Darkling I Listen
Bela had never been the religious sort. She blamed that on her childhood trauma, but whatever. Didn't matter. She was too tainted anyway, for that kind of thing.
Still, as the hellhounds ripped into her, Bela found herself crying out to God.
Thinking about what awaited her in Hell . . . Bela had never really had the courage to dwell on it for long enough for her imagination to even get started.
Funny, how even so, it felt like puzzle pieces were falling into place. This was her punishment. She would take it like a woman.
Her first torturer, a demon who called himself Alistair, only worked on her for a couple weeks or so. One day, he looked up with a feral grin and smiled right at her.
"My dear, you'll have to get on without me. There's fresh meat to be had, and this one will be delicious."
"Don't feel bad on my account," Bela said drily. She hadn't quite lost her sense of humor yet. Maybe a couple decades before it was gone.
The scream that rang through Hell following Alistair's departure—there were so many screams, but somehow Bela could always hear all of them at once, distinguishing each one, something inside their screams telling of their sins, the worst parts of them—was a name. A name that jolted Bela in her bonds and she automatically struggled, wide-eyed and disbelieving.
"Sam!" the anguish, the raw pleading . . . Dean Winchester was in Hell.
Bela should have gloated, but somehow it seemed pointless, here.
"He's an interesting one." Another demon sauntered up to where Bela was bound. "Pity I couldn't have a shot with him."
Bela smirked. "Looks like you're stuck with me."
"Yes." The demon drew the knife down Bela's stomach gently. "Don't worry. I may not be as high and mighty as Alistair, but I have plenty of tricks up my sleeve."
"Who're you?" Bela panted.
The demon shifted and grinned. "Call me Meg."
Each day was exquisite torture, but somehow, time passed quickly anyway. It all blurred together, the pain, the listing of her sins.
Her fellow sufferers cried out, just as Bela did. She wondered if any of them cared about her. They probably didn't.
Dean screamed for thirty years. And then he went silent.
Bela wouldn't say she missed hearing him. Except, well, she kinda did.
"He finally caved," Meg said with fascination. The demon knew her inside and out, and Bela knew all the sordid details of Meg's history with the Winchesters. There was a unique bond, between tortured and torturer.
"Caved?" she asked. Meg paused in her job of burning Bela's arm.
"Oh. You didn't know." Meg's voice hit a note of glee that had now become rare—it had been more common back in the beginning. "Some of the tortured get the option of getting off the rack, if they'll start torturing other souls. Hey, you never know. You may get asked in a couple hundred years."
Bela let her head thunk back onto the blood-stained wood. "Lucky me."
Meg came in, a cat-like grin on her face. "Got a surprise, today!"
Last surprise had been Meg impersonating Bela's father. That had been a particularly memorable and terrible day.
"C'mon, Dean, aren't you gonna play?"
Bela bucked slightly against her restraints, eyes rolling.
"Dean?" she coughed.
From what she could see of Dean's eyes, they widened somewhat, but they were still so dead inside. Bela could still remember from the real world, his vibrant, spark-filled eyes.
What had Hell done to both of them?
"You two have fun." Meg disappeared.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Dean murmured. His hands hovered over the barbed wire.
Above ground, Bela might have come back with a snappy retort. Figured, that it would take Hell to soften her.
"You don't have to be," she murmured. She smiled briefly. "I know the rules here. Just think about me shooting Sam, and go crazy."
At Sam's name, Dean flinched. "Don't bring him up. Please."
Bela nodded and looked to the infinite ceiling of writhing chains. "Go ahead."
The day Dean was raised, the entire infrastructure of Hell shook. For a split second, Bela had hoped maybe she could find a way out. Maybe, as the demons screamed about angels, she would be saved.
A second chance. That's all she wanted.
Little girls don't always get what they want.
One day, Meg looked at her in consideration. "How would you like to join our ranks?" she asked softly.
Bela surprised herself by considering the question.
Had Hell given her morals?
There really wasn't a choice, though, when it came down to it. "Yes," she murmured.
Torturing people was easy. Most of the people she was assigned were murderers, even some serial killers . . . As for herself, Bela took special pleasure in torturing the child rapists. However strange it was, Hell had a schedule. In her free time, Bela explored, skirting past the horrors she didn't care to see and hunting down bits of lore. Anything to get out.
In the process, she found a knife. A demon-killing knife. Locked up and stowed away. From what other demons said, its sister was already missing.
Bela hadn't been a great thief for nothing.
Whispers were springing up. A coming apocalypse, fights between angels and demons.
