Work Text:
Chas is on his way back to Georgia when he spots a path right off the side of the road. It goes through an ugly clearing that’s wet with mud and ringed with trees, and it’s less than anything special. Chas usually wouldn’t give it a second glance, but he sees people there, out of the corner of his eye. So he slows down the car, and he looks, because he gets the feeling that he might miss something important if he doesn’t.
Chas can’t figure out why anyone would be out here, a mile away from the closest town. Then he sees the teenagers, a boy and a girl, and remembers being seventeen and willing to go just about anywhere to get into a girl’s pants. It clicks.
Then he sees the guys surrounding them, and that clicks too. These kids are gonna get hurt or die in the world’s shittiest lover’s lane because of some assholes looking to have a completely different kind of fun, unless Chas stops it.
He veers off the road. One of his tires squishes against wet grass when he parks his car. His headlights are on, and they create a makeshift spotlight, illuminating the guys, who are drunk or high or psychopaths or all of the above, and the kids they’re scaring half to death. One of the guys has a baseball bat, and he’s got the boy pinned against a tree with it, shoving it into his sternum.
Baseball bat guy and the boy turn to look in Chas’s direction, squinting against the harsh light. Most of the merry band of jackasses follow suit, except one who’s too busy grabbing the girl’s ass. She shrieks and pushes him away. He backhands her. It distracts everyone involved.
The boy yells, the other guys cackle like hyenas, Chas gets out of the taxi and says, “Hey!”
Quick count.
The boy and the girl are outnumbered five to two. Chas is outnumbered five to one.
“Let them go!” he says, pulling himself up to his full height. The guys turn to him like they’re intrigued. “Are you looking for a fight?” Chas asks. “‘Cause they’re not gonna give you one.”
“And you will?” one guy, who’s got a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants and is probably stupid enough that it’s loaded, asks, harsh laughter in his voice.
Chas shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “I will. Let them go. Whatever you want, I can give it to you.”
More laughter. Baseball bat guy (except there’s more than one guy with a baseball bat) lets the boy go. “Seriously?” he asks. “Seriously?”
Chas looks at the boy, and he jerks his head. “Run,” he says, calm, always calm, and the boy grabs the girl’s hand and pulls her away, but one of the guys grabs her.
She screams. The guy says, “No one can hear you.”
“I can,” Chas points out, his words echoing in the tense confusion he’s created, and that’s when he finally runs out of patience
He steps forward and punches in the nose of the guy who’s holding the girl and, unsurprisingly, hyena-laughing, and he tells the kids, louder this time, “Run!”
At least the kids do, in fact, run, and by the time the guys notice, the boy and girl have gone too far to bother with when Chas is here and just as interesting. Maybe more interesting.
The guys descend on Chas like a pack of feral dogs.
Or hyenas, he thinks, more whimsically than usual.
Chas is gonna pay for that, for ruining their fun, they tell him, he’s gonna pay, and he smiles at them with blood on his teeth because that freaks people out, and he laughs in their faces, and he fights back until he can’t, and he goes down and waits to die, to get shot, to get his skull crushed by one of those baseball bats, but before any of that happens there are hands on his shoulders and his legs, pinning him down, and then hands on his belt, and the waistband of his jeans, and in the end Chas is kind of relieved when he finally dies.
He’s used to that part.
He’s used to the part where he wakes up too, discombobulated and sore and either exhausted or pumped full of adrenaline, lying alone in the kind of place where people get murdered or in a body bag or surrounded by shocked Good Samaritans or confused paramedics or with John (or, occasionally, Zed, these days) by his side, sometimes ineffectually trying to clean him off.
Chas prefers the deaths where John’s there after, but this time he’s relieved that he’s completely alone. Would’ve been a nightmare to have John or Zed around for this one. Would’ve been even worse to have strangers around, asking questions. Chas doesn’t really want anyone to know what kind of wounds he’s got right now.
He swallows bile and shudders, disgusted, when he thinks of those kids dying like he just did. No getting over that, not for normal people.
His wounds, of which there are a lot, are starting to close, and that distracts him.
He thinks most are shallow. Then he feels surges of pain inside his body and takes in a sharp breath, shifting uncomfortably. Not that that helps.
Okay.
Some of those wounds definitely aren’t so shallow after all.
Internal injuries. He hates those.
Makes sense that he got them, though, he contemplates, dazed. Now that he thinks about it. He doesn’t want to think about it. But.
Something collapsed inside him. Something tore. More than one thing tore, more than one thing collapsed.
He doesn’t want to think about it.
He watches the stars shine above him and studies the crescent moon. Depending on how he blinks, the sky looks fuzzy or sharp. Where is he? The middle of nowhere. Not Georgia yet. Maybe halfway there. Still a ways to go.
He thinks that maybe he should’ve just flown to Brooklyn this time. He didn’t, obviously, even though John said he was being ridiculous driving the whole way to “bleeding Brooklyn from bleeding Georgia, you madman.” But John says that every time, and Chas ignores him every time, because he likes the drive. He likes having some time to himself to clear his head, and he wants to take his daughter out in his own car, as though that means anything.
His car’s still here. He can hear its motor, still running. Good thing he’s got gasoline. Good thing the hyenas didn’t take the car with them, laughing the whole way. He’s surprised they didn’t, but they might’ve had their own cars. Chas doesn’t quite remember, even though he remembers more than he wants to. He tried to disconnect himself, look at his surroundings instead of thinking about what was happening to him, but it was harder than usual, in every way. Slower than usual too. Lots of time to get distracted by the whole shitty situation as the hyenas kept having bright ideas.
Bright ideas. Chas’s bright idea was driving fourteen hours to Brooklyn and fourteen hours back. More than fourteen hours, now.
But that decision saved lives, he reminds himself. At the very least he saved a couple of kids from injuries they wouldn’t get over so quickly.
That was worth it.
(Raped to death. Hell of a way to go.)
Chas sighs at the sky, already exhausted, because worth it or not, Chas is gonna have to drive like this. He thinks, for a brief, bitter moment, that he’d rather die, except then he’d come back and still have to drive the rest of the way home, so he guesses he’s gonna have to suck it up instead.
