Categories > Anime/Manga > Hellsing
Fairy Tale
3 reviews"She had believed her father was like the knights in the stories, pure and honourable and brave, until she realised he was keeping the dragon locked up in the basement." Integra Hellsing on knights...
5Insightful
Fairy Tale
by Charis
Disclaimer: None of this is mine. Based off the anime rather than the manga.
Notes: Because 'Dracula' comes from the Romanian word for 'dragon', and Integra's psyche fascinates me far too much. The idea made me giggle.
When she was a little girl, knights wore shining armour and rescued princesses from dragons, and they were pure and honourable and brave and stalwart and true, and a handful of other adjectives her adult mind cannot remember.
That was before she met the Round Table, and realised that whatever might have been true about knights before, it certainly wasn't the case anymore.
Her father was a knight. No armour, no princesses -- though she used to make up stories about her mother that recalled the fairy tales read beneath the covers after bedtime. She had believed he was all of those things, until she realised he was keeping the dragon locked up in the basement, and that the dragon was /on their side/, however unwillingly.
Her uncle was a knight. He was none of those other things.
When she was little, she used to make-believe she was a princess when she read those stories. In more fanciful moments, she thought about a knight on a white horse coming to rescue her from a dragon, sweeping her up and carrying her off into the sunset.
She didn't realise that sometimes the dragon rescues the princess. Or that sometimes, the princess rescues herself.
And sometimes the knights are wrong. Sometimes the knights are the Bad Guys.
The stories were full of knights fighting against other knights, but it was always clear who the villain was. False knights, knights corrupted by the other side, knights fighting against the code of chivalry ... it was always so easy to figure out who was good and who was bad.
But she's a knight now, not any kind of princess, and there's nothing in the stories she read about knights making one of their number take the fall for doing /good deeds/. When the knight slays the dragon -- snakes, the little girl part of her says, are kind of like dragons -- there is supposed to be honour and acclaim and praise, not this. Not a cell, however comfortable, while they deliberate over how much of her pride and honour they will try to crush, or whether they will simply take her life as a traitor and be done with that. Never mind that she did what they were all too weak and afraid to finish.
The Round Table are nothing like the knights in the stories. Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing knows that the world is hardly a fairy tale, but she had still cherished the hope that maybe there was, if nothing else, some justice left in it.
All else aside, the dragon certainly isn't supposed to rescue the /knight/.
The inanity springs to her mind as Alucard materialises in the cell. Her lip curls into a sardonic smile. If the world is not going to oblige her, then damn the world anyway. Maybe she'll take the dragon up on his offer after all.
- finis -
by Charis
Disclaimer: None of this is mine. Based off the anime rather than the manga.
Notes: Because 'Dracula' comes from the Romanian word for 'dragon', and Integra's psyche fascinates me far too much. The idea made me giggle.
When she was a little girl, knights wore shining armour and rescued princesses from dragons, and they were pure and honourable and brave and stalwart and true, and a handful of other adjectives her adult mind cannot remember.
That was before she met the Round Table, and realised that whatever might have been true about knights before, it certainly wasn't the case anymore.
Her father was a knight. No armour, no princesses -- though she used to make up stories about her mother that recalled the fairy tales read beneath the covers after bedtime. She had believed he was all of those things, until she realised he was keeping the dragon locked up in the basement, and that the dragon was /on their side/, however unwillingly.
Her uncle was a knight. He was none of those other things.
When she was little, she used to make-believe she was a princess when she read those stories. In more fanciful moments, she thought about a knight on a white horse coming to rescue her from a dragon, sweeping her up and carrying her off into the sunset.
She didn't realise that sometimes the dragon rescues the princess. Or that sometimes, the princess rescues herself.
And sometimes the knights are wrong. Sometimes the knights are the Bad Guys.
The stories were full of knights fighting against other knights, but it was always clear who the villain was. False knights, knights corrupted by the other side, knights fighting against the code of chivalry ... it was always so easy to figure out who was good and who was bad.
But she's a knight now, not any kind of princess, and there's nothing in the stories she read about knights making one of their number take the fall for doing /good deeds/. When the knight slays the dragon -- snakes, the little girl part of her says, are kind of like dragons -- there is supposed to be honour and acclaim and praise, not this. Not a cell, however comfortable, while they deliberate over how much of her pride and honour they will try to crush, or whether they will simply take her life as a traitor and be done with that. Never mind that she did what they were all too weak and afraid to finish.
The Round Table are nothing like the knights in the stories. Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing knows that the world is hardly a fairy tale, but she had still cherished the hope that maybe there was, if nothing else, some justice left in it.
All else aside, the dragon certainly isn't supposed to rescue the /knight/.
The inanity springs to her mind as Alucard materialises in the cell. Her lip curls into a sardonic smile. If the world is not going to oblige her, then damn the world anyway. Maybe she'll take the dragon up on his offer after all.
- finis -
Sign up to rate and review this story