Work Text:
Johnny wakes up on the bathroom floor.
Not the worst place he's ever come to, but the cold tiles hardly make for a decent pillow, and he's half sure he's already gone. The throb behind his eyes, a ghostly afterimage, like the fireflies after you stare at artificial lights.
Johnny lies there for a minute, catalogs the evidence.
Numb fingers? Cold.
Breathing? Weird.
Heart? Eh, he wasn't quite sure if he had one in the first place.
Yeah. Definitely flatlined.
There's a warm laugh somewhere off to his right. Amused and fond and probably still stoned from last night. “You ain't dead, dumbass. Jus' passed out. OD'd a little, I think.”
Kerry's sitting next to him. Still in that dumb vampire costume from last night: half stripped, lipstick smeared, hair a wild mess of glittery tangles. Warm and dangerous.
And Johnny, for his sins, is still halfway dressed as Rogue: tiny jacket, jeans, and the remanence of a nosebleed that probably explains her response to it.
Johnny looks up dumbly, still trying to figure out if he's alive. “I think I flatlined last night.”
“You didn't, babe.”
“Nah, you don't get it, man, I heard music. The fuckin' choir!”
“That was the radio.”
“I saw the light!”
“You'll be seeing the light when I hit you with my fuckin' car for scaring the shit out of me.”
“I'm all cold.”
“You've been on the floor for four hours.”
“Feels longer,” Johnny sits up with Kerry's help, leaning against the bathtub, sweat making him all sticky, brain a little scrambled from the drugs. “I didn't come back right.”
Kerry, at least, is amused over angry. A rare mood, for him.
“Oh,” he smooths Johnny's sweaty hair off his forehead in a slow, absent, affectionate way that Johnny can't quite stomach, “so, what y'saying is, you're haunting me.”
“Don't laugh at me.”
“I ain't laughing!” Kerry is absolutely laughing.
“Don't cheapen my spiritual experience, fuck-face.”
“Wouldn't dream of it,” Kerry fishes a cigarette out of his Dracula cape and sets it neatly between Johnny's lips. Smile wobbly and high and amused. “So you died and came back, huh?”
Johnny smiles kinda lopsided, “that, or I'm in the afterlife. Makes' sense, you being here.”
“Oh-ho, always knew I'd end up in hell.”
“Devils got nice hair.”
“That's the hangover talking, doll.”
Johnny swallows a burp, stomach doing little substance-somersaults. “Tastes like formaldehyde.”
“Can't argue there, punch bowl was dodgy.”
They lapse into a warm silence. Kerry cleaning Johnny's face up with the hotel's expensive, probably decorative, towels while the cig' burns between his lips. And the gentleness of it makes Johnny itchy.
“You ever think it,” Johnny murmurs between cigarette puffs. “Like, what happens after?”
“After what?”
“This, y'now. Gigs, drugs, screaming. Useless shit.”
Kerry tilts his head, a little. “Beats the quiet, don't it?” Then, he grins, lazy and too large, “besides, you look good halfway to the grave.”
“You got a real fucked up idea of romance, vamp.”
“Mhm,” Kerry leans in until their foreheads touch and their whiskey-breaths mingle. “You're not dead, yeah? Not yet.”
Johnny closes his eyes. “Then why's it feel like I'm already fading.”
“'Cause you want to,” Kerry says, serious and soft all the same, “you've been dying your whole goddamn life, Silverhand.”
“Hm, guess it's practice.”
Kerry kisses Johnny, gently, more gently than he should, than they are, because someone's gotta remember the ghost.
The moment's there, and then it's gone. They're pulling apart and Johnny's sporting that easy grin again like he didn't just contemplate life, half dead in a hotel room.