Darkness. It was dark, so dark.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Something near his ear was dripping. He honed in on the sound, listening to the steady staccato of water plinking against a metallic surface. It was like a mother's heartbeat, gentle and comforting. He realized, suddenly, that he had no heartbeat of his own. He felt a flurry of panic run through his mind and gasped, unsure of how he could breathe and yet have no heartbeat. Was he dead? Was this death; darkness and the plink-plink of water hitting a puddle for eternity?
Perhaps this was Hell. Why was he down here? Was he a bad person? He had to be, if he was in Hell. It was funny; he couldn't quite remember. He had the notion that he was, in fact, a he; he also knew that he wasn't a child, either. That wouldn't have made sense, for children go to Heaven. He wasn't sure how he knew that, to be honest. He wasn't sure of anything right now. He stopped panicking about his heart and started to think, trying to pinpoint any memory that would shed some light about where he was and what had happened to him.
He smelled gas. That wasn't good, but he couldn't imagine why. After a moment of hard thought, he decided that gas made fire when it was out in the open, and smelling gas meant that there was a chance for an explosion. He tried to remember where he got that information from, but it seemed more like common knowledge at this point. It was so strange; he couldn't remember his name, but he remembered that bad people went to Hell and gas caused explosions. So strange, so strange.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Maybe that was gas instead of water? He tried to turn his head towards the sound, but couldn't. He was vaguely aware of being pinned down, something crushing his chest and making it hard to breathe. He was also aware of the fact that the air was stale, and he was surrounded on all sides by metal and sheetrock. He quickly became claustrophobic, wanting nothing more than to get out of the space and into the open. The dripping became more torturous and he shifted, trying desperately to push whatever it was holding him down.
There was a loud sound and his enclosure shrank, something cold and hard prodding into his spine as the stuff surrounding him began to collapse. He panicked again, his hands clawing, but he had no way of knowing which way was up. His legs kicked and he heard something above his head dislodge, falling with a loud noise and hitting the ground with a final thud somewhere just out of sight. It was just what he needed; the space it had occupied was now empty, and a small beam of light shone above him. No matter where it led to, it was out, and now he had a new goal.
He climbed and kicked and shuffled, pushing a wider hole and managing to fold his body into the tunnel he created. He saw sparking wires, rent pipes, and metal twisted in odd, angular ways. He found himself easily able to move pieces of what looked like walls, though it ought to have been too heavy to lift. He didn't think on it, instead focusing on the space and gratefully breathing in the small bit of fresh air that came through from above.
Just when he felt as though he couldn't crawl any further, he pulled himself up once more and he was out. He saw a starry sky, but the materials beneath his hands slid and he tipped forward, letting out an involuntary yelp as he tumbled headfirst off of what appeared to be a mountain of garbage. A sharp pain registered in his arm and his entire body screamed when he hit concrete.
He lay there for a moment, teeth clenched against the agony, stars flashing behind his eyes. Then he managed to sit up, gazing at the tear in his sleeve and the gash in his forearm. He then looked up to see his blood staining a large piece of cracked glass jutting out from the mountain. He could see now that the mountain itself was, in fact, a demolished building. It raised more questions than answers, and he sat and thought while cradling his injured, burning arm. Who was he? Why in the hell had he woken beneath a ruined building?
He unfurled his legs and stood, looking down at himself as though his clothing might explain more. He was wearing an insane amount of red; he chuckled a little, wondering if he stood out like a sore thumb wherever he went. His coat was long and red, reaching all the way to his knees. He had black boots, black pants, a black vest over a white shirt (he assumed it was supposed to be white, for it was covered in filth from the demolished building), and a red necktie. Shaking back the long sleeves, he saw that he was wearing a peculiar pair of gloves covered in black markings and strange words.
He looked back to gage the injury on his arm and started, a gasp escaping his lips. The gash in his skin was little more than a scrape now! Before he could see the meat of his arm, but as he sat, the skin had knitted together and now a faint red line was all that was left. He had a feeling that it too would soon disappear. The blinding pain had stopped, but a dull ache still echoed in the arm bone. How? How had such a thing happened? Was he just seeing things, or… or what?!
