A/N: A movieverse fic which follows up the mission in the one-shot chapter 5 of 'Loving Liz'. The flashback sequence of the mission tragedy is reproduced here, for convenience and clarity. Hellboy causes the Professor and fellow agents deep concern after he secretly returns to the scene alone for a showdown with a killer entity.

Disclaimer: The Hellboy universe and characters are owned by Mike Mignola for the original comics, and by Guillermo Del Toro with Revolution Studios and Universal Pictures for the feature films.

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Hellboy had gone missing. Without a word to anyone.

On the second full day of his disappearance, Liz Sherman and Abraham Sapien were due for another meeting with Tom Manning at his anxious insistence, but the agents were then in no hurry to leave Prof. Bruttenholm alone in his burdened state. Their own conference on the same matter was as complete as it could be for the time being. Liz had spent hours with the elder as they analyzed her first hand account of the ill-fated mission, and all had drawn the one conclusion of Hellboy's likely response.

"I regret being unavailable for the initial exploration," Abe sighed. "With Red's own official report being left incomplete, only Liz and Agent Garcia can supply the physical overview of that dimension, and the true horror of agent Hart's death at the hand of the unknown entity."

"We were taken by surprise at every turn, Abe," replied Liz. "Given that, it happened to be – the fewer of us, the better. You needn't feel bad that you weren't there."

"Well, sir," Abe said, rising from his chair, "I apologize that we must leave you, now."

The Professor offered his hand to assist Liz up, seeing that her balance was as yet compromised with her left arm immobilized in a sling. "No doubt that my son has his reasons for keeping this particular secret, even from we three."

. . .

Director Tom Manning interrupted his state of irritation long enough to extend affable initial pleasantries to his summoned agents.

"Liz, are you having less pain? I hope to see you back in commission, soon."

"My temporarily gimpy arm won't adversely affect my usual skill set, and thanks."

"Look, folks," Manning proceeded into his pressing concern, "you know I have full confidence in your integrity, but ah -"

"But this is the second time you've called us out for answers, so you don't really trust us to let you in on breaking developments," Liz finished coolly.

"Surely, you expect that I need to reconfirm beyond any doubt that Hellboy's closest friends might be privy to information on his disappearance."

Scrupulously honest, Abe stressed, "None – absolutely."

"And again," Liz informed, "I had personally heard not a word from Red on any initial intention to go AWOL, or where."

"But, you two -" Manning persisted, attempting to impart a certain modicum of delicacy.

"But nothing. He'd confided no pillow talk about his leaving, if that's what you're implying now. And he has not made a secret check-in with me since." She and Red were close, fond of each other and she sometimes shared his bed, but there was no full-blown romance happening. Past a certain point, it was none of Manning's business. "It can only mean that he either can't, or won't."

"My own conclusion-" Abe stepped in, hoping to reinvest calm reasoning, "is that Hellboy, by his silence is protecting us from involvement in whatever he's chosen to embark upon."

"Be that as it may, my most rebellious and highly visible agent is out of my control, and off in hell knows where!"

"What more can we say, Tom?" Liz shrugged. "Red is his own man."

Manning pressed his lips tightly inward. "Take this, for example." He leaned forward over his desk with righteous courage of conviction. "Should I need to consider the mundane possibility that my missing person may have fallen down some set of hidden stairs here, broken his neck and was maybe lying there dead – wouldn't I do whatever it takes to locate him, starting within this complex of structures? And you do know what it takes to effect that kind of search. Through heat seeking and various other strenuously applied methods, it's been determined that Hellboy is anywhere but here." He leaned back to reiterate a past unpopular suggestion. "And I hope you two now see the sense of accepting the installation of a subcutaneous chip."

Liz looked at Abe and spoke for them both. "Still a no, on that."

Tom Manning felt well inconvenienced, to say the least. For the two days following Ben Hart's murder, Hellboy had been close-mouthed and ill tempered. And then he was gone. The connection couldn't be lost on anyone familiar with the case.

