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A Thousand
Words Fandom: Hellboy (movie)
Liz's first camera was a present from the Professor. By her fifteenth birthday, Liz had been at the Department for almost four years. Four years of being tested and experimented on by a team of increasingly bemused scientists and of waking up every morning in a room that could almost have passed as a normal teenage girl's bedroom, except that its walls were covered in the same tiles they used to stop the space shuttle burning up on re-entry. Four years of only being allowed trips outside under close supervision, always with a couple of fire trucks parked a discreet distance away, and the Professor standing nearby, watching her with an expression of deep sadness on his face. Liz never figured out what made him decide that a camera was the perfect present for a fifteen year old whose recreational activities included listening to Pixies albums, reading Sylvia Plath anthologies, feeling guilty, angry and depressed by turns, and occasionally bursting into flames. Later, she decided he'd either had a deep and uncanny insight into her character, or he had simply been stumped for ideas and had opened a mail order catalogue at a random page and bought the first thing he saw. She suspected the latter. It wasn't even a digital camera or a pocket-sized automatic. It was a Polaroid -- big and clunky and about as up-to-the-minute as bell-bottom pants and bubble perms. Liz took it out of the box and stared at it for a minute or longer before she could make herself mumble thank you. Later she dumped it, still in its box, at the end of her bed. It stayed there for several weeks, untouched. Then, one day, bored, Liz started fooling around with the camera. She stood on a chair and took a picture of her room. The camera flashed and whirred and spat out a sepia-colored square. Liz shook it vigorously and watched, fascinated, as the image formed out of the blankness, colors coalescing and lines appearing where there had been nothing before. She took several more pictures, and stuck them to the wall next to her bed. It wasn't long before she started to run out of wall.
"No." "Pleeeeeaaase." "I said no already." Liz tipped her head to one side and smiled in what she hoped was a winning manner. She played her trump card. "Abe already let me." "Abe's cheap," Hellboy said, making a derisory noise. "Couple of rotten eggs and he's anybody's." He flopped down onto the bed, and the steel beams supporting it groaned in protest. "Anyhow, you're only fifteen." "What's that got to do with it?" "You won't do it right. You'll mess it up." "Will not!" Liz said hotly. "I've been practicing. Red..." "No!" He folded his arms, the differently-sized hands resting incongruously against each other. "Now, buzz off. I'm busy." "Busy doing what?" He gestured vaguely with his stone hand. "Adult stuff." Liz eyed the room, watching several cats weaving their way through an obstacle course which consisted of discarded comic-books, empty soda cans and half-eaten bowls of Kitty Chunks. "Yeah. Because you're so grown up." H.B. scowled, which was always a good sign that she'd successfully scored a point off him. "You're not taking my picture," he said. "Get outta here." Clearly, Liz realized, she was going to need a strategy.
