Chapter Text
The last Belmont returned to his ancestral home two breaths from death.
It had been a bright spring day when they left Adrian to his solitude. Left him as the macabre caretaker of the world’s greatest repository of knowledge. Which was really nothing more than a derelict fortress and the musty basement full of books next door.
He was relieved to be alone then though. Some moments in life are better spent in silence and if there was one thing he learned while traveling with Belmont it was that the man was never fucking silent.
But blessed silence turns into a deafening din after a time and there were only so many tears that could be shed before disgust for one’s own melancholy set in. So he slept. In his father’s bed he slept, too tall for his childhood one and wanting somewhere to lay his head that had more humanity in it than a coffin.
While he slept, he dreamed. Most of the time they were only flashes, but the images were vividly coloured and they were accompanied by passing impressions of all the sounds, smells and textures of reality. The fleeting scenes offered him glimpses into the past, his past, his father’s past, and his mother’s, those with whom he shared blood. Whether it be by birth or by circumstance, sharing blood had strange consequences. Perhaps that was why his mother never took his father’s blood even if she had taken his name and his seed. Or perhaps that was why his father had never wanted her to. Blood was life. The experience of it and the danger in it, the mystery of it and the clarity that might be found in it, could connect individuals beyond the simple pumping of the stuff or the crude consumption of it. Being his father’s son, he was gifted with some small understanding of how souls could be bonded by blood. He wished he understood more, but there was no one left for him to learn from.
Still though, he felt there was something in those bloodbound dreamscapes, where the perception of time was different and it passed all too quickly. Something verging on epiphany haunted him but it was never quite close enough to grab onto, far away and moving ever farther out of reach. Then, it was gone, like a sliver of light disappearing behind a shutting door, and he was left in the dark again.
It was a dark winter’s night when they knocked on his door, frantic and insistent.
The seasons had turned while he chased dreams in his sleep. Days, weeks, months had passed without stirring him from his fitful slumber. The spring rains had come and gone without his knowledge along with summer thunder and autumn winds yet somehow the distant pounding of a tiny human fist on a massive door of iron and stone woke him.
Adrian wondered if that was how it had been for his father.
~
“God almighty Sypha, stop pounding on it! You’re going to hurt your hand for Christ’s sake. And the racket is already making my head hurt. He’s clearly not at home. Such a pity too. Let’s just go back to that last village. If we stop for a few days and rest there, I’ll be fi…”
Trevor had to stop talking when he was seized by a fit of coughs. By the time he finished hacking, he had to admit, he sounded awful and he felt even worse but trudging across the country in ankle-deep snow drifts with a pack of speakers constantly poking, prodding, dressing and redressing his wound while they shook their heads gravely was not helping him in the slightest. If he could just lay down and sleep for a while…
“Bullshit, Trevor!” His eyes had started to drift shut but he snapped them open when Sypha snapped at him. “You are not fine! You will not be fine no matter what we do! That is why we are here. Look at yourself! You’ve barely been able to sit up for days now!”
“I’m standing here, aren’t I?” He opened his arms to show her how good he was standing but it didn’t quite work out for him. The movement put him off balance and one of Sypha’s people had to steady him before he landed face first on the unforgiving flagstones of Alucard’s doorstep.
Fucking Alucard.
How had it come to this? Begging for help from him of all fucking creatures. And within sight of the ruins of his family’s home no less. His father would be turning in his grave. If he had a grave. Which he didn’t. Well, whatever scattered ash was left of the man was probably twitching under six feet of frozen soil at the very least.
He almost made himself laugh at that thought but it turned into another wet cough. Sypha’s annoyingly keen eyes saw the blood that spattered into his palm. She frowned, then she started pounding on the door again.
Much to his surprise, right before he passed out, the damn door actually opened.
He vaguely registered being carried inside after that. He’d been cold outside in the snow but now he was warm, too warm, uncomfortably warm, and his tunic was getting sticky. He thought he must be bleeding through the dressing again. When cool hands touched him at the back of his neck, at his forehead, and briefly on his cheek, he felt a little better. It was...nice.
People were talking above him. Talking about him instead of to him. There was a lot of that going on lately.
“...how did this happen? And why has it been left like this for so long?”
Trevor realized he was laying horizontal in a bed. Sadly, it wasn’t the kind of horizontal bed-laying he would have wished for, but he probably wasn’t up to snuff enough at the moment to get it up, even if there was someone around he wanted to get it up for. Which there wasn’t.
It was Sypha who answered the question he’d caught the tail end of.
“It’s not as if we didn’t try to treat it, Adrian. We did the best we could. He’d already lost a great deal of blood before we found him. And it’s not just a simple wound. It must be poisoned somehow. Or…”
“Or?”
