Archive of Our Own ^beta

John couldn’t tell you how he got his hands on that first pack of cigarettes. Maybe it’s just because of when it happened, after he was released from the readjustment facility and every word, action, or thought was liable to hurt himself or someone else. The place where his next steps were supposed to be became a gaping nothingness at some point while he’d been clawing at his eyes trying to avoid seeing exactly that.

The first time he went outside unprompted, without his dad’s knowing, is a blur. But he knows that he had a pack of Marlboros in his hand when he got back.

The embers on the end of a cigarette lit by a lighter he dug out the junk drawer became as bright as a bonfire. They blocked the emptiness from his vision and replaced it with something he could handle.

This, he could control. From the act of lighting it to the way he breathed the smoke, (after a few failed attempts left him hacking and coughing). It was an action that wasn’t plagued with uncertainties—some dizziness at first, sure, but he acclimated. He could do this, and it was almost okay. It was even okay for him to be almost okay.

(Smoking is bad for your health, but so are cuts and bruises and the sounds of your own bones breaking. It’s the only fairness he can muster in such an unfair world.)

Some shame came with it, but not enough for him to stop. William, not knowing about the packs of cigarettes occasionally finding their way into the bottom of John’s pillowcase, just seemed glad to find John opening up a bit.

When he caught John smoking, his efforts in reaching him became that much more fervent. He got him further from the edge, at least to a point where he didn’t need the embers to see something ahead of him. (Not that John had access to any cigarettes for a long time after. William made sure of that.)

It’s interesting in a morbid sort of way how even when you’re a few hundred miles away, in a city with people you’d otherwise have never met, you hear the same things over and over again. It was like someone had whispered into the hollow hearts and minds of the people—it was subtle, but impossible to miss. He knows from experience that the echoes could get so intense it would make your ears bleed.

He learns, not long after arriving at Wellston, is that he isn’t the only one going deaf. A little bit of trouble and a lot of bickering later John makes a friend.

Sera is… well, before long she becomes John’s only reason for putting up with everything at Wellston. Every day feels more difficult than the last, like there’s only more weight on his shoulders instead of less. It never gets any easier, and John doesn’t think it ever will, but Sera makes it easier to keep going.

(There is kindling at the bottom of his desk drawer, but he doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t intend to use it. It’s just—he’s used to having it there. It’s not wrong of him to just have it there.)

With Sera (gone) away, John deals with his day to day life like he normally does. He walks to school, he goes to class, he goes to the infirmary, he walks home. The system is easy and predictable, like twisting the handle of a jack-in-the-box and then setting it back.

Dealing with the other people at school, too, is easy and predictable. Simple.

He goads them into doing what he wants. He takes the hits he has to and he runs, through the halls of the school and in the early hours of the morning and overtop the wispy trails of smoke coming off the end of a cigarette that has yet to be lit, because stopping doesn’t just mean going back to the dark. It would mean losing himself to it.

He can’t let that happen again, so instead he texts Sera before he leaves the house. He gets his jaw broken after third period. He goes to the infirmary. He walks home and he plays pig themed games with Sera.

Easy. Predictable. Simple.

(He can’t do this anymore. Not without her. Not alone.)

The routine is disrupted by the appearance of a king that casts a long shadow. John gets dragged into someone else’s bullshit without realizing it, and mistakes the change for a figure offering to match his pace rather than a hand trying to drag him out of his easy, predictable, simple days.

There’s almost a comfort in the walk home. The familiarity of it.

He's familiar with the experience of dragging himself across concrete. With keeping his bag clutched in a hand so bloody no one would be able to see the knuckles that have gone white. With that feeling so intense in his stomach it makes him nauseous.

It's a blessing that there’s no one around. He always hated the stares. Eyes on him, the constant watching his every move—it piles extra weight on a body that barely holds itself up.

“Let me help you.”

That same body is a mess of blood and bruises, the peak of all this being the gashes up its arm from claws it took as its own. Everything is in pain, but the only things that really hurt are his hands. He’s known how to throw a punch since the sixth grade but somehow that ache still overrides everything else.

“Good luck on your test.”

Why does he even bother anymore? This is how things go every single time. He gets hurt, he gets betrayed, he gets reminded of how little worth anything really has.

Blood on his knuckles. His and others.

It’s not worth the pain, not worth the effort or the restraint. Where’s his reason to keep going? Where the hell is the future worth putting up with all this shit for?

He digs nails into skin, enough to make crescents and to make crescents become craters. They spill over with red and it blends with the rest of it all over his hands and the moment he notices is the moment he’s had enough—

“John!”

He follows her voice like the lines on his palm. He’s as far from religious as you can get but he still prays that he isn’t imagining the way her voice rings out, clear as a bell and clearing away everything else.

Sera sees him. John sees Sera.

