Chapter Text
He doesn’t know where it came from, why he can do this.
He’s a man of many skills, and he can account for them - every shot that hits dead center is hours at the range and then off it, every job his muscles, mind perform can unfurl memories behind it. A bullet that knocks a target back, a would-be assassin who won’t get up again - if a sequence of events changes because of him, if it feels almost as natural as breathing - he knows why.
Except for.
It’s night, patrol, and he’s alone in the woods, too far. He hears it first, follows the sound to see them - the man, the gun. Too far to cross the distance, too close to run and hope for poor aim. He might have tried it anyway, one or the other, but -
“Don’t shoot.” The words come out, almost of their own volition. Come, and they’re not just words, he can feel it. Something is carried in them. The man seems to pause for a moment. Then he smiles and lowers the gun.
Wherever it comes from, it feels like it must be a part of him, because it never surprises him, anymore than he’d be surprised that his eyes open when he wants them to, or that words people say map to meanings in his head.
He doesn’t worry if the man knows English. Doesn’t wonder why an enemy would do as he asks. When the man beckons him forward, shoves him to his knees in the dirt, it feels as only to be expected as hitting the ground again after a jump.
He chokes on the cock, in his mouth, down his throat, the man’s hands fisted in his hair, forcing him closer as he struggles to breathe. He thinks he might vomit, and knows he won’t. His body will cooperate. His body will do what is needed. Blackness dances in front of his eyes, his own hands open and close somewhere. His body will do what is needed, as long as needed. The man finishes, thrusting a last time, pulling John against him, rough fabric and overheated skin. The man shoves him back, and he goes sprawling in the dirt, knowing not to catch himself as clearly and absolutely as he knew to swallow, as he knows that striking now isn’t an option. This isn’t a distraction he can use to break the man’s neck or go for the knife in his boot. The man didn’t shoot him. That’s what he gets out of this.
The man leaves him there and it’s done, something that had seemed to hang in the air, just under the surface, closing like a completed circle and gone. Finished. Sealed.
He stands, cleans himself up enough not to be obtrusive. (It wouldn’t have mattered). Takes care of the need that had brought him out in the first place. He isn’t hard, wasn’t, even slightly. He hadn’t needed to be. This time, this one, whatever this is tells him. He notices when his breathing turns erratic, corrects it. He turns back the way he’d come.
The others, when he returns, say nothing, wonder nothing. If he’d chanced on a soldier with different desires, he could have come back with the evidence of what he’d done on his face, could have come back bleeding, and they would have wondered nothing.
He doesn’t know where it came from, doesn’t have the slightest idea, but it’s there, like his name, like the fact that he’s never heard of anything like this in his life. He knows he could have asked this man not to shoot, but not to die or to surrender or to show him his base on a map. Knows that there are people he couldn’t have asked it of. Knows that the man will and will have wondered nothing either, that it would have felt to him just as obvious, just as unstrange. Knows that there’s no need for him to go in for a medical test, that if he bleeds he’ll never need a doctor and never fear lasting damage. Knows that and more - the rules are there, dormant until he needs them, natural as breathing air, incontrovertible as suffocating without it.
He’s read stories in his life, of course. Genies. Incubi. Even if they were real and not stories, they’re - not this.
“God, you’re tense today,” Paul, from Columbia, tells him. “And quiet. Did you meet a demon in the woods, or something?” And he thinks, it isn’t who I met.