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mirabellafic2013-01-28 08:53 pm
mirabella) wrote in mirabellafic2013-01-28 08:53 pm
Jacking Gehenna, HP/Movie!Constantine crossover, Harry/John, R
Title: Jacking Gehenna
Fandom: HP/Movie!Constantine, Harry/John, R.
Summary: Evil never does know when to quit.
Imperio
Afterward, John will wonder what kept him from shooting first and asking questions later. Maybe he'll decide that he doesn't want to know.
Protego
He's sitting at John's kitchen table, leaning his head against the hand clutching three fingers of John's scotch in one of John's tumblers. A cigarette, which might be John's but at this distance he's not sure, is smouldering in the ashtray in front of him. He doesn't look up, but he knows John's there.
"Get the fuck out," John says, more as a conversational opener than anything else.
"You're John Constantine," the guy says with an English accent, not opening his eyes. "Are you really the best at what you do?"
John snorts, tosses his keys on the table with a clatter that ought to make the English guy flinch and doesn't, reaches into the cabinet for a tumbler, and pours himself a drink. "I'm the only one who does what I do. Did you think there was a fucking union?"
The guy gives a brief, humorless smile as John sits down across from him. "I was also told that you're a real twat."
"Well, now that we have that straight, want to tell me what you want?" John says sourly, lighting a cigarette. "And while you're at it, how about if you tell me how you got in here?"
"Magic," the guy says, opening his eyes at last. They're vivid green, the color weirdly refracted by his glasses.
"No such thing," John says; and it's true, in a manner of speaking.
The guy lets go of his glass. John's hand flashes out to catch it, and catches only air - the glass is hovering, spinning slowly eight inches off the table. The guy makes a small gesture and says "Accio," and John's glass tugs itself out of his hand and drifts across the table. The glasses spin lazily in the air, orbiting each other like binary stars.
John takes a drag from his cigarette and rescues his scotch. "Yeah, okay. But you still haven't told me who you are or what you want. You half-blood?" he asks, knowing the answer.
"Not the way you mean." The guy's glass floats back to him, and he takes a throat-scorchingly long drink of it.
"My name is Harry Potter," he says quietly. "I hope to God you can help me, because I don't think anyone else can."
Obliviate
Harry's leaning against the window now; arms folded, looking out, the lights of the street outside staining his white Oxford shirt with dim smears of color. John's still sitting at the kitchen table, and things have started to take on that weirdly surreal quality that you get when you're sitting at the kitchen table at an hour of the morning that most people don't even know exists.
"So you think he's not dead?" John asks, lighting a cigarette from the butt of his last one.
"He's dead," Harry says. "This scar on my forehead - you can barely see it now, but it used to be the first thing anyone ever noticed about me. It faded when I killed him."
John blows out a stream of smoke and watches it shatter against the rim of his tumbler. "So he's dead, he's just not gone."
"I don't know. That's what I want you to find out."
John shakes his head. "You want a medium for that shit. I don't commune with the departed." He was going to make a crack about the Psychic Hotline, but for some reason he doesn't.
"No," Harry says, and turns to look at him. "But you can find out if he's in Hell. And if he is, if he's managing to get out somehow. If he's trying to come back, and using me to do it."
"Look, you can't just skip out of Hell like you had grounds privileges and a weekend pass," John tells him.
"I'll take your word for it," Harry says simply. "But if anyone could get out of Hell, it would be him. You could find out. And if he's got out, you could send him back. Deport him, I think you call it," he adds with a spark of wry humor that makes John suspect that Harry's own passport wouldn't hold up to a good security check.
John's silent, thinking.
"I'll pay half again your going rate," Harry says finally, and reaches for the jacket draped across the back of his chair. He's been drinking this whole time, not much but steadily; his tie is loose and skewed carelessly to the side, and he doesn't quite grip the material on his first try. "You can have until the day after tomorrow to decide."
John watches the jacket slither backward off the chair. "Where are you staying?" he asks suddenly, and has no idea why.
"I'm meant to stay with… friends of friends," Harry says, and once John translates that from the Brit he realizes that Harry looks like he'd rather sleep in a dumpster. John stabs out his cigarette, resists the urge to light another one, and looks thoughtfully up at Harry through the haze of smoke wreathing the bulb over the table.
"It's late and you're drunk," he says abruptly. "Couch is over there. We can talk more about this in the morning."
There's a small pause, and then the jacket slides back down onto the chair.
