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11.
ouroboros
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Spite. It was an ugly word, but Integra Hellsing could be quite spiteful. Had she not ordered the deaths of men without mercy and with a smile on her face, just to prove a point? In that respect they were not so different, the master and the servant, overwrought though the statement may be. It was always as he had said: he was merely the weapon, she was the one whose will pulled the trigger.
Thus today, in this hour before nightfall, in this dark chamber, she was here to willfully pull the trigger once more. This time on the splintering husk around her heart. Dare she reveal the raw organ underneath?
You've guarded your heart jealously all these years, and here's where you ended up. Here again.
Over, and over and over and over again. We chase each other's shadows.
Ouroboros.
Alucard seemed as lost in thought as she was, unfocused. His hair danced in barely contained spirals around his visage, while his inflamed eyes held an unsettling kind of beauty, one reminiscent of those explosions deep in the sky that created veins of destructive colors. Silly vampire. Why did he insist on torturing himself? He could will these imperfections away, they were only illusions. Almost, fleetingly, she could envision him as a living, breathing human. And that would have been a pleasant notion—if unwanted.
For she wanted his monstrous beauty.
"Yet how ironic," Alucard said suddenly, as though he was commenting on her desire. But Integra saw he had not meant to say it out loud. What had he been thinking about?
(Once...)
Once, a prince craved paradise.
His definition of paradise was neither rich nor grandiose. He simply wanted to stop hurting. He wanted to stop feeling unclean. He fell to his knees and begged and begged for salvation.
None came, and he realized,
Ah, a living prayer is nothing.
So he led his men to their deaths, and sent them up; then his kingdom, then bits and pieces of himself, until there was none remaining to send. Yet still he could not reach paradise.
At his execution he realized,
Ah, God is nothing.
So he lost everything.
The things, the lands, the people he had yearned for slipped beyond his reach, left him with a thirst not even the world's lakes could quench, and a hunger that gnawed at his very soul. They were ephemeral, his wants. The things became broken, the lands barren, the people insipid bags of blood. That which he consumed were remnants. And it was his fault.
He destroyed beauty because he knew it was not his to keep.
But now, holding this beauty, this integrity so close so close, the monster was lost as to what he should do—what he could do. He could crush her neck, he could paint her skin red, he could drink in her chokes and gasps—wouldn't that be a sight? For she had brought herself here, looking like sacrifice, and what cruel god could resist such an offering?
But you're not a god.
He felt her heartbeats.
You're not even a king.
Yet how ironic.
He felt her breath passing through her throat as she asked, "What is?"
Had he said that out loud?
"That which I sought and eluded me when I was my own master," Alucard answered, "is now in my grasp when I am nothing."
Integra dignified the implications of his statement with silence. The touch of her fingers upon his jaw grew more insistent. He saw himself reflected in her eyes. Trapped in those clear blue pools. She was reminding him that he, too, was in her grasp.
Ouroboros, he mused. We'll end up devouring each other without knowing who started first.
"What was it that you sought?"
"What was it that I sought?" He laughed hollowly. "What is it that I seek? I have wanted many. But in the end they were surrogates for one. One to replace the God I had forsaken, yet who had forsaken me first."
His voice faintly took on the rough, accented tone of the man he had been centuries ago, whose name was not Alucard. His form blurred at the edges and it was only the cold, smooth flesh atop her fingers that told Integra he was there in the present with her.
"It drives a man mad."
"Then am I a surrogate as well?"
His eyes refocused quickly, and it was Alucard, not the mad king, who was staring down at her.
"No, my Master," he said. "You are unparalleled."
The coat rustled between them as he brought his hands down to the base of her neck. A gloved thumb dared to jostle the top button of her blouse. She was so close, but he was a wretch and he wanted her closer. He wanted to cup her heart where all her delicate stirrings of life originated and delude himself it was his to keep, forever, until she invariably shrugged him off, left him in his mock throne and pretended the next evening that nothing had happened.
Always, always, those he wanted were beyond his reach.
Alucard waited.
Her fingers slid from his face, leaving little tracks of warmth that rapidly cooled. She'll rebuke me now. She'll slap my hands away.
Integra leaned back against him and adjusted the red coat over her arms.
His thumb froze on the button. Alucard refrained from shuddering. This Integra...
"You're not running."
"I don't run," she said.
He lowered his head and crooned sibilantly against her ear. "I think you know that running is not necessarily a coward's tactic. When the monster in his natural habitat is behind you, Integra, aware of your blood and how it will look staining your clothes and mine..." The thumb slowly pushed the button out. "You should ask yourself, how could the hunter not only be so cruel..." It loosened. "But also careless?"
