When the Devil Came to Pluto Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
PG
Author's Note
Master post
Art
I originally had an entirely different idea for this bang but then I decided I wanted to write an Orpheus story, in which Orpheus is not a dumbass and does not look behind him and does not lose Eurydice a second time. And for that I blame lux--aeterna's Very Deep Went Down the Well, which is a fabulous Sam/Dean fic where Dean goes to hell and challenges the devil to a game of pool in order to bring Sam back. I highly recommend it.
About concurrent with that idea was the thought that I could write the old west half of Chad and Jared's web comic from my third bang, The Not-So-Secret Interior Life of the Scientific Moose. If you haven't read that, and you don't have to, Chad wrote and Jared illustrated a web comic called Haro that was kind of two stories - a contemporary story about a homeless vet (named... Haro :D ), and a historical story set in a slightly fantastical version of the old west. The same guy was in both halves, as two versions of himself, with some occult crossover and no way to tell which half was his real life and which was all in his head. My brain went "wild west!" and the rest of me went "OH FUCK ME", and then I attached the Orpheus myth and a totally bizarre desire to write something creepy - bizarre because I don't generally even read creepy, much less intentionally write it - and here we are.
It happened during an email thread with dear-tiger and I expressed my annoyance at myself by sending her some cute pics of bunnies in cowboy hats. Look, it made sense at the time.
Asexual!Jensen is a holdover from an unused bang idea from a couple years ago (it was superceded by The Only Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore in New York). I just got tired of writing sex scenes, and I was annoyed by the assumption that all fic should have smut, and I was feeling contrary and went "Ok, fine, I'm going to write a bang with NO SEX". We will for the moment ignore the fact that I'd already written two bangs with no sex, and managed to accomplish that without making anyone asexual, either.
(I know there's gen fic. I've written it. Almost all the SPN fic I've read that isn't RPS is gen. But there seems to be an underlying equivalence between fanfic and smut - not just in SPN but in general, and both inside and outside fandom - and it was starting to annoy me. And sometimes I need to challenge myself with something I have no idea how to do. So, asexual!Jensen.)
And yes, I know the presence of asexual main or supporting characters doesn't automatically mean no sex scenes. I know being asexual doesn't mean you can't enjoy sex, or don't ever want to have sex. The Jensen in this bang isn't opposed to boinking. He's just never been attracted to anyone enough - or interested enough - to want to initiate it, and while he likes Danneel's girls, he doesn't feel a need to fuck them, even if they would give him a discount. There's no reason Jared can't convince him to get busy after the fic ends, tho.
I have no idea where Jensen the teetotaler comes from, other than I had the line "You don't drink, you don't fuck..." from early on. It's probably the one thing he kept from his restrictive religious upbringing.
I didn't do nearly as much actual-fax research for this as I've done for other historical bangs. The feel of this fic is more important than any historical accuracy. I do have a Pinterest board, because I always need to know what things look like. Besides, aside from Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, the westerns I like aren't novels, but TV shows and movies, and what I take away from those is the feel and the look of the story. The old west isn't my time period and I don't know if The Magnificent Seven or True Grit or Tombstone are historically accurate (I suspect Tombstone isn't), and neither do I care. But I did look some stuff up, because I don't want to be egregiously wrong or accidentally anachronistic.
The ghost ponies that Jared finds are based on the story of the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon, which is in the Texas Panhandle near Amarillo. In 1874 the US Army attacked a group of Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa in the canyon and took their horses. The army had learned by then that if they left the horses standing around the Comanche would just steal them back - and the whole point of this exercise was to cripple the Comanche still inhabiting the plains - so General Ranald MacKenzie, the commander, ordered his men to shoot them. There were about 1400 horses. Doing away with them took all day. Tales of the ghost horses appeared not long after the actual massacre, and now the story goes that if you're camping in the canyon, sometimes you'll hear (or see) a herd of ponies thundering across the land, making the noise of a thousand horses but not hitting the ground at all.
The ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon is a horrible story and I'm completely fascinated by it.
(If you read The Coyote and the Hawk, my fic for spn-cinema, Jared and Jensen and the Colonel are all veterans of the Red River War, which included the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. They were not however involved in slaughtering all those horses.)
