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17.
event horizon
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Alucard laughed.
It started quietly, dredged up from somewhere near his cold, dead heart. He should have given it to her after all. Presented it on a platter. If he had, if he had offered her the pomegranate whole, if she had taken it—ah, but she had already. She had eaten it and her hands had stained, she had accepted the war he said he would bring to her as a dowry—but only in her dreams. She had conquered, and they had called each other as equals—but only ever in her dreams.
Leave me, she said. Never leave me, she had also said. I will return to you, as you will return to me, she said. Integra, are you hearing yourself? He had never left. Even as she gave her orders, it had been the unknowable future she drew in her mind.
And just like that, he had lost her. To himself.
It is a new low, even for him, to be jealous of himself.
And so he laughed, shoulders hunched, shaking madly, asynchronous with the ghost's laughter in the fog.
Behind him, Walter flexed his hands.
"You're not happy about this at all," he observed.
Good old Angel of Death. He could just rip his throat out.
"No," Alucard found himself answering instead.
"You called her Countess."
"And she calls me Count." His eyes swiveled around to where the butler stood at a distance. "Why, does the old man wish to raise his objections?"
"I think we're in agreement by now that nothing you or I say will get through her," Walter said. He tugged his gloves tighter on his fingers. "You know what's going on. You know what is happening to Integra."
"Desperation," Alucard said. His words spilled forth rapidly. "Desperation is what's happening to her. Desperation that makes a monster." He turned, facing Walter. "I used to taste that sort of desperation about you."
The fog reduced them to mere shapes, yet Walter's monocle remained visible, a silver disc.
"The desperation that all humans inevitably have as they grow older. The taste of bitterness. The taste of spite." Alucard's eyes curved. "Though, barring that morning our dear Master has put into question, either you've pulled yourself up to sublimity, or you're just good at faking."
"We were talking about Integra," Walter snapped.
"I am talking about her." Alucard held out a fist, the wounds he had not allowed to close leaking steadily, mimicking a metronome. "Another morning, my Master awakens with war in her eyes and blood on her hands, brings a stray to the house whom she holds in the highest regard, drags the two of us to this waste and orders us to leave. All with that same kind of bitterness—" Here he laughed again, a sharp, broken note. "The same kind of spite. And what this means, what this all means, is that we both have wronged her. And I don't know what you did."
Walter stood absolutely motionless.
"Never mind me." Alucard spread his arms. "I am a monster, and I shall savor even her scorn. But that doesn't bode well for you, does it?"
The drops of blood fell as seconds, and in its keeping of time the ghost's laughter had reverberated, until it decided to move first. Something blurred past, and the laughter split directions.
They ignored this.
Finally, Walter chuckled. "I do believe you are projecting."
Alucard shrugged. "If I am, what does it matter? If she knows, then that is all you and I need. In the end she will be the one to bestow judgment for our transgressions. We will fight the battle she has led us to, we will lay our spoils at her feet, and see then if the Lady Integrity will forgive us."
These were the words he said.
But abruptly, he stilled.
Walter took advantage of the sudden pause. "Enough talk. Let's get this over with. I'll take the left."
Alucard would have pointed out how much Walter's exit sounded like avoidance, had he not pricked himself with the very words he had been using as thorns. His palms, soaked red, trembled and opened before his stare, and the dead earth was nourished with their sanguinity once more.
Now, isn't this familiar?
The King he had once been. The Count he had once been. They stirred under layers and layers of decay. A failure after failure. Their mouths are red, their hands are red. Isn't this familiar? These are the hours before the break of dawn where you lost everything. And you will weep, for—
You will lose her like you did everything.
And not even to yourself.
He straightened.
Alucard let his flesh knit itself back together. His gloves were spotless. The only remaining red were the urgent glow of his sigils and the strange fragility of his eyes, and his coat; from which he sought, as if he could, in desperation, some barest traces of her.
"Projecting," he mocked.
But he would not stop trembling.
His eyes flashed to his right.
The forest, a mural of the void shaped by its desires and regrets, had dispensed with its foreplay and switched tactics. Its latest manifestation spun under the moon, giggling maliciously.