Scourgify
It's almost dawn when Harry slides into bed with him, winding around him, offering his mouth in a light brush against John's and his body in a more insistent one. John puts a hand on his shoulder and feels him shaking, and notes almost dispassionately - almost, because fuck, he's human, and Harry has a body that just will not quit - that Harry would rather admit to being easy than admit to being afraid.
John doesn't do pity fucks. He pushes Harry gently but firmly away, turns him over, and pulls him back so they're lying back to chest. Harry's hand slips down to the waist of his borrowed sweats and hooks a thumb under the waistband; John pulls the hand back up.
"Go back to sleep," he orders. He thinks about moving his arm, thinks about moving away, but he's too sleepy to do either so in the end he stays where he is.
It's a long time before Harry stops shaking.
Avada Kedavra
John looks at the wand pointed at him, takes a drag from his cigarette, and wonders why he's doing this. "You sure you know what you're doing."
"I'm sure," Harry says. "I had some training as a mediwizard, not much but enough. I can stop your heart but I can't keep it stopped for more than about thirty seconds without risking damaging it."
"That'll be enough," John says, putting out his cigarette. He's not wild about putting his life in the hands of the wizard equivalent of a second-year medical student, but he's going to do it anyway, because sometimes he's stupid like that. "It'd help if I had something of his."
Harry tilts his wand away from John and chews thoughtfully on the tip. Then he stubs out his cigarette and sits on John's lap, straddling him. "Here," he says softly, pulling John's fingers up to the scar on his forehead. The tip of his wand rests against John's temple. "Ready?"
"Ready," John answers. The scar is rough and cool under his fingertips, a pale lightning bolt a shade lighter than Harry's skin.
Harry's eyes darken, and for a minute John wonders if Hell just went off the itinerary for the night. Then he speaks and -
Incendio
It's the hot winds that get to him, fanned like a brush fire by the stacked metal of wrecked cars. Sometimes John wonders what Hell was like before the Industrial Revolution.
He doesn't have much time. He can hear them scurrying in the distance already; soon they'll catch his scent. John sticks a hand in his pocket and wraps it around a small pressurized orb like a hand grenade full of holy water, and sets out.
The sky is roiling like a firestorm overhead. John turns away from the distant city and goes another way, following the tingling in his hand - he can still feel Harry's scar under his fingertips, the one cold thing in this searing wasteland. It leads him toward a long, narrow stretch of flatland, too wide to be a road, too narrow to be a plain, a stretch of packed earth that raises a foul-smelling dust around his legs. The tingling in his hand is almost a burn now; he looks at the dark-robed figures lingering like wraiths on the plain and realizes that he's found what he came to find.
The Death Eaters, Jesus, what a name, don't notice him as he walks through the small crowd. Damned souls usually don't. But he has the feeling that the one he's looking for will notice him, all right, and he tightens his hand on the orb as the Death Eaters sway and grovel around him in slow obeisances that look bewildered and empty. The center of the crowd is close; a good thing, too, because John is almost out of time. He pushes through one last ring of the damned and steps through.
"Well, fuck me," John says softly, wishing he had a cigarette.
There's a tall gravestone in the middle of the circle. What's tied to it is filmy and indistinct, flaring to sharpness in a limb or a finger and fading back into mist, but it's not so indistinct that John can't tell who it is - or who it's part of, anyway. John has no idea how this is possible, a fact he's not wild about, but still less does he like the fact that wrapped around that gravestone is a bloated white worm maybe six feet long and proportionately thick, with one arm that's barely more than a vestigial hand protruding from the flaccid flesh and another that's a long, spindly limb like a spider's leg with a human hand at the end of it. The worm is hovering over the mist, pawing at it, looking for a way in; as John watches, it gives a hideous sucking sound and something passes from mist to worm, something that makes the mist more solid and the worm less so. The worm's frontquarters weave on the wind, and John sees that it has a human face, or a face that might have been human at some point.
It's no goddamned wonder Harry has nightmares, John reflects grimly.
And then he's gone, opening his eyes to the light in his living room, gasping for breath and waiting to reorient himself. Harry is standing a few feet away, watching him.
John runs a hand through his hair and lights a cigarette. "I'm gonna have to call in some favors," he says.
Harry turns pale. For a moment he looks more exhausted than anyone his age has any business looking; then he blinks and pulls himself back together. John's impressed in spite of himself. "What do you need me to do?"
