Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing.
Author's Thanks: I never published another Pip Explains so I didn't get the chance to thank: Abc (thanks for the correction on Integra's age), LadyAkki (thanks about the Yumie/Yumiko correction and 'psychotic pet vampire' is an excellent way of describing Alucard), RosoMC (many thanks for our email exchange!), FairFighter, LadyShiva (yup, I love trying to talk Anderson-ish, it's ever so funny!...now if only people around me knew what I'm on about….-sob-), estrella solitaria (thank you, thank you very much), estrella solitaria (thank you very much) and last but not least Cid Dante, thank you all so very much!
Many thanks to Metallica for Fade to Black.
Warnings: slight mentions of shonen-ai and Shoujo-ai (or Shojo-ai….whatever….) and umm….. Several nasty things….And historical facts. You have to write something historically correct with Hellsing and especially with Millennium because damned Hirano ( sorry if I'm upsetting anybofy) seemed to have forgotten a few chapters in world history….grrrr….I am so guilt tripping over each volume, damn him!
Oh, and if in the middle of the fic you suddenly hear me go 'AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGG' it's because Du Hast started playing on my computer and I'm having an overload.
Important Author's Notes: Since it will give me a tremendous headache and will freak the Word spellchecker if I'll write this with the German accent Schrödinger has, I'll write this in normal English and write whatever any character says in that ……I'm working with an online German dictionary for this…..grrrr…. I assumed Schrödinger is a werewolf because the millennium goons are called werewolves and cats don't have ears like that, I should know, I work in a cat shelter.
Creeping Down Corridors at Mid Night
I don't know where I came from. I know what year I was born, where I was born and….from the many lewd stories the men tell at night when they're bored….how I came to be but…..
No one is like me around here so I can never point out at a certain feature in someone and say "Hey, are you my vader?".
When I was young I often believed the fairytales about storks brining babies, I found no other theory to cling to.
I am a werewolf, a real one, unlike all those around me who are only named so. They are human, completely, for sure, vampire humans but definitely humans.
I am a werewolf. I have little black ears to the side of my head, sticking out and furry. I have sharp canine teeth and sharp molars, made that way to tear meat not chew vegetables and pastries.
I have a black tale coming from my backside where you have your tailbone and nothing else.
You've never noticed? Hah! It is because I keep it in my pants, tucked between my legs. When I bathe I wag it about for all the times I wanted to wag it but couldn't because it might scare the men. It feels kind of funny to be with your tale between your legs all the time, makes you feel sort of constantly succumbed.
Maybe that's what I am.
I always thought I was so damn rebellious (as rebellious as you can be here, that is). I ran around in the yard, in the big gathering halls, in the big war room, listening to no one as they holler at me to "Hor auf zu toben schon!".
I only listened to the Major in those moods, in any crazy adventurous mood actually.
He'd walk up to me on his stumpy, well padded legs and bow down a little to pet me on the head (in the days when I was still small enough for him to have to bow down. These days I'm a little taller while he's still short and stumpy! heh) mumbling under his breath "Ah Schrodinger, Schrodinger, Schrodinger, Schrodinger. Vhat vill ve do viz you?"
His smile always interested me. It's like watching dough split in half and pushed sideways, the extra material sliding into the splitting line in small cascades.
I told him that often, told him he needs a diet. He laughs while the Professor raged and screams at me for my insolence. But the Major never cared; he just laughed lightly and petted me on the head.
This is another thing I will never get; why I was never punished in my life. Yes, in my whole life! Unglaubhaft!
If the Major had anything to do with it I was left untouched, un-yelled at, above the law.
As long as for thanks I'd curl at his feet when he sat in his big chair I was forgive by the Major, for everything.
Sometimes I wonder what's hidden inside his little piggish eyes. What's in the glitters I see in his eyes, there's something there and I can feel it, I know it. But it's hard to tell with his glasses on, and it's hard to tell when there's noise all around me and smells all around me.
That is a disadvantage of being a real werewolf. The smell and sound of everything around me.
Whenever there's a big meeting in the war room I have to pinch my nose at the sudden attack, put ear plugs to keep me from a big headache.
The war room is very small when compared to the other meeting rooms we have. It's walls are so thick and so smooth it traps every sound, bouncing it back at me. It traps every smell until I am crushed under the stench.
