The door to the room opened and Seras stepped through, beckoning behind her for Integra to follow. She stepped, smiling slightly, across the threshold, and stood facing Seras, looking down at her from her superior height.
Seras reached up and brushed her cheek lightly.
"So…tonight you wish to become a full vampire, eh?"
Integra nodded, feeling the rough cotton of the glove against her smooth cheek.
"A last kiss first?"
"Hardly the last, Seras." Said Integra, as she leaned forward, "Hardly the last."
Vampires are, predominantly, dead. They have very few vital fluids left, apart of course from the blood they imbibe regularly. They cry blood, their weak urine is tainted with it, as is their saliva. Thus, when Seras and Integra kissed fully, what they tasted was each others blood. They pulled together as instinct did its best to take over, their cold lips pressed together, long tongues eagerly exploring each others mouths, trying to get as much as possible. Then, slowly, they withdrew, Seras practically levering the younger vampire from her. They looked at each other again. Seras grinned and licked a pink smear of bloody saliva from her lip.
"How long has it been since you fed, Integra?" She asked.
"Four or five hours."
"Too long. You'll need all your strength for the transformation. I'll go grab some."
Seras rushed out the room and headed along the corridor, up the stairs and into the kitchens where the refrigerator for the blood was kept. Throwing up the lid she grabbed about ten packets, getting stares from everyone else in the room at the time, cooks and a few soldiers grabbing a bite to eat. All of them, however, were wiser than to question what would seem to be a very hungry vampire.
She clattered down the dungeon steps and along the corridor, finally bursting into her room and dropping the blood packets heavily on the table.
She looked up, and saw Integra. She had unbuttoned her shirt and was lying on the coffin-bed, arms behind her back, a small smile playing across her lips.
Seras smiled too.
Integra smiled. "For the last time master, feed me."
Seras picked up a blood packet and walked slowly over. If breath had still been a necessity, she would have been breathing fast. Slowly tearing the top from the blood packet she sat down on the bed next to Integra and placed the tab between her lips. Integra closed her eyes as she drank the blood, the packet quickly crinkling up as it drained.
"Another?"
Integra nodded, and Seras reached out, willing a blood packet to her. One flew from the pile on the table, blurring across the room to her gloved hand.
"That's a neat trick." Said Integra, gazing at the packet. "Will I be able to do that?"
Seras grinned. "One day, Integra, you and I will both be as powerful as Alucard."
"That day is hundreds of years into the future, Seras."
"Hundreds of years spent with no-one but you for company…Somehow, I can live with that."
Integra smiled again, plucking the blood pack from Seras grasp.
"No you can't"
Seras grinned, "I can die with it then…every night."
She leant down and kissed Integra again, reaching out for the controls to the coffin lid as she did so. The heavy wooden and metal cover slid slowly into place as the two lovers embraced, sealing them into a darkness that was no concealment to their dead eyes. Every monochrome detail was as crisp as starlight as they kissed.
Pale, strong hands moved surely in the shadows, caressing cold flesh as they divested each other of their clothes. Tongues and lips met furiously, tasting blood.
"Now, Integra…" Seras leant back and up as far as the coffin would allow her, baring her neck, "Now, I offer my blood to you, willingly. Take it and be free!"
Integra seemed to hold back for a second, then she moved with viper speed in the darkness, sharp white teeth meeting in the bared skin of Seras' throat, flushed with blood that the vampiress was deliberately pushing through her veins. She sucked with all her might, intoxicated on the immortal blood of her master, feeling it drip down her throat like a liquid orgasm. Seras moaned softly as Integra worked her fangs into the wound, trying to get as much as she could, reason destroyed by bloodlust. Suddenly, she felt shuddering hands push her back into the velvet bottom of the coffin. Before she knew what was happening, Seras mouth was once more over hers, her long tongue licking at the blood that coated Integra's teeth. She felt her mind clearing of bloodlust as Seras' body moved against hers, the electric sensation of cold skin upon cold skin shooting through every part of her. The tongue withdrew, and her lips were free once again…and with them, suddenly, something else was gone. The removal of Seras body from hers was accompanied by the removal of something far deeper inside her than even the most adventurous appendage could dare go. The bond was gone. As it had come in an instant, so it departed, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Integra felt free. Free of everything, free of life, free of death, free of Seras, free of Hellsing. Now she knew why Alucard and Seras grinned all the time. Now she knew why vampires basked under the light of moon and star and soared in the night-time air on bat wings. They were animals, predators, hunters, utterly free. She gasped as the realisation struck her with the force of a thousand sledgehammers.
"Wow, I didn't know I was that good…" murmured Seras, a silly grin on her face.
"I haven't…" began Integra, only to be silenced by a hand laid across her pale lips.
"I know exactly why you just cried out, Integra…don't think that the breaking of the bond stops me reading your mind." She withdrew the hand.
"Doesn't it? Then you can read my mind right now?"
Seras eyes widened, as did her grin.
"As you wish…master" She said, her hand creeping down to rest across another pair of lips.
Integra's smile was a shark's grin in the blackness of the coffin.
"I never thought I'd be as glad to hear that word again…" she said, brushing the back of one hand across Seras' well-proportioned breasts. "I think, for now, I shall be happy with a simple search and destroy." She lunged forward again, and Seras reciprocated into her. Ivory teeth flashed in a slick drift of red, coating silken skin and velvet coffin lining, guiding serpent tongues in complex paths across each others bodies as they writhed, two of the dead engaged in a mockery of the most essential act of life, every second heaping blasphemy upon blasphemy. Yet, they would argue, how can love be unholy? Was their passion not proof that even within their bloodthirsty souls good still dwelt? Was not their love proof that God's love was manifest even in this seemingly profane act? As the slow fuse of orgasm burned down in the darkness, and the boundaries between human and monster were lost in a frenzy of biting and kissing, such metaphysical things, it must be said, could not be farther from the lover's minds.
