Chapter 11: Never Alone

Was it still today? Or was it tomorrow already?

With a fatigued sigh, Trevor dropped his head back onto the old trunk he was leaning against and remembered the last time he'd had to ask himself that question, he had woken up somewhere north of Bucharest with several cracked ribs, a vengeful hangover, and no recollection of who he'd pissed off the night before. Even more baffling was his last coherent memory had entailed him looking for a place to sleep in Giurgiu, which was south of the capital. A good deal south of the capital.

File that under the mysteries I'll never solve, he thought dismally. He was about to close his eyes and hope his body recognized it was tired when he caught sight of the Speaker girl's cloak in the corner of his vision. She was standing a good five or seven strides away, her head down and shoulders slumped wearily as she regarded the floor.

"You okay?"

"…tired."

Was she a child? He sighed irritably. "Sleep then."

A beat of silence followed, adding an almost tense aura to the room, and then she murmured so quietly he almost didn't hear her. "…a bit lonely."

Dense as he could be, even he recognized the faint tone of appeal in her voice. She had been homesick for her caravan ever since they parted ways in Gresit, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. Among grim strangers like himself and Alucard, the companionship she shared with her family was absent entirely and it must've weighed on her mind. There was nothing more tragic than a friendless Speaker, Uncle Arthur had said to him once, and he believed it. With a tired sigh, he raised his arm. "My dusty, old sheet is big enough for two. And no one was ever lonely in this house."

He watched Sypha's face break into a small smile and she approached, situating herself next to him with a quiet, "Thank you." As he dropped his arm around her shoulders, Trevor noticed with a trace of amusement that, amid woodsmoke and old parchment, the Speaker smelled of burnt hair. It was a faint scent but pungent enough to notice. He wondered if she'd singed herself by accident in the last attack. Or had it been in Gresit?

"Is Alucard back yet?" he asked, suppressing a chuckle.

Sypha shook her head. "Should we be worried?"

"No," he yawned. "A dhampir can hold his own in the dark just fine."

"Mm."

She pulled her knees even closer to her body and wrapped her arms around them. God, she really was a child. His elder sister used to sit like that when they were kids. Every day at lessons, Leona would pull her feet onto her chair and sit hugging her knees as their tutor wrote sums on the slateboard. Then, when Master Eszes complained to Leonel about his daughter's unseemly habits as well as her untidiness, Father only shrugged and asked, "So long as she sits properly at the dinner table, what's the problem? I'll speak to her mother about the other matter." So Leona's odd mannerisms continued, although from that day forward, her clothes were always neat and her silver-white hair that she'd inherited from Grandmother was always combed into a slender braid.

Trevor furrowed his brow and forced the memory away before he could remember Leona was dead. Before he could remember what happened to her. Before the memory came back to him of her blue eyes wide with fear and pain when she saw the crossbow bolt lodged in her calf, just below the knee, and how they both knew she would never get up again. Her voice, so shrill with panic that it sounded nothing like her, as she screamed, "Run, run, RUN!"

"…it's strange," he heard Sypha's distant voice say and Trevor blinked in surprise as he realized she'd been talking him.

"Sorry, what?"

"Are you tired?"

"A little." A lot. "But what did you say?"

Syoha yawned. "I said it feels lonely when you stand next to Alucard, and that it was strange."

"How so?" He hadn't really noticed anything of the sort. As far as he was concerned, the vampire halfbreed had been altogether standoffish since they met him, and that was fine. He held him in the same regard as the Speaker in that they'd all either be dead or parting ways soon.

"I don't know," said Sypha. "He is intelligent and he has wit, or his own brand of it anyway, and he is certain half human. More than human, really. He's a person in his own right…but standing beside him…it feels cold. Like a cold spot in an empty room. It isn't like your sadness."

Trevor raised his head, the statement taking him off guard. "I'm not sad."

"Yes you are." She turned her head to look at him, her nose and mouth buried in the hood of her cloak. "But you're still there. You still react when I shout at you or tease you. Alucard's sadness is bottomless, like an icy well, and it swallows up your voice and everything else you try to drop into it."

"Well…" he began, and Sypha flicked her eyes open again. She was drifting off. "He…did lose his mother. And after sleeping in a coffin for a year and traveling with us…I suppose he hasn't had the time to grieve really. And if he loved his father and sister…I mean, you would be the same if your family—" Trevor cut himself off before he could say something that would earn him a punch in the face or worse.

