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Trevor had seen them from far away, hazy against the autumn sunset: Billowing white banners at the castle doors. He remembered thinking for a bemused second that Alucard was truly trying to improve the reputation of this place, putting signs of peace up next to the entrance for everyone to see.
Then the horse had brought him closer, the castle had blotted out the sun before him, and without the light in his eyes the white had suddenly shown signs of decay, rips and holes and discolorations in green and black, and finally, Trevor had seen the bodies.
Two half-decayed, decidedly human bodies in shredded, once white dresses, impaled on wooden poles and accurately placed left and right outside the castle doors, the skin of their faces blackening and slipping, tendons and muscles of their legs partially exposed by sun, rain, wind and dogs’ teeth.
An ugly, hard knot was forming in Trevor’s stomach when he halted his horse right in front of the castle steps and the coward inside him called attention to the very appealing possibility of running away and never having to ponder what had happened to these people, who had happened to these people, and why…But, alas, the doors to the castle opened in front of him only a second later, revealing a tall silhouette with blond hair and unnaturally golden eyes that looked at him with an expression of deeply familiar impassivity, and he knew he had missed his chance to leave.
Trevor got off his horse, more gingerly than he would have liked to, and climbed the steps to Dracula’s castle. It seemed to take him a lot longer than the last time he had done it, with Alucard and Sypha next to him, fully prepared to save the world or die trying. Something inside him yearned for that past simplicity as he pointedly ignored the stench of the corpses on either side of him. Alucard kept looking at him, unblinking, and in the cold shadow of the castle he somehow seemed less human than when he had soared around his vault in Gresit during their first meeting.
Trevor didn’t like it one bit.
“Belmont,” Alucard greeted him, quietly. There was no menace in his tone, nothing to indicate that the good terms on which they had parted almost half a year ago had turned sour, but the ugly feeling in Trevor’s stomach only grew when he stiffly gripped Alucard’s offered hand and shook it.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he quipped. The tone of his voice didn’t quite support the irony he had been going for, wavering as it was, and he had to suppress the instinct to look over his shoulder towards the bodies behind him. He found himself hoping that Alucard would answer with a quip of his own, something to alleviate the tension, to lead them back on old terrain, banter and biting sarcasm, but the vampire simply stepped aside, allowing Trevor into the main hall.
“Sypha is with her family,” Trevor continued. “She wanted to visit, too, but they had some sort of Speaker convention planned, so she sent me alo-“
The door fell heavily shut behind him, suffocating his attempt of making conversation, and the ugly feeling in his stomach escalated into a spike of irrational panic, that Trevor managed to subdue just before Alucard moved past him, breezily, towards the staircase.
Only in following his host did Trevor really notice that the main hall had been cleared of chaos and thoroughly redecorated. The candle-lit chandeliers on the walls were in use, as were the colder, magically fuelled lights that still seemed to work quite well despite the past disagreement between Sypha and the castle’s innermost workings. The originally red and golden carpet on the floor had been substituted for a blue one unmarred by burns, cuts, water stains and vampire entrails. Here and there one could still find traces of the battle that had raged a few months ago: Black spots on the walls where fire had hit them, places where the marble floor had been chipped away and indented by something that looked suspiciously like the imprint of a morning star. But altogether the room was almost…homely. As much as that was possible for a hall of such gigantic proportions. Trevor had to admit – he did like what Alucard had done with the place. Save for…well.
“How is the library?” he tried for conversation again, following Alucard up the stairway. “Still there? Or have you already burned it to the ground?”
“I haven’t been down there in a while,” Alucard said, simply, and then they were back to silence.
***
As it turned out Alucard had prepared dinner for them both in the expansive but hospitable kitchen, which Trevor found strangely endearing, but their conversation – even over excellent lamb stew and freshly baked bread – consisted mostly of half-lines between long bouts of uncomfortable silence. Under different circumstances with a different person, Trevor probably wouldn’t have minded, but in this particular setting it felt…wrong. Sure, he and Alucard had had a lot of disagreements in the past, and – arguably – they were more battle companions than they had ever been friends. But even during their most bitter arguments, amidst their colliding heritages and verbal sparring matches over fundamental principles of life and death, there had always been a strange sense of understanding between the two of them, ever after Gresit. It might have been hard to admit in the beginning, but during their time together, Trevor had found a lot of reasons to like Alucard. His determination, his reliability, his knowledge, his humanity, his ironic, quick wit. Hell, he had bequeathed his family home to him – and not out of pity or self-interest. He’d wanted to give Alucard something to hold onto for the morning after the battle, something to build on and care for. A future.
