Author's Notes: This is an accurate description of what goes on in the Hellsing household these days, as interpretted by Makorechan (go check that person's new fanfic out! It's sizzlin'!)

alucard: ALL UR WOMAN R BELONG 2 ME

integra: get back in the house.

alucard: yes dear ;( trudges back

d: whisper whiiiipped.

integra: DUN DUN DUNNNNN deathglare

d: already running

Transient Beings": A VAMPIRE HUNTER D / HELLSING CROSSOVER

TAKE 7 : We're Damned After All

------

Walter kept a wary eye on Integra Hellsing's well-being. She was reclining tiredly in her leather arm chair, gazing stiffly from behind her wireframe glasses. Her usually severe expression was masked by a small measure of pain. There was a hot cup of tea sitting by her hand on the desk, waving tendrils of steam floating into the air; a bottle of over-the-counter pain relievers was not four inches away from that. She slid her glasses up to pinch and massage the bridge of her nose, brow furrowed deeply, yet another cigar wedged stubbornly in the corner of her mouth.

"The family wants their little girl back. They've signed over a ridiculous sum of cash for her. But regardless of how much money we're getting, we have a God-given obligation to see to the task anyway."

The ill mood set upon the room was probably due to to her late-night adventure. The overriding chill that beset her and made her wear more layers than usual was attributed to the combined presence of Alucard and D, standing opposite one another with only her desk and Walter in between. Their opposing gazes made for an interesting aura that choked the entire room with supernatural blackness. Her lonely desk lamp glowed softly, stubbornly fighting off the gloom cast by the two similar creatures.

"This is a very delicate situation, as always. The child involved must not be killed. D, will you see to it that she makes it safely outside to Walter?"

"I will." D glanced at Walter, who nodded and smiled. He seemed more comfortable around him. How long that would last, who knew, after everyone in the household had heard of D surviving a skirmish with the No-Life King?

"Go!" Integral growled, raising her eyes from the shadow of her hangover, a madness slowly creeping over her. "Go now and do God's will! Annihilate those freaks for God and salvage what's left of humanity!"

As the trio hunkered down for transportation, D's baleful eyes swerved toward the Midian as he rubbed a bullet between his fingers, gazing with little regard to what was going on around him, boredom etched into the tired lines on his face.

"You aren't excited at all."

"Why should I?" The words almost cut through the air with petulance, like a child asking why he should be grateful he got presents at Christmas at all, when he did not recieve the gift he wanted. He was sitting on top of his coffin, staring at the other with a devious smile. "It will be over so quickly, like an orgasm come too soon. How disappointing." He flicked the bullet at his companion; the blessed metal sizzled in D's palm. His expression didn't change, though he flicked it back. How odd that the bullets did not have any effect at all on the vampire. "Care to make it more interesting then?"

"Now, now," Walter interrupted, smirking at the pair. "This time, I don't want to have to cart him away on a stretcher. After all, he's responsible for the life of that child." Walter's expression sobered faintly. "D. I'll be keeping a hold on the detonator. If you should try anything, know that I won't hesitate to kill you!"

The rest of the journey passed in silence. Walter passed around a picture of the girl. She was beautiful, almost cherubic as only dhampir children are rumored to be; the photographer might have been one of the few master's remaining of his art. She sat before a large pond surrounded by flowers, glowing with the light of the summer sun. Her hair was bobbed and curled, her smile slow and intelligent.

"The vampire took her three years ago from the orphanage. This photo of her is from before the 2nd Nazi Invasion. She would be 16 years old now. She was last spotted alive near an abandoned American army depot on the Channel. It's been abandoned for a couple of years, left rotting half-submerged in the water."

In a matter of months, the United States abandoned all of their outposts in the vicinity of England and returned only after the battle for arms reclamation. Anything left over was useless to them, scavanged by the wretched remains of those who somehow survived. London, for months, had been nothing but a stagnating graveyard, whose corpses gave birth to disease and filth. For a few months, Integra had been forced out of her homeland to live in a cleaner part of the world while the gore and ichor littering the burning streets was burnt and purged away.

The depot was half-sunken into the thames. No one had bothered to break it up and sell the metal pieces for money. It loomed through the winter fog like a sea cast ashore in a storm, snapped power-lines coated with grime. It was a bitter cold day following the first snow; there was not a sound nor breath of life within a mile of the place, the burned out skeletons of armored cars and indeed people buried in mud from a decade of muddy springs and autumns. Snow piled on top of spindly metal interiors, making them look pale and crystallized in the dark.

