Tales From the Red White and Blue

Prologue: The One That Got Away

Pairing: HB/Liz, HB+Liz+John Myers

Feedback: Welcome.

Notes: Takes place immediately after 'Hellboy' (spoilers for the first HB movie)

Summary: The other side does NOT play fair.

Myers:

It started the day we buried Clay.

Hellboy was there, and Liz, and Manning. Even Abe was there, wearing his rebreather under cover of a long, dark green raincoat. It was raining, of course. Not that this would have bothered Abe, but I think it's a rule that it must be raining whenever a member of the BPRD gets buried. Clay's wish to be buried on the grounds surprised Manning. Red and I listened to his diatribe on that subject, and Red shot me a roll of his eyes. Liz, who had hardly left Hellboy's side since the Moscow incident, eyed Manning with semi-affectionate patience and snuggled her head more firmly against Red's shoulder.

Every time she did that, Red's eyes would widen just a little, and there'd be a shift of his shoulders, like he thought she needed more room on his chest.

The day we buried Clay, alongside four men from the original brigade that found Hellboy, was also the day that the BPRD cats decided to hate Liz.

It was funny at first, and that's one of the most painful things for me to remember now. We thought everything was okay. I was jealous, even. Not of Hellboy, or of Liz, really, just... I felt like a little kid looking in the window of Santa's workshop, knowing between one breath and the next that I -wanted- the thing I was looking at with my whole being... ...and also that I was lucky just to have seen it once in my lifetime.

Somehow Liz knew, and one day I caught her looking at me with those strange, dark eyes of hers. She picked up my hand, and said,

"Come on," and we went to Red's room. He was there, pouring a drink into one of those tall, metal cups you get when you order an ice cream milkshake at Denny's. He was glad to see me, but there was a note of apprehension too, like he kept expecting me to knock over something expensive. I was feeling a little apprehensive myself.

We got dinner, and tons of popcorn, and some of those six-foot sub sandwiches for Red. They do sam'iches good in New Jersey.

Liz then proceeded to torture us with 'South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut'. -Red can actually blush, if you watch closely enough. By the time the credits were rolling, we'd gotten crumbs all over Hellboy's bed, and my ribs hurt from laughing. Liz got up to put an empty popcorn bowl on the trolley, and when she came back, she climbed onto the bed from my side. I scooted back, and cast a quick, furtive glance over my shoulder to see what Red was going to do about that. He didn't look happy. ...Curious, maybe.

All I knew was that if I scooted any further over to avoid snuggling with Red's girlfriend right under his nose, I was gonna be in his -lap-. So I stopped moving.

We all did.

Their eyes met over my head, and for a single, horrible moment, I thought they were about to ask me to do a threesome with them. Would they ask that of me, to be so close to a thing I wanted so badly, yet not really part of it?

They didn't.

There was a long pause. Then Red chuckled, breath warm through the back of my hair like the exhaust of a car, and dropped a heavy, reassuring hand on my shoulder. Liz smiled and kissed my forehead, eyes closed, as sweetly as ever it was done. I took a breath, too deep and shaky, and then a more normal one.

They held me like that all night, never asking for more, and not offering.

Personal space was gone the next morning.

They could touch me, and I could touch them, and I couldn't kiss Liz on the mouth, but that was about it. They changed the rules, because they loved me. Maybe there were other reasons. I'd like to think that Liz didn't know about the rest yet.

It was Abe who figured it out. He got done reading Liz after the Serpentorium mission, and he told us. Liz was dead. Her mind had come back, and her body was fine, but her soul, that strength of will that Hellboy and I loved so much, had never returned from the other side of Rasputin's trap.

Even Liz hadn't known right off. She remembered how to be Liz, and she WAS Liz... but she was getting tired, and she'd finally figured out why. It takes a lot of energy to pretend to care about things you've moved beyond, and it says something about Liz's soul, that even the after-image could care for so long.

Naturally, Hellboy and me weren't having it.

We tried everything, and I do mean everything, including some stuff we probably should have left alone. We destroyed a loading dock on the Jersey shore, mightily pissed off the Egyptian Secret Service, and almost lost Red to the ninth circle.

And we failed, sort of.

With the unearthly too-bright light shining through the plate-glass door behind her, Liz took Red's hand, and mine, and she kissed each of us in turn.

Then she walked forwards with that determined cat's grace we knew so well, opened the door to Heaven, and went home.

-We did that much, at least.

It was after that, that things got really weird. Hellboy's impossible to live with under normal circumstances, but with Liz dying for real that time I'm surprised ANY of us came through, especially him.

Red trashed his room when we first came home, and it wasn't like when Professor Broom died. No, that time he had a mission and an enemy who still had to pay.

This time it was worse. Far worse.

Red just took his phone off the hook, and walked away from his give-a-shit. We'd find him sitting on the floor in a disused hallway, naked except for his shorts, playing cards.

When I tried to get him to suit up for a mission with me, he'd calmly ask,

"Is it the end of tha world?" and if I said "no," he'd say "fine," and put down another card.

Some people, he wouldn't even talk to.

Manning was making noises about firing him, but it was an empty threat, and Hellboy knew it. Manning couldn't KILL him, and the idea of Red wandering off into the big bad world with a carpet bag scared them BOTH silly.

I was...

Well, I had a lot of time on my hands. I remember a few missions. Philadelphia. My room. My sister's place in Maryland, with a curious horse looking at me over a white fence railing. My brother-in-law talking, at least his lips were moving, but I don't remember what he said. Sleet agitated by the windshield wipers of a company van.

Waking up sitting at a table in the BPRD library, with a gray woolen blanket like the ones you get on airline flights pulled tight around me.

Red was there, and he looked worried.

I spent the next six days trying to get Red to quit hovering and being too nice to me.

Giving Red someone else to worry about had finally snapped him out of his daze, and if I had planned it that way, it would have been pretty sneaky.

Manning thought I was a genius, and said so.

Personally, I blame stress and having pulled an all-nighter.

Most things blow over eventually though, and by the time Manning stopped shooting me those embarrassing 'attaboy' glances when Red's back was turned, I think we were all feeling a bit more sane.

Anyway, Hellboy and I got back to business as usual for the next two years.

Abe seemed especially relieved.

-

Author's notes: Beth, you're right. It is 'Myers' and not 'Meyers'.

Peya Luna, I cleaned up the beginning of Chapter 4 for ya.