!! Warning: mild slash, van Helsing/Dracula. !!
Summary: Gabriel van Helsing wonders how he knows.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, however much I might wish I did.
Author's note: This doesn't particularly fit in the plot of the movie; maybe it's a dream sequence, maybe it's AU. Written originally for the benefit of the nice people on the Livejournal VH slash community.
Evil Never Sleeps
Gabriel van Helsing remembers being told once that evil never sleeps.
Apparently the good Father was wrong about that, as about so many other of the Church's platitudes. The men who sit in the high halls and on the guiltless side of the confessional screen are often found wanting at these moments they miss, these moments when the battle between light and darkness ceases to be a comfortable metaphor and comes right down to the bloody wire. When the world tilts that way, when everything narrows down and sharpens to the razor edges of shadow and the empty coldness of moonlight on silver, van Helsing expects to be the only one there. He expects to be the only one who knows, and he never tells. He protects his fellow men from more than merely physical demons.
Though the tangible monsters are bad enough. He looks down from the shadows, running his gaze warily over the sleeping form of his enemy. The worst thing about all these horrors is that with their eyes closed, they so often look like men. Some say you are a man of God, he hears in his mind. Some say you are a murderer. At moments like this, he knows which answer feels right.
He sets his teeth, and shakes his head fiercely. No use to dwell on it, not with the devil's own favourite creation lying vulnerable at his very feet. Strike now, suffer later, man! he reminds himself, cruelly. With a flick of his wrist, he unsheathes his weapon - a silver stake as long as his arm, the point spring-loaded into the hollow shaft. Another of Carl's ridiculous, lifesaving toys. He would laugh at some of the things the friar comes up with, were it not for the uses he has to put them to.
His hands grip the silver shaft, lifting the heavy, slick thing like Zeus hefting a thunderbolt. A swift, silent pace out of the shadows, and his shoulders tighten with the power of his corded muscles as he starts to bring the stake down -
Outside the narrow window a fleeing cloud runs clear of the full moon. Light pours in over him, suddenly, breathtakingly. The silver in his hands blazes to life, but he scarcely notices the sudden flare of brightness. His eyes are elsewhere.
On the slim figure before him, now no longer a blurred shadow among shadows, but a stark reality. Count Dracula lies wrapped in the folds of his great cloak, half-turned from his back to his side, one long, elegant hand pillowed beside his head, the other resting on his breast. His handsome face with its teasingly faint lines, too faint for four hundred years, is relaxed and peaceful; his long black lashes sweep his cheeks, and his full lips are ever so slightly parted to show teeth only a little sharper than a mortal's. One black forelock lies over his face, silk-fine strands brushing the corner of the small, seductive smile that seems to be the Count's most natural expression. Perfect darkness. Perfect innocence.
And van Helsing knows he has seen this before.
He claws for the memory, one hand rising involuntarily to clutch at his temple as though he could tear away the veil that lies between him and his past. When in all of his lost life could he have been in this place, in this position? Deja vu is an old friend to him, but this is insane. Dear God, what has he lost? What in the name of all that is holy has he forgotten to bring him to here?
No. Not now! For the second time tonight, the part of him that is van Helsing, the Church's hunter, pulls him back from the brink of his own mind. He has a duty to perform and this is no time to forget it. Mechanically, setting his will, he grasps the stake again and brings it down. The point needs to strike the heart. No room for error. So his mark is there, between the spread second and third fingers of Dracula's right hand...
He cannot do this.
Silver gleams a breath away from milky white skin, the metallic shine hollow in the moonlight, dead and cold. The slightest movement now and the blessed weapon will brush against undead flesh. In his mind, van Helsing can already hear the screams and smell the horrible corruption of silver-burned tissue. He imagines pushing the stake down, the point sinking with sickening slowness into resisting flesh, grating on bone. He imagines those deadly dark eyes flashing open in sudden agony, staring wounded up into his, ablaze with shock and betrayal as Dracula's immortal life finally slips through his fingers.
Betrayal?
Where did that thought come from?
He cannot do this. With a silent, mouthed curse, he snaps the stake closed and thrusts it back inside his coat. Let them settle this another day. Let Dracula fight for his life, if he prizes it so much. Let those black eyes meet his for the last time and show him nothing but hatred.
He justifies it to himself as he turns away. A man of God. Not a murderer. Not again. The words ring empty. He does not know why he is doing this, but that is not why.
He turns back.
Dracula stirs in his sleep, eyelids fluttering briefly, and van Helsing watches him. He realises that he has no idea whether vampires dream, and files a mental note to ask Carl. What would the undead dream about, anyway? About blood, and death, and torment?
Or perhaps, he finds himself thinking, about everything they have lost. He looks again at Dracula's face, gentled and peaceful in the moonlight. In death, monsters become men again. Is the same true in sleep?
Perhaps it is. Hard to believe now that those delicate white teeth are capable of opening a man's throat at a stroke, or that those soft lips are stained with four centuries of innocent blood. And yet it is so, and all that blood and pain is still there, scarred intangibly onto the vampire's corrupted soul. By now, van Helsing thinks, that oh-so-innocent mouth must even taste of blood.
Blood, and ice, and cinnamon, some part of his mind fills in, and if he dared to ask himself how he knew that he would go mad. So he ignores it, simply leaning closer, studying the pale, beautiful dead face before him. The feeling is like that of being in church, he realises, like the dizzy, gentle hypnosis of staring at the Madonna or the crucified Christ; the man, the monster before him has the same remote yet inviting beauty, the same nameless promise carved in alabaster flesh and blood. He cannot but respond - moved, touched, seduced, scarcely knowing what he is doing, van Helsing bends his head to proffer adoration.
Sanity snatches him back with his lips only a fraction of an inch from Dracula's mouth. He stills, rigid as a statue - he dares not even breathe, lest the touch of his living breath should be enough to break the vampire's sleep. For one moment he lingers, taunted by a memory he cannot place and cannot catch, then, swiftly, he pulls away. Something in him is too ready to do otherwise, and that raises questions he would sooner leave unanswered. He closes his eyes, fighting to remember who he is; and then he is standing in the moonlight, himself again, looking down at the man he cannot spare and cannot kill. Van Helsing clenches his fist in frustration and for the second time he turns away, alone with his anger and guilt.
As he takes a step away from the Count's bed, the darkness grows wings around him. There is a dark, sensual swish of leather and moving air, and then a pale face is before him and strong hands are clasping his shoulders. Van Helsing gasps, tries in vain to draw back; the Count smiles and steps closer, into the light. His eyes shine with darkness, draining the colour from the moonlight, swallowing van Helsing whole. Van Helsing draws a breath but lets it go, stricken to silence. He has no words for this.
Dracula leans close, hands tightening all too gently on van Helsing's shoulders, sorcerous eyes drifting half-closed in seduction. His lips, those perfect lips, brush van Helsing's ear.
"I wasn't asleep, you know."
Fin