tm 207 -- 635 words
Control.
It's clawing inside of you, hidden beneath the surface like the dust under the rug that you sweep away in a hurry to keep it from your guests, like the monsters under the bed you promise your children don't exist when you know that there are horrors in the world you hope they'll never come to know.
Everyone has a plan, everyone has a destiny and while some of them are meant for greatness and glory others are meant for suffering and pain, the way you live determines the what you die and you know that the thing inside you that's aching to be freed has you fast tracked to an eternity in the deepest pits of hell itself.
You've seen what they do. The way the demons tear at the flesh and the souls of the dammed, the way the pain never stops, just grows louder and louder as you scream and scream, it never stops, just grows inside you like the thumping of your heart in your chest and the rush of blood in your ears. A wave of noise, a hiss, you close your eyes and force it down. Deep breaths. Slow down your mind and calm your heart.
The record skips a beat as you wander through your mind, over the file, your arrest record pages long, the files and notes they 'lost' from Ravenscar in the shuffle and the noise. The screams. They pinned you down and sent drugs through your veins, electricity through your mind, blows to your body.
Punish you. Break you. Cure you. Fix you. The doctor's orders, lost save for broken memories that come in the night, visions curled in smoke exhaled towards the ceiling. Prayers to the heavens in the darkness.
Your fingers run over the wounds in your neck, healing now but the scars will stay for awhile, another reminder. The sigils on your back, tattooed after they worked. There were others, before your body was destroyed and rebuilt, but those memories are also fragments, pain and fire, broken pieces of your soul you'll never be able to patch back up again.
You sit and your smoke and you watch the moonlight dance with the clouds that roll, light moving across the floor, and it tears at your chest, first a tickle then a prickling that spreads as you cough into your hand. Pale skin is splattered with blood and everything burns as you suck in desperate breaths of oxygen, hands shaking as you stub the cigarette out on the floor, sparks fading, dying in the darkness as you force yourself to stop coughing.
The silence is broken by the soft patter of rain against the glass as the skies open up, no storm but merely a shower, to fill the streets with wetness and the air with life. You think of what you were told once as a child, that rain meant the angels were crying, and you rise off the floor and push the shutters aside and open the window. The air is cold against your bare skin as you lean out, steam curling from your lungs as you hang your head and cough, blood splattering onto the thin metal slats of the fire escape.
You watch as the water slowly pools and mixes with the blood, and it slowly runs down the slats and disappears. The water will pool and wash away the dirt and grime from the London streets, and you raise your face to it and close your eyes.
Catching a cold isn't even on your mind, as you silently pray out habit, holding a shred of a threadbare and stupid hope that maybe the rain will wash away your sins.
Everyone has a destiny. Everyone has a plan.
But that doesn't mean everyone has to stick to it.
You control your own ending. You wouldn't have it any other way.
John Constantine
Hellblazer (Misc Comics)
It's clawing inside of you, hidden beneath the surface like the dust under the rug that you sweep away in a hurry to keep it from your guests, like the monsters under the bed you promise your children don't exist when you know that there are horrors in the world you hope they'll never come to know.
Everyone has a plan, everyone has a destiny and while some of them are meant for greatness and glory others are meant for suffering and pain, the way you live determines the what you die and you know that the thing inside you that's aching to be freed has you fast tracked to an eternity in the deepest pits of hell itself.
You've seen what they do. The way the demons tear at the flesh and the souls of the dammed, the way the pain never stops, just grows louder and louder as you scream and scream, it never stops, just grows inside you like the thumping of your heart in your chest and the rush of blood in your ears. A wave of noise, a hiss, you close your eyes and force it down. Deep breaths. Slow down your mind and calm your heart.
The record skips a beat as you wander through your mind, over the file, your arrest record pages long, the files and notes they 'lost' from Ravenscar in the shuffle and the noise. The screams. They pinned you down and sent drugs through your veins, electricity through your mind, blows to your body.
Punish you. Break you. Cure you. Fix you. The doctor's orders, lost save for broken memories that come in the night, visions curled in smoke exhaled towards the ceiling. Prayers to the heavens in the darkness.
Your fingers run over the wounds in your neck, healing now but the scars will stay for awhile, another reminder. The sigils on your back, tattooed after they worked. There were others, before your body was destroyed and rebuilt, but those memories are also fragments, pain and fire, broken pieces of your soul you'll never be able to patch back up again.
You sit and your smoke and you watch the moonlight dance with the clouds that roll, light moving across the floor, and it tears at your chest, first a tickle then a prickling that spreads as you cough into your hand. Pale skin is splattered with blood and everything burns as you suck in desperate breaths of oxygen, hands shaking as you stub the cigarette out on the floor, sparks fading, dying in the darkness as you force yourself to stop coughing.
The silence is broken by the soft patter of rain against the glass as the skies open up, no storm but merely a shower, to fill the streets with wetness and the air with life. You think of what you were told once as a child, that rain meant the angels were crying, and you rise off the floor and push the shutters aside and open the window. The air is cold against your bare skin as you lean out, steam curling from your lungs as you hang your head and cough, blood splattering onto the thin metal slats of the fire escape.
You watch as the water slowly pools and mixes with the blood, and it slowly runs down the slats and disappears. The water will pool and wash away the dirt and grime from the London streets, and you raise your face to it and close your eyes.
Catching a cold isn't even on your mind, as you silently pray out habit, holding a shred of a threadbare and stupid hope that maybe the rain will wash away your sins.
Everyone has a destiny. Everyone has a plan.
But that doesn't mean everyone has to stick to it.
You control your own ending. You wouldn't have it any other way.
John Constantine
Hellblazer (Misc Comics)