Integra's summons had been tugging at Alucard, with increasing impatience, for nearly half an hour before he flowed into her office. "Master." At least the shades on the big west-facing windows were closed against the late afternoon sun, leaving him with dimness more than sufficient for his preferred method of entry.
Integra nodded to acknowledge his presence, but she didn't look up from the stack of papers she was signing.
Early rising always left Alucard in a bit of a capricious mood – at least, to the extent he experienced moods at all. After a moment, he drifted around behind the desk to peer over her shoulder, not bothering to let his feet touch the floor, nor to mime the typical human motion of walking.
When that failed to garner him any attention, he let his body float horizontally, as if reclining on an invisible surface. He spoke into Integra's ear. "You know, Master, at my age, I really do need my beauty sleep." He expended a minute fragment of power and warped his visage into something truly ghastly. Now if she'd just turn around….
She knew him too well. Integra passed a manila folder over her shoulder to him without so much as an annoyed glance, continuing to flip through forms with her other hand. "If you'd crawled out of your coffin earlier, Alucard, I might've had time for your games. Here – tonight's orders. I have a meeting with the bungling police chief on that case in twenty minutes."
Alucard plucked the black-tabbed folder from her hand. He rolled onto his back midair and spilled the contents out across his chest, letting his features relax back into something more-or-less human. Blurry photos of gore and shambling corpses in torn police uniforms. A still capture of a red-eyed man in priest's robes. The carnage could be nothing other than the work of yet another fledgling vampire. How utterly tedious.
"You'd make a much better vampire than this defective cretin." Idly, he flicked a tendril of darkness at the trailing ends of Integra's platinum hair. She was far more entertaining to harass when she was on a deadline. The sheer volume of paperwork that had to be filed before Hellsing officially took over an operation from civilian authorities was staggering. Alucard had once orchestrated the invasion of entire sheikdoms with less red tape.
At least that got him a growl in response. "Alucard, don't be absurd. And stop that." She dropped another sheaf of documents into a wire basket, to be "faxed" to a slew of distant departments. Alucard wasn't entirely certain how the electric beeping box – located just across the hall in a smaller office – managed to send documents across London in seconds, but didn't particularly care. The box had once made Walter curse, though, so he supposed it wasn't completely useless.
One photo pictured several bodies flung into the branches of a tree. The arrangement of corpses wasn't artistic at all. Sloppy work, that. "At the very least, I wouldn't let you wander loose, mucking up the countryside."
"If memory serves, vampire, you kept several 'brides' who did just exactly that."
Alucard drew a breath to reply, only to be forestalled by the sudden shrill ring of Integra's telephone. He gathered up the photos instead, shuffling them in his hands like a stack of grisly playing cards, while Intrgra seized the receiver from its cradle.
The reminder of his brides' demise wasn't painful anymore, not exactly. He had been deeply fond of them at the time, in his way, but none of them had been entirely sane to begin with – not that vampirism had done anything to stabilize their mental states, of course.
Still, considering the violence of the times, they'd all three been relatively innocuous for vampires, especially compared with Alucard himself. If anything, he'd kept them far too sheltered -- Jonathan Harker's amorous attempts on their persons had unhinged them more than anything Alucard had ever done. As usual, the history Integra had read bore scant resemblance to actual events. Alucard saw little reason to enlighten her.
Victors write the histories, after all. And Hellsing had written his.
Integra was shouting at the unfortunate caller, now. She'd picked up an unlit cigar and was employing it as a virtual weapon, stabbing it into the air to accentuate her tirade.
On the other hand, she did have a point. Most fledglings were considered eminently expendable by their masters. During the inquisitions some No Life Kings had, as they fled, littered their paths with fledglings to distract the hunters. How long had it been since Alucard had actually reared true offspring, rather than merely keeping pets?
Well. There was that standard bearer during the Crimean campaigns. She'd been torn to pieces by a mob, if Alucard recalled correctly. And… that martyr in the wake of the Silesian war, sometime around, oh, 1740. What had happened to her? Witchhunts, perhaps?
Of course Alucard was perfectly capable of raising a sane, independently-minded, powerful, self-sufficient vampire till the youngster was prepared to stand proud among vampires. He had no doubt of that. But did he have any examples to prove that to Integra? Hm.
What he needed, he realized, sitting up and scattering papers and photographs, was a way to prove he still had what it took to be a really superlative sire. He could show Integra that he'd neither smother his fledgling, nor abandon it. He could demonstrate that he allowed his progeny to maintain their own free will.
Well, that was simple enough. But now, how was he to find the opportunity to make a fledgling? Virgins were few and far between nowadays, and while that could be worked around -- as Alucard's own case certainly proved -- it took time and rather a bit of planning beforehand. Somehow, Alucard doubted that his conducting a bloody, two-day ritual in the basement would go unnoticed or unremarked.
Integra seemed to have sufficiently cowed whomever she was speaking with, and was snapping out a final set of orders. Alucard turned his attention back to the folder in his lap, sorting through the typical dross -- unit deployments and requisitions -- to finally pull out a topography map with the town name circled.
Hn. He knew the English had some unfathomable names for their villages -- Alucard had been to Poxwell, Dungy Head, Beer Hackett, Tolpuddle and many, many more during his decades with Hellsing. But what kind of a name for a town was...
"Alucard." She'd finished with the unfortunate bureaucrat. "I should have authorization to get troops to the location by twenty-one hundred hours for cleanup detail. But I need you to get to there as soon as possible. There may be a detachment of D-11 police still in those woods – if they're alive, they'll need rescuing."
"And if they're not?" He didn't really need to ask, he just liked to hear her say it.
Integra turned, and the look she gave him was leveled and focused, intense. "Search and destroy, my monster."
He grinned back. She'd feel echoes of the bloodbath through the bindings while he hunted, and no amount of self-control could hide her satisfaction from him.
Alucard opened a shadowslip to Cheddar, and vanished.
Notes: From what I've read, this might a little on the light side for a Hellsing fic -- but I'd like to think it offers a rather... novel rationale for Seras. ;) It's my first in this fandom, so any advice or help in pointing out any out-of-character-ness would be most appreciated.
I'm currently on the lookout for a beta for a couple other pieces I'm (slowly) working on, so if you're interested, drop me a line.