It started as a game. The rules were pretty simple: Liz tried to take Hellboy's photograph, and he did everything he could to avoid having his photograph taken. When it became clear to everyone what she was up to, the various Agents and scientists assigned to the Department reacted to Liz's self-imposed mission with varying degrees of amusement and indulgence. No one actually went so far as so conspire with her to get Hellboy's picture -- no one was stupid enough to want to risk seriously pissing off a seven-foot tall demon -- but a couple of the younger Agents advised her on the techniques of subterfuge. When Manning discovered this, he went to pains to remind everyone of the very strict rules in place regarding making unauthorized audio or visual records of any kind inside the Department, but he was taken about as seriously as anyone ever took him, which was to say, not very. And all the while Liz lurked in shadows and dark corners, the camera dangling on its strap around her neck, waiting for the right moment. She hid behind doors and in empty rooms, armed with the Polaroid camera, and waited until she heard Hellboy's unmistakably heavy tread in the corridor outside. Then, pushing the door open and lifting the camera at the same time, she leaped out -- just in time to see a red tail snaking around the next corner. Sometimes she could even hear him chuckling to himself. The game had only one other significant rule, which was that it was played only in the public areas -- the hallways, the library, the canteen. This was necessary to allow Liz and H.B. to continue hanging out together, just as they had done since shortly after her arrival at the Department. When they were lazing around in the evening, watching TV together, the Polaroid remained locked away in a drawer in Liz's room, and when Liz turned up for one of her semi-regular (and expressly forbidden by the Professor) poker lessons, neither of them ever broached the subject of her ongoing stalking campaign. If the Professor knew about the Great Polaroid Duel -- and he must have, because after a couple of weeks, everyone else at the Department did -- he didn't say anything. Maybe he figured that it was just harmless fun, and that either Liz or Hellboy or both of them would eventually get bored and move on to something else. Most of the time, he would have been right, too. Most of the time. *** "I don't get it," Liz complained one day to Abe. "Why is he being so weird about this?" "He can be sensitive about his appearance, you know. He doesn't exactly look like the average man in the street." Abe's voice, conveyed to the outside of his tank via a series of small microphones suspended in the liquid, sounded tinny and a little muffled. "You let me take your picture," Liz pointed out. "I have never had reason to doubt my own handsomeness," Abe said. He put his webbed hands to the sides of his neck, and fluttered his fingers gracefully against the feathery slits in his gray skin: "Gills are both practical and aesthetically pleasing, don't you think?" A strange gurgling noise which Liz recognized as laughter emerged from the speaker set into the exterior of the tank. "He needs to get over himself," she declared. Abe didn't reply immediately. Instead he swam up to the top of his tank, performed a neat somersault in the water, then returned to the glass. He reached out and, extending one finger, tapped it sharply from the inside. It clinked dully. "The glass broke once," he said. "It was years ago, before you arrived. I thought the tank was strong, but there was a fine fracture in it, and it was a lot weaker than it appeared. More vulnerable." He blinked, the smooth lids sliding over his black, pupil-less eyes. Quietly, he said, "Don't push too hard. You might break something." But Liz wasn't listening; she was staring at the glass wall of the tank which he had just drawn her attention to, and at her own reflection in it, pale but very clear. *** It wasn't cheating, Liz told herself. Nothing in the rules said she couldn't improvise and, anyway, it wasn't as if she'd signed up to a Photographers' Geneva Convention, so technically there weren't any rules to break in the first place. But she still felt a mild twinge of guilt as, late one night, she unscrewed a full-length mirror from behind the door in the women's bathrooms on the administration level and hauled it down several flights of stairs. Maybe she wasn't cheating, but she couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that she was violating the spirit of, well, something. Armed with a screwdriver, she set about attaching the mirror to the door of Hellboy's vault. The vault door dated back to the original function of the bunker that housed the Department: during World War II it had been a weapons research facility, and had been built to withstand intense forces both within and without. The vault door was several feet thick and so heavy that the only person who could move it easily was Hellboy -- and he left it open most of the time, so that his cats could come and go as they pleased. She took her time, working carefully; H.B., Abe and the Professor would be away for most of the night, following up reports of a banshee infestation somewhere in the city's sewerage system, and the risk of being caught in the act was low. Once the mirror was attached, she put her shoulder to the vault door and pushed as hard as she could. On the first couple of attempts, nothing happened. Then, the vault door's hinges creaked, and it began, very slowly, to swing inwards. Liz pushed until the door was sitting at a forty-five degree angle to the corridor. The mirror now reflected the dull metal walls and, just as Liz had hoped, was practically invisible against the dull metal vault door to which it was secured. Satisfied with her handiwork, she went into Hellboy's room and sat down on the bed, choosing a position only slightly inferior to the spot closest to the radiator, which had already been bagged by one of H.B.'s cats. The cat opened its eyes just long enough to establish that she wasn't going to feed it or amuse it, then went