Milliways - Room 4204

[bprd_agent_red]

Spending a night and day in the infirmary, Hellboy was over the sterile environment, too small bed, and antiseptic smells of the hospital room, and well enough to make the trip upstairs to the room he and Liz share, and so they went up and settled in there for rest and recovery.

Mostly rest.

After making it to the cluttered room and sprawling out on the over-sized mattress, Red closed his eyes and slept on through the next day. Stirring rarely, sometimes moving or mumbling, but otherwise dead to the world.

Now, as evening breaks into night and Liz dozes, Red's side of the bed is empty.

The door to the bathroom is cracked, and from inside comes the hushed sounds of steady sawing.

Comments

[walking_napalm]

Liz had thought it might be hard to sleep in the room where she spent the last week suffering nightmares while trapped in Milliways and, to coin a phrase, paranoid as fuck, but it turns out that when you're exhausted enough, you can sleep anywhere.

She rolls over -- and her arm flops across the mattress. She blinks and lifts her head. There's a half second of sleepy confusion before she recognizes the sound coming from the bathroom, and registers that there's a crack of light under the door. She sits up, scrubbing at her face. According to the watch that she never bothered to take off, she's been half-asleep again for an hour or two.

She glances toward the bathroom again.



Liz knocks lightly before pushing the door open. Red has one horn off already and is working on the next one. She leans in the doorway.

[bprd_agent_red]

He glances up in the mirror when the door opens, then his eyes cut away and he goes back to what he's doing.

The second horn comes off, and he stares at it a moment, feeling the weight of it in his hand. With a frown he drops it into the small trash bin beside the sink, along with the saw he used to cut it off with.

Looking at himself in the mirror, the stumps left behind are uneven and rough, but at least the horns are gone. He can file what's left earlier.

Turning around, he looks her over. Her shoulder's bandaged beneath the tank top she has on, and she looks tired, but it's nothing unlike the end of any other mission they've been on.

Except for this time was different, and he doesn't know all the details of how, or why.

"Sorry," he says, and his voice is rough from all the sleep, and the remaining exhaustion till fraying him around the edges. "I didn't mean to wake you up."

[walking_napalm]

She shakes her head. "You didn't," she says, padding into the bathroom. She splays a warm hand in the small of his back and leans against his left side, looking at him in the mirror. They make quite a pair. Liz's hair is even more of a rats' nest than it felt like. "You look--" (terrible, but) "better."

[bprd_agent_red]

He puts his arm around her, mindful of her shoulder and ignoring the complaints from his own. He's sore, especially where the thorns were at, but nothing he can't live with to hold onto her.

"Feel better." He nods. "Hungry."

His system handled whatever it was that was wrong with him, but he's missed a lot of meals in the meantime.

[walking_napalm]

"Bet I could talk a rat into bringing something up here," she murmurs, letting her head rest against his chest and then tilting her chin to look up at him.

[bprd_agent_red]

"Pamcakes," he says. "Lots of 'em."

It may take more than one rat.

He turns his head down to look at her, lifting his hand and gently brushing aside a loose lock of her hair with a stone finger.

"What happened, Liz?"

[walking_napalm]

"I don't know," she says, soft; "not completely." She cups his jaw in her hand, thumb gentle at the corner of his mouth. "Lemme put in an order and then we'll talk about it, okay?"

[bprd_agent_red]

"Okay."

That corner of his mouth turns up in a small smile, and he lets her go so they can head into the other room.

While she takes care of food he searches through the clutter of their room. He can't find his coat, but he eventually finds a Baby Ruth in the mess. King Size, enough to tide him over until the food arrives.

Sitting down on the end of the bed, he munches on the candy bar while looking himself over, trying to put the pieces together. He traces a fading burn mark on his bare chest and shakes his head.

"Someone had a fancy gun." The marks aren't bullet holes.

[walking_napalm]

While Red was coat-hunting, Liz dug up a sweater and a pair of pants, and went downstairs in search of a rat. It's a quick trip; she's back just in time to hear the comment.

"I don't know anything about how you got hurt," she says, and then she steps all the way inside and closes the door behind herself. She kicks off her unlaced boots, and, on her way to the bed, grabs the notebook and folder that she'd left on the dresser yesterday.

[bprd_agent_red]

He looks up when she walks in, watching her cross the room.

"What happened to you?" He remembers seeing the blood when they got to the infirmary, and the bandage she has on now, and the way she's carrying that arm tell him it wasn't a small injury.

[walking_napalm]

"Crossbow bolt," she says, sitting down beside him and tucking one leg up under herself.

She looks up. "I think -- maybe it's better if I start from the beginning."

[bprd_agent_red]

"Crossbow?" Well, that's a new one.

