I always forget the bloody disclaimers and acknowledgements. I don't own Hellsing or its characters. I have no monetary interest in this. I just enjoy the stories and the community that came with them. I also wanted to thank the LJ people who kindly gave this a read in advance, since I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. My thanks to rosehiptea, Thess, Urwen and kelles for their input.
"So I met this crazy bitch at the shop today. She was hot, but she was fucking psycho."
"What did you do to her?" Luke watched his brother bounce around their flat. He always had so much energy after a day at work. He hardly needed the drugs he sucked down like candy.
"Nah, I didn't get to do nothin' to her." Jan flopped down on the couch next to the only person able to put up with his behavior for any extended period of time. "She was there for Spud." He grinned and shifted his arse off of his brother's hair. That damned hair of his needed its own flat, there was so much of it. Jan didn't understand why Luke insisted on keeping his hair down past his bum and then let it lie all over the couch like some sort of spoiled pet.
Luke knew exactly what Jan's sneer meant. They'd had that argument hundreds of times before. He didn't think his brother had any room to complain. Jan's face was a walking advertisement of his profession. People were always asking about his piercings.
People trust a piercer more when the person pushing the needle looks like he knows just what any piercing feels like. Despite his foul mouth, people trusted Jan to know what he was doing.
Spud shared studio space with Jan. How a tattoo artist from the American Midwest and a body piercer from London ended up sharing a studio in Sao Paolo was a convoluted story involving mutual acquaintances in Spain and Luke's insistence that there were research resources he could only find in Brazil.
"Yeah, Spud was working on this fucked up tattoo job she's got going. The tattoo's not fucked up, but what's she's having tattooed – that's fucked up. She's covered half her body with words – no, get this, she's covered half her body with spells!"
He watched with pleasure as Luke's feet hit the floor. "What?"
"You heard me, bro. Half her body is covered with tattooed spells. Okay, I lied; almost half her body is tattooed with spells. The rest of that half are mystic circles and symbols like I've seen in those fuckin' huge books of yours."
Luke was on his feet and pacing around their small living room. "Do you know how I can find her? Did you get her name? Did she say anything else about those tattoos?"
"Whoa, hold on bro, you can ask her all the questions you want. She'll be over in about," he checked the clock on the wall, "ten minutes."
"I can't believe this. Do you think she'll be any help, Jan?"
"Fuck, what do I know about the shit you're into?"
Luke caught his breath and stopped his pacing to glower at Jan. "How are you my brother?"
"Don't ask me, ask Mom."
•••
Jan's guest knocked on the door promptly at 10:30. Luke did his best to look casual while opening the door. He managed not to stare at the woman waiting there.
She was tall, and muscular, and seemed to have a sardonic grin permanently screwed onto her lips. If Luke was trying not to stare, their visitor was not bothering to be discrete. She looked him over with the same deliberation and implied x-ray vision that Jan used on women he found attractive. She apparently liked what she saw when she returned her eyes to his face.
"Hey Bro!" Jan shouted from the couch, "Stop staring at her and let her in."
Luke backed away, still holding the door as the woman pushed past him. She was wearing a sleeveless leotard which made it possible to read the tattoos on her arm as well as those on her face and neck. Jan had not been lying about the words and symbols. Luke had recognized some of the words of her tattoos and his heart was racing. After so many years, he had found someone who knew the things he wanted to know!
Luke gathered his thoughts and held out a hand to the woman. "My brother has abysmal manners. My name is Luke Valentine, and you are?"
"My name is Jolene." Her English was clear, but her accent marked her as German or Austrian, not Brazilian. She looked at his hand, but turned away without touching it.
"Hey Jo," Jan waved indolently from the couch. He was still a little twitchy from his workday, but had settled in with a big bottle of Cola and flipped on the television to something showing scantily clad women doing aerobics.
Luke cut to the chase, since Jolene didn't seem to be concerned with pleasantries. He curbed his naturally polite tendencies and stared directly at her tattoos. "These are primarily invocations of illusion. What are you trying to achieve?"
He watched her smile become more genuine and less mocking. She pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of her BDUs and began to speak.