"Maybe nothing. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"I'm not used to doing nothing." Harry comes closer and plucks the cigarette out of John's fingers, takes a drag, and hands it back. His tie is loose again and the top button of his shirt is undone. John hopes they didn't have uniforms at that posh Neverland of a public school of his, because if they did then Harry must have spent a fuck of a lot of time writing out I will not dress like I ordered my schoolboy uniform out of the back of a fetish magazine a hundred times.
"It's early," he says, lifting the cigarette to his mouth. "There's nothing we can do until tonight."
"I suppose we'll just have to wait, then," Harry says softly.
Deletrius
Harry pushes back against him, gasping, taking him deep, reaching an arm back to lock around the back of John's neck. He wants it hard and fast, wants to be fucked like the first person to get a concussion from the headboard wins, and in a minute John's going to oblige him. Right now, though, he wants to wrap his hand around that thick, hard cock, maybe slide the other hand up under Harry's shirt to caress nipples that are taut and dark where sweat and humidity have stuck Harry's shirt to his skin. There's a storm coming.
From the soft, breathless sounds Harry's making, John doesn't think he objects to the detour. Not as long as John keeps fucking him, slow and deep, lifting him off his knees a little with every thrust.
Expecto Patronum
The Archangel Chas, Jesus. If the duckbilled platypus isn't proof positive that God has a sense of humor, that is. Not that he doesn't deserve archangelhood - sometimes John wishes he'd appreciated the kid a bit more while he had him around - but he could have at least changed his name.
Then again, this is Chas, who is never going to stop being twenty years old somewhere deep down inside, and because of that twenty years old thing he could call himself the Archangel Chizz-Dawg and John wouldn't begrudge it.
"You know I can't intervene, John," he says, looking a little troubled. John can't remember what color his eyes were when he was alive but they're blue now, so dark that they're almost black in the club's dim light. "Quit the bait-and-switch shit and tell me what you really want from me."
"I want Balthazar to owe me a favor."
"Doesn't Lou owe you one already?"
"Not the way he sees it."
Chas' eyes gleam in the light of John's cigarette. "Give me twenty-four hours."
Harry's asleep in John's bed with the sheet crumpled carelessly around his waist, the late afternoon light drawing out the circles under his eyes and the blade-slim scar that runs nearly the length of his back. "You've got it."
Serpensortia
"You son of a bitch. I'm gonna rip your skin off an inch at a time and make you sew it back together in a salt-water vat."
John blows a stream of smoke into Balthazar's face and smiles as he chokes. "You know, I really like deporting you, Balthazar. I think next time I'm gonna send you to a cooler climate."
Balthazar snarls but backs down a little. It took him years to get back after the last time John deported him, and he knows damn well that John will follow through on both threats.
"Anyway, you should be thanking me," John points out as Balthazar's attention starts to stray toward Harry. "If Hell ran a tighter fucking ship we wouldn't be here. You want to explain to Lou why you guys are letting the Damned open portals back to Earth?"
Balthazar's silent for a minute, drumming his fingers on the table. "What the fuck do you want, Constantine?" he says finally.
John smiles.
Finite Incantatum
Harry Potter may be the only person John's ever met who's not scared shitless by his first taste of Hell.
There are things he is afraid of, John knows for a fact. Neither of them have gotten much sleep over the past forty-eight hours or so - Harry's nightmares are getting worse, and he wakes so high-strung that it takes making him come like a freight train to get him back to sleep. John prefers not to get into the question of why he's literally moving Heaven and Earth to help out one fucked-up Brit with weird powers and a full roster of sleep disorders.
Harry isn't afraid. But he wants to ask, John can see it. Everyone wants to ask. Everyone who gets a glimpse of Hell. Are my friends here? My father? My sister? My lover?
Everyone wants to ask. It doesn't do them any good. The dead exist here in their own little worlds, playing out damnation over and over like a two a.m. rerun on cable. They almost never see anything else. Harry's own mother wouldn't know him if he walked up and spit in her face. Watching him, John gets the feeling that Harry knows what that feels like from the inside, too.
"We gonna fucking sightsee or get this over with?" Balthazar snaps, looking around nervously.
"Let's get it over with," Harry says quietly, pushing his hair back where the wind has whipped it into his face in stinging tendrils.
John looks around, getting his bearings as best he can. The face of Hell shifts like water, and Balthazar isn't going to help. "This way," he says finally. With a glance back over his shoulder at distant Dis, Harry follows him.
