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05.
out of the blue
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When she next slept, it was dreamless. An airy slumber, so light that she did not realize she had succumbed until her hand hit the empty teacup beside her seat. The cup tumbled harmlessly to the carpeted floor, and she sat up from her slouched position, disoriented to see the windows aglow with scarlet.
Miss Hellsing, you've had a long nap.
There was a moment of eerily apathetic suspension in which nothing registered but the heaviness of the book in her lap and the softness of the carpet beneath her bare feet. She had shucked off her loafers a while ago. Integra combed away strands of hair from her face, adjusted her glasses, and mechanically gathered a stack of tomes and journals in her arms. It teetered as she shuffled to their respective shelves.
Sunset, again.
And I'm still, she thought, here.
She had not even hoped. It was simply an afterthought, that falling asleep once more might send her somewhere else. With the red slant of light rapidly turning blue and illuminating her crown coldly, it may as well be that she was doomed to repeat the same hour she had died. Perhaps she could fall asleep an infinite number of times and she would be delivered to an infinite number of worlds, and never know which one was real. She could be the dream of old Integra who was eternally slumbering, or it could be old Integra who was the dream.
That tale of the Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly. How did it go again?
She slid the books to their places, the lower shelves first. Their spines were stiff.
They were not about history.
Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, and the breeze in his wings was very agreeable indeed.
A few remained, belonging to the higher shelves that required a ladder to reach. Integra propped it up and climbed. The ceiling of the library was quite high, and the texts most worn were situated at the top. On the rungs she peered down at the darkening room.
What liminal space. The very epitome of a twilight zone. The ungodliest of the ungodly hours. How fitting for us, she mused. That you and I died just as it rose and just as it set. Do you reckon, Count, if there was a chariot, I grasped its reins with the night at my wake so you could be brought back?
She entertained herself with such odd ideas when she was alone.
Yet upon awakening he did not know.
"Are you going to jump?"
Was it Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly?
And now she was not alone.
"No," she replied.
"You looked like you were going to jump, and risk breaking your pretty neck."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'll sustain a sprain at the most." She replaced the last of the books.
He plucked it off. Insufferable creature.
"This is an anthology."
Integra shifted on the ladder for her gaze to meet his head. From her vantage point, he was rivulets of black. She draped an arm over the uppermost rung and pillowed her cheek on it as she watched him skim the text.
"An anthology of poetry," he said, "on death. My Master, are you trying to tell me something? It's not nice to tease. Ah, but you've been teasing me all day."
She had always watched him, as avidly as he watched her. Out of necessity, of course. A good master keeps an eye on her hound. But it was not only that.
When she began to watch him in her dreams, she knew.
It had never been only that.
He seemed unreachable. Oh, she was well aware that he was within range for her to tangle her fingers in his mane, if she so wished, yet in her dreams he had proven to be especially heedless. Dreams was the word, because this was how they would start out, her evanescent manifestations of him. Upon this mortal threshold of not-quite-day and not-quite-night, doubt creeping into her mind on whether she had woken up at all, she was, in stark contrast to this morning, almost afraid to touch him.
Or was it the butterfly that had dreamt of being Zhuangzi?
"Shall I read these to you? Let flow these stanzas from these dead lips? It will be awfully narcissistic of me."
"Are you real?" Integra asked instead.
She had not meant to say it out loud; yet there it was, her doubt, phrased and hanging in the air between them.
Alucard looked up. His eyes were incandescent in the dark.
"I imagine the great majority will say I am not."
"But I am not the majority," she said.
"You're certainly not," he agreed throatily.
"Then what I am asking is, are you real, to me?"
He let slip the anthology from his fingers. The gloved digits quested for the mystery before him. A mindless monster would have torn apart such a treat in its eagerness, but he was not a mindless monster, though it would have been easier and kinder for his existence if he was. With no expectations, no standards...and no pasts... If he was a beast for slaughter, he would not be as tormented.
"You are my Master, Integra. I am as real as you desire me to be."
