When the Devil Came to Pluto 1/4
J2 RPS AU
PG
Part 1 of 4
Master post
Art
You followed me into death, because I needed you. What do you think love is?
--Neil Gaiman, Death: The Time of Your Life 3
Once there was a town named for the lord of the dead. It sat in the foothills, at the edge of the desert. It was dusty and new, but prosperous enough. There was a mine there, and a train depot, and a hotel. It had saloons and a wide main street with a general store and a saddlery and a barber, a telegraph office and stables and a jail. The square wooden buildings creaked when the wind rushed across the land, and the town smelled of dry earth and cut wood and working men, and sometimes, very faintly, the breeze would bring the scent of scrubby growing things from the hills.
Two men lived there, one younger and taller, one older and stockier, the pair of them the best of friends.
They worked for a proud woman, doing what she needed done. They went to church on Sundays and helped their friends as needed it. They would walk around town on their business and see the hills in the distance and feel love for the land they inhabited and pride in the lives they led, for they were good men and they lived good lives.
But from time to time the devil liked to put on a human guise and go walking among the men and women aboveground. He traveled widely, for humanity is infinite in its variety and the devil was a curious creature. Perhaps he felt drawn to the dusty town in the foothills, for in the minds of the churchgoers there, he was indeed the lord of the dead, and the lord of the sinners among them. He was walking along the main street and took an interest in the older of the two friends. This one didn't drink, nor did he fornicate as young men at that time were wont to do. The devil was intrigued by this man. And then one night the devil took him.
* * *
Jared and Jensen came to Pluto a couple of years ago for the same reason a lot of people were heading west - to make a new life, to seek their fortune. The War Between the States had been over for ten years, the Comanche and Apache were being herded onto reservations, and the country was on the move. Jared had gotten a letter from his friend Chad, telling him there was money to be made in the New Mexico Territory. Jared and Jensen were still in Texas then, at Fort Stockton, and the western territories looked exciting. And Pluto, Chad said, had a productive silver mine, good saloons, a new train depot, and a brothel full of pretty girls.
Besides, they were tired of the army. Jensen had joined a Texas regiment towards the end of the war, and Jared thought that getting away from the army and his memories of the things he'd seen and done would be good for him. When he told Jensen this, Jensen just laughed and said he wasn't so tormented by his past that the sight of drilling troops troubled his sleep. He wasn't haunted. Jared just had too much imagination.
They left Fort Stockton because Jared wanted to, and because even though Jensen shook his head in disbelief at the notion, he trusted Chad.
When they rode into Pluto, they found a good-sized town, with a nice hotel, a rooming house, a white-washed church with a steeple, shops and saloons and stables, Chad's promised brothel, a mining camp, the train depot, and a sheriff to keep law and order. The brothel was owned and run by a pretty woman named Danneel, who looked them over and said her clients were usually well-behaved, but sometimes she could use some muscle, and they looked like men who could handle themselves in a fight. So in short order, Jared and Jensen were employed.
They worked together - most of the time as Danneel's unofficial bouncers, but sometimes as undeputized security at the mine, or on short-haul cattle drives - and even shared a room at the boarding house. Once a week they both went to the bathhouse for a good scrubbing, and once a month Jensen dragged Jared to the barber for a trim. They made friends, including a tracker named Christian, who had been taken by the Apache as a boy and raised as one of their own, until white folks managed to find him and drag him back into the bosom of white civilization. Jared liked to talk to people to learn their stories - the histories of their lives or just tales they liked to tell - and while it was sometimes hard to get Christian started, he was occasionally willing to share stories from his years with the Apache.
At first the money in Pluto was inconsistent and the new life was precarious. But Jared looked west, always west, towards new places and new people and new experiences, and everywhere he'd ever lived had been precarious. Besides, restlessness was in his blood. The first Padalecki had come from Poland, when the US was still a collection of English colonies strung up and down the Atlantic coast. He'd settled in Pennsylvania, where he built a cabin and raised crops and cows and joined the local militia when the colonists decided they'd had enough of King George. Padaleckis had been heading west ever since, following the frontier as it shifted. Jared's children, or his nieces and nephews, would no doubt settle in California, having brought the family name clear across the country to where they could see the Pacific. And who knew - maybe their children would even cross it.
But the desert, that was his. He loved the mountains and the mines and the scrubby trees and the dust and the dry, beautiful land of the southwest territories. He loved having the chance to learn about and then leave his stamp on this part of the country. It held stories no white man had yet heard, stories just waiting to be shared.
The town itself, and the land it sat on, had its own tales, but not all of them were kind.
People sometimes went missing. Hunters and trackers would vanish, miners would disappear down mine shafts, farmers or ranchers would be carried off by the Apache, men on the wrong side of the law would head for Mexico and no one would ever hear from them again. Sometimes someone would mount a search party. Eddie, the brothel cook, said the desert needed a tribute, that it required payment for letting white men settle its land.
Jared didn't know if he believed that. He believed in God, and the goodness of human beings, and the possibilities inherent in the vast and barely-settled southwest. He didn't think he believed in a land with its own agenda and its own kind of sentience.
But Jensen believed in the devil, and the devil, like the desert, claimed his own.
And that, Eddie could agree with. Eddie was from one of the tribes that hunted buffalo up in the Dakotas, and how he'd come to Pluto was a mystery. But he'd let Jared and Jensen sit in his kitchen and ask questions and share gossip as long as they stayed out of his way. That was how they learned about his grandfather's younger brother, who was by all accounts a hotheaded, quick-tempered man, until he became separated from the rest of the warriors during a hunt, and didn't return for three months.
“He was changed,” Eddie said, as he kneaded dough for dinner rolls. “Not as hot. You couldn't rile him up. 'She took my heat,' he said.”
“Who took his what?” Jared asked.
Eddie shrugged. “That's what he said. 'She took my heat.'”
“He wasn't a hothead?”
“Not anymore. The same in every other way. Just not as furious. Not as short-tempered. He and my grandfather would fight all the time - wrestling, racing - but after that, he wasn't interested. My grandfather couldn't goad him.”
