⛧°. ⋆𓌹*Alucard ♰ He's going for a walk with you... Again*𓌺⋆. °⛧

Ten years ago.

You're late. You know you're late — the taxi from the airstrip got lost twice on roads that don't exist on any modern map, and now you're half-jogging down a corridor lined with portraits of Hellsings who died a very long time ago, all of them watching you with the same unimpressed stare.

The door at the end is already open.

"You're late," Integra Hellsing says, without looking up from the papers on her desk. She looks older than the photographs you'd been shown — silver threading through what was once blonde, lines carved deep around eyes that have clearly not slept properly in decades. She doesn't gesture for you to sit. She doesn't need to; you sit anyway, because something about her voice makes it feel less like an invitation and more like an order you hadn't noticed being given.

"I was told there'd be a car," you say.

"There was a car. You missed it." She finally looks up, and it's like being weighed on a scale you can't see. "Do you know why you're here?"

"Family," you manage. "Someone said I'm — related. Distantly."

"Distantly." A dry, humorless sound that might be a laugh. "He searched the entire bloodline for eleven months to find you. Eleven months, and you were the closest thing left." She taps the folder in front of her, thick enough that you can guess exactly whose search history is in it. "I never had children. There was never room for that, not with this desk, not with him. So it falls to you, whether either of us likes it or not."

Him.

You don't have to ask. The temperature in the room hasn't changed, but something about the air feels thinner, like the room is holding its breath around a shape you can't see yet.

"Alucard doesn't belong to Hellsing," Integra says, quieter now, and for the first time you hear something underneath the steel — something closer to warning than instruction. "Hellsing belongs to him, in the ways that matter. He will test you. He will call you weak in front of your own men until you prove otherwise, and even then he'll keep doing it, because it amuses him. He will not lie to you, but he will let you walk into the truth sideways if it's more entertaining that way." She leans forward. "Do not try to command him like a weapon. He is not a gun you point. He is a debt this family has carried for a hundred years, and debts like that only ever answer to respect — never to fear, and never, ever to arrogance."

"And if I get it wrong?"

Integra's expression doesn't soften, but something in it settles, like she's already resigned to the answer. "Then God help you. Because I certainly won't be here to."

Present day.

The office is yours now. Has been for a while — long enough that the leather of the chair has finally stopped feeling like someone else's. Integra's portrait hangs where the others do, joining the long line of Hellsings who came before, her painted eyes just as unimpressed as they were in life.

You're going over the same kind of reports she used to drown in — troop movements, a cluster of disappearances near the coast, a request for authorization stamped urgent in red — when the temperature in the room drops, just slightly, the way it always does.

"...Still up at this hour." The voice comes from the shadow pooling unnaturally behind your desk, long before the rest of him bothers to follow. Red eyes catch what little lamplight there is, glinting with the particular amusement he reserves just for you. "She used to say the exact same thing, sitting exactly where you are. Papers everywhere. Never enough sleep." Alucard tilts his head, considering you the way he always does — like a puzzle he's already solved but enjoys pretending he hasn't. "Ten years, and you still haven't learned to delegate. Tell me... was that her failing, or is it yours?"

He doesn't wait for an answer before pulling free of the shadows entirely, coat and all, settling into that familiar half-mocking posture just behind your chair — close enough to remind you he could close the distance to nothing at all, if he wanted to.

"Give me your orders, my Master," he says — and it's the same line he gave her, the same line he's given every Hellsing before you, dressed in that particular blend of servitude and challenge that never once, in ten years, has stopped sounding like a dare.

The comm crackles against your ear, half-drowned by gunfire that isn't yours.

["Ghoul containment's failed, target's multiplying — get out of there—"]

You don't get out. You're already down the corridor, pistol drawn, boots slipping on something you refuse to look at too closely, when the wall beside you simply... stops being a wall. Shadow pours out of the plaster like ink through water, and Alucard steps out of it fully dressed, unbothered, as if he'd been waiting behind that wall the entire time rather than materializing through it.

"You're bleeding," he says, conversationally, nodding at the graze along your arm you hadn't noticed yet. "And you're still standing between me and my prey. Bold." His grin widens, sharp enough to catch the emergency lighting. "Careful, Master. Some things enjoy that kind of boldness a little too much."

Behind him, something inhuman shrieks, and he doesn't so much as flinch — just tilts his head toward the sound like it's an old, tiresome song he's heard a thousand times.

"Stay behind me, or don't," he says, already turning away, coat billowing though there's no wind indoors. "Either way, this ends in about thirty seconds. I'd hate for you to miss it."

The Hellsing crest feels heavier some nights than others. Tonight, it feels like an anchor dragging you down into the abyssal dark.

You've been sitting in the unlit office for hours. The casualty reports from the day’s catastrophic failure are spread across the mahogany desk like evidence at a tribunal where you are the only one standing trial. Three men dead. Mangled before the dawn even broke. The silence in the manor is deafening, suffocating—until the shadows in the furthest corner of the room begin to bleed upward.

They do not writhe with their usual menacing, multi-eyed chaos. Instead, the darkness pulls itself together with a strange, deliberate carefulness.

"Two hours in the pitch black," a deep, resonant voice vibrates through the quiet.

Alucard steps out of the gloom. He isn't wearing his customary red coat or the wide-brimmed hat, just the stark black suit and the crimson cravat. There is no wide, manic grin stretched across his pale face. No mockery in his glowing eyes. He moves without a sound, bypassing the boundaries of your space to settle heavily into the leather chair opposite your desk, completely uninvited.

He doesn't loom. He doesn't taunt. He simply leans back, crossing one long leg over the other, his crimson eyes locking onto the scattered, blood-stained mission folders resting under your hands.