And Liz had discovered in Hellboy's quarters, trays overflowing with heaps of kibble and both of his sinks filled with water to the brims; enough to sustain his pet cats for many days. He had gone to attempt a return, she felt certain, to that place of Ben Hart's death. Below its BPRD incident number and date, she had seen the virtually empty file given the code name – 'Gray World: Fatality'.

. . .

Four days previous...

Their escape path as far as the grey horizon had looked safely clear at the time, clear at least of the alien tall rooted stalks that could sense their approach and aim low, swooping attacks to lash at them. And Ben Hart, then first ahead, had discovered how easily the limber willowy stalks were broken off their bases with well placed side kicks. He'd chosen a straight ten-footer to use, sweeping and stabbing at the ground as he tested to detect any spontaneous eruption of the traps they'd managed to evade behind them. Liz walked briskly several steps back beside agent Gill Sanchez, covering Hart with firearms drawn and keeping alert for potential danger in all directions.

It became perceptibly more difficult for the human agents to breathe. As Hellboy guarded the rear of his team, he felt a crushing pressure building in the angry, low hanging sky. It magnified and concentrated on him like a ton of iron descended on his shoulders, collapsing him to his knees, then to his hands. It vibrated again through his body, a hollow voice of demand, darkly fiendish with the promise of imminent devastation – 'Blood sacrifice!'. Some god-force of these plains dogged the agents unseen, commanding and manipulating hazards to materialize in their way. Hellboy felt more absolute that his team was being marked for retaliation. All or any one of them could be singled out for notice, but the force's creations weren't infallible. Only five minutes earlier, a dense grove of white, dagger thorned vegetation had shot up to enclose them all like a gigantic iron maiden, and Liz had swiftly laid down a swath of blowtorch concentration to burn a gap through, while Hellboy smashed away and held off the inner growth encroaching around them. The amputated trunks crouched and writhed, their limbs spurting thick streams of pale, corrosive ichor. The team had run through the sizzling rivulets, suffering little more than seared clothing.

"It looks like it's screaming," Gill panted to Hellboy, glancing back. "Why is everything in this place only white, gray and black?"

No questions were ever answered here, either. The force held its name and origins silent, and Hellboy had drawn nothing from it except its choice to spike him with the unchanging cryptic threat. It now left Hellboy invested with the grim knowledge that his team had been designated as pieces in a macabre game. Their narrow escapes, it taunted, were soon to end.

He had to get up. Fighting to stay conscious as the force compressed his lungs, Hellboy kept a constant visual on his people. They looked recovered, now. Good. But Sanchez wheeled to come back to him. It was no random chance that he was the one held down hard, that he was too far away when he saw Ben Hart drop clean out of sight with a startled yell, and Liz diving to the ground after him. Just within reach of Hellboy, Sanchez was buckled to the ground. The young agent rolled to his back and sucked in a shuddering deep breath as the invisible crush began to lift away. Released, Hellboy immediately found the strength to curse his delay. He dug his boots hard into the peeling shale surface beneath them and bolted forward, revving another gear to join the new storm up ahead.

He flung himself down beside Liz lying prone at the jagged rim of a sinkhole, her legs frantically kicking as she fought to resist a headfirst drag into the rising level of black, viscous fluid. Her hundred pound body was under hard strain with both arms stretched down painfully taut, sunk to her elbows in the muck.

"Ben!" she managed to gasp,"Ben is drowning!"

Hellboy locked his left arm straight across the front of her shoulders to bar against the pull, and determined fast that Liz was overexerting to hold onto submerged Ben, just as tightly as he was clinging to her. He plunged his stone arm down by her hands to relieve her of the weight and clamped his fingers around something below, alive and moving as sluggish as anything sunk in a pool of dense glue. He could see there was no possibility of Ben's treading in this to keep afloat. Whatever else might be lurking below, Hellboy began to haul up his catch. Gill caught up to take Liz a safe distance away, where she crouched, trembling with pain.

