Neutral Omens

When Adam first entered, Raphael was sleeping. But the urgency of his voice and his aura were enough to rouse him. He cleared the chemicals from his body and ran to the hospital wordlessly.

As soon as he entered he saw Constantine and his stomach twisted. Whatever had beaten him up had done a very thorough job of it and the wounds stank of demonic rage. The damage was severe, ran deep, felt tainted.

He wasn't at the top of his game, angelically speaking, anyway, and it was a risk to start a purely supernatural procedure and only get halfway. That the damage was complicated only made things worse. He wasn't sure if he could get through the entire mess on miracle alone.

"Adam." He called out. "I need you to assit me."

Sometimes, the human way was the only recourse.

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average-adam.livejournal.com

"I'll do anythin' I can," said Adam. "What do you need?"

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Crowley came out of the phone line in the lobby and ran upstairs to John's room to find it empty. With a curse, he then ran to Raphael's room hoping to head them off, but there was no one there, either.

Fortunately, the hospital wasn't far from the angel's room and, exhausted, he dashed there to discover Raphael and Adam huddled over the still form of his friend. Not wanting to interrupt but refusing to leave, Crowley leaned against the doorway and watched intently.

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The angel turned towards Adam.

"Put on a set of scrubs, wash your hands thoroughly and use latex gloves. In the medical closet there should be a small cart and there will be surgical tools in the drawers. Lay the tools out on the cart while I get suited up and prepare the IV."

Then he turned towards the demon.

"You know him best - does he have any allergies? To latex, to any kind of medication that you know of? Also, if you make any sort of disturbance during the operation you will need to leave - I would recommend you did so anyway. I need to focus and any type of emotional outburst could be dangerously distracting."

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Adam left promptly to do exactly as Raphael asked and Crowley waited until he was gone before he spoke.

"He has no allergies that I know of," he said. He filtered through his recent memories of being in the man's mind, but nothing of that nature stuck out. "Why are you operating? As far as I can tell he's just got those nasty scratches, a lot of broken bones, and some dehydration. Apart from muscle strain, mental anguish, and having his nerve endings manipulated torturously for over a day, that is."

He crossed his arms over his chest and stood straight, trying not to sway. "And I'm staying. I won't make any noise or distractions, but I'm not going anywhere."

Adam returned then, dressed in scrubs, hands washed and encased in gloves, and pushing a surgical cart. He looked between the two of them and to John on the bed. "I'm ready if you are, Raphael."

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"First, the fractures need to be cleaned out before they're set. He's also got some internal damage. He's punctured a lung, hurt his digestive tract... I need to be thorough."

He went and got an IV stand. Carefully he cleaned the man's wrist then instered the needle into a vein and bandaged it into place as it dripped. Once it was started he picked up a pair of sciccors and started to remove the clothing.

"Get me a disposal, Adam," he directed the boy.

From:

average-adam.livejournal.com

Adam fetched the disposal. And the scalpel and the hemostat and the sutures and everything else that Raphael asked for as they worked in quiet concentration, interrupted only by the bark of orders.

Crowley watched from the corner, unmoving as promised, but eyes flashing as he took in every detail. Raphael was a good surgeon. Perhaps even better than himself. It was too bad he was such an ass, but it did put Crowley slightly more at ease to know that John was in good hands. The demon knew in his heart of hearts that he wouldn't have been up to this so soon after the other events of the last twenty-four hours. Nor would he want to. Not John. Not after Belial.

Bringing over a sponge, Adam chanced a glance at Raphael's face. "How's it goin'?"

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"He's lost a lot of blood. Crowley, what's his type? I don't think we have any fresh pouches, so could you conjure some?" He reached for another tool, a tube, to take care of the pneumothorax. Carefully he stitched it into the skin and used a vacuum to reinflate the lung. "I think I've cleared out some, if not most, of the major internal damages, including his heart which, while not expressly injured, was not in great shape. I'll have to set some of the bones, though, at least for a little while, unless you call Gabriel. I probably won't have enough left in me to knit them back together right away, but the tissue's been cleaned so it shouldn't get infected."