There are dark figures on the packed earth, milling around. John shoots a dark glance at Balthazar as he tries to hang back; he'll be willing to bet that Harry's no more popular with those drifting wraiths than John is with Hell itself, and Balthazar may be a prick but he's a useful prick, down here where he can summon guardian demons with a snap of his fingers.
"I can sense him," Harry says, and John turns to look at him. Harry's wand is in his hand; something John can't quite sense is crackling around him like ozone before a lightning strike. There's no trace now of the fear that keeps waking him, that drove him into John's bed to begin with. Harry is pissed, far gone in a cold rage that looks like it's been festering his whole life. And John…
Well, never let it be said that John Constantine doesn't know when to get the fuck out of the way.
Harry stalks forward, not looking at any of the Death Eaters. Some of them look at him, though, sullen whispers sweeping through the crowd like the sound of rotted leaves; but a pissed-off Harry Potter alone seems to be more than they have the courage to deal with, let alone a pissed-off Harry Potter followed by a cranky demon and a heavily armed demon hunter. The crowd parts in front of them, sullen, and some of them drift away, lost again in their private torments.
"Well, fuck me," Balthazar says irately, catching sight of the gravestone and the worm sliding slickly around it. "How did he do that?"
John doesn't answer. He's looking at the figure strapped to the gravestone, the one that was misty and indistinct the last time he was here. It's a lot clearer now, and the worm is becoming translucent. Fuck, he hopes Harry knows what he's doing.
Harry stops in front of the gravestone, knuckles white on his wand. "Tom," he says.
The worm-thing gives a horrible slithering laugh and lifts its head, weaving over the gravestone. "Harry Potter," it wheezes. "Welcome to Hell."
"Just visiting," Harry says. "It seems we still have unfinished business."
"What are you going to do, boy, kill me?" the worm chuckles. "They aren't called immortal souls for nothing, you know."
"No," Harry says evenly. "I can't kill you. But I can fuck you up so badly that it'll take you a thousand years to put your eyeballs back together."
"He can, you know," says Balthazar, who's still pissed about that portal.
"You're fucked, my friend," says John, who's still pissed about the amount of sleep he's lost.
"Oh, am I?" the worm asks, and moves like a striking snake - not at Harry, but at the dim form strapped to the gravestone. Harry jolts like he's been shocked and for a moment he's unsteady on his feet; then he shouts something in Latin and points his wand and the gravestone explodes like a land mine went off under it, sending stone shards geysering into the air. The worm is thrown clear and the wispy form that was tied to the gravestone spins in the wind between them, caught in stasis with both of them pulling on it, locked in a tug-of-war that might or might not be going Harry's way.
John reaches into his pocket and pulls out the holy water orb. Balthazar eyes it in alarm, edging away.
"He's not a demon," Balthazar says sharply. "That's not going to work on him."
"Oh, I bet it will," John says thoughtfully, and throws.
The orb tumbles through the sulfur-laden air and shatters into a million glittering shards above Harry and the worm, raining holy water down onto both of them and the packed earth of Hell. Harry barely notices; the worm screams, steaming where the water touches him, and in a flash Harry has yanked the mist back toward himself. It swirls around him and then slams into him, brutally suddenly, making him arch and jolt and come out panting with shock.
"You only have the power I gave you," Harry says. "I'm taking it back."
He points his wand and says a single word that John can't make out. The worm writhes, screams, swells like a bloated fungus, makes one last effort to cast some sort of spell, and then explodes with a crack that rocks the ground under their feet. Harry catches the brunt of it, braced behind some sort of shielding spell; John and Balthazar fare arguably worse.
"Aaahhh!" Balthazar says in disgust, brushing maggots out of his hair and dancing back out of the rain of them that still pours from the blast radius. John, who had the sense to move back early, dodges a few and waits for them to stop.
When they're done he moves toward Harry, taking great care to stomp on every maggot that gets in his path. Harry looks back over his shoulder, looking uncertain and weary, as if he knows this will hold Voldemort for a while but doesn't care to place any bets on how long.
"Let's go," John says. "I want a smoke."
Harry gives a slightly hysterical laugh and runs a hand through his hair, making it worse. "Me too."
"I'll buy you dinner. You like thai?"
"I've never had it," Harry says, looking suddenly, ridiculously shy for a man who's standing in the maggotty remains of his arch-enemy and talking to the guy whose cock he was riding twelve hours ago.
"You'll like it. Come on."
"Be seeing you, Potter," Balthazar says silkily, straightening his cuffs.
