22 December 2003
Harry Potter/Hellblazer
Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Summary:  Wizards have to do this every day.

Notes:
Title from "The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious" by Paul Durcan.

For Sheila.



London remains a city more powerful than any of Britain's wizarding communities.  Seven million Muggles, a few dozen wizards, a small host of other beings all shifting in the city's corners.  Hogwarts' library holds notes on the site from days when it was Londiniensium and Romans were cutting Celtic throats at the Thames ford.  It wasn't magic, then, precisely, but both sides has wizards walking with them, and the power they let loose is still here.  There are ghosts in this city for anyone to see.

He takes the Underground.  There are unused tunnels where water-spirits have long nested, and sometimes he expects to find the subway tracks torn loose out of sheer spite on their part.  He found his grindylow in a subway, though in Edinburgh, not London.  It still lives with him, wherever he is at any given time.  At night, it curses him with stories about the dark.

Above ground, there's water everywhere.  It takes him three tries to hail a cab; he thinks perhaps he'd lost the knack of it.  Every month he spends in the wizarding world now strips a year off his Muggle knowledge.

Only.  "Are you Lupin?"

"I am."

"'m Chas.  Know you're looking for someone."

"I see."

The cabbie is no one magical.  He doesn't even have the aura of a squib.  Just a dirty, overtired eastender driving cab in the night.  As traffic locks around them, though, he twists far enough to hand Lupin a folded card.

White, laced with tobacco-scent so ingrained it's almost sacred.  Silk Cut lettered on one side in commercial inks.  On the other side, What do you want?

"Pencil, mate?"

"Thank you."  The stub he accepts has been chewed for years, most probably.  He can smell life and smoke and blood on it.  Sharpened with a knife, but functional.  //I want to meet you//

Letters he didn't make spell, //fuckoff//

He writes back, //please//

//will u come into wards?//

//yes//

//ok//

Lupin hands the card and pencil to the driver, who stares at them a moment before nodding.  He takes them through slick places Lupin's never guessed at.  He could credit arcane knowledge, but it's more likely the years of study one puts in to know the city well enough for a cabbie's license.

The pub they find is anonymous, a little rough, but not loud.  Music plays softly, and the men and women inside are devoted to quietly erasing themselves.  Chas takes him in by one arm, but leaves him at the door, and when Lupin turns, man and car are gone.

John Constantine is there, drinking, watching him enter.  Forty-three years old and perhaps the most completely Muggle-adapted of all living wizards.  He's only a greying, balding alcoholic in brown trousers and yellowing shirtsleeves, smoking like his life depends on it.  Lupin can feel the man's power crawling up his skin.

"Do you want to sit down?"

"Yes.  Thank you."  Invitation and response: he can feel hard wards give long enough for him to seat himself on badly-repaired vinyl.  "I'm sorry to bother you."

"Should fucking well think so."

"You know what's been going on."

"I've seen the bodies.  I thought Dumbledore could handle this."

"He's done a great deal.  There were politics to be considered."

"Sod the politics.  There are dead girls lying in bin bags at King's Cross."

Lupin blinks.  "I didn't know about that.  Are you sure it was Voldemort?"

"It was his people.  Fucking sadists."

"Do you know who?"

"McNair.  Maybe others.  McNair likes blood runes, unless he's changed."

"We'll look into it."

"Thanks."  Constantine offers a kind of communicative shrug to the barmaid, who brings him a new pint and hands Lupin what's certainly Muggle whiskey.  He drinks it anyway.  "What'd you want?"

"Dumbledore sent me."

"Yeah, I knew that.  Your kind don't come looking for me 'less someone sends you.  Had a pretty thing in here last week, from Voldemort."

"Blonde?"

"Dark.  Utterly barking."

"Bellatrix."  Constantine drinks as though it's an answer.  "What did you tell her?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"I need to know.  Please."

"What d'you want?"

”Dumbledore thought . . . your magics are different than any others in Britain, right now.  You're the only wizard left who's not school-trained."  He breathes in.  "We need you."

