The Star to Every Wandering Bark

Of course Des knows who Constantine is the first time he lays eyes on him. Blond, British, wearing a trench coat? There’s no one else it could be. Des has been floating through magic circles his whole life, and for most people (including Des), they’re just small fish trying to survive in a big, scary pond. But some magic users, some sorcerers, they get names for themselves. Papa Midnite in New York, for instance. He was friends with Des’s great-great-gran way back when. Still sends a Christmas card addressed to ‘The Laveau Family’ every year, which ends up in Des’s mailbox on Christmas day, no matter where he’s living. Zatanna, perhaps the most powerful magician on Earth, who spends her day job pulling rabbits out of hats to amuse small children. And of course, John Constantine, the warlock, the conman. He makes risky deals with demons while smoking a pack a day and cursing out every person within five feet of him.

Their eyes meet as Des places Constantine’s plate in front of him. Constatine’s been sitting at the bar, nursing a pint and scowling at the wooden finish, barely giving Des a second look. He gets a second look this time -- a third, even, as Constantine doesn’t bother hiding the fact that he’s ogling Des. Constantine grins, gives Des a flirty wink. “Hello, handsome,” he says. He’s smaller than Des would have expected, looking like any other late-night straggler hunched over the bar and in need of a stiff drink. His magical aura has a sickly yellow-green glow to it, even as it crackles with a staticky power.

Des smiles back, because he’s always had a taste for dangerous things. His mama was always dragging him back from ledges, giving him lectures about being out too late at night, locking away the spices and herbs and totems so he couldn’t practice rituals unsupervised. So it’s probably not out of character for him to say, “The name’s Desmond.”

Constantine’s grin gets bigger. A flash of roguish charm. Rumor has it that he’s literally fucked some demons and not just metaphorically fucked some of them, and Des can see why. “John Constantine. Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he says. He gives Des a jaunty little salute with a nicotine-stained hand.

“I know,” Des says. His hand goes for his protection charm hanging around his neck, fiddles with it before he can stop the nervous tic.

“Oh really?” Constantine squints at him. “I see you’ve got a bit of magic in you,” he says.

Des shrugs. “You could say that, I guess.” Des never had much power himself. Just enough to get himself into trouble, his mama used to say. He wonders what Constantine sees when he looks at him.

“You want a bit more?” Constantine tilts his head to the side, his eyebrows rising with the innuendo.

That provokes a laugh out of Des, despite his better instincts. He can practically hear Tommy in the kitchen rolling his eyes at him. “Does that line actually work for you?”

“More often than you might think.” Constantine’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and Desmond knows, right then and there, that he’s going to take this man home tonight. Take him home and spread him out on the bed, kiss him and fuck him until he can’t say smart ass remarks from the side of his mouth. “In fact, it seems as though it’s working for me right now.”

“You know, you’re not far off from what I was expecting,” Des says. Constantine’s a con, alright. All smooth smiles and slick words. Des knows better, and he’s still drawn to it. Sure, the man’s handsome enough, but plenty of handsome men come into Des’s bar every night. Most of them aren’t trailing a legacy of broken hearts and dead bodies in their wake.

“Good. Then we both know exactly what this is.” Constantine tosses back the rest of his drink and looks Des in the eye the entire time.

It startles Des, just how much he likes Constantine. He likes the wry smile on the man’s face and the scruff of his five o’ clock shadow and even the aching, hurting thing that seems to linger in the depth of his eyes. That’s always been Des’s other weakness: the broken ones. “Oh, baby,” his mama would say whenever he trailed home another boyfriend with too many jagged edges, “you know you can’t save the world, right?”

Des knew that, of course, but that didn’t stop him from trying it again every time. Constantine looks like he needs a safe place to land for a little while and Des thinks -- Des knows -- that he can be that place. Constantine takes his silence as hesitation and backs off a bit. “Just say the word and I’ll be out of your hair, love.”

“Nah,” Des says instead. “Stick around. My shift ends at nine.”

Constantine sticks around. He orders another plate of greasy fries and a side of fried shrimp to go along with the drinks he makes sure Des keeps pouring him. At some point, he loses the coat, loosens his tie, rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, a dusting of pale hair on his forearms. He flirts some more, asks Des for stories. Des tells him some, steering clear of his family and any of their magic. Not out of any desire to conceal anything, but because it feels like work -- for all that it’s not Des’s work -- and Des doesn’t want to be listed in the ‘work associates’ category of Constantine’s mental filing cabinet. Constantine laughs at the parts where Des tries to climb his high school building after the first time he gets stoned, and it draws the corners of his lips upwards. It softens the hard edges of his face.

It strikes Des then, in a way that it hadn’t before this moment, that Constantine doesn’t just look sad, he is sad. Maybe Des should have realized that sooner, but the stories about him are all exaggerated gossip and cautionary tales, the shadowy occultist who’s more grifter than mystic. A trench coat and a cigarette, maybe a snarky one-liner or two. An outline of a person. Not the flesh and blood that’s in front of Des now.