“Huh,” Jensen said.
Eddie shrugged again and started pulling off pieces of dough and rolling them into balls. Jensen pushed a metal tray across the counter for him, and when Eddie pulled out a towel to cover his rolls so they could rise in peace, Jared and Jensen left.
“Took his heat,” Jensen mused. “You could use that.”
“Ha,” Jared said. “I'm not that bad.”
“Danny called you impetuous.”
“That's not the same thing as Eddie's great-uncle. I'm not quick to anger. Besides, I think that was her way of telling me to stop wasting my money at the poker table.”
When a freak snowstorm hit the area one fall and a little boy went missing from a settlers' wagon train, Eddie and Christian led the search parties. Half the town and most of the miners turned out to look, some of them following the misplaced Dakota and some of them following the adopted Apache, but no one found anything - not the boy's coat, not a shoe, not even his body.
“She claimed him for tribute,” Eddie said. “The desert did.”
At least he had the decency to say so out of hearing of the boy's parents and the rest of the wagon train. The group had been heading to California, where the land was fertile and the weather was mild and there was gold to be found in the rushing rivers and the hills, and while the boy's mother wanted to stay and mourn, and the boy's father wanted to keep searching, the rest of the settlers wanted to go.
After Eddie's story about his grandfather's brother, Jared and Jensen settled themselves in the brothel parlor, Jensen at the piano and Jared at one of the poker tables. Chad had vanished up to Albuquerque for a month for what he claimed was a potential business venture, and had returned yesterday with no money and even less news. Jared and Jensen both assumed the “business venture” involved a woman, and Jared had taken pity on Chad and loaned him a stake in the poker game. Chad was trying his best to win at least enough to pay Jared back, and failing miserably.
It was a good night. There was a steady stream of clients for the girls but only two men at the other poker table, drinking and smoking and watching Kim's hands as she dealt the cards. Rob and Rich had joined Jared and Chad. Samantha, the bartender, leaned on the counter and watched the room, and every time Jared glanced her way, she was smiling.
“You don't drink, you don't fuck - “ Brianna was saying. She'd come over and sat on the piano bench next to Jensen.
“No, but I smoke and swear and shoot people.” Jensen looked up from the piano keys and grinned.
“You shoot at people,” Jared added, grinning even wider. Jensen just rolled his eyes.
“Why don't you?” Brianna asked, leaning against Jensen's shoulder.
“Why don't I what?” he asked.
“Aren't we pretty enough for you?”
Jensen shrugged his other shoulder.
“He's saving himself for marriage,” Rich said.
Brianna laughed. “So am I.”
“I'll marry you, lovey,” a poker player called from Kim's table. The other man sitting there laughed. Kim allowed herself a smile.
“'Scuse me,” Brianna said to Jensen, pushing herself off him and the piano bench. She straightened out her skirts and sashayed over to the table. Jared watched the poker player finish his hand, push his chair back, take Brianna's arm, and escort her from the room.
Everyone was behaving themselves. Sometimes Jared wondered why Danneel paid him and Jensen to stand around - or sit around, as the case may be - when her house was well-run enough, and her clientele well-mannered enough, that they weren't really needed to keep the peace. Even the poker games were polite, even when the miners came to town at the end of the week, their pockets full of their weekly pay, those who could afford Danneel's girls looking to exhaust their energy with some pretty female company. And it wasn't as if he or Jensen even had to wear suits to give the place some class, as he'd heard the upper-class brothels in big cities sometimes did with their muscle.
He'd asked Danneel once, after a particularly well-behaved week, when he and Jensen had done nothing more strenuous than drink some drinks and lose some money at cards and shoot the shit with some of the clients and fellow poker players. She'd just patted his cheek and said it was because he and Jensen were so pretty.
One day an actress came to town, a blonde girl named Alona who claimed to be a disinherited Russian princess. The posters that appeared on the front of the theater and around town said she'd performed in Paris, London, New York, St Petersburg, and she was in Pluto for a month-long engagement.
“Singing and dancing and speechifying,” Rich said one night, as he tried to win Jared and Jensen's money at poker. The pile of coins and bills in front of Jensen and Chad spoke to how successful he was. “Did you see her? She's a tiny thing. Pretty, though.”
Jared and Jensen had in fact already met her, by the simple expedient of passing by the hotel as she and her entourage were walking up from the train depot. There were four of them, trailed by several men hauling trunks of what Jared assumed were costumes and props.
He and Jensen had introduced themselves and met the group - Alona, who sounded American through and through, her manager Misha, who did have some kind of accent, and her accompanists/costars Sebastian and Anton, who either didn't speak English or just didn't want to. They were all very polite, in any case, if tired.
After the troupe had been shown to their rooms, Genevieve, the hotel owner, came back outside to tell Jared and Jensen the first show would be on Sunday.
“So you can go to church and confess your sins,” she told Jensen, “and then spend your evening at a variety show thinking sinful thoughts about the actress.” She winked at him and went back inside. Jared chuckled. All the girls in Pluto, even the ones who weren't for sale, knew that Jensen had never acted on a sinful thought about a lady in his life. Some of them doubted he'd ever even had one.
“We met her,” he said now, returning two cards to Rob, who was acting as dealer tonight, and receiving two in exchange. “She seems very nice.” He rearranged his cards and pushed a couple of coins at the pile in the middle of the table.
“Is she really Russian?” Chad asked.
“She could be.”
“Is she really a princess?”
“She didn't say.”
“Where's St Petersburg?” He'd clearly read the posters closely.
“Russia.”
“And you don't think she's really a Russian princess?”
“Not an exiled one, no.”
“Your storytelling skills are terrible,” Rob commented, giving Chad another card. Chad looked at it, slotted it into the fan of cards already in his hand, and flipped a coin into the center of the table.
“She's not going to give away all her secrets to two strangers on the street,” Jensen went on. “Even if we are two particularly good-looking strangers.”
Rich snorted. Jared lightly punched him in the arm.
“First show is on Sunday,” Jared said. “We should go.”