"Well, well." Alucard smiled faintly. "The night is full of surprises."
The unmistakable silhouette of his female form stopped mid-spin, and curtsied.
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Integra's smile was cold.
"I don't suppose you happen to have what I'm looking for?"
"Perhaps, Sir," Dylan said, and produced from his uniform pocket a pack of cigars.
She continued to tap her fingers on the wall. "Well? You're not going to make me go get it, are you?"
Dylan grimaced. "I won't, Sir, but you might kill me."
"I might," Integra agreed, "but not until I have my answers."
The soldier swallowed. He looked peaked and much too nervous. But he came forth, presenting the pack with both hands outstretched. She plucked one and held it up. He lit it, and retreated.
Integra took a moment to appreciate the familiar redolence. Her fingers, however, were still tapping. She scoffed. "What a gentleman, coming all the way here to provide a lady with her vice."
"With due respect, Sir, you aren't smoking it."
"I promised Seras I would quit when I was forty-two."
He did not react.
Integra leaned back. "Eighty-six bullets, Dylan. Do you know what they mean?"
"No, Sir."
"Eighty-six bullets I put through my own men's skulls so they could at least die." The hand that had been tapping the wall stopped. Integra pulled her gun out of its holster. "Eighty-six bullets I named and buried. I remember each and every one of them. Your name, however." Casually, she pillowed her cheek on the barrel. "The morning we met, you said I know your name. I don't. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing you."
The smoke spiraled up to meet the spectator moon. "Almost as if," Integra flicked the ashes, "you didn't exist."
Before.
And the proof was the soldier himself, who appeared neither confused nor alarmed by her hypothesis.
Integra discarded the cigar, crushing it underfoot. She took aim. "What are you?"
Dylan ducked his head. "I am not at liberty to say, Sir Hellsing."
"Are you under orders?" Her knuckles whitened.
Integra had stood there after sending Alucard and Walter away, turning over possibilities, and finding them to be infinite. Who could she blame but herself? The butterfly woke from its dream, yet its wings would not stop fluttering; its very purpose was to create a storm. But who was the butterfly? Had she not made a false distinction? Was it truly her, whose death had become a monstrous thing?
Was she not someone else's dream?
"What I can say is," Dylan said, "that I am here with an objective."
"Your objective?"
"Seeing you off, Sir. To the Incongruity."
The shack behind her loomed large in the moonlight.
"The Incongruity?" Integra repeated. A strangled laugh escaped her. "Rather grandiose, that."
"That is what it is, Sir. You're aware I never existed within your lifetime." Dylan was visibly wary of her aim, yet he spoke with resolve. "Everything has a price. Something that's happened can't be undone. When time folds back on itself, there's bound to be fallout."
A few seconds' difference. A difference diverging into the Integra who had witnessed her vampire in white, and the Integra who had not. Time pivoting, eating its tail. She blinked and shuddered. A wetness she knew to be red slid down her left cheek.
"And if I go into this Incongruity?" she bit out.
Dylan recoiled. "I can't say, Sir."
Integra's hand shook around her pistol. She took a step forward, to grab the messenger, to demand answers, or to foist upon him, unfairly, this rage of hers against the wretchedness of fate—and found she could not.
The wall behind her gaped, a maw of the void.
And the ribbons of time wound themselves around her limbs and refused to let her go. They pulled her in with the gravitational hunger of a black hole to depths from which even light could not regurgitate. Integra forced herself upright. She gritted her teeth and fired, just as Dylan said, "I wouldn't—"
The silver bullet did not pierce the night as it should. Integra watched in disbelief as it froze midair, rattling in place, then increasing in velocity, before ricocheting and striking her right arm.
Nearly the same spot as three or forty years ago, too. The irony, Integra thought, barely wincing as blood streaked down her sleeve and spilled onto the boundary between reality and its distortion.
"I was going to warn you," Dylan groaned. "The laws of physics work differently in there."
Integra released her grip on her useless gun and let it drift out of reach. The darkness ate at her profile. "If I don't kill you, Dylan," she said calmly, "Alucard will."
