Integra opened her eyes slowly and tried to sit up, but something threw itself across her midsection and forced her to lie back down. "Do that, and you'll get a nasty bump on the head," she heard Alucard murmur in her ear, and she realized that it was his arm that had restrained her move to get up. Belatedly, she remembered that she was in a coffin. His coffin.
"Alucard, how long was I asleep?" she asked anxiously, trying to push up the lid.
"An hour at the most," Alucard assured her. "You have about half an hour before Walter makes your dinner," he continued, pushing open the coffin for her.
Integra sighed in relief, but shot him a piercing glance when something occurred to her. "How do you know when Walter makes my dinner?" she asked shrewdly, stepping out of the coffin.
Alucard stepped out of the coffin after her and stretched. Moving behind her, he put his hands on her shoulders and whispered in her ear, "Guess."
"It's taking every bit of my self-restraint to stop myself from hitting you," Integra hissed in reply. She maneuvered out of his grasp impatiently and stood a respectable five feet away from him. "I'd like to see you in my study after my dinner," she ordered in a deceptively pleasant and sweet manner, "I expect you to be on time…since you're such an expert on my daily schedule."
Alucard grinned. "I'll be there, Miss Hellsing," he said, bowing mockingly. She nodded and left his room, but not before Alucard caught a fleeting thought from her mind that went along the lines of, 'I did NOT just fall asleep in a coffin…his coffin…with him in it too…don't ever do that again.'
His grin widened. We'll see about that, Miss Hellsing, he thought to himself.
---------------------
At the precise moment Integra set down her silverware, took the napkin from her lap and put it on the table, Alucard materialized in front of her.
"Alucard," Integra acknowledged, looking up from the table.
"Integra," Alucard returned, but there was a hint of a question in his tone that Integra did not miss.
"Follow me, please," she ordered, standing up and walking swiftly out the door.
"Where are we going, Integra?" Alucard asked, seemingly out of idle curiosity as he followed her.
"Hush," Integra said irritably as they walked quickly down the halls. Despite his abnormally long strides, Alucard found himself having to actually rush to keep up with her.
The answer to his question soon became clear when they stopped in front of a familiar door and Integra took out a key and opened it.
"No," Alucard said immediately, his refusal coming out as a growl. "I decline your offer to go down there again."
"I was not offering such a trip to you. I am ordering you to come," Integra answered coolly, dragging him into the room where they had spent the night before. She'd wanted his company and the safety in having him along, but he was turning out to be a pain.
Alucard watched her uneasily as she opened the stairway to the underground levels and beckoned for him to follow.
"I do not want to see that insane, sorry excuse for a vampire any more than necessary," Alucard ground out through intimidating bared teeth. "Meaning, I will wait here for your inevitable return."
Integra turned to him with a mildly surprised look on her face. "Oh?" she inquired, raising an eyebrow delicately. "In that case, I shall talk to Quincy on my own. In fact, that is a better idea—your absence won't inhibit Quincy's words as much. His answers will, no doubt, be much more detailed if you are not there," she paused to let that sink in, and then turned on her heel. "I'll see you later, upon my….inevitable return," she said sweetly, throwing his earlier words back at him mockingly. With that, she stepped forward and disappeared into the darkness of the descending stairs.
Alucard glared at her fading figure and briefly wondered where the Integra that had slept in his coffin with him had gone. She had become calculating in her quest for information—information that he knew could jeopardize their growing relationship and his relatively liberal position in the Hellsing Agency. Information which Quincy would be all to delighted to divulge if it could possible make Alucard's life difficult.
Cursing, he slipped through the doorway and silently followed behind her.
-------------------------
Integra carefully made her way down the last few steps of the staircase and walked slowly in the direction of Quincy's room. When she felt she had found the right place, she started searching for the doorway.
This proved to be unnecessary when a hand reached out and roughly pulled her into a room. "Quincy?" she asked calmly, seeing his eyes faintly glowing red in the darkness of the room.
"A warning, my dear Hellsing," he breathed in her ear, "Be careful wandering this place alone…some of your ancestor's experiments were more unsavory than others."
Integra detached herself from his grasp and his close proximity and folded her arms. "I'll keep that in mind," she said frostily. "While we're talking about my ancestor's experiments, what can you tell me—" she began, but Quincy hissed violently, cutting her off, and pounced on an innocent looking pool of shadows that was stretching towards them across the floor.
The shadows erupted into Alucard and he shook Quincy off with ease. "Don't tell me you're strong enough to sense my presence, Quincy," Alucard said in disbelief.