“I think the whole town's going to turn out,” Rob said. He looked around the table, at the pile of money, at the other men. “No more cards?” They all shook their heads. “Show 'em.”
“Son of a whore,” Jared hissed, as Chad showed his hand. Brianna, who happened to be passing the table with a well-dressed older man on her arm, paused long enough to smack him on the back of the head with her fan.
“No swearing in Miss Danny's,” she said mildly. Jared pretended to be embarrassed and the rest of the table laughed.
“All right, boys,” Rich said, standing and cracking his back, “I'm going to find myself a nice lady to soothe my wounded pride. You have a good night.”
Chad swept the pile of coins and bills closer to himself, then reconsidered and pushed a silver coin towards Rob. Rob raised an eyebrow at him.
“It's a tip,” Chad explained. “You dealt me some really good cards.”
“I'll win it all back from you tomorrow,” Rob said cheerfully.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Jensen said.
“Another game?” Jared asked. Nods all around, so Rob gathered the cards, shuffled, had Jared cut the deck, and dealt them all a hand.
It was quite late by the time they called it quits, but in that time Jensen had won his money and half of Jared's back from Chad. They'd all taken Chad's lead and tipped Rob when they won, and Rob commented that he never knew dealing could be profitable.
“It's always profitable if you work for the house,” Danneel told him. “Next time let Kim deal.”
“She already had a table,” Rob said. “You need another dealer.”
“You need to take advantage of the lovely company on offer,” she countered.
“We paid you for the use of the table.” If you were going to sit at one of Danneel's tables and play cards all night, you needed to kick a percentage back to the house. Not even Jared and Jensen were exempt from that. Chad had vanished for twenty minutes to spend some of his winnings on a pretty girl, but Jared and Jensen and Rob had sat there all night, drinking and playing cards and shooting the shit and surreptitiously keeping an eye on the place.
“Next time you can pay one of my girls for their time, too.”
“Yes'm.” He jingled the coins in his pocket. “Tell Rachel to make herself ready.”
“Rob, darlin', she's always ready for you.” She winked. “Now go home. If you're not sleeping in my beds, you should be in your own.”
Jared and Jensen strolled back to the boarding house discussing their theories about Alona's show. It had been a while since they'd gotten any performers coming through town, and they imagined her posters would bring people in from the surrounding ranches and farms, possibly even from the next town over. It would be nice for people to not have to make their own entertainment for once.
“You really don't think she's a Russian princess?” Jared asked, pulling off his boots and flopping onto his back on the bed. He maybe shouldn't have had that last whiskey.
“I don't know,” Jensen said. He hung his coat over a chair and sat on the edge of the bed next to Jared. “She talked like an American. Her manager, he sounded like he was from somewhere else.” He shrugged. “She's not going to tell us if she isn't. You can pretend she's really an exiled princess if you want.” He looked down at Jared and grinned. “What do you think?”
“I think she was exiled for... um... falling in love with an inappropriate boy. A stablehand.” There was no library in Pluto, but Genevieve let him borrow books from the hotel parlor as long as he returned them in good condition, and sometimes the girls at Danneel's let him go through their collection. His choices varied immensely, and recently he'd been bringing home a random assortment of romances.
“Not a gunslinger?” Jensen's grin widened and Jared chuckled.
“What, like me? You think I want a Russian princess?”
“Who said I was talking about you?”
Now Jared grinned. “You want a Russian princess?”
“Rich could use someone with money. I don't think falling in love with a stablehand is enough to get you exiled, though. She'd have to do something worse. Marry him in secret.”
“Misha!” Jared sat up, excited. His brain conjured clandestine meetings with a priest and a surreptitious exchange of vows and Alona's imagined father turning purple with rage and ordering her and Misha out of the house. And so they came to America, Alona performing on stage and Misha protectively acting as her manager, both of them keeping their secret. It wasn't Romeo and Juliet, but neither was he Shakespeare, and as long as the story grabbed someone's attention, who cared?
“You just made up a story for them, didn't you?” Jensen said.
“Maybe.”
“Does it involve sex in the hayloft?” Jared liked to read the exciting parts of his literary finds out loud so Jensen could enjoy them too, and so Jensen had been exposed to the same quickly-written, cheaply-produced, unrealistically-plotted novels that Jared had.
Jared hadn't considered illicit hayloft sex. Now he did.
But in his imagination, it wasn't the actress and her manager he pictured.
He lay back down, closed his eyes, and tried to banish the thought of Jensen, naked and flushed, bits of hay stuck in his hair, reaching for Jared with a smile on his face.
“Don't fall asleep with your clothes on,” Jensen said from somewhere above his head. Jared sighed, opened his eyes, and sat back up. “We'll find her tomorrow and ask.”
“Ask who what?”
“Alona. Whether or not she's really Russian.”
“She won't tell us. That's what you told Rob.”
“I also said we were exceptionally good-looking, remember. Pretty faces open doors.”
But Alona just winked and asked “What do you think?” when they looked her up the next day to ask if she was really a Russian princess.
“She brought her own tea,” Genevieve told them. They'd snuck into her office to ask if she knew the truth, since Alona had been less than forthcoming. “Black tea and strawberry preserves. Who does that?”
“Russian royalty?” Jared hazarded.
“If she's not, those boys who came with her sure are.”
“Russian or royalty?”
“Russian, at least. I don't know about royalty. Only one of them speaks English worth a damn. You should hear them speaking French, though. I already asked if they'd join me and Danneel for dinner tonight.”
Danneel had been born in New Orleans and grew up speaking English and French, and Jared and Jensen knew she'd be thrilled to find someone who spoke one of her mother tongues.
“Ask her to find out if Alona's really a princess,” Jared said.
Genevieve said she would, and could they please leave her alone, she had work to do.
They went to the theater to see if the group was rehearsing, but the building was locked, so they rode out to the mine to make sure everything was running smoothly. It was, for once. The foreman told them he hadn't had any problems for a couple of days, although some of the miners had heard mysterious noises at night, when the camp was otherwise quiet.
“What kinds of noises?” Jensen asked.