He felt into his pockets, hoping to find a wallet or some ID, anything to cement him to this strange world he'd found himself in. He pulled out two guns instead, and pocketed them again almost immediately. What in the hell? Why in the world did he need two guns?! Did he need that much protection?
Looking up at the sky with a sense of overwhelming helplessness, he saw that it was a nice night. The harvest moon was full, hanging low over the landscape. He could see every dent and curve of the surface, it seemed, and each crater was familiar. How could something so far and distant seem to be so loving and understanding towards him at the same time? He remembered now that he moongazed a lot, and a strange sort of bitter longing rose in his chest. He couldn't place what it was that he longed for, but the moon seemed to hold the secret.
The horizon was beginning to lighten with the coming of another gray dawn. He searched the skyline, swallowing hard and turning in a circle. He couldn't tell exactly where he was; the ruined building now stood directly behind him, and on either side of it were twin warehouses. A high fence with thin coils of barbed wire ran around the perimeter of the buildings, coming together at a squat, square-barred gate. There was a large expanse of level land that he could see was usually empty. At the moment, military vehicles stood lined up in a formation on the dusty patch of earth. He heard gunfire in the distance and wondered if he was perhaps on an army base.
There was an almighty shout and something ran past him. He barely had time to look, his eyes catching a glimpse of red hair and white robes before the whatever-it-was jumped the gate in one leap. He watched it run down the straight road, and somehow it vanished between blinks. He was left staring after it, trying to discern what or who it was, and why they had been in such a hurry.
The answer to the last question came a moment later, when an entire army rounded the corner in hot pursuit. The fastest man ran into him and they both stumbled, but he managed to stay on his feet while the man fell backwards on his ass. The others had time to stop, looking at the man on the ground and then at him. He withered inwardly; as startled as he was, the armed men looked all the worse. They gave him a wide berth, a collective shudder running through the ranks as the aura around them grew apprehensive and fearful.
They all wore military-green uniforms, black boots, black gloves, and black bulletproof vests. In addition, they all wore red berets as well as a patch on their armbands in the shape of a red and black shield. Their ages ranged anywhere from nineteen to forty-nine, carrying all manner of weapons and standing in a semi-circle around their fallen comrade, though every eye was trained on him.
The man on the ground was perhaps in his early forties, strands of gray beginning to wind their way in with the mousy hair near his temples. He had a long face, crow's feet, a wide nose, and a lanky form. He wore the same clothing as the others, but on his lapel a golden pin gleamed faintly. The man groaned in pain and then looked up at him, the color rushing from his face. His brown eyes widened, mouth falling open to show rather large front teeth, and then he appeared to simply freeze.
"Are you alright?" he asked, unsure of the men's behavior. They were looking at him as though he were an escaped criminal or something! Of course, as far as he knew he may well have been a criminal, but right now he felt no desire to do bad things or hurt anyone. If anything, he felt a little guilty that he'd been in their way and had given their target time to escape. He held out his hand, intending to help the man off the ground.
The army around him gave a collective sound of wary confusion, and the man on the ground scrambled out of arm's reach and then stood, knees all but knocking together as he shook his head.
"I-I-I'm sorry!" he sputtered, his bloodless face breaking into a sweat. He held up his hands as if to fend himself. "P-p-p-please, I'm s-sorry!" he apologized, backing as quickly as he could into the other men, who surrounded him protectively, holding their weapons closer.
He let his hand fall, looking around at them in puzzlement. Every time he met their eyes, they looked away first and settled their gaze elsewhere. Why were they so afraid? He wracked his brain, trying to remember any reason that men with guns should be afraid of him. Perhaps that's what the two guns were for? A sudden thought seized him: what if he was another one of their targets?! He disregarded it almost immediately; if that were true, they'd have shot him by now. After all, his guns were pocketed and he looked unarmed.
