Chapter Text
Beetlejuice doesn’t pay much attention at auction houses anymore.
His lack of focus isn’t actually anything unusual - ignoring his mother is more of a lifelong survival strategy than anything, and it’s not like she’d take his opinion into account if he tried to give one. In Juno’s world, there’s no such thing as a second opinion. Her son is only here to help with handling, and only because he’s biding his time until he can make a clean break and go off on his own. Any day now. Any day a bet will pay out big or a side hustle will strike gold and he won’t need someone else’s money for prospects. Maybe this will be the last sale he’s standing off to the side for. Maybe it’s the last time he has to break in something he didn’t pick out himself. But for now, he’s leaning on one of the tall metal fences forming the lattice of pens in the old barn, drumming his fingers against it as his mother looks at some bulky grey-coated carthorse-type stallion just about taller at the withers than he is at the top of his head - a beast that’s definitely going to be a pain to work with.
When he finally half-tunes back into the conversation, the ranger leaning on the fence of the huge stallion’s pen is talking about a filly. He’s a big brute of a satyr, with thick horns arching back from his brow and a tattered jacket roughly hand-painted with the insignia of the band he rides with - the Inferno Boys. He’s just discussing some idle gossip, Beetlejuice assumes, since Juno doesn’t have much need for foals. Raising things isn’t really her strong suit, if Beetlejuice himself is anything to go off.
He would likely have tuned right back out if, a moment later, the occupant of the next pen didn’t start shrieking. He’s learnt to filter out most of the noise you hear at these things, the keening cry of a foal looking for its mother included. But this foal seems particularly determined that it will not be ignored. It’s shrieking and screaming at what must be past its maximum volume, seemingly not caring about things as trivial as pausing for breath or the wellbeing of nearby eardrums. And when Beetlejuice turns to see what’s set it off, he finds Juno and the ranger have stepped into the pen of a wide-eyed and wild young centaur.
Juveniles, Beetlejuice has learnt, tend to stay at either of two poles at sales. Petrified or furious. And this one is mad, thrashing and snorting and pawing at the air despite being downed by a rope lashing three feet together like a calf at a rodeo, arms tied behind her back. She’s a slightly stocky thing in the lower body, by foal standards, with long white hair cascading around her hooves and edging her forearms - it’s not hard to believe that she’s another one of those heavy cart-suited things. Or half one, at least. Because despite her persistent looking-for-mama shrieks, none of the mares return her cries. No, it’s the huge stallion that bellows back to her, tugging at the chain keeping him tethered by the wrists and neck to the other side of his pen.
“Probably a cross with something daintier, given the relative size of her,” Juno says, seeming to read Beetlejuice’s mind - a disgusting thought. The filly isn’t small, by any means, solidly in the teen years, but her head wouldn’t reach her sire’s upper shoulder. Beetlejuice steps into the pen, though he remains outside of the conversation his mother is having with the ranger. With a few ear-splitting calls back and forth out of the way the filly seems to have calmed fractionally, whickering quietly back and forth with her father in their own tongue. Past her build she’s not anything unusual, by Beetlejuice’s summation. A filly still a little too young to be worked, with a black coat dappled white over her hindquarters, the usual crest of fur over her flat upper chest, and white-blond hair on her tail and braided into an intricate but fraying pattern on her head. Being freshly rounded up the coded brand to one side of her spine above the withers still looks a little raw, seemingly proven by the way she occasionally shifts her bound hands like she’s trying to rub at it. She keeps shaking her head and fidgeting with her shoulders too, rolling her neck, probably not happy about the thin cable collar holding her metal ID tag.
He tries to tune back into the conversation, to figure out why Juno is interested in this kid, but by this point they’re already discussing how much she’s likely to go for. So Beetlejuice amuses himself by getting close enough to scratch the foal’s slightly shaggy back, and as could have been expected she responds with an alarmed whinny, giving a little kick with her free foreleg that goes straight past him. Her dad snorts, stomps, and tugs on his tethers again, clearly not appreciating the stranger touching his foal.
“Stop playing with it,” Juno snaps from behind her son, and he manages not to flinch. “Let it up, I want to see it move.”
“What do we even need a foal for?”
That gets him a swat with the clipboard she’d been writing notes on the stock on. “Wouldn’t kill you to listen, Lawrence. It’s an investment. This looks to be a good stallion, so his brat should be somewhat decent.”
“And what the hell are we doing with it ‘till it’s big enough for breaking?”
“You are going to put it in a paddock and keep it in decent enough shape. Now will you let the damn thing up already?!”
“Fine.”