His fingers landed on the rung next to her face and inched, spiderlike, to the wisps of mellow blonde hair framing it. "The difference between me and the monsters that lurk in children's closets is that, beyond the fatality of my bite, I am yours to banish without needing to turn on the lights." They crept closer. "Order me to the room you found me in, lock the door and swallow the key." Closer.
Integra smiled. It was melancholy in the shade of civic twilight. "I won't do that."
"Oh?"
"I might choke on the key."
"We can't have that." Closer. "Then shall I remove myself from this room to start with?"
"Decided, have you, that being amenable was the way to go?"
"I know I have vexed you today. I promise," he crooned, "I will behave."
The tips of his fingers, at last, brushed her face, near yet not touching her lips. Her eyes grew wide. Would she rebuke him?
She did not. She grabbed his hand. And lost her balance on the ladder. Alucard moved to intercept her and her back slammed into his chest.
His hand was still held in hers.
In the seconds he felt her warmth pressing against his cold heart the monster was consumed with a mutation of desire that transcended human lust or greed. His desire for his master could not be compartmentalized—at best it could be construed as a desire to be hers. He desired her for the things that made her integral to him. Integral, Integral, Integral, so aptly named. For the way she reclined against him even after her feet landed on the carpet, never questioning her power over him, never as wary as she ought to be in the sanguine folds of his embrace. Brazenly, he nosed her hair.
She was staring solemnly at the seal on the back of his glove. When she traced the runes they flared and danced to her pulse. He buried his nose deeper. He kissed her crown. Eyes heavy-lidded, rivaling the blush of the enchantment he had loathed.
"You're a liar, Alucard," Integra said. "If you were as real as I desired you to be, you wouldn't have made me wait."
"Wait for what, my Master?"
She faced him, her eyes inflicted with that something...
"For you to turn on the lights."
Alucard blinked.
Integra dropped his hand unceremoniously. "Prove to me you're real by remaining after you do," she mocked.
"So you do want me."
"I'm aware it's time for our lesson, you ridiculous bat." She plopped into her chair. "Lights, Alucard."
He laughed, and simpering, glided to the armchair opposite her. Behind him his shadows flipped the switch on, scurrying away once the overhead fluorescent lights beamed down on them. Alucard crossed his legs and laced his fingers. "Funny thing about that. I was roused by Walter throwing a blood bag at me, and he said you'd gone and fired all the tutors."
"Yes, congratulations," she drawled. "You're officially the only 'tutor' left."
"Do I get a raise?" he asked dryly. "I will not ask you why; it seems that as of this day you're resolved to pave your own path, and who am I to deter my Master's whims?" She lifted a brow. He mirrored her smugly. "Here now is my finesse, Integra."
"Lovely. But as it happens, you don't get a raise," Integra idly studied her bare toes, "and you don't get to continue your lessons either. I have waited," she glanced at the clock, "six hours to tell you this in person."
His smile fell. "Don't get to continue—"
"I no longer require your services."
Those words combined into that exact sentence struck him to such an irrational degree that he surprised himself. He shot up with enough force to knock back the massive armchair. Integra's demeanor was unaffected, having anticipated an outburst.
"Master," Alucard said, relatively calmly, "you have yet to conquer the language."
"Be that as it may, I don't need you to teach it to me anymore. I can read it and write it and hold a conversation with you, and that had been its purpose to begin with." She regarded him neutrally. "You're not sulking, are you?"
"My Master." Where was this desperation coming from? She chose not to continue with their Romanian lessons. Fine. That was her prerogative. It had been her decision to commence them and it was her decision to cease them. But out of the blue, and so callously? Alucard struggled to school his features. "Integra, what else will I occupy myself with to slake these stagnant nights?"
"Read to me."
His hair spindled around him, the nuisance.
"Pick that book up," Integra pointed to the anthology lying on the floor. "Read something to me." She smirked at his dumbfounded expression. "What's the matter, Alucard? It was you who offered."
Well. Well.
"And pick your chair up while you're at it. Really, must you be so clamorous?"
