Chapter Text
The blade finds its unerring mark in Vegas's chest. He chokes, crumples to the floor.
Time slows. The shock of the impact floods through him, but he doesn't feel much of anything else until a slow, pervasive heat starts to consume him from within. He feels the floor give underneath, dissolve into a viscous blood — and he sinks into the Underworld's inevitable embrace.
When he surfaces in the blood pool, coughing and sputtering, the taste of iron is thick in his mouth. He thrashes towards the golden stairs leading up into the House, grasps at the edges of one of the steps and rests his head there as he catches his breath. He waits for the horror running through his veins to subside, then steels himself — pushes himself out of the pool.
The blood pool is at one end of a large, looming hallway, slathered in gold and encrusted with massive gemstones. The harsh shine and glitter mock him as he begins his slow march down the hall, dripping blood and chunks of viscera onto the thick carpet leading straight to his father’s hulking throne. Vegas knows the hall is designed this way to make the newly-deceased human shades feel small and subservient. He wishes it didn’t work so well on him, too.
He stops at the foot of the throne. The shades part way to encircle him from a safe distance, paying heed to his impending humiliation.
“Foolish boy,” Gun says.
Vegas remains silent. There is nothing for him to say.
In the blink of an eye, his father appears directly in front of him, backhands him so hard that he crashes bodily into the west wall.
The pain is blinding, but he’s used to this now in a way he wasn’t before. So he breathes through it, forces his eyes open as he senses the shades scattering away in fear. His father stalks towards him, casting his shadow over Vegas’s sprawled body.
Gun sneers. “I told you nobody gets out of here.”
Vegas is the Prince of the Underworld, the heir to all things death and rot and bone. The heir to a repugnant, most undesirable throne.
Not a good heir, either. Vegas has never known anything but the Underworld, and so he is intimately familiar with its ways, from the bureaucracy needed to manage the countless shades of dead human souls, to the cruelty of torturing them for eternity — and everything in between. But for all of his knowledge and skill, he blunders. He fails his father, again and again, and his father has never been one to hold back his displeasure.
Vegas has tried so hard to be a faithful son. But if his father wants him gone from his sight so badly, he’ll go. If there is a way out, if there is somewhere else for him and Macau to go, he’ll find it — no matter how many deaths he has to face to get there.
Macau scrubs at the last of the blood in Vegas’s hair, cloth coming away stained dark, worry writ clear on his face.
“Why did you do that,” he says quietly.
Vegas wishes that Macau had not needed to bear witness to their father’s violence. But Macau was stationed at the entry hallway, tasked with greeting and taking record of new shades, and so was positioned perfectly for a front row view. He didn’t make a sound when Vegas had taken the hit — but he did pick Vegas up from the floor, helped Vegas limp towards their chambers.
Vegas watches as Macau wraps some ice in a fresh cloth, presses it to Vegas’s cheek. Though the blood of the Underworld drags Vegas back to his prison, it heals him too, stitches together his wounds until he appears untouched. The only wound left now is the one their father so kindly bequeathed to him.
“I was trying to get out,” Vegas says, just as quietly.
Macau’s face flashes through a kaleidoscope of expressions, too fast for Vegas to catalog any of them — and then he goes blank. “There’s no way out,” he says.
Vegas drops his voice, almost to a whisper. “I think there is.”
And so Vegas tells him about the papers that he found late one night, tucked deep into his father’s desk. Papers that tell tale of a woman who used to reside in the Underworld, a woman who his father was, by all accounts, obsessed with. A woman who left him. A woman who escaped, and never came back.
Vegas’s mother is gone. Vegas does not think this woman is his mother, though he selfishly, stupidly hopes for it. The only thing he wants more than his mother to be safe and waiting up above is for there to be an escape in the first place.
“You’re sure?” Macau says, after a long pause.
Vegas shakes his head.
“But it’s the only way to find out.” Macau chews on the edge of his mouth. “I’ll come with you.”
“No,” Vegas says.
Macau’s face floods with hurt. “You want to go alone?”
“No,” Vegas says, more hastily this time, hands gripping Macau’s shoulders. “When I find the way out, I’m coming back for you. We’ll leave together.”
“If I come with you, you won’t have to double back,” Macau says, frustration lacing his tone.
