Stitched Up Hearts (Alucard X Fem! reader)

Clawing At Our Casket

Alucard's hand is still in mine, even as we walk through the wreckage. I gaze down the broken hallways, the laboratories, and worst of all the library. The castle had four libraries, in all. Two in the eastern half of the castle, and two in the western half. Both the eastern wing libraries had been damaged.

I paced through the deathly empty rooms, fixing little pieces that I could, putting a book back onto its shelf, or putting a rack of vials back upwards, as if my little contribution did anything to help the complete mess of the castle. It didn't.

Part of me was so angry I wanted to add to the chaos and destruction. I wanted to scream to fill the silence. I wanted to kick things, to break tables or shove stacks of books from their places. Instead, my anger remained silent, my pain burning in my heart where it would not be released, only left to fester and boil.

I worried for Alucard, who still had yet to say much, let alone cry. He was likely trying to keep himself together for Trevor and Sypha. I was doing the same. "We really messed up the old house didn't we?" Alucard says, not speaking to me in particular.

I don't answer. I know he wasn't expecting a reply, and I don't trust my voice not to betray me. I have spent so long turning my sadness into anger, and my fear into rage. I cannot undo those habits still, no matter how hard I try. It is easier to be angry, I think, than to toil in your own wretched misery.

Alucard and I continue our walk back down to the main hall. It's so odd, seeing the front doors open during the day. They were closed for a majority of my stay at the castle, Alucard and I always used the smaller back doors to wander around during the day. We all had rather odd sleeping schedules, with Dracula not being able to go out in the sunlight. The light shines on the intricacies of the great hall that I barely noticed in the dark. This place truly is an architectural masterpiece.

"What do you think they're going to do now?" I can hear Sypha ask Trevor.

"We had a plan, you know." Alucard tells her, coming to the top of the grand staircase. I remember once, tripping down them, and falling all the way down on my ass. I hated that being back here, even though it felt like so little time had passed, brought back memories like that. Our life here could never go back to the way it was when those memories took place. We would never be those people again.

"We were going back to Gresit. Return to our vault, and go back to sleep." I explain loftily. I had dug a new dress of mine from my old room, one of the parts of the castle left untouched by the battle, somehow. I still feel the soot on my skin, it sickens me.

"But?" Trevor's hand rests on his hip.

"If I leave the castle here, all his work is inside it." Alucard explains. " his libraries, his materials, his knowledge. What happens to all that if the structure is abandoned? I can't just leave it here. It'd be nothing but a grave to be robbed."

"Then, let it be our grave." I look up to the tall ceilings. How ironic, I should die here, in the very place where I learned to love the life I had. In the same structure where I'd become a real person with a life worth living, someone capable of love. Where I'd really learned how to live.

"No." Trevor insists.

"No?" Alucard and I speak together. I smile slightly, or as close as I can get to one right now.

"No." Trevor repeats. "We can't move this thing. Sypha broke it." He points at the speaker like a child placing the blame on their friend for breaking their mothers vase.

"I did not." Sypha rebuttals, offended.

"You kind of did." Alucard tells her. And I nod in agreement. It was her spell that locked the castle here, and melted the gears beyond repair. Nothing would be able to move the castle now, at least not for a very, very long while. I sort of like that about it. It had always felt unnatural to me that the castle moved around, that it could teleport from place to place. I hated the idea that one day I could wake up and the castle could be in a completely different country.