Chapter Text
But we're not friends and we're not lovers; we're just trouble.
The first shock of the cool floor against the soles of her bare feet makes Sara’s toes curl in. A shiver works its way up her spine, but the hot-and-cold contrast between her skin and the steel of the ship feels good and so she takes her time navigating the darkened corridors of the Waverider, stepping heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. She forgoes asking for the lights, preferring instead to move in the shadows.
The specifics of the dream that pulled her from slumber are nearly gone from her perception now, lost in the fog of wakefulness, but the effects linger. Her pulse taps strong and insistent against the vein of her neck and knocks under her ribs in a way that has her still sweating in her cotton pajamas. Her nerves sting with a known and enticing energy and she shivers again—her skin turned gooseflesh—despite the ardor seeping from inside.
She licks her dry lips, craving the bite of good scotch on her tongue.
“Gideon, lights at 50% please,” she says as she ascends the steps to the parlor.
The lights slowly fade on as Sara crosses the room, heading straight for the bar. She picks up an empty glass and moves to unstopper the decanter when she feels keen eyes on her. She knows she’s not alone. She puts the glass down and turns slowly, the stopper grasped tightly in her fist, all senses on full alert.
In the half-light she can make out the figure of a man lounging on the armchair, one leg bent, the other stretched out, sipping at her good whiskey.
He happens to be completely naked.
“Jesus, John, put it away,” she says, raising a trembling hand to hide the sight of John’s nudity, voice shaky from the sudden adrenaline rush.
“What, you getting shy on me now? It’s nothing you haven’t seen—or enjoyed—before,” he taunts, but still makes a show of folding the smallest corner of the towel under him over his lap. “Didn’t want me arse getting stuck to the leather,” he adds, gesturing to the towel and her nose twitches in mild disgust.
His efforts at covering up do almost nothing to preserve his modesty and Sara instinctively sweeps her eyes up the cocksure silhouette until she meets his knowing stare.
“I thought I told you my good liquor was off limits,” she says, turning away from John’s probing gaze, focusing instead on the chipped borders of her toenail polish.
“So you did,” he says, bringing the glass up to his lips, sucking on his teeth once he’s sipped at the whiskey. “But you, uh, you say a lot of things, luv.”
She locks eyes with him for a tense moment, trying to decrypt the message, but he gives nothing away.
Trust John to make something meaningless sound so ominous. That’s his real power, and the danger of having him around; he can turn any situation in his favor. Like right now, when he’s the one who’s naked and yet she’s the one feeling uncomfortably exposed.
Sara turns her back to him and finally pours herself a drink. She practically gulps at it, feeling the whiskey carve a burning path all the way from throat to belly, blooming soothingly in her chest. She closes her eyes and exhales a silent breath as the frantic energy inside her begins to quiet.
She doesn’t take her scotch on the rocks, but she’d kill for some ice right now, she's still so hot. Lacking the ice, she makes do with dabbing at the back of her sweaty neck with a hand.
“Nightmares?” John asks, pulling her out of her moment of tranquility.
“No,” she says and doesn’t offer any further explanation. He’s the last person she wants to talk about her dreams with. Still, her curt answer proves to be too much information nonetheless.
“Ah, I see. The other kind of dream that has one squirmin’ in the sheets, then.”
A hot flush spreads anew all over Sara’s face and chest, making her ears burn and just like that she’s once again hyper aware of her lasting arousal. She wraps an arm around her middle and the slight pressure makes her want to squirm.
Damn him.
See, John is not wrong.
She’d awoken with a hand down her panties, her sex swollen and slick, need pressing so hard she’d had no other choice but to give into the lust and rub at herself until her thighs parted involuntary and she was contracting around nothing in that way that makes her crave and yearn.
It’s not the first time it’s happened either.
Lately, she’s traded nightmares for fevered dreams. There are no real, discernible images to these dreams, just impressions: adrenaline, danger and the rush of being forcefully and furtively fucked. She wakes up from these dreams needy and desperate, reaching for the warm body next to her. Except, there is no body, because she’s not at Ava’s—at home . She’s alone on the Waverider. Tonight, though, had been the first time she’d finished herself off after one of them. She’d felt oddly guilty about it before,she still does, because those dreams, well, they are everything her life used to be.