She squirms when he grabs for her legs, but he makes quick work of freeing her ankles and stepping back onto his feet. The filly immediately scrambles onto her hooves and to the fence between her and her father’s pens, glaring back at the three demons. Despite being a teen she’s taller than all of them, her withers a little lower than Beetlejuice’s own shoulder and her head just above his - almost seven feet total. Almost on autopilot, Beetlejuice pulls a switch from his belt loop and hits at the fence, scaring the creature into loping away around the edge of the pen. He chases her around the pen for a little while for Juno to watch, until she nods, notes something down, and leaves the pen without another word.
“Dad? I- I think something’s happening.”
Lydia has herself pressed into the corner of her pen, staring over at her father. There’s less bipeds milling around now, but there’s a lot of noise coming from outside. Horses are being moved around. Charles shuffles his feet, looking around the barn. The small group of centaurs that were captured from their large herd have been scattered, likely deliberately - it’s hard to communicate like this, only able to cry wordless calls over the sound of all the horses and cows and whatever else they’ve shut in here. Lydia paws at the fence.
“Do you think I could kick this down?”
“I’m- I’m not sure. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
“I’m already hurt.”
“I don’t want you hurt any more, then. You could injure yourself, or they could come along and hit you again, or-”
He’s cut off by a metallic clanging as hooves hit fence. Lydia stumbles a bit as she returns to all fours, somehow having managed not to get a foot caught.
“Lydia,” he hisses, looking around nervously. “We need to be careful.”
“And do what? Wait around for them to come back and burn something else into us?”
“No. No, of course not, but we can’t be reckless. These people know what they’re doing, they wouldn’t use something you could break down.”
Lydia snorts in frustration, hating the sense that makes. She paces around the tiny pen a few times, fidgeting with her hands, before letting out a loud call for her herdmates. Just a simple locating call and response, and she stands with her furry ears pricked and swivelling as the replies come.
“I don’t think anyone’s been moved…” she reports, looking nervously towards the door that horses are being periodically led through. She attempts to twist to look over her shoulder at her hands, trying to snag the end of the rope in her fingers.
“What are you doing?” her dad asks quietly as she shifts her footing, trying to find an angle she can see the rope from.
“I’m- I’m trying to-” She huffs, frustrated. “Do you think you could get your hands free?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t even try!”
“I’ve already tried, Lydia, I…” He catches her eye, and sighs, raising his hands with a clink of chain. He tries to reach around to fiddle with the chains around his wrists, feels at his neck, carefully inspects where he’s hitched to the fence, and shakes his head. “It’s all linked to itself, I don’t know how it opens.”
Lydia bites her lip, looking down at the floor as she thinks, and then heads over to where people have been entering and exiting her pen. She tilts her head to the side, trying to shove it between the bars of the gate and straining to grab at the latch with her teeth.
“Wh- Lydia! Lydia, leave it alone, if one of them sees you-”
“What do you want me to do?!” Lydia snaps, pulling her head back. “We can’t just stand here, so what do you want me to do?”
“I just-”
“They’re gonna make us slaves, Dad!”
They’re words that nobody has dared say, and her voice shakes around them. But she’s sure they’ve all been thinking it. Why else would they have been chased away from their herd and driven across the plains to be branded and locked up here? What else could this be?
“I… I know.” Her dad takes a deep breath, attempting to compose himself. “I know that. That’s why we need to be careful, this is a very dangerous situation, we-”
“There’s nothing careful we can do! We can’t carefully escape, they- you said it yourself, they know what they’re doing! They’re not going to let us just- I dunno- just slip away when they open the door, or whatever you think is going to happen. Either we break out, or… Or we’re taken away to work.”
Charles is silent for a moment, pawing at the concrete under him.”I just… think we should have a plan first.”
Lydia glares at him through the bars for a moment, then turns away with a snort. “Fine. If you want to wait for them to come along and take me off you forever then that’s fine. You can forget about me too.”
She hears his chain clinking as she walks away, standing in the opposite corner of the pen, back turned on him.
“Lydia, I’m not going to let that happen. Whatever they do, they will not take you from me.”
“Yeah, because that’s been going great so far, hasn’t it?”
Before he can respond, they’re both distracted by approaching footsteps. Bipedal footsteps. Lydia hurriedly turns and backs further into the corner as their captors near again, her hindquarters knocking against the metal bars of the fence. The latch scrapes loudly against the gate as it’s pulled back. Lydia feels the adrenaline flood her.
