Chapter One - SHOCK & DENIAL

Alucard stood in a long silence after having the news of Integra’s death confirmed to him by the Godmother of South Philly.  There was no way HIS Tegs could be dead.  In a dry hoarse voice, he thanked @Isabella-Luciano for the information then hung up the phone.

He walked over to the waiting area for his flight and sat with his face in his hands. He didn't know what he was expecting to hear, but part of him hoped Integra would have survived.

“No no no no no no no.”  He repeated like a desperate prayer. “She can’t be.”

He had a bodyguard that doubled as him when he was away on long trips, she had to have something similar.  They had to have gotten the body double and not her.   He refused to believe she was dead, she couldn’t be. 

As he sat on the plane his mind couldn’t help but wander to the possibility of Integra being dead, and his hands started to shake uncontrollably.  Everything got unbelievably cold, to the point he was surprised he couldn’t see his own breath. The very thought was unbelievable, the reality would be unbearable. So he closed his eyes, and he took several deep breaths as he counted back from 10, allowing his heart to slow down a bit.  

“She’s okay, there is no way anyone got the best of Integra.  She’s too good for that, and Jason and Aaron would have been with her.  There is absolutely no chance she’s dead.”

He managed to calm himself down enough to just pass out the rest of the flight to Detroit. He grabbed a taxi and quickly went to the home they’d just bought, of course Integra wasn’t home, but at this time of the day it wouldn't be unusual for her to not be home.  So he hopped on his motorcycle and checked all the places he knew she might be.  

He didn’t even bother going into the Mastrosimone headquarters since the place was little more than a skeleton of a building.  The sight of the building made Alucard sick to his stomach, but he kept his head about him.  There were other places she could be, warehouses, the cigar factory, his hotel even.  Each place was the same story, she wasn’t there and the people there told him that Integra was no longer of this world.

Outside his hotel he leaned against his motorcycle, his heart racing a mile a minute.  All these people are wrong, they have to be. “She’s out of town” he kept telling himself as he rode back to their quiet country home.   He would wait there until she got back, he would call a priest, they would be married and life would be good.  Everything was alright.

He spent his days at the house sitting beneath the willow tree on their property, overlooking the pond.  He would mindlessly flip her mother’s ring between his fingers, occasionally he would look at the tiny engraving of Integra and her mother’s initials on the inside of the ring, and smile to himself.  “She’s going to love this….”  he couldn’t think of a more meaningful way for him to tell her he wanted her with him for the rest of their lives, than this.  Swearing their love to one another, the gods as their only witness, in a private and intimate ceremony under this very tree. 

The nights he spent cooking for two, wanting to make sure that when she came home, even it was late that she would have a meal ready for her in the refrigerator.  Was it the 10th day, the 12th day?  He didn’t know anymore, the days all ran together, and all he knew was that he was running out of plates. 

It was an unusually cold night as he was plating up Integra’s food and walking it to the fridge.  Out of the corner of his eye, he happened to notice movement, and what looked like a flash of golden hair.  He dropped the plate as he turned, “TEGS!” he yelled out in a quivering voice as he made his way in the direction of the movement.  He opened every door in the house and looked in each room, only to find himself hopelessly alone. 

When he got back to the kitchen and looked at the broken plate on the floor the realization started to hit him.   He walked to the fridge, and stared in at the dozen meals that lay there, uneaten and spoiled… it was then the protective layer of shock started to wear off, and the truth hit him.  She was gone.  

When the pain of that truth finally took hold, Alucard's legs lost their strength, he fell to his knees, and the tears streamed down his face like rain. 

Chapter 2 - PAIN & GUILT

“This. This is all my fault.”  Alucard kept telling himself over and over again during the coming days. He kept thinking that perhaps if he’d been there he could have stopped her from dying. If he wasn’t thinking that, he was feeling guilty for not dying with her and forcing her to go through the afterlife without him.  It was a pain that cut deeper than any other wound he had ever been dealt before. 

There was little he didn’t try to take away the pain he was feeling down into his very soul.  One particular night at the bar of the Chaise Hotel, Alucard found himself drowning in his third bottle of wine, and the euphoria from that first hit of morphine.  He was tired of the other patrons though, their happiness and their blindness to the pain he was going through.  He couldn’t understand how they could be so damn happy while his world had fallen apart, so he moved to drink in his office.   The hotel’s concierge, Wesley, knocked on the office door to bring Alucard his 4th bottle of wine.

