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The night is without its moon, the sky without its stars. Inky blackness, blankness, and nothingness sit above all else tonight; their only company is the rain. Buckets of it shroud the streets tonight, a thin shift against neon lights and the dingy fluorescents of an old laundromat on fifth avenue. The adjacent apartment complex is unremarkable, a tall structure of fading green vinyl and dirty roof tiles. The white paint of it's looming stairs are caked in unchecked filth.
Pity it's exactly the same as Lyudmil remembers it, as though nothing has changed since 1997. He figured the laundromat would at least be out of business by now, but instead its as bustling as it gets two hours before sunrise.
And the landlord- oh god, the landlord from hell is still there in all her glory. On her throne of lies and dirty money and a literal lawn chair, she sits just inside the laundromat.
She still owns it, then, and he wishes she didn't but he has something to accomplish tonight. He only hopes the recognition will make things easier.
A bell sounds when he walks in, dull and quiet- as though its broken, but how does one break a bell? Lorelai snaps her head up to meet his eyes regardless.
There's a glare before a grin, and suddenly Lyudmil's being ushered in from the rain with open arms. She still smells like fish. After years she hasn't changed, her German accent is fainter now but no less recognizable, and fire red hair draws Lyudmil's eye.
Conversation is all pleasantries, though hardly exhausting. It's almost ironically cathartic really, Lyudmil regailing her with his misadventures of the last two decades, people rarely listen; but the siren does, and she doesn't do much else but smile as he tells her his mission.
His old apartment, he just needs to take a look if its still vacant.
Wordlessly she reaches under her lawn chair, hikes her purse up onto her lap. She pulls out a ring of keys and jimmies a set of them off the ring.
He nearly bolts out as soon as they're in his hands. It's only by the fleeting look she gives him that he pauses. They talk for another minute, promising to speak again soon- they know they never will. He's back for only one thing, and by her sad smile she knows she isn't the reason.
He departs after giving her a hug, nonetheless.
Back into the rain, he takes the stairs two at a time to get to his old apartment. Creaking and groaning, the only thing that's changed about them at all is how they're more likely to give out now than they ever were. It isn't a comforting thought, though now he knows he can float.
The awning of the staircase does little to shield out the rain, and as he marches meticulously upwards he knows he's getting drenched. Lyudmil hardly cares. Drops of rain against his back are almost comforting, considering the warmth of the night. A thunderstorm will start soon, surely from the heat alone.
He feels the heat, but does not sweat.
The apartment he used to live in is still the same, but in place of all the furniture there is nothing. Emptiness dominates all else, making the windows and the open stretch of the apartment feel lonesome. That is still the same, even when he had beat up old couches and a television set and kitchen hardware, it felt empty.
It felt empty then, it does now too.
He steps in, crosses the threshold to let rainwater drip onto the already scuffed hardwood floors. From his hair, his clothes, from his person it falls and is among the only noise he makes upon entry. His footfalls are completely silent as he wanders.
The walls are the same shade of pink as before, light and adorned with mystery stains no one has bothered to clean. Years of shady tenants who constantly move and damage the place have probably stopped Loralai from bothering.
A hole is in the kitchen wall, which Lyudmil can only guess must have been from one of said tenants. He certainly never did that, he has more class than to go putting his fist through every wall that dares stand in his way. He is more the type to break a bathroom sink or a bookcase in an ill defined moment of emotion.
He's done both of those things too, but not in this apartment.
The bathroom is the last stop, a tiny closet of a place really. Flicking on the light, he notices this is the only room that's changed. A shiver runs through him when he thinks of why, and what that might mean.
He knows he hasn't been the only vampire to live in this duplex.
Regardless, he flops against the wall and slides to the floor. White tiles cover half the wall, with the rest being an abysmal avocado green. The paint is all that's changed, and Lyudmil thinks that if he can find the right tile-
One comes loose with enough pressing, and he ignores the dust and crumbling mortar in favor of reaching his hand beyond its egress. His fingers meet something cold, and without hesitation he wraps his hands around the object and slides it out of the wall.
A pale gem sits against an iron chain, luminescent like tonight's missing moon. It's a crescent cut from opal, a charm he remembers hiding here years ago. He can't even begin to imagine why he ever let it go, hid it in the wall of a rundown duplex at the dawn of a new millennium.
It's the first of many things that he's hidden, and he's still trying to find the rest.
Easier said than done.
