The Child of Seras - by MindAsylum - Anime - http://www.hellsingfanfic.net/hellsingfanfic/The_Child

The Child of Seras

Chapter XII

Jake shifted in his seat. He immediately regretted it, as the leather seat of the limousine made a conspicuous screech at even the slightest movement. Integra sat across from him, taking no obvious notice of the noise but staring straight ahead in that intensely focused way of hers. While Jake knew that she wasn’t really looking at him at all, he also knew she was fully aware of everything he was doing, from the nervous shifting of his eyes to his needless, habitual breathing. Jake wasn’t blessed with a very analytical mind, but his instincts usually served him well, or at least kept him out of trouble. He could never escape the feeling that, like Alucard, was always watching him, though her purpose seemed to be different, less personal.

Seras was right beside him as she always seemed to be, and like every other time, her presence made it easier to be sitting front of the woman rumored to have ice water in her veins. She had a quiet, confidence about her, the kind that tended to shine onto others. Especially Jake, who had all the self-assertion of a Popsicle stick run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

In front of her sat Walter, in all his usual graceful formality and readiness. Integra never seemed to go anywhere without him, and the fact that he could stand so firmly when beside Hellsing’s iron fist was reason enough to understand why. He did not speak to Seras, not out of any apparent distance between them, but out of some silent contract that this was the time for working, not talking.

The briefing was simple enough. What was believed to be a murder in one of London’s wealthier suburbs showed several signs of a vampire attack, and thus prompted investigation by Hellsing. The victim was a middle-aged man named John Pearlman, a stock broker from Yorkshire who’d moved into the neighborhood a few months ago, and made few friends among his neighbors. What made things so awkward was that on Jake’s first mission, he knew precisely what his job was and how he was supposed to get it done, but this time he wasn’t sure why he was tagging along; he didn’t have any skills that would help in this situation, and besides, Seras would have been more than enough to begin trailing their target. If Integra’s conspicuous distrust in him was any indication, he certainly wasn’t being enlisted as a back-up bodyguard.

Jake decided not to ask questions. They didn’t need any reminder of what an unnecessary burden he was, and for that matter, neither did he.

The limo coasted to a stop and the faceless Welshman that was the driver announced they had arrived. Jake was careful not to try and get out before everyone else had, not so much out of fear as a strange dread that weighed him down the moment the door was opened. He was nervous, sure, but not the excited kind of nervous that had accompanied his first mission. It was a strange, confined, isolated kind of nervous, where no matter how many people were with him, he still felt as if he was completely alone.

He hated that feeling more than anything else.

----

By the time he shook himself from his brooding he was already passing through the front door of a house so plain it could easily be his own, sectioned off by yellow and black tape. Two impeccable men in white suits wearing latex gloves gave Integra a look of sudden fear disguised as well-earned respect, and then shot a nervous glance from Seras to Jake, taking a rather uncomfortable note of the patches on their arms. An inexplicable comfort went over him when he saw them look away the moment their eyes met, and while he didn’t understand how, he felt that he had come one step closer to understanding his place in Hellsing.

They had arrived just as the initial investigators were leaving. They hadn’t had a chance to more look through the house more thoroughly, since Hellsing took precedence in cases like this so they could determine whether or not this was a vampire attack.

They walked one by one into the living room, the spot the two cops had just scurried from like uniformed cockroaches. It was far cleaner than Jake had expected, the only massive bloodstain being a single stream splattered in a skewed angle on the corner of the whitewashed wall. The corpse lay in the ruins of a shattered, glass coffee table, his throat anomalously slit rather than bitten, and a pool of what little blood he had left had formed around the wound. His face was clean and white, and apparently, he wasn’t becoming a ghoul anytime soon. A houseplant with thick, wide leaves stood untouched in the opposite corner, the only living witness to the crime. There were a few lesser spots on the beige leather couch. There was a strong smell in the air, but oddly, it wasn’t blood. It was a harsh bleach-like smell that reminded Jake of the cleaner Walter used around the mansion.

“Oh, damn it all,” huffed Integra, “He used ammonia. This blood is useless.”

She turned her head just barely in Jake’s direction and said, in her trademark unarguable tone: “Rivers, Victoria, look around, see if you find anything our ever-vigilant police force hasn’t.” she added the last part of a hint of contempt reserved for those she deemed incompetent, which happened to be just about everyone except Jake that didn’t work directly for her.

“Yes sir.” He said quickly, while Seras nodded once.

They both went down the hall, Jake taking the bedroom at Seras’ signal, while she took the back room and the garage.