An obscene, morbid chuckle returned to make itself known...'Blood sacrifice!'

Delivered up by Hellboy's steady pull, Ben broke surface, blackened and shiny, spitting and exhaling blasts to clear his mouth and nostrils, his saturated clothing dragging at him. Hellboy leaned deeper over the edge to hook a solid arm lock around the slippery agent.

"Huh, Red!" Ben coughed, attempting a laugh, "It's the worst feeling in the w-" In a heartbeat, the pit ceased to exist, leaving Ben dangling in empty air between the walls of a narrow rock chasm. Hellboy gripped him hard and saw that far below him, the walls' strata were thrusting out to close the fault, locking together like a blindingly fast closing zipper. The demon rolled sharply to heave him free, but over the grinding clash of interconnecting rock, he heard Ben roar in agony. Still tight in his hold, Ben was immoveable; seized, crushed...and still alive. Liz and Gill...Hellboy's fevered glare flashed to find them before he wrestled off his coat and forced his arm down the fissure space at Ben's side. He found only pulverized flesh.

Sanchez made his hurried approach with Liz, bringing a field first aid box. What to do for a man this hideously mangled? He didn't have to stay blinded by the sticky black mess of the pit. As Ben sipped pathetic half breaths through his mouth, Liz carefully wiped his lids and the orbits of his eyes with sterile water and gauze pads. If only Ben could have been spared reviving from his stupor of shock. He hesitantly opened his red-rimmed eyes to find Hellboy near, the first to see his emerging distress become an eruption of helpless rage, then frozen disbelief as his hands trembled to explore the limits of what he had become. Ben clutched panting at his sternum, and stared down with stark realization that below this level of his entrapment, he knew what Hellboy had discovered – that his body was utterly destroyed. He curled his hands into shaky fists and thrashed at the ground, brokenly snarling his grief. Sprawled prone in front of the dying man, Hellboy stopped him by getting close up.

"Bud!" he whispered, steadying his head, "If you've gotta hit something, hit me."

Liz choked back heavyhearted tears. What worse could be rained on them now? Anything, she knew. Anything. She forgot the ache of her useless left arm and crouched by Ben, taking his hand to hold.

"I'll break you out," she heard him say to Ben. But in response, the man reached his weakening right arm over Hellboy's shoulder and pulled him in tight. Their closeness and muted tones shut out anyone else. If Ben could talk...he had so little time left. He reared his head back in Hellboy's hand, seized by spasms of choking, his throat expelling bloody wisps and shreds of tissue. Hellboy drew him back into their private space, where Ben's shuddering clutch at his back intensified to frenzied clawing until he'd gathered up a fistful of the demon's shirt, and that, he clenched with white knuckled tenacity. His laboured efforts to speak faltered to faint rasping at Hellboy's ear. When Ben's cruel awareness of the ruin of his body and the future he'd lost mercifully dimmed out of his eyes, Liz watched Red lift away from their clinch, and his fingers move gently to close his lids. The malevolent player had claimed its prize, and Hellboy no longer felt the presence. White. Gray. Black...and hungry for the red. The most coveted sacrifice throughout every age of Man. He could have stopped all of this by being the first to bleed for it. He knew that now, too late, and his mind snarled a vow to the slate gray sky. "I got your weakness, right here! Learned it the hard way. I'll be back for you."

Red bashed away the rock pinning the front of Ben's body until he'd cleared the way to recover his remains. His duster lay spread out on the ground behind him. It was all the more grievous to finally lift Ben out, as his smashed vertebrae and spinal cord peeled away from the cliff. He laid him down on the tan canvas and folded his arms over his eviscerated torso. There was so little of him left. He sighed as he slowly covered him over and stood up. Red had seen enough of the monstrous rear wall to know there would be no respect in bringing home any more of the man who now rested concealed in his coat.

