http://redseeker.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] redseeker.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] 31_days2008-02-10 06:55 pm

[Feb 10] [Hellsing/Devil May Cry] Bullseye

Title: Bullseye
Day/Theme: February 10 - "And are for ever damned with Lucifer"
Series: Devil May Cry/Hellsing (AU?)
Character/Pairing: Dante Sparda & Seras Victoria
Rating: PG-13 (violence)


[:Couple notes: this is, hopefully, the first in a little series. Also, the title is from DMC - I believe the bar in DMC3, next door to the strip-club, is called Bullseye.]

There was something about the girl at the bar that he just couldn't put his finger on. He hadn't seen her there before, and he was a regular. He knew all the usual faces, and took note of the new ones - the drifters, the tourists, and, occasionally, the demons. They were usually easy to recognise, though perhaps he had an advantage there. What threw him about this girl, however, was that he was having trouble deciding whether she was a devil or not.

She looked human enough from the outside. She was dressed in a black miniskirt and black thigh-highs - which alone made it difficult for him to concentrate - with a dark red top, heavy black boots, and a black jacket which would be easy to conceal a gun under. Long legs, big tits, tiny waist, and long blonde hair that fell in soft, shaggy spikes over her round blue eyes - she was his type, but there was something... off about her. She didn't smell right. She sat with her legs crossed, poised on the spindly bar stool with a rare, easy grace - the kind of preternatural surety that he usually only saw in devils. Trish had it. Hell, even his brother had had it. But she didn't smell like a demon.

Getting up from his corner table, safely curtained in shadow as it was, he slung the strap of his guitar case over one shoulder and, hands in pockets, strolled to the bar. The place was nearly empty, and he moved through a thick soup of cigarette smoke. She was nursing what looked like a Bloody Mary.

He slid onto the stool next to her and leaned on the bar top. She cast him a sidelong look, then he saw her inhale, and still. Her eyes turned keen and she turned her head to face him. There was something familiar about her scent.

"Yes?" she said. "Can I do something for you?" Her voice was sweet, slightly high-pitched, with a clear English accent.

He gave an easy, lopsided smile. "Buy you a drink?"

"I already have one," she replied, nodding to her glass. It was still nearly full; it looked like she'd hardly touched it since she'd been there.

"Damn, that's just too bad. Down it and I'll buy you another one?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No, thanks. I'm fine." She was still keeping a wary eye on him, though her body language was relaxed.

There was a pause, then he said, "You're a long way from home."

"I could say the same thing to you," she said, then bit her lip, as though she had not meant to say it. He cocked his head to the side.

"What're you talking about? I live just down the street from here," he said, but he was smiling. So she could tell. She could smell he wasn't human, which, in turn, confirmed his suspicions of her. "I'd introduce myself," he said, "but I think you already know who I am."

She'd been looking down, seeming to study her drink, but now she looked up sharply and met his eyes. Hers were a darker blue than his, but now that he looked, he swore he could see veins of red in the irises.

He stood up, hitching the guitar case on his back. He thought he felt Alastor crackle within it, like an animal purring. He nodded toward the door.

After a moment's hesitation, she rose to her feet and followed him, silently, out of the bar.

In the narrow street outside, he leant against an empty dumpster and met her eyes again. She shifted, eventually leaning her weight on one foot and standing with her hands on her hips.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she got there first.

"So you're him, then," she said. "You're the demon."

He was right about the jacket. She whipped a pistol from a concealed holster and fired three shots, aiming for his heart, neck, and head. The first one hit, though just off-target; before the second connected he had jumped. He leapt upward, grinning, onto one of the narrow balconies of the half-ruined apartment block that overlooked the alley. She growled, raised her gun, and continued to fire. He saw that her eyes seemed to glint red as she snarled and attacked.

He fired off a few shots with Ebony before jumping again; he wanted to do this away from possible bystanders, and it was only a matter of moments before the sound of gunshots drew the drunks out of the bar. He went for the next balcony, then up to one on the next floor, rebounding off the rails and up again, aiming for the roof. He ran the last stretch, glorying in the rush of defying gravity as he dashed straight up the crumbling wall; she was already following, with an agility that neared if not matched his own.

"You know, that's not very polite," he called back to her, using a burst of red energy to spring off thin air and somersault over the lip of the building's roof and onto the flat roof itself. "The least you could do is introduce yourself before you start shooting me!" Then, to himself, he muttered, "Why do hot girls always try to kill me?"

