Work Text:
Soft beams of dusk light filtered down through one of the Waverider’s windows to the outside world and, most offensively, directly across Constantine’s eyes.
Of all the places, of all the times in the quite literal known universe for Sara to park this glorified hunk of scrap metal, it had to be a place where the sun doesn’t seem to stop bloody shining.
He’d been zonked out on one of the ship’s creaky, uncomfortable couches for most of their latest flight back from 70s London. Mostly at Zari’s insistence, after she’d practically (and perhaps irresponsibly) shoved one of her psych medications into his hands.
“It’ll knock you out in minutes, really. Works like a charm,” she’d assured him with a soft smile. “Get some rest, John. You need it.”
The fact that she, and others on the crew, was medicated didn’t surprise him in the slightest. Or that she was currently being wildly careless in doling out incidental side effects to all comers. It was a large part of the reason why he was starting to warm to the lot of them, as much as he would be loathe to admit it. They all had their scars. What had surprised him was the sheer potency of the stuff.
“Maybe medication isn’t such a bad idea after all, Johnny boy,” he muttered to himself while dazedly blinking back out of the chemically-induced fog, shuffling through his tarot deck idly to regain control of his faculties. “Maybe I could finally get some fucking sleep.”
Sleep was hard to come by in his line of work. Not just from working (sometimes quite literal) graveyard shifts on the clock, but also from being unable to close his eyes without his ever-so-accommodating brain picking from a myriad of nightmare scenarios to replay in gruesome detail. It blew.
And not even in the fun, sexy way.
Christ, I need a good shag.
John extricated himself from the sofa with a groan and a loud pop in his aching, aging joints. He caught a glimpse of himself in the black mirror of a nearby computer screen and proceeded to groan once more at the sight; as usual post-depression bender, he looked like shit warmed up. Blond hair sticking up at all angles, purple-red bags under his eyes that put some of his handiwork with purple eyeliner in his punk frontman days to shame all painted quite the portrait. He scrubbed a hand through his already wrecked hair, making the situation so much worse.
“Gideon? There’s no one on the ship within earshot, is there?” John called into the empty air for the Waverider’s ever-helpful AI. He felt like cursing a blue streak in peace, and didn’t feel like having to deal with the sight of Ray’s horrified puppy eyes. Maybe the meds were making him newly considerate, as well as groggy. Someone get the lovely folks at Ravenscar on the phone; he’d been cured.
A short pause, before the newly familiar voice echoed back: “Yes, designation Uglier Derren Brown. All occupants of the Waverider are currently elsewhere in our port location.”
“Oi,” he called back, incensed and momentarily forgetting what he’d asked Gideon about in the first place. He kicked the central control console as if to really stick it to the non-corporeal being, but just ended up reeling back while hopping, pained, on one foot. “Who the hell taught you to call me that bunk? Bet you my left testicle it was Rory, the—“
John was interrupted from his abrupt launch into aforementioned blue streak by a dull clunk at the main ship hatch. Then, at the nearby window. He froze. His, although not stellar, battle-honed combat instincts seemed to conjure a fireball between his hands of their own volition. The hellfire blazed hot against his calloused palms as he took cautious steps toward the gangway release button. A curse in Latin too sat on the tip of his tongue. No backup, no Legends, and Gideon was suspiciously quiet. Just the last remnants of thirty plus years of pent up rage against his father boiling under his skin and some good old-fashioned magical party tricks. John wasn’t particularly fond of the Waverider. But, in terms of places to crash over the years, it was one of the better spots, and he’d be damned for the (likely) hundredth time if he let it be compromised. And they always got curry takeaway while watching HGTV on Fridays. He’d miss that loads.
The gangway release lowered just as he began the first phrase of the defensive spell. John’s expression blazed angrily as he locked eyes with—
“Whoa there, Conny! Are you smokin’ hot, or is that just the literal fire you summoned from the pits of Hell? … It’s both. It’s both.”
Gary Green, holding yet another pebble to toss at the ship’s hull, stood directly below the plank of metal bridging the ship and what looked to be sand below. John hadn’t exactly bothered getting a proper look out the window, as he’d been too busy being immediately grumpy. And if he had, he would’ve seen the vast, sunset-stained expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Gary was currently clothed in his usual Time Bureau getup, but with the added bonus features of tropical print neon blue shirt, instead of his usual perfectly starched whites, and dark sunglasses.
A long beat. The sheer mega-wattage of the man’s beaming, painfully endearing grin made John’s right eye twitch. One of his most unfortunate tells he’d picked up from whenever Zatanna summoned her sparkling silver stars in mid-air just to make him smile.
“Much as I’m digging the look, wanna put out those flames now, Juliet?” Gary began again. “Oh, wait, duh. Catch!”
A matching pair of knockoff Ray-Bans flew through the air and into John’s newly open hands. They still had the price sticker on them. Of course, he’d paid through the roof for absolutely no reason. John sighed. Right-o. Let’s start with the basics, then.
“Where the bloody hell are we?”