He has more questions, but for once he's willing to listen.

Looking down at her, it may show that he's nervous about this, not sure what she's going to tell him. His mind has been making up all sorts of possibilities already, and he's afraid of any of them being close to the truth.

Steeling himself for what he's about to hear, Red gives her a nod that he's ready.

[walking_napalm]

"There was something haunting the bar; I guess they think it was called Slenderman. It's big on the internet in somebody's world, which is where this," she flaps the folder and then puts it down again, on the bed behind them, "came from.

"It caused the fog and it made people get paranoid and sick. It fed off the fear," she says, low and matter-of-fact. She reaches over and rests her hand in the crook of his elbow, just above where stone meets skin. She inhales. "What's the last thing you remember?"

[bprd_agent_red]

"Slenderman?" He tries to snort a laugh, but something about the name sends a cold chill down his back, and he has a brief flash of a tall man in a dark suit standing before him.

Shaking his head to rid the image, he frowns and tries to think back.

"I don't know... I remember I'd been coughing, and I couldn't sleep. I guess maybe I spent some time outside. I remember those weird symbols all over the place."

[walking_napalm]

"Nightmares," she says quietly. "It caused those, too, and all the symbols."

[bprd_agent_red]

He hesitates, then finally nods.

"Yeah." His voice drops, and his eyes do, too. "I kept having dreams about father, and Rasputin. And just... stuff."

He looks down at her hand on his arm, and his stone fingers curl loosely.

"I couldn't sleep, so I went looking' for answers. I tried to figure it out, and find what was doing it."

[walking_napalm]

"You were missing for four days," Liz says, and it's actually easier when he's not looking at her. She has to tell him, she knows she has to tell him; she clenches her other hand tighter in the sheets under her knee. "So I went outside and I found you.

"Not-you."

[bprd_agent_red]

Four days.

He doesn't remember that. He remembers the fog, and the trees and--

Startled, he looks up at her again.

"I was-- " The horns... but how?

Working his throat, he looks her over, eyes searching for more beyond her injured shoulder.

"Did I... " He doesn't remember, but if he hurt her...

[walking_napalm]

-- She shakes her head, swift and vehement, and rises up onto her knees to put herself closer to eye-level. She rests both hands on the tops of his shoulders, ignoring the throb the motion starts in her own shoulder.

"Nothing happened," she tells him. "I blasted you back into the trees." One side of her mouth makes an almost-imperceptible tilt upward. "Sorry."

[bprd_agent_red]

His eyes lock on hers, and he's relieved even as he has trouble thinking past the 'whatifs'.

"Hey, I probably deserved it." The crack has less humor in it than it normally would, and the trace that is there fades a moment later in his expression.

"Liz, I'm sorry... "

[walking_napalm]

She's shaking her head again, fiercely, before he has even finished saying her name. "No," she says, "no, Red-- That wasn't you." She cups his jaw in both hands. "This Slenderman thing was possessing people. It's not you."

[bprd_agent_red]

"I don't know how he did it. Why did he do it?"

It makes a difference, why. Possession is one thing, but somehow this entity drew out Anung Un Rama. If it's purposes were in line with Rasputin's...

Red knows his 'destiny' and fears it. He's cheated it once before, how many more times will he get that lucky?

[walking_napalm]

"I don't know," she says. "I don't know how it did it."

She spent two feverish days digging through books in the library, trying to find anything that would shed light on that exact question.

She draws in a breath, letting her hands drift back down to his shoulders. "The doctor said he had a couple cases the other night where people were waking up, hurt, with amnesia, and other patients were saying they'd kidnapped or attacked them." Watching him: "It sounded like possession."

[bprd_agent_red]

It. He.

It takes Red a minute to realize they're referring to the creature differently, that he's thinking of it, and knows that it was, he. Even if Red can't remember anything else.

Coming back to Liz and what she's saying, he gives a short nod.

"Yeah. That might just be it."

Reaching up, he places his flesh hand over hers on his shoulder.

"What happened after you found me out in the woods?"

[walking_napalm]

She sinks back down to sit on her feet again. "I tried to go get Abe, but the door was gone, so I stayed here for -- god, I don't know, almost another week? I couldn't find you again."

Calling that figure 'you' doesn't seem right; it wasn't Red.

Liz scrubs her free hand over her face, and decides: screw it, she's going to get through the rest of her part of this now. "A couple of us investigated. There was a hospital, by the lake -- it looked a lot like the abandoned ones out on Roosevelt Island." She glances up at him again. "We went in, we got separated, I disarmed a guy with a crossbow, and I pulled out the psychic he had strapped to a bed.

"The hospital disappeared while we were outside, and," her mouth twists faintly upward; apologetic, for all the questions she can't answer, "there you were."

