"There are worse things than nothingness."

Seras and Walter held eye contact despite Alucard's somewhat provocative statement. Walter nodded in agreement, though. "I would have preferred not to exist at all, than to do what Millennium required of me. I was certain that not only was I doomed, I was damned when I told Alucard to kill me. Better hell than betrayal, better nothingness than hell."

"But you didn't go to hell or to nothingness. You're here, just as real as ever, and Pip doesn't exist at all." Seras' eyes filled with tears.

I am getting tired of the coddling and handholding. This is not how a No Life King should behave. And you, Walter, I would not have thought that you'd be encouraging her in these displays.

She is young. She does not have even my experiences of war. She cannot approach your depth of experience, or of callousness. One would hope that she never does. Walter understood Alucard's point, though. Just days ago, he would not have considered holding the girl while she moped about the many necessary evils of war. He wasn't a sentimental man; a life spent hunting vampires and serving Hellsing had erased most traces of sentimentality in his personality. He felt more sympathy for her than he would have thought himself capable of.

Walter looked to Alucard and wondered if the uncharacteristic patience that Alucard had shown with Seras and the equally uncharacteristic empathy that he felt for the girl's feelings were somehow related to what they three had been through. If it was, he suspected that the extreme manifestation of that was likely in their reaction to the three of them touching.

If Walter was more empathetic, and Alucard more tolerant (for Alucard,) what was the change for Seras?

Of course.

Walter pushed another strand of hair off of Seras' face with a fingertip. The girl who did everything she could to avoid close contact with others had adjusted herself to being touched and held with remarkable speed. All three of them were less guarded in their interactions with each other than was typical.

Walter looked at Alucard speculatively while he used a gentle hold on Seras shoulders to turn her around again to face the other vampire. "Let us finish this story. We're nearly there."

Alucard watched the pair. All of this reveling in emotion was starting to be wearing. "The next part of this is yours," he said to Walter. "Bring our raveled threads back together and I will finish it."


As the tones of Big Ben's bells faded away, Alucard left a newborn Walter on his own. Walter put aside the need for introspection, there was a war going on; he would handle his identity crisis later.

Around him, the battle surged back into full furor after the slight pause the bells had bought. Somewhere in this slaughter, the man who had nearly killed him in 1944, and who had brought him to Millennium's tender mercies the night before, was continuing his bloody business.

Walter turned away from the tower and looked around the square. How was he going to find the Captain? He casually flicked wires from his fingers, clearing a circle around himself while he assessed the ebb and flow of the combat.

Regarding the devastation, Walter was painfully aware that he had caused much of the damage to Trafalgar Square. It had provided a relatively spacious venue for his fight with Alucard, although he had cut down a large portion of the forest of impaled vampires and Catholics that had grown in the square during the combat.


"I was not happy about that. I waited centuries for another good impaling. Brazil was barely a warm-up."

Walter grimaced at Alucard. "Do you want to just skip this part of the story? We both know that it's not vital to what Seras needs to know."

"Don't skip it Walter." Seras twisted around again to see his face. "I want to know the whole story."


Looking down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace, Walter saw fighting, but a glance back down Whitehall toward Parliament Square and Big Ben made it clear that the thick of the fighting was there. That, then, was where he would go; that was where the Captain would be.

The fight to get to the walls outside Big Ben was invigorating. The old butler had paid lip service to growing old gracefully, but he had felt the sting of passing years as illustrated by his encounter with Jan Valentine – or the prior night's encounter with his current prey.

He was no longer old, and stronger and faster than he'd ever been. What had always been a pleasure was a joy, in part for the new strength he reveled in, and for the revenge he was exacting with every destroyed vampire.

The number of combatants thinned as he reached the houses of parliament. Jumping to the top of the wrought iron fence outside the clock tower, he scanned the melee. With his newly keen vision, he had little difficulty picking out the man who stood head and shoulders above most of his opponents.

Heavy above him, pregnant with threat, Walter could feel the zeppelin he'd only recently jumped out of. It was a palpable presence. He didn't look away from the hulking man to look at the death that floated above him. First he would destroy this one, then he would go up to that piece of hell and kill everything there that owed its allegiance to Millennium.

Walter jumped down to open a path to his target. His eyes met the Captain's and the two men prepared for their final encounter. Walter spun out the first web of flickering silver to snare and shred. He was faster than the boy that the Captain had nearly killed, with the guile and wisdom of the old man that he had been.