Alucard opened the door, only instead of just taking the bottle and sending Wesley off, Alucard pulled the blonde haired man into the office with him, knowing his concierge had a crush on him. “Shut the door,” Alucard said as soundly as he could. 

Wesley stared at his boss, “Are you, high?” he questioned.

“I can close the door too,  aaand so what if I’m high.“ Alucard purred as he stalked up to the blonde man, reached his arm out, and backed the man against the door, as he shut it. 

Then leaning in he whispered in the concierge’s ear, “I know you’ve been wanting this” before he placed his lips to the other man’s neck.

Wesley couldn’t deny what his boss had said, and he didn’t know if this opportunity would ever come around again, so he returned his bosses affections by kissing him full on the lips.  Not wasting any time, he worked to undo Alucard’s shirt.  After helping the amber-eyed man slip out of his shirt, Wesley took a step back to admire his work.  Instead of the finely chiseled chest and abs he had always imagined his boss to have, he was face to face with the harsh reality of Alucard’s past.  He pushed Alucard away, shivering at the feel of the man’s scars. “You…” Was all he could mutter out.

Alucard just blankly stared at him, “What you no longer want to fuck because I have these scars? You can not be serious.”

It wasn’t just the scars that turned Wesley off, it was the realization that those scars proved to him that his boss had gone through some really dark times and in his current state it was just wrong to take advantage of that.  He would also be lying if he said the scars didn’t disgust him to a degree as well, the thought of their feel beneath his hands made his skin crawl.  “I’m sorry Alucard, but that’s exactly it.”

The euphoria of the drug was wearing off, and annoyance started taking over.  While he grabbed the bottle out of Wesley’s hand he simply muttered, “Piss off then.”

“I...I’ll call you a cab sir.  I think you’d be better off at home.”   The man spoke apologetically. 

“I SAID FUCK OFF!” Alucard yelled as he threw the bottle of wine and it smashed against the door only inches from Wesley’s head. 

The way his concierge took off,  left Alucard surprised to find that not only did he come back in and tell him the cab arrived, but Wesley helped Alucard into the car itself.  The whole ride back to his home, Alucard lamented the fact that nothing he did was taking away the pain. 

The only thing he found, that he felt helped was immersing himself in those things that reminded him of her.  He found himself showering with her shampoo, smoking her cigars, or sitting on the bed with her jacket draped around him. 

One day he as sat there on the bed, smoking one of Integra's cigars the realization hit him. That while this did help with the pain, it wasn’t doing anything to push him forward, and his thoughts fell to Aurora and the promise he made to her. Alucard knew he needed to push forward and make his way back to her, and his next step was going through Integra’s things. 

FIguring out what to keep, and what to get rid of is never easy for most, but he had made up his mind on what he was keeping. The only things of hers he was going to keep was her wedding band and her pistol.  That was easy, the difficult part for him was deciding what he should give to charity and what he should just throw away, that was impossible.  Each item of clothing, bedding, even the toaster had memories attached to them, memories not only from the past but also from the future that will never be. 

As Alucard was going through the items in her desk, he was begining to think that things were getting easier.  It wasn’t until he opened her second drawer down and pulled out the book she kept track of their finances in, that he was going to find out how utterly wrong he was.  Tucked away on the inside cover was a folded up, loose sheet of paper. It appeared to be a messy letter with a bunch of things written then scratched out before a small note seemed to come out in full detail...

“I don't really know how to say this, and there is no way to sugar coat this type of news.  Just know that I'm excited and I hope you will be too.  While you were in London, I found out we are going to be parents... I'm not far along, but the thought of just having something so special between us, it brings me unmeasurable joy. I know you, so I know what you'll probably think, and you're wrong... you are going to be a great father Alucard. I know it."

He stared at the note, read it at least a dozen times before the meaning actually sunk in, and hit him. “She was pregnant…” He whispered.  His breath quickened as rapidly as his heartbeat did when he realized that he not only lost his lover, wife, and best friend… he also lost the mother of their child.  He lost a son or daughter he will never get to know or love. 

Pages ripped out of the finance log when Alucard threw the book across the room, screaming to the gods in an unbearable, painful rage. 

“HAVE I NOT BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH ALREADY?  HAVE YOU NOT TORMENTED ME ENOUGH? IS MY LIFE JUST A SICK JOKE TO YOU?” 

