Chapter Text
February:
Adrian begins repairs with the Hold.
Trevor had given it to him with all the grace of a man tossing scraps to a dog.
It’s yours, he had said, like the words were not utterly absurd. Like the last remains of a bloodline could be placed into Adrian’s hands and trusted not to crumble to ash in his palms, wind carrying the remnants somewhere far and foreign.
Adrian starts with the stairs. They are a disaster. Half collapsed, eaten through by age and night creature violence, stones scattered across the floor below in jagged piles. The old passage to the archives is nearly impossible to manage without flight, and even then, it is inelegant.
Adrian dislikes inelegance on principle.
He studies masonry from his father’s library first. For three nights, he sits hunched over diagrams of archways, support beams, counterweights, lime mortar, pulley systems, and ancient Roman construction methods. His father’s notes are still scribbled in the margins of several texts. Adrian traces them with his fingertips.
He builds a wooden platform first. Shortly after, a crude lift.
The first attempt jams halfway down the shaft and refuses to move. The second drops so quickly it nearly shatters against the floor. The third produces such a violent screech from the pulley system that Adrian stands beneath it for a long moment, staring upward in exhausted disbelief, before muttering, “Absolutely not,” to the empty room.
On the fourth attempt, it works. Just barely.
The ropes groan, the pulleys creak, and the wooden platform shudders as it descends through the broken stairwell, but it holds.
Adrian stands on it with his hands wrapped around the rope, dust in his hair, mortar dried beneath his fingernails, and feels dangerously close to proud.
Trevor would have made a scathing comment. Probably about Adrian building himself a coffin with extra steps.
The thought comes so suddenly that Adrian almost turns toward the sound of it.
Of course, there is no one there. The silence answers him instead, so he returns to work.
He replaces beams. Hauls stone. Mixes plaster until his shoulders ache and his palms sting from lime. He repairs what can be repaired and marks what cannot. He drags ruined furniture out into the courtyard and sorts through it with an almost clinical detachment.
Keep.
Burn.
Salvage.
By the end of February, the eastern stairwell no longer threatens to collapse beneath his feet. The archive entrance is passable. Several walls have been patched. Two rooms in the Hold are no longer open to the elements. It is not beautiful, but it is standing, and Adrian tells himself that is enough.
March:
The frost loosens its grip by inches, and water gathers in the low places of the garden. The soil turns dark and wet beneath Adrian’s hands. He kneels there for hours, clearing dead vines from the old beds, pulling weeds, cutting back rot.
His mother’s garden had once been lovely.
He remembers it in fragments. Rosemary along the stone wall. Lavender beneath the windows. Chamomile in small, pale clusters. Valerian near the shaded edge where the soil stayed cool. Feverfew. Comfrey. Thyme.
Lisa had never planted anything without purpose. Even beauty, she had insisted, was medicinal.
Adrian starts with rosemary.
“For remembrance,” his mother used to say.
She had planted it near the kitchen path because she liked brushing her fingers through it when she walked by. She would come inside smelling of clean earth and sharp green leaves, her hands stained from grinding herbs, her sleeves pushed to the elbow. Sometimes, when Adrian was small and sullen and determined not to admit he’d had a nightmare, she would tuck rosemary and lavender beneath his pillow.
“For pleasant dreams,” she had said.
The dreams had not always been pleasant, but they smelled better, so he plants rosemary first.
Then lavender. Then chamomile, because his mother had believed every house should be capable of producing its own tea, sedative, and poultice.
The work is slower than masonry. More dangerous, somehow.
Stone does not ask to be remembered. Wood does not smell like his mother’s hands. But the garden does, and it brings her back in cruel little pieces.
The smudge of dirt on her cheek. The way she hummed when she worked, some little melody from Lupu that Adrian never learned the name of, but could play flawlessly on the organ. The way she would glance back at him, smiling as if he were the best thing she had ever made.
He plants until his fingers go numb, and when the first lavender takes root, Adrian sits beside it long after dusk, staring at the little sprig like his mortality was tethered to if it survived or not.
He wonders what Trevor would say if he saw him like this, kneeling in the dirt like a penitent, coaxing medicinal herbs from the grave of his childhood.
Probably something vulgar.
Probably something that would make Adrian want to hit him.
Probably something that would make him laugh.
Adrian presses his thumb into the damp soil, pinching it between his forefinger.
The loneliness does not arrive all at once.
It would be kinder if it did. Instead, it comes gradually, in small humiliations.
