Hellsing Fan Fiction ❯ Thrown Away These Graces ❯ Thrown Away These Graces ( One-Shot )

Disclaimer: None of this is mine. Based off the anime.

 

Notes: Because it's one of those images which has lingered, and because when you acclimate yourself to pushing a reaction away, it becomes hard to call it back. Integra shades into Lady MacBeth. Title from Tori Amos' "Blood Roses", by way of an image by Solid&Etc: God knows I know I've thrown away these graces.

 

She does not cry.

 

There are moments which give her pause, moments when a small heretofore-silent part of her screams at her, demanding to know what she is doing. She has learned to ignore it; selective deafness is a quality one cannot but learn, being around Alucard.

 

Moments like last week. Moments as she took the gun in her hand and did what she must, as she did all those years before in the basement. Putting down mad dogs.

 

They were her men. She should have protected them better. Killed in the line of duty, she wrote to their next of kin in the letters she abhors -- the letters that never get any easier with time. In this case, the killing was by her own hand. She owed it to them, to look into their eyes one last time -- to search for some spark of humanity that lingers, even when she knows by now she will find none -- and to pull the trigger.

 

She stands now on the hill above the lines of freshly-dug graves, face half-hidden by the sombre veil. The rain pours down around her, as though England sheds tears for the fallen, but it does not touch her face. In her mind, the sounds echo: the click of the hammer, the sound of the bullet sliding into the chamber. The crack of the gun firing, of blessed silver ripping through flesh only recently human. The faces linger, together with the names -- her litany of small, human reasons for this cause, in the bleak hours when duty and faith grow shaky. Sometimes, revenge is easier to cope with.

 

She stands on the hill as the mourners leave, knowing she will never expiate this sin, even if she were to wipe out every last vampire -- even if she were to track down everyone responsible and kill and kill and kill, until she was bathed in blood and there was no-one left. No forgiveness ...

 

She stands there long after, names and faces and the endless echo of gunshots tolling through her mind, and though despair and anger war within her, she does not weep.

 

- finis -