Matters of Circumstance :: Crossover :: PG :: ZOMG CONSTANTYNE (it'll catch)
Title: Matters of Circumstance
Fandom: Crossover: Resident Evil + Constantine
Pairings: John/Jill SHIP IT, LAMERS. HATERS TO THE LEFT.
Rating: PG
Genre: General? I hesitate to say "romance," because... yeah. Their definition of romance is. Weird.
Word count: 3,658
Spoilers: None
Summary: Another RP spin-off thing, based on when I played Jill at underworldwars. John, Jill, random conversations, and small, mostly one-sided displays of sort-of-affection. The usual, in short.
Note: At the time of writing this, I've still only seen Constantine one time, so I did my best to go off memory/his player's characterization. If anything's off with his personality, GOSH DARN IT I TRIED.
Jill’s sleeping patterns had changed again and again over the years, generally depending on the location and her most recent experiences. Months ago, even the smallest sounds would have woken her; she wasn’t nearly so light a sleeper now as she was then, but it still took little beyond a gentle shake to rouse her these days.
What stirred her now wasn’t even that much. She heard the mattress creak before she was even fully conscious, felt the familiar weight slide in beside her, and caught the blurred glow of the bedside clock as her eyes blinked open - memory took the pieces and quickly painted the picture for her muddled mind, fortunately before overcautious instinct could kick in.
If the smallest sounds once woke her, the lightest touches could have sent her into a defensive reflex - and often had. In the worst-case scenarios, she had blindly seized and pinned him, or outright kicked him onto the floor; more commonly, she would tense, flinch, or withdraw. Those days were pretty much behind her, in this one case, so Jill’s muscles hadn’t even begun to tighten when she recognized that she was perfectly safe.
Relatively speaking.
On her side, she felt him settle in close enough for his chest to graze her back, but he didn’t put an arm over her or otherwise touch her. Her brain finally made sense of the clock’s face - four in the morning - and she shifted, stretching her legs out under the sheets and breathing out sharply with the stiff effort. Her next inhale brought in his familiar scent, but the standard smell of cigarette smoke was noticeably stronger than usual.
“You okay?” she asked without turning, and closed her heavy eyes against that annoying red glare.
“Yeah.” His voice was gruff, short, and clear of sleep. “Just needed a smoke.”
Jill didn’t respond right away, but her attention was caught. He was being dismissive - nothing new, but she was plenty familiar with the subtle differences in his short range of tones by now. After a moment of shooing away the weight of sleep and gathering her thoughts, she asked more lucidly,
“Just a craving? Or was it something else?”
A pause on his end, followed by some small movement. “What do you think it was?” The remark wasn’t sarcastic - rather, it wasn’t sarcastic in the usual sense, the kind intended to rile her up. The only sarcasm in it was his usual, the type Jill had come to outright ignore nine times out of ten because she knew it was mostly a habit of his - or, if it was intentional, the best way to get around the attitude was often to ignore it. She sensed the former case now: he was just avoiding her question in his own immature way.
And as was the norm, her response to said immaturity was cool, calm, and deliberately unruffled. “I know you’ve gotten pretty good about your habit. These days you only really smoke when something’s bothering you.” She let that sink in for a few seconds, and then rolled onto her back - a motion that gently bumped her shoulder into his cool collarbone. Her vision had mostly adjusted to the darkness to let her see his face; she met his dark eyes and watched them for a couple beats, disregarding how her sharp sense of smell was picking up that tobacco scent even more clearly.
The backs of her fingers came up to breeze along his chin, more a casual gesture of invitation than a sign of affection. “What is it?”
It was their usual routine: problem, curiosity, disregard, the appropriate push, some more dancing around the subject, and then finally a serious talk. It wasn’t perfect - oftentimes they didn’t make it past the “disregard” stage - but then again they weren’t perfect, and neither were their circumstances nor their odd thing of a relationship. Both of them knew it; neither tried to pretend otherwise.
John didn’t react to the brief touch, but that was nothing new, either. Even these days, it wasn’t always possible to guess what would and wouldn’t get a response out of him, and Jill was too used to his on-again-off-again receptivity to take offense in it. Most of the time.
He turned away and gave a short cough, either genuine or as a method of stalling. “Nothin’ new worth thinkin’ about. Same crap, different day.”
“Hm.” Jill’s hum was acknowledging, only lightly skeptical. “But you’re pretty good at putting up with that same crap,” she pointed out. Catching his look, she added, “I mean that in the best way possible.”
She hesitated, letting just enough seconds go by to avoid coming off pushy before trying more gently, “You wanna talk?”
