"Dream"
Work: Van Helsing
Character(s): Dracula/Van Helsing
Category: Angst, romance
Rating: PG
Warnings: non-graphic slash
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It is as if the past four hundred years never were. You look the same as ever: your hair long, your face somewhere between shaven and scruffy. Yet your eyes – they have gone cold, as though all your years of drudgery have at last caught up to you. I could warm you, revive your love of life, if only you would let me. Between us, two frozen souls, a spark might yet arise to thaw our icy hearts.
I take a moment to remind myself that you remember nothing. Our first meeting in over four centuries, and I must play coy.
Very well.
We circle one another. I take a step in advance; you take a step away. The distance remains the same, never closing.
Please do not look at me like that, Gabriel, with your mingled wariness and disgust. I cannot bear it; the very lack of emotion in your eyes is about to drive me mad, if I am not already. I recall a time when I could see the world in your eyes, but now I only see the shell of a man.
I used to have nightmares, Gabriel, horrible nightmares, back in those long-gone days when my soul was my own and you had a ready smile for me. I would dream that you ceased to care, that you scorned me and turned me away. But do they not say that some dreams are prophetic? For in the end the nightmare came true, when the only man I truly trusted killed me in cold blood.
What sort of dreams does one such as myself now have? What do the undead dream?
I dream of a time when the name Van Helsing was not yet synonymous with murderer, and when the name Dracula did not yet exist. I dream of life and my unborn children; of that day which was an eternity, when I sold my soul to the Lord of Hell; of unending emptiness and death by torture and lands which have never seen the sun. Sometimes I dream of my brides, mostly Verona; those dreams often change to wishes, wishes that I could know more than the most primal of emotions: hate, lust, rage.
But far more often I dream of you, my angel: the day we met, the nights we shared, the times we saved each other's necks, that evening when the cardinal nearly caught us kissing in the gardens. The night you killed me. You think you have nightmares? Perhaps it is so, but at least you wake to your blissful ignorance; your past can only haunt you in the realm of sleep. But for me, that one hateful nightmare still resurfaces, the phantom pain of an old wound, except now it is reality.
That is what I dream, Gabriel – of happiness and loss and torment. The son of the Devil dreams of love and the left hand of God.