Immortality

Title: Immortality
Author: fangirl_lizzie
Rating: NC-17
Fandom: Van Helsing/The Picture of Dorian Gray
Pairing: Van Helsing/Dorian; Van Helsing/Dracula
Disclaimer: Not mine, don’t sue. Also not really Sommers’, except in the details.
Notes: I'm picturing Dorian Gray as playe Stu Stuart Townsend in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; reading this doesn't require you to have read the graphic novels or the Oscar Wilde book, or to have seen the film.
Summary: Gabriel learns that he has a brother, and with the assistance of the mysterious Dorian Gray, sets out across Europe to find him. However, the Vatican have plans of their own for Van Helsing.


***
One

It was raining when he arrived in London, streaming from the dreary, ash-grey sky almost as a single icy sheet. Van Helsing stepped down from the carriage and out onto the street; he paid the driver generously with what little money he had, out of sheer pity. Van Helsing may have been dressed in his impenetrable leathers, but the poor scrawny excuse for a man shivering up there at the reins of the horses was clearly soaked down to the skin.

"Thank you, Sir!" said the driver, grinning broadly from under his broad, sopping hat as he counted the silver that crossed his palm. Van Helsing nodded and tipped his own hat; a sodden lady stepped up into the carriage and soon they were parted, heading in quite opposite directions.

He didn't mind the rainwater flowing over the brim of his hat or the heavy torrent that drummed on his shoulders as he walked. There was the rough equivalent of a river running down the street that flowed around his boots and chilled his feet a little, but he was used to British weather. Still, he strode quickly down the street, passed by the numerous coaches and carriages of central London, letting the rain wash away the last of the Transylvanian mud from his trench coat and looking forward to resting his bones in his own bed for the first time in months.

He turned left into a private little square and jogged up the six or seven shallow steps to the black front door. Shifting his small leather bag to his other hand, he knocked; he didn't expect to wait long for an answer, huddled close to the house's whitewashed façade to keep well away from the gutter's torrential overspill, and he didn't wait long. A housekeeper dressed all in black answered the door and let him inside.

Not that Taylor had ever shown even the remotest sign of emotion, but Van Helsing's sudden reappearance out of the jarring rainstorm didn't quite seem news to him. He stood there, regal as a king, as he watched the water drip steadily from the hems of Van Helsing's leather trench coat and pool on the chessboard tiles of the entrance hall.

"You are soaking wet, Sir," said Taylor, who had always possessed a certain flair for stating the patently obvious. "Shall I take your coat?" Van Helsing had pulled it off and folded it haphazardly in half before Taylor had the chance to move to assist him. "Would the master care for a pot of tea?" he asked, taking the coat and refolding it neatly over his arm as he did so.

Van Helsing nodded somewhat distractedly, finding that his boots had leaked and that this had somehow escaped his notice whilst walking from the carriage. "I'll change and take it in the library."

"Very good, Sir," said Taylor, expertly wheedling the travel bag from Van Helsing's hand almost without him realising it. "Ah, Sir: there is a gentleman waiting for you in the library. I explained to him that you were not at home - possibly not in the country - and yet he seemed most insistent that you would return today and that he must wait. I admit I did not see the harm in admitting him to the library."

Van Helsing nodded, with a slight tired frown. "Very good, Taylor," he said, stepping toward the front staircase and leaving a faint trail of watery footprints on the tile floor. "Tell the gentleman I'll be with him shortly." He saw Taylor's nod only from the corner of his eye as he mounted the stairs and disappeared swiftly to the first floor. As he went, his eyes strayed over the painting-covered walls; he bobbed up quickly past landscapes and portraits of all shapes and sizes, intense, vibrant colours, pictures of beautiful faces that he didn't quite know. And, of course, he passed that one empty space for whose presence he had never accounted, with its patch of perfect wallpaper almost completely free from fading. He thought about it with regularity that approached obsession on occasion, almost sure it held some clue to his forgotten past, but for the moment he didn't feel he had the luxury of time.

