Satis Chapter 17: ever-immutable, a hellsing fanfic

16.

ever-immutable

The leaves crumbled under their feet, and that was the only sound in the forest.

Integra could not say she had been to that many forests. Perhaps she had, once or twice, when was at an age hardly worth remembering; on her father's shoulders as he prattled about the forests being subprime real estate. "Subprime, my girl, because nothing beats the city, rife with those who would positively beg to be snatched up by the damnedest creatures on earth. Now that is prime real es—what are you giving me that look for, Walter?"

Her father had been right. She had walked the most fetid of forests in London.

Even one made of corpses, however, was comparable to this empty forest where the very trees appeared to have had their breaths torn out, leaving silence as knots hanging from branches, stifling the air. Or, she thought, that was just them.

Walter was up front, holding a torch.

Behind her, seeming to drag a wall of shadows with him, was Alucard.

They spoke not a word.

Without the clockwork stage of the manor—here, in nature's depths, only the smell of the earth and the crackle of leaves in accompaniment and all of it so primal—they were stripped bare, in a way. There was no routine, and without it there was no need of masquerade. It was precisely why no one was saying anything. What could one say, when there were no roles to play?

But she—Integra—always had a role, did she not? By the virtue of her name—Integrity—she was a role unto herself. The notion was at once so sobering and ludicrous that Integra scoffed.

"What amuses you, my Master?"

Master. Her ever-immutable role.

"It's been a while since it had been just the three of us," Integra replied, without glancing back. Alucard's voice had brushed close even though he was meters away. Her own voice echoed too loud. She went on, "Didn't Walter chop your arm off?"

"Oh, are we allowed to talk about that now?" He sounded delighted. "Would my master want limbs thrown at her feet tonight, as a reiteration of that day?"

"Whose limbs are we talking about?"

"Mine, for a start, if the Angel humors me."

Walter did not, of course. Instead he came to a halt. "My lady, we are close to the epicenter. Shall we proceed?"

Integra knew why he was asking. The nature of the enemy had still not been identified, vampiric or otherwise. In such dubious circumstances, if it had been as it were in the past, she would not have been there at all. What good are dogs, if not to release into the woods and wait idly for them to bring game?

She had no intention of waiting. Her left eye had been aching ever since they landed.

"Proceed."

"I only ask if it will not be prudent to send Alucard in first," Walter said, meeting her eyes staunchly.

Integra also knew it would have been prudent for Walter to be questioning her when she was this age. And she would have appreciated it, if she were Miss Hellsing. But it was Sir Hellsing who stepped forward and took the torch from Walter, dismissing his protest.

"Alucard's shadows have scouted the area and found nothing," Integra said, leaving the two men behind her. Illuminated by both the moon and artificial light, she walked toward the junction where the hiker's tracks had disappeared off to. "Yet absolute lack, on the contrary, serves as proof that there is something,wouldn't you say?"

"Quite," said Walter.

"Then the options are, something is static. Something is lying dormant. Or perhaps something waiting for us to make a move." Integra pushed aside a cluster of branches.

It was there that she paused, and looked down at the plant she was stepping past.

It was bone white.

As she stood, staring at the discoloration, Alucard's voice came through loud and derisive. "We should have brought along that pilot boy as bait."

The plant, as brittle as its noncolor, came apart easily in her hand. Integra shined the torch further into the pathless woods and confirmed her suspicions. The further it went near the epicenter, the paler they grew.

"Why don't you be a sport and play the bait instead, Angel?"

"Why don't you be the bait, Alucard, seeing as our enemy has a preference for white?" Integra ground out. "But since neither of you bastards seem to be willing, I shall have to do everything myself."

"My lady," Walter choked.

Alucard, for once, was quiet.

Integra whipped out her sabre and slashed at the roots and branches clinging to her skirt like so many emaciated arms. Her head pounded. And annoyed as she was at herself for losing her patience, she could not help the vitriol; the three of them, alone in a mission, how could she have forgotten there was a reason that had never been a mode of operation?

She had Alucard at sword-point for the second time that evening when he suddenly appeared in front of her.

"Master." Alucard held her gaze, a strange smile on his lips. "When have you seen me in white?"

