Singular

Hellsing and all its characters are creations of Kohta Hirano. I make no claim to their ownership.
Archaenon painted a beautiful AAxA picture. She told me that it was a shower scene and my imagination took off. However, Anderson\'s face in the pic is more peaceful than I have written AAxA in the past, so this story has a different tenor to it. You can find the pic at y!gallery (yaoi, not yahoo,) but you must be a y!gallery member.
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Alexander Anderson stood under the falling water and prayed. After everything that had happened, shouldn’t he feel closer to God, not farther away than he’d ever been in his life?

He turned the hot water up and leaned his head against the shower wall while the spray pounded his neck and shoulders.

The parsonage was abandoned – most Catholic clergy had been withdrawn from England to avoid the backlash from the attack on London. Anderson counted himself fortunate that the building still had basic services that allowed him the luxury of a scalding hot shower, even if there was no electricty to illuminate the gloomy shower room.

The priest had spent the past month since the attacks alone in this parsonage. He had haunted the place, avoiding all contact with others while he prayed and tried to understand what God wanted from him.

All Iscariots knew they would die for God. All Iscariots knew that they’d be going to Hell when they were done in their service. All were trained from childhood that this was as it should be, but Anderson’s faith had wavered when it should be at its strongest.

He no longer believed.

He drew his fingers over the unblemished skin over his unbeating heart. With Elena’s nail still lodged in his chest he could not and would not lose faith in God’s existence, but his faith in his church and his place within it was not just gone, it was shattered irreparably.

Suffer the little children…

He slid down the wall and buried his face in his hands. Every Iscariot life lost in London had been the loss of one of Anderson’s children – children he had raised and molded to be the Vatican’s assassins. Each one brought to Father Anderson’s orphanage because they were problems elsewhere, and each one a child that Anderson had inculcated with his faith and certainty in the righteousness of their mission.

With his eyes closed, it was all there in living color, no faded memory, no blissful blankness, no self-protective fogging. Enrico, the devil child, with his lifeless form held in his surrogate father’s hands. Wolfe, one blue eye staring at the sky, the other gone, lost to a bullet or shrapnel, or maybe just a ghoul’s clawing fingers. Yumiko, sweet Yumiko – eyes closed and face finally peaceful even without her glasses to hide behind.

Even Anderson’s own brother, Renaldo. Not a blood brother, but the two had spent their own time together as troubled children in the Vatican’s breeding ground for its holy killers. Alexander had seen the acceptance on Marco’s face as he hit the trigger for the explosives that took him to hell with a clutch of Alucard’s slaves as escort.

In the long hours and days that the priest had had to think and pray, he had come to believe that God’s punishment to him for trying to raise himself above humans was to make him live with the memory of what he had been party to.

He shivered and levered himself off the floor. He’d spent too much time in his self-recriminations and the shower was getting cold.

“I told you not to do it, fool,” came the quiet voice that froze Anderson with his hand on the hot water tap. “God punishes monsters differently than he punishes humans.”

Slowly the priest turned to face the speaker who stood just inside the entrance to the shower room, knowing without doubt whose face he would see. He stared at Alucard’s familiar visage, trying to interpret the unfamiliar expression it bore.

“Have you come to punish me?” He snorted and shook his head. “You aren’t God.” He wiped the water off his face and out of his eyes and examined his own feelings while trying to understand the ones he saw on the vampire’s face. He should be raging to be caught with his defenses down in this manner, but he found that he just didn’t care.

“You’ve changed, Judas.”

Anderson snorted again. Of course he’d changed. He was no longer human in anything except shape. He had claimed that he wanted to become heartless, remorseless, a monster – he had been an abject fool.

“What do you want? Do what you’ve come for and get out. You can kill me no more than I can kill you.”

“Who said I wanted to kill you?” Alucard walked across the slippery tiles and stopped just out of arm’s reach of the dripping man. “I don’t need to kill you. God will punish you for as long as he sees fit before allowing you to finally die.”

“He hasn’t allowed you to die yet,” Anderson noted. His fingers twitched in reaction to his flare of anger that he had not been able to kill the vampire. It was like trying to kill his own shadow.

“No shadows without light. No light that does not cast shadows,” Alucard said, paralleling the priest’s thoughts.

“Get to the point,” Anderson growled and turned away from the vampire to turn off the water. He realized now that the chill had not been because there was no hot water, but because of the vampire’s presence.

“No matter how you scrub, you cannot get clean.”

Anderson stiffened in shock when a cool – and nude – body pressed against his, and Alucard’s hand closed over his before he could close the tap. The vampire caught his wrists and pulled them behind his back.

“How are you going to atone?” Alucard murmured in his ear. “Will you return to your false church now that you know the truth behind it? Maybe start one of your own with you as an inhuman messiah?”

No. Not that. The monster of God would find a way to serve God, but not through human institutions any longer.

Anderson bowed his head and shook it slightly. “If God could find a way to use you, he’ll find a use for me.”

