All right, well, before the flames start pouring in, let me say that this was at no point intended as a sensible, realistic or even thoroughly legible piece of fiction. I can't well say who the POVs is, merely because it's a duo. There's parts of Integra, mainly raising the matter, and then Alucard. It hasn't a plot, and it barely makes any sense.
Now, if you're still reading in spite of what is a beforehand, very honest warning, then you're doing so at own risk: Ta-ta!
------------
A butterfly's fate, after all.
To be pinned and imprisoned for all to see.
The unwilling prey of its own vanity.
I had my first nervous breakdown when I was fourteen.
There was injustice even in this, I would later consider, for it would have been a lesser failing in a poorly sustained physical endurance. There could only be dark and divine conspiracy at place, however, when betrayal was met by my inability to maintain a mental balance.
I had never believed my extremism would reflect in a prolonged visit to the House of Assumption; but then, neither had I ever believed that I would find myself in the possession of a century-aging vampire, or in the command of an organization designed for outright murder at an age when most girls were normally preoccupied with their social standing.
Stability and resignation, understand, come with time, with some form of experience.
They do not come when you are no more than thirteen.
They do not come with a firearm and your first kill.
They do not come with the obligation of isolating yourself from the world as you know it.
They do not come with your Father's abrupt demise.
They do not come with the uncle you loved trying to end your life.
They do not come with a shadow, hissing dark promises at your ear.
I didn't last more than two months, and then my bereavement and my alarm and my fear took me at the Queen's feet, and she accepted my temporary removal from my responsibilities.
It was her doctors who signed the papers.
I didn't want to go.
Never wanted to go.
They wouldn't understand. Never consulted me. They only took a look at the shaking, underfed form in their studies, who kept crying for help, for someone to make him stop, for someone to wash the blood away – when there was no blood for them to see. They only saw a little girl who'd lost her father under disastrous circumstances, who was overwhelmed by it all, and who now resorted to describing horrors of shadows cornering her and tearing at her flesh, and placing guns at her head, and meaning to kill her.
They left me there, in the cabinet. They left to write my condemnation.
Walter came in, and he asked whether he could somehow attend to me, and I nodded. I told him what to do in my absence. His orders were simple, and he carried them out with the habitual efficiency that had guaranteed his spot in the heaven dedicated to those few people that Father had found tolerable. Father's solid reputation of a traditionally insufferable aristocrat had been built on the basis of owning an estate of impressive dimensions, three cricket awards, as well as an extreme impatience towards anything and anyone. If a matter was not dealt with in a convenient interval of time, then heads would fall.
I wondered, stiffly, what Father would have made of this, of all the truth and the charade and the nonsense.
And all too soon I had the answer, as if a thousand years of Oriental mysticism had united in this one proof of undead spiritual existence, and Father'd come from the heavens to whisper it at my ear.
Heads would fall.
Blood would be spilt.
I would never forgive them.
Amen.
Epur si muove, the wheel of pain, and then the wheel of fortune.
Round and round, the merry hound, its eyes appraising torture…
Hahaha…
Dig.
Deeper.
Buried deeper.
Insanity.
My master.
Alucard resumed his touch of such old, curious tricks for a few years after that. I was released a few months into my unusual imprisonment. My benevolent "pet" did not interfere with what was later called my miraculous recuperation – it is to my personal belief that he had never intended for everything to go quite as far.
Neither had he, however, imagined the sort of consequences my time in the asylum with attract. During six months they had toyed with my mind, resorted to all their available techniques. From the needle, to isolation, to shocks.
I never found out who of the council feared my imminent joining among their ranks so much as to will my early torture. But he obviously had the sort of influence required to reach even the Queen's men. They did everything in their power to intensify that madness that circumstances and Alucard had already induced.
And they failed.
Miserably.
It was also the time when I learned to rely on religion. God help me, religion fed my determination to get out of there. Christianity, protestant – the Bible and the Saviour.
Religion is the apogee of all that is universally good. Forgiveness. Mercy. It's a triangle of ideals towards which one is not meant to rise, that have no expectations.
You are what you are.
You are your duty, your honour, your pride, your strength.
When I again met Alucard, I did the only thing I could, and ideally threw his attempt at playing with my temper as his hellish little way of making me the stronger of my kind. I accepted it. I thanked him.
But from thereon, he was no longer free.
He drove me to the asylum.
I could forgive him, but I could never forget. And because these memories so stoically refused to fade, and because I could never chance a rebuttal of that weakness, and because I could never risk truly losing my mind – because and from all of this, I learned.
I learned not to care, not to smile, not to treat everything with the gravity it deserved.
If I thought of all the lives we took, I would have regretted. If I thought of them as no more than failures, of children who lost their way and got chastised, then I could afford to go on.