[bprd_agent_red]

It's unsettling to have such a large gap where he doesn't know what he did, but at this point there's nothing he can do about it.

She's told him what she knows, and she found him at the end of it all. The rest will have to wait for later, or never.

"I wonder if Abe could-- " he cuts off, uncertain if he really wants to know that badly.

"You got the guy, right?" Even with doubts about the rest, what happened to Slenderman is something Red does want to know.

[walking_napalm]

"Enzo said they did," she says, and she's quiet for a second, watching him.

"Abe could probably tell you. If you wanted him to."

[bprd_agent_red]

He wonders if Enzo saw him, and who else did. It's a side of himself he never wanted to show again, and certainly not here, the one place he can come to and walk around as he is freely.

Maybe he'll talk to Abe, maybe he won't. Red finds himself wishing his father were here, while being simultaneously grateful he isn't. Father would know what to do, but Red would be ashamed before him for letting this happen again.

Putting on a slim smile that speaks volumes about how upset he is about all this, he wraps his hand around her.

"I guess the joint is already back to normal?" Just another episode of Milliways crazy for everyone else.

[walking_napalm]

"Looks like it," she says, shuffling in closer and sliding a hand up under his arm to rest on the back of his shoulder.

She lifts her face. "Hey."

[bprd_agent_red]

Grateful for her closeness, he lets her hand go so he can wrap his arm around her.

He looks down at her, small signs of trepidation written in his features.

[walking_napalm]

"Whatever you want to do -- figure it out, not figure it out--- It's okay."

It's not 'okay'; nothing about any of this is okay. But this specific call is his to make and she's going to do whatever she can to support it, even if it does mean breaking a promise she'd made to herself.

[bprd_agent_red]

He nods, and he doesn't know yet what he wants to do, but having her support means everything.

Before he speaks again he hesitates. In this conversation he's probably measured his words more carefully than any other since the night they spoke after his father died. It's hard to know what to say, and harder to ask some things, but he's putting in the effort to try.

"Are they-- I'm not in trouble, am I, Liz? Are they mad at me?"

[walking_napalm]

Her mouth opens and closes once.

"I don't know," she admits, slowly, with a small shake of her head. "I haven't talked to anybody who saw you."

She doesn't know what he (what not-him) did.

[bprd_agent_red]

His head bows and he frowns. His arm loosens a fraction and he shakes his head.

"But they can't be, right? It wasn't my fault, I didn't mean to... "

Will it matter? They don't know what he did, and as the demon it could be anything. What if it was something that can't be forgiven?

[walking_napalm]

"I know," she says, immediate and fierce, lifting her hand to his face. "So maybe -- maybe we'll have to tell people that."

What would she do if she were put face-to-face with the man who shot her, and was told he'd been possessed?

Feel sympathy, probably, Liz thinks. But then again, she has a lifetime of experience when it comes to her body reacting beyond her control. Can she take herself as a reliable barometer?

[bprd_agent_red]

He leans into her touch, taking in a slow, deep breath.

"Yeah, sure. We could explain it."

Lifting his head, he looks at her.

"I wasn't the only one." That has to count for something.

[walking_napalm]

She shakes her head. "There were at least a couple people."

[bprd_agent_red]

He gives a small nod, feeling less than thrilled about all of this.

Trying to bolster something, he says, "The guy's just lucky someone else took care of him, instead of me."

[walking_napalm]

She smiles with one corner of her mouth. Looking up: "Yeah."

[bprd_agent_red]

He mirrors that smile, knowing the same could be said regarding her, as well.

Having that support, and knowing she'd have set on fire the cause of all this for him, goes a long way to making him feel better.

"Thanks."

[walking_napalm]

The other side of her mouth tips up, too.

"What do you say we go track down that rat?" she asks.

[bprd_agent_red]

"Sure."

That sounds like a great plan to him.

[walking_napalm]

She leverages herself off his shoulder when she gets up; runs her hand down his arm and flashes him a quick, tiny smile before turning away to find where she kicked her boots.

The last week and a half has been fraught and frightening, even by the standards that Liz's life generally sets, and there are still way too many unanswered sobering questions looming for her to feel precisely relaxed, but -- they're here. They're walking and talking. They can go home. Right now, that's enough for Liz.

She shoves her feet into her boots and glances to Red. "Ready?" she asks.

[bprd_agent_red]

He rummages around the mess and finds a shirt to pull on. His movements are still stiff as he pulls the black T-shirt over his head, and he grunts as he tugs it down over his midsection.

"I wanna know what the heck those sticker things were." And maybe who plugged him with them.

Pants and boots come next, and then he nods and joins her when he's ready.

"That rat better be packing plenty of syrup."