8684/The Road Goes Ever On And On

The Road Goes Ever On And On
Date of Scene:	14 November 2021
Location:	The Laughing Magician
Synopsis:	Meggan's steps bring her back to the Laughing Magician, where she meets Jon properly and gets a drink from Chas. Bonding ensues, and who can say where the path will lead in the future? Hopefully to a place where sun can warm the ice once more.
Cast of Characters:	Jonathan Sims, Meggan Puceanu, Chas Chandler

---

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    The Laughing Magician is quiet of late, with its namesake only just returned from whatever infernal realm he's been in all these months. Jon has rather stubbornly decided to sit in the bar waiting on further news, because he's damned if he's not going to get some answers--and also because the arrival of his friend pinged something in his head that he's not quite ready to deal with yet. Returning to the Triskelion means explaining to Martin, and writing a report (because they ought to at least be /aware/ of the whole business), and probably admitting he needs therapy, and... look, it's a lot.

    The trouble, of course, is that he's also /exhausted/.

    So he's there in the closed-down bar, sitting at a table with a stack of books on demonology he borrowed from Chas, an ashtray filled with cigarette butts nearby, face-down on the table. Asleep. He's liable to wake up if anyone walks in, though.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Someone hasn't darkened these doors for weeks, when she used to be such a regular fixture that Chas could probably rely on her formidable mixology skills to attend to a thoroughly seasoned clientele without blinking. Not since that final night of barbed words from a demon's jilted tongue has she crossed the threshold marking the Laughing Magician separate from Hell's Kitchen.

Hardly a sparkling moment fit for a Hallmark movie. The music doesn't swell and abruptly break. A man doesn't turn back from a particularly accursed stool, glib tongue for once nailed to his palate. No night of apologies to be given in halting words that start slow and then rush like a creek breaking free from the rotten winter ice, where hands are clasped or tears flow and laughter bubbles up in the wake of misery. Life isn't like that.

Meggan comes in, unnaturally fair to the eye, a pearl when before she was always golden-haired and emerald-eyed in her vibrance. The wards won't register as anything but mutant. "The more things change, more they stay the same," she speaks lightly.

To the Laughing Magician itself.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon jerks awake at the words and looks around. "Huh? Wha...?" He blinks and pulls his glasses on as he sits up, peers over at Meggan. She's /cold/ to his eyes, all ice and hard edges, silver-whites and blacks and blues. Everything is laid bare to his psychic gaze, the roiling emotions, the disappointment that John isn't there, the flickerings of what she might like to see.

    It's blinding. He actually shades his eyes.

    "You were in London," he says, squinting like he's trying to actually see /her/ and not the cascading emotional aura about her. "I didn't catch your name. Ahh... I presume you're looking for John?"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Meggan registers as no Tuath de Danaan, though the silvery lines playing in a translucent filigree around her left arm are entirely responsible for that. To the Sight, their handiwork far and away exceeds any bit of mere artistry. Not that it does a lick of good sparing Jon the difficulty of staring dead into the heart of winter, vibrant burning energy playing under her skin as though the flesh is purely optional. Which, in truth, it is.

Rainbow opalescence in her aura is struck and riveted by countless undulating lines of a bargain struck and held, though few enough people know what a real promise in this day and age looks like. Oathbound, her.

"I'd offer you a Gimlet or something harder, though might be put on my tab." Could be a joke in that statement, brought with her mouth lifted a bit. Her voice isn't East End at all. To a Brit, it's not right at all, amorphously locked up in the Cumbrian north, warmed by Gaelic and Welsh flecks that have no business being there. Like if John himself actually inherited the prettier half of a Liverpudlian accent, and bothered tuning his actually lovely voice regularly. "Looking for answers, in truth." Her interest tips higher, curiosity mellow in its churn around. Jon isn't a hostile threat and is treated as such. "I'm Meggan."

Chas Chandler has posed:
    The door to the backroom of the bar opens and Chas comes traipsing out. He looks like he hasn't slept (and likely he hasn't) but he's alert enough, moving with the urgency of a man who is after something. He stops as he notices there were patrons in the bar. Then he chuffs out a laugh.

    "Not patrons. Guests. And those with every right to be here" he says to no one but himself. "Meggan. Jon. What brings you by my door?" he asks, moving behind the bar and grabbing an apron. "And can I get you anything?" he asks, his own accent working class and unrefined as always.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon frowns for a long moment as he tries to place Meggan's voice. His own dialect is Southern England, sent through Oxford and then softened by a decade in New York. Though admittedly the latter is less accent and more word usage; he rather self-consciously forces himself to still sound like /home/.

    "I've /been/ here, Chas," he says with a bite in his tone. "I fell asleep, evidently. Lord, you don't have to play host, cut that out."

