The good thing about Trevor maybe having food poisoning is Sypha's distracted being smug she thought to include railings on her stairs so he can't fall over the edge. He says Dracula's castle becomes Alucard's castle and she nods because there's nothing so weird about visiting in that case.
"And that's why he doesn't come back here," she says.
"Right."
And. He. He just can't keep his fucking mouth shut. "Do you - do Speakers, do your funerals - it's, your grandfather, he wouldn't leave back then with somebody missing, even if they were probably dead, and I promised to get the body if they'd leave, but they were really just agreeing so I'd stick around because they believe in you, so would they, would Speakers, I know you have funerals but do you need to?"
Sypha shakes her head. "Our traditions are important to us, but, not so much we'd risk the living for the dead."
So at least he hadn't made things worse by being selfish. Bad enough he's in Hell, nobody else should have to be because he wasn't thinking.
"You're not upset, are you?" Sypha asks. "That he lied?"
Trevor shakes his head quickly. "No, I'm glad -" And he is, isn't he? Is he allowed that? It's not like it'd have been better if he hadn't. He shakes his head harder. "And it wasn't exactly - I volunteered. I wanted them to leave, they didn't want to leave, I offered to get you for them if they promised they'd go." He pauses. "Okay, they lied about that part, but that was right. People died but the ones who didn't, it's all because of you. I was planning to leave. I would've."
"But you didn't."
"But I meant to."
"But you didn't. That's what counts."
"Apparently not!" Trevor snaps, throwing up his hands. "Apparently doing shit isn't good enough, because here I am doing it all over again! Apparently what I said did count!"
"What did you say that was so terrible?"
"That I was leaving!"
Sypha looks distinctly unimpressed.
"That I was leaving and they were all going to die and if you didn't want to die first you needed to leave because I was leaving."
"But we didn't leave."
"You shouldn't have had to stay in harm's way for me to get my head out of my ass!"
"We had to stay to find the sleeper," Sypha says.
"Yeah, I know. There was an argument about it. You won, because I never win arguments."
She shakes her head. "I'm glad we could help the people of Gresit, but you understand, we would have otherwise left as soon as the talk against us started, or sooner."
"I know," he repeats. "It wasn't your job, it was my job. Maybe you haven't heard, but I'm a Belmont. It's what we do."
Sypha considers this for a bit. "Isn't it mine too? Or, will be? Because I will be."
"Uh," he says.
"A Belmont?"
Not technically. Or. Only technically. Depending on which way around you looked at it. On how you weighed the untried spirit against the forged letter of the law. "That's not really how it works."
"It isn't," Sypha says with the cadence of You're a liar. "Hm. Boys only, is it?"
"Absolutely," Trevor tries. He will welcome whatever Sypha has to say about that.
"Yes, you did mention how your mother was scarred in a tragic knitting incident."
"It's - Mom was - I am really not drunk enough to talk about my family tree."
"Ominous." When he doesn't respond, Sypha continues, "Exactly how noble was your family? Full of pure blue blood and extra fingers?"
If it gets this dropped, "Yeah."
"Funny. I'd heard rather the opposite."
"Sypha," he groans. "You don't have to be so smug." Well, this conversation had definitely gone differently. But then, he had been drunk enough at the time. And had cared what she'd think of his family. Of him.
And it would've been better if he hadn't.
"I'd heard," Sypha says, "that half the Belmonts were bastards."
"Conservative estimate. But that's noble as fuck right there," Trevor tells her. "How many lords have you known who kept out of the whorehouse?"
"I've known none to have interest in the results."
"I don't know why everyone had to make such a big deal about this. The whole, the line of inheritance thing, everything was in order, we were about the only ones not getting into spats about it, and nobody was marrying into other houses so it wasn't like we were messing shit up for them."
"So half your brothers? More?"
"I mean," Trevor says, "who pays attention to how many siblings you have, right?"
"Everyone. Everyone does."
"You had one brother Sypha what would you know. Why don't we talk about him since you want to talk about dead people so much!"
She glares. "You are cranky."
"I am sober."
"I would say this" - she gestures at him - "is far from sobriety."
"Tell me more about your brother, Sypha."
"Terribly cranky," she snaps.
"How old was he anyway? What'd he look like, I mean, back when he had a face? Do you even remember?"
She finally, finally shuts up. Thank you, God.
They make it all the way to the doorway out of the mausoleum in blessed silence but then Sypha says, "Wait."
He looks at her.
"About your family -"
He groans and tries to walk out. She grabs his sleeve and tugs backward. "What?"