In the silence that drifted between them, Trevor closed his eyes and thought it best to nod off now. When Sypha slumped against him, he thought she already had, but then he heard her quiet voice out of the gloom. "Did you know your mother, Trevor?"

The question conjured soft hands and a soft, laughing voice and pale, blue eyes as familiar to him as his own reflection. He remembered being small and surrounded by a curtain of rich, dark brown hair as Mother leaned over him, hands on his cheeks as she laughed. He used to comb her hair for her when he was little. She had a comb of ivory that felt as smooth as glass in his hands. Trevor bit his lip and forced a subtle laugh. "Her name was Isabel. Why do you ask, Speaker?"

Sypha didn't answer, only raised her head in a silent indication of wanting to hear more.

"She was born Isabel Hellsing in Targoviste and raised to be a great lady of the court. She and my father met while he was on a hunt." The Hellsings were cousins of theirs, a branch that had split from the main Belmont line several generations ago. And one that Grandmother, despite having been born a Hellsing herself, regarded with much disdain as they long ago given up the hunting of night creatures and had integrated themselves into the political games of the boyar lords. He cleared his throat. "My maternal grandparents weren't particularly thrilled to find their daughter was being courted by the heir to a provincial family, legendary heroism nonwithstanding. And my father's mother wasn't overly thrilled with him marrying a Hellsing."

He heard the smile in Sypha's voice before she even said a word. "A forbidden romance then?"

"No, nothing so dramatic as that," he laughed. "Isabel was rather taken with her admirer, so the story goes, and she happily left the Hellsings' ambitions to her siblings." He knew that story front to back. Aunt Anne had delighted in the telling and re-telling of how her little brother had brought his new bride home with him without so much as a letter of notice. When her ancestry became known, Grandmother Integra had been furious. Anne and Arthur had marveled at their brother's audacity. Grandfather Trevor apparently took everything as placidly as he always did and welcomed his new daughter into the family without any fuss. "What else do you expect us to do, love?" he'd apparently asked a fuming Integra. "We can't send her back. Our Leonel would certainly go with her, and then where would we be?"

"And then she had you?" Sypha asked.

"My brother and sister came before me. But yes, then she had me."

"You had a brother and sister?"

He'd been the third of six children born to Leonel and Isabel Belmont, and there had been a foster daughter among them, too. The eldest had been named for their father, but he was a frail infant who had died in the cradle only a week after he was born. No one ever spoke about him, and the only proof the younger Leonel Belmont had ever existed at all was his name penned carefully and elegantly in the record of the family tree. Then it was Leona, then him, then Marguerite had been adopted into the family, and then Edward and William were born. Anne's son, Leon, and Arthur's children, Richard and Elizabeth, brought the roster to eight living children.

No…he'd left out Grace.

A sour feeling hollowed his stomach in a way that had nothing to do with his hunger, and when Sypha leaned her head against his shoulder, he wondered if she'd sensed the shift in his mood. Shit. He shook his head and permitted another small laugh to escape him. "It's funny. I haven't talked about any of this in years, and yet you…"

"Yes?"

His smile—had he been smiling?—faded. "Am I really sad?"

"All the time. You don't notice it anymore. It's just how you are." Sypha's voice began to grow faint. "But then…you tell me no one was lonely in your house. And you tell stories about a grandfather who marked up your face with charcoal and how you used to play in a tree and about how your parents met and fell in love in Targoviste. And you offer me a stinky blanket."

"Yeah…the stink might not be the blanket."

The sound of quiet, even breaths told him she'd finally gone to sleep. Good. They both needed it, he thought as he closed his eyes.

No one was ever lonely in this house. How could they when there had been so many of them?

Coming up the forest road, one heard House Belmont long before they saw it. Every day, from the moment he was rousted out of bed, either by Leon or Marguerite, there were always people shouting in the yard and rushing about the hallways. Quite the contrast from other prominent houses he'd seen before where servants were restricted to certain areas, according to their rank and purpose, and they were commanded to go about their tasks disturbing their masters as little as possible. Moreoever, the staff 'below stairs' were prohibited from speaking with the members of the family. At home, Trevor could always tell when Father decided to go out riding, for no matter where he was in the house, he never failed to hear when the stablemaster bellowed orders to saddle Adevăr, Leonel's white charger. The kitchen staff always had a song to sing when they were briefly out of gossip. Between lessons and training, he and his cousins used to join them and were inevitably given a bucket of peas to shell or beets to cut, which they happily did until they were called away by the tutor, the master at arms, or their parents. All his young life, he'd dodged the family's page as he rushed about with his messages and, more than once, he'd had to duck under the laundress's basket as she went about her endless chore. He'd even seen Aunt Anne with a load of sheets hoisted over her shoulder and chatting blithely with the girl who tended the fires. In the winter, he once got into a snowball fight against the kitchen boys, the nursemaid's son, cousin Richard, the daughter of one of the laundresses, and even the chaplain. He took a chunk of ice to the face and Leona singlehandedly stormed the 'enemy castle' to avenge him. When the family's physician, who'd been fighting on his side, knelt to ensure he was all right, he found a grinning child with a bloodied nose and a tooth knocked out.