Vegas shakes his head again. “It’s too dangerous right now. I can’t make it very far without dying. And you can’t fight.” And I can’t watch you die.
Macau glares at him, unable to argue the point but unwilling to concede either. “Then let me help you rest,” he says.
Vegas closes his eyes, forces the tension from his body. Macau always saves the best dreams for him. The dreams are wonderful — so wonderful that, upon waking, the gnawing void they leave behind is sometimes too much to bear.
“Maybe later,” Vegas says. He smiles crookedly, ruffling his hand in Macau’s hair. “I’m going to give it another shot.”
Tartarus is not new to Vegas. He has spent many days inflicting the most precise of tortures on its residents. Many of the shades housed there could be kept in eternal suffering with a regular beating, or with any number of impossible tasks. His father liked to save Vegas for the ones that required a more… innovative hand.
Vegas has never had to traverse Tartarus like this, though. There used to be a gateway in one of the administrative rooms that would lead straight to the chamber of Tartarus that Vegas had been summoned to. One of the wretched old shades working there would man the controls for the gateway, ensuring Vegas would end up exactly where he needed to and nowhere else.
Once Vegas began to try his hand at escape, his father ordered the gateway sealed. This complicated Vegas’s goal. But it also served as proof that there was something out there that his father might not want him to find — something worth finding.
So Vegas leaps off of the balcony of his chambers into the sickly green darkness below, and starts to run.
He brandishes his sword, the one named for him, and slices into shade after shade — corrupted beyond belief by their unending stays in Tartarus, reduced to masses of rage and hatred. The shades fling shrieking orbs his way, and he twists and turns to dodge through them before slamming his sword into the ground, obliterating everything close by.
He pauses after clearing each chamber, hisses at the sting of his newly minted wounds and the aching in his muscles. He readjusts his grip and moves on.
The layout of the maze of chambers is never the same twice, although he can feel, somehow, that he gets further and further from the House every time. And he’s proven right when he reaches a curiously ornate door he’s never seen before. He wipes the sweat from his brow, excitement beating in his chest.
When he opens the door, a Fury is waiting for him.
He’s fucked. He can’t get out of range of her whip, can’t get within range of her to take her down. He curses his sword. He’s not fast enough with it, not comfortable enough with getting up close and personal with his sparring partners to know how to use it effectively in circumstances like this. He tries though — fights till he feels the whip lash into his back and lay him out on the floor.
He lingers in the blood pool, lets the blood finish searing his wounds shut before dragging himself back into the House. This time, his father doesn’t even deign to look at him.
It hurts. The shame of his own incompetence threatens to rip him apart. It would, if he weren’t so accustomed to choking the feeling down.
But the shame evaporates as he walks onto his balcony and finds a cloth bundle waiting for him.
He looks around furtively, but nothing seems out of place. No shadows lurking in the corners. Just the mysterious bundle, emanating an aura that sings to him. He unwraps it slowly, then breaks out into a wild grin. He pulls out the most beautiful, sleek bow — rubs at the smooth bow string between his forefingers — knows deep in his bones that this will take him much further than he’s ever been before.
Father has taken to assigning him far more than his normal workload, thoroughly disregarding all of the time Vegas is losing to his escape attempts. It’s smart of him. Vegas knows the consequences of disobeying his father. So he pulls double duty half the time, gets walloped for the other half, and has no time left to rest.
It’s not all bad, though.
Vegas is in charge of resource management for the three realms of the Underworld. He keeps track of shade counts, orders realm repairs and expansions, sources the necessary raw materials. Sometimes, he spends his entire shift frowning away at the accounting books, but mostly he delegates paperwork. This gives him some leeway to rest his muscles, to reflect on his tactical strategy and refine it.
He starts keeping careful track of every detail related to his escape attempts — chambers he’s seen, types of shades he’s fought. Most importantly, there’s been a new variable to account for: the gods he meets along the way.
The Olympians have found out about him. Somehow.
When Vegas had first seen the sphere of light appear in front of him, crackling in a blinding golden-yellow, his instincts had screamed danger. There’s only one god notorious for lightning manipulation—
“Nephew,” a voice had emanated from the sphere. Steady, firm, arresting. “We’ve received word of your, ah, escapades.”
—and Vegas has spent his entire life hearing the worst slander against him.