It was an accessory he had woken up with centuries ago, tucked under the collar of his bloodstained shirt. If he remembers correctly, it had been a gift from Magnus, in the fragile hours between them when Lyudmil could fool himself into thinking there was really something there. Magnus had presented it to him with a flourish and a bow, goofy but utterly charming when he clasped it around Lyudmil's neck.
It's a tender memory, one that's kept Lyudmil up often. Perhaps that's why he sought to abandon the pendant, but not destroy it. It remained here for some time, in the walls of a shady apartment building; he truthfully almost forgot it was here.
He wonders quietly, how many other objects and memories has he tried to leave behind?
The answer comes after he's left the apartment, dropped the keys under the mat and jetted off elsewhere.
Steps from point A to B, he's retracing them and jumping them and wandering all over them, until he can no longer tell which steps are which. So he backtracks, tries to think of the places that stick out to him most.
It leads him to another small apartment complex in Vienna, Austria. The moon is out for once, a mere sliver of white against an unforgivingly light sky. It's still murky blue rather than the ebony of a late night, the sun has only just set. It makes his skin itch like dried sweat on a summer day.
It's winter in Vienna, and snow is only coming to grace the ground just now.
He can't even tell how cold it really is, and he isn't sure if its because the buzzing in his head has made him lose all feeling in his body. A numbness is thickly settled over his limbs as he looks for a second artifact.
This time it's in a clay planter, full of rotting flowers and blighted dirt that hasn't been touched in decades. The porch of the place is full of them, plants all abandoned by their caregiver ages ago. He's surprised they're even still here, and that manages to slice through the numbness somewhat.
Actually feeling the item in his hand- a broach no bigger than a crab apple, it grounds him. It draws his limbs to his chest, full of lead but no less light, and shakes the hissing of his extremities away. The coldness of the dirty broach in his hands almost burns, almost puts a heart shaped hole through his hand- but it doesn't.
It only feels that way because of who gave it to him.
A prince with wispy hair and a lovely smile and eyes like dandelions on fire-
Lyudmil remembers hiding it here, tucking it away under some lilies and keeping his face a mask of stone as he did so. He told himself it meant nothing, that burying such a thing was completely normal. Back then he didn't want to acknowledge it, didn't want to think of him .
Maybe him unburying it is a sign that he's ready now- but he doesn't let that sink in. Instead he tucks the broach into his pocket and starts walking to the nearest train station.
But the box is open now and he suddenly can't stop thinking about Alucard. The box overflows and convulses and it consumes him- the trek to the station is just filled with thoughts of him and him and only him and more of him and those thoughts refuse to cease-- because he can picture the man as clear as day after all this time. Through crimson eyes devoid of objectivity, he can see the slope of his friend's face, the plushness of his lips, the fullness of his eyelashes- he can see ethereal perfection that's left him mistified after forever.
He sees him in the moon, and in the sky's snow flurries, and in the peaceful macabreness of so many dead flowers- Alucard speaks to him in his missing sun: and in a way the two are the same. So much has stuck with Lyudmil about them both, and he can't tell if he misses them for their truth or his own romanticism of them. Either way, he doesn't ignore the throbbing in his chest where his heart once beat, nor the pulsing in his long unoccupied veins- he knows what he wants to do. He can hear Alucard from his own place in his heart.
Come to me, Alucard is saying in a million little ways.
Look for me, find me, come to me, I'm right in front of you.
-
Alucard is not in Vienna.
He is not in Bismarck, or Brussels, or Moscow, or even Paris.
Lyudmil doesn't find him in Turkey, can't even feel him in Greece, and knows the trail has gone cold in Romania. He looks anyway.
Paths he's traversed already he walks again, trains he has boarded a dozen times he boards a dozen more, and ships that have sailed he calls back to port. Even cars- which he previously refused to understand and drive- are at his willing disposal now. Anything that will somehow speed up the meeting he knows they're destined to have. But one can not rush destiny, not even if they think they're trying to run ahead of it for the better.
He doesn't find Alucard until decades later, when he's nearly given up all hope.
Lyudmil had always been sifting through the seedy underbelly of humanity and night creatures alike. His prince was never one for the light, he figured that was the only place Alucard could be. He was wrong of course, but maybe he only told himself otherwise because it was all he had.
Either he searched at night, looked through the droves of his kind in the shadows, or he accepted that the sun stood in his way now more than ever. He refused to give up for the longest time.
Really, it's a miracle they find each other at all.
Because by all accounts, Lyudmil's finally getting cold feet about finding his sire. The uncertainty of his place in Alucard's thoughts, the danger and effort it's taking him to keep searching, it doesn't feel worth it. Even as he sits on another train to nowhere, the moon high in the sky and the light of his environment hurting his eyes, he remains unsure.
