AN: This is a re-upload of an old fic.

She leaned her forehead against the window. The glass was even cooler than her skin, and was soothing to the touch. Outside, fat droplets of rain splattered against the glass and created a blanket of sound as they hit the brick and foliage of the garden below, a dull drumming under which all other noise was dampened. The sky was a murky watercolour, the different shades of grey running together in windswept chaos.

She lifted her eyes and gazed out. The rich red of her irises provided two of the few points of colour in the room, which was richly furnished but bathed in grey shadow and dust. The place had been neglected for nearly a decade now, the historic building allowed to crumble and its many treasures - and secrets - hidden from the world that might exploit them.

With a sigh of air that failed to even cloud the cold pane, Seras Victoria straightened and turned away from the window. Her blank eyes surveyed the room's contents - the eerie portraits upon the walls of masters long since dead, the sideboards filled with crystal glasses and other trinkets, the vast oak desk, still littered with papers, veiled with the dust of ten years. She moved closer, her curiosity captured by the evidence of a life lived seemingly such a short time ago. There were still envelopes left unopened on the top of one pile.

Feeling as though she were somehow trespassing, she took a seat in the high-backed chair. She ran her fingertips over a few of the papers. They whispered as her touch ghosted over them, and she felt what could only be an echo of this chair's last occupant. The image of a blonde haired woman, the sense of her commanding presence, and a feeling… the weight of a final decision. Seras frowned, and drew her hand away.

"Underground…" she murmured. It was just a notion, but in recent years she had come to trust her limited telepathic abilities, rather than try to shut them out. There was a monster in the cellar, she simply knew it.

Leaving the study behind, Seras moved swiftly through the house and descended into the subterranean labyrinth that was the Hellsing mansion's dungeons and underground research facility, long disused. She wandered, mindlessly choosing one path or the other whenever her route forked. She knew the correct chamber when she saw it.

The door was a black portal set deep in the rough stone wall, scrawled over with red paint. The sigil was familiar, and sent a peculiar, warm thrill through her. To her heightened senses the place reeked of decay and, beneath that, old, dry blood. Approaching the door with tentative steps, she raised one gloved hand to the handle. As her fingers touched the flaking metal another image rose unbidden in her mind: a young girl, her hair long and pale, her expression resolute, a mask to cover her cold fear, standing in this same place many years before… and on the other side of the door, something stirring. Something so alien to that girl, yet so very familiar to the woman who now stood in her place. A monster locked in the dungeon, with blood that she shared.

Her throat dry, her grip firm, Seras pushed the handle down and let the door creak open. It swung easily, despite its weight and age, though the sound of its weary hinges was loud in the empty, echoing darkness. Her eyes searched the thick shadow ahead of her. The blackness eased, and revealed a short staircase descending to the chamber's dank floor, the ceiling's low beams, and a figure hunched against the far wall. From this distance it could have been a trick of the eye, the way the shadows fell to make that hunkered shape look human, to give the impression of a face with emaciated, corpse-like features. However, the smell told her all she needed to know, the one layered beneath the reek of decay. She could have recognised it anywhere: blood, coppery and rich and old, mixed with some indefinable, musky scent.

She had no reason to be afraid. The monster was weakened and bound, ten dry years having robbed him of much of his power, while she, in that time, had only grown stronger. With each step into the damp, sour-smelling chamber her gait became more assured, more eager.

"Master…?" she breathed.

He should have died ten years ago. Seras had thought he had. After the dissolution of the Organisation, she had gone it alone, and had somehow managed to stay out of the sights of the institutions and individuals who still made it their business to hunt and slay her kind. She had thought that he had gone the same way as his master…

She felt compelled to keep her voice low, as though the years of silence would object to being disrupted - as though he were simply sleeping, and she dare not wake him. As she drew closer, however, she could clearly see that it was no ordinary sleep that kept him motionless. No eerie smile curved his lips in an echo of whatever dreams a mind like his might produce. Instead, his mouth was a parched, papery crease in a dried out face, his body a husk. The hair hung limp and lustreless, more grey than black. The bindings that held him secured to the wall seemed flimsy to her eyes. He should have been able to break them with ease.

"Master…" Her face twisted into a mask of pity and disbelief. Could this truly be the same creature who had made her what she was, who had been so invincible?

She tried to reach him with her mind. At first it was as though he wasn't even there - he had sealed himself off from the outside world, in a dormant state that, she assumed, allowed him to continue to exist for so long without sustenance. After a moment's persistence, she thought she felt something give, felt something she recognised.

