Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Author Note: Set after episode 5x04 'Haunted.'

VERY SPECIFIC

Thea got his card from Laurel. She turned it over a couple of times. Exorcist, Demonologist, and Master of the Dark Arts. Yeah, she'd definitely call that number before she called Malcolm. John Constantine was able to join a body and soul together, something that should have been impossible. But he'd done it, as a favor to Ollie.

He'd been flippant and flirty but Thea had seen the look in his eye when he'd been talking to Ollie before leaving, like a warning, like there was a lot of experiences packed into his life. Maybe he wasn't so young. Face value was turning out to be a really dangerous idea.

Like she didn't look like a masked vigilante with a bloodlust that was not disappearing without blood on her hands or Damian Darkh's creepy lifedrain powers shorting out when he touched her. And yeah, Thea got that the more she tried to harness that particular cure, the more he was going to realize that she was a serious kink in his thirsty plans and would do something to unkink her.

So Thea holed up one night, when she wasn't campaigning with Ollie or on a date with Alex and called the number on the card.

"Hello?"

The accent and voice were familiar. It was friendly but not totally warm. Right, he didn't know the number.

"Hi, John? It's Thea, Oliver Queen's sister."

"Thea, I remember. You and Star City miss me already?"

His tone was warming up a little but it was like he was waiting too. Right, he probably got called a lot about bad news that people wanted him to fix.

"Oliver's fine. We all are. He doesn't know I'm calling you actually."

"Oh really? A tip, love, secrets among vigilantes never ends well."

Yeah, secrets. Like actual parentage and double-lives. Sometimes the bitterness and anger Thea still felt about all of that bubbled to the surface as fiercely as anything the Pit had amped up in her, in Sara. That was the point.

"Yeah, what do you know about Lazarus Pits?"

It turned out that John knew about the League of Assassins – he's done his best to avoid them and Ra's al Ghul, apparently the immortal vibe from Ra's had always set John's teeth on edge ("and the man held a grudge, that's all I'm saying."). He also knew Damian Darhk and something about Malcolm, of course he did. Malcolm was so good at making enemies.

"FYI, he's my dad."

"Interesting family forest you've got there."

Considering the different directions everything had taken since Thea's assumptions about her own family had been blown apart, actual trees with all their branches and roots was a way appropriate metaphor.

So John also knew about the Lazarus Pit and all its side-effects. Thea couldn't tell where John was as he spoke to her. He was moving and there was the occasional car speeding past but that was all she got. He didn't seem to be keeping his voice down or trying for anywhere private though.

"Merlyn's right, putting down people is the easy way to slake that bloodlust. Pretty sure a few serial killers the media loves might have Lazarus in their veins."

Thea's heart plummeted and she tensed her jaw. When Malcolm had handed her those files, telling her to kill bad people to keep herself from getting consumed, this was what she'd been reacting against - becoming someone who didn't kill to defend but who eagerly murdered. The thought was never far from her mind now, as her fury and need to take it out on everyone and everything ebbed and flowed and grew.

It was going to keep growing and she was going to need to do something, anything, to sate it. Before she hurt more people. Before she couldn't stop.

She'd seen what'd happened to Sara.

"Damian Darhk's draining didn't work on you," John was musing in her ear. "I wish I'd seen that."

Darkh had looked surprised and then breathless, confused by his own physical reaction as Thea had made her escape, confused and breathless herself. She remembered feeling elated though, not just battle-high or the bloodlust she'd become too used to but a feeling of something's different, something's good. She could fight and trust her own movements again.

"There's no guarantees, Thea. Especially not in this line of work."

But he didn't say 'no' to looking into things for her. He also wouldn't agree not to tell Ollie if he was asked straight out. For someone who looked and acted like normal expectations didn't apply to him, he was big on truth.

"It's a good weapon."

Thea tucked his business card into her wallet, behind a bunch of receipts and store cards.

John called her a few weeks later. She was toweling her hair dry, thinking about how only that day she'd nearly stabbed someone with a spoon handle, how it'd felt in the moment.

"You strike me as the kind of girl who gets impatient with radio silence."

There was a click and Thea knew that sound anywhere, "God, I really want a cigarette."

John laughed, the sound dry like kicking up old leaves. "It's outside or nothing in England now, every bar, restaurant and entertainment lodging is smoke free."

Was that where he was? Thea could make out footsteps, and rain? Yeah, that could be England, "Land of the free, John."

"Mmm, that's what the other side of the veil says too. There's a lack of answers on my end right now, seeing as I've been called in for something in New Orleans. How's the urges?"

Thea closed her eyes, "Malcolm keeps bringing me files."

"They're hard to resist."

He didn't tell her to keep trying or to give in. But what if he spoke to Oliver for some reason? "If Oliver finds out-."