Your spineless, backstabbing uncle, Gun had spat at Vegas, an overturned desk lying in shambles between them. I should have left him to rot in chains with our dearly beloved father. Do you know, he stole my throne. My birthright. Doesn’t lift a single finger in service of it either, toys with his humans all day and leaves the hard work of dealing with their festering corpses to me.
“Your father has always been… shortsighted, shall we say,” Korn had continued. “I suspect you are not the same. If you manage to make your way up here, little nephew, you and I might find we have more similarities than differences.”
Korn had given him an offer Vegas could not possibly turn down: power. Boons that only lasted until the blood inevitably swept him away again, but that gave him sparks springing from his fingertips, surging through his arrows to incinerate his enemies mercilessly.
Vegas needs the power. But he knows better than to blindly trust Korn, who has not once made an effort to reach out to him before. So he accepts the Boons, thanks him profusely, and takes care to promise nothing in return.
Since then, various Olympians have crossed paths with him and offered their kind services. Vegas accepts them all at first. But some gods are not nearly as useful as others, and Vegas knows he should choose his Boons more carefully. So he jots everything down, pores over his stack of notes in his spare time at work, tries to divine exactly which Boons will take him further.
It’s nearing the end of his shift. Most of the other shades have left; only two have remained to prepare the last set of today’s scrolls for archival. As he scribbles down his ideas for his next escape attempt, one of the shades approaches him.
“Lord Prince,” she says cautiously. “We’ve noticed your personal record-keeping.”
Vegas stills.
She glances at the other shade for just a moment. “We wanted to… offer our aid. We could organize your records for you, store them here in secret. If it so pleases you.”
Vegas stares at her. He’s familiar with these two shades. They’re good workers. Efficient, diligent. Not particularly subservient — not like the older shades, who are thousands of years into their terms of service and simpering at his father’s feet. Vegas had not thought to associate the younger shades’ behavior with potential subservience to him.
“We would be happy to do this for you, Lord Prince,” the other shade pipes up, eyes bright in an otherwise cloaked, shadowy face.
Vegas looks between them, then down at his haphazard stack of scrolls, half-sliding off the desk. He swallows. “I would appreciate it,” he says hoarsely.
When he returns to his chambers, he goes to stand on his balcony, gazing at the gloomy view of Tartarus down below. He had assumed all the shades in the House to be fully in contempt for him, if only for the wreckage he causes regularly. The cost of repairs for Tartarus keeps going up, thanks to him.
But some of the shades are choosing to throw their support behind him. Father will not not treat them lightly if they are discovered.
He holds their faith close, breathes it in through his lungs. His senses sharpen to a focus. He jumps. He runs.
The bow has required adjustment on his part. He's changed his positioning, now that he can maintain a distance from his enemies, and he's had to be more careful about watching his back. But he conserves energy this way, and it markedly increases his endurance over the course of each run.
And his aim is true — just like it’s always been. Just like it was when his mother was crouching next to him in his youth, patiently correcting his stance, laying a hand on his back as a reminder to keep it upright.
He can still feel his mother’s phantom touch there, right between his shoulder blades, before he looses every arrow.
The next time he makes it to the Fury, he doesn’t take her down. But he gets close — close enough to see the fear flash in her eyes. The attempt after that, he fells her.
The blood wells from below to take her away, and he watches with morbid fascination. He’s never seen the blood come for someone who wasn't him — perhaps because he's never slayed another immortal.
Her gaze is half-fixed on him, the other half of her face submerged. “If you won’t spare me the humiliation of trouncing me,” she snarls, “then you’d better go all the way to make up for it.”
All the way, Vegas mouths in shock as she sinks into the floor. He thuds down to his knees, knuckles his hands into his thighs. All the way.
The hope burns.
Before he opens the door — the final door of Tartarus, hopefully — he nicks his thumb with the head of an arrow, smears the blood in a harsh red slash across the door. No matter what lies ahead, he’s left his mark here.
He pries open the door and sees a long set of stairs going up — feels a haze of heat slam into him. A vicious grin spreads across his face. He steps through, determined to go as far as he possibly can, blood pounding in his ears.
Of course, given his luck, he dies a mere handful of minutes later.
Asphodel is a flaming nightmare.
