—there were broken candelabras strewn across the carpet, which was in tatters; the pillars still sported long scorching burns across their convex curves; the floor was still liberally smeared with old bloodstains that hadn’t been cleaned out. Shards of glass were scattered around the whole room, and there was next to no light besides the sunlight coming from the open doors behind them. If Trevor and Sypha hadn’t helped him clear out the corpses of Dracula’s generals that had littered the place after the fight, Trevor was almost sure that Alucard wouldn’t have bothered cleaning those out, either.

It was, frankly, alarming.

“Alucard?” Sypha called. Her voice rang through the cavernous hall, echoing several times before fading away into the air, melting like ice into water. “Alucard, are you there?”

Only silence answered her.

“Maybe he’s asleep,” Trevor suggested. “Like he was when we met him.”

“I doubt it,” Sypha said, frowning up at a broken candelabra still hanging precariously from a pillar. The wax from the lone candle speared onto one of its prongs had dripped down and solidified halfway to the floor, stretching its iridescent oily fingers downward like the icicles that used to hang from his windows when he was a boy. “He was injured last time, badly injured. I don’t think he needs to sleep if he isn’t.”

“And if he was uninjured enough to put those poor sods on sticks outside his door, I’ll hazard a guess at he’s uninjured enough not to need a coffin,” Trevor deduced. “And he also wouldn’t just leave the place undefended.”

“I think those bodies are defense enough,” Sypha murmured, as if to herself. Then she straightened, taking a deep breath. “We have to look for him. Come.” Without waiting for an answer she strode forward, leaving Trevor to once again scramble after her. He sheathed his blade as he caught up, glancing around. Alucard hadn’t lifted a finger to repair the damn place; everything was in tatters, from the broken floors to the torn-out doors to the slashed tapestries and knocked-down walls. He simply hadn’t bothered cleaning the place up, and had let all of it fall into disuse.

They both stopped in front of a door, one that was ever so slightly ajar. He could hear a faint noise coming from inside, something he couldn’t quite identify. It was the only door that wasn’t chipped and roughened from disuse, and the brass handle was shiny enough to suggest that the room had been entered, and regularly. Sypha shot him a glance, an eyebrow rising. He’s inside, she mouthed. He shrugged, nodding back. She looked at him pointedly, her brow climbing higher.

He rolled his eyes but placed a hand on the door anyway, feeling an odd sort of anticipatory panic rising in his throat. He exhaled, steeling himself—and then he pushed the door open.

He barely had time to look around and realize the room was a kitchen before something came sailing through the air towards his head, making him duck with a yelp of surprise. It shattered against the wall behind his head, and when he looked down he realized it was an empty green bottle of what had probably been wine, the shards now scattered all over the floor at his feet. He looked up, wheeling around with an indignant accusation already rising to his lips, but the moment he caught sight of Alucard it died before he could even open his mouth.

He was sitting at the table in the middle of the room, boots up on its surface and leaning back in the chair he was perched on. There was another bottle in his hand, this one half-filled, and more—too many more—scattered all over the table and on the floor by the chair, most of them empty. He was glaring at Trevor from where he was sitting, his cheeks flushed a bright pink and his eyes dull and unfocused, his hair in utter disarray, hanging in messy, limp golden loops around his shoulders. He looked like a mess, and so unlike the Alucard he’d known that he found himself unable to say a word.

“Get the fuck out,” he slurred, his hand shooting out unsteadily and nearly knocking another empty bottle over as he tried to grab it. He managed to get his fingers wrapped around its neck and he lifted it threateningly, still glaring. “I’m not… not in the… the deal to mood with you.” He swayed a little, blinking at Trevor blearily.

“Alucard?” Sypha pushed into the room from behind Trevor, her mouth falling open when her eyes fell on him. “What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m drinking,” he said, as if this was obvious—which it was, now that Trevor thought about it. “Now leave me alone.”

She looked taken aback for half a second, then her look of surprise melted into one of familiar outrage. “No,” she said. “No, we are not going anywhere.”

“’S not what you said the last time.” He pointed the half-filled bottle at her, unsuccessfully attempting to take a swig from the empty one. He frowned before switching hands, dropping the empty bottle back onto the floor and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand once he’d drank. Sypha froze, turning to look at him again. “The last time?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Alucard said accusingly, and as he slammed the bottle onto the table Trevor saw with a jerk that there were new scars twining up his wrists and disappearing up underneath his sleeves, dark pink and livid. The same scars crisscrossed his chest, a little above the older one that his father had given him a year ago, peeking out from above the neckline of his shirt. “You come back all the time. But you’re not real. You’re never fucking real.”

“We are this time,” Trevor said, stepping forward, feeling something in his chest twist with almost physical pain, something that was part sympathy and part empathy—because didn’t he know how it felt, to feel pain so visceral that the only way to numb it was drink until everything faded? Hadn’t he lived like that for God knows how many years, stumbling from tavern to tavern, paying coin night after night to forget his own name and blacking out, then doing it all over again the next day? “We’re real. We’re here, Alucard.”

