Author's Notes: I wrote this when I started reading Dracula recently. I don't know if I should finish it. If I do, it will be shounen ai of some kind and relates also to Hellsing the manga and the OVA... This hasn't been beta-read, so watch out for possible typoes and such.

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"The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story." - Edgar Allen Poe, The Telltale Heart

When the Wolf Sings

The first night in the company of my captors is an aged photographed burned at the edges in the scorching recollections that followed. The darkness that closed over me was more complete than that of my own coffin, which by far smelled and sounded different than the one which enclosed my body then. I woke to the sound of feet pattering on floors farther away; I felt a sense of largeness and space so open that I felt my soul would drown in it. I had no sense nor capacity of the passage of time. I could not rise; I could not move. I was alone in my madness, and my restless starving body tormented my mind with the craving for vital, red, sweet blood - dripping, pouring, dripping, gushing from open wounds. I thought that I might have screamed for lack of sustenance, but it might have only been in my mind.

Then a bit of relief, a taste of human. I felt it pour through the tiny holes in my man-made coffin that had but a bag of dirt from my homeland, the Carpathians, the sweet stink of contended territory. The bittersweet lullaby of wolves. The last strong memory, the music of the night-children. Wolves howling in the dark. They were calling to me, singing to me. I wanted to embrace their hard, furry bodies and take the strength out of their rugged limbs and make myself strong enough to get out of this damned little Hell. What a tragedy. I was not so lucky.

Lulled by such a well-remembered tune, I felt that maybe for awhile longer I could endure my starvation. I bided my time in the neverending darkness. I shut my mind away into a secluded glen, existing only in part. I wished to die, I think.

Nights and nights went on. I listened closely to voices around me and found as my thirst deepened, I could sense quite a bit more than I had before; I could smell very plainly the wood of this house, made of wood I knew native to Englands shores - poplar and cherry oak, expensive. There was a certain feeling of newness - a feeling I hated. I suddenly had a compulsion to try and envision the home Jonathan Harker had envisioned for me, the old and dilapidated Carfax estate. But no such visions would bloom; I had no imagination to sufficiently entertain me.

The rest of the house gave of smells of cooking food (which sickened me) and of ripening wines. I heard voices, young and old. A maid passed by so close I could hear her virgin thoughts, passing obsessions of a stable boy making her bosom swell and her loins burn with unfamiliar heat. A man with worries of payments and mouths to feed impressed me with his sense of urgency and maddening desperation passed above me.

I passed the time this way. At length I fell into a troubled torpor. Great long dark empty spaces reside in my memory. I recall little except the darkness, and those small bits of synesthesia that come to mind have been dismissed as clutter in an immortal mind.

Explosions of light disrupted my sleep. Yet before I could throw myself upon my captors in a furious rage, a stake was driven once again through my heart, and I was paralyzed by agony. I writhed against my captors and felt their warm hands pull me from my loathed home. The worst of it all was their smell - sweat and blood, and their panicked breathing like frightened horses. I fancied that the steam from their breath was smoke.

I tried to speak; my tongue felt like it had been cut out.

The shapes of these burly men circled in front of my vision as they dragged me down a long endless corridor and planted my body directly before a searing hot source of light. I shied away from it like an animal, the wooden thing in my chest twisting painfully. A familiar face hovered within my sight.

"Are you well, Herr Dracula? For you'll soon find that freedom comes at a wicked cost. Be still, curse you; the mercy of the Crown alone lets you live now." It was Abraham Van Hellsing. I pulled my emaciated lips from my teeth and smiled my most courteous smile and wished to make a statement of his hospitality, but again my tongue burned and felt like lead.

I must have made a terrifying sight - small spark of victory for me - and then they shoved a cloth over my eyes. Oh god, the blood smell was driving me mad but not a single movement of my body helped me get any closer to sating my eternal hunger. I was manipulated onto something cold and hard. My pouch of dirt fell at my hand and I clutched it for dear life. I was not afraid, but merely fascinated as cold, searing iron was clapped about my hands and ankles and my throat. What sin was my mortal enemy planning on committing? My respect for the man who had managed to catch me at my weakest and take all of what I supposed dear away in a single night was not lightly taken. I was humbled. My capture was a nuisance, more than anything.

Would that I had any idea what was to await my future!

"Make yourself comfortable. This shall be your home for awhile," Van Hellsing said at my ear. "And your foul sins shall be punished yet." He touched me. His palm was searing hot. I do not know why he touched me, but perhaps it was like the hunter touching the vast beast that he feared so much after felling it successfully.

And then all of a sudden, sustenance dripped at my lips. I smelled it a moment before it passed my lips. It aroused such a terrible joyful noise from me that some of it spilled down my neck, the gift-giver starting from fear. It kept coming and coming and I simply let my mouth stay open, my throat working all of that delicious fluid to each and every starving molecule of my demonic self. I writhed and moaned horribly, suffering so much ecstacy... and when the cloth was stripped from my eyes, it was Van Hellsing standing above me, his mean little mouth carved into a smile that disturbed me more than I am willing to now admit, reluctant as I am to relate this story. He took a single white handkerchief and almost reverently wiped the gore from my skin.

"You are a fool," I said, and he replied-

"My dear Count, you are far from home and deeply ensorceled by strong alchemy. You know it not yet, but you are enslaved. Waken tomorrow night, and tell me again who is the fool."

I got no more from him but those foreshadowing words before he left the cell and closed the enormous doors behind him. I looked at my prison walls, which proved no more fascinating than my coffin. I pulled and struggled at the chains, once the blood in me was strengthening my limbs. I found, to my shock, that nothing would break. I sensed there was some sorcery in the chains. My clothes were torn and ragged.

I screamed my scorn for all named Hellsing until the dawn light crept upon the earth and silenced me.