A/n: The penultimate!


11.


Serve me, Vampire King…


Integra runs. For how long, she has no idea, but by the end her skirt has caught on just about everything it can and flutters around her shins like tattered ribbons. The cool lash of the night prickles her bare skin and everywhere and everything smells of blood.

With a gasp, she stumbles to a halt, steadying herself against a tree. Only a small speck of her registers the old woods sprawling out in front of her, a thick darkness extending on and forever. The rest is busy cursing every inch and corner of the Hellsing name.

Abraham for all his cruelty and her father for all his ignorance. Herself for ever believing she could make up for what either of them had done.

And Alucard too, because he is sightless with anger and hateful and empty. Because he is gone, in every sense of the term save physically and she'll never find him. Not ever.

Integra clenches her teeth, hand curling into a shivering fist that bruises against the tree bark.

A child's spark in her still protests that it isn't right.

It isn't fair.

"No, it really isn't, is it?"

The voice breathes across Integra's nape. She will remember later, the ice in her belly, how she realized she'd spoken the words out loud.

And the choking darkness that followed, she would remember that too.


"Where is she?"

The wires grip his neck, coarse silicon nicking his flesh, but delicate enough not to draw blood.

"You've grown disciplined, Angel," he notes idly, "Fifty years ago, my head would've been sliced off by now."

"The possibility remains," Walter eyes him with icy disdain, "Where is she?"

Alucard stares back. He doesn't answer but Walter presses on.

"What did you say to her?"

"Only what she asked of me. About that child."

"No." The wires shudder and a sweet bloom of pain opens at his throat, "No. If she'd realized, she would've never…" Walter's eyes flash, his jaw clenching. "You're the only monster here, Alucard."

He smiles, faint and hollow, as his eyes shift towards the distance where the old woods begin, where he'd seen her run.

"I know."

Perhaps this is not the answer Walter had been expecting, because he blinks for a moment. The filaments wrapped about him twinge and slacken, before tightening again.

"Find her," he says, softly, "She is your master yet and you will find her and pray that she remains untouched."

Alucard doesn't know where the grin comes from, but it stretches ugly and black across his face, "Or what? Will you kill me, little reaper?"

Walter's gaze doesn't falter. It hasn't since he was ten years old and alone, a grubby orphan pulled from the streets into this black and twisted world. Yet even after all this time, deep down Alucard knows Walter is still afraid (humans always are) but he hides it so well that it's quite refreshing.

"I know you cannot die," Walter says, "I've always known and I've never forgotten. But if anything happens to Miss Integra, if she should come to any harm because of what you have or haven't done…" Another sharper pain slices into Alucard's neck and the sour tang of his own blood wafts through his senses. Walter's eyes are cold and clear, with a willful purpose even-matched with any angel.

"I won't rest until you are nothing more than crumbled ashes blowing across the moors. I will kill you, Alucard. Even if you cannot die, I will find a way and I will kill you, and it will be a more agonizing and pitiless death than even the ones you've dealt to so many thousands. You have my word on that."

Alucard regards Walter's pale, lined face. He means every careless declaration, as if he were suddenly a hot-headed youth again, believing himself invincible.

"Funny, it's been my experience that a mortal man's word doesn't signify much," his eyes glitter, like a wolf's eyes beaming in the fog, "Tell me, Walter, why does she matter? A wicked, ruthless soul such as yourself, slaughtering soldiers in droves and massacring entire towns. All your terrible sins…you think retirement and a feather-duster will suddenly make you into a good man?"

"Not in the slightest," Walter says curtly, and draws himself in, "But we are not talking about me. Miss Integra is the best thing that has ever happened to this damned place and you cannot pretend to me otherwise."

Alucard's eyes narrow. He says nothing, even as his blood beads across the wires like dewdrops along a spider web.

"I don't care," Walter says, "What Abraham promised you and I don't care what Arthur did. All these years and I've never known you in any other way than what you are now. Starving and blind and dead-hearted. When I look at you, I don't see anything left to save."

