The Soul and the Body

A/N: Back at the end of February, I wrote a non-explicit slash ficlet titled, \"Is It Really Good for the Soul?\" I hadn\'t planned to continue it, but a continuation was almost inevitable. This is that continuation. I have included the original ficlet at the beginning. My thanks to TeaRoses for the new title. Hellsing and all its characters belong to Kohta Hirano and whatever corporate entity has licensed the Hellsing portion of his soul. I make no money from my writing.
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“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” the voice drifted through the grille. Even with the relative anonymity of the confessional, the brogue was impossible to hide.

“I am a poor representative of our most holy Church. I cherish wrath and use it to do God’s will. I sin in pride when I perform my duties. I am a killer. Sometimes I am a murderer.”

The speaker paused. The first confessions came easily, with a flow that bespoke familiarity. The next words were almost dragged from him, “I sin in envy and in lust.”

The silence stretched until he continued, “I cannot seem to stop myself. I have an enemy…” he trailed off before resuming. “There is another sin of pride. He is not my enemy, he is an enemy of our Church.

“This enemy is a creature of evil. That I envy him makes me feel filthy to the depths of my soul. He has such power. He has spit on everything I believe and I have not been able to return him to Hell.

“My envy started with coveting his power. It weighed on me, night after night as I thought about what I could do with what he has. How I could cleanse the world of the blasphemous creatures that walk it. It ate at me. I had to know everything about him. I read every last piece of information that my order had on him and on those around him.

“Which led to my sins of lust.”

The man’s shoes rattled against the walls of the booth as he shifted position uneasily. He took several deep breaths before continuing. “The more I learned about him, the more I found myself wanting what he has. Worse, I started to see similarities between us.

“We both destroy the creatures that would feed on humans. We both serve something greater than ourselves. We both enjoy the hunt, the close and the kill. I enjoy it enough to merit a new category of sin.

“When the dreams began, I tried to tell myself that it was because I was coveting his power and my mind was twisting it. I even tried reading Freud to convince myself.” He gave a short humorless snort. “Freud’s a load of shite. I have been dreaming sexual dreams about him because I want him. I want his power, and in coveting his power, I have begun to covet him.

“I disgust myself. How many sins can I roll into this? I am sworn to celibacy, sworn to destroy Midians, sworn to God of my choice and will to eschew envy, pride and lust, and I feel them all for a creature of evil. A male creature of evil. Why couldn’t I have been attracted to his little pet? At least that would be one less sin.

“But I know why. She’s a pawn. A sweetly packaged pawn, but she doesn’t have the power that opened the door to my other sins. Her Master holds a key to my soul I didn’t know existed.

“How am I to make this right? How do I erase the stain?” his last question was plaintive and he sat, awaiting a response from his Confessor.

There was a small splintering noise from the direction of the grille and something bounced off the toe of his shoe. As he leaned over, his gut clenched as some instinct told him what he would find.

He let out a strangled cry - half rage, half horror - at the item in his hand. He could almost hear the creature’s laugh as he turned over the bullet in his fingers. It was dim in the booth, but he knew that in the light he would be able to read the engraving, “In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation. Amen.”

There was no sound and Alexander Anderson sensed that the other side of the booth was empty, but he knew that some night soon, Alucard would want to talk to him about his confession.

•••

Such a night.

Paladin of the Church, Father Alexander Anderson looked at the slaughter that surrounded him. He’d long ago learned not to be horrified by the things he did. It was the only way he could sleep at night.

He pushed his grief and regret deep inside of himself where they festered and fed his rage, which allowed him to fight more, which gave him more grief and regret to sublimate, which… On nights when the priest felt himself particularly lacking, he wondered whether God or the devil had set that cycle in motion in his heart.

He roused himself from his musings. These things did no good to dwell on. He was an Iscariot, one of the Church’s assassins, a man who had willingly given up his soul for his God. That was all the identity and all the answer he needed.

But it wasn’t and he knew it.

Perhaps he could live with that if he were the only one to know his shame, but Alexander Anderson had made the mistake of making his confession to the wrong person at the wrong time.

