Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Trevor’s always had mixed feelings about forests.

On the one hand, they’re usually devoid of people, and you can pass out under a tree without someone kicking you awake and telling you to move on. Sometimes you get lucky and find edible mushrooms, or other free food. Sometimes you get really lucky and there’s game - preferably caught in someone else’s snare.

On the other hand, roughly half of the beasties that could be found in the Belmont family Grimoire can also be found in forests.

Since Dracula’s hellbent vengeance upon the entirety of Wachalla, the odds of having a merry meet-up with one of those beasties has increased somewhat. But also since Dracula’s massive blowout, Trevor is no longer alone.

Right now, Trevor is contemplating the edge of a forest with his new (ish) company. Alucard on his left, squinting at the treeline as if he can will anything hiding out into the open, and Sypha on his right, hands tucked into her sleeves and head tilted thoughtfully.

They’ve been walking along a road running on the edge of the forest for about half of the day - and now there’s a T-junction. A wide dirt track with pretty significant cart-ruts leads into the forest. This isn’t some barely-visible forest trail.

The most tantalizing thing is a leaning wooden sign that once pointed into the forest, and reads “Sinore - 4 miles”

‘Well, it’s not a fairy forest,’ says Alucard.

‘If it was a fairy forest, we’d all be enchanted in a ditch hours ago,’ drawls Trevor. Several months on the road has not dulled Trevor’s urge to needle Alucard whenever possible.

Alucard gives him a dry look. ‘I’m tallying our options.’

‘Or stating the obvious.’

Sypha effortlessly cuts in sideways. Nipping their arguments in the bud is one of her many talents. ‘I’ve been to Sinore before - but we didn’t go through this forest last time. I’m not sure this road even existed then.’

Alucard leans to look at her. ‘It’s a logging town, isn’t it?’

‘It’s basically a logging camp that got too big and permanent to be a camp anymore,’ confirms Sypha.

Dappled light falls onto the path. The trees are widely-spaced - enough for a fair amount of underbrush, but Trevor can see quite a way into the forest from here. It looks normal enough. Suitably forest-like, no lingering sense of doom, no huge ominous cobwebs, no eerie silence. There’s the sounds of birds and insects calling, which is a good sign. Forests hiding bad magical things are usually silent.

‘If we go through the forest, it’s going to be an awful lot quicker than trying to walk around this,’ says Sypha. ‘I’m reasonably sure we’re going to have to go into mountain foothills to walk around this.’

‘I’m all for braving a forest,’ says Trevor. ‘We’ve been skirting it for a while and it’s not looking particularly cursed.’

Alucard glances sideways. ‘Why do only I get scolded for “stating the obvious”?’

Trevor starts walking towards the forest, namely so he doesn’t have to meet Alucard’s piercing golden stare. He tells himself that his heart flutters on eye contact because his family has been hunting Vampires for generations.

‘Because I like Sypha better than you,’ he says, not looking around. It’s not entirely a lie. Sypha makes his heart flutter sometimes too.

Sypha barks a laugh, and Alucard makes something that could possibly be a snort. Trevor didn’t think Alucard was physically capable of making such an ungraceful noise, and glances back over his shoulder.

There’s a tinge of hurt on Alucard’s face. In the corners of his eyes. Tightness in his lips.

Trevor mentally flails, feeling awful, and before he can clam up again, the words fall out. ‘I like you too.’

Alucard blinks. Sypha, the little shit, automatically glances back and forward between them, watching the whole interaction like a gleeful owl in the rafters of a mouse-plagued barn. A knot of flustered awkwardness at her sweet mischievous smile joins the rest of the feelings tying up his guts.

Trevor saves it by needling. Because any awkward situation can immediately be rectified by some degree of insult. ‘You’re much more fun to annoy, though.’

He turns back around and walks purposefully into the forest, so he doesn’t have to look at either of them anymore. He folds his arms tightly under his cloak. He knows Sypha relishes every tense moment between the hunter and the dhampyre, and he wants to stop seeing that little smile of hers.

He also doesn’t want to see Alucard’s face.

* * *

They walk in relative silence for about a half-hour, trailing in a loose line. Trevor first, Sypha in the middle, and Alucard bringing up the rear. Trevor is the one walking face-first into all the spiderwebs strung across the track. Thankfully, they are all normal sized - but that’s not much comfort when he’s scraping cobweb out of his hair.

The road is just leafy and gravelly enough for Trevor to be able to hear everyone’s footsteps, so he knows Sypha and Alucard are okay without having to look at either of them. It also means he hears Alucard (his footsteps are lighter than Sypha’s) slow down.

Sypha stops, turning a little with a shuffle of her speaker’s robes. ‘Alucard?’

Trevor looks around. Alucard’s glancing off into the middle distance, like he’s heard something. It means he probably has heard something. Alucard makes for a valuable early warning system.

Alucard exhales. ‘It’s nothing. I smell garlic, I think.’

‘...Are you allergic to garlic?’ ventures Trevor. ‘I don’t think you’ve actually told us.’

Alucard shifts subtly, becoming guarded. This is information that he only doles out on a need-to-know basis, as Trevor discovered early on. Trevor knows a sore spot when he sees one.

‘I am affected by it,’ says Alucard evenly. ‘If I come into contact with it, or there’s enough fumes, I’ll have problems.’

Trevor knows by now not to pry. He can tell Sypha’s curiosity is eating her up, but she’s keeping a handle on it.

‘Are you going to be able to keep going?’ asks Sypha. Trevor is a little proud of her restraint.

‘Unless we run into a field of it, I should be fine,’ says Alucard. ‘And if we do, I’ll find a way around it.’

Trevor nods. ‘If it gets too much, say something, and we’ll sort something out.’

Alucard gives him a tiny grateful smile, for not asking anymore beyond that.

Trevor hopes the sudden heat in his cheeks doesn’t mean they’re red.

* * *

They don’t get a chance to find out whether or not it’s too much for Alucard, because it starts getting dark fast, as it usually does in forests.

Sypha spots a clearing, just a little way from the road, and they have just enough time to collect some fallen branches and get a fire going before it gets too dark to do anything.

The clearing has been made by a fallen tree, and it’s such a recent fall that there’s still stones and soil in the knotty tangle of its roots. There’s a couple of brown leaves stubbornly clinging to its drooping branches. Trevor gives a branch an experimental tug, and it snaps off fairly cleanly. Easy firewood for the night.

The tree has been down long enough for some enterprising grass and tiny saplings to come up through the leaf litter - a dusting of green. Normally Trevor would just be glad it’s warm enough to sleep outside, but now, even through the tiredness, he can admire how pretty it is.

Sypha is sitting on the log, going through their packs, looking for their rations. She’s frowning in intensity, eyes flickering in the light of the fire Alucard is building. He’s found a few rocks to make a ring, and is carefully stacking larger sticks into the cone of flaming twigs. The fire is bright enough to make up a little of the fading light.

Alucard sits back with his hands on his knees, waiting for the fire to catch onto the new fuel he’s given it. He looks up and catches Trevor’s eye.

Trevor looks away, but Alucard’s already following his line of sight to the green fuzz in the clearing. He looks back to Trevor and gives him another of those tiny smiles.

‘It’s quite a picturesque spot, isn’t it?’ he murmurs, and glances to Sypha. ‘You chose a lovely spot for the night.’

Sypha doesn’t look up from her sorting in their packs. ‘Well, I’m glad the view is lovely, at least - because Trevor and I haven’t had anything to eat since those blackberry bushes we found in the ditch, and we’re down to a couple of dried fish.’

Trevor curses. Alucard can go for days without food, but Sypha’s looking beyond weary, and Trevor isn’t feeling so hot himself.

Sypha rubs her face, tired. Alucard looks worriedly back and forth between them, golden eyes catching the flickering light of the fire.

‘If you are willing to wait, I can go look for game,’ he offers.

Sypha looks up, very hopeful. ‘Really?’

Alucard nods. ‘I’ve been hearing birds and animals in the underbrush as we’ve been walking. I’m sure I can find something.’

Trevor sighs happily at the mere idea of fresh meat and a hot dinner. ‘I’d be eternally grateful if you could bring back a couple of rabbits.’

Alucard gives him another little smile, and Trevor thinks he might see a little twinkle in his eye as he stands to leave. ‘Would pigeons do?’

Trevor instantly goes in for another needle. ‘No - bring back two young rabbits, or I’ll have you beaten.’

Alucard serves it right back at him, eyes glittering. ‘If you want a rematch, Belmont, you can just ask.’

‘What, and lose days of travel because I’d have to carry you around after I’ve crippled you?’

‘You seem very sure you’ll win - here I am, thinking that you’re such a lightweight it’d be no trouble to carry you.’

A chunk of torn-off bark flies between them. ‘You can measure your cocks when Alucard comes back,’ says Sypha. ‘I swear, I’m leading this entire enterprise, and if I wasn’t here you’d be suggestively wrestling back in the blackberry bushes.’

Alucard makes a noise that could be an amused snort or a choke. Trevor splutters the only response he has; ‘You’re not leading this!’

‘When you guys start squaring off, all leadership duties default to me,’ says Sypha, in the flat tone of someone who’s saying inflammatory things to provoke others. ‘That’s how it goes.’

Alucard laughs - a little too loud to Trevor’s ears, like he’s trying to subtly kill this line of conversation dead before it can really get going. ‘Well, Sypha’s in charge until I get back.’

‘Fine, whatever,’ mutters Trevor. He’s a bit too flustered to come up with a witty retort right now. ‘Just come back with dinner. If you can.’ He adds.

‘I’ll try,’ says Alucard warmly.

Then, without another word, he launches himself at the trees, and vanishes from human sight.

* * *

Trevor’s pulled his boots off and is giving his socked feet a rub when Sypha decides Alucard is out of earshot.

‘You two are kind of adorable, you know,’ she says, tossing a stick on the fire.

Trevor doesn’t look up, but now his foot rub is an angry foot rub. ‘What?’

‘When we first started travelling, I was worried that all your insults would escalate to a proper brawl,’ said Sypha. She shrugged. ‘Don’t take that personally - you’re a Belmont, he’s a Dhampire, there’s a lot of tensions there. I was worried how you two would work that out.’