"Yes." The soldier bowed. "But this is my duty."
Integra stared at him for a moment longer. Then she turned, and walked into the Incongruity.
The darkness flowed past her like ink. Yet it felt like nothing. The tangible ribbons around her limbs had dispersed once she ventured in of her own accord. Her arm was soaked, and left glistening strands in her wake. They floated. Up or down? Was she walking forward, or backward? Were her feet even on the ground? Integra grabbed at her glasses when they slipped. They, too, were useless; except without them, she thought she might lose sense of herself.
For she could get lost in here. Perhaps she could be lost forever. Was she not already?
She had lost her way in death and fallen through a seam in time and space.
Who was she now?
She was not fifteen-year-old Integra. She would never again be fifteen-year-old Integra. Alucard knew this. He, a monster born out of desperation, tasted its bitterness even before she shed its tear. She was also no longer old Integra. The woman who had died in such a human way, to a human disease. The woman who had let go of everything she loved, for her human duty. And that which remained—new Integra—was too desperate to be human.
She could stay here. She, the catalyst.
I promise I'll be home.
Integra stopped. Her hair billowed in the dark, as pale as lightning. Her eyes were blue and clear.
She resumed her pace, but with purpose.
The light at the window. She had to find it. The crux of it all. The strands of blood oozing from her wound floated not up, not down, but toward somewhere. The center. If they called this Incongruity a black hole, and she had crossed its event horizon, then there had to be what they could call its center. The singularity. She still had her sword with her.
If need be, she would pierce the heart of space-time itself.
Once, when Integra was six, her father read to her from a dictionary of scientific quotes. He had been healthy then. They had opened random pages and taken turns picking the funniest. "Look here, my girl," he had exclaimed. "There's one by a fellow who shares my name." He had recited to her this limerick:
Young Archie, the intrepid mole,
Went down to explore a Black Hole.
A stark singularity,
Devoid of all charity,
Devoured the mole as a whole.
"Devour as a whole," Integra murmured.
The light hovered in front of her.
As though it had been waiting for her all along. It was smaller than she expected. A stark, bright sphere, able to fit in the palm of her hand. When she approached, it drifted toward her.
She drew her sword with her left and thrust.
The light dodged. It grazed her fingertips. It felt like nothing, changed into nothing, yet Integra only had a split second where her eyes widened before she was consumed.
A day in late October.
Integra found herself in a hospital.
Nurses bustled past. The sight of Integra suddenly appearing among them half-drenched in blood would have been, in any normal circumstance, cause for alarm, but they whisked by as if she was invisible. I am, Integra realized. They cannot see me.
This is a memory.
"It was a rather difficult birth," she heard one say.
Integra knew instinctively. It was hers. Her birth.
She moved as a wraith of the future through the inhabitants of the past. A door was ajar. From behind it came a voice she had not heard in decades.
"A girl," her father was saying in dismay. "A girl, ah, God…"
He mumbled to the other person in the room—her mother. Integra stood frozen, mere steps away.
There was a sigh. "No matter. A daughter of Hellsing will be as strong as any man. Isn't that right, my girl?" And she realized he must be holding her in his arms.
Integra could go see him. She could see her mother, whose face she did not even remember. They were right there.
But her feet refused to budge.
"Her name? Ah, yes. Her name is—Integrity—no, that's too old-fashioned. Integral. Yes. Her name is Integral Hellsing. Integra for short."
And thus her fate is sealed.
Integra shuddered. On impulse her hand shot out for the doorknob, only to sink through like a ghost's. With that she was back in the abyss.
She pivoted, her anger eating her raw from the inside. The light hovered in front of her, infuriatingly pristine, and she slashed at it. It dodged again, this time grazing her wounded arm.
A day in late spring.
She found herself in a meadow. The sun was high. The breeze was warm. Daisies speckled the grass. She, bleeding and breathing erratically, was much too out of place. She remembered this.
"Master!"
Integra bit her lip. It eviscerated her to look.
"Master!"
Yet she did.
"Seras," she whispered brokenly.