It was an all-or-nothing stab. Silence fell again as John didn’t immediately answer, his gaze absently downcast somewhere between the two of them. After another moment he sat up, but only to rest his back against the headboard as one hand scratched at his head.
“That’s what I meant,” he said finally, his dark stare fixed on the far side of the bedroom. “Same crap, different day. Some of the torture sessions or zombie apocalypses or whatever are more creative than others, but in the long run, it’s…”
“One big circle?” Jill offered.
John exhaled, glancing at her. “You could say that.”
After clicking on the bedside lamp, Jill moved onto her left side and propped her head on her fist. “And this suddenly bothers you?” A strange question out of context, but she knew John Constantine to be one of those who’d taken the most naturally - and willingly - to their circumstances; objectively speaking, he might have been more or less useless in a typical fight, but he could roll with the punches when push came to shove. Things didn’t faze him the way they did others, and when they did it wasn’t as much or as openly; he didn’t have the usual complaints that other unwilling residents did, and Jill could list several reasons why that probably was.
So for him to be bothered by it now was… unexpected.
“Not suddenly, no.” John didn’t explain himself right away, but Jill didn’t push. The patience she’d developed in dealing with him was a unique breed that some saints probably envied. “I don’t know,” he went on, sounding resigned. “This ain’t the first time I thought about it.” He looked over again, straight at her, and she saw the indecisiveness there even if she wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
Jill broke eye contact just long enough to find his hand and cover it with hers, familiar with finding his skin cold, and then looked up at him again. “About what?” Her voice stayed the same calm, the same patient, the same unassuming and attentive.
That touch did get a reaction, even if it was just a fleeting glance before John looked ahead again.
Abruptly, and in his usual straightforward tone that knew no shame, he asked without warning, “Do you think I’m crazy?”
Jill blinked - partly at the question itself, partly at how he’d wisely kept any and all hints of emotion out of it, leaving her with absolutely no guess as to where this was leading. After the initial surprise, though, she wasted no time in frowning slightly. “No,” she said simply, honestly. “You’ve done some crazy things, but I’m not one to talk. If you mean literally insane, though, that should be obvious. I wouldn’t be lying here if I thought you were.”
Ignoring her puzzlement, John plowed on without missing a beat, “Do you think anyone here is crazy?”
Jill took a moment to consider that one, just to be fair. “…No. No one currently, anyway, if you don’t count the ones in charge.”
“And you don’t find that weird?”
Her frown deepened. There was a suggestion of something like patronization in John’s question, like he was waiting for her to realize something obvious. “What? That we’re all sane as far as I can tell?”
He shook his head briefly. “That’s just it. We’re all such super special snowflakes that Spider-Man could walk in and we’d only think it was weird for the first ten minutes. A day later, we’d all be cool with it, giving him survival advice and telling him about the best place in town to get coffee.” He watched her for another beat. “That’s not weird?”
“Weird, yes. But these days, it just seems like anything’s possible.” Jill studied his face, perturbed. “What’s your point, John?”
“My point is that no matter how much of a freak something or someone is, it eventually becomes so normal that it’s - not normal,” he finished lamely, almost cutting himself off. When he next looked down at Jill, it was to find her staring at him with one thoroughly unimpressed eyebrow arched high. John exhaled again and set his jaw, thoughtfully grinding his teeth for another pause, during which Jill pushed the covers back and sat up. She waited, adjusting the collar of her T-shirt before linking her arms around her knees.
“I don’t know,” John repeated. “But what if all of this…” He looked at her, eye-to-eye, and for the second time there was that glimpse of uncertainty, as if he were debating being honest. At length, he seemed to do away with any doubt, because he regained that blank-faced look and said bluntly, “What if we’re all crazy? What if this whole screwed up little society is actually some nightmare cooked up by a bunch of nut jobs, and we’re all really sitting around in some - mental ward, a bunch of vegetables jacked up on happy pills a world away?”
As hard as Jill tried to keep the surprise off her face, she failed - it was there along with skepticism and more than a little bewilderment. It was John’s turn to be patient, and he waited for her to think that over for a minute and struggle for an immediate answer.
“What…” She studied him, but he was still carefully blank. “Why would you think that?” she managed finally.
“It’d explain why none of us have had a remotely normal life. It’d explain a lot when you think about it. Like why we’ve got comic book characters strollin’ around - the real things, too, not just some dorks dressed up at a convention,” he clarified with another look. “Or why entirely different people show up with the exact same face as someone else.”
“So… what,” Jill asked, her thought process evident on her face, “you think this is some… group hallucination en masse? Or are you saying everything you see right now could just be part of your imagination?”
