Dog Daydreams

Summary: Pip Bernadette has a rare moment of klutziness, but luckily Seras is around to help him clean up the mess he's made. Cuteness ahead.

A/N: This was hard to do, I still haven't gotten Pip and Seras's characters down pat yet. Did I get Pip's accent alright? I haven't watched the English OVA but I know that he does have a slight French accent. They may seem a little childish here, but I am feeling silly today so blame the author (Merde fuck, shit, at the beginning). I'm not particularly satisfied with how this came out, but suggestions and reviews would be appreciated greatly. Thanks for reading!

All characters © Hirano Kouta

II.

Brown Paint

-

Thud. CRASH.

If Seras Victoria had a heart, it would have jumped straight out through her throat at the earsplitting noise, the sound augmented by her enhanced vampiric ears. She almost dropped the Harkonnen on her foot in the midst of cleaning it, but managed to catch the elongated barrel before it made contact. The young Draculina had been on her way to the training barracks to pick up some spare cartridges for her gun before she had been scared shitless by the cacophonous crash that had emerged from the target room.

"MERDE!"

That sounds like Captain Bernadette, Seras mused. She started walking towards the target room with a quickened pace, short blonde hair flapping out behind her. The Harkonnen she placed in the nearest artillery cabinet for later use. Once she reached the room she peered in with wide cerulean eyes.

"Umm, Mr. Bernadette? Captain? Are you alright?" Seras blinked at the spectacle before her. The captain of the Wild Geese, dressed in casual jeans and a SoCo's shirt, was rubbing his leg and mumbling curses under his breath in a variety of different languages. Seras noted the fallen targets, some broken, and thick colorful puddles of spilt brown paint. She began to formulate a pretty good idea of what had happened.

Upon her entrance Pip looked up and a tinge of rosiness immediately bloomed on his tanned face. "Ah, hello, Mignonette," he greeted sheepishly, stubbing out his cigar. "Fancy zees, huh?"

"Captain Bernadette, what happened here?" Seras entered the room, meekly stepping over pieces of former intact targets.

"Eh, I apologize," Pip began, wincing. "I was painting ze targets and I fell off ze ladder… and zey all collapsed." He looked down at his paint-speckled boots.

Seras groaned and slumped her shoulders. "Captain…"

"I know, I know. But look on ze bright side, Mignonette," he allowed a smile to lighten his face. "Not all of zem are broken!"

"You are an idiot, Pip Bernadette." The young vampire strode over to him and hauled up the fallen ladder as easily as if it had been made out of styrofoam. Then she bent over and began picking up the dislodged pieces of wood on the floor, arranging them into a pile in the corner. Pip tried to avert his eyes as she bent over, but he couldn't resist such a lovely view.

Blowing her blonde bangs from her line of view with her bottom lip, Seras straightened up, having removed the broken target fragments from the floor. "We'd better fix this mess up before Integra-sama finds out," she huffed.

The mercenary blanched at how the Hellsing master would react if she discovered her targets to be incapacitated. "Uh yes, zat would be best," he mumbled, lifting himself up with difficulty. His leg throbbed where the ladder had made painful contact, but he ignored it. He'd had much worse.

"You don't have to help me, Mignonette, I can do zees mys—"

"—Haven't I told you enough times to call me Seras?" Sometimes the Frenchman could really grate on her nerves. The fledgling whipped her head balefully around at him, eyes flashing a nocuous crimson. "I am not your 'Mignonette', I am not 'Police Girl', I am not 'Draculina!'" She snapped. "Is it too much to ask for someone to actually address my by my name around here?"

Pip quickly apologized, knowing that he had inadvertently hit a rather sore subject with the police girl. "Sorry…Seras."

The vampire paused in the act of lifting a fallen target, slightly taken aback. True she had chastised Pip on numerous occasions about the topic of her identity, repeatedly requesting that she be called by her true name. But she hadn't expected him to actually do it. Her anger ebbed, replaced by a mixture of confusion and other traces of emotion that Seras couldn't quite place.

