7361/He Just Forgot.

He Just Forgot.
Date of Scene:	13 August 2021
Location:	Lighthouse Keeper's Cottage/LM Loft
Synopsis:	Once again, a Phoebe bandaid is put on the damage done by Astaroth, but how long will it hold? Chas is drawn to his last by John's blase' attitude, Meggan's drawn to hers by Chas - but everyone walks away living and breathing another day, that's a win.
Cast of Characters:	John Constantine, Meggan Puceanu, Phoebe Beacon

---

John Constantine has posed:
    Last night was a clusterfuck that ended with Stephen Strange putting John to bed. Well, it was actually Chas that put him to bed after Stephen put him to sleep. Chas, being the great and considerate fella that he is would have called Meggan to let her know that the *asshole* was safe and asleep for the night.

    It's the next day...

    It's really only a hop skip, through the House and to the front door here. But that's all it took, John makes it to the porch before the previous to stave off the curse of Astaroth fail horribly. It hits so hard, so fast that he doesn't even have time to call out to Meggan. Here's to hoping she's even *home*, if she's not, that rock is turning colors quick; color of dried blood by now, almost black.

    ...as black as the stuff coloring John's lips as he coughs, gags, splutters, hacks and *cannot* catch a breath. When it starts it doubles him over, as it continues it takes him to his hands and knees. Blackness creeps in to his periphery, his body screams for oxygen, his head spins. He's going pass out, and there's not a damned thing he can do about it.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
That asshole really needs to learn some manners. He needs a tag around his neck that says 'Return to House if found' and some automated reward dropped off for whomever thoughtfully delivers him. Wouldn't that be nice?

Meggan isn't the kind to usually fret but John's constant entanglements at the Laughing Magician are a long way from the quiet life that neither of them has ever found, wanted, or dealt with. There are other matters for her to worry about: her grades. It's a small matter compared to the rest of the League tumbling through one iota of trouble to another. The curtain of life and death seems to hover all the closer when Chas sends that message.

She resides in the water about a half-mile offshore, disentangling fishing gear from a frustrated shark, cheerfully advising it that things will just be fine as she removes a few of those hooks and a stretch of rotten wire from around its pectoral fin. Her endlessly black eyes don't need much to recognize a shift in the ambiant conditions, photoreceptors flashing so hard that it takes a moment for her mind to shut down the spikes of pain when the pale glow goes into a different shade altogether.

<<Oh fuck.>>

<<Nomnom?>>

<<No nomnoms. Give my regards to The Mother White.>> The faintly blue-skinned oceanid summarily snaps three cables and the shark thrashes, a last burst of energy to get free of the stinking human assembly. It doesn't say thank you or look back, but that's a shark for you. Four hundred millions as an apex predator and they've not forgot they ate everyone first.

A good thing, considering the waves practically reel around the girl and hurl her backward in a riptide. She already stretches her webbed fingers and feet forth to grab the water, and clears the reef in rather record speed. Waves split and air snatches her up, hurtling her in a smooth arcing throw straight for the stony tower aflame by night and bright white-grey stone in day.

It really does take her time to orient for all that reaching Cape Carmine is expressly quick. But an elemental empath doesn't know direction or details until they offer themselves, and she is already making preparations to land and bound off to the House's physical address in Gotham.

But the empathic element knows what it knows, and his soul wound in her own makes as good a trigger as any for knowing where the tattered, filthy thing is down there.

She's halfway to the headlands when that happens, whipping back fast enough leave a rattling boom for the disrupted air.

That might be the knell for John as he sinks into the nothingness. The void, erupting with the gates of Hell tearing open, and one pissed demon coming to collect.

That's how they all go in the dark, alone, escorted by none.

Well /fuck/ indeed, as she comes to hover over him.

John Constantine has posed:
    By the time Meggan makes it to him, John is down, face first on the stone stairs. Hell, he's even down *and* out, but he's not *out*. That is to say that he's still breathing, barely, a rasping, gurgling sort of sound? Is that life or is it a death rattle?

    Are they waiting for him? The Three with a claim? Or, maybe, is this the perfect time for him to die? When the Underworld is in shambles and chaos, would the even *notice* him?