The memory breathes over him like a cold wind—a snowy rooftop at year's end, where that small fragile hand clutched his wrist and her blue dress ruffled against dangling ankles.

Please, a girl's voice whispers, Tell me how to save you.

Alucard's jaw twinges.

"I never asked to be saved."

And then Walter smiles, devious and glinting—another echo of the past hidden in its curve.

"No," he agrees, "But you still wish to be, don't you? Why else would Abraham have promised—"

There is a hard squelch. A sickening snap.

Walter's gaze is unperturbed as Alucard materializes a hair's breadth from him, eyes beady red and darkness writhing in his hair. He glances minutely at the severed torso and head behind him, still dangling in his wires like an insect's husk.

Alucard draws in close, lips parting. "My, haven't we grown talkative in our age?" Something pulses in his head, a skittering whisper of hunger that Alucard has to shove aside. He has never regarded Walter as food before, but with how he pushes these days…

Disappointingly, the old man doesn't flinch.

"I only want to make things clear," he says, "My sole concern is Miss Integra. As should be yours."

Alucard scoffs. "A child of the sun like her? Why?"

Walter squints at him, as if he suspects Alucard's being purposely daft. "Because she needs you of course."

He bursts out laughing.

The shells of his head and torso liquefy into shadow and slither back under the cracks of his sleeves. An eye or two blink open amongst the black swirling mass of his shadow,

"Oh, little reaper," he pulls away, standing straight, "you really seem to have forgotten what I am."

Walter's face is purposely blank, as he retracts the now slackened wires. His eyes roam Alucard, something like memory haunting them, and the girl's voice comes unbidden again.

Monster.

"Never," Walter says, and for a flickering second, looks tired and sad, "But this is the life she must lead and you're the only one that can guide her."

He almost starts laughing again. "Me? When I am every nightmare she'll likely ever have?" He waves a long arm, summing himself up, "When I am this?"

"Do you wish your own fate upon her as well then?"

He flinches before he can catch himself. They stare at each other—a long, endless moment—before with an irritated growl, Alucard turns away.

"So be it," he bites out, "I'll go fetch your little mistress. And then we'll see if it's a monster that she truly needs."

"Unfortunately so," Walter says, simply and gravely, "And perhaps, you will come to need her too."

Alucard doesn't even deign to reply.

Without another glance, he scatters, a screeching storm of wings that beat towards the moon.


Her head is unbearably heavy when consciousness slinks back to her, as if an anchor has sunken into the base of her skull, weighing it to the ground. Cotton-sized blobs dot the edges of her vision and Integra blinks sluggishly trying to clear them out.

With a soft groan, she turns to her side, the chilled dirt of the forest floor pressing up to her cheek. An attempt at recalling what happened brings nothing at first but throbbing pain, before it begins trickling back to her. The woods and the night, the moon and then—

"Finally awake?"

Integra flies upwards, recollection washing cold over her. With panicked, groping hands, she sweeps the ground and somehow clutches onto her glasses. The left lens is broken up top and a spindly crack weaves down the glass.

So when the Commander's face comes into view, his eye seems splintered in half.

"Took you long enough," he sniffs, leaning against one of the many hundred trees, "Thought I might have misjudged the dose."

A gun's muzzle glints in his hand. Integra looks at it, oddly numb, and knows why she's here.

"She was only nine, you know," the commander says, voice catching slightly, "Nine. She wanted to be a ballerina. She still slept with a night-light." He breathes, a shuddering, gasping sound that seems to get stuck in his ribs. "And then…then she died all alone, in the cold, in that storm, w-with…with that thing."

By some miracle, Integra finds her voice. "It was an accident."

But the commander just shakes his head hard, eyes shining like a thousand broken shards. "It didn't come. It didn't save my little Mary because it had to save you."

There is one moment where Integra doesn't understand what he means and then the next where she does.

Frost breathes down her throat. "What?"

"The nest was in these woods and heading towards the manor," the gun shifts, gesturing at her feet, and that is when Integra sees the torn ground beneath her, the piles of ashes and crumbled bones.

