002. [visual] in debt to the earth
John Constantine has inherited a bowling alley.
In a burst of bizarre irony - perhaps even the kind worthy of giant hamsters God's sense of humor - the man who owned the place had not a week ago died of bees (and Balthazar), so were he in other circumstances he might have approached this by like ...finding a new apartment. One not above a bowling ( Read more... )
In a burst of bizarre irony - perhaps even the kind worthy of giant hamsters God's sense of humor - the man who owned the place had not a week ago died of bees (and Balthazar), so were he in other circumstances he might have approached this by like ...finding a new apartment. One not above a bowling ( Read more... )
But meanwhile: if allowed, John will take her coat, observing in tandem that knife's edge eye - he recognizes it, if not in exactly that guise. She can get settled in, as he both returns her belated introduction and obfuscates it, looking at her from under the same half-lidded assessing cast they were uh, leveling at one another before. "John Constantine." The first half of which she already knew, but, "I'm going to get you a chair."
And so he vanishes briefly to the larger part of the alley, in effect not really saying what he is, or does, and that's ...annoying, but it also doesn't have an easy explanation. While no one could mistake him for modest, that's where his pride is, in being John Constantine, and therefore many things, most of which is: still standing.
He comes back carrying a wooden chair enough enough to reach the table; Beeman had one back there, but it was weird and metal and also John can't help thinking of it as being inextricably linked to the dead, and so it's gone now. "I hope that's not a recipe for matzoh."
...shut up, John.
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Producing her glasses and her own notebooks, pens and the like from her bag, Enfys sets it down underneath the chair he gives her (John's manners are...weird, but so is he, and Enfys is not the sort of person to really notice much less object - sometimes people say things, sometimes they don't, and in due fairness she hasn't bothered to ask) and starts, for simplicity's sake, with what's already in front of her. The jaggedly bright colours that she tumbles around the world in shear off for a while, and she's a different person when she's working; quiet, focused, disinterested in her surroundings. A stiletto blade instead of the lochaber axe.
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Yet. Although Enfys of course is something other, but she's something John has never encountered, and the rules are not always consistent from place to place. This is going to be a learning experience. For now he takes on sorting out a small shelf of books just behind the table, some more terrifying looking than others (one, notably, is encased in several layers of plastic and then some kind of muslim, and even for the uninitiated it isn't the sort of thing that's pleasant to touch - John grimaces looking at it). Occasionally this necessitates that he move in and out of her space, which he does with relative ease. She's not paying him much attention, and for their current mutual purposes, that's ideal.
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Apparently Enfys regards her own personal space roughly as much as anyone else's - which is to say she barely seems to notice John moving in and out of it. She does notice, but it doesn't register as anything she should object to, so she doesn't let him distract her. Work is work, and fuck, she has missed working. She's missed a purpose, a goal, sitting down with her studies and assuring herself of her own fucking competence.
(The fact that her shoulders aren't like rock with stress is a minor miracle.)
"Do you have a pen?" she asks, glaring at hers with asperity when it gives up the ghost.
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He holds this out to Enfys somewhat dubiously; if she's particular he'll go look for something else, because he knows from particular. "Can you make anything out of it? I'm guessing you aren't making notes on the quality of the prose there."
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"Oh, yeah- I just need to sketch something out so I can get a better idea of it in my head, you know? Identification purposes, I've got you covered already." Enfys squints down at what she's looking at for a few moments longer, and presumably when she's got herself situated she'll actually let him in on her discoveries, but her fingertips on his hand when she takes the grease pencil may be...diverting.
And not for the usual reasons, either; somehow that'd be just a little too gentle.
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One of them, anyway.
This is not seeing; his eyes snap up to her face immediately, and there's still nothing to latch onto there but a pretty girl whose slightly sharp features are offset by large, expressive eyes and softness of mouth (at ...least when it's at rest). Nothing he can see changes, but knowledge comes in the same kind of waves (the faces of demons and the wings of angels, the otherworldly lights in their eyes - none of them stay, they pass like ripples along the surface of water and float out of view only to crash in again) traveling from his hand, reverberating through the long scar on his wrist and passing like a skein of invisible current to the mind which has learned to stop protesting these things. Because it never helps.
John Constantine knows from evil, it's pretty safe to say, its outer manifestation reflecting the roiling cruelty underneath, and his sudden awareness doesn't spell that out in the black and white he's used to. What he understands this as is darkness, and darkness can be anything.
All of this takes place in about three seconds that feel much, much longer; he doesn't back up or flinch away from her, but his posture changes. It's not subtle - some people who use their bodies with more inherent grace can wear fight or flight like a second skin, but this is the guy whose last exorcism ended with a three hundred pound mirror dropped out of a window. "A librarian, you said. What else are you?"
So that's ....straightforward.
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The sane response here would be to take her hand away from him- to recoil, sharply, at that straightforwardness, at the way he stares at her face looking for something that might be there under the surface (but not where he can see it). Presumably that's why it doesn't look a goddamn thing like what Enfys does, which is to curl her slender, terrifyingly strong fingers around his wrist like she's utterly fascinated by the sudden and subtle changes in him and wants to see how far he can be pushed or pulled by her girl-shaped maelstrom.
