Author's Note: Firstly, thank you all so much for the wonderful reviews! You fuel the creation. Sorry it's taken a bit of time between updates but I've had exams to write, for which I had to be very serious. Maybe that's why this chapter came out the way it did. I almost didn't post this but, eh, I'm going somewhere with it so I might as well.

WARNING: Background, non-explicit, non-con ahead.

Chapter Three

Undesirables

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. - Dante Alighieri, Inferno

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. - Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Considering that she's been stomping around Limbo with someone like Gabriel for who knows how long, it's perhaps a little ironic that it's the silence that gets to her. Before she'd begged for quiet, pleaded with him for it. The phrase 'be careful what you wish for,' has never been so despised as it is by Jo at this very moment.

Jo decides to leave him alone when it becomes clear that he's in no mood for conversation. He only grunts and hums at her when she tries to prompt any sort of exchange, so Jo figures that she should go try to talk to Persephone instead. Jo picks up her pace, matching stride with her while Gabriel lags behind.

"You're awful quiet over there," Jo says to Persephone, testing the waters of communication with the reticent goddess.

Persephone says nothing back. Ordinarily Jo would take offence at the perceived rudeness, write her off as a bitch, and go back to poking at Gabriel until he gets over whatever the hell is wrong with him, but Jo sees that Persephone isn't being rude. She's distracted. Her steps are sure and determined, but it looks like every one requires significant dedication. A thin line of concentration had appeared over her brow at some point, looking strange and out-of-place on her prefect face.

Jo tries again. "Hey, are you alright?"

She sluggishly absorbs Jo's words, like she's reviewing them before commenting. "Oh, yes," she finally replies, explaining, "It just takes some concentration to get where you are going here. If you let the destination slip from your mind for more than a few moments, you could end up almost anywhere. That's how you got yourselves into that loop earlier. You weren't concentrating."

"Fucking Limbo," Jo swears, low and under her breath.

Persephone hears it though and hums in agreement, lips curving up in what might've passed for a smile.

"So, if you have to think about this Settlement place anyway, you could tell me about it?" Jo suggests, reminding, "You said you'd explain on the way."

"I did."

For a few moments Persephone falls silent again, but Jo can see by the look on her face that she's only collecting her thoughts.

"There used to be many more souls here," she begins, careful as her words take a meandering path towards their destination. "More souls than you can imagine. But when Hades was remade, nearly all of them were destroyed. Only a few of us from the old world remain. The Chosen, it called us. I think it kept us around for amusement."

Persephone pauses, recollecting her thoughts, orienting herself back to thinking about the Settlement so they don't stray too far off their path while she talks.

"I suppose that after awhile we became tedious and so new souls began to appear in the Outlands. At first there were only a few, but then more kept arriving. These new souls were so pleasing that they were rewarded with the Settlement. It's a place where souls are allowed to live as if they are still on Earth, alive." Persephone shakes her head, mouth turning downward in disgust.

"Is that a bad thing?"

"It is not the old way," Persephone replies simply. "It is not my place pass judgement. My charge is only to lead new souls from the banks of the River Lethe to the Settlement."

"You don't sound too happy about your 'charge'," Jo observes.

The goddess's response is dispassionate and restrained. "Doing this menial task is my punishment."

"What'd you do?" Jo asks, wondering quietly to herself, what can you do in a place like this?

"I disobeyed." Then, with resignation, she adds, "I will not do so again."

Jo doesn't comment on that because she doesn't quite know what to say. It's obvious that Persephone doesn't want to talk about it and she wants to respect that, so instead she asks about the other people the goddess had mentioned back at the tree, the raiding parties she'd talked about.

"Not everyone was happy to live in the peace and amity of the Settlement," Persephone sighs. "There were some…restless souls, shall we say. The Undesirables broke with the Settlers and left to establish a community more to their liking."

"Undesirables?"

"Criminals," she clarifies. "Thieves, murders, rapists. The dregs of humanity. Damaged souls who take pleasure only in chaos and destruction."

"And, what, they just left the Settlement peacefully?" Jo sort of doubts that people like that would just say 'thanks but no thanks' to the Settlers and go on their merry way.

