Chapter Nine: D contemplates the meaninglessness of existence.
The fire department managed to extinguish the blaze that had engulfed most of Hellsing manor by the time morning came. The auxiliary weapons stores remained untouched but the main stash was now buried by metres of stone and wood. Alucard's ability to transport materials when shadow-jumping was limited by his wards, so Integra was unoptimistic about reaching them any time soon. She had enough materials to outfit thirty men and Seras still had her Halconnen, hastily thrown outside before she'd hefted Integra out of the blaze.
Her home might have burnt down, her suit might have been covered in ash and burnt in places but honestly, she'd been in worse scrapes than this.
Alucard returned and she waved away the assistant she'd talking to. He had taken far longer than she'd expected just to silence one vampire. His down-turned lips told her that things were not going to be quite that simple today. Hopefully there was only a hidden coven of some sort, perhaps Iscariot if they were unlucky.
"Well, Alucard, give me the bad news."
"Horatio summoned the DRBs to London, which explains their endemicity to England. This also explains why they disappeared after we investigated the Wepcom lab. He's keeping them there, on an inaccessible floor beneath all the rest."
"I note that you are referring to him in the present tense, do you have good reason?"
"Like I said, he's keeping them there." Alucard frowned even more, "They're unpredictable monsters, the only thing keeping them in place is Lord Horatio. His death won't guarantee that they return home, it will probably worsen the situation by removing what little control we do have."
"Can you summon them yourself once he's eliminated."
"It's been thousands of years since someone tried to control those animals, they won't allow it to happen twice within a few weeks. If we can chase them back to their home dimension and kill Horatio, they won't bother returning."
"So we shall be needing man-power then."
"I can distract Horatio for as long as it takes, the DRBs can be incapacitated by the Geese so long as they disrupt their olfactory sense."
"That simple?" Integra allowed her incredulity to enter into her voice.
"Simple, yes. Easy, no. Even if I had found and identified them from the beginning, we would still have been forced to find Horatio first and remove all the creatures in one step."
"Seras is in the boot of my BMW, I'd like to wait until evening so she can participate." Integra's fingers began to twitch for a cigar, now that she finally had information to work with, "The Geese will need all the help they can get and she fights like a tank."
Integra then remembered that all her fine cigars were likely burned into cheap black powder, possibly soggy from the fire-hoses, as of last night.
"Well, tell me what the odds are on this one."
"0.3 likelihood of success with elimination of 90 of hounds or better and minimum casualties. 0.2 likelihood of fatalities regardless of a positive or negative outcome." Alucard spat out the numbers as one might when reading from a newspaper, "I can give you more accurate numbers after we arrive there and I have a better idea of who will be participating."
There was a pregnant pause.
"Perhaps we shouldn't call James, then." they replied, in unison.
-------
Jareth rolled out of bed feeling a little worse for ware. He had ingested a liver killing quantity of whiskey last night and had barely managed to get home without chucking in the taxi home on the previous night. The telephone rang with all the kindness of an anarchistic cannibal in a room full of lesser royals. Jareth answered it to make the horror stop.
"Hello?"
There was a pause.
"BURNT DOWN? HOW?"
Jareth grabbed some instant coffee and a mug, then he put the kettle on.
"Yessir, I can be there by 1600 hours."
He pulled a spoon from his cutlery drawer and started spooning out sugar and coffee granules.
"No, Sarah isn't here…"
He dropped the coffee jar on his foot.
"No sir, I won't impugn Sarah's honour… Yes, I promise… I doubt I'd like that to happen very much at all, sir…"
-------
James stood in his kitchen, making pancakes. Lily waddled through the door and lowered herself onto the nearest chair. The kids were still asleep, tired from a late night spent hearing stories. James slid the last pancake onto the laden plate and carried it over to his wife. He picked up some lemon slices that he'd cut while he was moving. He put both in front of her and then sat there, hands cradling his face, while she squeezed the slices for juice and sprinkled sugar onto the pancakes. She smiled back.
"Don't you want any, love?"
He shook his head.
"In a minute, Sweetheart."
Lily reached over so he could put his hand in hers.
The phone rang.
"I wonder who that could be?" Lily asked, as she reached for the cordless phone on the table.
She hit the receive button.
"Who is it?"
There was a pause.
"Mum! How are you doing?"
-------
Walter gathered 25 men for the mission, at Pip and Sir Hellsing's recommendations. They were hoping to use Lord Horatio's predictable nature to lure out the DRBs. If he believed he was under siege he was likely to "throw his weight around in the manner in which an angry housefrau throws crockery," according to Alucard. The men were currently being carefully outfitted with gas masks. Walter was insisting that they use some very specific smoke-bombs that he had invented for the dimension rippers and nobody wanted to find out just what they could do to a man. They were hoping to be ready by sundown, so they could leave almost immediately after Seras awoke. She was wearing her mask while she slept and it was it was muffling her snoring beautifully.
"Are you sure about including Jareth, sir?" Walter allowed himself the luxury of his paternally-driven distaste, "He is exceedingly hung over."
"I am aware of that, according to Pip the man fights better when not impeded by his better judgement." Integra smiled, "Besides, if this proves to be untrue he will no longer be able to harass the secretarial staff."
"How shrewd of you." the corners of Walter's lips quirked upward.
"Let it never be said that I don't think of you, Walter."
-------
"Well, men." Pip began.
A very loud and feminine "A-hem!" interrupted him.