    He gets up, avoids looking at Meggan directly, but goes over to offer his hand anyhow. "Jonathan Sims," he says. "The Archivist."

    A pause, and then he blinks at her, actually looking at her, reeling for a moment before he says, "Your voice changed. Back in England, it sounded different."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
In some ways, Chas' face is more familiar than Meggan's own. Staring would well be rude, but she manages that lengthier survey him all the same. If she were a cartographer, would she map weariness and care? Anger buried under a plane of forced smiles and good humour? It takes her long enough to be caught, supposing she cared to hide the effort at all. John's the underhanded one, not her.

"Am I?" The question could break the spell. A faulted smile twists, her mouth sustaining winter sunlight and glassy translucency. Chas gets the direct inquiry, couched in as much kindness as he ever showed her; all she can muster. "How are you?"

Loaded question, with an empath. But genuine.

It takes a moment for her to gauge Jonathan holding out his hand and the right response, which means holding out her hand to his. Whatever immaculate seal winds over her wrist also provides an ideal stop on the sea of magical energy pretending to be a uni student. None budges. "Mr. Sims. The Archivist." Each word is tested, and she nods slowly. "Rather happens naturally when back on home soil. I take it you don't know much about me?"

Why is that echo such a soft knell, a mirthless laugh, a genuine inquiry?

Chas Chandler has posed:
    Chas rolls his eyes at Jon's dismisal of playing host, it's in his nature. He fills two glasses with some beer from the tap and sets them on the bar before himself. "You are Meggan. Always have been in my esteem it was..." he frowns. "That thing that wasn't fond of you. I'm..." He sighs. "A little tired. But that's not new."

    There is fatigue in him, it's an old feeling. There is something else underneath but it's hard to read fully. Obfuscated by something mystical in its own right.

    He eyes Meggan again and makes an old favorite of hers from his memory banks. "She's one of the Fae, Jon" he offers to the Archivist. Perhaps there's a hint of warning in his words. Caution at the very least.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    It happens as their hands meet. Not because of anything to do with that seal on her wrist, but just the act, the touch, triggering the Archivist's recall. One moment Jon has a pleasant enough smile on his face; the next his eyes widen and he gasps, as if in pain, as memory washing over him in a flood.

    Tender words that turned to biting retorts. Loving glances that became hard, cruel stares. Oath spoken, souls bound together, only to be broken and betrayed. A thing that likely wanted to love, /yearned/ to love, and could not, because it was flawed and broken in its core. Love turned to posession, to rancor, to cruel jealousy. Friendship and independence were not to be borne. No amount of comfort could heal the central wound. Not even the love and Oath of a goddess of the Tuatha de Dannan could heal the wretch that had sent her away from this bar with twisted, bitter words.

    And so Summer became Winter, laughter and joy and sunlight turned to bitter cold ice. And the demon just... moved on to its next target.

    Jon stumbles back, pressing the hand that shook Meggan's to his chest. Right back until he's almost toppling over a barstool. He gasps again, and again, trying to control his breathing, to fight the rage that burns through him at having to feel what that /thing/ had felt for and about Meggan. It didn't tell him much about /her/, it doesn't work like that, but at least now he knows who she was to John.

    Maybe it's because she's a Fae, maybe it's her influence, that he snarls, "By the gods, I /swear/, I'm going to see that thing destroyed, if it's the /last/ thing I do." There's a mystical feeling to the words, an oath of his own, sworn on his gods and his own honor.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Stephen Strange knows his art as a surgeon to unparalleled degrees, and he isn't too shabby as a sorcerer either. Not a thread out of place there, and the executed, barely-visible knot gracing her skin shows he has a rare sense of artistry about him.

Laying it on her, in an hour of hope and despair, to grant badly needed equilibrium so she might not fal back into sleep. The sharp, linear creation of the Sorcerer Supreme does more than that; it binds soul to a corrupted sliver of another's given freely to her, a counterweight against the invariable fall orchestrated by Hell. Someone's got a small and imperfect immortal anchor for himself.
-=-=-

Hurt isn't lost on her. Jonathan might as well have a neon sign over his head broadcasting all of it. She raises hands out to steady him, even if he probably doesn't /need/ her interference; if she listened to a demon, no one does. Stupid girl and stupid imperfect words. Silence for the Archivist, a spectral wavelength of concern filling the Laughing Magician unbidden, an unselfish worry for the two men present.

