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03.
eyes of war
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Three, she had learned from a book on numerology in the family library, was a perfect number. It had a past, a present, and a future. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Three was the number of pictures in a triptych, and it had been the whimsical side of her that thought it an apt style for describing her life. She would be in the center frame, Alucard the right, Walter the left, and the title would be a single word. Loyalty.
Loyalty. Oil on canvas. This painting depicts a lady knight and her two retainers, one of whom will ultimately betray her.
Time would reveal the traitor, whose picture would hang lower and lower on the wall until it lay face down on the floor.
The other picture would disappear altogether.
Only the portrait of the lady knight would remain, her beauty and glory unchanging, as perpetual as the blue diamonds of her eyes. Or so it would seem.
A careful look. A closer look. And there would be flakes of paint peeling off the canvas.
That was what Integra felt like right now. A decrepit painting—a spectacle, really—and oddly detached from herself. She was old Integra, who was observing her younger image from afar with a solitary appraising eye. Look at you. Crying without inhibition. How long has it been? Weeks? Months?
Decades.
And this is you, who shed not a tear even when your entire world fell to pieces. Old Integra laughed a laugh weathered by years of smoking cigars and barking out orders. You don't cry. You get angry instead. Crying is a waste of time. Even Seras and Alucard cried more and they're vampires. Yet here you are, proving yourself human after all.
Yes, Integral Hellsing did not cry. Tears would merely be proof that she was not made of iron, that she was made of the same fallible set of emotions as anyone else. In her world, that was a weakness. So she sublimated her tears into flames. She let them burn her foes to ashes. Death, death, death to those who have wronged me. To Hellsing's enemy. To Britain's enemy.
Even if that is someone I love.
But the gears of sublimation must have come to a standstill when she died and yet to restart, because these stupid tears were not drying.
"My lady," Walter said, aghast.
Integra wiped them away with deceptive serenity. "It's nothing."
"There you go again with the 'nothing,'" Alucard hissed behind her.
She did not deign to respond.
"Are you alright?" Walter grasped her shoulders and looked her over rather frantically. She might have been amused by how he panicked at the sight of her tears had she not been so utterly miserable.
"Integra! Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," she heard herself say.
She recognized this Walter. This was the Walter who had read her to sleep when her father could not, who had made her chicken soup when she was sick, who had always known when she wanted her tea and how she wanted it. Her dear old butler. She could at least smile at this Walter, so she did. She did despite how fragile it felt.
He was exactly as she remembered him. His monocle was a bit askew, having slipped while he was running around searching for her. But his wrinkles. They were the ones she had conjured when she complained to Seras about her own. She could not have imagined then that she would be facing them this way, as grooves on a mask hiding treacherous youth.
With that train of thought Integra sobered.
These hands on her shoulders were not the hands of the man whose possessions she had buried. The man who had left his monocle, his gloves, his shirts and vests behind, folded meticulously, knowing he would never wear them again. The man who had put all his cards on the table. No.
These were the hands of the man who still held onto them.
And they were unbearably heavy.
She stepped backward out of their reach as naturally as possible, her plastic smile in place. "I didn't mean to worry you. I simply had...a nightmare..."
Walter's brows rose. It was such a familiar expression that her throat constricted. "A nightmare."
Alucard's gaze was boring holes into the back of her head.
"Yes," Integra whispered.
"Forgive me, my lady, but I find it hard to believe that a simple nightmare could cause all this!" Walter was visibly upset. "You've had nightmares before, Integra. They never made you disappear from the manor for nearly an hour with blood down the front of your sleepwear!"
"What about your cut, my dear?" Miriam asked. "Do you need the doctor? At the very least it'll need bandaging—"
"There's no need," Integra assured, her smile growing strained. "Honestly, all this fuss for—"
"—nothing," Alucard finished sarcastically.
She ignored him.
Walter's eyes shifted from her to Alucard, then to Miriam. "A cup of tea, please, Mrs. Bolger. Chamomile. And something light for breakfast."
"Oh, yes, well." Miriam eyed the contentious group of three uncertainly. "Of course." She took Integra's hand and squeezed it. "My dear, I don't quite understand what's going on, but I do hope you'll cheer up. I always said you're too young to be carrying the world's burden on those shoulders. Sometimes you need to set it down."