But then he catches the gaze of a stranger, and it feels worth it once again.
Alucard has changed his hair, and that's the first thing that catches Lyudmil's eye- soft tresses of midnight hair completely replacing once golden ones. A wiser man would think it serendipitous, symbolic of the changes overtaken both of them.
Lyudmil liked him better blonde- at least that's the lie he spins for himself.
He tries not to fall in love all over again with stormy eyes and ivory skin and hair that looks so soft and a face shaped like perfection-
He tries , but like he does at everything else in life, he fails.
-
Lyudmil finds that they fit together again like two puzzle pieces on some days, and on others like two incongruent mechanisms in a locked door. Alucard's own efforts are like a key unmade for the door between them, and while it can breach the keyhole it can't quite make the final shove and unlock the door. Not that Lyudmil helps any, he locked the door in the first place, put up walls and walls made of doors and wariness.
Euphemisms aside, things are awkward at first on Lyudmil's end. Alucard is a stranger to him now, that much is clear. Strangeness shrouds him, he's an enigma like he never was before- but like he's always been; a walking contradiction.
He looks so well put together- it's strange to see him fill such a pair of shoes that it almost has Lyudmil reeling. The Alucard he knew was so distraught, so depressed that he could barely drag himself out of bed on a good day. This Alucard isn't that one, he holds himself with confidence, he talks of his responsibilities, touches on topics with grace. The curtness of his tone is grating, feels so foriegn to Lyudmil after centuries.
-But the softness in his eyes is still the same, and the small smiles and barely there chuckles haven't gone away either. Alucard's eyes still light up like they're on fire, diluted grey as they may be now rather than their radiant gold of the past.
Alucard is so different, but he hasn't changed at all. Its both a relief, and a horrifying fact to Lyudmil.
The worst part of being immortal is that nothing ever changes, at least not for Lyudmil. He himself feels stuck in time, like change overlooked him in the webbing of God's plans, or the Universe's great maps. To him, it seems like The Powers That Be just said 'fuck this guy' when they planned him out.
It sends him into a sulking spiral during tea one night, when the world is quiet and all he can hear is the soft inhales and exhales passing through Alucard's lungs. He glares at his teacup like it's just commited murder, and the action does not go unaccounted for by Alucard.
"Something wrong?" He asks after moments, dropping his hands into his lap and letting his own tea go cold on the table.
Sharpness sinks into Lyudmil's lip, and having realized he's been chewing it, he tries to redirect the conversation. His own thoughts can stay in the vault of his head, thank you very much.
"No," he says, like a liar. "No, I'm just thinking…" The moonstone burns against his skin.
"A dangerous thing," Alucard jests, taking to pulling at the sleeves of his sweater.
Lyudmil can only chuckle, slipping into an utter facade of pois. The thoughts screaming in his head for purchase are shoved down as he looks Alucard dead in the face, and changes the subject. "You never finished telling me about earlier. The young woman at your office today? How did that go over again?"
"Yoko?" He questions, his face of doll like features is a mask against his skin. The perfectly sculpted eyebrow he raises is an outlier to that illusion.
"Yes, Yoko! Something about an outing, something for work?"
Lyudmil can tell Alucard is puzzled then, both by the speed at which he bounces his leg against the table and by the question itself. As far as questions go it isn't an odd one, it is merely strangely placed, likely unexpected. "I'd forgotten about that," he confesses. Alucard straightens then, his back stiff against the relenting softness of the loveseat, one leg pulled over the other. He's a beacon, he begins speaking with such purpose, he sits without the weight of imperfection on his shoulders. Lyudmil is slouching.
"We were at an aquarium, just to investigate the business's ongoing care of it's creatures," Alucard does not call them animals, because that's not what they are. That's never what they are. Night creatures are not human or animal- they are simply beasts through and through. Being a biped doesn't let one escape such a definition. It makes Lyudmil's skin prickle.
"And how did that go? No mistreatment of any aquatic life I hope," The urge to be curt and cold is narrowly nipped in the bud, and Lyudmil remains as calm as ever. He should know he doesn't need to be defensive, but there's still a bitterness between them that he can't describe. A divide they can't shy away from.
"No, no! None at all. It was a rather routine set up for the most part. It wasn't until the inspection came to a close that things got- messy," Alucard tucks a lock of void hair behind his ear. His own cup of tea is clenched under delicate hands.