“Couple guys said it sounded like a woman crying,” the foreman said. “Couple other guys said it sounded like the wind, nights there wasn't a wind. Heard it myself last night, thought it was an animal. I never found anyone creeping around the mine wasn't supposed to be here, so I don't know what it was.”
“Should we investigate?” Jared asked.
The foreman shook his head. “Not until someone or something goes missing. Figured it couldn't hurt to mention, but I think the men are just antsy to get paid and get to town.”
So Jared and Jensen ambled back to Danneel's at a leisurely pace, riding in comfortable silence and thinking their own thoughts. When Jared was young, his mother had cheerfully scared him and his brother and sister with folktales from the British Isles where she was born - stories of the banshee, the sight of whom meant impending death, and the black dog, whose glowing red eyes likewise foretold someone's doom, and the shapeshifting kelpie, who could drag a person into a lake and drown them. He'd read everything by Edgar Allen Poe he could get his hands on. And now, as he and Jensen rode back to town, even though it was bright day, he managed to scare himself by remembering all the ghost stories he could and trying to map them to the mine foreman's report of the mysterious noise.
There were no rivers nearby, so the miners couldn't have heard a banshee, and Jared didn't think the black dog made noise - its red eyes warned you to its presence - but there could be ghosts in the hills, the ghosts of dead Apache or Mexican adventurers who were killed far from home, and who knew what kinds of creatures lived here, kept alive in the stories told by the men and women who'd inhabited this place for centuries?
Jensen didn't believe in any of this stuff and would just laugh at him, so Jared kept his mouth shut. But it was something to consider, at least for the length of time it took to get back to Pluto and go on with their day.
On Sunday Jensen got up early and shaved his face and combed his hair and brushed his one good suit and went to church. Jared went with him. Jared had never been much of a church-goer, but it was important to Jensen so it was important to him. That morning Danneel even showed up with some of her girls, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, and because her house was profitable and her girls had taste, their Sunday best was fine indeed. People whispered at the sight of whores in church, as if they had no right to be there, but they walked down the aisle with their heads high, and sat in a pew close to the front.
The minister nodded in their direction as he began his sermon, which was about the devil and temptation and the wages of sin. The girls did not seem particularly inclined to take his words to heart. Not a one of them believed their profession was sinful, and if a man chose to spend his time and money on them, that was his choice. They were opportunists, like so many other people in this country, merely providing a service to men who needed it. Danneel had merely found a market for their particular skills, and there was no shame in the way they made their living.
Now Jared watched the back of her head, and the backs of her girls' heads, as the minister told the congregation to resist temptation, and that everyone had good in his heart.
“Half the men here have something other than good in their hearts,” Jared whispered to Jensen, nodding in Danneel's direction. Jensen kicked his foot and told him to hush.
After church Danneel made a point to shake the minister's hand and thank him for a thought-provoking sermon, and then, because he wasn't the only one who could provoke, she invited him to her house for lunch.
The minister stammered and behind them in line, Jared snickered. Danneel and her girls sauntered off, the ribbons on their hats fluttering in the breeze and their skirts swishing over the dusty walk.
“It's good to see some honest men in church,” the minister said to Jensen, shaking his hand. Jared tried to keep a straight face. Jensen was at least as honest as any other gun for hire in the territory, and he'd never taken advantage of Danneel's - or any other - girls, but he took god's name in vain and gambled and sold his skills with a six-shooter to anyone who wanted to pay for them, and even though he was raised a believer and he went to church, he'd be sinning again tomorrow without shame.
Tonight, even, if going to see Alona's performance counted.
As for Jared, who assumed the minister included him in his assessment of the congregation, he'd never tell anyone how he really felt about Jensen, or what he really wanted. His desires were sinful - not just the fact of them, but the object as well. But to an outside observer he probably did look honest, because most of the time he tried to be honest. He certainly didn't cheat at cards.
Well, not at every game.
Sunday afternoons were busy at Danneel's, because the mine owner gave the miners and the foreman the day off when the mood struck him, and they'd come to town to spend whatever money was left after their Saturday sprees. The rules of Danneel's house stipulated that all the men walking in the door be freshly washed, combed, and dressed in their good clothes, so the bathhouse was doing a roaring business as miners tried to make themselves presentable.
Jared and Jensen stuck their heads inside the kitchen to see if Eddie could sneak them some lunch, but he was busy and waved them off. Instead they planted themselves at Kim's table and played a few hands of poker, killing time and trying to make some money, fully aware that they'd just been to church that morning, to atone for the very thing they were doing right now.
But they kept an eye on the room, as Danneel paid them to do, so they could claim they were working, and honest work was good in god's sight. They were looking after the girls, to make sure no harm came to them, and god would surely approve of that.
The girls appreciated it too. Jensen wasn't interested in their brand of appreciation, but every so often Jared took one of them up on it.
Danneel gave them an early dinner as partial payment for looking after her girls, but Jared had to buy his own drinks. He'd won some hands and didn't mind, but Jensen hadn't played well and was a little annoyed about it.
“You're just pissed that Chad keeps winning,” Jared commented, as they strolled over to the theater. He jingled the coins in his pocket, trying to make the noise extra loud to annoy Jensen further. Chad had been lording it over them that he was on a winning streak. Jensen pursed his lips and said nothing.
They paid for their tickets and sat on the aisle. Jared preferred to sit there so he could stretch his legs into the aisle and not feel cramped, even though the seats in the middle had a better view and people grumbled at having to climb over him. Chad sat behind him and Jensen, and Rich kicked at Jared's feet as he and Rob made their way towards the front. Even Danneel was there, surprising Jared by tapping him on the head with her fan.
“Who's looking after the girls?” Jensen asked her.
“Sam and Kim have it well under control,” she said. “I'm sitting in a box.” She pointed with her fan. There was already a gentleman sitting up there. He saw Danneel pointing and tipped his hat. “If there's an intermission, come say hi.”
“Who's she sitting with?” Jared whispered to Jensen, after Danneel had walked off to her seat. Jensen glanced up at the gentleman and shrugged.
