Igor didn't knock. His fist raised, perhaps tentatively towards the paneled oak, hesitated, and fell back to his side.
He stood motionless outside Maisie's door, a study in paralysis. The hallway around him seemed to lean in, the silence pressing against his eardrums.
What futile scene had he pictured playing out behind that silent barrier? A harsh command to leave? A soft, tearful whisper? Anything, anything at all, that would give this unbearable moment purpose, an end, a reason to walk away.
The house held its breath, silent, still, listening. The air pressed in close, not with calm, but with a tight, electric unease. Then, from deep below, a pipe groaned a long, metallic note that echoed like the pained cry of old bones under unseen pressure.
He wasn't supposed to feel hesitation. Not like this, not as a slow, sinking weight pressing behind his ribs, clogging his breath with something dangerously close to doubt. Everything they'd drilled into him, layer by layer, should've snuffed it out long before it surfaced.
The conditioning wasn't mechanical; it was psychological, brutal, and precise. Sleep deprivation. Pain association. The reward-denial cycles. Repetition until obedience replaced thought. They'd used light too, yes, but not like a switchboard, more like a weapon: blinding pulses during episodes of panic, reinforcement at just the right moment to forge reflexes out of terror.
It had always worked before. He moved when they wanted him to move. He stopped when they told him to stop. And yet, now, here, in this forest that smelled like damp leaves and something faintly like memory, he wasn't moving. The instinct to kill had surged, then faltered. A trembling pause had slipped in.
The conditioning, drilled into his nerves through repetition, reward, and punishment, was unraveling. Not cleanly, but like thread rotting from within. The commands came distorted now, dull echoes instead of sharp orders. Even the light pulses, once blinding and absolute, barely stirred him, muted like shouts behind glass.
Something inside him pushed back. Not the man they'd tried to bury, but something older. The Alucard blood, feral, ancient, and never truly theirs, was waking. They'd tried to tame it with science and chains, but it had only slept.
Now, it resisted. Not with rage, but with silence. With hesitation. A forbidden pause. Not a glitch, choice.
He backed away, a conscious withdrawal from the noise and expectations he'd left behind.
The carpet of the long hallway swallowed the sound of his boots entirely, a blessed silence enveloping him as he turned into its quiet expanse. The air here was calmer, distinct from the room he'd exited.
Glancing towards the magnificent sweep of the grand stairwell, a structure that always impressed upon him the sheer scale and history of this place, something unexpected registered in his peripheral vision.
A light. Not a direct source, but a reflection, a faint, restless shimmer dancing across the wall like the flutter of a distant candle flame, or perhaps something smaller, faster.
His trained instincts, usually focused on observation of the living, were momentarily diverted by this inanimate mystery. Where... He stopped, drawn by its persistent, subtle motion.
He followed it.
The light led him deeper into the less-used sections of the house. He navigated past the caged shaft of the servant's lift, a silent testament to the building's past life, and into a different atmosphere entirely.
This was a low hall, darker and narrower than the main corridors, a place neglected. Dust lay thick on every surface, and the tall windows were so begrimed they barely let in the grey afternoon light, creating a perpetual twilight.
It was the north wing, older than the rest of the mansion, built before the expansions, and largely forgotten except by the silence and the ghosts it seemed to keep.
Shapes under draped cloths suggested forgotten chairs, tables, and perhaps even statuary, a silent museum of antique furniture abandoned to the slow decay of time.
This wing, he knew, was rarely visited; even Marlow, the head servant who managed the estate's rhythms with near-religious precision, seemed to consider this section beyond the reach of daily care.
Cutting through the gloom, a vibrant line of light shone through the ancient atmosphere. It was a single shaft, focused and bright, pouring through a pane of glass that had suffered a clean, sharp fracture.
And there, precisely positioned on the wide, dusty sill within that beam of light, sat an object that shouldn't have been there.
A small, hand-blown glass ornament rested on the windowsill, round and imperfect. Inside, a swirl of pink and blue shimmered faintly where a shaft of cold morning light touched it. It cast dappled colors on the wall, dancing quietly in the stillness.
It didn't belong here.
This part of the house, the north wing, was long abandoned, its windows grime-streaked, the furniture beneath sheets, the floorboards dry and brittle. No one visited. Not even the staff. And yet… this.
Igor moved closer. The sill was blanketed in a thick film of neglect, but around the ornament, the dust had been brushed away in a small circle. Recently. Carefully.
He picked it up.
The moment his fingers closed around the glass, he froze.
It was warm.
Not from the sun. Not from his own body. It had already been warm, human warmth. Someone had held it just moments ago. A hand he knew.
Maisie.
He couldn't explain how he knew, only that her presence lingered on the object like the scent of memory itself. A keepsake. A relic. She used to keep little trinkets like this on her bedroom windowsill. This one… this belonged to her.
He inhaled, and it hit him like a thread snapping taut, not memory, but command. Sudden. Deep. Old. It crackled across his mind like cold lightning, cutting beneath the scars and new pain, touching something buried in his earliest training.
But it didn't seize him.
