Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Buddy you have answered the call and here are some headcanons about this disaster for this headcanon meme.  Disclaimer that I know NOTHING about the games and this is 100% based on the show.  Also, welcome to Latin Hour.

A: what I think realistically

Here are a set of three related headcanons that are my ride-or-die Opinions about this show.

First of all, the Belmont family was quite sizable—Belmont family proper, I’m sure there are any number of illegitimate children and/or other branches scattered around Europe.  They were close, most of the family living on the hereditary estate with the exception of the transient full-time hunters, but tough love was very much the word of the day.  It had to be, given their family duty and the sheer death rate.  Technically the Belmont family motto is Numquam Retro, arched over the ancient family crest. But for as long as Trevor can remember, the real family motto has been this: no matter how good a Belmont is, there is always something just that little bit better.  Aut cum scuto aut in scuto, reads the legend over the family mausoleum, either with shield or on shield, and it is much truer.  Belmonts come home victorious, or they don’t come home.

Second of all, Trevor was the crowning jewel of the Belmont family—a talented warrior from a young age, well-versed in the bestiary, and devoted, so devoted, to the ideal.  No one becomes as bitterly disillusioned as Trevor without having a long, long fall to get there.

Third of all, the Belmont family took their excommunication as they had taken every attempt to stop them from serving their duty: with stoic, stubborn disregard. They received the Bull informing them of their banishment and replied with a politely immovable “thank you but we’re rather too busy to be excommunicated right now.”  The Catholic Church responded as was highly typical in the 1400’s.

Trevor was returning from an utterly mundane errand into town, seeking some small gift for his baby sister’s first kill, when he saw the smoke start to climb. He reached the estate just in time to watch the fire bring the roof down and cut the screaming short.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

For the first little while of their journey, Sypha and Alucard are relatively sure that their third member is the muscle, the street-smarts, to their formal education.

Then Trevor busts out some fluent Latin to translate a book and adds a snide insult for good measure, o salvator somnelente mi.

They are both dumbfounded, and Trevor rolls his eyes at them.

“The Belmonts weren’t just a bunch of country drunks,” he points out, and tosses the book carelessly at Alucard.  “We were scholars too.  Carry that, would you?”

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

The three of them have been on the move, hunting for Dracula’s castle, for a full month and a half when Alucard finds Trevor sitting on watch outside the ransacked farmhouse they’ve claimed as shelter from the weather.  Normally, even if he’s drinking or on watch or distracted, Alucard struggles to get the drop on Trevor, which is far more of a statement about Belmont House’s skill than Alucard suspects even Trevor himself realizes. This time, Trevor jolts, even though Alucard takes care to make noise so as not to alarm Sypha.

“Belmont?” Alucard asks, crouching down to be on eye level with him.  “Are you all right?”

Trevor doesn’t respond—in all honesty, seems to barely hear the question.  “I had a baby sister,” Trevor says distantly.  “Older twins, too, but my baby sister—she just killed her first werewolf about a year and a week ago.  I got back just in time for the celebration.”

Alucard sits down beside him, cautious.  “That is quite an achievement.  How old was she?”

“Fourteen.”  Trevor blinks, takes a deep breath and lets it out, studies the moon with uncommon concentration.  “She burned, a year ago, with my brother, and my elder sister, and my parents, my cousins…”

“Ah,” Alucard says quietly, and does the math.  “Your family must have been quite large.”

“Forty of us,” Trevor confirms.  “And every single one of them died in that fire.”  

Alucard nods, and tucks his knees up so that he can wrap his arms around them, and they sit there in the quiet for a while.  If there’s a trace of moisture beading on Trevor’s lashes, neither of them mention it.

“I cannot imagine what it feels like,” Alucard says at last, barely a whisper, “to lose so many loved ones to the fire.”

“No,” Trevor confirms.  “But you have a better idea than most.”

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

There’s not really enough canon to make a judgement one way or another, but.

I really fiercely want the more intelligent demons—it’s clear that some, if not all, of the Night Horde are human-level intelligent—to start to…remember. Once upon a time the House of Belmont was the most feared force in Hell, the levee that held back the tide of the supernatural from washing over the majority of the populace.  Now the levee has been broken (burned) and the tidal wave is rushing in and the demons are running free—

And some of them, meeting a stubborn-jawed man with alcohol on his lips and the ancient crest on his chest, think twice.

