The light, said to bring eras after eras of peace,
Also casts a shadow, in which tragic wars are constantly taking place.
The lined-up funeral attendees, all taciturn and indifferent,
Can do nothing more than to keep walking in the soaking rain...
- Sound Horizon, "Hono-o (Flame)"
xx
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06.
déjà vu
xx
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Her profession made her callous. That once upon a time she had been a soft-fleshed thing, a little romantic who fancied a knight atop a white horse, seemed in and of itself a fairy tale. Here was a horror story, wherein lives had dissolved into numbers.
She was picking her way through the outskirts of London, on the hunt for straggler ghouls. It was a grueling task, yet it proved to be a distraction from ruminating on her loss. Her many losses. Among those, she barely felt the phantom pain in her vacant left socket. If her one-sided sight caused her to stumble over rubble, she did not curse out loud. Words had become cumbersome in her mouth. What was the point, she thought, of shouting herself hoarse, when nothing would come out of it?
"I've scouted the perimeters, Master. No ghoul in sight or smell."
Integra smiled thinly. "Good work."
Seras smiled back tiredly. "Just doing my job."
Yes. As the last of Hellsing, this was her—their—duty.
Three weeks. It was three weeks after the war, and London was in suspended decay. It was quicker to list the living than the dead and the missing. Aid was slow to arrive and always lacking. The stench of rust seemed permanent. In a pitiful amount of time she had had to train what remained of the Army in the basics of extermination, even though it would get them killed, even though Seras alone would be more efficient. Because it was their duty. Mankind's desire to regain a sense of normalcy knew no bounds, and people clung to their roles, albeit the society in which they had functioned was hanging by a hair. And so soldiers marched on, doctors treated the wounded, journalists braved the zone, and two women, a human and a vampire, walked the night armed.
"We should head back," Seras said. "It's going to rain."
Integra took a deep breath. The air was damp and earthy. It smelled like the London she remembered. She produced a cigar and lit it, and smoke mimicked the clouds above.
A single streetlamp was standing nearby, and was on, a break in the gloom. Integra reclined against it. Her hair was lit golden.
"Yes," she replied, with little enthusiasm. "Back home."
Back to the burial ground.
"Master Integra," Seras started sternly. She was actually wagging her finger. "You need your rest. Doctor's orders!"
"I take no orders but from the Queen," Integra deadpanned.
"Stress can affect your wound, you know," Seras ploughed on, as if she had not heard. She was too aware at this point that her boss was the worst patient ever. Clearing her throat, she deepened her voice. "Psychological stress can have a substantial and clinically relevant impact on wound repair. Physiological stress responses can directly influence wound healing processes." Seras nodded smartly, and added in her normal voice, "That's what Dr. Trevelyan said, verbatim."
"Aren't you a right little nurse," Integra muttered. "You should have considered a medical career, or childcare, seeing as you're becoming more and more like a mother hen each day."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Ridiculous girl."
Seras beamed.
These banters they shared were their only refreshments.
Integra was not going to budge without having had her smoke, so Seras pressed her back to the abandoned building beside the light, her shadow arm swirling. She could hear the pleasant buzz of Pip's thoughts in the back of her head. He was dormant for now, yet he would emerge if she needed him.
She clamped her red eyes shut, savoring the glow of her beloved's soul.
"I don't like children."
It sounded like something Integra would say, but it was in fact Seras.
Integra blinked her one eye slowly.
"I grew up in orphanages, Master Integra. And orphanages, they don't have much to offer. Crowded. Always noisy. I hated it." Seras said this tonelessly. "The other kids called me unlucky. The adults might have too, behind my back. They never really understood." She took a cursory glance down the street. "Come to think of it, this street is near one of the places I stayed in."
Integra was aware that Seras had moved from institution to institution, yet this was the first the girl was telling her about it.
"How old were you when you stayed here?"
"Twelve."
"Twelve," Integra murmured, and said nothing more.