It wavered, hesitated as if whatever was left inside him was resisting. The keepsake hadn't triggered obedience. It had triggered something else. Not controlled.
Recognition.
He recoiled instantly, a ragged, half-formed sound scraping from his throat. His body jerked sideways, stumbling a step as if struck from within, the delicate ornament slipping from his palm. For a moment, he was motionless, not paralyzed by any external restraint, but trapped in a sudden, primal rupture between instinct and conditioning.
Something inside him, human, reached out, trying to understand, to connect the warmth of the glass with the memory of who it belonged to. But another part, deeper, darker, trained, lashed back in defense. That part didn't ask questions. It obeyed. It survived.
The conflict wasn't a clean break; it was a gut-deep dissonance, an unbearable friction between learned submission and a rising, desperate awareness that he wasn't supposed to feel this. Not this kind of pull. Not this kind of remembering.
Not yet.
He remembered instances from the early years; a specific phrase, broadcast with such authority, would have instantaneously shut down any line of inquiry, wiping the forbidden thought clean. An investigation wouldn't just end; it would cease to have ever consciously begun.
But now... the impact, though sharp, felt duller, less absolute. The command had struck, yes, causing pain and physical disruption, but it hadn't annihilated the thought.
It had merely grazed the surface, a passing obstacle against a growing, persistent current. His curiosity remained, a stubborn whisper beneath the fading echo of the command.
The pulse beneath his skin wasn't the quiet hum of precision or design; it was the uneven, erratic rhythm of something fiercely alive and deeply fractured. His body had never fit their idea of perfection.
The conditioning they imposed was a crude attempt at psychic surgery, meant to sever empathy, to scrape away the burden of reflection and remorse. They'd tried to draw clean, sterile lines between action and thought, turning obedience into reflex.
But Igor was never a clean design. He was chaos at the cellular level, a collision of what they wanted him to be and what he truly was. Inside him, two forces warred constantly: the quiet, stubborn voice of human conscience, whispering of mercy, memory, consequence, and the deeper, older call of his Alucard blood, instinctual and brutal, a wild current that saw the world in terms of threat and survival.
They had studied his anatomy but misunderstood his nature. They built him like a weapon but forgot that living things fight back. The true battleground wasn't in his orders or programming. It was inside him, where something human and something aged clawed at each other for control.
"I am not…" The words scraped from his throat, a sound like dry leaves skittering across the stone. He swallowed hard, the movement a painful friction against a larynx that felt bruised and tight. "…broken." He forced the final syllable out, a defiant whisper wrenched from a voice raw and almost hoarse with disuse or strain.
He wasn't sure who he was trying to convince, himself, or the silent, oppressive air of the room. His hands curled into loose fists at his sides and trembled slightly. His eyes, wide and unfocused only moments before, were now sharp, darting, as he clung to the fragile assertion like a lifeline in a storm.
But the certainty he tried to project was a brittle shield. He wasn't sure anymore. Not just if he was broken, though that gnawed at him, the definition itself shifting and blurring under the weight of his experiences, but fundamentally, he wasn't sure what he was. The form he inhabited felt both alien and terrifyingly familiar.
The 'he' he had known seemed to be eroding, replaced by something sharper, faster, fundamentally other. The lines between his old self and this new, terrifying reality were blurring, smudged by the relentless pressure of transformation.
The truth of this metamorphosis, of his current reality, pressed in around him. It wasn't a sudden revelation but a slow, suffocating encroachment, like a dense, silent fog rolling off a hidden sea.
It obscured the past, blurred the edges of his identity, and left him adrift in a present he barely recognized, a present where the impossible was becoming his stark, undeniable existence.
He closed his eyes for a moment, not to block out sight, but to focus on the internal storm. And then, the other senses surged, no longer muted or distorted but screamingly clear. The sound was secondary, a dull hum in the background.
He didn't need his ears. He could scent the movement in other rooms, distinct, metallic tangs of ozone, the faint, stale smell of sweat and disinfectant, the almost imperceptible shift in the chemical composition of the air that signaled passing bodies.
He felt the minuscule changes in temperature, the thin, cold drafts, or sudden warmth that brushed against his skin as doors opened and closed down distant hallways. Most innately, he sensed the tension, palpable weight in the atmosphere, a subtle hum of anticipation or vigilance that vibrated not just in his ears, but through the very floorboards beneath his bare feet, a silent conversation only he could tune into. An awareness no human could claim, an understanding of space and presence far beyond the five standard senses.
This was the truth the haze carried: these were his senses, no longer bound by human limitations. They were sharpening now, expanding with dizzying speed, peeling back layers of dullness and suppression that had kept him caged.
The drugs, the fear, the forced ignorance, they were fading, and the world was rushing in, raw and unfiltered, overwhelming in its detail and intensity.
His hybrid senses, honed by whatever cruel process had created him, were awakening, blossoming into a terrifying, beautiful acuity.
He was no longer just in the house; he was aware of its every breath, its every shift, and the silent, predatory dance of those who moved within it. And he knew, with a chilling certainty that bypassed thought and settled deep in his bones, that they knew he was awake too.