WARNING: The following contains grody imagery, swearing, probable character death, magic, gods, perils both mild and not-so-mild and some things some people might find offensive. I don't claim to own any of the characters here nor do I claim to be the best author for them. I wrote this because I think I might want to read it one day.
Final Crisis: Anarchy for the UK.
Part 1 - MAGGIE THATCHER OVERDRIVE
John woke with a start.
His eyes, wide open with an instinctive fear he'd come to trust, flitted around the room a couple times while he tried to figure out just what it was that gave him that deep-down feeling of dread like a cold knife in his stomach. There was something... different in the air. The ghosts didn't feel like they were working right. The filth in the air left a different sort of film on the inside of his mouth. Wiping some cold sweat from his brow, the magician reached down and grabbed his slacks, getting to his feet and pulling them on. He took a few slow steps to the room's window, squinting out at the grey city of London, colours drowned out by the pissing-down rain. Cold, soggy and miserable? Well, things couldn't be too bad, could they? Everything looked alright at first glance. But he wasn't stupid enough to trust how things looked. Especially at first glance. He took up a pack of cigarettes from the hotel room's nightstand and lit up, hoping the smoke might warm up the cold feeling in his gut.
"Hullo, London," he said, squinting to try and see what, exactly, was wrong with the city.
HELLO, JOHN CONSTANTINE, said London in a voice that made John shiver.
"Uh," ventured Constantine to the city, looking out over it quickly before digging a penknife out of his coat and opening a small wound in his thumb, using the blood from it to quickly draw a small series of marks on the window. "How are you then, London?" he murmured as he frantically smeared the last symbol into place.
I HAVE BECOME.
Constantine looked through the symbols on the window and saw the Eye of London, the spaces between its spokes having taken on a baleful red cast. He felt its attention shift ever-so-slightly.
It was looking back at him.
"Fuck," said the man as he took half a step back from the window. "Fuck!"
The magician quickly smeared the symbols out before dashing into the bathroom and wiping the windows off frantically with the hotel's towels before dropping them in the tub and turning the hot water on. No sense leaving something behind for whatever it was to find him with. While he hurriedly finished dressing himself, his mind raced. What was that? What was that? And, more importantly, how had he not seen it coming? He always saw things like this coming! But that wasn't important. Something was coming for London. Or had it already. And it wasn't likely to stop there.
As he shrugged his way into his beat-up old trenchcoat, Constantine finally noticed what was wrong with London.
It was quiet.
The realization that it was quiet stopped John at the door, just about to turn the handle. It was quiet and that was not a good thing in the slightest. Not for London. But it hadn't got him yet. And if he was fast enough, it wouldn't. Taking one last drag from his cigarette and adjusting his coat on his shoulders, he tried to prepare himself for the run. And to prepare himself for the run going Very Wrong. If this thing had hold of London, it could bugger the synchronicities he depended on if it had a mind to. Slowly exhaling smoke, Constantine steeled himself.
He pushed open the door, ran out into the hall. It was silent there, too.
Couldn't say he liked that.
He ran to the empty stairs, taking them two at a time on his way down, the thick carpet absorbing much of the sound of his footfalls. The fact that he could hear the sound of each footfall in a hotel near the middle of London around noon made him want to take another few minutes to just shiver. But he knew there was no time for that. He had to find someone. Someone who knew what was going on or someone who could help him stop it.
The lobby, when he arrived, was filled with people. All the people who should have been in their rooms, who should have been in the pool or on the stairs. The maids and busboys and tourists and businessmen were silent, staring back toward the Eye. Then they all turned to him.
They all smiled the same smile.
HELLO, JOHN CONSTANTINE, they said with the not-London's voice.
Constantine stared at them dumbly.
Oh, God.
He was too late.
There was barely enough time for the bit of magic he needed as he ran to the emergency exit--if there ever was an emergency--as the crowd looked on. It didn't need to follow. He understood that with the same instinctual certainty that had jolted him out of a good night's sleep. On the other side of the door was a street that wasn't supposed to be there.