"Not your family members," she promises, and continues to tug to the side so they're no longer visible to anyone wandering by outside. "What you said about vampires and dhampirs. I understand the Belmonts know a great deal about monsters. But…" she says, and it's in that considerate tone of voice, like she's worried about sparing his stupid feelings by bringing up perfectly reasonable doubts as if Trevor is really that pathetic, "are you sure it's all correct?"
"Vampires are evil and dhampirs are extra evil," Trevor tells her, again. "Look, I get that - that people make stuff up. That people see stuff that's different and lie that it's evil. But even if actually it was my family who were evil -"
"I'm not saying that."
"- if they were evil and wanted people like Alucard dead, they'd have made up a lie that sounded like him. People don't say the Speakers are dangerous because you hack people's heads off in the street, because then anyone who met you would know it was all lies. So they say you act all helpful but it's only so no one will realize how you secretly do stuff like demon-summoning or stealing men's cocks to keep in a box."
"You're all strangely obsessed with that," Sypha agrees. "Every town there's someone asking to replace their penis with a better one from the penis box we are absolutely carrying around because who wouldn't want to carry around a box full of crawling, oat-eating dicks. Or just to see it. Why would you want to see that? And why am I always the one they think keeps it when only men would ever care this much about penises?"
"The oats part is weird." And wouldn't it mean you got a dick with oats crammed up there? How bad would yours have to be for that to be an improvement?
"All of it is weird!"
"The point is," Trevor says, still wincing a bit at the idea, "the bestiary's right about dhampirs that aren't Alucard. Exactly right. The other dhampir I saw was coated head to toe in gore and giggling." He hadn't killed it, which is less of a regret than most of his regrets but still stings. Killing Carmilla had to take priority and unfortunately, Carmilla was about the only vampire there with enough sense to not spend all her time cooing over the bloody little monster like aunts at a christening. "Alucard, maybe it's, it's like he's a hinny instead of a mule? With the other dhampirs, the mother's the vampire. You see," Trevor says, because Sypha did ask about dhampirs, "corpses can't get pregnant. But corpses can get people pregnant." Sypha makes a face. "Hey, you think I liked learning that either? Still a fact. They don't let biting the other person's throat out ruin the mood. And I think you get the soul from the mother so he could have one while the rest don't, since you lose your soul when you turn into a vampire."
"You get your soul when you take your first breath," Sypha says, like he doesn't already fucking know what she thinks, God, like they didn't have a whole - "Oh, your people think it's at quickening, right? While it's still inside."
He snaps his mouth shut again before he can scream at her to stop talking, teeth pressing tight enough to ache, breathes, says curtly, "Vampires don't have them. They die, they're soulless, then something nasty finds the empty hole and crawls in."
"So that ancestor of yours who became a vampire, you believe he lost his soul in the process? Even though he fought the other vampires?"
"He's why we know for sure. Last pages of Gilles' diary talk about it. There's just nothing, and you can't even care there's nothing, and his body had to keep moving anyway." And that hadn't even been the worst thing in them, it'd been - "He wrote about his sister," Trevor says. "Beth. About picturing her dead, and then about killing her. Because when they met up she'd asked him if he was already starting to want to kill her and if he could keep it together a little longer or not, and he kept writing after like poking a wound, about crushing her head between his hands or sinking his teeth into her throat like he did to other vampires or ripping her arms off and watching her bleed out, how no matter what it was he just couldn't feel anything, right until he finally got to die properly… They don't have souls," Trevor finishes. "No one could be like that and still have one."
"Oh. He knew she was going to kill him," Sypha says, like that's the relevant thing here and not the horrible soulless monster fantasizing about murdering his baby sister part.
Trevor shrugs. "Benefits of having a big family, you know someone will manage to fix your fuckup even if you can't manage to get yourself killed going after the other vampires."
"Huh."
"What?"
"I think Alucard's been worried you're like this because of whatever the strangely incompetent vampire puppetmaster did."
"Like what?" Trevor demands.
She waves a hand. "You. Being you. I wasn't sure what to make of it either."
"What," Trevor demands again.
"I was wondering if it was about you being confused about your situation. You don't think we're real, after all. But it is apparently just a Belmont thing." She shakes her head and adds, "I suppose I should have worked that out when you were talking about your family tradition of eating rocks and how Alucard was being foolish to point out that could kill you," because apparently she's taking Alucard's side and Trevor is the only one of them who understands how responsibility works. At his increasingly exasperated look, she says, "What I'm getting at is the rest of us are concerned about not dying."
"I outlived -" he starts, monetarily blind with outrage and then catches himself. "I was great at not dying."
"Well, good," she says. It is not good. "Keep doing that."