"Not so much," Quincy admitted, "but how would shadows move in a place with no light?"
Alucard shrugged. "An oversight on my part," he said dismissively. He looked at Integra smugly. "Well, do carry on," he encouraged lazily. "Ask him to tell you about…whatever," he continued mockingly. "I'm just part of the shadows," he whispered, catching her eye.
Integra kicked him out of sheer spite and he grunted from the blow. "What can you tell me about seals?" she asked with a sigh, hoping to make the best of the situation.
Quincy looked at her strangely. "Well, they're amphibious mammals, kind of fish-like…"
"She means the Hellsing seals, idiot," Alucard clarified disdainfully, though Integra suspected Quincy's misconception had been on purpose.
"Nothing," Quincy answered promptly. "It is forbidden, and I don't know anything about them, and even if I did, I wouldn't tell you anyway," he expanded.
His words earned him a steely glare from Integra, but he continued, clearly unfazed by her look, "And what little I can tell you involves Alucard and how naughty he was twenty y—"
SLAM.
"That—is—forbidden," Alucard snarled, punctuating each word by ruthlessly banging Quincy's head into the floor. In a single movement he had pinned down Quincy with one hand, and he seemed content with pushing Quincy through the floor.
"Alucard!" Integra managed to choke out finally in a reproving tone.
Alucard was beyond hearing her words, but Quincy fended him off (with some difficulty) and he snapped out of his rage long enough to hear Quincy ask Integra to leave them alone for a few minutes. He relaxed, knowing the value of a private conversation with Quincy, and slowly backed off of him.
"Integra, please," Quincy pleaded, a strange look on his face.
"No," Integra refused stubbornly. "The last time I let you two have a private chat, Alucard could not control his desire to hurt you. This time is no different. I'm not about to go and let you..."
"GO AWAY!" Alucard and Quincy all but howled at her. "Go...browse the private library or something," Quincy suggested.
Integra's ears perked up. "Private library?" she asked, an intense look of curiosity on her face.
"Down the corridor, second left," Quincy told her smoothly. "Watch out for any..." he began, but she had already walked out of earshot.
"Now listen here, master," Quincy said, turning to Alucard and spitting the formality out venomously. "You," he began, but floundered momentarily. "You...are a possessive, cowardly, no-good, love-bitten—pardon the pun—monster," he declared. "You won't even, no, you can't even tell your master what she deserves to know!" He paused to get his bearings and saw Alucard's growing look of anger and pain.
"I…can't…" Alucard began, with a rare look of defeat on his face. The tables had obviously turned in the last few minutes, and Alucard resented it, but couldn't stop it.
"What have you got to say for yourself, hmm?" Quincy asked him scornfully.
-----------------------
Integra found the library and silently thanked Quincy. This was what she had been looking for—the "secret laboratory" doubled as an extensive library. Almost immediately, she was able to find a promising book: Abraham van Helsing's original notebook recording his experiments in developing and strengthening the seals.
Opening the first page, Integra began to read.
It is very simple, the mechanics of the seals. They basically separate the "man" and the "monster" in the vampire. Every vampire still maintains human characteristics; they are just hidden by the driving frontal needs of the vampire nature. The seals suppress these needs and enhance the humanity that remains in the vampire…
Integra paused and mulled over the first paragraph. If the seals suppressed the vampire side and enhanced a vampire's humanity, did this mean that the removal of the seals would reverse this? "Probably," she muttered out loud, returning her gaze to the open book and continuing to skim the journal.
…30 October. Both subjects have become more compliant and obedient in actions and in following orders. The rudimentary seals I placed on Quincy and Dracula have been replaced with more fine tuned seals that are more permanent than the ones I placed on them in Romania…Today Dracula seems much more human and retains a more humanoid shape. In accordance with the five levels of seals I have bound him more securely to the will of any of the Hellsing line…11 November. Quincy is not reacting well to the seals…his behavior has become increasingly violent and his amicable nature has been replaced with a more sullen disposition.…am conducting experiments to see if it is directly because of the seals or if it is just the lasting influence of the change from human to vampire…
Integra looked up from the page and frowned, deep in thought. The seals had evidently altered basic characteristics of both Quincy and Alucard. Her brief encounters with Quincy had proven that he was not quite…sane, and the last ten years she had spent with Alucard had revealed him to have a shifting personality. Whether his rather varied personality was influenced by the seals or not was unclear. It was entirely possible, Integra mused, that sudden changes and unbalances in his character that he was prone to could be from the shifts in the strength of the hold the seals had on him.