No one was lonely. There was always someone to talk to, always someone to play with or help in some necessary task in keeping the estate running, always someone to go to for advice, for comfort, for a story, anything.

They were always there.

Until they weren't.

God, how it hurt so much less to breathe back then.

…

By the time Alucard returned to the Hold, he found his companions fast asleep, curled snugly into each other and sharing the same blanket. The sight startled him, for so far he had seen the Speaker barely tolerated Belmont and the feeling was painfully mutual. Alucard sighed irritably as he bent to pinch out the candle flame, as well as mentally kick the hunter for leaving it unattended in a room full of old paper. All that relentless bickering…he wondered when they had become so close? Although, now that he thought about it, he had heard the pair laughing together earlier that evening. What reason they had for this sudden cheer was unknown to him, but he supposed some laughter was good for them. Especially for the homesick Speaker.

Allowing himself a small smile, Alucard returned to the open area by the Hold's lectern and began to lay out the food he'd raided and prepared at Poenari: a loaf of fresh bread baked with rosemary; several jars of preserved fruits, most of which had come from his mother's garden, and a brace of carp he'd managed to catch in the Argeș River at the base of the mountain. These last he'd intended to grill as soon as he got back to the Hold, but he supposed that could be delayed for a time. Better to let his companions sleep, he thought. It had been a rough road for all of them, and when the hunter and scholar woke, there would at least be a hot meal waiting for them.

In the meantime, though, Alucard turned a troubled eye to the hundreds of tomes of Belmont lore arrayed around him. There were stories he needed to read, answers he had to find. Carefully, he picked up the fragile Compendium of Vampyres from where he had left it and turned the leathery pages to his father's chapter. Unlike Seras, Dracula's origins in the Belmonts' history was absolute. He began his mortal life in 'the year of Our Lord 1064 as Mathias Cronqvist, French alchemist and longtime friend of Leon Belmont.' Alucard knew this. It was an old tale in his family. Father lost his mortal life in a bloody crusade against the Ottoman Empire, and when he rose as a vampire, Leon turned against him. He damned his immortality as an affront to God and man and the friendship decayed into a fierce and bitter enmity that extended to end of Leon's days, bleeding into the lives of his descendants. He knew all of it, and yet Alucard found Father's account did not match that of the Compendium. Some details were familiar: the war between the Byzantines and the Turks, his father's first marriage to Lady Elizabetha, and the brother-bond between Mathias and Leon. But it was here the story he had known all his life diverged from the one the Belmonts told.

The narrative, written in faded ink, spoke of the vampire lord Walter Bernhard and how he had kidnapped a certain Lady Sara Trantoul, Leon Belmont's beloved. Kidnapped at the bidding of Mathias Cronqvist.

No, this wasn't right.

Surely the story had been warped through the generations of tellings and re-tellings. Alucard closed the Compendium and turned away. Belmont had mentioned a memoir written by Leon the Progenitor, hadn't he? That meant there was an original eyewitness account from an active contemporary. He looked toward the index, only to find the book he was seeking already waiting for him. Did Belmont leave this here? As carefully as his haste would allow, Alucard opened the small tome and searched the pages for the legendary hunter's encounter with the lord of the night. He read of Elizabetha's illness and how her death had left Mathias bedridden with grief, of how Leon had abandoned the crusade and renounced his lands and titles to rescue Sara from Walter's castle, of Walter's defeat…but where was the betrayal? Where was the part when Leon turned his back on his father and resolved to hunt him down? That his line would not rest until Dracula was defeated?

He did find those words, though the reason for Leon's vengeance was not the one he'd always known.