The ghost horses are the reason Pluto is in the New Mexico Territory and not Arizona. I needed it to be close enough to that part of Texas that Jared could reasonably get to the general vicinity without wandering the plains for months. As with everything, I'm kind of vague about where exactly he is, and where exactly the ghost horses came from. Specifics don't matter.
Pluto is mostly geographically based on Kelly, NM, which was a silver-mining town. It's south of Albuquerque, near Magdalena and Socorro. Even big silver mining towns in those days topped out at two or three thousand, so while Pluto is considered a good-sized town, it probably has at most 1200 people, including the miners. A lot of those places sprang up with the mines, and they died when the mines played out. I handwaved a little to make Pluto a town about a decade earlier than it probably would have been. (Kelly was settled in the early 1880s.) Mining towns weren't always inventively named - Silver City was, of course, a town that existed because of silver, and places could be named after whoever owned the mine - but I wasn't going to call the place Sheppardsville or Silverton, and Pluto fit the theme.
A southwestern settler town of that size would also have a number of places where a man could buy some female company, but for the sake of streamlining, Danneel's place is the only brothel and Danneel is the only independent madam, although the saloons would have girls with rooms upstairs and there might even be girls working the mining camp, rather than staying in town. Prostitution was one of the very few ways a woman could earn her own living - sometimes a good living - and keep a certain amount of independence, and there were working girls and madams who made money, got married, and finished out their lives as socially respectable people. Which is not to say it wasn't a hard life, because it was, but my bang is a bit of a romantic look at the old west, so forgive me some rosy glasses.
It may or may not be obvious that I’ve never been to New Mexico or western Texas. I’ve been to Arizona - the bits between Sedona and Tucson - but I don’t know from personal experience what the land looks like south of Albuquerque, or in the Texas panhandle. I wanted the southwest, and I needed a mountain - or at least a hill - and I’m fully prepared for side-eye for getting the geography wrong. And if I am wrong, really wrong, don’t tell me.
The need for a mine came out of the need for a cave, which came out of a need for a stand-in for the underworld and a place for the devil to live. I still figured there’d be desert, so part of my original plan for the fic included cactus and someone eating a rattlesnake. You can tell that didn’t happen. Which is too bad, because I love me some cactus.
Native Americans have been kidnapping white settlers about as long as there have been white settlers. The best-known Indian captives from the old west are probably Olive Oatman of the tattooed chin, who lived with the Yavapai and Mohave and was ransomed back to white folks after five years, and Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken by the Comanche when she was was about ten and for decades managed to evade every attempt to get her back. She was eventually found after a raid on a Comanche band, and along with her daughter was sent to live with white relatives. Stands With a Fist from Dances With Wolves was (I think vaguely) based on her, and The Searchers, with John Wayne, was also slightly based on her story.
Little white boys and girls who were taken by Native American tribes had usually just violently lost their families to those same tribes, and sometimes the girls were adopted into a Native American family and raised like they were natives themselves (as with Cynthia Ann Parker), and sometimes they were used as slaves (as with Olive Oatman and her poor sister, who died before they could be ransomed). Boys generally received better treatment - if they didn't die and weren't ransomed back right away they were raised as warriors - so Christian's history is based on things that really happened. To a person, though, if captives lived with the Native Americans for a length of time and were raised with the tribe's own children - especially if they married and had children of their own - they had a hard time readjusting to white life.
If you're curious about what it was like to be a white settler kid taken by a Native American tribe, let me recommend Empire of the Summer Moon, by SC Gwynne, which is about the Comanche in general at least as much as it's about Cynthia Ann and her son Quanah Parker, and Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879: The Story of the Captivity and Life of a Texan Among the Indians, by Herman Lehmann, the not entirely accurate memory of which served as the basis for Christian's backstory.
As an aside, I know that “Indian” isn't necessarily a respectful term coming from a white person. I used it in the fic for historical flavor, and if you read it and were offended, I sincerely apologize.