Trevor grunts, still not looking up, quietly worried about where this train of thought is going. Sypha is smart as a whip crack and always speaks, which is one of the things he really loves about her, but it also means she’ll find your weaknesses and more often than not start picking at them. Alucard’s hybrid nature is something she leaves alone - all of Trevor’s feelings are not.

He can hear the smile in Sypha’s voice. ‘I wasn’t expecting you two to just… start teasing each other? It’s as if you two were gearing up for a fight, weren’t expecting the other to be that decent of a person, and so just defaulted to telling each other that Trevor smells, and Alucard is too pretty. It’s like all the aggression had to go somewhere, but you realised you couldn’t actually fight, so you just pester each other.’

Trevor’s face feels hot, and he hunches into the thick fur draped across his shoulders, focusing very hard on rubbing every last smidge of discomfort out of his foot. ‘You make us sound like we’re a pair of idiot village girls.’

‘Village girls are smarter than you two. Village girls talk about their feelings. You’re a pair of idiot village boys.’

There’s a hot knot of… something, in his stomach. It feels like anger, but Trevor’s so intimately familiar with that emotion that he knows this is a different beast.

Sypha cuts off his train of thought before he can try and examine what it is. Her voice is gentle, and she nudges him with the toe of her thin boot.

‘That wasn’t meant to be a jab,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I’m just glad we all get along. If I have to break up your teasing occasionally - I’d much rather prefer that over breaking up an actual fight.’

He hears her shift off the log, settling next to him. It takes a minute for Trevor to pluck up the courage to look at her beautiful face, and while she’s smiling softly, she’s looking into the fire instead.

‘I’m just glad you both get along,’ she says. ‘That’s it.’

The firelight highlights the red in her chestnut hair - it gleams like like polished copper. It’s almost long enough to get in her eyes, falling into curls around her ears and down her neck. Trevor can feel himself blushing again, and he’s sincerely hoping she just keeps staring at the fire.

‘I’m glad we get along too,’ says Trevor finally. He knows she’s trying to make a situation where Trevor feels comfortable talking, and he gives in, working with her. She’s not as judgemental as Trevor instinctively thinks she’ll be. ‘I didn’t know how this was going to work, when we first started out… I’m used to travelling in hunting parties, but…” Trevor glanced upwards. ‘Well, I guess this is a hunting party, but I’ve never been in a hunting party with a Speaker or a Dhampyre.’

Sypha smiles that lovely smile. ‘Speakers are generally not ones for hiking into forests, armed to the teeth, to slay whatever’s been eating all the village goats.’

Trevor grins. ‘No, you are not.’

A hot coal tumbles between two stones. Trevor takes a stick next to him to nudge it back into the ring.

‘We can’t choose our parents,’ murmures Trevor. It feels like too much to say, but it leaks out anyway, because Sypha’s magical like that. ‘He might be a predator, but… he’s not his father. He wants to stop Dracula for the same reasons as us. This is unorthodox, but he hasn’t tried to kill me yet. This is definitely the longest period of time a Belmont has spent around a Vampire without him being attacked, so the least I can do is return the favour.’

Sypha gives him a sideways look, smiling wryly. ‘Sure - you’re barely tolerating each other.’

‘This is a working relationship,’ said Trevor evenly, stifling all flustered feelings.

‘Can barely stand the sight of each other.’

‘We’re just working together.’

‘S’why you’re fussing about him and this garlic he can smell, and he went into an unfamiliar forest puerly to see if he could find dinner for us two.’

Trevor gives her a sideways look, eyes narrowed. She stares back, not breaking eye contact as she toes off one boot, and gently pushes it into Trevor’s lap. That was not something Trevor was expecting, and he blinks.

‘Do you think you could have a working relationship with my foot, too?’ she says, deadpan.

Trevor snorts, hoping Sypha’s done with this line of conversation. He takes her foot gently, pressing his thumbs into her heel and making small circles.

‘That bruised sensation again?’ he asks.

‘Yeah - nothing new.’

‘Let me build you something for you to put your feet up on when you go to sleep. Helps drain the blood out. Easier than cutting your foot anyway.’

Sypha smiles wryly. ‘Speakers teach your family that?’

Trevor tilts his head. ‘Probably, come to think of it.’

She chuckles. She has such a sweet laugh.

* * *

Sypha lies back by the fire while Trevor rubs some of the aches out of her feet, and at some point their idle chatting trails off. The next time Trevor looks up, Sypha’s dozed off.

He gently pulls her boot back onto her foot, unbuckling the cape draped around his shoulders, bundling it into a makeshift pillow.

It’s a delicate operation to tuck it under her head, but he manages to do it without waking her. Sypha mumbles in her sleep, and curls up around the soft bundle.

She’s so young. Trevor forgets that when she’s awake - she’s so full of fire and steel, keeping him and Alucard in line, and incinerating anything that picks a fight with them… but she’s the youngest of them too. It still surprises Trevor, still catches him off guard, how small she is.

He’s got to make sure she survives this. There’s such a huge chance that they all might die - but out of the three of them, she’s the one who’s barely had the chance to live.

Trevor’s so wrapped up in that heavy, urgent thought, and the tightness in his chest, the feelings he doesn’t want to examine, that he only realises Alucard’s come back when he hears the telltale shfffff of the Dhampyre returning.

Trevor whips around, just in time to see Alucard seemingly materialise from thin air. He’s got two rabbits in one hand - already headless and dressed, the only thing left to do is cut off the hind legs that Alucard is carrying them by, and they can start on roasting them.

‘Sorry I took so long,’ he starts, and Trevor immediately shushes him, pointing to Sypha sleeping by the fire.

Alucard mouths “oh”, looking faintly guilty. He pads silently (too silently) to Trevor’s side, wordlessly handing him the rabbits.

They work in silence. Alucard carefully cuts green branches from the trees around them, being as quiet as he can as he builds a pair of roasting spits. Trevor finishes dressing the rabbits - Alucard’s done a great job already. All Trevor has to do is cut the remaining legs off and they’re ready to go.

He wonders why Alucard went to the trouble to dress both of them alone, when he could have easily come back and given one to Trevor. When he checks the neck to remove any dirt or twigs that might have stuck to the wound during travel, he finds the answer to that question.

Alucard’s cut hasn’t quite removed the large puncture wound on the neck. Very close though. If he’d cut a finger-width lower, he would have cut off that unmistakable bite mark.

‘Have you been feeding enough?’ asks Trevor bluntly, keeping his voice down.

‘Pardon?’ said Alucard, looking up from his spit-building.

‘I mean…’ Trevor’s never had to ask this question before, and it feels very uncomfortable on his tongue. ‘Have you been getting enough blood?’

Alucard stares at him for a long moment, seemingly taken aback. Trevor feels very awkward, but being a huge embarrassment has never stopped him before.

‘I’m getting enough,’ says Alucard at last.

‘From animals?’

Alucard hesitates for the briefest of moments, and in that moment Trevor knows for certain he’s about to hide something. ‘Mostly.’

‘So you’re getting some human blood too?’ ventures Trevor. He tries to be neutral about it, but it’s about as soft as dropping a brick off a roof.

This time, Alucard’s hesitation is much more obvious. He goes quite still, and it’s obvious from the flicker in his eyes that he’s weighing up how to respond to that, and the consequences thereof.

‘A little. As ethically as I can,’ he adds quickly. ‘Remember the bandits that tried to rob us? I had a little when you went to check Sypha was okay afterwards. Sometimes I can get a mouthful from any men passed out drunk in the towns we pass through.’

There’s a hard line running through Alucard’s shoulders. He’s ready for some kind of retaliation, expecting Trevor to attack or berate him for it.

‘You don’t have to hide it from us,’ says Trevor.

Alucard looks up, blinking in surprise. ‘I thought you wouldn’t approve.’

Trevor takes one of Alucard’s carefully-prepared spits, and starts threading it through one rabbit. ‘I’m not… completely comfortable with the idea, no. But you’ve gotta eat. I’d rather know you’re well-fed and in fighting shape, rather than you sparing my delicate sensibilities.’

Alucard smiles a rare smile, and there’s a note of relief in it. ‘I… frankly I didn’t think you’d be this comfortable with it.’

Trevor has to think for a moment to put his thoughts into words. He threads the second rabbit onto it’s spit as he does so. Specifically, he’s trying to think of words that won’t hurt Alucard’s feelings.

‘The idea of you feeding on humans still makes me uncomfortable,’ says Trevor at last. ‘But I know you’re not just murdering whatever hapless bastard we come across. You’re doing it with care and impunity. I’ve killed more than enough vampires that treat men as little more than future meals, but you’re not one of those.’ He wants to look up at Alucard to help drive the point home a bit, but he knows if he makes eye contact, he’ll lose the ability to speak so concisely. ‘The more time I spend with you, the more I understand how much you value human life, and how unlikely it’d be for you to drain someone dry. I… well, I trust you.’

Trevor risks a glance at Alucard, and sees the Vampire has gone very still, looking at Trevor with wide eyes. It’s hard to read the emotion on his face - it looks like shock, but it’s more complicated than that. Those pretty kiss-me-quick lips of his are parted slightly. Trevor can just see his fangs. The flickering firelight makes his pale eyelashes cast dancing shadows across his cheeks.

Alucard lowers his head, shaking it, seemingly lost for words. His golden curls sway, catching the light.

‘Thank you,’ he says at last. His voice is very soft, tremulous.

The situation is now way too much for Trevor to cope with, so he nods firmly and immediately changes the subject. ‘Can you still smell garlic? Is that still bothering you?’

Alucard smiles knowingly, seeing right through Trevor’s clumsy play, then lies back comfortably against the forest floor. ‘Everywhere. It’s enough to make me nauseous, but it’s not causing me any physical pain, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Tell us if it gets to that point, eh?’

‘Of course. It’s probably just the bulbs in the ground, getting ready to flower. I didn’t see any actual flowers.’

‘Right. That’s good, I guess.’ Trevor tends the spits over the fire, turning the rabbit so it cooks evenly.

They slip into silence. It’s not as awkward a silence as it could be, muses Trevor - Alucard looks comfortable, at least. There’s a soft smile on his face, the kind that makes Trevor’s chest fill up with warm butterflies. Alucard, too, has a pretty smile.