She had set it down, and it had rolled back onto her shoulders like she was a modern Sisyphus. Nonetheless, Integra graced the woman with a genuine smile. Miriam, she recalled, worked days, was little aware of what went on at night, and had a barely passable comprehension of Alucard as a "gentleman" who was "not quite right." She had a tendency to nose and coddle, yet she was the only innocent present. Integra could appreciate that now, more than she ever had in her past life. "Thank you. I'll try."
Miriam left to prepare tea and breakfast. The entrance hall was one person less and suddenly seemed very small.
Three, the perfect number.
The lady knight and her retainers. One betrays and the other disappears.
"Walter, there isn't anything I have to tell you that I wouldn't have with Miriam present," Integra said, getting straight to the point. She had been dead, she was weary, she was grimy, and here she was, stuck between two men whom she both loved and resented. The last thing she wanted was a replication of the last time the three of them were together. "I had a nightmare. I stumbled and broke my mirror and cut myself. I went outside to get some air and tarried because the sun was nice. That's all there is to it, and if you'll excuse me, I'd like to get changed. Alucard, go to sleep."
"You're a shite liar," Alucard said.
"Bully for me," Integra intoned, glancing at neither of them and bypassing Walter to make her way toward the main staircase.
"Integra, you can't deny this is highly irregular of you," Walter argued, turning to her. "At least tell me what your nightmare was about. Was it Richard?"
"No."
"As if the rat would merit a walk-on in her terrors," Alucard sneered. "She wouldn't tell me, why would she tell you?"
Walter regarded the vampire with steely grey eyes. "Because she has done so in the past, and perhaps she chose not to tell you because she knows you're responsible."
Integra stopped in her tracks. For fuck's sake.
"Walter," she started, pivoting slowly in front of the stairs, "Alucard had nothing to do with this."
"Very well," he conceded readily, "but may I ask, did Alucard close your wound?"
The palm Alucard had lavished attention on smarted. Integra curled her fingers over it. "Yes," she bit out, "but I offered. Alucard didn't—"
"You little punk," Alucard said, his voice dangerously soft. "I didn't think you would be foolish enough to actually suggest that." Until then he had been leaning against the doors, an immobile sentry watching her with keen red orbs under the brim of his fedora. He now advanced toward Walter, hatless, hair spindling around him. "You insinuate that I manipulated her dreams, on the off chance that I might taste her blood?"
"It wouldn't be the first time you attempted to manipulate her for less," Walter said with composure. "You might think yourself obedient, Alucard, but we know you're not above finding loopholes to exact your twisted form of entertainment."
"What I find entertaining," Alucard drawled, "is how a man who has already failed his master spectacularly is so desperately trying to depreciate his rival."
Walter's monocle flashed. "I've explained myself on that matter. I returned as fast as I was able. You can't hold that over my head forever, Alucard. It's becoming droll."
"Not as droll as blaming me for every little thing that goes wrong around Integra. I'm a monster, not an imbecile." Alucard stared past the butler at his master's inscrutable face, his eyes hooded. "If I attempt to manipulate her, it'll be knowing fully well it doesn't work on her."
"Of course it won't work on her. She's better than you'll ever be," Walter stated. "Something you should keep in mind."
"Oh, but I do, in the same way I enjoy keeping in mind that I am her most loyal, capable servant, while you are a senile, obsolete human." Alucard's lips furled deeply, the epitome of conceit, gloating at his former partner.
Walter's fingers twitched.
Then there was laughter coming from the stairs.
"My God, I forgot how childish the two of you were." Integra covered her mouth as more dry peals escaped. She had to steady herself against the balustrade with how much she shook from—from laughter, yes, not this, this bloody blistering ache in her heart. Alas, Alucard was correct, and even to herself she was a shite liar.
The two bickering men stood in bewilderment. Walter appeared abashed.
"Such children." She breathed in raggedly. Loud, vivid flashbacks the likes of which she had not experienced since the last anniversary of the war took advantage of her frayed nerves to blind her. A girl in white, with long black hair and manic red orbs, cackling as she drains the streets of blood stop drinking stop drinking! A boy with grey eyes that should not be cold, yet they were so cold so cold! I ordered your death!
She blinked, and it had only been a second.
