Request(s):

I'd like to see something a bit fluffier!
More A.S. fluff, please!
Aluseras fluff; I need more pls!

The Definition of Normal

Seras never really considered her master to be "normal" by any means. And she wasn't alone in her opinion, either; 99% of the people who encountered Alucard at least once in their lifespan thought him to be about as abnormal as you could get—the other 1% just though he was batshit insane and steered clear of him. And as far as she could tell, he did everything in his power to make sure that they kept on believing it.

She liked to think herself to be about as average a young woman as one could be. In fact, she liked to think herself to be about as average a vampire as one could be, too. Her life didn't change much after being having her neck mauled, really. She still got up in the morning—er, evening, and showered, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, checked herself out in the mirror, and got dressed. She still ate at least two wholesome meals a day—even if those meals were liquid in form.

The Nazis attacking was about the most unusual her life had become. Afterwards, she was still average enough. She went out and killed criminals; it just so happened that those criminals were vampires, too. Once Alucard had returned, she'd went ahead and cut her losses, doing the whole "independent and singular blah-blah-blah Queen" thing he kept yammering about. It hadn't done much other than regrow her arm, though he insisted that she was more powerful for it.

But in any case, while she and Alucard were alike in some (highly miniscule) ways, she considered them polar opposites on the "normal—eccentric" scale. And that's really how the rest of the manor saw them as well; the soldiers often forgot that Seras was a vampire, unless something happened that made them remember. She wasn't sure why it kept surprising them—it wasn't like you saw young women with red eyes who could manipulate shadows every day. But Alucard seemed to make it his mission in life that they would never forget exactly who he was and what he could do. He always managed to find loopholes in Sir Integra's orders and cause a little havoc here and there, to the older woman's chagrin.

"Well, at least he keeps me on my toes," she would often mutter, her mind torn between amusement and exasperation.

"Life's never dull around here, that's for sure," Seras would reply, all the time wondering why his actions never bothered her as much as when he was her master. She just couldn't find it in her to be cross with him when he sent Integra into a rage-fueled rant; for some reason, she often managed to rationalize his misdeeds with a simple "It's not the worst he can do", along with a shrug. She'd long stopped voicing that opinion, though, as it only seemed to make the elderly woman all the more cross.

And it wasn't the worst he could do. Seras had a sneaking suspicion that he only played along half the time with being an "obedient servant". She often wondered if he treated it as a prolonged mental exercise; something to stave off boredom and make him think of ways to get around the orders. It was all one giant lateral-thinking puzzle that spanned across three or four generations. If that was the case, she had to give him props for being a really good actor; most of the time even she couldn't help but think that he was bound by the blood of his captors.

But… that sort of power that he held—was magic strong enough to hold it back? She couldn't help but have her doubts, and she knew that he'd probably never reveal the secret to her. Not that she wanted to know; that sort of information would be hard to swallow!

And yet, for all this, there were a few rare occurrences that grounded her to reality, and a few certain facts. That he had been a human at one point, no matter how hard he struggled to hide that fact. His body worked the same as hers—well, not exactly the same, but the basics were there. And his mind, while being a skewed, corrupted black hole that remained perpetually in the gutter, was still the mind of a man: not some omnipotent being. And there were some things that you simply couldn't hide. Those were the sorts of things that surprised her the most.

Case in point—one time, they were working hard on an incredibly boring stakeout. The vampire in question had to be the dullest being in all of Christendom. For the past twelve hours, they'd just sat and stared at the house where the male was staying, looking in the sitting room window. For the past twelve hours, the vampire had been reading a book. That was it; the only movement he made was to turn the pages. It was beyond mind-numbing.

Seras had been watching him. After all, this vampire had twelve families' deaths to his name, and if he'd ever get off his lazy arse and move on then they could stop him before there was a thirteenth. But right now, he seemed content to read his damn book, snuggled up next to a roaring fire while she sat in the cold wintery night next to Alucard, who refused to speak to her and instead kept telling her to "keep her mouth shut and watch" whenever she started to talk.

But a girl could only take so much of something more boring than watching wallpaper dry. Finally she stretched her limbs and cracked her back, all the while keeping her eyes more or less on the man. He didn't know they were there, naturally, and from the looks of it he still had at least five chapters left in his book. Alucard wouldn't begrudge her a small break.

Even so, she glanced at him to make sure he wasn't about to scold her for squirming about. Then, shocked at what she'd seen, she turned her head fully and gazed openly at him, frowning. He wasn't even watching the window at all! Well, no, that wasn't true. His eyes were trained on the man inside, and he'd even taken off his sunglasses since the moon had been obscured by clouds. But he was… dare she say it? Alucard was daydreaming.

