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One's lodgings were a dangerous thing. A room floor was home to many visitors throughout its lifetime, from the architect's vision to its eventual demolition, with its only purpose to become a host for its parasites; which, often ungrateful, disparaged its sanctity without a care.
They did all sorts of rituals within the walls that covered.
And there-in lay the reason the planks would turn haunted.
They hid the beating hearts of the building as a carapace.
And this was a story that's been played countless times across multiple floorboards before: John Constantine, amidst the disgusting byproducts of his pathetic existence, and his best mate interrupting that image. Really, he's in a pile of garbage when Chas finds him.
Not like it's an issue, there's no niceties to be had between them. It's not like John had asked to be found and got into his favoured duds. The blood and vomit on the floor detail as much, and Chas seems to notice, not saying anything, but scrunching up his nose for a second before he dives into the picture painting John's self-realized portrait: blood, vomit, sweat, spit. Darkness, cold, bottles, rum. He's submerged in the piles of empty tin and glass shells of varied drinks that litter the floor in shameless clusters, with his limbs tossed about their negative space, face in a pool of spit and vomit.
Chas, though, the saving grace—he always managed to locate what-ever ditch John had tripped into. He was persistent and knew the city far too well. He knew John, too.
John, without moving, busies himself pondering the warm smoke of a cigarette when Chas places himself knelt right in front of his face, avoiding the puddle of puke. John's eyes follow Chas' movements by the shine of the hallway behind him and how it contrasts against the dark, near blinding him when he leans over and taps John on the back, calling his name in a tone too alien for the battered man to recognize.
And John answers with a mumbled sort of sound. Tad difficult to speak through bile.
Chas calls for him again, and with such intent that for a moment John Constantine is dragged back into the present: his spit-slick, morbidly darkened present.
He did not like the present. Never did. It was always a heavy-and-past-handed snare trap he stumbled in-to, never the gentle slip of the passage of time. There was nowhere to flee to. He sunk into its maws, surrendered to the imperishable continuity.
The present had the smell of vomit and spent cigarettes.
This kind of present was his least favorite. It was boring. He could hear his thoughts way too clearly. Not just the thoughts, but the memories. Running away was only worth it if you had something to run towards. No odd murders, no demonic clues, the ghosts hadn't even deigned themselves to haunt him. Yet.
For now, it remains a proper art to not think about certain things. Things that never leave. Things that drag their chains behind your every step in contempt and condemnation. Things that get beneath your skin and leave their parasitic offspring for posterity.
How'd Chas even get into the room? Had he kicked the door open? John couldn't tell, he hadn't heard him.
He'd probably fainted at some point and was too gone to notice.
The worst—and best—part of this present, though, had to be the mere presence of Chas. For once, John couldn't just resort to sarcasm and complain that it was best lonely than in wrong company, when Chas was never the wrong company. He always managed to fit himself to whatever situation surrounded him. An adaptable man, if any.
Endless thoughts parse themselves through, until they're interrupted by a hand on his collar and suddenly he's not laying in puke anymore. It does make a racket when Chas lifts him—moving around an assortment of disgraceful rubbish.
Chas drags him over his shoulder and John's body slumps against his.
The first thing to notice is how his clothes stick to his body, tugging at nonexistent seams when Chas handles him. He produces a mumble and tries to scramble his feet to stand. It was difficult, alright. More difficult than locating the rest of his limbs.
"You stink," Chas starts, and John does not hear the rest of it.
At that moment, he's got nothing of wit.
His head's pulsing with all the movement and he's distracted by his limbs and the moon-lit edge of Chas' face beside him. The moon-light scrapes the man's silhouette from the darkness as he drags them both through its warmth.
And he hadn't seen his best mate in a while.
John's stare hangs onto every move. The limb ordeal abandoned to a previous plane in the picture.
He can barely lift his head, but he can see Chas' face beside him, stern lips moving into the shapes of various, incomprehensible vowels and consonants.
