Title: Rebirth (Part 1/4)
Author: linaerys
Rating: R for violence. No sex.
Characters: Hellboy, Kroenen, Abe, a few OCs from the BPRD, including pathologist to the undead, Dr. Leah Andrews
Summary: After the movie, Hellboy takes a team back to the Moscow cemetary to clean up.
Feedback: Pretty please! I can never get enough feedback!
Kroenen did not know how long he waited there in the dark, impaled upon his own spikes, crushed under gears he had designed. Long stretches of blessed unconsciousness mixed with the more horrible eons of wakefulness. No magic he could think of would free him, and he had already made every bargain with the Ogdru Jahad that he could. The silence with which they greeted all his pleas was deafening.
After a time he bent his mind on his own death, releasing the clockwork that held his heart in motion, unpinning the network of wires that held his internal organs in place, but nothing came of it. The procession of sand would tick through his veins with or without his sanction, like an ever-turning hourglass. In the darkness his mind seemed to devour itself, going over problems of engineering and medicine, tracing well-worn paths until they could be traced no further. Memories of things he would rather forget crept in to dance. His mind did not usually run to the fanciful, but he could picture his thoughts capering like medieval devils around a bonfire.
It was fitting then, that his prayers should be answered by a demon. After an eternity of waiting he heard a woman's voice speaking in the clipped, accent-free English he associated with American intelligentsia. An affected voice, with a superior, nasal edge. "There's a man under here."
A forklift pulled the gear off of him and he saw a huge reddish figure silhouetted by a work lamp.
"Right where I left him," said Hellboy. He took a puff on his cigar. "Take his swords and his knives. Take the hand. I'll carry him.
Kroenen was spattered with shavings of metal as some agents cut down the forest of spikes with their diamond-hardened jigsaws. The woman donned one of Kroenen's masks to protect her eyes. Kroenen thought maybe she had seen him move, but if she did she gave no sign.
"He ripped through his own arms and legs to free himself, Dr. Andrews," a male agent said in quiet horror.
The woman answered, precise and impatient, "Yes, Kyle. Let's gather some of the sand to study it." Kyle ventured within reach of one of Kroenen's hands, and Kroenen could have killed the man in a heartbeat, but he remained still. The Odgru Jahad spurned his bargains now; perhaps this human agency would not.
They took his knives and wrapped them in cardboard. The woman, Dr. Andrews, found the catch at his wrist that released his mechanical hand and took that. The tendons and wires in his arm twitched when they were cut off from the hand.
"What's that?" Kyle asked.
"Latent nerve functions. Not sure. I'll study it," answered Dr. Andrews. Hellboy lifted Kroenen off the spike he had been unable to rip out, the one that went right through his back. Sand poured out like a river as they transferred him to a stretcher. They secured his arms and legs, and bore him up and out of the graveyard.
[][][]
Although she would never show it, Dr. Leah Andrews was nervous about being on a mission with Hellboy. He had a tendency to get his co-workers killed, and Dr. Andrews had no special abilities beyond her incisive mind. Sitting with Hellboy in the back of the chopper that would take them to Moscow, then to a plane to Newark, Dr. Andrews wondered if she should say something. The mission had turned out fairly predictable, and she did not have enough experience with Hellboy to know if his brooding silence was typical.
"Be careful when you study him, Doctor. He may not be dead," said Hellboy, finally. "I mean, he may not be any more dead than when I threw him in the pit."
"I have experience with undead creatures," Leah reminded him huffily. She looked down at her nails; they were clipped very short, as always, but now they had fine sand under them, and the creases in her hands were lined with dust. She rubbed her hands together and wished fervently for the moment when she could wash them and be back in rubber gloves.
"He's no vampire," Hellboy said. He took out a cigar and looked at it for a moment before tucking it back in his pocket. "He's closer to a mummy, and no one's really found a way to kill those. You can incapacitate them, but no one's ever been able to kill them. And mummies are usually bound with specific curses, and can only be raised under very specific circumstances."
Hellboy lapsed into silence again as they touched down on the tarmac in Moscow. Some additional BPRD agents met them on the ground with a large coffin shaped box.