He stooped and snatched up another bottle from the floor and both Trevor and Sypha had time only to duck before Alucard straightened and threw it, where it shattered explosively against the wall beside them in a starburst of dark green shards. “That’s not my name,” he growled, his fingers tightening convulsively on the bottle in his other hand. “Not anymore. Alucard’s dead. He died when he killed them, and you weren’t there.”

“Adrian, then,” Sypha said as they straightened, Trevor feeling more than a little alarmed now. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Your given name?”

“The name my dear, dead mother and father gave me.” He took another long swallow of wine, emptying the bottle. He tossed it over his shoulder where it shattered against the counter and groped along the table until he found another, lifting it to his lips before taking another drink. “The name nobody bothered calling me by.”

“What the fuck happened to you, Adrian?” asked Trevor. “What happened here?”

“You would know,” he said, breathing hard, “if you had been there.”

There was silence after that, his words ringing in the air between them. Trevor felt something rise in his chest, some strange emotion that tangled inside him until he was veritably choking on it. He opened his mouth to put it into words, expecting himself to say something meaningful and right and something that would magically fix everything that had happened. Instead, what came out of his mouth was, “Fuck you.”

Both Sypha and Alucard—Adrian—turned to look at him, identical expressions of surprise on their faces.

“Fuck you,” Trevor said again, glaring at Adrian. “You think you’re the only one who had a hard time? You think you’re the only one who’s had problems and difficulties and hardships? You didn’t face a fucking portal to hell, you didn’t fight these—these things that nobody in this world has ever seen before, things with wings and eyes and weapons, you didn’t try to save a town and try to save its people, and you didn’t watch that whole fucking place burn to the ground. You didn’t trust a man, like him even, and then realize he’s a disgusting piece of shit who murders children and gets off to the sight of their bloody shoes. But fine, tell us all about what you went through, how you staked two young people outside your fucking door like decorations. I’m sure it’s a fascinating story.” He dragged in a breath, his fingers curling into tight fists, his nails biting into his palms. “Oh, and your parents look like they’re doing great, by the way.”

Adrian’s lips parted, his fingers freeing the bottle he was holding. It fell sideways onto the table, spilling wine everywhere, the dark liquid burgundy of it fanning out mesmerizingly across the wood. “You saw my parents? Where?”

“Hell,” Trevor said shortly.

Adrian looked astonished. “Even my mother?”

“Yeah.”

Adrian put his face in his hands, elbows resting on the table. His sleeves fell down his wrists and Trevor saw the scars wrapped the length of his forearms as well, and likely continued up till his shoulders and across his chest. He wondered if they went further than that. “You’re telling the truth?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “You’re… you’re real? My mind hasn’t conjured you up to torture me? You… saw my parents in hell?”

“Yes,” Sypha said softly. “We are real, Adrian. We’re here.”

He looked up, eyes swimming. He looked small almost, crumpled and defeated, his eyes bloodshot and his face gaunt. He looked like heartbreak. “Why?” was all he asked, his voice quiet.

“Because we wanted to see you again,” she said simply. “We missed you, Adrian.”

He choked on what Trevor thought could have been a bitter laugh, wiping his eyes. “Oh, did you now?” He stood up, wobbling dangerously on his feet. Trevor and Sypha moved in unison, both hastening to stand on either side of him to steady him, hoisting him up with an arm around both their shoulders. He sighed, his head lolling. “I always thought in this sort of situation our positions would be reversed,” he said, his voice still slurred as he slewed his head around to squint at Trevor.

“Me too,” Trevor muttered. “Never expected you to be the type to get yourself this smashed over anything.”

“I’m learning the Trevor Belmont way of coping,” Adrian announced. “I have deduced that it is, in fact, ineffective.”

“You haven’t drunk enough for it to be effective,” Trevor said, then caught Sypha’s glare in his direction and amended hastily, “Not that you should, of course.”

“So what did happen while we were gone?” Sypha asked as they half-dragged, half-supported a very drunk Adrian through the castle, who had given them vague, slurred directions to his room before falling silent. “Who are those two people outside? What did they do?”

“Yeah, and those scars all over your arms,” Trevor said. “How the hell did that happen?”

When they got no answer they both looked at him between them only to see that he was asleep, his head lolling onto his chest and his hair hanging limply down his shoulders. She sighed, hoisting him up further as they pulled him along through the corridors, as in shambles as the rest of the castle. “What has he done to himself?” she asked softly, pulling his arm tighter over her shoulder and brushing his loose blond curls away from his face where they hung like a curtain, hiding him. “This is so unlike him.”

“Must have been bad,” said Trevor. “Looks like those two people he staked outside betrayed him somehow, got those scars all over him. Look.” He carefully hooked a finger beneath the neck of Adrian’s shirt, pulling the collar aside. The scars wrapped across his chest and abdomen, crossing over each other in ragged lines that looked almost like burns from silver wire. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see the edges of another set of lacerations disappearing beneath the waistband of his trousers, wrapping around his hips.