straight back to sleep. Although Liz spent as much time here as she did in her own room, she was usually with H.B., and it felt a little weird being here by herself -- like she was invading his privacy, even though true privacy was a luxury the Department didn't offer any of its resident freaks. After a while, though, she started to relax, lulled by the comfortable familiarity of H.B.'s junk and the faint smell of sulfur and cat-food. *** Much later, she sat up with a start, woken by the approaching thud of footsteps. She blinked confusedly for a couple of seconds, before remembering why she'd been asleep in H.B.'s bed. A bright shaft of light from the vault's entrance made her wince, until a large, solid shape suddenly blocked it. The cat, also waking, miaowed a soft greeting, then hopped down off the bed and twined itself between Hellboy's feet. He reached down and idly scratched it between the ears, but he was looking at Liz. "What are you doing down here?" Liz shrugged. "Oh, you know. Just hanging." "Just hanging," H.B. repeated. "At four in the morning." He sounded doubtful. She nodded. He looked tired, she noticed; the sleeve of his coat was ripped and there was a small, fresh dressing on his forehead, just below the stump of one horn. That was kind of weird -- normally, H.B. got back from one of the Department's missions energized, hyped up from the fight, but tonight he just looked worn down. A small voice in the back of her head began to voice slight doubts about what she was about to do. Too late now. "So," she said, "how were the banshees?" "Noisy." Hellboy raised his flesh hand and made a show of cleaning out an ear. "It was like being at a Mariah Carey concert. Except more tuneful." Liz giggled, and H.B. seemed to brighten. "Can I stay and watch TV for a while?" she asked. "Yeah, why not. I'm not gonna sleep while my head's ringing like a belltower." He started to cross the vault, to sit down next to her on the bed. "Just so long as you don't have that damn camera with you." At that moment, his foot connected with the string Liz had positioned at ankle-level above the vault floor. H.B. looked down, scowled, and said, "What the --", just as the other end of the string tugged at the camera, balanced on an eye-level shelf in the corridor outside the vault door. Hellboy turned around, and for an instant Liz had a perfect view of his reflection, filling the mirror she had attached to the vault door. Then the Polaroid, its lens angled towards the mirror, flashed and whirred. Liz leaped up from the bed and ran past H.B., out of the vault. She grabbed the photograph as soon as the Polaroid had disgorged it, and held it aloft in triumph. "Got it!" Her plan had been a good one, but the truth was it had kind of stopped at this moment; she hadn't given much though to what would happen right after she got her photograph. If she had thought about it, maybe she would have figured that Red would be a little annoyed but that he'd see the funny side; he'd admit Liz had won, fair and square, and then they'd go back to hanging out and watching bad movies on cable together. Except that it didn't look like things were going to pan out that way. At all. Hellboy was staring at her, and the expression on his face was -- it was hard to put a name to it. Underneath the evident anger, there was something else that made Liz feel suddenly desperately sorry she had started any of this. At last he said, "What was that about?" "I wanted a picture," Liz said. The photograph was slowly developing in her hand, the picture emerging a perfect shot of Hellboy, caught in a moment of perfect surprise by the mirror and the flash. "You wanted a picture," H.B. snarled. "So you figured you'd sneak up on me to get it." "Well, yeah," Liz said. "C'mon, it's not like you didn't know about it." She was starting to get angry, and a part of her knew if she was smart at all she'd walk away from this right now, but she didn't care. Hellboy lifted the string. It was still attached to the Polaroid, and when he tugged it sharply, the camera leaped out of Liz's hand. "Hey! That's mine!" "Yeah?" Hellboy jabbed a finger at his face. "Well, this is mine. You want a picture, you can get it the same way everyone else does -- from a distance and with a long lens." Liz gaped at him, appalled and furious at the implied accusation of betrayal. "You think that's why I wanted it? To sell? What do you think I am?" "I think you're a freak," Hellboy said. "And I think you oughtta have a little more respect for other freaks." He transferred the Polaroid camera into his stone hand and held it up. "Don't --" Liz started, but it was too late. His fist closed on the camera, and she heard a series of cracking, popping noises as the mechanism disintegrated. "That's mine!" she yelled at him. "That's mine, and you have no right --" She felt it then: the awful, familiar tingling all over her skin. She felt like a match being struck, as if every inch of her was reactive, flammable, unstable. She'd had four years of tests and experiments, of psychoanalysis and instruction in meditation techniques, and she wasn't any closer to being able to control this, much less stop it. She looked down, and saw the first ghostly flames lick over her hands. Her room, with its space-shuttle heat-tile walls, was on the next level up; there was no way she could get to it in time. And she could tell from the way her skin was prickling that this was going to be a bad episode, the worst in months. "Oh, God," she said. "Get out, get out, you have to get away -- " The cat let out an unnerved screech and bolted out the door. Hellboy's hand dropped to his side, the shattered fragments of her camera raining down on to the floor. Then he launched himself at the vault door, slamming it shut so fast and hard that she could feel the vibrations in the floor under her feet. Then he came back to Liz, and wrapped his arms around her. All the anger had left him, and she could only feel grateful for his solid, flame-proof presence. "I've got you," he said. She looked up at him, and met his gaze. Then her world quite literally exploded.
