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Even after traveling together for months, they still managed to surprise each other.
“Okay, my turn, give me a leg up,” Sypha insisted, tugging at Trevor's cloak. He was high up in an oak tree, and the very shredded end of the cloak was the only thing she could reach, even perched as she was on Alucard's shoulders.
“You already have an entire vampire up!” Trevor exclaimed. “Why do you need a leg too?”
She crossed her arms. “Because I'm still far below the branch and you're taking up most of it.”
“Alright, plenty of room for all three of us really stop fussing,” he said, crouching and balancing carefully before reaching down a hand. Sypha raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Come on, I'm not going to drop you.”
“I'm not worried about being dropped, I'm worried about you falling out and dragging me with you,” she said, taking his hand anyway.
“I'm stronger than I look, ask the vampire,” Trevor said, grasping her forearms firmly and then just standing straight up in the tree. His balance didn't waver at all. Sypha was blushing furiously when he set her down, but he didn't see because he was kneeling again to offer Alucard a hand. The dhampir did not need help, but seemed disinclined to be rude by refusing so he took Trevor's hand and stepped elegantly up.
“You are stronger than you look,” Alucard commented mildly, going up another branch so it wasn't so crowded on the lower branch.
“I can keep up with vampires and kill cyclopes and yet you still seem so surprised when I handle myself.”
“Killing beasts is rarely about brute strength,” Alucard reasoned, settling with one leg hanging down and his back against the trunk. “Technique and manipulation of force is usually the most effective.”
“Yes, but keeping up with three brothers and subsisting off of whatever I can find in the bare wild benefits from personal strength,” Trevor said, sitting in a fluff of his cloak. “Besides, you really think throwing myself around would be easy if I wasn't strong enough to pick someone else up?”
“You are rather, dancer-like in your fighting. I'll concede that,” Alucard said.
Sypha didn't trust herself to comment. She was still distracted by the realization that Trevor was perfectly capable of balancing himself in a tree, reaching below his knee level, and picking her straight up. She knew he was strong. She'd seen him fight Alucard and countless things since, but she hadn't seen seen him. She found herself staring at him and quickly turned away, bright red when he glanced back. Trevor chuckled but said nothing.
It turned out, each of them had hidden talents. Another of Trevor's was his absurd flexibility. The first time Alucard saw him limbering up for some whip practice he did a double take.
“Are you....stuck?”
“Hmm?” Trevor asked, bending over languidly, backwards, to look at Adrian. “No? Why do you ask?”
“Well...I mean......theoretically the human skeleton is capable of bending that way but...”
Trevor smirked and raised an eyebrow, planting his hands and flipping over gracefully to his feet. “Nothing theoretical about twenty years of limbering practice and core strength,” he chuckled, winking. “Father saw I wasn't quite as hard hitting as my brothers, so he taught me to dance instead.”
He stretched, cracking his knuckles, then his neck. Alucard looked alarmed, flinching as Trevor then twisted his torso one way and then the other, every vertebra popping. He sighed, closing his eyes like it felt good.
“Your body shouldn't be able to do that,” Alucard said, basely unnerved. Studying with his mother, Alucard had come to know the human body as intimately as anyone could, and what Trevor's was doing was just...wrong.
“And yet,” he said, rotating his wrists and carefully massaging and then stretching his forearm muscles. “Here I am—what are you doing?” he asked, freezing and staring straight ahead when Alucard put his hands on his back.
“You don't posses any kind of spinal deformity that I can detect....” Alucard muttered, running his hands across Trevor's ribs and down the groove of his spine.
Trevor snorted, looking over his shoulder with a wry amusement. “Of course not. I'm just flexible.”
“Flexible, please, you are a mutation!” Alucard exclaimed. “Being able to not only take, but then sustain those poses is not normal. Your breathing should be restricted at least.”
Trevor barked a laugh and turned around, shrugging Alucard's hands off his shoulders. “Says the dhampir!”
“I make sense!” Alucard defended. “You cross a human and a vampire there are certain expectations. Fangs, enhanced vision, limited shape shifting ability,” he listed off, finger by finger. “You are fully human, and yet you do things that defy your very biology.”