"Whatever. Let's just fix these. First let's clean up this spill. After that I'll stand these targets up and you take care of those, then we can paint."

"Rodger that." Pip stood up and limped over to the target closet to retrieve a mop, secretly glad that he didn't have to take care of this mess all by himself. Seras watched him lope as he sloshed the spilled paint around, eyeing his leg.

"Um, did the ladder hurt you, Captain?" She asked, hating the edge of concern that marinated her tone and gave it a tenderer flavor.

Pip blinked his eye and raised his eyebrows. "No, no, zees iz nothing," he paused, eyeing her slyly. "Are you worried about me, my little Mignonette?"

Seras's cheeks darkened, annoyance surfacing. "W-who would worry about you, pervert?" She spluttered to cover up her previous gentleness. "You can go break both your legs and I could care less!" A thick silence enveloped the room when she had quieted down.

"Zeriously, you need to loosen up, girl."

-- -- --

After an hour Pip and Seras had mopped the floors and placed most of the targets back into their appropriate positions, gluing the ones that had sustained only minor injuries and discarding the rest. Seras found the work to pass quickly and with ease. Bernadette didn't bother her while they worked, which was surprising for him. Perhaps he didn't want to provoke any more outbursts. Or perhaps he didn't want another flick of her finger to crack his skull open.

Seras began to notice something about Pip as they repaired the targets, something that she didn't even think that he was aware of himself.

The mercenary captain would sing as he worked.

It wasn't loud, just a throaty murmur under his breath—but Seras's hypersensitive, undead ears picked up the sound as clear as day. Sometimes Pip would hum words with his melodies, always in French. The vowels and consonants were warm and rich, the language flowing expertly over his tongue and through his lips in rolling cadences and phrases. The melodies were always different, but each one was unique in and of itself. They were haunting, far from atonal, full of harmonic color and strangely sublime.

Seras could not understand the words, and wasn't sure that she wanted to. Just the sound was enough to satisfy her ears. It was beautiful and gentle, so juxtaposed against the captain's gruff exterior that it made one wonder who he really was inside. He had removed his traditional western hat, and auburn hair hung silkily in his face as he worked. The thick reddish braid was draped around his neck as usual so it wouldn't become cumbersome and in his way. Finally, all of the targets were as good as new (as good as they were going to get, anyway).

"You should put that voice of yours to better use instead of insulting everyone with it," Seras remarked as she hauled two new unspilled buckets of brown paint and large brushes over to the targets.

Pip took a clean brush nonchalantly and surveyed her with one sparkling green eye. Seras also picked up a brush and dipped it into the bucket, standing in front of a faded target next to him and began to paint.

"Hey now, don't be mean. I don't inzult everyone," Pip protested innocently, his eye wide. "Only you."

Seras closed her eyes. "Please, Captain. You were so pleasant when we were setting up the targets, don't make me flick you again."

Pip chuckled as he remembered his first encounter with the Draculina. It was his own ignorance that had gotten him owned by a single finger. The captain, with a brush in hand wiped sweat off his brow with his forearm.

"Why won't you call me Pip?" He asked offhandedly, brush swishing up and down the marker in front of him. "You inzist that I call you 'Seras,' yet you won't even address me by my real name eizzur." He drooped his eye shut in a playful wink.

"For a number of reasons," Seras retorted. "One, because you are my superior Captain Bernadette, and two: referring to you by your first name would mean that I've stooped to your level and allowed myself to become subject to your perversion."

Pip was silent for a minute. He squatted down to dip his brush once again before answering.

"Ah, I see." His tone seemed almost thoughtful. "You know anozzer name I can call you by, Mignonette?" An emerald eye glinted impishly.

"What might that be?" Seras stopped her painting and turned to face the mercenary captain, hands of hips.

"Shit-head!" he proclaimed happily and promptly flicked his wet brush at Seras, resulting in a splash of brown paint spattering her hair and face. Pip cackled gleefully as Seras wiped the paint from her eyes in shock, which quickly turned to ire.

"Captain, you…you…" She was drowned out by his merry gales of laughter, which served to only enrage her further.