In setting out three cups before remembering there is no one to drink from them. In looking up from a book to share some particularly scathing observation with Sypha, only to find the library empty. In fixing a broken hinge and imagining Trevor saying, Well, look at you. Domesticity suits you terribly. In waking some mornings with his hand stretched across the bed toward nothing.
April:
Spring creeps in green and tentative, and the world begins having the audacity to bloom. Moss thickens between the stones of the courtyard. Tiny white flowers push stubbornly through cracks in the path. The air smells different now, damp earth and thawed roots instead of frost and smoke. Even the river sounds fuller, swollen with melted snow.
Adrian despises it for several days.
The birds return first. He hears them in the mornings while repairing shutters, their songs bright and thoughtless from the trees surrounding the Hold. Then come the insects, dragonflies skimming the water and bees stumbling drunkenly through the lavender beginning to take root in his mother’s garden.
The world is waking up around him in thousands of tiny, living ways. Sap running beneath bark. Ferns uncurling from the forest floor. Sunlight lingering longer against the stone walls each evening.
It feels offensive, in an odd way... after all that death and loss.
Quietly, and against his better judgment, he begins noticing which flowers open first after rain.
Perhaps gardening had its merits.
—
One afternoon, a note arrives. A girl brings it.
She cannot be older than sixteen, perched on the back of a small brown mare with mud up to its knees. Adrian finds her at the edge of the road, glaring up at the castle like she might fight it if given proper cause.
“You the doctor?” she calls.
Adrian pauses.
“No.”
The girl squints. “But you know medicine?”
“…Yes.”
“Then you’re the doctor.”
He cannot argue with that logic. She clutches the parchment between her fingers, shoving it into his face with bated breath.
Adrian unfurls it carefully. It is from Danesti, a nearby village Adrian had not known existed. Small and half-starved, a fever was spreading through several households. They had heard about someone living in the old castle. Someone with books and technology, who might know what to do.
Adrian reads the note twice, and then he saddles a horse.
—
Danesti is not impressive. That is perhaps why it still stands.
No cathedral or proud walls. No bell tower declaring its existence to every night creature with wings. Just low houses, muddy paths, smoke-stained chimneys, and people who look at Adrian with suspicion and exhaustion in equal measure.
The fever is simple enough. Just a combination of bad water, poor sanitation, and far too many people crowded indoors after winter.
Adrian makes them boil everything. Water, cloth, instruments. He prepares willow bark and meadowsweet for pain. Garlic and honey for wounds. Chamomile for sleep. He shows them how to clean bedding, how to isolate the worst cases, how to stop putting dirty hands into open cuts and calling it ‘God’s will’.
The village priest, if they had one, is nowhere to be found, and this improves Adrian’s mood considerably.
The first child recovers within three days. After that, they stop watching him like a bad omen.
Mostly.
The butcher, Julian, is the first to notice the fangs.
Adrian is reaching for a jar of rendered fat when the man stills, eyes narrowing on his mouth.
“You’re not human,” he says. It is a statement and not a question.
The shop goes quiet, and Adrian feels the old familiar tension settle across his shoulders. There is a knife at the butcher’s belt. A cleaver nearby. Three exits. Two windows. Six people in the room, one elderly, one injured, one child.
“My father was a vampire,” Adrian says.
The butcher grunts.
“Thought you looked too pretty to be normal.”
Adrian balks at that.
Then the man turns back to his work. “You still want pig’s blood, then, or are you too fancy for that?”
It is quite possibly the most unceremonious acceptance Adrian has ever received, and he does not know what to do with it.
“I… yes. Pig’s blood is fine.”
“Good. Got plenty.”
And that is that.
Danesti becomes something Adrian does not have a name for. Certainly not his home, but a place where people expect him. The baker, Martha, begins setting aside bread for him, round loaves wrapped in cloth, still warm when pressed into his hands.
“For the road,” she says the first time.
“The castle is not that far.”
“For the road,” she repeats, in the tone of a woman who has decided he is an idiot.
The children are worse. They trail after him like baby ducklings that have imprinted, convinced Adrian belongs to them now simply because he fed them once and failed to shoo them away quickly enough. Wherever he goes, a cluster of muddy boots and relentless questions inevitably waddles after him.
“Are your teeth sharp?”
“Yes.”
“Can you turn into a bat?”
“Yes.”
“Can we see?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said no.”
“That’s what my mother says when she doesn’t have a good reason.”
Adrian stares at the child. The child stares back, beady-eyed and pitiful, and Adrian eventually folds.
The village gives him lumber in exchange for medicine. Nails here, hinges there. A sack of seed potatoes. Two panes of glass that do not fit any window in either the castle or the Hold, but which Adrian accepts because the old man offering them looks so, so proud.
