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Who: Xas & You
What: Feels about religion, followed by feels about plants, and also new acquaintances/friends/enemies.
Where: In or around Chimer. Specifically the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the morning to early afternoon, then the Chimer City Trail Park - but he could have wandered elsewhere by nightfall, although he'll have a plant with him.
When: All day Shundi.
Notes: I have never done this summary-y type thing before. I'm sorry if it's the worst. Also, a rough approximation of clothes, minus the goofy hat and creepy mannequin face.
Warnings: None, I think. If anything comes up in the comments, I'll edit accordingly.

It takes Xas a few weeks to reach out to God, and when he does, it's less desperation than experimentation. He just wants to know. Before they took his wings, he used to hear God all the time, feel Him everywhere, feel himself pulled toward Him like a moth to light. But then he stopped listening, and now Xas isn't sure if the silence is his own doing or if God doesn't reach here, the same way he didn't reach Hell.

He's already in Chimer peering up at the spires of the Cathedral when he gives in and tries. ("All right," he says quietly, a little resentfully, and waits in vain.) He goes inside in time to catch the end of the service - his first time in a church, to add to his string of recent firsts - and sits in the pews for a while afterward, giving a set of stained-glass apostles a rather challenging look.

He always did think humans' idea that God waited in a house for them to deign to visit Him was a little ridiculous, if endearingly earnest. As if He were their patient grandmother.

When he finally leaves the church, it's half boredom and half frustration, and he's glad to stumble almost immediately onto a park and to almost as immediately get lost in it. He's never seen most of the plants before, and by dusk he's on his knees in the dirt, scraping at dirt to get his hands under the roots of a small flowering shrub. It's gotten him into trouble before, this habit of plant-taking, but he doesn't think anyone will miss it.

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Xas not responding aggressively allows Hellboy's initial flash of temper to cool over, and he relaxes back into his seat a little.

"I suppose I do," he says, his tone more even but with dubious patience. "What's it to you?"

(Depending on how closely he's looking, Xas might notice that Hellboy's belt has a rosary looped around a couple of its pouches, the cross dangling down near the belt's buckle. If he's capable of sensing such things, the rosary is still entirely blessed, and yet doesn't seem to be causing Hellboy any discomfort.)

Xas has been flustered more times than an angel probably should be, but it's still a relatively rare state for him. He crosses an arm over his chest to fiddle with one of the toggles on his suit and tries to pick his words carefully. "The demons I know would cause trouble," he says. That's less blunt than [i]find someone to torture[/i]. He catches sight of the rosary, belatedly - and he isn't much for Catholicism, himself, but it does make his eyebrows go up.

The rosary is actually just one of an assortment of holy items, talismans, relics, charms, and other such detritus that live mostly in his belt's pouches. It is, however, the only one externally visible, with the questionable exception of the iron horseshoe tied to the belt with a length of cord and hooked over one pouch's lip.

"Yeah, well, that's 'cause demons are assholes, and I am not." Not an asshole, not a demon, or both? He chooses to leave it ambiguous, not least of which because he hates being tagged with the d-word, but has learned too much about his heritage to try denying it entirely.

He takes a deep breath in and sighs it out -- possibly contrary to Xas' expectations, the exhale is not filled with sulphur and brimstone -- then gets his badge out of his belt and holds it up so Xas can see it clearly. "Okay, let's just get this out of the way. My name is Hellboy. I'm a senior field agent with Hellsing. If you don't know who we are, our job is to investigate paranormal trouble and make it stop. As far as I'm concerned, I was born in England and raised in America. Now I'm gonna ask again: What's any of this to you?"

Xas's eyebrows take a moment to return to a normal position, having begun raising at demons are assholes and reached their maximum height at Hellboy. It's not a very subtle name, is it?

But a demon like the ones Xas knows - knew - would have been trying to inflict some sort of pain by now, on the park's other occupants if not on Xas, so okay. This isn't actually quite the weirdest thing that has happened to him in the last month.

"Nothing, I suppose," he says, and after a moment longer of thought, he plants himself on the edge of the bench at a wary but companionable distance. They might have more in common than Xas does with most of the people he's met here so far, honestly, and he can't help being curious. "I'm just used to having to - well. I'm an angel."

Professor Bruttenholm's mind wasn't much on subtlety at the time of Hellboy's appearance on Earth.

Hellboy himself briefly wonders what he's let himself in for when Xas sits down, but his confusion clears quickly at the angel's confession. "Oh," he says, then has a good hearty chuckle as he more thoroughly settles into his seat on the bench again and puts his badge away.

"Well, I can see how I'd present something of a puzzle to you, then. I've been confounding pretty much everyone's expectations for most of my life." He pauses for a moment, mulling his options, and then decides to elaborate. "I don't talk about this much -- not since I've been here, anyway -- but yeah, the people who'd brought me to Earth had bad intentions for me. Fortunately, they didn't get me, and I was raised instead by good people, taught right from wrong and so on. I have, as the old saying goes, rejected the devil and all his works, and the world isn't ending on my watch, screw whatever destiny supposedly says I have to do it."