What good was it that her heart was intact, if it was going to be bludgeoned all over again? This was her comeuppance. Her penance, her fucking punishment. Stuck in a child's body with these two grown-up children. A final laugh, akin to a great sigh, was expelled, and she glowered at one and then the other. "I've had enough with you hypocrites. Leave me be and if you have something other than rubbish to say, have the decency to wait an hour."
"Hypocrites?" Walter croaked.
She ascended the stairs. Crimson eyes followed her figure of petals on snow. Alucard thought he had never seen her walk like that before. He knew this particular gait because he himself had employed it a long time ago, when he was his own master in his own castle, when there was nothing breaking his monotony but the coordinated stomps on the ground that heralded another war, another sea of blood, another feast.
She walked like a battlefield ghost.
What are you hiding? What are you hiding? His blood swelled with lust, lust for her secrets, the answers she would not give. Tell me! Integra!
She may have heard him. Her eyes flicked downstairs and for the briefest moment met his, and he saw them. Behind their glacial walls, the battered fires of—
She turned the corner.
"War," Alucard whispered.
"What?" Walter asked warily.
He did not answer. She has war in her eyes. His young master who had never known war, contained its flames. How could that be? His visage rippled, desirous, anticipant. "How lovely."
"Did you get up on the wrong side of the coffin as well?" Walter demanded. He straightened his monocle. "Integra says you had no part in this and I'm inclined to believe her. But something's obviously wrong and I swear, Alucard, if you worsen it by hassling her I will act."
"Aging has made you all bark and no bite, Angel. You say that as if you can actually do something." Alucard melted into the floor before the wires could sever his head and moved through the concrete as shadows, cackling the entire way to Integra's room. He would overlook Walter's cheek; their lady's reaction had rendered them all off-kilter this morning. Really, what had brought on those tears?
Tears were not a weakness to him. Some men evidently regarded them as a weakness, but they were simpletons. He, on the contrary, preferred men who were unafraid to shed tears to those who shed none. Tears were the overflow of the inner whirs, and a true warrior was one who could wipe them off and stand taller still—something you yourself have failed, pitiful No-Life King—Integra's had been such.
What flummoxed him was the cause. She had been perfectly sound just yesterday. The month was showing a record low for Midian activity. The moth-eaten pissants who deluded themselves superior to Integra were keeping their mouths shut for once. She had bid him and Walter goodnight and retired early after completing the day's agenda. Yet here she was, a starkly different picture.
That nightmare. It had everything to do with that nightmare.
He materialized in front of the door. He did not knock or make any move to enter. The plank of wood did not stop him from entering, of course, except he could hear the bathwater running. It was very, very tempting, but he was not that tactless.
Through the locked door her room smelled strongly of detergent. The staff had cleaned up the mess, though underneath the stench, his nose could detect the teasing traces of camellias and bergamot. What a waste. He could have lapped it up and saved them the trouble, but he had had to find her first. And she had rewarded him. The low hum of her life throbbed in his dead veins, in the precious sample of blood she had indulged him. Sweet blood. Bitter blood. It sang in doleful tunes.
If there is no nightmare from which one does not wake, then why are you still sleeping?
Little sleeping beauty with eyes wide open...eyes of war...
Alucard blended into the shadows. He would grant his Briar Rose her privacy for an hour. He would count down the seconds and they would talk.
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Countless possibilities and none without a price.
She slouched in the bath. The bubbles around her gradually popped, and so did her raw emotions, one by one, leaving her desensitized. When she pulled the stopper she imagined the water to be all her concerns going down the drain until she was met with the sight of her naked, young body. Reality did love to slap her in the face. She got up and dressed.
Twenty minutes later in her office, Integra looked down at her clothes and sighed. A blouse and a skirt. Her wardrobe had contained nothing but those and several summer dresses. It should not have surprised her, since she had not begun to wear men's clothing regularly until she was seventeen. She was Miss Hellsing, not Sir Hellsing. Miss Hellsing wore blue skirts and sensible loafers and did not quite comfortably settle into her chair, which was too large for her. She had to get used to being Miss Hellsing, and quickly. She grabbed the nearest stack of papers to find out where exactly she stood in this era.
Or she would have. Instead Integra emitted a groan and pushed the stack away. Paperwork. Again. And this was the twentieth century. Twentieth century paperwork. God, this was awful.
