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Ever since becoming a Regenerator, Alexander Anderson rarely gets sick. In theory, he should never get sick, but even secret Vatican nanotechnology can fall victim to man's stubbornness. So—as a result of a combination of three consecutive months of frequent strenuous monster hunts, a general lack of sleep and proper food, and the priest putting off his scheduled visit to the Vatican laboratories—Anderson is sick.
Anderson knows he must look half-dead, walking around as he is. His clothing is in tatters, his left shoe has a hole in it, his right arm is bleeding sluggishly, and his entire body is covered in a sickly sheen of sweat. He sucks in a labored breath, but the stale dusty air does more harm than good and sends him into yet another coughing fit. He would stop and rest, but he has work to do.
The underground wine cellar is a maze, discarded barrels forming tall, towering walls that make the large space feel claustrophobic and cramped, but Anderson continues. He inspects every body he passes, checking that there’s no saving the poor souls, before continuing, following the faint sound of crunching.
Eventually, Anderson rounds a corner and finds a figure, living this time, hunched over, and crunching . Beside it lies a sack; dirty, old, and patched, but blessedly empty. The priest retrieves a bayonet from his cassock, and flings it at the creature in the corner, nailing it straight through the heart. Or he would have, had the wretched thing not moved at the sound of blessed silver slicing through the air.
Anderson moves forward, launching a flurry of blades at the despicable creature, but it dodges, and so begins the chase.
It takes nearly 15 minutes to corner the creature again and finally kill it, and by this time Anderson can feel his energy waning and the haze of sickness creeping in. He needs to get out of here, and he needs to get out of here fast.
Of course, this is the exact moment Alucard chooses to come down the stairs.
Anderson watches the vampire survey the room, using his senses to see things that Anderson hadn't been capable of seeing through the maze of wine barrels, before grinning and fixing his gaze on the priest. “Hello, Paladin.”
It’s almost a reflex at this point for Anderson to snarl and straighten from the hunched position he’d been in to catch his breath. He pulls blades out of his coat and turns fully to face the new threat. He doesn’t account for the mucus clogging his sinuses making his balance off-kilter, but he manages to disguise the stumble as a step towards the stairs—the only exit.
“Yer late tae the party, freak,” Anderson says over the shing sound of his blades crossing in the symbol of the Lord.
Alucard’s grin doesn’t falter. “Oh, I think the party’s just beginning.”
Alucard launches himself from the steps, the wood splintering behind him as he flies through the air to pounce on Anderson, who scrambles backward to avoid the Midian. Alucard takes the dodge in stride, landing in a crouch on the floor and using his lower position to aim around the priest’s crossed blades, sending a bullet into Anderson’s right shoulder.
The pellet burns , ripping through sinew and muscle as it goes right through the meat of his deltoid. It scrapes his thoracoacromial artery, sending blood spraying out of the wound, and it’s all Anderson can do to leap back once more to avoid being hit with more bullets.
“Come on, beloved, dance with me.”
Anderson grits his teeth, both against the pain in his shoulder and the use of Alucard’s pet name for the priest. It does things to Anderson, things he’d rather not examine at the moment. Or ever. “Ah don’t dance with the devil , beast.”
“See, you say that now…” Before Alucard can finish there’s a bayonet buried in the muscle between his throat and his clavicle, which only makes the damn beast laugh. Pity, Anderson had been aiming for his throat. “That’s more like it!”
Anderson doesn’t respond, instead choosing to unleash a flurry of blades at his red-cloaked adversary. His aim is good, but not nearly as good as it usually is, and only a third of the blades land where he’d intended them to. Alucard doesn’t notice, clearly caught up in the excitement of getting to play with Anderson once again. His mind is fuzzy, his mouth feels like it’s full of cotton, and his arm isn’t healing like it’s supposed to. He needs to get out of here, and he needs to do it before Alucard notices his weakness.
Unfortunately, it’s right as Anderson thinks this that he feels that tell-tale tickle in his chest that lets him know he’s two seconds away from a massive coughing fit. He can’t use his bible, not while his hands are occupied with his blades, and he doesn’t have the energy to place wards with holy words, so he improvises. Instead of sending the next round of projectile bayonets at Alucard, he sends them hurtling into the barrels filling the shelves by the entrance, dumping hundreds of gallons of wine onto the vampire. This creates enough distraction for Anderson to duck into the next row of the cellar and out of sight.