“Miami! Miami, Florida, United States, to be precise. May 16th, 1982. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“And why are we in Miami?”
The way Gary bounced on the balls of his feet merrily was now also making John’s left eye twitch. Traitors.
“Oh, Captain Lance and I thought all of you needed a little R&R, what with how heavy things got back there. With all the, y’know. Psychological trauma,” he continued chirpily. “Nate and I fought an oversized houseplant with a stapler and a broken paper cutter! It was incredible! You’ve gotta read the report! I cut it down to 30,000 words with some dynamic action dialogue! Real page-turner.”
Alright. Okay. John channeled every bit of the no-good, careless punk of a teen boy left in himself into unanimously deciding to shut off every logical part of his broken brain. Maybe it was just the medication brain fog talking, but this was fine. This was better than fine. Better than five minutes ago, at least. There was a pining puppy dog of a boy he fancied, there was the almost comical absurdity of his life, and hopefully…
“Listen to me. Listen closely, Gary. This is very, very important,” he said in the same tone of voice he used for questioning demons as he stumbled clumsily down the gangway. He stood directly before a wide-eyed Gary. The man had a new flush across his cheeks that wasn’t directly correlated to the already baking sunburn. His hand weighed heavy on his shoulder. “Do you have. Alcohol.”
“Pfft, have I read your file cover-to-cover 102 times? The guy who sold me these great shades on some street corner also sold whiskey. So convenient!”
“Oh, thank christ, it’ll be absolute dogshit. Bless your heart.”
As usual, the mere mention of alcohol was enough to send John running. And as much as he still felt like rubbish walking, and looked it too, And the common area couch’s loose springs were really starting to dig into his lower back. So, when you looked at it like that, there really was no other place to be. Logically. He could brave direct sunlight for this.
“You down for some aimless vehicular sightseeing and chatting? Have my Time Bureau inter-dimensional driver’s license and everything. Even got the top of the line… everything at the rental company! You should just see all the paperwork I’m gonna have to fill out later!” Gary babbled while jangling the car keys between them. “It’ll be great!”
John allowed himself a faint glimmer of a feline smirk in reply. Maybe this would be fun, even though he could smell the intent to bring him out of his depressive funk a mile away. Gary wore just about everything on his sleeve.
“Ah, sod it. Let’s get a move on, then. Race ya,” he began, before darting off across the sand to the 80’s model sportscar parked just up the beach road. The distinct sound of Gary nearly tripping over his own feet just behind him widened his smirk into a newly genuine smile.
* * *
Just as John was trying out spontaneity, Gary was seemingly experimenting with not feeling the need to fill every minute with idle chat. Every so often though, John felt himself toying with spitting out the perfect, cruel one-liner to get himself thrown out onto the hot tarmac of the freeway. Though, every time he did, there was some half-remembered song on the radio, or some new twinkling vista in the distance for Gary to coo over. It was like the city itself was trying to sabotage his usual self-destruct button. Truly, fuck places where it was sunny a healthy amount of the year. Bloody unnatural, that was.
Thus why he had to let Gary down again. For the second time in as much as a month. John subconsciously metered out just how much personal suffering he’d have to take on in private penance for breaking the man’s heart.
“Look, mate, I—“
Gary cleared his throat while nervously flicking his gaze up to the rearview mirror. Light reflected across his glasses. “Y-You let me down easy, ‘balance of good and evil,’ not interested, blah blah blah. I get it. Which was nice of you and all, but my glowing performance reviews all state that I am ‘doggedly persistent at everything I set my mind to.’ I am, though, not persistent about our relationship. I know you don’t want that with much of anyone. But I know when someone needs a friend. Even a—“ he winked, but it looked more like a short facial spasm. “’friend,’ if you get my drift.”
It was absolutely baffling. Not just the horrendous wink, but Gary’s general… thing. The very concept of intentional kindness evaded John like a halfway decent hangover cure. By all accounts, and if Gary was really clever, he shouldn’t even be within a hundred mile blast radius of the damage John was capable of. The “letting him down gentle” idea hadn’t taken as well as he thought it had. He felt something twisted gnashing angrily in his head.
“Bit of advice, yeah?” John managed after a moment while tapping out a cigarette from its carton. His voice came out strained. “Free this time, but next time I start charging my usual consulting fee.”
“Ooh, I’m honored, Mister Constantine. Shoot.”
“Being the way you are,” John began after a long pull. “A good man. It’s gonna get you killed. As in, violently dismembered by hellspawn, hanged, the like. And it’ll be my fault, and on my conscience in the end. Like it always is. So, really, you deciding to hang about. That’s your stupidity, not mine.”
Gary’s sharp jaw set in unmistakable anger, knuckles white on the steering wheel. Or what passed for anger, in sweet, honest Gary Green’s world, which was much more terrifying than anything he’d seen this past week.
“And is being the way you are any better, in the end? Is it easier? Because not everyone finds it as compelling as you do.”
That was that.
They drove in silence for the next ten miles.
* * *
“You know that thing people do in movies?”