Before standing up, or maybe just procrastinating on it, Chas catalogues all the different fucked up parts of himself.
He’s a mess. That’s what it comes down to.
There are a lot of wounds and a few broken bones still knitting themselves back together, though some injuries have already gone and the ones he’s noticing are still healing at a quick clip. He can feel his skin crawling and tugging, growing and smoothing itself over. His lower half is worse than his upper half. He’s never felt this kind of discomfort below the belt. Blood all over his legs, his thighs, his ass, slick and wet as some of the worst, gaping wounds are still working on closing.
Blood, mixed with—with—with—
His mind skips like a record.
He licks his lips. They taste like blood and—and—and—
He shifts. The mud and grass is squishy against his bare skin. There’s so much bare skin that he finds it weirdly embarrassing.
He smells horrible too, like a fucking public restroom where there’s been a murder. Chas doesn’t gag, but he still isn’t sure if he’s ever had another death that was so objectively gross.
It really did seem to last forever, too, just went on and on—and it’s over now. Good. That’s good.
His head empties out, and he feels calm. He can hear crickets. Just crickets and his own deep, rasping breaths and his own heartbeat.
He waits patiently for his wounds to close. He keeps staring up at the sky. His mouth tastes like blood and dirt and salt.
He feels as though he should be drifting in and out of consciousness like he was at the end of his latest, greatest death, but he’s wide awake. He still aches all over, but he’s good enough at ignoring pain by now that he’s done caring about that, or he was until there’s a pain between his legs that makes him bite back a scream as a gaping, surely pretty horrific wound fixes itself.
He wasn’t able to bite back every scream, during, and some of them came out full-throated, which he hates.
To be fair, though, he’s not sure how many people wouldn’t scream if someone did that to them with a baseball bat.
Chas doesn’t know how long it takes for his body to put itself to rights, but by the time his lower half is better, the night sky has faded into morning.
Goodnight, moon, he thinks, and his lip twitches.
He can almost hear Geraldine’s criticism of his literary reference. That doesn’t even make sense, Daddy. The book’s about going to sleep, not waking up!
Chas inhales and exhales very slowly.
John, Chas imagines, would probably say something like, It’s a...subversion, sweetheart.
Chas, in his head, just tells his daughter, who will blessedly never have a clue that this happened to her father or that this could happen to anyone at all, ever, because she already has nightmares about being held hostage by a magical idiot and he refuses to let her know the kind of shit non-magical idiots can get up to, You got me there, baby girl.
And then he stops thinking about Geraldine, because it's starting to make him wonder if he’s gonna have to invest in plane tickets now and that’s—what would Zed say? That’s a problem for future Chas.
(Future Chas has a lot of problems.)
Up and at ‘em, he tells himself, and he gives the sky half a smile and comes back to the real world.
New day. One more unpleasant death for the list he’s accumulating. Maybe the most unpleasant he’s had. No, no reason to dance around it. Definitely the most unpleasant he’s had.
He sits up. Still a little sore. It’s probably in his head. Along with the blood and mud, most of the—the—the—fuck, he’s an adult, it’s over, he can say it, most of the come is drying. In his hair, on his face, in his beard, on his thighs. There were so many of them. They really got everywhere.
He can still hear the hyena laughter banging around his head, because they never shut up. Someone was always, always laughing.
Chas is wearing his undershirt, or what’s left of it, but no pants or underwear. He needs to find his pants at least. He feels kind of cold. He stands. Blood and come drip down his thighs. He wants to throw up, but doesn’t.
Instead he finds his jeans, torn and grass-stained and muddy and damp but wearable enough, at least for now, and slightly more dignified than being naked, and pulls them on. He only has one shoe on, and he has to take it off to get his pants back on. He doesn’t bother with underwear because he can’t find it and it’d be too disgusting even if he could.
The button on his jeans is gone, Chas realizes numbly when he goes to do them back up, and the zipper is broken.
No kidding, right?
Of course they didn’t exactly try to keep his clothes intact when they were alright breaking his bones and ripping him apart, of course they didn’t, so now his clothes are all torn up. A pretty simple sequence of events.
He was all torn up too, but he guesses he’s better now, except for the mess.
Chas has been blown up before, and he still thinks he’s never been such a mess.
The waistband of his pants slips down his bare hip, which is healed under the streaks and beads of blood on his skin.
He’s healed.
Magic.
Chas wants to go home and get into the shower and get back to normal. He adjusts his jeans. All the fluids he’s decided not to think about soak into the stone-washed fabric.
He puts his shoe back on and hunts for the other one. Finds it. Puts that back on too.
He smooths out his ruined undershirt, which is stained with blood and tacky with come and mud, and his hands go up to do the buttons on his flannel shirt, but he’s not wearing it, because of course he isn’t, and he doesn’t try to hunt it down, because he can’t imagine a button-up would survive what just happened.
He runs his fingers through his wet, muddy, bloody, sticky hair, runs his fingers over his wet, muddy, bloody, sticky face, tweaking his nose to make sure it healed okay. It did. It always does. There’s drying blood streaking down to his chin, and he tries to wipe some of it off. It’s hard to wipe anything off, especially what’s caught in his beard. It gets everywhere, since his hands are sweaty and wet with dew and mud and rainwater. He hates that this happened somewhere so damp, even as he’s relieved at how isolated it is.
He just can’t stop thinking about the mess.
It’s going to be hard enough to get clean that a part of him dreads it as much as looks forward to it. The part of him that looks forward to it is bigger, though, and more than anything, he wants to go home. He’ll grab some new clothes, slip into the shower, scrub himself off, and then once he’s clean he’ll be able to forget this ever happened.
He died. Sure. He dies a lot. He thinks he’s on his 29th life now.
His hands are shaking. He wipes them on his jeans. Maybe he’ll burn these clothes. He’ll probably have to clean the shower too. Not like John or Zed will do it. Not like he’d want them to this time. The thought still exhausts him to the point where he has to blink back tears of frustration when he considers the seemingly endless steps it’s gonna take to clean all of this up.