‘I forget how much you care, sometimes,’ says Alucard. His voice is even lower and richer than usual. ‘You hide it under so many layers of rudeness and crude attitude, and what looks like dismissive despair… but the truth is Trevor Belmont has a heart so big it fills his whole chest.’

Trevor can feel his face going fever hot, his chest aching, and suddenly he’s fifteen again, tripping over his feet because a pretty girl in the village gave him a wry smile. Alucard’s giving him such a warm look that Trevor almost wilts.

Thankfully his smart mouth kicks in automatically, a completely unconscious action. ‘Are you accusing me of being a good man?’

Alucard gives a mischievous grin, scooting closer to him across the leafy forest floor. ‘I’m accusing you of being a very good man, underneath your carefully-cultivated exterior surface of filth.’

‘Oh, I’m filthy now?’

Alucard stops and settles in by his side - Trevor’s acutely aware of a part of him that’s disappointed Alucard doesn’t get closer than that.

‘You are our extremely disgusting friend,’ says Alucard, with a great fondness in his voice. ‘And when we get to a town, and we have some money, we’ll get a bath organised for you. And just for a little while, you can relax, and let us look after you.’

Trevor can feel a bead of sweat run down the nape of his neck, and his smart mouth has abandoned him - but there’s no pressure to say anything. That much is clear on Alucard’s warm, smiling face - but Trevor can see shyness there too. They’re both keenly aware of how far outside their agreed comfort zone they are, how far into no-mans-land they’ve gone, how far they’ve strayed from their usual dance, how close they found themselves.

The moment is as fragile as a soap bubble. Trevor’s afraid to move an inch, in case he somehow ruins whatever’s happening. There’s a whole different collection of emotions in Alucard’s big gold eyes. Fear and hope and something Trevor can’t quite identify, in equal amounts.

‘Izzat rabbit?’ says Sypha.

Trevor and Alucard spook so hard they bump shoulders. Alucard’s touch tingles against Trevor’s skin, even through their clothes.

Sypha all but slithers over to them. ‘You could have woken me up to help!’

‘You were asleep,’ says Trevor, blinking a few times to try and get himself back from whatever just happened. ‘Was a two person job, anyway - no point in waking you after such a long day anyway. Better for you to get some sleep while you can.’

She flops and pulls them both into a sleepy, warm hug, making their heads clonk together. She’s not fully awake, which is good, because she won’t notice Trevor being flustered again. That’s happening a lot tonight.

‘Thank you, guys,’ mumbles Sypha.

Trevor feels Alucard shift, wrapping an arm around Sypha. A long curl tickles against Trevor’s neck, and he feels Alucard’s hand against his arm, over Sypha’s warm back.

Trevor’s throat closes over, and for the first time in years, it feels like maybe life isn’t complete and total shit.

* * *

The rabbits are roasted by the time Sypha decides she’s had enough lounging on them.

Trevor and Sypha devour them in silence. Trevor hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he’d taken that first bite, and now he’s tearing chunks off the spit like he’s the mangy dog that lives behind every tavern ever built. The only thing stopping Sypha from being quite so sloppy, fast, and gross as Trevor is that she’s not blessed with Trevor’s giant shovel mouth.

If this was happening a few weeks ago, Trevor would expect Alucard to look some form of disgusted. Right now, though, there’s warm fondness on his face. The tenderness cuts straight through to Trevor’s core. He wonders if Alucard’s feeling that same sudden raw feeling of of belonging that Trevor just had.

When Alucard speaks, his voice is soft like a touch to the face. ‘I can take first watch tonight. You guys sleep for a while - you’ll feel better with a few hours rest and full bellies.’

Sypha has reduced her rabbit to a skeleton, and is currently chewing the cartilage off its leg bones. ‘I can take second watch, if you like.’

Trevor gives her a side eye. ‘You should get a full night’s sleep - I’ll take second watch.’

Sypha’s eyes narrow and she’s fully ready to steamroll Trevor, but Alucard beats them both to the punch. ‘How about I wake up whoever looks the most recovered when it’s time to change over?’ Under his breath, he added; ‘That’s if I can even sleep in this stink.’

Sypha and Trevor are both giving each other the side eye, but it’s a good compromise. Difficult to argue with. Stupid Alucard, being good at mediating as well as unnecessarily pretty.

‘The garlic stink?’ clarifies Sypha.

Alucard sighs, grumbling. He’s pretty even when he’s peeved. ‘Yes. It’s not enough to do damage to me, don’t worry - but it’s deeply unpleasant.’

‘Is it still making you nauseous?’ ventures Trevor.

Alucard waves him off. ‘I’m not ill. It’s just uncomfortable. I’m not going to throw up on your boots.’

‘Oh noooo, not my boots,’ says Trevor dramatically. ‘You’ll destroy the crust of dog shit.’

Alucard snickers, Sypha barking out a laugh. She’s still got Trevor’s battered white fur, and she bundles it up into a pillow again, before curling into her robe, next to the fire. Trevor’s making do with the ragged fabric part of his cloak, folding an arm under his head so he’s not lying straight on the ground. There’s a lot of leaves and loam here, and the ground is relatively soft - Trevor’s slept on worse.

Alucard takes up his position on the log next to the fire, sitting cross-legged, one hand on the hilt of his sword. His eyes catch Trevor’s gaze, and he peers owlishly down at him.

Trevor gives him a sleepy smile, before he can really think about what he’s doing. There’s a little flash of delight when Alucard gives him an equally fond smile back.

Trevor uses his other hand to bury his face in his cloak, under the guise of going to sleep, before he does anything else stupid and sappy.

* * *

Trevor’s first sign that something’s wrong is that the sun is above the horizon.

He blinks and squints at the pale dawn sky. The sun is just high enough for its light to peek over the treetops, and into their clearing. Birds are calling in the dawn chorus - a sure sign the day has begun.

And he can smell a lot of garlic.

Trevor rolls over stiffly, blinking sleep from his eyes. For a brief moment, he thinks he’s woken up in a proper Belmont hunting camp, with their regular cook, who insisted on using a disgusting amount of garlic in every meal he cooked.

Then Trevor sees the carpet of finger-thick green shoots just starting to push through the loam. Some kind of bulb. They’re all over the clearing - they must be throughout the forest. A few have a tiny flash of blue between the bundled leaves, like bluebells - only they’re not bluebells. Trevor’s smelled and handled enough garlic in his life to recognise it, even if it’s not a variety he’s familiar with.

Trevor muzzily puzzles over daylight and garlic shoots, until further parts of his brain wake up and things click into place.

Nobody woke him up to do his watch, and he slept through the night. The garlic stink is so strong that even his puny human nose can smell it now.

He sits bolt upright, sloughing off his cloak and the damp leaves stuck to it. ‘Alucard?’

No response, save the birds in the trees. The fire has burned down to ashes and a few glowing embers. Sypha is still curled up next to it - all that’s visible of her is her soft auburn curls poking out from where she’s retreated into her speaker robes.

Alucard isn’t on the log. He’s not anywhere to be seen.

Trevor scrambles to his feet, automatically on high alert. No amount of living rough could destroy that fast Belmont reaction in a crisis.

Over the log, there’s golden curls spooled out in the leaves.

Trevor rushes over, kicking a leg up to swing over the log, and the sight is horrible.

At some point during the night, Alucard fell off the log and never got up again. Judging by his contorted sprawl, he had some kind of fit, or an attack, or a seizure. His legs and body are twisted, leaves kicked up around him. His arms are curled up hard by his sides, like a corpse twisted up by a house fire. His sword is still sheathed, and there’s no blood.

His eyes are puffy, red-rimmed, and rolled back into his head, so only the bloodshot whites are showing. His jaw is locked open, fangs elongated. Fully extended, they’re the length of Trevor’s fingers.

Someone screams Alucard’s name, and it takes Trevor a minute to realise that was himself, screaming.

He’s on his knees and pulling Alucard into his arms before he can really think about what he’s doing. Alucard is stiff and cold, like a day-old corpse, and for a horrible second Trevor thinks he’s died in the night.

He presses his ear to Alucard’s chest, listening for a heartbeat, before realising that he’s not even sure if Alucard has one of those. Then a horrible rattle goes through the Dhampyre’s chest, the knotted scar tissue on his chest pressing into Trevor’s ear, and Trevor hears himself cry out in relief.

Alucard takes another gurgling breath, twisting in Trevor’s arms. The movement is unnatural, and involuntary - hands curling into claws again, spine arching as his heels dig in the loam. A full-body shudder. His eyelids flicker, but his eyes are still rolled all the way back.

There’s an explosion of leaves as Sypha skids to a halt in front of Trevor. She’s wide-eyed, hair plastered flat on one side of her head, with a few errant leaves tangled in it.

‘The garlic?’ she says, voice trembling.

‘Yeah,’ says Trevor thickly. ‘I think so. I don’t know what else it could be. We’ve gotta get him out of here.’

Sypha stands up, scanning the edge of the clearing. Trevor’s trying to do the maths on how far they walked yesterday, and how quickly he could run that distance carrying Alucard. Blindly trying to calculate how quickly he could get Alucard away from danger.

Sypha points firmly, further down the road they were following yesterday, on top of the situation despite still waking up. ‘I can see daylight that way. Come on.’

She grabs Trevor’s fur and cloak off the forest floor and ploughs towards the road, looking back to check Trevor is following.

Trevor pulls Alucard closer against his body, getting one arm under his slender knees, and the other under his shoulders. Alucard is still oddly stiff, and twitching involuntarily, but there’s a weakness in his muscles that suggests that he’s been convulsing and shuddering all night. Trevor feels a sudden clench of guilt in his chest, for sleeping through Alucard’s suffering.

Trevor stands carefully, trying not to jostle Alucard. Trevor manages to lay Alucard’s head so it’s resting against his shoulder, with his clammy forehead leaning against Trevor’s neck. Trevor walked briskly after after Sypha, trying hard not to jostle Alucard, to give him a smooth ride.

Alucard makes a weak, breathy noise - barely flexing his vocal cords. It was hard to tell if it was him attempting to speak, or it was an involuntary sound.

Trevor presses his lips to the crown of Alucard’s hair, before he could think about it. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry we didn’t push on and get out. I didn’t know this was going to happen… we’re going to get you out of here, alright? It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be okay.’