"You're just going to put him in a box?" Hellboy asked.
"Titanium," Leah explained. "Etched with holy symbols--although I'm not sure that will help in this case--and locked with bank vault-style locks. We've had worse than this little wind-up toy in there."
"I'll sit in the cargo hold with it," Hellboy said, and gave the agents a glare that would brook no argument.
[][][]
It was not difficult for Kroenen to play dead on the way back to BPRD. With so much sand leaking out of him, his motive force ebbed to its lowest level. In his rare moments of lucidity, he wondered if, perhaps, draining all the sand in his body out would finally kill him, but no, that would probably just leave him immobile, but not without unlife.
After an indeterminate length of time Kroenen found himself taken out of the box and secured to the table in a bright operating theater. His eyes had been blindfolded with some material that grated uncomfortably on his exposed corneas. He wondered if that was for his comfort of that of the technicians who did not wish to look upon his hideous face. All his clothing had been removed as well and as before he hated the feeling of vulnerability.
Kroenen could sense presences around him, the businesslike efficiency of the female doctor, a less certain set of hands belonged to a young male technician, and outside the room some observer lingered. Kroenen could feel the touch of the observer's cool mind on his, a genuine psychic with somewhat alien thought patterns, male but not a man. Given time and proximity, Kroenen's limited telepathic ability might have picked up more, but the time was coming soon for him to act.
Abe had images of tearing flesh and breaking metal in his mind when he awoke that morning. The spike through the arm--that had to be torn out before the gear could be pushed off. Abe had dreamt of the man before, nightmares engendered after reading Professor Bruttenholm's observations, but nothing prepared him for the reality of having this creature's thoughts in his head.
The thoughts were exacting and clipped, much as Abe would imagine the man had spoken in life. He rarely referred to himself in the first person, especially when thinking of surgeries he had done to himself or injuries suffered. They seemed stuck on a permanent tape loop, a long litany of surgical procedures and memories phrased like entries into a medical journal.
Unable to get the thoughts out of his head, Abe went up to the medical bay and caught a glimpse of the scarred arms and torso of Karl Kroenen and Leah Andrews's watery blue eyes above her surgical mask as she cut a bit of flesh away from the wound and put it into a dish of formaldehyde. The thoughts were silent again, and Abe wondered if they had been the product of an overactive imagination--after all, he had known Kroenen would be back in the building soon--and the body lying on the operating table looked dead.
Then the creature twisted its hand out of the restraint and pushed the blindfold off its head with the metal stump. Before either scientist could react, Kroenen had a scalpel in his hand and drove it deep into the eye of the young technician. Kroenen hooked his maimed arm around Dr. Andrews's shoulders and held the scalpel to her neck. Abe rushed to the door, but by the time he had unlocked it, Kroenen had finished his bloody work. The revenant pressed the scalpel harder against Dr. Andrews's neck when Abe started to come through the door, so he backed away and went back to the window.
Dr. Andrews started to struggle in his grasp, and Abe heard a distinct, if raspy "Don't" come from the creature's lipless mouth. Kroenen cut the surgical mask off Dr. Andrews and it fluttered to the floor. Now Abe could see the terror on her face, and the revulsion at being pinned against Kroenen's dead flesh. Kroenen's naked eyes stared straight ahead and he was as motionless as dead machinery until he saw Abe.
The eyes swiveled in their sockets as if they were mounted on stalks, and then his head and neck turned to follow them.
"What do you want?" Abe asked from behind the glass observation window. "You need not speak, I can read your thoughts." If possible Kroenen's eyes widened, but Abe looked away before he could see if the visible muscles twitched in the open wounds that made up Kroenen's face.
Can it really? was Kroenen's thought. When Abe read an ordinary human's thoughts it was always a disordered alphabet soup of images and words, and learning to pick out the relevant thoughts had taken many years. But Kroenen's thought was clear and crisp as if spoken, with no underlying chatter. The head tilted like a bird's. Very well, I desire the means to repair myself, and some assistance in doing so. Then you may do with me as you wish. The last was thought sarcastically. Abe could see a metal rod protruding from the creature's back.
