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

The Child of Seras

Chapter XV

Corporal Braxton placed his rifle carefully on the rack in his locker. Nonetheless, he could still hear the sound of the butt lightly striking the thin metal. It wasn’t that the noise was particularly loud, but rather the locker room was eerily silent.

Normally, there would be enough chatter going on in this place to match any high school sports team, but tonight it was as though all the others had taken a hasty code of silence, not so much as even so much as whispering amongst themselves. Even while he changed out of his uniform, he felt their eyes on him, like a member of the Brotherhood in an all-black cellblock.

He heard a familiar voice from behind him. It was the first words anyone had spoken to him since the mission.

“I heard Integra’s still figuring out what to do with you.”

Mick did not sound pleased, but Braxton felt no need to defend his actions against someone who was grandfathered into Hellsing, and especially not one that loved to pal around with the same Hell-spawned abominations he was sworn to destroy. He wasn’t alone, obviously. Riley and Jackson were standing right beside him, hardly any more jovial.

“Yeah, she is.” He said, without bothering to turn around.

“Well, I’ve got some bad news for you,” began Mick, with an edge to his voice that jumped Braxton’s pulse, “We can’t wait that long.”

Braxton whipped around, but was too late. Riley and Jackson each held an arm, pinning him to the lockers while Mick looked at him like a judge before a defendant.

“What the Hell do you want from me, Ferguson? I did what anyone would—“

He was interrupted by four knuckles loosening his jaw.

“Wrong.” Mick answered, his expression unchanged, “You got jumpy. You gave the signal too quick, and now a kid who was only trying to do his job is fighting for his life!”

Braxton couldn’t believe Mick would go this far. Assaulting another soldier was grounds for three months in the brig, even a court martial in some branches. He could understand if it was the lady vamp; she at least made herself useful, but why would he be willing to do this for her incompetent, bloodsucking boy toy?

“He was out of uniform! How was I supposed to—“

Mick punctuated with an uppercut, knocking Braxton’s head back into the lockers so hard he was amazed he still had all his teeth. He looked around the locker room for someone, anyone whose common sense was strong enough to take his side. The room was empty by some sort of silent contract, born out of either approval or fear of Mick’s anger or Riley’s authority. The four of them were alone, in a room where no one but those just outside the hallway could hear them.

“You were warned” growled Mick with growing fury, “You were told he was coming. You’ve seen his face a thousand bloody times!”

“He was out of his sodding mind, Ferguson! If you’d have been there when I gave the signal—“

“Then I would have remembered that I’ve seen Seras do the same damned thing when she needed to.” He finished with a punch to his solar plexus, leaving him to gasp for breath as he continued. “None of this is anything new to you. Face it, Braxton: you almost killed one our own. I don’t know and I don’t give a flying shit why Integra hasn’t strung you up outside the gates already, because we haven’t even started with you yet.”

When he finally caught his breath, blood dripping down his chin, he looked up at Mick, who was daring him to defend himself further.

“.....He...won’t die...” he said weakly, expecting another strike. When none came, he continued. “He’s a vamp. They can survive almost anything. If he ain’t dust by now he won’t be. He’ll back on his feet like all the rest. Let’s just forget this happened.”

Mick nodded, as if in understanding, then both Riley and Jackson slammed his head against the lockers and slugged him the gut.

Jackson’s usually friendly voice became hoarse and bitter, “I guess he hasn’t heard him.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Riley said pleasantly, as though he’d forgotten, “the vent’s on the other side, he couldn’t have.”

Mick grabbed Braxton by the hair and pulled his head up to face him.

“Maybe you should listen to what we’ve been hearing for the past half hour. If you don’t get it then, I oughta’ pump you full of bullets, and forget you happened!”

They dragged him across the lockers, beating him every time he so much as twitched in protest. He felt Mick’s hand grab the side of his head and slam it against the vent. He held it there, and Braxton suddenly understood what they wanted him to hear.

Screams.

--------------------

Seras turned off the shower and watched the last wisps of Jake’s blood flow down the drain. It didn’t help much. No matter how hard she scrubbed or how hot she turned the water up, the smell refused to leave.

She dried and covered herself with a long white towel, and noticed, as she always did after a shower, that her reflection was absent. She didn’t mind this time; looking at herself wasn’t very appealing at the moment.

She checked the clock: 1:07am. Forty-five minutes since she witnessed her fledgling, being ripped apart and hastily sewn back together, all the while with his head in her arms and whispering “I’m right here,” over and over again, trying not to be as powerless over his pain as the anesthetics that couldn’t work on an undead body.