Alucard looked back and forth, lifting his upper lip in a grimace of pleasure. "A playground for fools," he commented. "If she's not dead, she's frozen solid somewhere here in the snow."

D stepped out into the snow. Every sound was muffled by the white blanket around them. The water was as still as perfect glass, obsidian in the fading daylight. He drew his sword - even that sound was dulled, as if he were drawing it in a seperate room in a small building - and planted it firmly in the ground, crouched, and listened with his head bent toward the blade.

Alucard watched him intensely. His ears could pick up trace sounds. But even the rats that scuttled here were mangy and starved. What a neat trick, he observed as D stood and recovered his sword from the snowy, hard-packed earth.

"I hear movement. It's very faint. But it's definitely coming from inside. But..."

"What?" Walter looked to D, smiling, anticipating a good fight.

"The water."

"Hm?"

"It's too still. Like... something I've seen before." He gazed at the water intensely. A slow change came over his body, his hand holding the sword at his side as if he were considering a canvas he was about to transform into a peerless work of imminent beauty. It gave him a kind of human quality that, for all intents and purposes, Alucard utterly lacked. It made him stunningly jealous of him once again. Just where between the narrow line between monster and man did this one walk?

But then he saw what was wrong with the water. His eyes gazed more closely at its surface. Beneath it, yes... it seemed to be undulating with an inconstant throb of... something. Two heavy guns raised slowly, aiming directly at the heart of the black, pulsating mass.

"Another monster. Another devil from the depths of Hell. From whence did you come, and where will you go?" He fired. The mass beneath the water, so quiet and still, then rose in an enormous spray of polluted filth. It was as tall as a bus standing on its end, a shapeless blackness writhed to mock the bullets that had broke its waxen surface. It was unlike anything Walter or Alucard had seen; it gave a sound that sounded something like a foghorn and an emptying water tank before a smaller black figure leapt skyward and descended with the silver line of a sword against the darkness. Four times his sword flew, in less than two seconds.

The engorged black mass writhed, cut into eights, tumbling back onto itself. But it reformed from below, rising again and snatching the dhampir's legs, dragging him beneath frozen waters. It was hard to tell whether he was under water or devoured by the ooze that had sucked him down out of sight.

Walter surged forward, but Alucard held him back, pointing at his face with the barrel of his gun. "Let me go see what he's doing," he purred. "That water is far too cold for you, and you're a mortal too."

With that, he plunged into the blackness and vanished as well. Walter stood trembling with a mixture of outrage and worry, before he turned to glance around their surroundings. Besides the roiling water, everything was quiet.

------

It was choking under the water. But Alucard, who needed never to breathe, fought the grasping, sucking ooze that was determined to soak through his clothes and blacken his skin. He saw D, by spying the glint of the blue gem around his throat, and made for him, shooting bullets through the ooze, until the viscous material made his weapons useless. He grit his teeth, bared his fangs, and reached out with one monumentous effort. They seemed weightless in the nothingness around them, and D seemed to be just... floating there. In his dark, black little heart, he hoped to see him live so he could rend his perfect flesh apart and prove that darkness was not beautiful, that immortality was not kind.

Though no one but D could see it, Alucard's eyes turned red, and he felt himself falling apart, becoming part of the monster around them. He drank its power right from the hardening fluid around them; he did not change, but became, and the screaming cries of a hundred souls echoed within his mind.

A bright white light shattered his concentration. A conflageration whose origin was the vicinity of D's left hand was spiralling out of control; within that palm, he saw again the mean little face with its black, open mouth, spawning its own whirlwind of havoc and chaos. A grimacing, fanged grin framed that vortex. A tiny, distant point of light flickered inside of its gullet, before it faded and vanished. Then, just as Alucard realized what was happening, that the vortex was drawing him within itself, threatening to send his very existent into that unknown, terrifying purgatory beyond.

He screamed, dragging his body molecules out of the fluid, becoming whole again, and then exploding into a storm of black, red-eyed, shrieking bats. The water foamed with the action of all his collective wings beating at once, moving skyward, drenching Walter with water as he passed over head, the frantic desire to get away annoying him. He collected himself at the shore, his eyes scanning the darkened waters. D broke the surface, retrieved his hat, disappeared again.

Then he was pulling himself out of the water, trembling and gasping as if he were nothing but human. His eyes were bleeding crimson, and the blue of his gaze was swimming in its own ruby dye. His hair was black when it was wet. Alucard's lip curled slowly. He himself enjoyed the perfectly dry, wintry air.