"Messy?" Lyudmil asks, faux enthusiasm shifting into reluctant interest in no time at all. He can feel himself leaning forward to absorb Alucard's words before he even knows what he's doing.
"That's what I said," Alucard chuckles. "Messy." Something about the way he lifts his tea to his lips enthralls Lyudmil, something in the way he sets the cup back down onto the glass coffee table only makes it worse.
"And how do you mean 'messy'?"
Alucard snorts then, barely remarking when Lyudmil drinks a mere sip of his own tea and gags. "I mean, Yoko fell into a fish tank and I had to jump in after her."
A hand comes down on Lyudmil's knee, his own thrown in a fit of laughter. "You're kidding!"
"Not at all, she got a little too close to a Mer tank and slipped," Alucard does not laugh with him, but the subtle smile which shadows his features does not go unnoticed by Lyudmil in the slightest.
It makes his chest feel warm.
-
"I think I miss the 80s the most," Alucard confesses to him on a foggy night. "It was all so ridiculous that I wasn't even sure it happened by the time it was over," It's the first time in months that Lyudmil has managed to get such a smile out of him, a borderline grin really
"Oh God, don't get me started. The hair, the clothes, the music…" Lyudmil's tone is uncharacteristically haughty. The 80s are and were a blur for him, having consumed so much compromised blood- drugs were the norm in those days, drinking from a young age. All of his donors were either higher than kites or absolutely sloshed- and thus so was he. Vampires are only products of their victims after all, and alcohol can compromise blood so much easier than he even understood then.
Magnus never warned him, never stopped him from sucking at the wrist of a drunk man or a tipsy young lady. Lyudmil was just easier to control that way, that's probably why.
But there were good things too. Lyudmil still can't get enough of the music, can never stop loving the movies. 80s cinema was tacky but in a way that still resonates with him, but good god what the fuck were mullets. Why the fuck were mullets.
"Do not disrespect the clothes. Shoulder pads are still fantastic and I will think nothing else," Alucard smiles wider, and Lyudmil can't stop giggling at the idea of him in shoulder pads . He can only think of the man with teased hair for so many seconds before he almost cries.
"Shoulder pads were an atrocity!! Alucard they were almost as bad as leg warmers!"
Alucard is silent then, a look on his face like he's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
"... Alucard… you liked leg warmers too, didn't you?" Lyudmil needs to steady himself, take a deep breath because that information is just far too much to process. He can't stop laughing.
The tips of Alucard's ears are genuinely pink. "Maybe I did and maybe I did not…" he shifts in his seat, the squeak of the leather armchair drawing attention to his squirming.
"Oh my- are there pictures? Is there photographic evidence of you in 80s clothing ?" Lyudmil starts to rise from the couch then, giddiness overflowing in him and pushing him to pursue this conversation.
"Absolutely not!" Alucard looks incredulous, like he really can't believe they've come to this line of questioning. It's only reasonable, they were running out of things to talk about and times past were easy to jump off of.
"There is, isn't there! You better show me, I will go snooping!!" Lyudmil rises up, gasping with emphasis.
"No, no!" Alucard practically tackles Lyudmil when he tries to get up and make a break for the bedroom door. They end up a tangle of limbs on the floor; a tender hand rests under Lyudmil's head with nothing but giggles between them.
-
Immortality has a tendency to strip a person of the feeling in their limbs, to dampen and numb the simplest sensations. Lyudmil, being as old as he is and being immortal for as long as he has been, knows this better than anyone.
Even now, as he's been reunited with Alucard and feels more alive than ever, he can't escape it. The slow build of tingling in his fingers that spreads and aches after too little time, the saccharine grin he wears to pretend he's quite alright, they don't make for a very good time.
He's in bed with Alucard the first time it happens in front of him.
The tingling in his limbs starts first, and he ignores it because this moment is too perfect to be ruined by his failing psyche. It remains as he speaks with Alucard in the dead of night about anything and nothing, persists even when dawn starts to flail into the sky. Ignoring it becomes impossible when he can't move his hands, can't reciprocate the soft touches Alucard graces his shoulders and back with. Its tender, he imagines, but he doesn't truly know; he can't feel exactly where Alucard's hands go or how hard they are against his skin. Even the usually pleasant drag of nails doesn't register to Lyudmil at all, his sensation completely lost.
The numbness spreads but Alucard keeps smiling, keeps moving his hands in such a soothing manner Lyudmil could cry. His usual touch starvation is somehow sated by this, even though he can't feel anything in his legs and arms- can't move his joints now.