Vegas knows that Asphodel is in disarray. It gets the least upkeep; Elysium siphons the most resources due to its unnecessary extravagance, and Tartarus requires constant maintenance to keep its captives imprisoned and unhappy. But Vegas was not expecting Asphodel to be flooded with lava.
“Why wasn’t I informed of this,” he announces sternly during his next shift in the administrative room.
The shades tremble at him. “Lord Prince,” a querulous old shade says, “we have not had spare funds to address the issue since you began ransacking our realms-”
“Are you implying that Asphodel hasn’t been swimming in lava for years?” Vegas says incredulously. “Did the lava perhaps appear overnight?”
The shade shuts his mouth.
Vegas eventually gets reluctant consensus to reallocate some of the funds set aside for Tartarus, uses it to start off the excruciating process of blocking the flow of lava into Asphodel. It doesn’t change a single thing for his runs, though.
“We’ve seen molten steel before,” he says to Macau. They’re sitting on Macau’s balcony, legs fitted through the rails and dangling over the abyss below. “But molten rock… I don’t know whether it’s that there’s so much of it up there. It moves strangely. It’s hypnotic.”
“Woah,” Macau says wonderingly.
Vegas smiles. “The heat is unlike anything we’ve ever felt down here. It presses down on you. It makes you unable to think properly, and the sweat won’t stop dripping into your eyes, and then when you’re closer to the lava, it feels like it’s searing your skin. It’s terrible.”
“I bet you could push the shades right into the lava though,” Macau says, a little too excitedly, “and then they’d sink into the lava and dissolve.”
“Not quite,” Vegas says. “They don’t sink. The lava is too heavy.” He makes a stuttering motion with his hand. “They just sort of — skid across it.”
Vegas finds he can skid across it, too, if he’s fast enough. It hurts, of course. His hands and feet always need a longer soak in the blood pool to heal all the burns, and the pain is sickening as the burnt nerves start to reform. He does try to evade the lava — though it's not always possible. As much as he enjoys propelling shades into the lava, they seem to enjoy inflicting the same fate onto him.
And then on one run he gets pushed out, gets hit by one too many blasts, falls face-first onto the lava and blacks out.
He comes to, and he’s screaming, writhing, the pain lighting up the entire front of his body. He dimly senses Macau holding him down in the blood pool, shouting something at him, he doesn’t know. The pain is too overwhelming. He wants to claw his face off. He passes out again.
When he wakes up proper, he’s in his bed, and Macau has his head lying on top of Vegas’s chest, and Macau is crying.
“Don’t do that again,” he sobs, “please.”
Vegas lifts a shaky hand, still prickling hot with pain, and rests it on Macau’s head. “I’m sorry,” he rasps.
“I’ve never heard you scream like that,” Macau says faintly.
Vegas buries his hand in Macau’s hair, scratches at Macau’s scalp clumsily. You've never seen me in pain like that, he doesn’t say. The thought instills a sudden, breathless fear in him. Every time he thinks he’s reached his absolute threshold for pain, the Underworld proves him wrong in some newly awful way.
The last thing he wants is for Macau to be waiting for him during each of his runs, alone, sick with worry. He can’t even give Macau that peace of mind.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
Macau’s gaze is fixed on him. “You need to be more careful. You need to rest. When’s the last time you rested?”
Vegas cannot answer this question without hanging himself.
“You’re on bedrest until I say so,” Macau says. “I will sit on top of you if I have to.”
“I have to work,” Vegas says weakly.
“Then you’ll go work, and then you’ll come back here.”
Macau’s face is stubborn-set, and Vegas doesn’t have the heart to force his hand. He brushes the hair off of Macau’s forehead. “As you say, little brother.”
Macau extinguishes the candles, takes care to leave one to fill the room with a soft glow. He huddles under the sheets and plasters himself to Vegas’s side — tells Vegas that he’s going to give Vegas a dream, and Vegas will not say no.
The dream is of their childhood. More so Macau’s than his, but Vegas had still felt the giddiness of childhood then, when he had a little playmate who would cling to him and follow him everywhere. Their mother is there with them. Macau does not recall their mother well, so he always draws from Vegas’s memories of her. Vegas drinks in the sight of her greedily.
