tampered | (no subject)

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(no subject)

When; Thursday night
Rating; Oh, who knows. PG-13?
Characters;

wisdom_rcvr and anyone else in the mansion that's wanting to talk to him.
Summary; Henry is confused. What else is new?
Log;
He'd been trying to stay out of the way. He'd been doing his absolute best- everyone seemed to be so busy, and they all knew what was going on. Besides, the place scared him a little, as much as he hated to admit it. This was supposed to be his home- and oddly enough, it felt that way. That fact, more than anything else, bothered him. How could he be comfortable like this? There were odd sounds, monsterous things hiding in the shadows.

And that's all ignoring the fact that so many people were hurt in order for him to come back. He still didn't know how to fix that- there really isn't any way, is there? He took something important from them, and he doesn't think he can give it back. Maybe he should try, anyway.

His thoughts heavy, he wandered aimlessly, exploring the rooms and apologizing whenever he came across someone in them. He thought maybe seeing more of it would trigger his memory. But the only thing that seems familiar is the way the faucet pours out blood. It all gives him a blinding headache.

He finds the quietest room in the house, which happens to be a study. He leans against the bookcase and closes his eyes, sighing.

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Walter only left when he had to for the occasional hunt. After two weeks, he was finally able to think clearly enough to be something other than a ghost in the mansion.

He could hear everyone in the mansion and pushed himself to spend a moment in real company, since he'd managed the two-dimensional company of the network.

A quiet knock on the door, and Walter pushed it open to see Henry. "May I?"

Even though the knock was quiet, it still made him jump a little. He wondered if he'd ever be used to people living in the same house as him. Hell, it'd been a long time since he lived in a house, period.

He hadn't ever been sure what to say to Walter, the few times he'd seen him. The man wasn't in condition to talk then, really, anyway...and Henry almost never talks without prompting. Now wasn't much different.

Henry took the question to mean that Walter wanted to use the library, and he should go ahead and take off for awhile. Because who would actually want to talk to Henry? He nods and says, "Uh...yeah, sure....sorry. It's all yours...." He shuffles a bit, then walks slowly towards the door.

"I meant, may I join you?" Walter wasn't sure what he was looking for, since conversation was not at all simple. "You don't have to leave."

"Oh...." Henry looks at the floor. "Sure. Sorry."

He leans back against the bookcase again, searching for something to say. "Are you...uh, feeling any better?" He didn't know what had been going on with the man, only that something hadn't been right, and now he seemed to be talking more.

Walter tilted his head at Henry, giving the question his full consideration before answering it the only way he could at that point, with a question of his own. "Are you?"

The question caused Henry to frown in thought. Of course, on Henry's face, this was only apparent as a very slight twitch of his mouth. "I...I don't know. Not the way they're hoping, anyway. This is all too...too unbelievable."

Oddly enough, it wasn't the monsters or the curses that was unbelievable. It was the fact that there were people here that were so attached to him. That just couldn't happen.

"Which part?" Walter asked, honestly curious. He remembered his animosity for Henry, but this wasn't the cocksure man from before, and Walter's perspective had changed drastically anyway.

"Everything...." Henry sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "There are people that...depend on me for something, and I don't know what. No one's ever considered me...uh, family before, not even my family. And it's....I don't think I can be the man they remember. He doesn't even sound like the sort of person I could talk to...." To be fair, though, Henry doesn't talk to terribly many people. "That's not...it's not me...."

Walter had no words of advice for the young man. When it came to identity crises, the vampire had more than enough of his own with a vampire that insisted Walter belonged to him, the memory of loyalties to two different factions, and the inevitability of the tie he had to the Red God.

"What do you want?"

Henry straightened the collar of his shirt, in lieu of answering for a bit. He was feeling fidgety- being the object of a conversation was another thing he wasn't used to, but that he'd come across a lot lately.

"I don't know. I'd never really wanted anything....I wish I wasn't disappointing them so much, though....and that's sort of weird, too. There's monsters here....weird creatures, and they seem fine. Comfortable. And they hurt so many people to bring me back-" His soft voice cracks a bit here- he can barely stand the thought of it. "I should be running away, scared....but I feel...connected to them somehow." He shakes his head. "It's like I can't leave....I don't get it."

This was not the young man who had thanked him for dying.

Walter had no idea how he felt about that. He had no idea how he felt about most things, when it came down to it, but many things that had resonated so strongly for him before were just... flat.

"You can't leave," Walter agreed. "I can't leave. You'll find where you fit."

