Oh, well... There isn't much I can say about this. English isn't my first language, and this ficlet wasn't beataed by native-speaker. So please don't judge me too hard ;-) Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing (what else did you expect ?)

Darkness

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. I often couldn't sleep because of this suffocating fear. In these nights, I used to lie in my bed motionlessly, afraid that whatever lurked in the shadows would notice me. Well, I barely dared to breathe.

From the room next door, I heard my grandfather's hoarse, rattling cough; it seemed to be lightyears away. How much I longed for calling him, snuggling to his chest crying and telling him about my fear! But I knew he would only laugh at me and call me a coward. A Bernadette fears nothing – especially not the dark. So I always pulled the blanket over my head in a tinge of courage, curled myself up into a ball and cried myself to sleep. These were the times when I missed my father most.

I never knew him; he fell in Colombia, barely two months after I „announced" my arrival. He died on a mission he only accepted to financially ensure mother and me – he wanted me to be able to „grow up properly". Sometimes, I felt that grandfather blamed me for father's death.

I know that I'm a disappointment to him. Even today, I still am. It must have been a bad trade for him: my cold-blooded, fearless mercenary father, a man without scruples, for me, the little cry-baby that couldn't understand why one could kill for money. Welcome to the decline of the Bernadette family tradition.
Perhaps I projected everything I missed on my father because of this. Children in my situation tend to idealize absent parents... I didn't have a mother either; grandfather once told me incidentally that she died at my birth. Isn't it interesting that I was born in a winter night?

Whenever I thought of my father, I imagined that he died by night, too. I don't know exactly how he found death (or death found him), but my childish imagination showed me knives, flashing out of the dark, snipers patiently waiting in the underwood or the explosion of a grenade, tearing up the night.

Is it irony that I lost my left eye through an exploson like this? Sometimes I still dream of the glaring flash and the burning pain, the wave of pressure that pulled me off my feet and brought my ears to roaring...

After that, I was once again imprisoned in impervious obscurity. Time after time Jim prevented me from tearing off the bandage with nearly angelic patience. Because of the disastrous hygienical conditions – I later got to know that Pierre removed the splinter from the remains of my eye by using the handle of a spoon – I had a fever. My wounds became inflamed.

I spent a seemingly endless time in a nightmarish state between sleeping and being awake, surrounded by the darkness and my comrades' voices, the yelling of the guards and this unbearable heat.

At some time, I was pulled to my feet and brought to another room. They pushed me on the floor again, and someone explained to me in broken French that there were a lot of questions for me to answer.

I can't remember too much; at least not when I'm awake. But in my dreams, it always overtakes me. The shouted, repeated questions I couldn't answer. The beatings and the kicks. The electrical shocks. The other „methods of interrogation". Then again phases when they left me alone in the soul-killing void; my breathing and my heartbeat seemed painfully loud to me.

Later they told me that I was nearer to death than to life when Amnesty International finally took out our release – I can't remember.

It took me a long time to put up with my disfigurement. For weeks, I couldn't stand to look at myself in the mirror – even when the empty eye-socket was covered by the bandage Jim responsibly changed every day (even when the wound had long healed...)

All this is so far away now... I don't know if Jim is still alive – if anyone of the „Geese" is still alive. But I know that I'm going to die. The wounds don't cause me pain. Deadly ones never do.

I'm so tired! How much I would like to let myself fall into the nothingness, in this cold, lurking blackness...Wait a minute. Wasn't there something important...?

„Pip!" Her voice is shaking.

Poor little Seras! My sight is blurred, so I can see the blood on her pale cheeks only as indistinct shadows. My eyesight becomes extinct – forever this time. C'est ça. Looks like I'm done. „Seras... Drink..." She answers, but I don't understand her. The moaning and the screams of my dying men fill my ears, until this sounds get lost in an irregular, steadily increasing thunder, too. Is it my heart?

Panic rises within me; for a moment, I'm in Uganda again. I don't want to die...

Cold lips meet my feverish hot ones, and a gentle voice whispers tender words to me. Something touches my neck. It tickles... A silent laugh escapes from my chest. If this is death, I was a fool to fear it.

„Pip." Again, I hear her voice, this time inside my head.

„Seras." Smiling, I become one with the darkness, her warm, soothing darkness that welcomes me like a comforting embrace. This time, I'm not afraid.

06/05/05