There’s something missing, though — something on the edges of the dream, something that Vegas cannot quite grasp without it slipping through his fingers like smoke. But then the Macau in the dream grins gummily at him, and he lets his mind go.
When he wakes up, Macau drooling away on his arm, he tries not to let the longing overwhelm him. They can never go back to that time. But maybe, up there on the surface, they can find a similar sort of happiness again.
Vegas tones down the recklessness, takes special care to avoid the lava at all costs. It does wonders for his lifespan.
So does the fact that he’s learning to haggle better with the gods.
“We’re just waiting for you to get your ass up here, man,” a voice proclaims from the lurid violet sphere suspended in front of him, “and then we’ll get you so plastered, you haven’t been properly wasted until you’ve tried some of the good stuff from here.”
“Thanks, Porsche,” Vegas says, thoroughly unimpressed. As if any liquor from Olympus could be stronger than the swill they brew downstairs, no matter what the God of Wine himself says. He’s sure the Olympians aren’t quite so desperate for self-medication.
“So I thought we could switch it up today,” Porsche says. “I can give you that thing I did last time, where your arrows also give your enemies the worst hangovers of their lives, or—”
“I think I’d like your stash of trip shots,” Vegas interrupts.
“Uhhh.”
Vegas sighs. “The little bombs? That explode into clouds of fumes?”
“Oh,” Porsche says. “Trip like, tripping, not — yeah, man, coming right up.”
Porsche doesn’t require all that much haggling. It’s half the reason Vegas likes him.
The other half is because Vegas can now walk into every new chamber and lob a bunch of tiny bombs into the air, each exploding with a vapor so potent that all of the shades nearby go dizzy for a few seconds — just long enough for Vegas to sink an arrow or two into their eye sockets. It’s one of his favorite Boons, right behind Korn’s shock-laced arrows.
He’s established a pattern for himself: lob, shoot, dart away before a shade hits him with one of their own bombs. Lob again, shoot some more, make sure not to sprint too close to the lava, end up dangerously close to the lava anyway and make haste in the opposite direction. Rinse and repeat. It’s not a glamorous strategy, but it works. Plus, the electric shocks and the wine fumes paired together are comically debilitating.
Vegas wouldn’t have expected either of those Boons to work against the shades made of bone and little else, but he’s happy to prove himself wrong.
The skeletal Hydra that bursts out of the lava in the final chamber of Asphodel is startling, but not a total surprise. Vegas remembers when the Hydra was housed down in Tartarus, had to process the paperwork for its relocation to Asphodel with little understanding as to why. Apparently his father had thought it more useful here to deter shades from trespassing into Elysium.
The six additional Hydra heads that pop out after aren’t a surprise, either, though they are infuriating. Vegas has nowhere safe to stand. But the searing pain of the lava is more familiar than it used to be, and the smaller heads really are quite stupid, and Porsche’s little trip shots muddle them completely. Much to his total surprise, he defeats them on his first try.
He leaves his mark of blood on the exit, a foreign sense of pride bubbling within him.
He should have accepted Asphodel for the gift that it was. Elysium, at its pleasantly soothing temperature, makes his blood boil.
It’s beautiful, of course. Vegas has heard that Elysium is designed to look like the most lush regions of the surface, and at first he is struck dumb by all of the flora, by the soft pleasing hues of blue and green. And then he meets their denizens in combat.
Elysium is the realm set aside for human heroes. It is the glorious reward they reap for their bravery and skill — and ego, apparently. It would be humiliating enough for these battle-bred shades to simply trounce him. But they sneer at him as they shove their spears into him, spit on his corpse as the blood pulls him down. The rage roils under Vegas's skin, makes his footing unsteady and his aim go awry, and he cannot control it. He never makes it very far before getting skewered.
They are his vassals. He is their prince. He should not be inferior to them.
He wipes a mix of sweat and blood off of his forehead as he pants for air. He bends to the ground to pick up his bow, head swimming from exhaustion, and trudges to the door to push it open—
Immediately, he can tell something is different about this room. The air is hazy, almost tinted grey. Vegas squints at the corners of the chamber, wary of what might emerge from the shadows.
Then he hears the sound of a gong emanate through the chamber, and he falters mid-step.
