Whoo! Chapter 20!
I want to say THANK YOU to the community - without you, this fic would never have gotten this far. Thank you. :3
Moving on!
WARNING: Drama. Oh, so much drama. Blood. Violence. Animalistic behavior, because they're called "cat-fights" for a reason.
This song stands in for Alucard's POV here, in a way. It seemed to fit very well into the rythm of things, in any case. :P
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CH XX
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"Bad Apple"
English cover by Lizz Robinette
Original by Pat McCarthy
'''
Ever on and on, I continue circling
With nothing but my hate in a carousel of agony
'Till slowly I forget, and my heart starts vanishing
And suddenly I see that I can't break free, I'm –
'''
Slipping through the cracks of a dark eternity,
With nothing but my pain and the paralyzing agony
To tell me who I am,
Who I was,
Uncertainty enveloping my mind 'till I can't break free, and –
'''
Maybe it's a dream,
Maybe nothing else is real,
But it wouldn't mean a thing, If I told you how I feel,
So I'm tired of all the pain, of the misery inside,
And I wish that I could live, feeling nothing but the night;
You can tell me what to say, you can tell me where to go,
But I doubt that I would care, and my heart would never know;
If I make another move,
There'll be no more turning back,
Because everything will change and it all will fade to black.
'''
Will tomorrow ever come?
Will I make it through the night?
Will there ever be a place for the broken in the light?
Am I hurting?
Am I sad?
Should I stay or should I go?
I've forgotten how to tell –
Did I ever even know?
Can I take another step?
I've done everything I can;
All the people that I see,
I will never understand.
If I find a way to change,
If I step into the light,
Then I'll never be the same, and it all will fade to white...
…
Ever on and on, I continue circling,
With nothing but my hate in a carousel of agony
'Till slowly I forget, and my heart starts vanishing
And suddenly I see that I can't break free, I'm –
'''
Slipping through the cracks of a dark eternity
With nothing but my pain and the paralyzing agony
To tell me who I am,
Who I was,
Uncertainty enveloping my mind 'till I can't break free, and –
'''
Maybe it's a dream, maybe nothing else is real,
But it wouldn't mean a thing, if I told you how I feel.
So I'm tired of all the pain, of the misery inside,
And I wish than I could live, feeling nothing but the night;
You can tell me what to say,
You can tell me where to go,
But I doubt that I would care, and my heart would never know;
If I make another move, there'll be no more turning back,
Because everything will change, and it all will fade to black –
'''
If I make another move, if I take another step,
Then it all would fall apart,
There'd be nothing of me left.
If I'm crying in the wind,
If I'm crying in the night –
Will there ever be a way?
Will my heart return to white?
'''
Can you tell me who you are?
Can you tell me where I am?
I've forgotten how to see,
I've forgotten if I can.
If I opened up my eyes, there'd be no more going back,
'Cause I'd throw it all away,
And it all would fade to black...
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Seras had assumed they'd been alone in the hallway - but one look over her shoulder proved otherwise. Seras felt her heart speed up in a way that felt unnatural for one reason or the next when a slim, feminine figure emerged from around the corner.
She'd been caught.
"Fear not, little fledgling." Amy smiled in a way that would have looked inviting to anyone else, but which seemed to hold it's own, threatening message to her. "I've not interest in getting you in trouble with my ex husband. You're likely to do enough of that yourself in the coming weeks." Seras frowned at her, confused.
"Just what is that supposed to mean?" Seras inquired, just a tad peeved. She realized belatedly that this was the first official conversation they had carried on since she met the woman.
"You really are naive, aren't you?" Amy smiled wider, but Seras could tell it was made to mock her. Already in an emotionally charged state, she felt her fists begin to clench at her sides almost without permission. "I can see why he would be entertained by you, in any case."
"What are you talking about?" Seras snapped, feeling her muscles tense like a cat once more, her hackles just beginning to rise. The very presence of this woman irritated her to no end. Now she had the audacity to stand there and mock her?