A droplet of water landed on Seras' nose, and she squeaked. "It's raining!"
Integra stretched out an empty hand. So it was.
"Oh, I really don't like flying in the rain..."
Rain flowed to the sea and rose to the air and formed clouds, which rained again, over and over and over. The world still turned. Integra closed her palm. "Then let's go home before it falls harder, Seras."
"Yes, Sir!"
They had done this so many times, it had become routine. Seras preferred that she be sure of Integra's safety, and Integra preferred that Seras be at her side, where she could keep an eye on her, or so she said. They neither questioned nor found inconvenient the other's constant presence. It was only natural. They strove to fill the vacuum their men had left, which meant most nights Integra was sleepless and most days Seras was up, the vampire made bagged tea and the human microwaved bagged blood, and they handed the liquids to their respective consumers. The scent of blood under their noses, dirt on their faces and dust in their eyes, ashes underfoot, screams in their ears.
They sipped quietly.
Integra pushed herself off the post. Seras came forward, shadows extending, ready to take off.
It was then that Seras' eyes flashed.
The Draculina snapped her head toward the dark of the street far beyond the periphery of the lamplight.
"There's something there."
Integra expelled smoke. "You said there weren't any ghouls."
"That's not a ghoul. That's...a human..."
A bent shape came limping toward them until, gradually, Integra could make out the tattered husk of what once might have been a charming man in his forties. He was a civilian. She knew without asking that he was by the look on his face, of despair and displacement, the same as the one worn by millions of others. He gazed at them from the opposite side of a haze both imaginary and wrought by rain.
"Margaret? Claire?"
Seras planted herself in front of Integra and faced the man. "Don't move! State your business!"
"Margaret. Claire. My wife. My daughter. Have you seen them? They were supposed to come home after a trip to Borough Market."
Integra shut her eye and squeezed the cigar in her hand.
Seras did not know what to say. "I..." She paused. The vital signs she could read from the man were off. Along with the obvious damage to his mental state, he was... "Sir, you're injured."
The man had a bullet stuck in his ribs. Too proximate to his lung. He was bleeding internally. He was dying.
"You need medical—"
"They were supposed to come home." The man's words were feverish. "Come home and we were supposed to have dinner. But then things appeared. Zepps in the sky. I thought, some air show. Then there were—screams—people dying—horrors—the news was cut off—but I saw them—monsters—"
"Sir, you need medical attention," Seras said steadily. Her shadow arm had reduced in size, attempting to be as inconspicuous as possible. "Let me help you to the nearest—"
"I didn't tell Margaret and Claire I love them before they left. They were supposed to come home." The man ineffectively dragged his wasting body toward them. "Can you tell them I love them?"
The rain was gaining in volume. Seras clenched her jaw. Behind her, Integra raised her face to the lachrymose sky.
"They were supposed to come home." The man extended a shaking hand. "Let's go home, girls—"
Seras made to stop him. "We're not—"
Then the man saw her eyes, and screamed.
"MONSTER!"
Seras stiffened.
"That's right," she said finally. "But I'm not the one who destroyed London. Sir, please, let me help you."
But the man was screaming with the last remainder of his vitality and from somewhere between the folds of his torn and bloodstained clothes he pulled out a gun. "I'll kill you!"
"Wait—"
A shot rang out in the rainy night.
Yet the man had not even touched the trigger.
Seras stared as the man slid to the puddling ground, gun discarded with a wet clatter. She turned.
Integra lowered her arm.
"Master."
"He would have died anyway," she said.
Seras opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked back at the man. His eyes were glazed over. It had been an instant death. Curious, though, how his expression was not one of shock or pain, but of joy. His lips were contorted into a word.
Perhaps it had been "Margaret."
Her head was buzzing; Pip was alert and was asking what the fuck had just happened. She tuned him out gently.
When she refocused, Integra was walking away.
"Master!"
She sheathed her gun and threw aside her useless cigar. "What's wrong, Police Girl? I thought you'd outgrown this."