Tears poured from his eyes, the pain and anger left him choking on his own breaths. He cried until his voice was raw and his eyes burned from the tears.  He had utterly exhausted himself, laying his head upon the desk, he questioned the gods one last time in a hoarse voice that was barely a whisper, “why?”
 

Chapter 3 - ANGER & BARGAINING

Alucard had never been much of a religious man.  He gave up believing in any sort of higher power a young boy when every prayer he sent up went unanswered, and he realized that if he wanted out of his situation, it was something he was going to have to do for himself.  Now, however, he was desperate.  The first day he just asked for them back.  The second day he started bargaining; first, he would give up drinking, then killing, he swore to whatever god was listening that he’d even become a more humble man.   Still, the prayers went unanswered. In some last-ditch effort, he prayed for just one more hour.

When he had given up all hope for any sort of prayer being answered, his anger started rising..   He walked into their bedroom, he grabbed what should have been their wedding bands. He slid his band over his finger, then found the only remnant of his childhood he had, a cross necklace.  He took the cross trinket and threw it to the floor.  In place of the cross, he put Integra’s ring and he wore that around his neck. 

He began his trek to the kitchen, but as he passed by her office, Alucard slipped in once again.  Her note still sat there where he left it, tear-soaked on the desk.  He read it over a few more times, then folded the note up and put it into his wallet.  Feeling his blood begin to boil he stormed into the kitchen and turned on the gas for everything they had that used it.  He let the house fill with the gas as he went to the barn to get the can of gasoline he used to fuel his motorcycle.  He topped off his tank then poured a line of gas from their kitchen out to their yard. 

He stood in the yard, and as the words of Integra’s note passed through his thoughts again, his anger peaked, and he flamed the gods for the last time, “FUCK YOU ALL!  I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR HAUNTING VISIONS, YOUR FUCKING TORMENT….” And as tears once again flowed like rivers down the curves of his face he lit a match and tossed it onto the line of gasoline, then watched as the house he and Integra bought become a massive burning fireball.

He didn’t wait for the fire to die down before he hopped on his motorcycle and took off.  There was nothing left for him in Detroit, any possible future he had now lay in Philadelphia. He took off down older country roads, pushing his bike to its very limits.  He was a very good rider, and he took every twist and turn with the grace of a professional racer, however near a farm on the outside of the city Alucard ran into something he never expected to see.  Along the side of the road was a little girl, who was the striking image of Integra. Her hair, the color of wheat fields, she had eyes as blue as the deepest sapphires, but her smile was… his smile.   She waved at him as he approached, he stopped watching the road and as his head turned while he passed her, and he heard the girl speak to him,  “Daddy….”   

Everything happened in slow motion, from the moment he saw the girl to the moment he heard her call him daddy.  When he heard that he gripped his brakes, he gripped the front brakes a lot harder than he intended to. It threw him off the bike as the bike flipped over.  His head hit the pavement first, followed by getting slammed into a tree.  Alucard placed a hand to his head, he was bleeding and from the sensation going down his legs and back, he was bleeding from more than just his head. 

He could feel himself fading out of consciousness.  He figured he was dying and found a sense of peace and happiness in that thought.  He couldn’t help but smile as he thought to himself that he was feeling a lot warmer than he expected to for dying, he thought he’d feel a lot colder.  With a smile still on his face, he accepted what he thought was his fate and whispered, “Tegs, I’m comin’ home.”

Bella had set up a man to trail Alucard the moment he made it back to the states. It was his sole job to make sure Alucard survived his mourning process because Bella didn't want Aurora to have to lose anyone else that mattered to her. It took the man tailing Alucard a couple of minutes to catch up to him.  He slammed on his breaks when he saw the accident, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit"  was all the man could say.

He walked up to Alucard and shook him. "Come on buddy, please be alive.  Bella will kill me if anything bad happens to you." 

He took a sigh of relief seeing the amber-eyed man take a breath, and he ran up to the farmhouse and asked to use the farmer's phone.  He dialed Godmother Byrne.  "Mrs. Byrne, now don't kill me please... but that maniac you had me trailing, he wrecked his fucking motorcycle.  He ain't dead, but there is fucking blood everywhere, and he ain't conscious.  We're by some farm on Union Grove Road, near 625.  Oh shit."