He shakes the thought away. It’s not endless. It’s obviously not. What it is is one step at a time.
He spots his belt lying limp on the ground, and breathes a sigh of relief as he grabs it and does his best to loop it around his jeans. He pulls it too tight—does he have a beer gut? Is he getting old?—and then tugs his shirt over the destroyed crotch area, even though a belt and a shaky attempt at covering up can’t do enough about it for his tastes. Fucking awkward, especially without underwear, but it is how it is, and he’s finally dressed enough for the drive home.
His car’s almost out of gas, which makes sense, because it’s been running all night. It’s okay. He’s prepared. Almost most of the time, he’s prepared. He grabs one of the gas cans in the trunk and refills the taxi’s tank, and then finally gets in and starts to drive.
The sun is rising. It looks nice. It’s a new day. That’s good. Chas is good with that.
Periodically, he hates the way his damp clothes cling to him and the way all the disgusting shit on him drips and calcifies, but he continues to shrug it off. It helps that he can’t feel a thing.
Every so often, he glances at himself in the rearview mirror. He looks horrible, still covered in flaking blood and mud and leaves and, yeah, definitely come, though it’s started turning a weird yellow in his hair and beard. He thought he’d wiped most of it off of his face, but it is what it is. He keeps his eyes on the road and tries to ignore his churning stomach even though he’s never gotten carsick before.
By the time he gets home, the sun is setting. It looks nice. It’s a new night. That’s good too. Chas is good with that too.
He gets out of the car and feels weak and sick with what he can easily pinpoint as relief. It’s almost over. The Mill House has never looked more inviting.
He opens the door and steps inside, and he hears, “Chas, mate! I was wondering where you’d gone off to. Could’ve sworn you said you’d be back yesterday. Or was it the day before? It was a day that wasn’t today.”
For the first time, Chas realizes that even though he’s thought of John, he hasn’t really considered him.
“Oh, is he back? Say hi for me.”
Or Zed.
Chas closes his eyes. Great.
“Didn’t see you here when we got back from Savannah the other day and thought maybe you’d died,” John says, voice almost aggressively cheery as he walks to the front of the house to meet Chas, but the moment he sees him, his eyes widen and his good mood seems to evaporate. “The hell happened to you? Christ, mate, I was kidding about the dying thing.”
Sorry I ruined the joke, Chas wants to say, probably rolling his eyes for good measure, but he doesn’t say a word. He shrugs instead, walking past John. He has to get to the bathroom, preferably without John figuring out what happened. He hates the idea of anyone he knows, anyone he loves, being even vaguely aware of his latest face-off with mortality. The idea viscerally embarrasses him.
He’s getting closer to the bathroom, the big one, the one with the good shower, but then he’s gone down the winding stairs to the room of artifacts and John is tagging along behind him saying, “Chas, what happened?”
And, great, Zed’s at the table, and she can’t help but ask the same useless question in response to his blank stare. “Chas, what happened?” He doesn’t answer. She gags. “Woah, why do you smell like that?”
Like what?
Like dirt. Mud. Blood. Sex.
Chas doesn’t understand why either of them think he might answer their questions.
He shrugs and takes a step forward, but John is in front of him, looking at him with concern in his eyes. Chas blinks down at him, uncomfortable. He hates it when John looks at him like that. A petty part of Chas always thinks that John stole that concern from him, and Chas wants it back. They stare at each other as John takes in the state of him. Chas knows that Zed is doing the same, and he can’t stand the awkwardness of their eyes stuttering over his lower half.
He shakes his head for no particular reason and takes a step forward, trying to dodge John even though his own movements are clumsy. He doesn’t say anything, trying to keep it all contained, because usually that’s what he does, he keeps things contained, but the problem is that all the things he alone possessed were dumped out on the ground and stomped on by hyenas a few hours or a couple of days ago, though all he did was die and it’s gotten so easy to put death away for him. Shrug it off.
He keeps trying to tell himself this isn’t different, that he only died, but Chas isn’t good enough at lying to buy it, because of course this is different from his other deaths. He’s not a fucking idiot.
This is different, and John would think this was different, and Zed would think this was different, because Chas was surrounded and he kept hearing jeans unzip and his own screaming and their endless laughter as they tore at his clothes and his body and there were baseball bats and that was fucked up and he’d never felt pain like that before.
He wonders if, maybe, part of it was that he didn’t expect it. He doesn’t think he’d ever considered the distant possibility that he’d go through this, so now he’s thrown off because this isn’t supposed to happen to people like Chas, but here he is. Living, unlucky proof that sometimes it happens anyway.
John, always persistent, doesn’t let him go forward, so Chas turns around because he has to anyway, because the bathroom he needs obviously isn’t even down here, but then John’s got a hand fisted in the back of his shirt and Zed’s stood up and she’s walking towards him and, thoughtlessly, she reaches up to touch his cheek because Chas bets she’s noticed that there’s something suspicious mixed in with the blood and leaves and, he suspects, remaining gray matter, and Chas flinches away so violently he surprises himself.
He snaps, “You don’t want to touch me right now.”
Zed steps back, crossing an arm over her chest, gripping her other shoulder so tight her knuckles go pale. “Sorry, man, I’m so sorry,” she says, looking sick, and Chas feels John release his shirt and can’t bring himself to say, no, you’re fine, you, specifically, are fine.
Chas runs his fingers through his hair again. They catch on all the shit ground into the strands. He bows his head and covers his mouth because he doesn’t want to puke, doesn’t want to get even more disgusting stuff caught in his beard, and hopes the others don’t think he’s trying not to cry. He can’t remember if he cried when it happened, but can’t imagine that he didn’t. When he closes his eyes he remembers the feeling of his face pressed into the grass, his tears mixing with dew, and—yeah. That makes sense.
Bodies cry when they’re in pain, and Chas consistently has one thing, and that’s his body.
Chas turned away, but he hasn’t said anything, hasn’t gone anywhere, because he doesn’t even know if he can take another step forward without sinking to his knees and the last thing he wants is to sink to his knees, there are grass stains on his knees, and Chas continues to say absolutely nothing, but John does, because of course John does.