"He was—"
"He was human," Integra finished for her, "and he was delirious, and he was dying. He aimed a weapon at you, and thereby established himself as an enemy. The merciful thing to do, if you so wanted to act out of your bleeding heart, was to send him to his family."
"I'm sorry," Seras whispered. "But I couldn't."
Integra ripped off her likewise useless glasses. What had started out as a drizzle was now a downpour, and her hair and coat were soaked, not that she particularly cared. She left Seras and the corpse under the streetlamp, took shelter beneath the eaves of a ramshackle storefront and watched, with poor eyesight, the drops that fell in desynchronization with the rain.
Seras came not long after. She stood next to Integra and twisted her shadow arm in a monstrous version of handwringing. There was only the pitter-patter for a while.
"I wanted to protect people."
Seras smiled as she spoke. "It was all I wanted to do. I used to beat up the school bullies until they cried to the teachers that I was bullying them."
"I can only imagine," Integra remarked sarcastically, and the girl laughed.
"I believed the best thing I could do in order to protect people was to become a police officer. The adults at the orphanage thought I was trying to follow in my father's footsteps, but it was more than that. I wanted to do the right thing. Even..." Seras swallowed. "Even if it got me killed. Master Integra, I knew all those things you said. But I couldn't kill him. I've drank blood. I've accepted that I'm a monster. But I'm not going to let it be my sole definer, like it was for—for Master. I had to try to save that man. At least try. If I didn't, what would be my limit?"
"There arrives a point where there is no choice but to have limits broken," Integra said. "You know this."
"Does it get better?"
"It gets easier," she said.
Seras hugged herself. "I still have a lot to learn."
Integra glanced sideways at her. She sighed. "Come here."
Seras did not hesitate to bury her face in the woman's sodden coat. Integra curled her arms around the vampire. They reflected, to the pluvial white noise, on those limits already broken. Seras did not cry, yet she did close her bright red eyes, and found solace in the life being emitted from her master.
Integra leaned into her ear. "The ones I kill, I make sure they leave me with little alternative. That doesn't make it better, but it does make it easier."
Seras nodded.
"I will not let anyone—even a dying man—hurt one of mine again," Integra vowed. "No matter how invincible she may be."
The war had heavily revised her perception of invincibility.
"I won't trouble you again, Master," Seras promised.
"I'll hold you to that."
xx
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"Miss Hellsing, we have arrived."
Integra did not reply to the unnecessary announcement. She had recognized the street they drove past, though it was, unsurprisingly, very different from what she remembered. Shutters were down; the majority of London was not yet awake at this hour to greet the dove morning. When she caught sight of the city in its former dignity, standing old and proud as it had before the war that was not a war but a potbellied man's killing spree, she had turned from the window. Her dress was indeed fitting.
"It looks like it's going to rain."
"Park somewhere unobtrusive," she told the driver.
"Yes, Miss Hellsing." Dylan Basbanes, her designated scapegoat, felt a drop of sweat roll down his temple. This was not a destination he could have dreamt up when his boss had given him directions to the opposite end of London.
"With all due respect, is Mr. Dornez aware of this trip?"
Really, she had forgotten how annoying it was being this age. Every other person questioned her. "That's of no concern to you," Integra warned. "Do you need reminding, Dylan, that you work for me and not Mr. Dornez?"
"No, Miss Hellsing," the soldier said hastily. "I apologize for my indiscretion."
The car turned at a sign.
Hortense Children's Home, it read.
She got out and assessed the property. It was large, hushed and—perhaps it was the weather, perhaps it was her preconception—dreary. Utterly dreary and how utterly stereotypical, she scoffed. Attempting to alienate her bias did nothing. The fact remained that this was a place Seras had hated.
The gates were not locked. If it was her intention, she could stride in and ask for the matron or whoever was in charge here.
"Wait here, Dylan," Integra instructed. "I won't be long. This is merely—merely a survey." She kept telling herself that.
