AN: Advance warning, this is another one of my "threesome pairing" fics, which means that for the price of admission, you can expect AxW, WxS, AxS, and AxWxS in varying forms. Thus, if you are a person for whom either het or slash is a no-no, it's time for you to hit the back button on your browser. For the rest of you adventurous/masochistic souls, this fic will be nine or ten chapters. I will be updating very regularly. This was written as a birthday gift for Oscar Rose. Sorry it's taken so long to finish.


"Do you remember your first kill, Walter?"

"Of course I do. It's not something I can forget, nor likely ever will, no matter how old I may get."

Alucard's laugh filled the room where the two were sitting, watching over their companion while she lay unconscious. "That will likely be quite old. The Angel of Death doesn't die. Can't die."

"I can die, Alucard," Walter demurred. "Even you can die, somehow." Only because he was prepared, and because he had known Alucard for so long, was Walter able to catch the flicker of emotion on the vampire's face. Even Walter, for all his long acquaintance with Alucard, would not venture to say what emotion it had been.

"However, you were asking about my first kill," Walter continued, as though he had not seen that naked flash. "What exactly did you wish to know?"

"Did you ever question why it was so easy for you?" Alucard's expression was a bit too self-satisfied for Walter's preference.

"No," he said slowly. "I was very young. I did what I had to do." He wanted to ask Alucard what he was getting at, but wanted to see where the vampire was going with his questioning.

Alucard glanced down into the open coffin where Seras lay.

"You and I spent more time together during World War II and for years thereafter than I have spent with my own child. Have you never wondered why?"

Walter shook his head and shrugged, "I never understood why you turned her to begin with. Your explanation about never giving up just wasn't quite enough to satisfy me. But I learned long ago the futility of questioning you when you choose not to answer a question in full."

He stood and walked across the room to look out the window. Looking outside at the darkness, what he saw instead was his own incongruously young face reflected back at him. He wasn't surprised to see this face. This young man was how Walter had always seen himself. Before Millennium's little changes, it had been the face of the old man that had always taken Walter by surprise when he looked at his reflection. He had always felt like this same young man.

With effort, Walter could make himself look like that old man again, but that always snapped back to this younger face. His body responded to his will, and when he wasn't concentrating, his body defaulted to how he saw himself unconsciously. Knowing this put a new spin on his perceptions of Alucard's varying physical appearance. He couldn't help smiling at the memory of the much less imposing version of Alucard he had known in the 1940s.


"Walter, I want you to meet Hellsing's most dangerous resource." Arthur Hellsing stood aside and Walter stared disbelievingly at the person Arthur had revealed. He looked up at Hellsing's leader, waiting for the man to laugh and explain that he was joking, that Alucard was actually in a room down the hall, bound in silver chains and sipping virgin blood through a straw.

The person Arthur had described as being "Hellsing's most dangerous resource" was a child hardly older or larger than he was, and Walter could charitably be described as short and stringy. It wasn't until the other approached and held out a hand for a handshake that Walter noted the red gleam of his eyes and the tiny fangs when he asked, "You're the new butler?"

Alucard glanced up at Arthur, "He's a bit small, isn't he?"

Arthur laughed, "You're unliving proof that size and appearance are not important." Hellsing's leader shook his head, "Although your current choice of form is not how I expected you to greet our new butler."

Walter tried not to fidget while Alucard looked him over. He could almost feel the vampire's fingers rifling through his head, picking at various memories and looking them over before moving on. He felt as though the vampire had taken his full measure and approved when the fingers finally withdrew from his mind.

"He has potential," was all Alucard said to Arthur before turning away and walking out of the room through a wall.


Alucard rose and stood behind Walter, looking at their reflections in the mirror that the window had become. "I have had three experiments this century. One was a complete failure, despite a promise of success; one has not run its course; one is a qualified success I had been resigned to seeing eventually fail."

"The failure was Integra. I came so close to molding her into the proper companion – bloodthirsty, intelligent, loyal, but independent minded – only to have her snatched away when we teetered at the brink of perfection together. If she had only taken my gift of immortality, she would have been my greatest triumph." Walter watched Alucard's face, but wasn't surprised when the other vampire kept tight rein on his expression.

"The experiment that I cannot yet judge is Seras. She has the potential to be great if she can let go of this useless hold on humanity she insists on keeping." The word "humanity" came out with a sneer. Alucard had even less truck with that now than ever before.

"You are the qualified success." Alucard met Walter's eyes in the mirror that the night had made of the window. "I had resigned myself to failing with your death." He shook his head, "For all that I molded you to be a companion who would be interesting for more than a human lifetime, you insisted on growing old, growing weak – staying human.

"You remain only a qualified success, as you did not choose vampirism yourself."

Walter was unsurprised to hear himself, Integra and Seras described in this manner. Alucard was not human, which was something he lulled people into forgetting. His motivations were not fathomable to those who were not as he, and there were none like him.

Even Walter had forgotten once or twice when he was younger, but as he grew older, he stopped letting that happen. He knew that Alucard was a creature with motivations he would never understand. Although, he supposed, he would now have the chance. He reminded himself that even in life, Vlad Dracula had been insane, with motivations the sane could not fathom. Certainly more than four hundred years of undeath had done nothing to gentle that.

"What characteristics were you working for in your experiments?"

Alucard laughed and drew closer to Walter. Walter's eyelids drooped for a moment when the vampire wrapped his arms around his waist and rubbed his nose across the line of his neck that was exposed above his collar.

