Encore

Water

"Wait," Trevor says. "So that place was actually Dracula's."

"As I keep saying."

"But you did the - ow fucking - collapsing gear disaster, and your endless staircase keep."

From his spot by the fire, Alucard says peevishly, "It wouldn't have collapsed if you didn't touch it."

"Which supposedly someone told me." A drop of stinging water trickles down his neck and he swats at it. You'd think pointing out the soap was a bad batch would've at least gotten him out of that part. "Which means you're sure Dracula knew about that. Fuck! Sypha it doesn't even need stitches!"

"Oh? A cut across the entire back of your head doesn't need stitches?"

And fucking Alucard takes her side and says, "Is there any element of medical treatment you aren't opposed to?"

"I'm opposed to Sypha and the fact she doesn't know the difference between stitches and trepanning!" He shouldn't even need to explain that, Alucard can damn well see the disaster Sypha's inflicting on him. But then, why would he expect Alucard to think anything of it? A slow death by needlepoint is probably Dracula-approved.

Sypha stabs him in the skull with the needle again. "You complain a lot for someone who said nothing about an injury in the first place."

She was a fucking hypocrite. He'd said she needed stitches and she'd insisted cauterizing amounted to the same thing, and at least Trevor actually could stitch a wound. And it's on his head! There's nothing even there to get fucked up by scar tissue.

"Does he have any holes drilled in his skull?" Alucard asks, like this is an actual possibility, and Sypha, like this is an actual possibility, lays off on stabbing him to prod the top of his head.

"Of course I don't!" Trevor objects, which accomplishes precisely as much as the rest of his objections. "Supposedly Dracula knew about the gears and future sinkhole place," Trevor says, giving up on trying to bat Sypha's poking hand away and returning to the subject. "But if you're not lying, why did you pick this as the best place to hide out from him? Figure was so obvious he'd never think to look? He wouldn't think his own son was so stupid?"

"I didn't build it expecting I'd need to hide from my father after he almost killed me," Alucard says.

Does every fucking thing have to be a pit trap with Alucard?

And then, not like he fucking asked to hear more but since when does that matter, Alucard continues, "It wasn't done, actually. I wanted to do it on my own and then I would show him."

Sypha was right, he's not even an icy well he's a goddamn winter lake that hasn't figured out how to freeze over properly! Why can't he just not answer questions like a normal person? Not think about it like a normal person?

The solution is probably to stop stomping around on the ice but if Trevor does that then he'll have to think about things and what's outside of his own head, be it Alucard and his stupid stupid feelings or Sypha and her insistence you can stitch up a wound like a ripped seam, continues to be an improvement.

He kicks Sypha's foot, hoping she understands that this is absolutely her problem too now and if she doesn't talk he's going to keep doing it himself.

"And you did it by magic?" Sypha asks, pulling her conversational weight.

"Most of it did not use magic," Alucard says.

"But you used magic," Sypha says.

Alucard makes a futile effort to move talk to force distribution and arches and whatever the fuck tensile strength means and Sypha persists in trying to find out how you could magic way too many stairs into existence and in the process turn a populated city into a sinkhole, seriously you'd think the one thing vampires would be good at is planning long-term but no, and, in sum: Alucard used magic any time he fucked something up, which he is strongly working to imply was almost never and probably actually was every other foot of the place.