Corpus et Animus

Yes, this is a followup for a fic I never actually intended to have smut in the first place. If you haven\'t heard me talking about it here, there, and everywhere, a very talented artist is illustrating The Soul and the Body for a doujinshi. She loved this story, so we might see Corpus et Animus illustrated as well.

Hellsing and all its characters belong to Kohta Hirano and whatever corporate entity has licensed that portion of his soul. I make no money from my writing (and that includes the doujinshi) and make no claim on the characters.
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“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” The voice was quiet, velvety rough, with a trace of an accent seemingly long left behind but never quite forgotten.

“It has been many years since my last confession.

“I was once a priest. I was once devoted beyond words to our God, but I sinned in pride and in envy…”

His voice was a sigh when he continued, “…and in lust.” The silence stretched unbroken after that admission.

Finally, he spoke again, “My pride was the key to my soul. My pride made me envy another. My envy turned to covetousness; my covetousness to lust for him.

“Yes, for him. I was a priest, sworn to celibacy – and we both know that dogma tells us that homosexuality is an abomination. It was sin compounded upon sin, but I could not stop the dreams and the desire to possess his power and him.

“The power he held over me without even knowing it was anathema to me. I repented and made a confession to try to find peace and strength to resist the temptation he presented.”

He chuckled bitterly. “Satan surely guided him that night. And God turned away from me. Just as I stalked him, wanting to know about him, he also stalked me. That night, it was he who listened on the other side of the booth, sitting where you sit tonight.

“I know you aren’t him. You’re something he is not and cannot pretend to be – at least not with me. I’d know better.”

Again the chuckle. “He came to me about my confession. Of course, he let me suffer first, wondering when he would find me to make me admit my desires to him directly.

“Finally, he did, and when he came, he used my admissions of lust, envy, and pride against me. He took me…”

The booth creaked slightly with the man’s shift in his seat. When he continued speaking, his voice was cold and tightly controlled.

“I’m not the man I was. I have spent more years with him than you would imagine. I have learned much about him and about what makes him so powerful.

“He told me that pride had been his downfall in the past, as it was to be mine at his hand. Pride will be his downfall again.”

The man’s control of his emotions loosened and the eagerness in his voice was apparent. “I have learned over these many years about him, about myself, about those like us. I have learned about the processes and techniques used to make him something unique among our kind.”

Something in the man’s voice shifted. “He was something unique among our kind. After tonight, he’ll know that he is unique no more. He said he’d share his power and I will hold him to it.

“And I will repay him for all of these years spent in his company.

“I have something to truly confess – after all these years of hating him, I don’t know just how I’d live without him to hate. I used to dream of destroying him, now I only dream of hurting him again and again. My beloved enemy.

“Do you think it’s true? Can hate be a kind of twisted love?

“This is my last confession, Father. I’ll make no more because I know that God sees everything I do, and it is all abomination to him.

“There is no way to make this right; no way to erase the stain.”

The booth creaked again and the priest listening to the confession jumped when pale fingers dragged across the grille separating the two men. “I came to say good-bye to God.”

The confessional filled with blackness, spreading through the grille into the other side of the booth.

A muffled cry of fear and horror escaped the darkness, then nothing.

Alexander reformed from shadows on the priest’s side of the booth and straightened his clothes, wiping a smear of blood away from the corner of his mouth before stepping out of the booth to go talk to Alucard about his confession.

•••

Alucard awoke in his coffin to the realization that something was very wrong. He knew exactly what that something was when he was unable to open or shift out of the coffin. He remained stubbornly solid in the unbroken darkness of his Last Domain.

Are you awake now, Master? Ah, Alexander. Alucard stopped trying to open his coffin and instead focused on his companion/servant/toy.

What are you doing? This then, would be Alexander’s long anticipated attempt at revenge. Alucard relaxed and shook his head, grinning smugly in the darkness. Nothing his servant could do would be too damaging.

His grin faded away abruptly when he felt Alexander’s presence violating the privacy of his coffin. What are you doing, Alex? Are you looking to be punished?

Alucard could easily picture the look on his servant’s face based on the sneer that resounded even in Alexander’s mental communication. I’m through being punished by you.