Bela just hoped she could make it topside before the world ended. She really wanted a hot shower.
"Easy, boy." Bela swallowed her incipient fear at the sight of a hellhound. The memories of her death were somehow still fresh after over half a century.
The small one sniffled slightly and whined. Bela glanced over at the person she was finishing up with and yanked out his femur.
"Fetch!"
And Bela had her own personal hellhound.
Lucifer rose in a stupendous, terrible light.
Bela searched for a way out. Plenty of other demons were crawling through the cracks.
She wasn't strong enough.
Bela hummed quietly as she snapped the man's pinky toe. "I really want to leave," she told him mournfully.
"So leave. Stop torturing me," he ground out.
"I wish."
"It's the apocalypse. Don't you demons have something better to do? Go around up there and kill babies, that kind of thing."
"Quite the hero, aren't you?" Bela smirked. "Hunters are supposed to be noble. I knew a couple that actually were. Funny, the only one who ended up in Hell was sacrificing himself for his brother." She broke the rest of his toes in quick succession.
The man choked back a scream. "I met him," he gasped out. "The brother. He's the one who started the apocalypse."
Bela considered that. She hadn't thought about what would happen to Sam while he was topside and Dean was in Hell, but chances were, the younger Winchester had gone out of his mind. That made sense. "Interesting," she commented. "Now, shall we move onto fire?"
Bela shed a tear for the first time in a couple centuries on the day Lucifer fell into the cage. It wasn't the outraged cry of the other demons as they saw their chance for a chaotic apocalypse get locked away. It was because Sam.
She had nearly forgotten about him.
But the instant she heard him screaming Dean's name, she remembered and felt a strange sense of loss. Sam shouldn't be in Hell. It didn't make sense.
"What happened?" Bela snuck up next to a demon—the landscape was full of sere trees and ashes, the cage an intimidating stone structure in the middle.
The demon hissed. "Kid let the devil in and then jumped in the cage. No one knows how."
Another anguished scream ripped through the air, and Bela flinched.
"Getting his just desserts," the demon said with satisfaction.
Bela nodded mindlessly, listening to the screams and truly remembering her humanity for the first time in decades.
An angel—the first one Bela had ever seen in person—battled his way into Hell, heading straight for the cage.
Bela had been remiss in her torturing duties. Technically, she was supposed to get close and personal with her charges in order to better torture them, but honestly, she didn't want to. Stick them in a place where they felt eternally alone, in the darkness, and that was torture enough.
The angel glanced at Bela with a sneer.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Don't make me smite you," was all he said, turning to the cage.
"Can you get Sam out?"
He turned back to her, his emotionless face marred by a line between his eyebrows. "You care?"
Bela shrugged. "I knew him before I came down here."
The angel paused, and then nodded. "I will do what I can."
He didn't quite enter the cage, but reached through the glass that made up the cage on that day—yesterday it had been made up of human skeletons—and pulled Sam out.
But Sam's screams went on.
The angel looked down at the body in his arms, and Bela crept forward.
"I don't understand."
"Maybe it's an echo," the angel said uncertainly. He glanced around, narrowing his eyes once more at Bela. "I have to leave."
Bela opened her mouth to speak, but he disappeared.
It became all too apparent. The angel had taken Sam's body . . . but not Sam's soul.
The angel didn't come back.
There were four in the cage. Four beings, two of them human souls. Bela could recognize Sam's, but there was another also. For some reason, that soul was mostly left alone, protected by—if the other demons were to be trusted—Michael himself.
Bela, whenever she was brave enough to get close, snarled at him to protect Sam.
He never did.
After Lucifer's fall, a devil named Crowley came in and started bossing everyone around. Bela didn't particularly care, long as he didn't mess with her.
He came in as she was busy flaying a serial rapist one day.
"Yes?"
"Just checking in," he had the audacity to smirk. "Y'know, making sure your work is up to par."
Bela flicked her whip. "And?"
He narrowed his black eyes at her. "You . . . Seem different."
Bela offered a humorless grin. "I'm special."
"Right." Crowley left without another word, and Bela turned back to her duties.
Bela wasn't sure what possessed her to do it. It was an idiotic move. What if the cage had closed after and left her trapped in the cage?
Still, as Death—Death himself, nothing would ever surprise Bela again—entered the cage, warding back Lucifer and Michael as they worked on tearing Sam apart, Bela slid past and possessed the other kid.
Death didn't even glance at her, taking Sam's soul and putting it into his case. The ex-angels screamed in outrage, and Bela fled the cage in her new meatsuit.