Meggan reaches for the glass only when Chas offers it. Faerie laws of hospitality notwithstanding, she cares for simple politeness. He offers and she smiles to his frown, pale jade eyes softening into a misty seafoam. "You gave me words of kindness and hope. Said one day he'd come round, and was that not true?" The bitter irony stays where it belongs in a corner, and she might deign to sip. "My turn to bring you peace, innit? Whatever consolation or kindness you might need, you've only to say. Though it will work out, Chas. Always does."

Long might the summer be gone, banished to hide south of the Tropic of Cancer, but embodied still in mellifluous words.

"The missing bit," she carefully presents the words between them, "is that I've stayed in Hell a good long while before. Supposing that thing comes from there, small advantages for us?"

Chas Chandler has posed:
    Chas takes a long draw from the beer on tap and nods to Meggan. "I know it will Meg. And... silver lining to all things, right?" He nods, a little of his own pep coming back into him at the Fae's kind words. "Hey... I'm cook us up something good." Hopefully, Chas' cooking skills have improved since Meggan last visited the bar's gathering hall (they have.)

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Meggan is an empath, and Jon is a telepath, and so surely she recognizes her own hurt reflected in him, the pain and anguish he's been burying, carried around for weeks like a raw, open wound. He was the one the demon moved onto, drawing him in while he was vulnerable, playing on a long-ignored crush, courting and dancing and almost-kissing. At least the demon cured Jon of /that/. He'll be able to be friends with the man but he's never going to harbor even the /slightest/ inkling of anything romantic toward John Constantine ever again.

    It all blew up almost as fast as it started, of course. Jon's too acerbic and biting, too liable to get angry even with those he loves most, to have pacified the demon for long. He's still convinced, on some level, that it's all his fault. All the fighting and confusion, the pain and isolation, the spiraling and obsession and suicidal impulses--not that the demon /did/ all of that, but it pushed and prodded and found the weaknesses, so that the bar is now a place of bitter, painful memories. And he won't admit to it, except only the tiniest amount. He'll be mad for Meggan's sake, for Chas and Zatanna and Phoebe and the others, but not for himself. He doesn't /deserve/ that, in his own eyes.

    Jon works to get his breathing under control, reaches over to take the beer Chas had poured and downs an impressive amount while Meggan is speaking. "Sorry about that. I, ahh... the thing that was here before, it spoke to my grandmother, and since she died the memories passed on to me. I know things I ought not to. I'm sorry. I'm... /so/ sorry."

    He takes a long breath, looks /toward/ Meggan but not /at/ her. "You're Fae," he says slowly. "You were John's... you /are/ John's... well, that's between the two of you, I suppose. And... you've been in Hell?" He raises a brow, honestly curious. And pretending he's okay.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Two extremes: the man who doesn't feel a damn romantic inkling, survivor for the abuse. Then the faithful lover hung from the same swaying gibbet that, in some ways, John Constantine occupies. Has occupied, truly, since the first day he summoned up Norfulthing, if not all the way back to accursed birth. Sigyn with a winter smile is a terrible burden to bear. No children to devour and bind with, so one's own hopes and happiness become the meal apportioned by cruel fates.

"Stop that." Two gentle words fall into the space between them. They hold no imperative that would double up on a demand. Ridiculous to even assume Jon would ever be impacted, that she can levy a command so. "Just goes to prove none of us are immune to what hunted him, not even /him/."

A beat stretches treacle-slow and thin, almost transparent in its silence. "Did he hurt her, your grandmother?" There are answers she does not want from him. The question rises to audible levels anyway.

"Not signed at the register's office, as he didn't believe in that nonsense, but handfasted and bound in all ways that matter." Knowledge is currency, and she shills out a lovely quid without much concerning herself then. "I was John's. Am, if that's how it turns out." Fingers articulate a loose circle before she drinks, since Chas has presented that and she would be loathe not to drown something under lovely flavoured water, its potency completely destroyed the moment it slides down her throat. "Now I know what to look for, I can tell the difference. Not that it matters." Three steps and she's hovering off the floor, looking up to the man by somehow kneeling in the space. To take up less room and more. "Fae's the simple term. Properly Tuath de Danaan. I'm more worried about you and how you were hurt."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon blinks at Meggan for a moment. "Stop...?" He frowns, and then swallows, and looks down at his half-empty pint glass. "Sorry," he mumbles. Easy apologies, dropping from his lips. He does that a lot, it seems.

    "He didn't hurt Gran, not that I'm aware of. They were an ocean away, spoke on the phone once a week. She did my sort of work for him, I think--I'm a therapist. Psychiatrist. In the parlance of the Archivist, she took his statements. It fed her, I think, and I'm sure she'd seen worse in person than whatever it had to offer up." A pause. "Besides, for him to hurt her Gran would've had to care about him, and everyone she loved she kept at arm's length. Kept in the dark." There's a bitter twist to his words. He knows that by experience, it would seem.