And he could feel those same eyes, London's new eyes, on him as he ran down it, dodging down the bizarre instinctive byways of synchronicity away from the hotel.
-----
A young woman stood in the alley behind the hotel ten minutes later, the crowd calmly watching her. She pushed the door back and forth between her hands, her fingertips caressing the surface of it before she muttered at the red-eyed mass. Turning away, she nodded again. "He was here. I know where he will go next." Brandishing her gleaming metal lance, she moved with speed away from the hotel, the tip tearing through the fabric of the fragile world until she caught sight of the long, meandering thread of synchronicity that connected the door to her quarry.
And she took off running.
-----
"Map?" John called out into the subway tunnel. Three hours of running from one tangental nonplace to another had left him gasping for breath. He should be somewhere else. Finding a bomb shelter or ducking under with some demons or monsters that he'd done right by. But he wasn't, was he? Still a halfwit with delusions of saving the day, going through the Underground to find the only person who could confirm his fears.
Of course, he already knew what he was going to find. But there was a chance he could do something if he could just find Map.
"Map?" he called out again, peering into the darkness, into London's Underground and Deeperground and all the other backgrounds he had could feel around in.
It was too quiet. Aggressively quiet. Like the dark and whatever it was that had stopped the trains and the sound of a London devoid of people screaming and laughing and fucking and fighting had all ganged up to make his voice a tiny thing. Even in the Underground, he felt it--whatever that not-London was--trying to muzzle him. Trying to shut him up or shut him down. It would be easy to get him here, after all. Turn on a train, send a horde of the people of London/not-London, drop a rock on his head. The feeling that he was the one being smirked at, for once, was not a welcome one.
"John," came a soft reply from behind a maintenance door with dim blue ghostlight drifting out from it. Maybe the not-London could see him here. Maybe it couldn't. He just had to hope he wasn't being bloody stupid and walking straight into a trap. Don't kid yourself, he chided that naive instict, of course you are. Figuring he might as well go boldly if he was going to go, he lit up another cigarette and opened the door.
The half-light was hard to see in, but that was to be expected. The room was filled with metal boxes on the walls and tools strewn about and, in the middle, was a table and chair. "Cordial," muttered Constantine as he took the offered seat, looking across the table as Map, half-visible as ever with his eyes the deepest shadows, emerged from the dark, features lit weakly by the blue ghostlight. He looked sick, somehow. "You shouldn't have come here," the once-maintenance man said, his voice the echoes of the long-silenced trains. "I don't want you here."
"I go where I want, Map. Not where I'm wanted," replied the magician, slowly exhaling smoke. Somehow, the smoke made Map seem more solid. It was hard not to take a little comfort in that. "What is all this, Map? Some kind of overmeme? Cult?" he demanded.
Map was quiet. His shoulders shook a little.
"Come on, Map," cajoled Constantine, changing tack a little. Seemed that Map wasn't in a mood for getting berated. "Everyone up there is just... there. The streets are empty, there's no one begging for money and the tube's not r--"
"I know about the tubes!" wailed Map, leaning into the room's half-light, two frosty outlines of hands appeared on the table. There was a sound, like broken electricity or someone falling on the third rail. Map was crying. The dead man was quaking and shaking his head slowly. "John, it's over," asserted Map between sobs, "I love her and she's gone over. You only see the symptoms and think they're the sickness. You're useless," the old ghost rasped. "Useless." Map slumped back in his folding chair, half-unseen once more.
The magician stared for a moment. "Map," he whispered, "Map what is it? Where's she gone?"
"You really don't know?" the ghost asked, incredulous, "London, my London, she's--"
The room went dark. Whatever that ghostlight had been, it had left in a hurry. John shot to his feet and grabbed the door handle. Of course, it was locked. He was scrambling for a pry bar or something like it when the ghostlight returned. Except it had gone red.