"No more killing, or they'll lock you up and throw away the key," Abe said. The technician sat slumped at the foot of the operating table and the fluids from his pierced eye had mixed with his blood to make his face a slick and jellied mask, but Abe's thoughts were caught in Kroenen's and he gave the death no consideration. Abe had a grudging admiration for the creature's mental discipline. Even in thoughts, he revealed no more than he wished to. Later Abe would wonder how he had been so callous about the gruesome death in front of him.
As you say, agreed Kroenen. What is my guarantee?
Abe considered and then rejected a few offers. "You get none," he said finally. "But we get none from you, except the bonds of mutual benefit." Abe could feel Kroenen's sardonic approval in his thoughts, and wished to discomfort the creature more. "Hellboy would like to see how you look in pieces. Don't forget that."
Leah quickly stopped struggling in Kroenen's grasp, and turned her focus instead on the undead creature who had her prisoner. He was very strong, and his skin on hers was cool. She could feel the sand in his veins crawling beneath the flesh like the march of tiny ants. Kroenen felt her pulse slow back to normal where the big vein in her neck beat against his skin. He pressed the scalpel into her neck a little, to make the blood flow and to feel her fear again.
"You've made your point, Nazi," said Abe with distaste. "We have a deal. Let her go." Kroenen let her out of his grasp and she stood up slowly. She went over to the mirror and affixed a Band-Aid to her neck. Her face had gone even paler than its usual sallow white, but Abe thought she seemed composed. She replaced her surgical cap over her stringy pale hair, too colorless a color to be called blond, and got a new surgical mask.
"Leah, you should rest, get that cut looked at," said Abe through the glass that separated them.
"No, I'd like to get started," she said coolly. "Can you send someone in here to clean this up."
Abe backed away frowning. His skin felt hot and sticky, as it always did after too long out of his tank. He suddenly felt he did not have the energy to argue. Abe radioed some agents with flamethrowers to stand guard.
Leah's thoughts now drowned out any of Kroenen's. They were her usual internal chatter, but now the themes seemed sinister. Must know, must understand, must discover, Leah's monologue, loud and insistent.
Next: Strange Allies
Author: linaerys
Rating: R for violence. No sex.
Characters: Hellboy, Kroenen, Abe, a few OCs from the BPRD, including pathologist to the undead, Dr. Leah Andrews
Summary: After the movie, Hellboy takes a team back to the Moscow cemetary to clean up.
Feedback: Pretty please! I can never get enough feedback!
Kroenen did not know how long he waited there in the dark, impaled upon his own spikes, crushed under gears he had designed. Long stretches of blessed unconsciousness mixed with the more horrible eons of wakefulness. No magic he could think of would free him, and he had already made every bargain with the Ogdru Jahad that he could. The silence with which they greeted all his pleas was deafening.
After a time he bent his mind on his own death, releasing the clockwork that held his heart in motion, unpinning the network of wires that held his internal organs in place, but nothing came of it. The procession of sand would tick through his veins with or without his sanction, like an ever-turning hourglass. In the darkness his mind seemed to devour itself, going over problems of engineering and medicine, tracing well-worn paths until they could be traced no further. Memories of things he would rather forget crept in to dance. His mind did not usually run to the fanciful, but he could picture his thoughts capering like medieval devils around a bonfire.
It was fitting then, that his prayers should be answered by a demon. After an eternity of waiting he heard a woman's voice speaking in the clipped, accent-free English he associated with American intelligentsia. An affected voice, with a superior, nasal edge. "There's a man under here."
A forklift pulled the gear off of him and he saw a huge reddish figure silhouetted by a work lamp.
"Right where I left him," said Hellboy. He took a puff on his cigar. "Take his swords and his knives. Take the hand. I'll carry him.
Kroenen was spattered with shavings of metal as some agents cut down the forest of spikes with their diamond-hardened jigsaws. The woman donned one of Kroenen's masks to protect her eyes. Kroenen thought maybe she had seen him move, but if she did she gave no sign.
"He ripped through his own arms and legs to free himself, Dr. Andrews," a male agent said in quiet horror.