"See, what did I tell you? Your head iz covered in shit so you must be a shit-head!"

Without thinking Seras scooped her brush into her bucket of paint and whipped the brush at Pip. He stopped laughing as paint entered his mouth, spitting brown. When he had cleared his mouth he smiled a leering grin.

"Oh, you are getting it now, Mignonette," Captain Bernadette said, chuckling good humouredly. "Zis iz war." He discarded the brush and picked up the entire bucket of chocolate-colored paint.

Seras eyed him incredulously. "You wouldn't…" She began.

"Try me," Pip replied smoothly, levering the bucket so that the open top faced the vampire. Seras quickly dropped her brush and lifted her own bucket.

"Just because you are a girl doezn't mean I won't," the captain sniggered. He eyed her bucket watchfully. She was dangerously close to throwing it at him. Hmm, Pip thought. One more push should do it.

"All of zat paint on you would make your uniform extremely clingy" Pip added, cocking his head. "I wonder zen if I would be able to see your nipples."

That did it. With a hoarse cry Seras hurled her bucket of paint at the Wild Geese captain, dousing him completely in a viscous brown wave…but not before Pip had flung his own bucket at her first. The result was an enormous splatter of paint that completely engulfed the two from head to toe.

The only noise that followed was the steady drips and plops of paint running down their bodies and spattering the floor.

Pip peeled his braid from around his neck, wringing it out distastefully and breaking the silence. "I guess we are both shit-heads now, eh, Mignonette?" He said hesitantly, getting ready to run if necessary.

On any other occasion, Seras Victoria would have relished in pummeling the living crap out of Captain Bernadette. The Draculina was actually about to do just that, but something stopped her.

It was just…

The captain looked so funny covered head to toe in brown paint. Thick trickles ran down his face and clumped his hair together, making him look completely ridiculous. Like a mud man, Seras's subconscious thought. She giggled. A shit man.

That got her laughing. And once the laughter came it didn't stop, only grew. Pip stared as Seras, drenched in paint, doubled over in fits of laughter, pointing at him. It dawned on him then that he had never heard the vampire laugh before. It was a shrill noise, but cheerful and bubbly. It was a pure sound, a childish mirth. Perfect for the Mignonette, Pip mused. And not to mention she looked absolutely adorable when she laughed.

It was not long before his laughter joined hers, mingling amicably and harmoniously together.

"You—you look like ze biggest pile of shit!"

"Look who's talking, goose droppings!"

They stood doubled over, laughing at each other for the longest time. Eventually after they had quieted down some, Pip strode over and wiped some of the brown paint from Seras's face. He rubbed his nose against hers playfully.

"I actually zink you look lovely in brown…Seras Victoria." Sapphire eyes widened. Her full name sounded so lovely with his voice and his accent, enchanting, almost. It was like the songs he sang, only with her name as the words. Seras didn't move.

"I would kiss you know, but we are bot' covered in paint," Pip remarked jokingly. His tone was affectionate. "Can you wait until later, Mignonette?"

The use of her nickname snapped Seras out of her daze. "U-um…" she stammered, thankful that the spread of paint covered up her blush. "I need to get changed," she muttered, heading quickly toward the door.

She would have left too, if it hadn't been for the elderly figure that stood silently in the doorframe, blocking their exit.

-- -- --

"Would you care to tell me," Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing began calmly, biting her cigar, "how two subsidiaries, both who have accomplished the roughest of missions, solved the toughest of cases, and exterminated the most malicious of ghouls, cannot accomplish something as simple as painting a wooden mannequin?"

The two figures, still soaked wholly in paint, stared guiltily at the Hellsing head, trying not to drip their sorry selves onto the tiled floor.

"Never mind, I do not even want to know," Integra grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose underneath her glasses. "Just get yourselves cleaned up and out of my site for the remainder of the day."

Pip and Seras gave hurried mumbles of "yes sir" and bolted out of the office. Once clear of Integra's quarters, Pip turned to Seras with a wide grin.

"Mignonette, how about we shower together?"

End.