He opened the double doors that led through into his bedroom and stepped inside dripping with somewhat reduced intensity on the plain sheepskin rug by the foot of the bed. He found a suit laid out for him, neatly pressed, and wasn't sure if he felt he should thank or damn Taylor for it; to be honest he felt like some form of impostor when he ventured out of his leathers and put on a suit, despite the fine fabric and the excellent tailoring. He felt the cuffs and necktie chafed and he preferred his high boots to the shoes he assumed were high fashion. But he changed out of his comfortable if now slightly malodorous clothes and into the suit, feeling awkward as his fingers fumbled with the small buttons.

In fact, he felt awkward not only in that suit but in that house. It was overly large for just one person, even if he did apparently keep a manservant, and the décor wasn't at all what he would have chosen, all paintings and tapestries and small decorative items that that littered the shelves in the lounge. At least he assumeat iat it wasn't his choosing, though a bishop, three neighbours and his servant believe that it was. Down to the last Louis Quatorze dresser and chased silver-framed mirror.

The house, a section of terrace that ran down one side of a secluded London square, did apparently belong to him; the deeds were in his name though he didn't recognise the hand in which h sig signed them, and he did have to admit that even aside from the clothes which were perfectly his size, there was an air of something quite familiar about the place. Still, though he did reluctantly refer to the place as home, he distrusted all testimony to the fact that it was his. Familiar as the house did feel, there was also a subtle yet disquieting undercurrent that told him there was something not quite right. He found, though, that he had little choice but to play along until he remembered for himself.

Perhaps it was the complete lack of any item personally and recognisably his own that bothered him so. That, and much more recently a visitor waiting in the library who had precipitated his return. He changed, fiddled with his necktie that he never could get to lie just so, and went downstairs, past the paintings and the lack thereof.

There were heavy wooden doors leading into the library, and he resisted the urge to push them both open for a somewhat grand and dramatic entrance. Instead he turned the cold brass knob of the right door and let himself in quietly. There was a pot of tea and two teacups resting on the low table by the fire roaring in the hearth, between the two deep green leather chairs. The left chair, though high-backed and facing the fireplace that lay almost directly opposite his place by the door, he could tell was occupied; a hand bearing two silver rings lay on the chair arm, the fingers of his as yet mysterious guest drumming at a constant tempo on the old and slightly tarnished leather.

"Been waiting long?" he asked curtly, backing into the door to close it behind him before walking toward the five place, the empty chair, the tea and his guest. It was not a particularly large room though the ceiling was quite high and the walls were lined for the most part with books that he didn't remember having read. He'd tried a few, on the odd occasion, and had so far found only texts on precious stones and medicine, the odd volume of philosophy and one or two works of French poetry. He was almost sure that he didn't read French, though he seemed to speak it well enough.

"No," said the man in the chair, as it was definitely a man's voice, and Taylor had, after all, told him that his caller was a gentleman. "No, not long." It was a deep voice, with a little age and gravel to it, perhaps a little tired or weary. "Three hours, or four, I believe." And there was also an accent. Not quite thick but quite pronounced despite the clear English. He was, perhaps, surprised to hear it; since learning of the gentleman's presence he had half-assumed that it must be some priest or other, from a list of names as long as his arm that he didn't care to recall; some of those priests were not English - the majority, in fact - but if they did come from outside of England they were invariably French, Italian, Spanish. This accent was entirely different.

He took a seat in the empty leather chair to his right, fiddling momentarily with the cuffs of his smart grey suit, ignoring all courtesy by not offering his hand. It wasn't a conscious slight - he quite simply forgot it, and often. Then he turned to meet his guest.

"Herr Van Helsing," said the man, leaning forward in his seat and proffering one white-gloved hand. "It is an honour. My name is Klaus Van Varenberg. I hope you do not find my waiting here for you impertinent."

He wanted to say that he did, that all he had wanted to do was strip off his clothes and bury himself in the clean, heavy dress of his bed, but he forced a civil look to his face. "No, not at all," he said instead, leaning forward to shake Van Varenberg's hand briefly before leaning back into his chair. "But why are you here?"

"Ah, straight to the point, Herr Van Helsing," said Van Varenberg, with the ghost of a smile playing at his broad, creased mouth. From the short grey hair combed back neatly from his forehead and the wrinkles on his really quite distinguished face, Van Helsing guessed the man was close to sixty. He clutched the brim of his hat in his hands, pressing at it with a kind of nervous energy that as yet Van Helsing did not understand. "I am here on behalf of your brother, Herr Doktor Abraham Van Helsing."