He remembered with painful clarity the moment in the confessional. He had made his admissions of pride, rage, envy, and lust, only to find that his moment of baring himself to try to repudiate his sins had been violated by the very monster of whom he had been speaking.

He still carried the bullet in his pocket as a reminder of what happened when he allowed himself to be weak.

“You do not allow yourself to become weak; you are weak.”

Anderson spun around, searching for the source of the voice. He knew whose voice it had been; now he sought his foe among the shadows. “Come out and face me, vampire, and I’ll show you how weak I am.” He opened his hands and closed them on the hilts of bayonets that had come to his call.

The voice was right in his ear, “You don’t need to show me, Judas Priest. You confessed it to me.” Anderson tried to spin to thrust his weapons into Alucard’s flesh and found himself held fast by something he couldn’t even see in the darkness.

“You do remember, don’t you? You still carry my token in your pocket.”

Anderson felt something slide into his trousers’ pocket and withdraw. A gleaming white glove holding a silver bullet floated out of the darkness. While the priest had been distracted by Alucard’s voice, shadows had fallen around him like a deluge of autumn leaves. He could almost feel them brushing his skin as they blanketed him, leaving him with no vision except what Alucard allowed.

The hand and the bullet it held winked out of existence, leaving Alexander Anderson alone in a darkness too perfect for nature.

“You envy me.” A harsh sigh into his ear, the words borne on a cool breath that reeked of old blood.

Anderson shuddered. His shame had come home to him.

Fingers, cold even through gloves, trailed over his scarred cheek, and the whisper this time was sibilant and chilling, “You lust for me.”

The captive priest jerked his head away from Alucard’s touch. “They are sins, and I confessed them to repent and be cleansed. Not to compound them.”

The vampire’s face loomed in front of him, radiant when all else was blackness. “You know we’re the same. You lust to kill. You love the hunt. You are a creature of your urges.” Alucard made his points in quick, staccato bursts of words, ending with his coup de grace, “You cannot tell me I lie; these are your own admissions.”

Shadows closed over Alucard, leaving Anderson blind once more. He ached to fight; to sublimate one lust with another, sex for battle. He struggled against the shadows, but they opened around the silver of his bayonets without ever loosening their unyielding hold on the rest of him. His writ would not come; it was trapped inside the clinging darkness just as he was.

“Freud can’t help you now, Judas Priest. Your Church can’t help you now. Your prayers can’t help you now because you are flawed. And your flaw is pride.”

Something moved across Anderson’s thigh; with a grunt of disgust he tried to jerk away, but could do nothing except endure the touch that came under his trousers as though they weren’t there. “All of your other sins stem from that one flaw.”

The first caress across his thigh was joined by another tracing the curve of one buttock. He shouted and cursed, torn between paroxysms of rage and purest despair. He fought because to do otherwise was impossible. He could not stop fighting until he literally could fight no more.

But more than four hundred years on the planet can teach remarkable patience. Anderson could feel Alucard’s attention on him while he struggled and ranted. The entire time, Alucard seemed determined to egg him on to greater frenzies with phantom caresses on his thighs, buttocks, back, and chest. Every time he would begin to force himself to calm down, a fresh invasion would pitch him into a new round of fruitless struggle.

Until finally, he could not fight when ghostly fingers brushed through the curly hairs below his navel. The priest would have fallen to his knees had the shadows not been holding him motionless.

“Your pride has forced you to weaken yourself for me. Do you see this?” The shadows parted for Alucard making the vampire again the only thing that Anderson could see.

Anderson lifted his head and glared at him. “I can not just let you do this. I have to fight.”

His glare turned to a snarl when Alucard threw his head back and laughed. “I love your pride. Your sinful pride, which you indulge even now, when your other sins have come home to roost.” He leaned close to Anderson and again the priest smelled the vampire\'s breath as he spoke, “I have made a study of pride, as it has been my own downfall in the past.” The spectral fingers on his abdomen dragged lower and stopped, a bare pressure at the base of his penis.

“I am going to assist you in your penance by helping you put aside your pride for a time.” Anderson gasped and stiffened when his penis and scrotum were encircled in a firm grip against his body and gently squeezed.