“En masse,” he said quickly, assuredly.
“Is that even possible?”
“It seems like anything’s possible these days,” John parroted, very much intentionally going by his expression. “Right, Jill?”
Her return look was momentarily a flat one, and then she shook her head. “That’s…”
“Crazy?”
“No.” She fixed him with a steady stare. “No crazier than any other possibility, but…” Jill glanced around at the low-lit room: the still furniture, the shadows, the two windows, the orange and white ball of fuzz currently sleeping atop the dresser. It all looked and felt real enough, but then again, she’d been subjected to a number of situations that, for a time, had convinced her to believe in things that weren’t true: delusions, false memories, her own altered personality. She could always recognize the lie once it was over - but what was to say that something about her now, her supposedly unaffected “real” self, wasn’t off in some way, and she couldn’t even tell the difference?
It was a possibility, a fear, even, that had occurred to Jill a couple times. She’d finally pushed it aside, telling herself that thinking like that was too close to paranoia, but what John was saying now wasn’t too far off her same mark.
In the end, the first argument she could come up with was, “That’d… be some hallucination, though. Consistent on a grand scale - plus we can even feel pain.”
John snorted in that slightly obnoxious way of his, a sound that wasn’t, at least, as much of a stark turn-off as it had been the first dozen times Jill had heard it (that wasn’t to say it was a turn-on now, because it definitely wasn’t). “Pain’s not as corporeal as everyone likes to think,” he told her, something like grim amusement in his expression. “If you know what something feels like, or if you just think you do, you can imagine it. Imagine it long and hard enough, and eventually feeling it and thinking that you feel it aren’t very different. Especially if you’re crazy to begin with.”
Jill also snorted, albeit softly and in a much more feminine manner. “If you think like that, then anything really is possible. Where do you draw the line?”
“Anywhere you want. Doesn’t mean it’s the right one.”
She sent him a sidelong look and smirked slightly. “…We’re getting philosophical again. You sure you wanna go there at four in the morning?”
John sniffed, cracking his neck. “Awake and half-naked in the middle of the night - what else is there to do?”
That earned a brief exhale of a chuckle as Jill pulled her hair back, gathering it over her right shoulder before going thoughtfully silent. “How long have you thought about this?” she asked more seriously.
One of his skinny shoulders twitched in a shrug. “First considered it a while back. Few months. But it’s not like I’m obsessing over it or anything.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jill replied, tone laced with teasing. “I’d hate for you to go doing something drastic.”
He scoffed, rewarding her with a brief glimpse of a grin. “Like what? Create a cult and start soapboxing on every street corner? A group of lunatics trying to convince more lunatics that we’re all nothing but lunatics?”
Jill twisted her lips, pretending to consider it. “…Something like that, yeah.”
Another snort. “Yeah, don’t worry.”
More silence, but the comfortable kind. The two of them always spoke their minds when necessary, and generally speaking they were as relaxed around each other as they could ever hope to be around anyone else. They had their awkward moments now and again, but those never came quietly; they wouldn’t force small talk if saying nothing at all was just as satisfying.
It was just as quiet outside, but Jill was used to that by now.
“…For what it’s worth,” she said at length, “I’ve been delirious before. I’ve hallucinated. I’ve had to look into some psych analyses regarding long-term delusions - criminal profiles,” she explained before John could ask, if he even intended to. “Something like this… it doesn’t fit the pattern. Any pattern.” She paused, and then- “…Or are you going to tell me that I could have imagined those studies, too, and it’s all just part of the grand, delusional scheme of things?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” said John promptly. “At the risk of getting philosophical, it’s all up to interpretation. Besides, I wouldn’t wanna… you know, sway your opinion. That might be considered drastic.”
A short, defeated laugh was Jill’s response before she muttered, “Always the wise guy.” In the same breath, she shifted, moving onto her knees and then slipping one over his thighs to settle smoothly into his lap. She looked down at him, the lingering smirk on her lips not quite touching her eyes.
“…It’s… hard to say anything with conviction anymore,” she began finally, her head tilting as she watched her fingers ghost over his shoulder. “Some things, anyway. I can give reasons, but I can’t always give proof - and I hate that, to be honest.” Jill made eye contact again to catch a slight look of curiosity in his gaze; he had no idea where she was going with this.
After a moment, she shrugged. “I think we are here, but maybe we’re not. Even so, I don’t… I don’t think that changes a whole lot, relatively speaking.” Her hand stopped at the curve of his neck; her thumb swept over his faint pulse. “Instinct is still real,” she said more slowly. “Feelings are real. You’re real to me. Beyond that…”
There were any number of ways Jill could have finished the thought. Beyond that, it’s material.
