Hellsing Fan Fiction ❯ Fare ❯ Awakening and Suffering ( Chapter 23 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Author's Note: As you know, I killed Seras Victoria. This made a lot of people unhappy. Like I said, bear with me. Alucard still has to kill Amelia before he can even think of Seras, and he doesn't even know if it's possible to raise her from the dead. Two more chapters after this, it looks like. :) And info on my new story in the last chapter of this fic, so wait for it :) and hey, REVIEW!!!!!








The altar was made of the same polished black stone as the rest of the chamber. He learned from her incessant chattering that this place was called the Chamber of Solitude, and that the place where the Siphons were made was called the Chamber of Submission. The room below where the Siphons finished their long transformation that opened into the tunnel was The Garden (sickening, but comical). There were no Siphons in the Chamber of Solitude now; she'd told him they were forbidden from entering this place.

She was silent now, though, as she approached the steps leading up to the altar. Alucard waited at the bottom of the steps, having no real desire to follow where she led.

Amelia reached the top, and placed a hand tenderly on the forehead of the body lying still and cold upon the altar. She bent at the waist and peered intently into his eyes, a tiny frown turning the corners of her mouth.

“We're back,” she whispered, “I hope you're not too angry with me, I did try to hurry. But there were complications.”

Alucard realized she really believed that the empty shell lying there could hear her and sneered.

She turned to him and waved him up. He joined her at the top of the stairs and took a look at the man she intended for him to resurrect. There was no decay on the body, but his chest sported a gaping wound and he knew that the heart had been damaged. Somehow, Alucard had the feeling that the wound was self-inflicted. The woman must truly be insane, if she intended to use him to bring this man back to the world of the living.

“Do you see, Mikhail?” she murmured, stroking back the blonde hair from the pale face, “This is the one I have brought to save you.”

Well, that was answer enough.

Amelia turned to Alucard.

“It's time to get started. He's very impatient and I think we've kept him waiting long enough.”

Alucard snorted.

“Lead on then, my master.”

She nodded, as if unaware of the sarcasm. And he got the feeling that she was, that she was blissfully oblivious to anything that did not fit with her ideal world, where all things gladly bent to her will and she was the focus of adoration and fear.

“Take off that coat, and your gloves. And the tie as well.”

He shrugged and dropped the coat, and she kicked it down the stairway, the heavy garment rolling up and landing at the bottom of the stairs. He peeled the gloved from his hands and they vanished into shadow, and he tugged off the tie and let it flutter to the ground.

Amelia reached up and began unbuttoning his shirt, and parted it so that his chest was exposed. He held himself still, forced himself not to shy away from her touch. As much as she repulsed him, and as much as he despised her, it was difficult. He nearly reached out to strike her when she stood back and studied him, her gaze wandering up from his boots, lingering on his muscled, lean abdomen and chest before moving up to his neck where her pupils widened and her lips parted slightly. Then she looked up at his face, and reached up to trace her finger over his mouth. Alucard's crimson eyes narrowed and he tensed, fighting back the urge to rip her throat out only because he refused to submit to weakness and give in to his impulses. Finally Amelia abandoned her hungry examination of him and brought her fingers to her mouth and bit down on her index finger. The scent of her blood reached Alucard and somehow, he was even more repulsed than before.

She reached out and traced her finger over his chest, drawing with her blood symbols that were unfamiliar. He felt a stinging burn following the path of her finger. He relished the pain. Surely it wasn't as bad as the emptiness in his chest where his heart should be.

“You have to enter his mind,” Amelia said suddenly as she finished.

“He's dead,” Alucard said bluntly, “His mind is as long gone as yours.”

“You will see what I mean,” she said confidently, “You will be a part of his world.”

“I'm sure.”

She walked around him to stand on the other side of the altar, and she reached across it to place her fingertips on exact points on Alucard's chest. Her voice poured out in a slow, rhythmic chant.

Alucard's skin tingled where her fingers touched him and he felt that he was moving although he stood still. The room seemed to shift beneath his feet. As her chanting progressed, he saw a mist creep over the floor.

Amelia began tracing symbols on her dead lover's body similar to the one's she'd drawn on Alucard. Then she took Alucard's ungloved hands and placed them on Mikhail's chest.

Very suddenly, he understood what Amelia had meant. The entire room became distorted and grey, the lines blurred and refracted as though he looked at the world through a prism, and looking down at Mikhail, he saw that there was no wound on his chest and that his eyes, bright crimson as his own, were open.