    Then he looks up at Meggan, frowns, dark eyes quite wide behind those gold-rimmed glasses. "What do you mean? Hurt? It wasn't... anything all that profound." Deflection. Obfuscation. Repression. Acknowledging the pain might tear his whole world down, and he has so /very/ much to do.

    Of course, ignoring a wound lets it fester. He of all people should know that.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"We can drink to shame and mistakes, but that's a lot of wasted pints and not much to show for it," Meggan insists with a wry roll of her shoulder and tilting her head. The pin-straight fall of her choppy hair bears nothing in common with a memory of golden waves, or the fiery aura trailing behind her when she flies. No bouncy, pointy-eared girl here. "I wasted a lot of words that did me no good." Her slender fingers trace over her brow, running down over her lips in a transgression against her own breach of silence.

Carefully she attends on every word, piecing together the cadence of Jon's moods from his statements. Hang a star by the sentences, and she can float between them, navigating a fragile reed barque through dark spaces and the bright. "Not directly responsible for her passing." A confirmation for herself as much as a chance to correct her, that brief pause. "My condolences on your loss."

Her eyes widen for a moment against the doubled image of him suspended in a pair of spring-greened pools, even the rings of her pupils faded to the rain-washed pallor. Doubt hides behind the transparent veil of the mind; he's hiding and she knows that full well. His dodge holds a terrible finesse, undermined by things painted as plain around him as her own duality balanced in quiet equilibrium is to him. Is it?

"Your heart doesn't think that. I can hear the chorus of you, Mr. Sims, louder than I heard Hell last night, and they were turned up to about a hundred and nine."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "I..."

    He can't hold it together under the weight of those green eyes. There's no more obfuscation or deflection; for once all the barriers drop away and shoulders slump, his face crumples. He hunches his shoulders, as if bracing himself against the flood of emotion.

    "My grandmother died, and I gained this title. The Archivist. Gained memories going back five thousand years." Waking screaming from dreams of John Constantine battling demons. "I became a telepath over night. It was... overwhelming." Screaming on a hotel bathroom floor, hands pressed to his ears, begging his husband to make it stop being so bloody /loud/. "When we went to England to settle matters, assassins came. My husband... faked his death to try to find out who'd done it." A spurt of blood, running feet, grief and guilt.

    Jon's eyes are squeezed shut and he's hunched up even further, still bracing for a blow. "When I came back to America, I came /here/, looking for him. I'd had dreams of him. He found out my cousin had called on... his /first/ demon. He took me in, let me live in the House of Mystery. He... he was the only friend I had left in the world, or so I thought. He made me part of this group, the Night Brigade. Helped me learn, but only a little. Took me with him to fight monsters and demons even though he said I wasn't trained enough to come." Swirling confusion, chaos, desperation. Jon has to know, to understand, it's part of him now, and /not/ knowing was driving him mad. Self-doubt still underlays his tone, doubt in himself, in his abilities, in his choices.

    "Then... suddenly, he... turned on me. Started fighting with me. Claimed I was trying to take over the Night Brigade." He hesitates. "I... I wanted to die one night, I was so /tired/ after channeling the gods to save his life. I lashed out at him." Wasn't it his fault? Hadn't he been ungrateful for the hospitality? "I made a... /stupid/ crack about gentrification, and he got mad, and I wouldn't back down." How could he deny the anger of his ancestors? No, he should have kept his mouth shut. "He was manic, he was taking drugs, and I... I couldn't /help/. I... I'm s-supposed to be able to..."

    He has to stop, he's sobbing so hard, even if silently.

    He's been going over it all again and again, perfect recall keeping every mistake fresh. Trying to figure out where he went wrong. Even if it was a demon--he should have handled it better. Shouldn't he? He couldn't be expected to know it was a demon, he's new and untrained, but people, he's supposed to be able to /help/ people like John. It's what he's /trained/ for.

    "He kicked me out," he whispers. "He drove me out of the only place I had. If Martin hadn't been alive, I... I don't know where I would have gone."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"I can only imagine." She can, it's true, because a power not being there before is utterly alien to someone who came to her birthright with her first breath. Meggan listens, though, her eyes as wide and clear as can be when Jonathan Sims ends up read as a book would be. The Voynich Manuscript before a fifth-grader, likely enough.

At another time, she might weep with every word the Archive's mortal avatar speaks.

At another time, she might pace the room in an angry gait, stopping fitfully and starting again in some effort to bleed away rage from misdeeds inflicted on a good man.

He gets an audience, singular, rapt and ignorant to whatever needs pass through in watercolour transparency.