She turned and caught his burning eyes. "It's not being careless if I'm not in any trouble."
"Then what do you call this?"
"I believe it's called flirtation," Integra said.
There was a palpable pause.
"Or courtship, whatever applies to this tête-à-tête between us."
His body tore from her as if seared. Alucard stood rigid, devoid of expression.
"Courtship," he repeated.
"Isn't it?"
He stared.
"What's the matter, Count? You're not getting cold feet, are you?"
She had not worn her gloves, for she wanted to touch him. She had not worn her cross, for she wanted him to touch her. In the past, in her naiveté, she had believed that wearing them would keep him at a distance, contain the flames between them. Hah. Like they had not been engulfed already.
She was like him. She wanted many, many things, but it all came down to one.
"I've been thinking."
Last night, she had curled up in bed with the coat wrapped around her, thinking.
About how everything about you is paradoxical. Such as this coat of yours that is soft and rough all at once. How your touch is cold and hot all at once. How we are master and servant, yet not only that.
Most times, they were Master and Servant. Oftentimes, they were Integra and Alucard. Rarely, they were Countess and Count. Their labels had been better barriers than their gloves and crosses, and her stubbornness and his self-loathing, their duty and pride had turned them into ghosts of their own desires.
And there are enough ghosts in this house.
"Tell me," she began. "If I were to reciprocate this courtship, what would happen?"
She almost thought he had died a second time with how unresponsive he was, when his pale mouth twisted and opened in pained apprehension.
"What?"
"Would you lose respect for me as your master?"
"What are you saying?" he whispered.
"I'm not here to be your God. I will not be a replacement of any kind. And to this you have said I am unparalleled." The corners of her lips curved up, yet it did not resemble a smile. "But isn't that a rather cursed existence, to walk a straight line alone to its end, and pretend it is fine because that's what is expected of a...line of duty..."
"My Master," Alucard bit out, "if you did not appreciate my comment, you could have just said so."
"There will be no running today, and no lies," Integra stated. "I am here for one thing."
Rarely, they were Countess and Count. Even then, he would kneel before her. And it was what he called her when it was scarcely a title in the country she served, and she was without an earl; it was what she called him when all he had to his name was a casket of dirt. It was nonsensical.
Just like them.
"I'm here to take you up on your offer, Count. Kiss me."
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A fragment of a time lost.
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It happened without fanfare.
Past the witching hour he trudged into the sitting room with the demeanor of one who had battled Hades himself, and the nineteen-year-old knight tutted.
Not more than three hours ago he had been positively pouting at the mediocrity of the mission. Her vampire was, however, a vain creature and took pleasure in exaggerating his long-faded detriments as though the blood and gore spattered across his frame were anything substantial. Integra allowed a cursory look at him, and then her glasses flashed back to the book in her lap. She had her own repartee.
Alucard knelt before her chaise, sweeping his hat into his chest. The acrid mixture of gunfire and death stung her nose.
"The target has been destroyed, my Master."
When she did not react, he lifted his head. He scoffed at the spine of the book.
"I did warn you that if you were to stain the carpet again, there would be consequences," Integra said lightly, as she perused a worn copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
"That book is inaccurate," Alucard muttered.
A cigar stub was smoking on a tray. The pungent odor of tobacco pervaded the room. The mise-en-scène had been deliberately set up to irritate him, and the finishing touch was the unattainable maiden lounging with that dratted book. His fangs grated on his lower teeth. He was irritated, but not altogether in her intended way. If he were susceptible to something as superficial as the pleasantness of a scent then he would have seduced any young-blooded female. It irritated him that she seemed to expect a mere human drug to detract from his awareness of her.
She was not stupid.
"Walter hasn't yet said anything, but I can tell he is this close to expressing his grievances." She made no gesture with this information, indicating that "this" was probably the width of his wires. "I've gathered that the entrails are particularly tricky to wash off."
Alucard cocked his head. "I thought you would rather a visual, Master." He protruded a ragged arm. "The vermin screamed and flailed when I picked him up by the cavity in his spleen, see? It was pathetic. These recent batches have no class. All they do is make a mess."
"It amuses me to hear that from you," Integra drawled, eyes stoutly remaining on the book, though its text did not quite register.
A red and white, spidery appendage crawled over the top of the pages and pushed down. The start of a rebuke formed in her throat, which got stuck when her gaze locked on the crimson impression his wet digits left. The eponymous vampire leaves his fingerprints on his tale...