“This is blessed silver,” he realized, rubbing a careful finger along the raised red lines around Adrian’s wrists. “Scars burned onto his skin from blessed silver wire. Look at this.” He lifted Adrian’s arm up, fingers loosely encircling his wrist. “This one is thicker, deeper. Not from wire like the others, see? It’s from a—”

“A cuff,” Sypha finished, quietly.

“Yeah.” He dropped Adrian’s limp arm over his shoulder again, continuing to drag him through the castle. “I know exactly which weapon they used to get him, and where they got it from. It’s two silver cuffs around each wrist, expanding into wire that wraps around arms, chest, hips, thighs and calves, ankles and sometimes neck. Not this one, by the looks of it. It’s a torture and interrogation device, one that keeps a vampire in excruciating pain but also renders them totally immobile. And the only place you can get those weapons is in my family’s trove.”

They turned into the room Adrian had directed them towards, and Trevor shouldered the door open. It was a plain bedroom, with a four-poster bed at the far end and a desk at the corner, unassuming and simple. They deposited Adrian’s prone form onto the bed, where he mumbled incoherently and turned his head restlessly, his hair fanning across the pillows.

“But here’s the thing,” Trevor said, watching him sleep, his lips parted just enough to show his fangs. “You can’t get one of those things onto a vampire’s wrists unless they’re totally vulnerable. Their guard has to be completely down, they have to let you in really close before you get them on. And they’re so deep into his skin and they’re all over him, he must have been…”

“Must have been what?” Sypha asked, tugging Adrian’s boots off and pulling the blankets up and over his body. Trevor’s eyes snagged onto his ankles where the edges of his trousers rode up a little, catching the telltale red flash of another set of scars. She glanced up at him, apparently not having noticed, and raised her eyebrows. He swallowed hard, shaking his head. “He must have, uh… trusted them,” he said, clearing his throat. “And they tried to torture and kill him, maybe. So he staked them outside.”

But what he hadn’t told her was that there was no way the silver would have made such ragged scars on his body unless all the wires were in direct contact with his bare skin. For them to have scarred his whole body like that, for them to have cut into his skin directly and burn those fiery lines onto him, he had to have been completely naked when they got the cuffs onto his wrists. And one way to get a vampire—or anyone, really—at their most vulnerable, at their most trusting and at their most willing, was to…

Suddenly it rushed into place, all of it—the bodies on stakes outside, the way they were scantily clad in only loose nightgowns, Adrian’s nightgowns, the scars all over his body, the fractured look in his eyes, the bottles of wine strewn all over the table and the floor. He felt a wave of nausea crest over him, and as he gazed down at Adrian’s fast-asleep form on the bed he found himself wishing those two had been alive when he and Sypha had arrived so that they could kill them themselves, and slowly. He’d savor every second of it.

“Trevor,” Sypha’s voice said, breaking through the dizzy haze of blood and death and revenge in his head. He looked away from Adrian with an effort and turned towards her, blinking. “Yeah?”

“We should let him sleep this off.” She stood from where she’d been perched on the bed at Adrian’s side, sighing. “Come on, I want to take a good look at the castle—all of it.”

“We just got here,” Trevor said, fingering the bracer on his wrist, fiddling with the flexible leather. He did not want Sypha to find anything that might tell her what happened—she might set the whole damn place on fire if she did. “Maybe we should get some rest too. Ask Adrian when he wakes up, hear it from him.”

He wasn’t tired in the least, however, and Sypha knew him far too well not to realize it. She raised a brow, hands on her hips. “I know you’ve figured something out, Trevor Belmont,” she said, stepping forward and jabbing a finger into his chest and ignoring his weak protests. “And whatever it is, I intend to find out.” She turned, moving towards the door. “Come on.”

Knowing any and all the forces on the earth couldn’t stop Sypha when she was determined to do something, and in extension knowing he was entirely powerless to do anything himself, all he could do was follow.

The castle was in ruins.

Everything was in pieces, torn apart and destroyed almost beyond repair. Doors were splintered and broken apart, carpets and tapestries were ripped and shredded, floors were cracked and walls were knocked in, and it was only as they walked through the ruins of the place that Sypha realized exactly how brutal the fight between father and son had been. It had taken them through the castle itself, through walls and floors and corridors.

They walked along its path, following the destruction that trailed through the whole place. She remembered running along the corridor where the destruction stopped, remembered the panic and fear that had choked off in her throat when she thought that the silence that had settled over the place meant that Adrian was dead and that they had failed, that the world would end and they had done nothing to stop it. But then she and Trevor had turned into that little room and she had seen the decaying corpse of the dying Vampire King reaching out with rotting hands for his son, whose eyes were wide in his pale face, and she had thought that he looked so young in that one moment, a lost boy staring at the dripping corpse of his own father reaching out to take him in his dead arms.