As red as the thing in the Eye.
"London's gone," said Map, his half-visible appearance the colour of old, dried blood in the red ghostlight. "It's gone to Dark Side."
Constantine spat out his cigarette as he got hold of a crowbar from one corner of the room and began working at the door. Maybe the redness was making it hot in here. Probably just the adrenaline. Either way, he was sweating. Map, he realized, may have just become the worst part of London to be around. "Dark Side, eh? What's that, then?" grunted the magician as he worked at the door, leaving long scratches in the surface around the handle and not much else.
"London. She told me the equation, John. And it's true. God help me, it's true," said Map as he leaned closer, seeming to speak softly in his ear. "You are a man of knowledge, John. But Dark Side has no need for your knowledge," Map whispered softly, resigned, "You're a man of magic, John. There... there is no magic but Dark Side." Ghostly tears ran down Map's face, like bleeding shadows, "You're alone, John. But. But no one is alone in Dark Side."
Giving up on the crowbar, John did his best to ignore Map while he tried in vain to look for something that might be better at breaking through the metal door.
"There's no more life," Map said, stepping away from Constantine, "No more life but death for Dark Side. It wants you to submit, John."
"Oh?" said the magician as he lit up a new cigarette. "Well, can you tell your invisible friend that I'm not interested?"
"It wants you, John. Dark Side wants you. And if you don't submit to it, it's going to take you like it took me. Submit, John. While you have a choice."
The man laughed bitterly and took a drag from his cigarette, "I don't care what it wants, Map. Why not 'take' me and be done with it?" Summoning all the bravado he felt he had in him, he grinned and exhaled smoke from his nostrils, "Or can't it do it?" He leaned closer to the ghost, his face growing cold as he pushed it toward the old, dead man. "What's your game, Map?"
"All is one in Dark Side," answered Map simply, his brow furrowing, "I just thought you might like one last choice, is all," bemoaned the dead man.
The red grew bolder, hurting John's eyes and causing him to shrink down, "Map, just let me out of here," he wheezed, the red light making his head throb.
"I can't." Map slumped back down on the chair and opened his mouth.
And Truth flowed out of it.
LONELINESS + ALIENATION +
Something True wrapped around a part of his mind, strangling everything else.
FEAR + DESPAIR +
Fear welled up in Constantine as his mind blossomed like it never had before, casting him outside his body and showing him the whole of Creation.
SELF-WORTH ÷ MOCKERY ÷ CONDEMNATION ÷
And it was all bullshit. His high aspirations were worthless. All the lives of everyone he'd helped or hurt, just emptiness and lies.
MISUNDERSTANDING x GUILT x SHAME x
There was only emptiness.
FAILURE x JUDGEMENT
As the Truths danced through his mind, he could feel them leaving long trails of freedom along his senses.
N=Y WHERE Y=HOPE AND N=FOLLY
Freedom from himself. From consequence and guilt. Everything would be allowed to him and everything was justified.
LOVE=LIES LIFE=DEATH
Before Map--or the thing speaking through him--could finish, Constantine's mouth went slack and his cigarette fell from his lips, the sudden change and his old smoker's instinct to pick it up forcing him back to existence as usual. As he bent to pick it up, he felt his mind slip out of the chokehold the bizarre math was having on him. And before the equation could finish, another truth hit him and he smirked a little.
SELF=D--
"Piss off," John snapped at Map, cutting the ghost off as he snubbed his cigarette out on the palm of his hand, the pain fueling the underwords and magic symbols he imagined into the room.
The ghost disappeared mid-sentence, leaving the room lightless and his hand hurting like Hell. But he'd felt worse. "Life is empty, meaningless and lonely, huh?" said the man to the dark room as he held up his lighter and looked for the door handle. Checking it, he found it unlocked. He smiled a bit and nudged the door open with his foot. "Good try, squire. But I already knew that."