Alucard clenched his jaw. Was this true? Had Father and Walter really done something so beastly to an innocent woman? Certainly there was no shortage of stories where a human was turned vampire against their will, but this…this was…Father wouldn't…and he'd known Walter since he was a boy…he…

He read the passage of how Lady Sara, rather than live the 'cursed unlife' of a vampire, gave up her life to aid her lover's cause against the evil that had infected the world. Her soul, according to the memoirs, neither ascended to Heaven nor fell into darkness. It remained within a whip made by an alchemist and continued to slay the creatures of the night. Belmont's weapon, the soul of Sara. As Alucard closed the book and set it back on the lectern, he wondered of Mother had known of any of this. Had Seras? What did the dead women have to say?

Where was Seras? He had so many questions to ask her about Father, about Leon and the Belmonts, the Hold, and why he had found a locked chest earlier today that contained the remains of an automaton. A mechanical man whose left side had been obliterated by what could have only been cannon fire. How had a being of clockwork and steam been defeated by Draculina, only to wind up down here among the property of her enemies? It couldn't have been stolen from Poenari—the Belmont hoarding problem nonwithstanding—because Poenari had never been invaded by a hunter or even another vampire.

And then there were her letters. Whilst looking for food in his sister's castle, he'd taken the opportunity to search her writing desk in hopes her last correspondences would give him some indication of her whereabouts or even some clues to Father's war plans. Maybe not all her communications with the Generals had been via distance mirror. It was a futile hope, yes, and quickly dashed, but he had found a small box of cedar wood hidden away in her bedchamber. At first glance, its contents had seemed to him a sparse collection of harmless keepsakes: a lock of auburn hair tied with a white ribbon, an old prayerbook that smelled of mildew, a sprig of dried primroses that he recognized as one he himself must have given Seras when he was a child, and other odds and ends. He found the letters at the bottom of the box.

Some were explainable: a brief but affectionate missive from their father expressing apology for some unmentioned wrong and a plea for her to return home; a lengthy and altogether nauseating letter from Master Librarian Bernadotte, although Alucard would have bet money the Frenchman had written it to win Seras' favor with humor; and a few casual messages from someone called Striga. But then he found a series of letters dated from over thirty years ago and signed by a certain T. Belmont.

Yours always,

T. Belmont.

What the hell was a Belmont doing writing to his sister? Why such a warm valediction? 'Yours always?' He glared at that signature as though doing so long enough would force the answers he wanted out of the faded ink. The missives themselves offered little in way of an answer. The sender's penmanship was atrocious, and Alucard scowled in frustration, pinching the bridge of his nose. What did it all mean? What stories had Father and Seras kept from him all these years? Why had Father brought harm to Lady Sara who, by all accounts that he could see, had done nothing to deserve the crimes against her?

"Who is still loyal to Dracula?" Belmont had asked him in Gresit.

"The great Belmont doesn't know?"

Alucard bowed his head and sighed. The whelp Adrian Țepeș doesn't know. The more he thought about his childhood, the more clear it became how Father and Mother had raised him outside the realm of vampire politics, guiding him toward a life that sympathized with Lisa's people and away from the court of intrigues that polluted the world to which Seras and Dracula belonged. Had he considered the Generals…he should have turned to them for aid, warned them of what was to come, gained a stronger foothold in challenging his father. He should have gone to Seras. Which path had his sister taken? Was she for Father or against him? If against, where was she? Dead? Imprisoned? Gathering forces and allies of her own? What was she looking for? Bernadotte was crazy enough to follow her anywhere, but what about Hector and Isaac? Neither of them had cause to love mankind, but they weren't insane enough to bring about their own extinction, right? Right? How many other enemies did he stand to face? How many vampires in the Compendium were vassals of Dracula?

He'd been a fool. A stupid, arrogant boy who'd done nothing to stop this. He should have sought out the Generals and warned them of what was to come, not face his father by himself. What had he been thinking? What on earth possessed him to believe he could take on the most poweful vampire in the world and win? That was something even Seras couldn't do.

Not alone.

Sister…if you're out there somewhere… He grit his teeth. Please be safe.

End of Part 1

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Author's Notes: It took a long time to get this chapter where I wanted it. There was a lot of adjusting, debating whether or not some parts should be left out, if the narrative was too choppy, and so on. There's a lot of complex emotions surrounding grief, whether it's a year old or a decade or more, and I wanted to do it justice. The hardest thing to write was the Belmont family because there is a lot opportunity to expand on who they were and how much they meant to Trevor, and the challenge was how much could I elaborate without it becoming too long or confusing. Mainly, my goal was to present a family that was alive and happy and more than a footnote in a fanfiction.

Hope you all enjoyed. This was definitely one of the hardest chapters to do so far.

I own neither of these series.