Integra breathed, sheathing her sabre. "Must I satisfy your vanity, now? Ask Walter to cut your arm off, if you so desperately need a reiteration."

Alucard's smile twisted, as if he had somehow gotten his answer.

"I never showed you that form."

And a sharp pain through her left eye made her stagger.

Alucard caught her, winding an arm around her waist while a hand tangled in her hair and cupped her skull. The torch fell from her grasp and rolled into a bush, throwing darkness over them as a cloak.

Walter's shout went unheeded. The two stayed in the anonymity of the dark, motionless, before Alucard pressed his lips to her ear.

"How is it that you saw me in white? Perhaps you remember us bickering, Walter and I, but you weren't there to see it. I transformed back before you entered the hall."

"What?" It was all Integra could do to not tremble against him as pain and confusion wracked her. "No. I was there—"

"You were there, yes. But only after I transformed back. A few seconds' difference, yet how is it, Countess, that your memory contains that crucial few?"

"No—you're wrong—I was there, when you were wearing that ridiculous farce of yours!" Integra pushed away from him. "Walter!"

"My lady." Walter joined them in the dark. "Did—"

"Tell him—" Pain scattered across her vision. Integra gritted her teeth. "Tell Alucard that I did see him in his girl's form, the day you returned."

His monocle flashing in the moonlight seemed to indicate how unhappy he was that she was bringing this up. Nevertheless, Walter answered, slowly, "It is true that we had—a disagreement, and Alucard did change into his—other form, but my lady, you were not there to witness it." Then the implications dawned on him. "How did you know?"

Integra took a step back from both of them.

Nothing made sense.

Perhaps, just perhaps, because she was human and human memory was faulty, she was misremembering. Forty years ago little Miss Hellsing walked into the hall and found a puddle of blood here and a missing arm there, and the two remaining men in her life who were supposed to be better than this. That was that. There did not have to be anything else.

No.

There was. There had been.

Integra thought of Dylan, and how he factored into this.

Either she was misremembering horribly, or there never had been a Dylan Basbanes in Hellsing so much as there had been an Integra who had seen her vampire in cruel white. Another incongruity.

And—that was why she was here. To take into line the biggest incongruity of all—this forest.

She turned and stalked into the dead woods, torchlight be damned. She did not need one anyway.

The fog crept in, and the moonbeams woven within embroidered it aglow. Integra merely had to head toward where it was thickening. She did not have to check whether Alucard and Walter were close by; a trail of red, red orbs slithered at her heels, unblinking.

"Of course you show tact only after everything has been said and done," Integra muttered. The pain in her eye had lessened, but she was not above begrudging his face just yet. "Well?"

The red orbs stared at her for the longest time before snapping to attention.

Integra looked.

In a small clearing, there stood a shack. Old, nondescript and with a single source of light inside.

She was sixteen when a soldier was found to have taken bets on when, and with whom, she would lose her virginity.

She was assuaged by the fact it had been the soldier's own squad that reported this to her. The matter had been quietly resolved. She certainly was not going to foist the sins of a reprehensible few on them.

Alucard thought differently. "Let me kill them."

Integra was in her office, sifting through papers. "You're welcome to propose how we will justify the disappearance of an entire squad. In the meantime, I fired the soldier, so you shall have to make do with that."

He stood before her desk, a wall of writhing embers. She noted with mild interest how the pressure was making her tea ripple. "I have destroyed entire nations for far less."

Integra raised a brow. "Are you honestly saying that this one offense against your master's virtue outweighs them all?"

His eyes blazed. "My Master, I'd thought you would have known by now."

Integra let out a disbelieving noise.

She never knew how to react when he said things like this. She had come a long way from the naive, impressionable child she had been, and had grown into a height she could work with, and yet his words felt as if they could topple her.

It was dangerous. She would never let him.

"Enough, Alucard," Integra snapped. "I will not put my men to death just to please your ego. You're only disappointed I didn't offer up the miscreant to your hound."

Alucard laughed darkly. "Do you know what men do, the moment you are seen as less than untouchable? They imagine, my dear Master, that which for the thought alone I would rip their eyes out. And you deny me the chance to make an example out of one so that none may tarnish your authority."

Anger and hurt bubbled in the pit of her stomach. "You are not helping," she hissed.

