When the Devil Came to Pluto 3/4

[tsuki_no_bara]

J2 RPS AU
PG
Part 3 of 4
Master post
Art



One night he wandered away from where he'd laid his camp, looking for animal tracks and a potential dinner, when he was stopped by a noise. He knew the noises of the world. He'd fallen asleep to the sounds of the wind in the brush or the calls of birds or animals. There was little silence to be had in Pluto, except in the gray early hours of the morning, before people were up but after everyone had gone to bed, and even then, there was always a chicken to make noise, or a dog or a horse, or the creaking of the boarding house as it settled on its foundation, or sometimes Jensen snoring.

This was something Jared hadn't heard since he'd started on his search. This was the sound of a herd running wild.

He paused, listening, ear cocked to a noise that sounded like hundreds of horses pounding across the desert. He'd be trampled if he didn't get out of their way, but he couldn't tell where they were coming from, and he didn't know in which direction to move.

And then they came into view, an entire herd of horses resolving on the horizon. As they came closer, he noticed two things through his surprise - they were mottled, like the Comanche's painted ponies, and they didn't hit the earth as they ran.

That many horses, so many he couldn't count them, should have caused a tremendous shaking of the ground under their hooves.

They surrounded him, manes and tails streaming in a non-existent wind, making a thundering noise but passing over the land like nothing, not touching him and not even noticing him as they ran. They weren't alive. They couldn't be real.

But they were solid, as he realized when he reached out in curiosity and grabbed one, yanking on its mane as he hauled himself onto its back. He hung on with his knees, his hands knotted in its mane, as it galloped across the scrubland. Some part of him knew he shouldn't have been able to do that. You couldn't touch a ghost. But the larger part of him knew, suddenly and unconsciously - They'll take me to the underworld. They'll take me to hell. And most importantly, They'll take me to Jensen.

They ran across the plain, the herd of ghost ponies with Jared clinging to one in their midst, streaming past scrubby trees and open land, across the rim of a canyon until they swerved at some unknown signal and went down. Jared wouldn't have known there was a track cut into the canyon wall there. The floor of the canyon rushed at him and he didn't feel it at all as his pony leaped off the track and landed on the flat ground.

It was full dark now. Jared could see by the light of the moon, but the land stretched away in front of him and stretched up behind him, and all he could do was twist his hands in the pony's mane and tighten his knees against its flanks and hope it stopped so he could get off.

But it vanished, as suddenly as it had appeared, the whole herd of horses fading into nothing, the sound of their passing growing fainter and fainter until Jared was standing on the floor of the canyon, near a cliff face, all alone.

He couldn't even say how he hadn't fallen off, how the pony had just faded under him and left him there.

There was a crack in the wall behind him. It wasn't quite a cave entrance, but it was an opening.

He was right - the ghost ponies had brought him to the devil's front door.

I'm coming, he thought, and squeezed his way inside.

It was dark in the passage, and he wished he had a lantern. He'd brought one with him from Pluto, intending to use it to light his way once he found the devil's house, but of course it was back at his camp, with his horse and all his provisions and his rifle. He was still wearing his six-shooters, and they were both loaded, but what good was a bullet against the devil? He'd need holy water, and that was back at his camp too.

He'd figure it out later. He started walking.

The passage was dark but the wall was close enough for Jared to use for guidance, so as not to trip and fall. He walked and walked, knowing that he was going in the right direction only because there was no other way to go. It was silent as he walked deeper into the side of the cliff, the silence that came with being the only living creature around, the silence that came with being alone underground.

He could tell that he was walking downslope, and he could tell that the path was clear. How easy it was to walk into hell.

He laughed. The minister back in Pluto might use this metaphor in one of his sermons - the path to hell, good intentions - but it was literal here.

He couldn't tell how long he'd been walking when he suddenly came out of the corridor into a cave. It was brighter there, the walls and ceiling phosphorescing with enough light to see by. On the other side of the cave were a couple of exits out. He picked one at random and was walking towards it when he realized he wasn't alone.

Jensen.

He spun around, but it wasn't Jensen. It was a woman - or at least Jared assumed the person was female - small and bony, wearing something shapeless and colorless that might have once been a dress, face half-hidden by a fall of white hair.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was dry and brittle and deep for a woman's. She had an accent he didn't recognize. She sounded like the scrubland might sound, if it could talk. Eddie would no doubt recognize the voice, and tell Jared that the land itself had taken shape for him.

But it wasn't the land in human form. It was the devil. And she had Jensen.