Anderson stumbles back through the maze, hoping to put some distance between himself and the Midian before the pressure in his chest becomes too much. Behind him, he can hear Alucard’s laughter, the slowly ceasing downpour of wine that begins to peter off, and the sound of the vampire’s boots splashing through the shallow pools of liquid Anderson left in his wake.
He gets barely a few yards before he has to stop, the tension in his lungs reaching a breaking point and a bought of coughing forcing its way out of his lips. He doubles over, using his left arm to brace himself on one of the barrels that separates him from Alucard.
“Hiding now, Father?” Alucard’s voice echoes off the barrels as he rounds the corner. “I’d expected a bit more…” The vampire pauses, taking stock of what’s in front of him. “Say, you don’t sound so good.”
Anderson forces himself upright, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth to wipe away the sweat he knows is there. His knees tremble under his weight, and his vision blurs at the edges, but he straightens nonetheless. “Ah don’t need yer pity, monster,” he growls, though his voice is rough, rasping, and anything but convincing.
Alucard’s expression becomes nearly unreadable as he steps closer, his boots sloshing through the shallow pools of wine. “Pity? Oh no, Paladin. This is… curiosity.” He tilts his head, dark eyes gleaming in the dim light. “I’ve never seen you like this before. Fragile. Human.”
Anderson snarls and launches a bayonet at him, but his aim is off, and Alucard swats it aside with a flick of his wrist. The vampire chuckles, the sound low and maddeningly amused. “Now, now. Let’s not waste energy you clearly don’t have.”
The priest takes an unsteady step back, his hand going back to bracing against the barrel. His chest heaves with every breath, and the slick sheen of sweat covering his skin has begun to drip, mixing with the blood soaking his cassock. He tries to draw another blade, but his fingers fumble, the weapon slipping from his grasp and clattering to the floor.
Alucard’s expression shifts, but Anderson still can’t read it. His smile has dimmed, no longer the mocking grin that he typically wears, and his eyebrows are low. He looks almost as if—no, impossible. Demons don’t care, and especially not Alucard.
The Midian steps forward again, closing the distance between himself and the priest, and Anderson has no choice but to lean harder against the barrel to keep himself upright.
“Git away from me, ye filthy heathen,” Anderson spits, though his words are weaker now. He swings at Alucard with the blade in his right hand, but the still-unhealed wound in his shoulder limits the amount of force he can put behind the blow and the vampire catches his wrist with ease, holding him steady.
“Heathen or not,” Alucard says, his voice quieter now, almost…soft, “you’re going to collapse if you keep this up.”
“Ah’ll die standin’ upright, ye damned blood-sucker!” Anderson tries to wrench his arm free, but the effort only jostles his gunshot wound, reopening what little had begun to heal, and sends another wave of coughing tearing through his chest.
The grip on Anderson’s wrist loosens, but instead of letting him go the vampire moves to the priest’s other side, looping the latter’s arm over Alucard’s own shoulders, heedless of Anderson’s protests. “Let go ah me ye demented hellspawn, ye ungodly parasite!”
Alucard rolls his eyes. “Tsk, stubborn as ever. How am I supposed to enjoy our game if you can barely stand? You’ll kill yourself before I even get the chance, and there’s no fun in that. I can feel the heat of your blood, and it’s near boiling under your skin. It’s a wonder you’re even alive.”
“Wha—” Anderson’s head is swimming, now that he’s no longer actively fighting something, and Alucard’s words feel like they’re slipping through his ears, in one and out the other.
“A fever, Anderson, a fever.” The exasperated tone of Alucard’s voice somehow makes his words easier to process. “Somehow you, a Regenerator able to heal from a bullet to the brain, have given yourself a fever. And a nasty cough to go with it.”
Alucard dumps Anderson unceremoniously on the cheap hotel mattress, the springs protesting mildly at the large man’s weight. The vampire looks down at the priest sprawled on top of the ugly brown and pink comforter and contemplates his options.