Alucard's soul had been pulled into the world of the dead.

You must help him find his way back. He will communicate with you, if you can figure out how to reach him. The body lying there is separated from his soul. He will know how to get you both out of there when his soul is returned, he heard Amelia's voice as if from far away, though in the material world, she was standing right next to him, whispering is his ear.

Alucard leaned over Mikhail and peered into his eyes.

“Can you hear me?” he whispered.

There was no response.

Alucard turned from the useless shell and began to walk down the steps of the altar, made uneven and difficult by the distortion of the world of the dead.

Then, from behind him, he heard a sharp intake of breath, a gasp, and a low moan. The sound was agonized, tortured, and Alucard spun around and returned to Mikhail's side.

He reached out and touched a hand to Mikhail's forehead.

Amelia had said that his body was nothing but an empty vessel, and yet as he watched, Mikhail moved on his own, turning his head and locking eyes with Alucard. The fingers twitched and his lips parted and Alucard leaned ever so slightly closer.

“Help me.”

“What do you need from me?” Alucard replied.

“Free me.”

“That's why she sent me here.”

“No . . . from her. Free me from her . . . do not resurrect me.”

Alucard grinned, exposing long, elegant fangs.

“Do you know why I'm here?” he whispered.

“She sent you . . . for me. She is keeping me here. I cannot . . . move on. I am in pain.”

Alucard brought his hand down on Mikhail's throat and squeezed.

“She destroyed my home to expose me. She destroyed my lifemate to lure me to her. She used my mate's blood to entrap me. All just to resurrect you,” Alucard hissed venomously, “You do not know pain. She wishes me to return you to the world of the living. If I do this, I will learn how to resurrect my lifemate. What do you have to offer me?”

Mikhail's eyes closed briefly, then fluttered open again with determination in his gaze.

“ I can show you how to return your love to the world of the living, and, I will help you destroy Amelia, my Prince.”

Alucard released Mikhail's throat.

“What do you require of me? She owns my powers as if they were her own. I cannot move against her until I find a way around that.”

“She cannot control you here . . . and she . . . cannot see you. Find my soul and . . . return it to this body. I am drifting and . . . cannot communicate with you . . . much more. It takes all . . . my strength not to lose myself completely.”

Alucard nodded.

“I will find your soul. And then you will do as you have promised. If you are lying, I will return you to the world of the living. To her.”

Mikhail nodded and the eyes of the body closed, and he turned from the altar without a backward glance in search of Mikhail's lost soul.

The halls of the Chamber were changed greatly from their counterpart in the material world, but Alucard still knew where he was going.

He had a feeling he knew where Mikhail's soul was.

Alucard could not tell how long he had been in the world of the dead, walking the tunnel to The Garden. But it wasn't long before he found it. Unlike in the world of the living, the door to the tunnel in this realm was still firmly attached. He phased through it, having discovered by trying to turn the handle that he could not affect his environment in the world of the dead without draining his strength.

The Garden was full of twisted black flowers of every kind and the irony nearly made Alucard laugh. So maybe Amelia had named the Chambers appropriately after all. Or perhaps this world had changed to suit her. He walked through the room, flowers wilting as he made his way through the room.

And when he entered the washroom, he found that unlike in the real world, there was a spiral staircase that led upward into the Chamber of Submission. So he ascended the stairs and what he saw in the upper Chamber made his eyes widen.

The Chamber held prisoners. Most of them male, all of them held in various forms of torture, frozen in agony, their torturers just as unmoving. And even the captors had looks of pain on their faces. It was worse than the sight of Siphons hanging from the ceiling in The Garden.

Alucard continued forward. As he walked through the room, he studied the still and silent ones who occupied it, and found that he recognized some of the faces.

Abigail.

Integra's youngest son, Isaac.

Numerous Hellsing soldiers.

And even Adam was here, a captor rather than a prisoner.

The look of sheer torment on his face said that it didn't matter much in the end.

Moving on, a strange pull took hold of him, a voice his ears couldn't detect calling him. Demanding that he listen. He followed this pull and it led him past the frozen forms of those he began to recognize as Amelia's accomplices and victims.

In the center of the room there was, elevated on a wooden platform much like a gallows, a lone figure on its knees.

Mikhail.

Alucard approached the platform, studying him.

His head was bent in defeat, his hands raised and outstretched before him. They cradled a gently throbbing heart. Blood covered him nearly from head to toe.