She doesn’t understand a word of what they’re saying. She doesn’t process her dad’s calls. She just knows that they’re here, in the pen with her, spreading out into a line and waving ropes around the way they did during the drive. An attempt to slip past to the left is blocked. Same with the right. A rope hits her back, coming short of snaring her but still startling her as it smacks into her. They’ve surrounded her, trapped her in a corner. So, blinded by panic, she puts her head down and charges.
She knocks the shoulder of one demon, narrowly misses another, and sends up a fresh wave of incomprehensible shouting. Someone grabs her arm as she passes. She screams and manages to wrench herself away, but she’s been still just long enough for a rope to be thrown over her, and then another, tightening around her waist and her neck. She shrieks for her father as she rears up and he bellows back, huge hooves stomping somewhere beyond the demons crowding her. A switch hits her hip with a sharp crack as the ropes are yanked and she stumbles back onto all her hooves, almost going down altogether as pressure on the rope at her neck forces her to bow. Rough hands hold her there by her braids, more tying a cloth tight over her eyes. She reels back as soon as the pressure lets up, shaking her head hard, until she stumbles into the side of her pen with a startling clang of metal. Lydia winces. The ropes are pulled again, trying to tug her forward. The switch stings on her hip.
Blind, disoriented, Lydia hesitantly stretches a foreleg out in front of her, feeling out the ground before setting it down. She’s scared that if she strikes out or struggles she’ll just hit something and get hurt. If she refuses to move at all she’ll be beat. So that only leaves doing what her captors want. Going wherever it is they’re leading her.
“Dad,” she cries. “Dad, they’re taking me!”
“It’s- It’s okay, Pumpkin,” he replies shakily. “I think they’re bringing me too.”
She hears a clinking of chain and a stomp from her dad, and then the crack of the switch. And then she’s being led along behind the sound of his hooves. She goes more or less willingly, wanting to stay with him.
“Did they cover your eyes too?” she asks quietly as they walk.
“Yes.”
“So you don’t know where we’re going?”
“No, but… I have a feeling it’s the same way those horses went.”
“It’s getting louder…”
They’re stopped. Something creaks. And they’re led straight into the noise.
Beetlejuice watches with only the mildest of interest as the draft stallion and his foal are led into the ring. He’s convinced that he’d be great at bidding if Juno would only give him access to the funds, but her constant refusal has made him somewhat bitter to the whole concept.
“Now, the Inferno Boys’ taurs One-Eight-Six-O-Seven-One and One-Eight-Six-O-Seven-Two,” the auctioneer is saying. The stallion is hanging back, the filly pulling forward, trying to close the gap between them. “Don’t let the kid on him fool you, Seven-One here is a stallion. Draft build, hasn’t been measured but I’d eat my hat if he’s not seventeen hands at least. Estimated to be in the late forties, early fifties, got some years in him yet. The foal Seven-Two is around fifteen, will be sold separate, a filly almost for sure sired by Seven-One but out of an unknown dam. Looks to be more of a warmblood than her father but she’s got some feathering on her already. Spirited thing, but she’s a good age to put time into gentling before you start eating into working years.”
He starts the bidding for the stallion first, numbers getting high fast. But Juno is efficient, swiftly winning the bid for first the stallion and then the filly. As soon as the hammer is down she’s shooing Beetlejuice away from the ring, back towards the barn where the centaurs are being led. As always, he’s on babysitting while she keeps an eye on what ends up where. Rolling his eyes, he pushes through the demons milling around the place - it’s mostly demons, maybe a few satyrs, now that they’re done with the regular livestock. Centaurs are a demon business; a human would be laughably easy for an unbroken centaur to kill.
They’re both in the same pen now, the stallion chained to the fence again but the filly loose beside him. Now she’s got the chance she’s pinned to his hip like a baby on its dam, resting her chin on his back, ears pricked and alert. Both flinch at the sound of him leaning against the fence, four ears flicking around to his direction. The stallion whickers something to his foal, and with her tail pressed tight to her hindquarters she quickly retreats to his other side. Hiding behind Daddy. And as ridiculous as it may be to be jealous of a horse, a hint of malice does slip into Beetlejuice’s voice when he tells them to enjoy it while they can.
Juno catches up before long. “He’s hiding her,” she points out, rather redundantly, and then turns to Beetlejuice. “We’ll put her in the cart and tether him behind, he should follow his foal.”
Of course, in this situation, ‘we’ means ‘you’. It’s just Beetlejuice who goes to fetch his horse - just a bog-standard horse, no arms attached - leads her and the cart down to the pen, and lets himself in with a rope ready.