If that was the best this "Dark Side" had on offer, Constantine became a lot more confident about his situation. Stepping out into the tunnel, he took another drag from his cigarette and began walking toward the nearest tube station. Looking up further up from the maintenance walkway, though, the confidence fell out of him. The tunnel was blocked by a clutch of bodies, their eyes giving off that same horrible redness as the Dark Side entity seemed so fond of. The group was still. Silent. He could hear their breath coming out in unison. In and out, echoing in the empty tubeway. They were behind him as well, he saw with half a look. He took another drag from his cigarette and braced himself as best he could.
"Alright," he spat toward the crowd, gesturing forcefully in their directions, "One more step and I'll banish every last one of you to the deepest fucking place you can think of!" It was a bluff. But if this thing knew his reputation there was a chance Constantine might make it out of London alive. He gestured a few more times, like he was weaving a spell or something. Things he'd seen Tim do a while back. Things that had looked damned impressive to Constantine. A magician he was, a merlin he absolutely was not. But if you could make someone think you were, it was just as good.
ENOUGH, the crowds said with one voice, all of them taking a step toward him in unison; a single beast with a thousand bodies. For a moment, they just glowered at him, this single-minded clutch of people, a leering, drooling hate machine without even the pretension of some higher purpose. They hated him. It hated him.
Constantine looked between the two mobs, hungry for hatred; felt all those old ghosts he dragged with him rising up behind the crowds. He could smell the hate growing in the air as this Dark Side turned its full attention to this formerly-abandoned stretch of tube. Probably meant that it'd probably got the rest of London already. Which was why it had Map. John sighed and took one last drag from his cigarette. Figured it'd end like this. He was ashamed of the sudden, instinctive hope that the thing took him into itself instead of just stomping him to death.
Too many things waiting down there.
And the crowds silent and controlled, organs in a single impossible body, charged toward him, filling the tube with the sound of a thousand running feet and the buzz of a thousand hearts humming with hate.
There was a sickening lurch and everything went sideways.
The shadows were filled with screams and everything tasted like desperation and fear. The not-London's red eyes burned like fire as the people comprising it stumbled in their tracks and fell to the ground, screaming and clawing at themselves. He couldn't understand what they were saying, but he could almost see the words coming out of their mouths, indecipherable black text on a white background limned in black that spilled out of their mouths. Massive incomprehensible symbols in red and yellow as they spasmed and their colours bled into one another. The red glow turned into dots then spheres then wasn't anything.
It was all uncomfortably like going crazy again.
John vomited words he couldn't read and everything was drifting sickeningly all around him before a pair of hands grasped his shoulders. "Come on," said an unfamiliar voice as the hands urged John away, something in the proximity of those hands and the person attached to them made all the strangeness more bearable. "Sorry for the... things," the voice continued as it and John shouldered their way through the throng of writhing people who alternately begged for something and others that, despite their wild spasming, seemed in control of their brains at least.
"Die," they all said. "Die for Darkseid."
On the far side of the crowd, John's saviour was coming more into focus and lifting him out of the railway onto the platform. Once she'd joined Constantine, the girl--he saw it was a girl now, dark-skinned, tall but young-looking, with a distinctly American sort of accent--said, "Look, not to be trite, but come with me if you want to live." The girl had wild grey hair and wide eyes that never seemed to settle on a colour. She wore a coat with a shifting and frankly psychedelic pattern of circles and dots on it that threatened to send John off to vomit again.
John took his eyes off it and followed the kid as best he could on his shaking legs, trying to shake it all off. "Thanks," he finally said as they climbed the stairs out of the tube station.