“This door is open,” she realized as they moved down an unfamiliar corridor, this one relatively cleaner and free of rubble. She stopped in front of it, something tugging at her, telling her it was important, telling her that she needed to open this door and see what was inside. She glanced down, then stepped back with a sharp inhale when she saw rusty bloodstains across the floor, dragging through the whole corridor and speckling the walls, spattered across the sides of the corridor in places.

“Shit,” Trevor muttered. “Sypha, maybe it isn’t the best idea to go in there—”

“Trevor, what are you so afraid I’ll find?” Her hand was already reaching for the doorknob, also smeared with old dried blood. “We need to find out what happened to him.”

“He can tell us himself.” His fingers caught her wrist, stopping her. “Sypha, you don’t want to go in there. Believe me, it’s best to hear it from Adrian.”

“Why?” She tugged her hand away, stepping back. “What do you know, Trevor? What did you find out?”

He hesitated visibly, reluctance tugging at his eyes. “Sypha…”

“If you won’t tell me, then I’m going in.” And before he could even open his mouth to protest, Sypha pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It was significantly grander than the room they had dumped Adrian in, this one bigger and airier. There were bookshelves lining the walls and the floor was paneled hardwood, and there was a massive bed against the far wall, bracketed by long arching windows that spilled harsh golden light directly onto the mattress, lion-headed pillars stretching towards the ceiling high above. Gauzy translucent curtains dripped from the posts and around the bed, fluttering a little in the breeze from one of the windows.

There was blood everywhere.

Sprayed all over the mattress, smeared across the floor in irregular fans of dark brown, a long arcing splatter of the stuff along one side of the curtains, curving almost all the way upward and having dripped down in stiff lines of rust. There were two congealed pools of it at the foot of the bed, soaked almost entirely through the mattress, so much that it still looked damp even after what was likely a week or so of neglect. There was a torn-off bit of a sheer curtain spread across the floor beside the bed, also smeared with old blood.

The whole place stank of blood and death, days of it smeared everywhere without being cleaned. Nobody—not even two people—who had lost this much blood could even hope to be alive. And judging from the long spray of it along the curtain along with the pools of it near the end of the bed, this was where Adrian had slit their throats. His… bedroom. She thought of the scars wrapping his body, the loose nightgowns hanging off the corpses outside, what Trevor had said about how a vampire had to be at their most vulnerable to restrain them as these people had restrained Adrian.

And now there was blood on his bed and death at his door and scars across his body, and suddenly she realized exactly what they had done to him.

The bedroom dissolved in front of her eyes and then suddenly she was standing inside the room inside the Judge’s house behind Trevor, lifting a hand and conjuring a flame that flooded the whole place with light. Shelf upon shelf on the walls, mounted on which lay a pair of bloody little shoes, gruesome trophies of the Judge’s sick pleasures. Small, frangible bones in the pit. Scraps of clothing. Blood smeared up and down the pikes. He had been a murderer, a monster, more a monster than the one shackled to posts in the priory basement, more a monster than the things that had crawled out of the guts of hell itself. And he had been beside them, he had been their friend, and she had actually trusted him, actually mourned him when he deserved nothing but his fate, nothing but to die for what he had done to countless little children—

“Trevor,” she heard herself say as if from a great distance, her voice hollow and bleak as she felt herself yanked back to the present. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me they didn’t—that he wasn’t—”

“I told you it would be a bad idea to come in here,” was all he said, softly.

Her feet moved backwards of their own accord, and she stumbled back into Trevor, who caught her against him with an arm around her waist. Nausea and anger and guilt, pity and horror and shock were all exploding in her chest, and she felt tears sting at her eyes as everything fell into place, all the pieces coming together in her mind. “No,” she heard herself say, her voice cracking. “No, it can’t be… he couldn’t have let them…”

He said nothing, merely tugging her tightly against him and burying his face into the crook of her neck, breathing her in. She clutched onto him for dear life, furiously blinking away the tears that had sprung to her eyes. How could so much have gone wrong in just two months?

“Let’s get out of here,” Trevor said softly, pulling her back gently. “There’s something I want to see, and I don’t think I want to stay in here another minute.”

She allowed him to take her hand and tug her out of the room, shutting the door behind them as he led her away. She felt a sort of cold numbness spread down the back of her neck, hardly looking where she was going as she let him guide both of them through the castle and out the front doors again. All she could see in her head was Adrian, vulnerable and trusting and lashed with silver in his own bed, the wires cutting and burning lines of fire into his skin, having to murder two people who he had allowed close to him—too close. And though they had died, he had paid the price for their betrayal.

