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Drabbles: Hellboy, B.P.R.D.
Once in a while, I do remember that this journal started its life as a fic journal. The last of the drabble posts for a while; the two longest (and least ridiculous) from the meme that I posted the other day (and am still finishing).
Title: Tinseltown
Fandom: Hellboy (movies)
Rating: PG-13? I hate rating things.
Summary:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ceitfianna requested Liz, Hellboy, and Las Vegas. This is set between the two movies.
Outside the Bellagio, fountains rise and fall to the strains of Debussy’s “Claire du Lune.” They refract the city’s dazzling lights; the tremendous blinking signs, the lights of the hotels and the casinos and the nightclubs. With the final swell of music, a solitary jet in the fountain holds steady, steady, steady – then tumbles down with a splash.
Thirty feet below the street, another geyser falls with a splash, but this one isn’t water.
“This is officially,” Liz punctuates the word with a burst of flame, “going on the list of the grossest things we’ve ever done.” She throws up her hand and hurls fire at the towering stack of gelatinous eggs that has been adhered to the sewer tunnel wall. She stands in thick, slow-moving, brown liquid that nearly comes to the top of her hip waders. She was wearing a paper mask, but nobody thought to make those fireproof; she has replaced the mask with a strip torn from her T-shirt. It barely covers her nose and mouth, but affords some protection from the stench.
POW! Red sends the angry mama frog-creature slamming through a tunnel wall with one blow from his stone fist. “Johannesburg was worse,” he says, pausing for thought. “So was the thing with the rotting pig intestines.”
Liz shoots him a quizzical look over her shoulder, lit by the controlled, towering pyre that was once a pile of egg sacs.
“Guatemala,” he says, starting to slog toward her. “ ’91? ’92. How’s it goin’?”
“Pretty good,” she says. Her eyes have gone deep, flat blue; her face is intent with concentration. “I think this is the last one. Would you tell the geniuses in the van they need to come up with an earpiece that isn’t going to melt the second I get above a hundred and fifty degrees?”
He grins; presses a finger to his own earpiece. “You guys hear that?”
As if in answer, something roars. Hellboy turns just in time to get pile-driven by something green, slimy, and really pissed off. They both go under with an enormous splash, which Liz instinctively throws an arm up against and turns away from. The wave hits her anyway, leaving her coughing and gagging, and, for a second, very glad of her makeshift face mask.
She clambers up out of the water, onto the ledge that the rapidly melting eggs rest on, and she watches the roiling sludge. “Son of a bitch,” Liz snaps at the silent drip, drip, drip of the tunnel, and she takes a deep breath in preparation, fire flaring around her hands.
Hellboy breaks the surface, sewer water pouring off of him. “A guy comes to Vegas, he just wants to play a couple hands of poker; instead, I get your ugly mug,” he roars, slapping his hands down against the surface, looking around wildly. “I didn’t ask for your tongue all over me, pal. I got a girl!” Something powerful yanks him out of sight before he can say another word, but from his expression a split second before he goes under, Liz can guess what he was going to say: crap. Almost immediately, the frog-creature comes rocketing out of the sludge to slam into the tunnel wall.
Unfortunately, it is the near tunnel wall; Red's underwater aim apparently isn't great. Liz ducks as the creature hits the wall over her head and then crashes back into the water almost directly in front of her. That's how Liz finds herself standing between a mother and her blackened, smoldering eggs.
“Don’t,” says Liz to the pair of black, bottomless eyes staring at her (and at what’s left of the eggs) out of the sludge. Its mouth is underwater but the frog-creature’s terrible keening cry echoes all the way through the tunnel just the same.
“Don’t,” Liz warns again, her hands balled into fists and her own voice echoing through the flames wreathing her body. Hellboy pops up halfway down the tunnel. The frog’s accusing eyes sink out of sight.
“Where’d Webby go?” Red calls, his growl audible even from a distance.
Something lunges out of the water right at Liz’s face, and she explodes, white-hot and unthinking. It happens in an instant, in one split second, and then ashes are raining down on her face and her head.
