"Frightened, Angel?"
"What's going on, Alucard? Where are we?" He recognized nothing about his surroundings.
"This way!"
Walter followed the vampire's chiming laughter, the hazy grey drawing closer around him until he walked a corridor delineated by walls of dirty fog that pulsed with bloody light.
He stopped when the corridor came to a T, looking both directions for signs of movement. "Alucard?"
"What's taking you so long, slowpoke?" Walter oriented himself and turned left to follow the familiar giggle, following a sweeping curve to the right.
"Where are we?" The next intersection provided a choice of doubling back along a corridor that paralleled the one he'd already traveled or taking another left.
Walter doubled back, slowing down as he heard quiet voices. One sounded like Alucard's though, and the young man picked up his pace.
When Walter swung around the corner the next time the corridor doubled back, he stopped in his tracks. In the far end of the short alcove his turn had revealed, Walter witnessed a pair locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace. The two separated and Walter recognized himself and the taller, older form of Alucard he had seen occasionally during his years at Hellsing.
The pair turned and walked into the mist at the end of their cul-de-sac. Walter frowned at the vision before remembering his first solo vampire kill. They'd put on a show of being lovers then. That was all he was seeing. Just a harmless memory of an act put on for others.
But that was a dead end.
Walter turned back and took the left he hadn't taken at the last intersection. "Alucard, this isn't funny." Frowning, he pulled off his shoes and wrapped a wire around one, using it as an anchor as he unraveled a monofilament thread behind himself to at least keep track of where he'd been in this bizarre place.
After a few more almost random turns and retries, Walter was moving deeper into the maze. He followed a short length of corridor to a sharp right that led into a shallow alcove. Standing in the alcove was a little girl with her hands covering her face.
"What are we doing here?" Walter reached out to pull Alucard's hand away from his face when a flash of memory stopped him abruptly. The memory of red eyes, sharp teeth, and a writhing, living darkness made his skin prickle with fear and anticipation.
"Alucard?"
"Come on, little boy, show me out." The diminutive vampire brushed past him and walked forward into and through the wall.
Walter hissed in frustration at the replayed memory, and backtracked to the last intersection.
"Angel…" drifted to him in a teasing sing-song.
Following Alucard's continued taunting guidance, Walter turned into another dead end and stared, horrified at the sight that confronted him there. He didn't recognize the huge man who held a limp, nude, and bloodied version of Walter's younger self, cleaning him with a washcloth that had stained pink the water in the basin he used.
The younger Walter suddenly twisted in the big man's grip and pulled away to stumble through a wall with the other man in pursuit.
"Forward, not back, Angel."
Alucard's voice came from right next to his ear; when Walter turned, he was alone. Turning back to the scene he'd been watching, he faced a now-empty dead end – no table, no basin filled with bloody water, and no younger Walter or his caregiver.
He shook his head. Obviously, there was more here than just memories, since he had no idea who that man had been.
"Waaaal-terrrrrrr."
"How many times do I have to tell you this isn't funny?" Walter grumbled and backtracked yet again to head in a new direction.
He nearly turned away from next scene, but this one was easier to face since he didn't know either man involved – not the big man in the armor, nor the smaller, slender man wearing a monocle. He watched scarlet tendrils hold the smaller man off the ground but turned away, uncomfortable, when the big man bent to kiss his captive.
None of this made any sense.
Walter left the two men behind. They were completely involved in each other anyway.
"Did that make you nervous?"
Walter shook his head and kept walking, refusing to rise to Alucard's disembodied taunt. The curved walls of the maze curved more severely as he worked his way inward. He followed several more paths to empty dead ends before turning down another doubled-back corridor.
At the far end of the corridor, he could tell that it opened out into a wider space than he had seen thus far.
Between him and the open space stood Alucard, looking at him with a familiar petulant expression on his pretty face. "You said you would give me a kiss if you lost."
"What?" Walter looked around, but the vampire was looking at him. "Lost what?"
"No. You gave me a dry peck on the cheek. You give a maiden aunt a dry peck on the cheek." Alucard advanced on him until he was tilting his head up to look at the taller youth. "I want my prize."
"If it's about this bloody maze, I'd say I'm about ready to win if you'll just get out of my way."
Alucard cocked his head at him and frowned. "It would be right if I were a woman?" Slowly, a smile spread over his face and Walter realized that the small vampire had subtly changed – his hips rounding, suit jacket tightening over the soft swell of her breasts. She looked both older and undeniably female.
"There. Now it is right, and I will have what you promised me." Alucard rose up on her toes and wrapped her arms around Walter's neck.
When he sucked in a breath to protest that he'd promised nothing, Alucard took it as license to kiss him insistently, pressing her tongue between his lips, and molding her body against his.
Walter made a muffled sound under Alucard's unexpected assault and stumbled slightly, using his hands on her hips to keep himself from falling backward. After Stoker's description of Dracula's "reeking lips," he was surprised that the kiss tasted faintly of cigarettes and toothpaste. At least someone, probably him, had taught Alucard to brush the bits of human flesh out of his teeth.
His initial incongruous thoughts were chased away as he became more aware of the vampire's body. She wasn't as cold as he'd expected, and she was soft where she pressed herself against him, making it impossible to ignore her new feminine attributes.
She kissed him until his stiff posture relaxed and his hands slipped off her hips and around her waist to hold her closer. Then she disappeared, leaving him holding and kissing air.
"Bollocks." He looked around, but there was no sign of Alucard, not even a taunting giggle.
"Right." Walter straightened his clothes and walked down the hall to the open area he'd spotted.
The corridor opened out into his darkened bedroom where he already lay asleep in his bed. He stood over himself and watched his eyes track back and forth under his eyelids. He wiped the thread of spittle off his sleeping self's cheek and looked out his bedroom window at the Hellsing grounds.
So, he'd been dreaming. That explained a lot. Not everything, but a lot.
Now, how to get out of this?
If it was a dream, he reasoned, the way out was to wake up, but the idea of waking himself directly filled him with a superstitious dread. Weren't there stories about waking sleepwalkers? And wasn't he a type of sleepwalker?
Then put the sleepwalker to bed?
Walter shrugged and lay down next to himself. It was as good a plan as any.
Alucard pulled away from Walter's dream as it faded and stared contemplatively at the lid of his coffin. He had recognized more than Walter had, but he was still puzzled. Some were clear visions of the past, but others…
Walter had never seen the vampire as warlord, but that bearded man in armor was one of Alucard's oldest identities. And whether Walter had recognized the other man in that pair or not, Alucard had seen Dornez blood in the lines of the monocled man's face.
There was more at work in the young butler's dream than just the vampire's curiosity.
Alucard
pushed his coffin lid open and went in search of a toothbrush and
toothpaste. If there were more to Walter's dream than just his
subconscious, the vampire would be ready for a kiss.