    Maybe it's his sheer stubbornness? Maybe it's Meggan's sudden appearance that does it, but he fights his way back, for moment... long enough to get out, "Can't breathe." In that moment, the fear, no that would be *terror* that rolls off of him is as intense at the waves that hurled her here to begin with. He *knows* he's dying. He knows his mistake. He remembers what he forgot.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The Underworld may be so disordered that those who dwell in fire and darkness have their own preserves to worry about. Perhaps it's a dangerous game that adds enough spice that they give John a touch of mercy, since observing how claims and conquest go is infinitely more interesting than slicing down the same damn demons for the last billion years.

Meggan isn't indecisive about the matters before her. She pushes two fingers under John's throat to feel for a pulse, feel for everything that would speak to obstructions or a rot rolling away from something.

However, a soaking wet Atlantean girl wearing water as her chosen garment could be a problem. Doubly because one doesn't simply walk into hospitals like that without raising questions.

He's dying, but the struggle against dying can be just as fatal as charm. She bows her head to his for a moment, blood or phlegm disregarded, tarry goop no more an issue than mild radioactivity. Salt touches his lips and she breathes out into him, oxygen instead of carbon dioxide kicked into his lungs as a lifeline to inflate them on his exhalation. It's not much except to hypersaturate his veins and the failing organs, even as she scoops him up as if he weighs nothing.

He really doesn't.

He can of course burn her, fight her off, stall it all with 'no.' Would he, when the balm of ages comes reflected off the temperamental moods of a fraught elemental? Not quite grasping how bad it is may be the source. Maybe it's one last kiss as a silly romantic notion. Maybe there's no terror to extricate from his own self.

"You plan on keeling over here and now, before I can even bind you to share half your debts with me?" she chides him, arms closing around him. Another kiss, another sustenance of air, and yes, she is made almost entirely of it, semi-translucent in places. The hair, her legs, that second elemental shift easier when battered by the wind. But warm, for the zephyrs soaring from the west bring the gentling presence of spring. He hates flash, well, this isn't flashy much. Can't be that much, can it, when the sea breeze coils around them both?

Even the House is far, so far, not blocks but further as the crow flies. The Laughing Magician is in New York.

House, then. As the crow flies is a languid thing; but when she can outcruise jets without a concern? It's going to be a staggering ride, maybe, to plunge through that door bearing its owner.

Dying is easy. Living is harder. He won't appreciate it but seek forgiveness later. Besides, being constituted of elemental air means that the atmosphere deflects around her, rather than buffeting him. But given that Mach 1 or 2 is a baseline for Meg's flight plans, suddenly miles are hardly an issue at all. He gets no warning, another kiss, embraced, and the world shifts and blurs in an eruption of blurring shapes, colour, and a few bumps here or there.

Fear gives love wings.

John Constantine has posed:
    There's no stalling, no burning, no fight. Other than the fight to stay alive. Living is only harder when dying means an eternity in Hell. But really, even without that threat looming, when has John Constantine *EVER* taken the easy road.

    When he can, when he has the strength to, when her breaths are enough to bring a mind to do it, John actually wraps his arms, trembling and weak as they are in the moment, around her to hold tight.

    The House stands, doors open, ready to accept its owner. Quivering even, perhaps over its own inability to just have opened there at the lighthouse without John's expressed permission.

    <<THE GIRL, THE GIRL, THE GIRL.>> In this moment the Wretched House doesn't sound female, nor does it sound male, it sounds loud, a booming voice of many become one. Screaming out what it knows John needs... yesterday. Time bought by the healing hands of a young girl that's still a mystery to all; a bandaid, but it'll save his life until more can be done.

    If the idiot doesn't *forget* again, how many times can a bandaid be applied and fail before those lungs are just liquid when it does?

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
<<I know!>> Reproving at the house's volume, that first bloody inheritance of the fratricidal son, Meggan answers in the Romani tongue of the Travellers in England. It's half Sanskrit, chopped up bits of eastern European polyglot, Celtic and English welded in there. No need to upset the home away from home, but the booming arrogance of the thing rattles her mind more than ears. The wind is often impervious to voices, after all, carrying them instead of being dissipated by those shouts.

But she is no maiden in need of defense here, blowing through the door with John in arms, still curiously in corporeal and corporeal in the same breath. The air rustles, shivering leaves and rug tassels in passing because how can it be avoided? The ultimate reality is that the elements are bound.

