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All those wars he’s been on and this is the first one that has truly tired him—although perhaps not as much as living did once. Inside him, it’s war now, civil war. And no side is winning. Because he is alone, sweaty, arms tired of holding up a sword he shouldn’t be able to feel, and tired, so tired, fighting many more than just a million souls, and they keep coming. They never stop coming. And some … some have faces he thinks he knows from his past. The world seems to have ended up recycling old faces from old wars, putting them into new people and new wars. It must be a terrible task, to endlessly create beings that are only capable of chaos, and however much that task is eased by given them all the same faces, he understands. But he also knows better, he knows that humans may be small and powerless, but they have a persistence that kills evil day by day. And he knows that because he knows the human that embodies it best.
Integra. His champion. Word might have it that he’s hers, but the world has always gotten that wrong. Integra was the one to end his banishment, a dog chained to the walls of a cell for the rest of its miserable eternal life. She rose him from his slumber into a life where she would save him far more often that he would her. Because he had shot monsters in the heart for her, crawled out of the mangled carcass the enemy had made of him to return to her side, fought her wars so she wouldn’t ever happen to leave her post as general to become a soldier, but it was she that kept his unbeating heart alive.
How does one keep a dead heart alive?, he had often wondered. Not with gentleness, not with kindness or affection, and certainly not with love. Integra had never loved him. Integra had been brought up in the belief that love is the last bullet, the bullet that pierces your chest cavity until it leaves you out your back. Integra didn’t know how to love him, but she had always known how to deal with him. Often like a beast on a leash, and so he knew he was. But … when no one was paying attention, Integra would look at him for a split second like he was more than just a servant. And for a split second he would feel like just a man, although he had long ago forgotten what that was like. A man that had lived too little for all the years his eyes had seen. A man that she shared a few minutes with every day, whether it was to learn his language back when she had been little, to send him away and be useful when she had fully come onto her position as leader of the family, or, as had been more often of an occurrence when time had grown less kind for her at the turn of her twentieth birthday, to sit down in her office and just talk.
She would smoke and drink and ask questions as if the answers haunted her more than they did him.
“Do you feel alive, Alucard?”
The question had taken him aback. Because he was so used to a different wording: Are you alive? Because his master was rarely so caring. Just because a master fed a dog, pet his head in passing, and regarded him with minimal dignity that didn’t mean she wouldn’t one day abandon him. After all, she was human. That was the irrevocable truth about what all humans inevitably ended up doing.
“I’m not alive,” he had said. “Do you want me to be?”
And that, instead of surprising her, had pissed her off. Because lately he had asked that too often, meaning more by it than he had when she had been twelve. Alucard had realized she was a woman almost two years after she had turned into one in the eyes of god and state, but alas too late was better than never. Still, it pissed her off. Because she had no straight answer for him. She never did.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“Ah, but it is what it is. And it is the truth. What I feel or do not feel doesn’t change that I am undead.”
She had tried again, puffing out dark gray smoke when she opened her mouth to.
“Do you ever forget that you are? Do you ever get up after the twilight and suddenly remember?”
He had chuckled at that. When she’d been little, she had often required him to be in the room to fall asleep, not because she was afraid of the dark or the ghost of her dead uncle, but because she wanted to know many things Walter would just never give her a proper explanation for. His favorite question of hers was ‘do you dream?’ Her favorite answer of his was ‘always’, as if that made him a little more human.
And now she was humanizing that side of him, again, almost ten years later. As if she didn’t know full well that all of his dreams were nightmares.
“Why the sudden curiosity?” he’d said. “It is something you will never have to experience.”
“To understand you, of course.”
He laughed again. Every time he did that, the room got a bit darker. But, again, Integra didn’t fear the darkness. He could scarcely remember the last time she had been afraid of him. She had seen him with blood in his gums, bits of flesh in between his teeth, his gloves drenched in red, his body torn apart and resewn together like a vampiric Frankenstein of sorts, and she had never feared him. Perhaps if she ever had, she would not have been able to command him as she was.