Seventeen. That’s how many bullets they’d tore from his body. The doctors had to use improvised silver scalpels to prevent what little regeneration still functioned from closing the incisions as soon as they were made. His left arm was barely attached, as two shots shattered the bone and ripped the flesh and tendons keeping it together. The worst part wasn’t hearing him scream himself hoarse, or smelling the blood congeal against the walls, or the grotesque sight of his shredded cheek revealing all the teeth on his right side. It was watching him try to hold still, try to grit his teeth and bare it, only to give in after a few seconds, and in the brief moments where the doctors were dropping the bullets into a steel tray, look at her with expression of such consummate shame she could barely hold his glance. And then the doctor would stick his blade in and it would start all over again.

The last bullets they took out were in his lungs. They were so close to his heart that if they weren’t taken out immediately, they’d have cooked it like a wad of hamburger meat.

Seras had pulled off a leg off a steel chair, stuck it between Jake’s teeth, and held him down the best she could. Then that horrible noise, that shrill squeal of the surgical saw drowning out his screams as it tore through his sternum. She thanked whatever God was listening that he passed out after that, either from pain or exhaustion; if it had gone on any longer she didn’t know how much more either of them could take.

She was just buttoning up her spare uniform when a familiar, unwanted chill touched the back of her neck.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” began the last voice in the world she wanted to hear, “he came to us hiding monster, you gave him the body of one, and now Hellsing’s finest have given him the face of one.”

“It doesn’t matter. He isn’t one, no matter how much you want him to be.” Her voice was bitter, devoid of affection or interest. The tone she’d used with her former master ever since she understood what he truly was, and what he wanted her to be. It was a petulant act of defiance that served no other purpose than to keep a distance between the two of them. It only worked for one of them. She did not turn to face him, but could almost hear the tightening in his cheeks, like ropes being stretched from a heavy load.

“You’re right,” he said, without a trace of irony, “for now. But there’s something you don’t understand, something you never have.”

“And what’s that?”

“That becoming something is making a choice.” He began, like a rehearsed lecture, “I chose to be what I am, just as you did. Just as he did. He made the choice once already, when his powerlessness damned his sister, to become the sort of creature that could have protected her, if it only had the tools. Now that he has those tools, why would he change his mind, if given the choice once more?”

“He was only a child then!” she snapped. “Even I lashed out when I was young, because I was too busy hating and feeling sorry for myself to see what I was doing. He won’t make the same mistake twice for the same reason I won’t; we have something greater than ourselves to fight for now.”

A loud chuckle bounced off the walls, coming from everywhere at once, including Seras’ own mind.

“And when has that ever stopped you from getting the itch? What you forget is that you’re barely an infant by the standards of a Nosferatu. Time has not tested you yet.” Alucard drew closer to Seras, but without really moving, as if he were leaning forward. Seras still refused to meet his glance. “Do you think I don’t know how many times you’ve swallowed your hunger to keep the trust of every Hellsing soldier willing to overlook your superior position on the food chain? Or how counted how many times you’ve…slipped…?”

Silence was the signal of Alucard’s triumph, and Seras wasn’t about to give it to him.

“I don’t live in this nightmare because I enjoy it, or because it’s convenient for me,” she spat, hastily putting her gloves on. “I’m here because every dead vampire ensures that at least a few other people won’t have to.”

Having had enough of Alucard’s games, Seras opened the door, hoping that Alucard was satisfied. She should have known better.

“Then why did you make him your childe?”

She stopped and went rigid. The door that stood half-open between her and the monster she’d sold her humanity to.

“The same reason I never left here. It’s the only way I can live with my mistake.”

---------------

Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing strode down the hallway toward the sick bay, unsure of what she would find once she arrived. When she’d heard that Rivers was awake, she put out her unfinished cigar and headed down immediately. She didn’t normally visit her soldiers personally in the sick bay, but given how uncertain she was of his reaction to Braxton’s friendly fire, she needed to know exactly where Rivers stood.

A pale, sweating doctor met her at the door, Dr. Briggs, if she remembered correctly. He’d spent his career patching up bullet wounds on hardened soldiers; he couldn’t have been prepared to operate on a young, conscious, convulsing vampire, especially not with his master barely able to hold him down. Integra ignored him for a moment, and turned toward Rivers, who laid limply in his bed, idly staring at the ceiling with strained eyes.

“His condition is…stable,” said the doctor, more to himself than to her, “but we weren’t able to save his arm; it had started rotting the moment it was detached. The stitches should hold in place until his regeneration takes hold, which should be soon, with the blood we have feeding him. He’s in so much pain…I’m amazed he isn’t in shock, but I believe he’ll recover within the week, maybe sooner.”

