The Way You Look Tonight
Chapter one • Ain’t Misbehavin’
Ao3 Next
Author’s note: Yay!! It’s finally here! I’ve been writing this for a while and have enough chapters written to set up a chapter schedule. Request fill for an amazing anon <3 Thank you so much for being patient with me! There will be a new chapter posted every Saturday. This chapter is a bit short. Mostly setting up the story and stuff.
Contents: MULTI-CHAPTER, Alucard (Hellsing)xfem!reader, eventual NSFW, written in 2nd person, relatively ambiguous time period but pre-2000s, reader and family members descriptions (other than clothes and personalities) are kept ambiguous for the sake of inclusion, ghost Alucard (kind of?), spooky stuff, Integra is dead and the Hellsing Organization has been dissolved.
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It must’ve been glorious in its prime. Those faded, dry-colored bricked walls loomed high enough to block out the early morning sun. Huge. Bigger than anything you’d ever seen as you stared up at it. The fact that you’d be living in it — even if temporarily — was a little mind-boggling.
The manor had fallen into a state of disrepair over the years. Its previous owner had been… some important person. You weren’t there to hear the conversation. “Last surviving member of the family” or something along those lines. Whatever had happened to leave this place so empty and crumbling slowly to time had to be a sad tale indeed. You’re sure you’d hear the full story again before it was fixed up and re-sold. Your father had a rather expensive hobby of buying “ancient relics” as he said — and fixing them up to be put back on the market.
"Could you lend me a hand with these boxes, please?" Your name is called. Attention drawn away from the manor, you look towards your mother, who’s already holding two boxes in her arms. The load looks a little heavy.
“Coming.” You nod and walk over to her, gravel crunching under your shoes. It will be hot today. Even with the manor blocking the sun right now, you could feel the heat of it beaming around it and warming the air. You take the top box from your mother’s arms with a grunt. You were right: it is heavy. Full of silverware and plates from home. Adjusting your hold on it a little, you make your way up the front steps and through the open doors. Your father and two siblings are already inside. You can hear them distantly upstairs. It’s beautiful indoors. A waft of cool air hits your face, eerily refreshing. Thankful that you’d looked at the layout of the place on your way here, you take a left for the kitchen. The carpet beneath your feet is quite worn out. What might’ve once been red is now a murky, dusty, grayish crimson. Each step sends a small cloud billowing around your sneakers.
The kitchen is less homey than you’d prefer. It’s big — meant to hold a team of cooks — and is a little creepy to be standing in. You note the grime that covers the tiles while setting down the box on the counter and begin to unpack. Grateful for the windows on the far wall that allow some light to enter, you swiftly remove the plates and silverware and then put the empty box back into your arms. Getting one last grimacing look around, you decide that you’d keep a glass of water always full before bed to avoid coming down here… in the dark.
⛤
By the time night had fallen, you’d set up a makeshift version of your bedroom back home. A small bookshelf set up on the opposite wall, some pictures for some color in this dreary place, a record player, and a stack of vinyls set on the vanity you wouldn't be using. This would be home for the time being, you tell yourself.
The bedroom is enormous. A little too big for you, in your opinion. The double you have squished into the corner feels terribly out of place in a room designed for a much larger bed and then some. But it’s pretty. The double windows open up to a beautiful view of the forest surrounding the manor. The room is ornate in a very… old way. There’s something dreamy about it. You wonder what kind of person slept in this room… If anyone slept in it at all.
While fluffing your pillow, you notice a breeze cut through your nightgown. Brow furrowing, you look towards the window and see it’s cracked a little. The sheer curtains that do nothing to block the light of the moon flutter faintly in the wind, and you can hear the soft ‘tap, tap,’ of the unlatched window. Dropping your pillow onto your bed haphazardly, you make your way over to the window and brush the curtains aside. Just as you suspected: the window is unlatched and is opening and closing very gently in the wind.