"Who are you?" she asked the soul.
"Adam." He was trembling, centuries of terror and trauma making Bela feel like shivering herself with his body. "What are you doing?"
Bela didn't respond, glancing around. Death had disappeared, Lucifer and Michael roaring out their grievances so all of Hell could hear them. She whistled for her hellhound.
The demons of Hell were mainly caught up in a flurry about Death's visit, and Bela used that to her advantage.
"Let's get out of here," she said to Adam, and began crawling out of Hell.
Bela took her first deep breath of air for the first time in three centuries. Smiling with Adam's mouth, she forced her watering eyes to open wide in the sun's glare. "Home sweet home."
Bela looked over her summoning spell critically. It had been a long time, and summoning an angel was far different from summoning a demon . . . she wasn't sure she hadn't screwed it all up.
"Will this work?" Adam asked.
Bela put Adam's hand on his hip absently, cocking his head. "Hopefully. Can't see of a reason why you couldn't be put up in heaven, kid."
"Is that a compliment?" he laughed. A shaky laugh, but for a boy who had died, been raised, possessed by an angel, and then thrown into the worst place in Hell, it was good that he could still laugh.
"I think we're good," she murmured, and threw down the match, the materials in front of her flaring up immediately. "Castiel, answer my prayer," she called.
"Strange, a demon calling on an angel. Would you like to cease to exist?"
Bela spun, and then smiled. "I'm not here to die. I'm here because of the body I am wearing."
Castiel frowned slightly. "I don't understand."
"Take Adam to heaven. If you know who he is, then you will comply."
"You will leave?"
Bela shrugged. "My decomposing body's around here somewhere."
"Be warned, demon, if you . . ."
"Blah blah blah, trust me, angel, I'm not gonna go 'round and cause mayhem and destruction." Bela waved, and internally bid Adam goodbye and good luck, her final view one of the angel frowning at Adam.
Moving incorporeally was strange, but it didn't take too long for her to figure it out. At least she hadn't been above a big city when she had realized that she was a swirling form of very visible black smoke.
It was so tempting. Bela could smell the fear in the man in the throes of a nightmare. Just slip in, take over, and take all the blood, all the blood owed her . . .
Bela fled before she could make good on her internal desires. There was a reason she was out of Hell. New life. That's what she wanted.
Finding her body was the easy part. There was a kind of pull, tugging her towards it.
Problem was, it had been more than a couple years, and the state of decomposition of her body in her unmarked grave—that probably should've bugged her more than it did—was frankly disgusting. Bela had to call in some major favors to some powerful witches. Even so, it took months for her to finally feel settled, back in her body again.
"Long time no see."
"Bela Talbot. I am impressed."
Bela smiled with too many teeth. "You going to give it back, or are we going to have a problem?"
The old woman chuckled, a dry sound that set Bela on edge. "You paid up before, dearie. No worries, you'll have it back."
She handed over the nondescript black pot, and Bela sucked in a breath. "Any ritual I need to do?"
"It's all yours, if you want it."
Bela shot a glance at her. "Why wouldn't I?"
"Lots of guilt and pain that comes with having a soul, mm, you might not be strong enough."
Bela glared. "Watch me."
The difficulty of having a soul again was enough to keep Bela distracted for quite some time. By the time she got her head mostly straight, she caught a rumor of the Winchesters having taken a nearby hunt, and got a sudden urge to see them. Teleporting was a normal-demon skill . . . it took quite a bit out of a half-demon. Still, Bela thought, it's worth it. If only to see Sam.
When she knocked on the motel room door—classy, Winchesters, even now—it opened and Bela saw Sam. Alive, with a soul. The same feeling Bela felt when she first heard his scream pulsed inside, and she couldn't help but smile.
Sam, however, did not smile.
"I . . . you . . ." Oddly enough, he grabbed one hand with the other, pressing his thumb into the palm of it.
"Hey, Sam," Bela said cautiously. Two centuries at the Devil's mercy . . . Sam could be drooling in a corner. At least he was up and talking.
"Bela?" There was utter confusion in Sam's voice.
"Oh, you remember me," Bela offered Sam a brief smile. "Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Ghost, right? Close, I'm a demon now. Sort of."
Sam bit his lip. "I don't understand."
"Climbed out of Hell, finally."
Sam was behind the salt line and he remained motionless. Staring at her like he wasn't sure she was real.
"So you want to kill Dean? I won't let you," he said. It would have been intimidating, except for the way his eyes kept skating off to the left.