"What's going on?" This voice was female, to his surprise. The men parted into two groups and revealed a young woman standing behind them, staring at them all in confusion. He looked at her, his stomach turning. She was so… beautiful. Her face was rounded, her skin creamy and pale, her eyes were bright and wide (they looked red, but perhaps it was a trick of the light), her body fit and curved, her hair golden and floating around her face like a halo, bangs falling across her forehead. Her clothing was different—it looked more like police attire than a military uniform.
She met his eyes steadily and he realized that unlike the men, she wasn't afraid of him. She moved closer, walking at a steady pace, and he found his eyes drawn to her. She had a certain grace that seemed almost inhuman. He found himself tuning her voice out and shook his head quickly, bringing his mind back to the present as she addressed him.
She asked him something, and he realized with a start that she wasn't speaking his native tongue. Now that he thought about it, the man earlier hadn't spoken it either. He sat for a moment, mentally translating the sentence in his mind, and understood that she spoke English. He knew English too, or at least he thought so. It wasn't his first language, but the more that he thought about it, the more he began to remember that he spoke many languages: French, German, Gaelic, English, Italian, Spanish…. How in the world did he know all those languages? Was he some sort of savant?
His expression must have worried the beautiful woman, because she spoke again in a hushed, hurried tone.
"Hey, are you listening?" she asked him, reaching up to shake him by the arm. "I said, what happened to the atrium?" He still didn't answer. "And where's the statue? Didn't you get it from her?"
"From who?" he asked, finally getting a grasp on the conversation. He had no idea what statue he was meant to get, or even what an atrium was, though he assumed she meant the building behind him. The woman's face slid from shocked to incredulous in a mere matter of seconds.
"From—" she started, and then looked into his eyes with an impatient expression, inching closer. "This isn't time for your little games," she muttered in an undertone. "Quit doing this to me in front of the others."
"Doing what?" he argued, feeling more frustrated than ever. The edge to his tone roused her, and the anger in her eyes flickered, the strange scarlet deepening to crimson.
"What's the matter with you?" she snapped, nose wrinkling. "It's not like you to be this way on a mission, Alucard." What in the hell was an 'Alucard'? He opened his mouth, and then closed it, and then opened it again, trying to decide what to answer with.
"I don't know," he finally answered. "I can't remember what's the matter with me, I suppose. I can't remember anything." The woman was pale anyway, but the last of the color left her face as well, causing her to resemble the hasty soldier from earlier. She looked from his disheveled appearance to the demolished building and back.
"A-Alucard," she half-pleaded, "That's not funny…"
"I'm not trying to be funny," he said, shaking his head firmly. It finally dawned on him what an Alucard might be. "Is that my name? Alucard?" That didn't sound right, but at the same time, it felt tolerable. Maybe it was his nickname? The girl blinked rapidly, her eyes roving over his face as if trying to find some hint of trickery there.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, feeling that he should offer something since he was causing them all such distress, even if he couldn't quite figure out the how or the why. "This isn't Hell by any chance, is it?"
"No!" the girl squeaked, a palpable fear in her voice now as well. "What—what—this isn't funny!" she repeated, hugging herself. Her hair moved and he caught the gleam of a pin at her lapel as well.
"So I'm not dead, then?" he asked her. She seemed to be the leader, as she was talking to him instead of the soldiers. It also seemed that they knew him, so maybe he was a soldier, too. He tried to work out if she was his superior as well, but the blank chasm in his mind was too great to cross, the knowledge lying just out of reach. "You see, I don't have a heartbeat, and—" He put two fingers to his wrist, "I don't have a pulse, either. That can't be good."
"Oh my God…" one of the men exclaimed suddenly. Another dropped a rifle on the ground, jaw slack. They were beginning to come closer, curiosity overriding their fears as they peered at him.
"E's got to be joking!" the man that had fallen said doubtingly. He turned to him, shaking his head. They all thought he was just playing a little prank, for some reason.