"And he will, things work in circles and the Queen family is an ouroboros."

There was a little tingle down Thea's spine, "Have you been looking us up?"

"Here and there. It's good to know where I'm dabbling, in case of fire break glass and all that."

Thea's fist was clenched tight enough to draw blood and it felt good, "Which side of the veil have you been looking?"

There was a pause like an outtake of breath and smoke. And then, then, "That's the question, isn't it? And I know, love, it's not an answer. On purpose, that. You'll learn, especially with how close to the veil you are at the moment."

Thea asked John more than once how he'd met Oliver but John wouldn't ever say, only that he and Oliver had met years before and that John had owed Oliver as a result, hence Oliver calling him in to help Sara. The years Oliver had spent away from Star City seemed to grow bigger and full of more crazy impossibilities than the shelf of old novels that Thea still hadn't thrown out.

Oliver was back, he was here. They were the only Queen blood left. But sometimes he was still the guy who'd arrived back from a shipwreck; present but really not, Oliver but someone else. It'd only made everything worse at the time – the weird disconnect between Oliver and everyone, Thea's feelings about him being back, about his grave always having been empty in the first place. Now, thinking about it, seeing that look on his face again, made everything in her blood worse and her stomach full of bile.

One day, she got a letter in the mail. Actually it was a slip of paper that definitely smelled like cigarettes. John was so taunting her. There were runes on it too. Thea ran her thumb over them and began to memorize the shapes. It made something settle in her, not everything but something. It was a total relief, even if it was just a single inch away from the cliff edge.

She kept the paper on her and ran over the runes in her mind. She was probably fooling herself, she didn't stop.

She called John when she spotted a rune in something Felicity had hacked, a rune that looked like it was from the string that John had sent her. He called her back with stories of a recent trip to New Zealand and how difficult it was to get a straight answer from an angel.

He mentioned something about a driver, Chas.

"Like our John is for Oliver?"

John conceded, "They could tell a lot of stories, yeah."

Chas seemed like a very specific kind of yummy too. He sounded it when Thea happened to hear him talking while John called her during a car journey. She told John, an implication hanging in her words. He and Chas did spend a lot of time together. John didn't sound shocked at all, it was more nostalgic than anything else, his words heavy with experience.

"Some things are more important, love."

"You do that a lot."

Thea startled and looked at Alex. He nodded to her fingers where she was tracing something over and over again across the tablecloth. She wasn't exactly surprised though she did still her fingers and then fold them up in her lap.

"Yeah, it..calms me? Something I'm trying out."

Alex nodded at that, probably remembering the guy Thea had assaulted when he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Calm was good. It wasn't enough but it was good.

John still didn't have any answers.

"Except for Darhk and he's no answer at all."

Yeah. And Malcolm was pretty set on getting Darhk all tied up and ready for Thea to feed off of. That sounded good to Thea but it wasn't going to work long-term. No way. Darhk was creepy and powerful and look at what he'd done to Andy Diggle. Thea was down with the idea of keeping Darhk off the streets and useful in stopping her urges but yeah, this had bad idea written all over it, making her feel sicker than her blood did. She'd learned her lesson with Sara.

There had to be a way to use him though, to use him and somehow get him away from Star City and stopped for good.

"Thea?"

And she was distracted again. She smiled apologetically, determined to concentrate again on something normal and complicated like dating her brother's campaign manager. She liked Alex a lot, the fun they had together, getting to completely leave Speedy behind for a refreshing while whenever she was with him. It was a great recharge. Her fingers traced ruins once more, fighting her blood.

Malcolm knew she was in contact with John. When he turned up with more files for her to look at, to use as a way to dampen her bloodlust, he eyed her for a while. Thea read the files so that she didn't have to deal with the fisheye until he spoke.

"John Constantine."

Thea didn't bother flicking a glance at him, she definitely didn't change her body language even a hair, though her anger was rising dangerously, always dangerously, "Old friend of Oliver's, something to do with supernatural investigations."

"Friend of yours too."

"We talk, he's looking into the Lazarus Pit for me. Stop trying to bug my phone."

Malcolm's gaze didn't leave her. Thea refused to give him what he wanted.

John turned up in Star City again – there was a very cursed artifact, nothing to do with Darhk weirdly, and John was fighting to stop it from 'making everything here worse'. He grinned at Thea.

"And I'm told there's something to be said for the land of the free."

Thea grinned back, "How's it fit?"

Felicity was looking between them with a grin while Olive was not looking angry exactly, more amused and sort of disbelieving in a 'this is not happening' kind of way. Thea shrugged a little at her brother as John took a phonecall.

"Specific kind of yummy."