Harry looks at him for a long moment. "Yeah," he says finally. "I know."
"No, you don't," John says.
Lumos
John lights up, takes a drag, blows a plume of smoke into the night air. "Let there be light," he says, and hears Harry laugh for the first time.
Fandom: HP/Movie!Constantine, Harry/John, R.
Summary: Evil never does know when to quit.
Afterward, John will wonder what kept him from shooting first and asking questions later. Maybe he'll decide that he doesn't want to know.
He's sitting at John's kitchen table, leaning his head against the hand clutching three fingers of John's scotch in one of John's tumblers. A cigarette, which might be John's but at this distance he's not sure, is smouldering in the ashtray in front of him. He doesn't look up, but he knows John's there.
"Get the fuck out," John says, more as a conversational opener than anything else.
"You're John Constantine," the guy says with an English accent, not opening his eyes. "Are you really the best at what you do?"
John snorts, tosses his keys on the table with a clatter that ought to make the English guy flinch and doesn't, reaches into the cabinet for a tumbler, and pours himself a drink. "I'm the only one who does what I do. Did you think there was a fucking union?"
The guy gives a brief, humorless smile as John sits down across from him. "I was also told that you're a real twat."
"Well, now that we have that straight, want to tell me what you want?" John says sourly, lighting a cigarette. "And while you're at it, how about if you tell me how you got in here?"
"Magic," the guy says, opening his eyes at last. They're vivid green, the color weirdly refracted by his glasses.
"No such thing," John says; and it's true, in a manner of speaking.
The guy lets go of his glass. John's hand flashes out to catch it, and catches only air - the glass is hovering, spinning slowly eight inches off the table. The guy makes a small gesture and says "Accio," and John's glass tugs itself out of his hand and drifts across the table. The glasses spin lazily in the air, orbiting each other like binary stars.
John takes a drag from his cigarette and rescues his scotch. "Yeah, okay. But you still haven't told me who you are or what you want. You half-blood?" he asks, knowing the answer.
"Not the way you mean." The guy's glass floats back to him, and he takes a throat-scorchingly long drink of it.
"My name is Harry Potter," he says quietly. "I hope to God you can help me, because I don't think anyone else can."
Harry's leaning against the window now; arms folded, looking out, the lights of the street outside staining his white Oxford shirt with dim smears of color. John's still sitting at the kitchen table, and things have started to take on that weirdly surreal quality that you get when you're sitting at the kitchen table at an hour of the morning that most people don't even know exists.
"So you think he's not dead?" John asks, lighting a cigarette from the butt of his last one.
"He's dead," Harry says. "This scar on my forehead - you can barely see it now, but it used to be the first thing anyone ever noticed about me. It faded when I killed him."
John blows out a stream of smoke and watches it shatter against the rim of his tumbler. "So he's dead, he's just not gone."
"I don't know. That's what I want you to find out."
John shakes his head. "You want a medium for that shit. I don't commune with the departed." He was going to make a crack about the Psychic Hotline, but for some reason he doesn't.
"No," Harry says, and turns to look at him. "But you can find out if he's in Hell. And if he is, if he's managing to get out somehow. If he's trying to come back, and using me to do it."
"Look, you can't just skip out of Hell like you had grounds privileges and a weekend pass," John tells him.
"I'll take your word for it," Harry says simply. "But if anyone could get out of Hell, it would be him. You could find out. And if he's got out, you could send him back. Deport him, I think you call it," he adds with a spark of wry humor that makes John suspect that Harry's own passport wouldn't hold up to a good security check.
John's silent, thinking.
"I'll pay half again your going rate," Harry says finally, and reaches for the jacket draped across the back of his chair. He's been drinking this whole time, not much but steadily; his tie is loose and skewed carelessly to the side, and he doesn't quite grip the material on his first try. "You can have until the day after tomorrow to decide."
John watches the jacket slither backward off the chair. "Where are you staying?" he asks suddenly, and has no idea why.
"I'm meant to stay with… friends of friends," Harry says, and once John translates that from the Brit he realizes that Harry looks like he'd rather sleep in a dumpster. John stabs out his cigarette, resists the urge to light another one, and looks thoughtfully up at Harry through the haze of smoke wreathing the bulb over the table.
"It's late and you're drunk," he says abruptly. "Couch is over there. We can talk more about this in the morning."
There's a small pause, and then the jacket slides back down onto the chair.
