Searching the grounds produced nothing that could indicate where the vampire might be hiding. The vampires returned an hour before dawn and managed to sleep until the squeals of girls getting ready for school crept under the door. Alucard didn't say anything that morning and none of Seras' friends said anything to him in return. Seras, though, could be said to radiate with joy at the temporary peace.
Alucard left the group after enduring their chatter for ten minutes and headed towards his first period class. The classroom was locked when he got there and he stared at the yellow light that illuminated the window on the door. He knocked once, then twice and received no answer. Too tired to want to walk through the door and then have to explain how he had gotten in, he sat down in front of it, placing the blue satchel that held his textbooks next to him.
More time passed and when boredom finally began to creep up on Alucard's mind, the door opened to reveal a shriveled math teacher who stared at him blankly for a moment before frowning.
"Ms. Hellsing, I'll presume?" He screwed up his eyes behind the lens of his thick rimmed glasses, noticing the oversized jacket. "Those clothes are why you didn't come to my class yesterday?"
Alucard was distracted by the way he had addressed him, but he let it slide and got up and walked past the old man and claimed a random seat. The teacher gasped at the blatant show of disrespect and he closed the door sharply, releasing some of his frustration.
"You understand, you cannot attend classes like this." Red eyes moved to him, making the man start. He cleared his throat, ashamed that he had brought so much attention to the unfortunate genetic defect.
"Do one's clothes affect how one performs in school?" Alucard's face was devoid of emotion as he stared at the flustered man.
"That isn't the issue. You are not respecting the rules of this school and are not…" The bell rang loudly and a song drowned out the man's words as the five minutes before school began. Students started to file into the room and the teacher huffed and retreated to his desk while Alucard stared the table he was sitting at.
Momentarily, he noticed a body standing in front of him and his eyes flicked up to reveal an agitated girl wearing far too much perfume. He flinched at the smell as she spoke.
"That's my desk." Her hand fell to her hip and her eyes narrowed, but Alucard ignored her.
"You smell."
A few of the students who were passing by stopped and gave Alucard an incredulous look before they continued on their individual ways. The rows of curved tables that were raised towards the back of the room, led the front to function as a stage and the students were able to watch the confrontation in comfort.
"Your eyes are ugly, so move." The girl smirked, anticipating her victory to be showered in a burst of tears from the girl in her seat, but Alucard merely stared at her. The vampire remained silent until the last student entered the room and the teacher coughed behind the girl.
"Ms. Hellsing, you are deliberately trying to cause trouble?" he gave a frown of disapproval and told Alucard to go to the front of the room to be introduced. He got up slowly and picked up the navy blue bag and slung it over his shoulder, leaving the angry girl to quickly claim her seat. When he turned at the front of the room, she gave him an evil grin. Alucard pretended not to notice and waited as the teacher introduced himself as Mr. Heffner and then asked Alucard to say his name aloud.
"Alucard." The vampire said in complete monotone, refusing to acknowledge the name the professor had called him and he walked down the aisle closest to the still grinning teen and went to the back of the room, a full row distancing him from the nearest student. The room was silent and Mr. Heffner's exasperated grunt was clearly heard by all of the eyes that stared at the strange red-eyed girl.
The classroom slowly fell back into normality as the teacher droned on about the upcoming final exam and the homework from the day before. Here the man paused and looked up at Alucard as the shuffling of papers and the working of zippers and binders were heard. He walked up the aisle and stood before him, pretending to be discreet in his proceeding, but his raised voice soon attracted the room's attention.
"Do you have the homework, Ms. Hellsing?" the sea of eyes blinked, knowing that it was impossible for the girl to have known what the homework had been.
"I was absent." Alucard looked up into the clearly satisfied expression.
"Wait outside until we have finished going over it. I'll give you the assignment and you can work quietly until you are called." Mr. Heffner spun on his heal in a practiced motion and went to his desk and pulled out a pad of sticky notes and scrawled the pages and numbers before ripping a sticky note off neatly. By then, Alucard was approaching the end of the aisle. As he neared the smell of perfume, the girl stuck out her foot in front of his shoe. Without hesitating he stepped on the offering leaving the girl in tears. She stood up awkwardly and then sat down again, unsure about reporting the incident to the teacher. She eyed the satchel Alucard had left at the back of the room when he closed the door.