She rose and circled her office. It was mostly the same. The same tall windows, which she glanced out. The sun was glaring. She retreated to the bookshelves and reacquainted herself with half of the titles she had lost or thrown out. As she read their spines, it dawned on her that in the decades she had worked here, spent the majority of her life, it had undergone the least amount of change. Change had always brought her suffering. And it only made sense that the biggest change of them all would bring her the most suffering.
Alucard. Walter. Alucard. Walter. She berated herself for her lack of reservation, but those idiots. Those fucking idiots. Alucard with his rot on age and failure. Walter with his rubbish on obedience and manipulation. Hypocrites. They should have cut out each other's hearts fifty years ago and saved everyone a whole lot of misery.
You don't mean that.
She realized her hands were clenched into fists, so she willed herself to relax. Knowing Alucard, he would heed her wishes and wait an hour, not a minute more, before barging in. She had to try and act the role of fifteen-year-old Integra, though details of herself at this age were fuzzy at best. She turned her back to the shelves.
There was a painting on the opposite wall, depicting a man with shrewd blue eyes. Integra paused. She had had this picture relocated to the library. Abraham Van Helsing, her great-grandfather, was not someone she wanted to see every day.
She pursed her lips at the man whose decision to harness his enemy had skewed the fates of his descendants and laid all the repercussions on her lap. "Men must insist on making bad choices," she murmured scornfully. She studied the countenance that bore minimal resemblance to hers, returning to the eyes.
Red.
Her moue deepened. "A bit tasteless, don't you think?"
"Poetic, rather," said the portrait of Abraham with diabolic irises. "Have we aggrieved you to the extent of scorning your forefathers? What would Arthur say?"
"He would say, don't listen to the demon," Integra said, and sauntered to her desk.
He chuckled. The portrait's eyes followed her like the props of a tacky horror film. "The demon you own, little lady. What does that make you?"
"God, probably, since Lucifer was His angel," she said loftily.
The demon whistled. "Unfilial and blasphemous. My Master, you are on a roll. You're stoking my curiosity." His tone became scratchy. "A curious monster is a dangerous beast, Integra."
"I said to come to me for something other than rubbish, and this is definitely rubbish." She sat in her chair imperiously, not allowing its size to dwarf her. Her body may be Miss Hellsing, yet her mind and soul were Sir Hellsing and this was her suzerainty. "After squabbling with Walter like toddlers in front of me, this is how you choose to act? Step out of that picture before I order you to your coffin."
Alucard took far too much time drifting out of the frame, and Integra had to roll her eyes. Again, always so difficult. It was almost jarring. Dealing with him was different from dealing with Pip, Seras—
She breathed. Not now.
He bowed. "About that. I think you upset Walter with your 'hypocrite' comment."
"I'll apologize," Integra merely said, as her insides twisted with a cloying mixture of guilt and righteousness. She did not want to think about Walter at the moment. "Well? Is that all?"
His red, red eyes sought hers. They were calm, Alucard noted. As in the calm before the storm. Not the blue fires that had scorched him as her talons carved crescents into his skin. She was restraining herself.
From what?
"So eager to dismiss me, Integra? Avoid the questions I ask?" He approached the desk slowly. When the toes of his boots hit the wood he leaned forward, casting a blurred crimson reflection on its polished surface. His hair, in contrast to his leisurely movements, was frenetic and gnarled in the air toward her. "They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. Cliché, but true. Do you know what I see in yours?"
Her eyes never left his. "Enlighten me."
He was very close. She could feel his coldness.
"War," he said.
She did not blink.
"Now, how could that be? You have never known war."
She was quiet.
A wayward tendril of black hair reached for her. Integra raised a hand to wave it away but was caught. The shadowy extension wrapped itself around her fingers, her wrist. She did not seem bothered by this. Another anomaly. Usually she would shake it off at once. Integra, have you any idea what you're doing to me?
"Perhaps," she said, "you, or I, have a vivid imagination."
"Perhaps," he said, "or there is something you're not telling."
"That again," Integra sniffed. She tugged her bound hand half-heartedly, to which his hair responded by tightening. "Even if I was hiding something, why would I tell you? You should excuse a lady her secrets, Alucard." She smirked. "You seem to sorely lack finesse in handling this kind of matter, especially considering your history with women."
Alucard's eyes became tinged with fervor. "Is it finesse you require, my Master?"
