Work Text:
So there's this joke, and it goes like this.
A bloke gets on an airplane, big fucking 747, miracle of modern technology, flying across the second-largest ocean on the planet at five hundred and twenty-six miles over the howling waves and all the things that lie beneath them. The man's name is John Constantine and he is drinking something that tastes of sharp sour honey and he is flying to America.
That's it. That's the joke. Crowd laughs, applause.
Nowadays, he sometimes sees things that aren't there. Things that really aren't there, not just things that are there but aren't commonly seen by the casual observer. By way of a f'rinstance, the man in the window seat is pulling his teeth out of his mouth, one by one, accompanied by a series of wet crunching sucking sounds as each ragged knot of gristle and bone pops out. There's blood running down his chin like dark slobber, and he's making tiny wounded noises, and none of this is real, he knows it's not real, he bloody knows it because he can also see the man sitting there in his chair reading the airline magazine with all his teeth still anchored in his respectable bald head. That's the factual truth. That is what's actually happening. But somewhere in his brain, this tiny savage voice is saying; what if it was like this instead. What if it was bad and crazy the way everything is underneath. It's the interface between the eyes and mind that's the problem, but then again, isn't it always?
Freud said something about how teeth falling out symbolized castration fear. Something like that. He's sure of it.
He takes another sip of what he thinks is probably scotch. Drinking on a plane always seems vaguely elegant to him, even when, as in this case, it's merely the most direct path from A to B, A being consciousness and B being peaceful oblivion. There's a faint warm buzz of comfort in his gut. He can't taste the dull bitter airplane oxygen anymore, which is well worth a hangover in his book. He considers whether ordering another would still seem elegant or cross the line into sad alcoholic territory.
And the girl in the seat next to him says "Give us a taste of that, will you?"
Her perfume is something cold and sweet and almost rotten in a strangely appealing way. He inhales and slides his gaze over to her. Clear sharp eyes like an animal, a sleek predatory mouth, a silky mess of hair in a dozen different vivid and unnatural shades of pink and green. Kool-Ade dye. He has a brief and nauseating flashback to his own delirious adolescent flirtation with homemade blue hair. Her face is too young, done up with makeup to look older. He wonders if she's on her own.
"What's that, love?" he asks, largely to allow himself enough time to figure out an appropriate response.
"Can I have a taste of that, I said." Her voice is modulated and low. A quiet little Brummie accent somewhere in there.
"What's your name?" he asks, half-expecting the curiosity to stave her off.
"Judith," she answers promptly.
"Judith. That's it, no last name? Like Cher or Madonna or Sting?"
She grins hungrily.
"Your references are a little out of date there."
"I prefer to think of it as fidelity to my roots. Why don't you get one of these for yourself, Mistress Judith?"
"Legality. It's an American airline and I don't have ID." Correctly reading his lack of expression with a speed he finds slightly alarming, she adds "I'll be twenty-one in August."
He has doubts about the truth of that claim. A little worried flutter in his chest questions the moral standing of giving alcohol to a minor. A much larger and more immovable presence, which seems to have made its permanent residence in his head, informs him that giving a kid some scotch is certainly no worse than killing a kid. One more thing to add to his neat mental files of transgressions and disappointments. One more reason to say you were always going to be damned anyway and mean it.
"Just a taste, then," he says, and hands her the glass.
She gives him a rich red smile and takes a thin but significant sip. He decides that something about her is beautiful but also sick and unsettling in a subtle, pervasive, way, like the hidden decay of her perfume. Across the isle, the man who is not actually pulling out his molars shoots him a look of revolted surprise.
She gives the glass back to him and licks her lips in a delicate and sexless way.
"Thanks," she says. "Needed that."
"Glad to be of service," he says, and downs the rest in a rush of bitter heat.
"I don't know your name," she says, watching him.
"That's right, you don't. Let's fix that. It's John Constantine. I chose to hold on to my last name."
"And what a fine last name it is," she agrees readily. "What brings to you America, Mr. John Constantine?"
"Land of the free, home of the brave," he says distantly, twirling the empty glass between his fingers. "Or is it the other way around? I always forget."
"You got it right."
He shoots her a wry look.
"You're just bursting with inquisitive verve, aren't you? Why are you going?"
"I'm running away from home," she says, with a swift ease that throws him off somewhat. He blinks.
"That right?"
"Yeah. My mum, she beats me up. Does other stuff too. She always says that if I tell anyone she'll have me put in a madhouse. So I think in America I won't have to put up with her anymore." Her voice is very bright, her face very open.