Beyond that, waking up wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
Beyond that, some people would say nothing else matters.
Any number of things that would have implied too much and said too little all at once, things that were only partly true for a variety of reasons.
In the end, she gave a nonchalant smile and finished, considerably more upbeat, “Well. Worst-case scenario, we’ll fight for the rest. The smaller things.”
John’s eyebrow went up in its signature nature-defying height. “That your answer for everything? Shoot first, take names later?”
Leaning forward, Jill perched her elbows on the headboard just above John’s shoulders. “Habit,” she said simply, her smile turning a little crooked.
“Ever even consider givin’ pacifism a try?” he asked. His hands found her sides, but lightly, as if only double-checking her balance. Jill tilted her head, touching her nose to his cheek.
“There aren’t many pacifists where I come from.”
A grunt. “What, in Zombieville and Virus Land? Guess that makes sense.”
“Hm.” The hum was vaguely amused as she closed her eyes. “Especially since not everyone can get away with hiding out on the roof.”
“Well. Sucks to be them.”
Jill smiled and leaned into him a bit, the movement playful, and was recompensed with his hand slipping around to her back. It was mild, no force to it, but she felt the lightest of pressures dissuading her from pulling away. Working on memory with her eyes still closed, she kissed him once, softly - and then again, longer, when John reciprocated. After that, she didn’t bother keeping track of precisely where one ended and another began.
Some half a minute later, she did pull back, returning to eye level and regarding him - with warmth, but not much beyond that.
She was tired, all right? So sue her.
“That enough philosophy for one night?” she asked. He gave another skeptically curious look.
“What’s your definition of philosophy?”
Jill’s warm arms wound around his chest and she settled against him, her head on his shoulder and their legs tangling. “Philosophy. Talking. Whatever.” She relaxed what few parts of her hadn’t already, her next sigh quiet and content. “I think we’ve hit our quota.”
“Probably. But the new quota starts at sunrise,” he said in a serious voice, one hand relocating to rest on her hip, “so I expect nothing less than a three-page speech from you when you wake up.”
Jill mirrored his tone. “On what?”
“On… whatever. Something philosophical.”
“And if I don’t?” she asked, trading curiosity for a sly hint of challenge.
“Then… you get… demoted,” John deduced. “Or whatever. You get demoted in the military, right?” That made her chuckle quietly; she traced blind, lazy lines over his back.
“What exactly would I get demoted to?”
“The worst thing imaginable,” he replied ominously, picking absently at the hem of Jill’s shirt. “You’d have your independence revoked, be given a curfew of six P.M., and take up the full-time job of cleaning and cooking.” A second passed, and then he added, “At home only. No career for you.”
“So, a…” Jill paused just long enough to yawn. “…Submissive, obedient, domesticated housewife, then.”
“Torture, isn’t it?” he asked, still in that intimidating voice.
Well. There were worse fates, if they were going to be technical. With anyone else, Jill would have tossed in a joke like, And I guess I’d rear six or seven kids while I was at it? All boys, just to make it extra difficult? - but this was a nice moment they were having, and she didn’t want to ruin it by making him awkwardly freeze up at the very thought.
Instead, she took a moment to nuzzle the curve of his neck lightly. “In that case, I guess you’d start providing a steady income, then? You could even go back to high school,” she proposed with a small, tired grin, thoroughly amused by her own joke, “maybe get a college degree… white-collar worker all the way.”
John scoffed. Loudly. “Yeah, that’s me, all right.”
“Never know. Maybe an affordable college’ll pop up around here one of these days. You could be a full-time executive during the week, part-time exorcist on weekends and during emergencies.”
“Orrrr, you could just become one of those crazy coupon women. Without any bills or insurance or whatever, we could probably live off that.”
Jill laughed, the sound full and clear despite the increasing weight in her voice. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on that.”
If John had a response besides a low exhale, she didn’t hear it. Reality slipped into that vague, blurry thing on the edge of sleep, and she was only distantly aware of when he shifted some minutes later, managing to keep her close as he lied down. She half-consciously moved closer, giving more body heat than she was taking but comfortable either way. Jill wasn’t the type to constantly cling, or who required that her partner be in her arms to get a decent night’s sleep; she had her moments of nestling up to him, but was otherwise content to let him initiate any intimacy, if he would, or to just settle for those couple inches between them.
Even more seldom, they met in the middle like this.
Fleetingly, the thought light-headedly random and the kind that only made sense at the time, it suddenly occurred to her that no, this couldn’t all be a delusion - because you couldn’t dream while dreaming, right? Like crazy people didn’t know they were crazy. Supposedly.
