A/N: The second installment! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do NOT, in any way, own Hellsing or the characters in it. It is owned by Kohta Hirano, Dark Horse Manga, and any other business or people who assisted in creating these fascinating characters!
Wherein Seras's Mind is Enlightened
Seras condensed her atoms, slowly reforming back into her human form. Their shared lair, comprised of one large room that extended nearly a football field, contained two coffins, one fixed table, one ice chest filled to the brim with blood packets, and…two chairs and wine glasses?
She cocked her head slightly, turning to her master in confusion, "Are you expecting someone again?"
Alucard shuffled silently to his throne and lowered his aged body into the cushioned seat, "Luke Valentine served as a poor guest. I had Walter bring a second glass, in case my weak fledgling had an epiphany and realized that she, in fact, was a vampire," his eyes flicked to her in annoyance, "So, Police Girl, will you dine with the NoLife King?"
Seras's gaze fell to the floor, repressing herself and her desires in the process. There was nothing she wanted more than to please her master, but if that meant forsaking her humanity –the only thing she had left that wasn't taken from her– then she couldn't. Not yet.
"I did not take everything from you, Police Girl," Alucard reached into the ice chest and pulled out his first victim.
"No," she frowned, "No, you just took my life."
"You're welcome," he tore open the packet and poured its contents into the wine glass, "Immortality isn't given indiscriminately every day, but it will be the free prize at the end of this lovely glass, if you'll indulge me."
"Immortality," Seras spat the word out venomously.
Alucard's mouth upturned into a smile, "Camus once said that 'beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.' You, my fledgling, were given the gift to stretch the impossible –that beauty– over the whole of time. You will forever remain as you were the day you died, never aging one wrinkle," his demeanor changed, body now facing her completely as he focused on her full form, "Look at me in the eye and tell me I did you no such favor."
"So, did you know Camus? Did he know of vampires and the innate curse that comes with them? Did he know just what he was hoping for?" Seras challenged him. If she couldn't prove him wrong, then she could try and prove his source wrong.
Alucard chuckled, absentmindedly swirling the contents of his drink, "In that quote, he was not hoping. He was lamenting humanity's weakness and obsession with remaining youthful throughout the whole of a lifetime."
Seras, feeling her argument all but obliterated, decided to pull up the chair next to him, "Oh...I see..."
"And I might have bumped into him once. Hungary, 1956. He sided with the anarchists then, in support of the Hungarian Revolution," Alucard tipped the glass into his mouth.
"Hungary?"
He nodded, eyes unfocused for a moment, "Indeed. My homeland."
"I…" Seras considered her next sentence carefully, "I thought you were from Romania…"
"But born within the Kingdom of Hungary," he added, offering her a packet and glass. She stared at it for a moment, then shook her head.
When he sighed, she detected no impatience or malice; just exhaustion. Seras quickly thought of something to distract his mind off of her failure to drink with him.
"Umm, master?"
Alucard poured another bag into his glass, "Yes, Police Girl?" His tone was surprisingly benign.
"How…Do you like being what you are? I mean, that is to say, do you remember what living, and I mean living with a pulse, was like?" she decided to stop there in case he was about to grab her by the collar again to lecture her violently on how she overstepped her boundaries.
He inhaled sharply, causing her to flinch, "I was once a very passionate man –for my country, my people, and my religion. Some would call me insane, or worse, but it was this passion that drove me on to accomplish what others were too frightened to do themselves."
"Insane? You mean from your most favorite form of torture, impalement?" she guessed, looking at a single drop of blood trickle down an empty blood packet.
"Yes, on anyone I deemed my enemy, lest anyone doubt me committed mind, body, and soul to the Order of the Dragon. But the true genius of my actions was the fear I instilled in each of my enemies, " his voice changed slightly, from banal to a fervent edge.
"The Order of the what?"
"Societas Draconistrarum," Alucard murmured gingerly, as if remembering a forgotten lover's name, "The Order of the Dragon was a monarchical, chivalric order for selected nobility, created in Hungary. It was founded in 1408 by Sigismund, King of Hungary. The Order required its initiates to defend the Cross and fight the enemies of Christianity, in particular the Ottoman Turks."
Seras settled into her seat, "Wait, but that meant that you fought for Christendom just as Sir Integra does every day! You were technically on the same side...though I guess at different time periods," she pointed out. He did not seem to register her comment as he continued onward.