Alucard shudders, making the breathy noise again.

Chapter Text

It turns out they were about two hundred yards from the edge of the forest.

It’s not a natural edge. It’s littered with tree stumps, and there are still patches of unrotted sawdust on the ground, from the massive cross-cut saws that the village would have used to cut them down. There’s even a few drag marks on the ground, and the deep footprints of the oxen that would have hauled the massive trees to the mill.

But right now, the forest edge is deserted.

Sypha drops back a little, sticking close to Trevor. He’s just as uneasy as she is.

The town is just visible from the treeline - your usual cluster of small houses around a T-junction, with some small- to mid-sized farms scattered about. Trevor can see a large building with a water-wheel attached a way out from the town. He guesses that’s the sawmill.

There’s a lot of extra features, which had become a grim standard these last few months. Two piles of charred wreckage where cottages should have been, the remaining fragments of beams pointing every which way. Any sharp and sturdy point has a head mounted on it, some human, some animal, all sloughing rotten flesh. Trevor could see dark lumps on the thatched roofs. Probably rotting bodies.

The thing that’s making them uneasy was that it’s deathly silent.

Aside from the natural sounds - the wind, the birds, the forest behind them - the village is silent. No shouting, no sounds of industry, no livestock, no weeping for those who had been killed that night, nothing. The water wheel is turning, but that’s the only sign of movement.

Trevor squints. The heads he can see have white patches of bone starting to show through. There are many, many small black shapes moving and fluttering about - crows picking over what he suspects are quite old remains. A fleeting glimmer of rusty red could be a brave fox.

Sypha sighs tensely. ‘You see what’s on the roofs?’

Trevor purses his lips. ‘Yep. I was secretly hoping they were just big rocks or some fucking weird local custom.’

‘No, I think the night horde has been through here.’

‘Yeah, think you might be right.’

‘And I think they’re not here anymore.’

‘Haven’t been for a while, I’d hazard.’

Sypha chews her lip, looking at Alucard in Trevor’s arms, then scanning the village. She’s thinking hard, weighing up all the options. Trevor leaves her to that while he inspects Alucard.

In the time they’ve been standing here, some of the contorted rigidity has seeped out of the Dhampyre. Trevor can feel Alucard’s weight shift in his arms, as he slowly starts to go lax. He seems to be breathing more regularly now, and there’s less strain to it, but there’s still a wet rattling to it that makes Trevor’s guts twist.

Sypha looks at Alucard, then Trevor, face pinched. ‘I mean… There wouldn’t be a huge flock of crows there if there were still any people, or horde hanging around. I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks, but we need to stop and check if Alucard is okay.’

Now it’s Trevor’s turn to chew on his lip and examine the town. The silence is deafening. Looking closer at the buildings, Trevor can see shutters that have swung open, front doors left unlocked. There’s scattered possessions outside doorways - it looks like people left in one hell of a hurry. He watches a crow-shape peck at a small white bundle on the ground.

Trevor looks further afield. The cottages in the village look to be in pretty rough shape, but the surrounding farmhouses seemed to have fared better.

Sypha taps his arm, pointing off to his left a little. He follows her finger to a farmhouse on top of a hill next to them.

It’s definitely the biggest of the ones in sight. There’s a second story, and it looks like a relatively recent addition. A well-built building is nearby - it could be a stable, could be a barn, it’s hard to tell from here. If the white fences surrounding it are the source of the wealth, then Trevor can figure out where that’s coming from - the whitewashed fences run all the way to the forest line, dividing up cleared land into paddock after paddock after paddock.

No livestock, though. Probably hasn’t been for some time.

The house’s most important feature is that it seems to be in good shape. The shutters and doors seem to have all been bolted, including the barn. There’s no suspicious lumps on the roof, no heads to be seen. No smoke rising from the stone chimney, or any other signs of life, though.

‘That’s my vote,’ says Sypha.

‘I second your vote,’ says Trevor.

‘Follow the path for a while, then cut through the field?’

‘Seems to be the most direct route, yeah.’

So they do just that.

* * *

Trevor gets to within a stone’s throw of the farmhouse door when Alucard gives an almighty retch.

It’s so loud that Sypha turns around, surprised. Trevor manages to hastily drop to one knee, letting Alucard’s legs trail on the ground, turning the Dhampyre’s head slightly and clumsily swiping back his long, white-blonde hair.

He’s just in time to prevent Alucard from vomiting up black bile all over them. He retches a few more times, agonisingly slow and hard, and quickly runs out of goo to throw up. It’s the kind of uncontrollable vomiting you get when you’re extremely sick - the body desperately trying to purge something that extends far beyond your stomach. Trevor has the absurd urge to squeeze him tightly, as if he could wring the sickness out of him.

The stuff Alucard is chucking up has the colour and consistency of hot tar. Sypha stares at it as she gives it a wide berth, then crouches next to him.

Alucard finally stops retching, trails off into a weak, wet cough. Sypha plucks hair stuck to his sweaty face, smoothing it back.

His eyes flicker open at her touch, unfocused, then looking at her. Trevor hears himself cry out in relief, and then Alucard looks up at him. There’s dainty red flecks in the whites of his eyes, where blood vessels have burst.

‘Hello,’ rasps Alucard. He looks quite dazed.

‘Hi,’ says Trevor. ‘Welcome back to the living.’

Sypha laughs weakly, almost a sob, and even Alucard manages a faint smile.

Trevor knows they might not have much time before Alucard passes out again, so he gets down to the important stuff. ‘It was the garlic in the forest that made you sick, yeah?’

Alucard nods, face pinched.

Spha shifts on her heels, one hand still protectively on Alucard’s head. ‘Are you going to get better now you’re out of the forest?’

Alucard nods again. ‘Yes, now I’m away from the garlic.’

‘Is there anything else you need?’ asks Trevor. ‘Anything else we can do?’

It’s clear that even this simple back-and-forth is wearing Alucard out. ‘I need rest. Sorry.’

Sypha strokes his head. ‘Don’t apologise. We’ve got somewhere to stay for a little while. You can get all the rest you need.’

Alucard turns his head sluggishly. ‘Somewhere…?’

‘This whole village is abandoned,’ explains Trevor. ‘We’re going to hunker down in a farmhouse for a while - it’ll give us a chance to all get some rest.’

Alucard looks concerned about this, but too exhausted to actually raise complaint.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Trevor softly. ‘We’re going to scout the place out, and board up all the windows. We’re not too happy either, but we can’t keep travelling with you like this.’

Trevor thinks Alucard might look faintly guilty at that, but it could just be him slowly lapsing into unconsciousness again.

Sypha leans over, gently shaking the Dhampyre’s shoulder. ‘Alucard?’

Alucard doesn’t respond. His head slowly falls against Trevor again.

She stands, lips pursed in a hard line. ‘I think we’d better get inside and find somewhere to lay him down.’

Trevor nods, then goes about gently gathering Alucard in his arms, making sure he’s secure, his head against Trevor’s neck again. By the time he’s satisfied and stands up, Sypha’s crouched by the door, fiddling with the lock. There’s an icy crunching noise and she straightens up triumphantly, looking at him. The door is popped open, the lock sprouting frosty ice shards.

They both step nervously inside. Sypha’s got her hands up, ready to start throwing bolts of ice at anything that moves. There’s no sign of a salt line over the threshold - Trevor wonders if the town had enough warning to even start putting them down.

The shutters are drawn tight, making the place very dark and gloomy. The air is stale and musty. This place has been closed up for a while now. Trevor would hazard it’s been about as long as the dead dog has been rotting on the roof.

Sypha cradles a bright yellow flame in her hand, looking around warily as she moves to open the heavy shutters.

Sunlight streams into a sizable room. There’s a hearth at one end - cold and ashy, with a heavy pot hanging over it, along with other implements for hearth cooking, hung on hooks around the hearth and on the walls. Quite nice-quality stuff.

There’s a heavy wooden table in the middle of the room, with generations of dents, scratches, and spills etched into its surface. There’s a small basket of needlework on it, and some equally heavy benches around it. The family dining table. There’s some handmade embroidery on the walls - maybe from the owner of the basket. There’s also a tapestry - modest but not cheap - hanging on a far wall, and cow-skin rugs on the floor. There’s a small door to the pantry, and another door to the rest of the house. Trevor’s guessing the bedroom is on the second floor.

This was a working family, not aristocrats, but they had a little money at their disposal.

There is, however, a small built-in daybed against one wall. Sypha reveals it as she opens the shutters above it. Maybe it was a servant’s nook at one point, but it’s clearly had a makeover. Trevor can’t see if there’s a mattress or not - there’s a rabbit-fur blanket over it, and a few throw pillows. Wherever he lays out Alucard, he’s stealing that blanket for him.

Sypha’s already had the same thought, because she pats it experimentally, testing for softness, before looking back over her shoulder. ‘There’s a mattress under this. I think it’s long enough to fit Alucard.’

She shoves all the pillows up the one end, and Trevor walks over, gently laying out Alucard, as if he were a newborn foal.

Alucard’s long lashes flutter as Trevor shifts his head to lie against the pillows.

Trevor strokes Alucard’s head, reflexively. ‘Hey. It’s alright - you don’t have to wake up. We just found a bed for you.’

Alucard nods just the slightest, and his eyelashes still.

Trevor looks up at Sypha, because he doesn’t know where else to look. Her face is pinched with worry - it must mirror his own.

* * *

Sypha and Trevor are both reluctant to leave Alucard’s side, but both of them desperately want to check the place is secure.

They wind up tag-teaming on and off, checking the whole place in small increments. He’s so glad that Sypha is overwhelmingly practical and quick to take action - there were a few moments getting out of the forest where Trevor was about to go to tears.

Sypha’s dying to check the pantry, so she does, while Trevor makes sure Alucard is fully settled.

His first step is to unbuckle Alucard’s sword from around his waist, and rest it on the table behind him. He leaves Alucard’s coat on - just that bit extra warmth - but he does wind up tugging off Alucard’s black leather boots. It’s Trevor’s personal policy that if it’s safe to sleep with your shoes off, you should. He finds it’s more comfortable in the morning.

He winds up with a boot in one hand, and Alucard’s heel in the other - and then it’s suddenly, strangely intimate.