But then the light clicked off, completing the darkness, and Jill was out.
Fandom: Crossover: Resident Evil + Constantine
Pairings: John/Jill SHIP IT, LAMERS. HATERS TO THE LEFT.
Rating: PG
Genre: General? I hesitate to say "romance," because... yeah. Their definition of romance is. Weird.
Word count: 3,658
Spoilers: None
Summary: Another RP spin-off thing, based on when I played Jill at underworldwars. John, Jill, random conversations, and small, mostly one-sided displays of sort-of-affection. The usual, in short.
Note: At the time of writing this, I've still only seen Constantine one time, so I did my best to go off memory/his player's characterization. If anything's off with his personality, GOSH DARN IT I TRIED.
Jill’s sleeping patterns had changed again and again over the years, generally depending on the location and her most recent experiences. Months ago, even the smallest sounds would have woken her; she wasn’t nearly so light a sleeper now as she was then, but it still took little beyond a gentle shake to rouse her these days.
What stirred her now wasn’t even that much. She heard the mattress creak before she was even fully conscious, felt the familiar weight slide in beside her, and caught the blurred glow of the bedside clock as her eyes blinked open - memory took the pieces and quickly painted the picture for her muddled mind, fortunately before overcautious instinct could kick in.
If the smallest sounds once woke her, the lightest touches could have sent her into a defensive reflex - and often had. In the worst-case scenarios, she had blindly seized and pinned him, or outright kicked him onto the floor; more commonly, she would tense, flinch, or withdraw. Those days were pretty much behind her, in this one case, so Jill’s muscles hadn’t even begun to tighten when she recognized that she was perfectly safe.
Relatively speaking.
On her side, she felt him settle in close enough for his chest to graze her back, but he didn’t put an arm over her or otherwise touch her. Her brain finally made sense of the clock’s face - four in the morning - and she shifted, stretching her legs out under the sheets and breathing out sharply with the stiff effort. Her next inhale brought in his familiar scent, but the standard smell of cigarette smoke was noticeably stronger than usual.
“You okay?” she asked without turning, and closed her heavy eyes against that annoying red glare.
“Yeah.” His voice was gruff, short, and clear of sleep. “Just needed a smoke.”
Jill didn’t respond right away, but her attention was caught. He was being dismissive - nothing new, but she was plenty familiar with the subtle differences in his short range of tones by now. After a moment of shooing away the weight of sleep and gathering her thoughts, she asked more lucidly,
“Just a craving? Or was it something else?”
A pause on his end, followed by some small movement. “What do you think it was?” The remark wasn’t sarcastic - rather, it wasn’t sarcastic in the usual sense, the kind intended to rile her up. The only sarcasm in it was his usual, the type Jill had come to outright ignore nine times out of ten because she knew it was mostly a habit of his - or, if it was intentional, the best way to get around the attitude was often to ignore it. She sensed the former case now: he was just avoiding her question in his own immature way.
And as was the norm, her response to said immaturity was cool, calm, and deliberately unruffled. “I know you’ve gotten pretty good about your habit. These days you only really smoke when something’s bothering you.” She let that sink in for a few seconds, and then rolled onto her back - a motion that gently bumped her shoulder into his cool collarbone. Her vision had mostly adjusted to the darkness to let her see his face; she met his dark eyes and watched them for a couple beats, disregarding how her sharp sense of smell was picking up that tobacco scent even more clearly.
The backs of her fingers came up to breeze along his chin, more a casual gesture of invitation than a sign of affection. “What is it?”
It was their usual routine: problem, curiosity, disregard, the appropriate push, some more dancing around the subject, and then finally a serious talk. It wasn’t perfect - oftentimes they didn’t make it past the “disregard” stage - but then again they weren’t perfect, and neither were their circumstances nor their odd thing of a relationship. Both of them knew it; neither tried to pretend otherwise.
John didn’t react to the brief touch, but that was nothing new, either. Even these days, it wasn’t always possible to guess what would and wouldn’t get a response out of him, and Jill was too used to his on-again-off-again receptivity to take offense in it. Most of the time.
He turned away and gave a short cough, either genuine or as a method of stalling. “Nothin’ new worth thinkin’ about. Same crap, different day.”
“Hm.” Jill’s hum was acknowledging, only lightly skeptical. “But you’re pretty good at putting up with that same crap,” she pointed out. Catching his look, she added, “I mean that in the best way possible.”
She hesitated, letting just enough seconds go by to avoid coming off pushy before trying more gently, “You wanna talk?”
