Chapter Two: A Fate Comparable to Death

Stiva's breathing was heavy as he sat up in bed, violently awoken by another of his recurring nightmares which had left him in a cold sweat that drenched his night shirt. He held his head, and ran his fingers back through his thick black hair, grasping at his short locks, anything to prove to himself he was awake and out of the hell his mind had once again trapped him in while he traveled the depths of his subconscious. He slipped out of bed, bracing himself on the bedpost and the night-table, the lamp and glass of water nearly shaken over with his trembling grasp. He stared out into the shadows of the room, his sapphire irises darted between the shadowy shapes as he searched for the demons haunting him in the dark.

After a moment, he took a deep breath and lit the lamp, sitting down on the bed. He rested his face in his hands, exhausted from yet another sleepless night, and tortured by the endless memories of his past. "Why..." he clenched his bangs in his hands, his teeth locked tight together, and he let out a horrid cry, "Why...was I cursed like this...These hands stained so red, even the devil himself would confuse them for his own!" His anguish burned into rage, he reached out to grab anything to throw and take out his anger on, but the first thing his hand grasped was the long beaded threads of his mother's silver rosary and the rosary born of his father's Mala beads and a silver cross, and no sooner than he was lost in a fit of rage, he stopped, the rage flowing out of him just as quickly as it had built up. He stood in the middle of the dimly lit room, clutching the rosaries to his chest. "If they hadn't left you...none of this would have happened..." he lost himself in a flurry of emotion as he threw himself through the bedroom door and into the tiny apartment's small living area, he quickly scooped up his mother's diary and its loose pages, which had been strewed across the small dining table, and stumbled back into the bedroom.

He had read those diaries pages more times than a priest reads the Bible, each word to him was some sort of connection to the parents he'd barely known. Despite his devoted memorization, he sat in the bed and began another night of rehearsing his mother's words, savoring each one like it was spoken right from her mouth into his ear.

"Dear Diary,

Stiva's gotten big enough that he is wandering around all on his own and greeting everyone we pass when we go to the store! Oh, our little angel is making us so very proud every day. It's been 5 years since we were blessed with him.. However... I fear that we cannot keep our past from catching up to us, so my beloved Sosuke and I took Stiva to Hellsing Manor today, to ask our old friend Arthur for help.

He welcomed us with open arms, and everything went better than I could have imagined, he promised us his help, even signing a note for our son to have the complete protection that the Hellsing Organization could provide him—whether my husband and I are alive or not.

Though, Stiva did cause a bit of a ruckus today...his little legs carried him off while Arthur, my beloved Sosuke and I spoke about the terms of our hiding. We quickly noticed he was gone, but the little angel had already made his way down into the depths of the Hellsing Manor, and how he found his way down there I'll never know. He was so close to that dungeon door I... I was so terrified to see him reaching for that door handle! But we caught him, I scooped him up and Arthur hurried us back upstairs. With that behavior, I can suspect that's where he keeps the beast from so long ago... That loathing creature, no matter how it was controlled or well-mannered when we were about... I wanted it no where near my son with him as young and defenseless as he is... a five year old with that creature... I fear what could have happened.

No matter that, the rest of the evening was wonderful, Stiva was unharmed, and the Hellsing Organization promised to stand with us as they always have.. I believe Sosuke and I will live out the rest of our lives in peace, and Stiva will have a beautiful life without having to know about the hell we fought all these years.

I can finally feel at peace, today was a beautiful day..."

Stiva's heart skipped a beat when he read her words, "promised to stand with us", his rage built up once more, not only his rage for the vampires—the very breed that slaughtered his parents, but also for the Catholics, and more importantly, the Hellsing. Both parties failed to uphold their promise to Serafina, Stiva's mother, allowing a filthy vampire to take the lives of his parents.

All of the pain flowed back to him again, the loneliness, the grief, the unkempt rage and the perpetual sorrow. All this flowed through him, surging his body with both pain and an odd euphoria of numbness. This was a recurring event, he wrestled with these bouts of emotion on a regular basis: each night he was swallowed up in them, until he once again breached the surface and gasped for the sweet air of escape to consciousness. He struggled so often with these fits of emotion in the evenings, often allowing him to live out his days emotionless. He could slaughter any and everything that he saw as a target—he did not bat an eye, he couldn't bat an eye—no matter what, he felt nothing for those who he saw as corrupt members deserving of execution, and that's how he saw the sins he committed.

After a taking a moment to recompose himself, he placed his mother's diary on the night-table and laid down to return to the hell of his own mind, braving another attempt at slumber...