"He went through the manic cycle before he met you. You did not trigger that. Nor deserve the accusations, words used to hurt you so you would not see the vulnerability inside." There, shadows sculpt their path, a hard-won fight to push them back when the inner voice rises up in firm reminder to herself, <That wasn't him. It was the other. You know better.>

But do any of them? And even if they do, does it matter?

A man in a ball of pain consumes so much of the world, except for that dark star on its irregular, sometimes destructive orbit she tied herself to. Meggan isn't good at matters of the head -- <Stop it, Meggan, the demon was a liar> -- but in other ways, she can reach out, flitting up to her full height from that kneeling position before him. Unrolling to hold her arms out slightly, she leans forward. The empathy goes both ways. Read and know compassion in him, kindness registered with a blanket her mother would be so much better throwing around his shoulders. Like a proper cuppa and a favourite sandwich in hand, a pool of sunshine to sit in, and familiar things -- smells of books, a favourite borrowed sweater, the fuzzy weight of a sleepy head and a smile.

"I am so sorry, truly so, that you faced such awful things from someone you trusted. Needed to trust." A tiny correction comes, but it passes, and she smiles. "You had someone waiting for you. A good man with a deep heart, ready to catch you. You aren't alone, Jonathan Sims, and you defied a monster when you listened to your heart and followed your path back to the safest place you could be. How lonely and miserable that thing must be, without a love, a friend, a student, anything at all. Not until its very end, for a fleeting moment."

The fae have no mercy, and their gods, least of all.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "I'm supposed to /help/. It's... it's the one thing I knew how to do in the midst of all this and I... I couldn't. Even if I know... it wasn't /manic/, it wasn't /having panic attacks/. It wasn't ill! It wasn't even..." Jon hesitates. Not /human/ is the wrong word. Neither is the woman before him, technically.

    He shudders, and closes his eyes, letting the weight of that blanket of kindness wrap itself around him. His tone becomes calmer. "Trying to fix that demon was like a surgeon trying to fix a robot. Whether or not it's 'alive' is beside the point--your expertise isn't going to help." He laughs, bitterly. "It doesn't make the wound go away, though. The doubt. I've already got so many problems, it didn't have to work hard to make them worse."

    He swallows, then, looks up at Meggan, fingers clutched at his own cardigan like he's clutching a literal blanket around him. "What about you, though? Who do you have to catch you? Did you have anyone at all?" No sympathy spared for the demon. There might have been a flicker, before, but rage at its memories of Meggan has burned that away.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Just me."

Two words put an icepick through the nice, beautifully constructed illusion. So falls the ice, so shatters any prospect of things walking away. The world can burn and she faces it with an aplomb no sorcerer put there, only hard-won honesty.

"This is about you. You help others. Do you not let them give you aid?" The question rises so softly, a technicality of sorts.

Meggan isn't human. She looks and acts it, but cannot be. "What do you want to happen? You are still dealing with something so big and hard to understand. It's a lot to take in. How do you feel?"

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon frowns. Reaches out, as if to place a hand on Meggan's arm or shoulder. He might, if she were close enough and let him. Regardless, he says, "You deserve better. I don't care /what/ you are, you deserve better. You deserve /friends/." His fingers curl back, hand pulled back, not out of fear but out of recognition she might not appreciate the gesture.

    He draws in a shuddering breath, lets his hand drop. "What do I want to happen? I want that thing destroyed. I want to strangle it with my bare hands." He looks down at said hands and laughs. "A foolish notion, but there it is. And then... I don't know. Move on. Make something better. Fix what he broke. Jubilation started it, insisting I come back here. I keep wondering about the timing. Is it a coincidence that it left as soon as I figured it out? Does it know, can it /feel/ that the Archivist has judged it and found it unworthy?" He shakes his head.

    "I thought I was going to have to kill /John/, you know?" Another shuddering breath. "I was trying to work myself around to it. Praying I could find a way to make it work out. And then it turns out I haven't seen the /real/ John Constantine in over a decade." He shakes his head. "Figures."

    A pause, and then he frowns. "He did something to me," he says. "I can't figure out what, or when. He may not have even /meant/ to. Whatever it is... I need to figure that out. Whatever it is, it's been driving me mad."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Whatever fears might be harboured about a fae, they are not relevant for the time being. Her Tuathan side lies obscured, in temporary exile, days piling up to weeks without its fingerprint. Unless the Archivist fears a shapeshifter, he can count the risk of curling his fingers upon that snowy shore of her arm as near minimal. At most, the taut, sharp rubicund lines of her angular bodice could poke him. Calm eyes still appraise him, given no reason to draw back when he acts presumably out of intent for comfort, rather than harm.