The sun beat down onto them as Trevor moved away from the castle and back towards the ruins of the Belmont manor, and it was only when they were halfway to the house that she realized where he was leading her. They stopped in front of what had once been a ragged, gaping hole in the ground, splintered bits of wood and damp earth leading into it and the massive vault beneath the earth, all that was left of the Belmont family’s legacy. But now it was clean and paneled, a shaft instead of an uneven pit, everything having been cleared away and fixed. There was a levering pulley beside it, one unlike that of a well’s, one whose ropes were attached to a wide wooden elevator on one end and a massive boulder on the other, acting as a counterweight.

Without a word Trevor stepped forward onto it, quickly undoing the ties attaching the elevator to the pulley and shutting the little grate once Sypha stepped in after him. It swung free, then slowly descended into the Hold, the destroyed stairs having been cleared away. Neither of them said a word, both stricken into silence as it lowered until they could step off, attaching it to a metal ring that had been built into the side to keep it on the ground. They moved forward towards the massive door beyond which lay the Belmont Hold, and for some reason Sypha felt her throat close up as they reached it, Trevor pushing it open.

All was dark beyond, only shapes and suggestions of the massive underground library leaping out at her in the dimness. All the blood that had flooded the entryway and the hall outside had been cleaned, and the place was spotless and looked almost new. She glanced leftwards, her eyes catching on an odd-looking contraption that had been built into the wall. She broke away from Trevor and moved towards it, putting a careful hand on the lever and pushing it down.

Light filled the Hold with a low buzzing hum, blinking to life on the shelves and flooding the whole place with a dim white glow. They were the same lights that Adrian had built beneath the catacombs in Gresit, dull white and seemingly lighting by themselves. And here they had been built on every shelf, all connected to this one contraption on the wall at the door. She wondered how long this had taken him to build, painstakingly wiring them all and positioning them so that there was no need to light every broken lamp with fire.

Trevor had already walked forward to the rail, gazing out over the library in silence. She drew up to stand beside him, reaching out and gripping the railing as if the feeling of the wood biting into her palm might anchor her, stop her lest she went unmoored and tipped, falling into what felt like an endless chasm of guilt that had opened up inside her chest. The castle was in ruins, completely neglected, and Adrian had fixed up Trevor’s whole library and built lights and elevators to make it easier.

“I don’t know what to say,” Trevor said finally, after what felt like hours of merely standing at the rail, both of them gazing silently over Adrian’s labor. “I just don’t know what to fucking say.”

“I know,” she said quietly, her voice half a whisper.

“It wasn’t our job to stay here,” he went on, still not looking at her. “We had to go and help. The people needed us, and the castle and the library needed a caretaker. We didn’t… we weren’t obligated to stay back here. And he needed a break, needed to step back for a while and just lie low. I thought we did the right thing, leaving him here.”

He turned to her finally, and his eyes were wide and blue and helpless almost, and the lost look on his face made her heart break. “What did we do wrong?” he asked, half-desperate. “What could we have done?”

“Trevor…”

“Is this our fault?” He swept a hand out, as if that one gesture could encapsulate everything that had happened over the last two months, everything that had gone wrong. “Could we have stopped this? And if we had, if we’d stayed and helped and if we’d… if we’d helped him instead, then would those people have been spared? Would they have hurt him like that?”

“Trevor.” She reached out, fingers gripping his arm. “Stop. This is not our fault. Those people above, it is theirs and theirs alone. How could we have known this would happen?”

“I don’t know.” His throat worked. “But it doesn’t make me wish we were here any less.”

“I wish we had been here, too.” She slid her arm around his waist, and he held onto her gratefully. “But if we had been here, then what would have happened to all the people of the country? What would have happened in… in Lindenfeld?” She swallowed hard past the memories that threatened to rise up behind her eyes when she said it. “The monks would have released hell onto the earth and Dracula would have returned. Everything would have gone to waste, all our efforts.”

“I guess.” He sucked in a long breath. “I just… fucking hell, Sypha, I missed the bastard. I’d never say it to his face, but I did. And now…”

“Oh Trevor, you silly, silly boy.” She leaned up, kissing his cheek. “I know you missed him. I missed him too. And we are going to stay now, and we are going to fix what those people did. It might take a while, but we will do it. And if we do ever leave again, we are going to take him with us. This place is doing him no good, with such terrible memories held within its walls. He grew up here, murdered his own father here, and now he—” She broke off, biting her lip hard. “Now he was betrayed here, by people he trusted,” she finished, her voice trembling just a little, but it wasn’t with sadness.

“I know,” Trevor said, his voice pitched so low it was nearly a growl. “I wish it had been us who’d killed them, too. We’d make Adrian spearing them outside seem merciful.”

“We would.” She took a deep breath. “But we will have to settle for loving him, so fiercely that their marks on him will fade, in all the ways they did not. And we will not leave him. Never again.”

“Sounds good to me.” He smiled, just a little, and that one small curve of his lips seemed to hold a world of hope in it, hope and something else that lit the edges of her soul to a blinding brightness. It had been a long time since she’d felt hope again, and she let herself cling to it, let it bind itself between her ribs and fill her lungs until she felt it with every breath she took.

