He disinterestedly watches her change into a new uniform. Her mop of blonde hair clings wetly to the nape of her neck and the width of her hunched-together shoulders, she sits daintily on her bed with one leg crossed over the other, trying to do the front hooks of a form-fitting black bodice with a furrow between her brows and her inner cheek carefully clenched between her teeth. He suspects Walter will get her a coffin soon enough.
Seras had protested his presence at first, when she emerged from the shower in a full-body towel and saw him seated at the sorry excuse for a dinner table in her claustrophobically small room.
But he was her sire and he would burke no insubordination from her.
Folding both hands in his lap, he settles down low against the backrest of the chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him, the heels of his leather riding boots clacking hollowly on the stone floor. Alucard catches the nervous glance she gives him from the corner of her eye and offers her a toothy grin. It's enough to make her fumble with the last hook, almost nick her finger on the brass, and shirk even more into herself. He chuckles and nonchalantly looks away.
What are you doing here?!Seras had yelped, not knowing how to react aside from wrapping her arms around herself,I'm not decent!As if he was supposed to care aboutdecency.
He hadn't answered her question, assuming his intentions were rather evident: she's gotten hurt and it was still his duty to check on her, since she had refused to drink his blood. While Alucard was often baffled by human behavior, he supposed getting stabbed by consecrated bayonets and carrying the dismembered head of someonecloseto them were legitimate reasons to be unsettled. She had been so distraught during the incident.
But his fledgling would only grow stronger from the experience, because there's no other outcome his pride will allow.
Seras puts on a clean blouse, buttons up and adjusts the collar. Next to her on the bed are a pair of thigh-highs and a short skirt, the rest of her uniform, with the colors muted in the dim lighting of the room to a matte olive. Her movements are quick and practiced, she seems to have rehabilitated well despite her reluctance to consume the blood bags Walter dutifully brings her every evening.
"Police girl," Alucard calls, taking note of how she perks up at the nickname, tilting her head to the side to face him with her wide, expectant eyes. He holds his chin high, peering at her from behind the yellow-tinted glass of his shades, and says, "Anderson could've easily killed you, you know."
Her shoulders slump at the words, as if she takes them for a beratement instead of an assessment. He blinks.How curious, he thinks amusedly, watching her fumble with the hemline of her blouse.
Seras heaves a heavy sigh and mutters defensively, "I couldn't bloody well leave your head behind—" here she hauls a hand through her wet hair, bares her expressive gaze to him and continues, "—I thought I'd lost you, master."
Tipping his head back and closing his eyes, he tries to throttle the nostalgia that threatens to rise from his gut at the fragile, vulnerable and slightly accusatory tone of her voice. Nostalgia for another life. He hears her standing up, balancing on one foot, back on two as she puts on the skirt, the same routine for the socks, shuffling around, and then footsteps echoing louder as she comes closer. There's the scrape of wood over stone and a soft 'plop' as she sits down.
Alucard levels her a look when he hears something sturdy clank against the surface of the wooden table. She's brought a hand mirror, an antique thing with the Hellsing crest engraved in the silver and he briefly wonders if Walter gave it to her or if she snatched it from somewhere in the mansion. In her other hand, she has a simple, plastic hairbrush. He suspects it's always been hers, it certainly looks that way.
When Seras starts to struggle with the tangles in her hair, he chuckles, and the sound catches between the four walls and the damp, low-hanging ceiling of the basement, an echo.
She huffs in frustration, levelling him a disgruntled look from underneath her blonde fringe, plastered against her forehead in wet strips of hair. With a flourish, he gets up from his chair, the tails of his coat bellowing with his movements when he rounds the table and approaches her; she throws a bewildered glance over her shoulder when he comes to stand behind her.
After plucking the brush from her grasp, Alucard motions her to look straight ahead and hold the mirror properly.
"You didn't drink the blood," his tone of voice's deceptively conversational, more easy-going than the grin toying along the corners of his dangerous mouth. He gingerly swipes back a few strands of hair from her temple.
He remembers thick, dark hair between his slender, childish fingers; the multi-colored mosaic on the walls was glittering under the sunlight cascading inside from the high windows, the floor was padded with heavy, finely-threaded rugs and cushions, the ceiling thinly-veiled with the smoke from the pipes, and there were feminine voices all around him.They deemed him less than a man, sending him into the sultan's harem with just one order,a boy like you is hardly a boy at all.Humiliation had burned angrily on his cheeks that day, when he'd entered the room on bare feet.
