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Hunting the Hunter	By : DreadfulPenny Category: Hellsing > General Views: 6416 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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A simple kiss can lead two new lovers interesting places, Walter mused several hours later as he propped himself against the headboard and lit a cigarette. Doru pulled the blankets higher for them both and smiled. “When did you start smoking?”
“Hm?” Walter set his lighter aside and blew out a stream of smoke, watching it swirl in the air. “When I was eleven, I think. All the soldiers smoked and I was just this wiry little kid who wanted them to take me seriously, so I started stealing fags and smoking ‘nonchalantly’ where people could see me.”
Doru laughed and motioned for Walter to give him the cigarette. After taking a drag and handing it back, he asked, “Did it work?”
“No, but the habit stuck. It used to be my only vice.” He traced a faint blue vein down Doru’s arm with a fingertip. “Now I have you, so I suppose I have two vices.”
“Am I a vice to you?” Doru asked with such forced casualness it nearly made Walter wince.
Walter glanced over at his face and shook his head as much at himself as Doru. “I don’t know what you are to me besides important. A week ago I would have sworn that something like this would never happen - could never happen. But now... I don’t think star-crossed even begins to describe what we have.”
“The monster hunter and the monster,” Doru said sadly. “Who can say what fate will bring such star-crossed lovers?”
“Two weeks of this,” Walter said. “Two weeks in which to be lovers. Two weeks for me to put things right in my head about everything.” About being lover to a man and monster, about his parents and the incubus, about Christian Wallace and Arthur Hellsing. About everything.
“But not right now. Right now I want you to tell me a story. Tell me about you and Mihaela.”
Doru sighed as though Walter had just made a difficult request. “If that is your wish. I did promise you I would.”
Walter settled lower and pulled the blankets higher. He would always have to provide his own warmth in bed with Doru. What a strange thought, but then, everything about what he was doing with Doru was strange. He simply had no template for how a relationship that defied all convention was supposed to work.
“First, did you know that Mihaela and I are the same age?” Doru asked.
“No,” Walter said. The thought was slightly jarring, even knowing what she and Doru both were.
“We are. Almost like twins. We were born on the same day in the same village in a country that no longer exist. The country has changed names and borders and rulers many times since she and I were born in 1743. Today it is called Czechoslovakia, and the name of the village exists only in her memory and mine, history books haven’t even bothered recording it.”
Doru sounded quietly bitter at that, but he went on. “We were raised together, and had she not been taken so young, doubtless we would have been married. She was my closest friend. We played secret games and told each other stories of the things that lurked in the mountains.”
He smiled nostalgically for a moment and Walter, riveted, thought he saw a ghost of the child Doru had once been in that smile.
“We were heroes in our little stories. We would save our village and our whole country in just a single afternoon, armed with sticks, imagination, and God on our sides.
“Until the night Mihaela disappeared. I remember being wakened by my mother, demanding to know if I knew where she was, and I remember her mother wailing in the square when they gave up the search for her days later, certain that she had gone out in the night to relieve herself and been taken by an animal. We were six years old.
“She had been taken by an animal,” Doru said and Walter could hear an ancient anger under the surface of his words. “But not a wolf or a bear. The vampire who took her... “ He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Do you remember the apology you offered her at the zoo?”
Walter nodded.
“Those kinds of men are her favorite prey for a reason.”
“She told me he died in the last century.”
Doru shook his head. “She lied. We killed him together, and I’m sure you can see why she didn’t want to talk about it. But that comes a bit later.
“First came the years in which I thought my best friend was gone. I got on with my life. People died and that was a cold, hard fact. It still is, but I think children were lied to less about it then, or perhaps that is just my experience.
“When I was twelve, she came back to me one night. She traveled with the one who made her a vampire and they were nearby. She slipped away to find me. If I had done what I was raised to do, I should have told everyone and she would have been hunted down and killed. Her and the vampire who had taken her.”
He shook his head, eyes focused on the distant past. “I couldn’t do that. She was still exactly my best friend in every way, only she wasn’t, she was pale and cold and alien and so sad. I wanted to help her, not hurt her. She said I couldn’t, that I wasn’t strong enough, but that there would come a time when I would be.
“I just wanted to be her hero. I kept her secret, and she would steal away to visit me when her sire would bring her near enough. I saw her again when I was fifteen, and then when I was seventeen, and then I didn’t see her for nearly ten years.”
“What about the rest of your life?” Walter asked. “Did you marry? Have children? Work?”