Hence why he floats along to the nearest door, if a door is at all present, trailing her. "Show me the way." Perhaps she can do it herself, the House, but if she cannot, then the fae is willing to try.

Should that fail, then the lesser sliver of John's soul is held forth in her palm -- his, in fact, taking on John's appearance -- with the simple request repeated. "Take us to her, if you would."

OK, so it's not asshole John, but demons and angels and fae have their art.

John Constantine has posed:
    Rules are bent, or are they? The rules seem to state that only the owner shall be afforded entry, not exit. The House has spat people out before. ...and so it does now along with another quiver of walls and floors, perhaps a sigh of relief from the wretched thing? The two of them are spat out wherever Phoebe happens to be at the moment, hopefully this isn't her morning time in the loo?

    Pale, but lips an odd shade of red from the hyper-saturation of oxygen in his blood and speckled black overtop, John's as still and limp as a rag doll?

    Is it too late?

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The House can spit out the blonde if it wants, but damn well expect her to sit outside and make it feel very bad about its decision. Or she'll go find its sister, and appeal to the maker of both with tales as rich and glorious or dark and harrowing as they need to give her a boon.

They tumble not at all, since she can pull along a body with ease in the wind bound barque created by her deliberation, but Meggan has to spin them forth gently without heed for her own safety. One little error might kill him, but at this point, time is almost out. Maybe it is out.

But three greater demons are not here. As long as they are not, there is a chance. No need to call out the greater salve. There is no point here to panic, to fear, no sick dread.

Why shout 'Phoebe Beacon' at the top of her lungs? She doesn't. "Phoebe!" will do. Named for an epithet of the Moon, her.

And if she fails to come, oh, there are choices. She leans in, whispering into John's ear in the tongue of the Otherworld, that known to the greater worst wizards. <<You don't go alone. You said what I was before an Unseelie King, and I will shout it back to the heavens.>>

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Phoebe had been on edge all day after wrapping an ace bandage around her wrist. Seeing the tattoo made her fingers want to scratch it. Seeing the white ink on her black skin made her want to touch it. She knew her skin had healed over -- it shouldn't itch -- but it's the thought that counts, right?

    Or maybe it's after she had left out a fresh pot of coffee and some bowls of cut fruit and yogurt that she didn't hear anyone leave, but when she came out of her small room for lunch, pencils tucked into her bound braids, sketches of circles and scripts on her notebook -- which is why when she hears the familiar voice call for her, she feels the urgency like an electrical shock to her system.

    The house has spat them out in the apartment above the bar, where Phoebe was wearing a pair of pajama pants with unicorns on them and a tank top, her feet bare on the cold floor. HEr mug of tea drops, shattering on the kitchen floor as she vaults the counter.

    She sees the red and black. John limp as a rag.

    Was it too late?

    "Set him on the couch." she states to the other figure -- John Aetherial, or wonderous woman from beyond their realization -- and the girl that shares a name with a shade of the moon skids to a stop at the cocuh, blowing holes in the knees of her PJ's.

John Constantine has posed:
    It's a good thing that Chas is downstairs getting things ready for open, controlling him right now would just add an entirely new level of chaos to the already chaotic situation.

    There's a sound a splutter, a breath barely taken ... and, "No," spit out with it. The word is screamed inside his barely conscious mind, but it's not even really an audible thing out here amid the not nearly dead.

    Maybe it's not too late?

    ...or maybe it was before Meggan's whispered words reminded him that fighting for his own life also meant fighting for *hers*, as she was Hell bent - no pun intended - on following him down should he go.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
The woman, albeit in this light, it really doesn't much matter. The gossamer strands of her hair floats in a halo around her and weaves around John, strands of wind and force keeping him contained to a byre that isn't troubled by manhandling. That in turn assure whatever fraught breaths he draws are taken from a higher oxygen content than usual, though not pure, for the damage of hyperoxygenation is a real monster. Meggan killing him by accident would please not a few people, including a bokor.

Sorry, love, signed on the dotted line with the best of intentions.

He goes to the couch, still hovering about it, while the hovering elemental Tuath de Danaan isn't exactly doing a fine job of concealing "Not human, honey!" what with the maelstrom of her hair, pointed ears, and unregulated shifting opacity from the thigh and elbows down. "I am not being reckless," she murmurs in a susurrus, "and I am on the verge of getting cross. Peaky." That's like a hydrogen bomb or a very unstable bit of dark matter announcing it's really happy to destroy everything in the cosmic neighbourhood. She's trying.