“Must’ve forgotten to latch it.” You mutter under your breath as you reach forward to do just that. Sliding the curtains closed, you turn back around only to find your pillow set perfectly in place at the top of the bed. Blinking and standing still, you glance around the candle-lit room quickly. The house’s electricity had to be fixed, so it would be candles or battery-powered lamps for a couple of days. You preferred the former. The room was practically empty… so there was nowhere for some intruder to hide. So how had…? You brush it off. You must’ve forgotten that you’d put it there before you checked the window. After all… a pillow can't just move on its own.
You’d slept well enough that night. Dreams not scary enough to call nightmares had clutched your mind in sleep. A strange foggy corridor. Musty-smelling and damp. Like a dungeon or a cave or a… basement. There was a door at the end of the corridor. It was really strange, that door. It looked like it was made of metal and bolted shut from the outside. You brushed it off. Weird dreams after sleeping in a new place were common… but the feeling of that dream nagged at you all through the day. Even while you were distracted with something like helping your mother clean the kitchen or assisting your father with carrying more boxes into the house, it still rested there in the back of your mind. You wondered — that evening, as you ate dessert on the front step while admiring the sunset — if you’d seen that door somewhere while looking at the layout of the house.
You checked the stack of paperwork that had come with the house before bed. They were spread out on the dining table with a battery-powered lamp buzzing dimly beside them while you shuffled through the house’s layout. Brows furrowed, you squinted at a particular page. It looked shorter than the others… like it had been sliced shorter. And faintly — as you brought it closer to your face to squint at the bottom of it — you noticed what you previously marked off as an ink stain… to be that of a cut-off letter. It looked like a ‘D.’ Blotchy cursive like the rest of the labels scratched onto the build plan. What could that mean? Had someone deliberately cut off the bottom of this page? You flipped the page over to check the back again. Nothing. “What are you hiding?” You whisper slowly, expression skeptical. Just as you were going to set the page down and fix them back into a stack, the lamp blares brightly before going out. You blink in the sudden dark, pupils straining to adjust. Pushing the fear down your throat, you pat the table to find the lamp as quickly as possible and push the “on/off” button several times. It's fruitless. Now the fear grips you a bit tighter. You've begun to sweat in the dark and thoughts of bolting to your room and leaving the paperwork here for the morning flash through your mind. You weren't scared of the dark, per se, but being tossed into sudden darkness was scary. Grabbing the lamp by its handle, you hurry while cussing under your breath to where the doorway was. It's just a few steps away from the dining table where you run face-first into something firm. It felt like… fabric. Warm satin and the dull, hollow sound a human chest makes when it's beat against. You let out a quick scream followed by another, louder one as you backed away and cupped your nose, which had gotten hurt when you ran into whatever that was. “Mom!” You shout instinctually in a bout of fear, backing towards the curtained windows. You felt childish calling for your mother. You hadn't done that in years. The last time was when you were eight or nine. Not soon after, your mother appears in the doorway carrying her lamp, looking just as confused and worried as you.
“What’s wrong?” She breathes a sigh of relief to find you unharmed.
You blink at the tall back of a chair standing there facing you, pretending to be the culprit. That was not a chair you’d bumped into. “M-my lamp went out. I couldn't see anything.” You take a breath and try to pull yourself back together. Grabbing the chair, you push it back into its place, noting that it had been there, pushed in before your light went out.
Your mom watches and, noticing the papers, asks, “What were you doing with those?”
You explain to her that you’d had a weird dream about a basement or something of that matter and wanted to check if you’d seen it anywhere in the layout. You hadn't found anything about a basement and were about to tell her about the shortened paper when something stopped you. You felt so tired suddenly, eyelids heavy with exhaustion and your brain fogging over. “I’ll walk you back to your room.” Your mom gestures for you to follow her after noticing how tired you look. “When I have weird dreams, it's usually because I didn't get very good sleep. You should go to bed a little earlier tonight. You're probably exhausted.”
You listened to her and went right to bed once you were in your room again. But not before checking the batteries in your lamp. They’d corroded. The bottom of the light was all crusty and with a grimace, you set it down on your nightstand. Could battery corrosion happen that quickly? You scratch the back of your neck as you think. That felt impossible. These were brand new.
You’d have to use candles again, you supposed.
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