"…And vampire, we are about to participate in the systematic removal of the DRBs from merry England. While Alucard distracts the putain that burned down our illustrious centre of operations, we shall be forcing the rippers to return to their own dimension or eliminating them. Once Alucard determines that they are gone, he will silence his own target and we will all be able to get home by breakfast. Any questions?"
Someone near the back raised a hand.
"Oui?"
"What's a putain?"
"An whore."
Everyone murmured in an affirmative fashion.
"Who's ready to kill some monsters?"
The Geese, and their vampire, roared.
-------
Horatio distractedly flicked through the various surveillance cameras that covered the Wepcom complex. He'd spent a worried few hours coming to the conclusion that Dracula's scare tactics were just that. Now he was really bored. Even the beasts were lying around sleepily all over the place. He flicked through to the main foyer again. Nothing.
Wait…
Over in the corner, there was someone creeping over to the control panel he'd hidden behind a painting. They were tall and female… Light coloured hair… Wearing a mini for some bizarre reason. Probably just a thief, he snorted and reached for the alarm button. The girl turned around.
Mother of crap, it was that arm-breaking, hellion bitch!
Horatio unleashed the hounds, screaming girlishly all the way.
-------
It had been a long time since he'd heard silence.
The pain had started to recede a few hours prior but Lefty had yet to speak. His mind felt clear, for the first time in many years. D wondered if this how monks felt after you left them on a mountain for a while. Did they simply run out of distractions, like he had, and start asking themselves questions? D had space to wonder about his place in all this chaos. Part of him felt that he should be outside contributing but things had been going smoothly long before he arrived and everyone was likely coping without him now. If he didn't do the job, somebody else would. If that was the case, though, what was his purpose in life?
How long had he been this broken?
The world he'd left behind was still filled with monstrous abominations. From the vampires to the humans to the beasts they had created. Everywhere he went he was surrounded by their madness and if not theirs, the shades left by his father to torment him. Did Alucard even remember these things? Did he remember what he had left to the people? Those poor children in Tsepesh… Those images of his mother during his own conception…
D had been drifting through the ether for a long time, his memory shot to pieces. Part of him knew it. The humans were affected by it too. The years flew by like seconds. He bought medicine and almost used it years past its prime on that hunter girl, Leila? Was that her name? If his hand had not reminded him he might have caused more harm than good. Sometimes he would dream of a spice, of gray metal, of a cross and he would know that something important was eluding him.
Now he at least had someone to ask about such things. He could wait this out. It was almost comforting not to have to go anywhere and the stone walls were closer to 'home' than anything else had been since he'd arrived. He was going to let himself sleep for a while and then he was going to wake up. It was a very welcome thought.
-------
Horatio sensed him before he saw him.
He tried to put off turning around for as long as possible. Denial was completely under-rated, he felt. Sadly, it was very difficult to ignore someone when they started talking to you.
"It's a lovely night, isn't it?"
Horatio decided not to be gracious about it.
"Frankly, I think fucking not." he drew himself up to his full height, "And your hat looks bloody ridiculous, you self-righteous bastard."
-------
Seras had her mask on the moment she smelt wet fur. When she looked towards the left and right corridors, she could see about twenty of the beasts. Most of them were bloody enormous, at least up to her waist, with noses like a microchiropteran bat. She was sort of glad that Integra had given her those encyclopaedias for Christmas or she wouldn't have had any basis for comparison.
She reached toward her belt and pulled off a small sphere labelled 'The Bomb'. She really wasn't sure it was wise to let the thing go off while she was still in the room but she also didn't feel it was right of her to question Walter's newest tool of war. The dimension-rippers all perked at the sound of a pin being pulled and dropped to the floor. Seras rolled 'The Bomb' towards them. The closest monster sniffed it, curiously.
Closely pack solid-something expanded into gas and threw Seras into the bullet-proof glass doors. It did kinda hurt but at least she wasn't howling like the eyeless dogs were. If they weren't so violently scary she'd have felt bad about it. The Geese rushed in through the front entrance, Pip stopping to give her a thumbs up, guns blazing. Even in all the confusion, Seras saw half of the creatures disappear into thin air.
Seras pulled out a pistol, there was no space to accommodate the Halconnen, and started aiming at the ones that popped back into existence above the heads of the Geese. It was so strange, they didn't make a sound when they did it. She tried to keep herself focused on abrupt movements but everything was an abrupt movement… She twisted to the left and had to pull her arms at the last minute to avoid shooting Pip.
He was riding one of the damn things, how the hell had he managed that?
"Seras," he shouted over the din, not bothering with radio or bothered by the mask muffling him, "They have gothic castles in their dimension!"
Oh, sweet Jesus.
She shot the monster Pip was riding in the frontal lobes. Pip was thrown over the reception desk and Seras fired another round at a smaller DRB that was dropping in on him. It shifted dimensions and avoided the shot. Seras swore. Pip appeared from under the desk and glared at her.
She was going to have words with him later.
I've been trying to keep the AN down to a minimum but I thought I'd throw in a few things here.
Firstly, thanks to everybody who reviewed and special thanks to Greece for the crit and Spas for being so nice about it the whole way through. I know a lot of people have been asking about the Harry thing, so I'll give a quick explanation here.
D isn't D's real name, in the first book Lefthand thinks it's an interesting name for him to pick. Given that, I decided that it'd be funny if the pretentious, socially-awkward little bunny was over-compensating for a name he did not like. Hence, Harold. It embarasses him and watching a godlike figure get knocked down a peg amuses me with great justice. Consider it my revenge for how insanely over-powered he is in the books (he's a far more even character in Bloodlust) and another cause for his decision to emotionally detach from... well... everything.