"You have no idea what he'll do to you, do you?" Amy said, and Seras felt her ire falter for a moment. Had she been the first to indicate something like that, Seras might of dismissed it as jealousy.
But she hadn't.
"You know what I'm talking about, I see." Amy said, voice annoyingly coy.
"No, not really." Seras admitted flatly, growing quite tired of her heart fluttering about in her chest for one night. Amy's dark chuckle, so much like Alucard's, made her heart once more speed up in a sickening way.
"You poor child." Amy cooed, coming to stand beside her. Seras reeled away from her, but held her nerve there. She couldn't be seen as weak by this...
Seras took a deep breath.
"You see, you don't know your Master like I do." Amy began, flipping her hair in a way that made it obvious it was habitual. "I was, after all, married to him once. But I left him - do you know why?" Seras looked up at her suspiciously, shaking her head.
"Because he tried to break me."
Seras' heart gave a lurch, making her unsettled stomach nearly follow. "You see," Amy continued, coming to stand closer yet. "I made him terribly angry by touching that which I was not supposed to. I did not know, of course, that I wasn't supposed to touch it - after all, we shared just about everything else with each other. Room, bed, and even some of our responsibilities. I was no Queen, of course." Seras did not miss the subtle note of bitterness in her voice as she said that, and couldn't help but feel strangely happy it was there. "He claimed that there would only ever be one Queen, and that he merely hadn't found her yet." Amy gave a wary glance to Seras. "But I would not raise your hopes for that, darling." Once more, Seras found herself resenting this woman.
"You see, I had done wrong, and the King - he grew very upset with me. I don't like to remember it," She said, her voice and eyes both lowering. It was enough to goad the confused Seras into feeling a tiny bit of pity for the woman. But only a bit. "But I remember hearing myself scream, thinking, 'is that really me?' " Amy went on, and Seras, watching the vampiress' face, could find no traces of a lie. That, unto itself, should have frightened her. But there was just something about all of this...Her intuition was trying to tell her something wasn't right here. And she knew better than to distrust, or worse dismiss, her gut feeling.
"I have scars, if you can believe it." Seras looked over at Amy abruptly, for she did, in fact, not believe it.
"Show me." She demanded simply. Amy smiled in a painful kind of way, slowly undoing her dark blue blouse. Like Alucard, she seemed to keep to a particular color scheme.
"See?" She turned and showed her back to Seras, where, between her neck and shoulderblade, lie a fat, leech-like scar. Seras was astounded, of course - she didn't even know vampires could scar, in the long-term.
"Wounds that are inflicted into the same place over and over can become permanently scarred in time, my dear." She explained. Seras examined the scar, and noticed that there were other, smaller ones dotted around it - she looked like she'd been nailed by a big cat's claws, with the semi-circular way the scars sat.
Seras' face went a little paler when the realization dawned on her.
"Yes, he used to bite me - quite hard." Seras once more examined the jagged edges of the fattest scar, and uncomfortably surmised that it had come not from puncturing, but ripping.
"But..." Seras said, brow furrowed. "Master...he's never done anything even remotely close to that with me."
"Has he not?" Amy argued, turning around. She motioned to Seras' neck, where she knew the bite-scars - the only ones she had anymore - were.
"That's not the same," She argued back, covering the bite self-consciously. "He drinks my blood sometimes, sure, but he never does it maliciously. He even asks permission."
"He did, you mean." Amy retorted, as if she knew better. "Now that he has no collar or leash about his neck to yank him back if he tries to hurt you, what, pray-tell, do you suppose will stop him?" Seras swallowed. She didn't want to talk about this anymore. "If you think that he 'loves' you," Amy snarked, "Then I am afraid you are more stupid than I thought. Take it from me, and all the other wives he's had - all the one's he's mutilated and killed..." Amy came well into Seras' personal space then, making her freeze. She then whispered, in a remarkably terrifying kind of way, "The man can not feel love. And by the time you realize it - you'll be the next one who's bones become lodged in his throat as he eats you alive."