"That's utterly too bad."

"I know you don't like our politics.  That's fine.  But do you know about the Order?"

"Next time you need to keep secrets, you shouldn't trust mad elves."

"You know, then."

"I know enough.  How'd he manage to mount his head after he got it off?"

"That's beyond me.  Will you listen, at least?"  He gets another shrug, and a new drink.  "We could pay you very well."

"'m not actually strapped right now.  And I don't have much use for wizard money.  Fucks the gold standard every time y'exchange it."  Sigh.  "What do you want?"

"Come to us."

"Your Order?"

"No.  Come to Hogwarts."  He fishes inside his coat for the parchment Dumbledore gave him.  "They want you for the Dark Arts chair."

Constantine looks him over for perhaps two beats too long, then snorts.  "You're barking."  Eyebrow raised enough to suggest he knows how close to literally true this is.  "Hogwarts school doesn't teach its kids the things I know.  You need one of your aurors, not a fucking dark wizard."

"They had an auror, the year after they had me.  He didn't make out well.  The survival rate's not good.  No one will take the job, now.  There are rumours its cursed."

"But I'm already cursed, is that it?"

"Well, so am I.  And I did come out of it with all my limbs intact."

"Little else.  You've even got the price of a drink?"

Lupin shrugs.  "I'm not terribly employable at present.  I manage, though."

"Lupin."  He leans forward.  "I don't like kids.  I'm not good with the little fuckers.  They've got problems adults can't solve for them and mostly they know that.  I give them a wide berth and they give me the same."  He sighs.  "And if I had my way, I'm not sure I'd let any more kids into this filthy profession of ours."

"Magic's not a profession, John."

"It is when you make it your life.  Let them go.  The old families'll run incest into snarling wrecks in another generation.  The others can go out and make real lives, outside those little boxes they make for themselves.  Go to schools that teach more than how to make your breakfast with a wand.  Build computers.  Cure AIDS.  Something like that."

"It's not an option, right now.  We're in too much danger."

"We're always in danger.  World's like that."

"Voldemort kills Muggles."  He can picture Constantine at King's Cross, holding some part of a dead girl who's finally free of McNair.  "If we let the children go, they might go to him."

Constantine stops looking at him.  He settles into his cups, drinks seriously for half an hour without speaking.  He smokes two cigarettes, inhaling so violently the ashes build in fast columns.  "God damn you," he says, finally.

"Will you come?"

"I'm a bad choice."

"Don't tell me.  Dumbledore chose you.  You can argue with him yourself."

"There are legends of the last man to win an argument with your Dumbledore.  They say he ascended to heaven unaided."

"It's likely true."  Pause.  "Will you come?"

"No promises to you."

Lupin nods.  It's fair, and he knows enough of Constantine to know the man wouldn't bind himself to a Dark Creature with a promise.  His magics are semiotic, language and sign, as close to the Dark Arts as anyone not currently bathed in blood.  It's only four days after the full moon tonight.  Constantine smells interesting, like power and blood.

He takes the next drink that's offered, and the next.  Though mundane insofar as they've never been enchanted, the swirling alcohols are still enough to knock loose his outer layers.  When he finally stands, the room twists.  Constantine's wards spark before dissolving.  Dangerous to wield that kind of power at this stage of intoxication.  He wonders whether there was any risk they'd both tear apart in the moment of release.

There's no cab outside.  The world moves with an odd slide that suggests they aren't entirely in it, but the Muggles around him make eye contact occasionally, enough to suggests that they're 'there' in a way that classical wizard magic doesn't allow.

Alleys.  Cast-offs.  There's another werewolf, half aware of itself, walking in London, but not close enough for it to come hunting.  A pair of vampires flicker and spit at Constantine before they move on.  He doesn't look at them.

