This thing has been chewing on my brain forever (or at least for most of my brief time in the Hellsing fandom so far). And this pairing, I will admit, holds a strange appeal to me. Even if I have other fics I should be finishing...

Anyway, this contains spoilers through the end of the manga: which I own absolutely no rights to, in case you were wondering. The title is inspired by a C.S Lewis novel.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”-Les Miserables.

Until We Have Faces

He is everywhere and he is nowhere.

He is the endless past and the eternal future, faceless because of the million different faces he is scattered amongst. In the aftermath of the attack on London, after pulling that poison into him, he exists only at the divergence point in a paradox.

(“Police Girl, do you know why vampires have no reflections?” he had asked her one day, after finding her in front of the small mirror in her chamber.)

It starts as a way to quell the noise, this carving through the lives within him. Their amassed voices are the irregular pounding of rain on a window, all shouting at once. Unable to bear it any longer, he-or the unanswerable question that composes him now, at least-reaches out in rage to silence one. As the afterimage of a man vanishes (that one had begged like a dog, he remembers with scorn), the deafening sound quiets. Only the slightest bit, but it quiets all the same.

(“No, Master. Why?”)

It is only after the first thousand lives, though, that he realizes; as each one dissipates, it is one more place he knows he cannot be. He is here and here perhaps, but at least not there. And he realizes that he has no idea of what, exactly, he is looking for.

When all the rest are gone, what will that final 'here' be? He forgot his own face long ago, after all.

(“'And then God said,'” he had quoted to her, each word of scripture searing his tongue, 'Let us make man in our own image.' Man is modeled after God, and we are the eternally defiled, the unholy, a mockery of that, monsters who put on the image of man.” He had indicated the bare, objective face of the mirror that reflected only the room they stood in. “Thus we are forbidden from looking upon ourselves.”)

He has always thought of identity as a thing for mortals to worry about. They are the ones who so cling to the illusion of souls within the physical body, of these fictitious things that will outlast the death that so terrifies them. He knows better. There is no true immortality, and they are all destined for the void he now occupies.

They are all forsaken by God, just as he is.

And yet. And yet....

(“Oh,” she'd said “I....I didn't think of it that way.” A frown had shadowed one corner of her mouth.)

And yet as the noise of nothingness is progressively silenced, he begins to think he can hear something, something calling out through the din. "Here, I am here," it cries out. "I am always here." Against the ongoing blackness, he thinks there is a certain light that drives it back.

(“I mean, that doesn't seem right. I always thought we'd....fallen, that we'd lost ourselves. That it's not God's rejection of us, so much as, well...” she had ground her teeth, chewing on her next words “...as our rejection of Him. I mean....oh, this made so much more sense in my head.”

Seras Victoria had looked up with those strange eyes of hers. They hadn't been holding their usual awe or reverence. It had been something else; the sort of expression one wears when they are on the verge of understanding, that kind of careful and privatized joy. For a fractional moment, he had been filled with an exposed, trembling sensation: as if his whole being were a pair of wings about to spread open.)

He decides that it was definitely the eyes.

It was the eyes that had made him choose her, with their impossibly clear and incorruptible shade of blue. He had been driven, largely, by curiosity. He had wondered if their clarity would shatter, the way he had shattered all those cold and unresponsive mirrors in the beginning of his unlife.

But they hadn't.

That mystified him more than he dared acknowledge. So it is those eyes he keeps in mind, as he eliminates the faces within him one by one. He wonders when he will come upon hers.

(After a few moments of that stare, he had frowned. “What are you doing, Police Girl?”

“Memorizing, Master,” she had reported frankly. Had both hands not been on the strap of the ungainly cannon she carried, she probably would have saluted.

“Memorizing what?”

“Your face, Master.”)

The number begins to dwindle as the years wear on, although he has no concept of time anymore. And the voice grows ever louder, directing him, pushing him, “I am here, I am here, I am always here and will never leave you.”

It draws him back each time he feels like discarding the worn and dirty pieces he has managed to gather up. He tries not to believe it-he is so used to being lied to, and doubt is so much easier-but within this darkness of confusion, it is something to cling to.

(“My face.” He had been repeating her words more than questioning her.

“Yes. We'll get our own faces back, eventually; my mum always said that God's a bridge-builder. Until then, Master, I can be your mirror. We're parts of each other, right? That should work.”

He had frowned-largely at her naivete-and her face had slid into an almost exact imitation. Finally, he had snorted and turned to leave with a flick of his coat.

“You are making a sport of me, Police Girl, and I suggest you stop it. Now hurry up, ghouls won't kill themselves.”

“Yes Master, of course.” The frown had turned into a teasing smile.

Integra had later asked why Seras was wearing such foul expressions lately.)

And then, there is only one left.

There is only one, but he stands there in confusion studying it. He looks upon this last remaining 'self', over three million selves later, and can finally make out the voice.

It is his own.

But it is hers as well.

It is one, yet it is two. He cannot tell where he ends and she begins, their beings twined around each other and bound by something he does not understand.

"I am here, I am here, I am always here and will never leave you, your mirror, your face, your completion when you know nothing else."

(Who was it, again, that said all those things about love binding together, about love that preserves in death? You knew Him, once.)

Alucard reaches out and seizes his answer.

She catches him wearing that look. Again.

“Master,” -of course she would still call him that, even after thirty years of absence- “What are you doing?”

He gives the barest of smiles, a smile that is instantly reflected on Seras Victoria's own face. The tint of his glasses turns the moonlight in her hair to gold, but her eyes are as blue as ever.

And that strange spreading pushes outward again, against the place where his heart had once beat: the place where he once believed there was nothing at all.

“Memorizing.”

A/N: Thank you for reading. Any tips, suggestions and critiques are welcome.