It was an all-or-nothing stab. Silence fell again as John didn’t immediately answer, his gaze absently downcast somewhere between the two of them. After another moment he sat up, but only to rest his back against the headboard as one hand scratched at his head.
“That’s what I meant,” he said finally, his dark stare fixed on the far side of the bedroom. “Same crap, different day. Some of the torture sessions or zombie apocalypses or whatever are more creative than others, but in the long run, it’s…”
“One big circle?” Jill offered.
John exhaled, glancing at her. “You could say that.”
After clicking on the bedside lamp, Jill moved onto her left side and propped her head on her fist. “And this suddenly bothers you?” A strange question out of context, but she knew John Constantine to be one of those who’d taken the most naturally - and willingly - to their circumstances; objectively speaking, he might have been more or less useless in a typical fight, but he could roll with the punches when push came to shove. Things didn’t faze him the way they did others, and when they did it wasn’t as much or as openly; he didn’t have the usual complaints that other unwilling residents did, and Jill could list several reasons why that probably was.
So for him to be bothered by it now was… unexpected.
“Not suddenly, no.” John didn’t explain himself right away, but Jill didn’t push. The patience she’d developed in dealing with him was a unique breed that some saints probably envied. “I don’t know,” he went on, sounding resigned. “This ain’t the first time I thought about it.” He looked over again, straight at her, and she saw the indecisiveness there even if she wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
Jill broke eye contact just long enough to find his hand and cover it with hers, familiar with finding his skin cold, and then looked up at him again. “About what?” Her voice stayed the same calm, the same patient, the same unassuming and attentive.
That touch did get a reaction, even if it was just a fleeting glance before John looked ahead again.
Abruptly, and in his usual straightforward tone that knew no shame, he asked without warning, “Do you think I’m crazy?”
Jill blinked - partly at the question itself, partly at how he’d wisely kept any and all hints of emotion out of it, leaving her with absolutely no guess as to where this was leading. After the initial surprise, though, she wasted no time in frowning slightly. “No,” she said simply, honestly. “You’ve done some crazy things, but I’m not one to talk. If you mean literally insane, though, that should be obvious. I wouldn’t be lying here if I thought you were.”
Ignoring her puzzlement, John plowed on without missing a beat, “Do you think anyone here is crazy?”
Jill took a moment to consider that one, just to be fair. “…No. No one currently, anyway, if you don’t count the ones in charge.”
“And you don’t find that weird?”
Her frown deepened. There was a suggestion of something like patronization in John’s question, like he was waiting for her to realize something obvious. “What? That we’re all sane as far as I can tell?”
He shook his head briefly. “That’s just it. We’re all such super special snowflakes that Spider-Man could walk in and we’d only think it was weird for the first ten minutes. A day later, we’d all be cool with it, giving him survival advice and telling him about the best place in town to get coffee.” He watched her for another beat. “That’s not weird?”
“Weird, yes. But these days, it just seems like anything’s possible.” Jill studied his face, perturbed. “What’s your point, John?”
“My point is that no matter how much of a freak something or someone is, it eventually becomes so normal that it’s - not normal,” he finished lamely, almost cutting himself off. When he next looked down at Jill, it was to find her staring at him with one thoroughly unimpressed eyebrow arched high. John exhaled again and set his jaw, thoughtfully grinding his teeth for another pause, during which Jill pushed the covers back and sat up. She waited, adjusting the collar of her T-shirt before linking her arms around her knees.
“I don’t know,” John repeated. “But what if all of this…” He looked at her, eye-to-eye, and for the second time there was that glimpse of uncertainty, as if he were debating being honest. At length, he seemed to do away with any doubt, because he regained that blank-faced look and said bluntly, “What if we’re all crazy? What if this whole screwed up little society is actually some nightmare cooked up by a bunch of nut jobs, and we’re all really sitting around in some - mental ward, a bunch of vegetables jacked up on happy pills a world away?”
As hard as Jill tried to keep the surprise off her face, she failed - it was there along with skepticism and more than a little bewilderment. It was John’s turn to be patient, and he waited for her to think that over for a minute and struggle for an immediate answer.
“What…” She studied him, but he was still carefully blank. “Why would you think that?” she managed finally.
“It’d explain why none of us have had a remotely normal life. It’d explain a lot when you think about it. Like why we’ve got comic book characters strollin’ around - the real things, too, not just some dorks dressed up at a convention,” he clarified with another look. “Or why entirely different people show up with the exact same face as someone else.”
“So… what,” Jill asked, her thought process evident on her face, “you think this is some… group hallucination en masse? Or are you saying everything you see right now could just be part of your imagination?”
“En masse,” he said quickly, assuredly.
“Is that even possible?”
