Chapter Text
“Just sign here.”
For a long, frozen moment, Eurydice stares at the paper. Her mind refuses to grip it, slipping one way with the cold, another with the hunger. She knows, somewhere, dimly, that she shouldn’t. There’s far more words on that page than Hades has given her plainly. She knows the neat script twists around the deal into something she doesn’t see.
But, he’s already asked for her soul, and she’s already agreed. There’s no shape those words could contort into that would have her choose to starve.
Taking the offered pen in numb fingers, Eurydice manages to scrawl out something that could be an E, if you squinted. Hades smiles.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” he says as he carefully folds the contract and tucks it inside his coat. “You won’t feel a thing. I promise.”
He only rests his hand lightly between her shoulders, but it sends a chill down Eurydice’s spine all the same. Her head swims, the fog thickening too fast for her to be alarmed by it. Her knees buckle just as her eyes roll back. Even the cold shock of hitting the snow is dulled.
“Easy, Songbird.” The hand lands on her back again. It feels heavier somehow. Reflexively, she tries to push back against it. She can’t. There’s room for nothing in her head aside from a vague fear. In the bitter snow, Eurydice shuts her eyes tight and curls in on herself. And she keeps on curling. In and in and somewhere in the back of her mind she knows she shouldn’t be able to go this far, but she’s more focused on whatever it is that’s wrapped around her, pinning her limbs against her body.
She lifts her head and opens her eyes, and immediately feels nauseous. Why can she see… so much? Peripheral vision isn’t supposed to wrap around the sides of your head. Still, it helps her identify what it is trapping her. It’s his hand. Hades’ hand is big enough to curl around her whole body and keep her limbs trapped tight against her. She tries to make a sound, to shout or scream or just say something, but all that comes out is a terrified peep. Shrill chirps as she squirms in his grip. The whittering of a frightened songbird.
“Shh, shh. Don’t fret.” Another huge hand looms in her too-much vision, and then she tenses as he delicately pets her head with a finger.
“You make a pretty little canary, don’t you?”
Eurydice feels sick, though she’s not sure she’d even be able to follow through on that anymore. She can feel her heart thrumming against her ribs, ribs that she realises - like all her bones - are now thin and delicate and liable to be crushed if Hades just tightened his grip a little. She’s tiny. Tiny and fragile and barely able to fidget in the god’s hand.
“Now hold still. I need to make sure you aren’t going to try anything stupid.”
She tries to do as he says as she’s shuffled about in his grip, realising that disobeying the god she just signed her soul to could only make things worse, but it’s a struggle not to panic. He’s got her on her back now. With his free hand, Hades gently pulls what her brain still registers as an arm away from her side. In the newly-extended corner of her eye, Eurydice can see that what he’s holding is in fact a wing, poppy-red and laced with black and grey. He holds his forefinger across her shoulder to keep it stuck like that, thumb over her doing the same, all uncomfortably snug around her neck. It’s not pleasant to realise that he can keep her trapped and force a limb out just holding her lightly in one hand. But she’s quickly distracted from that by watching him reach for an inner pocket. What he pulls out is a neat, ornate pair of small scissors. And despite what she signed, Eurydice squirms and chirps, once again reminded of how small and fragile she is. That small pair of scissors looks big enough for an execution.
“You won’t feel a thing,” he says again, holding her just a little tighter. It’s enough to make her tense.
“Good girl.”
As Eurydice watches, he brings those neat little scissors to her wing and begins neatly trimming off feathers. She trembles in his grip. He’s not just made her a tiny, fragile bird. He’s making her a flightless one. Feathers flutter to the ground, and then she’s reshuffled onto her front so he can clip the other one. Once there’s a satisfactorily large gap in her wing, Hades loosens his grip and lets her tuck it back in against her side. She huddles there in his hand, waiting miserably for whatever he’s going to do to her next.
“Relax, Songbird,” he says, petting her head with his thumb as he puts the scissors away. “Relax.” His thumb strokes downwards, all the way along her spine. A chill that has nothing to do with the weather wracks her body. She squirms uncomfortably in his grip. His chuckle sounds like thunder. And then, before she knows what’s happening, he’s stood up and tucked her into his coat pocket.
