Tarot deck

Uncle Richard smells of tobacco and unfulfilment. This is a very cheap smell that can’t be washed away or hidden by the luxurious perfume which comes in a very manly bottle. There is a subtle note of sweat and an undertone of greed, the sin that can never be fully satisfied. There is something else – the lust – that Integra doesn’t recognize at her gentle age of 12 but instinctively tries to avoid. Young animals do that too with venomous snakes and poisonous mushrooms, they sense danger. Integra doesn’t know why she feels uneasy when she has to stay with uncle Richard on her own. The feeling grows stronger and steadier with each day passing as her father is getting weaker and weaker. He doesn’t leave his bedroom anymore. “I don’t want to become the Head of Hellsing,” Integra thinks and her own voice sounds tiny and scared in her head. She already knows that when you are a Hellsing it’s the matter of what you have to be and not what you want to be. “Walter will help you out… at the beginning,” Father says. When Father is gone. Walter is gone as well. The family mansion, their pride and joy, stays silent not for long. It soon is filled with people – men – talking, and Integra is having her first real exam. It’s in stealth, and if she fails, she is dead. This thought is somehow much scarier than the idea of becoming indeed and ever-hungry for human blood or flesh. Father used to say that becoming a vampire is the worst fate for a Hellsing and a human being. Now Integra is not so sure. She doesn’t know for sure but something tells her that Father never had to crawl in ventilation shafts because there’s a small army of thugs looking for him. And also becoming dead now means leaving the whole Hellsing Organization to the man who has no idea what the difference between a ghoul and a vampire is, but knows how to tip in casinos and lose family money along with its name and his dignity. Uncle Richard’s hands are small and sweaty, and Integra doesn’t want to get in them for the reasons she is still too young to grasp. When the moment comes and Integra has to choose, she makes an easy choice between life – at least, for several more seconds, – and death. She leaps into the black void behind the locked door her father had told her about, and the sound of the gunshot makes it almost as painful as the wound itself. The darkness envelopes her for a moment – embraces – and then it’s over. She hits the stone floor. Hard. The unforgiving coldness of the stone shakes her body, and she wants to cry. But the tears in her eyes are not the tears of pain or self-pity. They are the tears of rage. Uncle Richard mocked her to be a rat hiding in the darkness of the tunnels, but she is no rat. She is a wounded viper. And it doesn’t really matter how big the viper is compared to others, she is still venomous. The darkness is filled with the liking sounds, and even though Integra is still deafened by the gunshot, she senses these sounds rather than hears them. The darkness is licking her blood off the cold stones. And her ankles with other tongues, cold and invisible, the ones she doesn’t pay attention to immediately. But she will. The darkness has the eyes of maroon on its pale face, and it hisses and growls as if it is dying and doesn’t know this. “Oh my God,” Integra thinks dreamily. The pain starts to kick in. That is the weapon her father told her about. That is her protector?! Suddenly uncle Richard doesn’t seem to matter anymore. He is nothing but a greedy mortal fool that couldn’t do anything right – neither in his pathetic excuse for life, nor in death. She is not a little girl anymore. Not because she doesn’t want to be one but because she can’t afford that anymore. Some doors are better left closed. Integra realises that when she took a leap of faith, she jumped into darkness that was way too greedy and famished to let her go.