"Ruthlessness." Alucard rubbed his hands across the other man's chest and nipped lightly at his neck. His tongue ran over the twin spots of blood that came to the surface before Walter's inhuman regeneration closed the punctures. "You took to ruthlessness so easily, Angel of Death."

Walter nodded almost involuntarily. He had taken to ruthlessness as though born to it. So easily, in fact, that he had never thought to question it.

"Sensuality. We are sensual, aren't we, Walter?" Alucard's hands dropped lower, stroking along Walter's stomach and stopping at the waistband of his trousers. "Do you remember that night…"

"…outside of Prague?" Walter finished for him as he relaxed against Alucard, leaning back and feeling the hard lines of the other vampire supporting him. "I remember."

"Loyalty." Alucard was speaking directly into his ear now. Walter could see the other vampire still watching their reflections. If he'd still been human, he would have shivered, or at least had goosebumps along his spine. As it was, he almost missed those little human thrills of reaction. "You were so loyal, Angel, that you would have died an old man for a promise Arthur Hellsing elicited from you when you were sixteen."

Walter's eyes closed entirely when Alucard's nose brushed over the shell of his ear while one of his hands dropped lower and rubbed against Walter's burgeoning erection for a fraction of a second before returning to begin to pull the tails of his shirt out of his trousers.

"Your loyalty is so great, so deeply ingrained that not even Millennium's technological wizardry could turn you against Integra when it really mattered." Alucard's voice turned to a low growl for a moment and Walter discovered that some of those little human thrills were not as gone as he had thought. He relished the feel of goosebumps marching up his back from the base of his spine.

When Walter opened his eyes, he wasn't surprised to see two different faces looking back at him from the reflective surface of the window. Gone were the tidy ponytail and distinctive monocle. Instead he saw a shaggy haired boy in his early teens. He'd forgotten how thin he'd been, a child of war years, but it was still Walter. He could still remember that feeling of complete faith in himself and in his companion he'd had when he was as young as he now looked.

His companion. Standing behind Walter, instead of the familiar figure of Alucard in his scarlet Victorian affectations, was a slight figure in white. Without turning away from their reflections, Walter reached behind himself and patted the fuzzy white hat he remembered with fond humor. He pulled it off of Alucard's head and dropped it on his own. Just as he remembered, it fell over his eyes.

"I have tried three different approaches. I was most hands-on with you." He pulled Walter tighter against his body and nipped at his earlobe. "I started young with you, even younger than with Integra. I made you what I wanted, in all ways," "except whether you would choose vampirism." He growled slightly, irritated. "I thought that the traits I encouraged in you would be enough to make it irresistible.

"But even if Arthur hadn't gotten that promise from you, you still wouldn't have taken the gift."

"Curse," Walter murmured. "Not a gift, a curse."

"This is not a curse, Angel. Can you not understand that now?"

Walter closed his eyes and let more of his body weight rest against Alucard. "Tell me about your approach with Integra."

Alucard let Walter change the subject. They had forever to have this conversation and Alucard already knew how it would go.

"Integra had already learned a certain kind of ruthlessness from Arthur before I was even released. I had little work to do there. I encouraged sensuality in her much more subtly than I did with you."

"Her cigars," Walter said, pushing the hat away from his eyes only to have it promptly fall down again. "I always knew you were the reason she began smoking."

"Yes, her cigars. Among other things. Whereas with you I took the initiative," Alucard's slid a hand under Walter's untucked shirt and rubbed across his abdomen, muscular, but hairless in this youthful form, "with Integra, I let her think that the few personal demands she made of me were her idea."

"Personal demands?" Walter reached behind himself to clasp Alucard's hips to pull the two tighter together. "Do I want to know what kinds of personal demands Integra made with you?"

Alucard chuckled in his ear, "No, Angel, you don't want to know yet." Alucard's hand moved up his chest, stroking sharp nails over the sensitive skin. "You still think of Integra as a daughter." His other hand tipped the hat away from Walter's eyes to let him see their reflections again. The boy looking back from the window hardly looked like he should be feeling fatherly about anyone.

"We both know that by the time Arthur died, he had already instilled unswerving loyalty to the Hellsing Organization and to the Crown in Integra. I had no work to do at all with her on those." Walter nodded; he did know that. Integra had not known the meaning of the world yield.

"And Seras?"

"Seras? She has been different." Walter gasped and stiffened against Alucard when the vampire drew sharp nails over his nipple and then began to circle it with his fingertips. "I have used no influence on her at all. She has made her choices entirely on her own.

"Many have been foolish. A few have been excellent. I think she's learned the lessons of ruthlessness and loyalty satisfactorily."

By then Walter didn't care whether the hat kept falling over his eyes, they had closed again anyway. "Ruthlessness and loyalty, but not sensuality."

"War only teaches a special few about sensuality," Alucard's free hand turned Walter's face up to him and he ran his tongue over the boy's lips before speaking again, "Not everyone can be like you."

Walter laughed and shook his head, "Thank God for that."

"We will have time to show Seras. I have been most hands-off with her. My control subject."

Seras made a small noise behind them. Walter stiffened and might have pulled away if Alucard's arm had not tightened across his chest. Instead, disheveled though he was, with his shirt untucked and Alucard's hat obscuring his vision, Alucard turned them both around so that Seras could see them. Walter was acutely aware that his trousers were a bit more constricting than usual. He could only hope that Seras wouldn't notice that detail amidst the others she'd have to take in.