(no subject)

[dangeroushabits.livejournal.com]

Setting: Manor Garden Deck
Date: 26th Dec. 1999, 11 pm
Status: Private (John and Ellie)
Summary: An old acquaintance is renewed.



Considering what was scheduled for the next day, John should really have been sleeping. But an hour spent in the clutches of acute insomnia had convinced him it was a pointless effort, so instead he was standing on the deck behind the Manor, smoking a cigarette and contemplating recent events and the ordeal ahead.

The latter might not have been such a discouraging prospect if the former hadn't been littered with assorted miscalculations and blindsidings on his part--stupid shit both major and minor for which he had no excuse, except the most obvious and unsettling.

Face it, Constantine: you're losing your edge.

The John Constantine of ten years ago--before the lung cancer, or Kit, or Crowley--would never have overlooked the trade value of that stupid spell. He'd never have got caught in a simple act of vandalism, or given away something worth ten thousand quid without knowing what it was first. He wouldn't have let Belial catch him completely off-guard, either, nor casually acknowledged that he owed him a debt.

He glanced down at the watch that he was still wearing, as per Crowley's request. John-the-younger sure as hell wouldn't have trusted a gift given to him by a demon, especially one that came with undisclosed fine print.

He sighed, crossing his arms on the cold wrought-iron railing. No, his younger self wouldn't be so careless, or so trusting, or so...what was the word...honorable? And he never would have second-guessed himself like this. He'd have ploughed ahead like nothing could possibly go wrong, looked out for number one first and foremost, manipulated, blackmailed or bought everybody in sight to get what he needed or wanted, and piddling things like friendship or simple decency could go hang if they got in the way.

John wasn't especially sorry to see him go. He hadn't liked that fellow very much even at the time, and he liked him even less in retrospect. He'd been selfish and short-sighted and occasionally downright cruel. The world was better off without him. But...and this was his dilemma...he'd been damn good at the game of survival. And though simply continuing to breathe no longer seemed like quite enough, it was sort of a prerequisite for everything else.

He shivered. The chill of the late December night penetrated quicker and more deeply now than it had in the old days. It was making his ankle ache, too, though that had stopped hurting otherwise. He wondered if it would always be sensitive to the weather now. Little things, but they added up over time to a growing sense of obsolescence, of corners turned that couldn't be retraced.

He was only forty-six. That wasn't so old, was it, really? But he'd be dead and roasting six years since, if he were any kind of normal human being. Old mates and enemies were decades in their graves now, many of them sent there by or because of him. It astonished him mildly to think that the new millennium was just a few days away, and he might actually survive to see it. Didn't seem quite fair, somehow.

His thoughts kept turning back, as they had for the past week or so, to that mind-boggling encounter with Belial. It didn't bother him especially that he'd found himself responding to the kiss; Belial was the Lord of Seductions, for fuck's sake, he could inspire lust in a piece of solid granite if he tried hard enough. What bothered him was that it had left him aching, not for the Crown per se (who really wasn't his type even in the long-ago days when he'd briefly prowled that side of the fence; too skinny for one thing, and too enamored of his own drama for another,) but for somebody. Preferably someone completely unconnected to the Tadfield Manor crew, who didn't know or care about angels or demons or Apocalypse-level events, and who had no ulterior motives beyond having a good time and working off a little tension. In other words, someone who was...

"Hello, John."

John groaned under his breath and dropped his head down on his arms. ...not her. "Hullo, Ellie..."

Comments

[chantinellie.livejournal.com]

Ellie came up alongside the conjurer and leaned on the rail beside him, eyeing his shirt sleeves with a slightly raised eyebrow. "Bit cold to be out here dressed like that, don't you think?" She noted with interest the subliminated frustration the man radiated. Not too surprising, perhaps; the entire Manor was positively humming with suppressed sexual tension, but John usually managed not to let himself get caught up in that sort of thing. She had reason to know.

"Wasn't planning on staying long," John muttered, flicking his nearly-spent cigarette butt into the snow below. "Should have known you'd turn up sooner or later. Just about everybody else has."

"You could have told me what was going on here," Ellie said reproachfully.

John shook his head. "I figured you'd be better off staying out of it. Too many infernal types running around."

"And I'd have stayed out of it, if I had known," Ellie retorted, folding her arms over her breasts. "You might at least have thought twice about using one of my feathers in your little trinket. I felt it miles away."

John did something he'd very rarely done in their acquaintance: he dropped his eyes and looked quickly away as though chagrined. Very interesting. "Well, shit. Sorry about that, luv, I didn't reckon it'd be that strong." He looked back at her with a rueful half-smile. "Guess that means it worked though, eh?"

Ellie eyed her human acquaintance speculatively. "Apparently. I'd be interested in knowing who else is benefiting, however. Nobody I have reason to begrudge the protection, I hope?"

He shook his head. "Nah. I expect you can guess a few of 'em, the rest are nobody you know. Is it causing you problems though?" He rubbed at the back of his neck in that way he had when he was agitated about something. "'cause I can take it down. I, ah, figured I'd probably give you the other feather anyway, sooner or later. If you want it, I mean."

Ellie narrowed her eyes. "I'd like very much to have it." She hitched herself up on the railing, crossing her legs and balancing effortlessly in a way that would have been difficult and highly uncomfortable for a human. "But of course I have to ask the price first. Or have you taken up philanthropy in your old age? Aziraphale said you'd given him a book. Or are you just waiting until the right moment to call in the debt?" She schooled her voice carefully, leaving just enough edge to the question to convey her displeasure at that notion.

