#i'm not ride or die for tynions jld

[jupitermelichios]

“Zee? You there?”

Zatanna sighs, and resists the instinct to fold down the corner of the page to mark her place before she replies. She’s fairly sure Kent would actually kill her if she did that to any of his collection.

“In here, Bobo.”

“Oh thank God, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s… Well, it’s John.”

“What’s he done now,” she says, the words out of her mouth before her brain catches up to the fear in Bobo’s voice. “Oh God, is he…?”

“He’s alive. He’s just… Well, I think you’d better come and see.”

She does fold down the corner. She doesn’t have a bookmark handy and it’s been a long time since she last heard Bobo sound this worried. Kent will just have to deal with it. 

Hezekiah Wayne’s books are 90% trash anyway, the man was mad as a hatter, and when he did write any effective spells they never seem to work as intended.

One of these days someone is really going to have to suck it up and actually talk to Bruce about that thing where all his ancestors went insane after a certain age, and she’s horribly afraid it might have to be her.

Bobo leads her out into the atrium, and there, standing beneath the dragon skeleton looking horribly small in Nick’s old coat, is John.

A John.

Oh God, this one might even still be a Johnny.

He looks maybe eighteen, big blue eyes ringed in the eyeliner she hasn’t ever actually seen him wear before, for all he’d joked about it all the time, and just a hint of boyish roundness to his face still. His hair is long, longer than she’s ever known it, and desperately in need of a hairbrush.

And he looks terrified.

“John?”

He turns to her immediately, and God help her but she hasn’t got it in her to be angry with him, not even her usual pre-Wintersgate baseline levels of annoyance, not when he looks so lost. “You’re Zatanna?”

His accent’s thicker than she’s ever heard it, but that makes sense. If he’s the age he looks, he only left home a year ago. Hasn’t had time to absorb London into the way he speaks.

“That’s me.”

“Okay, well I hoping you can tell me what the fuck’s going on then, because I was in Camden yesterday, I bloody know I was, and then next thing I know I’m waking up in America wearing some other bugger’s clothes, and the only thing I’ve got to go on is his.”

He pulls something out of one of the many pockets of Nick’s coat, and holds it out to her.

Walking over to him, getting close enough to touch, feels like being in a dream. She’s used to things which aren’t quite real, but this is… this is something different. This is something weird, even by her standards.

She takes the thing he’s holding, which turns out to be a postcard. The front has a picture of the hall of justice on it, one of the ones they sell in the gift shop upstairs. When she turns it over, there’s nothing on a back except a message, scrawled in John’s untidy handwriting. “If it all goes tits-up, find Zatanna.”

“I dunno wha’ it means,” the boy says. “Bu’ I figure wakin’ up on the other side of the world wearin’ someone else’s skivvies prob’ly counts as tits-up.”

“Yes,” Bobo agrees. “I’d say it probably does.”