Integra nodded and reached for her cigar case, but refrained. It seemed disrespectful somehow. She opened the door and walked a few feet toward his bed. Rivers tilted his head toward her, and for the first time she got a good look at him.

What she saw wasn’t Jake Rivers. What lied in front of her was something that a surrealist painter would put to canvas after being locked in a room with a mad war veteran and gouging out his own eyes. He looked like a scarecrow that had been sucked into jet engine; like a prototype of Frankenstein’s monster that was given up on and thrown away. The stump of his left arm extended a few inches past the shoulder, and twitched intermittently, in time with the fingers on his right hand. His body was a roadmap of stitches and staples. His chest was bisected by a split sternum scarcely wired shut. It opened just a little as he spoke, offering a small peek at the cut bone when he took a breath.

“Sir…Hellsing…”

Integra had witnessed more than her share of grotesqueries in her life, Alucard being responsible for most of them, but none of them had startled her by their sheer bizarreness as this. His voice scratched for firmness and dignity but could find only pain, having more in common with a flooded engine than the soft, wavering voice of the boy she knew. But what she would remember most was his face. Its right side was barely held together by a web of stitches starting at the corner of his mouth and branching out just underneath his eye and past his ear. The stitches stretched and squirmed with every syllable, as if something were crawling beneath them, ready to spring out at any moment. His right eye was permanently colored red, perhaps through some sort of bodily reaction to all the silver, and the left one was its usual steely green; both locked with hers and trying very hard to look like a soldier awaiting orders even in his pathetic state. Vampire or not, Integra found it hard to accept that poor abomination in front of her was still alive enough to speak and sane enough know what he said.

“Rivers…” Integra tried not to look shaken, but she knew she’d been staring.

“I…didn’t think anything…could surprise you, ma’am.”

His face was too frail to risk an expression, but his words carried no bitterness, just a passing observation he felt the need to almost split himself open to state. Was he calling her coldhearted, or was he trying to lighten the mood?

“I promise you, this will not go unpunished,” began Integra, trying to assuage the anger she knew he had to be hiding, “You completed your mission to the letter and beyond, and for that you nearly lost your life to a comrade’s carelessness. Braxton will—“

“No…” he croaked.

It sounded more like a meek request than a demand. If Integra hadn’t been paying such close attention, she might not have heard it at all. He took in a wheezing breath and explained himself.

“It wouldn’t do any good…” a deep breath, “…too many people have suffered tonight already, people we couldn’t save…” another breath, “…and even more will once the cops start making calls…besides, it’s just as much my fault as his…”

His paused to let the pain subside, leaving Integra to wonder whether she, for all her knowledge of his past, actually knew him at all. How could he, with a history of pathological violence, not be angry in the one time it would actually be justified? How could he stand up for the man who put him in a state of misery so abominable that she herself was moved? Perhaps he was afraid; unconsciously running from the rage he tried so hard to leave behind. Perhaps he was just meek, and did not want to the source of any trouble.

“What I did was selfish…and unprofessional…I couldn’t save those people on the train, and because of that…I wanted the target to suffer...I let my…feelings get in the way of my mission…”

“Your mission was completed. The vampire is dead, Rivers; you don’t need to nitpick over details. That’s the SAS’s duty, not yours.”

“It was luck, that’s all, Sir Integra…and when Braxton found me…it ran out. If I’d…stayed calm, he wouldn’t have mistaken me…I brought this on myself, Sir.”

He slowly slumped back into his bed, either finished or too exhausted to go on. His eyes hadn’t shifted from hers, still waiting for her response.

Integra suppressed a sigh and said finally, “If that is what you wish, then I’ll settle for a week’s suspension. Whether you choose to admit or not, you’ve done well, Rivers. From now on, if there is anything you need, come to me.”

His mismatched eyes betrayed no relief, they simply followed her as she turned to leave.

“There’s only one thing I need to ask…” he said, with the last bit of strength he had left.

“What is it?”

“…never handle me with kid gloves…I’m not afraid anymore, Sir…I know what I have to do…just give me a chance to do it right.”

“I will not give a moment’s consideration to lowering my standards, Rivers,” she said, less a threat than a sincere promise, “you have my word. Now rest, and that’s an order.”

He obeyed, closing his eyes and drifting to sleep almost instantly. As Integra took her leave, she lit a cigar and wondered what he would dream about. She barely noticed a concerned Walter waiting outside the door.

“How was the debriefing?”

She took a long drag of her cigar and exhaled, breathing out her musings in a puff of smoke.

“One of two things rests in that room behind us, Walter. A complete madman, or our most dedicated soldier. “

“Perhaps he is both,” offered Walter, no less sober than herself.

“I certainly hope not, because if he is, then he’s more dangerous than we ever thought possible.”

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