Only they were not fingerprints. The scraps of fabric which he never took off made them into an abstract testament to his inhumanness. Integra compared the gloved hand to her own. Hers was gripping the bottom of the pages, clean and bare. There could not have been a starker contrast.
"You're defiling my book."
"It defiled me first."
"Your gloves are filthy."
"It's not the only thing that's filthy."
Integra narrowed her eyes. His turned into crescents. He was laughing at her.
In truth, she was not as angry with him as she should be. Walter would have said she was being too lenient, but what the butler did not realize was that Alucard eventually cleaned up after himself. He simply missed a few spots. On purpose.
He can be such a child.
And it would have been easy if that was what she always saw him as. He made it easy, projecting himself as a querulous creature sorely in need of a toy. The part of her that she kept barred, however, projected another.
The man he had been long ago. A man who returned bearing the blood of his enemies on his armor.
His gauntlets would have been removed by a faceless woman, who would have said—
"Take them off."
His eyebrows rose.
"Your gloves, you git," Integra added in a hurry. "Take your gloves off."
"Oh?" Alucard leaned forward from his kneeling position. He licked his lips. Slowly. "Are you sure you don't mean clothes?"
She grabbed his hand. The book fell to the floor.
His hand was limp in hers, yet when Integra glanced up his pupils were dilated sanguine, his facial muscles taut with desire, that foreign familiar emotion. In turn she was coated with the blood of his enemies.
Her enemies.
She divested one of its confinement, and almost shivered at the meeting of their exposed flesh. She may have heard him growl. His fingers were long, bony, but at the same time supple, while hers were riddled with calluses gained from fencing and target practice—with weapons much lighter than those he wielded. Yet another testament.
She skimmed the back. It was unmarked. As it so happened, only she could remove the gloves with their sigils.
If I took off the other, you could leave. You could leave and never return.
"Master," Alucard murmured, "Integra, is this to be my punishment?"
Integra glanced at him again.
When that day comes, don't.
"Shh."
Don't leave.
She flipped over to his palm and saw the thin grooves running helter-skelter. They were painted by the blood that had rubbed off on her, a far cry from the impersonal blots left upon the book so carelessly discarded.
He had been human, once upon a time. In an older tale he had been a man who returned bearing the blood of his enemies—
My enemies
—on his armor. And his gauntlets would have been removed by a woman who would have said—
"Welcome back." Her voice was quiet.
But he can't go back.
"A job well done." Integra began to withdraw. "Count."
His responding smile was a brittle thing.
Alucard did not attempt to snatch her back. He let his bare hand—his branded hand—buoy in her tepid current before having it drop to his side, a castaway weight. Integra, expressionless, passed him his glove. He pulled it on quickly, wanting to preserve her heat, and retrieved the book for good measure. Their masks were in place and he was to act the part of the obedient dog.
But he knew that she knew he would not be going without a last word. Again, she was not stupid.
Alucard stood, devouring her blonde and dark-skinned form in the sole way he could, with his eyes. He answered.
"Countess."
Her pulse jumped.
Integra looked sharply at him, seeming uncertain if she had even heard him right.
Then, like a whisper, she let out a laugh.
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Lost, forever.
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He did not move.
"Well?" Integra asked.
He made no sound.
The air in the chamber had turned into a suffocating thing. Her heartbeats had quickened. How curious. They were so loud yet she had not realized. She had been so fixated on that single moment.
Kiss me.
He was doing no such thing.
His shadows had also quietened. They had become solid with the darkness, and it was Alucard who was rooted in its midst, an effigy in black, peculiarly breakable.
He was gazing at her with doubt.
"Ah," she uttered. It left a bitter tang. "I see."
I should have known.
Yes. Perhaps it was too much to expect.
In the end this in itself may only be a facade. I am certainly not the Integra you have known, nor are you the Alucard I have waited, and this is merely a substitute of that which I desired.
Once, it had been that your regard for me outweighed what I was willing to accept. Yet three years or even ten cannot compare to thirty, and now it is my regard for you that outweighs everything.
Quite literally, I might love you too much.
Great, the voice that sounded like old Seras said. Now just tell him!
I told you to hush.
Integra lifted a hand to reach out for him, then decided against it. What remained between them was the air, the silence, the distance of three decades.
"I've come at the wrong time."
Time had become her cruel hope. She had spent time in this very room glaring down at this very coffin and the slab of concrete sitting on it much too like a gravestone and contemplated on whether or not to kick it to pieces. And as she had done in that time in the past, she got up. The coat dragged at her shoulders, but Integra was hardly aware of that. She was aware of the anger rising inside at both him and herself—mostly herself.