They had dragged him through the grand gates of the Topkapı palace by the scruff of his neck, as one of the many foreign princes held hostage by the Ottoman sultan, as a spoil of diplomatic warfare. His pride still flares at the thought that he was bartered like common stock,cattle. They had trust him into servitude, snatched the cross from his neck and dressed him in light, linen clothing, fed him sherbet and taught him the symbolism behindDivanpoetry. And they were watching him, always watching him from the shadowed corners of the palace, to see if he would finally bend to Muslim customs, to Muslim traditions.
Seras is talking to him, a soft explanation in a softer voice, "I'm sorry, master, but I couldn't,not yet I couldn't—"
Nothing but a hum in acknowledgement, not betraying his mind's elsewhere.
Do not burn what you intend to pillage, the sultan sneered at him when he spoke in his Turkish tongue. How subtle the threat behind those words, he sometimes muses.Do not squander what you might use someday.
"Master!" She yelps out when he tugs hard on her hair, making her neck curve backwards painfully, the teeth of the brush caught stuck in knots.
Blinking owlishly, Alucard snaps back to the present. He hushes her, brings one hand to the handle of her jaw and continues what he started, noticing how her hair tends to tangle together along the width of her shoulders. By her reflection in the mirror, he sees how she throws him another wary glance, but he only shakes his head to ease her worry. His grin stretches when she finally relents, showing off all his sharp teeth when she exhales loudly and relaxes under his touch again.
Gentleness was something he thought to have forgotten, but it seems his body has remembered how to brush a woman's hair properly.
Elisabeta, a whisper of a name haunts the back of his mind.Elisabeta at the hearth as she takes off her maramă, and her long tresses come tumbling down her back like they were made to be run through by your fingers, and her eyes are reflecting the warm glow of the fire as she bravely looks up to you with your war-torn hands and your bloodied armor.He combs through Seras' hair with his fingertips to make sure there are no more knots to be untangled.
It draws an approving hum from her and he wouldn't be surprised if she's close to dozing off.
Elisabeta undressing and bidding him closer with a coy smile; Elisabeta throwing herself off the battlements; Elisabeta dead.He unconsciously forms a fist against the first knob of her spine, holding onto strands of hair as the memories chase each other out in front of his eyes.Mina with her big blue eyes in her modest sleeping gown, staring at him in wonder; Mina and her parted lips, ravenous, covered in blood,hisblood; Mina dying, Mina dead.He shakes his head lightly, sliding his knuckles between her shoulder blades, letting her hair slide through his fingers.Seras strapped to the chest of that FREAK, staring at him in wonder; Seras dying. Serasundead.
One word pulls him from his reverie, such a soft-spoken admission it might as well have been an exhale.
Father.
Alucard can feel his fledgling stiffen when she realizes she said it out loud. It's comical how she abruptly drops the hand mirror, and how the heavy thing clatters unceremoniously on the wooden table, and how she snaps her head back to regard him with wide eyes. He laughs in the face of her embarrassment.
"I didn't… That's to say— I mean,I did, but I didn't mean it," Seras stutters, turning to him in her chair with one hand on the backrest and the other pushing her away from the table, and she takes a deep breath to compose herself, "I wasn't thinking, master."
"So it seems," there's no mercy in his teasing reply, the only note of humor being the curt chuckle he ends the statement with.
Walter later tells him that Seras was orphaned from a young age, and he merely dips his chin and smirks knowingly, saying that he figured as much.
After he's put the brush down, he motions her to sit straight again and her slightly cross expression changes into one of wonder. Alucard gathers her glossy hair in one hand and slowly rakes his fingers through, watching how the strands gracefully fall back against the nape of her neck and her shoulders, done away -for once- with the spikes.
He smirks then, when she starts to tremble a bit, and comments idly, "Is this the point where I say you look presentable,prettyeven—" and here his grin threatens to split his face apart, "Daughter-mine?"
Seras sounds so mortified, sohuman, like she'd hide her face in her hands and refuse to look him in the eye ever again. "Master! Could you shut up, please?!"
And Alucard can only spit his cruel laughter at the inexplicable fondness that blossoms behind his ribcage like a field of roses and threatens to choke him on its flower petals and thorns.
.