Liz waved Gill to go ahead and leave her side.

He sombrely volunteered,"Red, I'll carry him." He knelt and respectfully made folds of the duster into a secure, compact bundle. When he got to his feet with the remains of Ben Hart in his arms, the look he cast back at his companions was glazed with haunted disbelief.

Too spent to stand, Liz waited seated on the ground for the men to finish their tasks. Worried Red came to sit by her, and examined her disfigured shoulder as well as he could. She squirmed in the discomfort of her soaked, stiffened jacket.

"This black mess," she sighed, utterly weary, "sticks like a mix of tar, glue and paint. I don't care how much it hurts. Please, get this off?"

He freed her from the encasement of her jacket with several strategic cuts, then carefully set her left forearm across her middle and used his shirt to bind around her.

"You need a doctor."

She frowned, concerned that her leader seemed so subdued. "Do we go home now?"

"We're going home," he answered, sounding tiredly far away. "We're taking Ben home. Nothing will happen to us, now."

She looked at him, not questioning his calm, understated confidence in what he'd said.

"Red!" Liz swayed and snatched for the support of his arm. She trusted his stone hand at her back to hold her safe. "We lost him," she breathed, exhausted, "So sad and horrible, and I can't think anymore. Is it over?"

. . .

Hellboy stood out like a vigilant lone red beacon on the endlessly flat, barren landscape.

"Just a whole lotta nothing." Everywhere he turned, he saw no variation in the all rock, temperate wasteland of his surroundings. "And a whole lotta nothing to do except wait to get noticed."

The environment's inescapable clay monotone disoriented his normal depth perception. There was scarcely any contrast, and his tall form cast no shadow. All appeared two-dimensional, felt depressing, heavy and lonely in its vast widespread sameness. The horizons, faraway crusty lines, met the identical neutral gray hue of the sky. That flat, low hanging ceiling spun slowly like a pinwheel crossed with a pattern of wispy black striations, cancelling their use as navigational points, plus being nauseating to watch for very long. His eighteen hours' previous exposure to this environment had been too short a time to learn anything of its atmospheric cycles. Until it happened, it was impossible to know if this bland, gloomy 'daylight' would morph into darkness.

It looked as though there had never been a living example of natural greenery here, to dry up and die. His team had twice seen some native colourless attack vegetation conjured to bust full grown through the rock surface. But they had killed those off without much trouble. He held his breath and strained his ears to listen for sounds of life. Not one. No such things as Gray world birds, insects or animals? This was a lousy place for them, anyway.

His first ugly, bitter experience of this dimension kept grinding at him. If he had one good thing to say, it was that the single odour of dry rock wasn't objectionable. He decided to find out what that murdering bastard, the Gray god, thought of a medium grade Cuban cigar, and lit one up as he paced without a secondary destination. All that he'd brought with him was secreted in the pockets of his duster. He welcomed the subtle, natural noise of brittle shale cracking under his boots, and watched his exhaled aromatic smoke drift off. Dammit. More gray.

As quickly as he became aware of an unseen encroaching presence, it had whispered its heated way around his head. He flicked his eyes shut as it molded momentarily to his face like a damp towel, then felt it rove on down his chest, snaking its invisible energy inside his coat, winding a serpentine exploration about his body. He found no substance to take hold of as the entity made its curious search of him, but there was nothing sinister, painful or sharp-edged about its intrusion. It performed some disturbed twitches and palpable recoiling motions, then seeped from his right sleeve to slither a clinging, inquisitive crawl along the length of his stone arm. It exited by sliding off the ends of his fingers. He assumed a firm stance, staying ready to retaliate. Just after it had seemed gone away for some seconds, it inflicted an impertinent, surprisingly solid push between his shoulder blades.

"What do you want?" he asked the empty air.

