Plotted starter for @blindeddevil
London had many shapes. Some of them were visible to everyone, from her stable residents to the tourist who set their foot in her bosom for the very first time. Others were more subtle and so well hidden that you could have lived in the City from the womb to the grave and you would have never been able to noticed them. It was the kind of impossible things that required not just an attentive eye, but a very open mind too. And they also a brave leap of faith, the stubborn will to believe in what most would have considered madness, dark myths, horrific fantasies.
John Constantine had always had the right eye for everything strange, out of place, impossible. The darker the better and the easier for him to spot. His mind had been cracked open at a very young age, too young for him not to bear the marks of it, in his sanity, on his body and on his soul, and it was both a blessing and a damnation. It made him good at what he did, but the price had been so very often almost too much to bear. He coped with chain smoking to soothe his nerves, casual sex to delude himself, in one, brief moment of thoughtless bliss, that he could have seen another dawn without shattering for the umpteenth time, and far too much drinking to knock him unconscious, in the hope that the alcohol would have push him deep enough for the nightmares to catch up with him. It wasn’t ideal, but nor was balancing himself between unrepentant selfishness and a too stormy ocean of self-loathing.
Looking at him, most people wouldn’t have been able to see the constant, bone-deep exhaustion that accompanied in every waking moment. All they saw was the charming, sharp smirk and the irritating devil-may-care attitude. Trench coat with every kind of weather, smart, comebacks, all cigarette and arrogance. He burst into their lives, did and took whatever he needed to and then left, leaving them confused, torn between annoyance, disbelief and fascination. So blinded by what he showed off that they were never allowed to spot the cracks that ran all over underneath the surface, large and ugly and impossible to fix.
John knew all that and he constantly exploited every advantage that it bought him, every opening that it provided, every weak spot that it uncover. Ruthless because he had no choice but being it, without hesitation because there was always time for the guilt to come back to haunt him later. And oh, how many regrets he had accumulated already. Too many to count, even if he could have named each one of them with deadly precision.
It was a mostly lonely life, one in which every connection could have been turned in yet another thing you would have either lost because of a bad choice, a mistake or been forced to sacrifice in the same of something else. Magic always came with a price and there was no way to cheat that rule, not even for the man who was known as “Conjob” even in Hell.
The magician chewed the butt of his cigarette slowly, studying the building before him. It looked nothing more than an abandoned warehouse, one of the many that still stood in the outskirts of the City. Scribbled walls, eroded by rain and humidity, broken windows kept closed by old wooden boards, chains on the rusty doors blocking entrance. A crumbling construction waiting for someone to decide its sad fate. However, he could feel that there was much more to it, under its anonymous facade, and literally under the building itself too. Dark energy sprouting from the ground and raising, reaching out from the cloudy sky, trying to suck the light out and poisoning the air all around.
At first, when he had decided to investigate the sightings, he had been slightly skeptical. However, the alternative would have been agreeing to pack up and allowing Chas to drag him into that bloody vacation his best friend kept insisting he needed so badly, so he had used them as an excuse to evade the other’s insistence once again. However, it had turned out that, all considered, he had made the right choice, and not just the selfish one. There was something going on there, something that couldn’t be explained with some random rumour made to drive people to keep away from a bad neighbourhood so that the local criminals could handle their business in peace. The Darkness was thick and strong, impossible to miss for someone like him, who knew how to perceive it.
Constantine blew out one last mouthful of smoke before letting his cigarette fall on the ground. The trail, however, didn’t dissipate in the cold air of the night, but instead it shaped itself in a line at a flick of his wrist and a whispered word, a thread that, from where he was standing, stretched toward the building. A track for him to follow, straight into the open jaws of whatever horror was lying in wait ahead of him.
A mysterious figure ripping through the shadows, a monster with the head of a stag leaving a trail of blood but no corpses behind it. Ghostly whispers echoing among the walls of narrow alleys, coming apparently from nowhere. And damn if that place held a smell that was very familiar even if it shouldn’t have been. The very peculiar stench of Hell itself, a mixture of sulfur, rot and despair.
One last look at his surroundings, blue eyes scanning the veil of darkness that had fallen on the roads, just to make sure that he hadn’t missed anything, and John stepped forward, following the trail of smoke he had willed into becoming his guide towards the source of the energy he was sensing. He was probably about to walk into some sort of trouble, crossing that threshold without knowing what he would find behind it, but after all that was what he tended to do. You couldn’t win a game of gambling if you didn’t take risks. And, among the many things, he happened to be a gambler too.