The young man looked at her uncertainly. "As you say, Miss Hellsing."
Integra walked. The air was difficult to breathe in. Was it the moisture, or was it the anticipation of whom she would meet that was smothering her?
This is merely a survey.
Old Integra laughed. Keep telling yourself that.
Seras, surely, was some kind of miracle, to have retained a heart of gold after such a childhood. On that night in Badrick, she had asked Alucard why he had turned the girl, and he had replied, in his characteristic unhelpful way, "Why indeed. Perhaps your human capriciousness has rubbed off on me." Later, at the curtain call of that puppeteered folly of a war, she had realized it had been that capriciousness which had salvaged them. In the form of Seras Victoria, that girl with the strange name, part goddess and part queen.
There was a refrain which played in her mind as she rounded the corner of the orphanage situated in the outskirts of London, a few minutes from the street where, once upon a time, she and Seras had waited for the rain to subside. Seras had hummed this tune, some premillennial ballad. Integra's memory reprised it, but music had never been her strong suit and she came up with blanks. It may have gone something like this, something like—
...there, look through the trees...the sun always shines, always on time...
Something like—
"...rest on your knees...and in a prayer..."
Integra stopped in her tracks.
The beginning of a summer shower hit her head, and her eyes fluttered. And then they were wide open, and were fixed before her. The water dripped down her brow and lingered upon her cheeks as she stood rooted to the darkening pavement, unblinking.
The girl humming did not look up.
"...follow me there."
The girl sitting on the pavement, with her face hidden behind her drawn knees, did not start at the change in the weather. She simply made herself smaller, as if she wished to disappear along with the raindrops splashing at her feet. Her short yellow hair was dull and disheveled. She must have not had enough sleep. Almost, the air that hung about her was tangible. Yet through everything there sounded from her an absent sort of singing, which filled in the blanks of the same song that had been playing in Integra's head.
Her darling girl loved music. She loved to hum. She loved to sing.
And she had loved that girl.
From lips that parted on their own escaped, "Seras."
The singing broke off. The blonde head lifted.
Blue eyes. Not red.
Watery tears. Not bloody.
Silence.
She wiped at her runny face and regarded her with both suspicion and curiosity. She was tense. Her hands were balled into fists. Integra felt her heart split.
Outwardly, she smiled. "Nice weather, isn't it?"
Seras stared at her uncomprehendingly.
"It's better to cry in the rain." Integra stretched out a hand to catch the fall. "You feel less alone that way."
The girl was more curious now than wary. She rose to her feet, wavering.
She might have said something if Dylan had not chosen that moment to show up with an umbrella.
"Miss Hellsing!"
His sudden appearance frightened Seras. She stumbled backward and ran.
"Wait!" Integra called, but the girl vanished into the trees at the back of the orphanage. She rounded on the quailing soldier. "I ordered you to wait with the car!"
"Forgive me, Miss Hellsing," he pleaded. "I only meant to bring you your umbrella."
Integra pinched the bridge of her nose and composed herself. "Forget it! Go to the car, Dylan, and for the bloody good of your soul do not make me repeat myself again. Am I understood?"
"Understood!" Dylan saluted. When had the young lady gotten so scary?
Integra ran after Seras. The rain, the rain, the rain, it had picked up its pace, and she had to squint through the drops impeding her vision for a hint of yellow. Seras, Seras, come back. You'll catch a cold. Her vampire was human. Just two nights ago, the Draculina whose bloody tears she had brushed away was now a human girl. The irony of fate was not lost on her. Her hands were wet and clammy, like yesterday, like the day before, when she had held that pale face in her cooling grasp and said goodbye. Seras, Seras, I won't leave you again. I won't leave you here.
This time, let me take care of you.
"Seras!" She spun left and right, clawing her hair out of the way when it stuck to her glasses. "Seras!"
What answered her was not a hint of yellow but a cry.