She looks at Red, who’s standing frozen with the Samaritan half-drawn. “Did I get it?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He holsters the gun and wades down the tunnel, toward her. Standing on the ledge as she is, Liz is taller; he reaches up and brushes ash out of her hair. “You got it, alright. Damn.”
The flames outlining her slowly extinguish; Liz’s eyes fade to brown. Her shoulders droop. “Did you hear the sound she made when she saw her eggs? God.”
“Yeah. But I heard the sounds she made when she tried to drown me and take your head off, too.” He gently flicks ashes off her cheek. Liz smiles, tiny and reluctant. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine. You?”
“Right as rain.” He cracks his neck. “Nothin’ we couldn’t handle. You were right, though.” Off her quizzical look: “This is one of the grosser ones we’ve been on.” She laughs a little; tucks her makeshift mask up around her mouth. “Hey guys,” Hellboy says. He frowns and lifts a finger to his ear – there’s nothing there. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud.”
“I told you I hate those things.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His eyes light up. “--Hey. The earpieces are gone, we’re the only ones down here – wanna check out the town?”
Liz, dripping with thick sewer water, looks at him.
He doesn’t blanch, but he does reconsider. “Wanna get a hotel room, take a shower, then check out Vegas?”
‘Well,” she says slowly, “we don’t have to get back to the plane til tomorrow.”
“...Would you look at that.” Hellboy flicks off the red light on his belt. “Locator’s dead, too.” He shrugs expansively, and grins that grin that has gotten him into so much trouble over the years.
“Technology is so unreliable these days,” Liz deadpans, and she turns hers off, too. He grins broadly at her, sets his hands on either side of her hips, and swings her down into the muck.
“There’s a big fight goin’ on tonight; bet it’s on pay-per-view.”
She rolls her eyes tolerantly, slipping her right hand into his left and wading back through the tunnel at his side. “I did not come to Las Vegas to watch you watch two guys punch the crap out of each other.”
He considers. “How about for room service?”
A pause -- and then Liz gives a curve of a smile. “I could have come to Las Vegas for room service.”
Title: Between
Fandom: Hellboy / B.P.R.D. (comics)
Rating: PG-13?
Summary:mmexlibris requested Liz/Abe.
Notes: This is all happening in some NEBULOUS POST-"BLACK GODDESS" WORLD, where the last issue magically somehow doesn't end on a weird cliffhanger. Spoilers for B.P.R.D. though "The Black Goddess"!
"You're sure you're okay?" Liz presses as she watches him touch the icepack to his mouth again, and Abe smiles at her, lopsided but entirely genuine.
"I'm fine," he promises, walking through the Bureau hall beside her, "just like I was the first four times you asked."
It was gently delivered but clearly the wrong thing to say; Liz glances down. She looks just as strange -- and beautiful, Abe thinks; she's always been that -- in the yellow robes topped by a BPRD jacket (Abe's jacket) as she did earlier, but now she seems a little lost in all that fabric. "I'm sorry," she says, "I know I keep asking and it's stupid, but--"
"No," he shakes his head; "I'm sorry, this must all still be overwhelming--"
"Abe?"
He blinks; glances sideways at her. "Yeah, Liz?"
"Can we quit apologizing?"
He grins. "Yeah. Okay."
"And it's not that it was overwhelming," Liz says, after a second. "It's that I hate seeing you hurt."
His heart thumps in his chest, almost as strongly as it did when she touched his face after first noticing the blood. "And I hate seeing you -- kidnapped."
She has the grace to laugh. He hadn't had any idea just how badly he'd missed her laugh until he hears it again. "Well, I hate it, too," she says. "But you got me back." Her eyes flick to his; her mouth twists wryly. "Again.
"Thanks, Abe." She rests her shoulder against his and he wraps his arm around her; it's instinct, he tells himself, perfectly natural.
"Anytime," he tells her, and they both know he means it, that he'll come for her anytime, anywhere, no matter what.
* * * * *
"They really gave away my quarters?" Liz asks.