“Good to know I’m not the only one with a metaphorical case of blue balls,” John says. “This playing hero gig with you lot has really done a number on me sex life, y’know. No fun for Johnny on this tin can, but you’re all shacked up with the lady boss an’ all. So what? Is she holdin’ out on ya? I hear it’s the curse of woman-on-woman domesticity.”
“Excuse me?” Sara’s fingers twitch and tighten around her glass, arousal tempering down just enough to make room for another darker, primal emotion.
“Oh, you know, lesbian bed death,” John says, tipping his head back to swallow the last of the scotch in his glass, completely cool, like he hasn’t just said something terribly offensive and inappropriate. “Wouldn’t have guessed it from you but I reckon that broad of yours is lez enough for the both of ya.”
Sara’s every muscle becomes stone as she readies for attack. She takes a deep breath and just like that, she feels herself deflate as the self-righteous indignation leaves her.
“Don’t, okay? Just… don’t.”
It’s moments like this that make her miss the days before John moved into the ship. What was she thinking when she'd decided to make him her pet project? He takes up so much space, his energy is inescapable. It’s exhausting. Having him bear witness to her middle of the night existential crisis is probably more than she can handle right now.
He raises his hands, palms out, but the conciliatory gesture is at odds with the mocking curl of his mouth. She really wants to punch it and it takes all her effort not to reach out and do just that.
“We have a perfectly good sex life,” she says and she hates herself for rising to his bait but she’s tired of him acting like he knows her, like her new life is just a whimsy that he can shake his head at.
“Sure, and that’s why you’ve been staring at my bits for the past three minutes. Face it, luv, you’re wound tighter than a bloody girdle.”
“Hmm, and yet, unlike you, I can go home to get laid any time I want,” she says, refusing to cower to him, even as that pearl of doubt settles in her gut.
“Then why don’t you?” he challenges.
Touché.
Why doesn’t she?
Things have cooled down between her and Ava, she’ll give him that. When they started, when they’d pledged to making it work, they hadn’t anticipated it’d be difficult to make time for their relationship. They are time travelers, for fuck’s sake, with the ability to travel anywhere at the speed of thought. But then work got harder and the pressure mounted and it got easier and easier to hide in their jobs, whether hunting down magical fugitives across the timestream or running the Time Bureau. And when they’d been backed into a corner and forced to make a choice, Ava had run to her rules and order, Sara to her chaos and now they are two extraordinary people stuck in a perfectly ordinary rut.
John pushes himself off the chair and holds his towel in a messy bundle over this crotch. He steps up to her, just shy of really invading her personal space, forcing her to look up to maintain eye contact.
“I’ll tell you why you’re here getting hot 'n bothered arguing with me instead of messing up the sheets back in DC,” he says and Sara’s heart pounds in her ears as cold dread settles in her stomach. “It’s the same reason you haven’t gone home in a week. It’s not really a sex thing. It never is. Oh, I’m sure you and the missus are having all the sweet love makin’, soul connecting, looking into each other’s eyes shite. It’s great, innit? While you have it. But it doesn’t scratch your real itch. The itch that was there before her, and will be there after her.”
“There’s more to life than just chasing adrenaline highs,” she sighs, wondering who exactly she’s trying to convince.
“I really wish that were true, but for folks like us, the itch always makes itself known, eventually. And when it does, it brings nothing but hurt.”
The wisdom in his voice is genuine enough that she forgets to be mad at him and something like pity comes forth instead.
“What happened to you, John?” she asks, and she’s lost count of the times she’s asked the question, of the times she’s tried to reach out and do for him what he’d done for her back in the asylum. Look at me John, she wants to say. I made it out. Did she, though?
But just like all the times before, John hides behind a smirk and says, “I happened.”
He clicks his tongue and puts his empty glass back on its spot in the bar, even though it’s dirty.
“Well, this has been fun an’ all, but I’ve got places to be tonight.”
“Oh? Really?” She says, momentarily taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. “And how exactly do you think you’re getting anywhere? You’re not allowed on the jumpship without supervision.”