Integra heard it above the din of falling rain and rustling leaves. It was loud and growing louder still. She quickened toward it, worry constricting her. The cry did not sound normal. Was Seras hurt? It seemed that countless trees were flanking her path until, at last, she found her.
Her blood curdled.
Seras was not alone. There was a man with her and he was—
It was times like this when every inch of her being befitted her epithet, when every bit of warmth froze into ice and sharpened into steel poised to maim the condemned's vitals.
The iron maiden is an execution device—
"Release her."
—by which one suffers an excruciating death.
The molester paused in his attempt to tear off Seras' shirt.
"Whatchu on about, eh? What's another pretty thing doin' in the woods?" He drunkenly shook Seras, whose mouth he was covering. "You her friend? Her sister? That orphanage there sure has tasty 'uns. This must be my lucky day!"
Seras stared at her over the dirty hand with wide and terrified eyes.
Integra curled her lips cruelly. "Lucky."
Her rage was a quiet, white-hot thing, simultaneously blinding and terribly focused. Her gun was in her grip before she even acknowledged it. "I said, release her."
The man guffawed at the sight of the weapon. "Y'know how to use that thing? Little girls shouldn't play with men's toys. Now I've another toy here you can—"
She fired.
The bullet grazed one of his ears, lopping a chunk of it off, and the man screamed. Seras seized the chance to rip her teeth into his hand and, when the piece of filth wrenched away with a fresher howl, extricated herself from his hold. Profanities polluted the torrent.
Seras darted behind Integra. She clung to her, clutching the fabric of her dress. Integra turned her head over her shoulder.
"Close your eyes," she said softly.
Seras shook her head.
"You want to watch?"
She nodded. Her eyes were hard and aligned with the barrel trained on her assaulter.
Her grip tightened on her gun, yet she did not press further. Integra returned her attention to the potential rapist.
"What the fuck? You fucking cunts, I'm gonna fucking rip your—"
She fired once more.
The bullet hit its mark between his legs.
The resulting scream reached a pitch where it was rendered inaudible. The man collapsed to the ground, thrashing, grabbing futilely at the gore that became indistinguishable from the mud.
Slowly, Integra lowered her arm.
The whimper that floated from behind her prompted her to drop her gun and swivel around. Her gaze flew wildly over Seras for an injury of any kind. Her shirt was rumpled, but there were none external as far as she could see. Yet she was convulsing so badly that her breaths escaped in ragged bursts. Integra cupped her face.
"There now. It's alright," she whispered. "He can't hurt you anymore."
Tears leaked out of blue eyes. Fragile eyes. Mixing with the rain, trickling between Integra's fingers.
"They can't hurt you anymore. No one can hurt you anymore. I won't allow it." She smiled. "You're a strong girl, aren't you?"
Seras hiccupped.
"Let it all out."
And with a sob she buried her face into Integra's chest, and bawled her heart out.
"Seras." Integra cradled the girl. Seras, Seras, did you cry like this when I left? Forgive me. Forgive me. "Forgive me, Seras."
Seras spoke. Her voice was full of wonder.
"How do you know my name?"
She might have told her a story.
That once upon a time there had been an exceptionally star-crossed girl, who had been fortunate enough to achieve her dream at an early age, but had been unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle of a vampire extermination, and had died, and had risen as a vampire herself. That she had fought in a war, fallen in love, lost and gained, and for thirty long years afterward had waltzed into her room every morning, humming a tune off-key, with an obnoxious greeting...
You and I have known each other for a very long time.
What she said was, "We met once in a dream."
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NOTES
This chapter was published on October 12, 2016.
It has been updated for grammar, punctuation, formatting, and word choice on January 29, 2021.
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.
Quotes:
Sound Horizon, "Hono-o (Flame)." Translation via Anime Lyrics dot Com.
Jean-Philippe Gouin and Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser, "The Impact of Psychological Stress on Wound Healing: Methods and Mechanisms."
The Connells, "Lay Me Down."