Chapter Text
The knocker fell against the heavy wooden door three times, and then he waited in the rain, lurking where the peephole couldn't quite make him out.
It was always raining around here. Almost felt homey, in its way. Dark and wet, wrong things lurking in the shadows.
He jammed his foot into the door as soon as it was physically possible.
"No."
"Jason," he said, all smiles.
"Absolutely not."
"Is that any way to treat an old friend?"
"We're not friends."
"Mr. Blood, then," he said, "but even acquaintances don't leave each other out in the rain."
"Constantine," Jason said, stern. "I cannot do this right now."
"It'll only take a minute," John lied, leaning against the doorframe. This close he had to look upward to meet Jason's eyes, but he was used to that.
John liked to say he was closer to Hell when he said anything at all on the subject. The facts of the matter could change quickly when the topic was a skull's distance from the pavement.
"Come back later," Jason said, blocking the doorway with the whole lean length of him. John always thought he ought to smell like cardamom, but he usually smelled like a grandmother's attic, old books and moth-eaten sweaters.
"Entertaining guests?" John teased, knowing very well that Jason Blood was never alone but always wished he was.
Jason hesitated.
The facts were these:
- They'd been on decent terms the last time they'd seen each other, or as decent as they ever were.
- Jason was a curious man, and John was always full of interesting new facts about peculiar things.
- John was oodles of fun in a one-on-one.
- John was consistently mortifying in the presence of a third party.
- Jason wouldn't even let John see inside the house.
Therefore:
- He was, in fact, entertaining guests.
The fucking cad.
"Oh, well I'd hate to interrupt," John lied again, fishing around in his coat for his pack of cigarettes. "I'll wait out here until you're done, then." He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, shielding it from the rain with one hand.
"Come back tomorrow," Jason said, snatching the lighter from John's hand.
"I might not be here tomorrow," John said, which was only true because getting hit by a car was always an option.
"I really can't do this right now," Jason reiterated as John took his lighter back, which was practically a surrender.
"I'll play nice," John said. Jason opened the door enough that John could squeeze past and leave room for Jesus between them. He didn't, but he could have. He slid up against Jason instead as he sidled by, and Jason rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, neither amused nor put out.
"Leave your coat," Jason said, indicating the rack by the door as he shut it. "You can wait in the... there." Jason gestured vaguely at a door off the front hall, somewhere he could stash John away like trash waiting for the curb. "I'll be with you in a minute, don't touch anything."
"Yeah, yeah."
"Don't smoke in here," Jason added, moving back down the hall with more haste than seemed prudent. Abandoning John for any length of time was almost never a good idea. He lingered in the hall, coat dripping on the hardwood, unlit cigarette resting in his mouth. He listened to muffled steps, distant voices, low and deep. Another man?
The fucking cad.
John rocked back onto his heels and tousled his hair, shook himself out like a clumsy dog. When he was satisfied that his level of damp-and-rumpled wasn't significantly above baseline, he started himself down the hall, slow steps toe-first as he listened.
Jason didn't immediately notice John poking his head into the office—or was it a library? A den? John had never bothered asking for clarification on the blueprints. Jason's guest did notice, making immediate and electric eye contact.
He was:
- Taller than Jason (absurd, illegal in some countries).
- Almost as pale as John.
- Light-eyed and raven-haired.
- Thick at the waist but comically broad at the shoulder.
- Shirtless.
- Scarred.
- Looked like he ought to model for the covers of novels about werewolves that like to fuck.
- Infested with mushrooms.
This last point ought to have been more off-putting than it was.
Something in Werewolf's posture must have given him away because Jason turned from where he'd been inspecting the bizarre growth of fungus in the stranger's side.
"What did I just say," Jason practically hissed, eyes flashing gold.
John shrugged. "Allo," he said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and waving cheerfully at the stranger. "What happened there?" he asked, pointing to the protrusion of pink oyster mushrooms growing out between ribs.
"Golfing accident," Werewolf said, flashing an easy smile too white and symmetrical. Something about him struck John as familiar, but he couldn't place him. Except on those novel covers.
"You don't have to talk to him," Jason muttered, looking back to Werewolf and standing to place himself between the two of them. "It's probably better if you don't."
