Dedication: to Thessie-pooh, who shall probably now kill me for calling me that. Oh well, such is life.
Author's note: written in the prose/semi-lyrical/delusional style of self's newly-discovered preference. If you understand naught, know that you are not alone, and do have my apologies. Also, the Kleenex for the excessive mushiness is on me.
He sleeps a child at her breast, a child of some-and-twenty. Desperate for her mother's milk, blood so sweet and fine - poison to his searching hands, drowning pale fingers.
He'll always be a child to her, a child of silent pleas and unwholesome questions. The words he speaks, she cannot hear; the glint of his blind eyes, she'd rather not see. There's happiness in ignorance, and she's always liked herself more the prettier than wise. Beauty haunts one not. And wise men usher off children.
She'll be the elder now, a part in a game she'd stumbled upon, an open board, dark whispers and undone promises. He knows the truth of it, but it is knowledge undeserved and knowledge little loved. Mater sanctis, she's the Madonna of her ways, the Princess and Queen and Knight Errant of all dreams.
"Of unwritten tales," she says, not without a certain bitterness.
"Neverending ones." And it's like the blood still drenching his throat that makes a hiss of his whisper.
Blood is blood and blood never fades. A mother is pure, and she is the angel to guide lost steps.
"A trip. There has to be a trip, there's always one in fairy tales."
"Where will we go, then?"
"You know where. We all go there, after all."
She would not agree, but she finds, much like in other days, that she's spared the choice. His feet carry him at a more lenient pace than her own, and she must be the first in their walk. To lead him, she webs her own careful lies, lies she herself would pay no mind to. To lead him so that he shan't go astray, perhaps, but far more so that she mightn't see the blood gathering now at the corner of parted lips, pouring slowly and softly and weakly.
They started their journey hand in hand, to where and why, she could never decipher. "It's more fun this way." But he has no more laughs for her, and there's a feverish look in his eyes, and for once there's naught of the troubles of his blood in it. Burning for her.
"Why not pause?"
As all of her like, all new with child, she had had her faults. And providing guidance for others had never been an ability she had possessed. They'd helped each other along the way.
Cling-cling go the coins in his hand, cling-cling as he toys with them.
"It was all I had to give you." An apology, once they're half way there.
"Was it?" He took more than she had wanted.
His feet give in, he dithers on occasion. A failing of the hand, then one of the knees. So much blood she must now cover her ears so not to hear its call, and pray that her task will sober her from the smell of it. "Shouldn't we please stop?"
He shrugs, infinitely more the colder. "It'd defy the purpose."
"Once we're there, there'll be no purpose at all." She knows not where there is, but she's all too sudden weary. And if not for the joy he takes in each step, if not for his craving to tangle his fingers among her own, then she would have ceased this all at once far sooner.
In many ways, she too is blind.
When he falls breathless, and there's blood all over, when finally it's on her too – it's only then that she lets go of his hand, and she would go on no longer. "Please."
"Then play with me." His coins slither in her hand faster than she can utter word in denial. Cling-cling, they murmur, cling-cling. "Play the part of fortune."
And she nods, for this is one role she has grown accustomed to, the one she hates best.
Heads, he dies.
Tails, he dies.
It'll all be of her making.
It falls on the side.
"Death without death. You'll be remembered." Her words are sealed with a kiss. And though he smiles in her arms, he's always with her reflection: gone, if greatly desired.
And it's Milady Hellsing who often finds her as she lies, in her dark corners, with her darker still coins.
"Should have been my child." Milady would never understand. But she does, and her hand is warm and so inviting.
"Your Child?" Such a pretty word. "Is that the way of your wants?"
But this was her last gift, reserved for all those whom she would not wish to reach that place, whom she would not want to accompany there. "I have nothing more to give."
He's taken everything.
Milady Hellsing came on the studied path of glittering images and glorious titles. The two of them had walked a certainly different road altogether.
"He took me here." Her hands would mould and break and make anew, but they contend with mere coins and their strange cling and cling. "He took me here, and so I can't leave without him."
It's for the men to grieve and Milady Hellsing to order and her own sire to work his plain magic – and though her body's no longer clinging to the dirt, and though the coins are now scattered between unwanted petals, her thoughts will be arrested by this cruel game once played with her child. "I'll be quite all right," she says, but she won't be.
They departed for there, and for all her leading, they both went astray. And there had become a one kiss and his grave.