"Now, we begin. You have no right here. You owe a trade for passage to my land." A coarse, though discernible female voice spoke within his mind.

"What kind of a trade?" Next came a decisive slap against the outside of his coat.

"You are a simple landbound brute of a demon impersonator, as my brother says. You carry valuable offerings together with repulsive poisons. Give me the offerings."

He grinned and reached into a deep inside pocket, closing his hand around some standard plastic soft packs he'd taken from the Bureau's blood bank.

"They're for the most powerful. Maybe you," he suggested with a feigned ignorance.

"I deserve them," she declared, "not him. I stake first claim to all you can supply."

He left the blood stash down in his coat, waiting for her next cue to help him figure on some approach to draw her out.

She turned critical. "Here, you do know that one more set of eyes on your side could double your chances of survival. Your handmaiden – the spindly, fiery wench, is perhaps too fearful or unfit to accompany you again."

"So, you're new," Hellboy said, playing a nonchalant bluff to her obvious prior knowledge of him; going straight to the business of learning his enemy.

"Not new. My penalty relegated me to the background."

"That hardly seems fair." He sounded openly empathizing, though having no idea what she meant. "Why?"

"I forfeited the game with the burning. I failed to draw first blood."

"You made the white thorn grove." His show of admiration appealed to her vanity. "It almost worked."

"You remember!" Her girlish pride abounded. "It cost a good deal of energy."

"Who are you?"

"The apprentice of my brother," she replied, in a tone flat with unmet expectation that he ought to know better.

No surprise to Red, that entity guarding her name. Still, she'd alerted him to the possible presence of a male. Where was he? When he took some experimental steps away, she followed him like a puppy, and again her invisible mass of heat hovered at his face.

"From the deeps of your being, I show you this."

Fine dust particles collected from the ground swirled upward into a dense column, and within it, an outline began to sculpt, gradually mimicking the entire shape and features of Liz, rendered in black, gray and white. The image remained slowly revolving above the ground, not animated, not responsive. He could only think how grateful he felt that Liz was at home, out of harm's way.

"That," he evaluated with a forced bland praise, "is as perfect as it gets."

The dust picture disassembled and was left to drift into a formless cloud, suspended in mid-air.

His hostess seemed to need to elicit some satisfactory astonishment from him with a sudden cruel suggestion. "Have you returned for a second chance to save your weak underling?"

Hellboy steeled himself to appear unaffected, but he couldn't look away as a second image began to form before his eyes. In the same way, she produced a faithful, colourless likeness of Ben Hart. Ben. Looking as he had before anything of this world had touched him – whole, healthy and sturdy in his insignia jacket, cargo pants and badlander boots. He'd as much as invited her to show off what she could do, and now had to stand up to the consequences. He had every reason to think that her capacity for compassion was as absent and corrupted as any he'd ever known of demon psyche. And he watched the revolutions of Ben's figure until she let the illusion dissolve away.

"And that is as perfect as the last," she pronounced, openly expecting his agreement.

"As perfect as the last."

Her exhibitions now properly appreciated, she said simply, "Follow. We go to my brother. For the moment, he sleeps."

She wafted by his shoulder, giving him a push toward her chosen direction. She made no use of a supernormal way of travel to hurry him along, he noted – just plain old-fashioned walking on his part while she guided from nearby.

"You're a mind reading physical medium." Hellboy infused his fishing remark with a tone of approval, and stayed well on his guard with only her heat to alert him to her position.

"A peripheral talent, when the presence is strong, and interests me." She promptly halted their progress to say, "And I see again – another of your acquaintance."

Hellboy damned himself for the necessary evil of bringing up the topic, and prepared to hide his emotional investment in whatever was to come. He gave his attention to the form now being carved from a third dust column, much larger than the others. The image coalescing was like himself, but not. Unmistakeable was the huge stone forearm worn by a solidly muscled male demon who stood on powerful legs ending in cloven hooves. He was clothed in a short armoured kilt with a heavy chain around the waist. A long pair of curved, fully grown pointed horns were rooted in his forehead, and between those horns, a king's crown was suspended in some kind of upright shadow. His eyes were deep set and as dead as in most statues, and the squared face was heavy boned, especially at the lower jaw. He was hellish menace and arrogance, all over.