He stirred as he drifted into slumber, and as he reached a deeper sleep the scene that haunted him each night began once again:

There he was, huddled in that dark, desolate servant's chamber, like every night before. The bed's ragged sheets hung over the side as he hid himself under the bed, clutching Serafina's diaries. Outside he heard them: the haunting sounds of blood-curdling screams of women and men alike, the crashing thunder of items falling to the ground as people ran to escape whatever horrors were hunting them. He flinched as thuds and splatters echoed through the halls, frozen with fear. Finally he overcame his paralyzed extremities, grasping the pistols his parents had left behind, and willed himself to move.

"One... Stiva counted to himself.

"Two.." He crawled from under the bed, his hands trembled as he clutched the pistols.

"Three." he stood, braced himself, and cautiously stepped out his bedroom door.

Following his door's sudden close behind him, there was no sound: there was nothing. It was as if everything had stopped—Stiva could not tell if the horror had already ended, or if the nightmare itself had mistakenly ended without completing his scheduled haunting.

Suddenly, sound pierced his ear drums—as if a switch had been thrown, cutting it all back on. He stumbled with the sheer force of the overwhelming mixture of crashing, deathly groaning and the squish of blood beneath feet.

The shadows merged as those familiar figures took form at the end of the hall. He saw them, their rotten, mangled bodies staggering towards him as they groaned with the pain of their own existence. His unreliable body froze once again, his mind unable to process the danger presented by the undead beings that moved ever closer to him, those who had at one time helped him to live through the unbearable hell they were all trapped in.

He ran. He was not prepared to face those horrifying corpses that were once his friends, so he made a run for sweet escape.

Thud-Thud, Thud-Thud..

Thud-Thud, Thud-Thud...

He couldn't tell if it was his heart racing or the force of his feet striking down onto the ground that resounded all the way up into his eardrums, but there was no stopping to figure it out: all he could do was run.

The dream took its familiar turn, one he had long known was coming. He could almost feel it: the rush of hot air as he mistakenly took shelter in the Master's luxurious bed chamber. The sheer warmth of the room scorched his face as the heated air forced itself into the cold hall and he plunged himself into the room through the rush of heat, pulling the heavy wooden door shut behind him, and barricading it with the ornate furniture and decor that was placed about the room. He backed up, all the way to the back wall, locking his eyes on the door. His sapphire eyes darted about the door frame, hoping for sweet relief from the terrors throughout the house, each creak and groan of the floor tied the knot in his stomach even tighter.

It wasn't long before the mobs of ghoulish figures descended upon the room and he was forced to relive his own mental fracture. The doors swung open, and the distorted, disfigured faces of the only family he had ever known squeezed their collective, gorey mass through the door. He pressed his back to the wall, his hands shaking violently as he clutched the two pistols, raising them, lining them up with the bloodthirsty hoard that expanded in front of him.

He didn't want to shoot them.

He couldn't shoot them.

But he did.

The ghouls shifted forward, and Stiva flinched, his grasp tightening and his fingers clamping down on the trigger, the pistols going off. The stray bullets pierced a maid on the left flank of the ghoulish mass and a young butler who stood in the center right, below the general head level of the group. The group halted for a split second, and Stiva's eyes widened.

His hunters' blood coursed through his veins, the seed of hatred planted by his mother's diaries blossomed with the sight of his first spill of inhuman blood. Everything was a blur as he opened fire on the mass, reloaded, and opened fire again... Gunfire pierced his ear drums, all his senses were numbed with the fear, the hate and the excitement of the situation.

When he regained control over himself, his whole body felt heavy, he slumped back slightly against the wall, still holding the pistols. It was almost as if all the blood that puddled around his feet and spilled into the hall was sucking him down. He looked over the floor littered with a plethora of bodies. He swallowed as he locked eyes with a head, which he had blown off from the base of the neck of an older butler that had once taught him how to properly tie the tie on his uniform. "...I killed them...all of them..." he was pained that he couldn't summon up a single tear for what he'd done. He straightened up slightly, but something was making him sick to his stomach.

Was it the blood?... The undead bodies littering the floor?

No, it couldn't be. He'd been forced to take out the Master's leftovers so many times, he was less squeamish than a medical examiner, a butcher or even a surgeon.

He turned, and laying on its back, on the floor, was the body of Stiva's closest friend. Jassan, a young man who worked as a gardener for the Master, and lived in the room beside Stiva. Stiva fell back against the wall, covering his mouth, dropping one of the pistols into the puddle of blood at his feet. He was sure he was going to vomit, the nausea filling his gut and threatening to fill his entire body to the brim with unbearable sickness. He choked it down, he wouldn't allow himself to further soil the area where he had slaughtered his best friend.

He buried his sickness, numbing himself and kneeling to pick up the pistol that he'd dropped into the liquid crimson that now almost covered his feet. As he began to straighten up, his mind finally settled, and it struck him. Among the corpses, the heaving mass that was his Master, the Lord of the house, was missing from the piles of inhuman flesh that rose from the blood that had flooded the floor.

