A/N: This is dark stuff. Moderately explicit, but not NC-17. There are some spoilers from later volumes. It's dark, though. I mean it. If you don't like dark, don't read any further. Don't get ticked off at me if you read on and it disturbs you. You have been warned. If I come back to this fic, it's pretty much guaranteed to get darker.

"They tell me that part of the process was removing my ego and superego personality restraints. According to Doc, I am pure id. It's an interestingly liberating feeling.

"It's balanced somewhat by the seals they put on me - similar to Alucard's. I can't fight them. I have tried. I suppose that's the ego and superego being imposed externally. I'll find a way out of it given time. Until then, I'll just have to take advantage of the liberties I do have."

He looked down at the bound form in front of him. "You would be one of those liberties."

Seras Victoria stared up at her captor. It had to be a nightmare. There was no way she was seeing what she was. This all had to be a nightmare – the attacks on London, Pip's death, losing Integra, her Master's unbound destructiveness, and this…this had to be the clincher on the nightmare theory. There was no way that she was lying on a lab table in a Nazi dirigible with a young vampiric Walter Dolneaz looking at her like a piece of meat.

"Walter…" her voice cracked. "Walter, what are you doing?"

"Anything I want, Seras. Haven't you been listening to me? Tsk, you're just one of the undereducated masses. Let me explain using public school vocabulary for you, child. Doc took out the part of my brain that makes me care about morality or law. Is that clear enough for you? It feels wonderful. The world is mine to use as I please, starting with you."

He began to walk around the table. She was restrained by the simple expedient of silver-coated chains. They burned her, but her pain was not his problem.

"I have watched you since your first night at Hellsing. With your tight blouse and short skirt, you've been taunting every man in the organization and I'm done taking that. Your lack of respect for me is over. You will not ignore me anymore. You will not tease me anymore."

He held a silver scalpel out for her appraisal.

She pulled frantically at the chains. "Walter! You can't do this. You're not like that! Let me go. Please Walter! Let me go!"

He smiled at her struggles. "You still don't understand. I may not have been 'like that' before, but I am most definitely 'like that' now. I'm going to do things with you that I only thought about in the insomniac depths of night before." He paused and thought for a moment, "And a few things I hadn't thought of then because I didn't have these." He smiled to emphasize his fangs.

"Ah, such a suspenseful moment. Let's prolong it, shall we?" Walter walked away, moving out of her line of sight. Seras craned her neck to see him, but couldn't. She could hear him moving purposefully and what sounded like drawers opening and closing. He began to hum something she didn't recognize. He sounded happier than he had any right to be, given the circumstances.

Seras continued to jerk at the chains that held her down. They burned terribly no matter what she did, but the more she struggled, the more cruelly they burned her. The silver was slowing her regeneration and she had lost a lot of blood when she had been captured. She couldn't have expected Walter, of all people, to be her downfall.

"How does it feel to have lost everything, Seras?" Walter had reappeared with that speed and silence that was the hallmark of the world's finest butler. She hadn't noticed him stop humming. If she didn't know how Millennium had amputated his conscience, she would have thought he honestly cared.

"Are you going to kill me, Walter?"

"I haven't decided. It's somewhat appealing to think of strangling the life out of you, but that won't really work on a vampire, will it? Then I suppose I can try that out just to see how it feels. There are so many things I have wondered about in my life and never been able to consider doing."

He leaned down and kissed her gently, "I have so much time to try everything I ever contemplated." The kiss became harder and more demanding. Seras made muffled noises of denial against his lips and he took advantage of that to thrust his tongue into her mouth. He tasted of blood. The taste ignited the embers of Seras' hunger. She licked the blood off of his tongue almost unthinkingly.

He pulled back and looked at her. "I knew you would be a responsive lover. You can't help yourself."

She felt something cold on her thigh. When she looked down, she could see the scalpel in his hand. She flinched and whimpered, but tried not to jerk and cause Walter to cut her. She couldn't afford to lose more blood.

When he saw and heard her reaction, he drew the blade across her skin. He cut into her thigh as though he were drawing on her. She quivered and tried not to scream. Between the cutting, the person cutting her and the pain of the silver, she was on the edge of hysteria. She closed her eyes and concentrated on drawing unneeded breaths.

The pain of the cutting finally stopped. There was a lingering burn from the wounds that her body didn't have the strength to heal properly. The silver had made sure of that. Seras kept her eyes closed and concentrated on her breathing. Since she didn't need to breathe, it took concentration to keep it going and keep it regular. She jerked when something cold and wet swept over the cuts. When she felt hair on her thigh, she couldn't keep her eyes closed.

"Walter please don't!" He was leaning over her, licking the blood from the wounds. "Oh God, Walter, please!"

"Please? Please what? Please get you a mirror so you can see the artwork? Please don't stop licking you? Please put a matching design on your other thigh? Do be specific, Seras, there are so many choices available to us."

"Walter, please stop hurting me! Please let me go! Please just stop this!"

"But I don't want to stop and I don't have to do anything I don't want to unless the little fat man tells me so directly. I want to make you bleed. I want to see you cry. I want to taste your blood and I want to taste more of you than that." He stood and walked across the room and out of her field of vision again. He was humming once more.

He returned with a small hand mirror. "Tell me what you think of my artistic skills." He held it by her thigh and adjusted the angle until she could see that he had carved a rose into her flesh. If she could get past the horror of what he'd done, she might be able to find it well executed.

Seras turned her eyes away and began to cry. She dug her fingernails into her palms and tried to force herself to stop.

"Is the execution really that bad? I guess I'll have to try again on the other side." And he was true to his word.

"Now tell me, Seras, is that any better?" He held the mirror up for her.

"Would you believe me?"

"No. Because I don't want to stop yet." He used the scalpel to cut her skirt off, pulling it out of the chains in pieces. "Now what design for your lovely stomach?"

"Can we do something else instead? Please. Please stop hurting me, Walter. It's me, Seras, please don't hurt me any more."

"I hear that you literally tore apart one of Millennium's elite vampires. I want to see the Seras Victoria who was that strong. Not this whimpering child. You want me to stop? Then stop being prey, because the predator in me isn't going to let go until you stop telling it to eat you.

"Now. Where were we?"