“I've come for my friend,” Jared said.

“How did you come to my cave?” She walked up to him. The top of her head barely cleared his elbow. She pushed her hair back with both hands and tucked it behind her ears, a startlingly human gesture for a creature who seemed to be - equally startlingly - not human.

Her face was a wide skull with thin, gray-white skin pulled tight across it, her eyes black and round like a bird's. Jared involuntarily took a step back. He knew the devil could take any form, but this was not a shape he was familiar with. He'd expected something much more human, something dark and terrifying, maybe even a beast. Where were the horns, the tail?

The horns could be buried in her hair, the tail hidden under her dress. Her shape didn't matter. All that mattered was that she had Jensen, and Jared was going to get him back.

“The ghost ponies brought me,” he said. “I want - “ He couldn't make a deal. No one who made a deal with the devil ever came out on top.

But what choice did he have?

“You are not supposed to be here,” she said.

But he was. He found his voice. “I want Jensen back.”

She just stood there, looking at him. The air of the cave was cool and dry. The ground was flat rock under his feet, clean as if someone had swept it. Jared could smell his own sweat, his own nerves.

“I want him back,” he repeated.

“No,” she said.

“What do you mean, no? You can't keep him.”

“I took him. I do not understand him. He is mine to understand.”

This isn't finders-keepers, Jared thought, but what he said was “What don't you understand? If I explain it, whatever you don't get, will you let him go?”

“It is not something you can explain. It is something I must know.”

“What?”

“He does not feel what other men feel, when they look at women. I know that desire well. I have tasted it many times over. I do not taste it in him. I must know why.”

You don't drink, you don't fuck.... Jared heard Brianna's words again in his head. As far as he knew, Jensen had never slept with any of Danneel's girls. He'd never slept with any girl. But he'd never been with a man either. It was something Jared knew about him, had always known - if subconsciously - Jensen wasn't interested in women the way they were interested in him.

The way Jared was sometimes interested in him.

The devil cocked her head, black black eyes blinking at Jared like an inquisitive sparrow's.

“You love him,” she said. “I can taste it on you.”

“Of course I do.”

“He does not feel the same for you.”

But Jared knew that. He wanted Jensen the way men wanted Danneel's girls, and he loved him the way a man might love his brother. He knew Jensen only returned the second kind of love. He'd known it for a long time, and it didn't matter. Jensen was still Jared's best friend in all the world. He was the one person for whom Jared would ride off into nothingness, the one person he'd go to hell to try and save.

The devil licked her lips, another strangely human gesture, and put her it flat against Jared's chest. He felt a burning chill, like ice against his skin, through his clothes. He flinched. She looked up at him, expression flat, inhuman black eyes sharp and bright.

“You cannot have him,” she said. “He is mine to understand or not.”

“I'll trade for him.”

“You have nothing I need.”

She took my heat.

But Jared couldn't lose that.

“Take me instead,” he said.

Her fingers closed against his chest and he shivered, a full-body tremble that shook all his bones.

“You have nothing I need,” she repeated. “You love him as many men love.”

“Not as they love men. That's gotta be worth something.”

“It is the same love that men feel for women. I know it. I need more.”

Her fist against his shirt was like a ball of ice working its way through his chest. He could feel it cracking his ribs, slowly, like tree branches after an ice storm.

What did he have? What was Jensen worth?

Everything.

“Take me,” Jared begged. “Take my love. Take my - my life. Let him go.”

“I will suck it from you like marrow from a bone,” she said thoughtfully. Her expression, her tone of voice, never changed. “You will never leave my cave. You will never see him again.”

But Jensen would never forgive him for that. What good would it do to save Jensen's life if he'd be alone the rest of his years? Some things, however romantic, were unforgivable. He'd never leave Jared, and Jared could never leave him.

But there had to be a way.

He was wrong. This wasn't the devil from the minister's sermons, to be defeated with prayers and faith. Jared had stumbled into a cracked version of the fairyland from the tales his mother had heard as a little girl, where lost travelers were cautioned against eating the food or drinking the wine or making any deals with the fairy queen, as they wandered a place where they could be lost forever.

This was a dark world he had no idea how to navigate, ruled by a woman from no story he'd ever heard.

She offered him nothing, so he would offer nothing back.

“You said he doesn't love me,” Jared told the devil, “not the way I love him. Take that - that, that lack - and let him go.”

“How strange,” she mused, “to offer something belonging to someone else, in order to save his life. This nothing is the thing I do not understand. I must keep him, so that I might.”