“Don’t need it,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “Got me own courier. Nicked it off’a Gary a while back.”
Sara just sighs and shakes her head in exasperated disbelief. She can feel a headache forming behind her right eye. “Well, I’m gonna need you to hand it over. That’s stolen government property and, technically it’s a punishable offense. We’re on thin ice as it is. The last thing I need is you going off and making things worse.”
John just laughs, an unfeigned straight-from-the-belly laugh that makes Sara’s cheeks flush with shame; he’s laughing at her. She’s surprised by how much it smarts.
“Well look at you, all domesticated and law abiding. The wild child’s all grown up. What? You gonna run and tell on me? Maybe what you should do is come with me, make sure I don’t step on any butterflies.” He takes a purposeful step forward, close enough now that she can smell the remnants of his shampoo and feel his whisky breath on her face. “Tell me something, luv, when’s the last time you said bugger all and did something spontaneous and fun just cause you wanted to?” he says, his voice dripping with challenge. It makes Sara’s blood sing and her heart pound.
She knows the answer to that: when she’d fucked him in the laundry room of Sumner Asylum in the year 1969.
But she stands her ground and forces herself to keep the eye contact, refusing to show him how much he’s rattled her. Eventually, he smiles and takes a step back and she squares her shoulders and crosses her arms over her chest.
“Suit yourself, sweetheart,” he says, throwing his towel over his shoulder as he walks away, bare-assed, down the hall into the dark.
She watches him go and after making sure he’s really gone, Sara sinks down into the chair John vacated. She sips at the scotch but it doesn’t taste as satisfying now and she puts the glass down on the floor because what she really wants to do is throw it against the wall to see it shatter.
Fuck John Constantine and fuck the way he can always knock the feet from under her with such ease. And fuck the way she just lets him.
She does care about him. He’s one of hers now and she’ll never forget how safe he’d made her feel when Mallus was hunting her, or how he’s helped saved her soul what feels like too many times now. But she hates that she needs him here by her side because John is a mirror of could-be’s and possibilities. A cautionary tale made flesh and blood. He’s everything that could happen to her, if she lets it. And she hates that his words echo everything she tells herself in the quiet moments:
This isn’t you, Sara.
How does she say, I love you but this life we’re reaching for feels like it’s someone else's ?
A year ago she’d nearly driven herself mad with the mundanity of normal life and yet she’s spent the past 6 months trying to build just that. In the morning, she wakes next to her beautiful girlfriend, they go to work, they come home. And then they do it again. And again.
Where had it gone wrong? It hadn’t, of course. It’s just her, always her and her restless soul and her bad adrenaline habit.
See, no one ever told her being happy would take so much effort. Or that being happy and staying happy were two different monsters. Fighting her darkness everyday, that had been exhausting, but she’d done it so long it’d become as effortless as sleep.
But it’s like he’d said: the itch always makes itself known and it’s prickling like pins and needles under her skin.
There's a selfish wish taking shape inside her heart and it manifests in those quiet moments on the days when she slips away from the Waverider, and she’s home between missions, sitting across from Ava at their dinner table, or when they’re cuddled together watching a movie and she's got her fingers threaded through Ava's soft hair, and she’s thinking of how complicated their simple life really is. And she wants to say: quit your job, come with me, let's say fuck you to the rules and make our own adventures. But who is she to ask that Ava give up the only sense of self she’s ever known?
Sara knows this much: being captain of a time traveling ship, swashbuckling through history, is her purpose. It’s where she feels most alive.
She stares ahead at the spot where she and Ava had shared their first kiss.
I'm not normal, I'm never gonna be normal, is what she’d screamed.
“Fuck,” she grunts, throwing her head back over the edge of the chair.
She pushes herself off the chair and all but runs down the steps to the bridge. She should stop and think about why she’s not opening up a time portal back to DC right now instead of chasing the stale smell of tobacco down the hall. But she doesn’t and instead lets the part of her she’d kept buried inside awaken.
She stands in front of the library doors, palms sweaty and heart pounding in her ears. She knocks and the door slides open a moment later. He’s there, still half-undressed, balancing a cigarette between his lips, looking like he already knows why she’s come calling.
“So, where are we going?”