Anderson’s only half conscious, mumbling nonsense to himself as his fever reaches mortal-felling temperatures. A part of Alucard worries that, if he leaves the priest alone, he’ll manage to hurt himself further—that he’ll roll off the bed and suffocate with his face buried in the too-plush carpet, or that he’ll manage to pick himself up and wander out onto the street, or something else equally ridiculous. Ordinarily, none of those things would be dangerous for a man like Anderson but, given that the fool has somehow done the impossible and given himself the fucking flu, Alucard would not put it past him to kill himself doing something completely idiotic.
However, Alucard has spent the last hundred years existing in close proximity to humans and knows that medicine has evolved to the point that there is now just about a pill for everything mundane. Alucard has also spent the last 20-odd years acting as a servant to one mortal woman who, as a child, caught her fair share of colds and sent Alucard to fetch things for her when Walter—an actual butler who receives financial compensation for his work and is not a corpse Integra found in her father’s basement—was busy. Whether those remedies would work on Anderson, Alucard doesn’t know, but it feels worth a shot.
Just down the road from Anderson’s piss-poor hotel, Alucard finds a 24-hour convenience store. The glowing red cross hanging off of the shabby brick building guides the Midian to a small, overcrowded building. The store is packed with rows of cheap generic medications, preservative-filled snacks in colorful packaging, travel-size hygiene products, and, along one wall, a vending machine with energy drinks.
The vampire, heralded by the jingle of a small bell above the door, strolls through the small store slowly, until he gets to the section helpfully labeled “cold and flu remedies.” Alucard looks at all of the options on the small shelves, reading what each medication claims to address and matching those claims up to Anderson’s symptoms, before deciding that it’s all so vague he’s better off just getting a handful of everything.
It’s not like it’s his money he’s spending.
The clerk, a tired-looking goth girl probably in her twenties, looks at Alucard like he has three heads when he dumps his armful of flu medicines on the counter in addition to a roll of bandages. Then she looks at him like he’s adorned each of those three heads with a different colored mohawk when she sees what he’s wearing—his sunglasses still on despite the hour and his red duster sporting some unsavory looking darker spots, originating either from the wine Anderson had dumped on him or the blood the priest had smeared on him when Alucard had been hauling him out of the wine cellar in the abandoned house. For a second he wonders if she’s going to remark on his appearance, but after a moment she just shrugs and rings up the small mountain of items he’s amassed.
Alucard is back in the hotel in just over fifteen minutes, but in that time he finds that Anderson has indeed managed to haul himself out of bed and into the small adjoining bathroom. The door is mostly shut, but Alucard can hear well enough to know that Anderson is busy puking stomach bile into the toilet in between mumbling bits of holy scripture. Typical.
Setting the bags from the convenience store on the dresser by the door, Alucard knocks gently on the door, before pushing it open further so that he can step through. He’s met with immediate hostility from Anderson, which is quite impressive given that the priest’s head is halfway into a toilet bowl.
“What do ye want, freak?”
Anderson looks, impossibly, even worse than when Alucard had left. His eyes are red-rimmed, his lips pale and covered with what little he’d eaten that day, and the entirety of him covered in a sickly sheen. His wounds, while no longer bleeding, are healing at a mere fraction of the speed that they usually would and are open and gaping. Alucard, the immortal all-powerful creature of Death’s creation, pities him.
“If you’re quite done, I’ve got things that should help.”
There must be something in the air around Alucard tonight because Anderson looks at him exactly like the corner store clerk had: like he’s got three heads, each topped with a brightly colored spike of hair. Unlike the store clerk, Anderson has no reason to hold his words back.
“How do ah know that’s what ye’ve actually brought an’ no’ some archaic poison tae torture me with?”
“Please, why would I go through the trouble of bringing you here just to poison you? Furthermore, why would I poison you in the first place? I far too greatly enjoy our little spats.”
Anderson mulls over the vampire’s words before grumbling “Ah’ll kill ye, demon.”
“I’m counting on it, priest. Now, hold still.”
The priest shifts to lean him against the bathroom wall, giving Alucard access to the handful of injuries sprinkled around his limbs from the fight with the creature in the cellar and then the gunshot wound from Alucard himself. Alucard peels off Anderson’s cassock—taking special care around the areas where the fabric has been torn open and coated with blood—and assesses the wounds. After a cursory look, he briefly leaves the bathroom to gather the alcohol and bandages he’d purchased. Anderson grits his teeth against the burn of the disinfectant but otherwise doesn’t protest Alucard’s care of his injuries. That is until the vampire is done tightening the last bandage.