Pulling off her gloves, she knelt at the corpse's side and hesitantly touched his face. His skin was dead and dry, though still she closed her eyes and tried to reach him again, attempting to find some scrap of consciousness within that dead shell.

"Master… Do you remember me? It's been ten years, but what's a decade to us?" She waited, and was about to pull back, when a voice resounded in her head, a voice she hadn't heard in ten long, lonely years.

"Police girl?"

Her eyes opened wide, and a smile broke across her face. "Master!" she spoke aloud, forgetting herself. "You are alive!"

"Of course not," came his reply, accompanied by an unspoken feeling of mild contempt. "What do you think?"

"You look like hell…" Instead of the anger she expected, he sent her a vague sense of amusement.

"My body is weak, police girl, but can be restored… What are you doing here?"

Disheartened, Seras frowned and drew back. "I thought you'd be happy to see me."

"And why is that?"

"Don't you want to get out of here?" She was met with silence. "Well, don't you?"

A long pause. "I am tired…"

Seras frowned. "Master… You've been here too long. Creatures like us, we're not meant to be locked up. Don't you want to be free again?" She tried to remember the words he had used, so many years ago, when trying to coax her to drink. "To… to walk the night under your own will?" She felt silly saying it, but thought she sensed a softening in his resolution.

After several moments' thought, Seras extended her left forearm, dipped her head, and brought the points of her fangs into contact with the white skin of her wrist. If she knew her master at all, she knew that there was only one thing that could grasp his attention. She bit straight down, then tore to leave a long, deep wound. It hurt, but she swallowed down the flesh and sat up, her lips bloody, the gash on her wrist large and raw. She watched the blood brim up within it. It was a while since she'd fed, so the flow was sluggish, the blood cold.

"I'll wake you up…" she said, half to herself. She could already sense his hunger. "You must be thirsty." She raised her arm.

"What do you hope to achieve from this?" Seras ignored him and gently pressed the cut against his parched lips.

"Maybe I'm just being selfish..." A drop of dark red slipped coldly over her arm and fell, dripping with a wet sound onto Alucard's leather. At first he stayed as motionless as the corpse he imitated. After several seconds, however, she felt the dry tip of a tongue begin to push and lap at the wound. "I don't want to carry on by myself."

More of her blood trickled out of her, between his now parted lips, and it was with a strange kind of satisfaction that she felt him move and, following his instinct, bite. His teeth punctured the skin on either side of the cut, and his tongue pushed into the wound. Seras felt light-headed as he sucked more blood out of her, a weakness she hadn't felt in years rushing up, and her ears began to sing. She bit her lip and knelt astride him, her free hand gripping the folds of leather at Alucard's shoulder. He was pulling the life out of her with more force now, and she noticed hazily that his hair was blacker, his flesh fuller, as her blood revived him. She glanced down at his face, and in that moment his eyes opened. They glowed in the shadow, a stark red against the white of his skin and the coiling black of his hair.

"Master…" She tried to pull her arm away from him. He held fast and increased the pressure of his bite, her flesh crunching beneath his jaws. "Ah, Master…!" With a great effort she pulled her arm free in one wrenching movement. He growled and attempted to regain his hold, jaws snapping. She bared her teeth in response, and clutched her wounded arm to her chest.

His head lowered, the thick curtain of his hair falling over his face. When he looked up again his expression was more restrained, more human, though the blood on his lips and teeth and chin betrayed him for a fiend.

"You need to leave me some ," Seras said. Her arm had already begun to heal, though she still felt weakened - her power, as with that of any un-dead, lay in her blood. Drain that from her and she was as weak as any human, any corpse. He grinned, baring red slicked teeth. Seras made a decision, and leaned forward. Moving swiftly, she licked some blood from the corner of his mouth in an echo of his own movement, that first night they met. She felt him tense slightly, maybe in surprise. Then it was he who caught her off-guard, quickly moving his head as to catch her mouth with his, pushing his tongue past her teeth and growling low in his throat. She yielded to him, and brought her hands up to knother fingers in his hair. She shifted her weight, bringing their bodies into closer contact.

When she pulled back, her head was still swimming, though not from blood loss alone. "Are you going to free yourself...?"

"Perhaps," he replied. He slowly licked some of the blood from his lips and teeth. "I've been chained here for so many years. What's a little longer?" He bucked, jolting her forward, and into another bloody kiss. Outside, the night crept in. The rain continued to fall. The shadows in the dungeon crept back, and the two monsters stayed, twined together in the darkness.