"The Undesirables are led by a particularly vicious soul, but aside from being merely ruthless he is also cold and calculating. He saw it in their best interest to broker an accord with the Settlement. In exchange for being left alone, the Settlers provide food and provisions to the Undesirables."

"If they get what they need from the Settlers, then why send out raiding parties?"

"Because they are greedy for new souls to torture," Persephone says. "In life their leader was a depraved healer who performed heinous experiments on his patients and killed indiscriminately and now he continues his experiments here. He reasons that by killing a soul, he can come to understand the nature of our existence here."

"Can he even do that?" Jo asks. "Can you kill a soul?"

"Only if you try very, very hard," Persephone replies, "and Mengele is nothing if not persistent."

"Mengele?" Gabriel exclaims from behind them with incredulous alarm. "You're saying that Josef Mengele is running around this place?"

It's then that Jo notices that while talking either she and Persephone have slowed down or Gabriel has sped up, because now he's only a few paces behind them and has apparently been eavesdropping on their conversation.

"Yes, somewhere," Persephone says.

In response Gabriel lets out a murmur of deep dissatisfaction.

"Bad?" Jo prompts.

"Understatement," he snaps. "This guy put the psych in psycho. He was so bad, lot of people back in the day thought he was possessed by a demon, but nope, it was all him. 100% pure human evil."

Gabriel makes a sound that might be disgust, his pace slowing as he falls back a little behind them again. When Jo looks over her shoulder at him, he looks distracted, absorbed in his own thoughts, his perpetual smirk curving down at the corners of his mouth in a way that looks unnatural. He's gone back to snapping his fingers. He does it absently, almost like he doesn't even realise that he's doing it anymore. Jo frowns at this, turning back to Persephone.

"What- What is he, exactly?" Jo asks, tilting her head a little to indicate the brooding archangel behind them. She remembers Gabriel telling her that he's been lying to Persephone, but she wants to know what sort of lies he's been telling.

"Loki? He's a Trickster. A god of mischief born of the Norse pantheon," Persephone answers like they're talking about different brands of peanut butter and not a cosmic being of—under normal circumstances—unimaginable power.

"A god of mischief," Jo muses, thinking over everything that she knows about the mouthy archangel. "Yeah, that fits. Though right now he looks more kinda like a god of misery."

"It's Mengele," the goddess confides in quiet explanation. "Loki gets easily disappointed by humans at times. He doesn't understand how horrible you can be towards each other because, despite all his talk, he really does care for your kind. He likes to think the best of you. Not all gods are like that. Not all gods can see you as he does. Even I admit that I don't quite understand it."

"You don't like humans?" Jo couldn't quite see that. While Persephone hadn't exactly been gregarious, she'd at least been politely kind.

"Don't misunderstand, I like humans very much," Persephone says. "We gods eventually learned to tolerate and even appreciate humans. We're especially fond of those that interest us or offer us worship, but beyond that… Well, it's just that you are so very small to us," she says, trying to explain things objectively. "Small and frail and very often difficult to understand. After a while most gods stopped trying."

Jo looks back over her shoulder at Gabriel to see if he's still eavesdropping, but he gives no indication that he's listening. In fact, he seems utterly absorbed now by watching his boots as he walks, his expression still serious and contemplative.

"But not- Loki," Jo guesses, stumbling only slightly over the name as she turns back to Persephone.

"Not Loki," she confirms. "At a time when other gods were loosing interest, Loki seemed to become… enthralled. Humans fascinated him. He- he loves them, I think, in a way that I don't understand. When he saw that we didn't see eye to eye on the point, we stopped seeing so much of each other."

"So you two were really, y'know, together?" Jo knows she sounds sceptical, but somehow she can't quite picture the two of them as a serious couple. Present context excluded, she can't really see Gabriel as a serious anything.

"Sporadically," Persephone replies lightly. "I think we both knew it was only an amusing dalliance. We were different people back then," she says, turning slightly wistful and then melancholy. "The world was a different place."

Jo nods as if she understands, even if she doesn't. After a stretching period of silence between them all, somewhere behind them, Gabriel starts to whistle again. Whatever he'd been struggling with seems to be fading away, slowly restoring him to his usual annoying self, and though she'd never hint at it, Jo's sort of glad.

