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When Zatanna wakes up, it’s still dark out.
She has never been a very light sleeper, but lately she finds herself waking in the middle of the night. Sharing a queen-sized bed with two dudes radiating literal hellfire in the middle of summer doesn’t exactly provide for an optimal sleeping arrangement.
New York is in the middle of a heat wave. Their third floor walkup apartment can never be cool enough and the oppressive heat just makes her feel tired and sort of gross all the time.
They’re here in New York because of Nick but the city just isn’t hers yet. Nick is a New Yorker through and through and John seems to have seamlessly integrated into the city but even after all this time living here, she still doesn’t think of herself as a New Yorker, and isn’t really sure if she ever will.
Nick has been pushing them a lot lately with more and more dark magic use and scrying. Lately he’s gotten focused on finding the mythical Books of Magic, which Zatanna isn't sure even really exist. This isn’t the first magical thing that Nick has become sort of obsessed with over the time she’s known him. Nick has an addictive personality – once he gets something stuck in his craw, he doesn’t let it go easily. His recent interest in the Books is different, though, but Zatanna isn’t quite sure what that means yet or why it gives her such an uneasy feeling.
She does know, however, they need to start being more careful not to overdo it. Lately, she’s been feeling that sick, sweaty, and vaguely flu-like feeling that she usually gets from a lot of intense magic use and honestly the weather isn’t helping.
Zatanna shifts around on the bed, trying to get comfortable and when she does, John murmurs something in his sleep.
He’s stretched out on his stomach with one hand curled under his pillow and the other draped across her hips. His fingers twitch, tickling her stomach and he mumbles something again in a language she doesn’t recognize.
Zatanna feels John’s body shudder, and his head twitches slightly, his breathing occasionally sharp. He's having another nightmare.
“John,” she whispers.
She wants to wake him gently so he doesn’t disturb Nick, who is passed out on the other side of him. John’s skin is hot and he’s sweating.
Zatanna waits a minute, but when John doesn’t wake up, she tries again, gently shaking his arm.
“Hey, John.”
John suddenly jerks awake with a start, giving a small yell as he bolts upright, one hand reaching out in front of his body as if he’s trying to grab something. The suddenness of it makes Zatanna jump.
Nick groans. “Jesus, Johnny.”
John sits there for a minute, trying to catch his breath. Zatanna watches him stare at a dark spot in the corner of the room under the window. John runs a shaking hand over his face but doesn’t lie back down. In the light from the window, Zatanna can see him trembling.
“You alright?” Nick asks through a yawn.
John clears his throat, trying to steady himself.
“Yeah,” John says, his voice rough. He traces some non-existent pattern on the sheets. “Yeah, sorry mate.”
John distractedly runs his hand over Nick’s thigh as he slides down to the end of the mattress, resting his head in his hands as he slowly puts his feet on the floor. He sits like that for a minute, trying to slow his breathing.
John sniffs loudly and finally stands up and grabs his packet of Silk Cuts and a lighter off the nightstand on his way out of the bedroom. He moves slowly, as though everything hurts.
After John closes the bedroom door softly behind him, Nick sighs loudly and pointedly adjusts his pillow. The mattress creaks as he roughly turns to face the wall.
“Third fuckin’ time this week,” Nick says.
“Yeah,” Zatanna says.
She lies there for a minute, listening to the sounds on the street and the hum of the sputtering window air conditioner on its last legs and debates whether she should get up. She has a low-grade headache building behind her eyes—another wonderful symptom of magic overuse—and if she’s not careful to relax it’s just going to get worse.
Zatanna closes her eyes, but she knows she’s not going to fall back asleep for a while. She doesn’t feel good and can’t stop her brain from turning.
She rolls over and presses a kiss into Nick’s shoulder. “Hey, I’m going to go check on him,” she says.
“Whatever.”
Zatanna slides off the side of the bed and searches around the floor in the dark for her robe.
It’s too hot in this apartment. Their stupid air conditioner isn’t working right. Some of her hair is sticking to the back of her neck from the heat, so she piles it on the top of her head, and grabs a hair tie off of the nightstand.
“You know,” Nick says, still facing the opposite wall. “You don’t have to run to him just because he has a fucking nightmare.”
Zatanna makes a face as she finishes putting her hair up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nick doesn’t move. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
Zatanna waits a minute for him to continue, but he doesn’t so she kind of rolls her eyes and slides out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
John is sitting on the couch in the living room in his boxers, chain smoking and focusing on one particular dark corner of the room. His eyes are rimmed in red in an all too familiar way and he looks miserable.