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Alucard woke up later than he'd of liked, sitting up in his coffin slowly. No more had he shook the sleep from his head than a pounding came through his metal door. Glancing around, he noticed Seras was long absent from his side, her position in the coffin having gone cold. The pounding continued urgently, prompting Alucard to rise irritably - As his Master was now six feet under, he could not help but wonder which of the men had the audacity to come wake him.
Swinging open the door in a rough manner, Alucard was expecting some ballsy chicken-shit to be pounding on the door - but instead found Jean standing there panting, a look of remote panic on his face as he struggled to catch his breath.
"A-Alucard..." He huffed, doubled over. He'd sprinted quite a ways here, if the vampire had to guess. "Come, quickly." He huffed again, standing up straight.
"What seems to be the problem?" Alucard replied, half-mocking the boy.
"It's Seras." Those words, along with the dire expression on the boy's face, threw his playful mood out the window.
"What happened?"
"I'll explain later," He rushed. "But her -" He gasped for air, "Her and Amy..." Alucard needed no more information than that, already assuming the worst. With nothing more in the way of a word or sign, the vampire promptly sensed out his fledgling's location and rushed to get to her, hopefully before his damned ex wife could. Seras was a strong girl - far too strong for someone like Amy to kill - but Amy...
She had other ways of doing damage.
Amy was a trickster - like the lady Lilith incarnate, she lived to decieve people. Manipulation was one of her many tricks, and she often used it well.
Well enough to fool him, even, at some point.
Alucard stopped after wheeling around a corner, halted by a sudden, night-piercing scream. Alucard recognized the voice wasn't Seras', and was half-grateful for it...
But if Seras hadn't screamed, then...
He turned another corner sharply, and was stopped again by the sound of loud, raspy hissing; but that wasn't the only thing that gave him abrupt pause. There, standing before him in a tangled mess of limbs and blood, was his Childe and his ex-wife, both of them hissing, both of them biting the hell out of each other, with Seras having sunk her fangs solidly into Amy's shoulder and Amy having sunk hers deep into Seras' neck. The two stood in an awkward, half-hunched over position, and it was obvious they were taking a momentary break from trying to wrestle the other down.
"See," Huff, "They won't stop! I can't break them up, no matter what I do!" Alucard was surprised to see Jean had caught up to him. Damn if that kid didn't have a pair of legs.
The two girls swiftly resumed their struggle, with Seras having a distinctive strength advantage, despite being a half a foot shorter. She managed to get Amy pinned beneath her, upon which the older vampiress let out a distressed, angry hiss, biting Seras' neck with renewed vigor, pulling and ripping as best as she was able at the angle she was being held at, which Seras had cleverly maneuvered so as to minimize her damaging capabilities. The same angle gave Seras an edge, allowing her to rip back like a dog without risking her own neck too much. She gave a rough tug at the flesh in her teeth, feeling entirely too satisfied at the distinctive popping sound it made as the skin tore away from the muscle. Amy let out another inhuman screech, kicking and clawing to the best of her ability, desperate to get Seras off of her. But like a stubborn bulldog, Seras hung on, even as Amy let go, hoping to appease her.
It didn't work, of course, and only gave Seras that much more leverage. Placing both hands on top of Amy and hooking her talon-like claws into her ribs and shoulder, Seras, in a fit of blind fury, ripped back on the flesh in her teeth as hard as she could, ripping not just skin, but muscle, which made a distinctively different sound, a sickeningly wet, low sort of vibration through her bones and body.
The screaming fell on deaf ears as Seras, above and beyond her limits of control, continued to maul Amy with an intensity that both frightened and fascinated Alucard, who stood and watched for just a moment more, out of curiosity more than anything.
"Alucard!" Jean pleaded, becoming more and more distressed the longer this went on. Huffing, Alucard approached the two, keeping his posture so that he appeared as intimidating as possible.
