Florence, Italy, 1076
"Vladimir?" a woman called as she walked down a thin hallway of a luxurious scene. Her dress' train was as long as any venomous snake's, its movements similar to it. No servants were to be found, not even the visitors, and Vladimir's eldest brothers had gone to war. All were shocked that the events following Vladimir's sister and fiancée's death, Vladimir dropped at even the most delicate touch of unforeseen illness himself. The woman's steps hastened at the sound of screaming. Vladimir panted and moved restlessly in his bed, his shirt torn off at the center of his torso and sweat covering him from head to toe. The woman burst into the room, freezing over in tear as she looked toward the regal bed her son lied in his own sweat and blood upon. He clutched his neck that bled relentlessly as cried out in pain. Vladimir's mother took a step closer when she noticed it: the thin, slow-moving form of something that peeked its head from the covers and rose the thicker half of its body to see his mother. He tried to shout for her to run, but instead, the blade of a silver sword came down to separate the serpent from the rest of his body. Vladimir sat up, his breath shaky and his hand trying to stop the bleeding of the bite.
Vladimir sat up, his breath shaky and his hand trying to stop the bleeding of the bite. His father, the holder of the blade, slowly looked up at Vladimir walking to his side as he removed his hand from the bite. Vladimir tilted his neck in pain of the frozen air hitting his wound, his father frowning at the sight of two large, fatally deep holes that dripped with fresh blood. No serpent's fangs were ever that big. It pulsed with a metallic gold liquid mixing with his blood to make a marble-designed wound. "There's venom...get the apothecary," his father demanded. He took off his fine leather gloves to hold onto Vladimir's hand, as he watched his wife run from the room.
An orchestra theme was always one of the few tortured echoes in the House of Usher that everyone ignored but Vladimir. His room was always filled with the sound of tragedy and unheard anger. Abigail truly hated his fascination with classical music, and it drove Victor mad if it ever put him out of concentration. Vladimir sat on the fine leather chair in his room as he listened to the score playing over his record player, staring at the hospice bag of blood that he held in one ringed hand. Victor always had a supply of them, using them to revive the bodies he had to work with and then send them off into a terrifying world where no one would ever pay them a shred of kindness. He hated the sight of it; someone else's life meant for his consumption. Abigail never had a problem drinking blood despite her half-human status, and he'd never want to wonder why or how. But Vladimir tried to put it out of his mind in the name of survival.
Victor walked down the hallway toward his bedroom when he stopped beside Abigail's door. He blinked slowly as he looked toward the dim ceiling of the hallway. Whispers. Whenever Abigail was awake as late as this, she was up to no good. "The music is bad enough. You're going to start your nightly prayer up again?" he said as he rolled his head in the direction of her slightly open doorway. He pushed open the door as looked inside for Abigail, but was greeted by an empty room with the whispers fading away.
Abigail sat in the attic, her eyes shut as she listened to the bodiless whispers herself. The attic was bare, except for a few paintings, old loveseat and cross nailed above the only window. The whispering she'd been hearing continued, caressing her with its compliments and its sensual persuasion. How she hated them...those voices. She could feel their nonexistent bodies against her back and taloned hands gripping the thick of the tresses spiraling down her back. Her eyes danced with anxiety in the light of the nearby religious candles she lit once she opened them. The whispers had died away. Her arm, which had been dancing at her side involuntarily, came to a stop. Her gaze went down the sketchpad of her lap. She stood as she looked at what she'd been drawing unconsciously. She slowly touched the surface of the dark, scaled shading while she shuttered. "Abi," Victor's rough yet gentle tone came from the doorway. She slowly turned to him as she shut the sketchpad, the shadow of her hair highlighting the hollows of her cheeks and placement of her eyes. "You're not trying to find it again, are you? Sometimes I wish you'd play with your gypsy cards instead of beckoning demons into our home" Victor sighed. "Going to be bothered by my magic once more, are you? My god, to this day you take one look at a broomstick and you run for the hills," Abigail teased.
"Abigail," Vladimir's voice called. Abigail squeezed Victor on the shoulder as she walked past, Victor slowly looking to the window in the attic. The cascade of morning's light coming through, cast a satin orange picture over one-half of Victor's face. He set his fist on the glass as he looked directly toward the incoming sun over the valleys in the distance, his jaw clenching. He never welcomed mornings. It seemed as though the sun's only purpose was to bring new harm to his family with every waking moment it shunned the earth's plea for one long summer night—when its undead could steal the spotlight for just a little longer and he could learn their secrets.
Florence, Italy, 1076
Vladimir was growing weaker by the day. His mother went into despair with her eldest at war and her youngest suffering every moment that serpent's venom was in his system. His father, never to be disappointed, was prepared for the worst. Vladimir may have been the weakest of his offspring, perhaps the most deviant, but this was an illness a cure couldn't fix. Screaming, growling, foaming, violent attacks on himself and others—what was happening to Vladimir? "We have to," Vladimir's mother cried. "I am not murdering my own flesh and blood. This is my boy, he can come out of it," his father snapped at his mother. "Abraham, please-" "I do not condone it!" he shouted at her. "Lady Van Helsing," someone choked out from behind them. The Lady Van Helsing screamed out in terror, Vladimir's father pushing her behind him as he walked toward the dying servant. A large excerpt of her skin was missing from her neck as a thick substance drained from her neck causing immediate death. Vladimir's father, Abraham, looked toward the hallway where Vladimir cried out from. No...his brothers. His brothers were in there with him.