Bella, at no small expense, had Alucard picked and doctored.  She'd also instructed the doctors to keep him sedated after she'd heard about what he'd done to the home he and Integra likely shared.  The man's accident might not have been one, and she wouldn't take the chance he'd try again before she got her hands on him.

Bella stood with Philly, but the ugly work in Detroit hadn't made her happy.  It was just part of the job.  It was how this thing worked, and she supposed Billy and Integra and even Rebecca & Giovanni all knew that.  Had roles been reversed, they would have mourned her too... after putting slugs into her and her family.

Well... at least most of them would have.  She had a hard time saying for sure about Billy.  After hearing about how hard he took Kenzi's death, she wondered if maybe he wasn't made for this thing they did.  Maybe, in many ways, he was too good for it.  She'd seen his like before... and if Death continued to avoid her doorstep, she would again.

Alucard was brought to Hollowood.  GavinByrne had Aurora off in Iceland and so there was more than enough space for the young man to be laid out and given peace to rest.  The nurses who came with the transport laid him out on the bed in the guest house and Bella looked at him, bare to the waist and shook her head at the mass amount of scars.  Only one other person in all the world, so far as she'd met, knew such torment and pain.  She wondered if this was why Aurora had befriended the man.  He certainly wasn't hard on the eyes... but the similarity between his scarred wirey form and Gavin's younger look was positively uncanny & undeniable.

"How long will he stay with us?"  Will asked his mom as the nurses left, his eyes following the backside of one as she disappeared, a smirk that matched his father's missed painted across his young lips.

"As long as he needs."  Bella said tucking Alucard in, never seeing Will's bold stares at the ladies.  "He's Aurora's friend.  She'd want us to look out for him..."

"And he works for you now, right?"  Will asked.

Bella nodded.  "Provided I can keep him from killing himself, yes."

"Mom I ..."

"Go get some lunch ready for yourself, make a sandwich for me too."  She knew this would make him go as she'd been eating so little despite his insistence.  

Will just nodded and walked out, closing the door behind him.

Bella sat beside Alucard's bed.  She knew he should be able to wake any time and so she spoke to him in a normal tone of voice, "That was some spill you had, Alucard.  Come on now... wake up... come back to us.  I'd like to talk to you a moment.  Then you can sleep more."

When Alucard finally opened his eyes he was surprised to find himself outside, laying in a large grass field filled with wildflowers.   He took a deep, easy breath looking up at a lightly cloudy, brilliantly blue sky.  It wasn't until he felt a hand grab his interlacing their fingers with his, that he looked over.  Beside him lay, a blonde long haired, blued eyed woman. 

Alucard stared at her for what felt like an eternity, he blinked a few times to make sure it wasn't a trick of his tired eye.  When she was still there, he choked on his words for a moment, "Tegs?  How can this be?  How, you...  you died."

Then somehow the memory of his crash hit him, and still, he was confused. "This is heaven?"

The blonde smiled and quietly nodded, her smile confirmed it to him, she was his Integra. "Tegs, I don't understand.  I... I... don't deserve heaven."

As he sat up, she pressed her finger to his lips to hush and calm his confusion.  He brushed her finger away and pulled her lips to his kissing her with love and depth he hadn't shown her since they had first found out how they felt for one another. "I love you. So. Fucking. Much" He breathed between each kiss.  He broke away from kissing her to sit back and just admire how beautiful she was to him, and he noticed that Integra had nodded for him to look behind him.  He turned and looked, and there running in the tall grass was the little girl from the side of the road.

"Tegs, that is, our daughter?" Alucard said as his heart lifted to find his child with them in this peaceful place. The woman once again just simply nodded. 

Alucard clambered to his knees and called out to her, instinctively knowing her name, "SERAS!"

The little girl stopped and turned around wearing a smile that was an exact match for Alucard's.  "DADDY!" She yelled as she ran towards him, right into her father's arms and it wasn't until he embraced his daughter that, for the first time in his life, Alucard ever truly felt at home.  He picked the girl up with him as he stood up and twirled her around in a circle, his smile and laugh mirroring hers.  He set her down and rubbed the top of her head, "Come on, let's get mom squirt."

"DAAADDYYYYY" the girl giggled out in protest to being called squirt, but still smiled as she took her father's hand as they took the few steps back towards Integra.  They sat in a quiet circle, Seras softly laughed as she handed Alucard a light bluish-purple wildflower.  He looked at it, it was oddly beautiful to him. The purple melted into the blue as if it were painted on with watercolor, he'd never seen anything like it.  He smiled as he slid the flower behind his daughter's ear.