When Hellboy was a teenager, the professor had sadly explained the lore of the destiny predicted for him as the future Beast of the Apocalypse. Of how and why the Third Reich had summoned him to Earth, intending to effect its own influence on the World War through alliance with him, a select prince of Hell. It was unthinkable that Hellboy should ever perpetrate that global horror of his own free will. He would have to remain constantly alert to recognize outside pressures from wherever they might manifest. He silently thanked Pop now for arming him against this kind of ambush, from being caught unaware should a mirror ever be held up to show him what he was seeing at this moment. It had been very upsetting then, and in the present, Hellboy studied this unimaginable, terrible being that she'd dredged up out of his subconscious. But he had to keep his cool. Maybe she could have got some wires crossed, this time. Whatever this meant, it could be worth it to keep her on his side.

She conversationally interrupted his disquieted thoughts, seeming to have no ability to sense the abstract of his inner emotional responses. She understood well enough what he addressed directly to her.

"Why you keep company with soft, weak beings, I can't fathom the sense." She sounded satisfied with a newly discovered agenda realized. "This brother of yours is one that I am moved to meet. He looks a rare match for the power of my brother. Summon him to support you."

Thinking on his feet, he spoke to convince her of his familial ease with this 'brother'. "Are you looking for my brother to whip your brother?"

"Competition and wagering have become favourites of our diversions. I crave a fresh, unique player, and – one to fill my empty arms. Tell me his name."

"No names." Hellboy threw back the caveat, though he was flying blind. A name for that hulk still displayed before him, he'd never heard of. Didn't ever want to know it.

"The one trade you owe to me now, is your brother. I've decided."

"Well, I'll try hard for you," he answered. "He's been away."

Playing along with this seemed his one strategic option, for the time being. He stoically forced himself to memorize the image from all sides – every detail of this infernal alter ego, as he knew she must be doing now.

"Him, I will hold intact to enjoy," she informed.

"You might be in for a fall," Hellboy cautioned. "He's kind of a ladies' man."

"Leave that to me."

"And now you'll take me to your brother, like you promised."

"It was no promise," she sassed. "But you furnish fine entertainment. Come."

Her attitude felt twisted, he thought, but he went on toward the one he'd come to find. She preserved the hulk's dust image to accompany them as Hellboy walked the path that she indicated. He'd spotted no geological anomalies since his arrival, but the place she led him to held a trench of steaming, thick gray soup of seeming liquefied rock. No other matter existed here. The lightly simmering surface emitted giant lazy half bubbles that rose to the top and gently subsided back beneath.

"You see, he sleeps," she said, with devious glee. "Now, you will hear him."

What happened next was the breakage of a newly forming bubble which popped open to release a rattling inhaled snore, cut off by a furious bellow.

"Intolerable, badgering female! What are you about, now?!"

Hellboy recognized that disembodied male voice. Tables turned. Ante upped. He wanted to openly curse her for rattling the cage, but he put her out of his mind and stared hard into the trench, awaiting the emergence of the awakened, pissed off Gray god. A hollow geyser exploded from the trench with an operatic roar. "Ah-OOH!" It resonated with stunning force like the visceral battle shout of thousands of ancient warriors, backed by the echo of as many spears pounding the ground in unison. It repeated in thundering bursts as the curled arcs of superheated rock collapsed and splashed outward in all directions.

Having failed to terrify Hellboy, it silenced to an echo all at once – and was followed by the Gray's expressed mood of pleasure.

"The hand," he purred through gravelly depths. "The blood bearing demon returned – the red stone prize, delivered up to me!"