Does Chas ever notice how he looks at him? The way he clings to the sight of his figure like it were the world's saving grace? John would rather not know. It was more aligned with his preference to pretend he didn't and pull up an inveterate facade about it. That was his signature spell, his modus operandi. Repress it until it bursts. He's done it so many times before, and so many times about this very same moment—the repeated image of the repentfully servient lover, all guilt and glory-like. Maybe not all the time, maybe not when they were younger, but definitely since the very moment they'd met.
Did he always stare?
There were a lot of half-trashed thoughts that trailed themselves silly in an endless spiral, but his moment of self-awareness was bound to be fleeting.
He swallows bile.
Worship is not something he does. Wanting is a second, deviant nature that makes his sanity verge upon delirium. Both are a deliberate practice—but that's something for another story. In this story, there is something about Chas that left him clouded from John's putrid touch. At least, in part.
That same thing is what tethers him, though. And he finally hears Chas calling out his name.
"Come on, John. You've got vomit half about you," he says in protest, his tone far too absent-minded for what he's saying, "is that blood?"
Probably. He somewhat remembered his reality. It came to him in flashes, in dim stills revealed by an amateur.
Dragging himself places and drinking until he couldn't think was well within his habits, but, by the looks of it, he was not in some decrepit street behind one of London's many low-end pubs.
The moon-light shone weak, interrupted: there was a roof between his head and the aster's gaze, and it smelled too little like rot and rubbish to be any back alley.
Still, he was tossed like an unclaimed corpse. And at least, it wasn't a morgue.
Chas holds him, though. Dragging him towards the shabby doorframe that they—Chas in his unfamiliarity, John in his mess—both guessed constituted a bathroom behind it, because the place was minute and there wasn't really another option.
Waves of rubbish swim past them, counter to their steps' stride.
Chas slaps the wall in search of the light switch; satisfied only when the bulb dangling above their heads radiates its white light, almost with a sizzle.
John squints. He'd gotten too used to the darkness.
Chas hauls him across the room in a sing-song of struggle, and drops him onto the bathroom seat.
He was a dismounted scare-crow being dragged around by its farmer. A rag-doll swung around by its owner. A sloppily built mannequin, falling apart one limb at a time.
The place is not as filthy as the other room, though the shadows at the edge of his vision resemble mold; but he wasn't one to complain. John Constantine would not be found pissed some-place fancy, it had to match the rot that follows him. If anything, his presence brought the place down to standard.
"Take off your clothes," Chas says.
John wants to reply with a joke, moving to make some sort of gesture towards innuendo—but with his arm goes his torso, and he has to catch himself on the wall beside him just before his stomach churns on itself. Bile crept to the back of his throat.
Impervious to his nauseated troubles and disgraceful fall, Chas still knelt in front of him, taking off John's remaining shoe. He made quick work of everything: and then his hands are stern on John's waistband, pulling his trousers down to his shins, undoing one leg at a time. The warm pressure of Chas' hands leaves whitened echoes on his ankles, fading over rotten veins and scars.
John looks at him in a nauseous daze. Like he's stranded in a desert and the mirage in front of him had taken the shape of man.
Chas stands up and puts those hands of his on John's collar. Undoes the tie, throws it aside. Comes back for the buttons.
He looks away as Chas undoes the already tousled buttons of John's shirt.
He inhales and laps spit off his lips.
"If ya wanted a kiss, mate," John says, still turned away from Chas' face and towards the wall. The mold at the corner of his eye seemed to taunt him. He finishes slurring out his sentence, "could've just asked."
"Bastard," Chas throws out. He looks up at John for less than a second. "If you can mess around you can help get this off."
John almost wants to, but when he looks down—he'd still not located his body—the man's almost done with his buttons, and then he's sliding the fabric off John's shoulders all on his own. He tosses it to the sink. His trousers must've followed the same path.
He's got the efficiency of a man accustomed to handling dead weight.
John tries to examine the trail of clothes, and reorient himself in the room, but his severed head is the main hindrance. The mix of withdrawal with consumption and a very empty stomach all come crashing down on him.
His body drops forward, this time.
