Work Text:
He woke, as if he had been only sleeping, to this most wane of winters again. To his mind, his body, hardly a night had passed, but it had been a year—a year away, a year sleeping.
And now Alucard was twenty years old.
He had been nineteen when he last walked these streets—nineteen, and dying, alone and cold, on a bleak night too fridge for snow. The ice fell in a mist as he shuffled on, cradling his insides and trailing his blood through the city. The night wind whistled through the cavity his father left in his chest.
It had hurt so much, and at that moment, he only felt the raw, ragged edges of it—where his bones and body ought to be and were not, which stung—bitterly.
He was nineteen. Nineteen and spoiled, he realized, with every heavy step down into the underground from the moonlight. He and his mother alike had been spoiled, spoiled by his father’s love for them, as if they were special, an illusion that had so completely blown apart in the space of a long night Its pieces still floated loose in his mind—that his father might have been enough to protect Mother from the world, that he might be enough to protect the world from his father.
He had believed himself loved well enough to persuade him to come away from a path of madness. How wrong he was Alucard thought as, at last, he found his waiting hall, his quiet tomb—if he did not survive this blow. The walk had been long and terrible and stooped him so low, he crawled the stairs to his box, his hands so wet with his blood that he slipped, struck his chin hard, and finally rested on the stairs.
A red color surrounded him; it ran the stairs, the floor. A red color that was nothing like fire, it was flat, deep as sea, dark and darker, a color that dragged onlookers within. It took in light hungrily but gave up no reflection, no shine. Blood, blood sliding slow, unhurriedly—carrying what spirit mobilized him, made him warm, away to grow old, dry, and evaporate.
Maybe he would not make it into the box.
Maybe he would sleep here, on these stairs, which chilled his arms with their black, metal coldness. (Or maybe that was only the nearness of death.)
He was spoiled after all.
He wondered, his vision wavering, if his father had missed his heart for purpose, or—or for nothing.
The old, angry man had just missed—
Alucard coughed, blood flooding his mouth, for it seemed he still had more to bleed! But the vomit was inspiring and he mustered up what life he had left and finished the climb into the box. There he slept, and slept for longer than ever before and perhaps ever again.
And now, on this day, in this time, he found himself twenty.
Twenty, and no closer to his goal than he had been at nineteen. He would try again, and again, but at least in this second attempt, he was not alone. He would have companions in his mission. It would begin; it would finish.
But for now, this still most wane of winters was kept at bay by a warm tavern, where everything was warm gold—from firelight, from beer, from full-hearted but amateur music makers. In spite of this merry-making, the Speaker had little to say, and the Belmont was engaging the barkeep in discussion of very great importance.
“Why do I have to pay for this,” Trevor said of his beer of which he had not partaken, not yet. “I saved this whole miserable town. Do you have a baby, man?” He sloshed against the countertop, frowned long enough for a thought, and seemed to think better of his question. “Does your wife have a baby?” he specified. “Do you have a wife?” The barkeep still said nothing. “If you still have a baby, or a wife, it’s because of me—”
They left the tavern very soon after this. The Speaker muttering as they left, “I cannot believe he is worse than I imagined.”
“The limits of our dreaming,” Alucard said, and only he could be sure he heard her—Trevor, Trevor did not seem to care.
But he did want to know why they were leaving.
“I do not think your comments endear us to them,” Sypha said with a look of ice and fire.
“They never do,” Trevor told her. “What barkeep ever had a soul to be endeared to anyhow? All in Gresit’s drinking industry—soulless, hard-hearted,” he frowned again, “and watering their drink! At bloody Christmas—does the Church permit no joy at all anymore?”
Bloody Christmas—it was Bloody Christmas, somehow—though the trappings of such seasons were gone long before the demons came. They might be found still—in the buried places of homes, of childhoods—dead trees, dead candles, bald ribbon. But winter did not need some trinkets to come and claim its time.
“No,” Alucard said. “‘Bloody Christmas’ is for hedonistic pleasures.” For idols. For excess. For popish festivity without biblical justification.
His mother had liked it anyhow.
Things had never needed biblical justification to have her love before, least of all Christmas. It had been banned by holy proclamation, and what was held in its absence in the cities of Wallachia were cold days of fasting, where no candles burned, and there would be no singing. All the people in all the towns gathered in all the churches to pray to a far and silent god until a pitiless night fell and they returned to their cold homes, their dry hearths. To sing, to dance, to drink, to light fires in the night—to permit joy—invited devils into their mists, to fall upon and rend asunder such fragile devotions.
But his mother had liked it anyhow and permitted joy in her house regardless of what God was supposed to do in His. As was her way, she never feared, and when the banners came, calling for the absolute ban of the festivals, she said, “It is an old day anyway, older than them.”
And what she meant was old things go on, old days follow year to year, with life of their own.
It would change and go on—she was sure.
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing truly dies,” she told him practically. “No days, no things. They all communicate into other forms.” As he was small, she made her points with cooking—communicating little heaps of flour, sugar, and a pat of butter into pale pastries that she twisted into rings and braids. They turned golden over their fire. She cooked such things only on occasions she very much liked, and she had him help her hang their little yule tree with them once they cooled.
Things had been so simple in those old winters—so happy. His mother did not sing as she worked, but she did hum to herself, stitching little, old Yule songs together as she threaded ribbon through cookies.
She did not, however, condone talk of Father Christmas in her house—whom she declared, forcefully, was perhaps a man once but was utterly myth now, however goodhearted and well-intended such a figure was for children. She insisted it was incorrect to fill young minds with such nonsensical stories. No man of any kind could steal over their threshold to fill socks over the fire with nuts, or oranges, or any such—
And the room had grown foggy—like a pale smoke had come in off of the snow.
“No man of any kind?” his father had asked, and his mother set down her ribbon in a huff—for the kitchen had been just her and her son until only a moment ago when he stole in over the threshold.
He liked to work such magic when it amused him, and this amused him.
“Do not tease me,” his mother told his father, but she was smiling. His father smiled too at her—a tight, secret grin, unguarded, that opened slowly to his wife and his son. He did love them and the place they made—for a man with a dark, traveling castle, there was no place like it.
He came home to them from the road, the castle, always in winter. December announced their time, the only season of the year where the nights were longest and the days came late and left early. Though there was not much singing or feasting in their house and only some candles, burning in little tin cups set among the yule tree’s branches, after Alucard went to bed, his parents would dance and while the longest nights away. They leaned together and swayed to a slow passage of music only they shared—what only lovers hear.
It was a good, sweet time—a good, sweet season—giving him something to look forward to when the taste of winter hit his tongue in his boyhood. A season that permitted joy—even in one little house, and the winter winds held it fast and kept safe.
Alucard lived in no such winters now. The new, cold air now was raw in his throat, and rusty, for the surge of demons did not stop with Gresit. Their toxic scents stormed ahead of them. They would carry on, a red wave on the land, making ruin of its cities, washing its mountains with blood, and swelling the river with corpses.
Alucard thought of that secret grin—that secret music—that played without sound or instrument through the cottage where a fallen prince came to his mother in the darkest nights of the year.
He had been spoiled then. In the rupturing of all he’d known, the utter upset of the world, of justice, he had learned what manner his father was, a form he had never seen in that little house so far from the black reaches of a castle like loomed like mountains in the air.
But he was twenty now, twenty and not alone, and would not be caught innocent again.