Looking at Alucard now, however, made Trevor feel like he was looking at a closed-off puzzle box that occasionally frightened him in its obscurity. It was obvious that he had changed – and the old Trevor from a few months ago would have probably waved that observation away a lot more easily. The new Trevor, however, the Trevor who had been in Lindenfeld, where all of his intuition had screamed at him for days that something was awry, where he hadn’t listened to it and people had died because of it; this Trevor came to the realisation that something was very, very wrong with Alucard. And the more he thought about it, the more it scared him.
The flight instinct that had been growing ever since Trevor had set foot in the castle was slowly threatening to overpower him, too, and when he sat opposite Alucard after dinner, a pair of unmoving golden eyes calmly watching him, he almost couldn’t suppress it any longer. The only thing that was keeping him from jumping up and leaving Alucard’s looming presence post-haste was Sypha’s voice in his head, that scolded him for his cowardice.
So, Trevor sat and endured the silence for a period of time that could have been anywhere from half an hour to half a year, locked somewhere between wanting to run as far as he could and helplessly watching the Alucard-faced stranger on the other side of the table with no idea what to say to him. To top it all off, Trevor knew full well how late it had grown over their supper, and he wasn’t exactly keen on travelling alone at night. The prospect of sleeping in the castle didn’t thrill him, either, though it was certainly a better and less exhausting option than playing monster-target outside; but asking Alucard for a room seemed like an insurmountable obstacle.
“There’s a guest room upstairs,” Alucard said after a while, thankfully, as if he’d read Trevor’s mind. “Several, in fact. Not the one on the second floor on the west side, though. I haven’t had time to clean it up.”
Trevor nodded, relief passing through him as he hastily got up from the table. He would find a room as far away from Alucard’s as possible, and once the sun was up, he’d be out of here – cowardice be damned.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Alucard.”
A strange expression passed through Alucard’s features, something like pain, but a moment later it was gone, supplanted by the usual statue-like indifference.
He didn’t utter a word when Trevor left the table.
***
While Trevor was climbing the stairs towards the rooms further upstairs, avoiding piles of rubble and destroyed furniture on the way that Alucard had obviously not gotten around to removing, he realised, truly realised for the first time how big this castle was. The marble hallways were throwing the sounds of his own steps back at him like an echo chamber and the magical lights on the walls coldly illuminated corridors whose ceilings were high enough to be left in complete darkness. Too big for one man, Trevor thought. Even an immortal one. A shiver ran down his spine as he remembered that, inside these abandoned hallways, Alucard was constantly surrounded by the remnants of his family, the ghostly footprints of his father whom he had killed with his own two hands. Every piece of furniture, every picture, every carpet …Trevor’s heart sank when he thought back to the day Sypha and he had left Alucard here. Alone. To become… well, what? Dracula? Eaten by loneliness, bitterness, hatred, finally out to destroy humanity in a long suicide mission? Sypha’s voice rang in Trevor’s head, clear as day, and the wisdom of her words regarding Alucard really struck him for the first time. His sadness is like an icy well. It’s bottomless. And it swallows up your voice and anything you try to drop into it.
Alucard had said it himself, had said that this castle was going to become his tomb. And Trevor, in his unending naiveté, had given him the Belmont library, believing that that would be enough to keep him alive, when it was just another pile of rubble and dust to take care of.
Something occurred to him at that thought, something Alucard had said a few minutes ago about the guest rooms. Not the one on the second floor on the west side. I haven’t had time to clean it up. Trevor stopped short in his tracks. What an oddly specific request to make, given that almost nothing here was truly cleaned up – he had been stepping around blackened pieces of wood and stone all the way here, and a room not being “cleaned up” wasn’t a very good reason not to use it under these circumstances.
“Second floor to the west,” he murmured, and without having made the conscious decision to, he turned around and followed the corridor to the west side of the castle. On the way he noticed that his surroundings actually became tidier the closer he got to the ominous room. The corridors here had not at all been damaged by the battle, and if Trevor had to find a place to sleep, he would definitely choose this part of the castle. He glanced through a few open doors and found a perfectly useable bathroom and a clean, fully equipped broom closet. Alucard’s request struck him as increasingly weirder as he kept walking, but Trevor merely frowned and moved on.
The door at the end of the corridor was a big, two-winged, important-looking one, and Trevor hesitated for a short moment before he decisively shoved aside the strange nervousness in his stomach, pushed the door open and peeked inside. Behind it he found a darkened, spacious bedroom with a stone-cut fireplace, undamaged wooden furniture and a four-poster bed. For a moment, Trevor was sure that he had gotten it all wrong, that this couldn’t have been the room that Alucard hadn’t wanted him in – maybe he had taken the wrong direction, missed the second floor?