He smiles at the gleam in Alucard's eyes and the quiet movement between them. The smile will drift from his own face soon once the numbness takes hold of him, but for now he just keeps it up. It's all he can do as his face loses feeling, as his eyelids get heavy and his smile cracks.
-but even through it all, when he can no longer move his lips or blink his eyelids or feel anything anywhere, when he has become the numbness, Alucard is patient with him. A warm hand is against Lyudmil's chest, and it doesn't stop the numbness but it does stand alone from it. It's a lighthouse against the sea of nothing that had become his physical body.
Alucard trails a hand to his face, traces Lyudmil's features with soft fingers.
The feeling in his limbs does not return until he wakes up.
-
He visits so often these days that he loses track of time as he relearns more and more about his so called friend. Lyudmil eventually comes to the realization that Alucard's kindness and willingness to meet Lyudmil in the middle only go so far. It's almost always there, except for the days when it isn't, except for the visits when Lyudmil can tell Alucard's affection is only skin deep.
His usual half smile is instead a poorly contained sneer, what he probably assumes is a normal look to others. It is, but not to Lyudmil, not to the one person who could never forget Alucard's faces after 500 years. He knows when Alucard is trying to control his disdain, and it hurts to be the one faced with it for the first time in forever.
Alucard looks at him with such a cold expression sometimes, speaks with such curtness, as though he thinks this version of Lyudmil is wrong, morally corrupt. Usually it passes, Lyudmil can handle it, but then there are the times when Alucard cannot look at him, cannot bare facing the mistakes he sees in Lyudmil now.
You did this to me, Lyudmil wants to say, you made me this, so why do you shy away? If I'm so bad, you have no one but yourself to blame .
Sometimes he wants to shout it, to throw his tea cup against the plain white carpet and stomp out of the sterile living room screaming to the hills. He wonders if Alucard would chase him, if his normal sweetness would overpower his own bitter guilt and disgust and force him to run after Lyudmil all the way to Europe.
It scares Lyudmil to think about how unlikely that is; though, maybe he's exaggerating.
Maybe Alucard feels guilty when he sees blood on Lyudmil's sleeves or smells the iron of his lover's last meal. Maybe he cannot look because he knows that what Lyudmil won't say is true: that Alucard did this to him, that at the end of the day it was his responsibility. Maybe the disdain is not aimed at Lyudmil but instead at himself- Alucard always is critical of his own actions to a fault.
But Lyudmil still feels too raw, stung by the suspicion of wandering, angry eyes. He doesn't feel the need to reassure Alucard of anything, least of all that he is not as guilty as he believes.
He is exactly as guilty, and beyond.
-
"You're beautiful," Alucard purrs into his hair, when only the stars can bare witness to their actions.
Lyudmil chokes on air he isn't breathing, pausing to shift his hold on a hand warmer than his by a fraction of a fraction. He hasn't been called that since the 70s.
"You're gorgeous," he says after a beat of silence, trying to one up Alucard in a manner both juvenile and familiar. It makes the tightness in his chest cease for several blissful seconds.
"You're…" Alucard pauses, draws closer and taps his index finger on the tip of Lyudmil's nose. It's familiar, it's silly, it makes his chest feel so light. " Sublime ," he finishes.
Lyudmil laughs then, full and open and loud. His laugh is the most genuine it's ever been. "Oh yeah? Well if I'm sublime, you're miraculous!"
They're both laughing then, holding each other just hours before dawn, unbothered by the impending danger to come.
They move from the roof to the garden, softly stepping on slick stone above mud. It had rained that morning, the ground is still wet and mushy. At some point Lyudmil floats over gravel, letting himself be taller than Alucard for just a second; it's just long enough for him to press a kiss to the crown of Alucard's head.
-
The sun licks his skin one morning, masking it's awful venom behind soft warmth. Its addictive, he's barely conscious, he lets the warmth persist for seconds because well, he's inside. Its a blanket or Alucard curling up on the couch with him. He thinks it could be nothing more, certainly not the long lost sun, who's touch he's apparently forgotten.
Seconds are all it takes before the sunlight has slithered far enough over him, has lapped at his bare arms for just a blink too long. The pleasant warmth he feels in his sleep shrouded brain turns so violent so fast. The sun is biting him then, sinking its awful fangs down all over his bare skin. He's never woken up so fast, never missed the numbness that always hides the pain but is so horribly absent right now.
He screams, he wails, he's blinded by all the light in the room before he even knows what's happened. A couch pillow is what he clings to, sinks his nails into and doesn't even acknowledge the sound of fabric tearing.
