Follow me through fear and darkness; follow me through your worst nightmares; follow me down the rabbit hole. Wonderland is a place of monsters and nightmares—there are no smoking caterpillars or Cheshire cats. Something much worse awaits in the land beyond the rabbit hole, as Seras well knows.

They leave her medical blood on the table in her room, and it sits, just waiting to be ripped open. She doesn't deny that it tempts her, that she craves it with all her being. She likes to say it is an effort of will that flushes each package down the toilet into oblivion.

She'd like to say that, but it would be a lie—it's some primary instinct that drives her, the survival instinct that let her shoot her own men and live with it. Seras was born to outlast her enemies, and her human portion, the survivor, refuses to be blotted out by the new bloodlust that consumes her.

She is torn between the monster she is becoming and the human she pretends to be. She claims sometimes to forget to sleep in a coffin, or to forget that she can't touch silver, or to forget that going to church on Sundays like a good little Protestant might be a bad idea. She's always been a bad liar; she knows this, her master knows this.

He's always been there, watching over her shoulder, his yellow glasses gleaming, his mouth stretched into a sadistic grin, laughing. He always seems to be laughing, making a point to be amused. Seras tells herself not to care, that it shouldn't matter, that she is fighting the inevitable—because when it comes to a fight, her master always wins.

To him she is simply cop, police girl, the little girl wielding a gun far too large and lethal for her. To her he is master, the dark force that commands her, the will behind the gun she shoots. But that is not reality; that is merely what they choose to believe. Reality tells them that she and him are one in the same. They are fighters, creatures willing to sacrifice—even to shoot their own men—to ensure their own survival. They are the victors because they know and realize that in order to live, sacrifices must be made. That, after all, is why she still exists, why she is still shooting away at the undead with gleaming silver bullets.

She knows this and Alucard himself knows this, but they will never admit it. She finds they both prefer to stay in their assigned roles. Her—the servant, the cop; him—the master, the monster. It is easiest that way, less painful. Sometimes events try to shake these positions, try to move them. The fates like to play tricks on them; they like to see what makes them tick.

She remembers carrying his severed head through the dark, unfamiliar halls, attempting to out-limp her death. She wonders if they think this is funny, if those higher powers consult on their long wooden table, devising the world's future, snipping away at the woolen threads one at a time until one of them smiles and says, "Let's see what our old friend Alucard is doing."

They take him apart piece by piece, limb by limb, and watch him grow back in cruel fascination. She imagines their dark eyes hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses, fixed in fascination as they watch the dead come to life. They, the cruel old men in expensive suits who plan the doom of the world in an expensively furnished room.

Wonderland is full of illusions; it consists of one-way mirrors and dead ends. The blood-sucking demons aren't the evil nightmares she imagined—the true evil comes from the powers controlling them. The term 'human' doesn't mean much to Seras anymore; it's just a word in a dictionary.

At first, she likes to think that she is keeping the human portion of her alive by refusing to drink the blood, that if she gives into temptation she will lose something vital. It is only now that she realizes the human portion of her never mattered; it was destined to destroy itself in the end. By denying herself she becomes better than her enemies—she becomes better than the monsters she fights to destroy, she becomes better than her masters.

Her master thinks she is weak, that her starvation is just a way to commit suicide, that she can't deal with the path she chose. He tells her once that she had chosen to forsake the light that day—that she had chosen to wander as a condemned monster in the shadows of death and fear.

He holds out his gloved white hand in the dark room and asks her if she dares to follow him, if she dares to see what the world is really like. He dares her to follow him down the rabbit hole where wonderland awaits, where the card soldiers wield their guns and bare their teeth—he dares her to follow him to a place where the rot of corpses is so common that a creature ceases to smell it; a place where blood soaks her clothes and sticks to her pale skin, never seeming to wash out.

She sometimes wonders if, like Alice or Dorothy, Hellsing is nothing but a dream comprised of a bumped head or sheer exhaustion. Even as she takes his hand and follows him through darkened hallways, she believes she is dreaming, and that one day she will wake up to bright sunshine and blue skies. In the meantime, she survives, and kills when she has to.

Murder isn't exclusive to vampires. Humans have been known to dabble in it as well.

Author's note: I told you I don't do one shots, this is now more of a… drabble? Thanks to my beta, who edited. (Beta: Revolutionary concept. Beta. Editing. Beta. Editing. Pah. I'm a genius.)