She rose brusquely from her chair and turned away from him. She could not bear to see him, not because she was ashamed, or even angry at him, but because she was barely able to keep herself from giving the order he desired.

At length, she felt him subside. "Forgive me, my Master."

Integra was looking at her reflection on a glass cabinet, a tinted image of a girl at the cusp of womanhood. Her blouse fit snugly. Her skirt brushed her calves when she moved.

She knew he was looking, too.

Hypocrite, she should have called him, but Alucard was different.

(Besides, even if she ordered him to gouge out his own eyes, they would regenerate anyway. And she was very fond of his eyes.)

"If they are unable to yield to my authority because I am a woman, that is their problem, not mine." She scowled. "That being said, I will take measures to ensure nothing like this happens again. I can't have you blind every man that looks at—or thinks of—me the wrong way."

She shifted to the side so she could have his reflection on the—silver-less—glass. As expected, he was watching her.

"I've already given it consideration," she continued, trying not to shiver.

"Oh?"

"It's true my current choice of attire does not inspire much authority. Miriam tells me I should move onto more sophisticated women's clothes, but I have been looking into menswear."

She gauged his reaction.

He was a blur of black and red, yet she could tell he was intrigued. "Pity your decision is in part due to those beneath you, but you would be striking in them, Integra."

"What is it that Miriam's rags say, 'Fashion is a statement'?" Integra had also toyed with the idea of cigars. Their redolence comforted her, and men seemed to piss themselves when having to deal with a woman who wore trousers and smoked, even though they were heading well toward a new millennium. "And so it will be—though, in the end, they'll know exactly who they are dealing with."

He came to her side. "Yes. When Death descends upon the battlefield to reap their souls. They will see my face, but they will know that it is you who pulls the trigger." His shadows, like claws, rested upon her shoulders, and his smile was violent.

"A battlefield?" Integra scoffed, to mask her thrill at his words. Another of his dramatizations, she told herself. She had told herself time and time again that she would never let Alucard seat her so high, for fear she would topple along with everything she stood for.

And yet, how could she resist?

A thought occurred to her. "That other face of yours," Integra said, waving his shadows away.

"The one I wore the morning 'nothing' happened?" Alucard asked sarcastically.

She had not brought up that particular morning for discussion since and she was not going to now. "I was only wondering—is that a statement?"

And Alucard laughed and laughed, and it was in these rare instances where his laughter was of pure amusement that he sounded almost, dare she say, human. He's a monster, she told herself time and time again.

"Do you want me to transform, and I shall demonstrate just what kind of statement it makes."

Integra rolled her eyes. "No, I've had enough of your theatrics for one night. Save it for later."

She was twenty-two and on a mangled zeppelin when she saw him in white, wearing a child's face.

She was thirty-two when she wished she could tell him how ridiculous he looked.

"Your shadows didn't find this?"

Said shadows converged. "No."

There they were, the three of them—Alucard on her right, Walter on her left.

The fog shaped itself into a barrier surrounding the clearing and the shack in its center. "So, this is the heart," Integra murmured, as she started to circle the periphery. Her retainers watched her closely. "How quaint."

She reached out to touch the surface of the building. "Be careful, Integra," Walter warned.

In the quiet, all of them heard the flutter of wings. Walter unleashed his wires and Alucard his Casull, yet it was Integra who was the nearest and the quickest. A gunshot, and something plummeted to the ground.

Integra knelt and picked it up.

"See for yourself," she said, after a moment, tossing it to Alucard.

He caught it. It was a raven, except where there should be one head, there were two. It bled purplish in his gloved hand, the heads twitching still. He crushed it.

"This forest was supposed to be empty." Integra calmly wiped her own hand on her skirt. "But there's that."

Alucard, for his part, appeared calm enough, but it was testament to how agitated he was that his hat and shades had vanished. "This feels like—nothing," he growled. "A void."

"An absolute nothing that is something," said Integra.

"Something monstrous, indeed," said Walter.

Integra resumed her pace. "A hiker's disappearance, followed by the entire fauna." She was speaking to herself, not to them. "It stands to reason that he disappeared within that hovel, the heart of this sphere of influence. A nothing that expanded, and devoured its surroundings, like..."

"A black hole," said Walter.

