DC: The Brave and the Bawdy

Legends of Tomorrow: Stowaway

Over the course of the 42 years of John Constantine's life he had faced down necromancers, dueled with the undead, gambled in damned souls, tamed beasts that had consumed entire spiritual planes, and seduced rulers of all manners of horrors. He had seen gods die and innocent lives burn. In all those years, he had never encountered a situation as difficult to explain as this one.

Charlie, a shapeshifter taking the form of a femme punk rocker, was currently sprinting across the darkened stone floor of the fiery plane. Charlie carried a naked blonde man over zyr shoulder, wrists and ankles bound as he bounced with every step. That man was John.

Long story short, John had sacrificed his soul to the demon Neron to save the soul of his friend Chas. Though John had resigned this to mean he was damned to hell for eternity, his old friend Charlie had unexpectedly turned up at the last minute and bailed him out by cheating Neron in a bet. All he knew about Charlie's motivations was that ze was a member of something called the Legends of Tomorrow. Though the two of them had escaped Neron's clutches, they were still deep in the pits of Hell.

John was weak. He felt as though he were near death. In truth he was beyond death; Neron had ended his life and taken his body and soul to Hell, where he tortured him physically and psychologically. John was already broken when Charlie had shown up and still hadn't had a full chance to recover. Being bound, naked, and constantly bounced with all the gentleness of a cross country sprint wasn't helping that recovery.

If Charlie stopped running though, they were finished. When Neron discovered the deception his rage was felt throughout the entire astral plane. Hellhounds, twisted gargoyles, and all manners of demons had attention focused on them. Charlie's abilities gave zyr enough endurance to maintain a sprint fast enough to outrun the creatures, but just barely. John hoped ze knew where ze was going.

That's when the heat waves rising off the pit of fire in front of them took a different shape. A shimmer of light revealed the waves to actually be the cloaking effect of a hidden vessel. It was a massive silver spaceship with a forked front, a glowing blue sphere of energy between the prongs. John sighed. He was being saved from Hell by a bloody spaceship.

The vehicle turned in the air and faced its rear to John and Charlie as it lowered to the ground. The ship's back hatch opened, revealing two individuals standing onboard. One was a young man in some sort of yellow and red spandex suit. The other was a young woman in athletic clothes standing at a control pad on the wall.

"Could use a little help here, Wally!" called out Charlie.

"Right," nodded the man in spandex.

He disappeared from the ship as a stream of yellow lightning trailed from where he had been all the way past John and Charlie. John looked over his shoulder and saw the lightning crash into the creatures chasing them, knocking them all aside one by one before rushing back into the ship where the man stood in yellow spandex again. The assist allowed Charlie to make it aboard unharmed. The woman at the control panel mashed the button on it to close the hatch as the creatures got back up. The ship rose away just before any of the creatures could get a hold.

"Bloody Hell..." groaned John, "Put me down and give me a second to catch up, will you?"

Charlie crouched and placed John against the wall. He sighed as he slumped against the cold metal, wrists and ankles still bound in front of him. John coughed as his head tilted back into the wall, muscles all still tense and body coated in sweat. He trembled as a sudden shiver unexpectedly overcame him.

"He's... naked," commented the woman.

"Yeah well if you know a good place in Hell that makes suits in my size," grumbled John, "You let me know."