Thinking twice is, more often than not, the last thing they do on this plane of existence, before the silver of Alucard’s sword or Sypha’s power strikes them down, or before the last son of the House of Belmont lashes out with whip and blade and holy water.

Those that escape spread the word: despite the Church’s best efforts, there is still a Belmont abroad in the land, and he has allies, and he is doing his family proud.

Strange, perhaps, that the last Belmont would be flattered by the rumors of a demon horde.

Headcanon meme.  Bones is my one true saltmate, okay, it’s like a soulmate but with bitterness about the world.  Also, this is a little bit gonna be the Jim & Bones Friendship Hour.

A: what I think realistically

Bones actually has a very real phobia of space.  Like, he manages it.  He does a good job managing it.  But.

Listen.

In order to successfully graduate Starfleet Academy, every student must take and pass a shuttle piloting class.  In case of emergency.  Pass proficiently, not just scrape by on a wing and a prayer. Bones fails twice and scrapes that pass the third time and honestly he’s thinking about just giving up.  He knows all the settings and controls—Jim drilled him silly after that first fail—but getting into the simulator and seeing all that black, and the pressure, he just.  He locks up.  It’s all he can do to control his breathing, never mind controlling the shuttle. He can’t go back to Georgia and he can’t do this and where does that leave him?

Jim finds Bones in a tiny-ass little bar the day before his fourth retest date and drags him protesting out the door, about eight whiskeys down, and bundles him into bed and listens to him mumble about how he’s never going to pass and he’s never going to graduate and honestly fucking good because space is the worst and Jim’s crazy for wanting to go there but also Jim’s going to go into space without him and Bones doesn’t have anywhere else to go and it’s all just really awful, you know what I mean, Jimmy?

“Sure, buddy,” Jim says, propping Bones up and pushing a glass of water into his hands. “Drink something, okay?”

The next day, at 1500 hours, Bones stumbles into the simulator room with—well, not the worst hangover of his life, but probably top ten.  And lo and fucking behold, instead of the usual gaggle of students looking to (re)test, there’s James Goddamn Kirk, hands stuffed in his pockets and a sunny-ass smile on his smart-ass face.  James Goddamn Kirk, who passed his pilot’s test with glowing scores on the first try.

James Goddamn Kirk, who somehow lied and cheated his way in here so that he could sit in the simulator while Bones sweats his way through a passing grade.

It doesn’t cure his phobia, obviously, but the first time Bones does actually have to pilot a shuttle, it’s James Goddamn Kirk bleeding out in the copilot’s seat and Bones barely even notices his heart race.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Leonard McCoy, day one of his term at the Academy as he stumbles, shaking and panting, off the shuttle, swears to himself that he’s going to pry this blue-eyed limpet off him on the spot and also sedate anyone who addresses him as Bones.

Day one of his second year at the Academy, Bones McCoy gets half-tackled by Jim, who’s already talking about this badass new Tactics class they’re offering, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna destroy everyone, it’s gonna be awesome and he has no idea how this happened.

What would have been day one of his fourth year, Bones is fuck knows how far into the black of space, listening to his crew tattle on Jim’s delinquent ass.

“Doc, I don’t think he’s taken an off shift in, like, a couple days maybe,” Sulu says as he passes through for an antihistamine.

“I’ll work on it,” Bones says, and jabs Sulu with a hypo.  “Stop poking plants you don’t recognize.”

“Doctor McCoy, Alpha shift told me to tell you that the captain forgot to eat today,” Chekov reports, sticking his head inside.  “Can I get another screen?”

“I’ll deal with that,” Bones says, and waves the kid in.  “Stop sleeping with people you don’t know.”

“Doctor, I would appreciate it if you intervened in the Captain’s opinion that holodeck safety protocols are optional,” Spock says evenly as Chapel checks him for broken ribs.

“I’ll do my best,” Bones says, and gives Spock a bitter wave with the medical tricorder. “Stop getting in fistfights, you have a damn phaser.”

“Doctor,” Uhura starts as Bones sprints past her.  “I think the Captain might be allergic–”

“I’m on my way!” he yells back over his shoulder.  “Stop Spock from causing a diplomatic incident!”

