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Life can’t quite be said to be cruel, though it certainly isn’t all that kind.
Neutral perhaps.
The things that happen, the reasons and conditions that cause ‘kind’ or ‘cruel’ monikers, that can’t be blamed on life.
It’s always been choices.
Choices are the cause and affects.
Freedom, greed, envy, love, hate, and all those other bare bones reasonings.
Doesn’t change the fact that some people’s lives are a walking tragedy, just as much as someone else’s might be a rose laid path of glittering gems.
Click.
Click.
The lighter isn’t lighting, then again, it hasn’t lit for many years.
It’s just a habit.
Fidgeting really.
John doesn’t stop walking, slouched and tired, he keeps walking. The dirty sidewalk cracked and in some places crumbled. Not a very clean neighborhood, but John never cared to wander those nice places.
Darkness looms regardless of where you’re at.
Lips pinched around an unlit cigarette, John keeps flicking the lighter. It’s mindless, and some part of his mind is recoiling, though he isn’t sure if it’s in response to his general existence, or the growing uncanny feeling haunting his steps.
Might be both.
John walks on.
The trees move slightly in the breeze, smog and something just overall heavy bearing on his lungs. Idly, he wonders if it’s possible to drown outside water. John makes a turn, and enters a park. He didn’t bother to read the sign, considering it would be pointless. Even outside this uncanny echo nipping at his heels, the sign was long damaged and who knows when it was last readable.
For all that age has worn this park to the brink, it’s surprisingly functional. The pathways are decrepit, but functional enough, though John does spot a mother pushing a pram over the cracks and uneven stone without a change in expression, clearly used to the bumpy stroll.
The baby inside makes no complaints, little tiny hands waving about. John turns his gaze to the play structures, old but at most creaky and typical of a low income area. A few young children are playing amongst it, a few parents huddled close together as they chatted, though John does note that they keep an eye out around them.
Jumpy, but something in him finds that normal for this area.
John doesn’t know this area.
That uncanny feeling is sinking it’s teeth into his limbs, and John keeps walking, letting his gaze wander over parents and children, and then…
John freezes.
His stomach roils in discomfort, and he isn’t sure what to make of the nightmare before him.
A young man, hardly even an adult, patched together with some kind of foul glue. John can see all the parts of this boy that's been shattered, broken, and then shoved back together. John has hated a lot of the things of his magical existence.
Has hated how much it took, and how much it gave.
Perhaps never more has he hated these cursed eyes than he does now.
And yet, the boy is nothing compared to whatever the thing in his arms is. John can barely see the baby blue onesie and little yellow ducks beyond the twisting and writhing void. The thing in the boy’s arms is consuming all the light around, and this is not an exaggeration about the gloomy sky.
It’s like a literal black hole with too many limbs, and nebulous death eyes. Three hands are gripping the boy’s shirt, another two are gripping one of the arms holding it, and John is quickly averting his eyes because if he keeps looking he knows something will go irrevocably wrong.
John felt like his insides were being pulled in a thousand directions, his mind unravelling like loose threads.
The patchwork boy cuddles the entity close, pressing kisses into it’s devouring shadows, even as it’s tiny limbs grab at him, at his soul. And the boy continues on unphased, chatting to another parent nearby. Briefly, blue eyes look over towards John, and he’s already ripping a talisman apart in his pocket, not even caring to focus much on how the patchwork boy’s eyebrows don’t match his dirty blond hair, or how John had noticed a peek of a scar nudging out from under the mask the boy wore over the lower half of his face.
John’s eyes fly open, and he barely rolls onto his hands and knees to hurl up anything that was in his stomach into the damp grass. His head is screaming at him, and his limbs are shaking and trembling. He barely has the energy to shakily crawl away from his puddle of sick to collapse onto the ground, much different gloomy skies overhead now.
His lighter fell out of his pocket, the old silver resting amongst the damp morning grass, and John focuses on that, even as his eyes want to implode in his skull, and his brain is valiantly trying to turn into soup between his ears.
John has dealt with demons, with god, with arrogant angels and ghosts and ghouls, but never, never in his entire existence, has John ever seen anything like that entity.
Devouring all around it, and yet, replenishing just as much as it devoured, and John was doing his best to avoid recalling anything more of that interaction.
He turns onto his side again and starts hurling again.
Not even drinking would do now, with the way his internal organs feel like they’ve been liquified and are trying to escape through his mouth. Struggling to sit up, John wipes his face, hand coming away damp with a mix of blood, sweat, and tears. A quick check of his ears prove more blood to be coming from them too.
John doesn’t know what that thing was, and he doesn’t want to know. Whatever it is, it’s way beyond his abilities, and truthfully, John doesn’t think anything anyone could do could be worth anything to deal with whatever that was.
The pressure of that annoying gaze of the fucker in the sky is back, and it makes John choke out a mocking laugh. Not even the big bad voice of the so-called God dared to cast his gaze upon that entity either.
The spiteful opening of the clouds only made him derisively laugh more, ignoring the way the rain beat down on him as he swiped up his lighter and stumbled out of some little park somewhere John doesn’t really care to figure out.
Instead, he stumbles and staggers through the little town, a couple half assed teleports here and there, before coming across a somewhat familiar gargoyle.
He must have made his way around Lincoln. Braun calls over to John, who gives up anymore movement and collapses more than sits. “You don’t look good, boy.”
John thunks his head back, and even still the pain is less than the way his brain felt like it was turning to soup before.