Abraham rushed to his youngest son's room to find four men in the room, only one alive. He clutched his chest at the horrid sight of his eldest's corpses on the stone-cold ground of Vladimir's room. Vladimir. had been chained to his bedpost, only one restraint withstanding his violent movements. He cried through his tormented screams, Abraham watching as his canines reshaped and lengthened themselves to be like an animal's. "Vladimir!" Abraham shouted. Vladimir's free hand pulled at the sharp fangs in his mouth, a loud and damp soundtrack coming from his gums as his abnormal strength permitted his sudden raw removal of one of the teeth. Abraham tried to near him, one hand secretly on the silver blade underneath his large winter coat. "I am sorry, father. Please...vanquish me," Vladimir wept. Blood collided with the saliva in his mouth as he set his forehead against the finely carved bedpost. Abraham slowly brought out his sword, looking miserably over his possessed son, a shallow breath coming off his lips as he looked around. Not one child left alive in the room. "What has become of you, Vladimir?" Abraham whispered violently, heartbrokenly.
Vladimir refused to look Abraham in the eye as he clawed at the snake bite that hadn't healed on his neck. "The Devil's devoured my soul. You can't let him take me in full!" Vladimir cried. His mother stood in the doorway frozen over in terror, or so it seemed. Abraham slowly reached to put a hand on his untamable son, who fatally crumbled under the pain and burden he now placed on himself. "I'm dying...I'm dying. I see him every time I look away from sunlight...every time I try and pull myself to my feet, father. I see him now," Vlad cried. "Where? Where Vladimir?" Abraham growled. "...In mother," Vladimir then replied.
Abigail descended down the staircase to answer Vladimir's call, stepping into his regal bedroom, covered from ceilings high to cherry-wood floors in paintings. He collected them, created them, mused about them. Abigail despised the walls that held nothing but portraits, and Victor repulsed none of them told an anecdote about the dark clouds on the horizon named "eventual fate." She stood in his doorway, her long and ruffled bohemian dress swaying as she stopped in the doorway. "The Mikaelsons. They're coming today," Vladimir said, looking to the large windows on the other side of the room. She sighed as she gave him an irritable look, going to shut the curtains. "I'm not going into that Quarter," she declared. Her accent's darker decorations came out with the bitter of her voice. "The child is ill...I know it leads back to-" "You've said that about many of our encounters," Abigail interrupted. "They're going to bring the child to you. It's motherless...not to mention the hybrid's. We need to cure it, or else that thing will use the child against us. The child could be worse than its father," Vladimir spoke briefly. "It's a little girl, Vladimir. Not an 'it.' And that girl is irrelevant toward its goal: destroying us," Abi claimed, gently running a black-polished finger up the stem of his dying roses.
"I'm quite jealous. I haven't seen a collection quite as extensive as this," they heard. Abigail looked at Klaus in the doorway, taking in all the rows of paintings. "I haven't anymore room to put up the others. Do you paint, Niklaus?" Vladimir asked as he stood after finishing his blood bag. "It's more of a hobby," Klaus smirked. "I'd love to see it sometime. Perhaps you can persuade Abigail and Victor to appreciate it more while you visit today," Vladimir said as he gestured to Abigail. "Is your little one still in need?" Abigail asked smoothly. "I'm afraid that's why I've come. She's gotten worse, and the witches in the Quarter know me well enough not to try and assist my family," Klaus answered. She removed the dying roses from the vase as she nodded her head toward the door. Vladimir watched them go as the charismatic smile on his face drifted away.
Florence, Italy, 1076
Vladimir's mother no longer cowered away from the scene in fear as she stood straight smirking. "What demon lurks in this room," Abraham demanded as he stood from beside Vladimir. A sharp and multi-toned Latin language erupted from deep within Vladimir's mother as spit flew from her lips and her eyes became bloodshot. Without hesitation, Vladimir's father lunged for his wife and vanquished his own wife and the demon inside her. Vladimir had successfully gotten out of his restraints, scratches and injuries dotting his muscular chest. Abraham turned to him slowly, but Vladimir was gone—and never to return. Abraham left Italy, hoping t forget the tragedies that had fallen all on just one day—but his mind always came back to Vladimir. The strange fatality of Vladimir that one day Abraham was going to be able to explain.
Vladimir no longer wanted to be a Van Helsing after hearing of his father's dire travels to seek out the demonic serpent that attacked him and made him a slave to sunlight and manipulation of human interaction. He took on the name Dracula to disguise his father's infamous name being his own. Word was Abraham Van Helsing was bitten by the very same serpent only a year after Vladimir, but was never to find it again afterwards. Vladimir was always dying to know not long after—the Serpent. Why did it choose him...and why would it go on to choose his father's other children, too?