The response he had not expected from the big man was to run entirely. The Captain had braced himself, seemingly ready to take action based on Walter's first move, and then suddenly snapped his eyes up to the zeppelin. He leapt over the spin of silver and jumped the fence to the clock tower with ease, leaving Walter to chase him.

Both vampires had no difficulty scaling the outside of the clock tower. Walter occasionally paused, gripping the wall with one hand and sending out another lash of wire with the other, but the Captain seemed to anticipate those attacks, sometimes shifting horizontally with unexpected speed, allowing the wires to harmlessly slap against the wall; memorably, in one instance, letting go entirely to fall almost directly on top of Walter. The falling weight dislodged the smaller man and set him back in his climb while his quarry clambered upward.

Once he reached the top of the tower before it narrowed to its point, the German crouched and made a leap that looked entirely suicidal, but which bore him close enough to the zeppelin to catch one of the trailing antennas on the bottom of the ship and swing himself over to one of the hatches into the body of the zeppelin. Walter followed close behind, making the leap and catching the antenna with his wires to swing in just behind the Captain.

He caught a glimpse of the big man running down a corridor and took off after him. The two men ran into the depths of the ship. Walter was so focused on chasing his prey that he barely noticed the oppressive atmosphere that grew with every step.

Finally they reached a stretch of straight hallway where Walter had the ability to throw his wires out to tangle the German. He caught the man's arm with a pair and was jerked off balance by the strength with which the Captain pulled against the cutting strands. The pull should have contributed to amputating his arm, but while blood flew from the deep cuts the wires left, they failed to cut through bone as they should have.

The Captain dragged Walter behind him into the First's chamber. Walter had time to register Seras leaning over a gurney with Integra strapped to it, Alucard holding Major Max off the ground by a hard grip on his throat, and the creature hanging on the wall, before the Captain lunged across the laboratory space to attack Alucard.
"So this 'Captain' was the one who captured you and gave you to Millennium?"

"Yes. He's also the reason why I wear the monocle. Alucard and I first encountered him when I was fourteen. He broke my cheekbone so badly that it damaged muscles that govern my eye. I require the monocle to compensate."

"You were only fourteen?" Seras touched his cheek under the lens. "You were just a boy."

"Walter was never 'just a boy.'" Alucard sprawled out in the chair and leered at the other man.

"Not after you got hold of me." Walter winked at Seras. "You saw us when you woke up. He looked so young, and he kept me company like another person my age – that 'hands on' approach he mentioned."

"It's hard to imagine." Seras twisted back around to look at Alucard.

"You're having trouble imagining that?" Alucard grinned slyly. The charcoal grey of his suit faded to white while his hair lengthened, his face softened, and his overall build became lighter and shorter. "Come here, Walter."

Seras had been so transfixed by Alucard's change from a handsome man who looked like the hero of a 1950s noir detective movie to an androgynous almost-child, that she had missed Walter's matching shift in appearance. She looked with surprise at the now white jacket draped over her legs before gawking at Walter as he stood. She let the shaggy haired boy help her off the floor and into the chair before he joined Alucard.

Alucard drew him down to sit next to him and leaned comfortably against the boy. "Can you imagine it now?"

Seras was flustered. She wasn't sure whether it was better or worse that they didn't look like the Alucard and Walter that she had known. They both looked so young to be so clearly intimate with each other.

"It's not a matter of appearances," Alucard said, divining her thoughts with no difficulty. "You must learn that lesson. The sooner you do, the easier it will be for you to acclimate to this."

"He may be a man now, but he really was just a boy then," Seras said indignantly.

"Your concern for my well-being is touching, Seras, but you're making assumptions based on incomplete information." The adult words and tone were somewhat jarring coming from the skinny boy nestled against Alucard. "If Alucard ever 'took advantage' of me, it was with my complicity."

"Precocious," Alucard said with a smile for the other vampire.

Walter gave Alucard a quick kiss. "In all ways. Which reminds me – I would almost kill for a cigarette."

"Feed your old habit after Seras has heard the whole story."

"It's almost over now, isn't it?" Seras asked.

Alucard nuzzled his nose against Walter's temple before answering. "Almost over, or nearly ready to begin. Your choice."