Outside, London was a nightmare version of itself, smoking rubble everywhere, a pile of burning bodies lay on a roundabout while men and women in pointed hats threw still-living bodies on the fire. Smoke and the screams of the dying floated up into a sky gone as red as the Eye. Crashed cars were being shaped by a swarm of red-eyed people into what crudely resembled a person. The air was thick with heat and fear. A deep, rumbling, inhuman voice repeated endlessly from speakers, "Die for Darkseid. Embrace Anti-Life. Anti-Life justifies your hate. Anti-Life justifies your actions. All is justified in Anti-Life." A crowd of people were herding a smaller crowd into a massive, ugly metal box that seemed to have been dropped into the center of the block, having crushed the space's previous occupant into naught but mortar and dust. Over the crowds of lock-stepped people, the familiar cameras looked on, their lenses holding that same malevolent glow as all the other eyes in London.
"Don't thank me, Constantine," the girl said as the two of them moved toward an old American muscle car. She looked away and got in the driver's side.
The magician thought better of asking after the car and, fighting years of instinct, went in on the wrong side. The idea of getting in on what felt like the driver's side added to the strange sensation the world seemed to be pouring into him. One more thing to keep him off-balance. "So which one of your friends did I wreck?" asked the magician as he buckled in and locked the door, as if that would do a single thing against a thousand angry hands.
"None of them, thankfully," she replied, "I wrote a story once where we met. It never really happened, but it still did." Turning her gaze to him for a moment, "Look, I've got to get out of here. If you want to thank me, how about you... I don't know... magic something so this thing doesn't catch everyone's attention when I start it?" The girl was a bit mad, from the sound. And believed his reputation. Seemed to be counting on it.
John just shrugged. He wasn't one of those tights-wearing magicians, after all. Or even the most impressive part of the Trenchcoat Brigade, come down to it.
"Great," she huffed as she put the keys in the ignition.
Just as she turned it, there was an explosion from the giant metal box as two figures leaped out of it; Knight and Page, London's answer to Batman and Robin. Why anyone outside of the States would want to dress in tights and punch people in the face was beyond Constantine. Especially if they were going to try and emulate a headcase like the Batman.
But heroes' escape from the box seemed to cover John and the American's so his estimation of them went up a lot. As he and the girl sped away, he saw a woman in red and a younger woman with wild hair that seemed to have a mind of its own--both grinning like ghouls--descend upon the pair. He didn't see Crimson Fox sink her claws into the Knight because Page and the new Godiva were blocking the sight. But he saw that poor girl Page fighting the hair around her neck.
Two more gone to save John Constantine. He had to wonder why the girl had saved him and not them. They probably had a million dollars worth of computers and tools and contacts all over the world who were experts at all this madness. Probably knew Doctor Fate or one of those other magic berks in tights. Fuck, maybe they knew Zee. There was a heady sensation as the world went all perpendicular again and John was sitting on the other side of the car, the girl and the steering wheel having apparently gone over to their proper side. Lit up a cigarette as the girl dodged the car around a group of people carrying a man in a shiny vinyl approximation of a Nazi uniform on a sedan chair that used to be a small Fiat.
"Shit," said the girl as she laid on the gas. "We need to get out of here, Constantine. Now. Can you get us a teleport or translocation or something?"
"What are you talking about, girl? I'm not one of those flashy Yank magicians who make shit disappear behind a mirror." he spat, a sudden prickling feeling on the back of his neck let him know he was Seen. By something that didn't intend good things for him.
"That feeling?" the girl said, looking over at him, "That's Vundabar noticing us, John," she snapped, "That feeling is him seeing that you aren't a part of their system yet and they are going to catch up with us and find us and then I won't be able to help you because you'll be... fuck it." The world outside the car went strange, the world boiled down to four colours and madness, his thoughts almost visible. He saw a shadow, ever-shifting and luminous, over the world. Looking up at its source, he made out four arches. The world shifted itself again and he saw two sets of fingers steepled around the whole of Creation. His cigarette fell out of his mouth, leaving a small burn on his coat before it fell to the floor of the car, smoking weakly upward.
"Yeah," she said, "That's what I said, too."
"What is it?" asked the magician, galled that he didn't know. "How do I fight it?"