The woman answered, precise and impatient, "Yes, Kyle. Let's gather some of the sand to study it." Kyle ventured within reach of one of Kroenen's hands, and Kroenen could have killed the man in a heartbeat, but he remained still. The Odgru Jahad spurned his bargains now; perhaps this human agency would not.
They took his knives and wrapped them in cardboard. The woman, Dr. Andrews, found the catch at his wrist that released his mechanical hand and took that. The tendons and wires in his arm twitched when they were cut off from the hand.
"What's that?" Kyle asked.
"Latent nerve functions. Not sure. I'll study it," answered Dr. Andrews. Hellboy lifted Kroenen off the spike he had been unable to rip out, the one that went right through his back. Sand poured out like a river as they transferred him to a stretcher. They secured his arms and legs, and bore him up and out of the graveyard.
[][][]
Although she would never show it, Dr. Leah Andrews was nervous about being on a mission with Hellboy. He had a tendency to get his co-workers killed, and Dr. Andrews had no special abilities beyond her incisive mind. Sitting with Hellboy in the back of the chopper that would take them to Moscow, then to a plane to Newark, Dr. Andrews wondered if she should say something. The mission had turned out fairly predictable, and she did not have enough experience with Hellboy to know if his brooding silence was typical.
"Be careful when you study him, Doctor. He may not be dead," said Hellboy, finally. "I mean, he may not be any more dead than when I threw him in the pit."
"I have experience with undead creatures," Leah reminded him huffily. She looked down at her nails; they were clipped very short, as always, but now they had fine sand under them, and the creases in her hands were lined with dust. She rubbed her hands together and wished fervently for the moment when she could wash them and be back in rubber gloves.
"He's no vampire," Hellboy said. He took out a cigar and looked at it for a moment before tucking it back in his pocket. "He's closer to a mummy, and no one's really found a way to kill those. You can incapacitate them, but no one's ever been able to kill them. And mummies are usually bound with specific curses, and can only be raised under very specific circumstances."
Hellboy lapsed into silence again as they touched down on the tarmac in Moscow. Some additional BPRD agents met them on the ground with a large coffin shaped box.
"You're just going to put him in a box?" Hellboy asked.
"Titanium," Leah explained. "Etched with holy symbols--although I'm not sure that will help in this case--and locked with bank vault-style locks. We've had worse than this little wind-up toy in there."
"I'll sit in the cargo hold with it," Hellboy said, and gave the agents a glare that would brook no argument.
[][][]
It was not difficult for Kroenen to play dead on the way back to BPRD. With so much sand leaking out of him, his motive force ebbed to its lowest level. In his rare moments of lucidity, he wondered if, perhaps, draining all the sand in his body out would finally kill him, but no, that would probably just leave him immobile, but not without unlife.
After an indeterminate length of time Kroenen found himself taken out of the box and secured to the table in a bright operating theater. His eyes had been blindfolded with some material that grated uncomfortably on his exposed corneas. He wondered if that was for his comfort of that of the technicians who did not wish to look upon his hideous face. All his clothing had been removed as well and as before he hated the feeling of vulnerability.
Kroenen could sense presences around him, the businesslike efficiency of the female doctor, a less certain set of hands belonged to a young male technician, and outside the room some observer lingered. Kroenen could feel the touch of the observer's cool mind on his, a genuine psychic with somewhat alien thought patterns, male but not a man. Given time and proximity, Kroenen's limited telepathic ability might have picked up more, but the time was coming soon for him to act.
Abe had images of tearing flesh and breaking metal in his mind when he awoke that morning. The spike through the arm--that had to be torn out before the gear could be pushed off. Abe had dreamt of the man before, nightmares engendered after reading Professor Bruttenholm's observations, but nothing prepared him for the reality of having this creature's thoughts in his head.
The thoughts were exacting and clipped, much as Abe would imagine the man had spoken in life. He rarely referred to himself in the first person, especially when thinking of surgeries he had done to himself or injuries suffered. They seemed stuck on a permanent tape loop, a long litany of surgical procedures and memories phrased like entries into a medical journal.
