Encore

Pets

"It's not like I do it that often," claims the person who Trevor has repeatedly seen very nearly climb into the fireplace and that's really sounding now like it wasn't accidental as Sypha continues to interrogate Alucard about the fact he apparently did mean he preferred setting himself on fire more than drinking one extra drop of blood. More evidence for dhampirs, or maybe just Alucard, being so unspeakably annoying to raise that even Dracula couldn't handle a second one. "It's why I wear gloves."

Obviously that's why vampires wear gloves and such when out and about pretending to be people! It's still fucked up that Alucard thinks literally setting himself on fire is a viable plan B. If Trevor had known this was the sort of brilliant problem solving his shitty vampire mind came up with, he would have put a lot more effort into actually talking through their plans. What did Alucard think the backup plan for fighting Dracula was, stabbing themselves? No wonder Alucard got the shit beaten out of him as soon as he was out of Trevor's line of sight. In fact, did Alucard even get the shit beaten out of him? Did he just beat the shit out of himself?

Still, good to know. Vampires, or at least dhampirs, not only can cheat with fire magic but think that's less weird than just being a normal temperature by eating a normal-for-vampires meal. Trevor pulls out his journal again and jots this down.

Alucard leans slightly to see. "That's not what I said."

Trevor adds, And they're pedantic assholes about how you phrase things. If disarmed, talk so you can die knowing you pissed them off.

"Weren't you paying attention when I told Sypha? Vampires aren't good at this kind of magic."

"We know you're completely awful at it, yeah."

"Vampires as a whole, not just me. My father is the only vampire who bothered with it and it's only because he was affronted to discover there was such a distinction between vampire and human magics. It's why he came to focus his research exclusively on the sciences."

"And upon hearing you'd suck at it you knew to add it to your list of hobbies, because you're only interested in things you're terrible at," Trevor says. That does make sense.

Sypha frowns at him, because nothing is ever fair. "Alucard looked like a perfectly good wolf."

"Yeah, well, you had to bully him into that and he immediately turned person-shaped again so that just proves my point that Alucard only wants to do stuff he's utter shit at it. If he was worse at making a dog -"

"Not a dog," Alucard mutters.

"- he'd be one all the time. We'd have woken up a dog shedding all over the fancy coffin, if we could even tell whatever fucked up pile of bones and fur Alucard made was supposed to be a dog."

Sypha bounces the flame in her hand and then finally, finally is satisfied by dawn and puts the damn thing out. "That reminds me...Alucard, if you think God didn't make dogs," Sypha says, "then who do you think did?"

Alucard says, "I respect your opinions."

"Oh, come on, you can tell me, I hate dogs too! We outnumber Belmont." Alucard doesn't respond. "Belmont. Dogs: awful, awful animals, don't you think?"

"They're great. Platonically and nonsexually great," he adds, giving Alucard a meaningful glare.

"What a very normal thing to say," Sypha says. "We all believe you."

Trevor ignores that to continue, "God definitely made them. They don't eat people."

"They bite people all the time!"

"But they're not vampires, Sypha, biting's not eating." Admittedly, he's seen some scavenge corpses, but he's not going to judge, and better than wolves eating the bodies and turning into werewolves and then biting living people and making more werewolves and so on. "It's not like they - well, actually, Alucard ran around with his magic sword when he was a dog -"