Alucard’s skin is cool to the touch. Soft, even after all the travel. Pale as carved marble, or alabaster. An unearthly, beautiful white.

Sypha practically leaps out of the pantry, spooking Trevor and jolting him out of his thought. She’s grinning like a maniac.

‘No demons,’ she affirms. ‘But lots of earthenware jars. Preserves. We can just box ourselves in, and we’ll be okay for food.’

She’s right - the pantry is well-stocked, and all the non-perishables are still intact. Trevor’s stomach growls, reminding him that the last food he had was the rabbit Alucard caught the previous evening.

‘Sorry, that was a bit morbid, to get all gleeful like that,’ says Sypha. ‘But I had been considering what we were going to do for supplies if we had to dig in for a while. I’m really sorry for what’s happened in this village… but we do get to eat.’

Trevor smiles reassuringly at her. ‘It’s okay. I was thinking the same things. Y’know… this is someone’s house, and we should be respectful, because hopefully they’ll return someday… but you’re right, we get to eat. I’d rather be a little disrespectful than starve.’

Sypha nods thoughtfully. ‘Yeah. That’s true.’

Trevor leaves Sypha to do a more thorough inventory of the pantry, and returns to Alucard. He makes sure his boots are standing on the floor at the foot of the daybed, then carefully wraps the rabbit fur blanket over him, wrapping him up in a neat package. He looks a little like a chrysalis. A very warm chrysalis.

Alucard moves his head weakly, burrowing down into the rabbit fur slightly. Trevor gets that odd clenching in his chest again - guilt and something else.

He deals with that feeling by not dealing with it, leaving Sypha to keep watch over Alucard while he goes through the door to the rest of the house.

The third door off this room leads to a smaller room, filled with shelves, drawers, and the staircase to the second floor. There’s linen neatly folded and stored on the shelves, along with boxes of household goods - soap flakes, brushes, and tools laid out carefully. There’s a saddle on a stand, and tack hanging neatly from the walls. No shutters. A good storage room.

Interestingly, there’s also a few bound books sitting on the shelves. It’s been months since Trevor’s seen a book. He’s curious, but he wants to secure the upstairs first.

The stairs are so solidly built that they don’t creak or make a sound under his weight. At the top, the staircase leading directly into it, is the bedroom.

Unlike the ground floor, there’s no partitioning walls. The upper floor is just one room, taking up the entire upper floor. The walls come up to about Trevor’s shoulder, then the thatch roof begins.

There’s skin rugs on the floor, with two short wardrobes tucked neatly against the walls - dark and carved. Those would have been expensive. The four-poster bed at the end of the room is also dark and carved, very fancy and impressive, filling the whole room with its presence, even if canopy drapes had a distinctly home-made look to them. Four other smaller beds line the room, like soldiers standing guard.

All of the beds are crusty with old blood.

Trevor’s guess is that the horde came in through the gently swinging open shutters, situated on either side of the four-poster master bed. Judging by the torn drapes, the ripped sheets, the blood-soaked straw spilling from the mattress… the last occupants of this house put up a gallant fight. They did their best.

Trevor pads slowly into the room, making a closer inspection. Sheets are trailing onto the floor. There’s splashes of blood here and there - it’s all dried to a rust-brown now. Old blood, but no organs or flesh. Killed elsewhere, then.

Trevor closes the shutters and latches them. It feels disrespectful to take anything out of this room. He’ll have to check the storeroom downstairs to see if there’s any clean bedding on the shelves.

Trevor walks downstairs. He’ll make a more thorough inventory of that storeroom when she’s checked Alucard and Sypha are okay.

Sypha’s wasted no time, and has found a wooden tray of apples in the pantry that were being stored for winter. She’s got her eating knife out, and is carefully cutting bite-sized pieces off for herself.

Alucard has rolled over onto his side, further wrapping himself in the rabbit fur blanket. He’s burrowed in further, so his long, closed eyelashes are almost touching the fur. His hair makes a wild golden splash over the mattress.

‘I think he’s just asleep now,’ murmurs Sypha. ‘He was actually snoring a little bit, then he rolled over onto his side.’

Trevor snorts softly, pulling out a chair at the table. He’s careful not to scrape it on the floor, and make a loud noise that might wake Alucard. ‘Hard to imagine him doing something so undignified.’

She grins, popping a sliver of apple into her mouth. ‘It was pretty funny to hear it coming from him, yes.’

‘Apples good?’

She hums, pushing the box within reach of him. Trevor doesn’t bother with his knife, just reaching in and biting into the first one he pulls out. It’s delicious and crunchy, still juicy even after being in the pantry.

Alucard sleeps peacefully, breathing evenly, just loud enough to hear.

* * *

Trevor winds up gorging himself on apples. In amongst the panic of that morning, he hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he’d started eating.

Between them, He and Sypha demolish the entire box. It’s been too long since they’d eaten their complete fill of anything, and it showed. Trevor is full for now, but he knows apples won’t keep him full for very long. By the way Sypha is eyeing off the pantry door, she’s thinking the same thing.

They quickly devise a plan to craft an actual full meal for themselves. Why not? They have the time and the tools to do so.

Sypha’s going to do a more detailed inventory of the pantry, and see what they have at their disposal. Trevor’s job is to go outside, inspect the nearby building, and also discover where the firewood heap is, so they can get the fire going.

The firewood heap is easy to find - it’s stacked neatly at the end of the mysterious second building, already cut and split into decent-sized pieces. Trevor makes a lap of the building and discovers that, yes, it’s a barn. The doors are latched shut. Trevor cautiously opens them, hand resting on the hilt of the whip at his hip.

The barn door creaks as it opens, and startles into flight a few pigeons that were sleeping in the rafters, but aside from that, the barn is devoid of life. There’s loose boxes for horses, the doors all open, horses long since gone. Smaller pens for goats and pigs, all empty now. A few brown feathers float around, hinting that there were chickens here once too.

Trevor makes a more thorough inspection, the straw on the floor swishing under his heels. There’s tools here - a lot of horse tack and gear, but nothing out of the ordinary. Hay in the loft. No grain in the barrels, though. This barn has been abandoned for so long that even the musky, shitty animal smell is starting to fade.

He latches the door on the way out, loading his arms up with as much wood as he can carry. Judging by the borer holes, knots, and dark stain of fungus through each piece, these are all rejects from the sawmill.

He gently juggles the door to the house open with his free hand. Sypha’s got earthenware glazed pots full of preserves on the kitchen table - she’s pulled the wax seals off three of them. But the thing that gets Trevor really excited is the side of smoked and salted bacon, and the wedge of cheese laid out next to her.

Sypha puts her hands together decisively. ‘Okay. So it looks like there’s lots of preserved and pickled vegetables in these pots, but there’s also this bacon, some cheese and some fish. There’s also some dried stuff… there’s bunches of dried herbs back there too. So we could just eat it now, or we could get the fire going and cook something more tasty up.’

Trevor begins to unload his load of firewood into a nook by the fire that’s already strewn with little shards of bark. ‘What if we had something now to keep us going, and then cooked something luxurious for dinner? Alucard can just sleep until evening and then when he wakes up, hopefully he’ll be feeling better and he can have a hot meal.’

Sypha grins. ‘I like all the aspects of this plan.’

* * *

Trevor explores the kitchen tools, and finds a few well-sharpened knives, much longer and sturdier than either of their eating knives. Sypha finds pewter plates, and even some forks. It’s lovely to see her so excited and gleeful.

Trevor carves her many thin slices of cheese - he didn’t actually ask how she likes her cheese, but Trevor’s of the opinion that anyone who liked biting into huge lumps of it was either starving or mad. Sypha carefully doles out gherkins, cabbage, beets, beans… all sorts. They’ve got quite a lot to play with here.

Trevor says a quiet thanks to the previous occupants for keeping such a well-stocked larder, and explains to Sypha what he found upstairs, and in the barn. He carefully carves strips off the rock-hard side of bacon as he speaks.

Sypha is silent, sombre. She also says a quiet thanks.

‘I still feel a little bad about doing this,’ she admits softly as she helps herself to bacon. ‘But at the same time… I’d rather be in here than outside.’

‘It’s easy to be moralistic when you’re well fed and well rested,’ quotes Trevor.

Sypha smiles. ‘That’s very true.’

‘Besides,’ says Trevor softly. ‘I get the feeling that the family might not ever get return here. There’s no blood in the barn - either they turned everything loose, or someone came in and took the stock after the family was… you know.’

‘Yes,’ says Sypha softly. She looks a little downcast as she helps herself to a piece of gherkin. ‘But I’d like to think they’d understand we needed shelter for Alucard. Somewhere for him to rest safely.’

‘You’d have to be a real dick not to at least give us the barn to use. We did that several times, when I was a boy - we had space in the barn, so we put up desperate travellers if we could.’

‘Obviously, you don’t tell anyone that your sick man is a Dhampyre.’

‘No, you don’t.’

And, bless her, Sypha does not ask questions about Trevor’s family.

* * *

They eat in silence, mostly because both of them are extremely hungry again. Even if you gorge yourself on apples, they really won’t keep you full for long.

All the pickled vegetables are very good. They’ve been prepared with herbs and just a little spice - it must have been handed down for generations, because that’s how long it would have taken to perfect the blend. There’s a part of Trevor that’s hoping the recipe might be written down in one of those books he saw in the storeroom.

Trevor doesn’t consciously think about what the three of them might do if they survive defeating Dracula. He might jinx it if he does. But there’s a part of him that instinctively wants to collect information like recipes, just in case.

The bacon is dry as bones, but any meat is great. Same goes for the salted fish. It feels like years since Trevor’s been really full - not the full of having a meal after a prolonged time, but the fullness of always having enough food to satisfy your hunger.

The improvised meal gives them the energy to get up and start cooking something much better.

Sypha pulls the large iron pot over the hearth, and starts strategically stacking logs underneath it. Trevor will always be grateful for her ability to start a fire in any weather. She merely has to lay her hands on the logs and flames start licking up around them. As opposed to trying to find the village well that this house would have used for water, she fills the cauldron with shards of ice, and leaves them to melt.