He pressed against the exposed hip and focused as he miracled the bone, drawing it back together.

"He'll need follow-ups too. X-rays from the tube thoracostomy and the compound fractures."

With a quick glance at the various apparati John was hooked up to, Raphael nodded then looked at Crowley.

"The blood, please? And Adam, get me the furosemide from the medical cabinet, just in case."

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Crowley didn't have the faintest idea what blood type John was, although if things continued like they had around the Manor he should probably find out. Still, it didn't matter. He was aware enough to remember that O-negative was the universal donor and could be given to anyone of any blood type. He produced two bags of it on Raphael's tray, not moving from his spot in the doorway or speaking. Instead, he just watched Adam pull the requested pills from the cabinet.

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Raphael started giving him the blood and set what breaks he could, bandaging what he had to. He carefully stitched him up and then stood over the body for a long moment.

"Step back," he told them.

Then he pressed his hand on John's exposed body and felt a rush of warmth and energy as he went deep inside, trying to clear out the last of the demonic taint. He could feel the physical body coming together, better than he'd expected.

The only problem came when he ran into the mental aberration. He frowned and concentrated, realizing that there were still difficulties to be resolved, though not by him. Once done, he stumbled backwards and breathed heavily. The body was still resting, coming slowly out of it's drugged state, but there was pain underneath and problems he had neither the energy nor the ability to fix.

Nervously, he looked at Crowley.

"I've done what I can," he said. "But there are some mental, emotional difficulties. Can't do anything about those. Watch him carefully. Tell me if the machines start to beep."

Then he discarded his gloves and walked shakily over to the sink where he started vigorously washing his hands.

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"I figured," said Crowley as he pulled up a chair near John's bed and collapsed wearily into it. "I'll watch him." He would, too, until John woke up or someone Crowley trusted took over, and that category was very small indeed.

His hand came up and rested on the bed on top of John's. The man had an even worse time of it than Crowley and the least he could do was give him some friendly comfort. Especially after what he'd seen... But he wasn't going to think about that now. He wasn't going to do anything at the moment but watch John breathe. The rest would sort itself out later.

Adam just smiled as he tidied up.

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Raphael watched the red water swirl down the drain and he bit his lip. He wanted to ask Crowley what had become of his letter, had it been delivered, but he didn't dare in front of Adam.

Besides, looking at the demon's face, it seemed an inappropriate question to ask. His thoughts were clearly elsewhere.

So he settled for heading back to his room.

"I need sleep," he told the two. "If the machines start beeping or something goes visibly wrong, come and get me. Otherwise, he should wake up in less than half an hour and I need rest."

As he walked slowly back to his room, exhausted, he couldn't help thinking of Michael again. He would have - ought to have - been there at the end of the procedure, helped him back, carried him even. Raphael slumped into his bed, feeling more alone after seeing Crowley sitting next to John, and pressed his face into the pillow until fatigue overwhelmed him.

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Meanwhile, still reeling with the shocks of the past twenty-four hours, John's traumatized subconscious had been frantically trying to make some sense of the fragmented mess the fiend had left behind.

The events in Belfast were hopelessly jumbled up with random bits of imagery from the two weeks or so prior, but the damage didn't stop there; sizeable chunks of the past several months were incomplete or missing, with further injury to random bits and pieces going back years.

The upshot of all this, as John's sleeping mind tried futilely to stitch what remained into some sort of coherent whole, was a bizarre, surreal dreamscape in which people who had never met held conversations that could never have taken place, events were relocated to the unlikeliest of venues, and cause/effect and continuity ceased to have meaning. Crowley's unexpected intrusion mingled inextricably with the painful events of the fight and everything that had come before, creating a hopeless quagmire of confusion and conflicting emotion.

But the residual horror of Nephrithraxus' presence hung heavily over everything, eclipsing all other concerns with the enormous question mark that hovered maddeningly at the end. It was this that finally drove him past the effects of Raphael's drugs and his body's exhaustion and pain, needing an answer more than he needed rest or escape.

