"That lovely young lady has only grown wiser with time." He smiled at Seras. "She saw the merit of my recommendation and has reinstated the Hellsing Organization."
"Who will lead the organization?" Oh please don't let it be some prat!
"I hope that you do not believe your Master to be a prat?" He grinned at her with most of his old deviltry.
"You? But you're not human!"
"You do seem to be attached to that observation, Police Girl. I will demonstrate for your education." Shadows swirled around him and parted to reveal a human man who bore a strong resemblance to Integra Hellsing down to the ice blue eyes. He swept a mocking bow to Seras. "Sir Vladimir Hellsing will lead the Hellsing Organization. Alucard will continue to be Hellsing's trump." The shadows returned him to the bearded form he had worn since London had been attacked. "If you would practice more and drink more blood, you would be able to construct a convincing human appearance just as I can. It takes strength and energy to maintain, but I have plenty of both."
Alucard strode off down the hall, through the construction areas toward the kitchen. Seras followed after him with her concerns. "But nobody has ever heard of Sir Vladimir, why would they even accept you as the leader, no matter how much you look like Sir Integra?"
"Sir Vladimir will be attending several social events in the next month. By the time he's done chatting up the peerage, half of them will swear they went to boarding school with him. Humans are so malleable. It won't take much effort." He pulled a bag of blood out of the refrigerator, nodding his thanks to Seras when she handed him a goblet.
"After that, it will be simple enough to announce that he is taking over the family responsibilities. The attacks around the world last month have made clear the need for a dedicated vampire eradication organization. Most of those fools will be relieved to have anyone standing between them and afterlife as a ghoul."
"But, you? Why would Her Majesty trust you?" Seras was expecting Alucard to snap at her soon, but this just didn't make sense and she had to understand.
"I have agreed to swear a blood oath to the Crown. I answer to only the royal family. Whoever wears the crown, commands me." He looked at his bare hands. "It's not as onerous as the Hellsing family seals. All empires and all families eventually fall. It's not an eternal commitment."
Seras didn't give in, "I still don't understand why you want to tie yourself to anyone again. After so long, why aren't you out ruling the world or taking revenge on all your enemies?"
"Sometimes you're enough to make a vampire despair," Alucard tapped her on the end of her nose, making her bare her teeth at him before ducking her head away. "You haven't asked yourself what I get out of the arrangement."
He's playing with you, girly.
"Yes, I'm playing with her, mercenary. However, now I am done playing and I am done answering my child's questions. If you can't answer them with two minds to work on the problem, you are probably a lost cause after all."
Before Seras could protest, he summoned a portal and left the room.
What do you think, Pip?
I think he just told us that you could make your body look like "Sir Vladimir."
So? I don't want to pretend to be a Hellsing.
Pip snorted at her, Maybe he's right about despairing. If you could make your body look like Vladimir Hellsing, could you make it look like Pip Bernadette? I wouldn't mind being in a familiar body now and then, you know.
•••
San Francisco wasn't so bad. The days were often pleasantly foggy, affording him the luxury of wandering among all the humans during the day. It was fascinating to watch them as they bustled about, secure in their personal illusions of immortality.
Warrant Officer Felix Schrödinger knew that immortality was an illusion for everyone. The people who were supposed to have been his companions in eternity were all gone. He was the last of the elite, the last Werewolf.
He was also on the run. The shadow of death had been following him for more than a month. He didn't understand how it was that he could move anywhere on the planet as whim took him and Walter Dornez would still be right behind him. The longest respite he'd gotten yet was only three days.
He shook off his worries about the renegade Angel of Death. If death found him, he might die, he might not. He was getting tired of running. He'd had sixty years hiding in the Brazilian jungle with only occasional forays into the world on missions for his commander; now Millennium was fragmented, his commander had been destroyed and he was on his own for the first time ever. Since the Angel might find him at any time, he was going to enjoy every moment he had.