But then the clouds outside gave way to an opaque ray of moonlight, almost bright through the window behind the bed, and Trevor saw it: The tangled white sheets, the gossamer curtains around the bed, the wooden floor next to it – all were drenched in old, darkened blood. He stepped closer, the terrible feeling in his gut making a vigorous reappearance as he touched one of the sullied curtains. From the shape of the splatter on the fabric that Trevor could make out, it looked like the strike of a sword through human flesh might have produced the pattern. But how…?
“I asked you for one thing, vampire hunter,” a voice spoke up behind him, icily.
Trevor spun around and indeed, it was Alucard standing in the doorway. Alucard, who looked angrier than Trevor had ever seen him, his eyes liquid gold, cutting through the room like knives. Strangely enough it was almost a relief to see him show emotion, even such a terrifying one.
“Vampire hunter? Have we come this far, vampire?” Trevor retorted.
He blinked and Alucard was a sudden presence in his personal space, a hand at his throat, all rage and superhuman fury, and for a moment Trevor thought he was going to kill him, right there, just squeeze and break his neck with a flick of his wrist.
“This is my castle,” Alucard growled, baring his fangs.
“Yes,” Trevor stated, his voice rough through the painful pressure around his trachea, his mind surprisingly clear, sharpened with adrenaline. “I helped you take it. Remember?”
That seemed to set Alucard back a little from actively proceeding to kill him, loosening the hand around his neck enough for Trevor to get in a few more words. “When I left you, I was under the impression that you were going to use this place to build a future inside it. And now I come back and what I find is blood on your bed, impaled corpses in your yard and – worst of all – someone I don’t recognise, who looks and talks like a friend of mine and now wants to kill me.”
Silence fell for a long moment, and the pressure around Trevor’s neck streaked the world around him in blurs of gold, grey and black. He knew he was going to pass out, if Alucard kept it up, but he grimly fought for his consciousness.
“Kill you…no, I….”
Alucard’s eyes widened, his hand disappeared from Trevor’s neck and he staggered back, two, three steps, staring at his palm in shock, like it didn’t actually belong to his body, like he couldn’t believe what it had done. Trevor coughed, the room swimming before his eyes, sprinkled with black dots as he tried to catch his breath, supporting himself with one arm against the nearest bedpost. Alucard had sunken to his knees before him, his face buried in his hands, and Trevor didn’t quite catch up to the situation, until he realised that Alucard was crying.
All pain, all anger, all fear went out of him in a flash and he took a step towards Alucard, arms raised, before stopping halfway and dropping them again, undecided. He wondered how often Alucard had sat in his castle like this, with nobody around to talk to, nobody to hold onto. Just empty, dark hallways and the phantom sound of Dracula’s footsteps around every corner.
The vampire-hunter-part of Trevor reminded him that Alucard had tried to kill him just a few seconds ago, that Trevor would have let him without even attempting to physically defend himself, and that he should be running or fighting or literally doing anything else but stare at Alucard and wonder how he might best comfort him. But that part of Trevor was brought to silence so quickly in the face of Alucard’s overwhelming grief that it might just as well not have spoken up at all.
He finally managed to take the remaining steps and place a hand on Alucard’s shoulder, surprised at the softness of his cotton shirt and the almost human warmth beneath it. Trevor felt a strange longing to kneel down, put his arms around Alucard and tell him everything would be alright – but before he could give in to it, Alucard had already pulled himself away, gotten up and turned around, smoothly and a little more quickly than a human would have been able to, his back towards Trevor, his arms at his sides, his posture once again immaculate and untouchable.
“What happened here, Alucard?” Trevor asked, careful and confused, his hand still suspended in midair where Alucard’s shoulder had been only a moment ago.
It was quiet for a while.
Then Alucard said: “You should get a different bedroom,” without turning around, and Trevor felt the anger and frustration inside him reappear with a vengeance.
He pulled his hand back and huffed.
“You almost broke my fucking neck over it. The least you can do is talk to me, Tepes.”
“I will not take orders from you.” Alucard’s voice sounded strained, and Trevor could hear the annoyance threading it.
“I don’t give a fuck about your superiority complex, you haughty bloodsucker.” That made Alucard twirl around, brows furrowed, eyes slitted.