He's in pain for seconds before the venomous heat stops, but his skin is still bubbling, he's still screaming his head off.
Alucard forgot to close the fucking curtains. God damnit.
-
In the weeks that follow, Lyudmil can't help but give Alucard the metaphorical cold shoulder. The subsequent halt of their once budding relationship is something he tries to ignore too, tries to ice over with the memories of that morning and the deep seated emotional pain it caused him. His physical wounds heal in no time at all, his throat stops hurting from all the screaming and his skin no longer boils or splotches, but he can't shake the dread he had felt at that moment. The heartstopping fear he felt when he realised he could have died by his friend's mistake doesn't leave him, not for a long, long time.
They make up though, they always do. With tears and screaming and more physical affection than Lyudmil had expected to get in a lifetime.
"If you could have anything," Alucard whispers the morning after, clutching Lyudmil tight to him in the relative darkness of his bedroom. The sun rose hours ago, it's the first time Lyudmil has ever stayed passed dawn. "What would you want? No matter how unrealistic, what could I give you?"
Lyudmil shakes his head, yawns against Alucard's collar bone. He thinks of the sunrise, the last one he had ever seen in person over 600 years before they came to be here. It's ridiculous, how he's come to miss something so mundane- practically asinine really.
"Oh love," he mumbles. "You can't give me what I want, and I adore you for it all the same."
Alucard can't give him sunlight, nobody can give that to him without simultaneously gifting him the release of death.
Some days, he thinks he wants both.
-
"Why do you travel so often, really?"
It's a question with good intentions, it has to be, but it makes Lyudmil ill. Alucard asks him about this with no idea the baggage it carries.
Because Lyudmil doesn't want to tell him- doesn't want to let him know just how afraid he's become. The idea, the feeling that something is out there and that he needs to run, that Magnus is always out there and he won't stop looking. It haunts him.
"I think it's fun," Lyudmil lies. "I've told you that before, haven't I?"
"... Yes, but there's more to it than that, I know there is. Your interest in it can't be skin deep."
Fucker. Always so perceptive, it makes Lyudmil flush briefly with the shame of being figured out. "W-well-! Maybe it is, ever thought of that?"
Alucard gives him a look, and Lyudmil just folds. He can't lie to that face.
For a while he tries to speak but words fail him, only to come tumbling out while his voice is hoarse, eyes wet again and-
Dammit why is he always crying around Alucard?
Its four in the morning, and Lyudmil is spilling his guts completely unprompted like this is some horribly written romance novel.
He talks, and he talks, and he keeps talking and digging himself a deeper hole. Memories he longs to forget, things he had never realised he would miss, the years of hell Magnus put him through. During it all, Alucard is silent. Lyudmil can't tell if he's soaking up the words or merely trying to ignore them and crawl back into the clutches of sleep.
Rigid, Alucard doesn't emote as he lets the silence hang after Lyudmil stops speaking He just wants Alucard to say something for God's sake, but Alucard has always been a man of actions rather than words. instead of saying much he just pulls Lyudmil closer and mumbles sweetly against his lips.
Infuriatingly, it's effective.
-
Through the blindfold, he can tell what's going on. He can feel the heat of the rosy dawn against his skin, only kissing it with muted murmurs of pleasant warmth rather than scorching old wounds.
When he sees the sun for the first time, he weeps. While his tears dry minutes later, he doesn't stop weeping internally until he hops on a plane to Vienna to pick up where he left off.
Alucard is with him the whole day, from getting ready, to the ride to the airport, to the long wait for the actual plane. One would think planes finally arrive and leave on time in the current year; one would be fucking wrong.
The fluorescent lights of the building would normally hurt, and even the gentle glow of the digital schedule screens would be enough to irritate his eyes. Today, he's lucky, eyes hidden away by sunglasses and the warmth of the sunstone against his chest; he's comfortable in an airport for once.
It makes him dread the approaching plane on the tarmac in a way he never has- he loves traveling. Ever since he set foot in Japan he's been itching to leave it, and now he wants to stay right where he is. Alucard's hand is warm in his, it's pleasantly quiet here in the late hours of the night, and there's something about Japan that just feels like home now.
If only he was good at making up his mind; maybe then he could enjoy his flight without feeling like his heart was in a blender. Maybe then, he won't book another flight to Japan as soon as he touches down on Austrian soil.
Of course, he's as indecisive as it gets; he'll be in Tokyo again by the end of the month.