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

The Child of Seras

Chapter XVI

Through New Eyes

Feb 26

When I was about eight, my dad tossed me against the wall so hard he knocked me out. I woke up a few hours later to find my arm in a cast and my sister standing right beside me, her eyes stained with dried tears, telling me ‘I’m sorry” over and over, even though I keep telling her it isn’t her fault. Looking back at it, I think that’s when I stopped caring about the pain. All I wanted was to never see her cry again.

Now here I am, almost ten years later. The arm my dad broke is gone, and instead of my sister, Seras is holding my hand, blood dripping silently off her face, wordlessly sending the same message with each drop: “I’m sorry.”

I never understood it. Why apologize? What could either of them possibly have done wrong? Both had given me everything but owed me nothing, and asked for nothing in return.

Why did they care so god damned much about me, if all it did was hurt them?

I can’t let this go on; I can’t let my mistakes destroy the memories she tried so hard to build last night, or make her forget how much they mean to me, even as I’m barely able to scribble out these words with my right hand. I need her to understand that no matter what happens, I’m not going to let this stop me or even slow me down. I want everyone: Seras, Integra, the soldiers, even Alucard, to remember this as the night I started pulling my own weight.

Someday, when they look at my face, I want to see pride, not pity.

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

A book slipped out of Jake’s hand: The FBI Handbook, 1357 pages, read in seven hours and fifty-three minutes. It fell into a pile of others beside his bed in the sick bay, with the titles such as The Art of War and Mixed Unit Tactics on top. He’d already gone through every file Hellsing had available, from old combat reports to schematics of the Manor, so he decided to this was the next logical step in educating himself. His wounds might have felt like bleach had been poured into them, but he’d be damned if was going to waste another second of his time staring at the ceiling.

The activity of the undead had increased exponentially over the past two decades, even preceding the discovery of the FREAK chip. Jake recalled a few of the statistics he’d read in Hellsing’s records:

The estimated percentage of missing persons related to vampires had grew from 11% to 39% in the last ten years alone. The average probability of being killed or abducted after dusk had gone from a negligible .015% to .18%.

The situation had reached a point where simply going out at night had practically become a game of Russian roulette, and yet, the tactics left over from the Arthur Hellsing’s administration fifty years ago—conceal, contain, search, and destroy—hadn’t changed at all, even after the increase in manpower when Integra began her reign. This was all very new to Jake, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that something didn’t add up.

Jake’s studies were interrupted by a cold tingle in the back of his head, as if a spider made of ice was crawling in his skull. His eyes narrowed, his red eye gleaming in the dark like a cat’s.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” he said, with neither contempt nor excitement.

A black, oily mist crept along the floor, pulling itself upward into a vague shape of a man sitting in the chair that Seras had once occupied. It melted off of the figure like dust washed from a statue, revealing the last face Jake wanted to see.

“I hear,” began Alucard, “that you absolved the man responsible for your…condition. Have you grown that fond of your new look?”

He sat with his hands folded in his lap, patiently waiting for an answer as if they were old friends. Jake’s face had mostly healed, aside from the complex web of scars left behind, but his expression remained unreadable.

“Punishing him wouldn’t benefit anyone, least of all me,” said Jake. His voice had recovered in the last few days, and thankfully didn’t sound like he was choking on hot asphalt.

“Of course…” the vampire’s voice held that elegant sarcasm that was his signature. “So tell me, what was it like?”

Jake didn’t even sit up in his bed. “It hurt,” he said flatly, “should I write a haiku?”

“You know what it is I’m referring to, childe, don’t be coy.”

Jake said nothing for a long moment, then stood straight up in his hospital bed, staring the No Life King straight in the eye.

“After I ran away from Catholic School, I lived on the streets of LA for six months. I met this guy once, his wrists were as thin than the legs of the chair you’re sitting on. He discovered heroin when he was twelve, and every day since then he’d spend strung out on an old mattress in an alleyway off 21st street. His entire life was about what he had to do to get another hit. He blew guys at bus stations, broke into cars to pawn off their radios, and when that wasn’t enough, started mugging people. He killed one or two before he was caught. By the time the cops arrested him, he was so cooked he couldn’t even tell them his own name. Anytime I ever got curious about drugs, all I had to do was remember him.”

