Chapter Text
As the walls of the House of Mystery writhed and twitched with indecision, John Constantine's mind supplied the latest version of the anti-life equation filtered through his own flawed perception and memory.
You will be unmade
“Ugh." Not-John rolled his eyes. "Everything’s unmade. That’s not anti-life, that's just life.” He turned to face himself.
“So, while I've got you here, serious talk— why not have a mental construct that looks like Breaden? I know I want to see him, so you must want to see him too. Why not make this emergency vision quest pleasant and aspirational? I could be quoting Robert Service in a sexy Irish accent instead doing this…" he gestured at the knife still lodged in his chest "... traumatic memento mori thing?”
Breaden was dead but not gone. He’d shown up for the stag party, for the hunt for Finn— and for pretty much any time John had needed a spy in heaven. Creating a shallow mockup of him to talk to because he was lonely...
“Oh. I get it. I’m not Breaden because you’re holding out for the real thing. You think his ghost is going to walk around the corner at any moment and you don’t want to be caught clutching a body pillow with his face on.”
Not-John seemed to seriously consider the dilemma before suddenly raising a finger—
“That’s dumb. You should call your ex.”
Breaden had earned his rest.
“But we’re so much fun! He said as much. Do a summoning. Eternal bliss sounds boring as fuck. Come on— call him!”
World’s worst drunk dial. He’d rather die than be seen like this.
“You’d rather die than do a lot of things, but you keep doing them anyway. If you won’t call Breaden, call Kit!”
Kit loved Breaden as much as he did. More even. It was a miracle they’d lasted as long as they had as only a couple— she’d eventually thrown John out for bringing work home and run off to a literal war zone because it was safer. Kit was alive, but she’d kill him in ways all the demons in hell couldn’t manage if he rang her without the world’s most platonic excuse for calling.
Danica?
Dani had gotten out. Dramatically. She’d accused him of infidelity and then had a few choice words for the literal succubus she’d caught him in bed with.
“So, Chatinelle, Blythe or Meridian then?”
It took effort not to get eaten by a succubus or incubus on a good day. No need to tempt the supernatural predators by limping past like a wounded gazelle on the psychic Serengeti.
"Angie?"
Angie Spatchcock would always be too much like Rosacarnis pretending to be Angela Constantine. After over a decade married to the false version, John wasn’t sure he could keep the memories straight long enough for a conversation.
“Weird you don’t have the same problem with Kit. How about Oliver?”
Who?
“The baker with the cute ass?”
John blinked up in blank befuddlement. That wasn't ringing any bells.
Hope for— "Nothing. Yeah, yeah, we get it."
“Look," not-John winced and shook his head as if it was buzzing "I’m tapped out. You’re doing better, but you need a real person. Any real person. Veronica even. Or else you're going to lose what little ground we've gained, and things will go bad fast.”
As if on cue, an owl hooted ominously from the shadowed corridors of the House.
Constantine flinched hard, exactly the way he had when he'd heard it the night before. The hiccup in concentration dispersed the already weak form of Not-John back into foggy memory.
He was alone in his head.
He was not alone in the House.
Maddie Fenton stared at the open portal to the Ghost Zone.
It was late. She had a fuzzy pink bathrobe and a glass of red wine and an indescribable pride at her own life and accomplishments.
That swirling abyss of post-consciousness stared back at her. She didn't make a habit of contemplating the abyss. Partially because it wasn't very scientific but mostly because of that idiom about how it would contemplate her back. But this evening she was feeling pensive.
The Specter Speeder had gone missing yesterday, along with several spare items from the Fenton armory.
Frustrating, but not surprising.
It only confirmed what was on the local news. The ghost boy was back. He had a strange brand loyalty to FentonTech. He had been so consistent about it before his disappearance that Maddie had developed the habit of working on projects in series—multiple versions of each new invention built simultaneously, so it wasn’t as much of a hardship when one inevitably went missing.
As much as she hated to admit it, the menace had been good advertising over the years. He probably factored into the city choosing to invest in Fenton ghost shields over the generic facsimiles manufactured by the Ghost Investigation Ward.
Him, and Vlad of course. Vlad didn’t have any loyalty to FentonTech, but he did have a soft spot for the patents bearing her name first.
Jack hadn't noticed, wouldn’t notice.
That was for the best.
They needed friends to get anywhere in academia, and she had always been better at navigating the precarious minefield that was Vlad Masters’ parasocial tendencies.