It's almost dawn when Harry slides into bed with him, winding around him, offering his mouth in a light brush against John's and his body in a more insistent one. John puts a hand on his shoulder and feels him shaking, and notes almost dispassionately - almost, because fuck, he's human, and Harry has a body that just will not quit - that Harry would rather admit to being easy than admit to being afraid.
John doesn't do pity fucks. He pushes Harry gently but firmly away, turns him over, and pulls him back so they're lying back to chest. Harry's hand slips down to the waist of his borrowed sweats and hooks a thumb under the waistband; John pulls the hand back up.
"Go back to sleep," he orders. He thinks about moving his arm, thinks about moving away, but he's too sleepy to do either so in the end he stays where he is.
It's a long time before Harry stops shaking.
John looks at the wand pointed at him, takes a drag from his cigarette, and wonders why he's doing this. "You sure you know what you're doing."
"I'm sure," Harry says. "I had some training as a mediwizard, not much but enough. I can stop your heart but I can't keep it stopped for more than about thirty seconds without risking damaging it."
"That'll be enough," John says, putting out his cigarette. He's not wild about putting his life in the hands of the wizard equivalent of a second-year medical student, but he's going to do it anyway, because sometimes he's stupid like that. "It'd help if I had something of his."
Harry tilts his wand away from John and chews thoughtfully on the tip. Then he stubs out his cigarette and sits on John's lap, straddling him. "Here," he says softly, pulling John's fingers up to the scar on his forehead. The tip of his wand rests against John's temple. "Ready?"
"Ready," John answers. The scar is rough and cool under his fingertips, a pale lightning bolt a shade lighter than Harry's skin.
Harry's eyes darken, and for a minute John wonders if Hell just went off the itinerary for the night. Then he speaks and -
It's the hot winds that get to him, fanned like a brush fire by the stacked metal of wrecked cars. Sometimes John wonders what Hell was like before the Industrial Revolution.
He doesn't have much time. He can hear them scurrying in the distance already; soon they'll catch his scent. John sticks a hand in his pocket and wraps it around a small pressurized orb like a hand grenade full of holy water, and sets out.
The sky is roiling like a firestorm overhead. John turns away from the distant city and goes another way, following the tingling in his hand - he can still feel Harry's scar under his fingertips, the one cold thing in this searing wasteland. It leads him toward a long, narrow stretch of flatland, too wide to be a road, too narrow to be a plain, a stretch of packed earth that raises a foul-smelling dust around his legs. The tingling in his hand is almost a burn now; he looks at the dark-robed figures lingering like wraiths on the plain and realizes that he's found what he came to find.
The Death Eaters, Jesus, what a name, don't notice him as he walks through the small crowd. Damned souls usually don't. But he has the feeling that the one he's looking for will notice him, all right, and he tightens his hand on the orb as the Death Eaters sway and grovel around him in slow obeisances that look bewildered and empty. The center of the crowd is close; a good thing, too, because John is almost out of time. He pushes through one last ring of the damned and steps through.
"Well, fuck me," John says softly, wishing he had a cigarette.
There's a tall gravestone in the middle of the circle. What's tied to it is filmy and indistinct, flaring to sharpness in a limb or a finger and fading back into mist, but it's not so indistinct that John can't tell who it is - or who it's part of, anyway. John has no idea how this is possible, a fact he's not wild about, but still less does he like the fact that wrapped around that gravestone is a bloated white worm maybe six feet long and proportionately thick, with one arm that's barely more than a vestigial hand protruding from the flaccid flesh and another that's a long, spindly limb like a spider's leg with a human hand at the end of it. The worm is hovering over the mist, pawing at it, looking for a way in; as John watches, it gives a hideous sucking sound and something passes from mist to worm, something that makes the mist more solid and the worm less so. The worm's frontquarters weave on the wind, and John sees that it has a human face, or a face that might have been human at some point.
It's no goddamned wonder Harry has nightmares, John reflects grimly.
And then he's gone, opening his eyes to the light in his living room, gasping for breath and waiting to reorient himself. Harry is standing a few feet away, watching him.
John runs a hand through his hair and lights a cigarette. "I'm gonna have to call in some favors," he says.
Harry turns pale. For a moment he looks more exhausted than anyone his age has any business looking; then he blinks and pulls himself back together. John's impressed in spite of himself. "What do you need me to do?"