She stares. "No…"

"A dog sees to his master first," the Commander whispers, "Not little girls lost in the dark."

"No!"

Integra doesn't remember how she finds her feet or when the shot is fired. Only that one instant she is up, wind threading past her thighs and the next she is on the ground again, fire bursting through her shoulder.

With a harsh breath, she grips the wound, swallowing her scream of pain. Smoke curls from the muzzle of the commander's gun. A watery, frightening smile curls across his aged face.

"For twenty years, I served Hellsing and believed its path one of nobility and righteousness. The silver sword delivered in the name of God's divine hand. It was a glorious place, I thought, pure save for the existence of that creature. How it tainted this very earth with the foulness of its evil." He laughed, "But now I see how wrong I was. Alucard is just a beast. A weapon set to attack whatever it's pointed at."

Integra's eyes are wide, heart pounding. "I didn't…I would never have told him to…"

"IT DOESN'T MATTER!" he yells and the gun rockets up again, stopping between her eyes, "Your blood, your family, the very essence of you compels him. That was how your father described it to me. It was what Abraham had always wanted."

The smile shrivels back into a snarl and suddenly, Integra is reminded of Alucard's blood-stained teeth beneath the spray of stars. His looming form in the pale meadow grass. The horror that was his eyes. And the face—that last terrible thing that all those he had killed saw—it wasn't his.

It was hers.

Wind howls through the barren trees, rattling branches which jumble in her ears like yellowed bones. The Commander's voice reverberates through the frozen canopy.

"Did you know...Abraham tricked that creature. Said he would give it something he never had a prayer of fulfilling. Your father didn't speak of it and yet, I always had an inkling of what the secret could be—"

"You misjudge the meaning of a secret then."

The Commander stiffens. Alien trills and leathery wings rain down from the sky behind him. They coalesce, weaving together into the form of a man.

Integra shudders as she sees the ebony hair and the long red coat. Her face is white and hot with tears.

"You let her die because of me," she whispers, "I killed that girl."

Alucard's eyes flick to her.

"It was my choice."

"No, you never chose anything." She gazes at Alucard, chest wrenching in different directions, and she must be imagining the startled concern sparking to life in his eyes, because he's dead inside and out and he hates her and there's nothing she can ever do to fix that.

"Press down on that wound," he says, with strange insistence, and a quavering, wooden smile tugs at Integra's lips.

She turns, staring into the bottomless depths of the Commander's gun.

"You really were right. About it all. It was my fault."

The safety clicks back, quick gears ringing through taut silence.

"You'd murder a child for crimes not her own?" Alucard asks softly, eyes flaring brilliant and pupil-less at a distance, "How far have you fallen, Commander? Not a scrap of honor remaining."

The old Commander never turns to look at him, gazing long and hard and alone on Integra.

"Honor?" he repeats and Integra sees the darkness curling about his shoulders, cooing and hungry, "Don't mock me. There is no honor here, demon. You know this too well."

Perhaps Alucard says something else. Perhaps he is silent. Integra does not hear him either way. She can only think, endlessly, of a little girl bleeding out in the night.

"I'm sorry," she whispers.

The commander breaths out, a harsh giggle-sob. "I know, little miss," he blinks his wrinkled eyes, cracked with the salt of old tears, "But it's just not enough."

His fingers grips the trigger, pulling back, and Integra watches it all from somewhere far away, without even the will to move.

Get down.

She blinks. For the fraction of a moment, at the point where time loops into eternity, her eyes meet Alucard's, as wide and shocked and desperate as her own.

I'll tell you. His voice echoes in her mind. About Abraham. I'll tell you, just get down….

Please.

And a gun fires in the night.


Look in the basement, her father said, There you will find…


Integra's eyes snap open. She sees a pale face wreathed in darkness, red eyes peering down into hers. Alucard's cold fingertips brush hair from her face. His lips move, barely, the glimpse of fangs between them.

"Serve Hellsing, he'd told me, and at the end there will be…"


There will be…


"Salvation."