John says, “Mate, your trousers are…”
Chas’s face burns. Of course he hasn’t seen what the back of him looks like and, considering what happened, considering everything he felt bleeding into his jeans and how not all of it was blood, he doubts that the aftermath’s pretty. All of it is going to be even worse when he takes his pants off.
This is going to take forever. Chas wants it all to stop taking forever.
Now Chas closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a shaky breath. No tears spill.
He sounds hoarse when he says, “I know. I’m a mess.”
“You get in a fight?” John asks, voice small, and Chas chuckles dryly.
“You could say that.” He shrugs. “Couple of kids. A few guys looking for a good time found them. Then I did. You know how it is.” He’s surprised at himself for saying it like that. So bluntly. As if it really was just another death. Maybe it was. He’s still carsick, but he’s not in a car, so it means he’s nauseous. He shudders. He’s shaking; he doesn’t shake like this. He can’t control it.
“And you just couldn’t help but step in,” John says, a note of annoyed judgment in his voice that makes Chas want to hit him because that’s not fucking fair, because of course he couldn’t, but he’s hit John too many times in their lives and he doesn’t think he could handle waking up tomorrow and having done it again.
So through clenched teeth, because he didn’t make a mistake and he didn’t get over his head and he doesn’t care what John or Zed think or what they’re going to think, he says, “Yes, and I came back.”
John’s found his way in front of him again, so quick on his feet that Chas doesn’t even know when he managed it, and he slowly looks Chas up and down like he’s checking him out but would rather do anything else. He reaches out with great hesitation, but Chas does nothing as John’s fingers brush the hem of his undershirt and then lift it up. Chas stands there, exhausted, and John’s breaths quicken and get heavier when he sees. No button, no zipper, all torn to hell. Zed lets out a choked sound.
It’s not like you didn’t already guess, Chas wants to accuse. Don’t be stupid. Neither of you are supposed to be stupid. What’s so different from the other times I’ve ended up covered in blood? Come on, tell me.
It takes a second, but then Chas remembers that he didn’t want anyone to see this and realizes that now someone has and he steps back and pulls his shirt down and shoves John away, too hard, for good measure.
“Sorry,” John stumbles out, putting his hands up, and Chas crosses his arms and hunches his shoulders and wishes John wouldn’t apologize. Too much has gone wrong if John’s apologizing.
“I need to shower,” Chas says, because he does need to shower, it’s the only thing he needs to do, the others are getting in the way of the fucking odyssey in front of him and they’re not going to forget this, none of them are going to forget this, until he’s clean. “I’m a mess.”
The funny thing is that he doesn’t sound angry. Doesn’t even sound kind of frustrated. He sounds flat. Soulless.
“How am I supposed to move on from this if I don’t clean up?” Chas asks, and John, who looks like he still wants to say something because John always wants to say something, even when he has nothing to say, the polar opposite of Chas in that way because Chas never says anything even when he has everything to say, steps aside.
“Good idea,” John responds, almost in a whisper, and Chas drifts past him until he’s all the way upstairs, but when he’s finally there he feels more than a little lost. It makes him want to punch something, because this is supposed to be his home, and in his home he’s not supposed to be suddenly terrified that if he takes a wrong turn he’ll run into wild-eyed sadistic glee and the promise of something that he didn’t know could break breaking and something he didn’t know could collapse collapsing and all that laughter.
Chas takes a step forward. He balls his fists. He hesitates. If he goes the wrong way alone, he might lose the next fight.
The stairs creak behind him and Chas’s body tenses, but he doesn’t go on the offense. He just presses his fists against his disgusting thighs, because he knows he’s in the Mill House and technically it’s safe and violence isn’t going to help. It didn’t even help not long ago when everything was violence, and that one kind of stings.
Aggression is the only way he knows how to think on his feet, but it was so hard to think this time, and he was mostly not on his feet.
He’s standing almost up against the wall. The stairs have stopped creaking. There’s someone behind him. He knows exactly who it is, and he’s not afraid.
“You need help getting yourself cleaned up,” John says, and it’s not even a question.
Chas answers anyway. “I’m fine.”
John sidles up next to him. His hand hovers over Chas’s elbow as though he’s afraid to touch him, which is stupid, because John touches him all the time and he’s sparking with magic, strong enough to mumble Chas into 47 lives, as little as he wanted them, and that’s comforting. The hyenas wouldn’t have had a chance against John’s magic.
“Liar,” John says.
“You’re one to talk.”
John shrugs. “This isn’t about me.”
The words make Chas’s stomach turn, and he looks down at John and John looks up at him and this is not, in fact, about John, and at least Chas can rest assured that that is making them both miserable.
John jerks his head in the general direction of the bathroom. “C’mon, mate. Zed’ll get you clean clothes once we’ve cleared out. She’ll leave ‘em at the door.”
“I didn’t mean to snap at her like that,” Chas mutters as he follows John down the hallway.
“It’s all right, she knows, she gets it. Don’t worry so much.”
“Yeah,” Chas says in response, which is a non sequitur, but John doesn’t mention it.
They’re in the bathroom now. John closes the door behind them.
The bathroom’s pretty big. Chas isn’t sure if it’s bigger than usual; it might be. He and the Mill House have always coexisted comfortably.
John leans against the sink, carefully casual.
Chas flexes his fingers. They’re flaky. He says, “It's all dry. How long has…?”
He trails off. John picks up the thread. Voice soothing, he says, “Can’t have been long ago, mate, it’s only been a few days, but sometimes things end up like this. I should know, eh?”
John is using too many words and not actually making much sense because he’s more nervous than he’s letting on. Chas, for his part, is fully overwhelmed, and he keeps telling himself he doesn’t know why. He’s cleaned himself up after dying before, even if he can’t stress enough that he doesn’t think he’s ever been such a fucking mess, even if he’s definitely never been a fucking mess like this, but all he has to do is get in the shower.