"Still don't want to hear that, Thea."

Felicity nudged her when Diggle called Oliver over to check something on a screen. "Any particular reason why you two are bantering like rock stars?"

Thea could lie – she was pretty good at it. But instead she said, "He's a good listener."

He was. It was a different kind of recharge, this time intertwined with her life as Speedy. Like spending time with Alex, Thea had weirdly come to rely on her conversations with John, getting to talk to someone outside of everything who had such a different perspective but who knew about her double-life. It wasn't shots and calling her dealer so Thea was naming it a win. Seeing as John called her just as often, she got the feeling he maybe relied on it too. What was there to lie about?

Felicity waggled eyebrows but looked pleased and her smile was warm and understanding, "Listening's good."

"It really is."

It was good to work with John again; he was impenetrably British to everyone except Thea who got jokes nobody else did and he asked for coffee and cigarettes, still in that old suit and trenchcoat. His voice was different to Star City but familiar to Thea and she could use it. She couldn't trick her blood for long but she could switch it up, give it something of what it wanted. She worked out a lot; she thought about joining an MMA class but knew it would only lead to bloody knockouts and worse. She was still tempted though.

The artifact ended up split in two but John got both pieces locked up and cast a spell on them. Thea's skin tingled in the presence of his spellwork – she hadn't noticed before when John had reunited Sara's body and soul, because she'd been distracted by Sara's resurrection probably or maybe it hadn't been the same kind of magic. Whatever, now maybe it was because of her blood, the remains of the Pit and how much more it was affecting her. It was something that wasn't the rage and hunger for violence though so she held onto it. John slid her a look that no one else noticed.

When he had to leave, Thea volunteered to walk him out. When they were outside, away from any cameras, Thea brushed a kiss to the corner of his lips. The magic tingled through her intensely just for a second. She rocked back on her heels.

"You know one addiction for another's not a good thing I'm told," John stated, his eyes bluer than Thea remembered.

She shrugged a shoulder up, "Felt good though. Can you look into it?"

John nodded. "It's something, isn't it?"

Yep. "Oh and Malcolm's probably going to stalk you and ask you about your intentions towards me, Ollie too probably."

John sank his hands into his trenchcoat pockets, "Wouldn't be the first time my intentions have been questioned, especially towards a pretty girl."

"It's either that or Malcolm'll want you to direct me towards some nice murders for my blood."

John lit up a cigarette and handed her a couple, "Finger pleasures, the smell might be a good distraction too."

So he wasn't bothered about the head of the League of Assassins trailing him or the Green Arrow getting him in his sights. Stupid or prepared? Could be both. Thea was pretty sure she wanted to see what John's magic could do to Malcolm. She pocketed the cigarettes and angled her voice.

"So is Chas coming to pick you up?"

John blew out smoke in distinctly unpretty shapes but didn't actually raise any objections. So Thea stayed right where she was, her fingers tapping out runes against her thigh, her blood simmering and her need to strike hissing, her revulsion at what she'd done and could do again background noise for now. She didn't have to explain anything to John or Chas.

Thea mailed John a lighter she found in a thrift shop. It was blue and silver.

He sent her a charm like a rune to wear in her hair or stick on a keychain. There was a tingle to it just like his magic. Yes. Thea wore it in her hair and on her keychain sometimes too; she liked mixing it up.

Alex asked her about it – "A friend got it for me, they travel a lot and their job is sort of non-existent so..." – while Ollie definitely knew where it'd come from. He was eying Thea like maybe they needed to have a brother-sister talk. Oh God no and he was hardly one to talk. Felicity pointed that out to him which seemed to help for now.

There were a lot of 'for nows' in Thea's life and eventually the Pit in her blood was going to catch up. Like she was the only one on Team Arrow with that stamped across her forehead. Andy was still locked up in the cave, Laurel still went to alcoholic anonymous meetings, her dad was still working for Darhk and Ollie hadn't popped the question yet. So yeah, so what?

Thea had this, she did. She had help.

She went out to see a movie with Alex and kissed him after grabbing take-out on the way home. She got a message to say that Black Canary and Spartan were checking something out and she was on standby for now. She'd signed up for MMA later that week. Bad idea. She called John. Whenever he didn't answer, Chas did. He was a good listener too and he knew things, her problem was familiar. It was another relief.

"End of the world, you two. When Oliver finds out," John warned them with a grin that said he'd had those kinds of conversations before with someone's brother, even if all Thea and Chas did was talk.

No, not the world but the end of something. It had to be. Thea kept Malcolm's files and always, always was aware of compulsion and saying 'no' and the trouble of resistance, the need to strike and never stop. She wrapped her fingers around a handmade rune and swallowed so much bile. Her hands never stayed still.

-the end