Everything comes crashing down with the sight of her, like fight and flight both go out the window as soon as Sera is in view. His legs give out underneath him and she stops him from hitting the ground like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“John, what happened?” she asks, alarmed. Worried. She shouldn’t be. (He feels so sick.) The weight of what he did drags him down, down, down, back into the hole he now thinks he never really left.

“Sera, please don’t…” The words come out small and weak as tension melts away, until there's nothing left of him but exhaustion. “Don’t look at me right now.”

Elaine is easily silenced. He doesn’t think about it any further than he needs to, and he shows Sera the face she deserves.

Kindling burns just as well after being discarded, it seems. John pulls a cigarette out of the box and settles into the movements of his habit like the backseat of a police car.

“You smoke?”

John straightens up instantly, pulling the cigarette away with one hand and clamping the other over his mouth. The instinctive act of hiding would’ve been pointless no matter what, but he’s pretty sure he looks a bit more ridiculous than he otherwise would’ve now that he has smoke seeping out of the gaps in his fingers as he turns around to face Sera.

For a split second, John recalls the look on his dad’s face when he found him back in New Bostin. Frustration, disappointment, but still—he was always unfailingly calm. That made it worse.

The split second becomes a whole and Sera is in front of him, looking a little amused, but mostly worried.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she says, stepping closer to him. “For how long?”

He doesn’t want her to look at him, so he averts his gaze as he answers. “Not long.” It isn’t a lie. This is the first time since Before.

“I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m assuming you know that smoking is bad for you, right?” Sera says matter-of-factly, reaching out to him in a way only she could. She’s almost tenderly gentle when she carefully takes his wrist and lowers the hand he has covering half his face (he hadn’t even realized he kept it there).

“O-of course I do,” he fumbles to say, trying and failing to deal with the way being treated carefully when he’s been found doing something reprehensible makes him feel. Of course, the fact that it’s Sera treating him like this really doesn’t help. He lowers his hand the rest of the way on his own.

“Just checking.” Sera doesn’t make him look at her, or comment on the fact that he isn’t making eye contact. “What made you start?”

“I was just a little stressed. I got a chance and figured I’d try something. That’s all.”

“I’ve seen you stressed before. But I’ve never seen you do this.”

Sera has never seen a lot of things from John. He prefers to keep it that way.

“Sera, can you just let this go,” he insists, desperation coming out as frustration. He gets himself to meet her eyes and sees that she looks a bit more annoyed than anything else now. Guilt as well as indignance bubble up, but he knows better than to let either guide him.

He puts the problems under lock and key and shows Sera the most polished veneer he can give her, trying to make himself seem lighthearted as he starts talking before she gets the chance.

“It really is nothing. I promise. If it makes you feel better, I won’t do it again. Okay?”

Sera meets his picture perfect smile with a level stare. He would never crack.

“...Do whatever you want.” Translation: I’m not going to tell anyone, but I don’t approve. “I’m going to bed. Good night.” She turns back to the door and heads back inside.

“N—” She shuts the door. When his smile falters, he doesn’t bother fixing it. “Night, Sera.”

John’s gaze naturally, inevitably, falls back to the cigarette between his fingers. He taps it to get rid of the ash and then takes a long drag, breathing in as deeply as he can before he exhales, and then drops the cigarette to the ground. He looks at it in the grass for a moment, the embers flickering from the ash. They take up oxygen for no good reason, burning little and brightening little all the same. Useless without smoke.

Then he smothers it, crushing it under his heel. He goes back inside once he’s sure the flame is dead.

John has seen photos of what a smoker’s lungs look like, courtesy of the “don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs” presentations shown at school every other year. He pictures it sometimes. An encroaching blight in his chest, spanning across his lungs until they’re pitch black.

It feels oddly appropriate. There’s a blight in the world, too, a poison that kills with ignorance and obsessive self-interest. It’s brought to the lips of the people, but it is still taken, and there is no one at fault for that except for the ones doing the taking, upholding the act of breathing this poison that kills them slowly from the inside out. All because there's just something addictive about making yourself and others miserable. Right?

Right, John tells himself as he wipes the blood on his hands onto his vest. They aren’t clean—he can still feel it, in the grooves of his palms, caked under his nails. The sensation never really goes away anymore. But his hands are at least clean enough for him to get the new pack of cigarettes from his pocket and take one out. Copper mingles with nicotine so often these days that he thinks he might end up confusing one for the other.

He reeks of smoke and blood, and still Sera reaches out to him.

“You are not a monster,” she tells him. He knows she’s wrong, she has to be, but if he’s been wrong about everything else then maybe he can believe he’s wrong about this too.

He catches her when she falls, smoke and blood be damned. Always. The one thing he can be sure of is that she wouldn’t mind smudging the halo given by her name.

If Sera will have him, John will be there to be had. Always.