Work Text:
1
“Johnny, shower’s yours!” Cheryl called from the hall.
I focused on my books to block the pain from my chest, but my lack of response drew her to me. She stopped short when she saw the tattoo bandages on my chest, then gasped, and insisted on seeing what I had done.
“A football tattoo? What were you thinking?!” she scolded.
“’S normal, innit?” I asked. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” I think I even managed to disguise my bitterness.
“Johnny, why…?”
I couldn’t look her in the face. “I thought… it might make Dad happy.” Might keep you from leaving.
2
I ached all over when I came to. I could taste blood in my mouth, and carefully tested for broken teeth before stretching my jaw to test that too. Only my nose, then, it seemed.
And my chest, hurting like blazes, what…?
I pushed myself up from the floor of the loo, clawing torn clothes out of the way.
The sight of the tattoo on my chest has me heaving over the edge of the nearest toilet.
Footballers can be vicious, when they think you’re less of a man than they are. Not that this makes them unique among predators.
3
“You need a normal tattoo, if you’re going to keep getting these. An obvious one.” Nick spoke quietly, trying not to startle me while tracing an anti-possession charm on my skin. “I look scary and can fight someone if I don’t want to use magic in public. You, with your pretty face, and the fact that you’re scrawny? People get an idea in their head of what your tats are, it’ll make the Malleus Maleficarum look like the funny pages, kid.”
Zee frowned, but added, “Camouflage. A way to explain away what you are.”
Nick grinned. “I have an idea.”
4
It was a relief, the day I woke up without an incorporeal peanut gallery. Then it slammed home just how little I deserved that relief, and I spent the rest of my day drowning in whisky. If I got drunk enough, I thought, maybe the ghosts in my head would haunt me as they should.
By the time Chas came to pull me out of my drunken stupor, I had already paid someone to emblazon my sins across my chest. I was torn between laughing and crying at his confusion.
“Don’t you get it, Chas? Gary would have,” I slurred.
5
I gasped as I came back to my body. Fucking elementals. See if I did a favor for one of them ever again.
I realized the skin on my chest was burning, and it was with dawning anger that I slowly opened the buttons on my shirt, one by one.
I fought to keep my breath from coming quickly as I realized the implications of the message. He knew me well enough to know why this would hurt. And he was watching to savor my reaction.
Why couldn’t he have just put a fucking tree on my arse or something?
+1
I’ve learned now that there are divergent dimensions, where things have happened differently.
On bad nights, I sometimes wonder if, in one of those dimensions, I sit with my (very much alive) mates in the Liverpool pub, drinking and swearing over football, the boys’ lousy season prospects the most grievous burden on my soul on a Friday night.
I wonder if that John Constantine has only the one tattoo, representing an actual bright spot in life, and can leave the battling of the forces of Heaven and Hell to others.
I wonder if he’s happy.
Not fucking likely, is it.