“And what … precisely … do you intend to understand, … Integra?” He moved closer with every word, lounging above her like the shadow of death, but she did not even flinch, not even when his long fingers gripped the armrest of her seat. This game was as old as she was and older still, born at a time of war and necessity. And her being the youngest player in this house did not mean she wasn’t already a master of it. And more…
“If you’re a man still, if there’s anything left of who you were before the darkness claimed you or you’ve just become another mindless creation that roams the world thirsty and alone for eternity,” she had said it with utmost conviction, and for a moment he believed he would never get an honest reaction out of her, no matter how hard he pressed. But the sigh that had followed changed his mind.
He was so used to seeing his master as an immutable force that barked orders and cared very little about her own wellbeing as long as there were others in the world she felt she had to protect. Watching her express the tiniest of signs of vulnerability opened his eyes. To the girl his master was, barely twenty. Anyone else her age would be drinking at parks and going to concerts, fucking until her brains exploded and exploring the wildest yet kindest parts of the world had to offer. Integra had given her life to this cause. And yet here she’d been… asking the king of vampires if there was so much as a shred of humanity left in him.
And as she had asked, he’d wondered. How did a man become a monster? Did it happen gradually, sign following sign until the monstrosity came fully alive to never leave? Or did the beast violently tear apart the human on its way out? Man or monster, what was he? Was there even an in-between?
Now, trapped inside a limbo of people he has killed, the answer comes to him more easily than it had that night with Integra, towering over her, his master, as if he would ever be able to hold something over her.
No other creation alive has killed these many souls. The names of old emperors and dictators come to mind. Columbus, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. Names of wars he knows well because he fought them. They all killed vastly more numbers than he has, and yet … they didn’t watch life be extinguished from all those millions of faces they wiped off the earth, they didn’t consume each and every one languidly, looking them in the eye before death was upon them. However many Alucard has killed, at least he did his own killing. He was his own hellhound.
Alucard keeps killing, because there is no other way out of his own head. He kills and he kills, but he doesn’t drink from the blood he reaps. There is no cursed thirst upon his lips. At least, in here, the monster doesn’t crave what once had made him thirsty. And that is what he is, what he has always been, even to the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl that had grown to think too much of him. He is a monster. A dog, a pet, a servant, nothing but the spoils of the old world and the trash of the next. This is what he deserves, to come face to face with the death he has caused, to look it in the eye one final time. This is his death. To kill because there is nothing else, to kill without thirst or anger, to kill out of something blander than the softest of revenges. He kills because each face he watches die is a face he knows isn’t his, with memories that aren’t his, with lives he would have given anything to have. A normal life, with a wife and a dog and a big house and bills to pay, oblivious to the truth of the world around him. A human life, what he once had, what he once threw away because it had rotted in his hands.
Alucard kills because the alternative is getting lost inside of himself for the promised eternity. And he kills without relent, for so much time that he no longer knows how to measure it. He kills until the darkness becomes his only companion.
Then—and only then—he wipes the blood on his mouth and hands and stops. There is nowhere tangible to be, but just like his feet aren’t being swallowed by the void, he is allowed to sit down without being devoured by it. It’s over, the chaos inside his head has been cleared. He could return, if he wished to. This is undeath, returning even when he is past that. Because he made a deal with the devil and this would be his punishment, to survive when he has long ago lost his hope for living. All those times in battle and skirmish that his body had been marred beyond salvation, he had brought himself back. At the beginning, because it felt good to have this kind of power, to extinguish life and yet still own it enough to not die. Then, after his chaining, after all his losses in Wallachia, Alucard had risen out of obligation. Gott mit uns. A spell carved in his hands as if they were wood. Hell's Gate arrested. A human had managed the impossible, to unleash hell upon the world and yet put a stop to it within his own household. And then … the wilting, the withering like a black rose after a harsh winter. He hadn’t had to rise then. He’d only had to let go and die and stay dead. Until—until…
“Hello,” says a voice now. It comes from a few feet opposite him, but there is nothing there. It is a high and calm voice, the sound of wisdom, something not entirely human. After all, he has, in his long years, put an end to more than just mere humans.