Later, still trudging along the winding path of dirt by Persephone's direction, Gabriel switches from whistling a series of made-up-on-the-fly refrains and begins to whistle something that actually sounds like a song. Jo occasionally glances back at him, gauging his mood. He seems happy enough now, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket as he walks at a languid pace behind them, head sometimes thrown back to catch a bit of the grey sun that strains through the treetops in scraps of passing light.

Persephone still seems pretty preoccupied with concentrating on the Settlement, but her forehead isn't as creased with effort as it was before and her expression is calm, almost serene even. Though it obviously takes some concentration, there's something rote about her steps, like she's walked this way a thousand times before. It's probably been more than a thousand times, Jo reasons.

She wonders what it must be like for Persephone, dethroned and basically powerless, forced to wander through the perverted remains of her world, shepherding the newly arrived souls of disoriented humans, creatures once so far below her notice that empathy for them had seemed like a waste. Jo wonders how many souls Persephone has escorted through the forests of Limbo. How many were young and scared, how many hopeless and lost, how many were someone's child, someone's parent?

"Hey," Jo says, catching the goddess's attention, "You wouldn't happen to know if there's a woman here named Ellen Harvelle, would you? She's my mother." She knows it's a long shot, her mom may not even be here, but it's worth a try.

Persephone's brow furrows now in thought rather than concentration. "I'm not certain," she says. "Not everyone I guide to the Settlement tells me their name."

"Oh," Jo hadn't considered that. She figures she should probably describe to Persephone what Ellen looks like, only Jo's never had to put her mother's appearance into words before. Also, given the fact that things like specific hair and eye-colour are pretty much off the table here in Greyville, describing her mom seems like even more of a challenge.

"She's about a foot taller than me," Jo attempts to convey by holding her hand, palm flat, above her head, "and her hair is a little past her shoulders, darker than mine but lighter than yours."

Persephone shakes her head in apology. "I'm sorry. I don't think I've met her."

Jo sighs and shrugs, "No sweat."

"But just because I haven't seen her, doesn't necessarily mean anything," Persephone says. "Lots of souls pass through this forest and I don't meet them all. Some people even find their way to the Settlement on their own. It's possible that she's there, waiting for you."

"Or she could've been picked up by one of those raiding parties and is getting tortured by Dr. Psycho right now, right?"

Persephone concedes, "That is another possibility, yes."

"Way to make me feel better," Jo grumbles, dragging her lower lip between her teeth.

"I- I'm sorry," Persephone says a little awkwardly. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"I'm not upset," the young hunter professes wearily. "I'm just worried about my mom."

"I understand." There's a sober pause and then the admission, "I often worry about my own mother."

"Demeter… right?" Jo pulls the name from the recesses of one of her memories where she is a twelve year old girl curled up in the corner of a public library, thumbing her way through a book on ancient Greek mythology.

"I doubt that she is still alive," Persephone says, absently brushing her fingertips over her heart. "I haven't felt her presence in many years."

"I'm sorry," is Jo's weak but sincere offer. "You must miss her."

"I do, very much. For a long time, she was my only companion. Zeus, my father, was only ever truly attentive to a few of his offspring and I was not one of them," Persephone explains, not sounding bitter or upset about it, just matter-of-fact. "My mother was enough."

"I was raised by a single mom, too," Jo tells her. "My dad, he died when I was little and I think Mom felt like she had to be parent enough for the both of them. It was hard, raising me by herself, running a business, doing everything. I kinda just wish I could've thanked her or something, y'know? I should've appreciated her more, let her know that I was grateful."

"Mothers always know," Persephone assures sagely. The two share a soft smile and Jo thinks that maybe Persephone sells herself a little short when it comes to understanding humans.

The only sound they make comes from the snapping of twigs and the crunching of dried leaves beneath their feet as they walk. And, of course, Gabriel's whistled rendition of Johnny Cash's 'Walk the Line.'

