#also if you thought 'gee it totally sounds like dracula struck out at the most visible sign of his son's humanity--his soulmark'

[words-writ-in-starlight]

*obligatory soulmates saying first words to each other castlevania prompt*

Bless your BEAUTIFUL SOUL Amuse.  Honestly there’s No fic for this so I guess I’ll just do a canon soulmate thing because it probably hasn’t happened yet.  And also I’m standing by Alucard/Trevor because I’m almost 100% sure that the show will be doing Sypha/Trevor, so strike while the canon is limited, right?

“So, vampire--”

“I have a name, Belmont.  If we’re going to be traveling together, you might care to use it.”

“Alucard, then."  Trevor stretched both legs out, propped against a tree.  He still looked mildly beaten to hell from Gresit and Alucard looked like--well, like Alucard, which was to say perfect to the point of being infuriating and entirely unsubtle, and Sypha had announced plainly that neither of them would be any use at buying supplies in a civilized village.  Leaving them a few minutes outside the village limits, she had marched away like she was going into battle.

Alucard was sitting cross-legged in the darkest part of another tree’s shadow, his sword across his lap and his eyes on the roof line of the village.  Looking for trouble.

“So,” Trevor repeated, and Alucard tipped his head toward him, only slightly, but enough to make it clear that he was listening.  “You don’t burn in the sun, and your sword has silver worked on the hilt.  Can you cross running water?  Hold a cross?”

“Yes, I’ve never tried, and before you ask, I’ve never developed a taste for garlic, although I can touch it.  And I don’t catch fire in the sun, but that doesn’t make it a pleasant experience.”  Alucard made a gesture to his own face, to his sharp inhuman eyes.  “It’s--bright."

“Huh,” Trevor said.  He wound Vampire Killer through his hands, taking pains to look idle.  It must have been easy to be a vampire, he thought a little irritably, with that perfect stony unconcern carved into one’s face all the time.  Then again, it was entirely possible that Alucard was unreadable simply because he was Alucard.  “So, you’re more human than vampire.”

“It’s not a clean division,” Alucard said.  There was a moment’s hesitation in his voice, something that Trevor tentatively identified as wariness.  “I can walk in the sun, and I am mostly immune to the majority of weapons against vampires, but I still require blood, and from what I can tell a consecrated item will still hurt me.  Your whip, for example.”  Another moment, longer this time, as Alucard turned his eyes back to the village.  “I have a soulmate.  Full-blooded vampires, like my father, do not.”

The niggling itch of knowledge at Trevor’s left wrist turned into a steady burn, as impossible to ignore as having a match held to his skin.  His bracers covered the four words of neat black script, written in thin, spidery letters over the blue lines of his veins, but the impulse to cover them with his other hand was overwhelming.

Trevor usually got through life just fine without thinking about his mark.  Why are you here?  He was a Belmont.  He got greeted with why are you here all the time, it was only barely more useful than good morning.

But then there was Alucard.

And Alucard’s mark stood out like charcoal on paper, half-ruined by the scar that bisected his chest but the last word still legible where it curved under his collarbone.

“What about your mother?”  Trevor realized, once he’d asked the question, that it was probably rude.  He might have punched someone out, for asking about his dead family’s soulmarks--they weren’t necessarily taboo, but they were personal, not to be bandied around for the public.

Alucard didn’t twitch, as stony as ever as he sat under his tree and didn’t look at Trevor.

“My mother’s mark matched my father’s first words to her.  She was glad that I had one."

Trevor had stopped coiling Vampire Killer, giving up on looking casual in exchange for studying Alucard closely.  “I didn’t have a mark for five years, when I was born.  For a while there, my family was worried I’d never get one.”

“The Belmonts care about soulmates?”  Alucard’s lips tipped up minutely.  “I imagined that they had elaborate genealogies to breed for strength and speed and bad tempers.”

“Fuck you too,” Trevor said, but it was a good-natured response, not the sharp tone he meant to put behind the words.  Alucard looked amused, a proper smile curving his lips.

Trevor wondered what Alucard’s mouth looked like when he laughed.  Then he recoiled from the thought in shock, like he’d been handed a live snake instead of an apple, and shut his mouth tight.