He tries to get up now to kill this last soul and end it. End this civil war and win it. Although, if it is indeed a civil war, wouldn’t that also mean he has lost it?
“Oh, no, please…” the voice says again. “There’ll be no need for that.”
And then the darkness parts, without a Moses to channel the miracle, to illuminate an old woman in a white toga that is smiling kindly upon him. Alucard doesn’t remember the last time someone showed him kindness. More often than not, the only thing anyone shows him is fear, and he has thrived on it for years. Until Integra began looking at him with respect, instead of just tolerance and curiosity.
The woman walks closer to him. And even while on his knees, she isn’t much taller than he is.
“You are finally here,” she says.
Alucard laughs. “Here… Yes, I would say that I am, if I knew where ‘here’ was.”
“Where do you want it to be?” she says. Slowly, she cups his face with her wrinkled hands and her smile turns rather sad. “After so long, after so many souls to purge out of you, you have reached the last step of immortality.”
“And what would that be?”
“Omnipotence.” Her grin pierces his eyes like light coming from a fire and he almost has to look away. “There is only ever one other entity in the known universe that has reached it.”
He just stares at her, awaiting the answer that he knows is coming.
“Me,” the woman says, stifling a giggle with her other hand.
“God,” he spits out with old reverence, with old hate. With a grudge that has lasted half a millennium. Since his head was cut off and his tongue tasted foreign blood for the first time. Since he last swore to god with hope in his heart.
“I am the god you once sought, yes,” she says. “But I am also the many other gods that are or have been worshipped in the history that you know, Alucard. I am what your kind hopes to be, in the end.”
He scoffs and pushes her hand away.
“What are you doing here?” he growls. If this is where his soul will be damned to wait for eternity, he would like to spend that time alone.
The woman’s face, until now serene and kind, turns into something Alucard has always feared. Not the rage of a deity, but their final judgment. That cold hard look of someone superior with the power to burn you to a crisp and leave not even ash behind.
“To ask you a question, son.”
He snorts. “A question… After so many years and you come here to ask me a question. I guess you were busy before, were you not? When I sold my soul to the devil and became this.” Because that could have been easily preventable. It would have solved him. A vampire without true friends, without true enemies. Alone in the world for as long as the world lives. Rotting with his guilt, with his regret, with his anger and his thirst for vengeance—a thirst that sometimes he feels is stronger than that of blood. A life this long … is rotting away and being able to breath the stench of you forever.
She could have spared the world that and it angers him deeply.
But the eyes of the woman grow gentler.
“There is,” she says slowly, “no devil. There is no hell. There is,” She smiles sadly again, as if this was a truth she didn’t want to give away so soon. “No afterlife.” And before he can interrupt, she adds: “But there is peace.”
For a moment, for a very brief moment, his attention is piqued.
“You never sold your soul. It’s still here, within you. In my reach, as it has always been. But, most important, in your hands.” It sounds like a nightmare, to have become this and yet still have god’s grace. He had given up on humanity as a betrayal to god and their injustices. And now here she is. “Now, my question.”
“What could you possibly think to ask me? If I want the job? If I want to share the load of hearing everything, being everywhere, losing myself to time and space all because I got here?” It’s beyond absurd, to become a surrogate god after he has killed the same people twice. All he has ever wanted in the darkest, best hidden corners of his blackened heart is peace. Not inflicting twisted pain on the world that has always hated him, not manipulating the people in his unlife to adore him unconditionally. Just peace. For his heart to rest still and content in his chest, for his mouth to crave no more blood. For the sun to rise above him in the morning and for him to be able to feel it when its light enters his room.
But the woman before him shakes her head softly. “That is already yours, whether you like it or not. You are the No-Life King and you shall always be. My question is, Alucard,” She regards him with the deepest of empathies, making him feel oddly at ease despite the situation. Briefly, he wonders. If there is truly divine light going into his chest or this is just another one of his nightmares and when he wakes there will only just be the familiar darkness. “Why? Why are you still fighting? Why are you fighting so hard to go back home?”