It’s dark, being face-down in a pocket. Eurydice hesitantly flexes her limbs, wanting to get herself out of the uncomfortable position she’s been put in but not sure how to negotiate moving her new body to do so. Being swung back and forth with Hades’ stride doesn’t help. She can hear footsteps crunching in the snow, the whistle of the wind. And then, what she realises with a pang of dread is the sound of a train car’s door opening. Steps on a wooden floor, shuffling and clattering as the god arranges something. She chirps in alarm as he reaches back into the pocket and picks her up again, not giving her time to see where she’s going before she’s been set down and the sound of wood hitting wood rings loud in her ears. Not knowing how to even get her legs under her, she remains as a small lump of red feathers as she tries to figure out what she’s trapped in now. There’s wooden bars wherever she looks.
“Now, you have a nice long train ride’s time to gain a little coordination,” Hades says, his face looming large above the cage. “I’ll see you down below, Songbird.”
And then he turns, and the train car shakes with the slam of the door. Eurydice is left in the glow of a lantern hanging from the ceiling. A whistle blows somewhere outside, and with a jerk the train starts moving.
She’s going down.
For a while, Eurydice remains huddled on the floor of the cage, eyes shut tight. It’s warm in the train car - or at least, not notably cold - and she just wants to enjoy that for a little before she has to face what she did to earn it. But there’s only so long she can put it off. Her head feels like it weighs a ton when she lifts it to look about.
Even with how big everything is now, the wooden cage manages to be tiny. Just about as wide as Eurydice is long, and only a little bigger in the other direction, made all the more cramped with the wooden trough at one end and the little ceramic pot in the corner of another. There’s a beam across the cage in front of each, presumably meant for perching on. And then, past the bars, it looks like she’s been stowed with an assortment of other cargo, her cage sitting on top of a crate. It’s almost making her dizzy, being able to see three sides of the space at once. She wouldn’t be surprised if she arrived in Hadestown with a splitting headache.
But thinking about her arrival - he said to gain some coordination, Eurydice reminds herself. That probably means getting herself on her feet. And besides, that wooden trough has her attention. She wants to know if she’s been left with anything to eat.
Tucking her wings to her sides again, Eurydice focuses on just getting a foot flat against the floor. It feels almost as wrong as her vision. Her foot is just toes, what she knows used to be an ankle is now some sort of... backwards knee? But no, she still has a knee, she can feel her knees. Her ankles just aren’t a part of her feet anymore, it seems. But her foot is on the floor, that’s the main thing. Two feet on the floor. She counts herself in to stand, feeling rather pathetic that she has to, but it works. She’s standing, and she feels incredibly stupid doing it. Her brain still hasn’t caught up to recent changes, it seems, because it still feels like she’s crouching on her toes with her arms tucked in against her sides. She can only hope that will pass. It must pass. How long that will take isn’t something she wants to think about.
But in any case, she’s on her feet now. The perches are about chin height, so she rests her chin on the one in front of the trough to look. Birdseed. She’s been fed, at least. She just needs to figure out how to get up onto the perch to get at it. It looks too high to jump unassisted, and even if she knew how to use her wings there’s no room to spread them - assuming she even has enough unclipped feathers to give herself a boost. No, she’s going to have to climb. The lowest horizontal bar in the cage wall is what the perches are resting on, there’s nothing below she can use as a step. But, she could get her leg up pretty far as a human. Just gotta hope that carried over.
Turning so the perch is to her side, Eurydice tries to dig her toes into the floor as she leans away from it, hesitantly lifting her other foot. For a moment she stands there on one leg, stretching and waving her foot around, until finally her little claws clatter against the perch. Gripping it is a whole new oddity, but her toes close around the beam. She bounces on one leg a couple of times, readying herself, and then finally tries to pull herself up. It’s a bit of a struggle, claws scrabbling on wood and wings flapping, but within a handful of attempts she’s up on the perch. It takes a bit of getting used to. She’s gripping onto something - actually fully holding it - with her feet. It feels far too easy to balance.
The next question is how to go about eating birdseed. She experimentally flexes her beak, testing it out. Has she ever seen a bird chew, she tries to recall. She’s fairly sure the answer is no. The seeds do look small enough to swallow whole. So she tightens her grip, dips her head, and carefully picks one out of the trough. Straightening up and tipping her head back, she manages to swallow. It’s slow going, but she manages to eat. For the first time since she can remember, she eats as much as she wants and has plenty left. Sitting back on her perch and shutting her eyes, she tries to appreciate that for a moment.
“Was it worth it?”
She cracks open an eye, looking up at the fate sitting beside her cage.
“You left him. You sold yourself.”
“You’re an animal.”
“Tiny, can’t speak, locked in a cage… For birdseed.”
She tries to respond - “What else could I have done?” - but all that comes out is chirping. They grin.
“You know why miners keep canaries, don’t you?”