“Cum se supne 'ingrijorata'” means “how do you say 'worried'” in Romanian, because that's Sebastian's first language, and “bespokoilas” is the feminine for “worried” in Russian, because that's Misha's first language (and probably Sebastian's second). This is what happens when you have a multilingual acting troupe - someone is going to forget a. what a word is in English, and b. that the person they're asking to translate might have a different mother tongue.
"For the love of god, Montresor!" is from Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado", and the other story Jared tells Rob and Rich and Jensen around the campfire is "The Tell-Tale Heart". Personally I would be creeped right out if I was sitting around a campfire in the middle of nowhere and someone thought it would be fun to repeat "The Tell-Tale Heart", complete with dramatic voices. "Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!" Because you know Jared does the voices.
My knowledge of Greek myths is good enough, but my knowledge of British Isles folktales is all kinds of scattershot, so I had to google more doomsayers than just the banshee. Also I apparently remembered the story of Scheherazade wrong. >.< God bless Wikipedia. The Thousand and One Nights was first translated into French by Antoine Galland sometime between 1704-17. Sir Richard Francis Burton's English version didn't come out until 1885 and was privately printed for subscribers on account of it was pretty erotic. The things you learn.
Why is the devil a woman? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it's dear-tiger's fault for mentioning Azovka (literally "the Azov girl"), a Russian folktale about a girl in a mountain. There are a bunch of variations (god bless Wikipedia, seriously) so I just kind of mixed and matched and made some shit up so Jared would have a nutbar reference for what might have taken Jensen.
But the devil (or a devil equivalent) made more sense to me for the nineteenth-century southwest than a Russian folktale, and so that’s what I went with. Besides, one of the very first scenes I wrote, before I even knew what the story was, was the bit where the devil puts her hand on Jared’s chest and it feels to him as if a ball of ice is working its way past his ribs, so part of me always thought of her as a her, and not the devil as good Christian churchgoers know him.
Maybe that was just me wanting to be contrary again, who knows.
I wanted it to be creepy, and I think some of it is. I wanted a little old west flavor without resorting to all the old west tropes, and I think I managed that. Sort of. Hopefully. It was never intended to be about death, epigraph notwithstanding, but ultimately I wanted it to be a story about stories, and it is.
At least, that’s what I hope people get out of it
PG
Author's Note
Master post
Art
I originally had an entirely different idea for this bang but then I decided I wanted to write an Orpheus story, in which Orpheus is not a dumbass and does not look behind him and does not lose Eurydice a second time. And for that I blame lux--aeterna's Very Deep Went Down the Well, which is a fabulous Sam/Dean fic where Dean goes to hell and challenges the devil to a game of pool in order to bring Sam back. I highly recommend it.
About concurrent with that idea was the thought that I could write the old west half of Chad and Jared's web comic from my third bang, The Not-So-Secret Interior Life of the Scientific Moose. If you haven't read that, and you don't have to, Chad wrote and Jared illustrated a web comic called Haro that was kind of two stories - a contemporary story about a homeless vet (named... Haro :D ), and a historical story set in a slightly fantastical version of the old west. The same guy was in both halves, as two versions of himself, with some occult crossover and no way to tell which half was his real life and which was all in his head. My brain went "wild west!" and the rest of me went "OH FUCK ME", and then I attached the Orpheus myth and a totally bizarre desire to write something creepy - bizarre because I don't generally even read creepy, much less intentionally write it - and here we are.
It happened during an email thread with dear-tiger and I expressed my annoyance at myself by sending her some cute pics of bunnies in cowboy hats. Look, it made sense at the time.
Asexual!Jensen is a holdover from an unused bang idea from a couple years ago (it was superceded by The Only Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore in New York). I just got tired of writing sex scenes, and I was annoyed by the assumption that all fic should have smut, and I was feeling contrary and went "Ok, fine, I'm going to write a bang with NO SEX". We will for the moment ignore the fact that I'd already written two bangs with no sex, and managed to accomplish that without making anyone asexual, either.
(I know there's gen fic. I've written it. Almost all the SPN fic I've read that isn't RPS is gen. But there seems to be an underlying equivalence between fanfic and smut - not just in SPN but in general, and both inside and outside fandom - and it was starting to annoy me. And sometimes I need to challenge myself with something I have no idea how to do. So, asexual!Jensen.)