Lupin can see Constantine needing sanctuary.  They do need him, but he's such a mess, perhaps Dumbledore chose him out of pity.  He's holed up in a Muggle apartment so heavily warded Lupin can see the door glow without even blinking.  Five, six, eight drinks into the evening, he's still moderately steady on his feet, but he moves like a man who knows he'll hurt tomorrow.

The floor's plank, not well-polished, covered with an ugly area rug.  Lupin considers both available chairs before sitting on the floor.

He accepts the joint when Constantine passes it to him.  Lets the smoke slide down into him, out to his fingertips.  Reaches a little with his mind to see if anything comes to him.

"You're being too mystic about it.  It's just pot."

"It increases sensitivity and accuracy in divination."  He inhales again.  "I should try it on Trelawney, next time I'm in Hogsmead.  See if it makes any difference to her."

"Sybil?  She knows better."

It should mean something to him that Constantine knows Hogwarts' wreck of a fortune-teller, but he's not in a position to care.  Even homely witches know things you don't expect them to.  He remembers Molly Weasley walking among Muggle heroin addicts during the last war, looking for squibs to protect.

Constantine asks, "Why don't you have a Pack?"

"What?"

"Why don't you have a Pack?  Anyone's been watching you knows you're gone fifteen years without anything like one, and even before that it was only wizards.  Your Marauders are gone, your friend's boy's got other folk.  You're nothing in the wizard world.  Why don't you go to your others?"

"There were werewolves with Voldemort in the last war."

"And more who didn't go.  None of the Black Forest Packs went to him, and most of those from the highlands stayed away."

"I'm not . . ." 

"Except you are, really.  But that's it, isn't it?  You're not one of them, in your head.  Should try it.  Go up there, live in the hills for a few years, be a real something."  Constantine takes the joint from Lupin's fingers, inhales, sets it back in the frozen grip.  "You like being nothing in particular?"

He lets it blow past, sharp air in his fur.  Nothing he hasn't heard before.  Sometime in the next year, the next few months, he knows Dumbledore will ask him the same questions, and he won't be able to let it go so easily.

"It's very difficult to study when one's naked in the highlands.  Books don't stand the rain.  And I think my grindylow would miss me."  He sucks acrid haziness into himself, lets it swirl in his lungs a long time before releasing.  "I'm a terribly indoor beast by inclination."  Happy warmth slides up his spine, and he demonstrates his point by sliding down flat on the floor.  The flat's ceiling is plaster, a little water-stained.  He can see wards shifting between the gypsum swirls.  "You have a most interesting ceiling."

Soft chuckle, and Constantine's shoe nudges him.  "Happy down there?"

"Yes, actually."

"I could run back to America right now.  You're too far gone to stop me."

"I would try very hard to cling to your ankles.  I have a great deal invested in bringing you in."

One fair-brown brow quirks slightly.  "Yeah?"  A hand reaches down to him.  Faint runes carved into the skin as though with the point of a grade-school compass, very old.  Lupin has to grasp at it twice before he catches the palm.  It pulls him to his feet.

Smoke all around them.  Constantine says, "Give me a good reason."

"Survival of all that's bright and clean."

"A good reason.  For the survival of wizarding suburbia.  He might be right, y'know.  The ones that came out of your war'd be more powerful than any wizards walking now."  Long, slow blink.  Constantine's pupils are huge, so black Lupin can see his reflection in them.

Lupin says, "We will give you anything you ask."

"Money."

"It's yours."

"Virgins."

"I'm sure someone would be willing."

"Unwilling virgins."

"Perhaps you are on the wrong side."

This crushed-up look, all eyes and sharp teeth, a whole second before Constantine kisses him.  Then teeth, whiskey-taste and nicotine and marijuana and too-powerful wizard.  Memory of the crackle Sirius had, when they were twenty and bent over Sirius' motorcycle outside a Muggle pub in Manchester and all he says is, "yes."

"Good to know."

He can remember that night so clearly.  The afternoon's rain and the night's cold wet that soaked through the knees of his jeans.  Both of them laughing and high, crackling magics in their bones and skin, kissing.  Sirius' motorcycle a leather-chrome-enamel ghost in the halogen dark.