Religion was the answer, always.
I never understood how we could kill and be forgiven, at first. But then I remembered that this was a crusade, and that the Lord Himself did not encourage death so much as the banishing of the sin.
We did not receive orders to kill. God did not want us to kill.
We simply delayed in this measure until we found another way.
Master, Christianity, it feeds on its times of glory as much as in those of persecution. It is persecution, and then its own persecutor.
"Thou shall not kill."
And then suicide is considered the gravest sin.
And so when someone comes at you with knife, or firearm, or claw or teeth – aye, teeth- it is your duty to defend yourself. Your honour. Anything else would be, why, letting yourself killed, inviting death. And that would be that, now wouldn't it? Suicide. Suicide curries no favour with the Christian heaven.
And when you know that even when you defend, he will return, to try again, to end your life, you must end his first, lest he prevail. Because should he prevail, then your weakness was in truth indulgence – you invited death. You killed yourself. Suicide.
The only cure against suicide is death to the other.
Kill or commit suicide.
Christianity is its own endless paradox. And I am its greatest fanatic, it would seem, or so others would have it seem. And who am I to disagree? It is not in my nature to quarrel over such small, relative things as morality.
The gift and curse of immortality: one steadily grows in the habit of understanding and then enjoying the sadistic, cynical streak. When you've read as much or lived through as much as yours truly, you come to realize that morality obeys no rule nor definition, and that in itself is the most obscure of thoughts and ideals. There is no greater perversion than the moral man, and so forgive me my honesty, and forgive me my pride, for I alone may translate the Christian moral as the very thing it opposes, the animal creed: "Kill or be killed".
This is faith. This is death.
One can therefore see why I'm such a reasonable Christian at heart.
I had my second nervous breakdown as he persisted and plagued my mind more, and questioned that, if ethics were of such substance to me, then how was it I could so easily terminate another's life.
I was eighteen when Alucard first posed the dreary old question.
Did I want to become a vampire? Well, did I?
I never answered, because I never could answer, and despite of our shared open view to my mind, he never truly received an answer of his own.
He was asking the wrong sort of question, you see. The true dilemma was, did God wish me a vampire?
It was surely unethical.
Often, ethics are the only thing that keep the animals in us at bay.
Had I not known this, had I not come by this knowledge by own, uncomplimentary experience, then perhaps I would have harboured dark suspicions, and not taken matters into own hands, and perhaps things would have indeed stood quite differently. But I had never been spared the less flattering or gentle aspects of life – and so, as I reached the apogee of my adolescence, I was already in the proud possession of a creature most attributed to fantasy or second hand horror fiction. By the time I finally stepped over the last boundary, I learned that abandoning an outstandingly active childhood also implied embracing a disappointing maturity. In short, my infant dreams of great adventures, or at least of continuity in a line of shocking discoveries, dissolved under the ominous sign of conventions – the foundation of all of the Empire's successes: the ghastly "done thing".
As several of my acquaintances – in particular those who had any thoughts concerning my education in mind- would come to know, there is little more stressful and tiresome for an impatient nature than to be rigidly moulded in the frame of the "done thing". To grow as part of the gentry, and therefore well above the middle class or the nouveau riches, and not to thoroughly detest the done thing is inconceivable.
But there came also a time when the done thing grew my only companion. It is easier, now, to pull that blasted trigger whilst thinking of England. It was easier then, to think of it all as unethical, of my turning as going against my orders.
I learned this myself, and more than once.
Divine Orders. I should have been born centuries ago, in the place of Jeanne D'Arc, to exhibit her same devotion for la guerre qu'on ne peut gagner jamais. It was not the done thing to win that battle, because it would have implied our reaching the level and status and whatnot of the magnificent archangels and their glorious kin.
Ethics, however, kept us trying. Ethics drove us in battle. We had to do our best, and we had to stand our ground, even though the alternative was by far the more delicious. Eternity should suffice for the entertainment of each and all – but would it also suffice to relieve us of the guilt? There was guilt in feeding off your own, guilt in leaving behind the tradition and purpose of a lineage, guilt in going against father's last wish. Guilt that would turn into disgust.
No, never.
Never against ethics.
Always the done thing.
Oh, ethics indeed. There's no such thing as the absolute ethic – each century has a code of morals of its own. It's only the surprisingly resilient men of science who have their continuity, because they at least acknowledge the abstract as superior to romantic ideals!
