–Abraham van Helsing in Stoker's Dracula
"I finally stole a kiss…!"
–Pip Bernadette, Volume 7 Hellsing
Pip opened his eye. He supposed that he was probably not dead, since he was moving, but he wasn't breathing, so that didn't speak highly of his being alive, either.
"Shit!" It wasn't the being undead part that had him cursing and pulling himself off the floor to lean heavily against the wall while he tried to figure out what the hell to do. It was knowing that there was still a war going on and that he'd been lying down on the job.
After everything that had been lost today, he couldn't just sit around moping. He'd worry about the implications of being undead later. Much later.
He talked himself through the shock. He'd been in shock before. Even if shock for a vampire was probably different than for a human. There were some universals. First, assess the situation; then assess your needs. Determine how to meet them and do it.
Pip snorted at himself. That was exactly as straightforward and as difficult as it sounded.
The situation was bad. He didn't hear anyone else moving anywhere nearby. His radio was dead. He looked at its bullet-shattered casing and dropped it on the floor. No regeneration for electronics.
No movement, but also no gunfire. He wondered if any of the Geese were still alive. He had a memory that couldn't be his of telling a few survivors that he was back. That had to have been wishful thinking; he'd had a bunch of violent and disturbing dreams before he'd finally woken.
Who knew you dreamed when you were dead?
No humans. He'd take that as a temporary given. Having no humans around spared him a distraction. He wasn't sure how he was going to feel if he saw his men and found that they made him hungry.
Now there was another problem.
He'd lost a lot of blood before he died. Even more if Seras had done as he told her to and drank his blood. He had to assume she had done so. Good girl.
Good for her, but the hunger twisted his gut. He bent over it and grimaced until he decided that the pain wasn't going to pass and he was going to have to push past it.
The clinic would be the place to go. That's where they stored the blood drawn from the troops to feed the vampires, and of course, for injured soldiers. Even if Hellsing had been without power for…
How long had he been dead? Pip looked at his watch and smiled mirthlessly. Of course it was broken. Everything was broken, wasn't it?
Defeatist thinking didn't do him any good. There was still tacky blood on the floor. It couldn't have been too long. The stench of blood and death was heavy in the air. A mercenary for all of his adult life, Pip was mostly accustomed to the smell, but this new side of himself that raised its head to sniff at it hungrily was disturbing. So this was what it was to be a monster?
It was insidious.
He walked heavily through the wrecked hallways. The barricades were still intact, but no one answered him and he heard no humans behind any of them.
He spared a prayer to a God whose existence he doubted in the name of his men. Please God, let them live or give them peace in death. His men had earned at least the latter if they could not have the former.
The mercenary captain was pleased to see the barricades into the medical wing still intact as well. Even though it meant no small amount of work to dismantle some of the booby traps he'd ordered, and then to move enough of the piled furniture and debris to slither through the small space he cleared. Once on the other side, though, he realized the room wasn't empty.
Sitting on top of the medical blood refrigerator sat a dark haired man – vampire. Pip brought up his pistol with its pitifully few remaining bullets. Shoot first, ask questions later was a good watchword when it came to vampires. The suddenness with which his weapon was torn from his hand and the glint of light on the vampire's monocle when he shifted to catch the pistol told Pip whom he was facing.
"He said you would be hungry." Walter jumped lightly down from the top of the refrigerator and stood in front of it. "It was simplest to allow you to come to me. I am pleased that my assessment of you as a clear thinker under stress was correct."
"Who said?" Pip was trying to catch up with this additional reality shift. He was a vampire. Walter was a vampire. It seemed to be going around like the flu. What about… "The Boss? Is she okay? And Seras?" He didn't bother asking about Alucard – either that vampire was okay, or the world was just going to end soon, either way, worrying about him wasn't relevant.
"Sir Hellsing and the police girl are both unharmed. The Count and the Catholic regenerator you encountered are nearly done with their attempts to kill each other. After that, they will turn their attention back to Millennium." Walter's lips twitched slightly at that.
Pip had never been very good at reading the butler, but vampirism leant him a sensitivity he had not had before – Walter was amused. He'd heard about the old man's younger days. The whispered words, Angel of Death, made much more sense looking at the vampire standing there. There was much more to the old stiff than met the eye.
Not that he looked all that old or stiff now.
"How'd you end up like that?" Pip waved a hand at Walter and approached him. The other vampire was standing between Pip and his first meal, but the new vampire found himself cautious for some reason he couldn't put his finger on.
"War is a transformative experience," Walter answered, waving a hand in return at Pip's condition.
"It didn't transform my clothes." Pip looked down at his own bloodstained and holed clothing and back at Walter's immaculate attire. "Did you raid a pimp's clothier?" It was a strange time to decide to change looks, he thought as he eyed Walter's new black pinstriped shirt.
"No. And we'll get you cleaned up soon enough." Walter nodded decisively to himself. "We should go now."
Pip frowned and shook his head. "Just let me…" …get some blood, did not leave his lips. Something was vastly wrong with this situation and he didn't feel comfortable showing the butler his weakness.
Instead, he casually turned away to look around. How had the butler even gotten in to the barricaded room when Pip had been forced to dismantle the barrier to get in?
Reading the other man's face, Walter pointed up. "I made my own entrance."
