Encore

Civil

"Basic! Civility!"

"Are you done."

"I don't know," Trevor says. "I may never be. God. Civility." He laughs yet again. This morning is, against every expectation, actually tolerable. "I wish I'd known this about you when I could do something with it," Trevor continues. "Sypha kept going, 'Trevor, Alucard knows how to be polite' and shit but this! You'd act the same with every horrific undead abomination you can find. Is it undead particularly you've got a stick up your ass about? Yours in particular, since there's no way this is a vampire thing. You can't use that excuse. I can believe a lot of stupid shit from vampires but civility for their fellow monsters ha, not if their fucking lives depended on it."

"Well," Alucard snaps at him, "at least vampires wouldn't get themselves killed in the process. You claimed this is all about protecting people. What happened to that?"

"Since when is leaving vicious monsters alone protecting anybody?!" Was Actual Alucard really this much of an idiot?

"These people have been massacred by night creatures," Alucard says, which, yeah, the city's more gore than buildings at this point, Alucard, good job working that out. He continues, "One would stand no chance against a refused gjenganger."

Oh. "I don't like that it goes like that," Trevor says. "That's just how it works. People die until somebody like me comes by to get rid of it. Which I'm not going to apologize for. You shouldn't demand people coexist politely with things that kill you if you make one innocent mistake."

Alucard shakes his head. "I killed the one I spoke with before I left. I was told it was cruel to leave her like that." And then, damn him, he stares out over Gresit and looks suddenly miserable. "I wonder if he meant it."

God. Look. Trevor's mostly certain Alucard, being a horrible perversion of humanity, isn't under God's dominion so whatever happened is not, at least, a moral failing. Okay? A failing on any number of other levels, sure, fuck it, everything's Trevor's fault in the end, but nothing that's a sin. So this is just, it's not fair. Why is this happening? What the hell is he supposed to say?

"Killing, Dracula, makes sense he'd be all for it," Trevor says.

Well, whatever the fuck it he should've said it's not that.

"He wasn't like that," Alucard says quietly.

Yeah, Trevor has himself to blame for this.

"Or maybe he was," Alucard continues morosely.

Oh no no no why did Sypha leave.

"Maybe he wanted me to do what I was told. He told me to leave the acolytes of the void be as well," Alucard says, which, yeah Trevor had also not really wanted to think about where Alucard had got that idea, but he never gets what he wants. "He knew what he was doing and how much they would suffer and he still did it to them."

Trevor picks the only part of that he can respond to: "So if you agree Dracula was lying about leaving them alone, have you changed your mind about letting Sypha drop the ceiling on their skulls?"

"He didn't lie that it was cruel," Alucard insists, so great, Trevor's stuck having this conversation and it's not even moving him closer to Gresit not having an infestation of horrible ice ghosts or horrible ice ghost maggots or whatever precisely they are. "He told me that mattered. And it doesn't. Not to him. Not to you either."

Alucard looks miserable instead of accusatory and this is kind of making Trevor think about how much of what happened down there was Alucard getting fed up with the argument and how much was him thinking Trevor was fed up and about to rush in and do something himself.