He knows how to clean himself up, knows how to clean anyone up. Hell, he’s cleaned John up in this bathroom before, which is objectively more difficult than what he’s facing now, because John’s body doesn’t put itself back together and Chas has to use antiseptic and bandages and stitches for more than just show.
If this had happened to John, if—in this nightmare thought experiment—he hadn’t somehow found a way out of it at the last minute like he always does, he would’ve died (horribly), and he wouldn’t have come back. He would’ve gone to Hell.
The thought makes Chas’s stomach turn, and for a moment he wants to grab John and hold him too tight because he needs some help here or he’s never gonna be able to move, and John’s probably the only person in the world who knows Chas well enough to understand that.
Chas gives John what hopefully isn’t but might be a helpless look, and, like Chas suspected he would, John understands. He grimaces and pushes himself off the side of the sink to wriggle his way in front of Chas, who’s standing in the middle of the bathroom, which has got to be a foot off from its original size at this point.
“Now what’re you doing standing there like a knob, big man?” John asks, patting Chas’s chest, his tone incongruously affectionate. “C’mon, let’s get you out of those clothes.”
Chas lets out a heavy breath, and, feeling stiff, probably because his clothes are actually stiff at this point, manages to take his mud-stained, bloody shirt off, shuddering as he feels how it unsticks from his intolerably dirty body. If he were normal, he’d be a mess of bruises, but as he is, there’s mostly mud, now dirt, flaking off of him, and blood, smeared and rusty red, some of it brighter and wetter than he thought it’d be. He feels like it’s been a while since he had blood all over him for so long.
His shirt was rucked up, during, so there’s also come on his stomach and disappearing down the waistband of his pants, a color between white and yellow, flaking and cracked, and there's mud on his back too. He thinks some of it has gotten wet again just with his sweat, and it makes him gag.
He still smells horrible, maybe even worse than he thought, considering the way John wrinkles his nose and swallows heavily. Most of what Chas is smelling is blood, since it’s still streaked down from his formerly-broken nose and dried in his beard. He tried to get the most disgusting stuff out of his beard and off of his face, but he knows, courtesy of his rearview mirror, that a lot of it only got smeared around.
Chas rubs absently at his sides and his elbow. They’re so intact and hurt so little that it feels surreal.
During the attack, he saw more than a few of his bones sticking out after they stabbed through his skin, felt them breaking as they snapped and splintered inside him, turning into knives and needles, so painful that he’s not sure if he was really feeling pain after a while. Near the end, he couldn’t breathe in a way that he knew meant his lungs had probably collapsed, punctured by his destroyed ribs as he aspirated the endless rancid things that found their way into his mouth and throat for good measure.
It was loud, too. He thinks about that because it’s not loud anymore, so he can hear it all again, things he’d never heard before and things he had.
He’s heard his bones grind inside him and snap before, and he’s intimately acquainted with what they sound like when they’re crushed, of course he is, but he still somehow couldn’t believe how loud it was as it went on and on, complemented by the hyena laughter and grunting and words that, after a while, he couldn’t make out, not that they mattered. Not that they had anything to say.
He runs his hand over his elbow again. Just blood. He wonders if there’s still blood dried on the bones that are now safely back under his skin. Chas doesn’t have a clue how his body fixes the damage he gets and he’s given up on understanding by now, but he still wonders sometimes. He still wonders, right now, because all those mounting injuries he saw and felt then are gone, and that seems almost wrong.
He guesses that this time the unnaturalness of it all has thrown him off because he could catalogue the injuries while he was getting hurt for so long that he started getting impatient. Maybe he lasted longer than a normal person, he muses, because of his whole thing. He wouldn’t really know.
He did slip in and out of consciousness by the end, too broken—and he means that only in its most literal sense, thanks—to try and struggle anymore.
Chas remembers now, with weird clarity, that at the very, very end, as he felt the not-very-familiar but not alien sensation of his body completely shutting down, injury upon injury finally getting the best of him, one of the hyenas asked, “Woah, do you think we killed him?”
And Chas wanted to say, “Wait, what the fuck did you expect?”
But his body wanted to die instead, which was fine. Chas was good with that too.
Chas realizes, with vague surprise, that this is the first time dying has hurt more than coming back.
Then he decides to stop realizing things, which he suspects John will approve of, since he’s calling his name with some frustration.
“Chas! C’mon, we need to get you cleaned up, come back to me,” John says.
Chas swallows and nods. Reluctantly, he undoes his belt. The front of his torn jeans flops open, and he feels like retching, so he grabs them instead as his belt slithers sadly to the floor, and he fixes his gaze on where it lies.
Faintly, John tells him, “It’s all right, mate, nothing I ain’t seen before.”
Chas scoffs, because that’s not really true and they both know it, and John says, “Here, I’ll, um, you just, you take those off, and I’ll get the shower ready.”
Chas chokes down some bile and, because there’s nothing else he can do, peels his jeans off.
John turns the water on.
Chas looks down at himself dispassionately. His jeans look like a crime scene when turned inside out, and the reason for that is clear on his skin. More dried come, some even still kind of sticky from where the fabric of his pants has been rubbing against it. Blood smeared everywhere. His inner thighs and legs got the worst of it, he thinks, but he sees places where his bones snapped too. There’s a shock of blood low on his leg. One of the hyenas, he remembers, stomped on his femur, over and over again, maybe to see what it’d do. He’s pretty sure it was a different one who did it to the other leg, but packs of animals have always blurred together for him.
Fuck, they really destroyed him, didn’t they? Except they didn’t, and the reason for that has his hand under the faucet, testing the temperature of the water. Chas doesn’t know how to feel about that, because, when he’s not angry about it, he never knows what to feel about that. He became a death-dodging freak by John’s hand, but that also means that John saved his life, and ever since that, Chas has been giving up the lives he got all by himself because he can’t look the other way.
Besides, there are no complicated feelings here right now, just Chas and John and the sound of running water, and when Chas can’t stand to look down at himself, he looks over at John.
John looks pale and sick and Chas can’t ask what’s wrong, what’d you do now? because he knows exactly what’s wrong and the second part isn’t his question to ask.
