[before] honest to god, i'll break your heart.
John is 23 years old when he meets Zatanna Zatara. What he can say about this is nothing but that when a person is constantly looking over his shoulder, being suddenly gobsmacked by a bus-side advertisement or two is a pretty relative casualty, especially when that casualty is wearing fishnets.
Zatanna Zatara: One Night Only.
It's probably a mistake, but he happens to be doing nothing else with his night, and she has legs like that. He's only human.
The show itself is only okay, in terms of audience reception; Zatanna's sleight of hand is seamless, perfect, but there's a bright dusty ribbon peel of otherworldly power at the edges, and that disconcerts the crowd for reasons they can't articulate. Given that magic is ostensibly what they've come to see this ought to boost ticket sales, but it rarely works that way. John, sitting alone at a table in the back, remembers having read that humankind lives so close to the truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of the eye, and having it nudged into focus is like being ambushed by a grotesque. He doesn't believe this, but the Balance is predicated on closed eyes.
After, he says "I liked the part with the doves," straightfaced - there were no doves in the act - and a spray of confetti flowers blooms from his breast pocket like a rush of rainbow-lit ...well, doves. His surprise must be enough to crack the corners of his expression, because she laughs, an unabashedly blowsy burst of utterly undignified sound from this woman who looks like Betty Paige might if she'd taken a tumble through the most arcane parts of the universe and come back glowing; the whisper thin fractures around his eyes shoot straight to his heart, even then.
He starts to call her Zee after a while. Most of the people they know find their contrast entertaining if not a little bemusing; Zatanna's starlit skin linked tight against his hollow-eyed pallor, all her incandescence and open-armed wanting wrapping his dark worn edges like warm red thread. They're pretty good together, actually. Her father doesn't like him, but there's nothing new about that, fathers never like him. When he meets them, which is rare enough to be notable on its own.
But he makes her laugh, and sometimes he catches her looking at him like - he doesn't know, like the angels he's met look at him sometimes. Like he's lost, and the absence where he should be aches like a bruise.
He hates that look on her a little more than when it comes under the shelter of wings. He isn't lost, he was thrown out; there's a difference. God is a kid who'd rather toss a broken toy than fix it. But at 23 he has all the time in the world, and the time that he has with her is good. A woman in her building gets jumped and they don't talk about whether or not she can take care of herself or needs him to protect her (she doesn't) but she says maybe you should just move in, simplify things. He says - splintered heart catching in his throat and spreading fractures along the dark dry plane of his voice - that he'd like that.
Living together is spilling ash on her sheets and leaving dime-sized holes (she makes him sleep on the couch), picking chunks of eggshell out of his teeth and eating the damn omelette anyway because she made it, and neither of them can be fucked to go to the store for anything else when they can lose whole days in each other. It's the smell of white gardenias that never come out of the clothes she steals, her stockings drying on the heater that never really works, and her worldshaking laugh.
They're pretty good together, until they aren't.