tampered | Log; Complete

Log; Complete

When; October 9th
Rating; PG-13
Characters;

silkcutremix John Constantine
Summary; It manifests and it consumes from the belly and outward.
Log;

John had stopped puking, but there he was in the bathroom still. He had been in there for hours, perhaps "shouting" every now and then in that laboured gurgle of his, just to assure the Corinthian that he was still alive and was doing better in there than out on the couch. Still he was hot, but he no longer had sweat, having to gasp instead. It brought him a small relief.

The porcelain was warm under his fingers. The tile was warm under his rear. He hugged that damn bog as if it were a longtime mate and they had just been reunited.

No longer he puked, but his ankles were too thin. He had noticed right now, noticed the slight distortion in his feet, the sudden... aging of the rest of him? His skin was pale, but his hair had gone dusty and somewhat whitish in places. His vision swam and blurred. Couldn't keep his eyes open lest he get dizzy and going into another vomiting fit. He had nothing left to bring back up.

So this was where he shriveled up and died? Should have known. He did not feel very deathly though, his innards were hot and tight, slowly slithering about in him like steady serpents. The dog that lived inside his belly seemed to claw inside him and gnaw.

That attack took place on the last night of the full moon, didn't it? Werewolf bites had a unique odor about them, a usual telltale sign, but even if he had contracted lycanthropy, wouldn't he be dealing with this shite in a month? Then again, the virus had different strains. Too bad he had been too ill to do anything about it. Must have been its way of making sure it'd keep alive and make more blokes miserable after.

The seat of the stained toilet was cool against his cheek.

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The Corinthian was reading the note Scarab had left him, over and over again to the sound of John delivering what was left of him into the porcelain driver's seat. There was something strange going on in The City, first there was John's illness, then Scarab's disappearance, and now this, a mass exodus of sorts with individuals being pulled from this reality. He knew it was a breach, a crack in the veneer that had split wide open. He hadn't spoken to Morpheus about it yet, but the nightmare knew, someone or someones had gotten tired of running their experiment and were abandoning ship, giving everyone else a one-way ticket home. Was it worth the risk? Not the risk of traveling what he thought to be the bleed, but worth risking the magus' health, his safety. The illness had anchored the man to the bathroom, what hope did he have of getting up and flying through the crack?

He huffed softly, thinking about this unusual breach, how it couldn't have been caused by the red horror, and if not that then what? Was there something higher at work and therefore at stake here? That was when he noticed the Englishman had become quiet... almost too quiet. He folded the note Scarab had penned and set it on the table before walking to the bathroom.

"Hey, you doing all right," Cori asked John with two knocks on the door, "you need anything?"

John did not look up, his world still black on the hard comfort of the seat.

"I'm fine." Blatant lie, but what else could he do if he were shriveling up or whatever the hell was happening? He did not want Cori to see.

His ankles and wrists felt as if a vice had taken them, paralyzing his fingers in the process. The tips of those as well as his toes ached horribly. A surging pain in his mouth had let him to spit up blood into the bog. Now what? Certainly not sit here and take it. Had to do something...

"Get me a candle and a knife." His voice was quickly growing hoarse, tightening with the rest of him. Already his skin felt taut. "Have the damn thing lit. Now."

"You're lying," said the nightmare in his cool tone.

There was no need to jump on the sick man for trying to conceal his bad health, but neither would he let John think he had the wool pulled over those teetheyes. Regardless, he left to fulfill the man's request, knife already on hand. Not but a minute later The Corinthian returned with a few candle sticks, emergency stash from down the hall apparently, even if it seemed like the electricity here rarely went out. He lit one with his lighter then placed a hand on the doorknob.

"I'm coming in," he warned John, allowing the man to steel his appearance for his arrival. He opened the door then, lit candle and knife in hand.

"You know me too well," Constantine moaned, facing his back towards the Corinthian.

Upon walking in, the nightmare would find the magus clinging to dear life to the toilet with retreating, curling fingers, his back bristly with more grizzled hair. He was shuddering, trembling.

He had a delightfully crude comeback for that moment but held his tongue due to the severity of the situation. The magus' posture, the trembling, none of it fazed him which wasn't to say that he wasn't affected personally, the nightmare had a way of always remaining cool, perhaps even cold despite feeling otherwise. He adjusted his sunglasses then knelt next to John, candle burning in his hand. The wax had already started to run down to his fingers but he didn't seem to react to that heated pain either, with flame flickering against his black lenses.

"Here, candle and knife," The Corinthian offered both to the expert.

For a brief moment one might have noticed his brow furrow when he got a closer look at the Englishman, but he said nothing.

"That'll do," John hissed. His slightly swollen chest rattled, almost painfully so. "Go. Please."