He was alone on the platform.

His personal torture was his isolation, reflecting his life, and his own emotional agony. He was isolated from the other victims in this form, heart in hand.

Mikhail had died to escape Amelia and found that she would not release him, even in death. He had never found his soulmate, because of her. He was doomed to spend eternity alone.

Standing upon the platform, Alucard looked at Mikhail's sad, defeated soul for a long moment. Then he reached out his hand, gently touching the still-beating heart that Mikhail's hands cradled.

The frozen form of Mikhail threw back its head and let out a long, inhuman scream.

And then vanished.

There was blood where he had knelt and from the smell, Alucard knew it was Victoria's.

Was she here?

At that moment, Mikhail's living body materialized before him, and Alucard knew he had succeeded.

“I gave you a promise to help you. I will keep it.”

Mikhail beckoned Alucard to follow, and led him down the steps to the platform and into the sea of tormented souls.

“I owe you this,” Mikhail said as he walked, “Her blood is on my hands. So is theirs.”

He gestured to the other frozen forms around them.

“But I can do nothing for them. It would take one such as you to help them the way you will help your lover, and for them, their chance is long gone. Amelia must die for what she has done here to be undone. And even after she is gone, they cannot return to the world of the living.”

Mikhail turned and soon they came upon the figure Mikhail sought.

Victoria.

“She is the only one who can be resurrected. But even for this, Amelia must still be destroyed.”

Her body was positioned like a pagan blood offering, a a gaping wound on her chest, her teeth clenched and her eyes squeezed shut in a grimace of pain. Blood poured from a puncture wound on her neck, the only thing moving in a world of stillness.

The puncture wounds caused by Alucard's bite. His mark.

“What must I do?”

“You must take her soul into your body.”

Alucard reached for Victoria, stroking her face for a moment, her tormented figure unresponsive. Then he slid his fingers down to her neck, and pulled, the chains that held her still fragmenting into nothing and he lifted her. He brought his mouth to the puncture wounds on her neck and began to feed.

Her blood tasted as it had when she was human, the first time he had bitten her, and he recognized that her soul was still very human in many ways, even after all this time.

But unlike previous times, he did not stop as his senses told him that he was reaching the danger point. Alucard continued to draw her blood into his body. In the instant when he knew she had been drained completely, her soul became insubstantial and entered his body. He felt a strange sense of wholeness.

“Be warned,” Mikhail murmured, placing his hand on Alucard's shoulder, “If Amelia discovers her soul within you, she will destroy you. If you die in your battle with her, your mate's soul will leave your ashes and move on into the next world, and you will come here. And then no one can save you.”

“I understand.”

“Now, come with me. I shall show you how you will kill Amelia.”

And he found himself back in the Chamber where Mikhail's spirit-world body had once lain, and Mikhail led him to the altar.

“Lay down on the altar.”

Alucard did so and Mikhail placed his hand over Alucard's heart, closing his eyes.

“To kill Amelia, you will have to return to the world of the living in my body. To return to your own body, you just need to come in contact with it. But before you can do that, you have to tear out her heart. If you tried to do this in your own vessel, she would use your bond of servitude to stop you and would probably destroy you. Tearing out her heart will not kill her. You need her own magic to do that, and I assume you have a source?”

Alucard thought of Deyavi and Gavril and nodded.

“Yes, I do.”

“You will know what to do when the time comes.”

Mikhail smiled, eyes still closed.

“When you enter my body, my soul will be pushed from this place and into the next life. I will be free of her.”

And then he pressed his fingertips into Alucard's chest and into his body, and Alucard felt as though he had been flung into a whirlwind.

When the wild spinning sensation passed, he found that it was dark, warm, and that no matter how hard he listened, he could not hear a heart beating in his chest.

He knew that he was in Mikhail's body.

* * * * * * * *

In that same instant, Deyavi heard a silent voice singing within her very veins and knew it was time.

“Deyavi.”

Alucard's voice called to her.

She smiled. After Malakai had told her what had happened on the cliffs, she had known he was on the right path, but had found herself unsure for a time. It was so easy to get lost in the land of the dead.

But she heard his voice clearly, felt it in her very soul, and knew he had escaped. She also knew how.

It was time. It was time. It was finally almost over, one way or the other.

She looked at Gavril, and he put a hand on her cheek, stroked her face with his fingertips.

“We should go,” Deyavi said quietly, and Gavril nodded, smiling.

“We mustn't keep the Prince waiting,” he replied.