And yes, I know the presence of asexual main or supporting characters doesn't automatically mean no sex scenes. I know being asexual doesn't mean you can't enjoy sex, or don't ever want to have sex. The Jensen in this bang isn't opposed to boinking. He's just never been attracted to anyone enough - or interested enough - to want to initiate it, and while he likes Danneel's girls, he doesn't feel a need to fuck them, even if they would give him a discount. There's no reason Jared can't convince him to get busy after the fic ends, tho.
I have no idea where Jensen the teetotaler comes from, other than I had the line "You don't drink, you don't fuck..." from early on. It's probably the one thing he kept from his restrictive religious upbringing.
I didn't do nearly as much actual-fax research for this as I've done for other historical bangs. The feel of this fic is more important than any historical accuracy. I do have a Pinterest board, because I always need to know what things look like. Besides, aside from Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, the westerns I like aren't novels, but TV shows and movies, and what I take away from those is the feel and the look of the story. The old west isn't my time period and I don't know if The Magnificent Seven or True Grit or Tombstone are historically accurate (I suspect Tombstone isn't), and neither do I care. But I did look some stuff up, because I don't want to be egregiously wrong or accidentally anachronistic.
The ghost ponies that Jared finds are based on the story of the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon, which is in the Texas Panhandle near Amarillo. In 1874 the US Army attacked a group of Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa in the canyon and took their horses. The army had learned by then that if they left the horses standing around the Comanche would just steal them back - and the whole point of this exercise was to cripple the Comanche still inhabiting the plains - so General Ranald MacKenzie, the commander, ordered his men to shoot them. There were about 1400 horses. Doing away with them took all day. Tales of the ghost horses appeared not long after the actual massacre, and now the story goes that if you're camping in the canyon, sometimes you'll hear (or see) a herd of ponies thundering across the land, making the noise of a thousand horses but not hitting the ground at all.
The ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon is a horrible story and I'm completely fascinated by it.
(If you read The Coyote and the Hawk, my fic for spn-cinema, Jared and Jensen and the Colonel are all veterans of the Red River War, which included the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. They were not however involved in slaughtering all those horses.)
The ghost horses are the reason Pluto is in the New Mexico Territory and not Arizona. I needed it to be close enough to that part of Texas that Jared could reasonably get to the general vicinity without wandering the plains for months. As with everything, I'm kind of vague about where exactly he is, and where exactly the ghost horses came from. Specifics don't matter.
Pluto is mostly geographically based on Kelly, NM, which was a silver-mining town. It's south of Albuquerque, near Magdalena and Socorro. Even big silver mining towns in those days topped out at two or three thousand, so while Pluto is considered a good-sized town, it probably has at most 1200 people, including the miners. A lot of those places sprang up with the mines, and they died when the mines played out. I handwaved a little to make Pluto a town about a decade earlier than it probably would have been. (Kelly was settled in the early 1880s.) Mining towns weren't always inventively named - Silver City was, of course, a town that existed because of silver, and places could be named after whoever owned the mine - but I wasn't going to call the place Sheppardsville or Silverton, and Pluto fit the theme.
A southwestern settler town of that size would also have a number of places where a man could buy some female company, but for the sake of streamlining, Danneel's place is the only brothel and Danneel is the only independent madam, although the saloons would have girls with rooms upstairs and there might even be girls working the mining camp, rather than staying in town. Prostitution was one of the very few ways a woman could earn her own living - sometimes a good living - and keep a certain amount of independence, and there were working girls and madams who made money, got married, and finished out their lives as socially respectable people. Which is not to say it wasn't a hard life, because it was, but my bang is a bit of a romantic look at the old west, so forgive me some rosy glasses.
It may or may not be obvious that I’ve never been to New Mexico or western Texas. I’ve been to Arizona - the bits between Sedona and Tucson - but I don’t know from personal experience what the land looks like south of Albuquerque, or in the Texas panhandle. I wanted the southwest, and I needed a mountain - or at least a hill - and I’m fully prepared for side-eye for getting the geography wrong. And if I am wrong, really wrong, don’t tell me.