His eyes held a certain look; she was sure she held the same look many a night where there was nothing else to do but stare out the window of the manor and watch the trees sway in the breeze. It was a look of absence; he might have been there in body, but his mind was far away, occupied with something else.

She wasn't sure why it surprised her so much. Of course he could daydream! Who didn't? Everyone sat around with their head in the clouds—Sir Integra, the soldiers, herself… why not him as well? But the sentence 'Alucard is daydreaming' sounded absurd in her mind, as if the very thought itself was fallacy.

She watched him for a while, laughing internally when she realized he was completely oblivious to whatever she was doing. He'd stopped focusing on her at all—she could probably get up and leave right now, and he wouldn't know it until he came back to reality. She wondered what he might have been thinking about. Was he merely lost in thought? Was he reliving an old memory, or maybe devising some plans for a future night?

She hardly believed that he was being imaginative. He wasn't much of a dreamer, not like she was. She spend entire nights devising alternate universes for herself, or wondering about the what-ifs of life, and how her existence might have been different if so-and-so happened instead of the way it'd really turned out. That was something even her overactive mind couldn't imagine Alucard doing. But who was to say what went on behind those crimson irises? Even when their minds were connected, she could hardly figure him out.

She'd snapped him out of it—literally, her fingers popping right next to his ear loudly. It had done the job, and he'd jerked out of his reverie, but it had also been heard by the vampire they were supposed to be watching. The male's book had clapped shut, his mustard-colored gaze moving to the window, and they'd both had less than a second to get out of sight before the entire mission was compromised.

"Get your head in the game," she'd chided him, lying flat against the ice-shrouded ground. He'd snarled at her, but said nothing in return, and that had been the end of it. Neither of them mentioned it again, and the report said nothing of it. The only thing the experience had done was give Seras a new bit of insight to think over whenever she spent time trying to figure the ancient vampire out.

That wasn't the only type of incident, though. Another one that had surprised her for no apparent reason was when they were stuck in the shaft of an old dumbwaiter. It had been a long an incredibly eventful night for them both (thus the reason they were piled on top of each other in the shaft while a swarm of Revenants groaned below, their bony claws scraping at the metal), and the tight quarters hadn't helped either of their moods. As it was, she'd been first up the shaft, having overtaken him in a rare burst of speed and had managed to clamber halfway up before being stuck like the Grinch in a Who's chimney.

He'd followed up right behind her, kicking at a Revenant that'd latched onto his boot. Seeing that she was stuck, he pushed her up and tried to dislodge her, but the shaft was too old. They'd heard a rending of metal and suddenly Seras dropped like a rock onto his head with a scream, nearly snapping his neck. Somehow, he managed to brace his feet on either side of the shaft and catch her at the same time, resulting in him being right-side-up and horizontal, her being upside-down and vertical, and both of them hopelessly tangled.

Her legs were above his head and her stomach crushed into the side of the shaft, the brunt of her weight on her chest where he'd managed to balance her on his stomach. One of his thighs was near her right hand, the entire leg from the knee down pushing against the shaft while his back pushed against the other side, his left boot barely fitting onto the head of a loose stud. The shaft groaned around them, threatening to break apart at any minute and send them both into the hoard of mindless reanimated corpses beneath them.

From her viewpoint, she could see them through a gap between his arm and his chest. They growled up at her with glazed eyes, their drooling jaws snapping like piranhas. They reached up for them with rotting hands, the flesh stripped from the bone in most places and the ends of their fingers rubbed down into sharp points. They were worse than Ghouls—at least Ghouls managed to have some sort of thought process going on, and could hold weapons and follow basic commands.

"Ghouls still have a soul," Alucard had said earlier while they were battling them (as if she'd cared at that point). "It's only a mere shadow of a soul, but it's a soul nonetheless. These creatures are what happen when barely-sentient dark magic manages to find a hole into our world and takes over a dead body. There's no mind, no soul—nothing but a desire to feed and grow stronger." As if proving his point, they'd been overwhelmed with a second wave of them and had to retreat.

But none of that mattered now—they just had to get up the shaft and out the ceiling. After that, they could order the warehouse to be burned to the ground, along with the creatures inside. She tentatively thrust out her shadows, trying to form wings in the small space while also trying to keep from smacking him in the face with them. They twisted up and hit the rusty industrial fan at the top of the shaft, knocking one blade loose. It hung by a mere bolt, swinging lazily and sprinkling them both with a fine layer of dust.