"Seras." The voice echoed in both the hallway and his Childe's mind, bringing her to an abrupt stop. She stood uncertainly over Amy's body for a moment, as if uncertain if she truly desired to stop.
"Seras." Alucard commanded again, his voice unmistakably hither-to in it's command. Coming out of a sort of stupor she hadn't even realized she was in, she lifted herself slowly from Amy's bleeding body, where the woman lie suspiciously quiet.
As Seras went to step over her, a sudden, burning pain erupted in her lower leg, and upon whirling around, she found that the vampiress had once more sunk her fangs into her, this time in her lower calf. Already above and beyond pissed off, Seras could not quite give name to the rage that boiled over her veins at the underhanded action. Before Alucard could so much as reach to grasp his Childe, she had wheeled back on Amy with the intention of biting her face off, and as her teeth made a cracking kind of contact with Amy's jawbone, it was evident that she had no intentions of listening to him right then, too caught up in her emotions to pay her Master any mind.
Whether or not Amy survived this ordeal didn't particularly matter to Alucard, but what did matter was that his Childe was not obeying him. As much as he somewhat admired how savage she could be when enraged, this was not the time or place for her to be having such fits. Those were always better saved for the battlefield, or when up against a real opponent - and as Amy was discovering, she really wasn't much of an obstacle, never mind an opponent, for the fledling draculina.
Deciding that this needed to stop now, Alucard reached into the fray with an iron hand, grasping Seras firmly, but not painfully, by the back of her neck, and catching her wrists in his opposing hand when she, quite expectedly considering the amount of adrenaline in her veins, reached to swing at him. She gave a half-startled, half-enraged squeal, which quickly decended into a murmuring, but no less menacing growl.
"SERAS." Alucard had had enough. She would listen, or she would face the consequences - ones that he hadn't yet had to employ on the girl as of yet, and which he honestly preferred not to, as he needed her to trust him; but if push came to shove, she had to know who was bigger.
"Stop that, now." He demanded in no uncertain terms as she continued to blindly struggle in his grasp, growling ferally all the while. His command seemed to reach her this time, for she slowly came down from her agitated state as he continued to restrain her. Once she stopped struggling, he released her neck, instead wrapping his arm around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides in the process, lest she try to fight him further. She struggled a little bit against his punishing grip, but relented after a few seconds, too tired to fight him any more now that the adrenaline was leaving her. He looked at the wound on her neck and knew by her otherwise wan appearance that she would need extra blood tonight.
"Jean." Alucard said simply, summoning the human boy to his side instantly. "Gather a few men and take Amy outside. Keep her there until I come to retrieve her." And with that, the vampire King picked up his Childe, who struggled anew against the movement, and fled with her back to his own chambers.
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"What the hell happened up there?" Alucard demanded not moments after setting his Childe down in his room. She huffed a few moments, habitually out of breath from the struggle. When she refused to answer, he grew agitated, reaching to grasp her shirt, that he might jostle a response from her. However...
Rather than reach her, he instead very, very narrowly missed a right hook to his jaw.
A deep, gutteral hiss was thrown his way, a warning if ever there was one - don't fuck with me. It was a shame that he knew the mechanics of that game, though, for vampires as a general rule didn't hiss unless seriously angry or feeling very threatened. He personally held with the latter on that one.
"Seras." He did not raise his voice this time, recognizing that if he pushed her any farther, he would probably be the next one her teeth were clamped onto. And not in a good way.
"I..." She said shakily, her voice barely audible in the silence. Her whole body shook, he noticed, and as she swayed a bit on her feet, he realized that trying to get her to answer questions coherently right now wasn't worth the effort.
"Come on. Let's get some blood in you first. She drained a lot more than I thought." Alucard said, keeping his voice even and inviting. Seras looked up at him with a half-dazed expression, and Alucard knew that he had made a very serious miscalculation regarding his Childe's physical state. As she went to step forward, she staggered, leaning too far to the side to right herself. Before she could hit the cold cement, Alucard managed to catch her, and giving her a long sniff, decided that Amy had probably been the first to bite - the other woman certainly seemed to have more blood in her, by appearance alone, despite her flesh wounds.