"Bloody good for you, then," he says, pushing back the static of anger that creeps in at the edges of his thoughts.
"So there. I've been honest. Now you tell me."
He gives her a long look. Three piercings in one ear, the fishnets, the hair, the mother. She's exactly the kind of girl he would have drooled all over at nineteen and there's not a damn thing he can tell her. I'm leaving because I can't always tell my nightmares apart from reality anymore. I'm leaving because the way my friends look at me is worse than anything I thought I would have to live through. I'm leaving because she was a kid and she thought I could save her and her blood ran like wine into the good black earth, so that wherever I walk on English soil the trees scream and the ground shakes because they know what I am and they hate me for it.
He looks at Judith and the ugly thing that lives in his head now imagines her with maggots crawling out of her mouth and her eyes stitched shut with wire.
"Guess," he says. She leans back, smiling, deeply pleased for some reason he doesn't understand.
"You want me to guess? Are you sure?"
"Why not?"
"My guesses are usually very accurate. Some people don't like it so much."
"Accuracy is my highest priority," he declares with a gesture, realizing as he does so that he may be somewhat more drunk than he believed himself to be. "Fire away. Tell me my life story, Mistress Judith. Do people ever call you Judy?"
"No," she replies calmly. "All right. Your name is John Constantine."
"Excellent. Top marks so far."
"Good." And she smiles her sweet blind smile.
"When you were in the womb, you absorbed your embryonic twin brother into yourself and consumed the nutrients of his body. Perhaps as a result of this, your mother died of massive hemorrhaging during the process of your birth. She was a lovely woman, very pretty hair, rather like yours. Initially your father wanted to leave you in a gutter somewhere to die, but it seemed to him that the odds of being caught were too good, so he took you home and raised you instead. Not that it did either of you very much good. Am I right so far, Killer?"
He stares at her blankly, wordless. Her words are like gunshots, one after the other, relentless. Well, fuck me, he thinks. The static crawls in like black spiders swarming on the walls of his skull.
"You spent some time in a band called Mucous or something equally idiotic," Judith continues blithely. "The music was terrible and thankfully you all realized this in time to prevent yourselves from making much of it. Somehow you convinced yourself you had a talent for the paranormal and you fucked around in that area for a bit, doing more harm than good. But always with the best of intentions. Isn't that right, John? The very best, the very purest of intentions. And then you went to Newcastle, and you also went mad, which demonstrates correlation but perhaps not causation. And now, by sheer, blissful, cosmic, coincidence, here you are, on a plane, next to me. The world is so marvelously full of these quiet kinds of miracles."
She is still smiling in a way which is toxic and lovely at once. He swallows the hot bile in his chest.
"Well," he says, in a voice which is, thankfully, even. "Your guesses are very accurate indeed. Except the band was called Mucous Membrane, and perhaps I flatter myself by thinking we weren't all that bad."
She nods.
"I knew I was forgetting something."
He has the dreamlike sense of knowing that danger is with him now, all around, inside his skin. It's a plane, a fucking plane, God the things were getting smarter and there's a limited range of ways he can respond with all these civilians around. He hates the thing with an abrupt intensity, not for anything it's done so far but simply for putting him in this impossible position and being so bloody smug about it.
"What are you, exactly?" he asks, perceiving it to be the only opening gambit available to him. Her smile grows even wider. He has the sense that she is, again, extremely pleased with him.
"Right now, I'm a girl named Judith, who is running away to America because her mother beats her. Judith has a few grains of workable psychic talent and she just so happens to be in the seat next to you. Clear enough?"
"Maybe Judith is there," he says. His mind is rattling through a spiral of options, each more unlikely and/or suicidal than the last. "But there's someone else there to, sharing Judith's old corpus in a manner I suspect is not entirely voluntary, and for reasons which elude the hell out of me."
"Surely it's not too complicated," she replies. "You're an interesting man."
"Yeah, well, I plan to be a lot less interesting from now on, so if it's a favour you're after you'll find more success with some other bugger."
"It's not a favour," she says steadily. "Think of it more as a social call. Getting to know you. Like the first day of school, all the kids playing games and filling out nametags."
"First day of school with a demon, then," he hazards, attempting a clumsy grab for information. It seems more like demonic possession than any of the other options. Demons generally have their affairs together more than the other body-hopping beasties and can often pass as normal humans. But if it was a demon, surely he would have known before. He would have felt it. Wouldn't he? He can't be that incompetent yet.
"Oh, good God, I'm not a demon," Judith says dismissively. "Or a ghost. No, I much like you, am a flesh-and-blood evocation of better living through black magic. Just hitching on a ride in our Judith for the present."