It was a gradual process, but outwardly it must have appeared rather abrupt. One moment John was sleeping--restlessly, muttering unintelligibly under his breath now and then, his face etched with a deep frown that aged it at least ten years; but sleeping--and the next he had lurched upright, blankly panicked as he registered that he wasn't where he had been, and wasn't sure where that had been, only that the thing had still been there when he shut his eyes.

Hindered by the assortment of tubes and sensors he was connected to, he yanked at them without comprehension, his entire body protesting sharply with the sudden, violent movement. "Kill it, forfuck'ssake KILL IT--"

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Crowley had nearly fallen asleep, mind blank from exhaustion, forehead resting on John's bed, when the man started flailing and screaming and the demon jerked to full consciousness. Without thinking, he grabbed John's arms to prevent him from hurting himself or disconnecting any more of the medical equipment.

"John! It's dead! It's already dead. I promise. Aziraphale killed it. It can never come back. Do you hear me, John? It's dead."

He hoped for once that he was telling the truth. He hadn't actually heard from Aziraphale in a while and was getting worried.

"John, look at me. Listen to my voice and look at me. You're all right. You're back at Tadfield Manor with... Adam and nothing can hurt you, okay?" Crowley didn't know how safe John would feel around him at the moment, but everyone felt safe around Adam.

"You're home now."

From:

ineffable-angel.livejournal.com

Aziraphale had rushed, disappeared through the phone-line in the way that he could, and reappeared in the lobby downstairs. It was, thankfully, Tadfield Manor*, unmistakeable pink chair and all, but there was no commotion apparent there, no sign that a sorely injured man had just arrived.

The angel decided it must mean they were somewhere else... The hospital wing, most likely. He certainly hoped it was so.

Worried already, he turned a corner to hear hoarse, panicked shouting - oh, heavens, John - as he neared the wing, and picked up the pace for the last few steps, slowing only when he heard Crowley's low voice comfort.

Quietly, he entered the room, seeing Crowley pinning a bandaged John down, the set of his arms and the tone of his voice revealing how careful the demon was being about it.

He listened to Crowley's murmurings, resting. He could see the dent in the chair where Crowley had been sitting, at one point, and his view from the doorway gave him a good look at all the accoutrements that had been set up for John's use. Crowley looked a sight, and John worse, and Aziraphale knew he looked no better with gore from staking Nephrithaxus to the ground coating his hands and jacket, which he was still half-sure he was wearing.

His eyes glanced tiredly about the bed. Someone else had been here... Raphael, likely, who else had that much expertise in the medical sciences? And Aziraphale thought he'd heard Crowley ring Adam - surely the Antichrist would've visited too.

His attention was brought back to the tableau in the bed. "...home now," Crowley was saying, with a slight sag as if the demon had just realized it himself.

"It's dead," Aziraphale confirmed tiredly, leaning against the door.

*Aziraphale wasn't quite good enough at this thing to find Adam's room precisely, but he knew the lobby location well enough. He worked there, after all, and the smell of a small bottle of pink tint nailpolish he kept there now for emergency manicure fixes smelled strongly enough to be smelled for miles anyway.

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The source of his panic abruptly snuffed out, John stopped struggling at once, obeying without question Crowley's unspoken directive to calm down.

"Tadfield?" he echoed hoarsely, meeting the other's gaze only for a second before his own eyes flitted away to scan the room, taking in the familiar four walls, the equipment, the paraphernilia attached to him, and the disheveled angel leaning in the doorway.

For the moment, he remained oblivious to the fact that his own hands had just knotted themselves in the front of Crowley's jacket, verifying the demon was real and not just another product of his own fevered imagination.

Aziraphale's back, he registered then as the circumstances of his leaving came back to him, with a flood of relief that turned immediately to fresh consternation--how long had he been gone? And--

"Where'd you find me?" he asked blankly, trying unsuccessfully to pin down where the hell he'd been and what he had been doing. He remembered the churchyard and its immediate surroundings, and there was a familiar feel about it all (someplace far away from Lower Tadfield, he was certain of that much,) but the larger context was missing, lost in a vortex of confusion that made his head hurt fiercely when he tried to focus in too closely on anything caught up in it. "And how?" Had Holland gone and delivered his message prematurely?