“Alright, Zee?” John says, but doesn’t look at her. His voice has a rough, bitter edge to it. “Sorry t’ wake you. Again.”
John keeps staring at the empty corner of the room under the window in a way that makes the hair on the back of Zatanna’s neck stand up, because she knows what he’s looking at, and the fact that she can’t see any of it creeps her out.
Despite having a number of powerful protection and shielding charms on this place, John’s ghosts always seem to find a way into the apartment.
Zatanna can’t figure it out—she’s tried talk to John about it, but he gets this angry, defeatist attitude about trying anything different to keep them out. One time Nick confessed to her that he thought maybe these things kept showing up because John subconsciously wants them there. John never has been good at dealing with, well, anything so it sort of makes sense, but Zatanna doesn’t know if she completely buys that.
“Hey,” she says. John doesn’t turn to look at her. “You want something to drink?”
“Hm?” John says, distracted. He clicks the lighter a few more times and murmurs something directed toward the corner of the room but she can’t quite hear what he's saying.
Zatanna walks to the kitchen and grabs a mug from the cabinet. She briefly glances at the liquor but then thinks better of it and fills the mug with water from the tap.
John’s hair is sticking up all over the place, a cowlick he always seems to get from sleeping pressed into the side of his head. Zatanna sits down next to him, smiling as she sets the mug on the coffee table (a leftover trunk from one of her magic shows).
She runs a hand through his hair.
“Hey,” she says.
John finally looks at her and gives her a sad smile, leaning into her hand, closing his eyes for a second as he relishes the contact. He lets out a deep breath. “Hi, love.” He notices the mug of water on the table. “Ta.”
Zatanna leans her back against the arm of the couch and wraps her legs around John’s waist, pulling him into her. “Come here.”
John grabs the ashtray on the makeshift coffee table and moves it closer to her side of the couch, and then slowly leans back against her, his back to her chest. Her arms drape over his bare shoulders and her legs stay wrapped around his hips and they both shift a bit on the couch before falling into a comfortable position.
It’s nice, lying there with John’s familiar weight pressing against her and Zatanna lazily runs a hand through his hair while John smokes.
It takes a while, but she eventually feels him relaxing and they sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes, listening to the noise of the city that never sleeps drifting in through the window.
Zatanna’s eyes are just beginning to drift closed when she feels John laugh a little to himself as he takes another drag on his cigarette.
“I dunno, Zee,” John says. “Maybe I should just have you mind-wipe me once and for all and be done with all this, eh?”
Zatanna stiffens. He knows how she feels about that. “That’s not funny, John.”
“Yeah, well.”
John lets out a shaky breath and ashes his cigarette.
She knows he doesn’t mean it but he’s still John Constantine and it’s like sometimes he can’t really help himself, saying things like that. Mind-wiping is a hard limit for her, magic even she doesn’t like to mess with – John knows that - but it’s like he’s testing a boundary. She can sense him sliding back into the dark place he sometimes goes at night when he can’t sleep and the nightmares come and the ghosts show up.
Zatanna traces the outline of Nick’s tattoo on John’s forearm and presses her nose into his hair.
“Hey. Stop,” she says softly, her voice slightly muffled by his hair. “You’re okay.”
John sighs like he doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but he takes her wrist and presses a kiss to the inside of her hand and lays it back down over Nick’s tattoo on his forearm.
Zatanna hears a distant roll of thunder and it slowly starts to rain and they sit and listen to the pings of the droplets on the glass of the front window. She hopes the storm means that the heat wave is going to break.
John sits up a little to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray and then settles back into her. A line of smoke lazily drifts up toward the ceiling of the apartment.
“I, erm,” John starts, and then sits quietly for a second, as though he’s deciding whether or not to keep going. “I tried to mind-wipe myself once, you know.”
“What?”
“In Ravenscar,” John says. “After she –“ He clears his throat and scratches the side of his face. “Astra.” His voice breaks slightly as he says her name.
John slowly plays with his lighter in his left hand, turning it over and over. His thumb traces the lines of the cross emblazoned on one side.
The rain starts coming down heavier, and they both sit with that for a minute, listening to the rain, the weight of John’s admission hanging between them. Zatanna feels John take a deep breath and slowly let it out.
“They do the whole shock treatment bit over there in Ravenscar– ECT they called it, electroconvulsive therapy – and they make it seem so nice and easy when they sell it to you. ‘Oh, you’re peacefully sleeping under anesthesia, the electricity is minimal, any seizures are entirely controlled’ - that whole bit. Supposed restart the brain or something.”
John lets out a bitter short laugh.