The need for a mine came out of the need for a cave, which came out of a need for a stand-in for the underworld and a place for the devil to live. I still figured there’d be desert, so part of my original plan for the fic included cactus and someone eating a rattlesnake. You can tell that didn’t happen. Which is too bad, because I love me some cactus.
Native Americans have been kidnapping white settlers about as long as there have been white settlers. The best-known Indian captives from the old west are probably Olive Oatman of the tattooed chin, who lived with the Yavapai and Mohave and was ransomed back to white folks after five years, and Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken by the Comanche when she was was about ten and for decades managed to evade every attempt to get her back. She was eventually found after a raid on a Comanche band, and along with her daughter was sent to live with white relatives. Stands With a Fist from Dances With Wolves was (I think vaguely) based on her, and The Searchers, with John Wayne, was also slightly based on her story.
Little white boys and girls who were taken by Native American tribes had usually just violently lost their families to those same tribes, and sometimes the girls were adopted into a Native American family and raised like they were natives themselves (as with Cynthia Ann Parker), and sometimes they were used as slaves (as with Olive Oatman and her poor sister, who died before they could be ransomed). Boys generally received better treatment - if they didn't die and weren't ransomed back right away they were raised as warriors - so Christian's history is based on things that really happened. To a person, though, if captives lived with the Native Americans for a length of time and were raised with the tribe's own children - especially if they married and had children of their own - they had a hard time readjusting to white life.
If you're curious about what it was like to be a white settler kid taken by a Native American tribe, let me recommend Empire of the Summer Moon, by SC Gwynne, which is about the Comanche in general at least as much as it's about Cynthia Ann and her son Quanah Parker, and Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879: The Story of the Captivity and Life of a Texan Among the Indians, by Herman Lehmann, the not entirely accurate memory of which served as the basis for Christian's backstory.
As an aside, I know that “Indian” isn't necessarily a respectful term coming from a white person. I used it in the fic for historical flavor, and if you read it and were offended, I sincerely apologize.
“Cum se supne 'ingrijorata'” means “how do you say 'worried'” in Romanian, because that's Sebastian's first language, and “bespokoilas” is the feminine for “worried” in Russian, because that's Misha's first language (and probably Sebastian's second). This is what happens when you have a multilingual acting troupe - someone is going to forget a. what a word is in English, and b. that the person they're asking to translate might have a different mother tongue.
"For the love of god, Montresor!" is from Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado", and the other story Jared tells Rob and Rich and Jensen around the campfire is "The Tell-Tale Heart". Personally I would be creeped right out if I was sitting around a campfire in the middle of nowhere and someone thought it would be fun to repeat "The Tell-Tale Heart", complete with dramatic voices. "Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!" Because you know Jared does the voices.
My knowledge of Greek myths is good enough, but my knowledge of British Isles folktales is all kinds of scattershot, so I had to google more doomsayers than just the banshee. Also I apparently remembered the story of Scheherazade wrong. >.< God bless Wikipedia. The Thousand and One Nights was first translated into French by Antoine Galland sometime between 1704-17. Sir Richard Francis Burton's English version didn't come out until 1885 and was privately printed for subscribers on account of it was pretty erotic. The things you learn.
Why is the devil a woman? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it's dear-tiger's fault for mentioning Azovka (literally "the Azov girl"), a Russian folktale about a girl in a mountain. There are a bunch of variations (god bless Wikipedia, seriously) so I just kind of mixed and matched and made some shit up so Jared would have a nutbar reference for what might have taken Jensen.
But the devil (or a devil equivalent) made more sense to me for the nineteenth-century southwest than a Russian folktale, and so that’s what I went with. Besides, one of the very first scenes I wrote, before I even knew what the story was, was the bit where the devil puts her hand on Jared’s chest and it feels to him as if a ball of ice is working its way past his ribs, so part of me always thought of her as a her, and not the devil as good Christian churchgoers know him.
Maybe that was just me wanting to be contrary again, who knows.
I wanted it to be creepy, and I think some of it is. I wanted a little old west flavor without resorting to all the old west tropes, and I think I managed that. Sort of. Hopefully. It was never intended to be about death, epigraph notwithstanding, but ultimately I wanted it to be a story about stories, and it is.
At least, that’s what I hope people get out of it