Which meant that Amy had to die.
Not only because she had broken what was one of the few generally recognized moral laws of their kind and fed on another vampire's Childe without permission, but also because if she survived with Seras' - and by extension his - power inside of her, there'd be no telling what she would do with it. Alucard clenched his fist into Seras' shirt where he held her over his lap, now unconscious.
Amy had tried to kill her.
There was no other explanation that he could fathom at the time - someone certainly seemed to want Seras dead, and he was not going to brush aside the sheer volume of blood that had been taken from his Childe, nor the convenient fact that Amy had clearly provoked her into biting back - an action that ensured their blood's mixed, and that any power Seras had was transferred over to Amy as completely as possible.
He'd had enough of this. He needed answers.
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Seras woke up in her Master's coffin again - she nearly assumed at this point she wasn't getting hers back - stretching out her muscles, which felt entirely too stiff. Upon stretching her neck and legs, she felt in both locations a burning kind of pain. 'What the hell?' She thought, not remembering initially what had happened to put her here.
"Do you remember anything?" Her Master's voice made her jump painfully, and she couldn't help but rub her neck as she sat up in the open coffin, finding her Master sitting cross-legged on his throne, which he had pulled closer to where she was at. Suddenly struck with the idea that it could have been far longer than it felt since she had fallen asleep (when did that happen again?) she glanced around in minute panic. "What day is it? How long did I sleep?" She asked in a pitchy, dry voice - not exactly comforting.
"Relax. You've been asleep most of the night." Seras sighed in relief - before groaning in misery.
"Guess that means Jean is pissed at me for not seeing him..." Seras mumbled, whilst her Master looked on, dumbfounded.
"Do you remember nothing?" He asked plainly. Seras turned to look at him incomprehendingly.
"Remember what?"
"Don't you remember what put you down here in the first place?" Seras had to think. Her memory came floating back to her bit by bit, but it was hardly complete.
"Well, I remember talking to Harold..." She blushed instantly once she'd said it, figuring it better not to let her Master know anything beyond that. "And then Amy came around..." Seras remembered now, the conversation they'd had, and her mood turned wretchedly sour.
"Anything else?"
"I remember Amy talking to me about...about you." She began, somewhat cautiously. Alucard raised a single brow, but otherwise said nothing. She took his silence as a prompt to continue, her heart, which felt very fragile as it beat violently against her ribcage, even at rest, picking back up it's rabbit pace - or, so it felt to her. "She...told me things, about how you used to treat her. Her and your other wives."
"And?" He prompted, as if it was no big deal. To him, it probably wasn't.
"Did you really mutilate her?" The question seemed to throw the King off guard. "She showed me scars on her back - I didn't even know vampires could scar." Her Master's low, rumbling chuckle echoed in the room.
"And you believed her when she said I did that?" He laughed openly now. "You are shockingly gullible sometimes." Not particularly one to fancy being insulted, she threw back heatedly, "And what of you? How do I know you aren't trying to trick me?" Alucard stopped, giving her a blank stare for a second, before his face twisted into his characteristic sneer.
"And why would I need to do that?"
"I...I don't know!" Seras hadn't meant to shout, but she was so very confused... "I just...I'm tired of listening to people tell me not to trust you. Integra did it, Jean did it, Harold did it - and just now, Amy -"
"Amy is a known liar." Alucard intercepted smoothly. "She's a trickster by her very nature, which is what intrigued me about her." He explained casually, as if he were talking about the weather. "But I guess I should give you more credit. She did manage to decieve me once, too." It was Seras' turn to stare blankly. "As for what others have said - what should it matter to you?"
"Because..." Seras tried. "Because, even Integra warned me not to completely trust you, in her own way..." Alucard chuckled again, though it had a distinctively more melancholy feel to it.
