Encore

Demons

Alucard could set him down again, but no, Trevor is chucked inside the house to bang into the wall. "Fuck you're cranky," he says as Alucard slams the door behind them. "And the sun can't be that bad if you can still sprint around like that."

There's a whole lot of nothing from Alucard, who is just doing his statue impression again in front of the shut door.

Trevor waits. He can totally do sitting around nothing if he has to, not like there's anything to actually do. He'll out-lazy Alucard. He just -

"Shit." Trevor jumps up and takes a step toward the door. Alucard somehow manages to loom without technically moving from where he's planted. "How far - you'd hear if something was going wrong, right? With Sypha?"

"Don't you know the future?"

"ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION!"

Alucard looks taken aback. "There's nothing dangerous."

"Really every other human in the entire goddamn city just vanished?" Alucard is still not moving from the door. "I'll keep quiet," Trevor bargains, "I can keep quiet. I'll be completely silent and not say anything to anyone outside. So we can go back out now."

"What makes you think the Scholar who helps us kill Dracula is in danger from some human here?"

He can't actually move Alucard from the door.

Even now Alucard is managing suspicion verging on outright paranoia without actual wariness, because he's an arrogant vampire bastard, so Trevor can definitely get in a stab, especially when he didn't break his sword in a pointless fight. Enough to actually make Alucard go down, probably. Shortsword through the collarbone does that.

But that doesn't matter because if Alucard goes down, Trevor gets maybe ten feet before Alucard pops right back up because fucking vampire healing magic bullshit.

Trevor isn't actually going to get anywhere while Alucard's alive.

"I'll stay here if you want that instead," he pleads, "inside, away from crows, is that better? It'll only take you a moment, you'll hardly have to be outside in the sun at all."

He doesn't know anything about stopping vampires that isn't just killing them.

Alucard repeats, "What makes you think the Scholar who helps us kill Dracula is in danger from some human here?" because why would he listen, Trevor's fucked it all up and now he thinks everything Trevor says is some evil trick.

"If she's the Scholar then you need her," Trevor tries to reason. "Your prophecy! Alucard, you want the prophecy to work so badly you're putting up with me, you can't possibly want to lose her."

"You were fine enough with all this to fall asleep just a few hours ago."

And Trevor - "I can't do this. I won't."

"What?"

He presses against the wall and he can't breathe and that's so stupid he doesn't fucking need to breathe. "Kill you. If I don't kill you I can't get past you but then you're dead and I. But she's dead."

"She's alive," Alucard says.

"When she's dead you'll know the prophecy's fake. And that's the only reason you're not killing me, right? It's - it's basically self-defense, you know that, you've got to, this isn't whatever your mother was talking about, you're sure I'll betray you, am betraying you right, and you're trying to save the world, you've got reason, it's not like she meant-"

"Sypha is alive." What does he have to be so horrified about? He doesn't believe anything Trevor says, that's the whole problem here!

"It's going to go wrong," he explains. "It shouldn't they shouldn't they didn't but it just is, it can't go wrong the same way because I know and it has to go wrong somehow, something I screwed up or just, that's how it works." It's already something he screwed up, it's because he said the wrong thing before that Alucard won't believe him now.