--

Mr. Pearlman was, as Seras could tell, an extraordinarily picky man. Everything in his home was kept in a precise order, pecking order. All of his pictures were on precisely the same level, all the pens on his desk were kept parallel the to arms of the swivel chair parked in front of it, and every album (some of which where vinyl) was kept upright and in perfect alphabetical order, as were the books, most of which were cookbooks from four-star chefs across the world. On the old fashioned turntable was a 50-year old Beatles single “Yellow Submarine,” and suddenly Seras’ mind went back to a section she read in the case file that the only thing his neighbor’s ever complained about was that he played his music too loud. Seras looked back at the record, and was suddenly filled with a revulsion she couldn’t explain. It reminded her of the time her father had taken her to the London Aquarium when she was a little girl. She remembered, in the tunnel filled with sharks, how closely she had clung to his side until they were out. They were contained, harmless outside of their own contained field or out of water, but just being so close to them, with their empty eyes staring straight into hers, was enough to make her look twice whenever she got into a swimming pool. She left the room, deciding she had searched this room enough.

She walked passed the door Jake was in, but stopped for a moment, wondering if she should check up on him, but decided to be less overbearing and went through the garage. The lights were off, which was perfectly fine, but out of reflex, she turned them on. The garage was ordinary, like everything else, with a wiped-clean work desk, lined with power tools that all looked as if they’d recently been used, from a power drill to even a popcorn machine with just-dried filler at the tip. He must have been remodeling, though the house showed no signs of it. She had heard somewhere that evil lies in the most mundane places. If that were the case, this must have been the tenth level of Hell.

Something caught Seras’ eye. It was so obvious that she was amazed she hadn’t noticed before. In the garage, two cars were parked: one a champagne-colored Jaguar convertible, and the other, crouching beside it like a hairy wart, a dirty, paint-stripped van.

She scooted over to it, around the V8-powered beauty that surely belonged in this man’s garage to the filthy mess that surely didn’t. She tried to open the double-doors in the back of the van. It was locked, but why should that have stopped her? After one strong jerk, the doors flew open with the sound of bending metal.

The back was empty, except for one thing: two small leather hoops descending from the top. Seras knew of only one use for them, and if she was right, then there was more to this “victim” than they ever imagined.

--

Jake had almost finished searching Pearlman’s bedroom. No clues whatsoever so far. In fact, everything was so normal it made him wonder if the murderer (vampire or otherwise) had cleaned the place up before he left. He wanted to leave, but there was one place he still hadn’t looked: the drawer by the end table.

He ignored it the first time he noticed, because it was locked and the key was nowhere in sight. He guessed, considering the neurotic cleanliness that showed in every other part of the house, that he kept it on his person, and Jake wasn’t about to mess with his corpse. The man already had the indignity of being a vampire’s lunch, he didn’t need another one poking around what was left of him.

Jake decided that breaking it open was the only option. He put his hand on the brass handle, and carefully, gave a single, quick pull. The lock snapped off like a toothpick, and a clump of Polaroid photos was revealed. Jake took the bundle in his hand, and looked at the first.

His eyes went wide.

Before he had any time to register what he’d seen, he heard a man’s voice, calling hoarsely from the kitchen. Jake couldn’t hear what he was saying exactly, but he did not sound pleased. Jake followed, involuntarily, hypnotically, even while he was screaming at himself to run from this house or call for Seras or hide in a closet and never come out.

He walked down the hallway, dropping a picture with every step, as though leaving a trail of crumbs to find his way home by. He heard the voice much clearer as he approached the kitchen.

“I asked you, what the fuck are you looking at?”

A man sat at the kitchen table, with a half-empty bottle of Heineken in his hands. His arms were thin but popping with wiry sinew. He wore a plain, sweaty T-shirt and had a mat of greasy, black hair sat on his head. His face was conspicuously clean and boyish, perhaps the only part of his appearance he took care of. For now, however, it was screwed into an indignant scowl at the little boy washing dishes as quickly as he could get away with.

“Nothing, sir.” Said the boy quickly, on the edge of sobbing.

Enraged, the man threw the bottle at him, and the boy just barely ducked as it shattered against the counter edge.

“Don’t insult my intelligence, you little sack of shit!” he bellowed, “I know you were staring at me!”

“I was...I was just...please, Dad—“

The man shot up from his chair, and to the boy’s horror, he didn’t remove his belt. He gripped him by the neck of his favorite T-shirt, the Transformers one his sister bought him, stretching it out beyond repair as he growled in his face.

“You think you get to judge me, don’t you? Think I don’t know what you’re thinking every time I come back from a hard days work to keep your pussy ass alive and all I want to do is crack a beer? Do you!?”

Jake stood still for all of this, a passive observer and nothing more. He watched dispassionately as the man heaved the little boy across the room and into the table. He did nothing as the boy nursed his possibly broken arm, or as the man raised his fist, not satisfied with the damage he’d already done.