It is strange, being useful in this way. Not as a weapon. Not as Dracula’s son. Not as the sleeping savior beneath Gresit. Just Adrian.
Adrian the doctor, apparently.
He returns to the castle each evening with supplies strapped to his horse and bread tucked under one arm, and the solitude feels different afterward.
Less absolute and consuming.
—
By late April, the Belmont Hold has a working staircase. One wall of the archive has been sealed against damp. The garden has begun to show green. The pulley lift only threatens to kill him every third use now, which Adrian considers progress.
He catalogs three shelves of Belmont texts and discovers, to his private horror, that Trevor’s family had possessed several extremely detailed manuscripts on vampire anatomy.
Several of them are inaccurate. One is insulting. One is alarmingly specific.
He sets that one aside for later with a faint flush and absolutely no intention of explaining himself to anyone. Not that there was anyone here inquiring about his reading habits.
No letters come. No word from Sypha, and no word from Trevor.
Adrian positively does not wait for them. That would be pathetic.
He works, and he studies. He visits Danesti twice a week. He repairs shutters, rebuilds the kitchen shelves, and sets rosemary to dry in bundles. He sharpens tools. He scrubs old blood from stone until his hands ache.
He does not wait.
But every time a horse sounds on the road, he looks up.
Every time the wind rattles the gate, something in him goes painfully still.
Every time someone in Danesti mentions travelers, he listens despite himself.
It is not waiting, he tells himself.
It is vigilance.
There is a difference.
—
The storm arrives near the end of April. It rolls in from the west, black and violent, turning the afternoon sky the color of old bruises. By evening, rain lashes against the castle hard enough to rattle the remaining glass. Wind shrieks through broken stone and sends shutters slamming in their frames.
Adrian stands in the great hall with a bucket in one hand, catching water from a leak he had been certain he fixed.
He stares at the ceiling, and the ceiling drips back at him.
“Oh joy,” he mutters darkly.
Thunder splits the sky, and the lone horse in the stable whinnies.
Adrian goes still, his ears catching far more than they were ever meant to. Rain striking slate rooftops in frantic sheets, water hissing through cracks in old mortar, and the groan of wooden beams deep within the castle walls. There were days he appreciated his hearing. It made him an excellent physician. An excellent predator, too, if one wanted to reduce him to something so animalistic. But storms were miserable things. Every noise arrived sharpened, amplified until the world felt unbearably loud around him.
His mother used to compare it to shouting near a skittish barn cat and watching the poor thing flinch itself sideways. Adrian had understood the analogy immediately as a child and resented it ever since.
Another crack of thunder rolls across the plateau. Adrian’s jaw tightens reflexively at the sound.
Then, beneath the storm, he hears something else.
Hoofbeats.
Frantic hoofbeats.
He drops the bucket, and water spills across the floor as he runs.
The courtyard is a sheet of rain, mud churning beneath his boots as he pushes through the doors. Wind tears at his hair, plastering it to his face. The world beyond the gate is nearly impossible to see, blurred by rain and darkness.
Then lightning flashes, illuminating the horse on the road.
Black as pitch, mane braided unevenly in the clumsy way Sypha always did it, with one loose strand near the left ear where he hated being touched. The gelding’s leather tack is waterlogged and crooked, saddle blanket slipping half off his flank from hard riding. His left stirrup knocks awkwardly against his side with every staggering step because Trevor never remembered to tighten the leather evenly.
It couldn’t be.
Could it?
Menace. The stubborn, vicious creature that bit strangers and flattened his ears at nearly everything alive. The same horse that had spent weeks trying to throw Trevor into ditches out of sheer spite. Adrian’s heart lurches so violently that he nearly stumbles. The horse staggers through the gate, sides heaving, foam white at his bit. His mane is tangled with mud and rain, and slumped over his neck is Trevor bloody fucking Belmont.
Trevor is barely upright, one hand tangled weakly in the reins, the other pressed to his side. Blood darkens his coat, rain washing it down in diluted streams. His head hangs low, hair plastered to his face.
Alone and injured and riding the horse that despised his guts.
Adrian is across the courtyard in an instant.
“Trevor!”
Menace tosses his head but does not bite when Adrian reaches for the reins. That alone tells him everything.
“Trevor,” Adrian says again, softer this time, making a genuine effort to quell the panic lacing his voice.
Trevor shifts faintly. His eyes crack open, unfocused and fever-bright.
For a moment, he seems to look straight through Adrian.
Then his mouth twitches.
“Good horse,” Trevor rasps.
And falls from the saddle.