Chas stops the fall with his shoulder as John tries to scramble his way off and onto the khazi, slamming the lid open and puking whatever is left of his brains out into the bowl.
Until the nausea's dissipated enough.
He puts his forehead to the edge of the bowl, breathing heavy with the taste of vomit on every gasp for air.
Chas calls for John once or twice, maybe. Taps him on the side, too, trying to get his attention. Or maybe to provide some sense of comfort. John ignores him. In fact, he doesn't think he can do anything but ignore it. The world was spinning and he wanted to get down.
His limbs went numb. The mold encroached at the edge of his vision and now nothing exists anymore. Except for Chas, who drags a hand across John's back, up and down as if he had a say on guiding the blood flow on his spine. As if the touch had healing ability. For a second, John thinks it might.
You never know, do you?
Time passes before John can feel the warmth on his face again.
When he opens his eyes, he's still on the floor, staring down, forehead against the crook of Chas' shoulder. What a warm, steady, pulsing headache. Christ, he had not noticed the pain before. The pulsing of his heart sent pain in relentless waves at the pace of a runaway.
The cold of the floor against his bare arse was nothing compared to the warmth of Chas' stupid embrace. Because of course, he had to be the sweetest sod you've ever known, when all John can taste is shame and vomit.
He wanted a cigarette. He had no clue where he'd left them. He could feel the craving in his teeth.
"You alive?"
Many answers ran through in sardonic taste before he managed to lift himself from his mate's shoulder.
"Yeah."
They'd done this back and forth so many times before. More accurately, Chas has done this for him so many times before.
Chas, impossibly stubborn, slid his hands beneath John's armpits and lifted his body with an eerie ease to drag him into the tub. Apparently, manhandling dead weight was easier than to carry it and make it walk.
John winces at the cold of the tub against his naked body. It was worse than the floor.
With sudden reality creeping onto the nape of his neck and at the edge of his vision, in the shape of his own flesh—ever recognizable by the pattern of scars all over—and cheap marble, the world reattaches John's head to his body.
There's a whirring sound, then a clank.
The cascade of water hits him like pesticide.
"Shit, Chas," he forces himself to spit out, "'s fuckin' freezing."
Chas makes a sound that resembles a snicker. "Was about time," he says.
"Give's a little warning, will ya," John starts, mumbling through the stream of water dripping down his face. His hair forfeit beneath and stuck to his forehead, made it nothing but worse. He shut his eyes.
"Should've done you in with a bloody hose."
"Maybe next time, mate."
Chas messes a bit with the faucet.
"The handles are inverted. You couldn't choose a worse place for your little kip?"
John limits himself to a snicker.
"There?"
Around Chas, his world turned painfully human. Not simple by any means, but human, and alive; different from what it usually was.
The water ran over him.
John tries to tidy, for lack of a better word, the hair on his forehead; hand moving upstream, then turns to Chas, who was rummaging with something that turned out to be soap.
"You got any cigarettes?" He slurs out the question without much thought.
"I'm not giving you any," Chas chimes back, and John can't help a smile. That Chas could be a smug bastard.
And the smug bastard goes and grabs one of two towels from the shelves—the less mold-looking one—and kneels next to John.
He always felt a little too small whenever Chas decided he was in need of help, but he was not about to refuse. He'd tried before, out of self-pity and self-hatred and whatever else that urged him the idea of being walking poison; but anyone would know how stubborn Chas can be. He would suck out the poison then spit.
It really wasn't that he wanted Chas to touch him—he was doing them both a favor by not protesting, because his mate is stubborn and would never let go of that foolish sense of debt.
He sighed and put his head back as the water fell over his torso. This would certainly be less tortuous with a cigarette.
Instead of smoke, he catches a mouthful of water to rid himself from the taste of vomit.
The water swirling beneath him has turned an odd shade of brown, what with the dust and ash and blood and vomit, and John makes a face at the sight. Mostly a performance for Chas' sake rather than his own reservations.
Not like Chas does or says anything about it. About any of it, really.