Conscience for the moment hits the ground, spilling forth in silent waves, embracing them both in the wreckage of decisions and sins performed against their persons. Pain achieving a collective mass brings with it a kind of obscene gravity, sustaining itself even during quiet moments made for reflection and measuring. She nods, and the slow brightening smile rises from winter's reflections. "Jubilation? The lass who worked for a takeaway food company, wasn't she? Problem with uncontrollable hunger, irony that was. Dealing with a nest of blood-drinkers that we did. I hope so, else this city breeds strangeness and charm when two girls carry that impressive name."

She could practically paint a picture from memory when needed. Might very well know the precise spot where the undead played, if 'played' is any sort of description. "You know, it's all very natural to push back against a destructive force wishing to unleash the same. No one would begrudge you that. They shouldn't. Tends to sway the one way or the other, right? Answer by an overabundance of creativity or punch it back until the harm goes away, a squashed house-fly, stopped just like that."

A demon reduced to a common bug swirling around a pile of faeces, isn't that just the visual to draw up in proper accord. She leans forward a little, humming a tune to herself, swaying into the chords of an obscure Mucous Membrane song until the whole of her accentuates the music or, rather, the music might want to accentuate her. Stirred into the rhythm, even in relative confined spaces, the furious pace of life resurgent on itself demands an outlet. Energy has to go somewhere, better this than blowing the bar up in a haze of fiery motes or slipping to be one with the soul of the city electric. "Be glad you didn't end up in bed with the thing. No way to scrub that from memory or soul without a hefty surcharge, and purification rites are spendy to come by round here. Which leaves us that great conundrum."

Looking back to Jon puts him in the central point of it, the fulcrum for the balance, the spin of the world seen through altogether too young and positively ancient eyes revolving on that neat, straight-backed point. "What transformed? Take it from one who knows a little about it, I might be a bit more use than a moss hat on a bear."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon laughs softly. "I wouldn't have anyway. Wound up in bed with it. I don't really do that." A pause. "Annnd yet it gave me memories anyhow. Sure Gran /loved/ hearing about /that/." He rolls his eyes. Meggan's movements don't bother him; he's content to sit back a bit, clutching his cardigan around him, tension draining. He'd been keeping all that hurt in for so long and admitting to it... didn't break him. The world didn't end. Funny, that.

    Of course, if he'd been one of his own patients he would've told himself that.

    "That is indeed the same Jubilation. She works here now, and good for her. She's getting help with the hunger issue. I'm glad to have met her." So what if she's a vampire? She's kind, and funny, and saved his life. Jon, it seems, doesn't judge much on physical state.

    And then, worked around to the final question, the important one: "I'm not certain. I've been... hmm. I'd say having bad dreams, but that's normal. But I've been... off. Off-kilter, off-focus. Diving down rabbit holes and coming up empty. Not that that's... that might just be 'the Archivist' but I don't get the sense Gran did that, not from talking to her shade." He frowns. "Might just be me. I've had problems, in the past. Was in a cult once. But it feels... feels like... like there's an /imprint/." He touches the side of his head. "It did something to my mind, somehow."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"You don't strike me much the type who fancies a quick shag and forget about it. We never really know where the lines for walking away or lashing out are drawn until called to the mat, though." Meggan doesn't look the least bit competent or likely to smack anything. In many ways, that impression hardly constitutes a falsehood. Far likely to blossom into something or divert by sunny means, though she cannot tap into so much sunshine. Jon's going to have to do with the natural illumination in the bar. Let the light of catharsis be a soothing rain over parched skin, mental plains blasted and dusty from the emotional effort turned elsewhere.

She shakes her head, a soft laugh coming almost free of actual warmth but trying, striving, to find something between. "Chas took help on? Might have been gone a year." Somewhere in the gold-bound aura, the light seethes, crackling back on itself in answer to a tiny hellfire spark preserved in the usually tranquil azure. How quickly it turns over as he speaks. "Glad she received some help. Wasn't her fault being targeted and she is smart as a tack. Funny, you know? I hadn't seen her for a bit." Oh, the obligations, tacked up like cobwebs in a haunted house.

"You ever have someone take a long look at that? The expert on all things demons prefers not to wear pants right now." Without missing a beat, she adds seamlessly, "Not that I'm complaining about it. Society takes a different view, I reckon, mm?"

Good to know where the English rose settles on that, right? Archivists may collectively pearl-clutch as suits their temperament through the generations. "They aren't ramblers in the Cairngorms. Takes a real expert to muddle up a human and leave no trace. John's nemesis," she rolls the word around instead of a name, disagreeing with Zatanna on that, "could be one. This one? That good to muck about with you? I'd be looking for the demon-shaped outline, if I could offer you two bits of advice."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon snorts. "I've seen worse than John Constantine's full frontal. But I also... don't want to intrude." He frowns. "It's not him that did it, whatever it is. And I don't... well. He didn't call for a decade. Par for the course with him, maybe, but /I/ thought he was dead. If I'd known, I would've gotten in touch." He's been processing that pain for a bit, anyway, the realization that a friendship didn't mean as much to someone else as it did to you. And he's used to it enough to let it wash over him.