They both know full well where that home is. Not here but in the physical world where time is unkind and monsters roam the earth hungry. There where a lonesome vampire once found something akin to a family, after years of wars and betrayals, after years of being nothing else but an animal—to the world and to himself.
And without a sword in his hands, without the desire to bite into another neck, Alucard’s gaze falls onto his lap.
“I’m a monster, of course. Why would I be anything else?”
And he had looked the part. Dangerous and terrifying, an Eldritch abomination turned real, but the girl he was supposed to torment didn’t fear him, didn’t pity him, she only ever moved him around like a puppeteer and he only ever felt grateful—that she had taken all his choices away.
He could see her eyes, burning beneath her spectacles, and he saw the rebuttal in them before she voiced it.
“Then why am I under the impression that it’s not all?”
“I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror in many hundreds of years, how would I know what I am when I cannot even see it?” His try at ancient vampire humor fell abnormally flat.
“Because,” she had said. “Because I’m asking you to now. To have an answer, to know. If there’s a man within you—broken, tormented, weak and abused, no longer responding to stimuli, but still there, still beating in your long dead heart—don’t you think it’s my business to be told?”
“And if there’s not? What does it change if I am, for all purposes, always and nothing more than just a beast?”
A beast in the eye of men, a beast in the eye of its owner. A beast and nothing more. A dog of Hellsing, a lapdog of its last daughter. When she died, Hellsing would die with her. And what would become of the hound trapped in its basement?
“I can’t love a beast.”
He would have loved to say he hadn’t been surprised by his master then, honest and calm as the weather outside the window, as the moon that shone amidst clouds. This wasn’t the Integra that intimidated older men in power and foes more powerful than her. This was a twenty-year-old, long ago ceased to be a child to take care of. A benevolent master, if you will.
But all he could take away from that was ‘master’. It was the deal, the binding, the contract. And shine heaven now. No one ever said anything about affection. No one ever said anything about shedding a light in his basement for him to cradle, to—
“Love?” he mocked with a sinister laugh. “You have no reason to love me. I am for no one to love. I am for you to command, to unleash upon your enemies and trust with your most wicked decisions, nothing more.” He came closer, lurking like the shadow limbs he liked to parade around to show his true nature when he feared he might lose touch with it, and whispered in her ear: “Make no mistake, Integra, I am what children think they see in the dark, I am the face of death and destruction. I am a monster.”
She took a long gulp of her drink, sober and quiet. “You’re wrong about that, as per usual. You are mine before you are anything else. A monster, he says…” She cackled loudly, unafraid of being heard or judged. Integra Hellsing feared nothing in this world, and what she feared would happen to the rest of her world would never have any chances of happening to him, would it? “Do monsters’ hands tremble as they attempt to appear threatening to their poor victims?”
And Alucard had the good sense to look at his own hands, gripping hard the armrest and shaking, indeed.
“Do monsters refuse to admit what they are, deep down?” She drank again. “You’re not a monster, Alucard. Not to me. You might not be human, but somewhere in you there’s the man you were, before anything human was stripped from you by the cruelty of the world you lived in once. You haven’t done a vile thing on your own in eight years, it was all me.” She smiled to herself. “That’s where the true monsters lie, in the hearts of the evilest of humankind, whoever that may be. To kill out of the evilness in your heart, that is truly monstrous. That, my old friend, is what we are trying to rid the world of.” She put a hand over his own, curled her fingers around his gloved ones and squeezed lightly. “It will cease to be as cruel one day. Let us hope I will still be here with you when that happens.”
And the smile she gave him, alone in the dark which to anyone else would have been terrifying, appeased his hunger for the duration of a heartbeat. And to a heart that hadn’t beat in five hundred years, that was a very long time.
When he looks up again at the woman, there is no placidness or gentleness to his shape, kneeling like a rag on the black nothingness. He evokes the shadows beneath his skin, the darkness within the darkness, and wraps himself in it, to truly be what he has been made out to be for many years. A monster, an abomination. Now truly free of any bindings—
“Why, Alucard?” he is asked again.
Without hesitation, he answers now: “For her.”
—and yet forever loyal to them.