They go on like this for awhile until Jo falls back a little to Gabriel's side, grinning softly as he accidentally-on-purpose nudges his shoulder against hers and strikes up a conversation about the history of cotton candy. Jo is surprised to learn that the stuff was originally called "Fairy Floss" and that the first machine that made it was invented by the future president of the Tennessee Dental Association, an irony which Gabriel enjoys.

He's giving her an eye-witness account of the 1904 World's Fair where "Fairy Floss" first debuted when he suddenly stops mid-step, mid-sentence, and throws an arm out, grabbing the sleeve of her jacket and making her jerk to a halt as well. Jo's half-worried that he's about to break into a grin and point out a large oak tree with a litany of expletives carved into it, but then she sees that Persephone has stopped as well, her shoulders tense, a delicate hand raised to them in signal.

"What is it?" Gabriel demands, his eyebrows pinching together, fingers still griped around Jo's sleeve like he's worried she'll try to start setting things on fire if he lets go.

Persephone swiftly shushes him, turning slowly as she scans the trees around them. "I hear something."

Jo strains her ears but she can't hear anything. It only occurs to her now that there's been nothing to hear this entire time. No insects, no birds, no animals; even the wind rustling through leaves every now and then only gives the feint echo of the sound it should make.

She reaches up with the arm that Gabriel isn't holding and presses a palm flat against her chest, directly over her heart. She can't hear the sound of it beating, she can't feel it. Maybe it's not? She is supposedly dead, after all.

"Can you hear that?" Persephone asks Gabriel softly.

He shakes his head no. "Been having a little trouble getting all the bells and whistles to work since I fell down the rabbit hole."

Persephone blinks, tilting her head slightly, listening intently. After a moment of this she declares, "There are people coming. We shouldn't be out in the open like this."

Though he can't hear what she does, Gabriel apparently agrees because he tugs on Jo's sleeve, pulling her over towards a large cluster of bushes just off the path, announcing, "In here," before stomping into them, pulling Jo in behind him. Once sheltered within the leaves and branches, another tug at her sleeve gets her to kneel down on the ground and he settles himself at her side. Persephone follows behind them a moment later, squeezing in beside them and crouching low so that all three of them are huddled amongst the underbrush in a leafy concealment of branches.

As soon as they settle, the bushes around them stilling, three people emerge from the cover of nearby trees, ambling into view out of shadow and leaves; two men and a young woman between them, all three looking haggard and unwashed. When Jo gets a better look at them, she's immediately glad to be in the bushes.

The girl is wearing a tattered pale-coloured dress stained with grey dirt and flaking crusts of grey smears—blood. Her long dark hair hangs around her face in tangled strands sewn through with bits of leaves. Her hands are filthy and dark charcoal smudges ring her wrists where they're bound together out in front of her by a knotted scrap of her own torn dress. Her legs are so badly bruised and scraped that they'd throb primary colours in any other world but in this one they're marked by large splotches of varying shades of slate. Even beneath the grime, Jo can tell that she's only a few years older than herself.

The girl stumbles, bare dirty feet tripping through leaves and dirt as the burlier of her two captors reaches out and swipes a massive paw at her back, laughing at the effect as the girl shudders against the impact and struggles to stay upright. The leaner of the two men cackles with his bulky compatriot and grabs the girl up into his thin, bony arms, gathering her close against his gaunt frame in a perverted embrace.

"Careful there," cautions Skinny to Burly in a thick southern drawl, still chucking as the girl struggles in vain to get away from him, "don't wanna damage her too much. Boss likes 'em whole when he starts in on 'em."

As the girl bucks against him Skinny pushes her away and the momentum sends her sprawling onto her hands and knees in the dirt. "'Course, that don't mean we can't play with her a little," he says with a slow, lecherous, jack-o-lantern leer.

His hands stray down to his belt buckle and Jo knows where this is going. She knows that look in his eye. She's seen it before firsthand, directed at her from some of the seedier customers she's had to put up with in the past.

But Jo has always had the means to defend herself, her mother had made damn sure of that. The closest she had ever come to being in this sort of danger was at the hands of a possessed Sam Winchester, and even then that hadn't been his ultimate aim. But it's happening for this girl, right here, right now, and she doesn't stand a chance.

