Chapter Text
Alucard stood in the middle of the clearing, in an spreading pool of blood and mud. The two monsters that had attacked them on the road were in pieces around them, scorched and dismembered. Alucard's eyes glowed bright red, claws fully extended, lips curled back from his teeth. His arm hung at an impossible angle, too long and too wrong in the shredded remains of his sleeve. Blood slicked and snarling, he looked like a monster and Trevor's survival instincts and years of training hummed in his head at the danger. He ignored them.
This wasn't some dangerous monster. This was Alucard. This was his monster.
Alucard shrugged out of his jacket and left it in a bloody mess on the ground. That was as far as he got. He took two staggering steps before going down on his knees. The the remains of the beast that had done it still twitched beside him. Alucard didn’t collapse. He knelt there in the spreading pool of his own blood and panted through bared teeth.
Shit.
Sypha was untangling herself from a tree where she’d been tossed and called out his name. Alucard's head snapped up to look at her and it broke the spell of shock. Trevor started across the clearing. He got there first. He stopped and stared at the mess of the arm. He had no idea what to do about it. It was beyond dislocated. The skin was torn into ribbons and though some of the arm was still attached to the shoulder, it was not attached by bone.
“Looks like that hurt,” Trevor said.
“Fuck you,” Alucard said but his voice was tight and strained.
They should have left the vampire in the damn castle. Instead Sypha had convinced both of them to come with her on her little adventure. So the shredded vampire problem was now Trevor’s problem instead of someone else’s.
“We’re two days out from the nearest town. I don’t know what kind of healing magic, Sypha knows,” Trevor said.
“I don’t need magic,” Alucard ground out. “Put it back.”
Sypha showed up at his shoulder, looking over the carnage. Trevor thought about arguing but vampires healed. If a vampire hadn’t exploded into dust or been burned to ash, it wasn’t dead yet. A human would lose the arm. Cutting it the rest of the way off and trying to bandage against infection would be the best option on a human. Alucard’s bared teeth and red eyes were definitely not human.
“This is going to hurt like a bitch,” Trevor told him and then grabbed the bloody ragged remains of his upper arm and grimaced. It didn’t feel right, too soft. He didn’t let that stop him and pushed the arm back up so the shoulder popped back into its socket with a sickening sound.
Alucard made a horrifying sound. An inhuman hiss that collapsed into a gurgling growl. Trevor took an instinctive step back, hand going towards a weapon before he stopped himself.
It was just Alucard.
It would be fine.
Probably.
“It’s already healing,” Sypha said.
Her fingers fluttered towards the wound and then back again. It was. She reached out and grabbed Alucard’s collar. He hissed at her and Trevor’s instincts went sideways again. His fingers twitched for a weapon and he forced his hand away from his hip and rested it on Sypha’s back instead. A warning. A defense. He could pull her back if she was in any real danger.
She wasn’t, he reminded himself. It was just Alucard.
She pulled the shirt hard enough to pop a button and then yanked it up over Alucard’s head earning her another hiss and a snap of teeth Alucard sat back on his heels and shied away from her. The red was gone from his eyes and the gold blazed. He looked at her with a different kind of hostility before he shook head and squeezed his eyes shut.
It had hurt him. He wasn’t a threat. He was just injured. It was just Alucard.
“Is now really the right time to be getting naked?” Trevor asked.
“The fabric was going to heal into the wound. It would get infected.”
“I don’t think I can get infected,” Alucard said.
“Let’s not find out while we’re two days from the nearest town. Not to mention that finding a doctor who could heal a half vampire isn’t going to be easy,” she said.
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“You’re going to need a sewing kit for your coat,” Trevor said. “And a good laundress.”
“I need blood,” he said.
He pushed himself up with his good arm. He stood. Tall and straight and Trevor thought that maybe he was fine. Then Alucard swayed like a branch on the wind and Trevor threw a hand out to catch him. It was automatic and Alucard grabbed his forearm with the working arm and held on hard. His fingers bit in hard enough that Trevor was going to have nasty bruises later. He had his eyes shut and the damaged arm just hung there, limp and shredded but healing.
“Are you going to kill me if I say yes?”
A sharp annoyed exhale. “It would make my life better if I did.”
That was the Alucard he knew and hated. He wasn’t an injured monster anymore, just a cranky bastard. Trevor checked on his arm again. Still healing. He was not in good shape and he’d never asked for blood before.
“You are not murdering each other,” Sypha snapped.
“I won’t,” Alucard said and his voice didn’t sound quite right. He was losing strength and pretending very hard that he was normal. Trevor sighed. If anyone had tried to tell him a year ago that he would be willing agreeing to let a creature of the night bite him, he would have laughed in their face. And yet here he was.
“Me neither,” he promised. “Do what you need. I’m fine.”
The problem with letting Alucard bite him was that it was good. He’d been braced for it to hurt. For a blood loss haze to take him and ultimately, to wake up with a bit of a hangover. Getting bit should have been violent. Blood and pain and the possibility of death.