•••
"Hey?""Hey what, Jan?"
"Hey, you awake?"
"What do you think?"
Jan flipped on the light in Luke's room. He ignored his brother's grunt and squint when the light dazzled him. "Do you think she can do it?" He sat on the bed, jouncing Luke just as he was scrabbling for his glasses on the bedside table.
"She claims she isn't the one doing it; that she has help," Luke reminded his brother while he settled the pince-nez on the bridge of his nose.
"Yeah, but do you think it's real or is it just bullshit? Do you think they could really do that for us?"
"You could have asked me that when I'd had more than an hour's sleep." Luke tried to lie down and cover his head, but Jan jerked the pillow out of his hand. "Fine." He sat up again and snatched his pillow back. "I don't know if she can or not. She knows more about magic than I do. Those tattoos are works of Art in more ways than just ink."
"What are we gonna do?"
"We're going to go along for now. We're going to see what her friends have to say to us. We're going to take the information and make our decisions based on whether or not it is, as you say, bullshit. But right now, we're going to get some sleep."
Luke made to take off his glasses, but stopped when Jan asked, "Do you want to do it?" The brothers stared at each other.
"Do you?" Luke challenged back.
"Live forever. Still be able to drink and fuck. Get enough money from them to start our own club back home. Get to do whatever the hell I want. And in exchange, all I have to do is spread the love and run some errands for them? Yeah, I want to do it. What about you?"
"When you put it that way, dear brother, how could I possibly resist?"
•••
Luke realized when he saw Jolene's home and "friends" that there was no backing out. There would be no analyzing the circumstances and making choices based on the available information. The available information was that they had gotten themselves mixed up with the prototypical exiled Brazilian Nazis and they were either going to go with the program or die ugly deaths.
"Welcome to the Millennium Group, Valentines," sneered Jolene as she escorted them to the lab that would be their home.
The very first step in their transformations from a pair of hedonistic youths into a pair of hedonistic vampires was the implantation of their monitoring chips. Jolene hadn't mentioned that having a chip that would send their every movement back to Doc for monitoring was part of the deal. She definitely hadn't mentioned that those same chips would send the brothers up in flames if they failed their new masters.
Then again, she hadn't mentioned that she was a ninety year old Nazi, either.
The next several months were not ones either Luke or Jan would be writing home about. The process was painful for one thing. It fucked with their heads, for another. Something about the whole experience was changing them in ways they hadn't really anticipated.
Luke began to really worry the day that Jan destroyed the entire game room just because Mario had failed to grab a mushroom before it fell over a ledge. Jan had always been temperamental, but he hadn't been prone to acts of wanton destruction. Nor had he been able to pick up and throw a billiards table as though it were constructed of cardboard. Luke watched his brother's violent outbursts escalate as their treatments progressed and wondered if he'd go insane along with his brother.
•••
"Luke, you been hungry lately?"
"Starving. You too?"
"Yeah. Why aren't they feeding us?"
"What do you mean? They bring us food three times a day. I'm famished, but I just can't eat it."
"I thought you were supposed to be the smart one, bro. They aren't feeding us what we need. C'mon, you haven't noticed that the food makes you want to puke? You know what we're supposed to become. Do you think we're getting there?"
Luke favored his brother with a long, cool look. "Have you looked at your eyes lately? Or my skin? Yes, you idiot, we're getting there."
"Don't call me an idiot when you're the shithead who doesn't get that we don't need food. Luke, it's time we got used to the idea of being bloodsuckers. I'm gonna ask Doc for something real to eat when we get to the lab tonight."
•••
Being stuck in the jungle surrounded by a thousand German vampires was getting boring. After her first tantalizing hints, Jolene had refused to share any more of her knowledge with Luke. The bitch.
Jan was obsessed with his video games and had made friends with some German kid who wasn't nearly the kid he looked like. Jan and Schrödinger would stay up 'til all hours of the afternoon playing games if they were given half a chance.
According to Schro, there was no telling what would happen to them when their transformations were complete. "Do you think I was born with these?" he had asked, pointing to his unmistakably feline ears.