"If there is no hope," the words come forth slowly, "say it immediately. Because then I have to start my war."

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    "Hope's in short supply, but it's not dead yet." Phoebe states "I am the very /Beacon/ of Hope."

    And while John is too damn weak to argue, she rips his shirt open so that she can touch the skin over his lungs.

    Phoebe switches to emergency mode. She's focused, willful, and in spite of that tattoo she is brimming with light and hope. She's practiced plenty of times.

    Coughing, sputtering men dying for lack of breath for tumors they couldn't get treated, and then the tumor lessens and can be operated out. An embarrassed smile from Nightwing as she put his guts back into place and cracks a joke, because it was her method of not being scared by the emergency.

    She puts her right hand on his chest, above his solar plexus. Her left hand, with that ace bandage covering the tattoo, is placed below his throat.

    She takes a deep breath, and she focuses. Healing without the Holy, coming up. She imagines grabbing a dangling thread, grasping it, and focusing her powers, water washing away the rot. Restore the lungs. Push the blackness and tar out.

    "Tilt his head to the side so he doesn't choke." the Healer demands, gently.

    "I am not losing you now that I've found you."

John Constantine has posed:
    It's the first time Phoebe's been privy to them, John's own tattoos, and they're numerous. They cover nearly his entire torso and only one or two of them are mundane mistakes from his teenage years. The rest of them are *all* mystical in nature. ...and there's a new brand, barely a day old, right in the middle of his chest, in the small spot he's always kept clear - in case of emergency. What's *that* about?

    Isn't there a saying about something getting worse before it gets better? That might apply here. At first, despite her best efforts, it seems as if Phoebe's attempts will be in vain, nothing happens. When it finally does? It's an explosion of gagging and coughing, violent... it doubles John in half unless he's held still. Black ichor - thick and foul, blood, sputum... it's all vile, all wrong and all *nasty* and it's coming up in an amounts that seem impossible with each gag and each cough and with force that seems equally impossible. That shite is splattering *everywhere*

    Gross.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Nature in its gentle aspect takes a great deal of space in here. A healer with capable hands draws from the growth and inspiration in most mammals to knit themselves together. Forest fire scars fill in with different species. If nature abhors a void, it adores fresh options to recreate new kingdoms or examine unexpected options. There too is the sunshine smile of a giddy activist happy to clutch hands and welcome whoever into the fold, that inspiration of the embrace where waves, woods, and wild wind meet.

But the Green is also a merciless bitch, happy to look on impassive on suffering, dog-eat-dog world a factor in every existence. Life is, if nothing else, a struggle. And while John is much more the predator than he ever lets on, the ragged coyote or the scarred loner loping along for another meal, he is not alone.

Predators wear a smile, sometimes. Predators can also stare with inchoate eyes funneling the perpetual green impulse in the heart of nature's quintessential expression. Teeth aren't needed, nor claws, here. The elemental gaze on Phoebe is not kind.

Neither is it openly hostile, but so fine a line separates two aspects of self that shifting across them spells the difference between breeze and Great Red Spot.

Long story short: volatility is barely bottled up. Barely. And it slides with the exchange of words, her eyes narrowing, and no other symbol suggesting she's going to move at all. Until that gory purging of ichorous masses clogging his lungs, which she witnesses without blinking. Death notes can be written with such, though she won't come any closer or move any further than resting her hand lightly on John's shoulder.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Phoebe doesn't stay clear of some of the gunk. It's /vile/. It stinks, but she pushes down against John's stomach and chest, pressing down with her own weight to Keep. Him. Still. Buttons fall odd places around them as John doubles, sending them crashing to the floor. The gunk, tar and blood and thick mucous and chunks of unidentifiable pus and whatnot stains her shirt as she bodily holds him in place.

    The circle in Phoebe's left palm appears as she presses it, just beneath John's throat, and then she moves her hand upwards, focusing her healing of John's body from the inside out, working from the smallest bronchioles to his lungs and the muscles, relaxing the aching, and pushing the broken bits of lung out, naming the parts of the lungs as she heals them, until her hands begin to shake.