“Why don’t you crawl back to the hole in the ground you came from, Belmont?” He didn’t look half as angry as before and a triumphant laugh slipped over Trevor’s lips when the realisation struck him: This was still Alucard in front of him, bitchy, sulky, occasionally insufferable Alucard, and the irrational fear of him that Trevor had experienced before seemed completely nonsensical to him now. He stepped up to Alucard, only stopping when their faces were so close to each other that he could see the forgotten tracks on his cheeks that had been left there by his tears. “You can fight me, Alucard. You can even kill me – which would probably be the quickest solution to your problem. You can bitch at me with your back turned. But I will not back off until I know exactly what happened to you.”
“Why?” Alucard gave back, and his voice sounded cold and smooth – save for maybe a small wavering that told Trevor everything he needed to know.
Trevor gave a crooked smile. “We’ve been through Hell together. You’re the closest I have to what I would call a friend. And I’m stubborn.”
The silence between them stretched for a long time, but neither of them stepped back.
Finally, Alucard sighed, deeply.
“Very well.”
***
They sat down over a bottle of wine on velvet-cushioned chairs in one of the rooms in the east wing. The doorframe was cracked, some of the wooden furniture damaged, but there was no old blood on the bed, which must have been the pivotal reason why Alucard had decided to move them here. For a while, Trevor had feared that he would go back on his promise and they would fall into uncomfortable silence yet again, but after a few long draughts of red wine Alucard finally started talking.
“They were two humans. A man and a woman. Taka and Sumi. Vampire hunters.” His lips formed a bitter smile. “Remember the vampire woman Sypha froze during the fight for the castle? Her name was Cho. She had a vampire court in Japan, with hundreds of human slaves. Taka and Sumi were two of them. After she’d died they fled from there and made it all the way here. They found me. They asked me to teach them everything I knew about vampires and how to fight them. And teach them I did.” He looked down into his wine glass. “Maybe I should have been more transparent, should have shown them every corner of the castle from the beginning… But I liked having them here. They filled this place with…life. And I was worried that once they’d seen everything – they would leave.” The same fleeting, pained look that had invaded his face after dinner came back to Alucard’s eyes, and Trevor once again felt the need to pull him into his arms and comfort him. He actively had to fight it before it went away this time. “They grew suspicious,” Alucard continued. “That’s what part of me wants to believe. Another part thinks that they had it all planned from the beginning – but that possibility is rather painful to consider. However, they doubted my motives. They doubted that I couldn’t move the castle, believed I withheld knowledge from them. They overpowered me in my room at night and attempted to kill me. It was close, but I killed them first.”
“Their bodies…”
“Yes. I placed them there as a warning. But I find myself thinking that they’ve become a warning to myself more than to others.” Alucard looked at Trevor, an indecipherable expression in his eyes. “I cannot trust humans. Ever again.”
Trevor swallowed hard. “What about Sypha and me?”
“That’s a different matter,” Alucard retorted. “I trusted Taka and Sumi, because I thought they would be like Sypha and you. I was wrong.”
A lump formed in Trevor’s throat at that and he tried to wash it down with more wine while he avoided Alucard’s impenetrable gaze and searched for an appropriate reaction to this haunting little story. He only came up with a question. “How could they overpower you? Even half asleep you’re much stronger than them.”
Alucard blushed, the pain in his eyes simultaneously growing and mixing with shame, and it suddenly dawned on Trevor that most of the blood in the other room had been spilled over the bedsheets. The used bedsheets.
“Did the woman seduce you?”
Alucard emptied his glass in one long draught and immediately refilled it with more wine. “They both…,” he trailed off.
Trevor’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a dick move.”
For the first time since they’d been together this evening, an honest laugh escaped Alucard’s lips.
“I think that might be a bit of an understatement.”
“Maybe,” Trevor said, surveying Alucard. There was a small blush on his cheeks, and Trevor noticed that in this light, with a glass of wine in his hand and the remnants of his smile on his lips, he looked rather human. Still supernaturally graceful, but more…alive, really. The observation made something stir in Trevor’s stomach, something warm and fond and strong, the same emotion, maybe, that had made him so hellbent to comfort Alucard instead of running away before… He didn’t realise he’d been caught staring, until Alucard said: “You look like you have more questions.”
Trevor dropped his gaze and cleared his throat.
“Did you enjoy yourself? I mean, before the…attempted murder.” The question escaped him as if Alucard’s prompting had physically drawn it out of him, and the moment he’d asked it, he already wished it had never left his mouth.
Silence fell, and Trevor avoided looking at Alucard, contemplating a claw-shaped scratch in the fabric of his dirt-ridden trousers instead that seemed very intriguing to him all of a sudden. Idiot, a voice in his head chided. It sounded suspiciously like Sypha’s.