Meanwhile, Trevor starts chopping up the pickled vegetables they’ve already opened, pouring their brine out the kitchen door and storing hisc choppings in the empty bowls. Sypha is happily rummaging through the pantry, bringing out all sorts of things - potatoes, turnips, carrots, all with soft loamy earth still on them from where they’d been packed in dirt-filled crates for storage. She brings out a mortar and pestle, and bunches of herbs, carefully hung and dried. She finds brown onions, still in their papery husks. A few garlic bulbs on the end of a braid. A small bag of barley.

They sit down at the table and peel, prepare, and dice everything they have. It goes into piles - root vegetables, the barley, and the hard bacon first, and the preserves last.

Trevor gets lost in the repetitive work. They talk a little, but mostly they just enjoy the moment in time. The fire crackles in the hearth. The ice pops and whistles softly as it melts. Alucard’s breathing is soft, just audible from his cosy nook. The firelight glints off Sypha’s curls, and her knife makes soft noises against the cutting board as she chops.

It’s a rare moment where they’re all warm, not in pain, not hungry, not even that tired. Where they’re all relatively safe. They don’t have to worry about whether the weather will turn. There’s no tavern weirdos to fend off. They don’t have to skulk. They’re going to have to keep a weather eye out tonight, in case the horde comes back, but the signs so far are good.

It’s a peaceful stretch. Everything is okay as it can be. Trevor’s got the two people he cares about most in the world by his side.

He wants this moment to last forever. But instead, he hopes to whatever god is listening that there will be more moments like this.

* * *

‘This is starting to smell pretty go-oood!’ says Sypha.

She’s hopping from foot to foot like she’s a little hobgoblin. It’s very cute. To be fair, Trevor is doing the same - the improvised stew does smell really good. It pretty rapidly turned into them just strategically chucking in everything that looked good, which turned out to be a great strategy. There’s an obscene amount of bacon in it, and they used all the herbs that smelled good.

Sypha’s poking the potatoes with the tip of her knife - they’re soft enough to spear onto the tips, but still firm. Perfect.

Trevor uses the hook hanging on the hearth to pull the cauldron off the fire, sliding it along the bar. Sypha’s already there, ready with bowls.

He ladles out two servings, leaving the ladle in the cauldron. Sypha’s already at the table, sprinkling the flakes of cheese they made on top of their soup. They melt almost instantly. Perfect.

‘That smells very good,’ says Alucard softly.

Trevor freezes, looking up. Alucard is smiling, head propped up in his hand, elbow on the mattress. He has shadows under his eyes, and he still looks very weary, but he looks much better than he was.

Sypha lights up when she sees him awake. ‘You’re up! How are you feeling?’

Alucard wrinkles his nose. Trevor has to begrudgingly admit to himself that it’s adorable.

‘Better,’ says Alucard. ‘Less exhausted. Some rest did a lot of good.’ He looks around the room curiously. ‘Where are we?’

‘Abandoned farmhouse,’ explains Trevor. ‘Looks like the horde came through here, and everyone bailed out. We haven’t checked the village, but there’s no real signs of life around here. No cleaning up or building fortifications or anything. The place is a mess.’

‘Obviously we’re going to keep watch tonight,’ adds Sypha. ‘But Trevor’s right - there’s remains down there that clearly haven’t been touched in a week or so. Doesn’t look like anyone or anything has been through here in quite a while.’

Alucard nods thoughtfully. ‘I trust you two to find somewhere safe. Largely because I’m not in the shape to do any of that myself.’

‘Are you doubting my ability to sniff out demons?’ asks Trevor.

‘No,’ says Alucard, flopping luxuriously back on the bed. ‘It’s me doubting my ability to do anything but have another nap.’

Trevor rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, of course. Alucard sleeps while we do all the work.’

Alucard smiles from his sprawl on the bed. ‘I specifically want Trevor to do all the work. Go fetch firewood and water, Belmont.’

Sypha slides in sideways. ‘Before you guys go into another half-hour round of teasing - Alucard, do you actually want some of this soup?’

Alucard grins. ‘Yes please.’

Trevor turns back to the cauldron, reaching for the ladle. ‘I’ll get it. Want some cheese on it, Alucard?’

When Trevor glances back over his shoulder, Alucard is looking up at both of them with such a look of warmth, love, and adoration, that Trevor momentarily forgets what he’s doing.

‘I’d love some cheese. Thank you Trevor.’

Trevor nods brusquely quickly turns to ladle out the soup before Alucard can see the blush creeping up his face. Dammit. He hates that Alucard has the ability to effortlessly do that to him. Sypha doesn’t make him blush this much.

Alucard carefully sits up, wrapping the rabbit fur blanket around himself like a cloak, before sitting at the table. He does look a fair bit better, but he moves and speaks like someone coming down with the flu - stiff, laboured, and soft-voiced. Sypha speaks with him, keeping her own voice as soft as his.

Trevor finishes dishing out the third bowl, takes a moment to ascertain that he’s not blushing anymore, and heads to the table.

‘Excuse fingers,’ he says as he sprinkles cheese on top.

‘Fingers excused,’ says Alucard with that same, loving smile.

They all get stuck in, and don’t speak for some time. Partly because they’re too busy scoffing the soup down, partly because Trevor’s (stupidly) too frightened to speak. He’s afraid Alucard’s soft voice, loving looks, and vulnerability will make something come out of him that he’d rather they not know about.

‘This is really good,’ says Sypha around a spoonful.

Alucard hums in agreement. ‘Thank you for making enough for me too.’

‘’Course we’d make enough for you too,’ says Trevor, swallowing down a mouthful. ‘Be extremely rude not to, especially when we’ve got a full pantry to play with.’

‘True, but…’ Alucard smiles. ‘Thank you, all the same.’

‘You’re welcome,’ says Trevor softly. ‘It was our pleasure.’

Sypha grins over her spoon. ‘It was mostly our pleasure because we also get to have soup.’

Alucard and Trevor snicker.

Maybe it’s the relaxed casual atmosphere, or maybe it’s the relief that Alucard is awake again, and on the mend. But either way, Trevor opens his mouth, and it slips out before he can get back on guard and stop it.

‘Do you guys want to find a house like this, afterwards?’ he says.

Sypha looks up at him. Alucard blinks. Neither of them need elaboration on what “afterwards” means. Trevor regrets it immediately. The mood is spoiled. He’s ruined it. Stupid Trevor.

‘I’d like that,” says Sypha softly. ‘But I think we might be spending money we don’t have just by saying that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Trevor thickly. ‘I had a similar thought. But I wanted to ask.’

‘I actually wanted to make a similar proposition,’ says Alucard softly. He’s stirring more cheese into his soup. ‘I… well, this is nice. It’d be nice to have a house together. Live together.’

Sypha’s smiling faintly, toying with the remainder of her soup. ‘Yeah.’

‘I’m not a superstitious man, but I feel like talking out loud about it is going to jinx it somehow.’

Trevor sighs. ‘Alucard, you’re a dhampyre that I didn’t think could possibly exist, we’re going to have to keep watch for the actual demonic hordes of hell tonight, which Dracula himself sent, and sometimes the sky rains blood. You’re allowed to be a little superstitious.’

Alucard laughs, but there’s a bitter edge in it, and Trevor knows that Dracula jibe cut a lot deeper than he intended it to be.

He grabs the seat of his chair and shuffles around, chair legs squeaking on the floor as he lines himself up next to Alucard, and pats his shoulder in the most hetero, masculine way he can.

‘Sorry,’ says Trevor. ‘That was a bit low.’

And much to his surprise, Alucard leans into him. Trevor wraps an arm around him before he can think about it.

‘True, though,’ says Alucard.

Trevor hesitates for a second, and then strokes Alucard’s soft hair, the blonde curls spilling over Trevor’s shoulder. He’s not quite as warm as a human should be, but there’s a soft spicy scent to him.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ murmured Trevor. ‘It was a cheap shitty joke, and I’m sorry.’

Alucard glances up at him through his eyelashes, giving him a wry smile. ‘You do such a terrible job of hiding that big heart of yours, Trevor.’

Trevor’s mind blanks out entirely, and he has no snappy comeback to cover. No thoughts at all, actually.

Thankfully, he’s saved from potential emotions by Sypha making a loud scraping noise as she drags Trevor’s bowl towards her, not breaking eye contact the entire time.

‘You going to eat this?’ she asks.

Chapter Text

They all absolutely gorge themselves. By the time they’re done eating, the cauldron is more than half empty, and they’re all so full they can barely move.

It’s a very nice feeling, and one that Trevor hasn’t had the chance to enjoy in years. That’s happening a lot today - various nice feelings that Trevor hasn’t enjoyed in a long time.

Sypha looks about ready to sink into her speaker robes and nod off. Alucard is almost asleep, slouched in his chair, head tipped over the back of it. He’s eaten so much that his belly is visibly distended under his shirt. He’s not quite asleep - he burps under his breath.

Trevor gently pats Alucard’s belly. ‘When’s the baby due?’

Alucard cracks one eye, giving him a withering look as if to ask why Trevor’s doing this. ‘When hell freezes over.’

‘I’m the father,’ murmurs Sypha sleepily. ‘We conceived the baby in hell.’

‘Trevor is also the father,’ says Alucard, deciding to get on this silly bandwagon. ‘It’s twins. One each.’

In the same soft sleepy voice, Sypha adds; ‘We’re all going to be so disappointed when it just turns out to be a massive fart.’

Alucard and Trevor burst into giggles, because Sypha saying crude things will never not be funny.

The laughter gets them going enough to get up, and start looking for bedding material, so Sypha and Trevor aren’t sleeping on floorboards. As cosy as they’re all willing to be, Alucard’s nook bed isn’t going to be big enough for the three of them.

Alucard is looking much better, but still wobbly, so Trevor has to firmly push him back to bed before he tries to get into the storeroom to help. Meanwhile, Sypha has already struck paydirt - in the pantry (oddly enough) there’s a bedroll. It’s just large enough for two people.

By now, the light is starting to fade. Trevor unrolls the bedroll next to Alucard’s bed nook. Generally, it’s easier to defend from attack if your group is all together.

Alucard has tucked himself back into bed, wrapped in his rabbit fur blanket. He still looks better overall, but he’s a bit restless and fidgety now, for some reason. He’s tapping his toes against the flagstones, and fiddling with the edge of the blanket.

Sypha has thrown a few more logs on the fire, snapping her fingers to make it flare up a little. She shuffles past Trevor, and flops onto the bedroll.