That was Alucard’s voice. Trevor decided it was time to join the conversation lest that stuck-up git think he was still out of it.
“Or cursed.” Trevor reached up to rub his eyes as he admitted to what Sypha was hesitant to say. He groaned and blinked at the candle light that seemed unexpectedly harsh. His headache was worse than before he passed out despite the soft pillows now under his head.
When he was able to fully focus his vision he saw Sypha biting her lower lip and standing next to Alucard, his brows drawn together, both of them looking down at him where he lay on the bed. It was a nice bed actually and the comfort of it didn’t make the cursed wound in his gut feel worse which was more than he could say for anywhere else he’d been since he woke up amnestic in a pool of his own blood.
“Oh, come on.” He continued, making some effort to sound like himself and not like easy prey in front of a damned vampire. “We all know I look like utter shit. I feel like utter shit. It’s either cursed or infected or...something. I vote for cursed.”
“He must have been ambushed.” Sypha guessed. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
Alucard lowered his face to Trevor’s. He narrowed his unnaturally pale eyes and wrinkled his unnaturally straight nose. “Was he drunk? He reeks of alcohol and vampire.”
“Hey! Fuck you! You reek of vampire, you fucking vampire! They poured alcohol on the wound, for all the good it did, if you must know. They should have just let me drink it.” Trevor mumbled petulantly.
A low, almost imperceptible growl vibrated out from Alucard. “It is not possible that he was bested by a simple pack of vampires.”
Trevor tried to laugh but it came out more like a weak gurgle. “Is that a compliment? How nice of you.”
“And even if it was the case that the last of the lauded Belmont hunters had gotten himself so besotted with drink that he couldn’t fight off a vampire attack, why did they not just kill him? Or drink him dry. Or enslave him. Was this wound from a weapon? Or something else?”
Alucard continued to talk over him to Sypha as if he wasn’t there, or as if he was too taken by fever to grasp what they were saying. They weren’t exactly wrong. He was shivering now. Shivering and sweating at the same time. He tried to continue to listen over the sound of his teeth chattering inside his head.
“It looks like it was a weapon but he doesn’t remember anything. He was like this when we found him. There was blood everywhere but we think it was all his. There were no other bodies or signs of vampires. Can you heal it?”
Alucard leaned over him again and waited patiently until Trevor was able to refocus his eyes and meet his gaze. “I need to remove this dressing and examine the wound. It will hurt. Prepare yourself.”
“Why do you sound like you’re looking forward to undressing me? And hurting me?”
Alucard’s frown deepened. “I don’t think you quite grasp the gravity of your current situation, Belmont. Have you lost so much blood that you’ve gone daft? Do you understand that this is a mortal wound? If the speakers had not brought you here, you would be dead by dawn. As it is, I am not entirely sure I can help you. Now shut up and let me look at you.”
Trevor gave in to the order more from exhaustion than fear of death or hope that he could be saved. Sypha had told Alucard exactly what he remembered of how he got himself into this situation, which was nothing at all until Sypha and her clan found him with a nasty wound in his gut that he didn’t remember getting. Even just trying to remember made his head throb. Whether by curse or blood loss his mind was dulled more than he was willing to own up to. He might have already died of inaction if not for Sypha’s insistence they seek Alucard’s help when it became clear the wound wasn’t going to heal on its own.
Deft hands undressed him and cool fingers delicately removed his bandages. It hurt, but not as much as he’d expected it to. Trevor chose to believe Alucard was being careful to try and avoid touching him as much as possible rather than being gentle on purpose. Distaste fit more with his aesthetic than empathy did.
“The gash isn’t deep but it has festered. This was meant to cause a painful and prolonged death. I’m frankly surprised you’ve survived this long.” Alucard sighed, long and slow.
“But you can heal it, Adrian...can’t you?” Sypha asked more urgently and she was gripping Alucard’s sleeve. He didn’t answer her for a long time. That silence, more than anything up to this point, got through Trevor’s clouded thoughts and a sick worry settled into his stomach along with the searing pain.
This can’t be how I die. Can it?
Trevor shut his eyes. He dozed off for a few moments but woke when Alucard spoke again.
“Leave us. I must speak with Belmont alone.”
“Wait...what? Hey…” Trevor protested. Sypha and the speakers did not. She simply rubbed his hand in support, then rubbed Alucard’s arm in thanks and left him alone, bleeding and moribund, with a vampire.
When everyone was gone, he felt the side of the bed dip under Alucard’s weight as he sat beside him. What he’d said wasn’t a lie. Dracula’s son obviously did smell of vampire. But of something else too. He’d never quite been able to put his finger on what it was. Something different. Something unique.
Is he really the last thing I’m going to smell before I die? Why can’t it be roast chicken? Or wine?
