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There’s a deafening silence that follows. Once the dust clears, Hellboy sits and he listens. The hours turn to days, then days to weeks, weeks to months. He loses track and realizes that the silence won’t end. It will remain deafening.
Everything is gone: Liz, Abe, his old man… There was nothing left. My fault. His sin. Maybe his waiting will allow him to atone. A lifetime for a moment; a pretty fair trade.
It’s a long time before the spirits begin rising. He’s been wondering when they’d show up, with all the decaying and charred bodies the world now harbours. They, like the time before them, are silent in their ascent. He watches, wary of the new inhabitants, but continues to wait. He’s sworn to wait an eternity if he needs to.
Finally, a day comes that might end the silence he endures.
“Anung un Rama.”
Hellboy sneers. “Sorry, but I don’t know your name. Who’re you to go throwing mine around?”
The spirit isn’t fazed. “You are he who wears the Crown of the Apocalypse.”
“Uhuh, I noticed,” Hellboy threw back, glancing away as he grew annoyed. “The fuck do you want?”
More silence. Ever continuing. “I have come to see the king with my own eyes.”
This surprises Hellboy. Demon, he’s been called: World Destroyer. King is a new one. Looking back, he asks slowly, “King of what? ”
“This.” The spirit gestures to the remnants of the world. The destruction. “It was you who made it, was it not?”
“I’m not a king, ” Hellboy bristles, realizing what the spirit means. “And you can fuck off.”
“Yet you wear a crown.”
“Do I look like a king to you?”
“Then why do you remain here, the crown still upon your brow?”
A good question. One he keeps asking himself. Why the hell is he still here?
He’d been warned this would happen, whether he liked it or not. His destiny or some bullshit. Being the son of Azzael meant he couldn’t have a happy ending, no matter how hard he fought against it. He had tried so fucking hard to just have some peace for a while.
But all it took was the whisper of his true name, and the world ended. None of it mattered. None of it.
“Hell if I know,” Hellboy answers, his shoulders dropping, defeated. To keep demons off his hand? That’s what he had told himself in the beginning, but enough time had passed in silence for him to realize he would rather be dead than live with what he had done, hand be damned.
He closes his eyes, but the memory of Liz’s crushed throat in his hand invades and torments him. “Hell if I know,” he murmurs once more.
The spirit watches him now. “Then what will you do?” It glances to his horns, which he has broken off every time they grow back. They refuse to remain broken.
“Wait.” No hesitation this time. “Until I’ve waited long enough.”
“...I wish you luck then, unwilling king.”
Hellboy watches the spirit dissipate, glad to be rid of it’s conversation. Then he breaks off his stubborn horns one more time, listens to the ensuing silence, and continues to wait.