Alucard closed the scant distance between their bodies and crushed his mouth against Anderson’s while the fingers continued to squeeze him and fresh caresses began over one nipple, over his buttocks, and even brushed through his hair with a feeling as real as any human hand. He invaded the priest’s mouth with his tongue and violated every part of it.

Only the thought of the way severed pieces of Alucard often seemed to have minds of their own kept Anderson from biting off the offending and invading bit of flesh.

Finally Alucard pulled away and licked his lips, leaving the shaking man with the taste of old blood to go with the odor on the vampire’s breath. “I hold a key to your soul that you didn’t know existed.”

Anderson quailed inside to hear his own words turned back at him.

“Because your pride incites you to envy my power, and to lust for what I can give you.” The fingers squeezed Anderson again and released him, only to begin stroking his shaft with a strong rhythm that made him futilely jerk his hips in the unrelenting embrace of Alucard’s darkness.

The vampire began to slowly circle his captive. Anderson found his eyes drawn to his foe simply because he was the only thing to see – or so he told himself.

His entire body quivered and the priest threw his head back with a wanton moan when more invisible fingers slid easily between his buttocks to tease and rub at his tight opening while the strokes continued to force his erection to a hardness that was almost on the painful side of pleasurable.

“I’ve taken your pride, Alexander.” The fingers penetrated him and the man squeezed his eyes closed. His face contorted in a rictus of either agony or painful ecstasy.

“I can sate your lust.” The penetration changed from the slow push of fingers to the smooth strokes of something larger. The first time it brushed across his prostate, Anderson’s entire weight was supported by Alucard’s shadows as his knees buckled. But still the thrusts continued in time to the firm slide of the stroking of his erection.

Alexander Anderson cried out for God to help him when his orgasm began to build, hot in his abdomen. The pleasure of the things being done to him left him unable to protest when his body began to shudder and hot come covered… Alucard’s hand? The vampire had reached around Anderson and taken over the ministrations from his shadows.

He felt his clothing tearing away from his body to be borne God knew where by Alucard’s witchery. Alucard’s hand, wet with the priest\'s semen, pressed between his buttocks and rubbed the sticky fluid around and into him.

Suddenly the shadows, which until now had been holding Anderson upright, released him. It came so unexpectedly that all it took was Alucard’s hand on his back to push him down to the ground on all fours.

There was pain when Alucard penetrated him. There was friction from his undead flesh that there had not been with his shadows; despite the pain, it was still damnably good. The shadows were once more wrapping themselves around Anderson’s damp and somewhat deflated erection; this time simulating lips and a tongue and a mouth that sucked him in and stroked his length as it pulled away. Soon the waylaid priest was once again moaning and shifting his hips to better take Alucard into him and to push himself into the mouth he knew did not exist.

Alucard pulled Anderson’s upper body away from the ground until the priest was kneeling upright with Alucard kneeling behind him, between his spread knees. Shadows coalesced again and held the priest in that position even while Alucard’s thrusts came poundingly hard until the vampire suddenly stopped when Anderson was quivering on the brink of another orgasm.

All pride gone, the man pushed himself back against Alucard, encouraging him to go just a little more, just a little harder. Instead, Alucard leaned over him, his chest a cool weight along Anderson’s back. His tongue flicked out and circled the shell of the priest’s ear before he spoke.

“I have done nothing to help you with your sin of envy.” He punctuated with word “envy” with a sharp thrust of his hips, making the other man gasp under him. “As part of my own penance for pride,” another sharp thrust, “I will do something for my beloved enemy and share that power with him.”

Anderson’s eyes snapped open when the implications of those words got through the sex fogged workings of his brain. Too late. The next thrust of Alucard’s hips corresponded with the vampire’s fangs penetrating the former priest’s flesh and Anderson cried out, a protest, a scream, a shout of orgasm, a plea for mercy while he filled that shadowy mouth with his semen. He felt Alucard’s own orgasm as a cold that began in both sites of penetration and spread throughout Anderson’s body, leaving him a changed man in more ways than one.