‘Can you take first watch?’ she asks sleepily. ‘I can barely keep my eyes open.’

‘All good,’ says Trevor. ‘I’ll wake you in a bit.’

‘I’m probably well enough to take a watch,’ says Alucard.

‘Take second watch,’ mumbles Sypha from her pillow. ‘I’m going to fall into a coma and I don’t want to be disturbed.’

Alucard chuckles, settling on the bed now. He’s not so restless anymore, but his stillness is extremely obvious, as if he’s putting a lot of effort into it. ‘I think I can do that.’

Trevor gets up, and settles himself so he’s leaning against the warm wall next to the hearth. He’s tired too, and this is an old hunting trick of keeping watch - stand upright and lean against something, and if you doze off, you’ll fall over and wake up.

Sypha is already asleep, snoring softly, her curls spilling out against the straw mattress. Alucard isn’t quite asleep yet, but he’s determinedly settled down, going to make best use of this time to rest before it’s his turn to keep watch.

It’s quiet. Not ominous quiet, but the quiet of deserted country. This is a good sign - it’s getting dark enough for the horde to have made their first appearance, and they’ve never been sneaky or subtle about their approach. You can usually hear them coming from miles away, which is grim but useful.

Trevor attunes his hearing to outside of the house, and listens.

Distantly, he can hear the distinct soft whistling of wind passing through shutters, under doors, down alleyways. The only sound coming from town. There’s the swish of grass nearby. The whisper of leaves in the night air.

In the distance, a fox barks. Insects hiding in the grass chirp and call in an endless tiny chorus. There’s a series of piercing squeaks that approach the house, then leave just as quickly - a very small bat, hunting for dinner.

Alucard shifts uncomfortably under his blanket, and after so long listening to quiet sounds from outside, the noise is deafening. He goes on for a little while, apparently unable to get comfortable.

Trevor blinks a few times, returning from his listening trance. Some time has passed - there’s moonbeams piercing through gaps in the shutters and the door, filling the room with fine slants of light. One is falling across Alucard, illuminating him tapping his bare foot against the wall.

‘Hey,’ calls Trevor softly. ‘Can’t sleep?’

Alucard emerges from the blanket to peer at him, and Trevor takes a soft breath. In the silvery night, Alucard’s pupils are blown so wide that his eyes seem black.

‘No,’ says Alucard softly. ‘Can’t sleep.’

Trevor bites his lip, wondering if he should hazard it. It’s been a night for discovering things. The boundaries in their relationships have all moved and shifted.

Fuck it. ‘You’re hungry, aren’t you?’

Alucard looks down, eyes glittering with a complicated lot of emotions. There’s guilt in there, but there’s plenty of other things Trevor doesn’t recognise.

Alucard’s voice is even softer than it was before - a papery whisper. ‘Yes.’

‘You need to feed so much it’s keeping you awake, right?’

Alucard gives him a strange look, curious and wary. ‘...yes.’

‘I can-’ Trevor cuts himself off, shaking his head. The enormity of what he, a Belmont, was about to offer him falls on him like a tonne of bricks, and he stalls. It hasn’t just been engrained into him, it’s been bred into him. Generations of ancestors are stuffing up his chest and throat, grabbing his tongue.

Trevor shoves his way through it, as blunt and ferociously stubborn as he is about everything else in his life. ‘Would I do?’

Alucard sits up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean-’ Trevor shakes his head. Get over it. ‘I’m not toxic to you, or anything?’

‘Trevor,’ says Alucard slowly. ‘Are you proposing I feed on you? Is that what you’re asking?’

‘Yes,’ says Trevor bluntly.

Alucard is silent and still for a long moment. He seems to be grappling with what Trevor has offered.

A oft-suppressed part of Trevor has  latched onto the idea of Alucard holding him against the wall, pulling aside Trevor's collar and pushing his head back to sink his fangs into his neck.

Trevor shakes his head to banish the image. ‘My wrist would be okay, right? There’s enough veins?’

Alucard sits up, a little too quick to be human. ‘No, it would be okay. There would be enough veins.’

Trevor stiffens a little. Occasionally, there’s that abrupt and uncomfortable reminder that Alucard isn’t a human being.

‘Can you give me an estimate of how much you need?’ asks Trevor.

‘I physically can’t ingest more than five hundred milliliters at a time.’

‘...and how much is that?’

‘A little over a pint.’ Alucard holds up his hands, not moving from the bed. Some of that inhuman enthusiasm has evaporated. ‘You’re not sure about this, are you?’

‘What I am sure about is one of my friends is suffering,’ says Trevor, trying be gentle but blunt, ‘And that I can fix it. I will admit, being voluntarily bitten by you is, uh… a first, and not something I’m completely comfortable with. But tell me, is it going to make you feel better?’

Alucard reflexively bites his lip. It looks much more dramatic now, because his needle sharp fangs are over an inch long. ‘Feeding would make me feel better. But I don’t want to do anything you’re not comfortable with-’

Trevor goes to dramatically stomp over to Alucard, remembers Sypha is sleeping on the floor, and stumbles into more of an angry pantomime. He flops down next to Alucard, trying not to stare at his fangs. ‘What’s the worst case scenario? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Because from what you’re telling me, it’s physically impossible for you to drain me dry.’

Alucard is quiet. ‘You might experience some side effects.’

‘Are any of the side effects me turning into a Dhampyre?’

‘No. Vampire saliva contains a large amount of phenethylamine and even more theobromine, which causes your brain to produce a massive amount of endorphins and inhibits other-’

‘Alucard,’ interrupts Trevor, ‘I need you to use regular words. What does saliva do?’

Alucard looks a bit bashful. ‘It lessens the pain and makes you feel nice.’

‘So like the mushrooms that village kids go looking for when there are no more goats to fuck?’

Alucard snorts, looking bemused. ‘I mean… that’s not a dissimilar comparison.’

‘So I’m going to feel a bit weird and floaty? What else could happen?’

‘You might faint, depending on your blood pressure.’

‘So I feel weird and floaty, and then sleep it off.’ Trevor shrugs. ‘I’ve had much worse nights.’

Alucard laughs softly, shaking his head, before looking up at Trevor. His eyes are still almost black, but there’s a bashful warm look on his face that makes Trevor’s chest do funny things.

‘You would really be okay with doing this?’

‘Yes,’ says Trevor. He’s already undoing the laces on his left bracer, pulling the leather apart. ‘You need to feed. I’m a big boy - I can handle this. You take the rest of my watch, I sleep it off, tomorrow we move on. It’s going to be okay. No long-term effects?’

‘No. Your body will regenerate the blood as normal, and the weird floaty feeling will pass in an hour or two.’

‘Okay,’ Trevor tosses his bracer on the bed, offering Alucard his wrist. ‘I don’t know if there’s any special ceremony or anything, but… do your thing.’

Alucard takes Trevor’s hand and wrist. ‘Tomorrow, we’re finding all the equipment to bathe you.’

The idea of maybe having to be naked in front of Alucard, combined with Alucard’s soft hands on his skin, is making Trevor’s mind go blank too much to make a witty remark. ‘Okay.’

Trevor watches, because while he’s heard of it happening, he’s never seen anyone voluntarily bitten by a Vampire, and he’s curious. Plus, it’s an excuse to stare at Alucard. Everything has got very intimate all of a sudden, and Trevor can feel his heart pick up a bit.

Alucard is very pointedly not looking at Trevor, but he must have found Trevor’s rapid pulse by now. He’s trailing his thumb over the vulnerable inside of Trevor’s wrist, and the touch makes Trevor’s skin tingle.

And then without much ceremony, he brings Trevor’s wrist to his mouth, and bites down.

Alucard’s mouth is hot and velvety, his lips soft. Instantly there’s the prickle of fangs against his skin, sharp and small as embroidery scissors, as he lines up, finding the best position. Then there’s the pain as Alucard presses his fangs in - the skin breaks, and Trevor gasps, trying not to clench his fist.

This isn’t the first time Trevor’s had a puncture wound, not by a long shot. He’s been stabbed, pricked, skewered, and bitten more times than he can count - but he’s actually managed to avoid being bitten by a Vampire. Or a Dhyampire. In every story he’s heard about Vampire bites, it’s either a horrific, paralysing pain, or the most intense, paralysing pleasure.

Right now, it’s the former. It’s not the worst pain ever, but it’s still painful - and there’s a curious nausea that goes with it. He really starts to feel ill when Alucard starts drawing the blood out of him. He clamps and hand over his own mouth, willing himself not to be sick as he feels that pressure-change inside his own flesh, in the veins down his arm and hands.

And then, quickly enough for Trevor to know it’s the saliva doing its thing, the pain starts to ebb away.

He doesn’t have to focus so hard on suppressing the instinct to slap Alucard away, and lets his hand and arm relax. He can still feel those fangs right down through the tendons of his wrist, and it’s an unpleasant sensation, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. He has an odd moment of just watching Alucard feed - of having this beautiful Dhampyre attached to his wrist, sucking the blood out of him.

Alucast has his eyes closed, perhaps in relief, and Trevor can see his long, pale throat moving as he swallows each mouthful. His long silky curls fall over his face and Trevor’s arm, making a curtain of hair.

He’s so pretty. Trevor doesn’t get much of a chance to just look at him like this, to just observe it, and despite the chance that Alucard could open his eyes at any time, Trevor’s going to risk it just this once. He just so rarely gets the chance.

He wonders just how, in amongst the tragic chaos that has been his life, he managed to get this lucky. When the church in this blasted country had condemned them all to a Vampire’s hellish wrath, Trevor assumed he would perish almost instantly. Surely the last surviving Belmont - the one man who might stand a chance of somehow stopping Dracula - would be high on the hit list. When he didn’t die then, he suspected that he’d perish in amongst the masses when the time came. Either way, it was an excuse to continue drinking himself into oblivion.

When this prophecy came about, there was a part of him that was thrilled - not because it was a chance to perhaps reverse some of the fuckery going on in Wachalla, but because it was almost certain death. Finally, all his horrific self-destruction could climax in a heavily-disguised suicide that he didn’t have to acknowledge was suicide. It was heroism instead.

