@wistfulniights asked :
talk me through it. what happened? (sypha for alucard? :>) ( src. )
He loses himself in the motions of cooking now much as he had done then. There has always been some solace to be found in the careful preparation of a meal, especially now that there is no need to hunt every last morsel of meat he makes into a dish.
There is more solace when his work is not enjoyed by him alone. Even now, he struggles to reconcile Taka and Sumi's last few minutes alive with the eager way they had sat around his table, savoring carefully cooked cuts of meat as though each meal was the last they would ever get.
Perhaps there should have been signs.
Alucard is not ignorant to his own complacency in the way things turned out. He possesses—has always possessed—the same tendency as his father to want to hold the people who enter his life close to his chest, to never let them go. Sypha and Trevor are no exception, though the trepidation he'd sensed within Taka and Sumi are wholly absent from them, ever since they elected to make their home here, in Alcuard's castle, in the small but promising town of Belmont.
"It's not a very nice story," says Alucard, delicately laying a cut of veal across the surface of a skillet.
He keeps himself in motion—as soon as the meat is out of his hands, he's relieving onions of their outer skin, setting them out to be chopped with fine precision. He doesn't need to look to know that Sypha, behind him, is keeping her eyes set firmly on his form.
She'd done that before, too.
Unlike Trevor, whose gaze fell on Alucard with a heavy sense of trepidation, he'd never sensed wariness or ill intent from Sypha. Curiosity, perhaps. A prying desire to see beyond the habitually-blank exterior Alucard sometimes considers to be a curse, in gentler moments like these. If nothing else, her curiosity is certainly characteristic of the Speakers from whom she hails.
"A pair of individuals who fashioned themselves monster hunters followed rumors that led them to the castle." He sends a glance back at Sypha, meeting her eyes for only a moment before turning back to the task at hand. "I taught them what I could. They wanted to know more than I was giving them, and considered my withholding a betrayal. So they responded in kind."
Slice.
Both halves of an onion fall cleanly apart from eachother. Alucard's knife meets the polished wood of the cutting board, and rests there for a beat too long.
Then he carries on dicing.
"I'm sure you can guess how it all turned out."