Exigencies

This is AU! There is an OC. My word to you that the OC isn't a Mary Sue. She isn't super speshul here to claim Alucard's heart. She won't listen to whatever the current popular music is. She isn't goth. I'm doing my damnedest to ensure that she isn't two-dimensional, and she is, in fact, based on an historical figure. So if she has moments of being a badass, she's earned them. At this point in writing and story plotting, smut happens in chapters four and five. You'll have to hang in there. And last, but not least, this was written as a birthday fic for a good friend, Gish. If you read my fic, you may recognize the name because I also wrote AxS (Dialectic) for her. Don't blame her if you don't like the fic, but thank her if you do.
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Alucard reclined in his chair and if he had had breath to catch, would have been trying to catch it.

At that point, that little physiological necessity would have come as a comfort.

Instead, he looked over at Walter’s motionless form in the bed they had so often shared and wondered just how he was going to explain this mess to Arthur.

It had started as any other evening – Alucard rose from his rest to find an ice bucket with his ration of blood waiting for him. Walter had been and gone while the vampire slept, leaving him what he needed and going on about Hellsing’s business without mooning around like some lovestruck teen.

Alucard liked to think that Walter was some lovestruck teen despite that. It was the little things – like ensuring that the blood type was AB negative as often as donations would allow, the quality of the crystal that the young man left him to drink that blood from, and the books that sometimes rested on the table next to the bucket, twins to whatever Walter himself was reading – that allowed Alucard the luxury of believing so.

That evening, Alucard had risen, poured the first bottle of blood into a goblet, and, because he had no summons from Arthur, settled in with the most recent book that Walter had left for him. No doubt the young man’s own copy of Moon and Sixpence was upstairs on his bedside table with a bookmark neatly tucked between the pages.

Immersed in the world that Maugham had created, he’d smelled the blood almost before he heard the clatter of feet and the raised voices, panic audible in the tone while he sorted out the meaning. Words stood out.

Walter...

... vampire

Bitten

Alucard was out of the room and up the stairs before the goblet shattered on the floor, knocked there by the carelessly cast aside book.

Ah, Angel....

The young man was a bloodied wreck. There were no tidy punctures on him, no – there were gashes, pieces torn from his body and no longer even bleeding, just seeping blood.

There was little to be seen of his throat – torn flesh, tendons showing, a slow welling of dark crimson that had the vampire wondering how it was that Walter’s heart was beating at all.

He should be dead.

He should be a ghoul. Or some vampire’s servant.

But the young man clung to life with all the ferocity with which he had lived it.

Had lived it. There would be no return to life for the Angel of Death. No reprieve. He would die, and he would rise as a ghoul. Unless…

Alucard snapped from his reverie and turned burning red eyes on one of the men who had given up trying to get Walter to the infirmary when the vampire had arrived and blocked the hall. At Alucard’s silent command, the corpsman stepped back and the vampire pulled Hellsing’s butler off of the stretcher.

“Tell Arthur that to interrupt now is to lose us both.” A lie, but Alucard would not be the one lying to his master, and thus he could circumvent the seals’ restriction against such things.

With that, he turned in a flare of red coat and walked into the shadows with his bleeding freight.

“You idiot!” he remonstrated the unconscious butler as he walked out of the wall in his bedchamber. “Gone and gotten yourself killed without....” He broke off when he realized the next sound out of his throat was going to be a sob. Dracula did not cry. Even van Hellsing’s pet vampire did not cry. Ridiculous. A nobleman, no matter how he was brought low, did not cry over a servant.

He laid Walter’s body on the bed and didn’t think about the fact that this bloody young man was the one who had last slept in this bed – taking his human rest while Alucard slept in his coffin. At least he tried not to think about it, but the memory was there in his mind as a contrast to this moment – Walter, looking almost innocent in his sleep as he could not look when his conscious mind brought the light of a ruthless intelligence his face.

He did not look innocent now, bloodied and fighting the inevitability of death as he was. He was cold and growing cooler by the moment as the blood that should have warmed him seeped from his wounds to soak his clothes and soak into the pseudo-fabric of Alucard’s shadow apparel.

“Angel.” Alucard sat next to him on the bed and tried to rouse the young man to a last grasp at consciousness. No human means could achieve that – Walter was too far gone down death’s paths to respond to just a word. Alucard employed a light touch into his lover’s mind. “Walter. Hear me.”

It seemed he might be too late for even that, but he pushed harder, employing force that would bring pain to require Walter to acknowledge that his body still existed.

The pain flickered over Walter’s slack face and Alucard could see him trying to force open eyelids sealed with drying blood.

He spoke aloud the words he pressed directly into Walter’s mind. “You are dying. You must choose now – I can kill you and free you from purgatory as a ghoul, or I can bring you over to me. There can be no discussion, no time to think. Choose.”

He could feel Walter’s fear at the thought of being a ghoul and the gratitude for the offer of death. He also felt the barest pause while Walter made the sort of split second decision his heretofore successful career as a vampire hunter had been training him to make.

The young man’s lips moved, possibly forming the word that stood out in his mind for Alucard to see. You.

It was all the affirmative Alucard required.

He bent over Walter and finding no unmarked place on his lover’s throat, tore the bloody rags of his shirt away from his arm and sank his teeth into the meat of his forearm.

The blood flowed sluggishly into his mouth, bringing with it the unique vintage of a young man who had given his life to death without a look back – not just now, but for the years that he had served Hellsing to his fullest, bloodiest abilities.