“Those tiny little lungs of yours will fill with poison far quicker than a man’s.”
“How much do you know about carbon monoxide, little birdy? ‘Cause you’re about to learn a lot more.”
Eurydice shakes out her wings, agitated. “You talked me into this.”
Again, they smile. Eurydice crouches lower on her perch. That felt like a lie. She’s never quite sure, with the fates. Have they ever told her anything she doesn’t already know? Anything she hasn’t already thought?
He won’t use her for the mines, she tells herself, finding the possibility of her being gassed to death far more palatable a subject to dwell on. Why would he waste a soul on that? Surely he can source regular canaries. And he shouldn’t care about her coordination if he’s just going to send her to her death. So, if not for the mines, then why? She remembers the way he spoke to her in that blizzard, the way she felt his eyes on her through those dark glasses. The chill that went through her when he ran his thumb down her spine. One so pretty and young, he said. She thought she’d known what his intentions were then, and she’d been desperate enough to take that deal. But as a bird?
“Maybe you’re just something pretty to look at. Maybe that’s all you’ll ever be.”
After a long moment looking down at her birdseed, Eurydice turns and hops down onto the cage floor. The space under her trough is just big enough for a canary to tuck herself into, a miserable lump of feathers once again.
It doesn’t take her long to learn that canaries can’t cry.
By the time the train screeches to a halt, Eurydice is up on the perch by the ceramic water pot. The fates left her to her misery long ago. She has no idea how long it’s been. Could’ve been hours. Could’ve been days. She did fall asleep a few times, clinging to one perch or the other. Just another odd new feeling.
She stays quiet and tense in her cage as the boxcar door is dragged open and people file in. She’d almost forgotten how tiny she is, but looking up at the station workers she has to resist the urge to scurry under her seed trough again. Without as much as a word passing between them they begin unloading cargo, and it’s not long until it’s Eurydice’s turn. The man barely glances at her, just looks at the card label tied to the handle on top of the cage, and then she’s grabbed up and carried off the train.
Eurydice didn’t know quite what she was expecting of Hadestown, but such blinding brightness in the underworld in winter is a shock. Brightness and heat and noise. She squints, holding her wings a little away from her body, hoping it’ll keep her cooler. It’s all a blur as she’s carried through the city, swinging slightly in the worker’s hand. And then there’s the clanging of metal stairs underfoot. They’re faced with a green door. She’s got a bad feeling about that door.
The man knocks.
The door opens, and once again Eurydice finds herself being towered over by the form of Hades. Her wings reflexively flap against the bars at the jerk of the worker holding out her cage, her grip tightening on the perch. Hades takes the little box, holding it up to eye level. Eurydice tenses, staring back at him. Without a word to the worker, he turns and steps back into the office, closing the door behind him. Eurydice doesn’t loosen up her grip on the perch until she’s been set down on the desk.
“Pleasant journey?” the god asks with a smile as he unties the tag from the cage handle.
No, I’ve been sitting in a tiny cage for gods know how long. But even if she could still speak, Eurydice knows that would be a stupid thing to say. She huddles on her perch, staring silently up at him. He tuts.
“Nothing to say, songbird? You know, there isn’t much use in a canary that won’t sing.”
A chill wracks Eurydice’s body, all the fates’ words about mineshafts and carbon monoxide flooding back into her brain. She’s going to die here. She’s going to choke to death in the dark with her tiny lungs full of poison. Hades chuckles.
“No need to look so frightened, girl. You aren’t being sent to the mines, if that’s what you’re thinking. No need to waste a pretty little soul on a gas detector.”
So an ornament, then. That’s better than dying, but she can’t bring herself to be too happy about it.
“You see, as much as I do for her, the Lady Persephone misses her summers. Her sunlight, her flowers, her birdsong. You are here for her. And I will not give my wife a subpar gift. So you will learn to sing, and you will learn quickly.”
Eurydice shuffles from foot to foot, her heart thrumming in her chest. Hades is staring down at her expectantly. She opens her beak, but nothing comes out. She can’t sing. She doesn’t know how to sing.
“Come on, girl. Didn’t your poet sing you any pretty little songs?”
Eurydice hunches into herself. He did, of course he did, but she’s not sure what would happen if a little bird sang the forgotten song of a god-king’s love to his face. She wracks her brain, searching for something else, anything else. That can’t have been all he ever sang.
“I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
She ruffles her wings, letting out a single nervous peep. She blinks.
Everything comes out of her mouth as peeps and chirps. As birdsong. It doesn’t have to be something he sang.