“Alright, up you get.”
A pause. Alucard watches, bemused, Anderson reconsiders every single life choice that has brought him to this point.
“Ah cannae stand.”
God does he sound miserable. He looks it too, with his cropped blonde hair soaked through with sweat, clinging to his scalp, his arms pale and trembling, bracing himself on the grimy tile of a motel bathroom, and his clothing half undone where Alucard had had to undress him to get to his wounds.
Alucard takes pity on him. He leans down and, using his shadows to gently support Anderson’s considerable weight, lifts the other man onto his feet. Touching the priest nearly burns Alucard, the other man’s skin so feverishly hot that it feels almost as if his blood is boiling in his veins.
A sigh escapes Anderson at the vampire’s touch, undead flesh rapidly absorbing the heat pouring off of the priest. It’s cool and refreshing, and by the time they get to the hotel bed, Anderson has practically melted into the vampire’s side.
Alucard largely doesn’t notice, focused as he is on getting Anderson to the bed while also relieving him of his heavy cassock, which gets thrown over the chair in the corner of the room.
That is until, after placing the priest on top of the duvet covers and stepping away, the latter lets out a low and rather uncharacteristic whine. Alucard half expects the priest to immediately react in shame, but it seems he’s succumbed once more to the haze of sickness and not noticed the sound he made.
The room is dark, neither of them having turned on the lights, and it is in that darkness that Alucard thinks. Standing as he is, at the foot of the hotel bed with the ugly comforter, he watches as Anderson drifts into that cloying sickly sleep, all thoughts of medication beyond him. Heat radiates off the priest like a too-hot drink in cold winter air—he’s practically steaming with it.
As the night ticks on, Alucard makes a choice. If anyone with human eyes were in the room, they would see what looks like a trick of the light; shadows moving in the still darkness and seemingly slinking towards the large man in the bed. The inky darkness laps at the feet of the bed frame and creeps up until it is lying on top of the priest like a blanket, before re-coalescing into the shape of the vampire.
Alucard twines his arms around Anderson’s sleeping body, threading them behind the latter’s back under his arms, so as to not trap him in place. He pauses then, hesitates for a moment. He knows that, were Anderson awake and in his right mind he would surely object to this proximity on principle, there’s no doubt about that. And with that in mind Alucard should leave Anderson to his suffering alone, get out of the hotel, and return to Hellsing, telling Integra that the threat has been handled.
But Alucard is a selfish creature, and Anderson is unbelievably warm against his too-cool undead skin. So, instead of leaving like he knows he should, Alucard lets himself drift surrounded by the warmth of Anderson’s fever and still-beating heart.
Sometime in the night Anderson’s fever breaks. He comes to slowly, his eyes gummy and the whole of the space behind his nose feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton balls, but blessedly, blessedly , he’s cool. His skin’s no longer clammy and any sweat that had been on him has long since evaporated.
The priest blinks his eyes open and looks around the room. On the nightstand next to the bed is a cup of water and…are those boxes of dayquil? Yes. Twelve boxes of dayquil, five packages of paracetamol, and the largest bag of lozenges Anderson has ever seen. What the fuck?
Anderson gets out of bed slowly, wary of setting his head spinning, and, putting on his glasses, carefully inspects the veritable mountain of cold medicine. On top of the pile, a slip of paper catches his attention. In a neat, overly flourishy script, it says the following.
Anderson,
It seems even Regenerators are not immune to the frailties of mere mortals. How quaint. I must admit, it’s almost refreshing to see you brought low by something other than my hand in battle. Your weakness, as pedestrian as it is, is very endearing. Like a clumsy puppy. However, your current state provides little to no challenge in combat, and so for that reason, I am imploring you to fix yourself.
Your one true nemesis,
Alucard.
The resulting angry scream is enough to wake the birds in a nearby tree, sending them flying off into the early morning air. Somewhere, deep underground in the outskirts of London, an ancient undead vampire laughs.