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That spring morning, she was at her desk, turning a page in the ledger when Seras barged in with a bunch of daisies buoyed up by her shadow arm. Integra glanced up only once. She asked, "Is Mr. Thistlethwaite dead?"
"What? No!"
"Who died and made you the gardener, then?"
"You can be so morbid," Seras groused. It was hard to take offense when her hair looked the part of a vegetation. "It's weeding day, and Mr. Thistlethwaite was trying to get rid of all the daisies again! Can you believe it? It's an outrage, Master Integra! Here, see? I rescued the lot."
Mr. Thistlethwaite, the gardener, was a true Hellsing employee. He took pest control very seriously. It was just that his understanding of pest included daisies, dandelions and other innocent perennials, to Seras' aggrievement.
"Good for you," Integra drawled. "And I'm sure you're aware that as soon as they're off their roots they're as good as dead?"
"Er." A beat. "Let me put them in a vase," said Seras, who was probably doing herself a favor by not being a gardener.
Integra sat back, her solitary eye arching with amusement and fondness at Seras' endeavor to arrange the "rescued" flowers somewhat presentably, as though it was the precise sort of thing a Draculina should be doing in the hours before noon. She tossed the ledger aside and listened to the pick of the day. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
"...with the sun in her eyes and she's gone... Hmm. Is this the right amount of water? I'm not sure..."
"I don't know why you bother. They're not going anywhere."
There had always been daisies in the lawns of Hellsing Manor.
"You could pull them up by the roots every week of the year and they'll still come back. They love it here." Integra curled her lips. "Too many dead under the soil."
"Uh-huh," Seras said. She was turning the vase this way and that, seeking out the best angle. Satisfied, she put her hands on her waist. "Isn't this nice?"
"Pièce de résistance! Makes the office much livelier."
"My office is not supposed to be lively," Integra deadpanned.
"Resistance. I like that." Seras nodded. "I like that they'll grow back, no matter what."
Integra suppressed a sigh, and threw the French walls a glare, which seemed to be rippling at her expense (she missed when they were sensible, no-nonsense English walls). The daisies flopped over the rim of a blue vase in a square patch of light. Bright and small and clustered, a spot of whimsy in the otherwise spartan room.
"Like little bits of hope."
Seras and Pip went on with their natter. Integra, silver mane falling to one side, let herself meander along it for a while, until her heart did not feel so heavy. "Seras," she said, getting up, "come here."
"Yes, Master?"
She leaned on her desk and pointed to her chair. "Sit."
"Uh." Seras looked at the chair and then at Integra. "No."
Integra rolled her eye and pushed her into the seat by the shoulders, ignoring her squawk. "I won't have the captain of my troops take after the plum fairy." She opened a drawer and fished out a comb.
Seras smiled sheepishly. Her red eyes rounded when a hand cupped her face, and the other began combing the daisies out of her hair. As yellow as the sun and stubborn as the skull underneath, Pip had once described it.
A minute passed in silence. Seras touched the ends of her master's own hair.
"I wish I could grow mine long."
"Why don't you?" Integra asked, attempting to picture Seras with long hair and finding it plain wrong.
"Mine grows all over the place! And I don't want to spend the rest of my life ironing it." She blinked. "Unlife."
"All over the place," Integra chuckled, "like your daisies?"
Seras puffed up her cheeks. "Now you're just teasing me."
The displaced petals flitted in the air above the checkerboard floor. The vampire made a contented sound. Integra maneuvered the comb through the stubborn hair a final run and, flipping it over, she knocked Seras on the forehead lightly with its spine.
A shadowy appendage rubbed at the spot. "Master!"
"Picking a fight with the gardener first thing in the morning. Making a florist's shop out of my office. Glad to see you have your priorities straight."
"But it is. I mean, they are. Well, not exactly." Seras beamed, fangs winking cheekily. "Making you smile, that's my priority."
"Saccharine words."
"So why don't you smile and admit that you love my pièce de résistance and it is, in fact, the showpiece of your office?"
"That's what pièce de résistance literally means, you silly girl," Integra scoffed.
But she smiled.
Mission accomplished, Seras bounded from the chair and pirouetted away. "Come on, Master! Making sure you eat properly is another priority and I can smell the muffins."
Integra moved with less fuss. "How rambunctious you are today. I wonder if there was too much sugar in your last blo—"
The comb dropped.
She gripped the back of the chair.
"Integra?"
"Nothing." She breathed. "Just a bit out of balance."