What he couldn’t hold still for was what happened next.

The door was thrown open and a sweet, desperate voice cried out. A young girl, perhaps Jake’s age now, tearfully pleaded with her father to spare the little boy any more suffering. She still had bruises on her face from the last time, but she kept on fighting for him, just as she always did.

“Stop it! Leave him alone, please!”

The man was already at her throat, throwing her onto the counter and, the ugliest expression of all, a smile spread across his face.

“Or you’ll do what? I play poker with the half the precinct. You think you can stop me?”

The man replaced his oil-encrusted fingers around her neck again, and pressed her against the counter. Words finally escaped Jake’s mouth.

“Don’t touch her...”

The man petted her face in a disgusting parody of tenderness, while the boy crouched in the corner, not having the courage to try and stop him or even enough to run away.

Jake found himself right in front of him, his right hand in a fist so tight his nails drew blood from his skin.

“I said DON’T TOUCH HER!”

His fist swung in the air, but illusion faded. Instead, Jake’s fist impacted popcorn wall, and spilled out a secret far more horrible.

--

Seras stepped out of the garage and found herself back in the same hallway. She stopped for just a moment, feeling something crinkle underneath her foot. A trail of photographs lined the floor, leading into the kitchen. She picked up the first one.

“My God...”

In the Polaroid picture was a little blond girl of no older than 10, sedated and strapped to a custom-maid highchair, with all of her fingers except her thumbs missing. On the white part on the bottom, in a sharpie pen were the words “first course.” The next one in the trail, the same girl, only with her eyes and tongue missing as well, the word “dessert” written in the bottom. With each picture, less and less of her was there, until only her partially shaved torso and mutilated head remained.

Pearlman wasn’t a victim here. He was a monster.

She heard a scream from the kitchen. On the white tile floor, from a broken wall, was the decomposed remains of a little blond girl’s head and torso, and in the far corner, was Jake, crouched in the corner, his head in his hands, staring blankly at the corpse.

Integra and Walter, right behind her, were as speechless as Jake for a moment, but regained her composure almost immediately.

“For God’s sake, Walter, call the police back, and let’s get the Hell out of here.”

--

It had been three hours since they had come back. Integra had confirmed by the absence of at least 3 pints of blood that Pearlman’s death was, in fact, a vampire attack, albeit an unusually well-disguised one. There were no leads as to where the predator had fled to afterwards, and the ammonia he used precluded tracking him by scent.

But none of that meant anything to Jake right now.

He sat at his table, staring at his second blood pack with more disgust than the first time. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry; in fact, he felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week. Even now, those insufferable hunger pangs were arching into through his veins, slowly moving from his heart to the arms and legs, then to his fingers and toes. It wasn’t that he was still hungry in spite of what he’d seen, or that he was doing, in essence, the same thing Pearlman did, using pieces of people for food.

It was that he didn’t feel hungry at all until he saw it.

Not just the normal craving one gets when they see a billboard for a steak. It was the kind you get when someone’s chained you to a wall and starved you for days, and then cooks a steak right in front of you. A man had tortured, eaten, and killed a little girl. And it made him hungry. Not angry, not horrified, hungry.

Just drink the damn thing and get it over with.

He looked at the pack of blood, marveling at how he could be so disgusted with something he wanted so much. Before he knew what happened his fist swung in an arc so fast he didn’t even see it happen, launching the ice bucket across the room and sending ice cubes flying everywhere. The blood pack just flopped against the wall and onto the ground undamaged, as if to say “I’m still here, and you still need me.” He shot up, as though it had offended him, pointlessly shut off the lights, ignored the sporadic ache that felt like pinpricks of a blind, dizzy acupuncturist, and hastily got under the covers of his bed. He didn’t care how much it hurt to deny himself; a little girl had suffered and died, and damn it, he had to prove that it mattered to him, even if it was futile.

He turned his head away from the table that held his one and only meat, fruit, and drink for the undefined period that could dubiously be called “the rest of his life,” and for the first time since all of this started, asked himself, what am I turning into?

February 13th

Seras said it was okay if I took a break, seeing what I did. As much as I want it, I couldn’t take it; after what happened, I have to prove that I can stomach working here. It’s funny, because I’m still not sure exactly what it was I saw that disturbed me more: what was really there, or what I imagined was there. I was able to ignore it the first time, when it was just a momentary glimpse...but now I’m actually seeing these things played out. If these are my memories, then why would I recall them now, and why from the outside, like I’m not even a part of what I’m witnessing?

It doesn’t matter. Who gives a shit if my dad beat me up? A lot of kids grow up with that, and worse. Besides, it’s not like I was alone. But the fact is, I’m not just remembering things; I’m seeing things.

Seras must never know.

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