Instead he had Alucard leaning into him because he couldn’t stand on his own and a hesitant brush of mouth against his throat. That set off all the wrong responses up and down Trevor’s body. The vulnerability of that lean. Alucard was trusting him to keep them both standing because he couldn’t do it alone. Breath against his throat. He was suddenly far too aware of his heart beat and all the places it was sending blood.
Alucard drew back his lips and hesitated again.
“Do it already, dickhead,” Trevor said.
His teeth slipped in with a bite of pain that made Trevor swear again.
Then it shifted.
Warm and heavy and drawing deep.
And good. It felt good.
A soft heat that spread up from the pit of his stomach and down from the mouth at his throat. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. He couldn’t remember his own name. He felt it when Alucard swallowed. The way his mouth moved, his tongue sliding out to catch a missing drop. Almost a kiss. A kiss with teeth. Trevor’s whole body responded to it and he ached for more.
More touch. More teeth. A deeper draw.
Alucard stopped. Pulled back.
Didn’t give him more. Didn’t even give him enough.
His cock strained and his head spun and he wanted to punch something or fuck something or scream or just curl up close and hold on. He didn’t do any of those things. It was not enough to get him off but it was damn close. He had to sit down and put his head down for a minute. He had no idea how long it had been since that first sharp pinprick of pain until Alucard stepped back and said something insulting that he couldn’t quite make sense of through the haze that was more pleasure than blood loss.
“I think you hurt him,” Sypha said and it was the first thing that cut through the blur.
“He’ll recover. It wasn’t that much.” Flippant, dismissive. Fucking vampire ass. He was fine.
Trevor swore at him but his voice sounded a little too thick and he decided he did not want to talk and risk either of them noticing. She fluttered a little around him, touching his forehead as though he might have a fever and then checking his throat though the wounds were already healed.
He was fine. He was fine. He was fine.
He was just still on the edge of an orgasm and his cock was taking its damn time calming down about it.
Sypha touching his face was not helping and he twitched away from her. “Stop.”
“Fine,” she snapped and left him to sit and stare at the bloody dirt until he could breathe and think straight again.
He was. He was fine. This was fine.
When everyone could walk unaided, they left the blood pool behind. Alucard found a stream and managed to wash the blood out of his hair. Once Sypha convinced him to accept help getting on a clean shirt to cover the still healing arm, he looked normal. He was still weak. He moved slower. His attention drifted. He held himself like every movement hurt but he refused a sling for the healing arm.
His eyes kept straying to Trevor in an unreadable way.
When they stopped for the night, Alucard didn’t bother helping to set up camp. He climbed up into a tree. He did it one handed, without using magic. Just scrambled up into the branches like he didn’t have a shredded arm and half his power. Not a word. He just disappeared into the fading light.
“You’re a weird man, Tepes,” Trevor called up at him.
He didn’t get a response so he tried to brush it off, tried not to give a shit. He definitely wasn’t worried about the vampire falling out a tree. That would be ridiculous.
He helped Sypha clear out a fire pit and then headed off into the woods to find something to eat. He needed to be alone. Maybe that’s why Alucard was in a stupid tree. Trevor needed to clear his head too. He needed to stop thinking about teeth and the way they’d felt sinking into his throat. And the thing that had happened after. He definitely did not want to be thinking about that heavy warm feeling in his stomach and what it had done to him.
He shook his head and went looking for rabbits.
Sypha was up Alucard's tree when he got back to camp and he pretended very hard not to care. He might have made enough of a detour on his route back from his hunting trip to look up at them. Even through the foliage, he could tell that they were very close together. They had these quiet intense conversations that did not included him and were usually about ancient history or the machinery that ran Dracula's castle or some book they'd both read when they were children.
Trevor tried really hard to not notice.
When that failed - and it usually did - he tried really hard not to care.
When one of them laughed, he failed at that too.
Sypha's laugh was bright and musical and Trevor spent too much time imagining all the ways to chase it. He paid too much attention to the jokes she liked and there were long nights spent curled up under a blanket beside her, wondering if she was ticklish. He pushed thoughts of falling asleep beside Sypha very, very far away. He was not in a mood to be able to handle that right now. She was friendly and it was platonic and just because he was horny today did not mean that that was going to change.
Trevor dug out the first of his catch and started preparing it to roast. It hadn’t been a great hunt but some fresh meat was better than nothing. Trevor had had worse than this.
Alucard's laugh came from somewhere above him. It was sharper than Sypha’s. Never quite all the way happy but it was also rarer and it always caught Trevor's attention.
They were having an absolutely hilarious conversation this evening. Sypha cackled at something Alucard said. Still bright but harder and less musical than it usually was. Alucard's voice was too far away to hear clearly but his annoyed tone was unmistakable. She was laughing at him and she wasn't stopping. She would be fearless enough to laugh at a hungry injured vampire. Alucard kept complaining but she didn’t let up until he finally laughed as well, lower and cut short like it embarrassed him.