“What about you?” Des asks. “I’m sure you’re full of stories.”

“Sure am,” Constantine says with another sip of his drink. “None of ’em good.” He avoids Des’s eyes for a moment -- out of fear or shame, Des can’t tell.

Des says, “Try me.” Des is a bartender with a weakness for broken people who’s spent his whole life surrounded by magic of all sorts. One of his cousins tangled with some cambions a few years back, and she came back without an eye and a few teeth and a deep-seated trauma that still haunts her smile. His gran had angry spirits haunting her house, all their terrible pain and suffering that they carried in life not even the slightest bit excised from them after death.

“You’ve heard of me, then.” Constantine smiles again, and this smile is all teeth, mean and hard. “Maybe you’ve even heard of Newcastle; summoning gone wrong, a demon dragging a little girl to hell? You ever heard of me mate, Gary Lester? Decent bloke. Shit guitarist. Tried to trap a hunger demon in a bottle once, but it got out anyway. Went on a rampage. There was only one way to trap and kill it, in the end. Wanna make a guess?”

Des only really managed to befriend one of his gran’s spirits, a man by the name of Walter. He was a lynching victim, and his ghostly head always sat badly on his shoulders due to the broken neck, His rage and despair at the injustice of it all was a physical thing, a living thing, the pain of it reverberating even from the past into the present. His gran eventually exorcised Walter, sang and danced the spirit right out of the house, and when Des was sad about it, she had said, “The world’s heavy, boy, and if you let it, it’ll sink you straight to the bottom. It don’t matter how bad things get; you gotta learn to swim.”

Des looks at Constantine, and he sees a drowning man.

He says, “Gary was the sacrifice.” Magic, Des knows, can be cruel. Demon magic especially likes blood, likes pain. It likes twisted ironies and tragic parallels. There’s only one way this story could have ended.

Constantine laughs, sharp and cold and biting. “You ever seen a man eaten alive by a hunger demon, love?”

“No,” Des says, honestly. “It was ugly, right? Painful? Not a clean way to go at all. My family’s got stories, like that, too. Masters who worked them to death, stole their children, beat them raw, attacked them with dogs. We’re still here.” He pulls Constantine another pint, sets it down in front of him. “And you’re still here, too.”

That seems to draw Constantine up short. He looks at Des with different eyes, careful and assessing, like he’s starting to see Des as something more than just a late-night hookup. “Fair warning,” he says, “I’m not a good man.”

“Most of us aren’t,” Des replies, thinking of all his own failings, all his own moments of selfishness and insecurity, “but we’re doing our best. You could’ve let that hunger demon roam free, and you didn’t.” He stares Constantine right in the eye and refuses to flinch away from the raw emotion he sees there. Just how much have those eyes seen? Des doesn’t have an answer to that question, but shockingly enough, he’s not scared of it either.

“You’re something else, Desmond,” Constantine says. The wry smile is back, but it’s tinged with a startling vulnerability, something almost like gentleness. It’s another layer, tucked underneath the roguish charm and the mean, hard edges. Des has no idea how many there are left to peel back, but he wants to stick around long enough to see a few more.

Des glances up at the clock hanging on the wall, the one his eyes stay glued to on slow nights. “It’s nine, now. We could grab a table, continue this conversation there.”

A flash of amusement crosses Constantine’s face, and Des thinks he likes this version of the man best, the one who doesn’t feel the need to guard every bit of himself so tightly. Constantine says, “I wouldn’t say ’no,’ but I suspect you’ve got a better offer on tap.”

“Or we could go back to mine,” Des says. “I only live a few blocks away.” Des thinks back to the fantasy he’d indulged in earlier, and he still wants that, wants to have Constantine in his bed. But now the fantasy is tinged with the desire to give Constantine at least a few moments of uncomplicated pleasure and human connection, something to keep the demons -- real or imagined -- at bay for just a little bit longer.

“As good a plan as any,” Constantine says. The twinkle in his eyes is back, and the sight of it is all the sweeter because Des feels like he’s earned it this time. He stands up, swings the trench coat back around his shoulders, tosses a handful of bills onto the counter. “Ready when you are, love.”

Des laughs. “I’m going to have to finish up here before we go. And then I’m all yours.”

“That a promise?” Constantine asks. He waggles his eyebrows, exaggerated and ridiculous.

It’s a bolt then, a sudden feeling that works its way through Des’s chest along with his giddy laughter. Years and years later, he’ll look back on this moment, and he’ll know the exact moment he was lost, the moment he damned himself to Hell and to the pain of loving and losing John Constantine. But in his moment, all he knows is this odd, funny, charming, sad man, and he knows that he loves him, just the tiniest bit. “Yeah,” Des says. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

FIN.