On his knees in that wet alley, mouthing along Sirius' waist and pulling his jeans open.  Enough of a look-elsewhere glamour around them he needn't worry about the Muggle police.  Male skin under his tongue.

"Yeah, just like that."

Salty-powerful.  All his werewolf senses read across wizard-skin.  Every man he's ever kissed he knew more intimately than they realized.

And all the cobbles

(floorboards)

under his knees while he licks his way down.  Hands in his hair guiding him in.  Wordless yes yes yes behind them.  Licking belly, nosing hair apart.  That first cock-taste when it slides across his tongue and it tastes

(different)

the same every time.  So familiar by now and it still wires him.  Love, he guesses.  Because it's just the two of them, wrapped up in this, with Peter finding friends outside them and James with his new family and Sirius-and-Remus turned loose to play in the dark.  This freedom and he can just.  Suck.

Just. like. that.

Hard and soft palate, the back of his throat pulling, and the so-very-male growling above him.  Laughing joy in him at the chance to do this.

He'd love to play it through.  Fuck Sirius here, in the midst of the Muggle city, wired into every inch of the old power.  He loves London

(Manchester.  It's Manchester

(London)

Over him, that body, curling in.  Leather-covered shoulders and jeans-covered legs, arching towards each other to hide the nakedness between.  Remus's hands on Sirius' hips.  Not sure whether to protect him or expose him to the night.

"You're fucking good at that."

There's magic all over this room

(alley, alley, alley)

crawling up his arms.  He's wanted this all his life and

"Shit.  yes."  Coming in his mouth, fierce and fast, male-sharp and wired into Remus' own instincts.  So hard by now it only takes two strokes of his hand against closed jeans for him to come.

Gasping there in the water, laughing with the power of it and Constantine

(Sirius?)

smiling down at him.  All that possession in him.

He's shaking.

This is London.  He's thirty-eight years old, and his knees are dry.  Sirius is

(Sirius is dead)

and there's a stranger's come in his mouth.

He doesn't know what to do, yet.  He can feel Constantine's glamour dissolving.  Impressed at the seamlessness of it and sick-horrified at what he just did.  The colder voice whispering 'necessity' from the back of his brain.

Lupin spits into his palm, whispers over it, tucks the resultant phial into his pocket.

Constantine tucks himself back, closes shirt and trousers, shoves his hands into his own pockets.  "Alright."

"What?"

"I'll think on it."  He walks off, finds a bottle tucked into a cupboard and takes a drink.  Swirling out his mouth like he's the one who just spit.

"What?"

"Tell Dumbledore I'll think on it.  And tell him whatever else you want."  Another drink.  "Make sure someone looks into those girls."

"That was.  Appallingly cruel."  Sirius so close Lupin thinks he can almost smell him.

"Yeah."

Watches him while Lupin crawls to his feet.  Icy blue eyes, and yes.  Dark wizard.

He thinks he might be going to vomit.  All the wards in the flat are pushing him towards the door.  All he can do not simply bolt.  He needs to hold himself together.  To walk out like a man.  Wizard.  Anyone with a modicum of control.  He pauses with his hand on the doorknob and hisses, "Bastard."

"Yeah."

On the street before he's fully aware of stepping out.  The wards behind him rival Hogwarts' for complexity and strength.

Outside, it's wet and raining and smells like Manchester, and he does vomit.  Sobs a few moments in the gutter-damp before he can crawl to his feet.  Holds himself together with both arms and tries to remember how to get home.

Just the grim (old Grimmauld) place waiting for him at the end of the trip.  Silent house for days until Dumbledore comes to him.

The Underground is there, half a mile a way and reeking power.  He can follow it even through this steaming, acid dark.  Spits every half-block to lose the taste.  All that darkness for him to slide into.  Disappear just as if he didn't have to answer to anyone at the end of it.



jane
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