"Hold on," he muttered, craning his head to look down the shaft before his arms twisted tightly around her stomach. She squeaked and wriggled, but he held on tightly. "Stop that! We're going to drop. I have an idea." His shadows glided up the sides of the shaft instead of the middle like hers had, and she realized what he meant to do.

"Is that going to work? There's only eight feet of buffer room between us and them!" she protested, looking down at the monsters before trying to see his face. She could only see his chin and the bit of his glasses that hung over the edge of his cheekbones. The dust still rained on them and she wiped her face on her shoulder, her nose suddenly accosted with the musty scent of time, smog, and bird.

"It's going to work. Theoretically," he added with a hint of his usual sneering mockery. "I've never actually carried someone else before, too. This should be in—int—" he hesitated, and she frowned at him before he let out a loud 'achoo!' that echoed up the shaft. He sniffed and shook his head. "Interesting," he managed to finish.

She didn't reply, her mind still trying to wrap around the fact that she'd never actually heard him sneeze before. Then, about the time she realized what he'd said, he stopped putting pressure on the shaft and they both fell. She gasped, unable to scream as the rotting stench of Revenant flesh grew and the stale air whipped at her face.

She slowed, surrounded on all sides by something resembling cooled caramel; the sensation was that of falling into molasses, but being sucked in and surrounded not by stickiness, but by lukewarm smoothness against her skin. She opened her eyes, but she was surrounded by inky darkness, her only sensation that of touch. Even the smell had fallen away, leaving only… nothingness in its place.

As quickly as it had come, it was gone again, and she was dumped unceremoniously onto the ground. Picking herself up, she felt a sudden vertigo and swayed where she stood, her mind still trying to decide which way was up and which was down. The same firm hands that had grasped her throughout the whole ordeal now steadied her shoulders, holding her upright.

"Well, that was interesting," he whispered near her ear as Hellsing soldiers came running towards them. "Give the order, Police Girl." She was still seeing double, but managed to open her mouth to address the two sergeants standing before her.

"T-torch it. Total loss," she ordered blearily, and the man/men turned to shout orders at the soldiers and their "twins". She waited until they'd moved out of sight before sagging back against a sturdy chest, closing her eyes so that she didn't have to look at the world around her, which was still spinning a little too quickly. "Ohhhh, my head… is it always as bad as that?"

"Maybe if you're upside down every time you do it," he admitted. Her stomach lurched as he picked her up, holding her against him for a moment. "Keep your eyes closed." She obeyed, not sure if she could keep her supper down if she opened them a second time. The sensation swept over her again, lasting longer than before, and then she was being placed on something comfortable and soft. My bed, she thought as she smelled the familiar aroma of energizing soil.

She opened her eyes to see that she was in her bedroom, twin Alucards standing over her with streaks of dirt down their cheeks and a layer of dust hanging onto the brim of their hats. She laughed weakly at the sight, watching in satisfaction as the two slowly melded into one and her wooziness began to leave her.

"I'll give the report to our master alone tonight," he announced. She nodded, the gesture almost too much for her poor dizzy head.

"And now we know what happens when two people phase at once," she said quietly, closing her eyes. "Let's not do that again for a while." She heard him chuckle, and then in another moment he was gone from the room, leaving only dusty footprints behind.

Things like those made her think sometimes that they weren't quite such polar opposites after all. He sneezed and coughed, hiccupped and yawned just like every other normal person. He daydreamed and got confused and laughed at things he found amusing (many of which included her in some way or another). She knew for a fact that he brushed his teeth and showered, having been shacked up in hotel rooms with him for one reason or another. Combing his hair was another story, but on most nights he hardly had enough to comb as it was.

He enjoyed reading books and listening to music, just like her. He didn't care for parties, but he knew how to dance, and was much better at it than she was. She'd persuaded him to get onto a military trampoline once, and aside from his confusion on why humans would enjoy such an asinine thing as jumping up and down in place, she believed he didn't hate the experience.

When they were in Brighton on a mission, she'd even gotten him to come down to the beach with her. He got his ankles wet in the waves, though he refused to go any further and had shouted at her when he realized she'd slipped past him and was in the water to her waist, refusing to listen to her arguments that the sand under her feet was still technically English soil.

They'd fought a vampire in an amusement park and while he refused to ride any of the rides afterwards, he still caught sight of them both in a funhouse mirror; it was the first time she'd ever heard him really laugh at something without being cynical about it. To be fair, it was a very funny sight, but the surrealness of it wasn't lost on her.

So yeah, maybe he was more average than she gave him credit for. He was just a really, really good actor.

Afterword: Wracking my mind for fluff, I began to sneeze and this whole oneshot was born. More coming soon!