The magus remained there, facing away. He was drooling, a gob of it hitting his hairy (or hairier than the norm) thigh. Even he did not want to see himself.

Fingers were aching, but he had to hold that knife. Had to carve a purification ward in his flesh. Even the beginning of it would do. Candles could channel things a bit if he positioned them right...

"John," he said the man's name with concern, but hesitated to move further after that request.

His appearance had changed, beyond ill health, beyond sickness and disease. It was as if someone, or something, had rearranged the man's proportions, his bone structure, and... was he hairier? This time the nightmare frowned but slightly, just a subtle downturn of his mouth. What was he trying to do with that knife.

"John, you can tell me what you need," The Corinthian offered his assistance.

"Every moment you sit there prattling about," Constantine growled, perhaps with an alarming amount of rumble in his chest, "is one minute closerrr... to me seeing if I canrrr bend overrrr an' lick me bollirrcks." It was getting increasingly difficult to speak, to articulate.

Aw, fuck it. Cori was not going to budge. Shakily, he wrestled with his deformed fingers, eventually seizing the blade with a clumsy grip. It was only going to get worse. His fucking thumb was receding too. Still could hold the thing with some precession, but his forearms were losing their ability to twist.

Fuck! He was going to be doing this almost blind. Screw the candles. No time for them. His knife hand shook as he tried to carve, but etching mystical symbols in the flesh was a careful art for human hands, not his malformed digits with stubby black nails poking up and out from under his former human ones. He slashed himself instead, spilling blood to the floor. The knife clattered and he roared a curse.

'Least it was across the street, he grimly thought.

Say what. He narrowed his teetheyes at the insolent Englishman, but that was John Constantine for you. He didn't take the rejection to heart, hell he couldn't make the nightmare leave even he wanted to at this point bwahahaha. But save the prattling and mocking for later, he truly was concerned for the magus' health. His malforming body seemed almost like... the process was a bit too slow to bear, he thought about finding a piece of silver and just sticking it to John to see his reaction. That would have been far more preferable than this, this torturous transformation about which he could do nothing.

"Jesus christ!" Cori barked, jumping back when John spilled his own blood on the floor. That bathroom definitely had seen better days before these two moved in, fortunately his movement had knocked the flame into the sink, no need to worry about a fire here.

For both their own good, the white-blonde tossed his glasses over his shoulder, forgetting to care if they broke or not. He approached John again, determined, disregarding if the man looked into his little mouths or not.

*Don't fucking die on me, old man.*

Cori was going to watch this fiasco. Determined, wasn't he? Let him. He couldn't fight him, or anything else.

"I wirrsh I was."

He fell over to his twisted arms, no, "arms," thinned and bony, the coarse hair thick enough to resemble what could have been fur. He noticed his formerly invisble nose had pushed outward enough, along with the strangeness of having massive teeth in a jaw that was still too small for them. His tongue belted about into a thin slab of pink. Articulating would be impossible now.

Colette. Colette had been looking for a new pet if she was so willing to spend her old one on Cori and him. Why did he feel connected to her? Why did he feel like he knew her?

A moment of vertigo set in, and he wobbled, then fell, feeling Cori's presence, but his world quivered in alien color and his twisting body was growing distant.

Damn right he was, to keep his eyes on the writhing and bleeding Englishman, to make sure John didn't hurt himself or to outright rip whatever was afflicting him from his conscious. Not even the red horror had seen the full extent of his rage, but the nightmare hadn't been pushed that far... yet. The transformation was unnerving to say the least, only because it was unpredictable. What would John do after its completion, take the path down the road? If he could hold the knife that is. Cori had an idea what was going on now, the attacker, the bite, the temperature, and now his snout, not that it took a friggin' genius to come to this conclusion. He growled to himself, frustrated.

"John," he knelt beside the other and attempted to prop him upright by the shoulders, if he still had any, at the very least he wanted to try and keep the Englishman conscious. If he failed at that, well... he wasn't planning to go anywhere, not even home, not now.

Could John be considered human? His apperance was haggard and the hair had thickened and lengthened more into a shaggy unkempt coat. A half-grown tail had curled into middle of his buttocks, trapped under his pants. At the very least, he was not losing mass but instead all of it had been shifting.

He heard the Corinthian call his name, felt him prop him up. The glance was cockeyed and exhausted but his eyes still remained blue, pupils were full, primal.

And John felt anything but. Wanted to reach out for the nightmare, he did, just to see if he still had some hold in reality, but his hands felt heavy and useless. Couldn't move his fingers.

Lord have mercy and make it fucking stop... He'd have Colette. He'd do everything in his power to make her fucking pay for this.

