It's dark out in the cemetery, just the eerie glow of tombstones in the moonlight visible to the horizon and the faint sent of flowers in the breeze. Leaves flutter gently from a barely-there gust of wind to cast the remnants of the latest snow onto the frozen earth.
There shouldn't be anyone here. At least, not at this witching hour. Most sane people are in bed, enjoying the warmth of their bedclothes and ignoring the inches of powder and sleet that coat the ground outside. But that's only the sane people.
Drew Anderson doesn't consider himself sane. Hasn't since he was nine years old, sitting on the roof of his apartment building with Hellboy while they ate cookies and watched spies. Since then he keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and photos he's found, hoping one day to meet the demon again. He slips away some nights from his wife, his children, to wander the older sections of the city on the chance that something has escaped the bonds of the underworld and Hellboy needs help to capture it.
He's arbitrarily picked the cemetery this night, having scaled a crumbling stone wall to get in and scratched his favorite camera lens in the process. With his hands stuffed his pockets to keep his fingers from getting cold, Drew's been walking the paths for half an hour.
Further and further, he goes through the rows, searching and trying to find his way without a flashlight. He's joking to himself about getting lost when he sees beyond him a break in the markers and realizes the dark void is the shadow of a person.
Not a person.
Hellboy.
His stature seems smaller, but then Drew's grown considerably in the time they'd been apart. He's a scant six-foot-one; a third bigger than he was as a child. He lets his eyes continue to adjust, taking in the sight of his hero with the leather coat is wrapped around broad shoulders. Hellboy is faced away, down, like he's staring at a particular grave, yet there are still no horns to be seen.
There's the crunch of snow beneath heavy boots and suddenly, Drew feels like he's being watched. A pair of eyes are trained on him, feminine and sad. The woman he'd seen back then, and as he tries to remember the name he was told, a second pair fall on him. Masculine this time, and he raises a hand protectively on Hellboy's arm.
A sense of wrongness falls over Drew, like something or someone is whispering in his ear that this is a private moment. A time for mourning and not for reunion. He's intruding and he can feel it in his bones – he has to go, because he doesn't belong here.
He takes one last look at the trio and begins to walk away, trying to memorize his footsteps as he leaves. He doesn't even have to think as he hefts himself over the wall again, fingers taut on the rocks while he recalls the tombstone they'd been standing in front of.
It is a simple affair, white marble with a verse from psalms and some of the usual platitudes about beloved fathers, with a strange angel carving set atop it of a little boy with a tail coiled around his feet and a rosary wrapped on his wrist. He's half way home when he finally pulls the name from the back of his mind: Trevor Bruttenholm.