#This entire AU can be summed up with the line IT SUCKS TO BE LEON.

[dahliadreamcraft]

Lament of Innocence AU

So I’m working on a fanfic of Castlevania that is basically “Frankenstein is the villain instead of Dracula”. However this au is in turn based in an au of Lament of Innocence instead of canon Lament of Innocence.

This post was originally going to be a bunch of random facts about the Lament of Innocence AU, mostly focused on giving Sara more character and her own backstory, and rewriting things so that they make more sense with the cartoon.

It ended up turning into a plot outline of the prequel to Requiem of Resurrection ( the name of the actual Franken Leon fanfic when I get around to actually writing it).

Which I’m putting under a read more so that it doesn’t end up turning into a ridiculously long post on people’s dashboards.

Also @darkartist98 for the freaking AMAZING fanart you did of Franken Leon. That inspired me to start posting content again and actually start working on the AU like I was supposed to. This doesn’t feature Franken Leon quite yet, this is all backstory but I thought you might like to know it.

*TRIGGER WARNING: One of the characters commits suicide. While I am going to do my best to treat the subject with all the gravity and respect it deserves, this is still a sensitive subject matter that I feel should be warned for.

Lament of Innocence is a tragedy. This doesn’t have a good end.

*Mathias was a vampire for at least two thousand years before Lament of Innocence happened

*Mathias is the “king of the vampires” by virtue of being the oldest. Bernhard is the second oldest. A vampire by the name of Oriana (inspired by the Witcher series) was the third eldest.

*Leon was eighteen when he first became a knight and actually earned his baron title by defeating a basilisk.

*The town the basilisk was menacing was where he met Sara and her father Rinaldo (I combined Sara and Rinaldo’s backstories)

*Sara gives him the first prototype vampire killer which she made.

*Sara eventually also makes the real Vampire Killer along with its upgrade Morningstar.

*Sara and Rinaldo are originally from Italy but came to France following Bernhard.

*Sara is a polyglot, which is a fancy term for she learns languages uncannily quick. She was damn near fluent in French and barely had an accent when she meets Leon for the first time and she’d only been in France for a year. The accent completely disappears a few months later.

*Sara was a young girl when Bernhard kidnapped her sister Gabriella, starved her to the point of madness, and let her loose outside of Sara’s home. Sara’s brother managed to throw her inside their father’s workshop to protect her just before Gabriella killed him.

*Her brother’s screams still haunt Sara’s nightmares.

*Rinaldo made it back in time to kill Gabriella before she could force her way into the workshop to kill Sara.

*He still has nightmares about that night.

*It was not love at first sight for Leon and Sara. Despite Sara giving him the whip, neither of them thought they were going to see the other again after that day.

*After Leon (with Trefor’s help) killed the Basilisk thanks to the whip Sara gave him (because his sword broke during the fight) Leon is so high off of the win and the fact they didn’t die that he finds Sara again to thank her and in his excitement kisses her.

*He comes back down to earth and starts to apologize but Sara waves him off saying ‘there are far worse things than being kissed by a cute knight’.

*Despite this they still didn’t think much of it when he left to go report to his captain about the basilisk being dead.

*On his way back from the basilisk fight he comes across an exceptionally tall vampire about to rip some poor bastard’s throat out.

*He attacks Mathias with his new whip, which causes him to drop the man out of shock because the whip actually hurt him. Not much, but the fact it did anything at all was amazing.

*Mathias at first thinks Leon is just some upstart vampire hunter, and accuses him of believing in superstitions because of the cross he is wearing at the time.

*Leon’s response becomes ingrained in Mathias’s memory.

*Said response was ‘I wear a cross because I’m Catholic. You prick.”

*Leon keeps refusing to be impressed by any of Mathias’s grandeur showboating and that leads to a fight.

*Leon gets his ass kicked and the whip gets torn up.

*Mathias decides to let Leon live however, instead stealing the cross necklace he was wearing at the time.

*Leon ends up having to go back to Sara and Rinaldo to get another whip.

*And that is how Leon ended up becoming a vampire hunter.

*Over the next three years Mathias keeps coming back to pick fights with Leon, each time Sara’s whips getting better and better but still not quite good enough.

*Leon and Sara also end up getting closer and closer until Leon proposes to her.

*Mathias crashes their wedding to pick another fight with Leon.

*Sara gets her revenge for this about a month later when he appears in their kitchen and she hits him in the face with a frying pan.

*Leon is where the Belmont impulse to fight the supernatural “because it’s the right thing to do” comes from. Sara is where the Belmont impulse to fight the supernatural “BECAUSE FUCK YOU” comes from.

*Mathias never quite lives the frying pan down.

*Meanwhile Sara’s best friend Elizabetha meets a tall handsome stranger one night. This tall handsome stranger is totally unrelated (no it isn’t it’s Mathias).