Colognes are a very touchy subject here in Millennium. If you are one of the high ranking officers you'd search out for the most expensive one, returning to the war room smelling like an Indian whore.
If you were one of the common soldiers you'd never bother to put cologne. Hell, you'll never bother to shower at all at times! They think it's manly to stink like a pig……they tell me I must be a woman if I talk like that and I bark at them to shut up.
"Vat vill you do if ve von't stop?" one leers over me. I hate bullies.
"He vill go and whine to the Major, that is vhat he vill do"
I hate bullies who know what they're talking about.
So what if I run to the Major and whine about it? He does things about it whenever I come to him with complaints.
Like the officer who hit me with rolled newspaper once when I was a child (should I say I was a pup? Ich weiß nichts davon) for stealing his slippers and chewing them to bits.
I couldn't control myself! When I was seven I had to have something to chew on or I'd go mad! I'd start chewing people's hands if I didn't have something in my mouth!
So I stole his slipper, big deal!
He ran up to me (I still had the slipper in my mouth) with the rolled newspaper and hit me, yelling at me that I'm a bad dog. Screw him!
The Major came in, snatched the newspaper from him and hit him with it, three times more then the officer hit me. Then he dragged him off and fed him to the soldiers. Heh.
That is another thing I wonder about, why am I such an exceptional to the Major? He says it's because I'm the Last Battalion's mascot. Tssk.
I get restless at night. Nights with a full moon drive me crazy, but are no different from any other night when it comes to restlessness, on these nights I howl as well as roam around our base.
I like walking around in the higher ranking soldiers, the werewolves living quarter, sneaking and creeping around from room to room, trying to tire myself to sleep.
There aren't many rooms along these corridors so I haven't much to look at. Sometimes, on lucky nights when everyone gets restless too, I catch the sight of interesting things.
But before I will tell you about their rooms I will tell you about mine:
There isn't much there……
A bed, big and comfortable and on the floor so I won't roll out of my bed in sleep and crush on the floor (besides, sleeping on the floor feels much more natural to me).
A bookcase….with nothing in it…..I'm not a bookworm; words make my head go a little foggy. They dance before my eyes until I can't focus on anything anymore.
The Professor says that I have a learning difficulty and mumbles that he made me imperfect.
He really works himself into a small craze when he's reminded of some imperfection in me. Then the Major has to calm him down, put a hand on his shoulder and whisper something to him to stop whatever it was he wanted to do to me.
I fear the Professor a little.
I have a table and a chair I never used because sitting on a chair makes my tail hurt if it's tucked in. the table I never used because it was meant for reading or working on homework or anything that has to do with words. I told you about words.
There's a shelf with lots and lots and lots of small jars on it. So many jars piled up one on the other. My collection of the forest.
I take walks in the forest around our base, letting my nose and ears pull me after the interesting thing. What I find I take back to my room where I will put it in a jar and wait for an extra boring or saddening day in which I will take the thing out and re-examine it.
A twig with the territory marking scent of some high predator, a leaf with an interesting aroma, a piece of excrement from an interesting anime (don't frown, it's interesting!), an interesting bug, a rock, a piece of wood….anything.
I sit on my bed and open them, jar by jar, absorbing myself in the little pieces of forest, closing my eyes and seeing the forest about me. It is one of my only pleasures along with rampaging around the base and pissing the higher ranking officers off.
What now? Ah yes, the others' rooms.
Let us start with Zorin's room. She's not in at the moment. Rip must be playing her records.
Zorin has the same smell the soldiers have, sweat and musk and well polished metal. She keeps her scythe hanged ceremoniously on the wall by her simple closet.
She has a closet. it is a joke if you know Zorin. She hardly changes clothes, she hardly washes whatever she has. She drops her dirty socks on the floor and never picks them up. Whenever I walk by Zorin's room I have to prepare myself mentally for the bad odors I will pick up.
Many components in those odors are very interesting to me and often, when I was young, I would creep into her room and sniff out at her socks, her shirts, her pants.
She walked in on me one day and kicked me out, swearing like a drunken sailor. After that she bought some kind of scented oil or spray that is supposed to be awfully stinking to dogs. I can't enter her room now.
Here this is something I will never understand: the mirror. A long mirror hung on the wall of her room with a little shelf by it's side. Why such a narcissistic item in the room of the butchest woman in all of history!
