04.
Look in the basement, her father had said, There you will find the instrument for your salvation.
"I'm sending him to Yorkshire," she tells Walter, who has for all intents and purposes, been mostly quiet about the whole Alucard affair.
It is two nights after and Integra's hurt has ebbed away like a bone set wrong. She hasn't seen Alucard since or told anyone about the exchange between them, but somehow Walter seems able to tell.
"It is what he was made for," he agrees, "And it's all he knows."
Integra stares hard at the papers in her hand. There is a thick pause, before Walter speaks again.
"What will your orders be?"
That earns him a confused glance.
"…orders?"
"For the hunt. He needs them."
She stares.
"…my lady?"
"Sorry, it's just," Integra frowns, almost to herself, "You make it sound like he's an animal."
Walter looks surprised for a moment. Then bemused. Alucard is not an animal, no, Walter had learned that decades ago. But he isn't what Integra keeps trying to see him as either.
"That was not my intention."
There is a silence.
"Tell him to kill it," Integra grips her father's gun, "Tell him to find and kill it."
She deliberately takes her time coming to Yorkshire. Alucard's harshness was as hurtful as it was mystifying, and it inspires only helpless rage inside Integra that cannot be released. His words replay in her head for hours and somewhere along the line it begins to sound like she has hurt him, though it is clearly the other way around.
Admittedly, mentioning Abraham had been distasteful, but she had tried to apologize and that certainly hadn't gone well. What could her great-grandfather possibly have done anyway? Walter has told her of the Hellsing contract, how the blood of her family has given this creature power beyond reckoning. They have made him strong. She can't reconcile that with the piercing hatred she'd seen that night.
So it is with a petulant need that she drags her feet. Her father's deep, scolding voice reverberates in her skull, calling her irresponsible and unworthy of devotion. Integra has no defense for it, all too intent on spiting Alucard in any way she can, even if it is just to annoy him by making him wait.
Only, he does not wait.
Initially there seems nothing amiss when they arrive. The grass is torn up in several areas and fragments of wood and glass litter the ground from fences and windows.
The house though is intact and the soldiers are standing next to it, staring at something in the backyard. When Integra counts heads they are all present. She only realizes something is wrong when one of the men suddenly sprints away and vomits into a nearby bush.
"What's going on?" she demands, but no one answers.
The Commander stares lifelessly at her. "You took your time, miss."
Integra begins struggling her way past the men. Walter makes a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but his eyes are filled with pity and resignation.
"What's going on?! Why are you all standing here? Where—"
Her voice dies abruptly, cutting off with a choked sound.
The Yorkshire vampire is a little boy.
He is wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt. A picture rests in the middle, a fire truck maybe, though most of it is obscured by the skeletal white glove resting casually over it. The end of the shirt is curled and partially shredded, something white and bone-like pokes out from the bottom.
A brown smear of intestines trail to his little cargo pants, a few meters away at a tree stump.
She can still see the small, white feet dangling limply out of the ends.
Integra walks forward, though she cannot feel her legs doing so. The grass rustles crisply, stiff with blood.
"Alucard…" she whispers and it occurs to her in some distant, detached corner of her mind that it is the first time she's said his name.
The dark figure leaning over the boy stirs and raises its ebony head.
Alucard's face is smeared a bright, glistening crimson. When he shifts, his hair spreads and pulls away from the boy to reveal a child's blue-white face. Needle teeth line the front of his cherubic little mouth, but Integra cannot process them. All she can process is how his arms are still feebly struggling against Alucard's hold—prey trapped by the lion's paw.
"What are you doing?" she asks softly.
Alucard spares the boy a fleeting glance, like he may as well have been ashes already. He looks at her with hollow, alien eyes.
"Killing it."
Integra is silent. She chokes a scream back down her throat along with the burning taste of bile.
"No," she says, "you're torturing him."
Alucard's lip twitches almost like he's going to laugh, but then his expression suddenly smoothens out.
"I suppose," he agrees, nonchalant though his voice is a black hiss, "Don't you want it to suffer? It killed five of your men. "
It did. Integra knows this creature is no boy. As pink as its little lips are, beneath them hide lines of shark-like teeth. Under the fringe of its blonde hair are eyes filled with blood and evil. It's not a boy. It's a monster.