"There was a war in Heaven, Constantine. The new gods fought it out in deep space." Shifting into a higher gear, she looked sidelong at the magician as she navigated through the mad un-streets, "Darkseid won. He's come for freedom. All of it."
"You know so much, ferrygirl," he said, eyes transfixed on the fingers that were slowly shifting, moving to wrap around the world, "You know I'm not a bloody merlin. What am I supposed to do against space gods?"
"I don't know," she said under her breath, "I'm getting out before those hands close up, Constantine. Just wanted to give you half a chance to do something. You saved the world once and were the only person I could think of."
"Who are you, mad girl? And why can't you take me where you're from?"
"I'm Shade, Constantine. I'm sorry, but I'm going back to the Meta-place where I'm from before this world seals me off from it. Before Dark Side seals off everything that isn't itself. I'd take you, but..." Shade turned sharply and slammed the brakes, the madness outside hardening itself back into the world, the car buried nose-deep in a deep, muddy mire. "My Madness Vest can only take one being back to the higher places in the Meta dimension. Even if I could take you, when you got there you'd cease to exist. I'm sorry." Looking to the man, she smiled, "You were always a favourite of mine, John." The thing from the Meta-places offered him a sympathetic smile and tossed a pack of cigarettes into his lap, "Got you as far as I could. Good luck."
The magician wasn't sure where the bizarre-looking gun came from. But before he could stop her, the muzzle was under her chin.
It wasn't the first time he'd seen someone kill themselves. Nor the messiest. But it was never something he got used to. And something he tried never to look away from. Suicide was a horror he couldn't disrespect or fight most times. So he shook his head and lit up.
But there was a new buzzing in the ozone-and-gore smelling car. That queasy feeling of externalized madness. Squinting, he looked at the mass of meat and blood.
And for a moment, he could only watch as something he couldn't name started drifting up from the gaping parody of flesh that used to be the back of his ersatz escort's head. He felt something happening. Felt that something reaching upward through the gaps in the dark god's grasp. "Sorry, mate," he whispered to the would-be ascendant as he pressed his fingers into the blood spattering the ceiling of the car, quickly smearing a few symbols on the ceiling of the car. Then on the windows. And then a circular symbol on his brow.
He swore he could feel the thing moaning in the air as it slid along the windows, looking for a way out. Wards kept the madness-thing from leaving. "Shade," he said grimly, "Nowhere else to go, mate. Either we both die in here or you get in and we'll see what we can do together."
There was a moment's indecision before the thing, with a bizarre feeling, climbed into his head.
The world in Constantine's mind exploded.
-----
A long way away, on another continent, the dark-haired girl touched the tire tracks the fat nazi fetishist had said belonged to John Constantine. A smile that wasn't her own crossed her face. And she began running along the tires' path, the spear humming with the promise of conquest, of subjugation and the dark satisfaction of trussing up her quarry. The spear wove in and out of the paper-thin stuff this low world's creatures called Reality, leaving tiny punctures in its structure. The synchronicity had gone, leaving in its place a screaming mass of ideas and dangling plot threads that begged for release or closure.
The girl laughed and wrapped them around her lance before plunging it straight into their center, riding their howls toward her quarry as the Female Furies rode their own unnatural dog-mounts.
-----
The moon had risen in the red sky, a malevolent white eye, by the time he woke back up, his mouth coated in a thin sticky feeling and his cheeks covered in thin, dried drool. The interior of the car looked a mess and so did his clothes, covered in blood and gore. The thing in his head, Shade, it must have made him seize. He could barely feel it there, shuddering in a deep corner of his mind to hide from the world and from the things in John's mind.
Couldn't blame it. It was all Constantine could do to not do the same.
He tried to reach back and touch the thing, but the contact between his conscious mind and the Meta Thing that had been Shade threatened to make him seize again, his eyes vomiting strange and contradictory information into his mind's eye and deeper in, leaving a sticky film of nausea and ozone coating his thoughts.
