Encore

Blood

Alucard, it turns out, somehow thinks that while he may have stupidly handed Sypha a way of making anything she feels like in defiance of God and man she'll still listen to his lectures about how very serious and boring it needs to be. Alucard is kind of an idiot.

"What you've done won't even last the year," Alucard continues. "You need to -"

"I only need it to last a few hours," Sypha says, because also, she's practical. "Oh! Actually I don't even need that, do I? If it falls apart before we return, I could just put it back again."

Alucard insists, "If you put it together properly, it wouldn't fall apart at all." And then he tries, "The mathematics underlying architecture are actually very interesting."

"Dhampirs are supposed to be good at lying," Trevor tells Alucard. "Are you actually a runt? Are you like the vampire equivalent of raising a puppy on bread, do you look fine on the outside and it's your brain that goes?"

This is supposed to be a joke. He has no idea why Alucard's head snaps toward him with an expression of murderous fury.

"Sorry?" Trevor hazards.

Alucard looks away again. "A parrot," he mutters. It sounds like a curse of some kind.

Okay so yes obviously this is a sensitive subject for mysterious vampire reasons Trevor can't even guess at but now that he's thinking about it it's starting to sound very uncomfortably possible and, "Are you sickly, actually?" Trevor asks. "Malnourished?" If regular vampires eat any human blood maybe half-vampire means only some types of blood work. Alucard's fucked up so much else, maybe he didn't stock enough of the right blood either. Whatever that is. The virgin thing never made much sense given purity's supposed to be what you drive monsters off with, but maybe the other way around? Sinners feeding monsters? Maybe that's why vampires are supposed to encourage that kind of thing. Like turning grapes into wine.

Might explain why they like eating kids so much, kids are little shits.

"I really do look forward to finding out whose voice is echoing out of you," Alucard tells him. "I think I'll eat their heart."

"I feel like that's kind of a yes." Can animals sin? Because Alucard specifically disrecommended goats and if anything can sin it's goats, but maybe he just meant he didn't want Sypha wasting good food.

"Perhaps it'll be some comfort for them to die knowing their concern about my diet has been addressed."

"I'm not saying you suck in a fight, you didn't get killed, but there's different kinds of messed up. You look nothing like Dracula," Trevor continues, "and you can point to any kid, say someone's its father, and everyone can and will immediately find a score of reasons the kid looks just like him, and Dracula actually is your father. I mean, I'm assuming your parents fucked like people. So you really should look like Dracula, and he looked like death warmed over a few dozen times too many. So are you supposed to be more corpsey looking? Is that what healthy looks like on a dhampir? Are you more dead the less dead you look?"

"I thought your family knew about dhampirs," Alucard says. He does not sound like he particularly cares what Trevor answers, but that's fine, Trevor doesn't care about if Alucard cares.

"Mostly in the immediate sense. There's some sort of plan and then fuck, one of them's a halfbreed and that doesn't work right and now someone's in five pieces, hurry up and stake it before anyone else dies. That's not real conducive to telling if one's a bit under the weather. But I do know you guys are not, uh, known for being light eaters."

"Doesn't it seem strange, Belmont, that you would think this yet agree to travel with one?"

"It was a concern, alright? Nothing personal. But it wasn't like Sypha would listen to me, would you Sypha?"