"That's just it; I'm not," he replied with the utmost seriousness, wanting them to understand his panicked state. "Here, see for yourself." He held out his wrist for the man to take. The men all leaped back as one, staring at the proffered hand like it would bite them.
"I think 'es serious, Commander!" the second man told the woman. He turned back to her, holding out his wrist for her to feel. She didn't move, her eyes wide enough that the whites surrounded the dull red irises. He took her hand gently and placed it on his pulse. She looked at it, and then at him, an expression of desperation crossing her features. She swayed once, twice, and then her hands grabbed his shoulders tight enough to bruise.
"Alucard!" He looked down at her, and she shook him like a rag doll. She was being rough, but she wasn't as strong as he was and it did little more than rattle his already rattled brains. He felt a headache pounding behind his eyes and reached up to run his fingers through his hair. A bolt of pain made him cringe and hiss, and his hand found a very large knot forming just above his temple.
"Alucard!" the woman shouted again, her voice pleading. "Who—who am I? What's my name?" she said quickly, her eyes boring into his. Her name? He looked closely at her, but nothing came. The seconds ticked by, and he felt as though he should answer, but still no name crept forward to present itself.
"I—I don't know," he admitted. She shook her head, shaking him again, this time hard enough to make him take a step back to steady himself.
"No! No!" she enunciated with each hard shake. "What's—my—name?! My name! You know me!" she blabbered almost hysterically. The men stood around them, staring at him now with confusion. A few of them looked almost angry, as if they still considered this to be his idea of a joke.
He tried; he really did. He squinted and winced and begged his brain to think of an answer. He even thought about guessing, hoping to be lucky. But his mind was a blank, his memory a large mass of gray nothing. He heard her choke back a sob when he didn't reply.
"I'm trying!" he yelled, pulling away from her hands and shaking her off. "I really am!" He heard the pleading desperation in his own voice. "I can't! I just don't remember!" A migraine began to throb in time with the knot on his head, and he touched it again and bit the inside of his cheek as the pain shot through his skull like a bullet.
"But—" She looked at him, tears swimming in her eyes. "I'm—I'm your Police Girl…." He let the sentence sink in, but it brought up no sudden recollection, no sense of who she was. "Don't you remember?" The tone of her voice was almost pitiable; she was clearly about to break down.
"P-police girl… no." He shook his head, grasping one of her hands as it went slack and fell from his shoulder. "I—I don't. I'm sorry."
"Well I'll be damned," one of the other soldiers said, scratching his head and upsetting the beret. "What the hell's goin' on? It's like we all just stepped into the Twilight Zone or something."
"What do we do now?" the one that dropped his rifle asked, finally bending down to pick it up. The woman didn't answer, her eyes still locked onto his face, hand limp between his fingers. He let it go after a moment and it fell, resting at her side. He turned away, not wanting to seem like a creep; after all, he wasn't sure what his relationship to her was. It would be strange for her if they'd maintained a steady work relationship before.
"Yeah, what'll we do?" "Who'll tell Sir Integra?" "How we gonna get him back to base?" "Are we supposed to stay and clean this up?" "We lost the target. Do we try and follow?" "What's the protocol for this kind of thing?" "I bet there's not one; he's never been messed with before."
The soldiers began to pepper the woman with questions all at once. She eventually turned to them, holding up a hand and shaking her head. They lapsed into silence, waiting with bated breath.
"I'll take him home," she said at last, her voice hollow and tired. "Maybe someone in medical can tell me what happened. I want you to direct the cleanup crew and then see if you can get a reading on where the target might have been heading. Don't follow unless she's stayed in the London area. Report back at shift change." She turned to the man that had fallen. "Harry, you're in charge."
"Aye'n," he drawled with a nod and a salute as the men rushed to complete her orders. "Get 'im straightened out," he added, motioning with one loose gesture. "I'll come see you before dawn." She nodded and he waved before breaking into a jog and heading for one of the larger jeeps waiting with the others in the lot. He looked after him, but before he could say anything a hand grabbed his firmly and he was dragged towards a black car half-hidden in the corner of the lot.