“And what does that have to do with your feeding off that vampire in the tunnels?” asked Alucard, sounding more curious than impatient.

Jake’s eye looked like a red crosshair as it leveled on Alucard. “Because now, all I have to do is look at you. Take away your guns, your fancy outfit and your cute smile, and that’s all you are: a junkie, living out of a needle and a spoon, too lost in the high to give a shit about what a degenerate parasite he is. But at least when a junkie sits on his ass, other people don’t suffer and die because of it.”

“You make it sound as if I’m somehow responsible for that vampire’s victims.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Al, but I’m pretty sure you were the one who chased it into the subway. That was, of course, after your negligence lead to it getting out of your sights in the first place.”

“Negligence?” said Alucard, as if he’d never heard the term before.

“I hope that’s what it was, because I hate to think that you let it go on purpose.”

Alucard’s eyes made a mocking plea for vindication. “And why would I do that?”

“You don’t get a lot of chances to have fun anymore, do you Al? Since Seras earned her rank, you’ve had to settle for the leftovers, so why not drag it out a little more, just to keep things interesting? Don’t want to go home blue-balled and empty handed, right?”

“You assume much about me, boy.” Alucard stood up, hold his hands open in front of him, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that you are under the misconception that my place as your teacher has ended merely because I’ve been ordered not to harm you.”

The light disappeared from the room. The walls pulsed and breathed. The symbols on the backs of Alucard’s hands began to glow. His clothes melted and twisted, morphing into some strange straight-jacket that somehow seemed more becoming of him than the ridiculous red outfit he normally wore. A thousand red eyes opened along the walls, on his body, and his arm began to swell until it took the shape of a dog’s head. A tremendous pair of jaws ripped along what used to be his wrist and let out an obscene howl that sounded like broken accordion and a strangled infant.

Jake never broke his gaze.

“You know,” he said, his voice unchanged, “A week ago, your little pet tricks might have actually gotten a rise out of me. But you’re looking at a different man.”

“A different man?” asked Alucard as the “dog” that was once his arm snarled at Jake. His head tilted to the side, contemplated Jake’s choice of words, then said, “how has this pitiful state you are in enlightened you so?”

“Forty-two died on that train, dozens more outside it. They all lived their lives knowing that one day they would, that’s the rule they lived by. You live for a while, then you die, and whatever happens to your soul, your spirit, whatever you want to call it, will happen and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. By taking Seras’ gift, I broke that rule, for no other reason except I was afraid to die, thinking it was some kind of second chance, but when it almost caught up to me in that tunnel, I realized something: when I die—and someday, I will—I’ll just be returning what I owe. But until that happens, I plan on doing something worthwhile with the power I sold my soul to have.”

“And what’s that?”

“Protecting those who aren’t as lucky as you, Seras, and I. So, if you’re not going to do anything with your parlor tricks except posture to me, kindly fuck off back to your pine box. I’ve got work to do.”

Alucard regarded Jake for a while, reading his straight, stony face with all the scrutiny of an art critic.

Then he started laughing.

It was only a light chuckle at first. It swelled and crawled slowly up his throat, like vomit stewing in his gut that he had to let out or he’d go mad holding it in. His head tilted back on the rotten stalk of bone and gristle that was his spine and his mouth exploded into a mindless choir of hyenas and little girls. It was a laugh that could kill a child in its mother’s womb, an ending to a bedtime story in Hell, a disease that Jake would never, ever, allow to touch him.

Soon the eyes and the breathing sounds were gone, followed swiftly by Alucard himself, in what order Jake wasn’t entirely sure. As he lied back against sterile hospital bed he promised himself that he would do everything in his power to destroy the depravity he’d just witnessed. Even if it took him a thousand years, one night, he would surpass the No Life King.

And on that night, he’d personally take him back to the hole Integra found him in, lock the door, and make sure that a monster like him never walked the earth again.

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