As I watched her tend to another new tattoo I realized what the mirror was for. She had to see where exactly she was applying the Bepanten cream(). She has so many tattoos…..doesn't it hurt her?
I hate needles; I can't even start to imagine all the little pricks she has to stand with every new tattoo. I shiver at the very thought.
She keeps pornographic pictures of women on the walls of her room. She tears them down whenever there's room inspection. She hangs them right back five seconds after the inspection is over.
I would have walked into her room to inspect those pictures if it weren't for the spray she has there. All I can see from here are two parallel spots and an upside-down blackened triangle a little lower.
I can't tell if those pictures mean anything to me from this distance.
Why I want to know if those pictures mean anything to me? I don't know. There's a bugging question in the back of my head. But it is so sneaky and slippery that whenever I try to grasp it, to bring it to words and clear thoughts, it escapes me.
Never mind, Zorin's room is a pig-sty! widerlich!
Next is Rip's room. She never talks to me; she's a lot like Zorin, talking to me only to mock me. Like I care, a couple of schlamps those girls!
Her room is very tidy; order and hygiene are two things very important to Rip. Her room smells of starch and ironing. Sometimes I think that's all she does besides playing her operas and cleaning her rifle; tending to her suits. The smell is so strong it even overcomes the smell of the oil she applies on her rifle.
Right now she's playing her operas, singing along with the singers or pretending to be the singers, making out the words with her mouth.
When Zorin is there Rip takes the roles of the female singer and Zorin takes the role of the male singers. They like playing 'Fair Lady and Fair Suitor', dancing and whirling about her room along with the music.
They always end up in each other's arms when they play that game and they always kiss.
If they catch me watching they make a bigger fuss about it, trying to see what I'll do.
I do nothing. I just stare and if they start making too much fuss I walk away.
I walk away.
The next room belongs to the only friend I have here. It is the Captain's room.
The Captain's room is as simple as mine, even simpler. It has a single bed, a single shelf, a single stool and a small round table where he keeps his tools.
The Captain carves things in his time off. He carved me a charming little bird, the replica of an interesting bird I was chasing after in one of my forest walks and escaped me. He made it from a piece of wood we found in the forest on that walk. He made sure I found that piece of wood as interesting as the bird before he selected it. That was after I stopped crying for the bird I missed (I was very young and easy to have tantrums and crying fits).
I didn't tell you, but I keep the bird on the little shelf by my bed. Sometimes I cuddle it in the night, the smell of the wood soothing me when I really can't sleep.
Right now he's carving a chess piece for a set he's making. He made the chessboard and every piece on it. The black side are carved into Hellsing members while the white side is us.
The King is the Major, the Queen is carved like Hitler's wife (I forgot her name) and the other various chess pieces are us, the Millennium soldiers, werewolves and officers. I am the Runner. Because I can move very fast and I'm always running about places.
The Captain hardly speaks at all. Silence is golden for him and he sticks to it religiously. I don't think I ever heard him talk. Maybe when we go hunting in the forest and none of the men understand what he's trying to do, he goes up to them and mumbles something in their ears. His voice is deep and clear as river water. I like his voice; it's soothing, very manly.
I walk into his room and sit at his feet. He is sitting on his stool, carving another of our soldiers as the peons for our side. He shoots a glance at me and resumes his carving.
I can sit for hours and watch him carve. There's something about his hand movements that fascinate me; his hands are so big and rough yet they can move so delicately, producing such delicate features with his rough knife.
He files the wooden piece and sawdust gets in my nose. I sneeze a little.
He looks at me, stopping his filing for a moment, and a tiny smile appear at the edge of his lips.
Was it cute, the way I sneezed? I remember that whenever anyone mentioned how I was cute as a kid (pup!) he'd look at me and that tiny smile would appear.
If it's true then my heart will start pounding powerfully and my head will spin. I will be very happy. I usually get affection from the Major only and for the tiny moments of free time he has. The others reprimand me, mock me or use me (I'm very good at picking up sounds of metal creaking in our hangers after the winter brought rust to the roofs).
The Captain is a little special to me. There's something about his height, his broad shoulders, his calm appearance, his all watching eyes and all hearing ears. His silence makes his voice, when it comes, if it comes, precious to me. The day that he will actually talk to me I will surely die of happiness.