"Maybe nothing. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"I'm not used to doing nothing." Harry comes closer and plucks the cigarette out of John's fingers, takes a drag, and hands it back. His tie is loose again and the top button of his shirt is undone. John hopes they didn't have uniforms at that posh Neverland of a public school of his, because if they did then Harry must have spent a fuck of a lot of time writing out I will not dress like I ordered my schoolboy uniform out of the back of a fetish magazine a hundred times.
"It's early," he says, lifting the cigarette to his mouth. "There's nothing we can do until tonight."
"I suppose we'll just have to wait, then," Harry says softly.
Harry pushes back against him, gasping, taking him deep, reaching an arm back to lock around the back of John's neck. He wants it hard and fast, wants to be fucked like the first person to get a concussion from the headboard wins, and in a minute John's going to oblige him. Right now, though, he wants to wrap his hand around that thick, hard cock, maybe slide the other hand up under Harry's shirt to caress nipples that are taut and dark where sweat and humidity have stuck Harry's shirt to his skin. There's a storm coming.
From the soft, breathless sounds Harry's making, John doesn't think he objects to the detour. Not as long as John keeps fucking him, slow and deep, lifting him off his knees a little with every thrust.
The Archangel Chas, Jesus. If the duckbilled platypus isn't proof positive that God has a sense of humor, that is. Not that he doesn't deserve archangelhood - sometimes John wishes he'd appreciated the kid a bit more while he had him around - but he could have at least changed his name.
Then again, this is Chas, who is never going to stop being twenty years old somewhere deep down inside, and because of that twenty years old thing he could call himself the Archangel Chizz-Dawg and John wouldn't begrudge it.
"You know I can't intervene, John," he says, looking a little troubled. John can't remember what color his eyes were when he was alive but they're blue now, so dark that they're almost black in the club's dim light. "Quit the bait-and-switch shit and tell me what you really want from me."
"I want Balthazar to owe me a favor."
"Doesn't Lou owe you one already?"
"Not the way he sees it."
Chas' eyes gleam in the light of John's cigarette. "Give me twenty-four hours."
Harry's asleep in John's bed with the sheet crumpled carelessly around his waist, the late afternoon light drawing out the circles under his eyes and the blade-slim scar that runs nearly the length of his back. "You've got it."
"You son of a bitch. I'm gonna rip your skin off an inch at a time and make you sew it back together in a salt-water vat."
John blows a stream of smoke into Balthazar's face and smiles as he chokes. "You know, I really like deporting you, Balthazar. I think next time I'm gonna send you to a cooler climate."
Balthazar snarls but backs down a little. It took him years to get back after the last time John deported him, and he knows damn well that John will follow through on both threats.
"Anyway, you should be thanking me," John points out as Balthazar's attention starts to stray toward Harry. "If Hell ran a tighter fucking ship we wouldn't be here. You want to explain to Lou why you guys are letting the Damned open portals back to Earth?"
Balthazar's silent for a minute, drumming his fingers on the table. "What the fuck do you want, Constantine?" he says finally.
John smiles.
Harry Potter may be the only person John's ever met who's not scared shitless by his first taste of Hell.
There are things he is afraid of, John knows for a fact. Neither of them have gotten much sleep over the past forty-eight hours or so - Harry's nightmares are getting worse, and he wakes so high-strung that it takes making him come like a freight train to get him back to sleep. John prefers not to get into the question of why he's literally moving Heaven and Earth to help out one fucked-up Brit with weird powers and a full roster of sleep disorders.
Harry isn't afraid. But he wants to ask, John can see it. Everyone wants to ask. Everyone who gets a glimpse of Hell. Are my friends here? My father? My sister? My lover?
Everyone wants to ask. It doesn't do them any good. The dead exist here in their own little worlds, playing out damnation over and over like a two a.m. rerun on cable. They almost never see anything else. Harry's own mother wouldn't know him if he walked up and spit in her face. Watching him, John gets the feeling that Harry knows what that feels like from the inside, too.
"We gonna fucking sightsee or get this over with?" Balthazar snaps, looking around nervously.
"Let's get it over with," Harry says quietly, pushing his hair back where the wind has whipped it into his face in stinging tendrils.
John looks around, getting his bearings as best he can. The face of Hell shifts like water, and Balthazar isn't going to help. "This way," he says finally. With a glance back over his shoulder at distant Dis, Harry follows him.
There are dark figures on the packed earth, milling around. John shoots a dark glance at Balthazar as he tries to hang back; he'll be willing to bet that Harry's no more popular with those drifting wraiths than John is with Hell itself, and Balthazar may be a prick but he's a useful prick, down here where he can summon guardian demons with a snap of his fingers.
