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

The Child of Seras

Chapter XX

Acceptance

Seras stepped out of her room and shut the door behind her. Her fledgling was in the gym, waiting for their sparring match to begin, and she was already late by nearly ten minutes. She’d wanted to wait a few more days, but when word got out that a particularly important raid was in the works, he’d insisted that they both needed to be as prepared as possible.

Jake had spent almost the entire three weeks since his dismissal from the sick bay alone, pouring obsessively over books and files as if they provided greater nourishment than blood. He never refused her company, but it was obvious, in the way his eyes darted back and forth between her and the plateau of books on his desks what he’d rather be doing. She wasn’t entirely sure that he’d slept at all until the first two weeks, when he’d started to slow down, and that was only after he’d run out of unclassified files and was denied further access. And then there was that unreadable stare he’d adopted. Seras noticed it the most when he told her not to begrudge Braxton for what had happened. She was so shocked by his request that at first she refused to let the matter go so easily. He’d listened to her then just as intently as he always had, and spoke with no less sincerity, but his face seldom moved past what it took to form the words, and his voice, while not monotonous or flat, was drained of the youthful excitability that once mixed so well with its innate shyness. Had his scars distorted his face some subtle way, making the meek but endearing face she’d come to know impossible, or was he so hardened by what Braxton had done that he couldn’t be moved to expression so easily anymore?

Or was it that he was so ashamed by the state of helplessness that Seras had witnessed him in, that he’d become afraid to show any emotion at all?

It wasn’t his scars or the loss of his arm that Seras hated Braxton the most for; it was that she still didn’t know the answer to that question. And that was why, until she did, she still couldn’t forgive him for giving that order, or herself for letting him go alone.

It wasn’t until that night three weeks ago that Seras realized how close she was to Jake. Her fear for his life was so strong that it stopped being an emotion entirely; it had become an instinct, as basic and primal as survival itself. Was that the way mothers felt for their children; feeling as if a piece of themselves was running around outside of them, in constant fear of it getting hurt, lost, or left behind? She’d once wondered if it had anything to do with the supposed spiritual bond between fledglings and their sires, but now she couldn’t have cared less. All she knew was that there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to make sure he never suffered like that again.

Seras opened the double-doors to the gym. Jake must have heard her coming, because he was just walking onto the mat when she arrived and looked in her direction expectantly. He was dressed in the same grey sweats and thick white socks that she was, standing up a bit straighter than usual.

“Good night, Seras,” he said softly, the phrase having lost its irony months ago.

“’Evening,” she replied, taking her place on the mat. “’Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Too long,” he said. “I hope all that reading hasn’t dulled my reflexes.” If her enthusiasm sounded false to him, he made no move to show it. There was a subtle anticipation in his eyes that was no small comfort to Seras: he was looking forward to this, and he wanted her to know it. It gave her hope that he wasn’t actually hiding his emotions, he just expressed them in ways that were more subtle, using his eyes instead of his face.

Then she remembered what they were about to do.

The stump of his left arm barely showed through the short sleeve of his shirt, a reminder of why Seras had been putting this off for so long. As obvious it was, she’d been dancing around the issue for days, enabled somewhat by his daily raids of the library, but mostly by the fact that Jake never brought it up. After one day, he’d learned to dress himself one-armed, and if the bite marks on the slider of his pistol were any indication, he was already re-familiarizing himself with his weapons. At this point, if she hadn’t known him before, she’d have guess he’d been without an arm all his life. But in CQC, there was no way to compensate: Jake’s disadvantage was so crippling it very nearly rendered him defenseless if a vampire of equal skill got too close.

And here she was, about show him in fine detail just how much he’d lost.

Jake settled into a sideways stance, his arm out in front of him. Seras mirrored him.

“Ready?” she said nervously.

“Yes.”

Jake’s mismatched eyes fixed themselves on hers, trying read her intent. He went for her wrist and Seras easily batted it away. He faked to the left once and Seras sidestepped as he tried to dive in close and throw his full weight at her. He moved a little faster than she expected and his shoulder brushed against her chest. She took his shoulder and shoved him back. He feinted back, held his footing, and his arm flew at her neck like a coiled snake—either a mistake or an effort to make it seem that way. His motion was quick even to her eyes, but it was too easy to guard, and without another arm to press the attack, he was left defenseless. Again, Seras shoved him back, not taking the chance to throw him just yet. Their eyes still hadn’t broken contact, and his narrowed slightly, frustrated. It was almost impossible to be surprised when more than half of the moves she taught him were rendered useless, and if Seras read him right, he was beginning to realize that himself. The best he could hope for was an over-the-shoulder throw, and without his other hand to restrain hers, even that wasn’t likely.

Still, he wouldn’t stop. In fact, the more times his efforts were foiled, he harder he pushed forward, as though he hoped to wear her down through sheer tenacity. The worst part was that, for his disadvantages, he’d improved in every other way: he was much faster, didn’t hesitate, his face never revealed his intent, and most notably, he never froze awkwardly when their bodies touched. If not for his handicap, this could very well have been the first day he threw her.

Seras couldn’t go on like this, it just wasn’t fair. After his next attempt at a grab, she took his wrist and flipped him onto the ground.

He lay sprawled on the floor on his back, staring at the ceiling with the face of a death row inmate whose appeals had run out. Not afraid, not accepting, just stretched so thin between anger and hopelessness that there was no way to show either.