As he let go of the flower, he could feel the warmth and light give way to the cold, blackness. He was being pulled away from them, and the tears streamed down his face, he screamed to them as they slowly got smaller and smaller in his vision.  "NOOOO, TEGS.  SERAAAAAAS!"  He reached as far as he could to try and reach his daughter, because he could see her running as fast as she could towards him. The last thing he could hear before everything went completely black was the sound of Seras screaming, "DADDY!"

Alucard lay for a few moments in the frigid darkness, when a familiar voice started piercing through the shadows.  "That was some spill you had, Alucard.  Come on now... wake up... come back to us.  I'd like to talk to you a moment.  Then you can sleep more."

He groaned as he blinked several times to allow his eyes to adjust to the light.  He turned his head in the direction of the voice, and he noticed a woman in her early to mid 40's he assumed.  She was very beautiful, with black hair lightly streaked with grey and stunning brown eyes, that behind their initial softer appearance hide a fierceness, that had he been 100% he would have most definitely hit on her.  Her voice he knew though, and as he sat up his dim amber eyes locked onto Bella's.  His voice cracked with both the emotional and physical pain he was in, "Why... why did you save me?  Why did you not let me die?"

"Because I love my daughter."  She admitted.  "Your Integra was a protestant... but even they believe in going to hell for suicide, so let's just resolve that I didn't do the favor for you so much as I did it for her, as I hope someone would do for me one day if I die before Gavin."

She leaned back in the chair she was sitting in and crossed her legs.  

"Besides, you don't really want to die.  Speaking from personal experience... what you want is to have her back.  Barring that you NEED the pain to stop but you got no idea what a world without her looks like and you have no interest in finding out.  Is that a fair statement?"

Alucard rubbed at his head,  partly in a response to the throbbing and partly in response to attempting to make sense of what Bella was saying. Did she really think he purposely wrecked his bike? There is no way. Then the more he thought about it, the more he realized that made perfect sense... Looking at the series of events, what he did to their house, his wreck, his first words to her.  

"Suicide?  You think I TRIED to kill myself?" He ran his fingers through his long black hair.  "Now I will say you are right in that I don't want to die. I do want Integra back.  Imagining a world without her is next to impossible.  But I have no choice but needing to find out, I made an oath to that daughter you love, the friend I care for.  I swore to her that I would help her through this. I'll be damned if back out of that just because life got damn near impossible.  LOOK AT ME, I've been through impossible things, I make it through it all, eventually."

Alucard took a long deep breath. "The crash was an accident, and there is no way to explain things without me sounding crazy. Also, there is a detail I found out back at my old place in DT, and it's something you need to know. It is an important factor for you making your decision about me in the future, and I do NOT want you thinking I am hiding things from you.  So I'll just come straight out and say it, Integra was pregnant when she died."

"So knowing that, I wrecked my bike because I could have sworn I saw my daughter, as a very young girl, on the side of the road.  I could have even sworn I heard her call me Daddy."  Alucard tried to close out the pain in this voice by shutting his eyes. 

Bella sat rigidly staring at Alucard as if he'd slapped her.  Finally, she shifted in her seat and stood up.

"You'll stay here and recover.  After that, you'll take up a residence at the Sewing Factory Loft apartments.  I don't know when Aurora and Gavin will come back but I promise you - the moment she returns, you'll know."

Her chin fell slightly and she whispered, "I know it means jack shit now... but, for what it's worth, if I had known... I wouldn't have let harm come to her and your baby, I swear it."

She sighed.  She'd seen those herbal teas in Aurora's belongings when they moved her into Vassar.  At some point, she'd gotten ahold of them, likely from Tara, and so there was no chance she was carrying Billy's baby.  No way for this horror to be compounded for her by the burden of becoming a mother in the wake of such loss.  

Thank God.

Though, some small part of her hated that thought.  She HAD wanted grandchildren - the sooner the better.  Now, her chance for them might have been lost with Billy, at least for a while.

"I..."  She hesitated.  "There are some bits of unfinished business I need to see to.  Please, rest.  The nurse will come by tomorrow to check on you and if you need anything there is a kitchenette in the other room.  This guest house is fully stocked - just, be sure to take it easy if you do get up and move about.  Alright?  No more accidents."