The Professor was sitting at the bedside. He looked like he might have been there for some time. Liz lifted her head so that she could look at him. "Did I hurt anyone?" He shook his head. "No." Liz recalled a brown streak of fur heading for the vault door just before it had closed. "What about H.B.'s cats?" "I believe that Smudge sustained a singed tail," the Professor said solemnly. "Nothing more serious." Relieved, Liz let her head drop back on to the pillow and looked at the walls around her bed, and the photographs covering almost every square inch of space. If she'd had her episode in here, they would all have been turned into a thin layer of black soot clinging to the heat-resilient tiles. She thought of Hellboy's room -- the scattered junk and bowls of cat-food on the floor -- and pictured it as it must be now, a sterile, ash-filled cave. Her fault. She could feel her eyes starting to fill with tears. "Now, now," the Professor said, his voice awkwardly comforting, but sincere. "There was no harm done. Nothing that can't be repaired, at any rate." Nothing that couldn't be repaired. Liz wasn't so sure about that. "Is H.B. mad at me?" she asked. He looked surprised. "No, of course not. He understands you can't control it, you know." "I took his picture," Liz said miserably. "He didn't want me to." The Professor removed his glasses and, taking out a cloth handkerchief form his pocket, began to polish them. "Well, you weren't the only person to do that last night." When Liz looked at him, he went on, "Someone had tipped off one of the less reputable newspapers about our excursion into the sewers. There was a photographer waiting for us when we got down there. The poor man couldn't have known, of course, how banshees react to bright light..." He stopped. "Let's just say things were more unpleasant than they needed to be." "Oh," Liz said. The Professor reached down and picked up something which must have been sitting out of sight, on the floor next to the bed. When he lifted it up, Liz saw it was a plain box, about the size of a new Polaroid camera. "I don't want it," she said straight away. "Of course, you don't have to accept it," the Professor said, setting the box down on top of the bedcovers, "but I think someone might be offended if you don't." "You didn't --?" Liz started. She stopped, and took the box. She opened the cardboard flaps, just enough to confirm that, yes, it was a brand new Polaroid camera. And there was something else in the box, tucked in at the side. She fished it out and held it up to the light. As photographs went, it was pretty bad. The image was lopsided, and blurry in places. It was a self-portrait, taken by holding the camera at arm's length by someone without any appreciable skill. Hellboy's face looked out at Liz from the picture, his red skin and stumpy horns as strange and freakish as ever. But she was used to seeing those, and she hardly noticed them. What she saw, before anything else, was his hopeful smile and his eyes. In them, she saw the same expression that had been there as he held her, right before the flames took her over. It wasn't pity or sadness, but something else -- understanding. And also the need to be understood. "They say a picture's worth a thousand words," the Professor said softly. "They're wrong, of course. It's usually worth a lot more than that." Liz smiled. "For Christmas," she said, "can I have a dark room?" |