LISTEN BUDDY I know you didn’t ask for headcanons about Hellboy but also no one ever talks to me about Hellboy so here are some headcanons about Hellboy (and Liz and Abe).
A: what I think realistically
Let me tell you the story of how a firestarter first met a demon
Liz is an eleven-year-old girl fresh off the accidental incineration of a square block and the accidental manslaughter of thirty-two people. BPRD swoops in to grab her out of the foster system because she tells one person—the very first firefighter on scene—that it was her, that the fire just exploded out of her and she couldn’t stop it. The firefighter writes her off as a scared, traumatized kid, but the arson report is inexplicable and BPRD can’t, in good conscience, take the chance that the incident might happen a second time.
Their concerns are immediately confirmed when an agent, unused to working with children, brusquely informs Liz of the deaths of her grandmother, her parents, and her baby brother. The agent gets away with only second-degree burns, by dint of one of his comrades tackling Liz with a fire retardant blanket.
Liz, on her own insistence, is placed alone in a fireproof room, and she refuses point-blank to allow anyone else inside.
“Well,” Hellboy says, absolutely unconcerned, when one of the agents guarding the door tells him all of this. “Lucky I’m fireproof then.”
It takes him three months and fifteen occasions of having some part of his clothing scorched away while he sprints back to Liz’s fireproof room with her tucked close to his chest, but by December, Liz sits at the table for Christmas dinner. She’s a tiny little slip of a thing in Hellboy’s hulking shadow, but she stays glued to him the whole night, murmuring responses to his deep voice. The handful of agents invited by the Professor are shocked to learn that their silent, grave charge can actually smile.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
There is a HANDSOME betting pool on how long every new agent will last, with a timer that is helpfully started by the agent at the reception desk the moment a new recruit comes through the door. The record is fourteen seconds from entry to end of bet, so fast that no one even had time to put money down—the floor started to move, and the young man hurled himself off the platform, landing sprawled on the marble while the agent gave him a disdainful look. As new agents last longer, the pool grows, and while reupping one’s bet IS allowed, the catch is that only one person at a time is allowed to bet that the agent will stay. Generally it requires a round or two of reupping before someone’s ballsy enough to put money on a permanent assignment, but there have been one or two times that someone (…often Hellboy) has been reckless and it’s paid off.
Some highlights of the pool include Liz’s uncanny ability to predict (and precipitate—for some reason it’s more unnerving to watch an otherwise normal person burn down a building than to see a visibly strange person do visibly strange things) exact departure times, Hellboy’s tendency to either bet ‘five minutes’ or ‘they’ll stick around’ with no discrimination whatsoever, and the fact that Abe isn’t allowed to bet anymore since he placed a bet over the comms exactly three minutes before an agent quit.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Hellboy learns when he’s three years old that people don’t just die in battle. Sometimes they just die. He lives on a military base, he knows that death happens, he just. It comes as a shock that it can just happen, even though he knows it in theory. One of the administrators suffers an unexpected heart attack and Hellboy—about the equivalent of an eight-year-old, and already standing as tall as his father’s shoulder—clings to Professor Bruttenholm’s sleeve throughout the funeral, in a way that he hasn’t done in almost a year.
“Father,” Hellboy says afterward, unusually subdued. “Will you die someday too?”
“Yes, my boy,” Trevor says, because he doesn’t believe in lying to children. “But not for a long time, I hope.”
Hellboy nods quietly to himself and sits there in silence for a few minutes before he speaks again.
“Will I?”
“We don’t know,” Trevor says, bending to kiss Hellboy’s forehead. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Almost sixty years later, Hellboy is sitting at his father’s grave, kneeling on the ground in the pose of someone praying, one hand clenched tight around his father’s rosary and the other tracing the words on the stone. And I shall fear no evil, reads the simple inscription. Trevor Bruttenholm, Beloved Father and Mentor.
It has been over ten years since Hellboy noticed any sign of aging in himself. Even if he did die, of old age or of injury, he knows where his father’s soul is now, and he doesn’t know if he’d even be allowed in the front gates.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Oh, I don’t know…I mean, the great thing about the fantasy noir style of the Hellboy universe is that you can justify a lot. But one crossover I haven’t seen but would really enjoy the hell out of would be a crossover between the Wonder Woman movie and Hellboy. Diana hears stories about some supernatural shenanigans happening during World War II, but she’s neck deep in struggling to do something, anything to stem the tide of bodies so she’s not around. A couple decades later, she almost walks straight into a huge man with horns and bright red skin and a friendly smile at an archeological excavation, and Hellboy tries real hard not to blurt out “Oh my God, you’re Wonder Woman!”
They hang out. It’s good. They never meet up on purpose, but they run into each other every few years, despite Diana’s firm refusal to get involved with BPRD or any other official government organization, and Diana is delighted to meet Liz when she’s just Hellboy’s shy, quiet teammate and even more delighted to meet her when she’s Hellboy’s fiancée. Also, Abe likes Diana because she can think in a bunch of different languages and teach them to him rapid-fire.
Also I’m still really enthusiastic about that one Animorphs/BPRD crossover I came up with one time?