Lights Up

December 19, 1946

Walter ran his hands through his hair to straighten his ponytail and adjusted his monocle in front of his eye. It was supposed to be a festive evening, celebrating another piece of restored normalcy in the reopening of Drury Lane’s theaters with Noel Coward’s Pacific 1860.

How normal attending said opening with a vampire was, was open for argument.

Walter waited in the foyer for Alucard and grumbled. How much getting ready did the vampire require anyway? It wasn’t as though his clothes were really clothes.

“We aren’t late, Angel.”

Walter turned at Alucard’s voice and gaped. The vampire stood before him in an ankle length white sheath gown that clung to curves that did not belong on the former Count Dracula.

“Good God, Alucard, what are you doing?”

“I am prepared to be your date this evening,” Alucard said, a trace of a pout crossing his – her? – face. “Am I not beautiful?”

He was. She was? Walter was stuck for a pronoun.

“You would be beautiful if you were not a man in a woman’s gown,” he finally answered, shaking his head. “But I cannot forget that you are no woman and it makes you…”

“Less beautiful?” Alucard finished for him. “And if I were to tell you that I am not a man in woman’s clothing? Would I be more beautiful again?” The vampire approached the young man, red eyes meeting Walter’s grey-green.

“I have told you before that form means nothing. Have you not seen me as a hound and a bat, as mist and things less easily described?” Stopping directly in front of Walter, Alucard took his hand, placing it on the barest curve of a breast under the silky white fabric of the sheath.

“If I wish to be a woman, I will be a woman, and I know what lurks in your heart, Angel mine. The question you have asked yourself when you think I sleep sated beside you.”

Alucard smiled up at him, dainty fangs showing at the corners of her smile. “Tonight I will indulge you with what it is like to go out with a woman. To not think about the opinions of others. To feel ‘normal,’” she sneered the last word. “And when we return to your room, you may indulge your other curiosity about women.”

•••

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Did you feel normal?” Alucard asked as she closed the door to Walter’s room and leaned against it.

Walter shook his head and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke upward. “Not particularly. Attending a play knowing that the beautiful woman on my arm was really a vampire, and usually my male lover, made it rather difficult to feel normal.”

“Complaining?” Alucard glided across the floor, and took the cigarette out of Walter’s fingers, putting it to her lips and painting it red with her lipstick before she drew it away to blow a cloud of smoke toward her companion. “Will nothing ever please you?”

“I didn’t ask you to do this in the first place,” Walter protested, taking his cigarette back. The taste of lipstick overrode the flavor of smoke for a moment. “I have no complaints about you as you are – were.”

Walter looked at the familiar face, the soft lines, and the gentle curve of the lips. This was the vampire he’d known for years, his lover of more than a year, his friend, or the closest thing he had to one. And Alucard was giving him a gift. At the very least, it was rude to act ungrateful.

“Thank you,” he said, bending down to kiss his lover, tasting lipstick again and smelling the powder she had used to tone the undead pallor of her skin. She looked ethereal, not inhuman, and Walter knew that he had been the envy of many men and more than one woman that night. She was beautiful, as she always was, and that was enough.

He turned away from her long enough to stub out his cigarette and remove his tie, returning to Alucard to kiss her again, gathering her smaller form in his arms. Such power in such a delicate-appearing package – neither she nor he were exactly what they seemed.

Someday, he might feel awe that this creature showed care for him; for now it was enough that they were together.

“Do you love me, Angel mine?” Alucard asked, and drew him toward the bed. “Are you mine?”

Walter never dared utter the words. Alucard owned him heart and soul, if she wanted. That last fig leaf between them was all that allowed Walter to pretend to being human. Though really, was he any more or less a monster than his beloved?

“Tonight,” he sighed as he allowed her to undress him. He pretended the sudden spread of gooseflesh was the December chill that crept through the walls of the manor and had nothing to do with the knowledge of who and what was drawing small fingers over his exposed skin.

Alucard stopped, and tilted her head up at her young lover. “Only for tonight?” She smiled and silenced him with a kiss as he opened his mouth to answer. It was a game to taunt him with the question, but she loved him – as much as she could love – for the fearless human killer that he was. She would not demand more of him.

Perhaps she was growing overfond in her old age.

Certainly she was overfond of the body she exposed, the long, strong limbs, the lithe grace of him, the power he held in those well-trained fingers of his. Walter’s face was beautiful to her, as were his scarred hands and muscular legs.