[dangeroushabits.livejournal.com]

John sighed deeply. Ellie knew him too well, and he'd given her no particular reason to believe him, but he was sick of the old games (and starting to shiver in earnest,) so he decided to try something novel and just tell the truth. "There's no debt. It was just an old book. Nothing magical or even especially useful, just something I thought he'd like." He turned to regard the succubus with a jaundiced eye. "And while we're on the subject of what ought and oughtn't to have been told, how come you never said you knew Aziraphale? Thought you had a mad-on at angels in general."

"The way you hate all demons?" Ellie countered. "Except me and this Crowley fellow, whom you've grown so attached to, rumor has it, you let him wear your beloved trench coat." Her perfect mouth curved into a wicked, scarlet smile. "And here I actually believed you when you said you were straight, all evidence to the contrary..."

"I am," John growled, silently composing something that resembled a prayer that she never heard about the Belial incident. "Crowley's a friend, like you or Chas or Never. And if by evidence, you mean the fact that I keep turning you down, you know perfectly well that's a load of codswallop. It's not that I'm not tempted," he added pointedly. He was tempted now, in fact. Just watching her sit there in her skin-tight outfit, all careless grace and curves and doing nothing especially seductive, was enough to make all his vitals spike sharply. "I just know better, that's all. And that's all about it. Next subject." The last thing he or Crowley needed was a troublemaking succubus spreading wild rumors about them.

[chantinellie.livejournal.com]

Ellie debated asking if she could borrow the trench, just to highlight how unalike she thought those relationships were. But she let it pass; it was much more fun to needle John about his mule-like stubbornness in refusing her advances. Unlike her abortive liaison with Belial, the thought of which still made her face sting, she found John's reluctance rather amusing; it was so earnest and rational, and so utterly ill-founded. "Oh, come on, John, you don't really think I'd try to weasel out of my debt with one roll in the hay?" She leaned toward him, displaying her generous décolletage to its best advantage. "I know the rules better than that..."

"Yeah, I know you do," John said sardonically, lighting a fresh cigarette. "And you know plenty of ways to make a man forget a debt or anything else but what you want him to remember, too, don't you luv? Thanks, but you know my answer."

Ellie pouted. John wasn't remarkably good-looking as mortal men went, and he certainly didn't hold a candle to darkly beautiful Belial or to comely young Adam. But he could be fairly categorized as ruggedly handsome, he had apparently kept the woman Kit happy between the sheets for some time, and the simple fact that he stayed so obstinately off-limits made him irresistibly attractive to her. She couldn't help it; it wasn't her fault that she'd spent six thousand years being conditioned to think of everything in terms of sex. Or that so few mortals had successfully resisted her lure...

Or that the one she really wanted had been so brutally taken away from her, but she didn't want to think about that right now. The night was relatively peaceful, and she was enjoying the conversation.

"Fine, be that way. Did your good friend Crowley tell you he'd cut a deal with Lord Belial in exchange for a certain spell with which you and I are both intimately familiar?" She was intensely curious about that. Part of her debt to John sprang from her own experience with that spell, and she wanted to know whether he would hold the other demon similarly indebted, or if his newfound generosity extended even further than she'd heard. He hadn't actually given her the instructions for how to cast the thing, and it would be decidedly annoying to see it passed around like Grandmother's cookie recipe.

[dangeroushabits.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, he told me," John replied tersely, wondering just how Ellie had come by that information. No need to tell her he was personally supervising the procedure. "Dunno what he traded it for, though. Not really my business. Or yours either," he added.

Ellie stared at him. "It doesn't bother you at all that he's handing free will over to one of the three who--"

"--ripped me open and parceled my soul out like it was a bag of Chinese takeaway?" he growled. Thanks for reminding me, darlin'. "Can't say I'm overly happy about it. But that was my own doing, and now Belial will have some idea what that felt like, won't he? Anyway," he added, still trying to convince himself that overlooking that opportunity hadn't been the single biggest and stupidest mistake of his life, "if he's out of the damnation business, then it can only work to my advantage, right? What do the rules say about souls claimed by non-aligned entities?"

"I don't know," Ellie said thoughtfully. "It hasn't come up in an awfully long time, and as I recall there was some conflict with the lesser deities and their Underworld dimensions. But that sort of thing was never really my department."

John shrugged. "Well. Anyway, if nothing else it'll hit your old boss where it hurts. That's always a plus."

[chantinellie.livejournal.com]

Ellie wasn't so sure. "It will infuriate him beyond anything that's happened since the Fall, I expect. His rage will shake the foundations of Hell. I'm not certain that's altogether a good thing." That was one thing about John she'd never understood: the man would go to the most absurd lengths to deliberately infuriate beings who could easily reduce him to a small heap of shredded tobacco and leather scraps.

"Well, we can hope he has a fatal aneurysm," John said philosophically.

"You're a very strange person, John."

"Aww, thank you luv, I try my best." The human smiled lopsidedly, straightening up. "Fuck, it's cold out here. I think I'm gonna go try to get some sleep. Watch yourself around the Manor, Ellie. Some of the shitheads wandering the joint will turn you in or smite you as soon as look at you."

"So people keep telling me." Ellie rolled her eyes. "Hm, you're shivering. Sure you don't want some company? I'll turn the defrost all the way up..." She fluttered her eyelashes, half-facetiously. There wasn't an innocent bone in her body, but she honestly thought it would do the man good to let his guard down and simply enjoy himself for a little while. (Wouldn't do her any harm, either.)

For a moment, she thought she saw a flicker of indecision in his tired blue eyes, but then he shook his head. "Some other time, maybe." He pushed himself away from the railing and ground his cigarette under his heel. "I'll see you around, Ellie."

She watched him amble back inside, hands in his pockets, and let her breath out in a puff of frustration when he was out of sight. Same old John, after all...if the fate of the world or his own fool neck's not at stake, he's not interested.