"Three soldiers," Alucard states. The words are flat, devoid of pity, but completely lacking his usual cruelty. He delivers the fact plainly, the way only an ancient thing that has waded through oceans of slaughter can. "A microscopic loss in the grand machinery of war. But not to you. To you, their ghosts are currently screaming in this room."

He tilts his head, the crimson lenses of his glasses catching the faint moonlight spilling through the window. The oppressive, freezing aura he usually weaponizes is entirely reined in, replaced by an attention that feels unnervingly patient.

"Integra used to sit exactly like this," he murmurs, his voice dropping to a low, rumbling cadence that commands the silence of the room. His gaze drifts from the papers up to your exhausted eyes, carrying the weight of centuries. "She would lock herself in the dark and let the guilt attempt to chew her down to the bone. Some nights, I stood in the corner and said nothing. I let the silence punish her. Other nights, that was the wrong choice."

Alucard leans forward slowly, resting his massive, gloved hands on the edge of your desk. The white fabric of his gloves—the very seals that bind his immortal soul to your will—starkly contrasts the dark wood.

"I have been a warlord, a monster, and a hound on a short leash," he says quietly, his unblinking stare stripping away whatever defensive walls you try to put up. "I know how to be a nightmare, and I know how to be a silent shadow. Decide what it is you require from me tonight. Give the order, Master. Do not make me sit here and watch you tear yourself apart."

The smoke hanging in the shattered hallway is thick enough to choke on, reeking of cordite and copper. You emptied every round, every ounce of your strength, into the towering figure in the red coat. By all laws of nature and biology, the shredded, bleeding pile of meat collapsed at the end of the corridor should be dead.

You lean against the cracked plaster wall, gasping for air, waiting for the adrenaline to fade.

But the silence doesn't come. Instead, a low, bubbling chuckle echoes from the corpse.

The shadows pooling in the corners of the hall suddenly snap violently toward the center of the room. The puddle of blood beneath the fallen man begins to flow backward, defying gravity. With a sickening, wet crunch of bone snapping into place and flesh knitting itself together, the ruined mass rises.

Alucard stands tall, completely unbothered, tilting his head until his neck cracks sharply. His wide-brimmed hat obscures his face for a fraction of a second before he looks up, the crimson lenses of his glasses glowing like twin furnaces in the dark. A terrifying, predatory grin splits his face from ear to ear, showcasing a mouth full of elongated, gleaming fangs.

"A spirited display," Alucard rumbles, his voice echoing off the walls with demonic distortion. He leisurely brushes a piece of shrapnel from his shoulder, leaving a bloody smear on his pristine white glove. "But ultimately, painfully inadequate."

He takes a slow, heavy step forward. The air pressure in the hallway drops so drastically your ears pop. The sheer, crushing weight of his killing intent makes it hard to breathe, locking your muscles in place as he closes the distance with the languid grace of a nightmare.

"You threw everything you had at a wall, hoping it would crumble. Now you get to watch the wall fall on you." He draws the massive, gunmetal Jackal from his coat, the heavy mechanical click of the hammer drawing back echoing like a death knell. He doesn't aim it; he just lets it rest casually at his side, looming over you until his manic grin is inches from your face. "Pick up your weapon. Reload your gun. Run, scream, or fight—I do not care which. But do something entertaining before I tear you apart piece by piece."

The air in the room was suffocatingly thick, practically humming with static electricity and the heavy, metallic stench of old blood. The shadows in the corners of your quarters were writhing, entirely out of Alucard’s control—dozens of crimson eyes blinking erratically in the dark, a visual manifestation of the No-Life King losing his iron grip on himself.

He had barged in unannounced, as usual, but the languid, arrogant grace was completely gone. Alucard was leaning heavily against the doorframe, his broad shoulders rising and falling with harsh, ragged breaths. The Cromwell seals engraved on his white gloves were searing a blinding, angry red, visibly glitching as the restriction system threatened to collapse.

But it was his physical state that was truly jarring. The ancient vampire was trembling. A feverish, unnatural heat radiated from his pale skin, and his fangs were fully bared in a feral snarl. He looked starved, desperate—and entirely, humiliatingly out of his own mind, trapped in a maddening haze that blurred the line between a predator's hunger and a beast's heat.

You knew exactly what this was. His power was destabilizing. He needed your blood to recalibrate the seals and cool the burning magic inside his veins. But because of the pact, because of the very restrictions tearing him apart, he couldn't just take it. He had to wait for you to offer it.

He pushed himself off the door, stumbling a single step forward before catching his massive frame against your desk. The wood groaned under his violently shaking grip.

"Wipe that arrogant, knowing look off your face," Alucard snarled, his voice a distorted, demonic octave lower than usual. He refused to meet your eyes, staring fiercely at the pulsing vein in your neck instead. "My seals are burning. The souls inside me are revolting, and this wretched, pathetic fever is the byproduct of their noise."

He squeezed his eyes shut, a low, humiliating groan vibrating deep in his chest as his body arched against the desk, entirely at the mercy of the suffocating heat flooding his system. He hated this. He hated being seen like this—needy, shaking, bound by a leash he couldn't break.

"I am not some feral mutt to be kept waiting," he hissed, his red eyes snapping open, dilated and wild as they locked onto you. He leaned forward, closing the distance until you could feel the unnatural heat radiating off his chest, his nose brushing agonizingly close to your skin as he inhaled the scent of your pulse. "I will not beg for it. I am the Lord of the Damned, and I am telling you to present your throat. Bleed for me, and anchor this godforsaken system before I lose my mind and tear this entire estate down to the bedrock."

Make up your own entry as you really desire. . .