“I don't defy anything, I simply move the boundaries,” Trevor said, waving him off and continuing his stretches. The next time he spoke, it was from a convoluted pose where he was essentially upside-down. “If it disturbs you so basely, dhampir, you don't have to watch,” he said flatly.
But he did. Because looking away just didn't feel like an option.
Alucard, it turned out, was a spectacular cook.
They'd been on the open road for the past several days and had finally taken up shelter in an abandoned house. The weather was slightly above freezing and Trevor took advantage of the game moving around to get them some fresh meat. Alucard had taken the rabbits right out of Trevor's hand and gotten to work the moment the hunter walked back through the door. Apparently when running for their lives, the family didn't think spices an important thing to take along, so they had a surprising amount of herbs and seasonings to work with.
“Why leave something they could barter for food?” Sypha asked, going through the spice rack. Alucard grunted and beckoned.
“The third bottle, if you will.”
She handed it over.
“The family probably realized running was more valuable than hauling things nobody has the coin for anymore,” Trevor said, looking at the jar of salt before attempting to pocket it. Alucard snatched it out of his hand and used it on their meat before handing it back, ignoring the annoyed noise Trevor made.
“Isn't that going to ruin the flavor for you a bit?” Trevor asked, watching Alucard with a suspicious squint. “Salt is better saved for combating demons, not experimenting with the food.”
“I'm not a demon, and I am not experimenting. A pinch of salt will not be missed in a fight, I promise.”
“You're not experimenting. Really?” Trevor drawled, crossing his arms. “You're trying to tell me you can cook.”
“You're really surprised?” Alucard asked, adding and moving things with a practiced flair.
“Did your mother teach you?” Sypha asked, watching him with more open curiosity than Trevor's skepticism.
“No, actually she was a miserable cook. She often forgot to eat when absorbed in learning some new concept.”
“Well it wasn't your father, so how did you learn?” Trevor asked, holding out a plate as Alucard took the meat off the fire. Alucard, immune to most heat that wasn't straight fire, pulled the rabbits into three portions with his bare hands as he spoke.
“I taught myself,” he answered simply. “We had all kinds of food and spices and herbs in the kitchen because father didn't want mother to ever go without any kind of flavor she may fancy. She mostly ate bread and cheese and dried meat because she was used to it and it didn't take much time, but they never discouraged me from experimenting. My sense of smell made me very good at predicting what would go well together.”
“How sharp is your sense of smell?” Sypha asked, perched on the table with her legs crossed. She'd lit the fire and secured the perimeter so it was up to the boys to handle dinner.
“If you were to ingest a poison, I would be able to tell which one and at what hour by the smell of your blood or sweat,” Alucard answered, stirring a few herbs into a pot of hot water to create a soothing tea. “It is primarily useful to me as a physician, but that same talent is good for more pleasant past times.”
“So you're telling me the son of Dracula himself spent his teenage years teaching himself to cook?” Trevor said, leaning his hip against the table. “Really?”
Alucard handed him a plate. “See for yourself.”
Trevor raised a skeptical eyebrow but he took the plate, sniffing at it before nibbling. Both eyebrows went up then. “Wow. That is...wow.”
Alucard smirked. “I told you. Enjoy.”
Sypha could sing, and not only as a human, either.
The first time they heard her sing it was into the smoke-choked ashen sky of a town on fire. She'd gone in like a tide of holy blue fog, extinguishing houses and driving the force back with a steely-eyed fierceness that evoked the image of an elemental goddess in Trevor's mind. He'd seen her work before, but this was above even that and it quite honestly took his breath away.
“Easy, Belmont,” Alucard said lightly, patting Trevor on the back.
Trevor glared at the vampire, fixing to retort when things suddenly went quiet and he thought it better to venture in and see if they were still needed at all. They dove in with a wordless agreement, moving through a slosh of ash and salt and holy water. Embers still glowed dully and charred skeletons fell to pieces at the slightest tremble from their footsteps.
But for their breathing, it was silent, and both of their expressions grew grimmer as they progressed. Another town lost. Another victory for Dracula's wrath.