The room was dim now, the blood had flooded the warmth of the fireplace and swallowed up its serene light. It quickly grew cold, and in reality Stiva had thrown the blanket off of himself, making the icy air even more real. Soon, paranoia penetrated his numbed facade, he twitched at every sound: every creak and groan that the massive structure loosed into the air. His childlike imagination created the Master's heaving mass at every sound, peering from every nook and cranny, ready to end Stiva's life at the first opportunity. He saw and heard the Master everywhere, drowning in his own fear—unbeknownst to him—the mental stress he was dragged through slowing chipping away at his delicate child psyche.

Creak.

Groan.

The darkness was creeping in on him, each gentle shift of the earth causing the structure to sing, cornering him with the ominous sound. His eyes were wide, darting about every inch of his vision, scanning for the nonexistent spectators, the hallucinated hunters, and whatever else his mind could conjure to replace the nothingness. He had something to fall back on, though, his last innate resort: He could run. And run he did, taking off through the blood, clutching the pistols as he tore through the pool off blood that clung to his ankles. He leapt over bodies, stumbling slightly before making his way through the quarter's double-doors.

His fears materialized as he slammed, with the full force that he could muster to run, into the Master who had finally made his way to the scene of the massacre. He staggered back, and upon seeing the Master, fled back into the room before his sluggish, grotesquely large Master could react and grab him. The Master loosed a booming, bellowing laugh, and walked right over the bodies of his fallen servants, entering the gruesome remnants of Stiva's frantic fit for life. Stiva's body flooded with adrenaline, his heart was ready to explode. He had seen what this vile beast could do, and he was more afraid than he had been before.

"Ungrateful Brat..."

"You filthy little bastard.. ungrateful little rat.."

"Disgusting little human trash. You backstabbing little murderer."

The Master sneered as Stiva's eyes widened, pupils contracting, tears forming and spilling over his blood-stained cheeks. "You made me do it! You're why they died! I-" Stiva retorted, only for the Master to interrupt with a boorish, booming bought of laughter. "My fault?" He grinned, bearing his blood-stained teeth at Stiva,"You're the one holding the weapons that murdered them. You fired the shots, my boy." The Master kept getting closer, Stiva's legs locked in place. Stiva's heart was in his throat, and he could not swallow enough to force it back into place. No matter how many times this moment happened, it seemed to

With Stiva's fear locking him in place, the Master was sure to take his life. However, he made a fatal mistake, "You're just as bad as me." the Master sneered at Stiva, and lunged to finish the troublesome, petrified child off. There was a flurry of movement, a splash of blood, and silence filled the dim room.

The blood-stained silver of a pistol jammed itself beneath the Master's chin, and when the Master was finally able to realize the situation that had come about, Stiva brought the second pistol to stand beside the other underneath the Master's chin. Now the tables had turned, the Master fearfully raising his gaze to meet Stiva's.

The Master swallowed hard, he couldn't have imagined the fear that filled him when he met that child's gaze. A boy of 13, just barely a teen, stared at him with the eyes of a killer—numb, lacking fear, and a tangible air of bloodlust swirling within his deep blue irises. "I am not as bad as you.." Stiva eerily whispered to his Master, his voice held an almost sinister calm, something the Master had only heard in seasoned hunters. "Unlike you, you spineless cockroach..." The corners of his mouth twitched in an almost sadistic smile."I am a true monster... and you, are nothing more than a bloody pile of vampire shit that learned to speak." The Master's eyes widened, and Stiva simultaneously pulled the triggers.

Bang. A spray of ash followed the gunshots, plastering up on the wallpapered wall behind the Master's corpse. Stiva straightened up, and he indifferently brushed the Master's ashen remains from his face, hair and the front of his vest.

The broken young man casually made his way through the thickening blood pool and over the bodies, mostly shutting the doors, and sliding between them. He rummaged through the empty manor, washing himself of the blood and ash, and changing into clothes he found in the other servant's quarters. He placed the guns in holsters that hung at his waist, and made sure his mother's diary was safely tucked in the inner pocket of his vest. He adorned his mother's rosary, and his father's mala beads, and walked through the halls.

The haunting memories of all the care and joy he had gotten from those ghoulified corpses, the very ones he had mindlessly slaughtered, manifested in translucent scenes that reenacted themselves in his path. Stiva watched himself pass them, it was otherworldly to watch himself walk through scenes of smiling faces, laughing children, and the only family he'd ever truly gotten the chance to know.

He walked into the darkness of the world outside the manor. His mind did not create the rest of the scene, he walked in complete darkness, until his dream self closed its eyes, and reset the scene again.

The rest of the evening continued as it always did. The scene played out over and over until the warmth of the morning sun woke him, and he dragged himself from bed to begin another day of hunting.