The sense of Alexander’s presence intensified until the coffin was stifling with it. When next Alucard attempted to move, he found he could not. He was bound in solid form somehow, and the other vampire’s shadows wrapped around him too tightly to escape.

Instead, he relaxed and feigned amusement. My fledgling is ready to leave the nest? Did you come to give me a good-bye kiss?

A kiss. The words hissed through Alucard’s mind and for a moment, he could feel the familiar rough brush of Alexander’s lips over his lips, chest, and inner thigh. With teeth.

Alucard snarled when the gentle caress of his servant’s mouth drew blood with savage bites on his thigh and his lower lip. Alexander wasn’t supposed to be able to do that.

How does it feel to be helpless in the dark? Alexander sounded far too happy with himself as the mouths drew away from the bites and allowed them to heal.

Let me out of here and I’ll show you helpless. I’ll tear your soul out of your body and make you dance to any tune I play.

Alexander’s chuckle made Alucard seethe. Is that your way of trying to make me want to let you out? The lips were back, brushing over Alucard’s stomach and throat and lightly passing over the vampire’s penis. With your blood, I am no longer your servant. You will not be making me dance for you ever again.

What do you want? Even asking the question was conceding more than Alucard wanted to, but he had to move the game forward if he was going to find out how to twist it into a win for himself.

The images hit him with a hammering intensity – Alucard on his knees in front of Alexander, sucking him to orgasm; Alucard on hands and knees moaning in mixed pain and pleasure while Alexander thrust into him; Alucard helpless in Alexander’s hold while the vampire buried his fangs in his throat.

I envied you. Images of Anderson’s torment replaced those of Alucard’s submission – the obsessive reading, the questioning of any who had encountered Alucard, the anger and the prayer.

Envying you made me want you. I lusted for you. Behind his eyes, Alucard watched Anderson thrash in his sleep and wake with an erection that made the man groan and strain not to weep in disgust at his weakness.

All a product of my pride, which you took from me one dark night. Alucard smiled at the memory that came next – of the two of them alone together, Anderson’s head thrown back in unmistakable pleasure moments before Alucard’s fangs plunged into his flesh. It was a moment he treasured – bringing Father Alexander Anderson, a paladin and an Iscariot, so low.

And you have spent these many years making sure that I have no pride. Thinking that I was nothing more than a killer you had put on a leash. Flickers of memory came to Alucard, many of which made him smile, few of which likely pleased the former priest.

I changed. Alucard remembered the first night that Alexander came to him willingly, standing partly silhouetted in the door to Alucard’s chamber, his chest bare except for the cross he had not left behind with the rest of his human life.

I learned to enjoy this new life. I put away regret and pride. I did not envy you, and my lust… Alucard felt fingers play across his body and over his burgeoning erection. …my lust was easily satisfied again and again.

We are too much the same.

I learned to enjoy a new kind of hunt and a more intimate kind of kill than that which came under my bayonets. Alucard watched again as Alexander looked up from the ravaged throat of his prey, blood streaming down his chin, and pulled him in for a harsh and bloody kiss.

I turned away from God, but you made me carry the reminder of my past service. Alucard had loved to pull that cross on its chain, seeing it swing when Alexander knelt in front of him. He loved the symbol of his conquest, seeing it shackle Alexander where once it had been his shield.

Do you think that I made the choice to be God’s killer, knowing full well I embraced my own damnation because I am a quitter? Did you make the mistake of thinking that because I am a killer, I am not a thinking man? Alucard saw Alexander sitting in the sunlight streaming into Hellsing’s library poring over dusty tomes until his eyes filled with the unholy glee they always held before a kill. He saw the man approaching his coffin while he slept inside and painting a circle on the floor, filling it painstakingly with runes that seemed almost alive when completed.

He saw the glow that filled the room when Alexander spilled his own blood to complete the circle. Blood of your blood to seal you tight.

So, what do I want now, Alucard? Do I want to kill you? Alucard jerked within the binds Alexander had laid on him, feeling the sharp point of a bayonet over his heart. You are trapped and bound in here. Do you think I could kill you if I cut your heart out, cut it in half, cut off your head, filled your mouth with garlic, burned your body, and buried the remnants at a crossroads?