“Someone with more money than us,” he said.
Onward!
PG
Part 1 of 4
Master post
Art
You followed me into death, because I needed you. What do you think love is?
--Neil Gaiman, Death: The Time of Your Life 3
Once there was a town named for the lord of the dead. It sat in the foothills, at the edge of the desert. It was dusty and new, but prosperous enough. There was a mine there, and a train depot, and a hotel. It had saloons and a wide main street with a general store and a saddlery and a barber, a telegraph office and stables and a jail. The square wooden buildings creaked when the wind rushed across the land, and the town smelled of dry earth and cut wood and working men, and sometimes, very faintly, the breeze would bring the scent of scrubby growing things from the hills.
Two men lived there, one younger and taller, one older and stockier, the pair of them the best of friends.
They worked for a proud woman, doing what she needed done. They went to church on Sundays and helped their friends as needed it. They would walk around town on their business and see the hills in the distance and feel love for the land they inhabited and pride in the lives they led, for they were good men and they lived good lives.
But from time to time the devil liked to put on a human guise and go walking among the men and women aboveground. He traveled widely, for humanity is infinite in its variety and the devil was a curious creature. Perhaps he felt drawn to the dusty town in the foothills, for in the minds of the churchgoers there, he was indeed the lord of the dead, and the lord of the sinners among them. He was walking along the main street and took an interest in the older of the two friends. This one didn't drink, nor did he fornicate as young men at that time were wont to do. The devil was intrigued by this man. And then one night the devil took him.
* * *
Jared and Jensen came to Pluto a couple of years ago for the same reason a lot of people were heading west - to make a new life, to seek their fortune. The War Between the States had been over for ten years, the Comanche and Apache were being herded onto reservations, and the country was on the move. Jared had gotten a letter from his friend Chad, telling him there was money to be made in the New Mexico Territory. Jared and Jensen were still in Texas then, at Fort Stockton, and the western territories looked exciting. And Pluto, Chad said, had a productive silver mine, good saloons, a new train depot, and a brothel full of pretty girls.
Besides, they were tired of the army. Jensen had joined a Texas regiment towards the end of the war, and Jared thought that getting away from the army and his memories of the things he'd seen and done would be good for him. When he told Jensen this, Jensen just laughed and said he wasn't so tormented by his past that the sight of drilling troops troubled his sleep. He wasn't haunted. Jared just had too much imagination.
They left Fort Stockton because Jared wanted to, and because even though Jensen shook his head in disbelief at the notion, he trusted Chad.
When they rode into Pluto, they found a good-sized town, with a nice hotel, a rooming house, a white-washed church with a steeple, shops and saloons and stables, Chad's promised brothel, a mining camp, the train depot, and a sheriff to keep law and order. The brothel was owned and run by a pretty woman named Danneel, who looked them over and said her clients were usually well-behaved, but sometimes she could use some muscle, and they looked like men who could handle themselves in a fight. So in short order, Jared and Jensen were employed.
They worked together - most of the time as Danneel's unofficial bouncers, but sometimes as undeputized security at the mine, or on short-haul cattle drives - and even shared a room at the boarding house. Once a week they both went to the bathhouse for a good scrubbing, and once a month Jensen dragged Jared to the barber for a trim. They made friends, including a tracker named Christian, who had been taken by the Apache as a boy and raised as one of their own, until white folks managed to find him and drag him back into the bosom of white civilization. Jared liked to talk to people to learn their stories - the histories of their lives or just tales they liked to tell - and while it was sometimes hard to get Christian started, he was occasionally willing to share stories from his years with the Apache.
At first the money in Pluto was inconsistent and the new life was precarious. But Jared looked west, always west, towards new places and new people and new experiences, and everywhere he'd ever lived had been precarious. Besides, restlessness was in his blood. The first Padalecki had come from Poland, when the US was still a collection of English colonies strung up and down the Atlantic coast. He'd settled in Pennsylvania, where he built a cabin and raised crops and cows and joined the local militia when the colonists decided they'd had enough of King George. Padaleckis had been heading west ever since, following the frontier as it shifted. Jared's children, or his nieces and nephews, would no doubt settle in California, having brought the family name clear across the country to where they could see the Pacific. And who knew - maybe their children would even cross it.
But the desert, that was his. He loved the mountains and the mines and the scrubby trees and the dust and the dry, beautiful land of the southwest territories. He loved having the chance to learn about and then leave his stamp on this part of the country. It held stories no white man had yet heard, stories just waiting to be shared.
The town itself, and the land it sat on, had its own tales, but not all of them were kind.
People sometimes went missing. Hunters and trackers would vanish, miners would disappear down mine shafts, farmers or ranchers would be carried off by the Apache, men on the wrong side of the law would head for Mexico and no one would ever hear from them again. Sometimes someone would mount a search party. Eddie, the brothel cook, said the desert needed a tribute, that it required payment for letting white men settle its land.
Jared didn't know if he believed that. He believed in God, and the goodness of human beings, and the possibilities inherent in the vast and barely-settled southwest. He didn't think he believed in a land with its own agenda and its own kind of sentience.
But Jensen believed in the devil, and the devil, like the desert, claimed his own.
And that, Eddie could agree with. Eddie was from one of the tribes that hunted buffalo up in the Dakotas, and how he'd come to Pluto was a mystery. But he'd let Jared and Jensen sit in his kitchen and ask questions and share gossip as long as they stayed out of his way. That was how they learned about his grandfather's younger brother, who was by all accounts a hotheaded, quick-tempered man, until he became separated from the rest of the warriors during a hunt, and didn't return for three months.
“He was changed,” Eddie said, as he kneaded dough for dinner rolls. “Not as hot. You couldn't rile him up. 'She took my heat,' he said.”
“Who took his what?” Jared asked.
Eddie shrugged. “That's what he said. 'She took my heat.'”
“He wasn't a hothead?”
“Not anymore. The same in every other way. Just not as furious. Not as short-tempered. He and my grandfather would fight all the time - wrestling, racing - but after that, he wasn't interested. My grandfather couldn't goad him.”