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13.
phantom ache
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Thus it ended up that the only person to rise from a good night's sleep was Seras, who sprang out of bed at once. Her hair resembled a haystack and her toes itched, yet her smile was as bright as the sun.
Integra loved her.
Her! Unlucky little Seras Victoria.
Loved her best.
Seras had been unable to say anything. She remembered stumbling after her, dazed, and somehow finding a patch of grass to sit on, where she watched the lady pluck a daisy and hold it up to the light. She remembered then wondering if it could be possible at all for her heart to burst, simply burst with happiness. Seras had not asked silly questions. Integra had made it clear that she meant what she said, and what she said must be a special kind of truth—it did not have to make sense, it just was.
There was the posy of daisies she had picked for her, on the windowsill. It was in fact the second batch Integra had picked. The first batch of daisies had been resting on her lap, spotting her blue skirt with dew. "I'm afraid I have no talent for weaving them," she sighed. "They're prone to break apart in my hands."
Seras had taken them. And the second time Integra turned to her, she shyly held out a lace of those delicate white flowers, gleaming under the moon like stars. She would have wrapped it around Integra's wrist but she kept it cradled in her palm.
"How pretty, Seras." A fingertip traced the petals. "Just as I said. You're better than any of us."
Integra had said that? When?
She had been too busy blushing to speak.
The posy on the windowsill looked dry. Seras gathered it to her chest and left her room to find a vase.
The trees on the periphery of the manor formed a tortuous path against the sky. Seras followed it with her eyes as she walked down the second floor corridor, where the curtains had already been drawn. The smell of muffins wafted up from below. It was going to be a beautiful day and the girl could not help but put a bounce in her step. This was her—Say it!—her home, and each new day here seemed to promise more than the last.
What tomorrow would bring? And the next day, and the next—
Whoosh.
Huh?
Seras' bouncy steps dwindled to a halt. She stared out the row of windows.
She could have sworn she saw something large and black run past.
The view through the glass, however, remained picturesque. Seras shook her head and reached the main staircase when, unmistakably this time, a very large, pitch black shape did emerge from the trees.
It lumbered toward the house. The closer it got, the clearer she could see, its maw matted and stained dark. Is that...? Seras was so startled, it was belatedly that she named the creature. It was a dog.
Isn't it?
The dog suddenly surged toward the entrance, and she yelled out a panicked "Hey!" as it slammed open the doors of the entrance hall and let itself in. It paid no heed to her whatsoever and tore through an opposite corridor, prompting Seras to race down the stairs after it without thinking. Or perhaps thinking too strongly about one thing.
Its eyes were red!
The corridor was deserted. There was not any hint that a dog had trespassed. Yet there was a door at its end that she knew led to the sitting room, ajar. Her fingers tensed around the daisies as she approached and peered inside.
There was not a dog, but a man.
He sat sprawled in a chaise longue, head lolling on a shoulder. Seras had hardly made a sound but he looked up. He was wearing tinted glasses. A gloved hand was stroking a rather disheveled red coat in his lap.
Seras recognized this man. He was the one who had come for Integra at the orphanage.
"Don't skulk about. Unless you're a mouse?"
She opened the door wider yet said nothing.
"Ah. The new girl." The man said this with less enthusiasm than he would have had for an actual mouse. "Sneaking into rooms as well as lives."
She stood her ground. "I'm looking for a dog."
"A dog?"
"It came this way."
"Did he?"
Seras missed the pronoun.
"As you can see, there is no dog here. Or there is, but you wouldn't know, would you?" He smiled oddly.
Everything about this encounter was odd, yet it was most peculiar that he would wear such glasses indoors, especially here. No one had bothered to draw the curtains here, it seemed. And the man was not getting up any time soon. He lost interest in her silence and resumed stroking the coat, which was noticeably smaller than his frame.
"She gave it back to you," Seras wondered out loud, her surprise overcoming her caution. "The coat."
His smile faded.
"But..." She faltered. Was it even the same coat? How could it change sizes?
"You shouldn't trust all that is in front of you, little mouse. Now, shoo."
"Mister, is there a dog here? In this house?" Seras was not leaving without answers. "I remember Integra saying something about—"
"There are many things in this house," he cut her off, voice flat, "which appear as one when in truth they are the other."
"Then who are you supposed to be? Integra said you work for her, but what do you do?"
The man laughed. "I?"
Seras, of course, could not catch the subtle shift in his eyes. They were wide and mad—and yet, in a blink, curiously fragile.
"I am anything she desires me to be."