So many times Alucard had thought of what this moment could be like for the two of them. He had even considered that he might have to make the offer of vampirism in extremis when things went awry in just this way, but he had never wanted this to be the way that Walter came to him.

In his fondest imaginings, the young man had asked for this without prompting, coming to him in the depths of Hellsing manor and going to one knee to ask his lover for the boon of being his companion through endless nights.

In those imaginings, Alucard would take him by the hand and draw him up off the floor to hold him, savoring those last moments when Walter’s touch would be warm and that strong heart still beat in his breast.

What he had was the reality that only his will and Walter’s combined would keep their fairy tale from ending only with final death. Alucard’s happily ever after would be restricted to the satisfaction of vengeance on the vampire who had taken his loved one from him.

His will kept Walter conscious enough to choose while Walter’s will fought the call of the one who had bitten him first.

Walter’s heart slowed, then stuttered, then stopped.

And then they were in between.

In between, where Walter was neither alive nor dead. Where choice could lead him out of this place to the waking world, still neither alive nor dead, but undead. Or leave his body broken and inhabited by nothing but another vampire’s contagion.

Alucard had been in this place before when he made his own choice. He had sent his Brides here to make their choices and they had come to him on the other side.

This was the first time since he had made his decision to become a No Life King that he had stood in this in between place, and this time he was not alone.

Walter stood there in that realm of sand that was not sand and a sky that had all the depth of a theater set, clean and tidy and whole as the young man no doubt always saw himself.

There was a third figure there as well. That was even more unexpected than being there with Walter. Alucard understood being there with Walter. They were fighting together, after all. A fitting team.

There was really only one explanation for the identity of the interloper.

“Get out,” he hissed at the grey-robed figure. Female, he assumed from the curves the robe didn’t completely hide. “He is mine.”

“Funny,” came the voice from within the concealing hood. It was neither young nor old, high nor low. Female in a manner not wholly definable. “I was here to tell you the same thing. My prize. My servant. You can’t have him anyway, you’re male and we all know that you have to be the opposite sex from your fledgling.”

Alucard snorted derisively. “I am not some trash vampire. I am a No Life King. He is mine.”

“I think I have a say in this,” Walter interrupted.

“No. You don’t,” the woman said firmly. “You are mine. My prize.”

Walter opened his mouth to protest again and the woman silenced him with a peremptory gesture. “No argument from you, boy.”

The young man was visibly perplexed by the fact that he’d closed his mouth again at her command.

Alucard looked both angry and grimly determined. That she was there with them in that in between place spoke to her hold on Walter. He didn’t like what it said, either.

“Walter, come to me.” He held out a hand to the silent young man.

“Tsh. Walter, come to your master,” the woman countered, holding out an arm to him. The sleeve fell back on her robe revealing smooth ashen skin.

Walter stood unmoving between the pair looking first confused, then unsettled, then angry. He looked toward Alucard as his body swayed toward the woman who would be his master.

“No, Walter.” Alucard snapped, then added, “Angel. Don’t let her take you.”

The problem, as it had been before Alucard had put his teeth into the young man’s flesh, was choice. The interloper could take Walter against his will, but the damnable Hellsing seals guaranteed that Alucard could not.

Not for the first time, the vampire railed against Abraham van Helsing and his successor. Damn them both if he lost yet another lover because of their machinations.

The object of their contentions swayed between his two would-be masters. When he looked toward Alucard, it was with both fear and longing on his face, but it was toward the woman that he took his first step.

Angel. Alucard took a step forward and stopped when the seals burned into his soul, reminding him as they always did that his will was not his own in all ways.

Angel, come to me. He did not command, but he did thrust memories at Walter like a sword to cut the strengthening tie between his lover and the thief who would take him – memories of stolen seconds exchanging smiles when Arthur wasn’t looking, nights spent hunting and then twined together as they satisfied lusts that few humans could hold in common with the vampire, years spent as the other’s only companions in a world where people turned away from the legends of Dracula and of the Angel of Death.

Walter turned back toward Alucard and took back that step he had taken away from his lover, and followed it with another toward the vampire he wanted, rather than the one who had laid first claim on his blood.

“No!” The woman’s voice lashed over Walter and he visibly shuddered, face contorting in pain. “You are not his. Not now. You will come to me now.”

Alucard had memories, which he continued to attempt to use to shield Walter from the interloper’s demand, and one last weapon that only held power because of the relationship he and the Angel of Death had.

“Angel... please.”

Walter’s face lit with a ghost of his usual cocky smile. The word had its desired effect, giving him the strength to take a last pair of steps to bring himself close enough to reach for Alucard’s outstretched hand.

“I knew I could get you to say it someday,” he said softly.

Not so simple, of course. Never so simple.

Walter’s fingers closed around Alucard’s and the other vampire shrieked in rage and threw herself at them. Her hood fell back to reveal a face that might be handsome when not twisted in anger, but never beautiful. Her features were too severe, too angular for feminine beauty.

As Walter clasped Alucard’s hand, she jerked his head back by his hair and sank shark’s teeth in his throat.

It’s not that easy, child. It will never be that easy until one of us is truly dead.

The words echoed among the three of them as the in between world faded away to blackness.

Now Alucard leaned back in his chair and watched his fledgling in his sleep. His, yes. But not wholly his.

With his head tossed back and his eyes closed peacefully, the pale pink scars on Walter’s neck said that someone else had left her mark on the young vampire, and Alucard wondered when they would know just what that mark was and how deep her hold ran.