For a second his heart leapt in his chest, but then it settled with a sickening lurch and left him with a feeling of empty suspicion. Icy, clammy fingers crawled his skin beneath that fine grey suit. "I don't have a brother," he said at last, enunciating clearly lest there lie any uncertainty in his almost unwelcome visitors seemingly clear English.

Van Varenberg dropped his black hat onto his knees and wiped his gloved hands down over his thighs. He nodded briefly, but seemingly to himself. "But you do, indeed," he said, his own enunciation startlingly clear, as clear as the gaze that he cast over the low table and its long-forgotten tea. "The Doktor said that there would perhaps be some confusion, due to the condition of your memory, but that I was to convey to you the fact that you have, indeed, a brother: Herr Doktor Abraham Van Helsing." Van Varenberg stopped, then frowned, before his hands flitted over his slightly ill-fitting jacket; Van Helsing found it troubling that he had begun to understand the logistics of a well-fitted jacket, and was, for a moment, distracted by this curiously appalling revelation. But then Van Varenberg produced from within his inside pocket a slightly crumpled plain white paper envelope.

He reached out and took the envelope; he turned it over and found on the front his name, Gabriel, in a deft yet spidery hand. It seemed curiously familiar. "From my brother?" he asked, his gaze concentrated exclusively on the spiky black-inked letters of his Christian name, though still wary of this term of 'brother'.

"Yes, certainly," replied Van Varenberg in his low voice. "It was chiefly to convey this note that I have come. Or was, rather, sent." Van Helsing ran the callused pad of his right index finger over the ink of his name. "And now that I have performed the task that was demanded of me, I must retire."

Van Varenberg hefted himself from the chair; he had obviously waited there for some long hours as his knees cracked soundly in a manner not unlike a muffled pistol shot. He made for the door and Van Helsing sprang to his feet.

"You won't wait for a reply?" he asked; the man, now seeming almost ten years older, turned and shook his head. He seemed all skin and bone and frailty, and Van Helsing almost went to him, to help him to the door. He stood his ground.

"No, I must return to my hotel," Van Varenberg said with a weary sigh. "I shall be at the Traveller's Rest Inn in Charlotte Stree you you should need me before morning; however, after eight or nine I fear I shall be unavailable to you."

Van Helsing nodded, strangely contented with those words, and then strode up to the door to open if before his now departing guest. He opened both doors with an inexplicable flourish as if to give a kind of grand farewell, then called to Taylor for Herr Van Varenberg's coat. The frail old man seemed to decline the pseudo-pomp of his goodbye and slipped out into the bitter, biting rain as though little more than a whisper. Before five minutes had passed, there seemed little more proof that he had ever come than an extra teacup on the table and a plain white envelope bearing the name of 'Gabriel'.

Ah yes, the envelope; it seemed strange, but he had almost forgotten it, though it was still in his hand. He passed back through into the library and sat down by the fire, remembering the paper knife too late as he ripped open the seal. It had a seal, of thick red wax stamped with a sword and a snake - how had he not noticed before that the seal was the image of his ring? He frowned but didn't dwell on the thought; he pulled the contents from the envelope, one single folded piece of plain white paper. Telling himself there was no reason for him to dread so, he unfolded the paper.

Across it ranged that same familiar hand in its black ink, all thin spikes and angles. It read simply:


'Gabriel, my brother, ittimetime.

Paris, January 17, the ball of the Countess Dupré. You will require no invitation. Dress for the masquerade.

Soon,
Abraham.'


It was a strange sort of letter with no hint of a return address clearer than 'Paris' hidden in its utterly confounding lines. It was, though, thoroughly compelling, and even then Van Helsing knew that come January 17 he would be there in Paris, whether or not the mysteriousrierrier Van... but his name had faded, and that troubled him, as had the evening as a whole.

He had not slept in almost two days; his troubling thoughts would wait for the morning. He slipped the note into its torn envelope and stepped onto the stairs. He stripped and plunged headlong and naked into his soft bed, the letter on the dresser where he was sure to see it when he woke. And then he fell to blissful, dreamless sleep.

***