“You really died of this, didn’t you?” John murmurs, and Chas shrugs.
“I really did,” he agrees, and John lets out a quick breath and then shakes his head.
“Well, let’s get the death off you, then,” he says, suddenly all business, and Chas nods numbly and steps into the bathtub. He looks at the swirling warm water running into the tub from the faucet, turning brown as the dirt caked on his feet starts to become mud again, just more and more of it escaping down the drain, and then John turns on the shower. The spray of water that comes out makes Chas sputter and close his eyes. He forgot how strong the water pressure on this thing could get.
Chas clenches his jaw so tight it aches. Clumsily, he rubs his hands over his face, and then he opens his eyes, blinking against the water, which feels a little like gravel coming down. Chas is fine with that, though.
He stands there under the spray, the grime on him sloughing and dripping and running off as minutes tick by, even though he can still feel it on him and in places the water isn’t gonna reach so soon, if ever, not by itself. If he doesn’t scrub himself off, he’ll never get out of here, he notes, and he proceeds to still not move. He feels like a statue.
The non-statue in the room with him (and what does that make John? A pigeon? Chas should remember that; John will hate the comparison) soldiers on, muttering, “All right, you’ve got some of the grime off, at least, but just the water ain’t gonna do it. C’mon, I’ve got the soap and shampoo all ready, let’s do this.”
John’s still using too many words, and sounds like he’s pumping himself up to boot, which would be funny if Chas were open to amusement right now, but as it is, Chas barely hears him.
“Help me out here, mate,” John says, sounding dispirited.
Chas blinks down. The water is still, somehow, dirty. Pink and red and brown around him, running down his skin. He’s transfixed enough that he doesn’t really notice John sigh heavily, crouch down, and reach past him. Then the lukewarm water turns freezing, and Chas’s body startles, shocked into action by the sudden temperature change.
His bare feet slip on the porcelain of the tub, and he falls. John yelps and grabs him, trying to help him down, and they both end up on their knees. Chas twists away from John’s grip even though he knows exactly who it is and the movement might be more accurately described as shrinking away, except Chas hasn’t been able to shrink back since he was thirteen, not for anything, not that he hasn’t tried.
When Chas gives John a look, he sees that John’s shirt is half-soaked, clinging to his upper chest and arms, and his hair is dripping.
“Nice,” he mutters, and John lets out a relieved, high-pitched laugh.
“Thought it might wake you up.”
“I’m not drunk, John,” Chas says. His voice is distant but should sound exasperated. He thinks it’s the first time he’s spoken in a really long time, but he just said something probably a few seconds ago, so he guesses not.
“Still woke you up, didn’t it?” John blusters, turning the shower off.
Chas swallows and stares down at the faucet. He watches it pouring water, closer than it was, and wonders if his knees would bruise from the spill he just took, if he were a normal person.
Chas isn’t really sure what John’s going for here, since Chas is still disgusting, so he reaches out to turn the shower back on.
John grabs his wrist. Chas tears it away.
“Sorry,” John mutters, and Chas shakes his head. Don’t dwell on it. “I’m—I need to help scrub you off, I think,” John says with a little embarrassment. “It wasn’t gonna work with the shower on full blast like that. Some of that, it’s...how it’s gotten on your skin, and your hair…”
“I get it,” Chas says, looking at his hands. His palms are still a mess. His fingers and fingernails are worse. There’s skin under his fingernails. Skin and blood and dirt. Chas got a few hits in, at least. More than a few. There’s still some blood on his knuckles. The fact that even the spray of water he just endured couldn’t get everything off of him makes him miserable, and all the grime getting wet again dredges up bad memories.
John stands up and grabs something, which makes Chas at least look away from his hands slightly.
“But—see?” John says with desperate good cheer, standing and grabbing something before crouching down again, brandishing a showerhead. “It’s detachable now. Just noticed.”
So did Chas. He scrubs his hands over his face. He thinks he’s got at least most of the shit off his face and his beard. He rubs his hands over his hair. It’s matted.
John reaches back and gets what turns out to be shampoo. He waves a hand gently in front of Chas’s face, and Chas nods. He looks at the soap resting on the side of the tub, and sees his body reaching out and grabbing it, but when he blinks, he hasn’t done anything.
“Duck your head a bit, mate, yeah?” John urges, all business again, like he’s working on a case.
“I can do it,” Chas says with a spark of embarrassed anger, except he doesn’t say anything. He ducks his head instead.
“Close your eyes,” John says, and Chas doesn’t want to, but he does. The unexpected feeling of dread that starts building in him makes him want to open them again immediately, but instead he clenches his fists and lets his heart pound as John starts semi-ineffectually rubbing the shampoo in.
John gets into the groove after realizing it’s easier if he lathers up with some water first, and massages the shampoo into Chas’s hair and scalp, his fingers catching on the matted patches the shower could do nothing but clean off.
John yanks his fingers through the knots, which doesn’t hurt but should, and when Chas opens his eyes a little, no longer able to stand having them tightly closed while he waits for things to happen to him, he sees John running his hands under the faucet to get the residual grime that’s rubbed onto him off, and he spots strands of his own hair wrapped around John’s fingers.
John lathers up again, and Chas feels shampoo run down his shoulders.
“Tilt your head back now,” John says, and Chas does, staring up at the ceiling. John doesn’t say anything about closing his eyes this time, just does his best to keep the shampoo out.
After a few minutes or more, long past the time that there’s a knock on the door and John throws a “thanks, love” over his shoulder, John grabs the showerhead. Chas lowers his head and stabilizes it. Shampoo runs into his eyes, and it stings. He doesn’t care. All sorts of stuff has gotten into his eyes lately.
John reaches for a hand towel Chas hadn’t seen, running it under the faucet and then lathering it up with the soap Chas hasn’t been able to reach out for. He glances over the side of the bathtub. There’s a fair amount of wet towels and rags there. Chas has no idea when John picked those up. He thinks they’re from the kitchen, and would complain about them probably being dirty, except that would be stupid. Considering.
John offers Chas the towel, and he looks down at it blankly.