“Come, let’s go back to the castle,” she said, turning away from the library. “I think it’s time we and Adrian had a nice, long chat.”

He didn’t know if they were real.

They’d certainly seemed real, Trevor with his rough edges and frequent scowls and irritated scoffs, and Sypha with her wide-eyed defiance and imperious tone and careful hands. It had scared him at first, how many times his starved, lonely, angry and craving mind had conjured them up, shimmering images of them that passed through his fingers like mist just when he had started to believe they were real.

He had expected to recoil the first few times, had expected himself to stop pining after the two of them like some hapless brokenhearted maiden after Sumi and Taka had let themselves into his bed. But if anything it seemed to have gotten worse; his mind birthed nightmares that were an entirely new flavor of horrible, warped memories of that night they had come to his room, only this time wearing Trevor and Sypha’s faces. Feeling their hands and mouths and bodies instead, hearing their voices, craving their touch. And when he woke, when that desperate wanting still churned inside his chest, he hated himself more and more every day.

Sometimes the versions of Trevor and Sypha his mind made knock on his door time and time again would touch him, whispers in his ear and hands on his skin and soft lips kissing away the scars. But they would turn to nothingness in his hands when he reached for them, dissipating into the air with a sigh. He would call their names, over and over again, till his voice broke and his resolve broke right after and he would collapse onto his bed, fingers digging into the scars across his body till they opened up and bled afresh.

On the sixth day, he discovered that wine chased away the ghosts.

So he drank. He drank half the wine cellar dry in mere days, not bothering to clean up the messes he left behind. The stuff was potent, potent enough even to incapacitate him and send his mind tumbling down a half-forgotten rabbit hole of hazy suggestions, and when he would wake up afterwards with his skull splitting open and his limbs stiff and his tongue thick and sour in his head, he did it all over again. Trevor and Sypha’s phantoms vanished, and Taka and Sumi’s corpses swayed in the breeze outside.

But now… now they were real. They had actually come back. And they had also apparently tucked him into bed like a child.

He sat up, the blanket that lay at the foot of the bed that he never used falling off his shoulders as he did. His boots had been pulled off his feet and were at the side of the bed, and even with his head pounding and his mouth dry and his whole body aching he could make out two faint, familiar scents that lingered in the air. It could well have been another hallucination, but something in him told him that this time, it was real.

They would want answers, he knew. Who were the people driven onto stakes outside? What had they done? What were those scars? What had happened while we were gone? What happened to you, they would ask. And he realized that he did not want them to know what had happened. Just the thought of admitting to them that he had allowed Taka and Sumi into his bed, had willingly let them take and take and take from him, admitting that he’d slit their throats and drenched his bedroom in their blood—it made him sick to his stomach.

He took a deep breath, making to get out of bed. He had succeeded in swinging his legs off the side in an attempt to stand and was debating whether or not he’d stumble if he did when the door creaked open, making him jump. He immediately tucked his feet under him again, not wanting them to see the scars twisting around his ankles, then looked up at them as they came into the room.

They looked—different. Besides their clothes, which was the most obvious change, were their expressions, the ghosts behind their eyes. He vaguely recalled Trevor saying something about hell. It was lost in the sluggish haze that was his memory of the past few hours, dulled and washed away by wine as it had been. They looked haggard and tired, and so drained of the optimism they had been bursting with just mere months ago when they had left that it was jarring.

“Oh, Adrian, you’re awake,” Sypha said, hastening to his side. He noted her use of his given name, then remembered that it was he who had thrown a bottle at her head mere hours ago for not doing so. He winced as she reached him, carefully sitting beside him on the bed and peering out at him with big blue eyes full of concern, concern he didn’t deserve. “How are you feeling?”

He shifted away from her subtly, resisting the urge to hitch the blankets up to his chest. “All right,” he said, and his voice was scratchy. “I realize I gave the two you a welcome that was… less than grand, and I apologize. You didn’t have to…”

“Yes, we did,” she said firmly, her tone brooking no room for argument. “You matter very much to us, Adrian, and since we weren’t here to help you before, we will help take care of you now.”

He swallowed past his dry throat, glancing up at Trevor, who was leaning against the doorframe, a brow raised. “I—thank you,” he managed. “It’s…” Good to see you again, he tried to say. It’s been a while. But the sheer reality of the whole situation was finally beginning to catch up with him, their reality and their being there and being real, and all those nights he had spent dreaming of them and wishing they were there, all the days he’d glance out the windows of the castle hoping he would hear the wheels of the wagon bumping along the road rushed back to him, making the words stick in his throat. And then all of it, all the lonely days and nights and dreams and hopes coalesced into one single, simple thought: He had missed them so, so much.

He blinked rapidly, looking away and trying as hard as he could not to let the emotion choke him. He twisted his fingers together tightly, as if they could form a cage, a cage to lock everything up and force it down. But Sypha had always been a little too perspicacious for her own good, and he had never been good at hiding his emotions.