Look at morals change and twist and bend, Integra. Look at how your sacred standards are shattered by your supposed "tolerance" – that's what tolerance is, Integra, decadence, depravity. You hide your vulgar and wanton nature and your loss of your so called principles under the pretty name of tolerance. In the old ages, the working class and the nobles never dealt a common hand, and now they must liaise in the name of "equal human rights" and "tolerance". For men to bed men was a sin worth the greatest reprimands – sodomy, Integral, they bloody butchered them for that! And now homophobia is greeted with a smile in the name of "tolerance". It is not a question of whether you approve of these things, or whether they are righteous – but the manner by which you submit to your weakness and keep drawing the line lower still is sickening"
Even for a vampire. And our existence is easily explained. They never bothered to hunt us down, and now they've no desire to do so! In the beginning, man feared the occult, they would have bowed to me and brought my sacrifices and incense, would have willed me away in an instant. Now, they want me. They want to be like me, my kin – they no longer care for the morality of the process. They're interested in the goal, and not the means, not the lives they would take along with the gift. The blood they would spill, and the hell they would wage, oh yes, what's all this in the path of acquiring immortality? You're a fool, Integra. All humans are foolish. And you far more than they, for having it all within your grasp and refusing under the pretence of guarding principles that have long fallen!
I pity you. I pity you because, of the two, my marks of slavery only linger on flesh.
If moonlight is romantic, then daylight is tedious. So oblivion must be one bright flash of light.
The cells they have here are horrendous, really. Hardly presentable – dysfunctional to the very last detail. No good ol' ounce of sadism in whomever came up with the far too comfortable device. I should have planted a few rounds in him had he been under Hellsing's service.
Incompetents. All of them.
I saw the doctor today.
It was quite a humorous ordeal, really. Ten years, and it's the same man, with the same smile, and the same black little eyes.
His name is William Warburton. W. W. World War.
He rose the World War when I was fourteen, and he was quite willing to do so again.
"A vampire came and offered me immortality just the other day," I informed him softly, when he came for the standard visit. He nodded curtly, we exchanged a few pleasantries, and then he took out awfully familiar forms and papers.
This time they need my signature.
I'll sign. Why not? It doesn't matter. Nothing matters, save for my given task, and this is, sadly, to endure. Why? Well, to spite, in all honesty. Alucard, the country, the media, everyone.
Living is now my one mean of spiting everyone, it would seem.
Oh, Alucard, Alucard, what have you done? Trapped me in a cell, driven me insane thrice, now that's hardly the done thing for a vampire your age, now is it? Oh, well, must be your sort of entertainment between your average massacre.
Apparently, I'm having my third nervous breakdown.
And I really do wonder – will they let me out this time too?
Her given name was Integral Wingates Hellsing, but before she was that, and much time after, her name on my lips was Simone.
Simone, my lovely, lovely Simone of fair hair and fair mind. The practical little wench that frightened or did away with men thrice her age, and put my kin to shame, and would do the same to me and to all those who would ever flirt with the treacherous ambition of getting through to her.
Such a singularly talented bitch, my Simone.
I would make an art of your death, Simone. The masterpiece of damnation. Pale skin and trembling flesh and human bone and sacred blood, and obsession. If only, however, you would deny me a last time.
You denied me once, unknown, lost, forgotten. When you were born, and so was your sister – your twin sister, the one who passed mere days after. You denied me when you were free, as I was not, when you flourished, and your blood did not cry for me. When you lived, and I willed you crushed or at my side. Because you are mine. All you are is mine. All any Hellsing is belongs to me.
You denied me twice, upon when your eyes first caught glimpse of divine Papa's little skeleton kept well away in the closet.
Deny me again, Simone. I urge you.
Simon Peter…Simon Peter. I am your Jesus Christ. In Hell. Relinquish your God, Simone.
Deny me a third time as you rot in this cell, for filth and vermin to have you, and I keep my hand extended towards you, and I offer you this, my one gift, my blood, my heritage.
Deny me.
Relinquish your god.
Vanquish him.
Simone...
Integral…
Master.
------------
Author's note - part deux:
On with the acknowledgments / explanations:
Epur si muove – last phrase uttered by G. Bruno when burnt at the stake for claiming the earth moved around the sun and therefore opposing the Church, who obviously felt otherwise. Translated roughly as: "And still, it moves/rotates". Implies continuity.
Simon Peter – beloved apostle of Jesus Christ, who formally relinquished his belief in Him when cornered by a Roman soldier. The Relinquishing and then Simon Peter's repentance to follow (having also been predicted by Christ) were a symbol of the primordial sin (the weak, human nature) being forgiven (Jesus' pardon of Peter's one moment of failing)
ETA: the Joan has been (not so discreetly) replaced with Jeanne, in the name of we know who. The fangirl French has been replaced in the name of people who actually know what they're doing. And my sanity has been replaced in the name of all badfic out there!
On this fic's purpose? Abso-bloody-lutely none. This is almost as good as spam. No, wait, spam is decidedly better – but at least writing it was rather amusing.