"No. You two have suffered enough." Bela debated, and then said, "I got Adam out of Hell and back into Heaven."
Sam gaped. The hope on his face was almost painful. "Really?"
Bela nodded.
Sam seemed to debate with himself, and then scuffed the salt line. "I have a demon-killing knife. Don't try anything."
So that's where the companion to her knife had gone. Bela laughed, the sound coming almost easy. She had been practicing. "Trust me, I wouldn't dream of it."
Sam bit his lip. "I'm going to call Dean."
"Sure." Bela settled back on one of the beds with a sigh. "I missed beds in Hell."
Sam's lips quirked up slightly as he flipped open the cell. "Dean? Could you come back?"
He paused, but Bela couldn't hear Dean's response.
"Bela's here. Yeah, her. Bela Talbot."
A sharp bark of sound made Sam blink and then close the phone slowly. "He's on his way."
Bela expected Dean to burst in with a gun, but instead Dean walked in like it was any other day.
Then, at the sight of Bela, he blinked, flinched, and drew his gun.
"Hey, Dean," Bela greeted him.
"Sam?" Dean checked.
"No, Dean, she is not just a figment of my crazy head, sorry you're disappointed." Sam's voice was a confusing mix of hurt and bitter.
Dean looked at him briefly, apology rising off of him like the fumes of alcohol Bela could smell.
"Here to kill us?"
Bela shook her head gently. "I have nothing against you two."
Dean laughed and looked at her incredulously.
Bela stood fluidly, holding her hands out. "I was down there for about three centuries, Dean. Trust me when I say, the amount of pain that I saw you two undergo . . . I have no reason to hurt either of you."
The brothers glanced at each other.
"But you're a demon?" Sam asked.
"Sort of." Bela paused, feeling that she owed them some kind of explanation. "You ever read Harry Potter?"
"Yes."
"No."
Bela rolled her eyes at Dean and focused on Sam. "I tricked the demon who held my deal. Split part of my soul and left it behind up here. Why do you think I was so mean to you two?"
Sam's reaction was the opposite of what Bela expected. With two steps, he was towering over her, hand wrapped around her throat.
"There was a way out, and you never told us," he hissed. "You knew about Dean's deal, and you didn't . . ."
Bela scrabbled against the paw at her throat.
"Sam, let her go."
Bela was dropped unceremoniously on the floor, coughing harshly.
"Why are you really here, Bela?" Dean asked shortly.
Bela tilted her head up at Dean. "The last time I saw you, you were holding a knife to my throat as I bled out. The last time I saw you—" she turned her gaze to Sam "—you were being ripped apart. Forgive me for being curious if either of you were functioning."
"We're fine," Sam said tightly.
Bela stood. Time this visit was over. "No, you're not."
Dean bristled, but Bela ignored him, keeping her gaze on Sam. "I also wanted to thank you, Sam."
His hostile eyes softened with confusion. "What?"
"You kept your humanity, down there. Not all the way, but enough that I was able to . . ." Bela swallowed. "I just wanted to thank you. For being so strong. And from what I hear, for saving the world."
Sam looked flabbergasted, and Bela wondered briefly if anyone had ever told him that. Approaching him slowly, she went on tip-toes and kissed him on the cheek. "Hang in there," she murmured. Saluting Dean, she sauntered towards the motel door.
"Bela."
"Yes, Dean?" The elder Winchester shut the door behind the two of them.
"What are you going to do now?"
Bela shrugged. "Maybe go back to thieving. It's kind of fun."
Dean rolled his eyes. "Well, if you ever get the rest of your soul back, there's a new threat going down. Leviathans. If you come up with anything, let us know." He handed over a scrap of paper with some numbers on it. Right, phone number. Dean turned to go, and Bela stopped him.
"Dean, I get that this is a low point for you. But you get Sam killed because of your alcoholism, and I may be tempted to give into my demonic tendencies and rip you apart. Kay?"
Bela didn't wait for a response. She was done here.
The church was empty, but Bela felt like she was intruding anyway.
The pew was worn, initials carved into the corner with a smiley face.
"Here I am," Bela said softly. "This is me."
A/N: Don't ask me where this fic came from. I guess mostly it started when I (for the millionth time) bemoaned the lack of recurring, good female characters. (Thank goodness for Buffy. It's sad that a show started in the 90s did a far better job than SPN does now).
And Bela was the closest we got to an interesting female character, who should've either had a redemption arc or come back as an awesome villain.
Insert *we could've had it all*
So here this is. Different from my usual fare, but I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think.