*The event that finally leads Leon and Mathias to becoming friends is right after Sara creates the true Vampire Killer using a blood ritual that creates a bond between Leon and the whip.

*Leon and Mathias get into another fight, but this time Leon says something that strikes a chord with Mathias.

* “You’re old enough to have seen all of these great things, old enough to have witnessed history itself, but never did any actual witnessing? You’re bragging about all the things you missed. That’s nothing to be proud of, all it means is that you’ve spent the past however many thousand years just...existing! That’s not respectable, that’s just pathetic.”

*Mathias leaves in a huff but while he does Bernhard comes in and attacks Leon (who is exhausted from his fight with Mathias.)

*I won’t get too graphic here in the interest of avoiding triggering anyone but let me put it this way. Bernhard is the vampire equivalent of a serial killer torturing small animals before eventually moving on to people (other vampires). Leon is the small animal.

*Mathias comes back and after seeing Leon in horrible shape (he’s barely alive at this point) realizes he actually cares about Leon quite a bit and doesn’t want to see him dead.

*Mathias then proceeds to fight Bernhard and saves Leon’s life.

*And that is how they end up becoming friends.

*Over the next ten years a lot happens.

*Leon and Sara have two children. The eldest Sonia and the youngest Gabriel.

*Mathias and Trefor are named the godfathers.

*Mathias gives Leon and Sara a mirror that allows them to communicate and even venture through to the mirror on Castlevania’s end.

*Elizabetha and Mathias get closer as well, Elizabetha in fact is the reason Mathias learns so much about the medical field and the human body. She wanted real methods to actually treat people inside of “throwing tea leaves at the problem and hope it works.”

*Sara still makes whips and other alchemical weapons in hopes of defeating Bernhard one day, which leads to the creation of the Morningstar upgrade.

*However one day Elizabetha dies unexpectedly. It’s the first major bereavement Mathias has ever hand in over two thousand years. 

*It is then that it hits Mathias just how little time he has left with Leon and Sara.

*He wants them to become vampires themselves.

*They both refuse.

*Mathias, knowing that they would hate him if he forced them to become vampires, instead tries to manipulate the matter in his favor.

*He pretends to have gotten bored of Leon and Sara, and suggests to Bernhard that a good way to get Leon to come to him would be to take and turn Sara.

*This goes horrifically wrong.

*Bernhard does to Sara what he did to her sister, starving her and once she went mad with bloodlust, he lets her lose inside her and Leon’s village.

*She massacres the entire village of people she personally knew for the better part of a decade. Sonia and Gabriel barely make it in time to hide from her inside the basement with Trefor.

*When she comes back to her senses she’s drenched in the blood of all the people she knew from their village.

*Sara, unable to cope with the overwhelming guilt of having massacred her own village or the prospect of living with that knowledge for thousands of years, kills herself.

*Leon comes back just in time to see the results of what Sara had done and what she did to herself.

*Bereft and angry, Leon takes the Morningstar whip and hunts down Bernhard, and finally is the one to put an end to the vampire.

*Just before he disappears into dust however, he reveals the true mastermind behind Sara’s turning.

*Leon is completely crushed by the revelation.

*Mathias meanwhile is just discovering how horrifically wrong his plan went and goes to Bernhard’s castle with the intent of killing him in the slowest most painful way he could manage.

*Instead he finds Leon just outside the ruins of Bernhard’s castle, tears running down his face and hatred in his eyes.

*Leon attacks Mathias, beside himself with rage and grief and betrayal.

*This time Leon wins.

*But he ends up sparing Mathias. Not because of their friendship, but because it’s the cruelest thing he can think of doing to Mathias, forcing him to live with the consequences of his actions.

*He swears that the Belmont line will haunt Dracula’s every step from now on, that they will kill every vampire who dares try to harm humanity and never again will they put their trust in a vampire. 

*Mathias moves to Wallachia and Leon takes Sonia and Gabriel and goes there too. Trefor follows knowing that Leon needed a friend to help raise Sonia and Gabriel.

*Five years later however, Leon dies of a similar illness to Elizabetha.

*Sonia contacts Mathias via the mirror to inform him of Leon’s passing. She angrily declares however that she will continue what he started, and that she won’t let any other vampire hurt people the way Mathias had hurt her parents, had hurt her and her brother

*She then through tears informs him that this was goodbye. That if they ever met again, she would fight to kill him, or die trying.

*Sonia then uses the morning star whip to destroy the mirror.

*The pain and loss of losing all three of the people he had come to love and care for, the fact his godchildren now hate him and he now has to fight Leon’s family for the forseeable future, ends up physically aging Mathias in a way time hadn’t.

And this is how Lament of Innocence happens.