“Huh,” Jensen said.
Eddie shrugged again and started pulling off pieces of dough and rolling them into balls. Jensen pushed a metal tray across the counter for him, and when Eddie pulled out a towel to cover his rolls so they could rise in peace, Jared and Jensen left.
“Took his heat,” Jensen mused. “You could use that.”
“Ha,” Jared said. “I'm not that bad.”
“Danny called you impetuous.”
“That's not the same thing as Eddie's great-uncle. I'm not quick to anger. Besides, I think that was her way of telling me to stop wasting my money at the poker table.”
When a freak snowstorm hit the area one fall and a little boy went missing from a settlers' wagon train, Eddie and Christian led the search parties. Half the town and most of the miners turned out to look, some of them following the misplaced Dakota and some of them following the adopted Apache, but no one found anything - not the boy's coat, not a shoe, not even his body.
“She claimed him for tribute,” Eddie said. “The desert did.”
At least he had the decency to say so out of hearing of the boy's parents and the rest of the wagon train. The group had been heading to California, where the land was fertile and the weather was mild and there was gold to be found in the rushing rivers and the hills, and while the boy's mother wanted to stay and mourn, and the boy's father wanted to keep searching, the rest of the settlers wanted to go.
After Eddie's story about his grandfather's brother, Jared and Jensen settled themselves in the brothel parlor, Jensen at the piano and Jared at one of the poker tables. Chad had vanished up to Albuquerque for a month for what he claimed was a potential business venture, and had returned yesterday with no money and even less news. Jared and Jensen both assumed the “business venture” involved a woman, and Jared had taken pity on Chad and loaned him a stake in the poker game. Chad was trying his best to win at least enough to pay Jared back, and failing miserably.
It was a good night. There was a steady stream of clients for the girls but only two men at the other poker table, drinking and smoking and watching Kim's hands as she dealt the cards. Rob and Rich had joined Jared and Chad. Samantha, the bartender, leaned on the counter and watched the room, and every time Jared glanced her way, she was smiling.
“You don't drink, you don't fuck - “ Brianna was saying. She'd come over and sat on the piano bench next to Jensen.
“No, but I smoke and swear and shoot people.” Jensen looked up from the piano keys and grinned.
“You shoot at people,” Jared added, grinning even wider. Jensen just rolled his eyes.
“Why don't you?” Brianna asked, leaning against Jensen's shoulder.
“Why don't I what?” he asked.
“Aren't we pretty enough for you?”
Jensen shrugged his other shoulder.
“He's saving himself for marriage,” Rich said.
Brianna laughed. “So am I.”
“I'll marry you, lovey,” a poker player called from Kim's table. The other man sitting there laughed. Kim allowed herself a smile.
“'Scuse me,” Brianna said to Jensen, pushing herself off him and the piano bench. She straightened out her skirts and sashayed over to the table. Jared watched the poker player finish his hand, push his chair back, take Brianna's arm, and escort her from the room.
Everyone was behaving themselves. Sometimes Jared wondered why Danneel paid him and Jensen to stand around - or sit around, as the case may be - when her house was well-run enough, and her clientele well-mannered enough, that they weren't really needed to keep the peace. Even the poker games were polite, even when the miners came to town at the end of the week, their pockets full of their weekly pay, those who could afford Danneel's girls looking to exhaust their energy with some pretty female company. And it wasn't as if he or Jensen even had to wear suits to give the place some class, as he'd heard the upper-class brothels in big cities sometimes did with their muscle.
He'd asked Danneel once, after a particularly well-behaved week, when he and Jensen had done nothing more strenuous than drink some drinks and lose some money at cards and shoot the shit with some of the clients and fellow poker players. She'd just patted his cheek and said it was because he and Jensen were so pretty.
One day an actress came to town, a blonde girl named Alona who claimed to be a disinherited Russian princess. The posters that appeared on the front of the theater and around town said she'd performed in Paris, London, New York, St Petersburg, and she was in Pluto for a month-long engagement.
“Singing and dancing and speechifying,” Rich said one night, as he tried to win Jared and Jensen's money at poker. The pile of coins and bills in front of Jensen and Chad spoke to how successful he was. “Did you see her? She's a tiny thing. Pretty, though.”
Jared and Jensen had in fact already met her, by the simple expedient of passing by the hotel as she and her entourage were walking up from the train depot. There were four of them, trailed by several men hauling trunks of what Jared assumed were costumes and props.
He and Jensen had introduced themselves and met the group - Alona, who sounded American through and through, her manager Misha, who did have some kind of accent, and her accompanists/costars Sebastian and Anton, who either didn't speak English or just didn't want to. They were all very polite, in any case, if tired.
After the troupe had been shown to their rooms, Genevieve, the hotel owner, came back outside to tell Jared and Jensen the first show would be on Sunday.
“So you can go to church and confess your sins,” she told Jensen, “and then spend your evening at a variety show thinking sinful thoughts about the actress.” She winked at him and went back inside. Jared chuckled. All the girls in Pluto, even the ones who weren't for sale, knew that Jensen had never acted on a sinful thought about a lady in his life. Some of them doubted he'd ever even had one.
“We met her,” he said now, returning two cards to Rob, who was acting as dealer tonight, and receiving two in exchange. “She seems very nice.” He rearranged his cards and pushed a couple of coins at the pile in the middle of the table.
“Is she really Russian?” Chad asked.
“She could be.”
“Is she really a princess?”
“She didn't say.”
“Where's St Petersburg?” He'd clearly read the posters closely.
“Russia.”
“And you don't think she's really a Russian princess?”
“Not an exiled one, no.”
“Your storytelling skills are terrible,” Rob commented, giving Chad another card. Chad looked at it, slotted it into the fan of cards already in his hand, and flipped a coin into the center of the table.
“She's not going to give away all her secrets to two strangers on the street,” Jensen went on. “Even if we are two particularly good-looking strangers.”
Rich snorted. Jared lightly punched him in the arm.
“First show is on Sunday,” Jared said. “We should go.”
