Notes: Another Alucard-centric fic, but actually about the show this time! Whoo! I'm excited to finally start posting this one.
Believe it or not, I started this idea a while before S3 started, wanting to write something for the time after S2 of Alucard being alone in the castle. Then after S3 I wanted to write it both more and less XD
The idea of Alucard seeing ghosts brought up at the end of S2 is an interesting one, and one I thought deserved more exploration. As well as just that month where he's alone being something interesting to write about.
This is one of those fics I wanted to post as a long one-shot, but ultimately got stuck and decided it would be better to break it up into chapters to make it more manageable for both reading and writing.
I said it'd be 4 chapters above, but I'm not quite sure exactly how many it'll be. It just helps me to jot down a manageable ballpark number.
That being said, one of the reasons I hesitate to break things up into chapters, is because if people don't seem interested it severely inhibits my desire to keep writing that fic. So, it really does help my motivation a LOT when you comment and say you want to read more! So just know that when you review, you're helping more of this fic get written!
There were no graves. Dracula and Lisa didn't get graves. The rest of the world would have said they didn't deserve to rest in peace.
Antigone would say Polynices deserved to sing in Olympus all the same.
The only grave they got was a castle. And many would say it was better than most—that they'd take a castle over a headstone, a mausoleum, or the ground any day. They'd say a castle was a hell of a lot better than being dumped down the sewage grate.
And all that's fair, but perhaps the bigger problem was this: there were no remains.
They both burned. One in holy fire, one in hell. (And who could say where they truly ended up, if there was a heaven and hell after all?)
All that was left of Lisa Tepes was a pile of charcoal on an altar to a priests own pride.
And all that was left of Vlad Tepes was a ring, and a soot stain on the carpet.
Most would say they got what they deserved; to die without chance at Olympus.
Adrian doesn't know where to put his flowers.
Most children bury their parents eventually, but usually this is when they have children of their own to keep them company, and their parents have been bouncing grandchildren on their knees for at least a year or two, with white hair and crinkled smiles, barely able to walk, or see: sick and ready to greet the gods.
Adrian may look old enough to settle down, but he's younger than most would surmise. And while he can certainly handle himself, he was not prepared for his parents to die within a year of each other…especially considering that the parent who was meant to be immortal died by his own hand.
He would have liked to have some respite in his own home.
But perhaps, more important than where to put flowers, there was most unfortunate side effect of the lack of remains, and the castle grave:
Ghosts.
And this isn't the pearly white wraiths wandering around saying 'boo', or skulls that float about the head gnashing their teeth. Not even a chained apparition to remind one of their sins.
This is something much worse. Worse because they belong to the house's owner. Worse because their true grave is his head.
—(And that place never rested)—
Their ghosts wander the castle, not just a graveyard. This castle seems to have an affinity for the undead.
Maybe not everyone could see them. He tries not to indulge the thought that maybe there's nothing there at all, and they're nothing more than undead memory.
Alucard has been seeing ghosts since the moment he was left alone in this place.
He'd rather have a grave to mourn them at, and converse with the memories, than watch their ghosts keep him up at night, unable to touch, or to talk to them.
He should remind himself to look up the definition of 'torment' later.
At first it was his father's steps when he walked up the stairs. His mother's smiles, his own young laughter when he sat in the study. When he sat at the table to eat, he watched the vampire king tossing a young boy into the air, both laughing like fairy wing beats, as Lisa watched on from the table. Alucard tried not to lose his appetite.
Then they were given voice: it was Father's lessons when he looked for a book in the library. Mother's stories as he sat reading, making him incapable of concentrating to his own book all the while. Baking cookies together in the kitchen. Father allowing him his first drink—(of wine or blood? Take a guess. He only needed one of them, after all)—as he walked through the cellar. Mother decorating the castle, making it look a little nicer, a little more alive. Not all of them were positive. Their arguing voices down the hallway. His own tears.
Father's claws against his chest.