The woman opened the passenger door silently and he crawled in, his hand automatically fumbling for the lever that would slide the seat back. He found it and the seat jerked back quickly, slamming into place with a bone-jolting thud. He winced at the sensation, but at least he had room to stretch out his legs. The door closed and he found his seatbelt, looking out the tinted window at the wreckage of the (atrium?) and the soldiers continuing on their job as though nothing had happened.
Another door slammed as she crawled into the driver's side, looking at him out of the corner of her eye as she turned the key in the ignition. She sighed, her earlier authoritative tone gone now that she didn't have to face her men anymore. She said nothing, leaning her head against the steering wheel for a long minute as she put the car into gear. She seemed to brace herself, and then she stamped on the pedal, tearing out of the lot and past the now-open fence as if she were invincible. He found himself clutching the seatbelt with one hand, pressed as far down in the seat as he could go. Was she absolutely crazy? She was going to wreck!
She did slow down to a normal pace as the car went off the service road and up the ramp onto a highway. She merged with the flow of traffic seamlessly, one hand on the wheel while the other ran through her short locks. He found himself staring at the few inches of bared skin that were revealed as her skirt rode up and forced himself to stare out the window instead. The last thing he needed was for her to think he was some sort of pervert.
"Did you… did you want me to call you 'Police Girl'?" he asked, if only to break the silence. "You never told me what your name was," he added sheepishly. She turned and looked fully at him, holding her gaze so long that he became nervous. "I'd appreciate it if you kept your eyes on the road," he added hurriedly. "If I'm not dead now, I'd like to keep from being that way."
"You really aren't joking," she said softly, obediently looking back at the road. "I'm…. My name is Seras Victoria, but you always told me that I "was a Police Girl, so Police Girl would do"." She gave a watery chuckle, as if it were an inside joke between them.
"That sounds kind of callous, doesn't it?" he replied, looking down at his hands. Was he a mean person? It sounded that way; maybe that was why the men had reacted the way they had. This earned him another chuckle.
"I guess you're right," she conceded, nearly cutting an old man off to reach an overpass ramp. "But I never minded. It was kind of like a pet name for me. No one else uses it, besides Walter and Sir Integra."
"Who?" She glanced at him again, only to get a pained expression in return. She rolled her eyes, but focused on the road again.
"You'll see when we get home."
"Let's see what we have here, shall we?" The little doctor at the medical bay barely cleared his collarbone, the tip of her head not passing his shoulder blade. She had sat him down on the examination table, the paper creasing and crackling beneath him as she pulled a small stepladder over to the table and crawled up it with practiced ease. Her nimble fingers poked gently at his head, and he wasn't entirely surprised when she ran over the spot where the knot was—or had been, at least—and he felt no pain at all. After all, if his arm had healed easily enough, why not his head?
She hopped down and moved the stool around to the front, clambering up again and pulling a thin light out of her pocket. He stared at her face, looking at the smattering of freckles across her rounded, pale cheeks as she nearly blinded him with the light. She made him follow her finger with his eyes, then pulled down his lids and looked at them with a tutting noise.
"Not that I didn't expect it," she began, hopping down again and folding up the stepladder, "but he's perfectly healthy. No sign of trauma." The nurse sat at another examination table, sans paper, and typed ceaselessly on a tiny laptop. Every so often she looked up at the chart, brushing her scarlet bangs out of her eyes and chewing on her lip before returning to her click-clacking. Her lab coat, the same as the doctors, was standard issue, but he stared openly at the small cat pins that decorated every available pocket surface.
"Strip your coat off," the doctor demanded as she rolled a tiny cart of supplies towards him, past the policewoman. To his relief, this Seras girl had stayed with him the entire time—not that he was scared of a doctor that barely cleared the height recommendations for most carnival rides, but she was the only person that he even knew anymore. It didn't help that he'd only known her an hour or two.