“You do the front, I’ll get your back,” John says, and finally Chas is able to move again, grabbing the soaked towel and scrubbing it against his arms and sides and chest, getting all the residual dirt and sticky and dry things off while, as promised, John does the same to his back. They both periodically run the towels under the faucet and lather them up again, and after a while they come away clean. The water under Chas is mostly coming away clean now too, just because he’s been sitting in it for so long, and Chas is starting to think that fully scrubbing off his lower half won’t be as difficult as he thought it’d be.
It’s still unbelievable, how dirty they managed to make him over what was, objectively, a short period of time, and it’s over now, except he’s still cleaning himself off. Still letting John clean him off. He should be alone right now, doing the dignified thing. What he usually does. He’s glad he isn’t. It’s not like John’s never helped clean him off anyway. It’s just never been like this.
Nothing has ever been like this. It’s something Chas wishes he could stop thinking, but instead for a moment he’s afraid that he’s never going to be the same. It’s too soon to tell. He swallows the fear down and goes back to his calm baseline understanding of the events of the past few days, about which he feels very little.
Since some of his lower half, at least, is in plain sight, Chas works a bit on that too, probably out of some distant sense of propriety. He grimaces when he briefly thinks of what exactly happened there, and tries to shove it away and just clean himself off, clinical.
Chas lets the hand towel drop. He’s exhausted.
“Now you should really close your eyes,” John says, picking up the showerhead, but Chas doesn’t, because he closed his eyes then, at some moments, and it was horrible. He didn’t know what would happen next.
“Your choice,” John says, and he turns the shower on and, sending water absolutely everywhere, sprays Chas’s hair, face, upper half, and basically any part of his body that’s kind of reachable off. Chas has to close his eyes anyway, spitting out water. His body won’t let him not do it.
When the shower’s off and the faucet’s going and wasting water again, John says, with relief in his voice, “We’re almost done. You’re almost done.”
Almost done with all of this. But Chas doesn’t know if either of them believe that.
Chas doesn’t even need to be prompted to stand up, at least, and he shoves John’s hands away, scrubbing himself off. John looks away a bit awkwardly when Chas cleans between his legs, and it makes him want to throw up or punch someone when he sees how dirty the rag still gets. He doesn’t think about it, only now he can’t stop thinking about how much this should hurt. How much it hurt.
Chas cleans thoroughly and considers, again, how this doesn’t happen to people like him. He thought that, during. He wonders if John thinks that, if Zed thinks that, and shame rests hot in his stomach and gets eaten up by stomach acid and probably sinks into his body and becomes one with all the other emotions he’s had to separate from reality and lock down over the course of his life.
It’s funny. Chas is emotionally aware enough to know that he shuts his feelings away and pushes them down and refuses to examine them even though he’s probably capable of it, and he knows that all that is unhealthy and leads to the burning anger he can barely control and the freezing numbness that cloaks him half the time.
And, eventually, leads to him doing things he’ll regret.
But he still can’t find a better way to be a person.
Funny.
Chas is clean now, mostly. Physically. Metaphorically, he’s still not sure.
Chas isn’t a metaphor kind of guy. Hyenas notwithstanding. Statues notwithstanding. Internal cleanliness notwithstanding. Chas really wishes he were a statue. He doubts statues care when they get defiled.
Chas drops the hand towel. He’s done.
“Spray,” he mutters, and John obliges until the soap is gone, until Chas’s skin is pink, until the water’s cold. The showerhead flops into the bathtub.
He’s done. They’re done. It’s done. Except Chas is naked. He wasn’t completely naked then, but somehow felt more exposed than he does now. He’s still shaking, but not as much as before. He looks at his hands. His fingernails are dirty. He doesn’t mention it.
The door opens for a second, then clicks closed.
Chas, with no help, because there’s a certain point where he stops needing help and he’s decided that that point is now and his body, at least, is cooperating, or maybe syncing up with what Chas wants for once, gets out of the tub. He doesn’t slip. It wouldn’t matter if he did.
There’s a couple of towels on the sink, and Chas grabs one and stares at it. When he’s not dripping anymore, when he’s got the clothes Zed left outside the door on, there’s going to be no sign of what happened. Maybe there already isn’t. Now that Chas isn’t a mess, he could’ve just stepped out of any shower. The tub and bathroom aren’t even kind of as messy as he thought they’d be. Maybe this wasn’t as messy as he thought it was after all. He can’t know anymore. That’s what he tells himself. This could be any time he’s ever dried himself off post-death. Completely normal, because Chas is freakish enough that dying is completely normal to him.
“Almost done, big man,” John says, a living reminder that this isn’t any time. Right.
John, who probably doesn’t know whether to give Chas privacy or not at this point, leans against the sink as Chas clumsily dries himself off, though he’s still kind of damp when he gets into the clothes John’s handed him, underwear and sweats and an undershirt Zed must’ve found going through his dresser.
When he’s done, he scrubs at his hair, which is the wettest part of him at this point, and then he sits down on the closed toilet and puts his head in his hands, which is not what he wanted to do, but he’s tired.
His body is so tired, so close to blacking out, so close to finally just letting him go to sleep, go into the peaceful darkness, away from the pain for a few hours at least—but when he goes to sleep this time, he’ll be alive. He wonders if he’ll have nightmares. He wonders if he’ll be able to sleep at all, and knows he will be, because his body needs it and it’s calling the shots and it doesn’t care about Chas Chandler’s feelings, whatever they may be.
There’s a hand on his head, and Chas doesn’t have the energy to flinch away from it. Whether he would if he did is up in the air.
John tries to smooth a hand over his hair, but he pauses, probably realizing that Chas’s head feels suspiciously lumpy, little clumps of hair tangled together. “Bollocks,” he mutters. “Thought I’d got the knots out.”
No getting the knots out, Chas guesses, even if it’s not a bird’s nest anymore.
“I’ll brush it, then,” John says, mostly to himself, but Chas doesn’t refuse. He lets John pull the hairbrush through his short, wet hair, forcefully enough that he has to grab Chas’s head to stabilize it because Chas sure as hell isn’t gonna make that effort. He just sits there until his hair is combed out. There's probably a bald patch at this point, considering how rough John’s been, but at least it won’t dry tangled, not that Chas actually cares.