Hades steps closer, opening his mouth for another admonishment, but Eurydice gets there first.
“Come home with me - who are you - the man who’s gonna marry you…”
The old conversation from last winter comes out as a twittering little tune. Above her, the god smiles.
“Good girl.”
Before Eurydice has time to be relieved, the cage door is scraping open. She’d almost forgotten how big hands are. She shuts her eyes and tenses, forcing herself to stay still and let him pin her wings to her sides and pluck her off her perch. He holds her on her back again, his thumb on her chest enough to pin her down. Something rattles. Eurydice opens her eyes just in time to see him picking up a fine silver chain. A fine silver chain linked to the tiny silver ring that he fastens around her ankle. He sticks out a finger once it’s clamped in place, and holds her over it until she manages to grab on. She doesn’t want to perch on his hand, far from it, but she doesn’t see much choice. The silver ring is cold and hard around her ankle. She has to resist the urge to fidget, if only to find a more comfortable way for it to sit on her foot.
“Don’t look so sad, songbird. I’ll be keeping up my end of the deal. You’ll be warm and fed, and all you have to give in return is a few songs. You made the right choice, you’ll see that soon enough.”
With Eurydice perched on one hand and the little wooden cage in the other, Hades steps away from the desk. Eurydice tightens her grip as they leave the room. His finger is thicker than the perches in her cage, and she doesn’t feel as secure being unable to get her toes all the way around it. But she isn’t carried for long; he pushes a door open with his shoulder, and then they’re out on a balcony. There’s Persephone, sat at a small table, arranging game pieces.
“What took you so- oh, who’s this?”
She stands, stepping closer. And with a glance up at Hades and a nervous shuffle of her wings, Eurydice recites something that seems fitting.
“To the patroness of all of this - Persephone…”
“For you, lover. I know you miss the little creatures.”
Persephone reaches out a hand, holding out her palm for Eurydice to step onto. She does so, wobbly as she is, and promptly sits down before she can fall.
“Well, aren’t you a sweet little thing?”
Eurydice trusts Persephone, as much as a wary mortal could trust a god. But looking up at her now, she’s back to that first summer day on the road to hell, and the Lady of Ways and Means is larger than life and unknown and unpredictable. She can’t help a slight flinch when the goddess strokes her head with the little finger of her other hand, but still feeling Hades’ eyes on her she chirps out a few more lines of the toast. Hades sets her cage on the table as she sings, looping the end of her chain around the handle. Persephone glances at it, and frowns.
“Oh, Hades, how long did you have it in that thing? It’s tiny.”
“Only for the way down, lover. I’ll have a bigger cage brought to the apartment.”
The frown hardens slightly. “Birds don’t belong in cages.”
She gently nudges Eurydice to stand, so she can examine the silver ring around her ankle.
“I know, lover, I know, but a little thing like her would only get hurt if she got out into the city. The cage and the chain are only to keep her safe.”
Persephone pets her head again, which Eurydice takes as permission to sit back down.
“She’s a female?”
“Yes.”
She sits down, and Eurydice very nearly digs her claws into the flesh of her palm in her fear of falling off her hand.
“She’s a sweet little thing,” she says again. The lack of an explicit thank you hangs heavy over Eurydice’s head. Glancing again at Hades, she tries something she heard from the goddess herself.
“You take what you can get - and you make the most of it.”
Persephone lays the hand she’s sat on on the tabletop, gently nudging her to hop off. Eurydice hesitantly clambers down onto the tabletop. But still under Hades’ eye, she doesn’t dare move away. She has to keep on being a sweet little pet.
For what must be hours, Eurydice sits by Persephone’s hands as the gods move dominoes around and chirps out whatever she can think of. She only dares to move for water. It’s terrifying the first time she does it, Hades’ eyes burning in her overlong peripheral vision as she tries to scurry across the table on legs that still feel jointed wrong, the chain threatening to trip her at every step, just to get there and find the cage is shut. She pauses for a moment, and then tries to tap at her water pot through the bars. Persephone reaches over and opens the door for her. Eurydice slowly, carefully climbs in, and then up onto the perch in front of the water.
“Is she hurt?” Persephone asks, which Eurydice takes as a less than favourable review of that coordination she was told to gain.
“Just a little stiff from the train ride, I assume.”
“I suppose that is what happens when you shut an animal in a little box.”
Eurydice resolves to keep her wings tight to her sides. The tension is already making her nervous, she doesn’t want to know what will happen if Persephone realises he clipped her wings. She just gulps down some water, clambers back out of the cage, and goes back to being a pretty little songbird.