“It was overwhelming,” Alucard answered, softly. “Being so…surrounded. As if I had been taken to a place where loneliness and pain didn’t exist. And when it was taken from me the way it was…I have never felt such betrayal, such complete grief.”
This was not the answer Trevor had expected, and he found himself rather shaken at the raw emotion in Alucard’s words. When he looked up, he saw Alucard looking back at him with interest.
“I always wondered what humans find about sex that is so irresistible to them that it makes them go against all of their beliefs, even put their lives on the line to obtain it,” Alucard continued. “But I think I might understand now, to a certain degree. Is it always such a…strong experience?”
Now it was Trevor’s turn to blush. This time he managed to hold Alucard’s gaze, however, as he scrambled for a good answer.
“No,” he finally said, after a few moments of awkward silence. “It’s not always that…intense, I think. Sometimes humans- people have sex simply because the urge strikes us. And a lot of times it’s boring, uninspired, meaningless, only for money or favours…all of the above.” Trevor thought of Sypha, of their shared days and shared nights, of her hands in his hair and her sighs of pleasure against his throat, of her soft, lithe form in his arms afterwards, bathed in sweat and entirely content with the world, however terrible their day might have been. “But having sex with someone you like…maybe even love… It can allow you to escape yourself for a while. To be…seen, I guess. Exist in a space where the world cannot enter. I don’t – I’m not exactly a poet, so I can’t really describe it much better.”
“I find your description quite fitting.”
Trevor chuckled. “Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Since I know that you need every single one of those you can get, Belmont, I’ll allow it.”
Alucard was smiling at Trevor, mischief in the corners of his eyes, and the warm, wonderful feeling in Trevor’s stomach threatened to well over. He quickly took another draught of wine – only to realise that his glass was empty.
In bowing forward and reaching for the bottle he was intercepted by Alucard, who’d apparently had the same idea. For a moment, their fingers touched around the neck of the bottle, before Trevor let go, startled by the soft press of Alucard’s fingers against his.
Alucard, on the other hand, seemed completely unperturbed. “So,” he said, refilling Trevor’s glass as well as his own. “You and Sypha.”
It was more a statement than a question, and Trevor knew it must have been obvious what had been going on with him and Sypha when the three of them had still been travelling together. Trevor just hadn’t anticipated Alucard of all people asking him about it.
“Ummm…yes,” Trevor gave back. “We’re…a thing, if that is what you’re asking.”
Alucard leaned back in his chair, his legs elegantly crossed and surveyed Trevor once again with his impenetrable gaze, making no attempt to speak up. In order to abridge the awkward silence, Trevor kept talking.
“But we’re not…like, getting married any time soon, you know? We actually talked about that at length, and we both agreed that we’re, you know, companions on the road, but we’ll inevitably take detours now and then because she has her Speaker community and I have – let’s just say, I need to be on my own in regular intervals. And actually, Speakers are very…sex-positive? Is that…is that a word? So, we came to this agreement that we get to spend time with…whoever we like, actually, but that we talk about things and support each other and have adventures and slay monsters together, but still have our freedom, and it’s really, really great, actually, and… Why am I telling you all of this?”
Alucard shrugged, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “I don’t exactly mind. In fact, I find it rather interesting.”
Trevor laughed. “You find my love life interesting?”
Alucard, however, didn’t laugh in return – just looked at Trevor, the smile on his face having turned somewhat wistful, the expression in his eyes impossible to read. And Trevor…Trevor found it more and more difficult to take his eyes off of Alucard altogether. The light from the fireplace threw flickering shadows over his perfectly cut face, and the warm orange blended with the gold of his long hair in a way that looked quite…becoming. Which was a strange observation to make about another man, Trevor distantly acknowledged.
“I would like to feel it again,” Alucard said, very quietly. “What I felt that night. I would like to go back to that place. To exist in a space where the world cannot enter, as you so eloquently put it. But I do not think I can. I would have to relinquish control. I would have to trust. And I cannot trust humans ever again.”
Trevor swallowed hard. The look in Alucard’s eyes was tugging at his insides, a mixture of sadness and hope and deep vulnerability, as if he’d just laid his entire soul open for Trevor to see; and Trevor didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t know anything anymore, his thoughts a confused tangle of disjointed threads. So, for lack of thinking, Trevor did what he always did in such situations, and let his instincts do the work for him.