With a grunt, John shouldered the door open, wiping at his face as he took in his surroundings. Fuck. Maybe Shade actually did know a little about John because he knew this swamp too well. It was a swamp he'd come to to summon up aid against whatever it was that had folded up a few different universes. Where he'd started all the shit that got Giovanni Zatara and others burnt up. "Swampy?" he asked, feeling around for the touches of Other-Dimensionality that the Plant Elemental gave off where he was manifesting. Taking a couple steps into the stagnant waters, he cupped his hands around his mouth, "Alec!"
The swamp was just a swamp. He couldn't feel anything else there. Couldn't feel that little tickle of Otherness. Cursing under his breath, he lit up a cigarette and scowled at the deep darkness.
Just about to turn away, he heard a sound. Might have mistaken it for an animal, but there was a desperation about it, an edge to it almost like a voice. It wasn't the Dark Side thing, he could guess that much. It was too damn loud to try subtlety. Too sure of itself. And if he couldn't find the swamp thing, he didn't have anyone around who might be able to get between him and whatever Dark Side was.
He heard the sound again. A strained thing, not far away. Female. Hurting.
Constantine was sure he should run away from it, but he knew the voice. Taking a long drag from his cigarette and exhaling a plume of smoke, he waded deeper into the cold, rust-coloured swamp, the moon providing just enough light to remind him how little he wanted to see the things that might still be alive in this swamp without its master's guiding influence.
And there, on a mound of plants, was something that might, once, have been Tefé Holland. Not that he would have been able to tell without the bright white hair coming out of her head. The rest of her, though, seemed to be rotted off. And the parts that had not rotted off yet were well on their way. Even through the smell of dead plant and swamp, he could not fail to notice the sick almost stench of rotted flesh.
"Tefé," he whispered to what was left of his almost-daughter, climbing onto the mound of plants with her. "Tefé, what's done this to you?"
She was the flesh elemental, just as her proper father, the one who'd been driving his body at the time, was the plant elemental. If this thing could take either of them... He fought not to panic. A little decorum for the dying.
"John," Tefé rasped, trying and failing to lift her head off the ground to turn her pus-coloured eyes to him. "It's... gone," she coughed out, bringing up more than a little blood with it, "The... Red. ...Gone." Lifting up a hand to him, she tried to import the urgency of the words. When he took her hand in his, her skin ripped open like a grape, putrescent muscle oozing out onto Constantine's hand.
He remained still. Been covered in worse in his time, after all.
"Falling... apart..." she wheezed. As if he needed telling. The Red, the Flesh Elemental Plane, was gone. Like the Meta Place. The Green, too, most likely.
Constantine reached down to brush some hair from her face, watching the girl rot away before his eyes. A chunk of flesh and her wet hair came away with his hand. If Tefé noticed, she didn't show it. With the blood around her gangrenous lips, he imagined she was in more pain than even an Elemental could manage. "Tefé, girl, I need your help," he whispered, "What did this? I'm out of my element... this isn't right! I know what things are. Tefé, you're the big fucking business. What can I do?"
Because those things had come for his head, his soul and, if his reluctant hitchhiker was right, his freedom. But no Earthly demon had any of them yet. Constantine wasn't about to let that change because some new gods he hadn't planned for popped up.
He was tired of running.
"Don't... know..." replied Tefé as her left eye began leaking down the side of her cheek, the friction from the rotted sludge running down the side of her head splitting the thin flesh there and letting the fat in her cheek begin draining out her temple, one bloody chunk at a time, "Magic?" she finally hissed.
"Magic?" repeated Constantine, biting down an urge to shake the decaying elemental, "Be more specific, girl!"
Tefé opened her mouth to reply when a pair of sneaker-clad feet landed on her head, popping it like an over-ripe melon, splattering Constantine with gangrenous meat and rotted, stagnant blood.
The magician stared at the feet dumbly for a moment before he looked up at their owner.
There was only time for a single thought before the butt of a shining metal lance caught him in the temple.
Gemma?