How strange to think of Doru doing such human things, but they were speaking of a time when Doru had had a heart that beat and blood that rushed in his veins like any other man’s.
“No,” Doru said with another shake of his head. “I didn’t marry. Even then I preferred the company of men. If Mihaela had grown up with me, I would have married her and I think we would have both benefitted, but I doubt it would have produced children. As it was, as I grew up, I threw myself into the hunt. It brought meat and fur to my parents, but I was always honing my skills for other reasons, thinking of when Mihaela would come again needing my help. I knew in my heart that should would come again and I made a point to be ‘too busy’ for a wife and family. I would put my parents off with ‘tomorrow, tomorrow,’ and when tomorrow came, I would be gone on another hunt and I would stay gone in the mountains for days at a time.
“It was on one of those hunts, when I was twenty-six, that Mihaela found me again. I had grown into the man you see now, and she was still a child, only not. She did not speak like a child, she had endured things - and done things - that no child should even know existed.
“She needed my help. She had angered her sire by denying him a murder he demanded. He was going to kill her when he found her. I told her I would hide her, but no, she said he knew her blood and it would call to him. There could be no hiding, only attack.”
Walter nodded his understanding. Such was often the way, and he had never been one for hiding. “You helped her?” he asked.
“Of course,” Doru said, motioning for the cigarette again. Walter passed it over and lit another one for himself. “I never hesitated. Although, looking back, I wonder what I thought I would do after she was free of the one who had made her.”
He shrugged and paused to finish the cigarette while he collected his thoughts for the rest of the tale. After he stubbed out the butt in the ashtray Walter offered, he went on.
“Ironic, really, how it was done. It wasn’t ironic then, but it is now after what happened last week in London. It was my plan, since I knew the area intimately. I took her to a deep ravine I knew. There was a cave in its bottom where we hid her, and I took a high vantage with my bow.
“Mihaela made a fire at the cave mouth so I could see when he came. She said I was far enough away that I would be safe from detection, and I would have been if he had been traveling alone. Her sire came just as she said he would. When I saw him silhouetted against the fire, I shot him through the heart. It was the single best shot of my human life, but while I was focused on him, his newest plaything found me.
“He had made a new child to replace Mihaela and brought her along to see him dispose of her predecessor. It was probably supposed to be instructive. She came to the sound of the bowstring and if she hadn’t been a newly-made vampire, I probably wouldn’t have had any chance at all, but I heard the rustle of brush and crack of broken branches and drew my knife.
“She sprang on me from the darkness and it was all I could do to bring my bow up to hold her off. I remember being amazed at how strong she was, just before I fell backwards off my perch and tumbled down the ravine with her still on top of me.”
His laugh was harsh and humorless. “I was led to my death by a little girl who was mad with what had been done with her.” He paused and mused, “Do I mean the little girl who attacked me, or do I mean Mihaela?
“Mihaela had to tell me the rest, I was near death from the injuries I took in the fall. She says I was conscious when I reached the bottom, but I don’t remember it. She killed the child before she could finish the job of killing me.
“It was Mihaela who made me a vampire. Sometimes she says she regrets it, sometimes she admits that’s a lie. Sometimes she says all she regrets is that she will never have a body I will desire, either in age or sex. Sometimes she says that she hates me because I remember.
“We were together for eighty years, more or less, after that. We left our homeland behind and travelled as father and daughter or brother and sister. We eventually split up when she found a woman who would play the role of her mother. By that time I had fallen in love with London and stayed while she moved on. Our paths would cross from time to time, because just as her sire could find her, she could find me. In Paris, in Rome, more than once here in London. We would meet, spend time together, and part once again.
“Now we are old, old friends who love one another deeply, with a constant ‘but’ between us.”
Walter cleared his throat. “What is the but?”
Doru half-smiled and closed his eyes. “But I hate her for making the choice for me.”

•••

Richard left the club in the early hours of the morning with the folder with the report on Walter’s Dornez’s assignation with a vampire safely locked in his briefcase. He had rung up several Round Table members from the club and had appointments with them to discuss this newest information and how it reflected on Arthur’s poor judgment and how far he had come from old Abraham’s ideals of the only good monster being a dead monster.
His benefactor had assured him that Walter Dornez was going to be well and truly detained in Scotland, promising that some of his most trusted men were in position in Aberdeen to lead the butler a merry chase.
“Who knows, Herr Hellsing,” the pudgy little man had said, “perhaps the butler will not survive to return to London at all.”