And neither does John; not until the water goes from warm, to lukewarm, to coagulating.
"How long d'ya want me here for?"
"Oh, quit whinging," Chas calls out.
"I wasn't," John lies, trying his best to evade the cold stream of water.
Chas puts down the towel he's been rubbing over John's body and closes the tap over his head.
"You act like a nanny," John adds.
Chas gives him a look, and John is proper pleased with himself for it.
"An' you take such good care of me, Chazzy," he stirs, again; dragging a wet, lanky arm to cup Chas' shoulders, soaking the man's shirt like the water were an unfinished statement punctuated with a sound kiss on his cheek.
"Shut up, John," Chas protests, slipping out of John's grasp.
With the shadow of a grin on his lip, John takes a moment to breathe when his mate stands up. A dry towel drops on his head and Chas is back beside him, rubbing at the wet of his shoulders.
John doesn't move.
Just how many kisses could he steal from his best mate before it got weird? Hell, it already had. It'd already blown shit apart because Chas, poor lad, loved him, and John carried that fact with the guilt of the cross. A criminal serving a sentence earned through no fault of his own, this time.
That was not true, but John could bloody dream.
They hadn't kissed many times, but he remembered every single instance, even now. Especially now, maybe. Chas' kisses were always sloppy. His lips moved with a nervous waltz that was characteristic of his. And John's kissed so many people, they should probably give him an award in sake of degeneracy; he's one to know what nervous feels like.
He takes the moment to look at Chas like he's memorising his every feature, gaze wandering from the arch of his brow to the bridge of his nose, down to the curvature of his lips. Chas stares him down in response. John has always found it amusing, the way Chas looks at him equal parts irritated and wondrous.
Not without effort, he lifts his hand to Chas' face and lands his fingers on the man's cheek, caressing at the traces of stubble and the edge of his jaw. Brushing his fingertips down to his chin. Lingering for longer than he'd like to admit.
It's pathetic, really, but he hopes Chas can't see that.
Right now, though: soaked, naked cold, and in dire need of a cigarette, he was willing to take that particular gamble.
There would always be some things better left unsaid, unnamed, tucked away beneath the sternum and in-between the ribs; rendered powerless against the rotten entrails of their cage lest they flee to the forbidden open.
You couldn't banish a feeling when there was no God it'd respond to.
This daydream of his lasts for a few seconds, and Chas doesn't move for its duration, but he does look at him in a way John doesn't want to decipher.
He drops his hand from Chas' face to the edge of the tub. He really needs a cigarette.
"Be a lad," he says, looking around himself, "get us out of this wet mess."
Chas extends him a hand. John takes it and groans at the effort. Once he's on his feet, Chas grabs and tosses the towel—the more mold-looking one—at him.
"Ta," John says, making a hold from the shower faucet.
"Got you clothes at the cab. Don't die before I'm back," Chas says, his voice dimmed by growing distance.
And just like that, he's gone.
John takes a moment to examine the place from where he's standing. The bunch of clothes at the sink, the mold at the edge of walls, the odd glisten of the tiles, the crack that runs across the marble from the khazi. A quaint place, albeit familiar in its shoddy spirit—but more important than any of the furnitures or their encasing, he was rather preoccupied about obtaining a cigarette. Where could his coat possibly be? Find the coat, find his cigarettes. Hopefully a light.
The mere imaginative warmth of the fire puts him in a better mood already.
The tub was dangerously slippery. One or two unfortunate-placed steps and he'd have a one-way ticket to concussion land, with some bloodletting to boot. Whatever, he manages. Avoiding the puddles and swinging a leg out couldn't be harder than some of the feats he'd done.
Something just didn't feel right. The world had tilted three millimeters to the left, and he'd been left behind, trapped by a different axis.
He just needed a cigarette.
And he'd just managed to get out of the tub when steps approached. John doesn't need to look to know who.
"Here," Chas says, arm extended with a lump of clothes in hand towards him, "I'm tired of looking at your arse."