"And she was right. You shouldn't completely trust me." Seras turned surprised eyes to her Master, who had stood and was now approaching her at a relatively easy pace. "I am a highly dangerous, unpredictable, and violent machine, wrapped in human-colored skin and possessing but a ghost of a soul within me." He kneeled down to her level, and she flinched when his hand reached out to touch her, his fingers landing softly on her cheek. "But are you not the same as I?" Seras looked away, knowing, somewhere deep within her, the truth behind his statement. "A monster in the dark?"
"I..." She didn't know what to say to that.
"You ought not to trust me, not because I will betray you," He explained, his hand falling to rest delicately on her throat. "But because I may ultimately devour you if I don't control myself." His wicked grin bloomed into place, but somehow, she didn't feel nearly as intimidated by it as the hand on her throat. She swallowed consciously, unsure how loosely or tightly he intended to grip her. After a moment, his smile faltered into a more natural-looking one, and he dropped his hand completely, meeting her in the eye, albeit unwillingly on her part.
"But this is something you have always known." He said, and he sounded...reassuring? "You have known from the day I met you that I wanted nothing more than to devour you that day. I would have, too, had I not seen some glimmer of a promise in you."
"Promise? For what?" He chuckled again.
"You will understand in time. Now, how about we get some fresh blood into you, hm?"
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Seras drank down the blood offered to her hastily, her poor mood forgotten as she and her Master shared an odd kind of bonding experience in the process. He gave her the blood packs by hand, refusing to let go of them even as she tried to tear them away.
" If you drink it that fast, you'll throw it back up."
"I know my limits." Seras retorted after finishing a pack in record time. Once more, due to injury, she was consuming far more blood than she felt she ought to. Alucard kept handing them to her, and she just couldn't bring herself to refuse them, until one after another she had accumulated seven of them now.
"Drink. You need as much blood as you can get. You lost a considerable amount of your own." She glanced at him in confusion, not quite recalling how that had happened.
"I will explain later. For now, just drink." He handed her another pack, and though her stomach protested from being much fuller than normal, she just couldn't say no.
Taking the pack into her mouth without his hand ever leaving it, she bit into the tip and idly sucked it down, not feeling the urge to gulp it quite as much now. She felt a strange sort of feeling flutter in her stomach whenever she looked at his hand, which still wore the now seal-less gloves - perhaps in memoriam, perhaps out of habit.
Reaching up and squeezing the pack for it's contents, she "accidentally" touched his hand, smoothing her fingers over his own in an affectionate kind of gesture. The way he was holding the packs as he fed them to her - for really, there was no other way to describe it accurately - made it seem as if he was silently testing her, trying to see if she would literally bite the hand that fed her. And what with his hand being fairly close to her mouth, it really wouldn't take very much for her to do so.
"This...might not be the best of timing," She voiced as she swallowed the last of the blood. "But...just so the record shows, I really like it when you do things like this." He quirked a confused brow at her. "Do things like what?"
"Feed me." She smiled coyly, her good mood somehow restored from her sour one earlier. She still remembered that conversation, and knew she'd need to talk to him about it, but as soon as he'd brought in blood packs - warmed up blood packs, no less - all her thoughts about arguing with him in regards to the matter flew from her mind. And now, feeling full and content, with said man feeding her by hand, which unto itself was strangely intimate, she just couldn't bring herself to stir up what she knew would become a fight.
"Ah," She sighed, feeling nearly blissful as she flopped back, as full as she felt she should be, lest she sleep until tomorrow morning trying to digest it all. But still, her Master insisted she take more.
"I don't think I should eat any more, or I won't be awake to say goodbye." She pouted. He smirked at her charmingly, taking a pack for himself. She expected him to keep it, but rather than swallowing the blood, he leaned down to her, and upon pressing his lips onto hers, let the blood flow from his mouth to hers.
It was such an intimate gesture, from her perspective, that she couldn't help but blush.
"I like it when you do that, too." She murmured shyly, face blooming scarlet.