That's when a sound high and clear and holy broke through like sunshine in winter, and both men stopped in their tracks. The words were not in any language Trevor knew, but Alucard seemed to recognize them and he looked almost stricken by the meaning. Trevor moved first, turning a corner to find Sypha kneeling in the midst of three children who cowered into her robes. She was stroking one's hair, her arm around the other while the third leaned against her chest, and the sound of her voice was so arresting Trevor held his breath to listen.
There was no magic in the air, no spell woven with her hands, but that moment would brand itself to Trevor's soul for the rest of his life and force him to admit he finally understood what the speakers meant when they said words were living, that words were magic. He had no need to understand Sypha's words to feel how she touched his very core with them.
As a speaker her voice had many edges, and as quickly as she could soothe or heal she could turn it deadly. With a voice like the spirit of spring she calmed those children, and with a voice like the sepulcher and smoke of eternity she turned against the hoards.
They found and she could not only kill demons, she could enslave them.
Trevor felt a chill go all the way through him when she snarled an incantation so dark, so low and scratching and fierce that the demons surrounding him paused and shuddered. His eyes went wide and he looked up, breathing heavy because of the fight, his heart pounding because of her. Her eyes were sharper than January glass and the power she held between her hands threatened the foundation of gods.
The demons bowed to her, slunk away from him, dragged their faces to the ground because they couldn't bear the weight of her command. Alucard dispatched them in a flash of sliver and moments later Sypha collapsed, but Trevor stood as though turned to stone. Alucard stepped through space in a flash of smoke and caught her, carrying her back to Trevor with a look of pure awe on his face.
“I didn't know that was possible,” Trevor whispered, staring at their speaker with a feeling that would have been fear if she hadn't just done that to protect him.
“It shouldn't have been,” Alucard said, just as quiet, just as stunned. “She spoke to them in a way only my father ever has. She broke his hold on them for a moment, commanded them away from you and cursed their very roots to shrivel and perish.”
“And people think speakers are easy targets,” Trevor said, blinking and reaching out to barely brush a curl away from Sypha's forehead. “I'm starting to think we actually have a chance,” he said, meeting Alucard's eyes.
“Yes. So am I.”
Sypha shrugged off their exclamations when she woke, but she was more open about her talent from then on. She could do far more than employ her voice towards magic or song; she could also mimic birds so perfectly that they darted closer in curiosity, or frogs so they didn't leap away until the last second.
On one patrol when Alucard turned into a bat and said something he thought was to himself, he almost fell right out of the air with shock when Sypha answered him. She could mimic almost any sound or language, including that of the infernal. Once night, when Trevor had been making a nuisance of himself Sypha got fed up and waited until he stumbled off half asleep to piss before making the most perfect echo of a territorial werewolf howl Trevor had ever heard in his life.
Sypha and Alucard were in absolute stitches when he yelped and nearly castrated himself trying to get his weapon out and put himself away at the same time.
"How much can you change your voice?" Alucard asked, grinning as Trevor stomped back and poked at the fire while he waited for his cheeks to stop burning.
Sypha shrugged, wiping tears of amusement from her eyes as she finally managed to stop laughing. "I don't know. I keep discovering new things, but I can mimic most voices or animal calls."
"Voices?" Alucard asked, leaning forward a little. "Really?"
She nodded. "Not most male voices, it's harder without some practice, but many lighter tones I can."
Alucard swallowed, dropping his gaze as though he'd thought about saying something and then gotten embarrassed.
Sypha frowned lightly. "What is it?"
"Do you have to hear a voice...in order to copy it?" Alucard asked quietly.
"Not always," she said gently.
"Do you....do you think you could--"
Sypha softened, reaching out to rest her hand on Alucard's. "Tell me about her. I'll try."
His expression twitched and he swallowed, but he tried. Slowly, he pulled out memories he'd carefully locked away, doing his best and yet feeling inadequate as he tried to describe Lisa's voice.
Sypha listened carefully. "Are you sure you want me to try this?" she asked, holding his eyes with her own. Alucard clenched his jaw, but he nodded.
She squeezed his hand and closed her eyes, focusing carefully, piecing what he'd told her together into a voice she could almost hear herself.
When she finally spoke Alucard broke down weeping.