Constantine fic: Birth (Live from Hell Remix). PG.

Title: Birth (Live from Hell Remix)
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: I own none of the characters mentioned here.
Rating: PG.
Original Story: Birth
Original Author: aliaspiral
Summary: This is why he hated caring.

For aliaspiral's Remix challenge.

Birth (Live from Hell Remix)




It was supposed to be easy, even if these things never were. It helped if he had only a professional interest in things. This is why he hated caring.

She said she had been sure. She said she wanted to see. He had been stupid and careless, had cared too much, had almost felt a connection between them. He hadn't wanted to see, either, not at first. Not ever, really, but it wasn't his choice anymore. Hell was real, pulsing beneath her skin, ready to rip through her, kill her, burst forth in a hail of blood to make the world over in an image of hell.

Live from Hell, his mind sang, impersonating a radio announcer, the one, the only, the Antichrist!

Amazing how he could spout Latin and still think abstractly, mind zigging and zagging along crazy back alleys he didn't know his mind could have.

This is why he hated caring. It suddenly mattered if she lived or died, in more than the professional abstract way.

Angela-is-Isabel writhed beneath him, lying underneath John Constantine. The pool of water was just beside them, a mockery of past events, a ghost of the twin that hadn't wanted to live long enough to do this. Angela was writhing on a hospital floor smelling of antiseptic and sulfur, John's hand over her belly as he chanted the ritual words. Isabel had known what was coming, Isobel had seen it all. Psychic sisters, but only one of them willing to see, his mind whispered as his lips forced out the Latin. And now there's only one of them left, only one to complete the ritual to give birth to Hell.

This is why he hated caring. This is why he was a selfish, solitary bastard. Having a heart didn't help him any. Having a heart only meant it could break.

He had never asked to have this kind of vision. But even that is almost a lie, because it gave whatever life he had meaning. It gave him purpose, it gave him the will to keep on moving and pretend he had a destination. He was avoiding Hell, really. He'd seen it many times, had walked its paths of razor wire and broken glass in bare feet. He'd felt the grasping hands of demons at his arms, pulling him down into the abyss. He knew what Hell was like, he knew what would happen to him when he died. Lucifer himself would come for him, would rend him to shreds then piece him back together with sour thread just to do the job again. John knew what lay in store for him. He knew what would happen to the world if he wasn't good enough to put the foot soldiers back in their place, the generals back along the front lines in Hell.

Angela had been better off not seeing, not knowing. The ignorant didn't realize the bliss they had until it was forced from their eyes. She was better off not having her ability, keeping it shut off and pushed away in the dark. The dark held teeth, sharp and eager, and the dark had eyes, bright and always seeing. People were better off not knowing what was in the dark, what was waiting for them once they stepped off the path. Life was easy if they couldn't see, if they didn't know with horrid certainty what was waiting for them in the dark.

Let it all be a fairy tale. Let it not be real.

There were demons in human skin waiting on the other side of the wall. The holy water in the sprinklers would only work for so long, and he was running out of time.

He was always running out of time. Even when it was suspended, he was running out of time.

Angela couldn't breathe, couldn't scream. The end of the world was coming. Hell was coming, pushing its way out of her, gnawing an exit through her.

He couldn't chant fast enough. He was going to lose. He was always going to lose.

The very face of Hell, the world's new master, pushed up out of her, mouth open in a scream that mocked Angela's. Angel.

It was all in the details, the thousand little things he'd missed. It was all in the way they painted a line, one end to the other. It was the thousand little protections he had forgotten to set, the words of warning he hadn't been able to say. It was the end of things, the end of worlds, the end of everything he had ever known was real.

This is why he hated caring. He knew it couldn't last for long.

Don't give up! he wanted to tell her. I'm trying!

But trying wasn't good enough, and they both knew that now.

She couldn't breathe, her world was nothing but agony and it was simply the beginning of her torment. Angela was going to be the mother of the Antichrist, the world's new Master, not a virgin mother but a dead one. Angela wasn't going to have the comfort of a child to raise. She would have Hell, with all its myriad miseries, with her twin sister for company. Or maybe she wouldn't go to Hell. It hadn't been her choice, after all. She hadn't wanted to participate in all of this. She had been taken against her will, ripped through walls and out of her comfort zone. She hadn't known this was going to happen when she asked to see.

No, only John was going to go to Hell when all of this was over. Once a suicide, always a suicide. There was no redemption large enough to cover that mistake. All the little miseries he had sent back to Hell was nothing in comparison to his childish mistake.

Angela would suffer now, but he got to suffer forever.

She said she had been sure. She said she wanted to see. She hadn't asked for this, and all he had done was bring her pain. Another sin to add to his list, another misery to atone for in the fiery depths of Hell.

She was going to give birth to an atrocity. He was trying as best as he could, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. She would die in his arms, bathed in blood and pain, and Hell would rise to reshape Earth in its image.

He couldn't win, only lose. And this time, he would lose everything.

This is why he hated caring.


The End.