A knight, a dog, a...
Alucard was no longer aware of his audience. His digits dug into crimson fabric, desiring for themselves slopes of dark skin heated and trembling with shallow breaths, and finding none.
"I cater to her every whim. If she would want the world, I will give."
He pried away from the futile search and glanced upward. She was coming.
Seras stared. It was the most peculiar answer she had gotten, ever.
"You sound like you love her."
He snapped his neck toward her so quickly that Seras balked, tripping over the threshold and landing in a heap of white debris on the floor. She squeaked and scrambled to rescue the flowers. "Oh, oh no—"
"Seras?"
"I—uh—"
She was brusquely pulled upright just as Integra rounded the corner.
"Seras?" Integra stilled when she saw who it was behind her. "Alucard. What happened?"
He said nothing, eyes feasting on her face.
"Er—" Seras fidgeted between the two of them. For some reason the air was stuffy all of a sudden. "He helped me up!" she said in earnest, and Integra tilted her head at her.
"Alucard helped you up?"
"I tripped, and Mister Alucard was in the room and," Seras was getting confused, "first I was chasing after a dog—"
"A dog," Integra intoned.
"There was! It ran this way, but then it disappeared…"
"I don't doubt you, Seras," Integra reassured her. "I only inquire if Alucard happened to see this dog." This was thrown scathingly at the dog in question.
He remained silent.
"Well, no..." Seras squinted. "Integra, there's a scab on your lip."
Instinctively, the older girl ran her tongue over the spot. It neither ached nor tasted of blood and saliva, yet she flinched nonetheless—its lack teased her want. And there across the few steps of distance between them, punctuated by stray daisy petals, she felt his desire flare, the wildfire that his ridiculous shades could not contain.
Really. At a time and place like this.
"Is it very hot out here?" Seras in the middle piped up, utterly confounded and oblivious.
Integra ushered her back in. "It must have been when I fell out of bed," she said of her scab, straight-faced and completely aware of the man trailing at their heels whose desire bristled against hers, electrostatic. Her dress was white today. It would be inked if she touched him, was her fleeting thought.
The child went bug-eyed. "You did?" she exclaimed, finding the possibility that a lady like Integra could fall off her bed incredible.
Integra merely smiled.
The shadows curled discreetly beneath her feet, mimicking a kiss.
Alucard returned to his levity on the chaise longue while Integra strode to the opposite side of the room. She took a pitcher from the table there and gave it to Seras, who accepted it not without bewilderment.
"You want it for your posy, don't you?"
"Oh!" Seras marveled and was prompt to nestle the sorry state of the daisies in it. "You knew! You know everything, Integra!"
"Why else would you be carrying those poor things around?" Integra said, and sobered.
The pitcher was blue.
"Happy now, my darling?"
She could feel Alucard's gaze puncturing her.
Seras nodded, and chirped in surprise when Integra threaded her fingers through her hair, tucking the cheery mess behind an ear. The child clutched at the hand that cared for her so tenderly, of the one person who would tell her the truth. "Integra, is there a dog in the manor?" She whispered this because she was sure, somehow, that the strange man with the strange name studying them with strange eyes had a great deal to do with the very strange dog with the very strange eyes.
And Integra answered, "Yes." Her countenance changed not a bit. "There is, and he can eat a man whole."
There were things...
Seras' heart was an uneven pit-a-pat. "That isn't normal, is it?"
"No," Integra agreed. "Are you afraid?"
There were things the people in the manor spoke of in hushed tones.
They were things that were quite odd.
But Integra was not afraid, Seras realized. She had no reason to be afraid. She was the lady of this house and the boss of every oddity within, and that included the dog and the shrinking coat.
And that man in the long chair who probably loved her.
"I'm not afraid if you're not," Seras said. "I won't be afraid of anything here, because you're here and—" She tugged at Integra's hand until her head was level with hers and whispered the softest she could muster. "I won't be surprised anymore if I notice things that aren't—normal. It's like a fairy tale, right?"
From across the room and out of nowhere the man let out a chuckle.
Blue, blue, was the color of the pitcher, and blue were Seras' eyes, the color of innocence persisting in this bleak world. "Yes," Integra said. "Like the strangest fairy tale."
It ached.
Her heart, yes, but she was used to that. It was the phantom ache in her left orbit—oh, it had never ached this much. Even with the bullet lodged in it she had felt nothing. Yet the eyeball throbbing there was not meant to be, and it was reminding her of that fact viciously.
