Chapter Text
“Mother, you’re worrying me.” Leandra sat in the window of her mother’s bedroom, looking down on the training fields at her cousins, who were laughing and carrying on between bouts of their swords. Patrice and her friend Elise who Leandra assumed was a Comtesse watched over them all, talking between themselves and sharing a pot of tea.
“Don’t watch them then, gazing upon inferiority breeds contempt.” She tosses another map aside adding it to a growing pile of papers and scrolls. Belinda picked up a small scrap and inspected it closely, bringing it to her nose and squinted hard at the few words scrawled there; unsatisfied with her findings she tossed it into the pile with the others.
“You’re awful.” Leandra spits, but she still turned away from the window, their familial happiness making her gut rot. She winces when she looks back to her mother, who was still frantically crawling around the room looking for God knows what.
“You have to come with me, Lee.” Her mother turns towards her, but there is something wrong. She’s hollow. A shell, Leandra’s mother wasn’t there anymore. Just anger and a sense of superiority, and nothing was left of the woman who raised her. Like an old hunched hag you’d find in the woods.
“Belinda. We have to talk to the others. They think you’re going crazy.”
“Let them, the church is going to burn this place to the ground in a few hours and I don’t intend to stay here and wallow in my own ego like these pigs for long.”
Leandra paused. The light didn’t seem to hit the room correct now, and it hit her mother so that she wasn’t even more of a gruesome caricature of herself. “What did you say?”
The old woman’s eyes snapped up, bloodshot and panicked and plunged her stare into her soul. “You and I warned them, didn’t we? Now the church is going to come and kill them all and hike their corpses up for the world to see.” She hunched back down into her papers and books. “You and I will be leaving before then, where Elinore can protect us. She’s been waiting for us to come back.”
Her eyes went back to the window, where she wanted to scream, beg her siblings to run. But she didn’t, she wasn’t and she was lost as to why. She was in an echo tunnel, sound didn’t feel right, light didn’t feel right, her heartbeat felt too solid in her chest. “What about Trevor? A-and Valence?” She wrung her gloved hands together, the feeling of her own skin somewhat foreign to her touch.
“Nothings my dear! We are the ones who will survive. You are the one who his above all of this! These people who are the secondary spawn of my parents will not be able to stave them off for long and your son comes from a bloodline of beggars and fools! For all he has of you he has of his father ten times over!” She threw the paper into the air, raining down on them both in a macabre show of her own insanity.
“M-mother I don’t understand why I can’t--” A crack, and then darkness.
“We will be above them, my dear. But for now, we have no choice but to leave.” She stood over her daughter’s now limp body, crumpled on the floor in a pile of silks. “I have to protect you.”
-0-
“Elinore is a sapphic witch that my mother fell in love with.” Trevor holds out the paper to the pair and they exchange a few more glances. Sypha takes it gingerly from his hand and turns it over again.
“I suppose that makes some sense?” She looked at Adrian.
“That doesn’t answer your other questions, Belmont.”
“My mother is a sapphic conjuration that was created by the witch as a gift to my grandmother.”
Sypha drops the old parcment., eyes blown wide, and Adrian pauses and responds. “I-I’m sorry?” He whispers.
Trevor sits up proper and snatches the folded piece of paper from beneath Sypha, opens it with a flourish, and looks halfway down through the middle. He reads out the text there.
“ All I could do is watch while she worked. She dumped the vial of our blood over the shapeless mold of clay, the way her eyes sparkled when it began to sink into the dirt, turning it an awful black color. She circled around it in the dark room, before grabbing a pitcher of water on the table. She raised it high above the collection of dirt and poured it over.
The clay washed away, revealing pink rosy skin folded into a little ball. It’s tiny lips quivered, before letting out a scream I had never known a baby could make.
She was beautiful. And perfect. Every inch of her was handcrafted for me and Elinore just smiled as I walked closer to inspect. I fell instantly in love, and I knew that I would never be the same. Her name is Leandra, for my great aunt who taught me the true ways of the world.
“There’s more here but this is the important bit. My mother is a -um a witch thing?” He sentence trailed off. He thought hard again and found his sentence. “But anyway my other grandmother is a witch.”
“Your grandmother is a lesbian who had a daughter with a sapphic witch.” Alucard drolls.
“Yes.”
“So you think this witch is still alive?” Sypha leans in with a sparkle of light in her eyes.
“Possibly, witches usually live up until their hundreds of years old, but there’s no telling for sure. If I could find the rest of her more recent journals I could piece together my own memory with the stuff my grandmother was writing about.” He turns the page to face outwards to the other two. “Like here, it talks about how my grandmother was asked by the woman a lot to come and live in the mountains with her and others of their people yes? But my grandmother denied her, saying that she still had duties to the Belmont clan.”
“Looking for more dusty journals doesn’t sound like too difficult a task.”