The bullet in his chest was stinging more than it should; he'd survived a lot worse without so much as flinching, so why did that one lump of lead smart so much?

Unless it wasn't lead.

"Bitch!" he cried, half laughing, as he dodged out of the way just before she landed on the roof. Silver fucking bullets. Probably blessed too. "That's some old-school shit you're packing." He drew Ivory as well, and fired several times, plugging her chest and belly with lead. She retched up blood and stumbled, but he wasn't surprised when she didn't stop. Her body seemed to grow a black aura, and the bullet holes began to knit closed as she moved. "You got holy water in that jacket too?"

Her mouth pulled into a hungry, canine smile, and he knew then why she'd smelled familiar. Her black aura crackled and coiled, giving the impression of wings, and he could see now her mouth was filled with needle-like teeth. He hadn't fought a vampire in years.



Bullets flew in quick succession, whipping through the grey air in a deadly stream, a spray of lead. Seras gripped the trigger, hardly feeling the recoil; her face was set in a monstrous death-mask, ragged grin as cold as the dirt in her boots.

Her target leapt sideways, rolled; the bullets hit. They ripped in like bayonets, holy metal searing hellish flesh. The man, the man-shaped-demon, growled, crouched, and laughed. Laughed.

"Not bad!" he called, glee in his voice. He sounded young, younger than he looked, as though he drew a warped kind of vitality from violence. He wasn't the only one she'd met who could do that. He wore a long red coat which flared as he moved, like a trailing ribbon of blood. He wielded two guns, one silver, one black. As he moved in a blur of red and white and spitting hot metal, she tried not to think of how he looked. Of who he looked like.

His eyes had begun to glow red.

"But I'm better."

She bared her teeth in frustration as he jumped upwards, soaring in an arc above her, laughing; she aimed her pistol up and fired, but he somehow avoided her fire and, now perpendicular to the ground and right above her, pointed his pistols and shot, corckscrewing down and spitting a twisting rain of bullets. Seras screamed and rolled out of his line of fire, just as he twisted in midair, somehow pulled a blade from the guitar case on his back - discarding the case in the same movement - and slashed downwards, bringing the sword's edge down hard on the concrete. The impact sent up sparks, and the blade flashed blue, sending out searing tongues of electric blue. She missed death by inches; the blow would have split her apart. The air was singed with gunfire, and the clean smell of lightning.

Seras snarled and raised her pistol again, sending a line of bullets straight into his skull before he straightened; his left eye exploded, the side of his jaw caved in. His remaining eye, burning scarlet as it was, turned on her. His half bloody, skeletal grin was hungry.

"I haven't had a fight like this in ages," he said, and sounded like someone else.

His flesh was repairing too; the holy silver didn't seem to be enough to turn him to ashes, like it would a vampire. She'd known he was a different kind of creature, but as the air around him burned blue she wondered, in that split-second, if she wasn't in over her head.

He drew himself up, guns holstered. He flicked his sword, then seemed to explode from the heart in white light, pure electicity. She felt the shadows form wings at her back, and her nails stretched into claws. He had changed - when the flare faded, his body appeared to be encased in grey-blue armour, though it looked organic, like an exoskeleton. Veins of blue light ran through it, extending even to the short, curled horns protruding from his head, and along the spines of the new, batlike wings which now extended from his shoulder blades. His sword and guns were nowhere visible.

She hadn't known the hackneyed image of the winged, horned demon had any truth in it.

He struck before she could move. Lunging forward with inhuman - hellish - speed, he slammed his clawed hand through her abdomen and sent a wave of searing blue-white fire through her. She jerked and gasped, and when he withdrew his arm from her gut she fell, spasming and bleeding, to the concrete. Her skin was charred, her eyes wide open. The scent of burning flesh was rank in her nostrils. As she curled and jerked at his feet, she was able to look up at him with bleeding eyes. He took a step back, and the same electric aura that had transformed him seemed then to pull in on itself, and once again she was looking not at a medieval devil but at a young man in red, with white hair and blue eyes. His sword was back in his hand, and it still rippled and hummed with electricity, as though its power was barely kept in check by the man holding it.

Her vision was painted red, and she curled in on herself, clutching the gaping hole in her gut.

"You're pretty different to the last vampire I fought," she heard him say through a white noise. The last thing she saw before she blacked out was him leaning down to her; a tall figure in red kneeling beside her as her life once again bled out into the dust.