Ascension.03 - The Girl Who Could Not Sleep at Night

It was midnight, when--as they say--all good little girls in London should be tucked into their beds. I lay awake, unsure why I still tried to keep up this charade of normalcy. A month, and no pain dulled. Only duty; numbingly quiet duty as of yet. When rest was offered on these nights, I took it, but more and more sleep evaded me.

And so I lay awake, stretches of time becoming interminable, the night suddenly become more eerie, the day more a far-off dream.

I thought of my father, mostly. How well that he did not live to see blood on his daughter's hands. There is this law, thou shalt not kill and I had failed it, and it galled me, at night. When I dreamt, I dreamt that he knew of my sin, and his eternal shame.

(How silly I was then, how silly, to not know better of my duty, and the blood that it was steeped in. What a fine brew, indeed).

I am no one's little girl. And that still stung. I was still too young to fend for myself.

(How quickly, how quickly, I would learn).

This night was no different. Silence. Unblinking moon. And the thought parade, making its dreary way across my grey matter.

Little girls don't have to kill. Little girls don't have to lie awake like this.

This little girl, I knew, had somewhere gone wrong. But stumble back across the path though I might, I couldn't find another way; not even the illusion of choice. Only kill or be killed.

Or, let the monster do the work for me. Oh, perhaps; put the taint instead on his soul, not mine. I suspect his immortal soul was endangered long ago, anyway. But it wasn't his uncle, and it wasn't his duty.

Brave little princesses have to do some frightening things to take the throne, I heard echoed in my head. I felt the buzzing that accompanied it, like the milling of a thousand ants inside my skull, and knew the voice as Alucard's.

"Nosy, aren't we?" I replied aloud.

I don't believe you've got much to hide.

True enough, that. We shared the same business now--killing vampires--and in that, there were no secrets between us.

He laughed in reply to my thought. His placelessness unnerved me. For all I knew he was the voice of my own madness. You cut a fine Prince of Denmark, my liege. Again the murmur of laughter, the buzzing of the ants. I'm in these fine accomodations you've secured for me. An image flashed in my head of the dim basement room he had chosen as his own. I wanted to invite you out to play.

"Play?" My, Walter would think me mad if he saw me addressing the darkness.

You don't seem to be sleeping, after all. Come down to the firing range. I'll teach you some things.

I was silent, considering.

The girl who can't sleep at night... already you've become like the creatures you hunt. It was an afterthought on his part, but something in it jarred me to action.

"Why not?" I replied. Already I was climbing out of bed and back into yesterday's clothes.

--

I found the firing range empty and dark. Even our soldiers didn't train at this hour. I felt ineplicably nervous to see it so abandoned, all the same. What, had I expected Alucard to throw on the lights and make the place cozy for me?

But then, I didn't expect to languish in the dark. I reached for the lights, but my hand only met air. A little closer to the switch, then. And then, I was touching something cold like marble and yet smooth like flesh, and I drew back, heart suddenly taking a leap, as if I had fallen into an ambush.

Which, at the moment, I wasn't sure I hadn't.

I heard him laugh, and the light switched on a moment later. He had been crouched against the wall beside the door, that irksome hat pulled down over his eyes. Silly Victorian affectation. Even squatting he was about at hand level with me. "Take a care not to poke out my eyes next time, Miss Hellsing. It would sting. Just a little."

I nodded, and held my ground; a steady meter between us. I hadn't seen him without my desk between us since the interesting circumstances under which we had met.

He rose, gestured towards the rows of targets. "Are you ready?"

I looked around questioningly. "Don't I need a weapon?"

"Hmph." A pistol appeared in his hand (and I do fairly mean appeared; he had this habit of moving faster than I could perceive), and he held it out in my direction. "I spoil you."

I took the weapon. It was heavier than the other gun I had held, and of finer make; and I gathered from its dull color that it was made from a different metal. "Is it silver?" I hazarded.

He nodded. "Plated, at least."

"Doesn't that hurt you?"

A vicious grin. "A little. Hence the gloves."

Ah, yes, the gloves, with the sigils. I recognized them as the sigils that had been inscribed on the door of the room where I had found him. Like those sigils, they hummed with a kind of familiar magic. I had thought these gloves another detail added to his jaunty pseudo-Victorian wardrobe that he had acquired since his reawakening; but they apparently had their uses.

I pressed for more. Wouldn't anybody, handed an unusual weapon in the middle of the night? "Where did you get it?"

"It's a Desert Eagle, of special make for the Hellsing family. I understand there were originally three. I believe the other two went to other Royal Knights Protestant, but this one was your father's."

I was silent, dumbfounded, wondering why he had been the one to pass it on to me. He seemed to sense my questions, and added. "I think Walter did not consider it a fit gift for a young girl."

"Then why-"

"I think it's not fit that a young girl be at the mercy of others." When still I said nothing, he prompted, "Shall we get started, then?"

"Won't they be alarmed, up in the house, if they hear us shooting?"

No reply. But I felt something heavy and dull descend upon the room then, not unlike it had been covered with a giant cosmic blanket.

"Not now," he replied, and gestured in the directions of the paper targets.

I stepped up to the bar, unsure quite what to do. I found the dutifully provided ear muffs, and put those on, because it seemed wise. They were too big for my head, and slipped down; and it took me a moment to arrange them to sit right. From there, I didn't know what to do.

You would think, wouldn't you, that shooting at paper targets would be easy once one has killed a man. You would be wrong. The first shot..... well, that couldn't have been helped. This was a willful act; a harmless one, but still, it was no easier to force my hand.

