(I went back and read some of my older stories and wanted to continue this. It doesn't add a lot on to the story but it does keep it going. Hopefully I'll have another chapter up with an epiphany by Anderson!)
Alucard lay in his coffin, fuming, his painting on the dirt nearby. How DARE Anderson! He'd needed to come back to the quiet isolation of his coffin to pull himself back together mentally. The painting, the bastard had seen his painting, had chased him out. The brushes weren't rinsed, they'd be destroyed once they dried, brushes new this year. And his painting. Paintings shown a light into the artist that created them, revealing details of personalities that he'd rather not have anyone know about his own. He hadn't even gotten to finish it and now it was down in a dusty room with smears of dirt on the back of it.
He had nearly attacked Anderson for this, but surprised had held him still for the brief moment it took him to overcome the instinctual reaction to remove the man via turning him into bloody gobbets. That moment had let him realize what pain Hellsing had in store for him. Furious, without much recourse, he'd slung his paint brush at Anderson and been delighted to see it spread across the man's glasses. Nowhere near as nice as blood across the walls, but it would have to do. He wished he'd had the presence of mind to verbally tear a few layers off the man's psyche, but the unexpected appearance, the depth to which he'd immersed himself in the painting, the intense desire to get his painting AWAY...he'd left without any of the choice comments now easily coming to mind.
A snarl at the lid. The bastard knew he'd painted a flower. Him, the King of the Undead. He knew he was a far more complex creature than Anderson could ever have dreamed, but he didn't want his enemy knowing any more about himself than possible. Integra, and before her Arthur, had kept anything and everything about their vampire's personality under wraps that they could. Knowledge could lead to weakness, and Alucard was a very private person. Even their knowledge had been limited. Abraham...Abraham hadn't known anything that wasn't relevant to Alucard's purpose as a tool. He'd been so relieved when Arthur had paid attention, noticed when books were moved or missing, and flat-out asked him about his interests...and then provided for those interests. Integra had simply assumed he was more than a two-dimensional killing machine from the beginning. Two generations and many decades separated her from Abraham and it showed.
A long history had taught him a hard lesson in trust and having anything you shared being used against you. So he'd limited what he told even his Masters, and when Arthur had pried, he'd removed one possible avenue of information through painting. Integra had not even begun to pry, simply accepting the limitations he requested, and he'd found his guard dropping for her. But even she didn't get to see his paintings.
And that papist idiot had done just that. And so he snarled at the coffin lid, enraged, worried, and slightly embarrassed about not noticing Anderson's approach. It was only an hour to dawn, and he had no interest in encountering anyone until he'd mentally pulled himself together.
-v-v-
Upstairs, Anderson wondered. Once Alucard had vanished, he'd waited, swords ready, expecting the undead ass to come at him again. But he hadn't, and after several minutes of waiting in vain for the monster to come and give him a fight, he'd ended up back in "his" room. By the time the sun was pinking the sky, he'd realized he needed information, a lot more information. Things were not adding up, pieces were not fitting. Alucard was not acting like a vampire should act; was it unique to him? The result of his enslavement to the Hellsings? (and what sort of monstrous slave would have the large room, the bookshelves, and...an art room? He would be locked away, not wandering freely with access to everything.) Had he himself been given wrong information?
He was not a stupid man. He needed to know more. And as Alucard would be asleep...it was time to start looking for those answers. He'd start in the office.
He'd found some items there. Not much, but on the desk a note about Alucard wanting to take his child out to London to show her how to track and hunt in a city and that he'd been requested to pick up an order of...he couldn't read her writing... for the troops. Flipping through her calendar and a journal on her desk, a few similar notes here and there over the year showed a more domestic side to the vampire, especially one reminding her to order art supplies for Christmas for the vampire. It was...weird. Unsettling. Un-right, and against all that a vampire was. They were demonic, hellbound murdering beasts intent on destruction.