Jared wasn't Orpheus, to offer a song to sway the lord of the dead into letting Jensen go. He wasn't Scheherazade, to tell the king a story with no ending every night as a way to prevent Jensen's death. He wasn't Persephone, to trade six months of his life underground so Jensen could have six months under the sun. He wasn't Janet of Carterhaugh, to pull Jensen from his horse and hold him as he changed shape again and again, to free him from the clutches of the fairy queen.

Jared was a gun for hire, like many men in this part of the country. He had nothing. He was no one.

No. He was Jensen's brother, Jensen's partner, Jensen's friend. He had grabbed hold of the ghost of a Comanche pony and ridden it into the underworld to find Jensen and bring him home. And he stood in the middle of hell in front of this tiny woman with her white hair and her black eyes and her fist like a ball of ice, and he was not leaving unless Jensen came with him.

She tilted her head to the other side.

“Interesting,” she said. Her tongue flicked out, like a snake's. “You have many stories inside you. Other men's stories. You will share them.”

“In exchange for Jensen?”

Was this the deal? He'd stay and be her personal storyteller, and Jensen would get to live?

But how could he let Jensen walk out of here without him?

“One story,” he said. “And you'll let us both go.”

Her expression didn't change but Jared got the distinct impression that she was laughing at him.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“One will not satisfy my curiosity. You must tell me all of them.”

All of them? Every fairytale his mother had ever told him, every folktale, every myth, every tall tale he'd ever heard or shared around a campfire, every play he'd ever seen, every book he'd ever read.

“I'll be here forever,” he said in disbelief.

“You wished to trade.”

“Not for that.” I can't stay here while Jensen's free out there. I can't leave him alone like that. “I can, um, I can tell you one now and come back later, and you'll let Jensen go.”

Her black black eyes stared at him, unblinking. He realized her fist against his chest wasn't a ball of ice anymore. He could feel his skin and his bones and his blood racing through his body.

“I'm not leaving here without him,” Jared said, just to be sure she knew what his terms were.

She said nothing. He could hear his own tense breathing, hear his heart thudding behind his ribs, but she was still and silent and the world around them felt empty and dead.

Was Jensen dead too, and this was all a trick? Was the devil planning to keep them both, forever separated from each other? Had he ridden into hell after all?

“I can't leave him here,” Jared said, to himself as much as to her. “I can't.”

The devil flattened her hand against his shirt. She looked away from his face, eyes flicking down to her palm pressed to his chest. She tilted her head as if she were thinking.

He was struck by how small she was, what a tiny woman she must have been if she had ever been human, and how much power she held over him. He was trapped here. There were no herds of ghost ponies to carry him back home. There was no way for him to know the way out, no way for him to determine which of the openings leading from the cave would take him to the path he'd walked to get here. He could have left breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel, or a red thread like Theseus in the Labyrinth, and he still wouldn't be able to follow them back the way he'd come.

This creature, who was not the queen of the fairies or the devil in hell or the girl in the mountain from Alona's story, had the upper hand because she was playing a game he had no idea how to win. She was playing a game in which only she knew the rules. But even in town, up in the real world, in even the shadiest saloon, the house didn't always win.

What had she said? You have many stories inside you.

Jared had an idea. No one got the better of the devil, but he was going to try. Maybe he was Scheherazade after all.

“I'll make you a deal,” he said. “Let me and Jensen leave, and I'll tell you all the stories I know. But not all at once.”

She looked up at him.

“I'll tell you one now,” he went on, hoping he had an advantage to press. “So you know I mean it. And then you'll bring Jensen here so I know he's still alive, and you'll let us go home.”

“What will you share with me?”

“The first story in The Thousand and One Nights.”

The devil pulled her hand away from his chest. She didn't move, and for all her slight size Jared felt crowded. He tried to mentally put more space between them as he told her about Scheherazade and the king of Persia, and how the king would marry a virgin each day and behead her that night before she could be unfaithful. He told the devil how Scheherazade conspired to spend the night with the king and tell him a tale without an ending, and how the king came to her every night after that to find out how the previous night's story ended, and how she kept telling him stories but stopping before she finished them, and how the king keeping her alive to hear her tales prevented him from marrying and beheading any more girls.

“After a thousand and one stories, she was done,” Jared finished. “She didn't have any more to tell. But the king had fallen in love with her and married her.”

“Is that the end?” the devil asked.

“That's just the introduction. There are still all the stories Scheherazade told the king.”

“Tell me another.”

