Series/Canon: Hellboy [movie; draws from Yvonne Navarro's novelization]
Feedback: Appreciated.
Notes: Originally meant to fit the comics universe, but I felt it would fit the movie better.
Disclaimer: Elizabeth A. Sherman created by Mike Mignola; screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, novelization by Yvonne Navarro.
---
---
To Ash
--
She shifted her toes, unbalanced as she took a wavering step forward through the heated sand. She could not seem to focus her eyes, and so she squinted, bleary and still crying though she did not remember why (did not want to remember why).
Hot sand beneath her feet, shoes lost somewhere along the beach (beach?), but when she rubbed a grimy hand across her face to brush away the hazy tears, a streak of red was on her thumb - and there was a puff of grey city snow falling silently around her. She blinked, slowly, and felt her gut squeezing with a deep terror.
Not sand and snow, but cinders and ash; without thought, almost panicking, she took a ragged half-breath and gagged on the ashes of her now-dead world. Her stomach heaved but nothing came other than the taste of bile; feeling it, bitter, in the back of her throat she fumbled for her cross. It was a blind need for something familiar in her dirty, bloody fingers, to keep her from consciously realizing that -
The cross was blistering hot in her hand, and when she dropped it her hand was not blistered; it did not hurt, the burning. Fire still coiled inside of her, some terrible heat greater than that in the cross swinging around her neck; for a moment there, standing in the burnt and hollow remnants of everything, she tried not to think, tried to pretend the fire twisted inside was not there.
But the thought came anyway, that the ash and soot (in her nostrils, in her mouth, between her toes) she breathed was her family, clinging in her throat and tainting the air both within and without. Breathing the dead, killed by her.
Looking to the dark, ruddy smear on her hand and the endless grey, she could no more stop crying as she could the burning.
---
---
end