He obeyed silently, and she motioned for him to take the gloves off too. He looked down at them, noting that Seras leaned forward in her plastic chair while trying to maintain an air of inconspicuousness. He wasn't sure what she was looking at him like that for, but he yanked off the gloves by their fingers and laid them next on his lap. He heard her take a sharp breath, but when he looked over she had a very neutral expression on her face.
He frowned, seeing the same marks on the gloves tattooed onto his hands. What in the world? He didn't feel like he was one to tattoo anything on himself, and when he looked at the markings, he felt—what? Pain? Anger? There were both there, in the back of his mind, but also something more like melancholy. He felt that even with his memories, something about the markings would have made him unhappy.
Touching the edge of the left hand with the tips of his right fingers, he nearly jumped in shock when he realized that they weren't tattoos, but very thin scars etched into his hands. They were barely puckered like a regular scar would be, but instead of fading to a pale off-color skin tone they'd darkened to black, for some reason. Why would that be? He stared down at them until the doctor came around again, this time with the nurse.
The doctor rolled up his left sleeve and shoved a blood pressure cuff up his arm, strapping the Velcro in before pumping it up and holding his wrist in her hands, keeping an eye on the ticking clock that sat on the wall above a poster of a caricaturized soldier with a bullet wound in his arm, the text above his head reminding that "The best way to get shot is to get a flu shot!" He wondered if they'd made the poster themselves, seeing as it looked suspiciously like one of the men he'd seen earlier in the night.
While the doctor took his blood pressure, the nurse strapped monitors to one finger, pricking another to take blood into a little handheld machine. He smelled the iron tang of his blood even from the miniscule drop, and he saw the policewoman's nostrils flare as she breathed in, her irises darkening in color while she gazed intently at his fingers. She seemed to come to her senses a moment later and looked away, her cheeks reddening as she began to gnaw on one of her knuckles.
"No blood pressure, no pulse," the doctor told the nurse in a bored tone, "just as I suspected."
"Of course, of course," the nurse replied in a tone of utmost academic solemnity that came off as sarcastic. "Consequently, his blood sugar readings are alarming, to say the least. Severe hypoglycemia; severe enough to be fatal," she concluded.
"Naturally, naturally," the doctor nodded in the same serious manner. "After all, a diet of little to no carbohydrates will kill anybody." She looked at him with a kind expression, her long lashes fluttering over blue eyes. "Alright, Mr. Alucard; what's the last thing that you remember?"
"I woke up underneath a pile of rubble and had to dig myself out," he answered stoically, trying to match their seriousness. "Before that, everything is a blank."
"And he didn't have any particular warning signs earlier, Miss Police Girl?" the nurse asked, adjusting her glasses on her nose. "Irritability, confusion, jitteriness, complaining of dizziness or fatigue?"
"No, nothing!" the Seras girl replied fervently, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. "Well, the irritability maybe, but he's always getting impatient with the soldiers. That's why he wanted to go into the atrium alone." Her eyes watered and she blinked rapidly. "I knew I should have convinced you to let me go too," she muttered, more to herself than to him. He winced and looked away, unsure if he even felt guilty or not. He couldn't remember doing it, so how could he feel the accompanying guilt?
"Doctor." He twisted around to look at the open door to the basement-level medical clinic. Two more people stood there, a woman and an elderly man. He stared at them both, hoping that one of their faces might spark something inside his brain, but to no avail.
The man was tall and slender, and despite his obvious age, something in his appearance gave off the air of being lithe and supple. He was pristinely dressed, his white shirt and gloves spotless and bleached, not a single hair out of place on his head, and a monocle resting over his left eye. His mouth was held in a manner that suggested he thought the sight before him to be amusing in some small way.