"I can sense him," Harry says, and John turns to look at him. Harry's wand is in his hand; something John can't quite sense is crackling around him like ozone before a lightning strike. There's no trace now of the fear that keeps waking him, that drove him into John's bed to begin with. Harry is pissed, far gone in a cold rage that looks like it's been festering his whole life. And John…
Well, never let it be said that John Constantine doesn't know when to get the fuck out of the way.
Harry stalks forward, not looking at any of the Death Eaters. Some of them look at him, though, sullen whispers sweeping through the crowd like the sound of rotted leaves; but a pissed-off Harry Potter alone seems to be more than they have the courage to deal with, let alone a pissed-off Harry Potter followed by a cranky demon and a heavily armed demon hunter. The crowd parts in front of them, sullen, and some of them drift away, lost again in their private torments.
"Well, fuck me," Balthazar says irately, catching sight of the gravestone and the worm sliding slickly around it. "How did he do that?"
John doesn't answer. He's looking at the figure strapped to the gravestone, the one that was misty and indistinct the last time he was here. It's a lot clearer now, and the worm is becoming translucent. Fuck, he hopes Harry knows what he's doing.
Harry stops in front of the gravestone, knuckles white on his wand. "Tom," he says.
The worm-thing gives a horrible slithering laugh and lifts its head, weaving over the gravestone. "Harry Potter," it wheezes. "Welcome to Hell."
"Just visiting," Harry says. "It seems we still have unfinished business."
"What are you going to do, boy, kill me?" the worm chuckles. "They aren't called immortal souls for nothing, you know."
"No," Harry says evenly. "I can't kill you. But I can fuck you up so badly that it'll take you a thousand years to put your eyeballs back together."
"He can, you know," says Balthazar, who's still pissed about that portal.
"You're fucked, my friend," says John, who's still pissed about the amount of sleep he's lost.
"Oh, am I?" the worm asks, and moves like a striking snake - not at Harry, but at the dim form strapped to the gravestone. Harry jolts like he's been shocked and for a moment he's unsteady on his feet; then he shouts something in Latin and points his wand and the gravestone explodes like a land mine went off under it, sending stone shards geysering into the air. The worm is thrown clear and the wispy form that was tied to the gravestone spins in the wind between them, caught in stasis with both of them pulling on it, locked in a tug-of-war that might or might not be going Harry's way.
John reaches into his pocket and pulls out the holy water orb. Balthazar eyes it in alarm, edging away.
"He's not a demon," Balthazar says sharply. "That's not going to work on him."
"Oh, I bet it will," John says thoughtfully, and throws.
The orb tumbles through the sulfur-laden air and shatters into a million glittering shards above Harry and the worm, raining holy water down onto both of them and the packed earth of Hell. Harry barely notices; the worm screams, steaming where the water touches him, and in a flash Harry has yanked the mist back toward himself. It swirls around him and then slams into him, brutally suddenly, making him arch and jolt and come out panting with shock.
"You only have the power I gave you," Harry says. "I'm taking it back."
He points his wand and says a single word that John can't make out. The worm writhes, screams, swells like a bloated fungus, makes one last effort to cast some sort of spell, and then explodes with a crack that rocks the ground under their feet. Harry catches the brunt of it, braced behind some sort of shielding spell; John and Balthazar fare arguably worse.
"Aaahhh!" Balthazar says in disgust, brushing maggots out of his hair and dancing back out of the rain of them that still pours from the blast radius. John, who had the sense to move back early, dodges a few and waits for them to stop.
When they're done he moves toward Harry, taking great care to stomp on every maggot that gets in his path. Harry looks back over his shoulder, looking uncertain and weary, as if he knows this will hold Voldemort for a while but doesn't care to place any bets on how long.
"Let's go," John says. "I want a smoke."
Harry gives a slightly hysterical laugh and runs a hand through his hair, making it worse. "Me too."
"I'll buy you dinner. You like thai?"
"I've never had it," Harry says, looking suddenly, ridiculously shy for a man who's standing in the maggotty remains of his arch-enemy and talking to the guy whose cock he was riding twelve hours ago.
"You'll like it. Come on."
"Be seeing you, Potter," Balthazar says silkily, straightening his cuffs.
Harry looks at him for a long moment. "Yeah," he says finally. "I know."
"No, you don't," John says.
John lights up, takes a drag, blows a plume of smoke into the night air. "Let there be light," he says, and hears Harry laugh for the first time.