She glanced at them, as if she had forgotten they were there at all. "Yes, and preliminarily Alucard would not have been able to detect it, because his shadows and the blackness are cut from the same cloth."

Integra circled back, and in the lunar glow of the fog, she could view the faces of her men quite clearly. Walter looked impressed. "Astute, my lady. I don't believe we've come across anything like this before, for you to make such an assessment."

She let the comment slide, and turned to the light at the window. "A black hole—with a light inside. That is the objective we need to break the spell. Seras, target your silver bullets on it."

When nothing came of that command, Integra realized where exactly in time she was and what she had said, and bit the scab on her lip.

"I—think you misspoke, my lady."

Integra bit until it tore, the sting jerking her back to reality. "Yes. I meant Alucard." She faced them, her retainers (one who will betray you and one who will disappear, whispers cruel voices, she has difficulty suppressing them, here under the lunacy of the moon and the raw taste of copper and the nothingness of the void) and they were chilled, even the monster, at the sight of her. Lit by the inhuman light, blood on her lips, eyes too blue and too bright. "Alucard. Destroy it."

Are you afraid?

Alucard had not been afraid. Even when Integra had shed that drop of blood, that piece of deviltry, that hint of desperation.

And yet, with every step she took back and forth toward him and toward the one she awaited, every incongruity would stack, stack so high eventually that tower would collapse—she would no longer be able to assure him, because she cannot assure even herself.

And it was his own desperation that had him aim Casull without any mirth; his desperation to destroy those dreams that ensnared her, though it was she who said, like her ancestor, there is no nightmare from which you do not wake.

He would have, if the beasts had not broken through the mist.

Some bloody family trip this was turning into.

Not that Walter could complain. Or enjoy the release of his wires for that matter. In fact, he could not do or feel much anything, because there were alarm bells going off inside his head that were only barely muted by the din of the fight.

Walter was well aware that things had gone peculiarly this past week, but every doubt he had regarding the nature of the peculiarity was overthrown by the sight of his lady.

She whipped out her sabre and engaged, lightning fast and fatal, simultaneously beheading a buck and shooting down an owl with her pistol. In none of her practice sessions had she displayed such speed and force. Integra had been an excellent fencer—for her age. This was beyond age. This looked like decades of practice.

That was not the most chilling observation, however.

The most chilling observation, Walter loathed to admit, was Alucard. His reaction to her, to be precise. He would have expected from him intrigue or delight. Then why was it—Walter snapped another deer into halves—that he looked afraid?

The vampire had a mad desperation in his gaze that never left Integra. He was trying to reach her, but she was backed into a wall and the beasts were attacking them in earnest.

It was as if they were preventing them from getting close to her.

Walter snagged a hare in mid-jump. It tumbled to a stop at his feet, where he grabbed it by the ears. It had twin pupils in each eye. These animals were living creatures, albeit puppeteered by the void, and every one of them bore mutations and discolorments.

Alucard, finally fed up with the distractions, summoned the Hound of Baskerville.

Right, we're on Dartmoor, Walter thought dryly.

It could not get worse. It bloody could not get worse.

It did get worse.

In the very, very brief quiet following the annihilation of the mutant fauna in the jaws of the black hound, Alucard took a single step toward Integra.

The fog thickened. The light at the window flickered. And Walter was reminded that silence in a bedeviled forest is never a good thing.

From the haze rang out laughter, inhuman.

(It sounded familiar, he would realize much, much later.)

"Fuck," Walter said, and broke his embargo on swearing around his lady. It really could not get worse.

It all comes down to this.

There was Integra, and Alucard, and Walter. Just like thirty years ago, or seven years later.

At least it was her Walter, the old man with the kind grey eyes. There were no burning cities, no zeppelins, and Seras is an innocent tucked in her bed miles and miles away.

But time pivots. And eats its tail.

And Integra knew that laughter.

A ghost of a laughter she had heard so often in her dreams.

Her dreams, after the war, had been the same repertoire. In the end she banished them like she did with monsters: with the sun in her eye, and with routine. Some nights she was lucky enough to be dreamless.

(This is a lie.)

Dreams are strange things. As you lie in the quiet of a not-quite-death, your memories splinter. They are shards, resurrecting a new mirror.