John Constantine has posed:
    It goes on until he's purple in the face and then a little longer. Finally it starts to ease, he starts to breathe with just a few splutters here and there. John lifts a shaking arm to wipe his mouth on the back of one hand. "Well, that was just lovely," he rasps out as he's trying to get out from under Phoebe's grip so he can sit up.

    It's about now that Chas makes his way in. ... he stands in the doorway. It's not often that he loses his cool or his patience, this is one of those not often times. "I thought you were taking care of this, *John*," he says, a little too 'pot right before it boils over' calm.

    "I just forgot, mate," John explains.

    "You *forgot*?" Chas spits back, incredulously. Then the boil over happens. It's clear that he likely intends on snatching his best mate up by the scruff and shaking him like a doll, in the way he stalks toward the couch. He hasn't gotten there yet when he starts speak, "Go get a fuckin' shower, John, now." Before he gets to his destination, he turns on Meggan... "And you... go... figure out how to put your fuckin' human suit back on again!". To Phoebe, "You... go do your fucking homework or something!" Because, it seems, he has a mess to clean up and he really doesn't want to see *any of these people* right now. He's still going for John though and if the gross covered magus doesn't move quick, he's like to find himself snatched and dumped into that shower.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
See, she's made of air.

Gaseous or not, the rule breaking when it comes to atoms applies to the faeling elemental. She can choose to blow along nicely, or she can pointedly hit twice the speed of sound without letting the very squishy man normally subject to those G-forces wear the damage. That rattle over Gotham wasn't a plane or Superman coming for a sammich with Bats.

Before he gets to his destination, Chas hits a wall. A nice wall. A rounded wall, in places, but a seething wall crossing her arms like every lollipop lady in front of a primary school in the face of traffic ever.

"All the same side," she breathes out, jolting to the side if he tries to go around, anticipating the poor sod. It's fairly easy; he moves, she shadows, and there you have it. The worst game ever of tag and dodge. "I will make it bloody rain in here, you keep up like this. Think of all the wasted liquor. Gone bobbing out down the street, *pails* and *buckets* full." Who would be scared of that? No one! Maybe the point? "Get. Back. From. Him."

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    "Meg, Chas -- take breaths! Please!" Phoebe states, and she hops to her feet, teeters slightly (which lets John up), and she takes takes a deep breath. She doesn't have her calming aura, she breathes out quietly.

    "John is okay. His lungs are okay. They suck because he smokes, but they're okay." she states.

    "Meg, don't make it rain in the bar -- please. Chas, I just litterally cleared like two gallons of disgusting demon-lung gunk from John's body -- John?"

    She states, and and points.

    "BReathing easier?"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Fear feeds fear.

Remember that. Tool of the damned, tool of angels, and for an empath, it's poison and sustenance all in one.

Chas fears, Phoebe rolls over with the shock before and the toning down now, and John's terror from earlier is transformed to invoke a thing, a name, something. Being himself.

Straws, camel.

The oldest truth of Meggan's non-fae side, the mutant one, is that the projection back into her is spontaneous and reactive. It clamps onto the emotional projection and turns it straight back, her features blurred and gone in an instant, replaced with exactly what Frances William Chandler fears utterly the most in the world. His stepmother, Lucifer, his own corpse run through by Baba Yaga's broomstick, John transformed into a clown, doesn't right matter. There it is, living in precise, exact detail with savagery fed proportionate and exact to the darkest caverns of the mind, deepest rime of the soul, where ancient songs ply the vestigial secrets between him and God.

It isn't by choice.

But it is.

Long enough for the mark to sink, long enough for the sheer, unabated bloody terror to transform into one of those heart-palpitating moments when the brain can't catch up to what the body knows.

"Don't," a whisper in whatever voice, pitch-perfect copy he feeds and fills in details with. She is but a canvas.

"Push." Another risk, it can just as easily be Astra standing there, bloody handed, pleading, whatever horror is pulled from Phoebe's heart of hearts. Meggan's gift and curse don't care when she is that upset, that shoved to a brink, not even one of her own.

"Me."

The charm, the collapse, seconds pounding, ripping to pieces. Flesh rebels, reverts, and she's fleeing for the door but will it matter?

A child of processional courts and seasons overturned, Merlin's warden, none of these matter. The monster is what she is, and the violent attraction leads to the same repulsion to jettison her from their presence by the spark of screaming identity alone.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Well. How does one follow *THAT*?