It was her Seras. The one with the red eyes, and the shadow arm which could also be a pair of wings. She was laughing and waving at her. "Master! Over here. I've set up the picnic mat—hurry, it's a bit windy!"
She remembered what she said. She said—
"A picnic, on a windy day." Old Integra sauntered into the vision, separate from the Integra who was watching with pained eyes. At the age of forty-two, there were faint creases on her face, grey streaks in her hair. "Seras, I don't want a literal tempest in my teacup."
"This is fine! It's just a bit—oh no, the cake is escaping!"
A robust bout of wind caused a fairy cake to tumble out of its china. There was a commotion where the Draculina scrambled to catch the runaway pastry and old Integra just sighed and brought an unlit cigar to her lips. Seras ran past, and the Integra who was watching stretched a hand out, to touch—
—and she was pulled from the vision, her hand falling through murk.
Her sword clattered as she shook with grief and rage. How dare—how dare it show her this, when she had died, when that death had been denied to her, when all had been for nothing, when she could not go back—
"Yes. You can't."
Opposite her, the light hovering between, a dark figure made itself known. It had a stature, a physique, yet in all other aspects it was utterly featureless.
But it was unmistakable.
Integra's silhouette said, "I won't let you."
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"Who dares to use my image against me?" Alucard murmured.
The silhouette emitted a giggle and resumed dancing. It had no features, yet replicated the outline of his coat and even the hat surprisingly well. The hair which he wore straight and sharp in this form spun an arc with its choreography, yet did not reflect the moonlight. A paper-cutout puppet of the void.
He knew what this was supposed to be and bared his teeth.
A distraction.
He always smiled at the promise of extra kills, but distractions would arouse his bloodlust more than they ought to. Because he despised them. Especially when they kept him from playing with his true target. He made sure to draw out their deaths as long and painfully as possible, if only to send a message: a terrible fate awaits those who send their inferiors to the No-Life King while they themselves hide behind the curtain.
Alucard began to circle the puppet. "Whoever is behind this, I will admit, they are resourceful. Using the darkness so I cannot detect, using beasts as a smoke screen, using my likeness to have my Master send me away." His hair gnarled. "Bait."
The unknowable enemy had achieved thus, and more.
He drew Casull. "Let's see if you can keep up with the original goods."
The puppet nimbly sidestepped the first silver bullet, with peals of laughter that were higher and snider than the original. The second and third bullets hit its head and abdomen. Yet instead of blasting massive chunks off, they merely went through, causing distortions in its fabric that quickly knitted back.
It wagged its finger.
"Not to be deterred with toys?" His eyes arched. "How delightful."
He was prepared to be sorely disappointed if the puppet assumed his silhouette but was otherwise a wet rag. His grin widened at the challenge. The Hellsing sigils flared, his restriction levels lifted. Oh, he had not done this in ages. Alucard released a wave of shadows that burned as embers and whirled serpentine under the fake's feet. They snapped it up.
It went limp in the jaws for a moment.
Then, its laughter persisting, it swiped at its restraints.
He felt the shrieks of the souls in his retinue as they were torn apart.
"Oh." Alucard's smile became fixed. "Fatal, are we?"
The femme fatale covered the region of its mouth with its hand and snickered, as if to say, Of course.
It had disintegrated his shadows as if they were nothing.
The entity behind the curtain was certainly more than a Category A monster.
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
The abyss was desperate and full of spite.
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Integra gazed into the featureless reflection of herself.
"You're," she took a breath. "Me."
Everything has a price. Something that has happened cannot be undone.
She is an Integra that has already happened. But she is here. A young Miss Hellsing went to sleep, and an old Sir Hellsing woke up in her place. That which should have been is gone.
There is bound to be fallout. And so reality implodes, a void is formed, and within its boundary she confronts the echo of what once had been.
"I am you, or who you have been, or who would have become you. If time hadn't folded back on itself." The last sentence was spoken harshly.