He heard her ask, as if from a great distance, if she could touch him, and he heard himself choke out a small, pitiful yes, and a second later she was folding him into her arms, tucking him against her body. His hands moved seemingly of their own accord, fingers knotting in the fabric at her back, his face pressed against the curve of her neck. He shut his eyes, inhaling the scent of her, magic and sweetness and Sypha. Her soft, careful fingers were in his hair, her other hand holding him against her.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, we’re here,” she was saying, her voice hushed and soft. He could feel himself shaking, fine tremors wracking his whole body, and he sunk his teeth into his lower lip and squeezed his eyes shut to chase away the threat of tears, not wanting them to see him cry. “We’re here, Adrian.”

He felt the mattress dip and heard it creak, and then with no warning another pair of arms came around them, warm and heavy and enveloping, Trevor’s scent melding with Sypha’s and flooding his mind with safety and familiarity and comfort. It proved to be too much—his shaking fingers tightened on Sypha’s robes, a small choked sob scraping past his throat. Her fingers tangled in his hair as she pulled him closer, murmuring soothing nonsense as he shook apart in their arms.

“Come here, you fangy sap,” he heard Trevor’s voice say, and a second later he was being thoroughly squished between the two of them, curled up on the mattress and veritably drowning in their shared warmth. He had thought the idea of being touched by two people—and two people who he’d had less than chaste dreams about in the past—would make his body recoil, make sour memories rise up in his mind, make him cringe away and make him hate himself for it later. But despite everything that had happened, and despite all the bitterness that had risen up after he had speared Sumi and Taka’s bodies on sticks outside, bitterness that had made him tear those stupid dolls to shreds with his hands and burn them in the fireplace, made him never set foot in the Belmont Hold again, made him want to hate them for leaving him and fucking him up until he turned himself inside out—despite it all, his body and his mind remembered Trevor and Sypha. Despite it all, he still needed them, still wanted them, still loved them. How could he ever have thought Taka and Sumi could be what they were to him?

“It’s going to be okay,” Trevor murmured, his voice thrumming though Adrian’s back, pressed up against his chest as Adrian sobbed quietly into Sypha’s robes. “We’ve got you.”

After several millennia—or perhaps it was merely several minutes—his sobs quieted to heaving ragged breaths, loud in the stillness of the room. They stayed huddled together on the bed, Trevor’s hands rubbing carefully on his back and Sypha’s fingers carding through his hair. His eyes were closed, and Sypha’s skin was warm beneath his lips, their presences solid and real and God, he had missed them so much.

He took a deep breath, then pulled away from the cage of their arms around him, wiping his eyes as he did. They were warm and solid and so there, and he knew that if he let himself he would never let go of them, bury himself into them and never resurface. But he had to tell them, had to confess, had to admit what he had done and what he had allowed to be done.

“I—I’m sorry,” he started. “I—”

“No,” Sypha said, once again so firmly that he shut his mouth with a snap. “You will not apologize to me, Adrian, or to Trevor. Not for anything. If anyone has to be sorry for anything it is us. We left you here, alone, and so much has happened, so much has gone wrong…”

“I imagine you want to know what did happen,” he said, sighing and shutting his eyes for a moment before opening them again. “While you were gone.”

“Adrian, you don’t have to—”

“I do.” He glanced at Trevor, who had spoken. “You need to know, and I need to rid myself of its weight.” He swallowed, taking a shaky breath. “The two bodies outside,” he said, and his voice was raw and scratchy. He cleared his throat. “They… they were my students. I—taught them to kill vampires. Took them down to the Hold. I thought you might… might approve.” He looked at Trevor, who gazed back, an indescribable sadness on his face. “You soft bastard,” he muttered. “Maybe I would have, if your ‘students’ didn’t steal blessed silver weapons from the Hold and try to kill their teacher.”

He stilled. “How did you—”

“It’s a little obvious.” Trevor raised a brow. “You staked their bodies outside, and you’re covered in these.” His fingers brushed ever so lightly against the raised, ragged scars around his wrists, scars that shone almost like an accusation from beneath where his sleeve had slipped. “I know my family’s weapons’ marks when I see them. And we saw your room, too.”

He yanked his sleeves down, feeling humiliation and shame make blood rise hot to his cheeks. “Then I suppose it’s just as obvious to figure out how they got to me.”

They said nothing, merely looking at him with that same soft concern, and even though they knew what had happened they were still looking at him like that—and suddenly he wanted them to hate him, wanted them to shove him away and tell him that he deserved what had happened and that he was a fool to trust the first two people who had knocked on his door. He deserved their hatred, their anger, their disgust. Not this, not their concern and worry and help. He turned his face away, fingers twisting into his shirt, knotting into the sleeves.

“Adrian,” Sypha’s voice said, gently. “Don’t blame yourself for what happened. It wasn’t your fault. It was theirs—the people outside. And they deserved what they got in the end.”