Do I want to humble you? Do I want to kill you? Do I want to fuck you? What do you think I want?

Alucard shuddered against the restraints upon him as the shadow lips glided up the underside of his shaft and played across the head of his penis. I know what you like, now, Alexander whispered in his mind.

There was a shifting sound outside the coffin and Alucard could feel Alexander’s weight settle on it.

“You can hear me. I know you can.” Alexander’s voice was low, intimate, but easily caught by a vampire’s hearing.

“If you agree to bind yourself to me as my servant, I will release you from the coffin. I will open the circle and you will be as free as I was when I rose early from my sleep today.”

He chuckled at Alucard’s wordless denial. “You would like it.”

Alucard’s mind was filled with Alexander’s imaginings – vivid for having been cherished for long years. He knelt in front of the fallen priest and allowed him to drop the chain to Alexander’s cross around his neck. Without being told, he opened the standing vampire’s trousers and slid them off before taking his erection in his mouth.

In his coffin, Alucard felt a phantom mouth doing the same to him and groaned when lips closed over him and an inhumanly long tongue wrapped itself around the length of his shaft.

Despite his anger at the situation, he groaned as the phantom mouth began to slide over him, mimicking the motion of the image Alexander placed in Alucard’s mind of the vampire kneeling in front of Alexander and drawing the other vampire’s penis into his mouth.

When he arched up to meet a mouth that was suddenly no longer there, Alucard realized that the shadows holding him motionless had retreated, leaving only his hands restrained at his sides.

“Do you really believe that it is better to give than to receive?” He could hear Alexander shift positions on the lid of the coffin and bared his teeth in anger at man on the other side of the lid, the snarl turning to a grimace of shock when shadows insinuated themselves between his buttocks to probe at him, the grimace fading to a smirk.

“Is that the best you can do?” he asked the vampire who had once been a man of God. “You spend years in surreptitious research, find a way to confine me, trap me in my coffin, and the best you can come up with is a bit of sex play?” He arched his back again and closed his eyes, making a point of moaning lasciviously when the probing shadows pushed slowly inside him.

No imagination, he thought to himself even as he moaned again as the shadows began to stroke into him. Alexander’s mouth crushed against his, parting Alucard’s lips with his tongue to taste him. Alucard’s eyes flew open, certain that the other vampire had somehow joined him physically in his coffin, but he was alone except for the shadows.

With his eyes closed again, Alucard was again immersed in the illusion that he wasn’t alone in his coffin; that Alexander was there, kneeling between his legs and pushing himself deep inside him with mercilessly hard thrusts while shadows played over his erection in a confusing welter of lips, fingers, and tongues.

From the other side of the coffin lid, he heard Alexander’s shaky groan, the one that usually preceded the other vampire’s orgasm. The speed and intensity of the phantom thrusts increased until he heard Alexander cry out wordlessly and heard the man’s body shift suddenly on the lid.

Alucard pushed up the meet the pounding of the other man’s body – phantom or not – needing just a few more strokes to come. Shivering on the knife’s edge of climax, the shadows were suddenly gone – all except those still holding Alucard’s hands at his sides.

His groan this time was one of frustration and anger. He was so close. So close.

He heard Alexander sit up and get off his coffin.

I am going to walk out of here now and leave you alone in the dark with your need. I’m going to go out into the city and hunt. I’m going to find a woman – you know the ones you like so much? Young, and blonde, and full of fire? I’m going to find a woman, and I’m going to bring her back here and I am going to make her scream in ecstasy before I bleed her and I’m going to share every moment of it with you except the peak. And I’m going to do it again and again for years.

I have your pride. Your servant has sealed you helpless in your coffin.

I have your lust. Can you feel it aching for release?

I want you to envy me, now.

The door swung closed and locked on Alucard’s chamber, leaving his coffin sitting in the middle of the room surrounded by the seal Alexander had drawn. Coiled just under the cryptic alchemical inscription on the lid lay Alexander Anderson’s cross and chain.