A/N: I couldn't help but bring in some (lengthy) quotes from Nathanial Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" (one could almost call this chapter a cross over). My vision of Adrian's childhood seemed to parallel that of little Pearl. Some quotes were quite apropos.
….oOo….
Alucard sat in his chair, elbow on the arm rest and hand on his chin, staring at the locked drawer of his desk.
Those two were determined to discombobulate him. Greta was no help either, always smirking and smiling when they did it. She probably encouraged them. However, Alucard smiled to himself upon reflection, this was a problem he was happy to have.
No matter how much his friends teased him he was extremely happy to have them, including (and maybe most especially) that asshole Belmont. Oh wait, there was more than one Belmont now. Grudgingly he realized he would have to refer to that pain in the ass as Trevor. Again a smile sneaked across his face.
Alucard's mind drifted back to a time shortly after they had met.
Flashback (the Speaker's cottage in Gresit):
"I can't read or understand magic," explained Trevor, "But my family stored everything they found, including books of magic and whatever other weird stuff they came across. I just can't do anything with it," he said with a shrug. Indicating Alucard and Sypha, he insisted, "But you two can."
Jumping at the opportunity to make a snide comment, Alucard said, "Fortunate indeed, then, that I chose not to kill you and eat you, Belmont."
"And that I decided against gutting you, flaying you, and turning you into shoes, Alucard," Trevor quickly retorted.
"Such a merry band we are," an irritated Sypha interjected, out of patience with their incessant bickering, "I will find us a covered wagon and horses, if you two can manage not to kill each other while I'm gone."
"Oh, please," groaned Alucard, as Sypha walked away, "We're not children."
"Eat shit and die," Trevor said to him.
"Yes," rejoined Alucard, "fuck you."
Both laughed knowing they were behaving exactly like children.
….oOo….
Speaking of children...
They had really gone and done it this time. It started when they named their first born after him, well the child's middle name at least. It was still an honor he had not expected.
He had never had any real friends. His mother was an outcast. Not just because she married the most notorious vampire of them all but also because she was a doctor. Female healers were not generally accepted in societal circles. It was more often assumed that they were witches. That being the chosen reason for burning her at the stake. The children of such women were pariahs and the fact that he was half vampire made it even worse for him. Mother and son stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society.
His mother had kept a cottage on the outskirts of the village of Lupu in which she offered her healing services and lived with her son when her husband was off on his travels. She missed him immensely but her practice and her son kept her busy. She did what she could to educate her patients, going to great lengths to explain to them that what she practiced was science, not magic or witchcraft. But these were a backward people and the simplest explanations were what remained uppermost in their minds.
A mystic shadow of suspicion attached itself to the cottage. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her at the cottage-window, or standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little herb garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led town ward, and would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.
With what strange rapidity, indeed did Adrian arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse! And then what a happiness would it have been could Lisa Tepes have heard his clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unraveled her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children. But this could never be. Adrian was a born outcast of the infantile world - an imp of evil.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended his loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about him: the whole peculiarity, in short, of his position in respect to other children. This saddened his mother and she fervently hoped that someday he would find the truest of friends.
Whenever he would join his mother on her walks to town he would often see the children of the settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as their upbringing would permit! playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging night creatures, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Adrian saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, he would not speak again. If the children gathered about him, as they sometimes did, Adrian would grow positively terrible in his puny wrath, baring his fangs at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made his mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue, something she supposed he must have picked up from his father's relations.
Within and around his mother's cottage, Adrian wanted not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from his ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials-a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower-were the puppets of Adrian's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of his inner world. The pine-trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as the village elders the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Adrian smote down and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which he threw his intellect. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Adrian, in the dearth of human playmates (or vampire ones either, for that matter), was thrown more upon the visionary throng which he created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of his own heart and mind. He never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom he rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad-then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her husband's lineage the cause-to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good his cause in the contest that must ensue. And so she resolved, not only to turn her husband toward the light (so to speak) but to nurture her son's human side as well.
The truth was, that the little town's children, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Adrian felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. It appalled his mother to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had once existed in her husband. All this enmity and passion had Adrian inherited, by inalienable right, out of Vlad's heart.
She remembered-betwixt a smile and a shudder-the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, observing some of his odd attributes, had given out that poor little Adrian was a demon offspring: such as had occasionally been seen on earth to promote some foul and wicked purpose. But Lisa knew the truth. His father was a good man. She had turned him, through her love she made him a better man. She had faith that someday her son too would find someone who would inspire him to be a better man and would love him with all her heart.
His father's friends and relations were not much more accepting of him than his mother's people.
"Why was this new wife of yours never turned?" a fellow vampire once asked his father, dripping with contempt, "You married, you had a child, and yet you did not make her a vampire. Were you simply keeping a human pet?"
The vampires and hordes at least understood Adrian's vampiric nature. However, they were suspect of his human half and so shunned or ignored him as well.
Poor Adrian was alone and friendless.
….oOo….
Alucard did not think upon his childhood very often. Those were memories best left buried deep. His parent's love, however, was constant, and his lack of playmates caused him to mature at a young age. But the last time he had pondered the negative aspects of his upbringing...
Flashback (the ruins of the Belmont Estate):
"You've been on your own since you were thirteen?" a sympathetic Sypha asked of Trevor.
"Maybe twelve," replied he, carelessly, "Who remembers that sort of thing?"
"Twelve," repeated Alucard in a monotone, thinking of what his own life was like when he was twelve.
"Is there a point to these questions?" Trevor inquired, petulantly.
"I'm disturbed to find that I had more of a childhood than you did," Alucard pointed out.
"And your dad's fucking Dracula," added Trevor sarcastically.
All three laughed.
….oOo….
Then there were Sumi and Taka. They came along when he was at his lowest, missing Trevor and Sypha and jealous of the intimacy the couple had shared. He befriended the young twins, teaching them all that he could. He thought they were his friends but that ended in a colossal disaster.
No one in his life had ever trusted him and accepted him unconditionally and for who he truly was like Trevor and Sypha had (and now Greta, he reminded himself with a roguish smile). The hunter, the scholar, and the sleeping soldier had formed a unique alliance. They had a common goal and achieved it by working together.
Even now, though his first friends were happily married, they insisted on including him in their lives in every way possible: they asked him to perform their wedding ceremony, requested his medical skills for the delivery of their child, and gave the child his name.
And now today, when the child was but a day old, they asked him to be his godfather, rendering him speechless once again.
He twirled the key to the drawer with his long fingers, a devilish smirk playing across his face. He would wager he could make them, Trevor in particular, speechless too. It was time to get even.