The reflection sounded like her. But it also had the petulance of a young Miss Hellsing, who wore blue skirts and sensible loafers and did not quite comfortably settle into her chair, which was too large for her. Who had wished for something to happen, so that she would prove herself. Who had, despite her own caution, let herself be seated so high she toppled. Who fancied her hands unsullied even as they cleaned up stains that would never truly fade and swept aside shards that would ever sting under the skin.
The Integra who had once been, gazed into her with no eyes. "I'll do better. I won't let those things happen."
She almost laughed.
What a childish sentiment.
Integra leaned heavily to the side, the blood loss from her wound too prolonged to ignore. She mourned for her, this girl who was lost in this rift created out of bitterness and spite. "Don't."
"Why not?"
"I know I've always been stubborn. But you can't. Everything that has happened and everything that will happen, have become one and the same. It's done. We can't go back." Her left eye closed in pain. "Don't let there be two wraiths existing."
"We can undo it." Desperation laced the voice. It indeed sounded like her. "We can clean the slate. I can clean the slate. It doesn't have to be you."
It was as though the reflection considered her a failure, which Integra conceded that to her fifteen-year-old self, she would be.
"I won't—I won't let Alucard leave me. I won't let Walter b-betray me." It stumbled on the word, not yet used to its gravity. "Even the girl, Seras. I'll love her as you do. I'll love her better."
Integra shook her head. It was wrong. All of it. "You can't. You're unable to."
"And who gets to say that?" the reflection challenged. "Look at you. You're like a monster."
She must be. If Integra had a proper mirror, she knew she must look a fright. Blood trailing behind her, threading into her hair. Her eyes too blue and too bright, the left smudged with the bitter tear. Her sword stained and clattering in her grasp. A crimson-soaked wraith.
"You're the one who doesn't belong. They're not yours out there. It's not the Alucard you waited. It's not the Walter you forgave. It's not the Seras you loved." The reflection moved toward her for the first time and snatched the hand holding the sabre. "Stay here."
"And what will that achieve?" Integra asked. "You're already lost."
It stabbed a finger at the sphere of light hanging innocuously above them. "I'll destroy it."
"No," Integra said.
The reflection squeezed her hand in frustration. My, how impatient she had been. More impulsive, more dishonest.
"They deserve better than your bitterness and grief!"
She sighed, shakily. "I need to return. I promised."
"I will instead of you!"
"No. You don't know the weight of the promise. You're right. They are not the ones I have waited, forgiven, and loved." Integra winced, and another red tear escaped her left eye. "But I am the only one who can accept them with all their depravities and sins."
"Are you God, to claim that?" the reflection demanded. "Can you call yourself a Protestant knight? You're not even wearing His cross!"
Yes. She was not.
Not since she woke up.
"You're so young," Integra said, and took her reflection by its free hand. She tugged it into her embrace. It felt odd yet familiar, like Alucard's shadows, or Seras' wings. The light of the singularity illuminated the crown of her head. "You couldn't have known. We were proud of our name and eager to serve our duty, our God-given mission. We thought the war was our calling, it would be the culmination of our purpose. We let it come to us. You let him bring it to you."
If you win this war for me, would that be redemption for the king who lost so many years ago? She had also thought that. Ah, but was it a war? Was it a good war? What was it?
In the end it was nothing more than clockwork. It was nothing more than a childish squabble.
Her wound stained her deeper as she clasped her warmth tighter around the trembling shadow. "After the glorious night, what remains?"
Death looks tiny on a map; a blip and nothing else, though to a person a whole world has disappeared. The sun rises, the nightmare is broken, and what has been shed in the name of glory is bared in all its red and weeping fragments.
And you stand there, in your house full of corpses.
But it could not have known that, her little piece of childish vindication. It lashed out. "Then I'll keep you here with me!"
The Incongruity? The heart of space-time? The crux of it all? Such grandiose words. Integra laughed low, her gaze turning upward to the light. It hovered, as if waiting.
"It's always humans who kill monsters," she whispered. "But it's always humans who become them."
She pushed.
She leapt.
And her mouth closed on the sphere of light—
And she devoured the singularity, as a whole.
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NOTES
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.
Quotes:
Arthur Koestler, Cosmic Limerick, in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.