I guess you can call this a teaser, although it could stand alone adequately. The entirety of chapter four is posted with the preceding three chapters at adultfanfiction dot net. There is a link to my aff net profile in my profile here, just click my name.

"Dutch?"

Walter intercepted Alucard's hand before the vampire could close the book he was using.

"Not today, Alucard. I'm busy."

"Oh?" Alucard leaned over the desk and craned his head around to look at Walter's papers. "Business or pleasure? It must be business." For just a moment, Alucard's pretty face twisted in a sneer. "What pleasure is there to be had in Dutch?"

Walter raised an eyebrow. "Your mask is slipping." That didn't happen often, but the young butler had a reasonable idea why Dutch would not be Alucard's favorite language.

The young man watched the vampire compose his face into the harmless-seeming façade he stayed behind most of the time. He suspected that he was one of the only people alive to have seen that façade crumble and live to remember it.

Well, time to test his theory about living through the slippage…

Walter slid a book from under the huge volume of the Dutch-English dictionary and watched Alucard's face carefully. He was unsurprised to see the vampire's visage contort again. "Van Helsing's journal. What does old Abraham's journal have to do with your other language studies?"

"You don't know?" Walter looked at Alucard with honest surprise. "I thought you knew." He pulled several pages out of the stack next to him and looked them over before flipping open van Helsing's journal. He read the Dutch aloud, "Dit wezen verbaast me met zijn vasthoudendheid. Ondanks mijn beste inspanningen, blijft hij een onhandelbaar beest, glad en verleidelijk."

Walter looked up and raised an eyebrow at Alucard, "You tried with Abraham, too." He read again, slowly this time, translating the Dutch to English on the fly. "This creature amazes me in his tenacity. Despite my best efforts, he remains a wanton beast, lubricious and enticing."

He held up a page covered in his tidy handwriting and began to read, "Diese Kreatur begeistert mich in ihrer Hartnäckigkeit. Trotz meiner stärksten Bemühungen bleibt sie ein zügelloses Biest, schlüpfrig und verlockend."

He pulled a page from a separate stack and read again, "Cette créature me stupéfie dans sa ténacité. En dépit de mes meilleurs efforts, il reste une bête dévergondée, lubrique et attirant."

"Do you see now?" Walter held the pages out for Alucard to look at. "Arthur wants it translated, but he doesn't want to trust anyone outside the organization to do it."

"Why translate it into German and French in addition to English?"

"Hellsing isn't the only organization that hunts vampires, Alucard. You know that as well as I do. Arthur said something about 'information sharing.'"

Walter flipped through a few more pages and read, "I have chosen the sobriquet Alucard. He is no longer Dracula, he is a servant of the greater good. As I have reversed his role, I choose to reverse his name as a reminder to us all."

Walter snorted softly, deliberately not looking away from the page to gauge Alucard's reaction. "Was he prone to melodrama?"

"He was a vampire hunter in an age when most people didn't know what vampires were." Alucard's tone was unreadable. "And a master of rodomontade, since you ask."

Walter raised an eyebrow, but let the vampire's spiteful words go without comment. After turning a few more pages, Walter read again, "He was a man when we vanquished him, at least in appearance. Why is his figure now so epicene?" He glanced up at Alucard as he turned the page, almost smiling. "Actually, the word he used translates more as 'androgynous,' but I've grown partial to 'epicene.'"

Returning his attention to his reading, Walter slowly translated, "I cannot take his attempts to seduce me any longer. Every day he seems to look more like my wife did before her illness. I no longer even know if it is a male or female beast I command."

"Enough." Alucard slapped his hand down on the page and bent forward to glare at Walter. "Does it please you to know how Abraham humbled me?" His usually pretty features were contorted and bestial, eyes glowing fiercely in a face Walter barely recognized.

The young man met the raging vampire's stare with an equanimity he didn't feel. "No. It doesn't please me to think of you in those circumstances." He leaned forward in his seat, bringing his face near Alucard's and watched him begin to calm in the face of Walter's own composure. "Nor does it please me to think of other people reading what I have read," he admitted. "But we both serve here and that's the long and the short of it."

Walter began to square the pages on the desk and considered his next move. It was going to be better for household tranquility if he put this on hold while Alucard calmed down. No doubt the maids would thank him if he could keep the vampire from putting on his hellhound guise and wandering the halls. They lost more good help that way.

He could feel Alucard's eyes on him while he put the translated pages and van Helsing's journal into a drawer and locked it, but he didn't look up until he was finished. At least the vampire was no longer snarling, although his eyes were still glowing with the force of his anger.

Walter made an elaborate show of stretching while he made his decision, then picked up the dictionary and rose to put it back on the shelf. He turned and leaned against the bookshelf, looking at Alucard. "You don't want to stay angry about the journal, do you?"

"And if I do?" Alucard's lower lip was coming very close to protruding in a pout, which made Walter purse his lips against a smile.

"Then we won't be doing anything together this evening, will we?"

"I will need distracting to put this behind me." Where moments before had snarled a creature to frighten most sane men, now stood a petite, androgynous figure with the smiling face of an innocent and lambent red eyes that promised hell.

Walter exhaled a silent laugh at that. "For years you've interrupted my language studies and distracted me from my work; why would we change the pattern now?"

"Do you have words that you need assistance with? Lubricious didn't seem to give you difficulty. Nor epicene, from what you read to me." Alucard looked up at Walter through his lashes and smiled, "Something difficult that I could charge for?"

"No, no words. At least none that have anything to do with Abraham's journal or anything Arthur has asked me to learn. But surely someone with so much more experience than I would have a few words to teach me?"

AN: My thanks to darkfather66 for his assistance with the German vocabulary. My thanks to Boemkool for her help with Dutch vocabulary and sentence translation. Thanks also to LiveJournal's Kodaishi and Rattgirl for their help with the German sentence translation.