In her dreams Alucard is wearing white, as if he is making a statement, and crimson floods the streets of London. He laughs and says he cannot lose, though he has lost time and time again. He is so drunk on the victory he has brought her, he has forgotten.

(But of course. He is a monster without consequence.)

Thus he disappears, leaving a void in her heart.

And Integra remembered—she had ripped open her palm on a mirror shard, her dreams had shattered and resurrected themselves in the present.

Oh, Integra thought.

This void.

It somehow must be mine.

Which was why she parted her lips to say, "Alucard. My orders."

The words were poison on her tongue. It rewound itself, over and over and over again, her final order.

For one night, she won. She was the ruler of Midian. Her words brought death and ruin. And on the same night she lost; her words cost them all. She lost them all, the one who betrays and the other who disappears, lost them all and oh, she let them seat her so high so high she toppled in consequence.

Ah, but I am the Master, and this is my ever-immutable role.

"Search and destroy," Integra said. "Search and destroy my enemies."

No matter what they are. No matter who they are.

"Leave me here," she said, "and go after them."

The laughter danced around them, beckoning.

"You too, Walter."

"My lady!" Walter shouted immediately. "Please reconsider!"

A corner of her mouth twitched upward. "Well, that's nice to hear from you." She sobered. "Go, Walter. That is an order."

"Leave you?"

Alucard clenched his fists as the sigils flared, registering her command. Yet he lashed out against it, his fingers puncturing his palms and washing the sallow earth in crimson. "And what will you do, dear Countess? Step into the void and reclaim the one you have awaited?"

Would it not have been kinder for her to have died, in that sunset, opposite the one who left her at the break of day? Did the king he had once been ask the same thing? Wonder, as the world continues its melancholy course, if he should not have died in that sunrise? The same question repeats, over and over and over again. Count, I've become you.

"I will take on my mantle, as you have said. I will shape my Eden, as you have said." Integra raised her face to the moon and closed her eyes.

"I will return to you, as you will return to me," she said.

It was three days after the war when she and Seras reported in at the refugee camp for a briefing. They had been greeted by Sir Robert Walsh. He nodded at Seras and her distended shadow arm. "Long flight, eh?" To her he held up a warm mug of water. "Fancy a cuppa? Only have teabags, I'm afraid."

There were bags under Integra's one remaining eye. The other was wrapped in a bandage. Nevertheless she stood as tall and beautiful as always, even if that beauty was now the refrain of a haunting threnody. "I can't stay long. I must return to the zone as soon as possible."

"I'm aware. It'll be brief," Walsh said, and opened the flap of the emergency headquarters.

"You!"

A figure threw themselves at Integra. They were instantly rebuffed by Seras, and intercepted by Walsh, whereupon they began to scream insults at her.

"Excuse me," Seras began, appalled.

Integra recognized the woman. "Lady Mary Penwood," she whispered. Sir Shelby Penwood's wife.

"My poor Shelby!" Mary wailed. She thrust an arm out of Walsh's grip and clawed at the air as if to gouge Integra's remaining eye out. "Why did my Shelby have to die, huh? What did he do to deserve that? He was a good man, he was nothing but loyal and you left him there!"

"Restrain yourself, woman!" Walsh barked.

"How dare you!" Seras shouted.

"Stand down, Seras," Integra said.

It was the grief of a widow that capacitated Mary to throw off Walsh and grab the edge of Integra's coat lapel. She shook her. "He'd only just had his grandson, he was so happy, it's your fault that you ruined it, Integral Hellsing, it's all your fault!"

Integra did nothing to stop her. "I am sorry for your loss," she said.

Mary's wild hands found the mug that Walsh had set aside on a stool, and hurled its contents at her. Seras shielded her, yet a part of it splashed onto her face. It seeped into her bandage, staining it pink.

Still, Integra did nothing.

"For bollocks' sake—"

"That is enough," Seras snarled—

And above the commotion Mary kept screaming, "Die, Integral Hellsing, die, die, die!"

No, Seras.

It's never enough.

Integra let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

An old, discarded habit of hers resurfaced, and her fingers tapped the wall behind her in want of a familiar object.

"Good evening, Sir Hellsing."

She opened her eyes.

"Hello, Dylan."

NOTES

The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.