"Is it so implausible to you, my acceptance?" she sighed. "It's only a kiss, Alucard."
Finally, he parted his lips. "A kiss," he said. It was jagged. Broken as shards of glass. "A kiss and then what?"
"You tell me. It was your offer."
"An offer you ridiculed, Integra."
"I reconsidered," Integra said evenly. "Don't make me repeat myself."
"And why now? Why this?"
"Why not?"
Alucard smiled, a wreck of a smile, and the hair sticking to his face cracks in the snow. "Whatever you've been thinking, it can't have been this. Do you know—do you have any idea what it is that you're offering? Don't tempt the beast. Let him be content with what he already has. It'll keep him in line, because he can't expect anything else." The cracks in the snow distorted. His mouth formed a snarl. "But with what you're offering now, I'll destroy you. I'll destroy you like everything that has passed my hands."
"You won't. I've found that I'm quite durable."
The monster wanted to prove her wrong. That she was deluded, that this imprudence of hers was as fragile as the slender neck which he could crush easily, so easily—he surged forward, digits gnarling down to snag her throat and throttle it—and stopped short. His fingertips teetered on the edge of her skin, hesitant to even touch.
And there and then she seized his hands and pressed them to her throat in a hold that was shockingly blistering to him despite having caressed that same flesh mere moments ago. Cruel! Careless! She wrapped them close without an alteration in her composure.
"There now. This is all but an invitation. Destroy me as you have said."
"Are you mad?" he hissed.
"No," she said, pressing his fingers harder into the column of her neck, relentless. "Simply demonstrating that I know exactly what I'm getting into."
Integra shoved his hands away and stepped back.
"But again, I've come at the wrong time."
She turned. She went. Farther, farther, farther. She walked up the stairs, leaving him there, in his empty court.
The house was quiet. Yet never silent. It groaned under the burden of its age and the concerns and interests of its occupants, from something as pleasing as supper to something as harrowing as unrequited love, or rather a love that had no proper recipient. For the visage which the lady of the house had drawn privately in her memories was of the one who had vanished into the ashes of war. Oh, she knew she was being horribly unreasonable toward the one with her now in the present; they were the same and she had kissed that same mouth. It tasted the same. It smiled the same. But she was spiteful. And she had many things to say to the vanishing smile.
Or a few. Or none at all.
She walked up and far, the farthest she could get away from him inside, to a room equally empty and sagged against a window. The moon, full and fair, was ascending between clouds of indigo and scarlet, and the minutes it took for its glow to cast her shadow on the floor felt like centuries.
"Integra?"
Another, smaller shadow appeared outside in the corridor.
She straightened. "Come here, my darling."
There was a tiny squeak. Seras shuffled into her line of vision, cheeks aflame. "D-darling?"
She beckoned, and the girl came shyly but eagerly to her. A daisy was in her hair.
"I found you, all by myself!" Seras burst out. She was beaming with pride. "I told Walter that I could find you, Integra. I just had a feeling."
"I suppose that means I won't win at hide and seek with you," Integra replied, with a lightness fabricated. "Did I make you look for long, Seras? I must have lost track of time."
"I don't mind. I understand this place a lot better now." Seras peered around. "What are you doing here in the dark?"
Yes, what was she doing here?
Waiting, again?
"And," Seras tilted her head, "you're wearing that coat."
Integra did not glance down. "So I am."
The child noted the strange deep red color. "It's very pretty on you," she said honestly, though she was aware it had belonged to someone much stranger, and where was that person anyway, if he worked for Integra? There were still many mysteries here. "But I don't want you to be cold. Integra, please don't be sick."
"I'm not," Integra said, in the way she had when the doctor had broken the news to her at forty-seven.
Seras stuck a palm to her brow. Integra stayed put.
"You don't feel too warm..." Seras trailed off.
Ever the little nurse.
"I told you I wasn't sick." Integra touched the daisy in front of her. "What about you? Have you been wearing this the entire day?"
Seras, abruptly bashful, hid her hands behind her and ducked. "You gave it to me."
Often, that was all it took. An insignificance, given by someone of utmost significance.
"It's wilting."
The lady of a house where none were satisfied—in a garment which clung to an illusion, and among those whom she loved with a heart that had never been a telltale heart—briefly basked in the glow beating down on her back, and decided the night was young still to succumb to its woolgathering.
"Look, Seras. Isn't the moon beautiful?"
The child glimpsed the moon for the first time that evening, over Integra's shoulder. "It is!"