Walter helped D stand up. "Are you quite alright? That was quite a feat. What happened down there?"

"It's gone," was all D said, straightening and regaining most of his composure. Flawlessly intercepted by Alucard as he marched back up the bank, he gave him a level, even stare as Alucard forced his left hand upwards. There was nothing there. Then, quietly, just the mouth formed and it said in an undertone,

"Pushy bastard, aren't you? Always got to have all the glory. Get a life!"

A derisive sound answered the carbuncle's words as Alucard dropped the hand. D's unwavering gaze was diverted toward the depot again. "Satisfied?"

"Oh, no. More curious than ever." He laughed at him, at his weakness of water. He could feel it pulling at his strength like the gravity of a much denser planet. He looks so mortal, it's painful to look at him. How can he be so monstrous and human in the same breath? Bastard! Whose child are you?

"It will have to wait." The blackened figure strode forward, cheeks stained by the ink of the blackness like tears, mixed with blood. It seemed, in those clear crystalline depths, there was a trap set for those who looked too deeply. A trap that made them forget who they were, digging deep into their own hearts until it made their very breath stop in their throats and wonder.

Alucard licked his fingertips lasciviously, enjoying the flavor of blood with the taste of the demon from the water, watching him with narrowed eyes, troubled, deaf to Walter's questions. He's impenetrable, his mind reeled. He is a god among men but a black mark against our kind. What kind of future does he hail from that spawns such beautiful beings?

"Tell me," Alucard bade the dhampir, "do you weep when you destroy vampires? Do they beg for mercy, or do they count themselves as fortunate to fall at your blade?"

"I can't say," D answered softly. "When I entered the coffin... I wanted to sleep forever. At that time, I finally understood what it meant to suffer the stagnation of the soul. I chased my own shadow across the world, endlessly, back and forth in a tireless effort to redeem the sins of my father."

"'The stagnation of the soul,'" Alucard mused, as if mocking his flighty, frivolous, flowery words. But within, his soul was quaking. No matter how he manipulated it, it would not be still, and with more gravity than he admitted, the words were hanging on him like the droplets of water on his companion's black hair. He let loose a soft, rasping breath, and then another. Husky, breathless laughter that sounded suspiciously like a desperate attempt at levity bounced across the Thames.

The cracked interior of the building stank of corrosion and rust. For eyes so accustomed to darkness, this sanctuary that reeked of sin was not so terrible. Slowly, blinking sleepily, a multitude of eyes (not nearly as many as Alucard's) gazed as if into their souls, tearing them apart thread by thread, muscle by muscle, baring their bones. And the pair, immutable in their strength, bore the scrutiny with unimpressed or unphased expressions.

The girl. The Girl. Find her, Alucard urged his silent friend, his body unravelling slowly as he tapped into his power. I'll manage this upstart! His sleepy smile grew into one of outright bloodlust, eyes widening, flooded with the malice of a hundred thousand tortured, wretched souls. But they were not for this battle. "Releasing Art Restriction to Level Three..."

D turned, his lean body slipping effortlessly between stacks of empty, broken boxes, breathing the stagnating air. The ceiling was punctured with artillary fire and snow had collected in patches along the ground. The rising moon cast diagonal beams of silver into the open spaces between towers of open, gutted crates.

A frightened sound, intermittent gasping for breath between whimpers. The girl was close.

"Two... One. Ready.. or not!"

D was not prepared for the surge of black, choking, all-consuming cold that flooded the entire grounds. It was not even so much that he was physically cold, but that it entered his brain, bleeding into every iota of his being, contaminating his senses with power so like his, it left a foul taste on his tongue that would not vanish when he rubbed it on the roof of his mouth. He stopped to turn and look back, glazed eyes watching the two vampiric entities clash and twist against each other, a dozen mouths with diamond fangs and bloodshot eyes, each one seeking a vital throat to rip open. The noise was immense; it was enough to terrify a young woman dressed in a soiled yellow dress into breaking for a run out of the shadows.

He caught her in a second. She fought only for a little while, her weak slender arms bunching with muscle before she looked up, captivated by the beauty of the man before her, death all around her. You're safe, he told her, under the howling of wretched, soulless demons, tearing into each other's flesh as if they passionately lusted for the taste of each other. Alucard had already won. By now it was for the sheer joy of carnage now that he ripped and carved his way into the other vampire's body with tooth and claw, hunting for that final satisfaction, that endless bliss of taking another soul into himself. From everywhere, his laughter resounded, screaming with irrepressible, raw, terrible and mad joy. A shrill cry of negation rose above it, a man's voice, despair counterpointing the insanity that was Alucard.