"I don't mind," Werewolf said to Jason, ignoring John entirely. It was an intimate little scene, which annoyed the hell out of John.
It wasn't jealousy. It was peculiar. Jason Blood was a cranky old fuck with a devil inside him, which didn't lend itself well to having a lot of close friends. Curse of the reluctant immortal, and all that.
"You will soon enough," Jason said.
If Jason was trying to hide this friendly stranger, he thought John might recognize him.
"John Constantine," John announced, introducing himself with a rock of his heels and no hand to shake. "Pleasure to meet you, Mister...?"
"Shut up, Constantine," Jason said.
"Pierrot," the stranger said by way of introduction, an alias for a man who didn't care if you knew he was using an alias. John kept tilting in different directions to get a better look at him, and Jason kept on getting in the way.
"Not that again," Jason sighed, and Pierrot shrugged. "I would've thought that'd be ruined for you by now."
"I'm sentimental," Pierrot said, and in the brief moment that John was able to make eye contact Pierrot flashed him a polished grin.
Actor? Some of the pieces almost fit—those shoulders, that smile—but there was still the matter of those mushrooms. And being in Jason Blood's parlor, with Jason hovering like a hen.
"Is that Mr. Pierrot, or are you more of a Pierre?" John asked.
"Are you suggesting my name is Pierre Pierrot?"
"In this town? I don't see why not."
"I'm a little offended."
"I don't think you're a little anything."
"Flatterer."
Jason looked between the two of them, frowning. He looked somewhere between annoyed and confused—annoyed at John, confused by Pierrot.
"Got dinner plans?" John asked, before checking his watch. "Breakfast plans?" he corrected.
"Here," Jason interrupted, handing Pierrot a leather strap. "You're going to want to bite this."
"Breakfast," Pierrot said ruefully of the strap, before sticking the leather between his teeth.
Lord, but that was an evocative image.
John was polite enough to avert his eyes as Jason started cutting away at mushrooms, though Pierrot didn't make a sound. John was rude enough to watch the goings-on reflected in one of Jason's many decorative mirrored surfaces. Pierrot gripped the edge of Jason's desk as Jason sliced away at what was hopefully the border between man and fungus with surgical precision.
"Could get a pretty penny for those at the farmer's market," John suggested helpfully, and Pierrot snorted.
"Stop trying to be funny, Constantine," Jason said.
"Try, my arse," John said. "I am funny."
"Make yourself useful and bring me the gauze," Jason said. "I know you know where it is."
"I might," John agreed, meandering out of the room. He'd made himself at home in too many houses to be sure, but some subconscious part of him usually remembered. He moved in the direction that felt right and found himself digging into the bathroom cupboard beneath the sink.
It was such a mundane bathroom. It was disappointing, was what it was. A man enters the lair of a demon-possessed immortal with a last name like Blood, he expects an antique toilet with a pull-chain, or at least a clawfoot tub. Instead it was all cheap white porcelain. Dreadful.
John meandered back into the impromptu surgical theater, and immediately covered the bottom half of his face with one hand. "Oh, fuck me," he said, "that's fucking rank."
"Thanks," said Pierrot, his side all slathered in something black. Jason's leather gloves were ominous. "It also burns, so it has that going for it." Jason was scowling, had started scowling as soon as Pierrot had begun smiling like a salesman. He peeled off his gloves and threw them in a bin, which was somehow more ominous than wearing them had been.
"Give me that," he snapped, snatching the gauze out of John's hand.
"I can take care of this part," Pierrot said, holding his arms high enough to keep them out of the way. Jason muttered something indistinct and which may not have been in English, ignoring Pierrot while wrapping his torso in gauze. He used more than necessary, enough more that he may as well have been bubble-wrapping the man.
"About breakfast," John began.
"He wants a meal on someone else's bill," Jason said before Pierrot could answer. He had stopped wrapping only because he'd run out of gauze, and he grabbed a nearby shirt to throw at Pierrot. "Get out of here before he talks you into it," he warned. "You have places to be, remember."