“Now you’re okay,” John says when he’s done, patting Chas’s shoulder, and Chas hears an echo of that night in the club. He knows John’s said that if he could change it, what he did to Chas by accident, he would. Chas still isn’t sure if that’s true.
He isn’t even sure if he himself would want to change it. It’s one of those questions he stopped asking himself before he started.
Now you’re okay.
That’s never been true, and it’s gotten less true with age, and even less true with this.
Chas is numb. Chas has so many things inside of him, and he can’t access any of them, and he wants to give up on trying, except he’s pretty sure he already did that years ago.
“Time to rest,” John says, grabbing Chas’s elbow and tugging.
He isn’t really expecting to pull Chas up, but he is trying to get Chas to stand, so he complies.
John is in front of him now, looking up at him, his expression tired and sad and bordering on defeated, the wrong emotion now that this is over, but Chas understands, because he doubts that the look on his face is comforting, because he doubts that there’s a look on his face at all.
Chas rubs absently at his neck, and then looks down at his hand and sees nothing but his own skin. Clean. It doesn’t seem right. He doesn’t feel clean. The thought makes him shudder with dread, and John rubs his hand up and down his arm and says, “We’ve been in here too long, mate.”
In response, Chas nods and lets John open the door and take his elbow and lead him away from the bathroom and to his room. John doesn’t say anything on the way there, which is a feat, but it’s not like Chas would listen.
When they’re at the doorway, John shoves Chas forward gently, and, reluctantly, Chas stumbles his way into bed, lying down and only half covering himself with the comforter. He feels his stomach twist. He keeps his eyes open and stares at the wall, but his body itches too much for him to lie down any longer, so he sits up and looks at John, who’s hovering by the doorway. At least he’s still here.
Chas imagines John not being here. It makes his breath catch, even though it’s not like he needs John. Not anymore. It’s over. He feels like he’s getting dirt all over the sheets, but he’s not. He hopes that that doesn’t last, the phantom grime on his body. He doesn’t have very high hopes.
John stares at him. He’s clearly fighting with himself on whether to stay or go.
Chas helps him out, and tells him the truth.
“It’s fine if you leave,” he says, voice matter-of-fact and hollow.
John almost flinches at the words, but he clears his throat and chokes out, “Oh. All right, I’ll just. I’ll. See you in the—”
Chas barely hears him, because he’s been too busy getting up the energy to keep telling the truth, the simplest truth, the kind that can’t hurt him right now. The energy to say, “But.”
John shuts up.
“It’s fine if you stay too.”
There’s a flicker of relief in John’s eyes. If there’s something Chas knows, it’s that John doesn’t want to lose him. That, at least, is a constant.
Chas doesn’t want to lose John either. Also a constant.
“I’ll stay, then,” John says, inching forward. His hands and face are clean, but his clothes are still wet and kind of grubby. Chas feels a pang of panic.
“Take your clothes off first,” he says. “Or you’ll get the bed dirty.”
Dirtier than it already is.
John stops cold and looks down at himself. “Right,” he says, probably realizing that he’s almost fully dressed and in dirty clothes to boot, thanks to Chas, and then he hesitates and glances up at Chas.
Chas doesn’t look away. He watches John like he’s watching someone perform an autopsy.
John shrugs to himself and to Chas and to the world in general, tired, and undoes his shirt and takes it off, grabbing it before it drops to the floor and bunching it up to put it on Chas’s dresser.
Then, after giving Chas a sideways look, he kicks off his pants so he’s just in his boxer briefs.
Chas hadn’t noticed that his heart was banging so hard against his chest until now that it’s not as frantic and loud. John doesn’t take his underwear off before moving forward. Gross, but understandable. Chas will live with that; they both will.
John looks vulnerable like this. Paradoxically, that makes Chas feel better.
John’s usually not shy about shoving his way into Chas’s bed, but now his steps are hesitant. It seems like the events of the night have shaken him.
Chas lies down on his side, still looking at John.
John stops halfway to the bed, staring at Chas almost helplessly, and for a moment Chas wonders if John is going to get in after all.
It’s fine if he doesn’t, obviously, but Chas thinks he’d rather John came over, because Chas isn’t sure if he wants to be alone.
He isn’t sure if he wants anything but to be driving home from Brooklyn and seeing nothing out of the corner of his eye. Instead, one more life is gone. He wonders who it used to be.
Everything goes still. Just Chas and John and the past few days between them.
Chas feels stuffed with cotton, as if a taxidermist got his hands on him and now he’s frozen like this, standing still in these memories, feeling about as much as a stuffed creature can. The couple, the hyenas, the death, they all seem so far away.
He wonders if he’ll feel the same when he wakes up. He wonders how he’ll feel when he wakes up, period. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t have to wake up, but he always does, because he has no choice.
He was staring at the sky.
Now he’s inside the Mill House. Safe. Maybe.
John’s in the room with him, and Chas mumbles, “I woke up alone.”
He died surrounded. He’s not thinking about that right now.
At those words, John finally moves, scrambling into bed. He lies on his back next to Chas, his body close but not quite touching.
John says, “Not this time.”
Chas is the one to move closer, now. He presses his forehead against John’s warm bare shoulder, drapes his arm heavy over him and feels John’s chest rise and fall.
He stays close to make sure John’ll stay even though Chas is so exhausted that he really would have no choice but to go to sleep, in the end, alone or not, and he’d probably be okay waking up alone in the morning, exactly like he will be okay with this death, someday. Soon.
He has to be, because he’s stronger than almost anyone and his purpose is to keep being strong for everyone.
Then John reaches up and grips Chas’s arm, and Chas exhales, long and slow.
The hyenas hover in the periphery of the room, but Chas is distracted by John’s presence, and for the ten minutes it takes for his body to give up and fall into a sleep he doesn’t want, he really believes that John can protect him.
And even though Chas was so fucking tired he could’ve fallen asleep alone, this is good too.
This is better.