When the bloody feast was done at last, and the thousand mouths disappeared and the darkness pooled into a solid mass once again, D approached cautiously with the young woman in tow. The young woman was clutching his cloak, unable to see as he did. And who wanted to see Alucard, lifting his eyes and his gore-stained hands, his perfectly straight, white teeth, all sharp like a shark's, bared in a rapturous grimace.

"You found her," he sighed. It seemed the air heaved with him, compressing around the dhampir's body. The girl quivered. "Now.

"Kill her."

The girl trembled. Her eyes, so clear and bright like on that day, looked toward where she thought she heard Alucard's voice coming from. She very nearly plastered her soiled body to D's, as if he were a talisman against the words dripping from the No-Life King's dark mouth.

Suddenly, the barrel of Casull materialized from the solid black silhouette that his body inhabited. It occured to D at that moment that Alucard was not simply a solid creature anymore; he had become something... more. Something incorporeal that could ravage a small army in seconds. He did not yet know that it was Alucard who decimated the Nazi legions and overran the city with his legions of mangled souls, wretched creatures all devoured one by one over his lifetime.

D's eyes narrowed as the scale of Alucard's power dawned on him.

"N-No!" a high-pitched voice shrieked. "No! I haven't been turned by him! He just dragged me around all the time! I'm not like that demon at all!"

"How insulting," Alucard droned, leveling his cold and blank stare upon the terrified lady. Casull was still pointed at her, despite the fact that D was the only thing standing between them. The head of a giant hound rose from the floor, eyeballing her hungrily. "What a pathetic, cruel little joke!"

D suddenly stepped away from the girl. Once his body was clear, Alucard fired - not waiting for D's jacket, which sported a new hole to match the one suddenly gaping in the girl's chest. Girl now, because her dress fell down in tatters, and there was nothing on her chest save for two small dimples. Her eyes widened in terror and pain. But the whole slowly closed itself over in a matter of seconds, and her expression was sedate and calm.

D turned to side with Alucard, keeping himself a respectful distance from the giant hound head snapping and growling in the shadows.

The girl smiled, pointed fangs pricking into her plump lower lip. But was it a girl or a boy? This child looked no older than twelve, but then vampires, to a point, could bend their shapes to appear any way they pleased if it was within their power.

"The picture's a fake. I could tell the lighting was ever-so-slightly different compared to the background," D said tonelessly. "And the letter written begging to retrieve the 'little girl'..."

"I wrote it," the child said with a man's cultured, smooth tones. "The vampire you just destroyed... was my lover. He couldn't understand what I was trying to do. He wanted to save me from... myself."

"What?" Midian and dhampir both matched their immutable gazes with the boy's. He seemed to be staring into nothing, however, and no matter how hard they tried to force their sight into his mind, it was as if nothing was there.

"Aren't you going to destroy me?" he sighed hopelessly, closing his eyes, opening his arms to the world. "Go ahead. Like this. Here. And you, slash here. It will have me undone like clockwork. Do it!" He was not so much animated as he was fervent with his words. He closed his eyes, waiting, trembling, expectant for the release he would surely be granted.

The Midian's tongue rolled the name of the girl out. "Dorian... Grey. Where is the handsome man from the picture, Mr. Grey?"

"That's one of my names. And dead soon, I hope." A tedious smile shyly tiptoed its way onto the boy's cherubic lips. "I don't want to live like this anymore.

"I'm tired, Count. Give me what I want. You must understand; I've been waiting a long time. I've tasted every wine, slept with every man and woman I've ever wanted, drank deeply of every vice known to man and demon." He opened his eyes, meeting Alucard's incredulous, outraged glare; the hound of Baskerville snarled, spitting saliva and ichor from its maw. "But one last joy is denied me, Alucard."

The boy stunned them further by doing the unthinkable. He actually approached the No-Life King, and placed his hands on the Casull, pulling his aim toward his heart and smiling with a grown man's seduction. The invitation was there; he wanted Alucard to enjoy his death as surely as he had enjoyed Dorian's lover's. "I want it... and you can give it to me. I know you can. Devour me; take my blood and body, like the body of Christ. I may not be as tasty or wholesome as those gone before me, but consider it as gift for your hard work!"