The average Millennium soldier wanted nothing to do with the two Valentines. That left him with few choices for companions outside the elite – the so-called Werewolves - and each other. Luke and Jan were close, but after a while, they wanted to kill each other more than half the time. With their new natures pushing them toward mayhem, Doc found it politic to keep them separated and occupied as much as possible.
Luke was slowly drilling a hole in the surface of his desk when the knock came. He didn't look away from his fingernail's gradual progress through the wood as he called for the visitor to enter.
"What do you w-" he stopped when he saw his guest.
•••
She was amazing. She could destroy multiple widely separated targets with a single shot. Luke had asked if she was going to teach him how to shoot like that; he'd had to offer her his handkerchief when her tears of laughter had stained her face. Clearly he wasn't expected to learn to shoot like Rip the Hunter.
"The Major has asked me to teach you the use of guns, Mr. Valentine. He didn't expect that an Englishman would have learned that necessary skill. Was he wrong?"
Luke enjoyed his view of Rip. She was slender and almost androgynous, but undeniably feminine when he looked at the spatter of freckles on the bridge of her nose and her girlish grin. She was the best thing he'd seen in his months stuck in the jungle. He resolved to learn as slowly as she'd allow.
•••
"What does he mean that Jan's done and I'm not?"
Rip dangled one long leg over Luke's. "It means, my dear boy, that you are going to be a Werewolf, and Janni is not."
Luke stroked her thigh, "Are you going to spell this out for your poor Englischer," she chuckled, "lover? Or am I going to have to look like an ignorant fool when I ask Doc about it tonight?"
Rip leaned back and kicked off a shoe. "I will tell you all about it. If you give me one of those lovely foot rubs of yours."
She leaned back against the arm of the couch and sighed appreciatively as Luke's strong, deft fingers found and soothed away knots of tension in her feet before moving up to rub her ankles. It was really a shame that the upcoming course of injections meant that Luke wasn't going to be in the mood for giving her foot rubs soon.
•••
"You're not done?" Jan's pupils contracted down to pinpoints as he stared at his brother. He felt great, fucking great. He was stronger, faster, and one hell of a lot harder to kill than he'd been when he came in here. If he had a slight aversion to being out in sunlight and had to drink blood to stay alive, it hardly seemed like a high price to pay.
Shouldn't Luke be where Jan was? Luke had adjusted as well as Jan had. He'd bleached out a lot more than Jan had, but he was as much of a bloodsucker as his brother. "Why aren't you done? Is there something wrong with you?" Jan leaned forward, arms wrapping around the pit in his stomach.
Luke shook his head. "No, there's nothing wrong with me. You could say there's something right with me. Most people don't respond to the treatments the way I have. It means that I can take some advanced treatments that would kill most people. I guess it's not going to be a lot of fun."
•••
Jan swore and held Luke down while Doc tightened the straps. His brother was convulsing after the latest round of injections and had already broken the lighter set of restraints.
Jan had made a habit of staying with Luke during the injections after the first time he had heard his brother screaming from across the Millennium barracks and research wing. Any thoughts of jealousy at Luke's advancement were dispelled in that moment, and Jan broke down at least one door in his haste to get to his brother's side.
He'd asked Schrödinger about the process that had inducted him into the Werewolves. Schro had nervously tugged on his ears and only answered, "I don't like to think about it, Jan. Don't make Luke think about it when it's over. The best thing to do is to put it as far behind you as it will go."
Jan didn't even want to think about what Luke had been going through. He definitely wasn't going to make his brother dwell on it.
•••
"Outstanding! Your regenerative abilities are excellent and your speed – most impressive." Doc scribbled a few more notes before giving Luke's face his full attention. "I'm certain you will be pleased to know that I have certified your treatments complete."
Luke beamed at the doctor. Not only was he never going to have to have another of those injections, he and Jan would finally be able to get out of this damned jungle and go home. If things weren't exactly what he'd expected when he'd signed his soul away…well, they weren't so bad either. It wouldn't be too long before he and his brother were part of the ruling class instead of just being the ruled.