“I think the whole town's going to turn out,” Rob said. He looked around the table, at the pile of money, at the other men. “No more cards?” They all shook their heads. “Show 'em.”
“Son of a whore,” Jared hissed, as Chad showed his hand. Brianna, who happened to be passing the table with a well-dressed older man on her arm, paused long enough to smack him on the back of the head with her fan.
“No swearing in Miss Danny's,” she said mildly. Jared pretended to be embarrassed and the rest of the table laughed.
“All right, boys,” Rich said, standing and cracking his back, “I'm going to find myself a nice lady to soothe my wounded pride. You have a good night.”
Chad swept the pile of coins and bills closer to himself, then reconsidered and pushed a silver coin towards Rob. Rob raised an eyebrow at him.
“It's a tip,” Chad explained. “You dealt me some really good cards.”
“I'll win it all back from you tomorrow,” Rob said cheerfully.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Jensen said.
“Another game?” Jared asked. Nods all around, so Rob gathered the cards, shuffled, had Jared cut the deck, and dealt them all a hand.
It was quite late by the time they called it quits, but in that time Jensen had won his money and half of Jared's back from Chad. They'd all taken Chad's lead and tipped Rob when they won, and Rob commented that he never knew dealing could be profitable.
“It's always profitable if you work for the house,” Danneel told him. “Next time let Kim deal.”
“She already had a table,” Rob said. “You need another dealer.”
“You need to take advantage of the lovely company on offer,” she countered.
“We paid you for the use of the table.” If you were going to sit at one of Danneel's tables and play cards all night, you needed to kick a percentage back to the house. Not even Jared and Jensen were exempt from that. Chad had vanished for twenty minutes to spend some of his winnings on a pretty girl, but Jared and Jensen and Rob had sat there all night, drinking and playing cards and shooting the shit and surreptitiously keeping an eye on the place.
“Next time you can pay one of my girls for their time, too.”
“Yes'm.” He jingled the coins in his pocket. “Tell Rachel to make herself ready.”
“Rob, darlin', she's always ready for you.” She winked. “Now go home. If you're not sleeping in my beds, you should be in your own.”
Jared and Jensen strolled back to the boarding house discussing their theories about Alona's show. It had been a while since they'd gotten any performers coming through town, and they imagined her posters would bring people in from the surrounding ranches and farms, possibly even from the next town over. It would be nice for people to not have to make their own entertainment for once.
“You really don't think she's a Russian princess?” Jared asked, pulling off his boots and flopping onto his back on the bed. He maybe shouldn't have had that last whiskey.
“I don't know,” Jensen said. He hung his coat over a chair and sat on the edge of the bed next to Jared. “She talked like an American. Her manager, he sounded like he was from somewhere else.” He shrugged. “She's not going to tell us if she isn't. You can pretend she's really an exiled princess if you want.” He looked down at Jared and grinned. “What do you think?”
“I think she was exiled for... um... falling in love with an inappropriate boy. A stablehand.” There was no library in Pluto, but Genevieve let him borrow books from the hotel parlor as long as he returned them in good condition, and sometimes the girls at Danneel's let him go through their collection. His choices varied immensely, and recently he'd been bringing home a random assortment of romances.
“Not a gunslinger?” Jensen's grin widened and Jared chuckled.
“What, like me? You think I want a Russian princess?”
“Who said I was talking about you?”
Now Jared grinned. “You want a Russian princess?”
“Rich could use someone with money. I don't think falling in love with a stablehand is enough to get you exiled, though. She'd have to do something worse. Marry him in secret.”
“Misha!” Jared sat up, excited. His brain conjured clandestine meetings with a priest and a surreptitious exchange of vows and Alona's imagined father turning purple with rage and ordering her and Misha out of the house. And so they came to America, Alona performing on stage and Misha protectively acting as her manager, both of them keeping their secret. It wasn't Romeo and Juliet, but neither was he Shakespeare, and as long as the story grabbed someone's attention, who cared?
“You just made up a story for them, didn't you?” Jensen said.
“Maybe.”
“Does it involve sex in the hayloft?” Jared liked to read the exciting parts of his literary finds out loud so Jensen could enjoy them too, and so Jensen had been exposed to the same quickly-written, cheaply-produced, unrealistically-plotted novels that Jared had.
Jared hadn't considered illicit hayloft sex. Now he did.
But in his imagination, it wasn't the actress and her manager he pictured.
He lay back down, closed his eyes, and tried to banish the thought of Jensen, naked and flushed, bits of hay stuck in his hair, reaching for Jared with a smile on his face.
“Don't fall asleep with your clothes on,” Jensen said from somewhere above his head. Jared sighed, opened his eyes, and sat back up. “We'll find her tomorrow and ask.”
“Ask who what?”
“Alona. Whether or not she's really Russian.”
“She won't tell us. That's what you told Rob.”
“I also said we were exceptionally good-looking, remember. Pretty faces open doors.”
But Alona just winked and asked “What do you think?” when they looked her up the next day to ask if she was really a Russian princess.
“She brought her own tea,” Genevieve told them. They'd snuck into her office to ask if she knew the truth, since Alona had been less than forthcoming. “Black tea and strawberry preserves. Who does that?”
“Russian royalty?” Jared hazarded.
“If she's not, those boys who came with her sure are.”
“Russian or royalty?”
“Russian, at least. I don't know about royalty. Only one of them speaks English worth a damn. You should hear them speaking French, though. I already asked if they'd join me and Danneel for dinner tonight.”
Danneel had been born in New Orleans and grew up speaking English and French, and Jared and Jensen knew she'd be thrilled to find someone who spoke one of her mother tongues.
“Ask her to find out if Alona's really a princess,” Jared said.
Genevieve said she would, and could they please leave her alone, she had work to do.
They went to the theater to see if the group was rehearsing, but the building was locked, so they rode out to the mine to make sure everything was running smoothly. It was, for once. The foreman told them he hadn't had any problems for a couple of days, although some of the miners had heard mysterious noises at night, when the camp was otherwise quiet.
“What kinds of noises?” Jensen asked.