He's finished with the peon, placing it in it's square on the set. He has to get up off his stool to do so and that gives me a chance to pull a little trick.
As he gets up I hurry to settle on his stool. Not elegantly cross-legged like I do when I want to snob out at the higher ranking officers, just sitting there with my hands on my knees in expectation.
The Captain turns around to discover that I have prevented him of sitting on his work stool. I have to fight my guilt to remain on the chair.
He stares at me for a moment, then walks up to his working table, ruffling my hair as he takes another piece of wood and his work tools, and sits on his bed.
I am too overwhelmed by the ruffling, so gentle and soft, to notice that he accepted my sudden unexplained need to sit on his stool.
I tried having him teach me how to carve. I failed miserably. I'm not that good at holding things, tools are beyond me.
He was never angry at me, even when I destroyed a piece of wood it took him three hours of roaming around the forest to find. He simply stared at the ruined wood and my trembling, sore palms, taking the tools gently from my hands and putting them down on the table. He didn't look angry at me for it but I still apologised until he laid his hand on my head to silence me (or was it his way of saying "it's okay, that's enough").
The Captain is very kind to me, always, and I am grateful for it.
But tonight I am restless, too restless to sit and watch him carve yet another peon.
And there's something in the air that rings an alarming bell in my head. A smell I know too well. A smell I am unwilling to recognise. Yet I know I have no choice in it, it will come anyway whether I want it or not.
I get up and excuse myself. The Captain nods lightly and resumes his carving. I can feel his eyes on my back as I walk out.
The next room is the Professor's.
His room is creepy. I don't like walking past it, into it, around it. I don't even like walking on the floor above it.
It's not a room, it's a lab!
I don't know why everybody calls him 'Professor', he is a doctor. I think I heard mumblings about the Professor being sought after by a group of assassins calling themselves 'Mosad' or something so they named him 'Professor' instead of 'Doctor'. I don't know.
There is an operation table in his room, standing right in the middle of the large room, drenched with the smell of disinfectants and various medical chemicals.
Medical chemicals are the ones with the sharpest, most pungent smell in the whole world. They're like pinpricks to my nose, to my head. Whenever I walk anywhere near the Professor's room I get a headache worse then when I walk past Zorin's room. This smell is bad but it's sinister-bad, not stinking-bad like Zorin's.
The Professor often reeks of these chemicals when out of his room, that means he treated somebody to something. Sometimes people walk into his room and never leave. They're locals, not one of us, never. Although…..
Although I heard that the Professor helped make me into what I am with the knowledge he got from those locals. They helped make me a werewolf instead of a normal human baby. I don't know how they did it.
I know that before I came there others like me, others that weren't perfect as me…..
……I don't want to think about it…..
I don't want to think about the night I snooped around the Professor's room too much and found that cabinet where he kept them, my brothers and sisters.
Deformed, twisted, mutants, monsters. All held in jars filled with formalin.
They all had their eyes closed as if in sleep but when I closed mine to sleep for the next few months they woke. They screamed at me.
I screamed in my sleep.
I slept in the Captain's room for about a year after that.
If I'd scream, arms would quickly surround me softly and I'd fall asleep again.
When the arms wrapped around me I would sleep like a baby, and the nightmares were gone.
But I said I don't want to talk about it, didn't I?
I'll tell you about the Professor's shelves of files. He keeps all his past works there, all the researches he did in the war (according to the dates on the little white stickers on each file).
'Pregnancy disruptions', 'Injury recovery rates at early age', 'Injury recovery rates in twins', 'Injury recovery rates in dwarfs'.
'Castrations'. 'Eye colour improvement'. 'Extreme air pressure survival rate' (a very slim file with only one page saying "all specimens annihilated"). Files over files over files of experiments from the Professor's past.
If you stand with your face to the files, if you walk into the Professor's room at all, you'll feel like you're being watched. You'll be right.
On the wall facing the shelves with the files there are hundreds of tiny shelves stuck into the wall. On each shelf, inside small jars filled with transparent formalin, eyes are kept.
From bottom to top the eye colours grow brighter and brighter, from the darkest black to the brightest blue.
I would linger before this wallpaper that stares back at you and observe the various colours if I wasn't colour blind and if the smell in the room and the trauma from that cabinet wouldn't make me bolt out of there after five minutes.