The silence that settled over the pair of them was thick and smothering.  More so because there had been a moment, brief but surprisingly easy, of camaraderie, Trevor thought.  The contrast made the silence press on his ears and try to wriggle down his throat, and his arm itched under his bracer, the black words demanding his attention again.

Trevor closed his eyes and let out a slow breath, trying to push the itch away.  When he opened his eyes again, he almost cracked the back of his skull open against the tree, startling back from Alucard, who had moved to sit in front of him.

“Holy fucking Christ,” Trevor hissed between his teeth.

“My apologies,” Alucard said, looking entirely unapologetic.  “You’re usually very difficult to sneak up on, I assumed that you knew I was here.”

“Well, congratulations on reaching a new level of just--obnoxiously quiet, I guess.  What did you want?”

For the first time in Trevor’s life--hell, maybe the first time in anyone’s life, ever--Trevor had the dubious pleasure of seeing a vampire look at him with what looked almost like nerves.  It was...heady, really, a little intoxicating, and didn’t that just give a lot more insight into the woman whose death had precipitated all this than Trevor ever wanted to have.

“What does your soulmark say?”  

Alucard’s question was as unadorned and direct as being punched in the fucking face, and twice as disorienting.  Trevor throttled down his first response, which was it says ‘none of your fucking business, now back off before we see just how vulnerable you are to consecrated objects’, and gave Alucard a look that he hoped wasn’t too much like a rabbit eyeing over a fox.

“Why do you want to know?”

Alucard sighed, the sigh of someone putting up with the insufferable day after day--as if that wasn’t absolutely Trevor’s prerogative at the moment.  Then delicate fingers rose to his throat, loosened the laces at the collar of his shirt, pulled the cloth down and aside.

The scar, Trevor remembered, started just inside Alucard’s left shoulder and slanted down to his hip, an attempt to rip out his heart or something else vital that, frankly, Trevor was shocked he had walked away from.  Alucard’s mark was two short lines of text under his collarbone, over his heart, and all but the first letter and the last word had been mangled by Dracula’s claws.  It took some doing to damage a soulmark--they were stubborn things that tended to write themselves over scar tissue if possible--but it looked like some of Alucard’s skin had been very nearly flayed off all together, and the mark had gone with it.

All that was left was the letter I, the suggestion of a few more words, and the word hole.

“You can’t read it anymore,” Alucard said, releasing his collar.  “But it used to say ‘I fell down a hole.’  I’ll admit that I expected something...else.”

Trevor snorted.  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly braced for the hole either.  Your castle has some fucking structural integrity problems.  Hire an architect.”

“It’s--”  Alucard shook his head.  “It’s a trap, Belmont, and the structural integrity of the city of Gresit is not my responsibility.  What does your mark say?”  This close, the liquid gold color of Alucard’s eyes was impossible to ignore, a steady and inhuman stare that seemed to lance through Trevor’s skull and rummage around in his head.  Alucard didn’t blink enough.  An inane thing to notice, at a moment like this, but Trevor couldn’t seem to stop noticing inane things.  Inane things like how, of all the things that he ever imagined doing with a vampire--even a half-blooded one--a sit-down chat about soulmarks fell significantly below Hell freezing over.

Then again, Hell had declined to freeze over in return for coming to visit Earth, so Trevor imagined that a lot of people were reevaluating their expectations.

Reluctantly, as slowly as he could manage, Trevor unlaced his left bracer, and held out his arm without a word.

Alucard’s touch, one uncalloused finger tracing over the line of the words, was cool.  Not quite as warm as the air around him, and it was starting to be cold.  For once, though, Alucard was neither stony nor unreadable--his lips were parted, his eyes fixed on Trevor’s wrist, and his face looked open, almost wondering, like a child.

It turned his marble beauty into something fit to stop the heart.

Trevor let out a breath, slow and careful to keep it from trembling.  He’d never given much thought to who his soulmate would be, or what they would be like, except to hope that they wouldn’t mind being paired with a Belmont, wouldn’t want him to give up his family’s work.  Then, after the fire, he hadn’t thought of them at all.  He had expected, in all honesty, that the world would end before they met, or at the very least that he would go the way of the rest of his family and that someone, somewhere, would have their words go scarred white without explanation.

He wondered what his family would have said now, to know that the last son of House Belmont was soulmates with the son of Dracula Tepes.