“It seems like anything’s possible these days,” John parroted, very much intentionally going by his expression. “Right, Jill?”
Her return look was momentarily a flat one, and then she shook her head. “That’s…”
“Crazy?”
“No.” She fixed him with a steady stare. “No crazier than any other possibility, but…” Jill glanced around at the low-lit room: the still furniture, the shadows, the two windows, the orange and white ball of fuzz currently sleeping atop the dresser. It all looked and felt real enough, but then again, she’d been subjected to a number of situations that, for a time, had convinced her to believe in things that weren’t true: delusions, false memories, her own altered personality. She could always recognize the lie once it was over - but what was to say that something about her now, her supposedly unaffected “real” self, wasn’t off in some way, and she couldn’t even tell the difference?
It was a possibility, a fear, even, that had occurred to Jill a couple times. She’d finally pushed it aside, telling herself that thinking like that was too close to paranoia, but what John was saying now wasn’t too far off her same mark.
In the end, the first argument she could come up with was, “That’d… be some hallucination, though. Consistent on a grand scale - plus we can even feel pain.”
John snorted in that slightly obnoxious way of his, a sound that wasn’t, at least, as much of a stark turn-off as it had been the first dozen times Jill had heard it (that wasn’t to say it was a turn-on now, because it definitely wasn’t). “Pain’s not as corporeal as everyone likes to think,” he told her, something like grim amusement in his expression. “If you know what something feels like, or if you just think you do, you can imagine it. Imagine it long and hard enough, and eventually feeling it and thinking that you feel it aren’t very different. Especially if you’re crazy to begin with.”
Jill also snorted, albeit softly and in a much more feminine manner. “If you think like that, then anything really is possible. Where do you draw the line?”
“Anywhere you want. Doesn’t mean it’s the right one.”
She sent him a sidelong look and smirked slightly. “…We’re getting philosophical again. You sure you wanna go there at four in the morning?”
John sniffed, cracking his neck. “Awake and half-naked in the middle of the night - what else is there to do?”
That earned a brief exhale of a chuckle as Jill pulled her hair back, gathering it over her right shoulder before going thoughtfully silent. “How long have you thought about this?” she asked more seriously.
One of his skinny shoulders twitched in a shrug. “First considered it a while back. Few months. But it’s not like I’m obsessing over it or anything.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jill replied, tone laced with teasing. “I’d hate for you to go doing something drastic.”
He scoffed, rewarding her with a brief glimpse of a grin. “Like what? Create a cult and start soapboxing on every street corner? A group of lunatics trying to convince more lunatics that we’re all nothing but lunatics?”
Jill twisted her lips, pretending to consider it. “…Something like that, yeah.”
Another snort. “Yeah, don’t worry.”
More silence, but the comfortable kind. The two of them always spoke their minds when necessary, and generally speaking they were as relaxed around each other as they could ever hope to be around anyone else. They had their awkward moments now and again, but those never came quietly; they wouldn’t force small talk if saying nothing at all was just as satisfying.
It was just as quiet outside, but Jill was used to that by now.
“…For what it’s worth,” she said at length, “I’ve been delirious before. I’ve hallucinated. I’ve had to look into some psych analyses regarding long-term delusions - criminal profiles,” she explained before John could ask, if he even intended to. “Something like this… it doesn’t fit the pattern. Any pattern.” She paused, and then- “…Or are you going to tell me that I could have imagined those studies, too, and it’s all just part of the grand, delusional scheme of things?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” said John promptly. “At the risk of getting philosophical, it’s all up to interpretation. Besides, I wouldn’t wanna… you know, sway your opinion. That might be considered drastic.”
A short, defeated laugh was Jill’s response before she muttered, “Always the wise guy.” In the same breath, she shifted, moving onto her knees and then slipping one over his thighs to settle smoothly into his lap. She looked down at him, the lingering smirk on her lips not quite touching her eyes.
“…It’s… hard to say anything with conviction anymore,” she began finally, her head tilting as she watched her fingers ghost over his shoulder. “Some things, anyway. I can give reasons, but I can’t always give proof - and I hate that, to be honest.” Jill made eye contact again to catch a slight look of curiosity in his gaze; he had no idea where she was going with this.
After a moment, she shrugged. “I think we are here, but maybe we’re not. Even so, I don’t… I don’t think that changes a whole lot, relatively speaking.” Her hand stopped at the curve of his neck; her thumb swept over his faint pulse. “Instinct is still real,” she said more slowly. “Feelings are real. You’re real to me. Beyond that…”
There were any number of ways Jill could have finished the thought. Beyond that, it’s material.
Beyond that, waking up wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
Beyond that, some people would say nothing else matters.