He circles behind the stallion, giving him a wide berth, and the foal’s ears immediately flick towards the sound of his footsteps. She stomps and snorts, and that gets her father’s attention, and he stomps in turn. A warning. Beetlejuice tries to tread quietly as he approaches the filly, but still she rears and shrieks at him when she deems him too close, and once she’s back on all fours he has to stumble forward to grab her by the arm before she can retreat around her father again. Before she can get her bearings he throws the rope over her to catch her around the waist and gives it a hard yank, sending her stumbling out of the stallion’s kicking range. She bucks and shrieks, twisting and thrashing, but Beetlejuice keeps himself at her side and loops the end of the rope behind her to get a better handle on the terrified foal.
“Come on,” he says, adjusting his grip on the ropes. “Don’t waste your energy, kid.”
The foal, as expected, pays no attention.
Great.
It takes a while to persuade the filly to walk to the cart, and another to get her onto it, and another to get her down without too hard an impact to get her ankles bound. Luckily the stallion is much easier, more than happy to follow his daughter’s voice over to the cart to be tethered.
They cart the two of them back to the ranch like that, whickering back and forth again as the stallion plods along after his foal. Every so often she begins thrashing and whinnying, little bursts of rebellion before she falls back into laying still. But the stallion… Well, the stallion, in Beetlejuice’s opinion, is being incredibly stupid.
He could get away, if he wanted. Rip up the board he’s chained to and bolt. Hell, even if they saw him in the process and both went to grab him he probably wouldn’t have much trouble breaking free. Seventeen, eighteen hands at the withers puts him at near ten foot tall overall, with hooves that could probably grind a demon’s physical form down into a fine paste if he felt so inclined. But it’s laughably easy to keep him in line.
The second he tries to tug on his chains, stomping those huge hooves, Juno simply turns to Beetlejuice and orders him to switch the foal.
“Huh?”
“The damned foal! Give it a lick!”
“Alright, alright!” He stands on his seat and steps into the back of the cart, over to the agitated, squirming foal, grabs the switch tucked into the back of his belt, and gives her a sharp crack on the hindquarters.
The stallion freezes when he hears the filly yelp, her lashed hooves scrabbling against the wooden boards in a panic. After a moment he begins tugging on the chain again, trying to grab at his blindfold, but understanding the tactic now Beetlejuice responds with another switch to the foal.
That’s how they continue on. Beetlejuice spends the journey stood over the filly with the switch, and every time there’s a hint of fight from the stallion he’s met with a sharp crack and a yelp from his foal, and that gets him to fall in line quick. There’s not much concern about the filly herself; she isn’t strong enough for much more than squirming in the ropes. And if her father tried to help her, well. Even if his chain was long enough for him to turn, or if he broke it, with his eyes covered a kick at her captor is just as likely to land wrong and cave the kid’s head in as it is to connect right and shatter the demon’s jaw. So the stallion stays in line.
Because of one annoying kid.
They let her up when they reach the ranch, keeping the two of them together right up until the stallion is in a stall. Juno gets a collar on him, and a chain to the back wall, and only then does Beetlejuice haul the confused foal back out into the stable’s corridor.
As expected, the centaurs immediately begin to raise hell. And as expected, Juno makes no effort to help. So Beetlejuice is left wrestling a desperate, thrashing foal in the hallway, trying to stay at her side as she twists and turns, having to summon a few spare limbs to manage her and give her a few hard switches before she finally allows herself to be led down the hall and back out of the building. This garners some attention, of course, centaurs looking up at the sound of a distressed adolescent, but he just focuses on getting her out.
After what feels like an age, they reach the gate of one of the small paddocks behind the stable - a six foot fence around a two foot pit. Beetlejuice retrieves a knife to cut the rope around her wrists, unlocks the latches, and opens the gate just enough to shove her halfway through. She yelps in alarm as she’s forced onto the steep ramp of earth down to the bottom of the pit.
“Go on,” he says, loosening and pulling off the rope around her waist and trying to shove her the rest of the way through the gate. And when she tries to resist, digging her hooves in as she frantically shakes the cut rope from her wrists, he swats at her hindquarters - not a hard hit, but enough to make her scramble away from him with another startled yelp. And before she can get her bearings, he yanks the heavy gate shut and latches it back up.
He pauses for a moment before he walks away. Just for a moment. But that’s all it takes to step up with one foot onto an old overturned milk crate and peek over the fence.
The ropes around the kid’s wrists are off now, and she’s scrabbling to pull the blindfold off and toss it to the floor. She stares back at him once she can with pale blue eyes, the kind that make her rectangular pupils obvious and unsettling to the inexperienced. Right now those eyes are wide and petrified.
