Alucard moved first, a hand darting lightning-fast to flip the cover over the picture while his eyes never lost contact with Anderson's...but they narrowed and the pupils constricted to a bare trace of a line. Bad enough that the bastard tromped abound and damaged his home, chased him from his lair, and threatened his child...but now he was intruding on him in the studio! Which Master had stocked and set aside specifically for him!
He saw red.
A moment later, so did Anderson.
A vampire is a deceptively powerful creature. The paintbrush flew across the room faster than Anderson could see and slammed into his nose, paint flung entirely across both lenses.
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The paint was a lovely soft pinkish-red, and that was all he could see. Anderson's nose hurt briefly, but that wasn't the concern, the concern was the lack of visibility with a predator only a few feet away. He whipped off the glasses with one hand, grabbed a blade with the other...to see the room empty of both vampire and easel. Cursing roundly, he stomped off to clean his glasses. Then stomped back because it needed paint thinner to remove the paint after all. Then stomped off again to finish the job with a good rinse. Once no longer handicapped, he fully intended to go slice that vampire into tiny bits, let it regenerate, then do it again.
Glasses clean, he paused. Where to even BEGIN to find the vampire? He had no idea, not really. This would require some thinking, and he returned to "his" room to consider options.
First, the damn vampire was the painter and probably the chess player? Why on Earth would a vampire want anything to do with either? Was it some sort of punishment imposed by Integra?
Another memory pushed its way to the forefront of his mind. Blood bags. While he'd ridiculed the vampire as a housetrained dog, he was well aware that it was purely a predator. One reason he loathed Hellsing so much (though lost in the pile of other reasons) was that it fought vampires while having one, then TWO vampires, which hunted and ate people themselves! The blood bags were likely just because of the lack of edible people in London right now, yes?
Then again, Alucard would have no problem in traveling outside the borders, eating to his heart's content, and leaving the slaughtered bodies behind upon return to London.
So...why a blood bag?
Convenience?
He sat on the bed, back against a stack of pillows, legs crossed, and just...thought. He'd been doing plenty of action, plenty of hunting, plenty of searching...but he'd never taken the time to actually consider where he was, what he was doing, and what he was seeing.
Integra's minimalistic room as opposed to the luxurious den of sin he'd imagined. The lack of opulent luxury anywhere in the house, honestly. No gold plating here. It was simple and functional. Expensive and elegant, yes, but not frivolous. The Vatican looked positively decadent next to this home.
The little vampire's room. Uniforms in the closet, not exactly the expected attire of a seductress preying upon the innocent. Bright colors, pictures, a PLUSH TOY on the bed(?), everything in that room screamed that she was just a sweet young woman and not an undead blooddrinking monster of the night.
Alucard's room. He hadn't found the lair but while he'd mentally pictured a stinking blood-soaked room festooned with bits of rotting bodies and gore, perhaps a chair of bones...he'd found something simple and plain. With BOOKS for God's sake!
Books...the beast had been selecting chess books. Playing a chess game at what was admittedly a master level. The PAINTING? His brain fought that one, but memory supplied the image of a smear of paint on the beast's gloves.
He was painting. A vampire. Painting.
A FLOWER.
Anderson stacked these facts up against what he'd personally observed from Alucard, Integra, Seras, and Walter during previous...interactions. Compared them to what he'd already seen to be typical of vampires and what he'd been taught as vampiric lore by Section 13.
Nothing added up.
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