“Don’t feel much better.” He replies, and Braun chuckles, shifting of stone the only indicator that they moved. “I don’t believe you would, considering your soul is held together by sheer luck. What did you mess with? Pissed off a right terror, to have your soul nearly pulled apart like that.”
John shudders, and his stomach roils again, and its only the fact he has nothing left to throw up that keeps him mostly upright.
“Not sure. Don’t wanna know.” John sighs, hands too shaky to reach for a cigarette. He isn’t sure he could light one right now anyways, everything feeling out of sorts. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to know. I didn’t want this adjacent long-leap walk either.”
Braun makes a noise that might be pitying, might also be mocking. Probably both. “I don’t imagine so, never heard of any long-leaps being willing.”
John rubs lingering blood from his irritated eyes, and decides, whatever the fuck is going on in America, he wants no part in it.
Fucking Long-leaps.
John hated them, being suddenly in some new area without his consent was shitty in all times, and this time more so. Long-leaps were rare in the first place, a bit of a mix of premonition and a brief dip into the future before being thrown right back into the present.
Some magicians or spiritually touched get to have premonition dreams, maybe a gut feeling, or brief glimpses.
No, he just had the luck to being thrown who knows how long into the future, right in front of whatever that thing was, wherever in America it was, before being yanked right back into the present. Long-leaps were more of an informal term, but John couldn’t care to recall what the proper terms were.
Not that many really used it anyways.
Regardless, John resolved to avoid America as much as he could, and based on what happened in that brief moment, John decided to avoid anywhere that kind of uncanny weight lingered.
He was in a lot of pain, so he just remained where he was.
John will stumble his way to the nearest pub when he can move again, for now, he just firmly reiterates to himself to avoid that nightmare as much as he can.
Whether this is a warning, or a plea for help, he doesn’t care. Long-leaps were done without consent, and on the whims of reality or the universe or whatever.
John doesn’t care.
Regardless of what it was, he had no intention of getting involved.
The way his gut wrenches at the feeling when the Bat contacts him, John decided, yeah fuck that.
Whatever bats want can be done at the Watchtower, or over distance.
John turns and dry heaves into the bush near him, and decides, yeah fuck it.
The lightning flashing above only pushes him to spit the saliva out of his mouth right onto the steps of the cathedral.
He was a man of grief, and spite.
Jason’s gaze snaps over Minnie’s shoulder, sensitive to gazes naturally.
Both from his training, experience, and sheer paranoia.
There’s no one outside the parents group he’s chatting with, but that doesn’t change the fact Jason felt someone’s gaze crawl over him.
The faint feeling that there is some sort of sudden absence in the air, causes Jason’s paranoia and anxiety to overflow.
He cuts his chat with Minnie and the other parents short, skin crawling. Gathering Danny’s stuff, he starts making the way home, looping circles, slipping through hidden passages, and all sorts.
Sure, it takes him three hours to get home, but at least he can be mostly sure no one followed him and Danny home.
His first time mustering up the will to take Danny outside, and he returns home quickly and obsessively checks every doorway, window, and vent.
Jason would rather never let Danny outside, at least not this early, but he knows it’s not good for Danny’s health to be cooped up inside, and that someday Danny will be going outside, after all, he’ll need to go to school, make friends, socialize and all that.
But Jason also fears for Danny.
His son is unique, and not quite human. There’s plenty out there who would try to turn his son into a weapon if they could, Jason knows a long list of bastards who would.
Preferably, Jason would put them all in the ground long before Danny was old enough for play dates and school, but with how heavy the Bat has been breathing down Jason’s neck, he’s aware its going to be harder.
That fucking old man, he’s too soft, that's why the rot keeps spreading. Jason will not let Danny suffer, and if he needs to make an example out of the Bat’s little bird, he will.
There's nothing Jason wouldn’t do for Danny.
Throwing his mask onto the table, Jason rips off the wig and tosses it onto the couch, Danny babbles and reaches up for Jason’s face, grinning a bright, drooling, smile.
It makes Jason feel unworthy.
It also makes his teeth ache.
Jason resolved to patrol more the following nights, because he can’t shake the feeling someone had seen him and Danny, and saw more than Jason wanted seen.
He licks his teeth, and the urge to rip out the peepers throat with his teeth wraps around him heavily.
Unfortunately, Jason doesn’t feel that gaze again, and thus doesn’t get to tear out the bastard’s throat.
Pity.
He remains unaware that just a week before the start of the week he spent hunting for that gaze to end it permanently, a British occultist stumbles onto his hands and knees to throw up his guts as blood spills from his eyes, ears, and nose. The Watcher observes the occultist, but turns their gaze away from the soul that remains a loose knot of threads, each connected to another who set their claim to it.
John Constantine escapes a fate likely worse than death by the deep avoidance that coils around his neck at all times.
Click
Click
Click
Fwsshh
John’s lighter flickers.
The flame is dark, less a flame, and more like shadows coiling up and flickering in a mimicry of fire.
John closes the lighter, and shoves it in his pocket.
Haunted, he hunts down the nearest pub.
Don’t look too closely.
A thin, black claw taps the back of John’s neck once, before dissipating.
He doesn’t turn around.
Thunder roars.
An entity jealous and prideful, keeps his gaze firmly away from the black hole that is New Jersey.
Danny yawns, and stretches out in his dad’s arms.
Jason gets a tiny foot to the chin.
Life goes on.