John makes a lopsided grin while obtaining the cloth lump, dropping everything but the shirt on top of the sink.
He slides an arm into its casing, then the other, then buttons it up. Chas is resting against the bathroom doorframe.
John grabs the tie from the sink, it was one of his favoured prints. He begins doing the knot when an idea posits itself in front of him.
"You seen my coat?"
(...)
John rustles with the coat until it produces a tattered pack of Silk Cuts.
As a foreboding gesture, Chas opens a window, and John can't help but laugh to himself a little. Such empty dramatism.
There's no clock to check the time, but the sun is not out yet, so they sit at the round table that sits in one corner of the room. There's only one chair. There was a small bed, giving a glimpse of its mattress amongst the garbage. A crease of light crept from the bathroom. The place was disgusting.
John lights a cigarette, leaning against the edge of the table.
"Finally," he proclaims while holding his prize.
The heart beneath the floorboards beat at a known pace, in a tune so haunting it proved hard to ignore.
Chas takes the chair. It creaks beneath him.
"It better not break," he protests.
"Not paying for that either way, are we," John consoles him. If they wanted, they could likely slip out unnoticed from the building, like they were never there. A pair of ghosts unbound, kept secret only by the floorboards and the smoke of a cigarette.
Erring on that idea, John takes a drag of the cigarette.
The smoke he exhales makes forms cut out of the skyline from the trashed room, baubles enacting levitation for a mere second, before taking the shape of something else.
John looks over the various images in front of him; parses through them like pages on a dictionaire.
They were mostly nonsensical. Something that always looked a little wrong, like anything that attempts to emulate the human and the living.
These ghosts don't speak, though, and John looks at Chas through the curtain of smoke: he's sat, uncomfortably under the moonlight, with his arms crossed over his chest and gaze lost somewhere along the stains on the wall. John looks at the hair that covers Chas' forehead, as grayed through the smoke, style distilled from a lack of care, when his eyes dart towards him before he could finish his examination, as if John's stare had tapped him on the shoulder and called his name.
John chooses to indulge this sad excuse of a daydream.
Under his gaze, he drags his free hand over the man's neck—the collar of his shirt was soaked, well thanks to John's previous efforts—and he could swear he felt Chas' breath hitch upon contact, in the way only Chas would react with, to him, to this scenario. The very same way he did before he cussed him out.
This time, the cussing never comes, and Chas receives his touch without complaint.
John's thoughts want to be caught by some sort of surprise instead of the looming sense of longing that threatens to drop an organ above his head. But then the longing is replaced by guilt. And the guilt is replaced by want. He's a terrible man to be such a case and, after everything, still want.
With his left hand he pinches the fag-end between thumb and index finger, as if it were some sort of bug. He squashes its embers onto the bare table, leaving it to sit with its remains.
Either way, the smoke ghosts are still there, demons haven't come to claim him, and he's missing a haunting, isn't he? May as well take the chance.
He slides another fag from the poor pack and flicks it alight.
"Want some?"
He gestures his cigarette towards Chas, who looks up at him and nods. So John extends his hand up to Chas' mouth—cigarette still between his fingers, now lined up to the other man's lips until they touch.
The man leans forward and steals a drag, promptly blowing the smoke up into John's face, as if it'd bother him.
It was a taunt, and John knows it. Chas knows that, too.
John brings the cigarette back to his mouth and, likewise, takes a drag, then exhaling the smoke through his nose. He used to do that when he was younger; to flaunt, like some sort of diseased peacock. But it made Chas laugh.
"You still smoke like a teenager?"
"Do you like it?" John sneered with his practiced strain of bravado.
Chas laughed again, shaking his head.
"Makes you look like a dick, is all it does."
John hoped his expression didn't betray his thoughts.
These cigarettes always burned far too quickly.
Chas would always look like that boy he'd share cigarettes with while discoursing bands.
"Thought that's exactly your type, Chas," he says in feigned offense as he offers another drag.
He couldn't kiss him any-more, but he sure could dream.
And that dream would cling to the creases between the floorboards, waiting like a beating heart.