Pip turned his eye up to see the neat hole cut in the ceiling, a glimmer of stars showing on the other side of a sandwich of insulation and roofing. The hairs on his nape were rising with every passing second. The mercenary grew more and more certain that this was not the man who had hired the Wild Geese, nor the man who had served Hellsing for longer than Pip had been alive (or dead.)
"The refrigerator…?" Pip looked pointedly at the appliance behind the butler. He needed to drink, if this was going to turn into a fight.
"Oh, yes," Walter said, making no move to get out of the way. "I assume you're rather weakened by the experience."
"Not so much." Pip said as casually as he could. "But you know how it is in war – bathe when you can, sleep when you can, and bloody well eat when you can because you don't know when you'll get another chance."
"I do know how it is," Walter agreed with a faint smile. "One of the other things you learn in war…"
Both Pip and Walter were proportionately enhanced in speed and strength by their transformations, which left the Angel of Death still ahead of the undead mercenary. He raised his hands and brought them down like a conductor directing a symphony. Silk-fine threads dropped over Pip and drew tight, binding his arms to his sides.
"…is to never allow your opponent an opportunity to regroup, refuel, or rest."
'The fuck? Despite having been uneasy about Walter, the sudden transition from pleasant words to unpleasant action was shocking. Pip was alive because he wasn't taken by surprise easily, but his attempt to dodge was brought up short by sharp stings around his neck and in lines across his body where the butler's wires cut easily through cloth and skin.
"What are you doing?" Pip stood motionless, waiting for the twitch of wires that would send him flying into bloody gobbets.
"Following orders." Walter secured several wires around the mercenary and retracted the rest. "You understand how that is."
"What orders? Whose orders?"
Pip growled in frustration when Walter moved behind his left shoulder and leaned in to speak in his ear. Choosing his blind side hardly seemed accidental. "My master's. In terms a mercenary might understand, I have a new contract."
"Oh you're a right fucker then, aren't you?" Pip twisted his head to try to see Walter and cursed his missing eye for neither the first, nor hopefully the last time. "Switching sides for a few less wrinkles and some pointy teeth."
"As you say, Bernadette. I serve of my free will. Be that as it may, it's time to take you to meet your new principal. They'll get your contract straightened out as well. Who will you be in the new order of things? We already have a Captain. Mercenary. That seems likely."
Walter put his arms around Pip and hoisted him easily off the floor. The shift drew some of the wires tighter and the smell of his blood was strong to the enhanced senses of the two vampires. Walter purred in the mercenary's ear and licked a streak of blood off his neck where a wire bit into his flesh before carrying Pip across the room to stand under the hole in the ceiling.
Pip's attention was drawn to the slumped figures of three of his soldiers; they had been blocked from his view when he entered the room. Each sat propped against the wall with his head neatly in his lap. Apparently, Walter couldn't be bothered with ghouls.
"You're thirsty, aren't you? I know how the hunger burns even when I have had my fill." Walter licked the bloody lines off Pip's neck. "And your skin is healing over the wires, slowly, slowly."
The butler held Pip in place with an arm tight around his waist while his free hand slowly rubbed over Pip's chest and abdomen. "It's going to hurt more than you would believe when I pull those wires out of your flesh," he murmured in the mercenary's ear. "If I don't pull quickly and cleanly, pieces of your flesh are going to tear out in shreds with the wires. Even regeneration won't touch the excruciation at first.
"Weak as you are from not feeding, healing will be a slow agony. What would you do if I pulled the wires loose now and let you go? What would you give me for that gift?" Walter nipped at Pip's earlobe. "Hm?"
"What's the game?" Everyone had always assumed that Walter was gay. It hadn't really mattered. What the retainer wanted to do with his free time was definitely his business, but this… this was making his business Pip's business.
"You can guess." Walter's hand slid lower in its explorations. "How pragmatic are you, mercenary?"
"You didn't get his libido calibrated right, Doc." Schrödinger sat on the desk next to the monitor on which Doc was watching Butler's retrieval of the bonus vampire, drumming his heels against its metal drawers with a loud, and increasingly annoying clatter.
The scientist made an annoyed noise and pushed the catboy's knees until he stopped the aggravating drumming. "It was hasty work but more than good enough. You heard him to tell the mercenary he serves of his own will. Only a genius like mine could achieve that kind of reversal of loyalties so quickly."
"Ja. Ja. You're a genius, Doc." Schrödinger jumped down off the desk and climbed the back of the man's chair to watch Butler and the newly-risen mercenary. "But I'm the one who told you the new vampire would be there. I saw it when the girl killed Lieutenant Blitz.
"Come on. I earned it," he cajoled while the two vampires on the screen exchanged more banter.
"You can't have one every time you do something clever, Warrant Officer. You aren't a kitten any more." Doc tapped a few commands into his keyboard and watched Butler stiffen in pain just as he was opening the mercenary's trousers.
"Pleeeease," begged the catboy in a whine that verged on a yowl.
When their servant stopped his advances and picked up his captive to jump through the hole in the ceiling to return to London, Millennium's scientific genius turned back to his other creation. "Alright, Warrant Officer. But this is the last time."
He turned back to his screen and his monitoring of Butler while Schrödinger scampered after the catnip ball his creator tossed toward the far side of the lab.