He’d stood up from his chair and crossed the distance to where Alucard was sitting quicker than his clogged-up mind could follow, his movements sure and confident, a complete disconnect from the chaos inside his brain. Alucard’s hair was soft beneath Trevor’s fingers, his lips softer still, not warm, exactly, but not cold, either, the ghost of the wine they’d been drinking still clinging to them, when Trevor kissed him, cautiously at first, then deeper; and only then did he realise that Alucard had been waiting for him to do this for a while, that he himself had wanted to do it, but not let himself think of the possibility.
Alucard sighed into his mouth, his tongue a smooth, sweeping presence at Trevor’s bottom lip, his hand grabbing at Trevor’s hair in return; and the warmth in Trevor’s stomach turned into something heavier, hotter, spreading downwards.
At that point his mind finally caught up with him, and Trevor let go of Alucard for a moment, looking at him in surprise. His hand was still anchored to the back of Alucard’s neck, gripping, as if physically unable to let go. Alucard didn’t seem to fare much better, his pupils blown wide, fingers digging into Trevor’s shoulder through the leather of his back protector.
“Do you… want this?” Trevor asked, his voice not quite steady.
Alucard gave an almost imperceptible nod, and Trevor felt nervousness settle in his stomach, next to the heat.
“I’ve only done this with women. So, I might be…”
Alucard interrupted him by rising from his sitting position and kissing him again in one smooth motion, fangs catching ever so lightly at Trevor’s lower lip, fingers deftly untying the fasteners of Trevor’s leather protector over his chest. A small moan worked its way out of Trevor’s throat, when Alucard’s hand tugged at his hair, bending his head backwards and breaking the kiss, his lips coming down to hover over the exposed skin of Trevor’s throat. It should have been frightening, having a vampire’s breath hit such a vulnerable part of him, close enough to do life-threatening damage, but for some reason it only added to the delicious arousal in Trevor’s stomach, and made his pants feel about two sizes too small.
“You might be…what, exactly?” Alucard asked, a playful undertone in his voice.
“A little out of my depth,” Trevor gave back.
“More than usual?” Alucard teased, and Trevor rolled his eyes – which prompted Alucard, in turn, to lick up Trevor’s throat in a long, lavish line that sent electric shivers down his back.
“Fucking Hell,” Trevor cursed, pulling Alucard’s head up to kiss him some more, his hands now grabbing at the man’s shirt, searching for skin with something close to desperation. Alucard was quicker than him, though because the fabric was ripped away beneath his fingers, and then Trevor couldn’t see anything for a moment, when his own shirt was pulled over his head, the loosened leather protector falling to the ground with it, an afterthought.
Trevor assumed that it probably wasn’t a normal instinct to call a man beautiful, but that was the only word that sprang to mind when he saw Alucard’s upper body stripped before him in the firelight. The deep, red scar marring his chest didn’t derogate from the notion at all; in fact, it seemed Trevor a reminder that Alucard was…touchable. Real. Had it not been there he might as well have been a marble statue, a perfect image of something otherworldly and divine to be worshipped, rather than loved.
Alucard’s fingers were languidly travelling over Trevor’s chest, following the criss-cross lines of his own scars. Like his lips before, his fingers weren’t cold, exactly. Slightly cooler than a human’s, probably, but not icy like the vampire hands Trevor remembered Dracula possessing. He looked back at Alucard’s face, saw the mischievous glint in his eye a moment too late to be prepared for the sudden loss of ground beneath his feet, and yelped when his back hit the mattress of the bed Alucard had just hauled them upon with superhuman strength and speed. His surprise soon melted into pleasure, when Alucard’s hips ground down into his, making it perfectly clear that the previous proceedings had left him the opposite of unaffected. Trevor wound his arm around Alucard’s waist on instinct, his hand at the very slope of his arse, pulling him closer and intensifying the delicious friction against his cock, while Alucard came down to kiss him again, a dirty slide of tongues and lips, golden strands of hair brushing Trevor’s forehead, his cheeks, his shoulders. Having Alucard against him like this felt very different from having a woman, no soft curves moulding themselves into Trevor’s hands, the thighs encompassing his hips less than supple. And yet it was completely enticing, feeling Alucard’s hardness against him, the rigidity of muscles and tendons stretching and releasing beneath his hands, strong enough to break every bone in Trevor’s body, if Alucard only wanted them to.
“Come on, get those trousers off,” Trevor demanded, Belmont-boldness finally getting the upper hand over his nerves.
He was almost waiting for another I’m not taking orders from you, Belmont, or something of the like; but Alucard seemed very much in favour of his suggestion, because a moment later his trousers had all but disappeared, and Trevor’s with them, in another astonishing display of vampire strength and speed. Trevor’s surprised laugh was taken from his lips, when Alucard’s hips came down again, and Trevor could very much feel him now, hard and heavy and bare against him, forcing another moan from his lips.