He was a creep, but he was their creep—one with pockets deep enough to buy plenty of goodwill. So long as he kept his hands to himself and financed their shared research, if he wanted her name to appear first? She could make that happen.
The air near the portal was cool and laced with ozone.
It pulled at her. It always had. Even back in college. All the way back to the first portal she’d ever felt, the natural one, before she’d ever had the idea to build a stable one of her own.
That first sensation had not been very scientific. She hadn’t seen that portal or measured it, but she had felt it and known it was true. Known it was real. Known she had to study that mystery, whatever it turned out to be.
That was why she was looking at the portal tonight. To remind herself of how far she'd come from that first night when, in absence of any tangible or recordable phenomena, she had somehow walked out of her college dome certain in the knowledge that she knew the location of a hole in reality.
She hadn’t been the only one to notice. That had gone a long way to convincing her she wasn't crazy. That was how she met Jack and Vlad. There had been a whole crowd of people standing together on the sidewalk of La Cienega Boulevard.
Waiting.
Waiting for days.
They'd pressed against each other trying to stand just a little closer to that indistinct point of origin hidden inside the locked nightclub.
She still wasn’t sure how long she had been there.
She’d been half-awake, missing classes, missing meals. Some people in the crowd had started calling it a religious pilgrimage—ridiculous babble to fill the gap in their knowledge.
That was the thing. No one had known what it was.
Then the building had burned down.
Most of the crowd stayed even then, but Maddie had grabbed the two men closest to her and dragged them away from the inferno. The three of them never went back.
It was easiest to notice you were being pulled forward like a moth to a flame after watching the first few moths burn up in front of you.
They had found their answers and survived their search for knowledge mostly unscathed, ecto-acne not withstanding.
The rest of the crowd... well. It took a whole lot to shift the needle on missing persons reports in Los Angeles but that winter there had been a storm and the figure had spiked. A statistical outlier in the thousands. People who had never been seen or heard from again after December 2001.
That was why she kept the blast doors shut.
Not to keep the ghosts in.
To keep the people out.
Because that feeling of infinite, electric possibility was still there, just as it had been in that club in L.A. In ways she could barely admit to herself, she feared that if she left it open, the pilgrims would come back.
Stand on her sidewalk.
Burn down her home.
What had that club been called again? Something fancy. Too fancy for a twenty-something Kentucky girl out in California on an engineering scholarship.
Something like… Lush? Lavish?
Lux.
It didn’t matter who had owned the property under the first ghost portal. It could have been the devil himself for all she cared.
She pulled the lever to close the blast doors with avaricious pride and finality.
This one was hers.
In the hallways of the House of Mystery an owl rounded the corner, screeching in righteous fury.
John dropped on reflex—curling up in a ball moments before needle-sharp talons could take his eyes.
They raked his shoulder instead. He reacted to the white-hot pain on instinct. He knew this bird. The bird knew him. The real threat would appear any moment now—
Hurried footsteps rushing to follow the owl and a young anxious voice called—
“Yo-yo, stop! We don’t attack our friends.”
Friends?
John managed a glassy-eyed stare through bloody arms. Past the edges of the torn purple windbreaker a teenager with messy black hair and thick round glasses called off his bird.
“Sorry about that,” a 14 year old Tim Hunter offered sheepishly.
John didn’t respond. It was too surreal. At least the bloody bird remembered him— even if the wand-waving idiot didn’t.
There was something seriously wrong with John Constantine.
There was also something seriously wrong with the House, but Tim tried to focus on the problem in front of him.
He’d met the man twice.
Sort of.
Probably.
He wasn’t dumb— he knew the timelines got weird. Too many people were too worried about his mistakes, and John was one of them for sure.
They were right to worry. He wasn’t very good at this.
Last year Tim Hunter had done something nearly unforgivable. He’d murdered the Cult of the Cold Flame—at least he was pretty sure it was them, based on how loudly they screamed about being in the Cult of the Cold Flame. Except they were also time travelers with nothing in common with the people currently using that name.
He liked to think Constantine would have approved of cultist-murder.
Of all the people who had tried to instill their own rigid morality systems in him, the man on the floor had always been the most flexible. The most forgiving, despite appearances.