"Time to go grab a bite," he chirped at his reflection. Gone was the Hitler Youth uniform, traded in for clothes appropriate to someone his apparent age. He'd thought about trying to hide his ears, but after an evening spent exploring both the Castro and Haight Ashbury districts, he decided he didn't need to worry about looking a bit odd.
The cute and harmless act worked beautifully no matter where he was, but in this city, it went over particularly well. Schrödinger ate as often as he wanted, which wasn't too frequently since ghouls were a pain in the neck. He could have just popped into the hospital and stolen a few bags of transfusion blood, but he was hooked on the real thing after so many years of bagged rations.
He left the tiny room he had rented for too much money from a shabby man who didn't care how young his tenant was as long as he paid in cash. He thought he'd hop a bus just to enjoy the people watching and the potentially homicidal driving of every bus driver in the city. He hadn't seen a fatality yet, but he'd seen more than one person bumped by a bus taking a too-tight turn. It was like a bizarre kind of wild animal hunt using a bus instead of a gun. People who didn't like public transit just didn't understand the sheer entertainment value of that mode of transportation.
His mind wandered while he stood at the bus stop. It had been a month; maybe he'd go back to London soon just to see if the girl was okay. She probably thought they were enemies, but he didn't. With no more Hellsing Organization and no more Millennium, they were just two vampires, not opponents in a long-term game of war. Schrödinger just wanted to see her, just for a minute. Maybe in ten years or twenty or a hundred, he'd be able to talk to her and they could see if they had more in common than an odd physical resemblance and a penchant for bloodsucking.
He was absorbed in his visions of getting to know Seras Victoria when his sensitive ears picked up a familiar footstep. Damn! I liked San Francisco. He didn't change his position or posture while he gave his situation a quick analysis. Too many eyes and not enough refuges, but he had to get out of there.
He waited for his stalker to move again. It was one of the harder things he had done in his long life, to wait, knowing his doom stood behind him. The sound of a sleeve brushing cloth, as an arm moved, was his cue. He dove to the ground and rolled under a car that was stopped at the light. The instant he could feel the anchors of other people's eyes removed from him, he teleported.
He stood and looked around. Well, I wanted to go back to London, didn't I? The night was nearly over instead of just beginning. He started looking for an appropriate refuge to spend the day.
•••
Walter C. Dornez smiled at the device in his lap. He could just incinerate the pest, but that would take all of the fun out of this hunt. Of course, without this handy tracker he'd retrieved from the Hindenburg II before he sent it down in flames like its namesake, he would have had much more difficulty tracking a vampire who could vanish and appear anywhere in the world.
Millennium had inadvertently facilitated many things for him, including the first class travel in which he had been indulging for the past month. Never allow a skilled intelligence retrieval officer time alone with your computers. With most of Millennium dead, he'd had plenty of time to rape their network for everything he needed.
He smiled at the flight attendant as she walked by; she looked positively delicious. Her smile dimmed for a moment when she met his grey eyes, but came back on at full wattage when he poured charm at her. The colored contact lenses were bothersome, but necessary in a world where everyone knew without any doubts that vampires were more than just the stuff of late night horror marathons.
Returning to London was actually one of the smartest things Schrödinger could have done. Walter was constrained by Alucard's presence to keep his activities completely secret. He wanted to face the great No Life King, but not yet.
He leaned his head back and thought about the day that would come when he and Alucard would finally test themselves against each other. They had known each other for such a long time. As age had claimed Walter's speed and strength, he had accepted the fact that Alucard would mop the floor with him. Now, with his skills restored beyond those of his human peak, he would have his showdown with his old companion. He thought back to a time, sixty years before, when he had first met Alucard.
"Who's the pouf?" he'd asked Arthur Hellsing.
"The pouf, as you put it, is the most dangerous weapon the Hellsing Organization has," Arthur answered coldly. "You'll do well to remember that."
Walter had responded with an exhalation of smoke that was just barely far enough away from Arthur's face to avoid being a matter for disciplinary action. "I thought I was the most dangerous weapon you'd have. Isn't that why you recruited me? You know, the complete package of inhuman speed, the ability to kill a dozen men at once and I never need to reload." He glanced meaningfully at the tommy guns the foppishly dressed man was packing onto the airplane.