“Jake…” she began meekly, “I think…I think that’s enough for—“

“Am I charity case?”

Seras blinked. “What?”

“Am I only here because you don’t know what else to do with me?”

“Of course not!” she said in disbelief, “Why would you even think that?”

“The first thing you taught me was ‘don’t hold back,’” his face was as still as it had been from the start, but his voice raised a little more with each word, and there was barely audible shakiness to it, one that Seras hadn’t heard in weeks. “At the time I didn’t know how important that was, because I didn’t understand what’s at stake.”

He picked himself up and stared her straight in the eye, just as he had when they were sparring.

“On the train I found out what happens when just one of us screws the pooch: people die. The morgue’s holding one-hundred and twenty-seven body bags filled with our mistakes, and they could have easily been mine. And now that I finally understand why I can’t afford to hesitate, now that I’m ready to do whatever it takes keep my best friend’s home from falling to the tenth level of Hell, the one person I need to show me how is holding back on me!?”

“What are you talking about? You never even got through my defenses!”

“And until you felt like it, you didn’t get through mine,” he said coldly. “You and I both know you could have thrown me five times over just then, and just a few weeks ago, you would have. But now you’re stopping short, going easy, like I’m some kind of glass statue you’re scared of breaking!”

Jake’s right eye glowed brighter as his voice rose, like a wielder’s torch slowly burning through steel, transforming his once-calm face had twisted into an outraged scowl.

“You can’t be expected to keep up with our normal pace; for god’s sake, look at yourself!” she shouted, “You’re lucky to be alive after what—“

“Yeah, lucky,” he spat, “That’s all I ever am, isn’t it? I was lucky at the Typical Freak club the night you turned me, and in the car crash that killed my sister! The world keeps falling around my ears and somehow, someway, I always crawl out of the corpses like a god damned maggot!”

His last words echoed briefly through the thankfully empty gym, and he turned away from Seras with a heated sigh through his clenched teeth, as if to protect her from any further outburst. Jake took a seat on the bench with a hand combed through his hair, his back to her still, Seras could only stare in shock as she understood what was happening. She had thought for so long that his memories would be what brought this side of him back to the surface, but here he was, completely unaware of his past, yet still returning back to the same cycle of guilt and self-hatred that had made them so unbearable.

“My survival has never amounted to anything except that,” he said quietly, “I kept asking for this spar because I hoped that could change, that maybe my life could count for something besides just staying alive. But no matter how many books I read or how many guns I have, I can’t do this alone.”

Seras approached him carefully, unsure of what to say.

“Jake…”

She trailed off as he turned to her, silenced by a face she hadn’t seen since the tape of Dr. Harding’s first session.

“I need you, Seras,” he pleaded, “Now more than ever. If you ever lose faith in me, please, don’t let it be over this.”

In one moment, everything that bound them together, as master and fledgling, as friends and comrades, was tested. Seras had the power to break him completely or inspire him, and the reality of that struck her with more force than Alucard’s bullet ten years ago. She had to be there for him the way his sister couldn’t be, to pull him out of this cycle he was trapped in, or else the nightmare he’d worked so hard to escape from would start all over again, with or without his memories.

“I haven’t lost anything in you.” She said, carefully taking a seat beside him, “but if you want me to help you, you need to understand that this war we’re fighting is much older than us. No one person can end it: not me, not Integra, not even Alucard, if it ever does, it won’t be in one great battle. People are going to get hurt whether we have control over it or we don’t.”

“But we did have control!” he protested, “We only lost it because—“

“Whether Alucard was being lazy or self indulgent is for Integra to worry about, not us,” said Seras, with a subtle strength in her voice as she put her hands on his shoulders so that they faced one another. “If you spend the rest of your life blaming yourself for what you can’t do, the only vampire you’ll end up defeating is yourself.”

He started to turn away, but her hands moved to his face, keeping his eyes aligned with hers as she said what he needed most to hear but no one ever told him.

“You can’t protect everyone, Jake. Before we go any further, I need to know that you can accept that.”

Jake drifted away for a moment, his eyes wide and confused, a child lost in some strange place he didn’t understand. Seras brought his chin back up to face her, much as she had on their first spar when she reminded him of her promise.

“Can you accept it?” she asked again.

“I don’t know.” He said, his face beginning to straighten, “but…I’ll try.”

Seras rose from her seat and guided him to stand with her, and Jake followed, looking at her expectantly like he had when she first walked in.

“Alright,” she began, “We’re going to have to figure out a way around this. I can teach you to be faster, but that’ll only help so…much…”

Seras trailed off when she noticed her fledgling was staring off into space, as though he’d just realized he’d forgotten to turn the oven off on his way to the grocery store.

“Jake, what’s wrong?”

At first didn’t seem to hear her, but right as she was about to call him again, he spoke, more to himself than to her.

“If I’m no good in a fair fight…” he murmured, “then we need to make sure it never is.”

Seras’ brows narrowed, puzzled. “Jake, what are you talking about?”

“Is Walter still awake?” he asked suddenly, as anxious as the night of his first mission.

“I’m not sure--” she began, but he was already on his way to the door. “Hold on, where are you going?”

Halfway through the door, he turned back with the first smile she’d seen since their day at the theatre.

“To see what Hellsing’s butler knows about fighting dirty.”

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