“...I’ll be back to give you your dinner, kid,” he tells her.
She doesn’t reply, of course. Doesn’t have a clue what he’s saying. So he doesn’t wait for a response before he walks away from the paddock.
If Lydia was less of a sceptic, she might say the universe has a vendetta against her.
Because first there was Mama. And then there was Dad getting dismissive and distant. And then… All this. The blur of the last few days, being rounded up and driven and dragged away from her one remaining parent every time she managed to fight her way back to him. Demons jeering in a language she can’t understand, whipping her with sticks. The dawning horror of realising she’s been taken captive. The branding and the tag and the rope around her wrists. The unprecedented terror of it all.
And now she’s shut in a tiny pen.
It’s a sunken sparse square of patchy, muddy grass, boxed in by a tall wooden fence, the only real feature of note being the little shelter in the back corner. Lydia fidgets uncomfortably with a hind leg as she anxiously looks around - as if the exhaustion and pain of the walk wasn’t enough, that bastard just had to smack her hip right where he already switched her, and she’s sore. Not to mention the fresh wounds to her pride.
She scrambles unsteadily back over to the gate, forefeet on the slope up to it, feeling almost like she should be limping - the pain in her hip isn’t that bad, but she feels so utterly wretched already that it might as well. She tries to use the slope as a vantage point to look out, but it’s too steep. Rattling the gate doesn’t get her much more than a clattering and clanging of metal latches. Stepping back slightly, she rears up, attempting to catch a glimpse over the fence. She’s unsteady on her gangly foal legs, and can’t hold herself upright for long, but after a few tries and repositionings she manages to catch hold of the top of the fence, and hold herself up to peek over.
Muddy fields. What looks to be the back of a large wooden building. Some round, branching structure she couldn’t begin to identify. Her arms and hind legs are shaking from the effort of holding her up. Lydia takes a deep breath, throws back her head, and lets out a long, keening cry for her father.
No response.
She can’t hold on any more. Lydia drops back to the ground, stumbling slightly, and calls out again - just to make sure.
Nothing. She’s alone.
For the first time ever, she’s completely alone.
Trying to push down her fear, Lydia puts the thought of the gate aside to turn her attention to the fence beside it. A bit above her eye level there’s a little metal basin bolted to a fence post, and then a small trough suspended with rope over the top of the fence, and a net of hay. But none of that looks as though it could help her escape, and so for now she moves on.
A careful, slow - or at least, as slow as she can force herself to be in her panic - assessment of the fence reveals no weaknesses. A second pass yields the same results. Repeated kicks to the gate and fence panels are no help. And so Lydia is left with nothing but those shrieking cries for her dad - a desperate, frightened foal’s scream for a parent to come protect them. She screams and screams, kicking pointlessly at the fence, dashing in tight constricted circles as her flight response kicks into overdrive, and still she’s trapped and isolated.
She yells her throat raw eventually, stood panting in the centre of her pen. She can’t get out and nobody’s coming to help her. She’s a prisoner, again, and doesn’t have the energy anymore to be anything other than miserable about it.
Tired, sore, and hungry, Lydia dejectedly plods over to the net of hay hanging over the fence. She tries to tug it down, but the thing holds firm, and she doesn’t have the energy to wrestle with it right now. So she just settles for tugging a few small handfuls out of the net before trudging over to the little shelter. Two walls are formed by the corner of the fence. The third is horizontal planks with a few sizable gaps between them. The last is entirely spanned by the door, held open by a string hooked over a nail sticking out of the fence. A grown centaur would have trouble turning around in there, and her dad would definitely have to duck to get in. But that doesn’t matter, Lydia reminds herself, because nobody grown needs to fit in here. It’s just her. Just one trapped foal, looking for some small feeling of safety. Alone.
She lays down, too exhausted to stay standing despite instincts calling her to be ready to run. Finding a comfortable position in the sparse straw bedding on the dirt floor proves impossible, so she gives up and sets her little pile of hay beside her head so she can slowly chew on it, barely having the energy to eat but too hungry not to.
She tries not to focus on how eerie she finds the quiet.
She tries to ignore her sore hips and the itching of the brand on her back.
She tries not to think about where her dad might have been taken.
She tries not to imagine what those demons might be planning to do to her.
“...Hey, mum?” Lydia eventually calls quietly into the empty air, her voice hoarse. “If you’re still… around… Please don’t leave me?”
There’s no response. Nothing of the sign she’s been waiting for.
At least there’s nobody there to see her cry.