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Seras Victoria doesn't know her master very well.
She’s aware that no one ever did, and likely, no one ever will. Alucard is inscrutable, an enigma of a person, if he could even be considered a person at all. He’s a paradoxically odd mix of complex idiosyncrasies and baser animal instincts. He scares her on occasion and confuses her almost constantly. He keeps everyone at an arm’s length, and unfortunately for her, his arms are abnormally long. She can’t distinguish the happenings in his head, nor is she ever privy to his emotions. That is, if he has any at all.
She doesn’t know much about his past either. Of course, she politely interrogated Integra on the matter of her servant, but apparently, even the Iron Maiden is just as clueless as she is. His elusive history seems like a lost cause, though, she has a few assumptions, and more than enough speculations. She knows that Alucard, as a whole, is extremely difficult to pick apart, but Alucard, in individual moments, is slightly easier to analyze. She still can’t look much beyond his surface, but if the metaphorical tip of the iceberg already terrifies her, she fears what she may find in the deep blue.
Seras Victoria believes that her master is insane.
And so she observes. The self-assigned task of understanding Alucard is inconceivably difficult, and she starts to discern some traits of his that she would rather forget. For instance, she smiles whenever she spots a pretty flower, or a handsome mercenary with a sexy French accent. To each their own. Alucard, however, smiles whenever he shoots ghouls into pieces and bathes in the subsequently tasteless display of gore and innards. To her, smiling indicates pleasure and contentment. To him, well. The way he smiles during riskier Midian hunts, it’s nothing short of disturbing. His menacing fangs always manage to steal the spotlight in her worst nightmares. She has to conclude that he isn’t very good at smiling.
Alucard isn’t good at laughing either. Every time he does, it sends shivers down her spine. Most of the Wild Geese, after their initiation, tend to steer clear of him, and honestly, she doesn’t blame them. The first time she witnessed him being ripped into shreds by a lesser vampire, he cackled until his guts fell out. Literally. She could see them writhing next to his halfway decapitated skull. At the time, she didn’t think it was a laughing matter, but then, Alucard stood up and proceeded to annihilate his target in the most horrendous method possible. He was still laughing all the while. She can’t quite fathom how one could fake happiness to such a perturbing degree.
Seras Victoria thinks her master is never happy.
She can recall the essence of happiness, like the wild elation of childish joy, or the rainy sunsets in her old neighborhood. Every so often, she dreams of it, the fleeting blip of lukewarm bliss, the faint flavor of her mother’s butterscotch cookies melting on her tongue. Once in a blue moon, she still feels it thrum, once, maybe twice, someplace deep and sacred in her chest. To her, happiness tastes like yellow. It doesn’t escape her notice that Alucard is always drenched in red. She’s never been one to read too much into color differentiation theories, but the spiritual contrast between gold and crimson is simply too large to ignore.
Sometimes, during the witching hour, when the Hellsing mansion is silent with slumber, she can hear him shifting restlessly on his revered throne. That, within itself, is nothing too unusual. In fact, it’s one of the more harmless activities he engages in, devoid of the supernaturally violent element that he loves to utilize. But if she listens very closely, she can hear droplets of blood hitting the concrete floor of the basement. She doubts anybody has ever seen him cry, and she doesn’t particularly want to be the first anyway. The melancholy expression that slides over his face when he expects all eyes to be focused elsewhere, it’s enough to make her dead heart ache once more. After all, five centuries is a long time, and she thinks he must be too tired to be happy.
Seras Victoria reckons her master wants to die.
That memorable night, when she had reached out a trembling hand, hoping to grasp the remaining dredges of her evanescent life, she recalled being so utterly horrified by the look in his eyes. It wasn’t the bloodlust that scared her, nor was it the ever-so-potent hatred that seemed to follow him around like a second shadow of impenetrable darkness. Rather, he was radiating exhaustion, and that singular emotion was almost as cloying as the freshly spilled blood in the air. To this day, she isn’t afraid of much, courtesy of her vampiric abilities, but the absolute lack of interest in living, it reminds her of long-forgotten fear and monotone.
She is yellow and he is red. It’s an elemental truth that she has come to know, woven through the fabric of time, into the storybooks that her parents read with gentle smiles on their faces. It has become an undeniable facet of her very person; the grass is green and the sky is blue. But if she digs into the fathomless fatigue he exudes, she finally finds a contradiction that shakes her to the core: this isn’t a fairytale. With the blazing fury of a red-hot fire, vibrant forest meadows disintegrate into colorless ash, and the heavens shower torrents of rain from dull-gray clouds. Of course, after the grueling trials of nature’s wrath, the sun will always rise again. At the end of it all, she is still yellow, and he begins to fade.
Seras Victoria might know her master very well.
But eventually, everything she figures to be true turns into a lie. Alucard is an ever-changing, ever-shifting, anomaly of a person, if he could even be considered a person at all. By uncovering a single aspect of his character, she takes one step forward, and more than two steps back. He has five hundred years of experience hiding his motives and stifling his secrets. She doubts that she could ever unravel the tangled layers of himself.
Even so, she still has more than enough questions to ask. What’s your favorite color? Do you have a preferred blood type? How old are you? Who was your first crush? Are you happy? Did you have any siblings? What’s your best memory? What about your worst? Can you turn into a cactus? Are suicidal propensities prevalent in every vampire? Or is it just you? Silly questions, really. In a way, she’s still trying to find the person that he used to be, and perhaps still is, below all of the extravagant displays of bloodshed and the rough exterior of a ruthless killing machine.
No, Seras Victoria doesn’t know her master very well.
It won’t stop her from trying though.