"Kate raised hell when she found out," Abe says, apologetic, which is an answer in and of itself. "Someone in requisitions was apparently under the impression you weren't coming back. All of your stuff is in storage; we got to it in time to make sure it didn't get thrown out. Are you sure you don't want to--"
"Abe, I want two things right now," says Liz. "One, I want to sleep in a bed in Colorado, and two, I want pants." He can't quite stop the half-grin that rises. "I'll go to the infirmary tomorrow, I promise. They checked me out on the plane; they said I was okay. So I'll go tomorrow. I need to see Panya, too, and get my stuff, move into a new room; if there's time before the apocalypse."
"There'll be time," he says, confident.
She glances at him strangely. "What makes you so sure?"
We just got you back, he thinks; he says, "I don't know. I just am."
Her mouth curves. "Very mysterious," she tells him.
Abe inclines his head. "I do my best," he says, solemn, and he wins another laugh.
They're not really talking about what happened in the Himalayas. They're not talking about Memnan Saa or his predictions or any of that; Liz got the explanation on the plane ride (giant robots in Munich, Ben Daimio still missing, frog epidemic worsening, Lobster Johnson, Johann, Heca-Emem-Ra and exactly what Liz did while she was dead to the world and not under her own control), and it was a lot all at once, and Abe hasn't brought it up again in a couple of hours. She's smiling; she's laughing. It can wait, Abe thinks. The apocalypse can wait a few more hours.
"Your best is pretty great," she says. "You have my stuff!"
"Just a box or two." There's nobody in the halls; everybody knows the big one is coming, is gearing up, getting ready, or spending time with family. "We started taking it out of storage before we left for China."
"You guys were that sure you'd bring me back," she says, quiet.
"We were hoping." They're at his door; Abe turns away to wrestle with the doorknob, but in doing so, he opens up a new profile to Liz and she sucks in a breath through her teeth. She reaches up and touches his chin with two quick, light fingers, and Abe isn't quite sure whether to freeze or to let her turn his head, but in the end, he goes with door number two.
"Your face is swelling up," she says.
"It hit a pretty big pole," he reminds her. His gills flutter once, twice, before he gets them under control. "I'll be okay."
Liz takes the icepack right out of his hand and very, very carefully presses it to the corner of his mouth; Abe doesn't wince. "You need to--" She seems to realize exactly what she's doing -- standing well within his personal space, cupping his face in one hand and holding ice to a bruise with the other -- in the middle of the sentence; her voice hitches. "--to, um, to keep icing it."
"I will," Abe promises, low, and for once, he doesn't look away, and Liz doesn't either. She runs her thumb across his cheekbone, slow and steady, and he realizes that she is going to kiss him about ten seconds before she does it, but that doesn't make those ten seconds any less nervewracking. It's slow, first one leaning in and then the other, until their lips finally meet, careful and chaste.
For a moment afterward, they stare at each other.
Then it's hard to say who exactly makes the first (second) move, but whoever it may be, the second kiss is rather less slow and cautious. Liz throws her arms around his neck; Abe backs her up against the door without entirely realizing that he's doing it and sinks his hands into her hair, cradling her head. It's a shock to both of them when he suddenly hisses in pain and half-pulls back, a hand rising part of the way to his face.
Liz looks between him and the icepack melting in her hand; there's color high in her cheeks. "Oh, Jesus, Abe, your mouth--"
"For God's sake, Liz," Abe says, strangled; "It's fine," and then he kisses her again, and Liz is kissing him back and fumbling for the doorknob.
("Abe," she says later. "Abe Abe Abe," and he'll be damned if it's not one of the most beautiful things he's ever heard.)
* * * * *
Kate Corrigan freezes with her hand inches from the door, knuckles poised and ready to knock. There's a box of books under her arm, a pair of pants thrown on top, but she only has eyes for the yellow-orange fabric on the floor. It has been caught in the door, as if whoever closed the door didn't know or didn't care that much of the long train was still out in the hallway. The room is quiet, but the other half of the robes certainly isn't on anyone inside.