    Phoebe had delivered a tired look to John's smile and wink. She tried not to be pleased with herself, because now it's twice that she's healed the man with demon blood and hellfire.

     Nevermind that John was nearly shirtless and probably had more black gunk on him than she did, she was trying to keep her eyes above his neckline (because awkward teenager) her hands still up to Chas before the turning of Meggan.

    She had never witnessed such horror or wonder. She stepped back, her eyes going wide. She tries to steel herself, concentrate. Be clinical about your fear now that John was walking and talking and smirking again.

    "Megg?" she questions in a soft voice, and then for a moment, Phoebe was back in the silo, her hands bound and peirced, needles through her skin, alone.

    In the dark.

    She falls backwards, her eyes wide, hands curling at her knees. Regulate your breathing. Ground. All she can feel is the ringing in her fingers. All she could smell was the gunk, all that she could taste was John's ashtray downstairs in the bar.

John Constantine has posed:
    Before she flees, almost as soon as she's changed, John is sucking a breath into those previously useless lungs. "MEGGAN, STOP!" It's loud, booming, amplified by magic. It's *commanding*. It's down and dirty and it's magic done on the fly, not normally his forte, but that doesn't mean he can't do it. His will is behind that command and everyone knows that John Constantine lives today, mostly by nothing but the sheer force of his *will*.

    Hellfire flashes behind those faded blues and one hand extends, palm out, fingers open until they close into a fist as if snatching something. He jerks that hand backward.

    "I SAID STOP, MEGGAN!" Just for good measure that, a physical representation of the verbal command meant to drag her back.

    It's not Astra standing there with bloody hands pleading, it's Geraldine. "No, baby, no..." Chas whispers, tears burning his eyes, before spilling down his cheeks. He's frozen, his sweet girl dragged to Hell just like Astra was that night.

    "It's not REAL, Chas!" Still bellowed, but without the magic touch.

    "IT'S NOT REAL, PHOEBE!" This time the magic's back pushing, shoving, prodding the truth into the girl's mind. 'It's not real.'

    Chas, he didn't need so much prodding, man's got a lot of years of this shit under his breath, he's shaking his head as if to clear the fog of the horror from it as soon as John screams his name.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Oh, but there's the rub. It's not an illusion at all, but the flesh answering the clarion call of their minds. It's the detail in perfect, living colour right down to the granular level, making the forgery precisely the same as the original from the external side. Internally it doesn't matter one bit, does it?

One has to wonder what Meggan's mortal parent did to inflict this on her. What X-gene they passed down to make the mix, if the divinity who made up the other half had the remotest clue of what legacy they were getting nto and if they even cared. If they're laughing now, she isn't.

The mental scream is absolutely there, for all the very little good it does. Push too far, something breaks, rolling over and over. Choice would be a nice thing, wouldn't it? To stop, like there is that choice.

Oh, John *can* trap her. That's not beyond the pale, but there is no rational response of someone who can just throw off the 'oops, drank a bit too much of that, did I?' effect.

Fighting a storm with a storm is one thing or another. Especially when one side wants to flee, not fight, and sink through the floor.

If it's an option? Down. Drop. Probably not that, but instinct is all there is, and the blonde seeks it out with furious abandon, hands pressed palm-deep to the sockets of her eyes and curled in on herself. Nightmares of internment camps and drowning water are one thing, but if there is no where to go, all she has is that forcible cracking to plunge beyond again and again, until exhausted or until something gives way. Maybe herself.

Bloody elemental.

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    Phoebe doesn't have that experience, and the fear that was pulled out of her was raw and bloody and tangled, unresolved because it doesn't match her happy and sunshiney reputation. No one likes the one with trauma. The reason why she held so tightly to a hand in the dark. Adreniline drops. She shakes, her arms covered in goosebumps rising on her arms as she balls herself up tightly, holes in the knees of her pajama pants, a number of those happy unicorns ripped through or covered with hellgunk. Her eyes are wide, though her visions unfocused.

    "It's not real. It's /not/ real. They pulled me out. I'm not in Montana. I'm not in the Silo." she whispers, closing her eyes.

    "New York City. North Fifty-Third. Laughing Magician loft. Midway between the couch and the kitchen." she murmurs to herself. "I'm fine, I'm fine, triggered a panic attack."