He glanced up, hardly daring to breathe. “You don’t… you don’t hate me? Feel yourselves disgusted by me?”

“Why the fuck would we?” Trevor asked, sounding genuinely bewildered. They really didn’t blame him, he realized, really bore him no ill will. “Adrian, they took advantage of you in the worst way possible. You trusted them and they threw it back into your face. How the hell is that your fault?”

“I…” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have trusted them so easily.”

“You were lonely,” Sypha said, putting a careful hand on his shoulder. “There was nothing here but ghosts and shadows. Of course you would latch onto the first real human contact you had since…”

“Since you,” Adrian finished for her, quietly.

The pain in her face was beyond description as the implication of what he had said sank in. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He looked down at his hands and said nothing.

“Right,” Trevor said. “Now that we’re all caught up on what happened here and wherever the fuck we were while we were gone and we’ve done all that emotional shit, I think now is a good time to say I really need a fucking bath.”

Adrian sighed. “Eloquent as ever, Belmont.”

“Maybe I just need soap to make me more agreeable. Maybe some hot water. Clean clothes, too.”

“There’s a bath three doors down the hall to the right.” He pulled his hair away from his face. “You’re both welcome to use it, I can lend you some spare clothes too. There’s also food in the kitchen if you get hungry afterwards.”

“Ooh, a bath sounds divine,” Sypha sighed, seizing his arm. “And you must have dinner with us, Adrian, I insist. And then afterwards we can all sleep together—”

“—Sypha—”

“—Sypha—”

“—and it’ll be lovely,” she finished, ignoring Trevor and Adrian spluttering steadily beside her. “It will be an intimate moment of trust and the destruction of boundaries!” She leaped up from the bed, grinning widely. He found himself staring at her rather stupidly, and at the soft pink curve of her lips in particular. She appeared to notice him staring and blushed a little, though she stood no less straight because of it, nor was she any less bold under the attention. She was beautiful, and shameless, and Adrian was in love.

“I don’t think I’d mind that,” he heard himself say.

“Neither would I, so long as I’m not next to Sypha,” Trevor announced, swinging himself out of bed and promptly stripping off his shirt right there, giving Adrian yet another thing to stare at. “I don’t fancy having her icy feet up my arse after a hot bath. Her feet are where she stores her ice magic,” he added in a stage whisper to Adrian, who felt a grin tug at his lips almost against his will. He felt himself being sucked back into their orbit, that easy banter that he’d secretly loved. “Oh?”

“It’s a nightmare.” He tossed his shirt onto the floor, and Adrian peered at his bare chest rather unabashedly. He wasn’t difficult to look at, all things considered. He, too, caught Adrian staring, but rather than blushing he stepped forward, palms braced on the mattress on either side of Adrian’s hips as he leaned down, their faces inches apart. “I’m not going to ask you if you like what you see, because clearly you do,” he said, and his breath was warm on Adrian’s lips.

He refrained from arching up with difficulty; it would be so easy to just lean forward… “Maybe you should go take that bath, Belmont,” he said. “Seeing as you’re supposed to be getting clean and not the other way around. Moreover the lady has promised a few things afterwards, so you have something to think about.”

“And so do you.” He grinned, straightening, and Adrian tried not to feel too deprived when he did. Sypha sighed theatrically, placing her hands on her hips. “You boys are so…” She gestured vaguely, as if this would convey what she meant. “Adrian, come bathe with us,” she said—no, ordered—as she moved forward, pulling him up off the bed. “It will be nice, and warm, and we will all be naked.”

Trevor coughed, alarmed, and Adrian couldn’t stop the smile that tugged at his lips. It was nothing short of magic, how the two of them could do this to him. “I’m not sure Trevor is entirely on board with this newest development,” he observed, raising a brow at Trevor’s pink cheeks.

“It is because he’s afraid your dick is bigger than his,” Sypha said nonchalantly as she began to drag him out the door and into the corridor.

“What?” Trevor squeaked. “I am not—”

“You have a lovely dick, Treffy,” Sypha said earnestly with Adrian giggling helplessly behind her, still being tugged in tow. “Don’t worry. And I’m sure you do too, Adrian.” She smiled innocently, but the gleam in her eyes was nothing short of absolutely wicked.

“Well, there is only one way to find out,” he said, still laughing. He reached out and grabbed Trevor’s arm, pulling him along as Sypha pulled him along in turn, and with a shake of his head he relented, allowing Adrian to drag him down the corridor. “You’re both ridiculous,” he muttered, but he was grinning too.

“I want eucalyptus soap,” Sypha announced as the three of them stumbled towards the bath, arm in arm, giggling and breathless. “And if possible, bubbles. Large pink and blue bubbles. Ooh! And lavender oil, and rose petals. And one of you must wash my hair, I can’t possibly reach it on my own, and the water must be the perfect temperature, it must be hot and it will be absolutely heavenly—”

Adrian grinned to himself as he allowed himself to be led away, and hoped with all his heart that things would never, ever change.