"You'll want water for those." Integra kept the infliction out of her voice. "Go on, Seras. I'll be along soon."
"Okay," Seras said, but her feet did not budge. "Integra? Are you—"
"Run along, little mouse." Alucard was there and neither of them had seen him move. "You don't need to be told twice."
Seras frowned at him. "You're not very nice," she muttered, before hugging the pitcher close and scurrying off.
She turned back once, just beyond the threshold. She saw the man remove his tinted glasses, when the door shut on her nose, and there had not been any wind.
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"Master. Let me tend to you," Alucard crooned as soon as the child was out of sight. He banished his glasses and pressed his fingers into the small of her back, guiding her to the nearest seat. Integra went with an acquiescence that was unsettling and lowered herself with burden, the left side of her face creased. He thumbed away a strand of pale hair.
She grabbed hold of his hand and plastered it to her eye. He watched fervently as her fingers slid into his spaces. She huffed, and the air tickled his chest. "What were you thinking?"
"I?" he asked, feigning ignorance.
"The dog that wasn't there?" Integra gibed. "What were you thinking when you took that form?"
"You," he answered.
Truth danced bare in his flames.
"I have been thinking about you and how I must prove I am worthy to call you Countess, my Countess. But I am a dog." The velvet voice became a growl. "A beast, and a beast does not like to be caged in his thoughts. I ran on all fours and begged lunacy to tear me asunder, but no, I could not—escape—you."
She was limp in the cradle of their entwined hands. "Promises, promises."
Alucard leaned in, his hair hiding their intimacy away from the rest of the world. "Am I so reprehensible?"
"Would I be touching you if you were?"
"Master, you're using me as ice," he said, half-jesting and half-serious. "Which I would do a better job of, if you would remove my glove."
Her visible eye was shrewd, and he gained the distinct feeling he had put the proverbial foot in his mouth.
"You don't say."
She was almost dispassionate.
Their interlocked digits were dragged, clinically, down the slope of her cheekbone, her jaw, to the cushion of her lips. At their moist warmth, his teeth clattered shut, and at the same time Integra bit.
She pulled his glove off as delicately as she would an apple peel. Her blunt, human incisors grazed his flesh with the fabric their barrier, unbound him inch by inch at an indolent pace. A century. It had been a century since his hand had been freed. Countess! his wraiths cried, out of spite and defiance and worship—Your rightful title, and which you have denied me after allowing a taste, an irrevocable taste.
Finally, she removed the entire glove. It tumbled into her lap, teeth-marked. "There." Her breath dampened his naked fingertips but Integra was all business. She yanked his hand back to its post. "This is better, well done."
"Ah." How could he argue with that?
"Now." She buried her face in his palm. "Hush."
Alucard could only obey, galled and voracious, sinking to his knees as a worshipper was wont to do and canonizing her repose. Isn't this that fairy tale with the poisoned apple? He considered the dwarves of that tale—one of them, keeping guard over the glazed coffin, keeping guard over their prinţesă, never to touch yet content to watch her sleep, eternally... Until death comes in the guise of a prince.
And who is who in this?
(You sound like you love her.)
"I am reduced to a thing that wants Integra."
He had pillowed his chin on her knee, his mane spilling into the snowscape of her dress, intending for this letter to reach her within her shallow tide-pool of a slumber. Her muscles twitched. A sliver of steel pinned him in place.
"I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night and it has all gone: I just miss you—"
"—in a quite simple desperate human way."
She picked up the prose, her thumb caressing his knuckles in that desperate human way. "I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal."
It was no longer Vita's letter to her Virginia, nor the monster's to his master.
"Damn you, spoilt creature. I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this." Her words were quiet but vexed, yet steadfast all the same. "I can't be clever and stand-offish with you."
"Integra."
"Do you know why?" Integra asked.
She was not going to recite the rest of the prose. She would make him writhe in unmet anticipation. Alucard wanted her, wanted her unspoken phrase; wanted to touch her even as he was touching her, wanted her succulent heart as though he had never wanted anything else. Oh, but what did that matter now?
"Too truly," he replied, throat parched.
Integra raised her head.
Her left eye was closed, yet when she opened it something fell out. It landed on his palm which she still held, and burst. It might have echoed in the silence.
Alucard straightened his spine in an instant.
There, oozing into the lines of his palm and speckling her white dress, was a drop of blood.
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I love you too much for that.
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This chapter was published on October 31, 2017.
It has been updated for formatting on January 29, 2021.
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.
Quote: Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 1926.