"Well, you seem to be coloring better. The blood is helping." He remarked. Before she could retort, he kissed her again, enveloping her lips in his own. The kiss was a bit wetter than she preferred, but she wasn't going to complain, instead flicking her tongue out to lap up what remained of the blood from his lips. He responded by meeting her tongue with his own, deepening their kiss considerably in a very short period of time.
They kissed in a languid fashion, and Seras could not resist letting her mind wander away from her problems as they did so. It was strange, the way kissing him seemed to fog her mind and distract her from everything. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it, to be honest. While initially seeming like a good thing, she could see how doing this too much could create a few issues.
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Jean was in the library, reading idly. Across from him, sitting on one of the comfy leather sofas, was Harold, who also sat with a book in his lap.
"Hard to imagine this all going away, huh?" Harold said after a moment, closing his book. Jean, sensing an impending conversation, sighed at length before dog-earing his page.
"Who says it's going anywhere?" the redhead replied, taking off his reading glasses. He was a little bit peeved at having been interrupted - but he supposed that they all had different ways of coping.
"Somehow, I get the sense that when the Knights take over this establishment, they're liable to destroy it, in some fundamental way. Maybe not in the physical sense, but - y'know?" Jean nodded. He no more trusted those guffawing buffoons than Seras or Alucard did - perhaps as a measure of knowing them personally. Or, at least, as personally as one could know Alucard without being a living tank...
"Yeah. I see what you mean." Jean's fists clenched. He'd been hearing all kinds of rumors since Integra died, many of them things that the soldiers wouldn't dare to utter were she living; that unto itself made him sick, in a way, but one particular rumor had recently lit his hide on fire, making the ordinarily demur Jean Winslow boil with anger.
"I...I know rumors are supposed to be just that, but..." Jean didn't know Harold well, but he knew that he still cared about Seras - it was one thing, if nothing else, that sort of tied them together, in a way. And it was because of that tie that he felt the need to reiterate to the older man what he'd heard.
"But?" Harold prompted. Jean's fists clenched tighter.
"I heard that the Knights...might be going after her. Seras, I mean." Harold, who had been avoiding eye contact and generally lounging about in a relaxed fashion, suddenly drew to attention at the news.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, they're gonna hunt her down." Jean said, and the anger he felt about it showed in his voice. "They want to weaken Alucard - to make sure he doesn't have someone he can fall back on in case he ever falls. Besides, two vampires with Alucard's kind of power..." Jean paused for a moment, relaxing slightly. "I can understand why they're scared. But Seras? Since when has Seras ever been a threat to any of us?" Harold nodded gravely, understanding.
"I see where you're coming from, but - hear me out here -" Jean watched Harold carefully. "But just because she isn't a threat now, doesn't mean she won't be later."
"What d'you mean?"
"I mean...well, you're probably too young to know, but I've known her a long time. I can tell that she is a lot stronger now than she was even ten years ago. Hell, the four years we were together, she got stronger. A lot stronger." Jean nodded, catching on. "And that was just on her own. I mean, think about it. I knew Seras since before she could walk through walls - I was there most the times she tried and failed, to be honest." He smiled nostalgically before his expression fell back onto a much graver sort of hue. "But I can understand their concerns, especially now that she has her Master to teach her." Jean swallowed, unsure what to say. "You can imagine, surely, what sort of person he could make her become, if enough of his influence fell through her?"
"Yeah, I see what you mean...to be honest, I've thought about that too." Jean said quietly. "More and more, I notice how much they have in common...I haven't been here as long as you, you're right," he said "But I've been here long enough with the two of them to see how she was before and after he came back. And I've been here long enough to see how he's changed her...for the good, and the not-so-good."
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Dun-dun-dun! What exactly is Alucard's plan? What are the true intentions of the Knights - And what, exactly, did Amy tell Seras? And perhaps most valuably, what is Lukas doing right now? You'll have to wait until next time to see! :)
Until then, goodbye!