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Looking over his shoulder to see Aziraphale, Crowley sighed with relief before turning back to John and trying to gently pry his hands off his lapels.

"Belfast," he said. "Ireland," he added stupidly, as if there were more than one. He really was rather tired. "I don't know what you were doing there. Besides fighting off a fiend, that is."

Crowley's hand moved down John's to where the watch remained in perfect condition. "As for how..." He rotated the man's wrist to show him the face of the watch. "There's a reason I told you to wear this all the time. It's a good thing you didn't get rid of it. I... thought you might."

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John's eyes widened at the name Belfast. There was only one possible reason he'd have gone there--Kit--and the thought that he might have brought the fiend within a thousand miles of her made his blood run cold.

His eyes were already latching onto the watch when Crowley made to draw his attention to it, and he didn't answer until he'd seen the second hand dip sedately to the right.

"Almost did," he said then, awkwardly, blinking and loosening his grip as it occurred to him that he was clinging, and no matter how extreme the circumstances or how badly he needed an anchor right now, that quite simply was Not On. "Couldn't quite bring myself to give it up, though. 's a nice watch," he mumbled, sagging back to the bed. Christ, he was tired, aching to the marrow of his freshly-mended bones, and he doubted he'd ever feel really clean again no matter what he did.

He couldn't look Crowley in the face. There just weren't any rules in the Bastard's Handbook to cover a situation like this, and he didn't know how much the demon had seen or had time to absorb, how much he already understood or what he thought about any of it. He'd never felt more exposed in his life, and drew the covers up almost to his chin in a reflexive gesture, trying to find a way to say all the things that needed saying without sounding overly dramatic or sentimental or ungrateful or...stupid. Thanks for saving my life, why didn't you tell me?, I was wrong, I was stupid, I'm scared, and for the love of Someone, don't ever, ever do that again.

Somewhere between his brain and his mouth there must have been some kind of disconnection, though, because what finally came blurting out was the last thing he'd intended to say--albeit maybe the one that needed most to be said. "I'm sorry. Christ, I'm so sorry..."

His vision went suddenly murky. Cursing and turning his back to Crowley, he huddled into the bedclothes, squeezed his eyes shut and made his confession, not just to the demon but to the ghosts of all the others he could feel crowding around the bed; the ones who hadn't been around to take his apology by the time he could bring himself to give it. "You were right, everything you said--when I left--" He choked at the memory, which by whatever perverse chance had remained almost entirely intact, but went on doggedly in a voice he barely recognized as his own, "--all 'cept the bit about taking their part against you. I never did. Not that."

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"I... what? Shit, John," said Crowley anxiously, fiddling with his shirt cuffs and looking away. That wasn't how this was supposed to go. John was supposed to affectionately call him rude names and maybe give a gruff thanks, and Crowley was supposed to call him names back and things were supposed to go back to normal without either of them feeling anything remotely like embarrassment, guilt, or hurt.

He squirmed to remember the depth of remorse that the man lived with every day. Crowley never considered that John might feel embarrassed by what he had seen in the man's mind. Any humiliating experiences or feelings were completely overshadowed by the guilt. It was, by any measure, the thing he most remembered from the brief journey. "It was worth a wound..." he muttered under his breath.

"Don't. Look..." he took a deep breath, "Fuck-all of what I said that day was right. I was... upset. There was only one thing I said that I'd actually stand behind. And I'd just... oh, Adam Young, John. You have no reason to be sorry. I'm the one... I should have told you."

Gruffly, he seized John's shoulders and pulled him into an awkward hug. A few seconds of seeing from someone else's perspective had been enough to change Crowley's world forever.

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John couldn't repress a small gasp--it was painful, being grabbed and manhandled around that way--but the discomfort was subsumed under a wave of almost delirious relief as Crowley's meaning filtered through the deafening background noise inside his head.