The cultists hadn’t really been dead, just… lost. Souls separated from their bodies. He’d found them again. Forgiven them. Healed them. Sent them on their way. He was pretty sure forgiveness was almost always a net good. He hoped someone would forgive him for that and the other things. The things springing to the top of his mind and filling him with regret right now because—
That glassy, vacant stare was unnervingly familiar. Too much like the worst crime he’d ever committed. Right now John Constantine looked disturbingly like his dad.
Tims father had been so concerned. His mom was missing, and his dad was overprotective, and, and—
—and Tim was pretty sure every kid in history of ever would have been tempted to forcibly change a parent’s mind at least once. It hadn’t even been anything bad. He’d just wanted his dad not to worry so much. To think everything was fine.
Ms. Rose had been so disappointed in him.
The other things—the things some other Tim had done, or would do, or might do someday—he could compartmentalize those. But the murder, and the mind control? Those were his. The things that kept him awake, wondering if Mr. E might be right.
His father had spent months unable to say much beyond, It’s fine.
Tim pulled a pair of asymmetrical multicolored glasses from his pocket. The foci he’d built to see the influence of mental magic. Specifically to try and undo the ham-handed compulsion he’d slapped on his father.
Through the lenses, John’s face was a dizzy, tangled ball of putrid light. It was similar. Only worse. Much worse.
It wasn't like the initial compulsion he'd cast— it was more like afterwards when he’d tried to remove his dads pain and fix his own mistake by force. That's not how healing works. He knew that now.
Tim wasn’t very good at mental magic, but he was at least good enough to know he wasn’t good at it. He’d learned the hard way that this kind of thing was recursive, self-reinforcing. It just got stronger when you tried to touch it.
This throbbing mess? He couldn't even keep track of how many people had tried to touch it.
Mind manipulation by committee.
There was no quick fix. Not one he knew of. People could recover from just about anything, but the main spell component for his dad had been rest.
Rest, time, and love.
But John—Tim examined the wizard again through the mismatched lenses—John was chocking on a single weird red equation. Tim could could do something about that. Push it deep. It would be something at least. Give him some breathing room and a fighting chance.
The apathetic wizard to flinched when he drew his “wand.”
That wasn't good.
Tim was careful. He worked slow and deliberate with the blue-handled screwdriver, talking softly in a continuous babble as he went.
"—so the head Librarian, Lucian said that the Houses were of the Dreaming even when they aren't IN the Dreaming and while the main branch of the library holds all of the books never written the satellite branches might hold some of the books written but lost and never found again and that the collection here is part of the collection there and I have a Library Card so it's not really trespassing and if you could tell me which way to go I can just —"
He barely brushed the distorted memory of the message but it shot through him with pure galvanizing conviction—
You are nothing.
Hm. That tingled.
Not unpleasant.
Almost refreshing, not to be convinced he was the lynchpin of reality for half a second.
He knew it was only an echo of an echo. Secondhand apathy was probably easier to ignore than the real thing but at this distance it was an almost meditative loss of perceived self.
He nudged the red haze again. Folded it. Tucked in the corners, folded it again, until it was a tight little packet of pain. Not gone. Something to be unpacked and examined later.
He lost track of time, fully engrossed in his mental origami. When Constantine finally came out of his stupor enough to focus, the look in his eyes wasn’t gratitude.
It was wide-open fear.
The panicked shield that sprang up between them knocked Tim back on his ass. It was a mess of blue lines, circles, sigils—crackling, bright, flashy. Exactly the kind of thing the older man had sneered at. It was the sloppy, overpowered casting, of someone backed into a corner with nothing left to lose.
Tim still had the glasses on. He saw the wizard’s mind collapsing in on itself. Saw the flaring multicolored panic bloom in real time.
He choked back a platitude. This wasn’t something that could be reasoned with—it was an animal reaction and that animal was about half a heartbeat from gnawing it's own leg off.
Tim didn’t know the full history there but he didn't need to. He had learned, at least, that there was a difference between the number of times he’d met someone and the number of times someone had met him.
Whatever had happened—whatever he’d done—it was bad enough that just his presence was a triggering.
He couldn’t explain that he wasn’t a threat. Not now. Not yet. Most days, he wasn’t sure that was even true.
So he just...
Left.
He’d done what he could. Anything else would only make it worse.
Behind him the tawny-brown owl looped back around and shat on John's head before following Tim down the corridor.
Somehow, in its wingbeats and posture, the bird who used to be a toy managed to radiate contempt for its sworn enemy as it flew away.