"It no longer mattered once I had turned," Alucard chuckled after a moment, face morphing from sweet nostalgia to fanatical, "My, Police Girl. I'm surprised you haven't caught on…You see, I had transcended my religion's most basic principles, thus tossing away the games of war. I had proven myself above humans and their petty standards. Why should I need to follow suit with humanity's laws when I had broken the boundary between life and death? I no longer heeded my human concerns, nor did I need to, and, with time, they all washed away."
Seras found her eyes widening, as if all was becoming clear, "Master…"
"Ah, clarity" he grinned, a lilt to his voice, "Nothing so becomes you."
Seras blinked, "My eyes…it's like I've been staring at a complex painting and only now am I beginning to see the knowledge and context behind it."
To this, her master's senses hummed with understanding, "Camus also said that 'Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object'."
"Please, master, tell me more." There was avid emotion in her voice, boiling just beneath.
Alucard, swallowing his second full glass, reached in for a third and fourth packet, "The passion I had for my country and religion transferred to the many victims I chose. Possessing each, they fell under my trance, allowing me the thrill of utter control over them. One by one, they dropped to their knees begging for more, and what elation overcame them once I allowed them a glance, a breath, a taste of immortality, only to be violently ripped away from them as Death punctuated the end of their pitiful lives."
Seras began to shrink in her seat. Watching her master transform from Integra's war dog to a hound seemingly frothing at the mouth to chew his leash free was getting scarier by the second, "Uhh…master…didn't you, umm, turn people? I mean, didn't you have several wives?"
He relaxed in his seat, forgetting the wine glass entirely and tearing a slit through the tops of the blood packets instead, and five at a time, "My celestial beauties…yes. I had several over the hundreds of years, but all of them paled in comparison to one."
"Lucy Westenra," Seras breathed.
Alucard nodded softly, "Aye," his eyes flicked to hers for a moment, "You look more alike than you could possibly imagine."
Seras averted her gaze, glancing down at her shaking hands, unable to read his tone, "Oh."
"She was my sealed fate," he lifted his gaze from her, freeing her of embarrassment, and elaborated when Seras frowned at the ground, clearly confused, "I may have arose drunken with my success as the powerful NoLife King, but it was she who made me the fool. Lucy had an aura about her that captivated even the best of men. The moment I dropped hints for the others to stay away they caught on to my weakness, nay, my obsession, with possessing her. Abraham and his cohort soon followed, conquering me in the process, thus sealing my fate and bondage to the Hellsings."
Seras found a lump in her throat, chest aching. As she remained on the receiving end of the wave of his pain through their mental connection, she battled her emotions futilely.
Alucard grinned at her, "Pitying the dead is an affront to the living, Police Girl. Do not pity me."
Seras reined in her emotions, "It's just…how can you stand carrying all of it with you?"
Alucard paused from drinking, his expression now turning methodical, "I don't. I have no possessions of any kind. I gave up everything when I swore to serve Abraham. The bonds of servitude are the freest release, Police Girl."
"Y-you sound like a machine more than a man," Seras stuttered as his head slowly turned to her.
His scornful scoff turned into outright cackling, spilling some of his drink onto the floor in the process, "What had you thought I was beforehand, my young fledgling? Appearing from the scientist who tinkered, tweaked, and redesigned my very being, I was, by all rights, more a machine than man. I was reassembled and redesigned for my new purpose: to serve and protect crown and country."
"So you're nothing more than a product of experimentation? A continuous trial and error process until the scientist had completely changed you into a true monster?" Seras forced herself from shaking in anger. How could the Hellsing family torture him so much that he emerged from the wreckage a new and even more terrible creation: Death incarnate? If Abraham wished to rid the world that was rife with inhuman freaks, then he should have done the world a favor and cut it at the source –her master. It would have done Alucard a favor to end him his pain as well.
"Police Girl," he shook his head again, clearly disappointed, "Again, you think too near-sightedly. This is my atonement."
And with such a brutally simple statement, Seras was rendered speechless again. Clarity.
"Well, then what do you think of Sir Integra and your oath to her?" she asked, almost casually reaching for a packet but stopping herself short.
"You mean my hateful indenture?" Alucard corrected, "Yes, Police Girl, I long to be free again. It is in the very nature of a vampire to be above humans, thus placing me in an unnatural state below one. If you don't believe me, then just simply look over where we are placed in the food chain," he added with a lethally charming smile.
"You have it down to a scientific fact," Seras lamely joked, though she saw her master grin in appreciation.