Later, he'd look back on it and be astonished that his friend would come so close to openly admitting he'd been wrong. It just wasn't Crowley's style. (Then again, it wasn't John's either.) But right now he was in no condition to analyze anything; the words were enough taken at face value, striking a visceral chord that ran deeper than his injuries, bodily and otherwise.

Forgiven. Home. He hadn't felt anything remotely like it since...well, in a really long bloody time, that was what.

And Crowley was hugging him. How fucked up was that? A sound that was half-laugh, half-sob broke out of him as he clasped the other close, shaking more than a little.

"Shit. Don't let's do that again," he muttered against the fine fabric of the demon's suit coat, mildly alarmed at the wavering, almost shrill timbre of his own voice. "My fucking head's on upside down. How long's it been, anyway?"

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ineffable-angel.livejournal.com

It was a scene of uncharacteristic tenderness, and Aziraphale read heartbreaking sincerity in the lines of Crowley's figure when he clasped the injured man to him.

The angel was startled to realize that he had been thinking of John Constantine, owner of the Casual Sex Trenchcoat (which would likely need repairing, but that was no matter) as "ours". As his and Crowley's, or at least Crowley's. He hadn't felt so protective of a human in a very long, long time.

There was little for him to say; he had been, after all, dead when most of this had occurred. He couldn't help the little sigh of relief at their apology, however, like he couldn't help the bubbling of happiness somewhere above his belly over how sweet they looked.

Aziraphale had looked away after but a moment, raising his hand to cover the slight smile on his lips.

Such dear boys.

The angel stood when he heard the question, not a solid pull to his feet as he was exhausted, and came over, fussing with some of the other equipment that had been mildly disturbed with one hand and a lot of stretchy angel thoughts. He saw John's hands shake and quietly slipped a supportive arm around John's shoulders so that he could ease back to the pillows when he wanted.

"It's been too long, John. A month, nearly," he replied, somewhat sadly, and glanced at Crowley. "You're home now. We all are."

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"Fucking long month," muttered Crowley as he let John go more gently then he had seized him. He'd forgotten that Aziraphale was there and was faintly embarrassed at having been watched at such a moment. Despite the sinking sensation that he was never going to be able to live it down, or regain any of his Manor cred, Crowley pulled his comfortable sardonic mask back on and continued. "With both of you gone, the only people to talk to were Ellie and the Snob. I didn't socialize much. But then Aziraphale came back early looking like that," he indicated the new corporation with one casual wave, "And you came back looking like hell."

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John was, for a moment, less embarrassed at being caught in the act than worried that Aziraphale might jump to the wrong conclusion again. But it seemed he had conquered that particular insecurity (maybe the new corporation had something to do with that?) and his quiet, understated aura was soothing to nerves frayed by the fiend's corrupt presence.

"An express ticket home and an upgrade, huh? Good deal," John said tiredly as he settled back down and tried, with middling success, to sort out the tangle of sensors and tubes that were (mostly) still attached to him. He was glad for the momentary distraction; it gave him a chance to pull himself together, and also covered a brief flash of envy. Aziraphale had been the only angel around the Manor who'd favored an all-around unimpressive corporation. John couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to simply trade up to a newer, flashier model, but he did his best to squelch the thought. He was glad the angel had made it back so quickly, for Crowley's sake if no other reason, regardless of what he looked like.

"Yeah well, I'll ask the next fiend if I can stop for a shave and a haircut before we hit the churchyard," he said in response to Crowley. There wasn't a great deal of real humor behind it, but he felt somewhat encouraged that he could even make the attempt.

Though on second thought, there was really nothing remotely funny about the idea of such a thing happening again. If he couldn't keep his shit together better than he had this time, it was all too possible.

As the adrenaline drained from his bloodstream, a thick fog of exhaustion was gathering in his mind, tugging him back toward sleep. He fought it stubbornly, not eager to return to the disjointed solitude of his dreams.

"So's everybody else still in one piece?" he asked, unable to be more specific, though he could picture several faces and felt the names hovering somewhere just beyond his reach. A lot could have happened in a month.

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