The woman was more severe, all but glowering at him as she looked in at the occupants of the room. She wore a dark green suit, her hair settling over her shoulders and flowing down her back in pale strands of platinum. She had rounded glasses that caught the light as she moved, throwing her blue eyes in and out of focus. She held a lit cigar in one hand, and took a slow drag on it before stepping into the room. She was the one who had spoken, her voice soft and even, yet demanding complete attention from anyone who listened.
"Hello, hello," the doctor replied in a cheerful tone, picking up the laptop and balancing it in the crook of her elbow. "I'm happy to report that your patient is, for the most part, completely and utterly dead."
"That's well and good," the woman said with a hint of an exasperated sigh behind her words. Clearly, she didn't take the same sarcastic pleasure from it as the doctor and nurse seemed to. "But I allowed the Police Girl to take him down here so that you could figure out what's wrong with him, not to waste my time searching for nonexistent vitals." The doctor raised one brow above the rim of her own glasses, her lips pursing before she continued in the same tone.
"In my professional opinion, this man is suffering from…" she checked the laptop screen, "amnesia." There was a dead silence in the room. He found himself catching the policewoman's eye, and she graced him with a cringing smile.
"I know that!" the woman in the suit shouted at the top of her lungs, her voice booming in the confines of the room. The elderly man coughed discreetly and looked away, hiding a smile as Seras buried her head in her hands, shoulders twitching. He realized that she was laughing, too. The nurse didn't seem to care if she hid it or not, her face contorted in mirth as she giggled openly. The doctor was the only other who didn't laugh, her expression solemn as she rolled her shoulders in an elegant shrug.
"Well, you asked." The woman took a deep breath and exhaled, smoke rising towards the speckled plates of concrete ceiling tile.
"What I meant was: why is he like this, and how are you going to get him back to the way he was before?" The doctor mused upon her questions a moment, setting the laptop back on the examination table before sitting down on a rolling stool nearby. She rolled back and forth absently, tapping her fingers together in front of her nose before she spoke.
"Trauma-induced amnesia isn't unheard of; though I think that you'll find this is one of the few, if any, cases that involve supernatural creatures. Now, in a human case, I'd have been able to gage the severity based on the injury itself: I couldn't do that here, for obvious reasons." She lapsed again into silence, prompting the woman to repeat her question.
"But what can we do to fix this?" The doctor looked up, and shrugged again.
"Nothing." This caused a reaction in the other three; the policewoman gasped, hands over her mouth, the woman dropped her cigar in surprise, and the butler tried to speak but choked on his words.
"We can't just do nothing," he finally managed to say, sounding completely flustered. "Y-you do know who we're dealing with, don't you!?" He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped sweat from his brow. The doctor turned to look at him where he still sat on the examination table. Her eyes met his and she sighed before looking down at her hands, tugging at the elastic on her wristwatch.
"The brain is strange. There's really nothing I can do—medically, anyway—to get him back to normal. In humans, memories can take anywhere from a few hours to a few years to return. Who knows? You might get lucky," she said, addressing him. "You might wake up tomorrow, completely back to normal."
"Am I normally lucky?" he asked Seras, who bit her lip and gave a gesture that he took to mean 'I have no clue'. The woman sucked in a breath through her teeth and lifted her eyes to the ceiling before her shoulders slumped an inch or two.
"Thank you very much, doctor," she said, turning look first at him, then at Seras. "I want both of you to finish up here and then meet me in my office. No dawdling, Police Girl," she added cooly, turning on her heel to head out the door with the man two steps behind.
"She's certainly a character," the doctor quipped cryptically before looking him over. "Go ahead and roll your sleeves back down, Mr. Alucard. I'll start printing the reports so that you can just take them up all at once."
Afterword: The best part of Amnesia-card is that I can make him as OOC as I want, seeing as he doesn't remember how much of a jackass he is normally. That isn't to say he'd be frolicking around picking daisies, though… just that he's less uptight without all those bad memories weighing him down.
I was originally going to save this for when I had it all finished, but since 2016 has kicked off in a writing slump, I'll post it now. Please let me know what you think! (Ketti, you can kick me later for posting this before it was finished, okay?)