Human was not the word Cori would use right now, but he could feel that John was still the same man, caught in a metamorphosis, losing only his physical shape. Perhaps he gained a few new senses as well, but these were not things the nightmare could detect. He waved a hand in front of John's face, tried to look into his primal blue eyes. He didn't think the other could even see him right now, much less fall victim to the eyeteeth. Without thinking, he reached for the Englishman's hand, or what constituted as a hand in this halfway shape.

"John, John, can you still hear me," asked the nightmare, searching for his gaze, even a jolt if he could acknowledge the dark mirror. "Fuck," he hissed and reached for the man's pants, better to get those off than let that tail cramp up or something. The Corinthian really didn't have a solid clue as to what he was doing.

Cori's voice echoed, like a distant thunder rumbling on the horizon. He felt him grab his hand, whatever it was now, handish thing, but the distraction was only momentary. His body cracked and grind. His innards writhed as a snake pit. His breaths were forcefully wrestled through swollen lungs.

Christ, he wanted to die. His lower lip, now black as the rims around his eyes, burned, most of the pain centred in her touch. Blood stained the tile, the light fur on his belly.

Cori... I'm alive... Just fucked sideways and in too deep...

His head felt heavy. It went loose in its socket, limp, letting the large muzzle weigh it down, the pink tongue lolling out.

As soon as he managed to wrangle the not-quite-human-man's clothes off he slipped both arms under John to try and get the man in the bathtub. While this wasn't a case of alcohol poisoning the nightmare didn't see anything wrong with taking that course of action. Even with a coat of fur between their touch he knew John was burning up, best not to let him burn out. He turned the water on, letting it gush from the lower faucet, cool but not too icy cold. He scooped some of that water up and let the Englishman have it in the face, gently of course.

"You son of a bitch," said the nightmare, concerned but incapable of expressing it in a more polite manner. Maybe that was the biggest mark of his worry, fighting it with anger. "Come on," he urged John, at least to drink.

Fortunately for the Corinthian, Constantine was clad in only his underwear. His limbs swung and wheeled against the floor, over the ledge, in his haze, guided by the direction of where the nightmare wanted him to go, a sleepwalker being led. With some difficulty, in the tub he went and the cool water came.

The first true relief he had since that fucking dog bit him. It eased the mad pulsing in the wound, calmed the throbbing through the rest of him, a lot of it in his head.

Having whiskers now, he could feel the hand hovering near his face. Barely he could focus, even more so by the explosion swirling through his nostrils, needles of sensation injecting the missing color formerly granted by his eyes to his brain. Too overwhelmed to pay any attention to it; he was close enough to fainting outright as it is. Still, his tongue weakly reached out, and he learned to lap.

Cori, I owe you too much...

That... was interesting. He quirked a brow when John started lapping at the water in his hand, definitely brought a new meaning to his constant dogging. At the same time he felt sympathy for him, just as he did at the clinic when that crazy redhead was prodding his wound, and still he knew not to express it, even now. There were small gestures though, acts through subtlety, like when he reached out to hold the other's head steady, the easier to lap at the water in his hand.

The Corinthian didn't know what else to say, there weren't any words he could form or wanted John to hear.

Constantine's skull was mostly flat now, the final traces of the man lost in the thick mostly-white fur. His muzzle had reached its full length and final shape, helping him partake in the soothing grainy liquid. Reality still swayed about in the current on a thread, the blue eyes lost as water cleansed the drying blood from his foreleg, which had healed over in the change. His world was that cupped palm of water at the moment, Constantine's now lupine body a sag. Sleep. Needed sleep...

His nose pressed into the palm once he could not drink anymore. The full gravity of what had happened to him had yet to ground and amazingly, the water had stayed in him, down.

Sleep. Yes, that thing mortals and even animals needed, something the nightmare could do without and would if he didn't prefer it over spending every waking hour alone with his thoughts. When the magus turned canis lupus laid his muzzle in his hand the Corinthian frowned visibly. He dared to even pet the man's smooth fur, between the ears. He reached aside to shut the water off then grabbed a towel to rub his coat dry, keep the blood and bile off. Whether John... and he still believed it was John, protested or not he attempted to remove him from the tub to transfer him back to the living space.

Whoever did this to him was going to suffer the consequences, and as always, the nightmare was so much better at making people pray for death.

The brief touch was soothing, the full weight of his exhaustion coming down upon him. The next few moments, taking him out of the tub, toweling him off, to the bed, had gone by a steady stream of muck he could not differentiate. He was pulled over a ledge, stood there on shaking, stiff legs while the Corinthian rubbed him down, the double-layered coat still slightly damp, and then was cumbersomely pulled to yet another, this one soft and plush.

Bed, he reminded himself groggily as his mind very briefly surfaced, sinking back again like a mellow hippopotamus, and collapsed on his side, he sunk in and slept.

He'd be better off facing all this tomorrow with energy to bitch about it. Might as well convince the nightmare he was still in there as well.

Later.

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