Fic: Deathlessness and Old Age (part one)

[splinteredstar]

Title: Deathlessness and Old Age

Fandom: Hellsing

Pairing: None

Summary: Walter and Alucard have known each other for sixty years, through wars and bloodshed. They have been partners, fellow monsters, and something almost like friends. Three flclets spanning from WW2 to the current time, about the relationship between them.

Rating: PG-13 for violence. But it is Hellsing.

Note: Christmas Gift for the wonderful los_christabel That I'm just now posting. Yes.

Walter wouldn't mind dying this way, but he'd rather not die at all.

He's on the battlefield again, the adrenaline burning in his veins and the wind whipping around him and the entire world is focused in this one moment of battle, and he wonders if anything can ever really be this perfect. The enemy soldiers are falling like broken marionettes, jerked around on his wires until their bodies finally snap. It's not the fastest way to fight, but it's his and it works well, and nothing feels fast next to Alucard's bullets.

He knows he should be ashamed of himself, horrified at the blood splattered in his hair and all over his clothing, and terrified of his partner with the blood-soaked grin, but all he feels is the thrill of the battle and a rush when those Nazi bastards are sliced to pieces. His mother, his dear, dead mother, would be horrified and his little sister would never forgive him, but Walter stopped caring the night they died. They don't matter now, because nothing matters, except for the bloody wire wrapped around his fingers and the immortality that echoes in Alucard's laugh.

He can hear that laugh now, ricocheting off the sides of ruined buildings like the bullets around them. Alucard's somewhere ahead of him, decimating the terrified soldiers with his guns and god knows what else. He moves like a demon in the wind, and all Walter can do sometimes is bite his lip and try to keep up.

"Are you coming, Angel?" Alucard calls out from the front, turning back to stare and laugh, and Walter - not for the first or last time - feels a shot of jealousy. Alucard is forever young, forever alive, indestructible and immortal and powerful. Walter wants that, wants that power, but Alucard always refuses with a smirk.

The Axis bastards are all running as fast as they can in the mud, terrified of this boy too young and this boy too old. This battle's almost over, they always are once he and Alucard show up, and Walter spares a moment to be disappointed. It's always too short, never long enough for Walter to lose himself in it completely and pretend he's not just human.

Walter remembers well the day Alucard found him in the ruins of his home. He remembers how his family died in a torrent of bullets and shouts in German. He remembers hiding, terrified, praying that he would never ever be found. He remembers the screaming of the soldiers, the silence more dead than the grave, and how Alucard stalked in, bloody with slaughter and death and so violently alive.

He remembers, more vividly than he should, Alucard's smile and hands, reaching over corpses to where Walter was hiding. He remembers how Alucard found him, pulled him from the wreckage of his old life and showed him the Nazi soldiers torn to pieces. And he remembers, oh, how he remembers Alucard pulling him close and whispering in his ear,

"Do you want to be able to do this?"

Walter had trembled then, because he did want that, wanted that power, wanted the power and life that sang in every move Alucard made. He wanted, and he wants.

Walter remembers, even as he reaches where Alucard is waiting for him in the midst of the panicked Nazi bastards wallowing in the mire of mud and their fellows' bodies. Alucard is standing above them, his smile brilliant like a blood-red ruby in the sunset, a boy-king-god gorged on blood and death, the screams of the dying his trumpet fare and torn German and French flags his banners. Walter knows Alucard is a monster, but he doesn't care. It doesn't matter to him now. Monster or human, here there is only life or death.

Alucard is unquestionably, unrelentingly alive, and that's what matters.

The few soldiers left below are screaming as one, their individually lost with the rush of instinctual fear. Walter kills the last of them with a flick of his wrist, bloody wires flashing out like things possessed, wrapping around the soldiers and tearing them to pieces, their life and organs spilling out in a flood. The ground is already stained sticky red, pools of blood forming in the hollows of the ground. The standing orders are to leave no survivors, no one who could report on the Allies' secret weapons.

Alucard looks around at the bodies, and then his gun is out, pointing at the muddy mess below them, and a bullet flies out before Walter can blink. There's the cry of a dying man - Walter recognizes the sound well - and then Alucard grins.

"You missed one."

Walter huffs, crossing his arms and trying not to notice the life and power that reverberates in the air and makes everything taste like copper.

~