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[draculabutbackwards]

I have no idea if there's some future etiquette for this. Leave whatever message you choose?

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[seegodhatesme]

She snorts, shaking her head. "Maybe that is why Cypher found so many things to do. Filling a void. My plans, my own, were more like hers. Until I met the two of you."

[draculabutbackwards]

Alucard winces and hopes it wasn't visible. She was never going to let him leave this abstract. "You're right. A lot like you."

[seegodhatesme]

Since when has Sypha taken the path of comfortable half-truth? She wouldn't even know how.

"I see him in you," she says, taking more direct aim. "Not as much alike, but it's there - the way you are with Trevor, the kind of good moods I have seen you in." Not that they're nearly as frequent as for his other self, but still. "You, but made in a different forge."

[draculabutbackwards]

How could he possibly talk about Trevor while it's taking everything he has to face her? "Well, I can't imagine taking quite such an avid interest in the chemicals of various rocks or a deranged quest to prove there's no such thing as magic. But. Yes. If you'd met me before Mother died..."

[seegodhatesme]

"That was deranged," she agrees, with mild humor. "But the rocks were interesting.

"I would like your mother, I think."

[draculabutbackwards]

"Oh. Absolutely," he agrees, pleased to find some neutral ground. No landmines here. Everyone would like his mother. He doesn't think the people who killed her even disliked her, just found her where politics, power, and stagnation happened to crash. (This is not exoneration. Losing her to small, pathetic impulses and not a grand, principled act of evil is not better.) "The two of you together could rule the world. But wouldn't, because of the bother."

[seegodhatesme]

"It would be so much bother." She puts some drama on the tone. "But the two of us could make you, Trevor, and probably your father do most of the work, so we may as well." There's only the slightest change in her tone - she's still much more uneasy than she'd admit about Dracula. Instead of actually stopping to have a conversation with him, she's just very low-key stalking him from time to time.

[draculabutbackwards]

Alucard relaxes further. This is fine. Mother is a loss he's confronted, internalized, learned to live around. Gone, mourned, still with him. And Father is complicated in ways that feel possible. "Well. Father, anyway. He's an able administrator if you can get a fire lit under his ass."

[seegodhatesme]

"Did you have to put it like that?"

[draculabutbackwards]

"Sorry, whistling in the dark."