Minutes passed, and the teacher forgot about the disruptive girl until the sound of the door handle turning made his hand pause on the whiteboard. Alucard started towards the aisle but a familiar cough stopped him.
"We haven't finished." Mr. Heffner clicked the cap back onto the blue marker and turned to face Alucard who remained expressionless, though he almost portrayed boredom at the glare he was receiving.
"Well, I have."
A heavy silence resumed, broken by a low growl. Without a word of instruction, the teacher held out his hand expectantly and Alucard walked to the board, removing the Geometry textbook from under his arms in a way that it fell open to where two pages of lined paper were neatly tucked. The teacher observed the numbers and geometric shapes without a word and the papers rustled in his hands as he looked over the answers, pausing to check them in the back of the book which was on a stand that stood beside him. When he got to the last question he froze, only his eyes moving to look at the silent vampire.
"How did you finish them so quickly?" he demanded quietly. "Did another student lend you their answers?"
"No." Alucard paused as the man held out a hand for the textbook. The trading of the textbook and the papers took only a second, but minutes passed as the old man meticulously examined each page. Chattering soon filled the silence as he licked his hand to turn to page one hundred and four. When he was done, students were laughing, not caring if they were heard as the sheer multitude of voices would make identifying them impossible. The thundering echo of the book as it was shut abruptly in the teacher's hands caused a hush to fall on the room.
When the book had been returned to Alucard and he to his desk, Mr. Heffner struggled to hide his crossness by jabbing his marker into the board, forgetting to take off the cap. He glared at the dent in the whiteboard.
Homework was finished and notebooks and papers appeared as the day's lesson began. Without the option of looking out a window, Alucard crossed his legs under the reddish wood of his table and watched the teacher move about before the board, his marker squeaking occasionally. Time passed and Mr. Heffner now faced his class, waiting for them to finish the example he had written. His eyes ran over the bent faces, row by row, stopping on Alucard who looked back at him. The man's eyes fell to the area before the vampire, finding it void of the notes that should have been present. A frown wrinkled his mouth and his eyes went back to Alucard.
"Ms. Hellsing, I see you are finished before the rest of the class. What answer do you have written…Oh!" he didn't even try to show any false surprise as he looked at the empty table. "Where are your notes?"
"I don't need any. If I need instruction I have the book. Isn't that why you gave it to me?"
A scowl escaped before Heffner could calm himself. He smiled after a moment and gestured towards the example on the board.
"Please show me how well this works for you by answering the problem, my dear." His smile deepened when Alucard's eyes deadened, but he almost jolted when the vampire got up and went to the board. Moments later, in neat print, the answer alone rested beneath the question. The teacher's lips parted in surprise.
"You mean to tell me, Ms. Hellsing, that you were able to work out the square root of 289 in your head? The length of…" his voice trailed off as he realized he was beginning to speak to himself. He looked at Alucard with mild annoyance. "You must have used a calculator." He muttered. His eyes widened and he blushed when Alucard answered, not having thought that the girl could have heard him.
"I only worked it out to the fifth decimal place. But, I was wondering if I could just take the exam you mentioned earlier, or if I could so that I wouldn't have to came to your class in the morning." Alucard thought of the idea of being able to sleep for another hour and a half, and of avoiding having to see the police girl's friends.
Mr. Heffner sputtered and his eyes widened as a few voices chirped out in surprise. He blinked and his lips twitched. "F..fine! You can resume your place outside and you can take the exam during the remaining forty minutes of class, but mind, this will be your final grade. You cannot retake it."
Students looked at Alucard as if he was insane when he walked out the door with nothing but a pencil and the exam. Mr. Heffner didn't seem to be able to regain his calm, and he gritted his teeth more than once after he sloppily wrote examples without explaining how to do them. Twenty minutes ticked by and the door opened again, making students gasp and whisper. Mr. Heffner was beat red and he indignantly grabbed the exam out of Alucard's hands when it was offered to him. Alucard gave a tired sigh and went back to his seat. He put his head on the table and closed his eyes, sitting up once to move his arm under his head. The students were amazed as the teacher stopped the class to look over the answers in a folder that now lay open on his desk.
Alucard looked up when the man appeared before him, as white as a ghost.
"You may leave, Ms. Hellsing. I've written you a pass so that you may go to the library for the rest of the period, but you will have to go to come with me to explain why you won't be attending my class for the rest of the year."
"Year?" Alucard was sitting up now.