With a sigh she shuffled through the journal to glean more information from it, but only found sketches of pentagrams and the accompanying notes around them. Near the end of the book, she paused at a promising concluding entry.
I am not brave enough or foolish enough to see the after effects of taking off the seals for myself. As the seals dominate and control many of the mental and physical functions of the vampire, I can only hypothesize that taking them away would impact the vampire greatly in a variety of ways.
Integra shuddered and closed the book with a soft thump. "Slightly helpful," she muttered, "but not overly—oh!" she ended with a small gasp, seeing three indistinct shapes, that faintly resembled dogs, moving towards her from the opposite side of the room.
Remembering Quincy's earlier warning, she turned around and exited the library at a run.
--------------------------
"You're weak," Quincy concluded, and Alucard stiffened. "Oh, well, sure, you're the strongest vampire in the world, but emotionally, you're a wreck." Quincy waited for this to sink in for a moment, and then went on. "You may be the single most horrific force of nature in the history of mankind, but that doesn't stop the fact that you are still somewhat human inside. Don't deny it—there are times, I know, when that pure evil side takes over and you a truly a monster, but this doesn't cancel out your other side."
"My other side?" Alucard whispered.
"Your feelings," Quincy said simply. "They keep you whole. They keep you sane. Imagine the thought of losing someone you had grown to love deeply, someone who you knew loved you back despite the fact that you are a monster. You would be devastated. When you lose all the anchors to your humanity, you become an incoherent killing machine. And that's what happened with Mina, isn't it? Only, you mistook her pity for love. And when she didn't turn into a vampire as planned, you cracked just a little. But when Hellsing bound you to his family and your powers were no longer yours to command, that was the last straw, wasn't it? I remember…"
Quincy's eyes glazed over slightly and he quickly shook out of his thoughts. "Your mind was in complete turmoil then, too," he continued. "I could feel it in my mind. And you became the most pitiful of monsters, trapped in your mind with nothing but your hunger for blood to keep you functioning. With Integra, this could, and probably will, happen again. I imagine it's only a matter of time before your inhumanity takes control."
---------------------
"You're wrong," Integra said, out of breath, swiftly walking from the doorway she had been leaning against to where Alucard was sitting numbly. "I've seen him crying. If nothing else, he has his memories," she said, pausing. "He carries the weight of over five hundred years on his shoulders, and that's more than enough to remind him of humanity, in all its brutality. And if Alucard mistook pity for love, well, then, Quincy, I think you are mistaking insanity for rage." She stopped and brushed her fingers lightly against Alucard's face, and when she took her hand away, it was bloody with his tears. She placed one bloodstained finger against his lips gently before he could speak and addressed both of them calmly. "Now I'm very sorry to interrupt your little psychotherapy session, but there are currently two or three vicious hybrid experimental creatures after me."
Her words were punctuated by the arrival of three giant, snarling beasts of indeterminate species that wasted no time in cornering her against the wall. As Quincy and Alucard watched in dawning horror, one of them dissolved and spread, forming a transparent barrier between the vampires and Integra.
"Early military technology prototypes, I wonder?" Quincy mused in a steady voice, but his eyes were darting quickly between the creatures and Integra, trying to formulate a plan.
"This is not the time to speculate on the uses of these beasts," Alucard snarled, trying to tear through the barrier. To everyone's surprise, it repelled his attempts.
"What now, genius?" Quincy hissed, shuddering when one of the doglike beasts clawed Integra's arm and blood spurted from the wound.
"Hurry," Integra gasped, wishing that she had brought her gun.
"Good, we can hear each other through the barrier," Alucard murmured, putting himself close to the shield. "Now listen to me very carefully, Integra…" he began.
------------------------------------------------
Ending it there for now, filler chapters are so exhausting to write. And filler it was, too, I'm sorry about all that background journal entry crap.
I expect about two more chapters, and then it will be done, which is good, because I really don't like this fic. I doubt many people like their first fics much…it seems to be the current fad in Harry Potter fanficdom, anyway. I'm currently starting/finishing another Hellsing fic, but I'll wait until I finish this fic before I contribute any more to the piles of lousy stories out there.
To explain the pen name change, some one very, very scary is after me and will stop at nothing to find my posted fics and then use them against me. Somehow, she managed to guess it through an intense game of hangman and so I had to change it. Bleach is a fairly safe manga to choose from, I don't know that she knows I read it religiously. However, I can't be too sure, sergeant beta leslie shapiro is a devious clever person, so if the pen name changes again, I'm likely fleeing her clutches.
I hope your summers are going well )