“People do a lot of things in movies, mate,” John raised his voice over the roar of the engine. They’d left the connotations of their unusually tense exchange on the road behind them, even though they’d be running through John’s head for a good while yet. Gary looked as if he was making a conscious effort to keep up his cheer. “Going t’have to be more specific.”
The sky was now an inky blue-black above them. Palm trees waved in the nighttime breeze, while just about all the shitty whiskey was burning through John’s intestines. The empty bottle now lay discarded in the footwell. Barely anyone else was left on the road, and the Legends-branded communicator had been blowing up with apparent photos of their esteemed captain and her director’s tropical escapades. Just as much chatter was being entertained regarding rumors surrounding one infamous witchy petty dabbler and his Time Bureau agent, but John chalked it all up to hearsay. His leg bounced to the beat of the fuzzy synthpop-y track coming through the tinny radio speakers. All in all, the muggy air seemed to vibrate with something dangerously close to happiness. The continual urge to tuck-and-roll out onto the road rose in his throat like acrid bile.
“No, you know what I mean! The end of a movie thing! Driving off into the sunset, hooting and hollering for no reason? We should do that!”
“What ever-fucking-for.”
“Aw, come on! We’re Miami Vice-ing it up, buddy! Living large! Driving something that isn’t a timeship!” Gary nodded with his head in the general direction of the picturesque scenery flashing by in a blur of motion. “Here I thought you were the king of punk. What’s more punk than being a noise violation for no reason?”
“Literally anything else. For example.”
John lazily threw his ever-gangly legs over the center console and into Gary’s lap before the man could lecture him about safety hazards. He made a convincing effort of draping himself lazily about the man’s shoulders, nosing at sharp jawline and warm cheeks. He’d had years of practice perfecting this particular move; rich blokes with fancy cars and cash to blow ate it up like candy. It often bought John another night with food in his belly and a warm bed, when he was most hard up for the essentials. Gary, meanwhile and none of those things, made a noise that sounded more like a squawk than comprehensible human language. The car swerved precariously.
“This must be breaking— um. Multiple laws,” Gary managed to cobble together in reply with a voice meandering through various inhumanly high pitches. “Fraternizing while operating a— oh, that’s nice— m-motorized vehicle.”
“You don’t want to know all the things I’ve done in a passenger seat.” John curiously wrapped a dark curl around his finger. Tugged, just to see what kind of noise the man would make.
“D-Demon slaying?”
John chuckled. “Oh, at the very least.”
“Not wearing a seatbelt?”
“Almost certainly.”
A full-body shiver momentarily seemed to take hold of Gary.
“John Constantine, you minx.”
John blinked. “Really? The seatbelt bit is what did it for you? Out of all that?”
“So, there is going to be a next time,” Gary beamed expectantly in that way that made something in John's stomach swoop.
“Should we happen to breeze on past a scuzzy motel that’d remind me of my days as the dazzling frontman of a certain punk outfit…” the shitty excuse for a witch waggled his fingers in an elaborate show of drawing arcane symbols in the warm air that were actually cartoonish dicks of assorted shapes and sizes. “Perhaps. S’all in the cards.”
“Yeah, and watch me draw Temperance first thing, with my stupid luck.”
“Oh, come off it now. I think I can stack the deck a bit in your favor,” John purred, the arm currently curled about Gary’s shoulder’s pulling him closer, and his thoughts honing in on the tarot deck in his pants pocket. “On the house.”
The Fool, the Hanged Man, and the Lovers appeared between his fingers in a snap of golden energy. More magical party tricks. One that served his current single-minded purpose of getting the sadness fucked out of him, but hey. Priorities. Priorities that currently led law-abiding Gary Green to drive at breakneck speed for the very first time in his life towards the nearest highway exit. Constantine cackled madly all the way.
* * *
Later, as Gary snored beside him on a motel mattress that could barely hold claim to that dubious title, John held a card up to the light. It was made hazy, both by the sleepy fog clouding his brain, and gray plumes from the cigarette hanging limply from his mouth. His other hand traced invisible protective sigils into Gary’s back.
“The Fool, eh.”
The meaning correspondences he’d written out dozens of times as a teenager, clinging to the occult in any form as a shield against his father’s cruelty, ran through his head almost immediately. They were his bread and butter. Ineptitude, naïveté, yes. But, also, new beginnings. A blank slate, the start of a journey. Gary’s face and the gentle rise and fall of his chest echoed in the line drawings of the card’s surface.
“S’not easier, love,” John murmured lowly. “Like bloody Z, you’re always right. It’s not. Christ, what is my hard-on for brunettes with acute emotional awareness? Attract ‘em like ruddy flies, me.”
He flicked his cigarette butt expertly into the full ashtray with an annoyed finality. And, seeking out the cool calm of Gary’s body pressed into his, John sealed the last of his incantations. He wondered if Zari would be proud of him for trying out this whole “not being alone” shebang. If his mom would. If there was even anyone out there keeping score. God certainly wasn't.
For the first time in a long while, he fell back into a blessedly non substance-induced sleep.