"I see," John says. A sorcerer. That adds an entirely new dimension of complication. "Have we met before?"
"No. Not in person, not yet. Although doubtless one day we will, and hopefully under friendly circumstances."
"The more I get to know you, the less likely that sounds," he mutters darkly. "I don't suppose you could give me some vague hint about your identity, to keep things sporting?"
"Sorry," Judith says, without a trace of remorse. "At least a hint about what you're doing here, then." Chalk, an iron key, some salt, a cross. And cigarettes. That's all he has on him now. All the heavy stuff is in the checked baggage. He always knew something like this was going to happen someday.
"Curiosity, mainly." She spins a lock of strawberry candy-coloured hair around her finger in an uncomfortably childlike way. "You're a very confusing sort of person, Mr. Constantine. You have no extraordinary talent in your chosen field, and no one really significant is protecting you, and yet you dance constantly on the edge of damnation and death, seemingly out of sheer arrogance. You constantly go out of your way to flirt with the worst kind of trouble, knowing that you can't possibly handle it. And yet somehow you're still alive and more or less undamaged. Why do you think that is?"
"My shimmering personality," he replies absently. "And possibly my dashing good looks."
"Yes. It's quite a mystery. The universe seems to like you, Constantine, though I'll be damned if I know why. And given the weather forecast, it seemed worth my while to look into it." A chilly unease runs over his skin, made gentle by the lingering grace of the scotch. "Weather forecast. That sounds nice and ominous."
"It should. Things are going to get very interesting soon. And I suspect that much of it will take place in your vicinity, since it always seems to." She leans forward a little. Her mascara is caked on her lower lashes like a bruise. "Tell me, have you heard of the Brujeria? Or a man named Alec Holland?"
"Can't say that I have."
"You will. Yes, I think you will." Her eyes are too big, too bright. Like the unblinking glass eyes of a doll. "When it comes, you will know. There will be an artist, and a child with a broken neck. And a bird. A beautiful, beautiful, bird with a black pearl in its mouth. And then there will be nothing at all."
His heart turns over in his chest. Panic seethes below and he loathes it.
"That's quite a weather forecast you got there, love."
"Believe me, I wish it was different. We're all going to be very busy for the next little while, and I had plans of my own."
"It's a bitch how disaster never waits until your schedule is clear," he agrees flatly.
"Very irritating indeed. Have you figured it out yet?"
"Figured out what?"
"How you're going to get me out of Mistress Judith, if I turn out to be uncooperative."
Well, that was predictable.
"I was thinking I'd wait for you to get off the plane and then bash you over the head at the next opportunity."
"Kidnapping. Simple, but effective." She sounds pleased again. He realizes, with a brilliant rush of anger, that this whole conversation is a kind of test to her, and that no matter what he says he's playing her game by answering at all. No wonder she looks so fucking happy with herself. "What if that doesn't work?"
"I assume that a basic knowledge of the occult arts and a pathological wellspring of misdirected rage will eventually present me with some kind of solution," he tells her cheerfully.
"And they always do," she murmurs. "What an odd creature you are. I can't wait to meet you face to face."
"Tell me who you are and I can make that happen." She laughs at that, a dry vacant laugh which does not fit with the youth of Judith's face. "We will meet when it is time, John Constantine. When the moment arrives. And I, for one, look forward to seeing you again."
He has no response to that which isn't hopelessly inane, so he keeps his mouth shut. She gazes at him for a quiet, intense, moment, as if trying to memorize his face. The smile flickers again, like a movement half-glimpsed in the dark.
"I've decided to leave," she says. "Give Judith her body back, free of charge. Consider it a gesture of goodwill, and remember it when we meet next. You owe me a little trust, at least."
Before he can slap together something appropriately cutting and dismissive, Judith's eyes roll back into pearly blankness. She crumples back against her seat, her opal hair hanging over her face. A sharp twitch, and then another one, as if she's being pricked with a pin, and then her eyes slide back down with an unsettling damp glaze. Her hand moves up to touch her mouth, almost unconsciously. She yawns soundlessly and glances around in mild bewilderment.
"Jesus," she says. "Did I sleep the whole flight?"
"That you did," John says, which is not completely a lie. She gives him a look, apologetic with an edge of wariness.
"Sorry if I snored. I hate that."
"You didn't."
"That's good, I suppose." She peers out the window moodily. "What an absolute cunt of a day. How awful."
And, as John motions the flight attendant for another glass of scotch she says, "I'm Judith, by the way. Think I could have a sip of that?"