“You still have your Morning Star.”
Trevor cleared his throat to respond. He instinctively moved his hand to the weapon that hadn’t left his side since the moment he’d recovered it. “I...yes...I still have it.”
“And you haven’t been bitten. I can tell. You truly remember nothing of how you came to be like this? Accosted and incapacitated and yet still in possession of your weapons?”
“If I did, do you think they would have fucking dragged me half-dead all the way here to get help? From you of all people.”
“Do you want help from me, Belmont?”
“I uh...I…” That was far too difficult a question to be honest about when he was at a disadvantage.
Alucard didn’t wait for him to answer, either because he intended the question to be rhetorical or he didn’t actually care. “I don’t know what happened to you any more than you do, but I will admit to you that whatever it was troubles me greatly. I’ve seen you fight, Belmont. I’ve fought you. Whatever did this to you, whatever could do this to you…”
The sentence drifted off to nothing but a shake of his head. Trevor wasn’t in his right mind. He’d lost too much blood, was in too much pain, but he still understood what Alucard hadn’t said. Whatever did this to him, was certainly nothing good.
“Unfortunately we do not have the luxury of time for supposition. If you live, then we’ll see. I can heal you, but without knowledge of how this cursed wound came to be, I have only one option by which to do it.”
It was getting harder to stay awake and even harder to just think. He couldn’t hold his eyes open anymore. Simply continuing to breathe was proving a challenge. Fortunately some deep-seeded Belmont preservation instinct was able to speak up from the bowels of his soul.
“If you even fucking think about turning me, I will stake you right here.”
To his credit, though Trevor hated to credit him with anything, Alucard rejected his assumption. In fact, he sounded a bit disgusted by it.
“Don’t be ridiculous you dying bastard. You couldn’t muster the strength to stake me right now even if I just sat here and let you do it. And I don’t need to turn you to save your pathetically fragile existence. But...” Alucard winced as if he were about to swallow a particularly bitter pill. Trevor braced himself. “...you will need to drink my blood.”
Jesus Fucking Christ.
Trevor tried to recall everything he knew about vampire blood but he could barely remember his own name through the ever increasing agony in his gut. All he could manage to sputter out was, “How is that...I don’t…no! Just...no!”
“I am not asking you to drink some common vampire’s blood you stupid fool. I’m offering you my blood. It will heal you, I can promise you that, but then…”
The candlelight in the room seemed dimmer than it had before but his head hurt no less. “Then…?” The word came out as nothing but a breath.
“Sharing blood is not a thing to be taken lightly.”
“Sharing any old blood or sharing your extra special Vampire Jesus blood?”
Faster than Trevor could counter, even at his best, Alucard’s hand shot out to pull him up by his tunic until they were face to face. Pain poured over him anew and he grit his teeth.
“Listen to me Belmont, and listen well: You will die here. You will die here, in Dracula’s fucking castle, atop the ruins of your dead family and the Belmonts will be no more. The darkness that exists in this world, that you and I are both all too familiar with, will then have finally succeeded in swallowing up your clan for good. No ignorant villagers with pitchforks and torches needed. Is that what you want? Is it? I am not offering to turn you. You will remain the same inebriated asshole you were when I spared your sad little life beneath Gresit because I needed your help then. The help of a Belmont. A birthright that you now seem willing to throw away over personal distaste and ancient prejudice. Believe me when I say I share some of that sentiment. What I am offering you could bind you to me in ways I am unable to predict. There is, however, no healing art or magic, black or otherwise, that I know of to cure this mess you’ve come to darken my doorstep with, unsolicited I might add. This is all I have to offer you and I have never offered such a thing to anyone. So you can either die here and throw away your life and your legacy or you can take the exceedingly generous offer of my blood. The choice is yours.”
Having finished thoroughly telling him off, Alucard released him. He fell back onto the bed with a soft thud and a whimper.
“Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound as if I have much of a choice, now do I?”
“Necessity is often the enemy of choice. You either wish to live or you wish to die. Which is it? And understand that if we do this, there is no going back, for me as much as you. There is no exit once this threshold is crossed. But, as you said, we have little choice. And we have no time.”
“No choice, no time, no exit…” Trevor slurred his words as delirium overtook him. Even through the pain of dying it galled him that a vampire was questioning his devotion to his calling. Was he really going to let the darkness snuff out the Belmonts? Was he going to succumb to some unknown assailant that might prove a larger threat than just to his life? As Alucard had once asked him, was he the last son of a warrior dynasty or just a lucky drunk?
He had to find out who did this to him. He had to kill whoever did this to him. He was a Belmont. He had to live so he could fight on. No matter what.
“Fine,” Trevor said in a whisper, both resigned and determined, “I’ll do it.”