    He frowns, then, thoughtful. Tilts his head to one side. Clarity, emotionally anyway, is helping him /think/ for once. And then all his emotions dampen all at once as his gaze turns inward, flicking through memories like he's sitting in some surveillance room watching the video tape of everything that's happened to him.

    "He cast a spell on me, to keep me from being tracked, but... I think that's all it did, and that's not when it started. Not the thing with Set... that Green Lantern gave me the first statement, but that wasn't..."

    Suddenly Jon actually jumps up from the barstool, one hand pointing at nothing. "That's it! I've got it! The statement he gave me, the statement the /demon/ gave me, about going to the Underworld! That's where it started!"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Meggan considers the bar, possibly how well it might work as a perch. Perish the notion, Chas might have a coronary if she took liberties. The stool would be the appropriate choice, except she needs nothing of the sort to function. Floating over one splits the difference. "I'd have plenty of questions had that right and proper shocked you." Her beer has long been forgotten, the pour left for them somewhere on the floor a bit of a distance back. Jon's moods and changing patterns are still a bit obscure to her, learning a new climate and terrain quite different from others more familiar.

"Probably not necessary to say he's not good at the trust and outreach bit, as a rule, innit?" Good job saying it, Meg. Mistress of the obvious, though she manages not to blush once the tap is turned back, if not fully off.

Talk of Green Lanterns, business with Set, it all goes in waves. Tidal forces pull them around, given time as long and wide as the man requires to chart his bearings. In this, they might have no maps at all.

Til he leaps.

Til he cracks the code, equilibrium sundered, and she looks almost mildly at him. "Which time?"

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon blinks himself back to the present, attention turned outward again, a light suddenly undimmed. "The first? I think? I don't know exactly where it fits in, but then there's no real chronology to any of it--the memories from prior Archivists come as they will. But this, this was the second statement I ever got and I remember it clear as day."

    He stops. Shudders. "I /experienced/ it, as if I were there. As if I were /him/. He... jumped into a door in the Botanical Gardens--" He stops, blinks, as something occurs to him. Waves it off like an annoying fly. "--and down into the Underworld. It's the thing he showed Chas, the thing that burst out at Phoebe and Zatanna when he was warding the Curio. The fear, and isolation. Seeing the faces of his dead." He shakes his head. "It was so /awful/ I haven't wanted to revisit it--who would? But I've been re-living it every night in my dreams. Something, /something/ in that has been bothering me."

    A pause. Then, slowly, "No, not bothering /me/. Bothering /the Archivist/." And that's different. Jonathan Sims is the Archivist, but the Archivist has not always been Jonathan Sims. There's a mental separation there. He fiddles with the bracer on his left wrist, frowns.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"I slumbered in Britain for the first to hold firm to hope. It kept focus where it belonged, too. For those like me, drawing attention from the Great Hunger would be dangerous." Meggan's mouth bleaches and she twists her fingers around her knife-pleated skirt. Her hands rest against her knees, the closest the floating posture gets to landing on the stool at all. Silver bindings steel against her inner heart, not so much caging it as stifling the wildfire burns from reaching beyond their well-scorched channels.

He offers much. Grounding to a time past, months slipping out of their chronological order to come alive again. A slow, long descent through disparate realms hammered together from distant, separate places never meant to be aligned. Spaces shaped to a man's understanding, dimensions never meant to be comprehended by mortal minds, which cannot in their totality be grasped. They have only imperfect strokes, 256 colours to try and capture millions of shades, degrees of detail that flit past and out from one perspective. "Thrice-damned fool walking through that door," she says softly, whatever condemnation that ought to be roused by Jon's suffering as an echo of Constantine's own deeply diluted. "A living man falling into who knows what. Why'd he do it? What compelled him to keep throwing his life aside like none of it mattered? None of us mattered?"

A long, long soan then awaits. Stretching out in imperfect hands, spreading and spilling to pieces, long enough for her to reach with a soft sigh for the unknown. "I know you can't answer it. Imagine he wouldn't know what to say either. Except it wasn't enough then... and now, we might be. I don't know what bothers the Archivist, how you draw a line."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "There's something down there," Jon says slowly. "Something the Archivist wants. Something /I/ want." There's a hunger in his words, a craving as strong as Jubilee's, now, for blood. A craving to /know/, to unearth buried secrets. A darkness lies deep in his heart already because of that hunger, and it terrifies him.