A cloud of black smoke erupts in front of him and reveals a man floating in its midst, swathed in purplish-grey cloth, adorned round the neck and forearms with armor tinted a dull, cool gold, brandishing an eerie scythe behind him.
“Vegas,” the man says quietly.
Vegas stands there for too long, the silence ringing in his ears, before he puts on his most derisive smile. “Pete.”
Pete says nothing. Good. Pete should have nothing worth saying.
Vegas shifts his stance. This fight — this is one Vegas cannot win, not by skill alone.
“So this is how far you’ll go to do my father’s bidding,” he snarls, “you useless dog.”
A muscle twitches in Pete’s face.
“Well?” Vegas continues, readying his bow. “Aren’t you excited to finally lower me into my grave? A first for you, since you’ve never had the chance to do it with your bare hands.”
Hurt bleeds into Pete’s face, and Vegas tells himself that’s what he wanted to see.
“If you think that’s why I’m here,” Pete says eventually, “then you’re a fool.”
And as the shades of Elysium start to materialize all around them, banging their shields and roaring for blood, Pete whirls his scythe out from behind him. He turns away from Vegas, and with one giant sweep of his scythe, he obliterates half of the shades in front of them.
Vegas stares, mouth agape, as Pete slams the end of his scythe into the ground. A glowing array etches itself under a cluster of shades. Pete raises his free hand to the sky, turns his splayed fingers slowly — snatches it shut into a fist, and the array screams with power as every shade within its perimeter evaporates into smoke.
The shades keep appearing, though, and Vegas quickly turns as he senses a shade barreling at him from behind, broadsword poised to slice his head off. Vegas ducks, fires off an arrow straight into the shade’s throat. He has no time to glance back at Pete before a new wave of shades are upon him.
The fight is brutal, but not nearly so much as usual, not with Pete at his back. And Vegas viciously hates how they move around each other with ease, Vegas leaning out of the way as he hears the whoosh of Pete’s scythe, Pete waiting a split second for Vegas to dart out of the way before laying down a new array. The shades seethe with anger, but fail to exact any sort of meaningful revenge before facing death at their hands.
When the dust finally settles, Vegas shuts his eyes wearily, focuses on the blood thudding in his ears and the breath heaving in his chest. When he opens them again, Pete is hovering in front of him.
“You’re trying to leave,” Pete says.
Vegas scoffs. “Put that together on your own, did you?”
“Stop running your mouth for one second,” Pete snaps. “You-” and his voice falters. “There’s a way out? And you — it’ll work? For you?”
“That,” Vegas says, “is none of your fucking business.”
"You have made it everyone's business," Pete hisses. “Did you know the Olympians are placing bets on you? Not just on when you’ll make it to the surface, but with which gods’ blessings you’ll manage it?”
“Good,” Vegas says, “gives them more incentive to aid me.”
“Vegas, this — you know it’s dangerous. The Olympians are fickle with their favor-”
“So you think I shouldn’t try at all, then.”
“That’s not—”
“Coming from you,” Vegas says softly, stepping closer to Pete, “that’s quite a change in tune. My father’s influence, no doubt.”
Pete’s eyes blaze with fury. “You can’t be seriously—”
“Why are you here, Pete,” Vegas interrupts.
Pete pauses, mouth half-open.
“None of this,” Vegas says, gesturing to the chamber at large, “is worth your precious time. We both know this. So why are you here.”
The gentle sounds of mist, rising from the small pools scattered about the room, are practically deafening in comparison to Pete’s silence.
“You can’t even say it,” Vegas sneers. “You can’t admit that you’re trying to help me, because you know that the last thing I could possibly ever need — or want — is your help.”
And Vegas knows Pete too well, because he watches Pete’s face go completely blank, smooth as eroded stone, and he feels abruptly sick.
“I know,” Pete says.
Vegas can’t look at him. He fixes his gaze on the foliage in the distance.
“I came to see if it was true,” Pete says, “because it was the only way to know for sure.” He turns away, flips his scythe over and to its resting position at his back. “Because you wouldn’t have told me yourself.”
Of course Vegas wouldn’t have told him. Vegas tries to never, ever let the spectre of Pete cross his mind.
“Good luck, Vegas.” Pete glances back over his shoulder. “And good-bye.”
He disappears in a crackle of black smoke — leaves Vegas alone, leaves Vegas behind, just like he always does.