The girl knows this. Her eyes are wide and pleading, tears trailing ashen lines down her dirty face as she sobs. The sound she makes is a sad, mewling noise, like an injured animal that knows it's about to get beaten.

Jo feels a rush of protection, a need to defend this girl that comes on so strong it drives her to stand. Her efforts are aborted when Gabriel hastily grabs at her, wrapping an arm around her back and anchoring her to his side. "Don't," he whispers close against her ear, his breath hot her skin. "There's nothing we can do. We can't help her."

She ties to shove him off but he holds tight. She goes for the knife in her boot but Gabriel apparently knows what she's thinking because he clasps his hands around hers like a vice before she can get there. She tries to pull her hands free but he won't let go and now he's got both his arms around her, her back pressed against his chest.

"We have to do something," she whispers harshly, a fervid plea as she twists her neck to see him. Gabriel shakes his head no and in that horrifying moment Jo knows for certain that they're about to witness this girl out there get raped.

Jo looks to Persephone for help but the goddess is watching things with a quiet detachment that shocks the young hunter. "Aren't you going to do anything?" she demands through whispered accusation.

Persephone shakes her head. "I can't interfere. More will come if we try to stop them," she whispers back. "We don't have the means to fight them. We would all be captured."

"But you can't let this happen," Jo insists. "We have to help her."

"The only way to help her is by taking her place," Persephone says bluntly. "Are you willing to do that?" Gabriel's arms tighten around Jo, nearly crushing her ribs, as if he's worried she'll say yes.

Beyond the bushes Skinny looms over the girl, suddenly seeming impossibly large in comparison even despite his rawboned frame. His dirty fingers pluck his worn belt from the buckle's clasp and a button comes undone with the sound of rustled fabric. Jo hears everything with heightened awareness, every sound magnified like she's standing right beside them.

The quiet, metallic snit of his zipper as it's pulled down sends a swell of bile crawling up the back of her throat. Maybe it's the adrenaline pouring through her or maybe it's the horror and revulsion, but Jo can't stop shaking. Her every nerve ending feels like it's coiled with suppressed energy and inside her head she's screaming at herself to do something, to stop what's about to happen. Gabriel turns her in towards him, obscuring her view.

Jo pulls at him, fisting her hands into his jacket, and she doesn't know if she's trying to break free so she can see or to bury herself against him so she doesn't have to watch. "I can't… I can't…" she stutters against his collar. I can't watch this. I can't stop this. I can't let this happen. I can't take her place.

Gabriel threads his fingers through her hair, at a loss as to how best to comfort her and settling for trying to keep her as quiet and as still as possible so they're not discovered. If he can't stop this, can't protect the girl out there, at least he can protect the one sobbing against him.

The girl screams are like a dying thing, choked and frantic between chest-wrenching sobs. The two men laugh as they take turns on her and it seems to drag on for ages. Persephone watches the entire thing with a sort of detached disapproval that Gabriel desperately envies.

He's seen this sort of thing before, this kind of violation. How could not? He's been around since before the dawn of humanity and has seen every vile, despicable, heinous act these treasures of his Father have committed against themselves. But things used to be easier to manage.

Angels pride themselves on their ability to disconnect emotionally and, when you regularly ferry yourself back and forth between the visceral, pandemonium of sensation that is Earth and the more staid, transcendent glory of Heaven, it's not so difficult to do. Gabriel hasn't been back to Heaven in so long, he's become so immersed in humanity and sensation, that his off-switch is beyond rusty. Couple that with the mack-truck of weird that this place has slammed his Grace with and Gabriel finds himself feeling a little too raw, a little too open to human emotion.

And Jo, this tenacious but conversely fragile girl crying silent tears against his neck, makes it all so much worse. She's the microscope lens that pulls into focus the bitter, terrible disgust that wells inside him like a virus. It almost makes him want to shove her away, hand her off to Persephone so he can deal with pulling himself together. Instead he holds her closer, tighter, gentler, and focuses on trying to comfort her because it makes him feel like he's doing something, some small act to alleviate someone's suffering.