But that doesn't make him look any less like a boy.
"Stop," she whispers, "It's cruel."
"Cruel?" he tilts his head, eyes bright and cold, "You think I am cruel?"
The soldiers suck in one terrified collective breath and she can see Walter tightening his gloves out of the corner of her eye. One small part of Integra wants to run behind him, bunch his vest in her hands and scream until her throat bleeds.
But all of her knows that it's too late for that.
"Finish this," she says, failing at keeping her voice from croaking.
Alucard licks blood off his long, bony fingers. "But I'm hungry."
A shudder rattles deep through Integra's core. Oh, God. God.
"I don't care. Finish it."
He turns to her and his smile is formed from all the darkness of the world.
"No."
There is a long, terrible beat of silence. A small whimper is heard from somewhere amongst the soldiers. They look like they're suddenly realizing a twelve year girl is all that can protect them. Walter takes another step forward, wires slithering down his hands, cursing himself for letting it get this far. She is only a child after all and she can't be expected to—
Integra pulls her father's gun out of its holster.
"I won't ask again," she whispers, aiming it between Alucard's red, red eyes, "Finish this."
The soldiers shift in surprise and Walter stops dead in his tracks. The creature just stares at her.
She racks the slide. "Do it. Now."
"I thought you were afraid of guns," he says, almost conversationally, "Do you think you can kill me with that?"
"I'm not trying to kill you," she says, barely keeping the tremor from her voice, "It's loaded with blessed silver-tipped rounds. A shot to the head is going to hurt."
Alucard smirks almost bitterly, showing red-stained teeth.
"So is this how it will be then? Will you hurt me now?"
Integra doesn't reply. "Finish him."
He stares at her again for a long, careful moment. There is something in his eyes—a little like disappointment and strangely, a little like relief.
Then he lifts the hand still pinning down the boy's torso and plunges it into his chest.
The sounds of ribs snapping send most of the men to the bushes, though Integra does not (cannot) move. The boy screeches like an animal, rattling Integra's skull, and in one final burst of desperate anger, his claws suddenly spring upward and rake deep down Alucard's shoulder.
He explodes into gray dust a second later.
Alucard never even looks at him.
"As the master wishes," he says, and his flesh wounds seal with a hiss.
Integra spends the car ride home in a numb haze. Walter talks urgently and quietly into his phone next to her. It sounds like he's calling the doctor again.
She turns away from him, jostling the gun that still lays haphazardly in her lap. She keeps remembering Alucard's eyes against the blue tint of the window.
The coldness in them was unfathomable. Gone is the creature that sat next to her on the rug—the one that told her she could become great. Perhaps he had never existed in the first place.
Perhaps Alucard's words to her that night on the stairs were not so much a loss of control, but the loss of a mask.
Vampires lie. It's in their nature and her father had never let her forget that. She doesn't know why this should surprise her, or even more why it should hurt.
But it does.
He hears Walter long before his chamber door opens.
"I knew you would come eventually," he says, swinging a leg off his coffin.
"What are you trying to achieve?" Walter demands, ignoring him, "Does it please you so greatly to ruin the innocence of children?"
He almost scoffs. Walter and his delusions. He's somehow become more idealistic with age.
"She was never meant for innocence, Walter," he blinks slowly, "You know that."
"And you couldn't spare her what little she had left?" Walter spits, eyes blazing.
He sees in them the desperate anger of a father—Walter, who is ruthless and cruel and forgives no one.
Some part of Alucard still wonders in vain if he had ever felt such a way towards his own children. He can't remember. His memory is full of holes, full of blood and snow and Abraham's ice-cold smile, stretching out into eternity.
"I am what I am," he says simply, truthfully. "Wouldn't you rather she learn this sooner than later?"
Walter is silent for a long beat.
"Are you afraid?" he suddenly asks.
His eyebrow arches slightly, darkly amused. "That she'll hurt me? They all do."
"That she'll save you."
Alucard laughs, loud and harsh and it echoes like a nightmare across the walls. Even if some part of him remembers her eyes, blue-white, and the gun in her hand. Even if some part of him knows she is destined for greatness, like how weakness had been destined for himself.
"No one can save me," he says, and it's without grief, without regret. A simple statement.
Walter looks at him with abject disgust, and perhaps the slightest bit of pity.