His shoulders relaxed—he had not even realized they were tense. Sibilant laughter erupted from somewhere in the nadir of his being, a place he did not wish to contemplate. Alucard masked the fragility of his mirth. "Touché. This new side of yours has me off-balance, Integra. How tempted I find myself..."
"The book."
He bowed. "This is a severance pay I will accept with utmost pleasure," he purred.
The vampire bodily moved to retrieve the book this time, while his shadows righted the chair. He did not notice, as the hem of his coat wafted past her, the way Integra looked out the window. The day had vanished for good. And her eyes in the encroaching night were bright and sharp and the pinnacles of vindication.
Her Count put it best.
She would pave her own path.
"'The Funeral.'"
Integra jumped when she heard his voice from below. She twisted and found Alucard sprawled against the side of her seat, one leg bent and the anthology open on it.
"What are you doing here? Go back to your own chair," she said, unimpressed.
"Better acoustics, my Master," he quipped. What bullshit.
But she let it slide, and his velvet voice floated up to her ear.
"Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair which crowns my arm..."
The funeral. Her funeral. Her funeral would have had—daisies. Not the lilies she had left on many, many graves, because Seras would be there and the silly girl loved daisies and how they grew everywhere, how they were the color of eggs and ducks and stars. Maybe Penwood would have stammered and Islands clucked his tongue, saying daisies were too common, but Walsh would have sucked on his pipe and croaked he would like daisies at his funeral because he was bloody sick of lilies. And her silly, darling girl would have not said a word, would have stood there in the blistering sun while some poor sap droned his eulogy, and she would have—don't cry, Seras—
That image, she kissed goodbye.
"Count."
Alucard stopped. His old title again. That was twice today.
"Yes?"
"Your kind roams the earth, seeking war."
She perched an elbow on the armrest next to his head, and her hair spilled over it. "If the nights ahead of us continued like this, Count. If we were bound to spend our evenings reading poetry and taking out the occasional trash, with no war on the horizon, tell me, would that be too much for you?"
"Too much boredom, Integra?" Alucard toyed with the curled ends of her otherwise straight hair. "I'm no stranger to boredom. I am used to irreducible stretches of time passing by without the backdrop of death throes...those collective gasps of men and women as their bowels are spilled and their children are burned...as their land is transformed into a sea of ashes." He wound a curl around his wrist. It tautened. "War is a performance and I await it, as you humans do the season's opera. It wouldn't be quite as fresh if every night was a rendition of 'Walkürenritt,' now would it?"
Ride of the Valkyries. Integra pursed her lips. "But?"
"But," he murmured. "Those voids, I always sought to compensate, if not with war, then with pursuing something else."
"Something else," she said. It was not a question.
"Something else," he said. It was an answer.
Before, Integra had only ever thought that dwelling on the what-ifs was pointless. It was like crying over the events set in stone, as if enough tears would efface them: pure folly. Yet it was all she could do now. All she could do, to rearrange them and unravel their threads, split their ends. And upon one, red, forbidden thread she thought that if there had been no war she would have inevitably taken this monster, this man with his pit of depravities and sins, into her heart. Let him kiss the sole of her foot.
And she would have limped.
"Finish reading," she ordered.
He obeyed. His wrist caught in the tendril of his master.
"So 'tis some bravery,
That since you would save none of me, I bury some of you."
"Ahem."
Walter was at the door, facial muscles vaguely strained. "Your supper, my lady."
"Thank you, Walter. I'll be down shortly."
The butler nodded curtly and left.
Alucard stretched his neck over the armrest. "The Angel never likes it when I'm alone with you. I wonder why." He knew exactly why, and he was gloating. "Does he think I'll paint the walls red again while you're with me? He'll be such a delight when I tell him I've been fired, only to be redeemed as your personal minstrel."
"Don't aggravate Walter, Alucard," Integra sighed.
"Whyever not? Who else in this house will threaten me with dismemberment and have the spine to go through with it?"
