Encore

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"Belmont."

Trevor does not, exactly, jump, but that's got significantly more to do with the fact he's half frozen than he'd like. He does fumble his journal and end up juggling it for a moment before regaining his grip. Then he twists around and snarls, "You fucking prick! Are you that - arg!" He throws up his hands. "I could ambush you too if I felt like it! This doesn't prove anything!"

"My apologies," Alucard says in the least apologetic way possible.

"Fuck you!"

"I was curious about your startle response."

"I'll stab you in your fucking smug face, how's that for my fucking response!"

"Normal," Alucard says.

Trevor kicks at Alucard's knee. Alucard flickers a foot back.

"It's a legitimately useful diagnostic criteria."

"It hurts your stupid ego that much to think I'm not scared of you?" God, he can't believe he kept his mouth shut all night, even when he saw several cats, because he mistakenly gave half a shit about Alucard's stupid paranoia.

"You've made it very clear you're not scared of me."

"And it pisses you off."

"No," Alucard lies.

"You're such a fucking liar," Trevor tells him.

"I don't like the context," Alucard says. "I don't like that this was done to you, and whoever else."

"Whoever else?" Trevor repeats. "What, now there's more of us?"

"From how you're acting with Sypha, they're all dead."

"Everyone I know is dead for normal reasons," Trevor says. "And none of it was to vampires, different monsters." They don't get credit for Letty, if you get killed because you're mostly dead from fever thanks to fucking weretigers it's the fucking weretiger's point.

Not that dying to enough vampires is anything to be ashamed about. Just doesn't come up much. It's rare there's that many vampires in one place and when there are it's obvious there's way too many and that going straight in would be s-

A light flares on the ground. Unnecessarily dramatic - it's still dark-ish, but it's close enough to dawn you can see well enough. "Oh, Alucard's back," Sypha says. "I'm going back to sleep. Stop yelling."

"It's Alucard's fault!"

"I'm sure," she mumbles. "Stop yelling."

She goes back inside. There is, perhaps, an entire minute of silence, and then Alucard asks, "Why are you on the roof?"

Right. "I didn't say anything to anything," Trevor starts. "Nothing has been said on this roof until you got here. Except for talking to Sypha when I climbed up originally," he amends. "But otherwise, nothing. So you have nothing to complain about."

"You felt compelled to separate yourself from Sypha and stay awake while everyone else slept, despite your original intention of -"

"No, that was me lying," Trevor interrupts. "I figured I'd have a bad time of it if I tried to sleep, but I said that stuff so you'd leave and..." Is he not supposed to mention it? "...Do stuff," he finishes after a hopefully none too suspicious pause. "The stuff you needed to do. And Sypha needed sleep. But I didn't say anything, at all, while I was up here so I couldn't have accidentally been passing messages to whoever you're worried about. Not even to the black cat I saw!"

"Black cats aren't magic."

"I know they're not magic! They're friendly and if I said something it'd probably come over. But instead of getting to pet a cat I sat in dead fucking silence up here."