I don't enter the Professor's room now, he's not in. I never walk into the room when he's in because that's when the door is closed and I can't see what's going on.
I can smell what's going on, hear what he does in there but the moment all my sensations draw enough conclusions to paint a vivid picture I bolt away, shivers running down my spine.
I don't linger by the Professor's room now because I hear the Professor calling me from a few rooms away. It is the Major's room he calls me from.
I have to go. I have no choice. I don't want to but no one is asking me.
The Professor told me it's my genes fighting against one another. This is the reason why I have to get these shots every once in a while, or I'll die.
It started around the time I turned sixteen that my genes began to fight against each other. Funny, I always thought they were supposed to constantly fight against each other, not realise it half way trough my life…..
When I turned sixteen, they started building the big zeppelin hangers. They worked day and night to build the huge hangers.
The noise drove me crazy, especially the sound of the metal drills against the metal slabs from which they made the roofs.
I had migraines from hell. That's when the doctor began his shots.
Why the Major was in the room when I got my shots I don't know. Why I got the shots in the Major's room I don't know. Why my head started feeling heavy, my eyelids drooped and sleep began overcoming me after each shot I don't know. Why I was laid gently on the Major's sofa after the shot I don't know. No one tells me.
Why I can foggily remember opening my eyes in the middle of the coma the shot brings me, and seeing the Major looming over my, leering hungrily, I don't know. Why he was rocking while he leered I don't know.
Why I ache when I wake from my sleep I don't know. Why my clothes are dishevelled, my shirt slightly or completely open (sometimes the buttons are ripped off) I don't know. Why I often have what looks like bite marks on my neck and chest I don't know. Why it's pains me to sit I don't know.
I tried asking the Professor and he told me it's the side effects of bits of my body with a concentration of violent genes being attacked or attacking. I'm not very good at strategy or genetics but he is the expert so I guess it's true.
I wake up a few hours before dawn. My body is a lump of pain. A few buttons on my shirt's collar are torn out out, another hanging limply by it's last threads. I have a bite mark on my neck and another on my collarbone. I have a bite mark on my left nipple and three more across my stomach. Rubbing against my pants' fabric I can feel several small bite marks on my thighs. My belt is open.
My arms shake as I rise from lying down on the sofa. There's a strange smell around me, a cloud hanging heavy in the air around the sofa. It's musk and sweat and something else I did not get to the bottom of yet.
I reek of it.
I like taking long hot showers after each shot I get. It makes me feel clean though I know not what I clean myself of.
My legs shake as I rise to my feet and begin to stumble back to my room. I stumble and fall down a few steps in the staircase to my room's floor. I barely manage to hand on to the railing to stop me from rolling down the stairs completely.
Creeping down the corridors at mid night.
I need to lean on the wall as I limp to my room. My head is heavy and aching. My vision is clouded, my eyes sting. The shots. The Major leering. I will not think about it. My whole body is in pain, on fire.
The floor feels soft when I crush on it, my skin failing to register sensation properly when I am feverish. I always have a fever after I get my shots.
A familiar sound beams into my mind through the fog; the scraping of wood. I turn my face to see that I have crushed on the floor by the Captain's room.
The Captain!
I crawl on my hands and knees to settle down at his feet again. My head is too heavy and I am too tired, aching and weary to do anything more then lean my head against his thy and sink into a real sleep.
I don't know why I felt two burning hot drops make their way from my eyes down my cheeks. I don't know why more followed them. I don't know anything anymore.
I didn't know the Captain looked down at me (he was looking at me from the moment I crawled into his room) and noticed the bite marks exposed by my ruined shirt.
I don't know why he suddenly clenched his fist until he snapped the half-made peon in his hand into sawdust.
I don't know why he growled in anger and shook with rage.
I don't know why he got up from his stool, placed me gently on his bed, and walked to his chess set.
I don't know why when I woke up the next day's noon I found the King without a head. I didn't know the Captain threw the wooden head into his room's little fireplace.
I don't know many things.
(End)
() Bepanten is a cream most recommended to use on new tattoos from the day of their making until about two weeks later once the tattoo is fully healed and can be exposed to the sun. it helps regenerate the skin and accelerates the body's 'accepting' of the tattoo's ink. Having five tattoos I think I can have a little lecture over it. Yes, I just wrote that line to brag about my tattoos…..sad, but true.