Running the Asylum
A Supernatural/Constantine crossover by Monsignor
A/N: Movie-verse, not comics-verse; set around Supernatural season 1-2. Some gore, some obtuse imagery, and some overlong sentences. Now sally forth!
John didn't usually go back to places where he'd done exorcisms for at least three years. He kept track of these places with a map of the city tacked to a wall and pins stuck in it. Red for successes (twenty-eight), pink for failures (eighty). (Pink because John was a stubborn, petty bastard, and if he was going to lose he was going to be as small-minded as possible, damn it.)
Because the thing about exorcisms was that they so frequently resulted in what to the naked, inexperienced eye looked like scenes of murder. Demons wreaked hell - ha ha - on the human world, like fat people trying to squeeze into a extra-small. They broke it just by being there. Even if the person who was possessed survived, there was always blood and fluids and excessive property damage. Safer for John to keep his distance and let time blur some of the evidence and some of the surveillance on a site before he went back - if he had to go back at all. John honestly tried not to fuck up exorcisms; with most demons it was a one-time chance anyway.
Again, that was his usual practice. But now, less than six months after That Night, John stood in front of That Place and took a deep, unblackened breath, just to reassure himself.
Angela had called him. "Someone broke into the hospital last night," she'd told him.
"So?" John had asked blankly. He'd been writing Psalms on the bottom of his shoes; the lumpy red ink had dripped globbily from his suspended stylus onto the Formica table. He'd had no idea what hospital Angela had meant; wondered why she would call him about some police thing like a B & E. (As opposed to a police thing like a demon feed or a botched possession. Angela had taken to ghostbusting better than John had ever suspected.)
"John." Angela always spoke his name firmly, almost like a commandment. As if she thought that if she didn't keep the vowel short and pin down the consonant at the end, the slitheryness of that initial J would just slither the whole thing away from her. "I mean Ravenscar. "
John had said nothing. He'd stared at ink on his left shoe. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, he had written, and begun the downstroke of the f. From whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
It was a charm for travel; an incantation for safety in the night. John hadn't slept much since Ravenscar and so he'd been doing even more of his business in the night hours than usual. He could only close his eyes once the sun had cleared the Santa Monicas.
Daylight was a false security, and could protect him against so little, really. But the darkness that hid the eyes and the bodies and the twisted wills of so many malicious, infectious demons that John knew were there had made nighttime into its own new world, one beyond the hideousness of Hell he knew so well and without the lightness and brightness of the Heaven that he had glimpsed.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
He felt weight on his own shoulders. The metaphysical weight of a night that began with punching the face off a Helldenizen; took a cheery ride through a crowd of the possessed; had an agonizing twist with the sudden angelic slap that had crushed Chas' viscera to pulp; and in the end had involved a fallen angel, the Fallen angel, unholy demon spawn grinning through the skin of Angela's womb, and God the Father Almighty.
And Heaven, too, John's one and only taste of pure water in a lifetime spent choking on the blood-red mud of Hell-
- a taste snatched right from his lips. From the goddamned Devil who had saved John's goddamned life, and nothing was fair, nothing, not ever.
In other words. Weight. Who the fuck wanted to go back there? Not John, bet you anybody's ass.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
"Are you still there?" Angela had asked patiently.
"Yeah," John had grunted. He dipped the stylus into the ink and finished the f and said, "It got broken into. So what? People love to break into abandoned insane asylums. There's probably even a blog or something."
"People love to break into anything that's got a chain and a padlock on it," Angela had agreed. "But whoever it was who broke into the hospital, I think they were part of your scene."
John had lifted his eyebrows.
"John?"
Dammit. He'd forgotten that telephones were phonic-only, not visual. Since Beeman and Hennesey had been murdered, and Chas had ascended or whatever-the-fuck, Angela was pretty much John's only telephonic communication. He was rusty, he guessed.
"Didn't know that I had my own scene, Angela."
"I didn't know that you knew about blogs." She had almost laughed; Angela only ever almost laughed. "They left a mark on the door," she went on. "On all the doors on the ground floor. Some kind of pentagram thing, with… sigils inside."
"Kids these days. Playing with Satanism and Wicca and all that shit." Luckily just the preschool version of Satanism, the morons. John, unimaginative at the best of times, refused to even try and picture a hormonal teenager with a finger on the power of the other realms.
"John, take this seriously."
His silence that time was perfectly intentional.
"Just… why don't you go by and see what they're up to?" Angela had said.
"You do it," John had suggested acidly. "You're the cop."
"I would, but I'm in Atherton at a law enforcement convention. The only reason I even know about the break-in is because I have one of my friends in uniform division keeping an eye on the place for me while I'm gone."
Just while she was gone? Did that mean Angela had been keeping watch on the place on her own for the last six months? That thought had surprised John. Because, hello, Mammon in her womb, taking over her body entirely; almost killed by Satan and Gabriel, in that very building. Not to mention Isabel's swan dive from the roof that had started the whole thing.
John hadn't been able to tell if he was impressed, or just confused. Was it a female thing or more of a normal-human thing, this returning? Whichever, he'd thought with irritation, I'm shit at understanding either of them.
"You know, Angela, when I gave you my number I was not actually volunteering for deputy duty."
"Yeah, well, until I can make some connections with another demon hunter in the greater Los Angeles area, you are my deputy," she fired back. "Especially here. Especially with Ravenscar, John."
His name, firm as a rock in her mouth. Not just because of what she wanted from him. But because, like Chas had, Angela actually trusted John Constantine that night. And now continued to trust him.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
"Come on, John," Angela pushed, "it's not like we can just ignore it. What if something else is happening there?"
Funny, wasn't it, what a girl's expectations could drive a man to?
"Definitely… mostly not about the girl."
"Fine, Angela. I'll go tomorrow morning." It was nearly midnight now. Sometimes you wanted to find things, and that was when you ventured into the dark. But if he was going back to Ravenscar, where earth had been touched by hell, then he was going there in broad daylight.
John wasn't suicidal, anymore.
"Thanks, John." Angela's voice was warm. He could hear her smile, could picture it: the small, restrained, but all-honest curve of her lips. "Let me know how it goes, all right?" And she'd hung up before he could, leaving John half-annoyed and half-amused.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
Now, John stood in front of Ravenscar, glaring up at it from across the street, leaning against Beeman's old car, his own new ride. The old hospital loomed like a tombstone built for thousands.
"Yeah, sure, Angela," he muttered. "I'll let you know how it goes. Assuming that I survive."
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
TBC
Edited 8/30/13