Their conversation had derailed somewhat. Integra did not let her emotions overpower her this time, but inwardly she shivered.
No one but Alucard talked to her like this. No one else dared to bait, to presume... She was abruptly crushed by the observation that her life had become barren of this tug-of-war simultaneously with his disappearance. She had ensconced herself in work, locked the gates of her heart, guarded it jealously. She had let no newcomers in. There was only space for Seras and Pip and maybe Gregory Penwood and a handful of people. She had lived with her passion in exile for years. Then one day, she had discovered a wrinkle.
It's gone, she remembered thinking. My spring. I let it pass me by.
Pip was right. She was a lovesick fool.
True horror right there. What will I admit next, I secretly enjoy soap operas of the gothic persuasion? This does look like the plot of one. The spinster reawakens in her youth and finds herself again the recipient of a dead Count's butchered, socially unacceptable version of courtship. Integra snorted.
Alucard misinterpreted the noise. He bared his teeth. "You mock me."
She yanked her captive hand, sending him plummeting to the hardwood desktop. He was practically lying flat on his stomach. He tilted his head up from his position and his expression of insane desire would have felled a lesser woman.
"I do require your finesse, my Servant," she told him sternly. "That does not entail baring your fangs at your Master."
"That nightmare has changed you," Alucard growled. "In the course of one night, everything about you has altered. My Master with her eyes of war..." He was not sure if he was ecstatic or mournful.
He was so very close. "Don't be overdramatic, Alucard. It's just that I saw many things in that dream."
His gaze was burning hotter than the great conflagrations of human history, and possibly hell itself. "And you saw war? Is that it?"
On cue, images flooded, unwanted. Against her better judgement, in proximity to a ravenous monster, her eyelids fluttered shut.
"Did you see blood in that dream, Integra? Were there corpses lining the streets?"
Stakes in the ground dripping with blood and the bodies of her enemies their source. Earth upturned and saturated with gunpowder and entrails.
His voice seemed to be echoing inside her mind, the susurrus of the Devil. "Did I deliver that war to you? Was I your champion?"
Two figures. A Count and a Countess. For that night, the indisputable rulers of Midian.
So, so very close.
But then—it was the ebb and flow of sea tides, how her thoughts fluctuated. Death had not only compromised her method of sublimation, it had broken open the lock on her memories as well, and so they surged. The knight disappears at the wake of morning and leaves a trail of broken vows behind.
Integra jerked back to awareness. Their faces were still close enough to kiss. Her hand was still wrapped in his hair. She waited.
In the prolonged silence, the strands loosened and, unhappily, parted from her warmth. Alucard detached himself from the desk at a painstaking pace. When he straightened, it was with tension in every line of his sculpted features.
"Does it...not matter?" he mocked.
Integra's eyes still did not leave his, but they were distant.
"I think it does, Integra. I think it matters absolutely."
"Believe what you will," she said. "It's quite late for you, isn't it?"
Evasion, again. Alucard snarled softly.
"I will bring you to victory through any war, Integra. You know this."
She smiled strangely. "I suppose I do."
And for some reason that made him beyond ravenous. It made him...anxious. This not-quite-Integra, this mystery that seemed determined to ruin him.
"I will find out," Alucard promised. "Each and every secret which you insist does not matter. You will tell me, and I will be there, holding you in my grasp, as you divulge them willingly."
She accepted his challenge, even as in the abyss of her heart, the bell tolled—Countess, Countess, you have dug your grave!
"We shall see."
"I shall retire now, my Master." He faded from the room.
Alucard did not immediately withdraw to his crypt. He instead took a detour to the kitchen, where he nearly crashed into Walter who was about to leave with Integra's breakfast. Accustomed to this, the butler balanced the tray and raised a brow at the vampire who was grabbing a packet of blood from the refrigerator and tearing his teeth into the plastic without heating it up.
"You didn't hassle her, did you?"
Alucard was busy slurping to reply. Blood splattered on the tiles.
Walter sighed. "Maybe I'll fare better." He started for the corridor.
"You won't."
Walter halted.
"You sound quite sure."
"You won't," Alucard repeated, his jaw smeared red. "Trust me." He laughed, the racket loud and high and arrogant.
Everything Walter hated.
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NOTES
This chapter was published on August 12, 2016.
It has been updated for grammar, formatting, and word choice on January 28, 2021.
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.