“Seemed like a load of old bullocks to me at first but then as I was sitting there in another pointless group therapy, I got the brilliant idea to combine the ECT with a targeting spell. Figured that might be the closest thing I could get to performing a mind-wipe on myself.”
“Oh, John.”
Performing a mind-wipe is exceptionally tricky. Only a very small number of highly trained magic users can even perform it. The only reason Zatanna knows how to do it in the first place is because her dad taught her so that she could defend against it. Regardless, she’s not sure she’s ever known anyone crazy enough to even think of trying to mind-wipe themself.
“Didn’t work, obviously,” John says. “Such tricky magic, that. But I figured it was worth a shot. Luckily I didn’t come out of it too worse for wear, although I find I am missing a few days here and there from around that time period.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t wipe your memory entirely or damage your language center or something.”
“Yeah.” John thinks about this for a second. “I was in a bad place, Zee. Just wanted everything gone – damned to Hell already, yeah? At least then I wouldn’t have to think about it every waking moment the rest of my miserable life.”
John flicks his lighter open and closed quickly with his left hand.
“Took a hell of a long time to enchant all papers I needed to convince four doctors to sign off on it,” John says, chuckling a little to himself. “Had to do all the spells from memory.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” John says, and Zatanna gets the feeling that he’s talking about it because he needs to but also almost like he’s poking a bruise. “I realized I needed to be awake during one of those ECT procedures for the magic to work – to keep the magic going and tap into the memories I wanted gone.”
Zatanna sighs quietly. “Oh.”
“The doctors protested a lot – say what you will about Ravenscar but some of them at least try to help the people in there, for all the bloody good it did me. It was ‘highly against protocol’ to do ECT on an awake patient and all that. So much talking about the therapy just to get the actual procedure, yeah?” John says. “But you know, yours truly eventually convinced them to let me go ahead with it.”
Of course he did, Zatanna thinks, but waits for him to continue.
“Of course I did,” John says. “I am nothing if not a persistent bastard.”
John turns the lighter over in his hands a few more times, like he’s trying to find the right words to continue.
“So I’m lying there, strapped down on the table in the basement of Ravenscar and I’m listening to my heart beat on the monitor and, well… They give me a bite guard so I don’t bite off my own tongue when they send the shocks and I’m staring up at the flickering ceiling light of the basement of that damned hospital, just waiting for the electricity to come.
“But holding on to the memories through magic means I’m reliving the bloody things at the same time, yeah? It’s almost in slow motion. I’m thinking about drawing the summoning circle with Ritchie, everything going dark, Anne Marie screaming. The last glimpse I got of Astra’s face as she --” John stops himself and runs a shaking hand over his face. “Christ.”
John sits up away from her, putting his feet on the floor and resting his head in his palms. His lighter clatters noisily to the floor and Zatanna hears him take a gulping sob into his hands.
“It tore her apart, Zee,” John whispers, his voice breaking. “I just – I had to watch while the bastard demon tore her apart.”
John sits there shaking quietly, the muscles in his back tight. He looks just so wretched and miserable that Zatanna almost wishes for a second that she could take this away from him. How nice it would be for John to have a night where he doesn't carry the weight of everything in his past around.
“I dream about saving her all the time,” John says, quietly.
Zatanna leans forward and murmurs a spell that sends a slight magical healing pulse through John’s back – while the healing magic obviously doesn’t do anything to cure emotional wounds, she knows it feels comforting. She remembers her dad doing this for her sometimes when she was little.
John takes a breath like he’s collecting himself, and quickly swipes a hand across his eyes. He sniffs loudly and leans back against the couch as he stares up at the ceiling and takes a few deep breaths.
He turns to look at her and his eyes are red and he looks awful but he smiles a little at her. “Fucks sake,” John says. “If Nick sees me like this I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Zatanna laughs. “Your secret is safe with me.”
John is smiling at her but then he suddenly looks serious for a minute, all joking and self-deprecation gone from his eyes as he studies her face.
Zatanna gives him a small smile and John reaches up and tucks an errant strand of her hair that didn’t make it into the bun on top of her head behind her ear.
“Sometimes I can’t believe I ended up here,” John says.
“Yeah?”
John is quiet for a second. “The only good thing I’ve ever known is you, love,” he says. “You and Nick.”
A far away flash of lightning silently illuminates the dark room for a moment followed a few beats later by a roll of thunder, closer this time. They watch the rain as it continues to beat against the windows.
“I’m completely knackered, Zee,” John says. “I just wish I could sleep.”
Zatanna leans over and rests her head on his shoulder, pressing in closer to him and feeling the warmth of his body against hers. She feels John press a kiss into her hair.
“I know,” she says. “Me too.”