Trevor poked the food he was cooking over the fire and it sizzled but didn't respond. He wasn’t lonely. He wasn’t considering chatting with his dinner. He did not pout. If he rolled his eyes, it was only because they were being silly. He took his meat off the fire and put another piece on to cook while he ate the first.
Sypha climbed back down as he started eating. He didn’t bother trying to pry the meat off the stick, he just took a bite. She was still in a buoyant fucking mood and stole a piece of his meal as she sat down. All smiles as she licked her fingers and turned the other stick over the fire. He tried scowling at her and she just laughed at him and stole more of what he was eating.
“You two are chummy,” he said.
“That bothers you?”
“We’re not talking about me.”
She laughed and it was that same mocking cackle she’d used to laugh at Alucard earlier. He elbowed her and she wrapped herself around his arm and leaned in. It might have been an apology but more likely it was just to make it harder for him to elbow her again. She was warm and her weight at his side was nice. He felt a little less like he was about to crawl out of his own skin when she was curled up at his side.
Alucard joined them. He sat down on Trevor’s other side and leaned over to steal some of his food. He was moving more easily, his expression less pinched and hostile. Trevor pulled the stick out of his reach so he couldn’t take any more. That just put it in Sypha’s range. She helped herself to another piece.
“Thank you!”
“Hey!” Trevor said.
“It smells good,” she said around a mouthful of food.
“You vultures could cook your own damn rats,” Trevor said.
“Is it a rat?” Sypha asked wrinkling her nose.
Served her right.
“Squirrel which is just a rat that lives in a tree,” Trevor said. “But it’s my squirrel.”
Alucard laughed at that. Trevor tried not to care but he was a little pleased with himself for getting a laugh out of Alucard.
They cooked the rest of the food and the evening started to feel almost normal by the time it was getting late.
The moon was up and Sypha had left them to curl up in a ball under Trevor’s cloak. The fire was burning low and the shadows of the forest were velvet dark. He was exhausted. The hiking. The battle. The blood loss. Wrapping himself around her and falling asleep with his face in the crook of her neck was such an incredibly appealing idea that he almost left Alucard sitting there, staring at the fire. His feet turned his body around before he’d made a proper decision.
“Let me see your arm,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“Let me check it anyways.”
Trevor wasn’t used to having people to take care of. Alucard didn’t look like he was used to being taken care of. He shrugged out of his torn coat and let Trevor pull his arm out of the sleeve of his shirt. He watched. Trevor didn’t love the watchful eyes and the way the firelight reflected off them like they were actually made of gold and not just a glorified yellow.
Alucard had eaten through everything that Trevor had managed to catch in the woods and still seemed off. The arm was one piece but the healing lines were still red and harsh. Trevor made him lift it, move his fingers, watched him grimace as he tried to lift the shoulder. He seemed to be healing slowly for a vampire.
“Should you be healing faster than this?” he asked.
“I’m healing fast enough. Dismemberment takes longer than a paper cut.”
“Makes a better story,” Trevor said.
A half smile. It wasn’t a good joke but Alucard looked worse than Trevor felt.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked without looking at Trevor.
“No,” Trevor said too fast.
“Ah. Too far?” he said.
“Too far?”
“I’ve never done that before,” Alucard admitted. “I’d heard that you could make it less painful but I had never tried. I might have over compensated with the magic. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“It wasn’t painful.”
“I noticed.”
Of course he did. Of course he fucking did. He was leaning against Trevor through the whole damn thing. It would have been hard to miss.
“Oh. Fuck. You,” Trevor enunciated.
A laugh. Low and tired. Trevor let it go. The poor bloodsucker was barely staying upright. He kept his mouth shut as he helped Alucard struggle back into his shirt. The wince when he had to move the shoulder was enough to make Trevor grimace in sympathy.
He pulled Alucard to his feet and didn’t get any complaints. He was half asleep already. Trevor considered his options and then decided he was too tired for thinking this shit through. Alucard let himself be steered across the camp site to where Sypha was curled up.
“Hey, I’m tucking our bloodsucking friend in with you,” Trevor said to her.
“Hm?”
“Alucard,” Trevor clarified.
“Where?”
“He’s going to sleep here so he doesn’t freeze to death.”
Alucard said something about it not being that cold but still laid down under the blanket. Trevor dropped it back over him and then sat there beside them. He could have taken the other bedroll. They did have three even if Sypha and been crawling into his pretty much every night and they’d just started setting up their little nest with all her blankets and all his in one heap. He could have gone to get Alucard’s but he was too tired for that.
He just stretched out behind Alucard and lay on his back, they had the blankets but it really wasn’t that cold. Trevor closed his eyes and hoped he would be asleep before his brain could distract him with thoughts about why. All the whys were running around in his head. Why he was even traveling with a vampire. Why he was so worried that the vampire was healing properly. Why he had let the vampire bite him. He pushed all the whys away and let sleep pull him down.