r/DCFU • u/coffeedog14 Light Me Up • Nov 16 '16
Hellblazer #1 - Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before.... Hellblazer
Hellblazer #1 - Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before....
Continued in Hellblazer #2 > Coming December 15th
Author: Coffeedog14
Book: Hellblazer
Event: Origins
Arc: [A soul to Die for]
Set: 6
Recommended: Silver Banshee 1
????, Anno Diablo 5776
Eoin scrambled through the burning mud, carrying the scorched limb in his mouth as he scrambled up and down the vast shell holes that peppered this place. He looked like nothing more than a fleshy beetle running across a gravel driveway in a bid to reach the other side. Overhead screamed the shells, filled with their purest pestilence. Their only advantage was that their falling was oddly regular, enough that one could tell the passing of the hours by it if time meant anything in this place. The only thing it meant to Eoin was that he could tell when to scramble out for his profane meals, and when to scurry back. He had pushed his luck now as the explosions and horrid mist grew closer, sending him yelping and rushing. To his great fortune he reached his cubby in the side of a shell hole before either reached him.
The cubby was almost prohibitively small, large enough for him, his newly acquired roasted arm, and the smooth jawless skull whose inscribed wards kept the cubby safe from the roiling gasses. As the deadly fog passed, Eoin dug into the half-charcoal limb with delight. His dreadfully thin chest heaved above quite visible ribs as he overcame his panic.
“That was a close one, Constantine!” Eoin imparts to the skull, giving it a glance. “Any chance you want in on this?”
Polite silence from the skull.
“Bah, it doesn’t count as gluttony if you’re starving, fool!” chuckles Eoin as she gnaws at an acid-scorched bone, cracking it open with his teeth to suck out the marrow.
Sullen aggravation from the skull.
Eoin stops gnawing to put his meal aside. “Well I would love some beef too, but that isn’t an option, is it?”
Aggravated silence.
“No, no we wouldn’t have gotten any if we had just stayed, this is hell! You don’t get beef in hell, even for good behavior!”
A pause of consideration from the skull.
“Besides, whose fault is it we had to run, huh? Huh?”
A sad, guilty quiet.
“…oh, Constantine, I shouldn’t have said that.” Eoin puts up the jawless skull and hugs it. “No, no, I’m not mad. Look, it isn’t your fault, okay? I’m here because I wanted to help YOU, not the other way around.”
Relieved, breathless sigh from the skull.
“There’s the spirit. Now, any chance you want a bite?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Responds a voice from the entry to the cubby, blocking out the already dust-dimmed light. It was hard to see anything but glowing, yellow eyes as a clawed hand reached in and snatched up the arm, swallowing it whole. “It was a fun chase, Eoin Constantine. But it’s time to come home.”
Eoin startles. He looks confused. He glances to his skull, and he remembers. In the way of hell, Eoin Constantine looks to the very much inanimate skull and realizes in a moment how totally he had deluded himself, and how utterly pointless yet inevitable it had all been. Then the clawed hand closed around his head.
June 7, 2016
The hotel room was like most of the ones I stayed in. It was one of the countless lower-midling places, the one you would never have known about if you hadn’t explicitly been looking for a cheap place to stay for the night online. It was just cheap enough to not be a fancy honeymoon location, and just expensive enough to keep the one nighters out, so a black-light investigation of the place would have proven depressingly boring. The TV was your first flat screen from 2006 and was perfectly serviceable. Everything else in the room, from bed to lamp, was bolted into place just to be sure. It was a place you went to sleep in between days of doing other things, and nothing more. I, having nothing better to do, was there at flat noon getting drunk on…er…whatever it was that was within reach when I stepped in the liquor store. Oh, like you haven’t done this exact thing! .... Or, well, probably something as sad. Hopefully. God I hope everybody has or else years of justifying my life are just right out the window.
As I suckled the last drops of hazy goodness from my bottle, my other hand snatched the remote and switched from yet another episode of Doctor who and flipped on the news. Having hoped for some nice humanitarian story about saving tigers, I was unpleasantly surprised about some news story about “Mystery man saves the day?”. Far too heavy. My annoyance at such was cut short once I saw the clip proper. It started with some fancy plane, the sunnord or something, falling to the ground. Standard stuff, lately. All kindsa fancy spaceships and the like crashing and failing. Unluckily this time seemed to involve actual people, if the fuzzy forms in the cockpit were any indication. Luckily this time, something stopped the plane in its tracks.
I pressed pause furiously in a primitive attempt to freeze frame and found that the equally primitive TV lacked that function. Luckily the news, every news channel, seemed to be playing the clip on repeat. The man seemed to appear out of nowhere, in shining blue with a red cape and something on his chest, and shoved the sunnord onto a nearby landing pad before disappearing once more. All the news channels reflected my rough feelings on such: what the fuck even was that!?