Still Alucard waited patiently at my shoulder. If he had a watch, I think he would have been looking at it. As if it were helpful, he said, "Aim for the head."

Well, that helped. Some. At least it gave me a direction. But it was enough. I wasn't quite sure about the specifics of aim, but I did my best to target the head of the paper target, and pulled the trigger, finding it much less yielding than the last gun I had shot.

I was surprised by the recoil, as it was more than I had expected from a weapon its size. And still, I was surprised by the noise, and the searing violence of it all. I stood, still a little stunned, as the noise and fumes departed.

"Good." He indicated the target. "You're far off, but still doing damage. Give it another try."

My eyes were stinging, from gunsmoke or memories, I wasn't certain. I set the gun down, took off my glasses, and rubbed at my eyes. "I think I've had enough for tonight."

He reached around me to take the weapon back, chuckling as he did. "So we're going to spare the life of this poor paper target? Where is the brave little warrior I met down in your basements? She certainly didn't seem reticent around guns."

I clenched my fists and looked stubbornly away from him. Blood was rushing to my ears, a sure sign that I was getting angry. My goodness, he took pleasure in the fact that I had killed. He relished it, I dared say.

Good little girls don't have to -

I turned around to face him, hurriedly replacing my glasses on my head. "Can't we do this later?"

"Later may be too late. But," and finally he drew away, "if your guardians don't care enough about your welfare to give you weapons training, then perhaps it's not my business to care, either."

I can fence I almost reminded him sternly, until I realized how silly that sounded. Why must he aggravate me so?

Of course it was for my benefit. It had nothing to do with killing, right? He simply wanted me to live.... that was more than my my uncle had done, certainly. I was being silly, when I had to be strong.

"Wait." He turned away from the door, looking back at me questioningly. I reached out my hand. He needed no prompting to set the pistol back down in it.

"You're wiser than I thought, Miss Hellsing."

Wordlessly, I turned back to face the target.

It was easier the second, or rather, the third time; easier still the next. It was reflexive, like any other good skill was. Like riding a bicycle, only more deadly. My aim was even improving, as I got used to directing the weapon. Not long after, I was looking up at him expectedly.

"Do you know how to reload?"

I shook my head. What did I know of guns? He took the weapon back from me and obligingly showed me. Fumbling, I did the best I could to follow what I had seen.

As I worked, he lectured. "Usually, you'll be using exploding or silver rounds. Much more effective against what you like to call 'my kind.' But these are adequate for your training... ready?"

The grim humor of this struck me. Once again stepping up to the target, I said, "Funny, and some girls just get warm milk when they can't sleep."

"This, in the end, is much more satisfying, I think," he replied. "If you wanted warm milk, you could have stayed inside and just asked Walter. But somehow I doubt you'll ever be happy with simple things."

What was that supposed to mean? I ignored him, and fired. I was beginning to find that I could enter a pleasant state of nothingness when I was doing this; in that, it was not far different from my fencing lessons, where the body took over in all its wisdom. The echo of the shots was far off, and the target practically called out to be hit.

In short, I was rather talented at this. For a thirteen-year-old, at least.

"You seem to enjoy holding the gun. Does it suit you?"

I was too engrossed to care too much about what he said, though I had noticed that he had stepped closer, practically over my shoulder. I simply nodded in reply.

"Does it make you feel powerful?"

Undeniably. I only thought it, but it was certain that he heard.

After all, you do seen to enjoy killing your own kind echoed in my mind suddenly.

I spun around. He was there, solid and yet still the immaterial voice in my head, laughing, ah, yes, laughing. If there was one thing he was good at it was turning someone's own words back at them, I would learn. It was his own perversion of humor.

I couldn't stand him, suddenly. I fired on him. Why? Oh, I think I was just a hothead, and as much grieving as I could do over murder, I don't think any thirteen year old really understands mortality...

... just as well that he wasn't mortal. I put three shots into him, two in his torso, and one in the head, before I stopped. Had I expected him to keel over? No, not logically. But it still shocked me to no end to see the wounds heal practically before they were opened.

The shells clanked to the cement floor of the firing range. He laughed. Of course he laughed; I doubted that he ever had any reaction other than humor in regards to me.

It infuriated me. "I should have used those exploding rounds. Bastard."

His face still a vision of mirth, he simply clucked at me. "Such language in a young girl."

"I should have. That was... cruel."

He brushed off the arms of his frock coat, as if my shooting had been an insult to his fashion sense more than anything else. Odd, how the very cloth of it seemed to heal with him. "Well, at least we know you don't have any hesitation about shooting the undead."

Right at the moment, I was ready to take his head off, if it would have come easily, so I simply snarled at him and tossed the pistol back to him before I was tempted to use it on him again. "If they're all so obnoxious as you, no."

He grinned. He took it as a compliment, God damn him. "I think you've learned enough tonight. Let me reward you." He pressed the weapon back into my hand. I was hard-pressed to decide which was colder, his grip or the dull silver. "Use it in need."

I nodded. "In need."

"In need, but not in fear." His eyes flicked back over my shoulder, inviting me to turn and look, and then was gone, phased into the walls, before I even turned.

Walter was standing in the door, looking stern. Now I understood the reason for Alucard's quick departure. Still, Walter was a good steward, irreplaceable, even, and he knew when to keep quiet about what he didn't like. He simply nodded his head towards the stairs to the house.

I ascended the stairs, to sleep, at last.