John Constantine has posed:
    But there *is* somewhere she can go. He's standing right there, alive and well. Through that same force of will, that same determination, that same ... something John Constantine has that keeps him getting up time and time again - the same whatever it is that, according to Meggan, makes Nergal 'scared shitless' of him if truth be told...

    John uses all of *that* to funnel *his* will to her. His will... need you Meggan, Meggan... Meggan, my Meggan, can't do it without you, love, my love, keeper of my heart, my soul... need you back, here with me, where you belong, forever, through heaven and hell and all the places between, need you, need you... come back to me. Can't win this fight without you, my Meggan, I love you, Meggan, Meggan. Meggan. -- His will, his *need* and there's not a bit of it that's false as it might have been with someone else; shoved at her with every ounce of his being, so much so that it might even be felt *outside* Meggan, by Chas, by Phoebe.

    Chas over there, he just squeezes his eyes shut tight against all of it; breathing ragged, likely repeating the same sorts of things as Phoebe, but silently, in his head.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Is that freedom, safety, or the source of broken horror that they've seen -- they know, they have understood, the fundamental truth is that she's the sum of fears and nothing of herself, nothing at all (there's no one in there, Meggan~)

At some point that seething attempt to get through the floor sends her catapulting through at least six different forms: air, fire, pure shadow, something narrow an drain bowed and surpassing Ly thin like from a child's drawing, human enough but with vicious claws not a little unlike Laura but definitely made to carve through wood and stone. What they're made of? Doesn't matter. The swift jerk back into solid earth flips with disarming rapidity until she still has her legs, feet, rest of herself intact. Unfortunately. Because some bloody sod won't let her *be* anything but that, hauling her back into the golden-haired girl horrified by it all.

She's not screaming let me go, so that must account for something. Reason just drops her to her knees, curled up in a ball, floating roughly mid-air. "I'msorryididn'tmeanitbuti'vehurtyouiknowi'vehurtyoui'msosorryithappensandI'msorry."

Phoebe Beacon has posed:
    There is an amazing amount of love being transferred through the room, and Phoebe would be all for it. It calms her heart as the vision is let go, the magic penetrating and she is no longer in the dark... but...

    She looks at John. And Chas. And Meggan, and she opens her mouth, reaching out towards the hovering blonde woman, and then drops it. She takes a deep breath, and she retreats, quietly backwards, exhausted and in pain and tasting the ashtray that results from healing John, and with and ugly little spiral of jealousy, she slips into the little room, and quiet as a mouse, closes the door behind her to try and block out the panic and love and obscenities that swirl in her mind, sitting against the door and contending with Pride's opposite twin: Shame.

John Constantine has posed:
    Even when he speaks, John still focuses his will on ... well, his will. "Aye, and I damned a girl to Hell, yet you'd have me believe I shouldn't carry the guilt of it," he murmurs gently. "Everyone here's alive, well, breathin', walkin', talkin' and hasn't gone through anything that wasn't there before, I call it a win, love."

    For certainly, Chas has seen that vision in his nightmares more than a time or two. "No harm," he murmurs quietly, a little shaky but quickly going back to 'stoic'.

    "Come down now, love, we've a curse to research." That? The uncurling and coming down, he'll leave the time for her to do it herself, s'long as that time isn't terribly long.

    John does cast a glance toward the retreating Phoebe and it's certain either he or Chas will poke a head in later to check. But for now, they're both a little busy with a floating fae.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
In the clockwork noise, there is worry for Phoebe. It registers, the symphony so loud for that single note of the oboe to stand out the stronger. She is, however, on tumble dry with a load of hand grenades and their removed pins. Meggan has no capacity to even understand that.

In truth, the rapid shifting is exhausting. She cannot sustain that without a price, and the golden-haired girl is silent and subdued in a way that's so rarely seen.

Still, work calls. After John she goes.

For Chas, there are no words other than that.

John Constantine has posed:
    John takes Meggan's hand once she's down and near enough. "C'mon, love, help me get cleaned up first..." A distraction before the work begins again. A murmurs, a portal, the two of them stepping through it to the House of Mystery.

    ...and Chas left standing amid the ichor splattered ruins of his apartment. ... relieved and perfectly fine with cleaning up the mess - it's what best mates do, they clean up the mess, pick up the pieces.

    He'll check on Phoebe once it's done.