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He tossed in his sleep. As always, memories assaulted him in the guise of dreams. A castle rose from the earth, full to the brim with the horrors and terrors he strove to protect his mother's people from. As always, the final confrontation in that castle tore at his heart. After his victory he would seek out a quiet place where he could sleep undisturbed until he was needed to defeat his father again.
He called it sleep, but it was more of a living death. He wouldn't eat or wake. He barely breathed. But he did dream.
And those dreams had always been full of the regret that he was what he was, a son of Dracula, and further, that he felt such a strong responsibility, almost a geas, to protect the humans of his mother's race from Dracula's evil plans.
His mother had loved Dracula. Even though he set himself against his father's plans, he did too. Enough, at any rate, to accept a living death so he could stop his father when Castlevania rose every one hundred years instead of questing to find a more permanent solution.
Furthermore, as long as he slept, he could protect the world from his own tainted blood. He wasn't certain he could deny the urge to drink, the bloodthirst, if he tried to live among humans.
So his life had fallen into a pattern he considered tragic, placing him between so many worlds at once he hoped he wouldn't go mad. He was half-vampire and half-human. He slept, not quite alive, but not yet dead, in a place apart from humans to protect them from his own urges. The same power of Dracula's presence that forced Castlevania to rise would wake him. He'd become more sensitive to the emanations of his father's power over the centuries, so that he would 'wake' earlier to spare the humans more pain.
He always hoped someone would come, someone like Maria perhaps, and somehow break the loneliness for him. If she had asked after that rising he might have had a chance to find what his father had found. A companion...maybe even love. In his more wry dreams, he admitted he had become something of a sleeping beauty, like the story his mother had read to him once, but it would take a heroine, not a hero, to wake him from his slumber. A heroine, or the advent of his father's castle again.
He had always longed for someone to open the coffin he slept in, for something other than Dracula's presence to wake him; but he never would have wished for what actually happened.
"Another noble idiot?! What's his story, I wonder..."
"No way! You have GOT to be kidding me! That's the stupidest one yet! I can't stand it!"
His heavy, stone coffin lid had been slid aside. He knew someone was looking down on him as he started to wake from that strange sleep he willingly endured. He knew that only fifty years had passed since his last waking.
"Oh, geez! Another pretty, noble, tragic, full of angst one...AURGH!"
He'd come out of his sleep enough to open his unfocused eyes. He saw a face only an inch from his, glaring madly into his light-dazzled eyes.
"Wakey, wakey!" Something bit his nose.
He'd risen up, fully awake at that.
"Who are you?! Why did you wake me?!" he demanded, "Why did you bite me?!"
"Why would you uselessly sleep your life away when there is so much rich hunting around here?" the man sitting on the edge of his coffin crossed his ankles and fussed with the drape of his cloak, "I haven't seen this many oblivious humans this close to one of the blood ever! It's disgraceful!"
"Don't! Don't harm them!" he sprang up at that and looked around for his sword.
"Oh? Your sword? I have it, I didn't want you attacking me," the intruder rose languidly and approached. His lazy advance sparked no alarm. A wide brimmed hat, decorated with fancy gems and an insanely long scarlet feather shadowed his eyes and a floor length dark blue cloak obscured his form.
"Your name is Alucard," the intruder declared, laying one hand gently on Alucard's cheek. Alucard nodded silently, "And you spend you life in a half-aware living death except for those few days, or weeks, every century when you rise to defeat Dracula," the man looked down into Alucard's eyes with a soft blue gaze.
Alucard nodded again.
"Idiot!" the intruder into the sanctuary pinched Alucard's cheek before whirling playfully away, "I didn't notice you the first time I came here. I was just waiting for the birth of my child this time when I felt your emanation!"
Alucard just then noted the long sword on his intruder's back and wondered again where his own sword was before the words sunk in.
"Emanation? Child?"
The intruder smiled, baring fangs as he did so, "Yes, emanation, little brother. I am a son of Dracula too, so I sensed you. And child... My goal is to have a child in every world that daddy dearest did, so on my last visit..." he let his sentence trail of leadingly.
Alucard saw red at that.
"No! You would prey upon humans as father does?!"
"'Prey'? 'Father'? Honestly, you are much too serious! Don't worry...Alicia was not harmed in any way. I didn't even change her. In fact, I made her quite happy if I do say so myself! But she's had her child now, a healthy nephew for you, little brother, so I must be on my merry way!"
"Wait!"
"Catch me if you can, little brother! This will be more fun than just waiting until that stupid castle rises again, you know?" the intruder whirled madly on one heel as blue light sparkled all around him. He vanished. Alucard's sword and a strange multi-colored gem were all that remained.
Alucard reached up at a tickling sensation and pulled back fingers tinged with blood. The tip of his nose throbbed where the intruder had bitten him.
"Who the hell was that?!"