Kate only looks for a moment. Then she gives a tiny ghost of a smile, sets down the box, and tiptoes away.
Title: Tinseltown
Fandom: Hellboy (movies)
Rating: PG-13? I hate rating things.
Summary:
ceitfianna requested Liz, Hellboy, and Las Vegas. This is set between the two movies.Outside the Bellagio, fountains rise and fall to the strains of Debussy’s “Claire du Lune.” They refract the city’s dazzling lights; the tremendous blinking signs, the lights of the hotels and the casinos and the nightclubs. With the final swell of music, a solitary jet in the fountain holds steady, steady, steady – then tumbles down with a splash.
Thirty feet below the street, another geyser falls with a splash, but this one isn’t water.
“This is officially,” Liz punctuates the word with a burst of flame, “going on the list of the grossest things we’ve ever done.” She throws up her hand and hurls fire at the towering stack of gelatinous eggs that has been adhered to the sewer tunnel wall. She stands in thick, slow-moving, brown liquid that nearly comes to the top of her hip waders. She was wearing a paper mask, but nobody thought to make those fireproof; she has replaced the mask with a strip torn from her T-shirt. It barely covers her nose and mouth, but affords some protection from the stench.
POW! Red sends the angry mama frog-creature slamming through a tunnel wall with one blow from his stone fist. “Johannesburg was worse,” he says, pausing for thought. “So was the thing with the rotting pig intestines.”
Liz shoots him a quizzical look over her shoulder, lit by the controlled, towering pyre that was once a pile of egg sacs.
“Guatemala,” he says, starting to slog toward her. “ ’91? ’92. How’s it goin’?”
“Pretty good,” she says. Her eyes have gone deep, flat blue; her face is intent with concentration. “I think this is the last one. Would you tell the geniuses in the van they need to come up with an earpiece that isn’t going to melt the second I get above a hundred and fifty degrees?”
He grins; presses a finger to his own earpiece. “You guys hear that?”
As if in answer, something roars. Hellboy turns just in time to get pile-driven by something green, slimy, and really pissed off. They both go under with an enormous splash, which Liz instinctively throws an arm up against and turns away from. The wave hits her anyway, leaving her coughing and gagging, and, for a second, very glad of her makeshift face mask.
She clambers up out of the water, onto the ledge that the rapidly melting eggs rest on, and she watches the roiling sludge. “Son of a bitch,” Liz snaps at the silent drip, drip, drip of the tunnel, and she takes a deep breath in preparation, fire flaring around her hands.
Hellboy breaks the surface, sewer water pouring off of him. “A guy comes to Vegas, he just wants to play a couple hands of poker; instead, I get your ugly mug,” he roars, slapping his hands down against the surface, looking around wildly. “I didn’t ask for your tongue all over me, pal. I got a girl!” Something powerful yanks him out of sight before he can say another word, but from his expression a split second before he goes under, Liz can guess what he was going to say: crap. Almost immediately, the frog-creature comes rocketing out of the sludge to slam into the tunnel wall.
Unfortunately, it is the near tunnel wall; Red's underwater aim apparently isn't great. Liz ducks as the creature hits the wall over her head and then crashes back into the water almost directly in front of her. That's how Liz finds herself standing between a mother and her blackened, smoldering eggs.
“Don’t,” says Liz to the pair of black, bottomless eyes staring at her (and at what’s left of the eggs) out of the sludge. Its mouth is underwater but the frog-creature’s terrible keening cry echoes all the way through the tunnel just the same.
“Don’t,” Liz warns again, her hands balled into fists and her own voice echoing through the flames wreathing her body. Hellboy pops up halfway down the tunnel. The frog’s accusing eyes sink out of sight.
“Where’d Webby go?” Red calls, his growl audible even from a distance.
Something lunges out of the water right at Liz’s face, and she explodes, white-hot and unthinking. It happens in an instant, in one split second, and then ashes are raining down on her face and her head.