And he wouldn't dare get close to that room. Because whenever he walks past the door, he can still hear his father speak to him like he did when he was still a child dressed in sunlight, and there was nothing but love.
Mother, father and…himself. As if he died long ago with them. As if the happy child he was within them is gone. As if he's no longer the Adrian who sat with his parents, read with them, baked cookies, and laughed with them…but the Alucard who killed them.
And, well, maybe he didn't kill his mother, but sometimes he didn't know what else to think but to blame himself for the thought that he could have saved her.
And he did kill his father.
He still feels that stake in his hand when he walks by that room—(But it wasn't a stake was it? It was the bedpost of his childhood bed, as if ripping his childhood at the seams and denying everything he was born as). He still feels its splinters in his fingers, the smell of pine, the feeling of it piercing his father's chest, the way his heartbeat refused to stop—(he rested his head on his chest once, the constancy of the rhythm was comforting then). The warmth of his father's blood draining over his fingers. The sound of his father's ripping voice. The unearthly, ungodly howling of the souls trapped inside him—(was he really so bad?). He could still smell his flesh burning.
He still wakes up in the middle of the night with the image of his fathers face melting off its bones as it came closer to him, reaching out as if to to caress his son's cheek, seared onto his eyes—(is this how Victor Frankenstein felt when the creature smiled at his window?)
But when the morning came, he took that ring and he wore it on a chain around his neck all the same, to remind him of a few things:
One: that love is one of those things that is free, but comes at a high price. If you take it lightly, it will leave you heavily.
Two, an addendum to one: that love is not soft. Love is not flowery words, or even the insatiable desires the romance novels say it is. Love is an insidious fire, when you have it, it rages, and you know what warmth is. When the fireplace is empty it aches, and when your heart breaks your chest gets cut on all the pieces. And underestimating it, calling it weakness, will always be your undoing.
Three—(one that was beginning to weigh heaviest): that living and immortality are not the same thing. Vlad may have been immortal, but he was only ever alive with Lisa.
Four: to always know where he came from…and where he didn't want to end up.
Five, and final: that though he had saved lives, though it was noble, and the stories and songs would say he was brave, and though Trevor and Sypha would say it was for the greater good…he would always be the son who loved his father…and the son who drove the stake into his father's heart.
All for love.
He can find respite from the memories sometimes. He finds himself spending too much time down in the Belmont hold, reading, organizing, putting away ancestors—(ancestors not of his, ones that didn't come back). Learning, pursing his lip in disapproval, or laughing to himself at the thought of some of the things Trevor's relatives did (making a mental note to use the story against Trevor when he next saw him). Thinking of his friends…and trying not to think of them, lest they become ghosts too.
He likes going out into the woods to get food, and water, and fresh air. He wavers there at times, wondering if maybe he could just… leave. He spends more time out there than is strictly necessary.
Sometimes he runs out into the woods—well, more precisely padding, cantering on paws—and other times flies—trying to make sure his tongue can taste freedom, and his wings can snare sunlight, before he turns back.
But he always has to return. Return to the stuffy, putrefied remains of the castle. The air where he hears his parents whisper sweet words that are gone, where memory reconstructed from fairy castles sweet worlds he's ripped away.
Would it be so hard to just leave?
Surely we can let the poor wandering souls in the woods find refuge. It was a grave after all. Just let the lost rest against the headstones, though they know not whose skeletons lie beneath them.
He leans against Trevor's tree, and sees a young boy playing on the branches—laughing, free—and smiles…before it becomes gasp and grimace, and he shakes his head, returning to the castle.
Not them too.
He thought he could take it. The grief. The ghosts. The wrath of the gods
But he can't stay.
Not forever. That is to say, he can't leave for long. Just to visit town, to see another person or two, to get out of his head, and pray the specters won't follow him.
He slings his bag over his shoulder, along with the coat he always wore—the one that smells like the campfires he sat at with Trevor and Sypha—and sighs as he walks out the door.
He has another grave to visit.