Integra disentangled her hair from his wrist and gave him a withering look. "You idiot."
You blind idiot.
She made to stand, and remembered she had taken off her shoes. He was there, holding one up, baiting her with a self-satisfied curve at the corner of his mouth. Integra did not remove her gaze from him. Staring directly into those carnivorous orbs, the pupils of which were the hue of clotted blood, she granted him her foot. He slipped the shoe back on, then the other, tickling her flesh ever so slightly.
"Integra, was your question because of the war you dreamt?" he asked. "Were you afraid of it?"
She leaned into him. She whispered in his ear.
"I am not afraid of dreams."
Walter pulled out a chair for her when they arrived at the dining room. The table appeared to be divided into parts lit and unlit, a goblet of blood on the latter, a lonesome picture on its own. The vampire seated himself nonetheless, either unaware or uncaring.
The butler bowed. "Dinner is served."
"Walter, won't you join me?" Integra said.
Walter glanced at her quickly. He smiled. "Thank you, my lady, but I was planning to sup later in my quarters."
"No, join me. There's more than enough." Integra pushed a basket of rolls toward him. "It's been a while since we had a meal together, hasn't it? Like old times."
Walter took the basket. His face softened, and he chuckled. "How could I refuse."
Integra cut into her steak.
Alucard downed his blood.
Walter broke his bread.
The Master, the Servant, and the Butler ate quietly.
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The day and the night alternate without pause.
It was the same. It would remain the same until the end of time, for as long as the earth revolved around the sun. Every night and every morning the blue hour was the precipice, and in the identical way venturing along the edge of a precipice evoked the sense of unreality, waking up at this hour evoked the sense of fantasy. Miss Integral Hellsing did not, however, confuse herself now in the manner she had done in the library before her vampire had swept her out of her haze with his touch. Her mind was clear. Alarmingly clear.
Her sleep had been, yet again, dreamless.
She chose a piece of clothing from her wardrobe. It was a summer dress, black. Sensible. Suitable for where she was going. She donned it and crossed to her vanity. The mirror had been refitted, and would be spared, for she did not seize it between panicked hands. Miss Hellsing steadily and diligently combed her hair and polished her glasses. She put them on, and then opened a drawer.
It held a gun.
Again, sensible.
She strapped it to her leg. Integral Hellsing was never without a weapon.
At this hour no one was awake. Not her butler, who began his duties an hour later. Not her vampire, who retired to his coffin before the sun emerged. That had been what she desired. She wished no one to accompany her for this. Old habits die hard, after all, and she had been doing things herself for thirty long years.
Integra walked out of her room. She went downstairs, past the entrance hall, past the dewy grounds, and found herself at the gates.
The soldier standing guard was understandably befuddled when he saw his young boss, of all people, outside at this hour unescorted. The summer dawn was muggy and he was one of the few men on duty at Hellsing Manor during these uneventful months. For a moment he wondered if he had dozed off, but there was no mistaking the authority in the girl's blue eyes as she assessed him from head to toe and seemingly came to a conclusion.
"What's your name, soldier?"
He was even more perplexed. "You know my name, Miss Hellsing."
She narrowed her eyes. "Is that your answer?"
The soldier snapped into a salute at her tone. "No, Miss Hellsing. Dylan Basbanes, Miss Hellsing."
She tutted. But he would do. "Dylan. I need you to do something for me."
"Miss Hellsing?"
"Go fetch the car," Integra said. "You're going to drive me somewhere."
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NOTES
This chapter was published on September 17, 2016.
It has been updated for punctuation and formatting on January 29, 2021.
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.
Quotes:
"Zhuang Zhou Dreams of Being a Butterfly" - The well-known image of Zhuangzi wondering if he was a man who dreamed of being a butterfly illustrates that the distinction between waking and dreaming is another false dichotomy. If one distinguishes them, how can one tell if one is now dreaming or awake? (Wikipedia)
John Donne, "The Funeral."
Richard Wagner, "Walkürenritt (Ride of the Valkyries)" from the opera Die Walküre.