It ends as abruptly as it began, Skinny and Burly hauling the girl up out of the leaves and dirt and setting her back on shaking, unsteady legs. Jo risks a glance, expecting to find the girl in pieces from the way she'd been screaming like they'd been tearing her apart, but she's whole. Her eyes are empty glass shapes sunk into her head though. She's gone somewhere else.

No one says anything but Skinny prods at the girl to start moving and they follow with her like vicious pitbulls that, for the time being, have been sated. She moves like a shade, the same vacancy from her eyes seeping into her motions and like an apparition she slips back into the cover of the trees, her captors folding in around her until they're all one dark stain in the shadows, and then they disappear.

For what seems like a long time, no one makes a move to leave the bushes. No one talks. Jo's still shaking, face turned in against Gabriel's neck, his collar pasted to his skin where it's damp from her tears. His arms are still around her and he's not exactly sure who is holding on to whom any more. It feels like they've just awoken from some terrible, shared nightmare; the echo of it unreal and too awful to contemplate as reality.

"They're gone," Persephone announces. Something inside Jo cracks.

Waves of nausea cascade through her, making her mouth taste acidic. Her stomach flips and her throat tightens. She scrambles out of Gabriel's arms, clawing her way out of the bushes on her hands and knees, and promptly vomits.

As her retching coughs subside, she feels a gentle hand against her back. It's Gabriel.

Jo shrugs the hand off, twisting away from him with such a glare of hostility that it makes him recoil in surprise.

"Don't touch me," she pants, half command and half plea. She gets up on her feet, arms wrapping around her middle like she's about to freeze to death.

Gabriel holds up both hands in submission. "Alright," he says. "Okay."

Persephone steps daintily from the bushes like she's getting out of a bathtub, all fluid grace and calm serenity. Jo seethes with rage, her sick stomach suddenly nothing more than a distant memory.

"How could you just-" Jo shakes her head, fighting for her words through anger. "Don't you feel anything?"

The answer comes to Jo out of nowhere, as sudden as it is certain. The answer is no. No, she doesn't.

Persephone stands before Jo's fury with an odd look of perplexity, as if she can't figure out why she should be so upset. The word 'monster' rolls through Jo's thoughts like a tornado, uprooting the foundation of understanding she'd thought they'd been building between each other, but then it suddenly occurs to the hunter just how inhuman this being that stands before her is, how remote and alien. Persephone admitted that she'd stopped trying with humans a long time ago and here was the truth of that staring her right in the eyes.

Gabriel, however, is a different story. He stands apart from Jo, the third point in the triangle they form as they stand together beneath these damn grey trees. He outwardly reflects her own emotions back at her, looking just as shaken, just as abraded as she feels.

And as she looks at him, his eyes meeting hers across the few paces that stretch like a gulf between them, a deep spring of emotion overruns inside of her, spilling out grief and anger and guilt. He looks at her, seeing all of this, and regret joins the torrent of his own anguish. Looking at her he knows that even though she understands his reasons, she may not be able to forgive him for stopping her from trying to save that girl. The trust they'd been carefully nurturing like an infant child now lies cold in its crib.

Persephone tells them that they should continue on, warning that there are more Undesirables likely on their way. "The two men we saw will not be alone out here," she says. "More will follow."

Logically Jo knows that there's no reason to stay, that there are in fact many, many reasons why they should get moving, but simply walking away somehow feels like an acceptance of something that is unacceptable. Gabriel makes a move as if to reach out to her, but wisely stops himself in time.

"She's right," he sighs, expression grave, pleading with her to understand. "We should go."

I'm sorry, Gabriel says with only a look.

Jo's reply is just as wordless as she passes him, following Persephone as the goddess once again takes the lead. You can't fix this.

Solemn and outwardly numb, they again begin to walk, the forest folding in around them like a bleak veil, swallowing them into the shadows of trees, a shroud of helpless despair weighting their every step, making each one a little harder to take than before. Jo would cry if only her anger didn't burn with such exquisite intensity. How they'll move forward now, she doesn't really know.

Author's Note 2: So besides exams, what delayed this update was the simple fact that I'm not very happy with this chapter. Gabriel is much too broody for my liking here and the whole chapter is a little dark, but it has to be written because I'm "laying groundwork" or whatever. Things will bounce back though. I promise.