“Mmmh,” Alucard made, a satisfaction in the sound that reminded vaguely of the one a tiger might profess when scenting its prey. His face was suddenly gone from Trevor’s field of vision – and Trevor almost lost his bearings right then and there, when his cock was enclosed by wet heat only half a second later.
“Shit. Shit. Fuck, Alucard!” That earned him another satisfied sound from Alucard’s throat, this time going straight up Trevor’s spine and adding to the molten heat already pooling at the base of it. He managed to lift his head to take a look, and the sight presenting itself to him almost made him come on the spot. Alucard’s cheeks were hollowed out, framed by the golden curtain of his hair, his eyes closed in satisfaction, his lips wrapped obscenely around Trevor’s length. His hand was moving between his own legs, and Trevor’s hips jerked up, involuntarily, at seeing Alucard so obviously aroused by this himself, another moan forcing itself out of his throat.
After a long while Alucard opened his eyes, gold and black, letting go of Trevor’s cock with a filthy pop and watching him through the shadows on his face, an inscrutable depth to his expression.
“Come here,” Trevor said, his voice frayed. “Kiss me.”
Alucard complied, his body coming back up and sinking down on Trevor’s once again, gracefully, kissing the taste of him back into his mouth.
“I may be out of my depth,” Trevor managed, between kisses. The nervousness in his stomach came back with a vengeance, when he realised what he was about to ask. “But I do know what men do with each other.”
Alucard broke away to look at him, no sign of impatience in his eyes, until Trevor worked up the courage to actually say it.
“I want to know what it feels like.”
He could tell that Alucard didn’t immediately understand, could tell, too, the exact moment when he finally did, his eyes darkening, something like a hiss leaving his mouth, and Trevor’s cock got impossibly harder at how affected Alucard was by his words.
“Are you sure?” Alucard asked, softly, but with obvious restraint.
Trevor’s hand came to rest at the side of Alucard’s neck, his thumb caressing his jawbone, and the warmth in his chest dissolved the tension in his stomach.
“I trust you, Alucard. With my life.”
“You say this to the man that almost killed you tonight.” There was pain in Alucard’s words, a near-physical hurt, and Trevor hated it.
“I say this to the man,” he said, pulling Alucard’s head further down, until their foreheads were braced against each other. “That fought with me, almost died with me, saved my life a bunch of times. And that never would have killed me, even when his mind was shrouded in so much pain and darkness that he could hardly see through it.” His fingers tightened in Alucard’s hair and he could feel the man relax against him, into the touch. “I trust you, Alucard. With my life.”
A sound passed Alucard’s lips, something between hurt and relief, and Trevor took it from him with a kiss that was almost inept, teeth clanking together, the angle all wrong – but it didn’t matter amidst the powerful sensation passing between them, the distinct feeling that the rest of the world was no longer here in this room with them.
After a while, Alucard broke the kiss, surveying Trevor carefully. “We need-“ he said, and then he had already disappeared, taking the rest of the sentence with him, a flash of red before Trevor’s eyes; only to come back a moment later, kneeling by Trevor’s side, a vial in one hand, a cushion in the other. Trevor’s hips were being hauled up, the cushion placed beneath them, and he was just about to mockingly complain about Alucard’s bedside manners, when his cock was once again being enclosed by the man’s mouth, reminding him of the arousal still pounding in his veins.
Trevor had expected it to feel like more of an intrusion than it actually was, when the first slick finger breached him. The addition of a second one burned, for a moment, but amidst the debilitating pleasure of Alucard’s mouth on his cock, the short discomfort almost didn’t register. And then Alucard’s fingers crooked, ever so slightly, sending an unexpected, electric spark of pleasure up Trevor’s spine.
“Fuck,” he said, when the fingers started moving inside him, bending and crooking, driving more small moans of ecstasy out of Trevor’s throat. Something like impatience started gnawing at his insides, as he felt himself getting closer and closer to his release between Alucard’s fingers and his mouth.
“I’m…Alucard, I’m ready. I need you to…please. Just – fuck me, for God’s sake.”
The fingers left Trevor, hesitantly, empty and wanting, and the mouth disappeared from his cock.
“Adding blasphemy to your considerable list of sins?” Alucard said, somewhere above Trevor, amusement blending with the arousal in his voice.