Any number of things that would have implied too much and said too little all at once, things that were only partly true for a variety of reasons.
In the end, she gave a nonchalant smile and finished, considerably more upbeat, “Well. Worst-case scenario, we’ll fight for the rest. The smaller things.”
John’s eyebrow went up in its signature nature-defying height. “That your answer for everything? Shoot first, take names later?”
Leaning forward, Jill perched her elbows on the headboard just above John’s shoulders. “Habit,” she said simply, her smile turning a little crooked.
“Ever even consider givin’ pacifism a try?” he asked. His hands found her sides, but lightly, as if only double-checking her balance. Jill tilted her head, touching her nose to his cheek.
“There aren’t many pacifists where I come from.”
A grunt. “What, in Zombieville and Virus Land? Guess that makes sense.”
“Hm.” The hum was vaguely amused as she closed her eyes. “Especially since not everyone can get away with hiding out on the roof.”
“Well. Sucks to be them.”
Jill smiled and leaned into him a bit, the movement playful, and was recompensed with his hand slipping around to her back. It was mild, no force to it, but she felt the lightest of pressures dissuading her from pulling away. Working on memory with her eyes still closed, she kissed him once, softly - and then again, longer, when John reciprocated. After that, she didn’t bother keeping track of precisely where one ended and another began.
Some half a minute later, she did pull back, returning to eye level and regarding him - with warmth, but not much beyond that.
She was tired, all right? So sue her.
“That enough philosophy for one night?” she asked. He gave another skeptically curious look.
“What’s your definition of philosophy?”
Jill’s warm arms wound around his chest and she settled against him, her head on his shoulder and their legs tangling. “Philosophy. Talking. Whatever.” She relaxed what few parts of her hadn’t already, her next sigh quiet and content. “I think we’ve hit our quota.”
“Probably. But the new quota starts at sunrise,” he said in a serious voice, one hand relocating to rest on her hip, “so I expect nothing less than a three-page speech from you when you wake up.”
Jill mirrored his tone. “On what?”
“On… whatever. Something philosophical.”
“And if I don’t?” she asked, trading curiosity for a sly hint of challenge.
“Then… you get… demoted,” John deduced. “Or whatever. You get demoted in the military, right?” That made her chuckle quietly; she traced blind, lazy lines over his back.
“What exactly would I get demoted to?”
“The worst thing imaginable,” he replied ominously, picking absently at the hem of Jill’s shirt. “You’d have your independence revoked, be given a curfew of six P.M., and take up the full-time job of cleaning and cooking.” A second passed, and then he added, “At home only. No career for you.”
“So, a…” Jill paused just long enough to yawn. “…Submissive, obedient, domesticated housewife, then.”
“Torture, isn’t it?” he asked, still in that intimidating voice.
Well. There were worse fates, if they were going to be technical. With anyone else, Jill would have tossed in a joke like, And I guess I’d rear six or seven kids while I was at it? All boys, just to make it extra difficult? - but this was a nice moment they were having, and she didn’t want to ruin it by making him awkwardly freeze up at the very thought.
Instead, she took a moment to nuzzle the curve of his neck lightly. “In that case, I guess you’d start providing a steady income, then? You could even go back to high school,” she proposed with a small, tired grin, thoroughly amused by her own joke, “maybe get a college degree… white-collar worker all the way.”
John scoffed. Loudly. “Yeah, that’s me, all right.”
“Never know. Maybe an affordable college’ll pop up around here one of these days. You could be a full-time executive during the week, part-time exorcist on weekends and during emergencies.”
“Orrrr, you could just become one of those crazy coupon women. Without any bills or insurance or whatever, we could probably live off that.”
Jill laughed, the sound full and clear despite the increasing weight in her voice. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on that.”
If John had a response besides a low exhale, she didn’t hear it. Reality slipped into that vague, blurry thing on the edge of sleep, and she was only distantly aware of when he shifted some minutes later, managing to keep her close as he lied down. She half-consciously moved closer, giving more body heat than she was taking but comfortable either way. Jill wasn’t the type to constantly cling, or who required that her partner be in her arms to get a decent night’s sleep; she had her moments of nestling up to him, but was otherwise content to let him initiate any intimacy, if he would, or to just settle for those couple inches between them.
Even more seldom, they met in the middle like this.
Fleetingly, the thought light-headedly random and the kind that only made sense at the time, it suddenly occurred to her that no, this couldn’t all be a delusion - because you couldn’t dream while dreaming, right? Like crazy people didn’t know they were crazy. Supposedly.
But then the light clicked off, completing the darkness, and Jill was out.