“I said one.”

“There is time yet. Tell me another and I will let you go.”

Jared could take out his pocket watch but he knew it wouldn't give him the correct time. He had no choice but to trust her.

So he told the devil the story of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, and how Ariadne helped Theseus find his way through the maze and he repaid her by abandoning her on a beach.

Maybe that wasn't the best one he could have shared.

“But the god Dionysus heard her crying for her husband, and took pity on her and married her,” he said. “The end. Now let me and Jensen go.”

The devil stretched up to put her hand at the base of Jared's throat, where his shirt collar was open. Her palm was dry and cool.

“You will come to me on this day each year,” she said. “You will tell me stories for the length of time between sunset and sunset. I will taste them on you and remember what it was like to be human.”

“Deal.”

“And you will bring your Jensen. He will stay with me from that sunset to the next, so I might try to understand him.”

“Once a year.”

“Once a year.”

“And you won't take anyone else.”

She tilted her head, as if she didn't understand. “But I must eat. I must live.”

He blinked at her. What did that mean? Was she going to eat Jensen?

“Uh,” he said stupidly. “What do you mean?”

“I must eat.” She took his hand and licked his palm. He yanked his arm away, startled and disgusted, and wiped his palm against his thigh. “You have many years yet. I can taste them on your skin. You would sustain me.”

This was not a line of discussion he was prepared for.

“Did you want to eat Jensen?”

“I cannot eat his emptiness. A man has passion, sometimes. A strong hatred, a great love, a need for revenge. This I can take, to remind me what it is like to be human. But a man's years, what he has not yet lived, those will keep me alive.” She tilted her head, seeming to study him. Jared stepped back, away from her probing regard.

He was so close. So close to getting Jensen back, to saving both of them. He could not lose now.

“You promised me I could have Jensen back,” he said. “You'd let us both go, and we'll come back in a year so I can tell you stories for a day and you can study him for a day. That's it. That's what you promised.”

How did you seal a deal with the devil? Did you spit? Shake hands? Cut your skin and bleed on the ground?

Faust signed a contract in his own blood. But Jared hadn't signed anything.

“You may take him,” the devil said. She stretched out her hand until her fingers nearly touched Jared's chest. “You will return in a year so that I might listen to you for a day and a night, and study him for a day and a night. Then you will leave, so you might return again. As long as you live, you will come to me on this day each year. That is our deal.”

“Agreed.” He was afraid to mention the eating again. He didn't want to have to renegotiate and risk losing the one thing he wanted. “Now bring him back.”

“He will follow you.” She pointed to an entrance across the cave from the one by which Jared had entered.

She'd tasted his future on him, the years he had yet to live.

He suddenly remembered the little boy from the wagon train who'd vanished in a snowstorm, how half the town of Pluto had turned out to search for him, how they never even found his body.

He left.

This passage was just as dark as the one he'd taken to get to the devil. The air was cool and dry. Once again Jared wished he had a lantern, or at least a match. He could feel the passage sloping upwards, just as the other had sloped down, so he could at least guess he was going in the right direction, towards the surface rather than deeper underground.

Orpheus hadn't trusted Hades, and looked back to make sure Eurydice was really following him. He lost her for good, because no one breaks a deal with the devil, and no one gets to negotiate twice. Jared wasn't going to make that mistake.

But he couldn't hear anything behind him - not footsteps, not breathing, not the clink of Jensen's spurs or the shf shf sound his coat sometimes made. And how did Jared know the devil had kept her side of the bargain? She said she had, but she'd also said she kept Jensen because she couldn't understand him, and how was she to know for sure Jared would bring him back every year so she could try to figure him out? What was one day a year, for however long Jared and Jensen stayed in Pluto, compared to a lifetime of having him as her prisoner?

For all she knew, they'd be gone in a year, following the railroad or just their own desires. The mine could play out, Pluto could fade, everyone could leave. If Danneel upped stakes and moved her brothel and her girls farther west, or even north, Jared was sure he and Jensen would follow. Pretty girls in their line of work would always need someone to protect them, to throw rowdy clients into the street or menace them into behaving.

And what happened then? What would the devil do, if Jared and Jensen moved on? Would she follow them? Would she take Jensen back from wherever they were? Would Jared be able to find him again?

You better be behind me, Jared thought. If she tricked me, or she sent a changeling in your place, I'm coming back here with dynamite and blowing her off the face of the earth.

That's pretty extreme, Jensen said in his head, and Jared had no response to that, even in his own mind, that was anything other than Well, I love you that much, and I can't live without you. And he could never say that to Jensen in person. But he didn't have to.