And this one painted a rose. And played chess. And picked up shopping when wandering around London freely. It was difficult to balance that with the murderous bloodthirsty beast he'd battled. But then again...would Alucard understand it if the vampire had seen him consoling an orphan or rocking a sick child in the wee hours of the morning?
There had to be more information. The shelves of the library held a great many books; some on law, some on military tactics. A few hand-bound from the Hellsings themselves on various aspects of the supernatural. History, some science, a few supply catalogs too. Nothing he would not have expected but also nothing that helped him match what he was seeing with what he knew, had learned from hard experience, about vampires.
There had to be more. There HAD to be more. And, eventually, he found it. While eating an early lunch of the last of the stale bread in the fridge, a few apples that were going soft, and some sliced meats...he realized that there should have been a bookshelf behind the desk.
There had been a nearly-empty set of shelves with a few random decorative items on it, then the broad fireplace, then a solid wall...the same size as the bookshelf, and not indented enough. The bookshelf was nearly a foot deep and the wall was not set back that far at all. It might just be a thicker supporting wall...or it might hold something.
It had a hidden lock. He had muscles and some sharp objects. The wood, lined with metal, yielded to him. Most of the area behind that wall was empty space, empty shelves on a concealed bookshelf, but not all of it. There was a full shelf and a half of journals. The first set of them were in Dutch or some Germanic language as well as an old-fashioned and faded script, but the next ones were the personal journals of the Hellsings, Integra and her father Arthur. His brother...his niece...and the oldest ones...those were his father's.
Shaking off the stunned realization of his connection to those volumes, Anderson pulled off a stack and began to skim through the pages. The first volume by Arthur had nothing in it of note, but in the second one, he mentioned the vampire's expanded interests, surprised by them. Settling down to read more thoroughly, it was clear that while Abraham had not provided anything for the monster beside the basics (or really even known the vampire would want them...even cared?), Arthur had realized there was more to the beast. He'd caught him listening to a phonograph when the vampire thought him asleep.
He didn't have time to go through them all, and he was tired; hunting that vampire had thrown his sleeping schedule entirely off. Being a regenerator helped with the fatigue, but he needed sleep. Alucard would see the damaged bookshelf; there was no fixing the shattered wood and while the warped metal lining the board could be pushed somewhat back into shape it wasn't going to be smooth. He had most of the journals still to go through, and wanted to sit and think and read. Several minutes later, he'd placed the books into a set of cloth grocery bags from the kitchen, gathered a few meals-worth of canned and dry foods, and vanished in a flurry of papers back to the church he'd been staying at.
The bed was too short and not very comfortable, and he missed electricity, but he'd take the next day to read through the books and see what he found. He kicked himself for lacking the foresight to bring a pen and paper to take notes on but some rummaging about in the priest's rooms found a stack of post-it notes and a mechanical pencil. Anderson ate a small and cold meal and slept on the small pallet, mind turning over what he was learning.
-v-v-
Alucard woke up angry. Eyes narrowed and flaming red, he left the coffin and the cramped dirty hole to find the bastard that had pushed him out of his rooms...to find Anderson missing. His scent remained all through the house, but old, nothing recent and warm. The Hellsing's bedroom was contaminated, and it was with a rising fury that he made the bed, placed the slippers under it, restored the shaving equipment to the place in the cabinet it had been for the last century, and pulled covers over it all. It was still contaminated. Still desecrated...but it was...better.
He was too angry to paint or to play the piano, far too angry, the anger bubbling under his skin and keeping him twitchy and restless. He didn't want to see his Master like this, or Seras, not when he was not so fully in control of himself.
Grabbing his guns and an abundance of bullets, he vanished, planning to cut a bloody swathe through the ghouls until morning. Alucard did exactly that, returning to his home not long before dawn, covered in dust and having gone through every bullet he'd taken. There were still ghouls in the underground, but he'd made great progress in clearing out a large portion of the subway as well as his mind. A blood pack to take care of the hunger pangs, a quick trip through his home listening and scenting for Anderson, a return to his coffin with a pensive, disappointed glance at his painting (it had been going so WELL!), and he was asleep for the day.