Unable to get the thoughts out of his head, Abe went up to the medical bay and caught a glimpse of the scarred arms and torso of Karl Kroenen and Leah Andrews's watery blue eyes above her surgical mask as she cut a bit of flesh away from the wound and put it into a dish of formaldehyde. The thoughts were silent again, and Abe wondered if they had been the product of an overactive imagination--after all, he had known Kroenen would be back in the building soon--and the body lying on the operating table looked dead.
Then the creature twisted its hand out of the restraint and pushed the blindfold off its head with the metal stump. Before either scientist could react, Kroenen had a scalpel in his hand and drove it deep into the eye of the young technician. Kroenen hooked his maimed arm around Dr. Andrews's shoulders and held the scalpel to her neck. Abe rushed to the door, but by the time he had unlocked it, Kroenen had finished his bloody work. The revenant pressed the scalpel harder against Dr. Andrews's neck when Abe started to come through the door, so he backed away and went back to the window.
Dr. Andrews started to struggle in his grasp, and Abe heard a distinct, if raspy "Don't" come from the creature's lipless mouth. Kroenen cut the surgical mask off Dr. Andrews and it fluttered to the floor. Now Abe could see the terror on her face, and the revulsion at being pinned against Kroenen's dead flesh. Kroenen's naked eyes stared straight ahead and he was as motionless as dead machinery until he saw Abe.
The eyes swiveled in their sockets as if they were mounted on stalks, and then his head and neck turned to follow them.
"What do you want?" Abe asked from behind the glass observation window. "You need not speak, I can read your thoughts." If possible Kroenen's eyes widened, but Abe looked away before he could see if the visible muscles twitched in the open wounds that made up Kroenen's face.
Can it really? was Kroenen's thought. When Abe read an ordinary human's thoughts it was always a disordered alphabet soup of images and words, and learning to pick out the relevant thoughts had taken many years. But Kroenen's thought was clear and crisp as if spoken, with no underlying chatter. The head tilted like a bird's. Very well, I desire the means to repair myself, and some assistance in doing so. Then you may do with me as you wish. The last was thought sarcastically. Abe could see a metal rod protruding from the creature's back.
"No more killing, or they'll lock you up and throw away the key," Abe said. The technician sat slumped at the foot of the operating table and the fluids from his pierced eye had mixed with his blood to make his face a slick and jellied mask, but Abe's thoughts were caught in Kroenen's and he gave the death no consideration. Abe had a grudging admiration for the creature's mental discipline. Even in thoughts, he revealed no more than he wished to. Later Abe would wonder how he had been so callous about the gruesome death in front of him.
As you say, agreed Kroenen. What is my guarantee?
Abe considered and then rejected a few offers. "You get none," he said finally. "But we get none from you, except the bonds of mutual benefit." Abe could feel Kroenen's sardonic approval in his thoughts, and wished to discomfort the creature more. "Hellboy would like to see how you look in pieces. Don't forget that."
Leah quickly stopped struggling in Kroenen's grasp, and turned her focus instead on the undead creature who had her prisoner. He was very strong, and his skin on hers was cool. She could feel the sand in his veins crawling beneath the flesh like the march of tiny ants. Kroenen felt her pulse slow back to normal where the big vein in her neck beat against his skin. He pressed the scalpel into her neck a little, to make the blood flow and to feel her fear again.
"You've made your point, Nazi," said Abe with distaste. "We have a deal. Let her go." Kroenen let her out of his grasp and she stood up slowly. She went over to the mirror and affixed a Band-Aid to her neck. Her face had gone even paler than its usual sallow white, but Abe thought she seemed composed. She replaced her surgical cap over her stringy pale hair, too colorless a color to be called blond, and got a new surgical mask.
"Leah, you should rest, get that cut looked at," said Abe through the glass that separated them.
"No, I'd like to get started," she said coolly. "Can you send someone in here to clean this up."
Abe backed away frowning. His skin felt hot and sticky, as it always did after too long out of his tank. He suddenly felt he did not have the energy to argue. Abe radioed some agents with flamethrowers to stand guard.
Leah's thoughts now drowned out any of Kroenen's. They were her usual internal chatter, but now the themes seemed sinister. Must know, must understand, must discover, Leah's monologue, loud and insistent.
Next: Strange Allies