“Doc,” Scotty starts, leaning into the medbay and squinting painfully.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Bones snarls, and gives Scotty a vengeful jab with a hangover hypo (actually a calibrated mix of thiamine, folic acid, and magnesium sulfate, but listen, it’s a hangover hypo) as he marches past toward the bridge.

Bones has Regrets.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Bones keeps expecting to get to a point where he’s…like…past being horrified and shocked when one of the crew rolls in, near death or already dead.

It wears on his soul like acid, every time.  He decides very early that he’s going to leave Starfleet when Jim dies.  The longer he spends on the Enterprise, the more names he adds to that list (when Spock dies, when Uhura dies, when Chekov-Sulu-Scotty dies).

Bones is a doctor, not an adventurer.  He’s not built to outlive these people.  When they are gone, he will never leave orbit again.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Read an AU once where Bones was a humanitarian aid volunteer at like 21/22 who went to Tarsus IV and met furious, half-starved, 13-year-old, fresh-off-a-genocide JT Kirk and it was my favorite thing.  It was also abandoned after like two chapters.  But like.  Any intersection of my infinite feelings about Tarsus IV and my infinite feelings about Bones & Jim (& Spock) friendship is My Favorite Thing and I believe in my heart that this is true.  Bones didn’t recognize him at the time and it takes him years to connect the emaciated murderous kid with the electric blue eyes to his buoyantly brilliant best friend, but he does, eventually.  He asks Jim straight up, very late one night, and they have one single conversation about it before they vow to never discuss it again.

Sophieeeeee yes.  Headcanon meme.

A: what I think realistically

Sophie is highly suspicious of Maggie a while.  Not because of Nate, just because.  Because Maggie is Maggie.  Because Maggie is good and honorable and honest and Sophie is…Sophie is not those things.  Sophie is a criminal and her thefts might not have hurt anyone, but sometimes she thinks about little children with stolen artifacts, about the look on her team’s faces when they realized she’d played them, and wonders what the fallout pattern of her life looks like.  Maggie surely doesn’t have to think about that (Sophie is wrong about this) and Sophie cannot understand why someone like that would willingly put herself in the middle of all this.

Sophie gets past this, of course.  Maggie, she comes to realize, is just.  Maggie. She is good and honorable and honest, and just as furious and steely and brilliant and cold-eyed as her ex-husband.

So obviously Sophie sleeps with her.  It’s a good fling, all intimacy and affection with absolutely no romance, and Sophie is lying in bed when Maggie bends down to kiss her forehead and say, “I hope things work out with you and Nate.  You’re too good for him.”

“Of course I am,” Sophie sniffs.  “We both are.”

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

To be COMPLETELY clear, Nate gets Sophie’s wedding ring engraved with ‘Your Name Here’ even though he knows!  He fucking knows!  He knows her real name!  He knows all her titles and ranks and everything (you’ll never tell me that Sophie isn’t actually a British noblewoman okay) and yet! Fucking!  Your Name Here!

They have to pause the service so that Sophie can stop laughing.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Sophie really wants to be in love, but she’s…she’s afraid of the part between being strangers and being in love.  It’s so vulnerable, putting little bits of yourself out there one at a time and waiting to see if the other person is going to slap you down.  She wonders, every time she sits down with a new person, what they would think of the real her, and she opens her mouth to say “my name is Sophie Devereaux” and instead some other name pops out.  And in the end, inevitably, she slips up, gets too comfortable and shows a bit of the wrong self and…

Well, there she is again.  Wanting to be in love and sitting down to introduce herself and giving the wrong name.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Um…I honestly have no idea, so instead here’s an AU I want.

I want a mutant AU where Sophie is a metamorph a la Mystique, and her ‘Sophie’ face isn’t actually…her real face.  Like, she thinks of it as her real face.  It’s the face she always wears when they’re not doing a con.  Even when they are doing a con she doesn’t like to depart too far from it.  But when she was a kid she had a different face, and she shifted whenever she could, into whoever she wanted, and then one day she was standing in front of a mirror and shifting back and she…couldn’t quite remember what color her eyes were. Hazel, or mahogany?  Black lashes or brown?  Did her skin have pink or yellow undertones?

Sophie Devereaux wears a face assembled out of her favorite features.  She takes a picture of that face, the moment she fixes it the way she likes it, and keeps the picture beside her mirror so that she can always get it right.