Pip leaned over the table and poured a little more blood into Seras' wine glass before falling heavily back into his chair and reaching for the whiskey bottle, which she unobtrusively pushed toward his hand before he knocked it over. She honestly didn't understand why the mercenary captain had shown up at her door holding a whiskey tumbler, a wine glass, a bottle of whiskey, and a bag of medical blood. She'd let him in more out of paralyzed surprise than anything else.

And now, there they sat. Seras was slowly drinking the blood and Pip was quickly consuming the whiskey and telling her stories of the mercenary life. Some were funny, some were frankly bizarre, and some were cautionary.

"We took a contract in Africa once."

Seras looked up from her glass at the tone in the mercenary's voice. He sounded grim.

"We've taken more than one contract in Africa. Hell, I left my eye there on a different mission. But the one I'm thinking of…" he sighed and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, but put them away when he saw Seras wrinkle her nose.

"The one I'm thinking of was a bitch of a job. I didn't even want to take it."

"Then why did you?" Seras cocked her head and watched Pip put both elbows on the table and prop his chin up on his hands.

"We needed the money. There's not an insurance company in the world that will touch the Wild Geese and we pay a lot of our fees out to patching up the men. The sort of surgery our guys need after a mission doesn't come cheap. And it was in the Comoros. We thought we'd have a bit of a vacation, spend some time at the beach, pick up pretty island women." He screwed his face up almost comically at her before looking serious again.

Seras looked at Pip in a slightly different light. She had heard that one of the stipulations for the Geese working with Hellsing was that the organization would pay off their debts. She had assumed the debts were for debauchery and gambling or things that were similarly unwholesome. She'd never thought about the realities of taking care of a bunch of men who hired their guns to the highest bidder.

"We were providing extra security for a little tin dictator who knew there was a coup brewing. We'd been there for two weeks, gotten settled in, were starting to get a feel for the lay of the land and which way the political wind was blowing" He gave one of those uniquely expressive Gallic shrugs and held his hands up as though to say, Who can predict when people will choose to be stupid? "And then the president called us in to tell us that he was going to give a speech from the balcony of the presidential palace.

"He was just setting himself up for a sniper."

Seras was drawn in by the story despite herself and asked, "Did you tell him that?"

He stopped talking to turn his unsteady eye on the empty glass in front of him. What followed was a display of drunken clumsiness that had Seras hiding her mouth with her hands to not burst out laughing. After Seras repeated her question, Pip nodded and put the mouth of the glass over the upright whiskey bottle and turned both over together. He whooped at the sudden flow of liquor, but pulled the bottle away and set it upright with only a minor incidence of alcohol abuse via spilled whiskey.

"We warned him. We did everything we could to explain to him that assassinating him in public would be a better tactic for people who wanted to send an impossible to ignore message about who was in charge. But that stubborn bastard wouldn't listen to the people he was paying to keep him alive."

Pip pulled a face and mockingly imitated their client, "'I rule here and I won't let some fools keep me from proving it. They won't dare to attack me in front of my citizens.'"

Dropping the imitation, he snorted derisively. "As if commanding mercenaries, and the army, and the treasury, and the media, and practically whether his citizens could take a piss without him wasn't enough proof. He could have given a broadcast on radio and TV and made a similar point without setting himself up for what happened next."

"They killed him, didn't they?" It just seemed inevitable to Seras. She was more interested in how the Geese had survived the experience.

"Yeah. As assassinations go, it was perfect. We never even saw the sniper. There were just too many hidey-holes and we couldn't cover every possible vantage. And while we protected a fool who wouldn't take basic precautions to protect himself, the revolutionaries took over power plants, media outlets, and water systems throughout the country."

Pip gave up on trying to get more whiskey into his glass without spilling it and took a swig straight from the bottle before finishing the story. "The people who took over after him were pretty decent, actually. They picked up our contract and we bugged out after the first elections. It worked out pretty well for them, if not for Abderamane."

He wrinkled his nose, making the plaster there shift with the skin. "And all of their people listened to us about security. They knew that the best way to make a coup stick was to make it public and crippling."

"Captain, your stories are interesting, but why are you down here with me?"

"Because we've got more fighting on the horizon, girly. I can smell it." He laid an unsteady finger along his nose. "And I can see it." He tapped his eye patch. "And people's lives are going to depend on you and that crazy bastard you call 'Master.' I want you to take some of these stories to heart when the Boss decides she's too tough to listen to the people she pays to take care of her."