With another sigh, this one less exasperated than the last, he pulls out a thin flat silver case. Opening it up, he extracts a wooden match from a little box in the bottom and a cigarette. He considers for a moment, then holds the open case out to Xas, offering him a (holy) smoke if he wants it. "You got a name, angel?"

"Xas," he says, shaking his head at the proffered cigarettes. He's never smoked before, and he doesn't want to cough and sputter in front of a demon, even a very surprising one.

It takes him a second to finish working through everything Hellboy said; the end of the world is a new idea to him, as much as the idea of a demon choosing not to be miserable and sadistic. It's like a human choosing not to be needy and grasping. He doesn't think it would be possible, where he's from, but here - all right. He takes a deep breath.

"I'm sorry. This is strange," he says, then asks, "What was Hell like?" Maybe entirely different - he doesn't know if that would be reassuring or more troublesome.

With a nod of acknowledgement, he puts away the case, then strikes the match on the stone covering his right forearm and lights up. As with the rosary, the holiness transferred into the tobacco from the water used to grow it doesn't seem to cause him any discomfort.

Xas' question gets a big slouchy shrug. "Wouldn't know. First thing I remember of my life was appearing in a fireball on the floor of a burned-out English church." The wallet containing his badge comes out again, and from one of the folds he takes out a photograph. "Look how cute I was.

"I kept getting told, back home, that someday I'd go down there, do my part for their war effort, bring Hell on Earth, but..." He shakes his head. "Nah. Not interested, not happening."

Xas is still peering at the photograph, glancing with silent interest between the enormous arm on the baby and the enormous arm Hellboy just used to light his cigarette. But he doesn't ask. It doesn't seem polite, somehow, and mostly he's charmed: he was cute.

"Well, thank you for that," he says, a little amused - until he remember that it's not his Earth they're talking about, anyway. Lucifer thought Earth was Hell enough on its own without sending demons there. The thought makes him sober up, tugging absently on a strand of his own hair and missing Lucifer (the bastard) more than he'll ever admit to anyone, but after a moment he smiles again and asks, "Are you Catholic?"

He doesn't have a sense for blessedness - before today he'd never even been inside a church - but Sobran was Catholic, and it made him happy, so Xas mostly counts it as a good thing.

Hellboy shakes his head. "I'm not really anything, religion-wise. The man in the bow-tie, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm--" He pronounces it like broom. "--he was Catholic. He adopted me, raised me like his son. I suppose a lot of the morals he taught me probably came from Catholicism, but he never pushed me to embrace any particular faith."

He flips the picture around to have another look at it himself. Everyone in the picture's been dead for years, except for him. He sighs sadly as he puts the picture back into the wallet and the wallet in turn back into his belt, then looks back at Xas. "Are angels all that picky about the religion thing, or were you just curious?"

"Curious," Xas says. The demon's sigh makes him frown, but all of the wariness is gone from his posture. This has been a surprise, one of the first pleasant surprises since he arrived in Baedal. "I had a Catholic friend once. He tried to use one of those - " Xas gestures toward the rosary. " - to ward me off. I was more intimidating then. Twenty-foot wingspan."

Besides which, Sobran hadn't understood the nuances of Xas's position, so to speak, and thought fallen angels and demons were the same thing. The thought makes Xas brighten, suddenly amused. "I wish he could have seen you."

Hellboy chuckles, taking another puff of his cigarette, and then tilts his head slightly and looks more intently at Xas with one finger tapping against his chin. "Huh. You know, I didn't even think to ask about the wings. Guess I assumed you had some way to hide them. You know, for walking among men and all that."

"Oh," Xas says. "No. Nothing like that." The possibility had never occurred to him, not even as a passing fancy. He didn't try to blend in until he was grounded. He never wanted to.

"We don't usually bother men," he adds, but his tone is distracted and he's looking at Hellboy's sawed-off horns, barely containing the question. He has some manners. He wouldn't want anyone he'd just met asking about his missing pieces, and it doesn't occur to him, either, that Hellboy might have parted with his voluntarily.

Hellboy nods, acknowledging Xas' statement about angels not bothering men without comment. He has heard a thing or two about what angels were like in his world, and how they affected the world long ago, and that's not something he's in the mood to talk about right now. Besides, he notices Xas looking at his stumps, which gets a chuckle out of him as he reaches up and rubs at them.

"I got sick of smacking them into doorways," he says as though that explains everything. Anything more he might say about it is interrupted by a bleeping from his belt. "Really?!" he exclaims plaintively as he reaches into a pouch and retrieves his CiD, shaking his head at what he sees on the screen.

He puts the CiD away, then stands up and slings his sword onto his back. "So much for my afternoon off. Listen, this has been kind of weird, but I should be used to that by now. It's nice to have met you anyway." He extends his left hand to shake. "I got to get going, but maybe I'll see you around."

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poor Hellboy. :(

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we can wrap this if you want! I know it's been going for a while and you've got a lot on your plate

sounds good