She looks at Red, who’s standing frozen with the Samaritan half-drawn. “Did I get it?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He holsters the gun and wades down the tunnel, toward her. Standing on the ledge as she is, Liz is taller; he reaches up and brushes ash out of her hair. “You got it, alright. Damn.”
The flames outlining her slowly extinguish; Liz’s eyes fade to brown. Her shoulders droop. “Did you hear the sound she made when she saw her eggs? God.”
“Yeah. But I heard the sounds she made when she tried to drown me and take your head off, too.” He gently flicks ashes off her cheek. Liz smiles, tiny and reluctant. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine. You?”
“Right as rain.” He cracks his neck. “Nothin’ we couldn’t handle. You were right, though.” Off her quizzical look: “This is one of the grosser ones we’ve been on.” She laughs a little; tucks her makeshift mask up around her mouth. “Hey guys,” Hellboy says. He frowns and lifts a finger to his ear – there’s nothing there. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud.”
“I told you I hate those things.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His eyes light up. “--Hey. The earpieces are gone, we’re the only ones down here – wanna check out the town?”
Liz, dripping with thick sewer water, looks at him.
He doesn’t blanch, but he does reconsider. “Wanna get a hotel room, take a shower, then check out Vegas?”
‘Well,” she says slowly, “we don’t have to get back to the plane til tomorrow.”
“...Would you look at that.” Hellboy flicks off the red light on his belt. “Locator’s dead, too.” He shrugs expansively, and grins that grin that has gotten him into so much trouble over the years.
“Technology is so unreliable these days,” Liz deadpans, and she turns hers off, too. He grins broadly at her, sets his hands on either side of her hips, and swings her down into the muck.
“There’s a big fight goin’ on tonight; bet it’s on pay-per-view.”
She rolls her eyes tolerantly, slipping her right hand into his left and wading back through the tunnel at his side. “I did not come to Las Vegas to watch you watch two guys punch the crap out of each other.”
He considers. “How about for room service?”
A pause -- and then Liz gives a curve of a smile. “I could have come to Las Vegas for room service.”
Title: Between
Fandom: Hellboy / B.P.R.D. (comics)
Rating: PG-13?
Summary:
mmexlibris requested Liz/Abe.Notes: This is all happening in some NEBULOUS POST-"BLACK GODDESS" WORLD, where the last issue magically somehow doesn't end on a weird cliffhanger. Spoilers for B.P.R.D. though "The Black Goddess"!
"You're sure you're okay?" Liz presses as she watches him touch the icepack to his mouth again, and Abe smiles at her, lopsided but entirely genuine.
"I'm fine," he promises, walking through the Bureau hall beside her, "just like I was the first four times you asked."
It was gently delivered but clearly the wrong thing to say; Liz glances down. She looks just as strange -- and beautiful, Abe thinks; she's always been that -- in the yellow robes topped by a BPRD jacket (Abe's jacket) as she did earlier, but now she seems a little lost in all that fabric. "I'm sorry," she says, "I know I keep asking and it's stupid, but--"
"No," he shakes his head; "I'm sorry, this must all still be overwhelming--"
"Abe?"
He blinks; glances sideways at her. "Yeah, Liz?"
"Can we quit apologizing?"
He grins. "Yeah. Okay."
"And it's not that it was overwhelming," Liz says, after a second. "It's that I hate seeing you hurt."
His heart thumps in his chest, almost as strongly as it did when she touched his face after first noticing the blood. "And I hate seeing you -- kidnapped."
She has the grace to laugh. He hadn't had any idea just how badly he'd missed her laugh until he hears it again. "Well, I hate it, too," she says. "But you got me back." Her eyes flick to his; her mouth twists wryly. "Again.
"Thanks, Abe." She rests her shoulder against his and he wraps his arm around her; it's instinct, he tells himself, perfectly natural.
"Anytime," he tells her, and they both know he means it, that he'll come for her anytime, anywhere, no matter what.
"They really gave away my quarters?" Liz asks.