But that was before they’d hit the road. That was before the three of them had been thrown together, before they’d had to work together, before they got to know each other. Before Trevor fell so damn hard for both Sypha and Alucard that he cracked the earth.

He gently brushes back the hair falling over Alucard’s face, tucking the soft curls behind the shell of his ear, and the Dhampyre opens his golden eyes, looking up at him. He blinks curiously, soft lips still pressed firmly to Trevor’s wrist.

‘How did such a good thing come out of all this chaos and misery?’ murmurs Trevor. ‘What cosmic good deed did we all do to meet each other like this? What did a useless sack of shit like me do to deserve to even meet you?’

Alucard stares up at him, bemused and… a little touched? Trevor’s feeling too warm and fuzzy to precisely pin it down. Instead, he gently strokes Alucard’s cheek.

‘You and Sypha make me feel like it’s worth getting up in the morning,’ murmurs Trevor. Where all this courage is coming from, he’s not sure, but he doesn’t mind. ‘I was so close to just… not getting up out of the snow one day. But now, every day, you both give me so much to live for. For years, I’ve wanted nothing but a drink - but now, I just want to see you both happy and safe. That’s my greatest wish in the whole world, Alucard. I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my life.’

Alucard looks at him with such a naked, vulnerable tenderness that Trevor’s breath hitches in his throat. Trevor is already feeling pretty warm, and when Alucard slinks forward and gets a bit closer, Trevor feels even warmer.

He brushes back Alucard’s hair again, using it as an excuse to stroke him. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were okay - that’s why I offered to let you feed. Just wanted you to be alright. You filling your belly alright?’

Alucard makes a long, low, breathy moan, that flows through Trevor’s bones and makes him shiver. His collar is sticking to the sweat on his neck.

Alucard shifts one hand, tenderly taking hold of Trevor’s hip, and Trevor breath hitches. He tries to exhale normally, and instead lets out a tortured groan, swallowing. He feels like he’s melting, like he’s warm oil being poured from a cup.

When Trevor starts to slump off the bed, and can’t get his legs in order to stop himself from slowly oozing to the floor, he realises that the second effect of Alucard’s saliva may have kicked in.

Alucard’s other hand snaps out to grab the back of Trevor’s shirt, but it’s not a good enough hold on him to stop his gradually-quickening journey to the floor. Through all the floaty warm feelings, Trevor’s starting to feel a little bit of panic now.

There’s a sudden shff of robes and Sypha is grabbing him under the arms, using all her strength to wrangle the considerably heavier Trevor back onto the couch. Alucard manages to get an arm around him, helping to get him hefted up into a stable sitting position.

‘A woman tries to sleep for five minutes,’ she mutters fondly, wrestling Trevor back onto the bed. ‘And you two are feeling each other up and falling off the daybed. Good lord.’

Her robes are rumpled, and her beautiful curls are going everywhere, plastered flat against one side of her head, and there’s sleep in the corners of her eyes. When she’s satisfied Trevor is propped up stably against the wall, she plonks herself down next to him, one arm clamped firmly around his waist, just in case.

Trevor is so overwhelmed by having the people he loves on either side of him, that part of him just wants to have a good cry, and squeeze them both. Alucard’s still got one of his arms out of commission.

Speak of the devil. Alucard’s sitting up and very carefully pulling his fangs out of Trevor’s wrist. The sensation is probably unpleasant, but Trevor’s too floaty and emotional to tell for sure right now.

The moment his fangs are out, Alucard presses his tongue firmly to the wound for a long moment, and Trevor’s wrist feels itchy. When Alucard takes his mouth away, the bite is nothing but two pale dots.

Alucard sits up, presses a gentle kiss to Trevor’s wrist, gives it a pat, and smiles at him. ‘All better.’

Trevor gets an arm around him and pulls him in close for a sloppy cuddle, squeezing him against his chest. Alucard laughs.

Sypha’s smiling. ‘Oh, you’re both silly now. Great.’

‘Alucard’s better!’ says Trevor emphatically. His voice is this close to cracking.

‘Having a feed has done me a lot of good,’ agrees Alucard, patting Trevor’’s chest. ‘Trevor’s been very kind.’

‘Love you,’ mumbles Trevor.

‘Love you too,’ murmurs Alucard. He gives Trevor’s chest another pat.

‘I’m going to guess Alucard’s bites have some kind of effect on his mental faculties,’ says Sypha.

Trevor wraps his other arm around Sypha and crushes her against his chest, and Alucard. ‘It makes me tell you I love you both.’

Sypha laughs, Alucard makes a touched cooing noise. Sypha wriggles up in Trevor’s headlock, getting into a less rib-crushing position. Alucard’s content to accept his fate, and bruises.

Trevor realises he’s swaying a bit, but he doesn’t really care. ‘Love you two so much,’ mumbles Trevor.

‘We love you too, Trevor,’ says Sypha. ‘Are you sure you didn’t find something to drink?’

‘He hasn’t had anything to drink,’ saya Alucard. ‘It’s a compound in my saliva - I didn’t think it would have this strong of an effect.’

‘I am trying to talk ,’ protests Trevor.

Sypha giggles, this time managing to squirm free from Trevor’s headlock, and throws an arm around his shoulders before he can grab her again. ‘Sorry, Trevor - go on.’

‘Thank you,’ says Trevor, trying to be steadfast and serious and failing miserably. ‘You guys are so important to me…’

‘You’re important to us too, Trevor,’ says Alucard. He sounds a little breathless from being squished.

‘Shh,’ says Trevor. ‘Not done. I thought this whole quest bullshit was going to be such a pit full of shit, and no offence, Alucard, but I thought we were just going to wind up murdering each other within a week-’

‘None taken.’

‘Good. But then I got to know you two a bit better, and-’ Trevor’s voice starts to crack a bit at the end. ‘-and you guys are so important to me now, I can’t imagine living without you.’

Sypha and Alucard dissolve into a chorus of cooing and awwing. Sypha throws her other arm around him, resting her head on his shoulder, giving him a big squeeze.

Alucard gently wriggles free of Trevor’s loving headlock. Mere mortals can’t keep a Dhampyre pinned for terribly long. He slides his arms around both of them, making sure to get Sypha in his hug too.

‘I feel the same way about both of you as well,’ murmurs Alucard. There’s a note of vulnerability in his voice that makes Trevor calm down enough to listen. ‘I… Trevor, especially, I’m surprised how supportive you’ve been to me. I thought we were going to fight it out instead, as well.’

‘Instead, you just teased each other like children with crushes,’ said Sypha wryly.

‘Don’t think I didn’t notice you teasing us,’ said Alucard, just as wryly.

‘Oh no, I’m denying nothing,’ replied Sypha cheerfully. ‘It was how we were all flirting with each other, so I joined in. Speaking your language and all that.’

‘Fuck, you can’t just come out and say stuff like that,’ mumbles Trevor. ‘You gotta be soft and coy about it. You can’t just tell someone. You don’t know what might happen. Alucard had to drug me before I got stupid enough to tell you guys anything.’

Alucard shifts his hand to give Trevor’s cheek a gentle pat. ‘You don’t have to worry about things like that with us… we won’t make fun of you for having feelings.’

‘I know,’ says Trevor, voice starting to crack again. ‘I just didn’t know… I didn’t know what you guys would say, and I was frightened.’

Alucard coos again, but Sypha leans over to give him a little kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s okay. I can understand that. But… we love you too, you dirty idiot.’

Trevor’s so overwhelmed that his throat is closing up, and he can feel his eyes prickling with tears, so he just leans his head on Sypha’s shoulder. Or at least, he tries to. Instead, his balance is so screwed up, that he winds up slumping into her, and starts to drag all three of them over sideways.

Thankfully, Alucard’s still got his hands around all of them, so he can haul them all back upright before Trevor squashes Sypha. Sypha laughs softly, and helps push Trevor more upright, getting him settled against Alucard’s chest.

‘We do love you,’ murmurs Alucard. ‘Very much. But maybe it’s time for you two to get some sleep, eh? I think your blood pressure has dropped a bit, sleep will help.’

Trevor doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nods. He is sleepy, but he’s mostly just overwhelmed. Overwhelmed and sleepy might be the same thing. Either way, lying down and not talking for a while sounds like a great idea.

Sypha yawns. ‘More sleep would be good. I must admit, I’m enjoying sleeping indoors, on something other than dirt.’

The yawn is contagious, and Trevor yawns so hard his jaw pops.

Alucard gives him a squeeze. ‘Can you stand, Trevor?’

Trevor grunts, summoning what’s left of his wits, and testing his legs. ‘Stand up with me, and let me lean on you. Please.’

Alucard does that, mostly just hauling Trevor onto his feet. Trevor might as well weigh as much as a broom, the way Alucard effortlessly, gently lays him down on the bedroll.

Sypha flops face-down by Trevor’s side, throwing one arm over him. Alucard daintily curls up against Trevor’s other side, snuggling in like a housecat.

Now he’s lying down, Trevor can feel sleep creeping up on him. Funny how you don’t realise how tired you are until you lie down.

He throws one arm over Sypha, and wraps the other around Alucard. Sypha makes a happy grunt, and Alucard snuggles in a bit more.

‘Are we keeping a watch?’ mumbles Sypha.

‘I am,’ replies Alucard, muffled. ‘I’ll keep watch for rest of the night. Least I can do for Trevor, and for waking you up.’

‘Thank you,’ says Sypha. ‘We should probably have an adult conversation in the daylight about our feelings and such, over some of that tea I saw in the pantry.’

‘That sounds like a good plan,’ murmurs Alucard.

‘You might have to bite me again,’ mumbles Trevor.

‘What if we were just very gentle and loving and understanding?’

‘Maybe,’ mumbles Trevor, shyly this time.

Alucard uncurls enough to stretch up and give him a gentle kiss on the cheek. Trevor hunches into his collar.

Sypha laughs. ‘Aw, Alucard, you made him blush.’

‘Frankly, I quite like doing that,’ admits Alucard. ‘Now I don’t really have to be subtle about it anymore.’

Sypha chuckles again, and Alucard grins, pressing another kiss to Trevor’s temple as he snuggles against his side. Trevor gives them both a hard squeeze, and Alucard coos, as Sypha squashes him against her, making a happy noise.

And despite everything else in the world around them, Trevor feels loved, and everything feels like it’s going to be okay.