“Directly followed by sodomy,” Trevor gave back, a breathless laugh on his lips that fell to silence, when Alucard pushed inside him a moment later, all heat and perfect hardness. The stretch burned, more than that from the fingers before, but the feeling of fullness, of being so entirely surrounded by Alucard’s presence, inside and out, made Trevor forget about it completely.
He opened his eyes just as Alucard bottomed out, saw his lashes flutter against his cheeks for a moment, the gold of his hair illuminated by the fireplace far behind him, forming a halo around his head, and Trevor stopped caring about everything except Alucard’s eyes on him, piercing through the haze of complete pleasure in his expression, as he bowed down to kiss him. He kept kissing him when he started moving, angling Trevor’s hips until he found that spot again, the one that made Trevor gasp sharply into his mouth, made his neglected cock jerk against his belly, fingers digging into the smooth skin of Alucard's back on their own accord. Fangs nicked Trevor’s lower lip, leaving a tiny cut there, and the iron taste of blood mixed into their next kiss. Alucard moaned, sucking on Trevor’s lip, moving faster inside him, and something primal and needy stirred in Trevor’s stomach, something dangerously compelling. In any other situation his survival instinct would have prevented him from even thinking about this, but Trevor was too far gone to think. He simply wanted.
“There’s more elsewhere,” he said, interrupting the kiss, his voice low and rough.
Alucard stilled for a moment, his eyes focused on Trevor’s mouth, obviously restraining himself, and Trevor felt the vampire’s arousal like a physical entity in the air between them. Slowly, he turned his head, offering his neck, a savage thrill going through his body like the vibration of a harp string, when Alucard’s gaze fell down to his pulse point as if drawn there by gravity.
Yet, Alucard was still holding himself back.
“I trust you, Alucard. With my life,” Trevor repeated his words from before, and they rang true this time, too.
Slowly, almost gingerly, Alucard bowed down, his hips picking up pace again, slower this time, deeper, as they kept moving into Trevor, spiking the pleasure in his stomach to impossible heights. His pulse was rushing in his ears, the muscles of his neck straining, when Alucard’s tongue swept over the side of it, the sharpness of his fangs first a promise, then a touch, before they finally sank into his skin. The pain was sudden, hot and exquisite, and Trevor drew Alucard closer, fingers buried in his hair, felt the soft sigh against his neck as he started drinking; and that was enough to send Trevor over the edge. He was coming, harder than he had ever come in his life, the pleasure at the base of his spine spilling over and sending punishing, white bursts of heat throughout his body, impossible to be contained. He screamed out, and Alucard was coming, too, filling him up; and for a moment Trevor couldn’t tell anymore whether he was alive or dying or everything at once.
He found himself, quite profoundly, not caring at all.
Eventually, though, he had to come down. Alucard pulled away from his neck, a last sweep of his tongue over the puncture wounds his teeth had left there, extricated himself from Trevor’s body, too, his fingers a tender presence at Trevor’s cheek, his mouth warm and wonderful at Trevor’s lips, the faint taste of blood still between them like a sacred communion taken a bit too literally.
“That was very stupid of you, Belmont,” Alucard said, after a while, too much warmth in his voice to really get the point across. “Offering your neck up to a vampire in the throes of ecstasy.”
“Mh.” Trevor made, entirely content. “From where I’m standing, that was one of my better ideas.” He looked at Alucard, surveyed him, the tangled strands of golden hair around his head, the warmth in his equally golden eyes. “Did you get back to that place you wanted to go?”
Alucard returned his look, thoughtfully. “No, I wouldn’t say so.” His brows furrowed a little. “When I was with Taka and Sumi I was overwhelmed. Lulled. Like I’d been put on sleeping herbs. Forgetting myself, forgetting the pain. Which was…a relief. For a moment, at least, before it all went terribly wrong.” Silence spread between them, and Trevor let it happen, watched Alucard intently, the bad memories playing through his features in a sequence of miniscule movements. When he finally looked back at Trevor, however, his face was completely open. “With you the pain is still there. All of it. Every detail. But it’s different. The darkness is less complete, with you forcing yourself in beside it, demanding room. So, to answer your question: No, I cannot escape myself in your presence, Trevor Belmont, because you make me feel. Everything. Forcing the darkness out, and letting me back in.”
Trevor stared at him, entranced by the beauty of his words, not sure what to say to this. After a while, he felt a smile spread on his face. A real one. “Yeah. It was good for me, too.”
Alucard rolled his eyes at him, but the annoyance in his expression was undercut by his answering smile. “You’re an idiot, Belmont.”
“No. Just not good with words.”
And so, instead of saying anything more, Trevor kissed Alucard again, like it was easy, and Alucard kissed him back just the same way.