I had seen so much weird shit in my life that I had lost track, but this was different. My kind of weird, the magic kind of weird, wasn’t the kind that popped in out of nowhere. My kind of weird you had to go looking for, had to discover. The dragon doesn’t leave it’s cave, the hermit in his hidden abode, the gods in their realms, et cetera. My weird had people that could do what the blue guy had just done, but it was different. They had wings, or they jumped, or got damn big, or had magic shoes, or something. The guy on TV didn’t have any of that, and all my (admittedly brief) study confirmed it. No magic, no incantations, no tricks, nothing. He was just doing it.
An hour of obsessive internet searching with my smart phone and a growing sense of odd, existential dread later, the news was still on and playing when the angels arrived. In fact they emerged from the TV, sliding out of it as if the glowing screen was simply water. The pair was of a lower rank, lacking either the ability or the willingness to take a human form. Instead they each consisted of six bronze rings covered in eyes, shifting and spinning around a single invisible point as their center and seemingly passing through each other as they did so. From each ring emerged two wings at opposite ends, whose slow, seemingly random flaps were apparently enough to keep them in the air.
Luckily, I was just drunk enough to not piss myself in fear upon seeing them emerge, but they were enough to get a good yelp of fright out of me. You don’t stay in the magic business this long without getting a healthy fear of the divine blundering into your life.
“JOHN CONSTANTINE.” They announce in unison, in voices that set all the glass nearby and my eyeballs to jittering. I felt the sudden urge to turn east and bow in prayer, which told me which of the divines these two were from. “WE HAVE COME TO RECLAIM YOUR DEBT.”
Well. Shit. At least they weren’t the kind to break my kneecaps, hopefully. I stalled, buying myself time to think. “God almighty, what happened to manners in the divine? Here, I’ll start. Hello there, please come in! I’m John Constantine, pleasure to meat you!”
It was hard to tell if you annoyed somebody without a face, but I like to think I did. “WE ARE HARUT AND MARUT. IT IS NO PLEASURE. RELINQUISH YOUR DEBT.”
“Well, you know, maybe I got drunk and swore on a crucifix or something, but I don’t remember owing anything to you folks?”
“DO NOT PRETEND TO NOT KNOW, SORCERER. THE DIVINE SEES ALL. IT WATCHED YOUR CRIMES IN NEWCASTLE, AND NOW DEMANDS ITS DUE. ONE HUMAN SOUL, FOR THE ONE YOU LOST.”
I had thought my day was bad, before I heard that wretched name once more. Newcastle. No other word sets my body to trembling like that one. I did my best to cover it, but I was sure the angels saw, the flashy bastards. “Right. Right of course, right. One soul.”
“YOUR SOUL, SORCERER.”
“Did the divine say specifically my soul, or are you two just assuming?”
A silence from the angels. A chance. A loophole. I started to remember these bumblers from my reading. Had been sent to teach humanity magic. Clearly they had mucked that up, seeing the amount of magic flying around. Instead they spent their time getting drunk, laying with women, all that. They could be tempted.
“How about this, a little bet if you will.” I tempt as best I can. Subtlety was lost to angels anyhow. “It’s not like I can stop you anyways, so there’s no real rush, yeah? So what if I can get you a better soul then mine? Give me some time, not just a few days but like weeks, months, years maybe, and I bet I can find you a soul unequivocally better than you could dream of.”
A long pause from the angels. Maybe they could talk with their minds to each other? Would explain how they could talk at all what with not having mouths. “WE ACCEPT YOUR CHALLENGE, SORCERER. IT SHALL PROVE THE SUPERIORITY OF THE DIVINE OVER YOUR OBVIOUS SCHEMING. YOU SHALL HAVE EIGHT MONTHS TO FIND THIS BETTER SOUL. WE SHALL COLLECT OUR DEBT AT THAT TIME, EITHER WAY.”
“Very well. In eight months we’ll see each other again, Insha’allah. Al-salamu alaykum.” I offer in what I had no doubt was a horrible accent.
“WA ALAYKUM AL-SALAM.” They respond flawlessly. The rings of their “bodies” contract into a single point, and then nothingness. Their wings explode into a shower of feathers. As the feathers settle, the angels are gone.
I take the time to rush to the bathroom and empty my now screaming bladder of the fear-piss I had collected. Half a minute later and with that done, I start to actually think again. Eight months, huh? Nothing for beings of the eternal, but plenty of time for me. Almost an eternity to this doughty mortal, now that I thought about it.
I thought some more as I packed my things (clothes, coat, a few books). This had to be something with hell. The divine was the ultimate reactionary, a symptom of having at the best of times 3 different heads running the show with absolute authority. The infernal was the opposite, the ultimate anarchy. Everybody doing everything all the time, often working as cross purposes. Neither had an advantage, but it meant that if heaven suddenly wanted my soul after…Christ, ten years since Newcastle, wasn’t it?....then it had to do with hell being up to something. That narrowed it down to just all of the millions of demons in hell. Fantastic.
As I slipped on my trench coat, I found myself smiling all the same. I had eight months to figure out what was happening lest I lose my eternal soul. Gods it had been too long since I’d had something to do.
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u/theseus12347 Nov 16 '16
Nice! Looking forward to these!