    "I don't know why he did it. I can't... it's all a jumble, a mess, and I don't know when the demon took over exactly. At that point, at least. But..." He flicks his tongue out to wet his lips. "I think I might understand... would I leave Martin behind, throw over all we've built, to go chasing down into the Underworld for whatever it is the Archivist thinks is down there?"

    Then he blinks suddenly, and laughs. "No," he says. "No, I'd take Martin with me." He focuses on Meggan. "But, then, he's more mortal than I." He sighs. "I suspect if you'd been down in that dark with him, it would have been far worse."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Jon might be admitting to abandoning his husband and traipsing off into the dark for something prized. Maybe he's a little carried away. Possibly not given the tone.

"That's a bit inconvenient. Something all buried away like a sausage hidden by a dog." Unable to be fully mollified by the notion of John or Jon vanishing to follow a bone, she breathes out a sigh. Beer is suddenly in hand, the glass shivering as it leaps to the palm from its floorbound perch. No gulps here until it's all gone, she tilts the glass in a long sip. Any toxins registered in the liquor are broken down, shattered in links long before a buzz ever develops. Hoppy water, that's all it is.

"Never to know." She brushes her sharply cut bangs to the side. "Wherever he goes, were it Martin, wouldn't you follow? It goes like that. The demon's to come to resent it, if we get the chance. Bonding opportunity, isn't it? Any good comes out of this, friendship and repairing the damage must be it."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon goes to sit back down, smiles. "Friendship and bonding--I've made more friends in the past few weeks than I did in the past decade. So that demon /will/ regret it, because I'd like to be your friend if you're amenable."

    Then he sighs. "Martin and I..." He hesitates. "Martin's followed me into terrible things before. But when we got married... his job is complicated. He's, ahh..." He's a spy. How do you just /say/ that aloud? You don't, is how, you frown and pick up your beer and gulp it down and then say, "He couldn't talk about his work. He'd leave every night and I never knew if he was doing his /real/ job or the other job we /told/ people he did."

    He swallows. "When the Frost Giants attacked New York, he got injured. He was away, working, and he got injured." It's a hint, slight, at the job he does, because who responded to that, first thing? "I had responsibility for our daughter, and she was killed while we were trying to get to a shelter." His fault. Old guilt, old pain. No parent should have to outlive their child.

    "We work together now. We go into danger together now. But we're still getting used to the idea." A pause. "I'd take Martin with me, though, because if nothing else he's /far/ more experienced with all this than I am." He glances around. "He wouldn't follow John, though. Doesn't like his methods. So this? It's just me. The rest, though...? Would /he/ follow /me/ into the Underworld? Oh, yes. Of that, I have no doubt."

    He smiles softly. "Where I go, he goes. That's the deal." It has the weight of words spoken often. Promises made again and again.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"I like being friends with everyone and everything. Whole bit better than disliking them." The obvious alternative doesn't bear much thinking about. "That's where the dynamic for us works quite well." Meggan breaks into one of those smiles again, though she puts the glass down carefully. Very carefully, since asking the shards to reconstitute themselves is the sort of thing that upsets even mundane people.

Elbows planted on the bar give an apparatus to lean against, something to settle her chin on. Easier for a long-term audience for Jon to speak at length and without interruption from the confluence of very tangled mortal lines to the glimmering distaff.

Not a note of insult taken from Martin turning up his not-so-patrician nose at following Constantine into the void. In fact, she grins for a twinkling moment when the ice cracks. "No one trusts the Fool marching into the unknown. /He/ rides the wave, the rest of us might get caught in the muddled-up trough or pulled under. Riding his coattails is not for everyone, I reckon. Just as yours might not be the sort that stirs all hearts to the trumpet's call. Not meaning it offensively; for something like that, you've got to have trust, you know?"

With a clearing of her throat, she approximates Sean Bean: "One does not simply /walk/ into the Underworld."

And by approximates, is.

Boromira.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon snorts softly. "No, one falls through doors in Botanical Gardens, evidently." He downs the rest of the pint, looks around. "But... my husband must be wondering where I am. I didn't let him follow me into this. I... I need to get better at that." A beat. "I need to go home." Then he climbs down off the stool and goes over toward the table he'd been at when Meggan arrived.

    "Thank you," he says as he moves. "For letting me talk. For listening. For..." He stops. Turns toward her. "We have pain in common," he says. "I hope that we can forge a bond on shared joys in the future." He digs out his wallet, offers a card. Jonathan Sims, MD, it says. Numbers for an office and cell phone. A psychiatrist, with a focus on trauma. No wonder he thought he should be able to help John.