"I…" Heffner hesitated and bowed his head in shame. "I've seem to have given you the second semester exam…for my advanced placement class." He cleared his throat and Alucard's eyes widened and his lips turned to form a wicked grin.
"Like Hell you did that by accident." Alucard took the pass from the teachers hand as the man's head shot up at the vampire's words. Alucard took up his bag and threw it over his shoulder.
"Goodbye then, Mr. Heffner. It was a pleasure meeting you." The vampire's eyes flashed dangerously, making the old man start. Alucard walked passed him and the rows of shocked expressions, stopping only to grin at the perfume drenched girl. "You can have the seat, but you still smell."
Alucard's next class was chemistry and he glowered at the irony. He went to the class when the bell rang and demanded to take the final exam, for the second semester, before he introduced himself. After a few minutes of enduring Alucard's disrespect, the woman who was to be his teacher left to retrieve the exam. He handed it in twenty minutes later, and while the students worked on some problems that were scrawled on the board, she wrote his pass to leave the class with a shaky hand.
Without bothering to wait for the end of the period, Alucard moved to his next class and the next, demanding to take the history and French finals. The English final was done during lunch, and he left to see his gym teacher. He nearly made the burly man faint when, an hour later, he had run twenty miles without breaking a sweat. (Alucard of course had been trying to go at a fast pace for a human)
Alucard spent his 5th and 6th periods sleeping in the library. At the bell signaling the end of the school day, Alucard left to wait for his teachers in the office. When he sat before the desk of a familiar, red-shoed woman, he had a grin that made her shudder.
Alucard slammed the door, making Seras squeak. He glared at the circle of girls doing their math homework as they chattered about God knows what.
"Where were you?" Seras managed as he turned to throw his satchel on his bed and himself after it. Burying his head in a pillow, he mumbled. A moment of silence drew his head away from the cloth and he tossed the pillow on the ground.
"Taking every accursed final exam this school has to offer. I score full points for all of them and the morons insist that in order to stay here I must be enrolled in at least three academic classes." He scowled at the memory and looked at the digital clock on the nightstand that showed it was 5:45 pm in big blue numbers.
"What?" Seras and the girls stammered and one of the girls stood up. Alucard recognized the brunet as she walked over to his bed.
"What the hell are you talking about?" She demanded and Alucard glanced at the Calculus book in her hand. He cursed under his breath.
"I chose three of your classes." He looked at Seras and she sat stunned for a moment. "Calculus, Art History, and English." He lay back down as the brunet gasped and Seras began to cry.
"I'm in the same history and math class as her!" her fist shook as she looked at the black hair laying face down on the bed.
"I'm as happy about it as you are." He mumbled and fell asleep.
Integra looked at the clock that read 5:55 pm, and she fixed a pile of papers on her desk before stretching her arms over her head. The phone on her desk began to ring and she composed herself before answering.
"Hello, this is Integra Hellsing…"
"Hello." said a serious voice, the tone startling Integra and she groaned at the thought of Alucard causing some more trouble at the school. "Are you the mother of Ms. Alucard Hellsing?"
Hesitantly, Integra answered that she was his guardian.
"I am Mr. Harris, the principle of Ms. Hellsing's school."
God. Integra closed her eyes and took out a cigar.
"I would like to inform you, if you do not already know, that Alucard is what one can call special."
Indeed. Integra blew out a lungful of smoke.
"Today, Ms. Hellsing took every second semester final we offer at our school. She can graduate at this point and can most likely enroll in any college of her choice, but she insisted on remaining at the school with her relative, Seras Hellsing. As her guardian, I think it is in her best interest that you enlighten her on how gifted she is to be of such an intellectual level at her age. She is a genius by definition, and has broken the mile record, two mile record, and every mile record at our school. Ms. Hellsing should not be permitted to waste her gifts…"
"Excuse me?" Integra's cigar had fallen into her lap and she picked it up and tossed it into her ash tray. "Alucard…a genius?"
"Yes. She is beyond even that title."
Integra was silent for almost a minute. "She will stay enrolled at your school none the less."
The phone gasped. "But…!" Integra hung up with a tired sigh, and slowly returned it to its receiver.
She pushed a few buttons on the phone after a moment and brought it to her ear. When a voice answered she sighed again. Walter frowned at the sound.
"Alucard has been deemed a child prodigy." She hung up.