No one chased down the devil, and rode a ghost pony into the underworld, unless it was for love.

The path went on and on, up and down hills and around corners and through narrow passageways and occasionally caverns. He couldn't see more than a few feet in front of him and he was too afraid to look behind. He had no idea how long he'd been walking or how much farther he had to go. He couldn't tell how far he was underground, if he even was underground at all, or if there was anything else in the caverns and passages with him. All he knew was that it wasn't the path he'd taken on his way in. It curved too much and passed through too many open spaces and was too uneven an incline.

He still couldn't hear anything behind him.

He started to hum, to let Jensen know he was still there, in case Jensen couldn't see anything either, but the sound was so eerie in the echoing quiet that he stopped. His humming bounced off unseen walls and ceilings until it sounded like two Jareds, or three, and he could imagine his own doppelgangers trailing him, sent by the devil for her own incomprehensible reasons.

He was half-hoping his off-key humming would elicit a sarcastic comment from Jensen, an affectionate joke, anything. But there was silence. And so Jared kept walking.

He wasn't tired, and he realized that for all the time he could have spent in the underworld, he wasn't hungry or thirsty either.

His canteen and all his provisions were still with his horse, wherever that was. Jared hadn't been carrying anything except his six-shooters when he grabbed that pony and rode it to the devil's front door. He didn't know how to get back there, or even where “there” was, once he and Jensen emerged into the sunlight again.

He was assuming there would be sunlight, and the devil hadn't kept him until nightfall. Time was unpredictable in the underworld. Persephone was six months in the land of the dead, so she could follow that with six months in the land of the living. But Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep for one night after meeting the men playing ninepins and had gone home to find decades had passed, and Oisin returned from Tir na nOg after three centuries, assuming it had only been a few years and that he could still visit with his family and friends.

Jared didn't want to repeat any of those stories. He didn't want to be any of those people. He wanted to go home to Pluto, with Jensen next to him, and resume his life.

And in a year he'd have to find his way back here with Jensen next to him, and give up two days of their lives so he could tell the devil stories and Jensen could submit to her studies. It wasn't a bad bargain. He could have done much worse. But that was assuming the devil had held up her end. He had to trust her. He didn't have any other choice.

“I hope you're still back there,” he said. “Alona told me the devil was some Russian girl, and if I knew her name and gave it back to her, she'd let you go. But she was wrong. She was so wrong.”

His voice echoed around him, the way it might in any normal cave, but it didn't bounce off the rock like his humming had, and he could only hear himself.

“No one's advice was any help,” he went on. “I didn't even ask Eddie. He'd just tell me the land took you for her own, and I couldn't work with that.”

The land didn't take Jensen, the devil did. But she'd meant to keep him for herself. He'd have to tell Eddie that.

And Christian -

Shit.

“Christian's looking for you,” Jared said. “He went one way, I went the other. He's never gonna find you, but we're never gonna find him to let him know you're okay. You are okay, aren't you?”

Nothing.

Jared would just have to keep hoping. Hoping and walking.

He pulled out his pocket watch, out of curiosity, and wasn't entirely surprised to note that it had stopped. Of course it did. There was no time down here. There was nothing except the devil and her inhuman face and her strange bargains.

And Jared, and Jensen.

Jared walked on.

And then it was lighter in the caves, light enough to see the rock on either side of him and the path twenty feet in front of him. He could dimly see the ceiling over his head. He realized it must have been getting lighter for a while, so slowly he hadn't noticed. He was getting closer to the end. He was getting closer to freedom.

And he was getting closer to seeing Jensen.

He walked faster. His boots crunched on loose stones and sand, enough noise to cover any sound of Jensen behind him. But he'd come this far assuming Jensen was still there, and this was when Orpheus fucked up, when he was close enough to see the way out of Hades' kingdom.

But Jared was smarter than that.

“We're almost there,” he said. “We're almost home.”

The light ahead was diffuse and indirect. Jared couldn't tell if he was heading for a cave mouth, for a doorway, for a mere crack in the rock face of a mountain. He couldn't tell if he was walking into sunset or sunrise, or where he would come out. He only knew there was light ahead, and it was growing.

He walked out of a cave, onto the stony rubble partway up a hill rather than the floor of a canyon. The sky looked like sunset. He wasn't sure what direction he was facing, but he couldn't actually see the sun, so he knew it wasn't west.

He blinked. And turned around.

Onward!