His face turns back up from staring at the floor to look at Walter. The knowledge startled him for some reason, leaving him worried. "You...you can't leave either? Why...? What happened to you?"

Walter's shoulders twitched in the barest intimation of a shrug. "In ignorance and hubris, I gave myself to a god."

"Oh..." Of course. Xulchibara was a god, wasn't he? And a scary one. "I'm sorry. I wonder if I did that, before...." He couldn't imagine himself doing that- he'd never hated god, but he hadn't really believed in on, either. Of course, there were all sorts of things he apparently did that he can't remember.

"Was it an accident...? Or...uh... If...if you don't want to answer, that's fine." Henry was just curious.

"I don't know what you did before." Nor did it serve the family for Walter to relate what he remembered of Henry for before.

He took a seat in one of the room's reading chairs and motioned Henry to do likewise. "You are aware of what I am?"

Henry sat down carefully and looked up to Walter. "You're a...vampire?" That's what he'd read in the journals.

"Correct." Walter's face gave little away. "I was given a very small quantity of his blood as payment for a service rendered." He assumed Henry would understand whose blood he meant.

"Eventually I tasted it."

"Oh...man. That was enough to- to...?" Clearly it was. And Henry wasn't about to debate that at all- he certainly didn't know how vampirism worked. He vaguely realizes that he should be more upset about learning about that. "A lot of this seems to be about blood. Maybe it's just today, but....I don't know."

"Where I am from it is said, 'blood is the coin of the soul.' With a soul like his...." Walter trailed off. He didn't want to sound as though he was complaining. He'd spent a human lifetime as a faithful Protestant and never had the experience of divinity that he'd had in the past two weeks.

"Blood is important whether human or vampire."

"....I guess." Henry stared at his hand, wondering just what was flowing through him. Was it really his own blood? ...and just what did he mean, thinking that? That's nuts.

But everything here was nuts.

He sighs. "I feel so tired..."

If Walter relaxed his hold on his mind, he might catch an inkling of Henry's thoughts. But he had trouble enough with his own thoughts and kept his hold tight.

It did leave him with no insight into Henry's concerns.

"Do not let me keep you from rest."

Henry looked up from his hand then, staring at Walter. Then he shook his head and smiled apologetically, possibly his first obvious emotion since he got back. "I don't think there's any rest here....but thank you."

"I was a soldier when I was a youth." Walter saw images play behind his eyes like memories that had happened to someone else. "Not uniformed, but a soldier, still. I quickly learned that you can sleep anywhere when you know that rest is a precious commodity."

Henry was quiet, thinking. "I never did anything. I slept a lot when I wasn't working...there wasn't anything else for me to do." It was a wasted life and he knew it. He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I was happy like that, I think."

But then his face softened. "Did you do...good things, as a soldier?" He didn't think until afterwards how this could be a very sensitive question.

And it might have been, but Walter wasn't quite the man he'd been, nor the vampire he'd been. He wasn't altogether sure what he was anymore.

"I thought I did. Each time I have fought, no matter the side, I have believed I was doing what needed to be done."

Henry nodded, slowly. "...at least you were doing something."

He wasn't sure why that bothered him so much, or how he knew what he'd done (or, perhaps more accurately, didn't do) before. He reached, but couldn't get any more information than that.

"What do you think about it now...? Was any of them the right side?" He's not really sure why he asked. Maybe he just envied Walter's knowledge, his ability to look back and think about what he'd done.

He gave Henry's question careful consideration. In light of the values he had now from Xulchilbara....

"What I did for Hellsing was to protect those who could not protect themselves. That was right. I can see now that Millennium use my jealousy to twist me to believe that what I did for them was necessary."

What he did for Xulchilbara was by definition right, if he was doing it at his god's will.

Henry actually smiled slightly when he heard what Walter said. "Protecting people...yeah, I can see how that would be good. I wish I'd been better at it."

Then he paused to frown in thought and rub his face. "...man, I don't even know what that means. But I agree with you there..."

Walter wondered how you could agree with something you didn't understand.

"Do you wish to learn? I was human once. There are skills relevant to humans I can teach you."

Henry is a terribly confused man, and not terribly good at talking. These two things frequently combine to make him seem like a complete idiot. This is one of those times.

The offer made Henry almost smile again and gained a fair amount of consideration. "Actually....yeah, I'd really like that. If it's not too much of a pain for you, of course. I don't know...uh, anything." Which is fairly obvious. "So...it'd probably be good for me to learn."

"Ensuring that you have tools to defend yourself is a good use of my time," Walter said matter-of-factly. "We can begin as soon as you are able."

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