"I always do," Pierrot said, buttoning himself up. He passed John on the way out, too close, giving him a brief once-over. He narrowed his eyes, and grabbed John's tie before he could recoil, untying and retying it in record time. He stepped away, and John immediately tried to loosen the too-tight, too-symmetrical triangle pressing at his neck. "I have expensive taste," Pierrot apologized, before letting himself out.
Ouch. A set-down for the ages, that one.
"You couldn't wait to get him away from me," John observed, pulling the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and leaving his tie egregiously loose.
Jason had relaxed a little, or at least slouched, fiddling with his fingernails. "Yes," he agreed.
"I know him from somewhere."
"You don't know him," Jason said, disputing something deeper than what John had said.
"I wouldn't mind getting familiar," he said to needle him.
"He isn't like that."
"Could have fooled me."
"Yes. He did." Jason rolled a pink oyster mushroom between his fingers contemplatively. "Why are you here, John?"
"I was in the neighborhood." He lit his cigarette without breaking eye contact.
"Why are you in Gotham?"
"Got some business out in the swamp," he said, and he did not have to specify which one. "Heard something new's come crawling out of the fissure with an appetite."
"It's nothing that needs concern you," Jason said.
"Got a friend out there who says otherwise."
"Does he speak?" Jason asked.
"After a fashion," John shrugged. "And I hear tell you've got yourself a bat monster."
"Dammit, Constantine." Jason exuded a professorial kind of annoyance, running out of patience he'd never really had.
"C'mon," John said, exhaling smoke and spreading his hands. "You thought I'd come to Gotham and not want to see the bat monster?"
"I don't care what you've heard," Jason said. "Don't meddle in things you don't understand."
"Have you met me?"
"I mean it this time," Jason said. "Leave him be if you know what's good for you."
"He," John repeated with a thoughtful drag of his cigarette, as Jason's frown deepened.
"Matters in Gotham are being handled," Jason said.
"I wouldn't be here if they were," John said. He snapped his fingers with sudden realization. "Was that Bruce Wayne?" he asked, delighted, pointing after their absent comedia dell'lycanthrope friend. It was the smile that gave him away, same as the magazine covers.
John's face went blank as Jason turned on him, suddenly snarling and sulfurous. John was pinned against the nearest wall before he could process what was happening, boots a foot off the ground. Jason's eyes glinted gold.
"All you had to do was say 'yes'," John observed mildly, ignoring how his heart raced or the temptation to egg him on. "Didn't think he'd be your type," John added, because he'd never been good about ignoring temptations.
"My temper is better than when I was young," Jason growled in a voice not his own, "else I'd already have ripped out your tongue."
"You're rhyming," John warned.
"I have it under control," Jason said, his voice closer to human, though he bit back whatever else he wanted to add. "I've been a friend to his family many years now," he said, slowly setting John back down.
"Friend," John repeated with a waggle of his eyebrows.
"Not like that," Jason said, letting John go with a look of disgust in eyes once again brown. "I've known him since he was a boy," he said, putting distance between them. "Beside mine, his years are few enough that he may as well still be a child."
"Goldie know that?" John asked. Jason snarled at him again, eyes glinting, a flash of sharp teeth. John considered this a satisfactory answer as Jason rubbed at his jaw and refused to look at him. "Didn't know you knew the Waynes."
"Not the Waynes," Jason said.
"Family family?" John asked, and Jason drummed his fingers against a desk instead of replying. That meant 'yes' again. Jason was always loathe to tell John he was right about anything.
One of the homey things about this city, this bit of the old world sprung up in the middle of the new world. Rainy and gloomy and built on the bones and blood of those families desperate to sit at the edge of a hole in the world. Like called to like, and they'd built this city on a nasty bit of swamp.
Unfortunately, no one had told that other kind of family, the kind that thought a swamp was a good place to keep corpses.
The lake, they said, never gives up her dead—but the swamp never could hold them.
"The mushrooms—those family business?" John asked. "That bat one of yours?"
"Something like," Jason said, still not looking at him. "Leave it alone, Constantine. I know you've never been one to mind your own business, but my obligations in this city are not to you. I cannot guarantee your safety, not even from me. Not if you force yourself into matters not meant for you. I'll help you to settle your own affairs, if you can promise me they have nothing to do with my charges."
"I appreciate that," John lied, already on his phone and looking up where they kept the big bat lamp.