“And until then?” Alucard pulled on the man’s wrists until he leaned against the vampire, and smiled faintly when Anderson turned his hands to place his open palms on Alucard’s abdomen.

Until then?

Every time that Anderson thought that his choices could grow no more taxing, that his road to Hell was paved with every possible sin, more choices presented themselves, more sins were offered to him.

Was there anything more opposite than the two of them? Anderson pictured what they must look like standing there together, one with the glow of life on his skin, the other with death’s own pallor. One dark. One light. One broad. One lean. One served Hellsing, the other served God.

Both killers. Both monsters. Both singular in a paradoxical way. The Monster of God leaned back against the Monster Against God and closed his eyes. There was no other on Earth who could understand him the way Alucard did.

“God punishes monsters differently than he punishes humans,” Alucard repeated, his words coming from close enough to stir the fine hairs on Anderson’s neck.

What better punishment? Choose to be a monster? Have only monsters as peers. Alucard’s body was unyielding, but slowly warming under the continued spray of hot water. He could feel the vampire growing hard, a slowly increasing pressure against his hip.

The church told him that what he was contemplating was wrong. The church would tell him that what he had done in London was right.

He and Alucard were the same thing. Singular in their monstrosity.

Anderson leaned his head against Alucard’s shoulder, stretching and exposing his throat. It was a quintessentially vulnerable position in a vampire’s arms, but it didn’t take faith for the fallen priest, would-be savior to know that God wasn’t done with him yet. It wouldn’t be so easy to get out of the fate he’d chosen just by allowing the vampire to kill him.

So why then did he allow the vampire to sink fangs into his throat? Why did he fight his body’s attempts to heal the wound or fill the vampire’s mouth with thorns instead of blood?

Alucard understood. Seeking a little death if you cannot have true death? slipped into his head in the vampire’s voice even as Anderson fought the blissful lassitude of the bite to control his regeneration and allow his blood to flow.

“If I cannot die…” If he could not die, could not bring back his fallen companions, could not be the servant of holy wrath he had thought himself to be – why punish himself more than God already was and would?

Alucard held him up as he relaxed and shifted his hips until his erection rubbed between Anderson’s buttocks. They both knew that he’d won this little contest when the man arched his back to allow Alucard to slide down and nudge at his entrance.

Alucard carefully pushed into the other man, growling quietly in his throat while he drank slowly from him. Water was a barely adequate lubricant, but Anderson hardly noticed, too absorbed in the overwhelming pleasure the bite brought to every sliding millimeter of penetration.

When Alucard was fully buried in the priest’s constricting heat, he pulled away from the wounds he had made in Anderson’s neck. Eyes closed with his own pleasure as he slowly drew himself out of the warmth, he did not see the wounds fill with thorns before the rents closed over with unblemished skin.

Anderson hissed through his teeth and arched his back again when Alucard teasingly withdrew to the point of almost breaking contact. When the next thrust came, slow, but with restrained strength behind it, he reached back to grab Alucard’s hips and pull him in harder.

He could feel his own erection as it stood away from his body, swaying with the slowly escalating rhythm of penetration and withdrawal. The priest jerked and gasped in surprise when the vampire’s hand closed over his cock and began to stroke him in the same slowly escalating rhythm, sometimes almost painfully firm, other times teasingly delicate.

The two men rocked together under the spraying water. The tiled room was filled with the sound of water and wet skin slapping against wet skin, but no gasps or moans or whispered endearments or even breathing. It was the unnatural silence of two monsters taking the pleasures afforded them while they could.

Alucard pulled Anderson tightly against him and fucked him with short sharp thrusts, matching them stroke for stroke with his hand on the man’s erection. “I want you to come for me,” he growled in his ear. “Show me.”

If Anderson had had any of his faculties about him, he might have been tempted to make a sarcastic observation that orgasm on demand was not a gift that God generally gave out with his relics. Instead, he thrust harder into the vampire’s hand and shuddered under the building pressure.

“Now, Alexander.” Alucard punctuated the demand with a shift in angle that caused each stroke to rub across the man’s prostate. He growled approvingly in Anderson’s ear as the man stiffened and jerked his hips while coming with a soundless gasp of satisfaction.

The vampire watched the fallen priest’s orgasm with pleasure, letting the power of the moment and Anderson’s physical reactions bring him to his own peak and over before Anderson had recovered himself. Alucard’s growl echoed off the tiles before he muffled it by burying his teeth in the other man’s shoulder.

Anderson allowed the vampire a few swallows before thorns forced his mouth away from the wounds. He pulled away from Alucard and soaped a washcloth to clean himself again, his face unreadable and his mind closed to the vampire for the first time.

Alucard licked the last of Anderson’s blood off of his lips and looked at the man with the ghost of a smug smile playing over them. “Don’t tell me you’re going to go into another funk of morose introspection.”

Anderson shook his head and wrapped the soap in the washcloth before throwing both to Alucard and leaving the shower to dry and dress. “No, but there’s no hot water left for you.”