The beauty of his body was a secret that was theirs alone, usually hidden under the staid uniform he wore like a second skin. No one else knew that his shoulders and chest were tightly muscled from his work with the wires. No other ever saw the taut planes of his stomach.

He didn’t have to tell her that he was hers; she knew it without words as he swayed forward under the gentle touch of her fingertips on his skin. She knew it in his silence and would have felt it from him had she been merely human and unable to read his heart and mind like the open books they were.

For both their sakes, some things needed to remain unspoken.

When he stood naked before her, she let the thin straps of her gown slide off her shoulders and allowed the light fabric to fall past her hips to puddle on the floor. Standing before him wearing nothing but her stockings and heels, there was no question that Alucard was female from the delicate curve of small breasts peaked with tiny alabaster pink nipples to the gentle swell of her mons.

She guided his hand to touch her, closing her eyes in silent pleasure at the heated contrast of his palm against the cool of her breast. Even if she were inclined to tell him, Walter would never believe that he was the first man ever to touch Alucard in this manner – in this gender.

She must be growing sentimental to decide to gift this – one of the only possible firsts she had left to share – to the Angel of Death.

Walter bent to kiss her, his free hand slipping around her slender waist to hold her as he stepped forward to press his body against hers. Past the lipstick, she tasted the same; past the breast under his hand, she felt the same. Walter felt his body reacting despite his mind’s confusion; this was Alucard, whether the vampire was male or female or something that made the distinction irrelevant.

Too soon, Alucard pulled away and sat on Walter’s bed to slip off the fashionably impractical shoes she had worn. She perched on the edge of the bed and dangled her stocking-clad feet.

“Kneel.”

Walter raised an eyebrow at the command in her voice, but knelt on the floor in front of the vampire. The view was… different from what he was accustomed to. He leaned forward as Alucard spread her legs and drew his fingertips gently through the slightly coarse hair that shielded her pubis.

He examined her carefully, noting the way her labia slowly swelled under his fingers as he touched her. He stroked her outer labia before parting them to reveal her more delicate inner lips. Following her instructions, Walter gently touched the small knot where those inner lips came together and smiled as it plumped up with the attention, even as Alucard raised her hips and stroked his hair.

Perhaps a difference in scale, but apparently some reactions were somewhat universal.

To test that observation more fully, he leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss over her clitoris. The soft press of her fingers on his head encouraged him to dart his tongue out and stroke that small target, first gently, and then with greater assurance as Alucard raised her hips again and made a quiet sound Walter recognized from other, slightly different circumstances.

“Don’t stop.”

Hardly, he thought smugly as he slid his hands under her to raise her hips up. There was a fair amount of ego involved in being a vampire-hunting butler keeping company with Vlad-bloody-Dracula, and that same ego ensured that Walter did his damnedest to impress his lover.

As always, Alucard led the way, directing his movements – harder, softer, faster, slower, there, right there – until she was grasping his hair roughly and raising her hips off the bed to a shuddering release. The anatomy might be different, but the moans were the same. Strangely, Walter found that reassuring.

Her hand in his hair drew his head up to meet her hungry gaze. “Come here.”

He slid up her body, his erection sliding along the smooth skin of her thigh as she took his mouth for a demanding kiss. This was his lover, always and never the same, the changeless and ever-changeable undead.

When she shifted to take him inside her, Walter’s eyes, closed in focus, snapped open. There were obvious similarities between this and what he and Alucard had done before, but he’d been a fool if he’d ever thought that it would be the same.

No fool, her Angel. Alucard watched her young lover, her brow knit in concentration. She wanted to remember every moment to hold and warm her through the countless nights that would follow this one. Nights that would inevitably come no matter her will.

Nights that would come when this boy, full of life and exuberance, was long in his grave.

Vampires are selfish, it is said. They feed and bleed. Leeches.

Alucard opened her mouth to put an end to her thoughts of her Angel’s inevitable death. One bite, one moment of extraordinary bliss, and he would be hers forever.

Where was the selfish vampire when, instead of burying her fangs in his neck, she murmured his name against the defenseless skin there and kept her teeth to herself?

Where was the monster when they cried out together through the night?

Where was the evil when the creature of the night and her Angel slept tangled together?

Not in the room where an ancient kept company with a youth, both accepting the other for what they were.