"Integra's inexperience brought much welcomed bloodshed to the table, but she was always too easily provoked. She gave me the rush of killing again, gave me the intensified haze and excitement that came with each casualty I had long forgotten in the cell they threw me in. Integra gave me the souls I needed in order to replenish my strength from that comatose state –something you will one day feel."
Seras faltered for a moment, "You mean the true strength of a vampire, once I consume my first familiar?"
Alucard placed the entire ice chest onto his lap and used both hands as he picked out the last remnants of his dinner, "Not just strength, but feeling. With each familiar comes his or her memories, knowledge, joy, anguish, rage, temperance, love –all of it yours. Yours to take, and yours to keep."
"So, Sir Integra gives you these," Seras tried her best to disguise her disgust, "these fleeting moments of raw emotion you truly wished for all along, and you didn't even realize that everything you just described culminates to what mortality is? Did you even realize that the answer to your equation had swung you around full-circle? In your theatrics and antics, your enhanced reflexes and concentration, sixth sense, physical adeptness, endurance, transformation, and undying nature, for all that, you never once realized that you were seeking for something that you already had previously? Mortality! It gives you everything you now wish you had kept! And you gave it up just to try and grasp it again!" Seras shouted, this time unable to rein in her emotions as she stood up and barked down at her master with Hell's fury in her eyes.
So, he had not only swung full-circle in whom he served –from protecting Christendom, to serving himself, to protecting Christendom– but he had done so also with his desire to transcend basic human need; in her master's arbitrary lust to want more, he ended up searching for something he already had but no longer possessed: his humanity and mortality. She wasn't sure if this sudden tantrum originated from angered pity for her master, or from the fact that after five hundred years –five hundred years too many– she could end up the same as him. Just as pitiful. Just as lost.
Just a war hound chasing his tail.
"You are walking in your own wake, my master," Seras stated, fresh pain so evident in her eyes that she had to wipe them.
And that, Alucard remembered, was the vampire's great paradox. Grinning at large, he sighed in the triumph of getting her to see a part of the truth, "More the fool I, no?"
She exhaled, flatly exasperated, and un-clenched her fists, "W-why? Just answer me why?"
He tore open the last drink and absorbed the life essence –someone's life essence– into his own, "Because, Police Girl, you'll soon find that it is never enough. Nothing is ever enough."
And once again, clarity. Seras relaxed as she felt Alucard relax, their shared mind connection soothing her into a lulled quiet. She nodded one last time, "I see, my master."
He manipulated her, contorted her knotted maze of a mind in all its anger at him, then unwound the ball of twisted thorns until he was able to bury it back into the ground. A beautiful rose would blossom from that fertile loam one day, and it would be his to keep for eternity. She first, however, had to see and comprehend what was charging at her. Truth was knowledge, and knowledge was power, but their secrets combined was always inevitable pain. If he couldn't teach her that, then he wasn't the NoLife King.
Thoughts aside, Alucard cleared his throat, watching Seras finally look up at him from his induced haze, rueful expression in tow, "Police Girl, would you be so kind as to bring me another ice chest?"
She scoffed in disdain, "Because it's 'never enough'?"
A mocking tone? Alucard glanced up at her, but she was already turning away to do what he bid her. The elder smiled. What irony. What she didn't know was that she was more the paradox than he, for he risked expelling from her the very emotions and feelings he wished to cultivate from her. But she did not change. She did not arise with drunken stupor at her new and powerful abilities, as he did. Her feelings had not dulled around the edges, eventually ebbing away completely and leaving her numb, as had been his experience. No, she had clutched onto her humanity, still ignoring her vampiric sixth sense, far superior than consulting her sentiments which still controlled her. What a death grip they had over her, and what a treasure trove for him to feast on for eternity.
But she would yet see what he spoke of, and quite soon, he could tell.
Settling into his throne, Alucard felt his eyelids fall to half-mast, body overcome with satiation and senses drowsy. Sleep soon took him from the waking world, where he would hibernate in a food induced coma until his body would wake him for the next hunt, which apparently was an entire aircraft carrier. More for him, then.
Ohohoho! I think that might've been my best work of this angle yet! Wow, that was sooo much longer than I thought it would be. They were supposed to talk about Millennium and how crazy the Major was. What happened? Hahaha
I didn't think I would capture anything correctly, but hopefully I did. Let me know if you enjoyed it!
Seriously, I don't know what you're thinking. As much as I'd enjoy being Alucard and reading your mind, I don't have that power...nor do I have the NoLife King at my disposal.
*cries*