Integra locked arms with her and spun her to the door. "Come on. Let's go decimate a field of daisies."
"Eh?" Seras squealed. "You mean—kill them?"
"They'll be gone by the end of the season, when the gardener mows the grass. So let's cut down on his work. We'll pull them up," Integra announced, oddly determined. "We'll put them in vases, we'll make them into posies and crowns and whatever it is girls your age fancy."
"Really?" Seras lit up at the idea. "But—Walter—and dinner—"
"They can wait."
There were many questions Seras wanted to ask.
Integra, Integra, why do your eyes look so sad when you mention daisies?
Integra, Integra, who is that man, and why do you wear his coat?
"Integra," her big mouth chose to say instead, "am I really your darling?"
It had been a day and then some, and Seras was only beginning to understand. That there were things the people in the manor spoke of in hushed tones, with furtive slants toward the corners where the dark seemed especially coiled (and stared out, with red, red eyes) in hunger (the kind a beast could possess, a monster could possess; the kind a man in his glorified cell, nosing the trace of bergamot left on his gloves, could possess). Seras could not hear the cries coming from those corners. They were reserved for the lady beside her.
Only a kiss?
Only a kiss?
Only a kiss?
Lady, all I possess is this hunger; should you place anything in these hands, I shall eat it raw.
(Eat it, then.)
And because Seras could not hear the cries, she waited several excruciating seconds for Integra to blink and respond.
"What?"
"Nothing!" Seras said hastily.
"Nothing is hardly ever nothing," Integra chided. She was guilty of that herself. "Forgive me, Seras. I wasn't paying attention. Won't you say it again?"
Seras stopped in the middle of a corridor. "Am I—" She pulled at her fingers. "Am I really your darling?"
Integra watched her carefully.
"It's silly but—I just wondered if—" Seras braced herself. "If you meant it and—"
"You two are strangely alike," Integra said then.
Two? "Who?"
Integra plucked the daisy from Seras' hair and smoothed it out on her palm. "You two," she readdressed, "seem to be under the impression that I say things I don't mean to say. Quite the contrary, I mean them very much."
"I just wondered, because already, you're the most important person to me in the whole world," Seras whispered, her voice taking on the quality of confessing into a diary.
The lady of the house tucked the dying flower back in her ward's hair.
"My Seras. Without doubt," she took in a breath, "of all living beings in this world, I love you best."
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God will descend from the heavens.
God will descend from the heavens!
Did he?
Did he descend on that crimson field under the rising sun?
No.
Instead the Devil ascended. He ascended from the depths of hell and gave you his nectar. He bade, Drink, drink, drink to your enemies, to your men and fallen kingdom, to the Father who has failed us both. And you did. You thirsted, you hungered more than you had ever hungered in your life, and where gravity implodes, a void is formed.
Lord, the wine of vines can no longer quench me; I shall now drink the wine of veins.
Ah, so did it quench your thirst?
No.
What must you consume, then?
The summer evening had brought unwelcome guests to feast on her flesh when she shucked off her shoes to walk barefooted in the daisy grass. Integra sat on her bed, huffing at the tiny pinpricks around her toes. Cheeky little varmints. She had never had the problem of bug bites during her smoking years. A rare perk of the habit.
Not that it had been any help shooing the biggest of them all.
"This voyeuristic tendency of yours is getting a bit repetitive, isn't it?" she quipped.
The shadows in a certain corner of her room flickered.
She stuck a foot out. "Jealous?"
Integra did not jolt when her ankle was grabbed by a cold hand.
He was even messier than the state she had left him in, if that were possible. His sable locks writhed in the moonlight, serenading it silently in bizarre shapes, and his frame hunched over her foot made him appear more massive yet scraggly. If his face had not been young, if it had been one rougher and lined, she would have seen him as the man whose name was not Alucard.
But it was.
Wordlessly Alucard moved the hand holding her ankle down the curve of her heel and under it, where his thumb started to stroke, almost idly. Integra shuddered. He had assumed this same position in the library two days ago, but the way he was touching her now was nothing so chaste.
"Is this the right time, Alucard?"
"My Master is asking me?" he rasped. It was an inhuman sound. "It appears that my Master exists in her own time, and thus my answer will be false."
"No one is a master of time," she said. "Let's not be its fools, and reach a compromise."
Alucard smiled faintly. "There's an order to these things, Integra."
He lowered his mouth, and kissed the sole of her foot.
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Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
xx
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NOTES
This chapter was published on March 26, 2017.
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.
Quote: William Shakespeare, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116)