"Kate raised hell when she found out," Abe says, apologetic, which is an answer in and of itself. "Someone in requisitions was apparently under the impression you weren't coming back. All of your stuff is in storage; we got to it in time to make sure it didn't get thrown out. Are you sure you don't want to--"
"Abe, I want two things right now," says Liz. "One, I want to sleep in a bed in Colorado, and two, I want pants." He can't quite stop the half-grin that rises. "I'll go to the infirmary tomorrow, I promise. They checked me out on the plane; they said I was okay. So I'll go tomorrow. I need to see Panya, too, and get my stuff, move into a new room; if there's time before the apocalypse."
"There'll be time," he says, confident.
She glances at him strangely. "What makes you so sure?"
We just got you back, he thinks; he says, "I don't know. I just am."
Her mouth curves. "Very mysterious," she tells him.
Abe inclines his head. "I do my best," he says, solemn, and he wins another laugh.
They're not really talking about what happened in the Himalayas. They're not talking about Memnan Saa or his predictions or any of that; Liz got the explanation on the plane ride (giant robots in Munich, Ben Daimio still missing, frog epidemic worsening, Lobster Johnson, Johann, Heca-Emem-Ra and exactly what Liz did while she was dead to the world and not under her own control), and it was a lot all at once, and Abe hasn't brought it up again in a couple of hours. She's smiling; she's laughing. It can wait, Abe thinks. The apocalypse can wait a few more hours.
"Your best is pretty great," she says. "You have my stuff!"
"Just a box or two." There's nobody in the halls; everybody knows the big one is coming, is gearing up, getting ready, or spending time with family. "We started taking it out of storage before we left for China."
"You guys were that sure you'd bring me back," she says, quiet.
"We were hoping." They're at his door; Abe turns away to wrestle with the doorknob, but in doing so, he opens up a new profile to Liz and she sucks in a breath through her teeth. She reaches up and touches his chin with two quick, light fingers, and Abe isn't quite sure whether to freeze or to let her turn his head, but in the end, he goes with door number two.
"Your face is swelling up," she says.
"It hit a pretty big pole," he reminds her. His gills flutter once, twice, before he gets them under control. "I'll be okay."
Liz takes the icepack right out of his hand and very, very carefully presses it to the corner of his mouth; Abe doesn't wince. "You need to--" She seems to realize exactly what she's doing -- standing well within his personal space, cupping his face in one hand and holding ice to a bruise with the other -- in the middle of the sentence; her voice hitches. "--to, um, to keep icing it."
"I will," Abe promises, low, and for once, he doesn't look away, and Liz doesn't either. She runs her thumb across his cheekbone, slow and steady, and he realizes that she is going to kiss him about ten seconds before she does it, but that doesn't make those ten seconds any less nervewracking. It's slow, first one leaning in and then the other, until their lips finally meet, careful and chaste.
For a moment afterward, they stare at each other.
Then it's hard to say who exactly makes the first (second) move, but whoever it may be, the second kiss is rather less slow and cautious. Liz throws her arms around his neck; Abe backs her up against the door without entirely realizing that he's doing it and sinks his hands into her hair, cradling her head. It's a shock to both of them when he suddenly hisses in pain and half-pulls back, a hand rising part of the way to his face.
Liz looks between him and the icepack melting in her hand; there's color high in her cheeks. "Oh, Jesus, Abe, your mouth--"
"For God's sake, Liz," Abe says, strangled; "It's fine," and then he kisses her again, and Liz is kissing him back and fumbling for the doorknob.
("Abe," she says later. "Abe Abe Abe," and he'll be damned if it's not one of the most beautiful things he's ever heard.)
Kate Corrigan freezes with her hand inches from the door, knuckles poised and ready to knock. There's a box of books under her arm, a pair of pants thrown on top, but she only has eyes for the yellow-orange fabric on the floor. It has been caught in the door, as if whoever closed the door didn't know or didn't care that much of the long train was still out in the hallway. The room is quiet, but the other half of the robes certainly isn't on anyone inside.
Kate only looks for a moment. Then she gives a tiny ghost of a smile, sets down the box, and tiptoes away.