"A rainbow," she says, because it's the first thing to come to mind, "but you could say 'a monster' and I wouldn't mind. We're weapons shaped like girls, it's a bit fucked up, mostly it means I'm supposed to kill things until they kill me. And handsome, don't ask me what kind of things I'm talking about, because you already know."
She was listening to his conversation; she was going to seek him out. These are small details, but noteworthy.
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It's this self-preservation that makes him hold still against the hold on his wrist; he's been tossed across enough rooms to know, for instance, when a person (and sometimes they are just people; the possessed have all the terrifying strength of what's inside them) could snap those bones if she wanted. "I like the part where we pretend we're talking in metaphor as much as I like it when someone grabs me without permission. Yeah. I know."
His eyes go half-lidded again, not for the first or even second time in her acquaintance, and for all that he doesn't, actually, sound like he minds. "And here I was thinking you just had a lot of time to kill."
He thought no such fucking thing, but these are people who communicate in an ...especial way.
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"Oh, we're not talking in metaphors," she assures him, ignoring the part about 'permission' like it's a foreign word she'll look up when she has a Dudes to Enfys dictionary handy, "half of me is Welsh and so is my name. It means rainbow."
The implication, of course, is that she meant 'monster' pretty damn literally.
Either way, she laughs, letting him go and turning her back on him (just like that, back to the paper in front of her), "Me and time have an understanding." By which she means she probably has very little, and intends to bend it over and make it scream in order to make the very most of what she does have. She splits her focus, now, sketching for understanding (lightning- more complex than that- foci-), "We're called Slayers, I'll give you a book with the revised notes."
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"It figures." Yes, it f...igures that her name means rainbow, in Welsh; arguably the definition of irony was the only part of the short story unit where he was paying attention in English class. "And that's nice, if it's something they teach in school I'm sorry I quit." You know, the ability to make time your bitch, since time as it operates with John has always been arbitrary and kind of lousy.
He leans against the wall next to the table and shelves above it, arms crossed loosely over his chest to watch what she's doing - and watch her, in some capacity; he still doesn't see anything, but now that this new level of perception has been introduced it flickers and comes back again, like a new layer in the atmosphere. "How similar is this? You're reading Aramaic, at this point I'm assuming with some confidence that's not what you took up because the macrame class was full."
Because 'demons' and 'monsters' and whatever else are not necessarily all the same thing. And he hasn't mentioned that he kills things yet, exactly, but she can presumably make her own inferences at this point.
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"It wasn't macrame," Enfys says, not missing a beat, "it was unicorn-wrangling and they had space, they just said I was ineligible."
Madam.
"It's pretty similar, though- not to unicorns, unless you're really interesting once the pants come off- this is a little more than I usually get my hands on, but you know how it is, broke-arse university student living in the arse-end of the world." There's a lot of ass involved, apparently. "I used to know people who had more resources, I figured I could do it on a shoe-string, I turned out to be right. Girls like me- well, there aren't girls like me. There are Slayers, but I chose for myself."
Which...most of them don't. They're like priestesses of the slaughter to be sacrificed and a choice isn't offered to them; Enfys embraced monster as a part of her identity, not an albatross around her neck, and she knows she's not the standard.
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His education has been slightly more patchwork, making it not dissimilar to hers, actually - choices. What you choose to be because of what you are; he chose to be this person who needs something read in Aramaic to him - his is okay, but it's not great - because he was damned, and she chose to be the girl who can read it because she's a little bit of a monster. He shifts off of the wall and comes to look at what she's doing, since that is ostensibly why they're here regardless of conversational shifts and altered tone, leaning by one arm on the table next to her. "Slayers, huh. Got kind of a ring to it; I usually just call myself cursed."
Which answers part of the question why he hasn't exactly put forth a title. "The things you fight - everyone see them?"
For what they are, presumably.
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The sketch under her hands is the artist's impression of summoning electrical power and channeling them into the body of an enemy, for the record; Enfys is looking at distances and forces and consequence, and for some reason it helps her to draw pictures.
"In every generation there was one of us, and hundreds of potentials- girls who might have been, might still be, weren't. 'Generation' is a bit misleading, because it implies that we live for longer than about three or four years on average; we didn't. Called mid-teens, generally didn't live past eighteen. Summers changed the rules and now every potential is a Slayer, which I discovered when I punched a guy through a bar because I hit a little harder than I was used to, suddenly."
She looks sideways at him. "We kill things that people could see, but they don't. Personally I got other priorities than killing everything, but it is what it is."
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Slaying, and whatnot. He declines to get into much of the rest of that; he'll process and absorb it on his own time. For instance, if she actually gives him a book, he'll read it. "How was that working out for you? Before here, if we're going for the obvious." His head tilts, sardonic; he lifts his head from the drawing to raise his eyebrows at her. "I ask because - let's say interpreting the rules for myself hasn't always gone so well."
Other priorities, indeed.
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"You didn't say kill," Enfys agrees, placidly (never to be trusted), "but I did. And I'm twenty-four, so I'd say it's not going awfully or anything; my da likes to call it God's work, which is nice for him, I'm sure."
(She wears a cross pendant, but without turning her attention fully to what she's saying- honestly, she sounds totally indifferent to God's interest in what she does or does not do in whose name.)
"Making my own rules up seems to have been working."
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