Sir Hellsing had flushed at Walter's challenge, but instead of punishing him, he had called to the man in question, "Alucard, come meet your new assistant."
"Assistant? I'm not his bloody assistant!"
"Language, Mr Dornez. I have tolerated a lot from you because of your value, but you will learn some decorum if you are going to serve this organization and through it, Queen and country."
"They aren't my queen or my country. I'm here to kill Germans and vampires. I don't give a fuck about the rest."
He waited for Arthur to remonstrate him for his deliberately vulgar language, and was surprised when Arthur merely spoke mildly to the man he had called Alucard, "Alucard, demonstrate to this boy why you are the more dangerous of the two of you."
Sitting in his seat on an airplane thousands of miles and six decades away from his first meeting with Alucard, Walter smiled ruefully at the memory of the child he'd been. Alucard had effortlessly terrified him in that first encounter. It didn't take him long to learn that the great git was just as dangerous as Arthur had said he was, but Walter had always burned to know if he was dangerous enough to survive the wires.
What had Arthur Hellsing been thinking when he'd taken a talented boy off the streets and set him to murder and mayhem? He had used Walter just as casually and callously as he used Alucard, twisting him in no time at all into as much of a monster as the vampire.
Then, when the war was over, he'd had the nerve to try to re-humanize his Angel of Death. After years of a life made up entirely of blood and slaughter, how did Sir Hellsing think he could take that away?
But Walter was given no choice. He was educated, he was constricted, he was constrained, he was virtually brainwashed into being a perfect gentleman. He'd pushed it down. He'd sealed away his bloodlust almost as successfully as Alucard's freedom had been sealed away from him, burying it under the façade of an Englishman who would do anything for Queen and country when he was really just a bastard citizen of no country with a love for violence.
He'd done it so well, even he had believed it after a few decades. He had honestly believed that he belonged at Integra's side. He had sacrificed himself for her. In the end, he might have left her alive if she hadn't kept talking about how he was Hellsing's and how he had to come back to her. How could she have had the nerve to be grateful for his freedom when her own arguments made it clear that he would never be free? Her own words condemned him as just a tool of the Hellsing Organization and family. He admitted to himself that he hadn't been thinking entirely rationally when he'd taken her heart, but he would make the best of that, and in the end, it would be the proper decision.
Walter leaned his head against the seat and thought about his plans to replay that first meeting with Alucard with a different ending. Next time they met, it would be on Walter's terms.
•••
Schrödinger made his way back to the abandoned building he'd taken as his home. So many people had died in the attack on London, there was no dearth of lodging.
He'd seen Seras. She had found a way to regrow her arm and he was happy for her. The wing had been interesting, but she looked much better with two normal limbs. She hadn't regenerated one of the eyes that Jolene had taken from her, but she still looked like she was doing well.
He hadn't known from their brief meetings before that she had a tendency to talk to herself. He'd watched from a distance, fascinated, as she walked the damaged grounds at night carrying on long, one-sided conversations with herself. Sometimes she laughed as though someone had told her a joke or scowled and scolded.
He was so caught up in his musings about a vampire girl he knew he would probably never have that he almost didn't hear the whisper of razorwire whipping through the air. Only instinct kept him from being shredded, and he was rolling back up off the ground almost before he knew why he had hit the dirt in the first place. A quick glance told him more than he wanted to know when he saw the shimmer of the wires and the dark figure of the man the Major had thought to use.
He looked for a refuge. If he could just get the man's eyes off of him for a moment, Schrödinger could be anywhere else he wanted to be, but he couldn't do it if he was observed. He tried to duck away, but he had allowed Walter to get too close this time. The thin sting around his neck pulled him up short and he waited for Walter to finish the job. The wire barely even hurt, but the pain wasn't the worry. The worry was how easily the wire was going to separate his head from his body.
He jumped when Walter spoke right next to his ear. Schrödinger hadn't heard him moving that time. "You led me a long chase, little kitty."
