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"You were born bluer than a butterfly
Beautiful and so deprived of oxygen
Colder than your father's eyes
He never learned to sympathize with anyone."
BLUE, Billie Eilish
Wallachia, 1475
The halls smelt of smoke and blood, the aftershocks of the battle still rumbling through the castle. Or perhaps that was the fight continuing below him.
Dracula did not care. He did not want to know what would become of his castle.
His hands were stained with blood. The blood of his son, who looked back at him with wounded eyes.
"Father…" the voice of Adrian, his only child, was weakened and strained, blood pouring between Dracula's fingers as he desperately tried to stem the bleeding from many wounds.
"My boy…" Dracula responded, voice barely above a whisper. "The greatest gift I had… And I- I have killed you…"
A tear ran down Adrian's face. A dhampir was much stronger than the average human, yes, but even Adrian's body had its limits. And Dracula, in his rage, had found them. Oh how delicate the body of his child had turned out to be. Just like his mother's.
The rage that had once filled Dracula's body had dissipated the moment he had struck Adrian's head with that candlestick. The moment Adrian's eyes had gone unfocused and the boy had fallen, landing in the arms of his father, who now held him close.
It was too late to help. Too late to apologise. The other injuries from their terrific fight from the castle had weakened Adrian too much. Now they lay, Adrian held close to Dracula's chest, on the floor of a bedroom filled with too many memories.
A doll lay on the floor. It was a female doll in a pretty blue dress, with blonde hair in ringlets spilling across the floor. Lisa had made it in her image, and it had been thrown across the room with the intensity of their fight.
Now, her delicate curls soaked up Adrian's blood as it pooled beneath them.
The bed, still made, as if the Adrian of many years before was about to run through the door, ready to be tucked in by his parents. It still stood, but the bed frame had one post torn off of it, the makeshift stake Adrian had ripped out before Dracula had struck him.
The stake now lay beside the doll, fallen from Adrian's hand.
The woven rug below them had taken Lisa weeks to make, its delicate silver work she had pained over, hoping she would finish it before their child came.
Now it was stained red.
"My boy…" Dracula said again, meeting Adrian's eyes. Eyes filled with hurt, with betrayal, with pain.
"My boy… I am sorry." Dracula kept his hand against the wound at Adrian's temple, the blood sticky and warm.
Adrian swallowed, tears still running down his face. He looked as though he had something he still wished to say, but before he could, death's cold touch stole him away.
Dracula watched as the life left his son's - Lisa's - eyes. As the boy's jaw slackened, as his body went limp and dead weight in his arms.
Silence followed.
Dracula gently lowered Adrian to the floor. He stood, taking slow, laboured steps to the bed, and picked up the quilt. Then he went back to his son.
His son, the spitting image of Lisa.
He laid the quilt over him, over all but his face. Dracula lent over him and slowly, gently, closed his eyes.
And then footsteps thundered up the stairs, two people bursting through the doorway.
It was the Belmont and his Speaker companion.
The two of them stilled.
Taking in the scene.
The Alucard, dead.
His father, the culprit, slowly tucking a blonde-haired doll under one of his arms, tears spilling down his face.
Dracula looked up once at the two stood in the doorway. He drew himself up, taking hold of the stake Adrian had dropped, and handed it to the Belmont.
"This child was the greatest gift my wife ever gave me," He eventually said. "That I have killed him… I must already be dead."
He sank to his knees.
"Do what you must. I will not fight anymore."
The Belmont and The Speaker did it together. Both grasped the stake, both drove it through the ancient vampire's heart.
He barely felt it.
Death took him, but it was not gentle. It ripped through him, tearing him apart from where the stake had struck, burning, burning, turning his body into something even he did not have a name for.
He stood. He reached out, perhaps for Lisa, perhaps for Adrian.
Perhaps for the man he had been before he had become Dracula, many centuries ago.
A man who has lived, but has never known death, cannot truly be called a man.
Dracula did not deserve to be called a man. Not anymore.
Now, as his body is overtaken by dust, as he ceases to exist, the only thing that fills his mind is the face of his wife.
The last thing he sees is her.
The echoes fade, and with it, his reign comes to an end.
"You were born reaching for your mother's hands
Victim of your father's plans to rule the world
Too afraid to step outside
Paranoid and petrified of what you've heard."
BLUE, Billie Eilish