“Couple guys said it sounded like a woman crying,” the foreman said. “Couple other guys said it sounded like the wind, nights there wasn't a wind. Heard it myself last night, thought it was an animal. I never found anyone creeping around the mine wasn't supposed to be here, so I don't know what it was.”
“Should we investigate?” Jared asked.
The foreman shook his head. “Not until someone or something goes missing. Figured it couldn't hurt to mention, but I think the men are just antsy to get paid and get to town.”
So Jared and Jensen ambled back to Danneel's at a leisurely pace, riding in comfortable silence and thinking their own thoughts. When Jared was young, his mother had cheerfully scared him and his brother and sister with folktales from the British Isles where she was born - stories of the banshee, the sight of whom meant impending death, and the black dog, whose glowing red eyes likewise foretold someone's doom, and the shapeshifting kelpie, who could drag a person into a lake and drown them. He'd read everything by Edgar Allen Poe he could get his hands on. And now, as he and Jensen rode back to town, even though it was bright day, he managed to scare himself by remembering all the ghost stories he could and trying to map them to the mine foreman's report of the mysterious noise.
There were no rivers nearby, so the miners couldn't have heard a banshee, and Jared didn't think the black dog made noise - its red eyes warned you to its presence - but there could be ghosts in the hills, the ghosts of dead Apache or Mexican adventurers who were killed far from home, and who knew what kinds of creatures lived here, kept alive in the stories told by the men and women who'd inhabited this place for centuries?
Jensen didn't believe in any of this stuff and would just laugh at him, so Jared kept his mouth shut. But it was something to consider, at least for the length of time it took to get back to Pluto and go on with their day.
On Sunday Jensen got up early and shaved his face and combed his hair and brushed his one good suit and went to church. Jared went with him. Jared had never been much of a church-goer, but it was important to Jensen so it was important to him. That morning Danneel even showed up with some of her girls, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, and because her house was profitable and her girls had taste, their Sunday best was fine indeed. People whispered at the sight of whores in church, as if they had no right to be there, but they walked down the aisle with their heads high, and sat in a pew close to the front.
The minister nodded in their direction as he began his sermon, which was about the devil and temptation and the wages of sin. The girls did not seem particularly inclined to take his words to heart. Not a one of them believed their profession was sinful, and if a man chose to spend his time and money on them, that was his choice. They were opportunists, like so many other people in this country, merely providing a service to men who needed it. Danneel had merely found a market for their particular skills, and there was no shame in the way they made their living.
Now Jared watched the back of her head, and the backs of her girls' heads, as the minister told the congregation to resist temptation, and that everyone had good in his heart.
“Half the men here have something other than good in their hearts,” Jared whispered to Jensen, nodding in Danneel's direction. Jensen kicked his foot and told him to hush.
After church Danneel made a point to shake the minister's hand and thank him for a thought-provoking sermon, and then, because he wasn't the only one who could provoke, she invited him to her house for lunch.
The minister stammered and behind them in line, Jared snickered. Danneel and her girls sauntered off, the ribbons on their hats fluttering in the breeze and their skirts swishing over the dusty walk.
“It's good to see some honest men in church,” the minister said to Jensen, shaking his hand. Jared tried to keep a straight face. Jensen was at least as honest as any other gun for hire in the territory, and he'd never taken advantage of Danneel's - or any other - girls, but he took god's name in vain and gambled and sold his skills with a six-shooter to anyone who wanted to pay for them, and even though he was raised a believer and he went to church, he'd be sinning again tomorrow without shame.
Tonight, even, if going to see Alona's performance counted.
As for Jared, who assumed the minister included him in his assessment of the congregation, he'd never tell anyone how he really felt about Jensen, or what he really wanted. His desires were sinful - not just the fact of them, but the object as well. But to an outside observer he probably did look honest, because most of the time he tried to be honest. He certainly didn't cheat at cards.
Well, not at every game.
Sunday afternoons were busy at Danneel's, because the mine owner gave the miners and the foreman the day off when the mood struck him, and they'd come to town to spend whatever money was left after their Saturday sprees. The rules of Danneel's house stipulated that all the men walking in the door be freshly washed, combed, and dressed in their good clothes, so the bathhouse was doing a roaring business as miners tried to make themselves presentable.
Jared and Jensen stuck their heads inside the kitchen to see if Eddie could sneak them some lunch, but he was busy and waved them off. Instead they planted themselves at Kim's table and played a few hands of poker, killing time and trying to make some money, fully aware that they'd just been to church that morning, to atone for the very thing they were doing right now.
But they kept an eye on the room, as Danneel paid them to do, so they could claim they were working, and honest work was good in god's sight. They were looking after the girls, to make sure no harm came to them, and god would surely approve of that.
The girls appreciated it too. Jensen wasn't interested in their brand of appreciation, but every so often Jared took one of them up on it.
Danneel gave them an early dinner as partial payment for looking after her girls, but Jared had to buy his own drinks. He'd won some hands and didn't mind, but Jensen hadn't played well and was a little annoyed about it.
“You're just pissed that Chad keeps winning,” Jared commented, as they strolled over to the theater. He jingled the coins in his pocket, trying to make the noise extra loud to annoy Jensen further. Chad had been lording it over them that he was on a winning streak. Jensen pursed his lips and said nothing.
They paid for their tickets and sat on the aisle. Jared preferred to sit there so he could stretch his legs into the aisle and not feel cramped, even though the seats in the middle had a better view and people grumbled at having to climb over him. Chad sat behind him and Jensen, and Rich kicked at Jared's feet as he and Rob made their way towards the front. Even Danneel was there, surprising Jared by tapping him on the head with her fan.
“Who's looking after the girls?” Jensen asked her.
“Sam and Kim have it well under control,” she said. “I'm sitting in a box.” She pointed with her fan. There was already a gentleman sitting up there. He saw Danneel pointing and tipped his hat. “If there's an intermission, come say hi.”
“Who's she sitting with?” Jared whispered to Jensen, after Danneel had walked off to her seat. Jensen glanced up at the gentleman and shrugged.
“Someone with more money than us,” he said.
Onward!