Richard slid behind the wheel of the car he had borrowed from Hellsing’s motor pool and started the drive back to Hellsing manor. He wondered what Arthur was doing. Was he consulting with his two cronies, Islands and Penwood? That Penwood was a useless lump, but Richard didn’t underestimate Islands. Top marks at Eton and at Oxford after that, and his competent leadership of his family’s business and political dealings made Hugh Islands more of a threat in Richard’s mind than his own brother.
If someone was going to help guide Arthur through this and out the other side, it would probably be the current Sir Islands.
“But what about your man? The one managing things in Scotland.” Richard had asked his patron. How he hated that gleaming smile he got in response; it almost wasn’t human. “Didn’t he kill one of your people in London? I thought you said you had plans for her, and the next thing I know you’re telling me she’s dead.”
“Oh her? Yes, he was supposed to let our little sharpshooter live, but there are always casualties of war. She knew the risks when she volunteered.”
Richard shook his head to himself as he navigated the sparse traffic through London and out of the city toward the estate. “She knew the risks,” he parroted. “He thinks I don’t know the risks, but I’ve taken steps and if he tries to make me as unimportant as her, he’ll regret it.”
He had all of it, documented from the start - when he had been contacted in Argentina, the money that helped fund some of his investments, their insistence that he take on Christian Wallace in Budapest and his eventual understanding of why the young poof had been important to their plans - and lucky for them all that Wallace had actually been good at his job in the intervening years between his hiring and death - to their intervention with Arthur’s right hand man, the mercenary’s report, and their “contingency plans” in the unlikely event that the vote went against Richard.
He might come out looking the villain as well, but he would not go into ignominy alone.
Tomorrow he would cement his allies and weaken his enemies. Soon, Hellsing would be his.
If anyone ever asked Richard his opinion on the old Cain and Abel story, Richard would have been squarely on Cain’s side. Just because one son was better at saying what he was supposed to did not make him better or more worthy. It just made him deserve a bloody rock to the head.

•••

Walter woke to the insistent sound of the phone ringing. Doru was lying on his side facing away from him and the room was murky with light filtered through the curtains.
He slid out of bed and winced as the cold hit his bare skin, but that didn’t stop him from hurrying into the front room to stop the phone’s damnable ringing. Didn’t anyone know he was on holiday?
“Hello?”
The line crackled with empty phone noise before somone cleared his throat and spoke. “Hello? Is this Walter Dornez?”
“Yes,” Walter said, glancing around for something to cover up with. Damn it was cold and his skin was quickly prickled with goose bumps. “This is he.”
“Ah, Mr. Dornez. My name is Rolf Lieber. I got your number from Mickey Andrews. He won’t be coming back to work on your renovations, his mother passed last night and his family needs him. I would like to meet with you later to go over Mickey’s people’s work and what you want done on the manor.”
Walter had the phone stretched as far as the cord would allow and was doing his best to pull the top blanket off the bed with his toes. It was an exceedingly awkward position to be in when Rolf paused for him to respond.
He was just going to have to get the man off the phone and then he could duck back into bed with Doru for a bit longer.
“Ah, yes, thank you for calling Mr. Lieber. Why don’t we meet at the site at...” he looked around for a clock - 7:20? That was definitely too early to be wakened on holiday. “Let’s meet at 9:00. That should give us plenty of time to go over the property and discuss what will be needed.”
After finishing their arrangements and hanging up, Walter practically ran back to the bedroom to slide back into the warm spot he had vacated with a sigh of blissful relief.
Doru rolled over and cracked an eye at him. “Duty calls?”
“Mmhm.” Walter slid closer and let Doru wrap him in his arms. Doru might not make his own body heat, but he still retained some he had leeched from Walter while they slept, just as the sheets were still warm where he had been lying. “But I can pretend I’m on a real holiday for a while longer before I leave you to get your rest.”
Doru smiled lazily and planted a light kiss on Walter’s forehead. “You have to find time to rest too, Angel. How else am I to keep you up all night for the rest of your time away from London?”
Walter turned his face away to yawn widely. No, he certainly wasn’t getting much sleep, was he?
“I’ll get a nap later. I’ve gone with less during the war. Just don’t get bored with me before we even leave Scotland.”
Doru shook his head. “No, never. Who can say how much time we will have together? I will treasure what time we have. I fear it won’t be as much as I would want.”
Walter propped his head up on a hand and studied Doru’s face. “Do you know that Mihaela told me not to break your heart?”
Doru smiled ruefully. “I think she has it backward. The chances are much better that it is I who will break yours.”
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Hunting the Hunter