John Constantine was already screwed over the moment he was born.
Death was already present when a difficult labor led to his mother dying during childbirth. The ghost of the tragedy would linger for the rest of John's childhood.
He remembered a lot of running. Hiding. Lots of cigarette stubs littering the floor, dreading the creak of the front door opening when his father would come back from the pub. He remembered holding his breath under the covers in hopes his father wouldn't discover him awake. Only for that to not work anyway.
He couldn't tell anyone of the atrocities that went on under that damned slated, leaking roof of his home. His father would silence him with threats, of more harm coming where it came from. Of doing what John did to his mother. John knew his father was capable of fulfilling those threats. And worse. Killer. Killer. He was called that so often John wondered if it was his real name. If that was all he was in life.
At the age of five, Cheryl became what a mother should be. She did odd jobs, like cleaning the neighbor's home or walking a dog, to score enough quid to buy baby food when his father wouldn't bother to give her some for the grocery trips.
Oddly enough, Cheryl never got hit by his father.
As John grew older, he learned that bruises on Cheryl would raise questions: bruises on him would just be blamed on rough housing.
John wondered if he was better off abandoned. What life he could have led if he was ditched in a basket on someone's doorstep as a baby or just left out in the middle of an unknown town. But no, his father kept him as his personal punching bag and a portable ashtray.
John lost faith.
He didn't know what god to believe in. If there was a god. If his father's abuse to him was revenge for his mother's death. If this was just how it was meant to be by the way fate was twisted in. It was the absolute worst.
At thirteen, he remembered Cheryl leaving without a word during one night and the pain and fear that came from it. And how the abuse worsened.
From that moment on, he hated Cheryl. Betrayed by his own sister, abandoned by the only source of safety in this never ending storm. The pain hurt and hurt.
But as much as he said it, he could never truly hate her. Because had he had the same opportunity, he would have left too.
But he found a window. He could run away. His sister could do it. His sister did it.
And so did he.
A day before he turned fifteen, he stole all the quid his father used for the pub and stuffed it in a bag and a change of clothes and dried foods and a water. And he took the train to London.
From there, John considered that the starting of being alive again. Or survival turning into living. Starting over.
Home back in Liverpool isn't home to him. No. Not anymore. It never will be.
The world of the occult wasn't home in the traditional sense. There wasn't that nurture, that stability, that warmth of what a home should have. Of a family. God no. It was every person for themselves, nothing more, nothing less.
In the world of the occult, it didn't matter who you were and where you came from. Where you have the advantage. Where you can find a way. Where when you're in trouble, you can fight back. Where running away didn't cost you a heavy hand.
And John found home in it.
In the early 2000s, John forged a passport and crossed to the United States. He grew tired of the European air, tired of the cramped bricks of London.
Being in the States, his accent already gave people the fact that he wasn't from their coast. It was enough explanation that asking where he was from went unneeded.
His first good friend he made in the state of Georgia was an old Southern man named Jasper Hall.
Jasper was an easy man to joke with. He lacked the slurred accent of John's father. It was one of sharp wit and Southern charm, where Jasper could con the Devil himself with a firm handshake and a ear to ear smile.
It was difficult at first. John's cynicism kept a good barrier between being completely comfortable. People close to him died. It's just what happened. He had that effect on others. For a while, the hearty slaps on shoulders of praise made John jump. But Jasper wasn't a threat.
Jasper passed away a few years after John met him, cancer taking his life as quickly as it was diagnosed. Rather than leaving, John stayed with him until his very last days, where he quietly passed away in his sleep in an Atlanta hospital.
Old Man Jasper left John the Millhouse, the safest place in the universe. Protection runes from multiple cultures and languages were carved into the bricks behind the bookshelves, under the floorboards, etched in the doorways of each room. It became home, a physical home, something John never had.
The cruddy house in Liverpool didn't count.
Death was present everywhere John Constantine went.
(Quite literally. He supposed it came with the sight of being able to see spirits.)
Death was a feeling, like humidity in the air before the storm It weighed on your mind. Weighed on the atmosphere around the place where a tragedy happened.
The demons that were weak stood out like a sore thumb. You feel the vibes coming from a demon possessing a human. You feel like there's something in the equation that isn't adding up.
It came with being in the occult. It can be learned or it can be gained through a near death experience, but the latter comes with luck and even John strongly advises against it.
You just see. You just know. A demon that possesses humans is already strong on it's own. A ghost that possesses humans is rare, but possible. A ghost that possesses items is common.
There's the ghost of a memory, like smoke of a fire that is no longer burning. Like the echoes of shouts of a decades old battlefield. The after effects of trauma.
Death was present. It was silent, saying no words and expressing no feelings. Just as there was life, there was Death. Natural occurring forces of existence that couldn't be altered, couldn't be changed. Couldn't be prevented. Only it could be cheated if it weren't the care of humans, of mere mortals, but even that came at a cost.
John cheated Death more than a few times before. He was the lucky one. John knew Death doesn't discriminate.
What comes around goes around. For every time John cheated Death, it chose to take someone's life in return. And John didn't stop.
John was a con man, and he knew it. John knew Death had a particular fondness for killing the ones closest to him.
Or he supposed he had a hand in it too. He lied to Gary. He manipulated him. He hurt him.
No outcome would have been an easy one.
Chas used to have a home with his wife. He used to have his family, a pod of three.
Zed...Zed used to have something that she never considered home. At least that's what John pieced together from the brief sentences Zed has ever uttered in terms of where she came from.
He wasn't much about voicing his sentiments. But he knew that in the little things, it mattered. He could feel something being formed. Something new. Calm. Intimate. The bride before unbridled passion and other feelings he dared not to say.
The three of them were finding home in the dusty bedrooms of the Millhouse. They were finding home in each other. Each one was a maze full of dead ends, pathways, secrets. They were finding each other through the maze. Through the impending, looming fog of the Rising Darkness.
It was where he was now.
And that absolutely terrified him.